ABSTRACT

Michael Chekhov suffered a living death in Soviet Russia because he had emigrated to the West in July 1928. In the first decades following the 1917 communist revolution, Soviet control over the arts had tightened into a death grip. By the mid-1930s Stalin’s imposition of Socialist Realism as the only politically acceptable style for Russian art reduced artistic freedom to mere illusion. Thousands of artists, deemed traitors to the Socialist Realist cause, paid with their lives in Stalin’s gulags. Those who managed to escape from the Soviet maw through emigration, as had Chekhov, also paid, when their names were systematically obliterated from Russian classrooms, scholarly works, and published histories. As theatre scholar Inna Soloviova explains:

For most of the people who stayed in Russia those who had gone abroad actually did cease to exist. All ties were severed. There was no way of finding out whether an émigré was alive or dead. Historians of the arts had to fight for the right to mention that émigrés had actually existed even before their departure: the inroads of official propaganda went that far.