“From Akhmatova, I moved to Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. Always start with the moderns. If your student is a woman, appeal to the lyrical. Ask her what she thinks, and when she is ready, cautiously mention feelings. Then, after a few months, if signs of feelings are observed, prescribe Zoshchenko and Babel, to develop a sense of the absurd and a sense of history.”
“Absurdity and history … aren’t they the same, in your country?”
“Yes, Comrade Lewis, definitely, proudly, yes!” says Kogan. “But that’s something you learn at home, not at an orphanage. If you see signs of feelings and instill the sense of the absurd, you work back to the foundation: Pushkin. Starting with Pushkin is wrong. Without proper preparation, Pushkin is nothing but pretty verse and cheap melodrama.
“Think of Onegin: Tatyana loves Onegin. Onegin doesn’t love Tatyana, but changes his mind later. He does … he doesn’t … he does … oy! He shoots a friend at fifteen paces. Bang-bang … basta! Write a dim-witted opera, stage a ballet. Narishkeit! But if you are able to feel and laugh, you’ve beaten history at its game, and then the real Pushkin awaits you in his debauched glory.”
“I am familiar with the curriculum,” says Lewis.
He is, after all, a walking testament to its effectiveness.
* * *
The Black Maria pulls up to the darkened dacha of Professor N. Since the houses on Zapadnaya Street stand vacant and shuttered during the winter, there is no reason to hurry.
Kogan bounces out of the cab, opens the gate of Zapadnaya Number Four, and climbs onto the running board.
* * *
Tied with the chain that under normal circumstances suspended a bucket, three partially clad white corpses are laid out next to the well.
Sadykov is positioned three meters from the well, a chain looped twice under his arms. The nineteen-year-olds lie closer to the well, the chain passed once under their arms and tied in knots under the armpits. All three are in undershorts, their milk-colored skin on the verge of transparency.
“Commanders first,” says Levinson.
The skin of that which once was Lieutenant Sadykov is cold and slippery. Lewis fights the gag reflex.
The lieutenant is propped up, folded over the edge of the well.
“Let him drop,” says Levinson to Kogan, who is holding the winch handle.
Sadykov’s body goes over the edge, dangling on the chain. The chain tightens, and one of the nineteen-year-olds starts to slide toward the well, pulled by the descending Sadykov.
“Help him to the edge,” commands Levinson. Lewis feels queasy. Levinson and Kogan are unmoved.
“This is the land of the dead,” Lewis declares to himself. Frozen, like a corpse dangling on a chain. The nineteen-year-old is doubled over, his arms and face hanging over the water.
“Now, send him,” commands Levinson, taking the right leg and motioning to Lewis to take the left.
“I didn’t come to arrest him,” says Levinson, sensing Lewis’s reluctance to take part. “He came for me.”
“I know … it was war,” says Lewis, taking the left leg and easing the corpse over the edge.
A moment later, the boy is dangling above Sadykov, and the third corpse moves sled-like toward the well.
“Kogan,” says Levinson curtly. “Hold it. Don’t let the handle spin.”
“Yes, komandir.”
“Let’s help him,” says Levinson, and he and Lewis position the boy over the edge, his blank eyes turned to the comrades below.
As the last corpse goes over the edge, Kogan drops to the ground, letting the handle spin. The bodies hit the water with three distinct splashes.
“The beauty of this is that we can always fish them out and bury them,” says Kogan as Lewis bends over the edge to let out a stream of vomit.
“I’ve seen this reaction in first-year medical students,” says Kogan, his hand resting on the back of doubled-over Lewis.
“And I’ve seen it in actors,” counters Levinson.
“Actors? I’ve seen it in the audience,” says Kogan.
“When?”
“When you were onstage!”
* * *
Indeed, halfway through his career at GOSET, Levinson became known as “the janitor of human souls.” It’s also true that sometime in the thirties, the theater wags had stenciled his name on the janitor’s closet and on every bucket therein.
Many stories were told about the Levinson-Mikhoels broyges (rivalry). Here is one: in a nasty, public altercation in 1932, at a time when Mikhoels suffered from a crippling depression, which Levinson regarded as a sign of weakness, der komandir shouted: “Gey shpil Kinig Lir, Khaver Direktor!” Go play King Lear, Comrade Director!
Translation: Your career is done, perform your dance of the dying swan, make us cry if you still can, and, please, zayt azoy git, have the decency to stiffen after the curtain falls.
This attack occurred at a theater-wide meeting. Some people laughed: a few disgruntled actors, the janitor, the fireman.
In an article about the staging of Lir, Mikhoels attempted to obfuscate this ugly moment:
“My life in 1932 was filled with grief. Over a very short time, I lost several people who were dear to me. These great losses affected me so profoundly that I started to contemplate leaving the stage altogether. The prospect of going onstage to play my former roles became intolerable. These roles contained comic episodes, which amused the audience. To me, laughter was alienating. I was envious of people who could laugh, since at the time I was internally deprived of this ability. I had made a firm decision to abandon stage. But my theater comrades had resolved to return my interest to life and work, and with increasing frequency they said, ‘When you play Lir…’”
Mikhoels accepted Levinson’s challenge.
He performed that swan song, and he kept its beat, and he didn’t die for another decade and a half, an era when people vanished by the million.
In the same article, Mikhoels describes Levinson as a hard-working mediocrity with a “nasal voice, lower than average musicality, and less than a natural sense of rhythm.”
Worse, “fate didn’t give him the opportunity to obtain proper training,” Mikhoels wrote. “As compensation, he was given immense determination, stamina, and an overarching drive to prevail by force. That’s how he educated himself. Everything he knows he picked up on his own, by overpowering his nature. Now his knowledge is considerable, albeit empirical, forced and disjointed. Like most actors in our theater, Levinson is a passive thinker. He lacks the capacity to generalize.”
In his universe, Mikhoels was both the Creator and the Master.
Not only could he direct the director directing him as an actor, but he could write a review, publicly humiliating members of his own ensemble, on the pages of the journal Teatr.
* * *
These were the kindest words Mikhoels could squeeze out of himself on the subject of Levinson.
To be an actor, especially if your main interest is comedy, you have to read voraciously, and voracious reading was not for Levinson, not because he couldn’t read, but because he couldn’t sit. He needed to be engaged, he needed something to do. His brain was powerful, but not nimble. He had only one joke. It was done with a straight face and was rooted in his character. Zuskin was much funnier. Mikhoels was in a different league altogether.
GOSET employed a plethora of actors who had been instructed in a variety of training schools, but the majority had no training at all.