Брехт

Brecht's penetration into the individual socialist countries has its own history. First came the interest in the writer as an innovator who broke with the canons and opened new horizons for revolutionary art. Then - at different intervals - followed the translations and the first productions of Brecht's plays. Today, the dividing wall of some dogmatic postulates that could not fit Brecht into the framework of socialist realism has been finally demolished. The experience of the original playwright is being studied and summarized. From the phase of guesses, he passes into the phase of research, which aims to acquaint us with all the values ​​of contemporary world literature. Over the past two or three years, in-depth studies on the principles of Brecht's Creativity have appeared in the Soviet Union, along with reviews of new performances of Brecht's works in Soviet theaters. A few months ago, readers received the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Brecht. Its author is Bernhard Reich, a German emigrant to Moscow since 1926. Reich's book, voluminous and documented, accompanied by photographic material from various productions of Brecht's plays, is distinguished by several advantages. It is an attempt at solid research and at the same time a personal memory and personal assessment of Brecht's work. Its author was among the young Brecht's entourage in Munich after the First World War. He observed his first directorial performances, and retained personal impressions of the characteristics of Brecht's individuality and method of work. Reich, however, was not tempted by the temptation to endure all his work in a subjective and memoiristic plan. He tried to study and interpret Brecht's theatrical aesthetics comprehensively, to understand both its theoretical positions and its stage realization. He did not * B. Reich Teatralnoe - Brecht, essay on creativity, ed. 1960. Society, Moscow, 124 was satisfied only with the analyses of individual works, and he united his observations in a special section on the theatrical mission of the innovative writer. Thus, the analytical exposition did not prevent the personal accent, the researcher's own voice, from sounding there too.

The innovators and seekers, the Argonauts of the march for new art, go against the tide. They teach their contemporaries the most difficult habit - to break traditional notions, to get used to the unknown and unusual. Ehrenburg congratulated the 80-year-old Picasso on his youth. The surest sign of an artist's youth are the disputes that flare up around his work. Innovation does not like the fanfare of unanimous recognition, it does not tolerate the incense of jubilee eulogies. Its ambition is different: to divide minds, to clash them and thus make new and unsuspected truths phosphoresce. Brecht is among the great phenomena of contemporary art, which are very contested and against which aesthetic inertia has long persisted. His value is affirmed through the resistance of canonical opinions and traditional tastes. Like other of his contemporaries such as Mayakovsky and Picasso, he caused aesthetic disturbances throughout his life due to his firm intention to renew the language of the centuries-old stage art, to satisfy the needs of a scientific age and a dialectical way of thinking. When Brecht's theater visited Moscow or Paris, it did not generate universal approval and recognition with its performances. The audience was far more unanimous and enthusiastic, applauding Vico Torriani's variety evenings or the numbers of the Viennese revue on ice. After Brecht, however, something else remained: the restlessness, the productive anxiety that the theater was being cleared of junk. The fools stirred, the routineists united. After Brecht, the debates began.

Recently, Minko Nikolov published his new book, dedicated to the work of Bertolt Brecht - the most significant playwright of the mid-twentieth century. This fact in itself shows how important the subject of the book is, what a gap this book fills in our contemporary art studies. The work on Brecht was also necessary because of a number of fruitless disputes about Brecht's methodology, which always revolved around Brecht, around arithmetic problems and never reached the heart, the meaning of the great creative work. These conversations created an atmosphere of suspicion in connection with the name of Brecht, they made gossip out of things that should be written about with the true mark of respect - with inner passion and civic conviction. I note this not only in connection with Minko Nikolov's book, but also because of something else. Because of that scientific conscientiousness that should be present in the assessment of great contemporary writers. It is true that Brecht does not fit into the needle's eye of narrow-mindedness and spiritual laziness, but this does not mean at all that we should deprive our socialist art of a Great Creator. Brecht may not belong to the geographical latitude that is closest to us, but he is a creature of the same forces that renew the climate, the spirit of our time. The struggle for Brecht, when it is led by a Marxist-critic, is not an apology for flat rationalism, it is only an affirmation of the rational, spiritual, active communist principle in Brecht's dramaturgy.