they inculcated Stanislavsky’s ideas in mechanical fashion, using his prestige to suppress dissident artists who were trying to go their own way… At that time the name of Stanislavsky served as the only password for admission to the camp of the ‘orthodox’ realists, and so everybody without exception swore by that name, including those who in their hearts had no faith in it.114
And now, after the Twentieth Congress, actors, producers and especially theoreticians saw their task as returning from the dogmatic, scholastic ‘Stanislavsky’ to the real Stanislavsky. Knebel' wrote:
The shadow of one phenomenon fell upon another, and at once amateurs were found who put the blame for everything on Stanislavsky. But, of course, the founders of the Moscow Art Theatre were in no way responsible for the fact that, in later years, dramatic art developed on worse lines than we should have wished. There were other reasons for that — they were recorded in the decisions of the Twentieth Congress, we know them, and we are fighting against everything that hinders our art from developing and growing. Can it be said that Stanislavsky was responsible for ‘conflictlessness’ in art, the prettifying of reality, the reign of half-truth? Can we blame Stanislavsky for our timidity, for the fact that, for a time, we lost the spirit of discovery and ceased to approach his system in a creative way? No, in my view neither Stanislavsky nor Nemirovich-Danchenko has anything whatsoever to do with that!115
N. Krymova, who quickly became one of the theoreticians of the new generation of the intelligentsia, called upon them, in her dissertation, not to rest content with ‘using the terms of the system and making general appeals to truth and experience’.116
An endeavour to get back to genuine realism was the basic programme of the Contemporary Theatre, and these ideas also inspired A. Efros. In its turn, V. Yu. Lyubimov’s theatre attempted to ‘throw a bridge across’ to Brecht and the dramatic ideas of the twenties, which had been hushed up in the period of Stalin’s ‘socialist realism’. But this was not just a renewal of art, it was also a political struggle, and people wrote and spoke of that fact almost openly. ‘The Contemporary Theatre’, wrote Kardin, ‘was born in the year of the Twentieth Party Congress, and, in their avoidance of the high-flown, its actors called themselves “children of ’56”.’117 The young Contemporary Theatre, and, later, Lyubimov’s theatre on the Taganka carried out a real revolution in the field of drama, and this revolution in artistic form would have been impossible if the artists of the new generation had not based themselves also on new social ideas, a new world-view. The famous Leningrad producer G. Tovstonogov, who emerged in this period, emphasized that
