Stanislavsky's Ghosts

Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. When the Stanislavsky-directed Moscow Art Theater last appeared in New York in 1924, it was the apostle of a new dramatic naturalism bent on depicting man with all his mental warts, body aches and soul pains. For U.S. actors it was a kind of Magna Carta, freeing them from stilted and artificial stage conventions. In more recent years, the Stanislavsky Method has suffered the old age of any revolution, which is to become a religion. The esthetic irony of the Moscow troupe's reappearance on the Broadway scene is that 41 years have effected a reversal of roles. It is the Russian actor who now appears to be all surface, a musty relic of the past, embalmed in the stylized rituals of ballet and the overstatements of vaudeville. By contrast, the American actor performs his abiding task, which is the intense psychological probing of every nuance of inner torment.

Gogol was one of those writers who take up their country's venality as their cross. The closest U.S. equivalent of Dead Souls is Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. Gogol's confidence man is Chichikov (Vladimir Belokurov), an on-the-make bureaucrat who haggles with miserly and drunken aristocrats for their dead serfs (listed on the government tax rolls as alive) so that he may pose as a propertied man, float a mortgage loan, and make a fashionable marriage. Just as murder is war in miniature, Gogol's Chichikov is a comic common cold symbolizing all the perennial tragic sicknesses of Russia--but not in this hammy production. It looks as though the Soviet Establishment decided that when a masterpiece bites, one has to pull its satiric teeth.

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