• Leonid Snegoff as Vakhtangov’s follower in the USA and his Broadway production of Dmitry Scheglov’s play “The Blizzard”

УДК: 792.2(73):792.09

DOI: 10.35852/2588-0144-2022-2-10-33

EDN: URWHEW

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Maxim M. Gudkov

Senior lecturer of Department of interdisciplinary art studies and practices of the Faculty of liberal arts and sciences
Saint Petersburg State University, Russian State Institute of Performing Art
Saint Petersburg, Russia
E-mail: m.gudkov@spbu.ru

Leonid Snegoff as Vakhtangov’s follower in the USA and his Broadway production of Dmitry Scheglov’s play “The Blizzard”

Abstract

The study focuses on the export of Eugene Vakhtangov’s theatrical methodology to American stage practices. The problem is specifically discussed based on the the acting and directing activities of Vakhtangov’s follower Leonid Snegoff. He staged the play by the Soviet playwright Dmitry Scheglov “The Blizzard” (“Purga”) on Broadway in 1929. The deep interest in Russian theatrical ideas and systems (Konstantin Stanislavsky, Eugene Vakhtangov, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Michael Chekhov) of the US practitioners in the interwar period are explained. The main two reasons are the absence of national acting school and thus theatre pedagogy. The characteristic of the main ways for exporting Vakhtangov’s ideas overseas are provided. Among them – the theatre tours abroad, translation and publication of Soviet theatrical literature about Vakhtangov and his method, the stage activities of Russian emigrant actors who studied with the Master or by him (Richard Boleslavsky, Rouben Mamulyan, Benno Schneider, Miriam Goldina). Theatre activities of Snegoff are analyzed along with the organicity of the poetics and the idea of “The Blizzard” play according to stage realization in the course of the Vakhtangov school. A brief analysis of the main productions of Scheglov’s play on the Soviet stage of the 1920s – in the Leningrad studio “Proletarian Actor”, Leningrad State Bolshoi Dramatic Theatre – BDT, Moscow Drama Theatre (former Korsh Theatre) and Studio of the Moscow State Maly Theatre – allows us to make a conclusion about the most successful of them. They were presented not in a ultra-realistic and naturalistic way, but in a Vakhtangov way – theatrically and conditionally. The author presents the analysis of Vakhtangov theatre ideas overseas on the basis of materials from the collections of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Houghton Library (Harvard University), the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, as well as documents from the Museums of the Eugene Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre and the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre.

Keywords

Eugene Vakhtangov, Soviet theatre, Leonid Snegoff, American theatre, Broadway, Soviet dramaturgy, Dmitry Scheglov, play “The Blizzard” (“Purga”).

For citation

Gudkov M.M. Leonid Snegoff as Vakhtangov’s follower in the USA and his Broadway production of Dmitry Scheglov’s play “The Blizzard”. Theatre. Fine Arts. Cinema. Music. 2022, no. 2, pp. 10–33. 

DOI: 10.35852/2588-0144-2022-2-10-33

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Received: 09.12.2022

Revised: 01.03.2023

Accepted: 14.03.2023