Laughing: Russian-Style

Lately I have had several interactions with Russian literature which have helped me to better understand their culture and their influence in theatre. In I.B. English we recently finished reading Crime and Punishment, a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which tells the story of a young man who is dissatisfied with his life and ends up murdering a pawnbroker because he thinks this will benefit humanity. He suffers from the consequences of this action greatly until he confesses his crime and is sent to imprisonment in Siberia. Themes of suffering as well as poverty and drunkenness are prevalent throughout the novel.

In I.B. Theatre, we also read a Russian piece called The Seagull. It is actually a play, though, written by Anton Chekhov, one of the greatest Russian playwrights. The story of The Seagull revolves around the struggles of the upper class in Russian society and ends with the destruction of innocent life and even a suicide. The play was written in the late nineteenth century, only a decade after Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment was published.

Because I had the background of reading Dostoevsky before Chekhov, I was aware of the difficult times that Russians were experiencing during their industrialization. However, the struggles of the people in The Seagull seemed generally less significant than those in Crime and Punishment. Interestingly enough, this is how Russians created comedy. They were experiencing such difficult times, so even their comedy is dark. Russians would be kept entertained merely by the ridiculous worries of a man who's biggest problem is an addiction to writing. Even ending the story with a suicide would please the audience because the world that the characters live in was just so unrealistic to them the events were laughable.

I think that this points out the importance of context in the understanding of characters and even of the plots of theatre performances. So often, plays are written for specific audiences of  a certain time period, and it is only through extensive exploration that they can have meaning out of context. One of the most interesting aspects of an actor's life is the duty to learn about a completely foreign culture and time, and the give it a purpose in the modern world.

~Julie