◆ SpookStack

Igor is presented in such realistic detai! it one's attention in danger of being drawn away from the music by the sta that come out one by one when the eclipse reaches its heigl In the final act of Moussorgsky's Boris Godunov at the Bolsh Theater ancient wooden Moscow burns down with enough re: ism to make the audience start looking for the nearest exit. The Soviet theater inherited a magnificent theatrical trad tion, which had been created by such masters as Stanislavsk and Nemirovich-Danchenko and was enriched in the early year of the Soviet period by the bold genius of Vsevolod Meyerhol. The experimental vigor of the 1920's was numbed, however, i the cold winds of conformity that swept through the Sovie Union in the 1930's, and the Soviet theater has remained fair static ever since. This conservatism has been reinforced by th traditional repertory system of Russian theaters. Virtually th same selection of Russian and foreign plays is produced yea after year. The strength of this system is that it offers Sovit theatergoers -particularly in the large cities a magnificer array of the best drama of all times. During one week of ou visit the theaters of Moscow alone offered five plays of Shake peare (Hamlet, Othello played in two different theaters, Twelft Night, Much Ado About Nothing and Two Gentlenen of Verona) and plays by a dozen other foreign authors, including the Eng lishman John Galsworthy, the German Friedrich Schiller, th Spaniard Lope de Vega and the American Litlian Hellmar Foreign and pre-revolutionary Russian drama made up abot. half of that week's repertory of all the theaters in Moscow. Alon with its strength, thir-conservative Soviet theatrical system als has the weakness of monotony. While New Yorkers are able 1 see some 80 new plays every year, Londoners about 100 an Parisians about 150 (few of them masterpieces, to be sure), th Moscow theatergoer rarely has a chance to see more than dozen new plays from one year to the next. Literary Black Market. The most interesting manifestation of the Russians' cu tural interests was to be found in their bookshops. Books in th. Soviet Union are relatively cheap, and the Russians are ins. tiable readers. Their tastes run strongly to their own classics an. to the foreign works that are permitted to cireulate in Russia transiation. Works by Tolstoy, Turgeney, Pushkin, Gogol and host of Iesser Russian writers of the Nineteenth Century ar published in enormous editions, often running into hundreds thousands of copies. Severa! Russians told us that a new editic 64