Levinson was squarely in that majority.
He was an autodidact, and autodidacts are rarely nimble thinkers. They can amass facts — vast storerooms of facts — but they are too uncertain of themselves to get comfortable with doubt, humility, and nuance. Indeed, the more their storerooms of facts expand, the less flexible they become. They start believing that no one understands them, that their critics are conceited fools.
Anyone can amass facts, but it takes wisdom to connect them.
Mikhoels saw der komandir as his responsibility, his potential vulnerability.
Why did this soldier need theater? And why did he have to end up at Mikhoels’s theater?
Clearly, Levinson wasn’t, strictly speaking, an actor. Was he even—truly—a soldier? Levinson’s stubbornness — punctuated by infrequent eruptions of genius — could reduce directors to tears. Was this man ever able to take orders from a higher-ranking officer? He may have been highly effective in the forest, as Robin Hood, but not reporting to Robin Hood. He would have excelled in the Paris Commune, on the barricades.
And surely he was just the sort of royte komandir—red commander — you would want to terrorize the White Army and its foreign sponsors along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, as he so famously did.
Who would give you orders in the Siberian taiga? The howling wind? The wolves? The hibernating bears? It had to be Levinson versus the world, Mikhoels presumed.
At another time, Mikhoels might have added that a man of Levinson’s makeup would have done exceedingly well leading death-defying feats of ragtag fighters in the Jewish ghettos of Central European cities and — of course — the forests, but that calamity was a few years away at the time Mikhoels wrote his vicious screed in Teatr.
Since Levinson and Mikhoels were the sort of adversaries who hardly speak to each other, Mikhoels had no way to determine whether Levinson was (1) the kind of brigand who seeks glorious death in battle, or (2) the kind whose objective is to kill and flee. How do you ascertain whether you are dealing with a Type 1 or Type 2 lunatic, except by spending time with said lunatic, observing him in action, perhaps even drinking vodka with him in order to make a conclusive diagnosis? This Mikhoels couldn’t force himself to do.
What Mikhoels understood was indeed troublesome. What if something in Levinson’s head went cosmically wrong and he started to act? What if he decided to form a terrorist group or ignite a slave rebellion? Wouldn’t he (Mikhoels) be held accountable for this act of madness?
To analyze Levinson, Mikhoels resorted to the shortcut of the Stanislavsky Method, a philosophy of sorts that directs the actor to apply his entire being to portray the characters that appear onstage. Mikhoels didn’t use the method. He shaped characters out of aspects of himself, just like God created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs rather than the entire Adam. With leftover ribs, an actor can shape a variety of very different characters. Mikhoels had a storeroom of characters which he could combine as he saw fit. He knew Stanislavsky well enough to accept his assurances that there was no such thing as a single Stanislavsky method. He had taught different approaches at different times and in different settings.
Still, Mikhoels found it useful to consider whether Levinson’s experience informed the characters he portrayed onstage or whether the characters he portrayed informed Levinson’s experience.
In his case, it was clearly the latter.
Let us unpack this dichotomy. When your characters inform your experience, you are intent on making the world conform to your will; you are creating the universe in your own image; you become the Creator. Only a playwright is entitled to such power.
If your experience shapes your characters, you are safe. You know where the stage ends. You realize that after you go home, you stop being Kinig Lir and become yourself. Your door is firmly closed to allowing characters to shape experience, and you will have no trouble refraining from slaying villains on Groky Street.
If you are allowing the characters you portray to shape your experience offstage, could it be that you are also invisibly allowing your experience to shape your characters? You could be locked in a cosmic spiral — cosmic because, having relinquished gravity, you are unable to distinguish your up from your down as you speed through the dimensions of madness.
* * *
In 1936, while Lir was still running, Levinson heard a rumor that his nemesis had authorized a series of concept drawings of King Richard.
Skeptical of putting on another play about a monarch, Levinson went to the Lenin Library and located the text of Richard II in a prerevolutionary translation into Russian. He was preparing a case against the play, which he was going to present to the meeting of the GOSET collective, in conjunction with a motion to relieve Mikhoels of his duties as artistic director.
The translation was stilted and academic, yet the story sent chills down Levinson’s spine: a usurper and his satraps murder an ineffectual monarch.
Surely, Mikhoels would cast himself as the bumbling, doomed king. He would inject his character with complexity, faith, and moral superiority over his killers.
That would leave Mikhoels in need of a strong Bolingbroke, the leader of the revolution, someone who understood that objective laws of history inevitably demand regicide, a komandir from another time. Was any member of the ensemble better schooled in the art of prevailing by force? Who at GOSET could play der komandir better than Komandir Levinson?
After reading the play, Levinson went up to Mikhoels’s office, the sanctum he had avoided for over a decade. The reception room door was ajar. In the inner office, Mikhoels lay on a leather sofa. His shoes were in the center of the room, atop a small pile of manuscripts. He was writing on a pad.
Mikhoels seemed startled, obviously annoyed.
“I know we haven’t been the best of friends…” said Levinson in Yiddish. “But I have to agree with your choice of Shakespeare.”
Levinson stood in the doorway to avoid towering over the sofa.
“Thank you, Khaver Levinson.” Comrade Levinson. Very formal.
Mikhoels sat up. Height was unavoidably an element of their interplay.
“I’ve read the play,” said Levinson. “It’s really about our revolution.”
“Our revolution?”
Yes, strong leaders like Bolingbroke were the stokers of our worker-peasant revolution. That matter was beyond dispute. Levinson had come to Mikhoels to negotiate a peace treaty, to trade concessions, to secure the part of a heroic leader, not to be put on the spot.
“I can’t recall a revolution … how does it end?”
Levinson recited his own translation:
Ikh for bald opvashn, inem Heylikn Land
Dos merderishe blut
Fun mayn zindiker hant,
Mikhoels repeated the line, his mind bouncing it into Russian or German.
“Yes, Richard II would be an excellent selection,” Mikhoels said. “Of course, in Yiddish, the Bolingbroke conspiracy would be reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that final declaration would be, I’d say, passionately Zionist.
“I don’t think the audience will have the courage to applaud. They’d be looking around to make sure that no one is watching. Then they would go home, lock the doors, and cry. I am not critical of that play, Khaver Levinson, because we are, first of all, educators, but I have no plans to stage it.”
Levinson stood silently.
“You’ve probably heard of concept drawings for Richard, but you’ve read the wrong Richard. I was thinking Richard III.”