ABSTRACT
To say that the Moscow Art Theatre is ‘naturalistic’ is likely to be misleading. Since the advent in the theatre of Expressionism we have come to make a sort of bugbear of naturalism and to associate it with everything that is prosaic, laboured, and dreary in the drama. We think, at least, of ‘Hindle Wakes’ and ‘The Weavers’ and all the drama of the proletariate and the middle class which corresponded to the novel of Arnold Bennett and Zola and Dreiser. But the Art Theatre represents something different from this: it represents the higher reaches of the realistic movement. It constitutes perhaps the only successful attempt to put on the stage the aesthetic ideal, not of the men I have mentioned, but of the school which produced Flaubert and Turgenev, Anatole France and Henry James - that is, of the school which went beyond notation and merely conveying the impression of life and, accepting the convention of plausibility, aimed to produce not merely something real, but something beautiful - something valid as art.
