"City at dawn": the second birth and the first conflict. Irkutsk history Aleksey Arbuzov city at dawn summary

3. Second birth How difficult it is sometimes for a work to find its way to realization! Tolstoy, having conceived The Cossacks, will begin to write them as a poem; he will not immediately understand that this is a story. Dostoevsky will toil with every big novel. And heroes at first will not always be able

"Darkie". The second birth The music of the film “Only “old men” go into battle is an important component of the expressive structure of the picture. This is not a convention, not a background, not an insert number, but a completely conscious choice of the director. Almost a dozen well-known melodies and songs sound from the screen

Alexey Nikolaevich Arbuzov

Arbuzov Alexey Nikolaevich (1908 - 1986), playwright.

Born on May 13 (26 n.s.) in Moscow in an educated, intelligent family. The strongest childhood impression of the child was the sea, where the family went every year to relax. The beginning of the war of 1914 found the Arbuzovs on the Riga coast, and they urgently had to leave. The Arbuzovs moved from Moscow to Petrograd, where six-year-old Alyosha joins the theater, listens to opera, and goes to the cinema. He studies at a private gymnasium (1916). The revolution of 1917 prevented him from receiving a systematic education.

At the age of 9, he had to face the collapse of his former life, and he eagerly absorbs new experiences. Hard days come: hunger, scurvy, typhus. At the age of 11, he remains alone, ends up in a colony for the difficult to educate. The theater was his salvation. At the Bolshoi Drama Theater, the boy had a chance to see the play "Robbers" by Schiller, which was shown for the Red Army soldiers leaving for the front. Made an opening speech. A. Blok. The impression was so strong that in this theater he reviewed all the performances, knew the entire repertoire.

His life is a little streamlined: he lives with his aunt V. Savich. He refused to attend school, and never received a secondary education.

At the age of 14, he began working as an extra at the Mariinsky Theatre. At the age of 16, he entered a drama studio led by P. Gaideburov, a brilliant actor and director. In the fall, after graduating from the studio, Arbuzov enters the Gaideburov troupe. In the spring of 1928 he left the theater to create his own "Experimental Drama Workshop" with a group of young actors. After its collapse, he takes part in the organization of a theater on wheels (agitvagon), which travels with performances in small towns of Russia. The theater did not have its own playwright, so Arbuzov took up the pen himself. The first multi-act play "Class" was staged in Leningrad, but was not successful. After the failure, Arbuzov left for Moscow and entered the Meyerhold Theater. New friends appear: V. Pluchek, I. Shtok and other actors and directors. In the spring of 1932 he married and had a daughter.

The first play, which was staged in Moscow, Leningrad and other cities and received recognition from the audience and critics, was the comedy "Six Beloved" (1935). In the same year, a new comedy "The Long Road" was written. Arbuzov always admired the talented play of the theater actress Vakhtangov Babanova and wrote the play "Tanya" especially for her. "Tanya" was staged in 1939 by the Moscow Theater of the Revolution and was a resounding success. It was staged in the 1960s and 70s by many Soviet theaters.

The premiere of the play "The City at Dawn" took place on February 5, 1941, but the war prevented the long life of this performance.

After the war, Arbuzov wrote the comedy "Meeting with Youth" (1947), for about five years he worked on the drama "Years of Wanderings" (1954). Arbuzov becomes one of the most famous playwrights in the country, whose plays are staged in many theaters. For many years of joint work connected the playwright with the theater. E. Vakhtangov, in which there were seven plays by Arbuzov: "Irkutsk History", "The Twelfth Hour" (1959), "The Lost Son" (1961) and others. Man", "Old Fashioned Comedy", it is also staged in Paris. April 20, 1986 Arbuzov died. Buried in Moscow.

Used materials of the book: Russian writers and poets. Brief biographical dictionary. Moscow, 2000.

20th century writer

Arbuzov Alexey Nikolaevich - playwright.

Born in the family of a merchant, a native of the nobility. Arbuzov's childhood and youth passed in Petrograd, in an atmosphere of discord between his parents. The father left the family when the boy was 8 years old. The impressions of childhood, complicated by family drama, mental illness of the mother, will leave their mark on the work of the playwright. “His biography is theatrical” (Krymova N. - P. 10) in the full sense of the word. The day when he saw Schiller's Robbers at the Bolshoi Drama Theater decided his fate once and for all (Autobiography, p. 47). Young Arbuzov joined the theater consistently and actively - first as an extra on the opera stage, then as an actor and director (after graduating from the theater studio of P.P. Gaideburov) and, finally, as the author of theatrical newspapers, propaganda performances, etc. He learned the secrets of the theater before he learned to write plays. Arbuzov's first dramatic experience was the play "Class", staged by the Red Theater in Leningrad (1931). The performance ended in complete failure, but this did not stop the young author. In the early 1930s, he moved to Moscow, where he became a member of the Proletkult Theater of Small Forms. The appearance of Gorky's "Egor Bulychov", according to Arbuzov, prompted him to part with the agitation theater and "return to the psychology of man and his soul" (Questions of Literature. 1968. No. 3. P. 7).

Success came to Arbuzov along with the lyrical comedy "Six Beloved" (1934). Intended for rural amateur performances, it - unexpectedly for the author - was staged in many theaters of the country. The comedy The Long Road (1935) for the first time revealed the essential features of Arbuzov's creative personality. The title of the play expressed the writer's characteristic motif of wanderings, "a long journey" as an alluring and healing tool for his characters. In this cheerful and cheerful comedy about young builders of the Moscow metro, however, an alarming note associated with the theme of loneliness (the image of Lily Bregman) unexpectedly arose. This theme will become one of the "cross-cutting" in the writer's work.

Arbuzov's talent manifested itself in full force in the drama "Tanya" (1938) - his most repertoire play, which made the author's name widely known. Its idea arose, according to Arbuzov, from the usual desire to warn people close to him from troubles (The way of the playwright // Soviet literature and issues of skill: collection of articles. M., 1957. Issue 1. P. 13). The fate of Tanya, as she seemed to the playwright, contained a cruel but useful life lesson. The author acted as a demanding judge of his heroine, who gave up herself for the sake of a loved one, and in the course of action led her to the “right” path - from a cramped room world to the world of wide public life. However, the image of Tanya objectively turned out to be wider than the moralizing author's attitude, and in some ways resisted it. This was clearly revealed in the performance of the Moscow Theater of the Revolution (1939, dir. A. Lobanov, in the role of Tanya - M. Babanov, for whom Arbuzov wrote this play). The author was surprised and at first even outraged that Tanya, whom he condemned, despite her mistakes and delusions, won the greatest sympathy of the audience. The dispute about Tanya that arose between Arbuzov and Babanova (Soviet Art. 1939. April 27) was deeply instructive for the playwright. Subsequently, he abandoned categorical intonations in relation to his heroine, making appropriate changes to the final version of the play (1947). Interest in it did not weaken in the following decades. The vital capacity of Tanya's image made it possible for talented actresses at different times to discover new, sometimes unexpected facets in it: A. Freindlich in the performance of the Theater. Lensovet (1963, dir. I. Vladimirov), T. Samoilov in the Film Actor Theater (1968), O. Yakovleva in the TV movie "Tanya" (1974, dir. A. Efros). Born in the era of the 1930s, this play by Arbuzov asserted the rights and significance of the so-called. "personal" theme, noticeably pressed in the literature of those years by the problems of "social", "industrial", etc. The author of "Tanya" had to listen to a lot of reproaches for being addicted to "intimacy" and "sentimentality". It was then that Arbuzov conceived the polemical idea that “on the twenty pages of Karamzin’s Poor Liza, essentially all Russian literature of the 19th century fit in” (I. Vishnevskaya - p. 81). This thought clarifies a lot in the position of the playwright. Regardless of the fluctuations of the literary and political pendulum, he retained an interest in the complex and subtle sphere of human feelings throughout his creative life.

No less typical for Arbuzov is the constant search for productive forms of interaction between literature and theatre.

In 1938, together with director V. Pluchek, he organized the Moscow Theater Studio with the aim of creating a modern. performance by the collective efforts of creative youth. What was born from improvisations at rehearsals, Arbuzov processed and turned into the text of the play. This is how a romantic chronicle appeared about the history of the construction of a young city in the Far Eastern taiga - "The City at Dawn" (1940, new edition - 1957). It was staged by the studio in Feb. 1941 and warmly received by the audience. The Arbuzovskaya studio had state status and, with the outbreak of war, turned into a front-line theater. The trace left by her did not disappear: on similar studio principles, the Moscow Sovremennik Theater later arose, as well as many others. current theater companies. The new brainchild of A. was the studio of young playwrights, which he led in the last decade of his life.

During the years of the war against fascism, Arbuzov turned to the genre that seemed to be the least in line with the spirit of the times - melodrama. The play "House on the Outskirts" (originally titled "House in Cherkizovo", 1943) reproduced Chekhov's situation of three sisters (Faith, Hope, Love) in the rear life of the war period. She gave rise to persistent reproaches against Arbuzov in "theatricalism", in gravitation towards "touching" and "pitiful" scenes (Rudnitsky K. - P. 266), etc. At the same time, the features of the genre he chose were sometimes presented as personal weaknesses of the playwright. In particular, it was not taken into account that the melodrama organically corresponded to the nature of Arbuzov's talent, as evidenced by his later plays: "The Lost Son" (1961), "Waiting" (1976), "Cruel Intentions" (1978), etc. Responding to reproaches of criticism, Arbuzov argued that "our theaters lack cordiality, passion, excitement of feelings, simple sincerity ..." (Vishnevskaya I. - S. 17). He persistently (both in word and deed) defended the genre of melodrama and defended its legitimacy in Soviet drama. Unlike classic examples of this genre, there are no figures of outright villains in Arbuzov's melodrama. Even those few negative characters that are found in his plays (Agranovsky in The City at Dawn, Molodtsov in The Lost Son, Korolevich from The Choice, 1971) do not reach the level of such negative characters who would be able to significantly influence for the development of dramatic action. This is due to the peculiarities of the writer's worldview, who perceived any person with an "optimistic premise" (Vasilinina I. - P. 34) and therefore deliberately avoided dividing his characters into "good" and "bad". After Tanya, Arbuzov saw his task as not blaming the hero, but explaining him. He believed that "the most interesting fights that can be in a play are the hero's fights with himself" (On the playwright's work, p. 17).

These creative principles were most clearly embodied in Arbuzov's drama Years of Wanderings (1950, published in 1954). The revelation of the character of an extraordinary person (Alexander Vedernikov), who is at odds with himself, causing a lot of suffering to other people and gradually realizing his mistakes - such is the true content of this drama. She aroused keen interest among the audience and critics and was at the center of the literary and theatrical disputes of that time. The absence of the author's guilty verdict in the play caused obvious displeasure of the critics. The playwright was accused of condoning his hero (Teatr. 1955. No. 1, p. 112), of indulging individualism, and so on. The publication of "Years of Wanderings" and their performance on stage coincided with the discussion about the "ideal hero" that unfolded on the pages of newspapers and magazines. The author of the play deliberately broke the habitual schemes and stereotypes in literature, but he still could not completely free himself from them. In the final scene, he resorted to his favorite, tried and tested method - he sent his heroes to the far northern or Siberian regions for spiritual "purification" and maturity.

Changes in the inner world of a young contemporary continued to excite Arbuzov in the drama Irkutsk History (1959).

Staged and originally interpreted by major directors (E. Simonov at the E. Vakhtangov Theatre, 1959; N. Okhlopkov at the V. Mayakovsky Theatre, 1960; G. Tovstonogov at the Bolshoi Theater named after M. Gorky, 1960), it became noticeable an event in theatrical life at the turn of the 1950s and 60s. The play was created in such a public atmosphere, when the rejection of lofty words among young people turned into a rejection of lofty feelings, disappointment, skepticism, which took on peculiar forms of a moral "challenge". The action of the drama is based on the struggle for the authenticity of feelings, the beauty and truth of human relationships. Its main characters - Valya, Viktor and Sergey - are subjected to a serious moral test, tested by the criterion of "true love". The researchers noticed that jealousy in Arbuzov's play, perhaps for the first time in the history of drama, becomes a force that does not destroy, but revives a person (the image of Victor) (Rudnitsky K. - P. 291). The combination of bright theatricality, publicism and psychologism in The Irkutsk History allowed its author to avoid the "intimacy" and go to the form of an "open" drama (in connection with this, there was a lot of controversy about the place and role of the Chorus in it). But time has shown something else: political terminology with an admixture of words about “communism”, uttered mainly by the lips of Sergei, prone to reasoning and, moreover, devoid of a sense of humor, noticeably weakens this work today.

After Irkutsk History, Arbuzov wrote quite a few plays, most of which vary his favorite themes and motifs in one way or another. Over the years, the writer became wiser, and this prompted him to rethink some of the problems he had previously raised. A situation familiar from Irkutsk History (she loves him but marries someone else), albeit in different historical circumstances, is reproduced by Arbuzov in My Poor Marat (1964). The fates of Marat, Lika and Leonidik, who went through the war, outwardly develop as if safely. But mental turmoil and anxiety haunt them many years after the blockade and the front. It is not easy for them to give sincere and honest self-assessment, the realization that “even a day before death it is not too late to start life anew” (Selected. Vol. 1. P. 702).

A peculiar continuation of the fate of Vedernikov at a new stage was Arbuzov's drama "Happy Days of an Unhappy Man" (1968). Her hero, a young doctor Krestovnikov, eventually achieved a lot in his scientific career, but lost a lot in his moral character and remained, in essence, a lonely person. If the former heroes of Arbuzov went out of loneliness to people, then Krestovnikov, in the words of a critic, went "the way back - from people to loneliness" (I. Vishnevskaya - p. 217).

A number of Arbuzov's plays of the 1970s are connected with the theme of a person's perception of approaching or already overtaken old age: "Tales of the Old Arbat" (1970), "In this sweet, old house" (1971), "Old-fashioned comedy" (1975). For the elderly puppet master Balyasnikov ("Tales of the Old Arbat"), who found himself on the verge of a creative crisis, old age is akin to disaster. However, the appearance of the smart and charming Viktoshi in his house resurrects the master spiritually and revives his former creative powers. “Tales of the Old Arbat” is sometimes called Arbuzov’s “most personal” play (Krymova N. - P. 35) not only because some facts of the hero’s biography coincide with the author’s biography, but also because of its intimate intonation, special poetic style.

Arbuzov's return to the youth theme in the play Cruel Intentions (1978) revealed a fundamental change in his view of the problem previously posed in Tanya. The author of "Cruel Intentions", this modern. variations of the “drama of fatherlessness”, does not dispute, as it once did in Tanya, but, on the contrary, defends the right of a woman to devote herself entirely to her family, to her beloved (the image of the geologist Masha). Such an unexpected turn in the interpretation of this topic did not take place without the influence of the negative consequences of female emancipation, which were acutely felt by the playwright. Orientation mainly on service success, efficiency, a purely rationalistic lifestyle due to the loss of love and motherhood as the basis of women's happiness disturbed Arbuzov in the play "The Winner" (1983). Arbuzov's last drama with the expressive title Guilty (1985), where the problem of the mother's personal guilt for the fate of her son, once abandoned by her, occupies a central place, sounded a warning in this sense. The action of the play unfolds as a revelation of the sad, albeit remote in time, consequences of this fact. The writer proceeded from the idea of ​​the family, the years of childhood as an indispensable prerequisite for the moral and mental health of a person and society as a whole.

The heroes of Arbuzov are, as a rule, outstanding personalities, easily mistaken and difficult to overcome their mistakes, paying dearly for them. The emotional coloring of his works is a combination of diverse elements of irony, gentle humor, lyricism, and heartfelt pathos. At the same time, the author does not always manage to avoid a touching shade in the image of the unsettled destinies of his characters. Arbuzov's interest in universal human problems, in the education of a "culture of feelings" to a large extent contributed to the fact that his dramaturgy received wide international recognition. Arbuzov's plays were staged in England, the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Japan, India, the Scandinavian countries and Latin America. Abroad, he is perceived as "Chekhov's natural successor" (Selected. Vol. 1. P. 728).

V.L. Muromsky

Used materials of the book: Russian literature of the XX century. Prose writers, poets, playwrights. Biobibliographic dictionary. Volume 1. p. 101-104.

Read further:

Russian writers and poets(biographical guide).

Compositions:

Selected works: in 2 volumes / entry. article by N. Krymova. M., 1981;

Drama. M., 1983;

The craft of the playwright // On the work of the playwright: Sat. M., 1957;

How "Irkutsk History" was written // Questions of Literature. 1960. No. 10;

Soviet Writers: Autobiographies. M., 1988. V.5.

Literature:

Rudnitsky K. Portraits of playwrights. M., 1961;

Vishnevskaya I. Alexey Arbuzov: Essay on creativity. M., 1971;

Vasilinina I. Arbuzov Theatre. M., 1983;

Zhilina E.N. Alexey Nikolaevich Arbuzov: literature index. L, 1958.

Alexey Nikolaevich Arbuzov was born May 13 (26), 1908 in Moscow in the family of a merchant, a native of the nobility. Arbuzov's childhood and youth passed in Petrograd, in an atmosphere of discord between his parents. The father left the family when the boy was 8 years old. The impressions of childhood, complicated by family drama, mental illness of the mother, will leave their mark on the work of the playwright.

Young Arbuzov joined the theater consistently and actively - first as an extra on the opera stage, then as an actor and director (after graduating from the theater studio of P.P. Gaideburov) and, finally, as the author of theatrical newspapers, propaganda performances, etc. He learned the secrets of the theater before he learned to write plays. Arbuzov's first dramatic experience was the play "Class", staged by the Red Theater in Leningrad ( 1931 ). The performance ended in complete failure, but this did not stop the young author. Early 1930s he moved to Moscow, where he became a director of the Proletkult Theater of Small Forms. The appearance of Gorky's "Egor Bulychov", according to Arbuzov, prompted him to part with the agitation theater and "return to the psychology of man and his soul."

Success came to Arbuzov along with the lyrical comedy "Six Beloved" ( 1934 ). Intended for rural amateur performances, it - unexpectedly for the author - was staged in many theaters of the country. Comedy "The Long Road" ( 1935 ) for the first time revealed the essential features of Arbuzov's creative personality. The title of the play expressed the writer's characteristic motif of wanderings, "a long journey" as an alluring and healing tool for his characters. In this cheerful and cheerful comedy about young builders of the Moscow metro, however, an alarming note associated with the theme of loneliness (the image of Lily Bregman) unexpectedly arose. This theme will become one of the "cross-cutting" in the writer's work.

In full force, Arbuzov's talent manifested itself in the drama "Tanya" ( 1938 ) - his most repertoire play, which made the author's name widely known. Its idea arose, according to Arbuzov, from the usual desire to warn people close to him from troubles. Born in the era of the 1930s, this play by Arbuzov asserted the rights and significance of the so-called. "personal" theme, noticeably pressed in the literature of those years by the problems of "social", "industrial", etc. The author of "Tanya" had to listen to a lot of reproaches for being addicted to "intimacy" and "sentimentality". It was then that Arbuzov conceived the polemical idea that "on the twenty pages of Karamzin's Poor Lisa, essentially all Russian literature of the 19th century fit in." This thought clarifies a lot in the position of the playwright. Regardless of the fluctuations of the literary and political pendulum, he retained an interest in the complex and subtle sphere of human feelings throughout his creative life.

No less typical for Arbuzov is the constant search for productive forms of interaction between literature and theatre.

In 1938 he, together with director V. Pluchek, organized the Moscow Theater Studio with the aim of creating a modern performance by the collective efforts of creative youth. What was born from improvisations at rehearsals, Arbuzov processed and turned into the text of the play. This is how a romantic chronicle appeared about the history of the construction of a young city in the Far Eastern taiga - “The City at Dawn” ( 1940 , new ed.- 1957 ). It was staged by the studios in February 1941 and warmly received by the audience. The Arbuzovskaya studio had state status and, with the outbreak of war, turned into a front-line theater. The trace left by her did not disappear: on similar studio principles, the Moscow Sovremennik Theater later arose, as well as many current theater groups. The new brainchild of Arbuzov was the studio of young playwrights, which he led in the last decade of his life.

During the years of the war against fascism, Arbuzov turned to the genre that seemed to be the least in line with the spirit of the times - melodrama. The play "House on the Outskirts" (original title "House in Cherkizovo", 1943 ) reproduced Chekhov's situation of three sisters (Vera, Nadezhda, Lyubov) in the conditions of rear life during the war. She gave rise to persistent reproaches against Arbuzov in the "theatrical", in the attraction to "touching" and "pitiful" scenes, etc. At the same time, the features of the genre he chose were sometimes presented as personal weaknesses of the playwright. It was not taken into account, in particular, that the melodrama organically corresponded to the nature of Arbuzov's talent, as evidenced by his later plays: "The Lost Son" ( 1961 ), "Expectation" ( 1976 ), Cruel Intentions ( 1978 ), etc. Even those few negative characters that are found in his plays (Agranovsky in The City at Dawn, Molodtsov in The Lost Son, Korolevich from Choice, 1971 ), do not reach the level of such negative characters that would be able to significantly influence the development of dramatic action. This is due to the peculiarities of the writer's worldview, who perceived any person with an "optimistic premise" and therefore deliberately avoided dividing his characters into "good" and "bad". After Tanya, Arbuzov saw his task as not blaming the hero, but explaining him. He believed that "the most interesting fights a play can have are the hero's fights with himself."

These creative principles were most clearly embodied in Arbuzov's drama Years of Wanderings ( 1950 , publ. V 1954 ). The publication of "Years of Wanderings" and their performance on stage coincided with the discussion about the "ideal hero" that unfolded on the pages of newspapers and magazines. The author of the play deliberately broke the habitual schemes and stereotypes in literature, but still could not get rid of them completely. In the final scene, he resorted to his favorite, tried and tested method - he sent his heroes to the far northern or Siberian regions for spiritual "purification" and maturity.

Changes in the inner world of a young contemporary continued to excite Arbuzov in the drama "Irkutsk History" ( 1959 ). The action of the drama is based on the struggle for the authenticity of feelings, the beauty and truth of human relationships. The combination of bright theatricality, publicism and psychologism in "The Irkutsk History" allowed its author to avoid "intimacy" and go to the form of "open" drama.

After Irkutsk History, Arbuzov wrote quite a few plays, most of which vary his favorite themes and motifs in one way or another. Over the years, the writer became wiser, and this prompted him to rethink some of the problems he had previously raised. The situation familiar from Irkutsk History (she loves him, but marries another), although in different historical circumstances, is reproduced by Arbuzov in My Poor Marat ( 1964 ). The fates of Marat, Lika and Leonidik, who went through the war, outwardly develop as if safely. But mental turmoil and anxiety haunt them many years after the blockade and the front.

A peculiar continuation of the fate of Vedernikov at a new stage was Arbuzov's drama "Happy Days of an Unhappy Man" ( 1968 ). Her hero, a young doctor Krestovnikov, eventually achieved a lot in his scientific career, but lost a lot in his moral character and remained, in essence, a lonely person.

A number of Arbuzov's plays of the 1970s are connected with the theme of a person's perception of an approaching or already overtaken old age: "Tales of the Old Arbat" ( 1970 ), "In this sweet, old house" ( 1971 ), "Old Fashioned Comedy" (1975 ).

Orientation mainly on service success, efficiency, a purely rationalistic lifestyle due to the loss of love and motherhood as the basis of women's happiness disturbed Arbuzov in the play "The Winner" ( 1983 ). Arbuzov's last drama, with the expressive title "Guilty" ( 1985 ), where the central place is occupied by the problem of the mother's personal guilt for the fate of her son, who was once abandoned by her. The action of the play unfolds as a revelation of the sad, albeit remote in time, consequences of this fact. The writer proceeded from the idea of ​​the family, the years of childhood as an indispensable prerequisite for the moral and mental health of a person and society as a whole.

The ensemble is what all directors aspire to. But it can be created with like-minded people, with people who profess the same faith, who understand both each other and their leader perfectly. Naturally, no one can do it right away, it takes years to create a theater of like-minded people, it takes years for teamwork, adaptability to each other, submission to the law understood by everyone equally, and at the same time, the refinement of each individuality. This can only be achieved through joint efforts. These are the efforts that our youth, led by Yevgeny Simonov, began to make in the fifties and sixties.

Evgeny Simonov came to the Vakhtangov Theater in 1947, after graduating from the B.V. Shchukin Theater School. Even at the school, he tried himself as a director.

In the theater, he seriously took up directing, looking for his style, his voice, his way. In the very first performances - "Summer Day" by Ts. Solodar and in "Two Verontsy" by V. Shakespeare - there was a tendency to poetic comprehension of the stage material, a romantically upbeat sound of acting work and a well-thought-out musical solution.

Evgeny Simonov was born and raised in an acting family; he absorbed the traditions of the Vakhtangov Theater with his mother's milk and followed them from the very beginning of his career. And if his first works were both imitative and timid, then he came to his best performances as an already established artist. In them, the realistic and detailed-natural play of the actors is combined with the elevated, poetic conditions of their existence. Poetry shines a beautiful light on the realism of the acting, and this is the charm of his productions. The main idea of ​​the performance reaches the viewer through a combination of theatricality and life details, elation and accuracy.

Just before the war, the studio, which was directed by the playwright Alexei Nikolaevich Arbuzov, showed its first performance in Moscow. The studio members decided to write the play together, or rather, not to write it, but to create it in etude order, taking the construction of Komsomolsk-on-Amur as the theme. Each participant came up with his own role, the character of his hero, and all these notions were refined and verified in the course of work.

So we were told by Maxim Grekov, a former “Arbuzovite”, and then, after the war, an actor in our theater. They called the performance "The City at Dawn", and its success with the Muscovites was noisy. This is the play Yevgeny Simonov took for the next production. He took it, immediately seeing in it something that corresponded to his understanding of the theater, his style.

The coincidence of the material of the play and the figurative vision of the director made the work extremely interesting. She walked, as they say, in one breath. The image of the performance and its rhythm were immediately found, the actors also immediately, without the usual long searches and doubts (at least I almost always have them), accepted, picked up and began to develop what the director offered them.

This does not mean that hard work is not needed. But it is one thing to work, and another to change decisions endlessly, completely confusing the actor. Twisted, not aimed precisely and excitingly, he begins to argue with the director, and mutual irritation often reaches such intensity that there can be no question of any creative atmosphere.

Clever and subtle directors do their best to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and friendship at the rehearsal.

They say that the great Shchukin did not like to argue in words.

He offered several options for solving this or that place of the role and carefully listened to the reaction to them and the director and comrades. The richer the actor is creatively, the more generous and varied he is in his searches. Naturally, choosing a more accurate solution, he will be careful and attentive.

The director's dictatorship is good only in combination with respect for the freedom and creative emancipation of the actor. And when the performer knows in advance that his every step is predetermined, then he is seized by a terrible dependent state: he is constantly, like a chick, waiting, with his mouth open, what the director will “put” for him. The director made one role for him, another, and now this actor is afraid to take a step on his own, and he doesn’t know how to do it anymore. A smart director will not put pressure on the performer with his authority, he will give him the opportunity to try a variety of acting options. And it is possible, and this happens quite often, that, having weighed everything, he, together with the actor, will stop not on his own, but on his decision. Well, if he firmly insists on his own, then he will bring the actor to him naturally and, if possible, not by force. Disputes at work are inevitable. If they are quests for the best, they are creative disputes. But if these disputes are a clash of two "inflexible" characters, then, as a rule, nothing worthwhile comes out of this.

The theater group is a collection of very complex and often vulnerable acting personalities. You can complain about it, but it's a real fact. Such is the theater and its people, who work not on marble, but on their nerves, not with a brush, but with their heart, overloading the psyche. And the actors have no other material. And the director - the captain on this ship - needs a lot - and tact, and human understanding, and endurance, and diplomacy, and will (only not evil and stupid), and patience, and, of course, great talent so that he can offer such decisions and moves that the actors would stand in front of surprised and shocked by their surprise and their accuracy. A director needs a lot of things, and not always all the desired features are combined in one person.

In the work on "The City at Dawn" there was a rare unity of the entire composition of the performance. They invited the remarkable Leningrad theater artist A. Bosulaev. Quite quickly, he created a layout for the future performance. Against the backdrop of the boundless deaf taiga, a conditional rock with many ledges and steps stood on the stage. This rock was very convenient for expressive mise-en-scenes and was an image of the bare, gloomy bank of the Amur, where the first Komsomol builders landed.

It was on this rock that all further events unfolded. Yevgeny Simonov considered the performance as a romantically elevated performance, in which the theater involved the viewer from the first minute, demanding participation and complicity from him. Yevgeny Rubenovich for the first time in his directorial work introduced a frank appeal to the public. The performance began with a landing on the shore and a furious, choking appeal from the sailor Kostya Belous to the public.

And I, the performer of Kostya Belous, was given the task to address not the auditorium in general, but specific people sitting there.

Do you know what happiness is? And you? You? What do you aspire to, what do you dream about, what do you want, my friend, my brother, with whom a quarter of a century separates me? How I would like to break through these twenty-five years and spend at least an hour talking, look into your eyes, Komsomol member of the future, find out your hopes, your dreams. Do you worry, as they did us, distant roads and untrodden paths? Do you know the joy of nightly disputes, have you forgotten the law of the great Komsomol partnership? Are you ready, like us, to give your life for the immortal cause of Lenin? But what if you get bored and become solid and important beyond your years - you don’t stand up for your comrade at the first call of your party conscience and learn to live in peace with untruth and injustice?

But what if you are looking for happiness in silence and loneliness and your faith in that holy cause to which we gave our youth, our lives has cooled down? If so, I feel sorry for you - you will never know true happiness! And we - I will say this with pride - knew him. Didn’t our hearts beat with happiness on that unforgettable day, June 20, 1932, when we went down to the Amur coast and, standing among boxes and bales, baskets and suitcases, sang, sang with dry throats of happiness ...

This appeal to the public at the very beginning of the performance was, as it were, a warning of what would be discussed.

And the whole performance was full of such involvement of the public in the action, which was also emphasized in the mise-en-scene - the actors went straight to the ramp and directly addressed the viewer. In this nakedness of the reception lay great trust in the viewer, in his ability to understand the concept of the theater. It was expressed both in direct appeals to the audience, and in the dynamic deployment of the stage action, and in some frantic rearing rhythm of the performance. He was really intense and passionate. Passionate in solving mass scenes and in solving many characters. And the stupidly orthodox, wooden-straight Agranovsky, and Leshka Zorin biting from around the corner, and the unrestrained dreamer, passionately believing that the city they are building will be a city of sun and happiness, Chaffinch, and thin, seeming fragile and defenseless, but in fact in fact, a girl with an unbending will - Natasha, and Oksana, who boldly declared her love for little Don Quixote Zyablik, Oksana, and a sissy, an Odessa good boy, short-sighted, with a courageous heart Altman, and a reckless sailor Kostya Belous - all these different people are soldered by the desire for everything do, overcome everything, conquer everything, endure everything for the sake of the bright city of the future.

Evgeny Simonov permeated the performance with this leitmotif line, and therefore it turned out to be solid, precisely directed and effective. The spirit of the Komsomol of the thirties was guessed, the spirit of boundless faith in the feasibility of one's desires, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the spirit of irrepressible energy and true burning. And the rearing, passion of the performance was born not from the director's naked idea, but from the obsession of the characters, their frantic desire to build the future. These feelings overflowed into the hall and, as it were, hit the hearts of the audience with an electric current.

It was one of those performances that had to go to full heat, to the full extent of temperament. And then, and only then, he won the audience. Actors (and almost all young actors played) - Yulia Borisova, and Yuri Yakovlev, and Vyacheslav Dugin, and Maxim Grekov, and Larisa Pashkova, and Antonina Gunchenko, and Mikhail Dadyko, and Alexander Grave, and others - studied at this performance before only collectivism and the strain of common efforts in creativity.

Whenever it comes to the problem of youth, about the best ways to go, educating the actors of a new generation, I remember the "City at Dawn", which sowed a lot of good in our souls and helped us understand what studio life and camaraderie are. It is worth a lot when you feel a wonderful sense of your involvement in a common cause, when you understand that without your efforts it will be weaker.

There are many ways to educate young actors, and these ways are necessary. But the most fruitful, the most creative is a performance created by the youth themselves, as their human and creative credo. Of course, if this performance is successful, if it fully expresses all the passion, impatience and desire of the young. This performance does not become another among others, but represents, if you like, a human, civil and actor's manifesto. Such a manifesto for us, then beginning actors, and for the director Yevgeny Simonov, who is gaining strength, was the play “City at Dawn”.

Then there were other roles, other performances. There were successes, there were failures or gray everyday roles, but The City at Dawn remained for us a performance where we were able to declare our creative position in full voice, for the first time to feel the great power of the theater.