◆ SpookStack

Igor is presented in such realistic detai! t 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 heist 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 Meyerhok ‘The experimental vigor of the 1920's was numbed, however, i the cold winds of conformity that swept through the Sovic Union in the 1980'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 Sovie 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 Shakes peare (Hamlet, Othello played in two different theaters, Tiwelft - Night, Much Ado About Nothing and Two Gentlemen of Verona) and plays by a dozen other foreign authors, including the Ens lishman John Galsworthy, the German Friedrich Schiller, th . Spaniard Lope de Vega and the American Lillian Hellmat Foreign and pre-revolutionary Russian drama made up abot half of that week's repertory of all the theaters in Moscow. Alon ith its strength, thiv-conservative Soviet theatrical system als has the weakness of monotony. ‘ew Yorkers are able 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 yer to the next. Literary Black Market The most interesting manifestation of the Russians’ eu 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 circulate in Russia transiution. Works by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pushkin, Gogol and host of lesser Russian writers of the Nineteenth Century a1 published in enormous editions, often running into hundreds « thousands of copies, Several Russians told us that a new editio 64