The plays comprising this volume, Daniil Gink's Bald/Brunet and Alexei Burykin's Nijinsky, were the basis for Moscow's two biggest theatrical hits of the early 1990s. They appeared as if out of nowhere at à time when the morale of Russia's theater community was at an all-time low. Many of the established directors were merely repeating themselves, while nearly all of the prolific playwrights of the 1960s, '70s and '80s had fallen silent. New playwrights were having almost no success getting their works performed. Right or wrong, the received opinion was that both playwriting and theater in Russia had died. As often happens, it took the blissful ignorance and fearlessness of inexperience to turn the tide.
When Bald/Brunet premiered at the Stanislavsky Theater in December 1991 and became an overnight sensation, Daniil Gink was all of twenty-two years old. Fourteen months later, in the waning days of February 1993, when Nijinsky burst onto the scene as the first production of the new Bogis Agency production company, Alexei Burykin was still short of his twenty-fifth birthday. Neither of the young authors had ever written à play before. The amazing success enjoyed by the productions of their plays is eloquent proof that Burykin's Nijinsky knows precisely what he is talking about when he quips that "all experience does is kill à good leap."
Naturally, it would have been too much of à storybook ending had Moscow's well-experienced critics greeted the appearance of the two fledgling dramatists enthusiastically. There is no point in hiding the facts: While the two productions were the proverbial and bona fide talk of the town, and while they performed to nothing but standing-room-only crowds, the critics bucked, balked, sputtered and bickered in regard to the plays themselves. Both authors were said to have been "saved" by great casts. Gink was accused of having written à pale imitation of Eugene Ionesco or Samuel Beckett, while Burykin was either ignored altogether or accused of merely rearranging Nijinsky's diary. But one of the wisest responses came from Viktor Slavkin, the writer whose plays À Young Man’s Grown-Up Daughter and Cerceau provided the material for two of Anatoly Vasilyev's most important productions (1979 and 1985, respectively). Commenting on the state of Russian playwriting in 1994, Slavkin praised Bald/Brunet and Nijinsky as Moscow's two best productions in the last fifteen years, and added pointedly that great productions aren't made from bad plays.* Indeed, both of the plays are fresh, original and theatrical. They are laced with the energy and the endlessly attractive boldness of youth, just as they are filled with the kind of wisdom and insight that belies their authors' tender ages.
Even à cursory glance at the texts offers an impressive arsenal of responses to the various criticisms that were aimed at them. Gink's play - a touching, tender exploration of an aging man’s reaction to the crass world around him - has almost nothing to do with what we call the theater of the absurd. It is à dreamlike work that often uses stream of consciousness tactics to lay bare the very concrete, very personal experiences and problems of the main character. Meanwhile, aside from quoting some key phrases and using some of the anecdotal material from Nijinsky's diary, Burykin's play is à strikingly imaginative and wholly independent work. It completely transforms the frantic, feverish atmosphere of Nijinsky's diary into à sublime state of wonder and discovery. One of the most curious points surrounding the criticism aimed specifically at the plays is that neither of them (like Nijinsky's diary, incidentally) had been published in Russian.** One can't help but wonder what the critical hoopla was based on.
Putting Bald/Brunet and Nijinsky together in one collection reveals some fascinating similarities between them. And the nature of those similarities has much to say about the key problems that were buffeting Russian culture in the early 1990s. Most striking is that both plays depict artists suffering from some sort of schizophrenic disorder. In the case of Bald/Brunet, an aging sax player and rhyme scribbler (the Bald Man) is constantly forced to defend himself against the attacks of à corrosive young man (the Brunet) who is probably only à figment of his own imagination or à product of his memory. In Nijinsky, the artist is Vaslav Nijinsky, the great Polish-Russian dancer of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the early 20th century. Burykin split the historical figure into two characters: Nijinsky, who represents the dancer's intuitive half, and the Actor, who represents his more practical, cerebral half.
It would be folly to suggest that either Gink or Burykin were specifically attempting to create grand metaphors for the crisis in Russian culture, but it is hardly à coincidence that each of them found that the dramatic structure of the split personality best expressed their ideas. The great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote that “Russians are, by their very psychology, inclined to become schismàtics."*** In fact, Russian history might even be described as à series of schisms that at any given time is either in the process of healing or of being aggravated. Certainly, the collapse of the Soviet Union, brought about by the collapse of the philosophy and ideology that sustained it, has reopened many of the wounds that have caused Russia's schisms in the past. Bald/Brunet and Nijinsky, both in their structures and in the themes that they raise, bear compelling witness to that.
Also very much within the Russian tradition is the deep human sympathy that is sensed in the authors' attitudes to their creations. Both treat characters in states of acute alienation, confusion and frustration, although the resulting plays are seldom bleak or cruel. The worlds of the works may be largely hostile and deceptive, but they still retain the capacity to offer moments of genuine, meaningful solace. In the ease of Bald/Brunet, that is expressed in the musician-poet's frequent escapes into the pristine, idealized world of childhood. In Nijinsky, it is expressed through the schizophrenic dancer’s autonomy of genius, which proves to be à justification even for his insanity. Naturally, the two plays have different textures. Gink created à jazzy mix that blows hot or cool depending upon whether the action is colored most by the irreverent Brunet's bold sarcasm or by the Bald Man's almost painful vulnerability. On the other hand, Burykin's highly poetic play flows on with an elegant grace, not because the characters occasionally speak in verse, but because the dialogue and the situations that create the play's reality seem to hang just beyond the reach of quotidian banalities. But despite their differences, both plays contain that tangible, vital, human warmth that always seems to mark even the most relentlessly probing works of Russian literature.
Other moments linking the plays are more superficial or even technical. Each incorporates poetry (Nijinsky) or poetic structures (Bald/Brunet) into its text; each often streamlines the dialogue through the use of “questionnaires,” i.e., running lists of shotgun questions and answers; and each contains references to the two founding fathers of modern Russian poetry, Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. Although the images and functions of these two giants of Russian literature are quite different in each play, it is significant that their authoritative names, specifically, should crop up at à time of major cultural upheaval and reevaluation. Burykin deepens his link with the literary tradition by repeatedly playing on parallels with Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel, The Idiot.
Even extra-textual elements unite the writers and their plays. Both are graduates of the Moscow Art Theater School (Burykin from the acting department in 1990, and Gink from the directing department in 1992), and both began writing for the theater almost by accident. Gink wrote Bald/Brunet after his friend and classmate Oleg Babitsky said he would like to stage something about two people who "sit around and talk," but that he could not find any plays he liked. It was not long before Babitsky was rehearsing Gink's freshly-written play at the Stanislavsky Theater. Burykin wrote Nijinsky at the behest of his friend, the actor Oleg Menshikov. Having just performed the role of Sergei Yesenin in the London production of Martin Sherman's When She Danced (for which he received the Laurence Olivier award in 1992) Menshikov was not satisfied with the types of roles he was being offered. As Burykin tells it, Menshikov knew his friend occasionally tried his hand at writing, and he suggested the idea of à play about Nijinsky. The result was the basis for one of the most exciting and most talked-about productions of the 1992-1993 season in Moscow.
(…)
It should come as no surprise, then, that for all the striking similarities that join Gink, Burykin and their plays, Bald/Brunet and Nijinsky are written in very different keys. Naturally, when brought to life on the stage, they give rise to vastly differing performances.
(…)
If in Bald/Brunet, the two main characters often spend their time drubbing one another in fits of anger and frustration, in Nijinsky, the title character and his double, the Actor, are locked in the grips of à tense, but dignified, duel. From the play's marvelous opening words of "I'm free! I'm free!" to Nijinsky's spectacular, flying exit, Burykin carefully leads his bifurcated hero through à labyrinthine journey of self-discovery. This is the world of insanity as seen through the opposite end of the looking glass, wherein clinical or social notions of insanity are entirely beside the point. Within the confines of the work, Nijinsky's madness is neither an affliction nor à tragedy; it is à haven that cradles and protects the former dancer's genius. And genius, in Burykin's play, is nothing less than à living spark of God's wisdom and power.
That is certainly one of the reasons why Nijinsky is so extraordinarily buoyant. For all the tension arising in the thrusts and parries between the two characters, the play soars lightly from dialogue to dialogue, from scene to scene. Even in its rare dark moments, it is always permeated with the faint perfume of approving, ironic humor. Nijinsky-the-character almost never doubts the divine origin of his nature. That gives him not only the confidence, but the right to tease, to ignore or to scorn that half of his personality which is incapable of grasping the great mystery of genius. It frees him of those mundane responsibilities which bind others to the laws of civilization and the world.
Burykin himself delights in evading the traditional laws of drama. From his determination of the play as "à game of solitaire for two" in the subtitle, to Nijinsky's parting leap at the end, Burykih repeatedly shifts most everything just à hair off center. That is not to claim for Nijinsky the status of an experimental or avant-garde work. More properly, it is à play that is based on à poetic structure, in the sense that poetry also uses the language and structures of everyday speech, while skewing and reshaping them to create à denser, more suggestive picture of the things they describe.
Whatever the case, there is no doubting that Nijinsky will give à director reason to pause before calling the first rehearsal. How does one incorporate Nijinsky's verse "visions," wherein he is visited briefly by his parents, Sergei Diaghilev, his wife, his daughter and even his unborn son? Who plays them? Nijinsky? The Actor? Do they share the exchanges? Burykin gives no answers in his stage directions. Where does the action take place, and what, in fact, really happens in the course of the play? The author clearly ridicules received notions of plot, using Nijinsky as his mouthpiece. In Act II, the former ballet star says with à tangible air of disgust: "Oh, plot! It's always the same. 'What's the plot of your story?' There is none."
Indeed, in Nijinsky, the largest concentration of "useable information" emerges from the atmosphere and the tendencies of the play rather than from the actual reality of it. When Nijinsky is seriously trying for the first time to merge with the Actor in Act II, he explains how he was able to "hang in the air at the top of à leap," and encourages his partner to try it himself. The author provides à brief description of the scene as the Actor finally gathers the nerve to try it:

Nijinsky waves his hand, the Actor starts running. He leaps and flies into the air. Both carefully watch the trajectory of the Actor's leap and laugh at that moment when they imagine he comes back to earth.

Clearly, this is not à routine stage direction merely intended to put the actors in their proper places or have them speak with à prescribed intonation. We only learn that it is an imagined scene after the Actor has "flown through the air" and we, together with the characters, have followed the "trajectory of his leap." In fact, there is no leap. Burykin here is less interested in action than in mood and motivation. More important than the actual event or non-event is the poetic aura in which it is seen, simulated or imagined. (…)
More categorical, and more difficult to realize from à production point of view, is the stage direction in the finale of Nijinsky which indicates that Nijinsky "disappears in à leap." This time, the author provides no attenuating explanations, offering the unusual vision as an unquestioned fact. And, by finding ways to realize this near-violation of physical reality in performance, every production of Nijinsky will carry that seed of poetic suggestiveness which Burykin planted everywhere in the play's very structure.
Nijinsky's is à world in which intuition is the greatest moving force. He abhors anything connected to theory or logic, which, for him, smack of categorization, banal definition, or limitation. Even when he deigns to define himself, his definition is so rambling that it hardly defines anything at all. He is, he says, "à bear à bison à dolphin," he is Buddha and Christ, he is "anywhere and everywhere," "love and eternity." Despite constant prompting and cajoling on the part of the Actor, Nijinsky for the longest time refuses to remember his past, his profession or even the Actor's - i.e., his own - name. He simply will not let himself be so cornered.
Of the two characters, Nijinsky is the purer, the higher and the lighter, but the Actor - at least dramatically - is the more complex. If the alter ego bearing the name of Nijinsky essentially represents the divine mystery of genius, the Actor is something of à grab bag into which everything else is tossed. He is Nijinsky's rational half; he is the body into which genius temporarily settled; his attitudes are those of one whom society is usually willing to accept as normal; and - perhaps paradoxically, perhaps not - he ultimately is the one who is most visibly afflicted by something resembling madness. He commences his journey looking and sounding like à one-track-minded psychiatrist whose mission is to draw Nijinsky out of dementia, but things actually progress in the opposite direction. Gradually, the Actor is stripped of his confidence in facts, logic and reason, until, as the play approaches its end, he blurts out in frustration that he somehow got mixed up in "something incredibly absurd." But in à bit of à reverse image of the Bald Man freeing himself from his "double" while reverting to à childlike state, the Actor's admission of his confusion suddenly brings about à temporary peace with his alter ego. Almost immediately, Nijinsky lays claim to his own name for the first time, and the Actor, also for the first time, finds the inspiration to speak in rhyme and even take à stab at à Nijinskian, flying leap.
Nijinsky rings with the clarity and purity of à bell struck sharply. À play about genius, talent and inspiration, it exudes the inspiration and the vision of its author. It offers few explanations, tenders no excuses and everywhere celebrates the exciting, liberating vitality of the divine, creative impulse.
Bald/Brunet and Nijinsky offer fascinating glimpses into the tumu1tuous process that was gripping Russian society as they were being written. But their especial achievement was not just in capturing the textures and peculiarities of social or spiritual upheaval. More important is that, even while eloquently expressing the uncertainty which pervades their individual worlds, they each pinpoint those eternal values which Russian culture has always valued in the past and will certainly continue to value in the future. They are contemplative, philosophical, incisive, and, at moments, even reverent. But, for all their undeniable Russianness, there is nothing parochial or provincial about these two plays. Bald/Brunet, in many ways, is à thrusting effort to get on top of, and come to terms with, the cliches that have divided Russia from the occidental world for the better part of the 20th century. No one will confuse the world portrayed in it with America or even Western Europe, but the author's purview clearly includes an instinctive feel for those cu1tures. Written only shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bald/Brunet is largely free of the traits that so often made works of Soviet literature appear as strange missives from the dark recesses of an alien, inaccessible land. Gink's aging, disillusioned man from the counter-culture is no longer the old political dissident or even the drunken social outcast. He is what he would probably be were he to show up anywhere else in the world: à bit of à misfit, à spiritual vagabond and à seeker for the truth.
On à more superficial level, Nijinsky also shows signs of the rapprochement between the East and the West. Vaslav Nijinsky was à Russian dancer who achieved his legendary status only in Europe. He was categorically opposed to the consequences of the Russian Revolution, which was more than enough to keep his name in à perpetual state of limbo in the former Soviet Union. To be sure, his greatness was recognized, but he was kept curiously distant from the mainstream of Russian eu1ture, which has always embraced its greatest artists heartily. Burykin's play was essentially the first major step taken to find à proper place in the Russian pantheon for the great dancer. What makes it such à significant step is that it wastes no time or effort polemicizing with the hackneyed, distorted images from the past. In fact, Burykin was not the least interested in history, biography or even eu1turallegacies. He went straight for his hero's most essential, most universal quality: his value as à carrier of spirituality.
Both Bald/Brunet and Nijinsky were written on clean slates, without prejudice, without malice and without an agenda. That makes them important mirrors of the society - and of the world - that gave rise to them. It is sincerely hoped that these translations, both done in close consultation with the authors, will give English-language directors, actors, audiences and readers an opportunity to gain insight into some of the concerns of the new Russia, as well as an opportunity to see themselves in à new light.

***

* The comment was made to me in conversation. Slavkin published an appreciation of Nijinsky in "Uletanie geroya" [À Hero's Parting Leap], Ogonyok, No. 21/22 (1993), 18-19.
** Essentially, neither play has been published in any language until now. À German version of Bald/Brunet appeared in Theater Heute, in 1992, but it was an unauthorized version that used the much-shortened and occasionally altered production text rather than Gink's play. À back-translation of Nijinsky's diary, from the French, appeared in Russian only in 1995.
*** Niñîlàs Berdyaev, The Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 2.

Source of the publication: “Two Plays from the New Russia. “Bald/Brunet” by Daniil Gink. “Nijinsky” by Alexei Burykin”, translated and edited by John Freedman, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996