Lillian Hellman and the Soviet theater

The article examines the contacts of the American playwright Lillian Hellman with the Soviet theatrical world. It focuses on Soviet productions of her plays, recollections of actors involved in those productions, critics’ reviews of the premieres. Hellman’s more than 20-year career in the USSR helps to trace back the changes of Soviet cultural and ideological agenda. Acting as a cultural emissary during the Second World War, Hellman visited Moscow where she was greeted as a dear guest, and her plays were staged by two largest Moscow theaters. With the beginning of the Cold War, her dramas The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine disappeared from the repertoire. Surprisingly, Hellman’s play with a conspicuously Western title Ladies and Gentlemen circumvented theatrical censorship amid an anti-American propaganda campaign, although the production received negative reviews from magazine critics. In the 1960s Hellman returns to Moscow again, where she meets Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev. Cultural and political landscape of that period was deeply influenced by struggles of the dissident movement, which Hellman deeply sympathized with. She considered Kopelev and Orlova to be people of remarkable courage and integrity since they refused to leave their native Russia despite the risk of being imprisoned and persecuted. That is why the case of Anatoly Kuznetsov who fled to the UK from the USSR infuriated Hellman who publicly disapproved his decision to flee. Hellman wrote and spoke about dissidents back at home in the United States, and she continued to correspond with Orlova almost until her death in 1984. Thus, Hellman’s creative biography represents the trajectory of defecting from the ranks of Soviet sympathizers: starting her career as a pro-Stalinist, she subsequently refused to support Soviet socialism.