ABSTRACT
The theatrical pulse of the young country was developing rapidly. A variety of collectives sprung up and the largest theaters were overrun with small studios. During the season of 1925–1926, the Repertoire and Artistic Collegium was established at the Moscow Art Theatre. The mass audiences, of which the creators of the Public General Theatre had once dreamed, was an overwhelming reality for the Moscow Art Theatre. The Moscow Art Theatre prepared to stage Vsevolod Ivanov’s play Armoured Train 14–69, which was written in close collaboration with the theater. Work on the Armoured Train was the start of a new stage in Viktor Simov’s artistic career. The staging of Armoured Train was a timeless piece of romantic hyperbole. The theater revealed the sublime and the heroic, not in abstract romanticism and abstract heroes, but in the reality of revolution and civil war, which had yet to become legendary.
