Chapter LII: Part XVIII: A Talk on the Drama

Reported by I. Teneromo, _ca._ 1907

I recently had the opportunity of talking with Leo Tolstoy about the theatre.

“What dramas, what heartrending dramas, are being enacted before our eyes: national dramas, class dramas, caste dramas! And the individual drama! Has there ever been a time so full of terrible suffering, of mutual destruction? Only think what has passed before us during these last four years of horror! What a din of battle, what a storm of insurrection, what shrieks of massacres with their heaps of mutilated bodies in the streets, in the fields, and at the bottom of the sea! And now that the noise is past, how many secret executions, secret suicides, and how much secret madness! And in spite of such a plenitude of subjects the stage is impoverished. We have no tragedies, no moving drama, not even a healthy amusing repertoire, no humor....

“It is as though life and the drama were made of one piece of dough, and if more is allotted to the one, there remains less for the other. The well-spring of plays for the stage has dried up, and there is only the dull sticky liquid of adaptations left at the bottom.

“Oh, those adaptations! Of course, what will not hunger drive one to invent? But the idea of adaptation is a perfectly childish one. To take a novel, or a story, and rearrange it as a play is like what children do when they cut a figure out of a picture along the outline, stick it to a bit of cardboard, fix it on a stand, and are quite delighted. It stands up, therefore it is a statue! A novel or a story is pictorial work: in it the master works with his brush, putting on dabs of paint, producing backgrounds, shadows, half-tones. A play is sculptor’s work. One has to work with a chisel: not to put on dabs of paint but to cut out in relief.

“I first understood the wide difference between a novel and a play when I sat down to write my _Power of Darkness_. At first I set to work using a novelist’s usual methods, to which I was accustomed. But after the first few pages I found that they were not the right thing here. For instance, on the stage it is impossible to prepare for the important moments lived through by the hero, impossible to make him think and call up memories, or to throw light on his character by referring back to the past: it all comes out dull, forced, and unreal. A ready-formed state of mind, ready-formed resolutions, must be presented to the public. Only soul-images like these--sculptured in relief and in mutual collision--agitate and touch the onlooker.

“It is true I myself could not resist it, and put into _The Power of Darkness_ a few monologues; but while doing so I felt it was not the right thing.”

The above is taken from _The Life of Tolstoy_, Vol. II, by
Aylmer Maude.

_c. 1917._