ABSTRACT
Historians of the Soviet theater of the 1920’s advance two opposing theses: One school says that the brilliant artistry of the theater in that early period of the Soviet Union was but an afterglow of the Silver Age that preceded the Revolution, that the Bolsheviks simply had not yet had time to liquidate the Russian theater; the other school holds that the Soviet theater of the 1920’s was a product of the Bolshevik cultural revolution, a testimony to the fertility that revolutionary ideas bring to the arts. The roots of the revolutionary theater reach deep into Russian and also West European tradition. The leading figures of the theatrical world were mature and publicly acclaimed personalities who had developed their fundamental conceptions of art by the time the Revolution broke out. To illustrate this point, this chapter considers the foremost revolutionaries of the theater: Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Tairov, and Vakhtangov.
