Nemirovich-Danchenko concludes his Chapter Seven with this: ” . . . in order to create out of a Chekhov play a high achievement in art, we had not only to carry out a creative labour of many years over ourselves, over our natural, born gifts—because ‘even spiritual fruit is not born without agonies’—but also to suffer humiliation in Varvara Alexeievna’s reception-room, to seek out and genuflect to the 4,000 rubles of Ushkov, to the 2,000 of Vostryakov, to the 1,000 of Firgang—human beings whom, candidly speaking, with a hand on our hearts, we did not respect, neither them nor their capital.” No one who has had experience with fund-raising for the arts will fail to recognize the feeling. The underlying predicament has not changed. But among the things that have: 1) These independent companies—given only permission, not support, by the government—struggled in an environment that did boast major institutions of theatre, opera, and ballet whose ongoing existence was guaranteed by Imperial subvention. An important aspect of their raison d’être was as a class-based alternative to those institutions, and the building of an audience of the educated youth, the intelligentsia, and the working class. At its beginning, the MAT called itself The Accessible Art Theatre, with prices to match, until it discovered, quite quickly, that so much accessibility was not compatible with survival. 2) Draining though it undoubtedly was to kowtow to the Varvara Alexeievnas and Vostryakovs while trying to launch a new kind of theatre, these unrespected humans did come through with the necessary amounts. 3) These were artistically exciting but politically and economically terrifying times to live through in Russia. The shakiness of the regime, the successive calamities of the Russo-Japanese War, the 1905 revolution, the First World War, the Revolution and following civil war, and the establishment of the early Soviet regime, brought to an end the contributions of the aristocratic and entrepreneurial classes, and with it the existence of those opera and theatre companies, including the Theatre of Musical Drama, that had not already succumbed to economic pressures. Except for the MAT. Such was its established stature, and that of Stanislavski himself, and such was Nemirovich-Danchenko’s eagerness to co-operate with the new government, that it was taken into the Soviet system as securely as the former Imperial institutions themselves, along with (for a time) the companies of Meierhold, Vakhtangov, Tairov, and others.

As for our own situation, perhaps some humility is in order when it comes to the relationship between art and politics. True, the Soviet system required genuflection as surely as did the Alexeievnas and Vostryakovs, and with ideological restrictions attached. But like those unrespected souls, it, too, ponied up, and not only for the institutions that served the purposes of iconic monumentalism, but for smaller and more experimental adventures as well. And if we, here and now, were to set out in search of significant underwriting for a new kind of opera company based on a new way of training and rehearsing singing actors, a new relationship between them and their directors and conductors, and a revival of respect for the work of composers and librettists, with the R&R time necessary for discovery—for a pig in a poke, in short, just like the oinkers that were the MAT and the TMD in their earliest days—where would we look? To our governments, municipal, state, and federal? That was once promising, but in the current sociopolitical climate seems hardly worth the badgering and paper work involved. To those intrepid campaigners still pressing our representatives on this front, I sincerely echo John Ludwig’s words to me: “Keep trying.” But there are no grounds for anticipating a significant turnaround from these entities. To our munificently endowed foundations, corporate and private? For the most part, they have shifted their priorities away from the arts and humanities, as have many wealthy individual donors. And at the moment, from all potential sources comes the stipulation to place social justice considerations ahead of artistic ones. So it seems to me that the question of whether our culture is not simply too debased, too accelerated, too trapped in the present, and our democratically structured political system too embattled with itself, to do as well for civilization as did the late Tsars and the early Soviets, hangs very much in the balance. Is there, across the breadth of our great land, a Morozov or a Neischiller ready to hand a check to a Joseph Lapitzky in waiting? A forlorn hope, I concede. And yet the most plausible one.

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Further reading: There is an extensive literature on Stanislavski’s life and work and the Moscow Art Theatre, and a large secondary one on its American adaptations. I am including here only the books I have made direct use of, or referred to, in my article.