Written between 1941 and 1944 during Brecht's exile in the United States, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is made up of two stories, Grusha's, which starts in Scene 2, and Azdak's, which does not begin until Scene 5, the penultimate scene of the play. These two stories converge in Scene 6 where the problems that had been posed at the outset and highlighted throughout the sequences involving Grusha are resolved, thus bringing the whole action to a more or less 'happy' end. Since happy endings are not characteristic of Brecht's drama, this particular example of harmonious conclusion to anything but harmonious events (and to anything but a transparent argument) has prompted a number of commentators to draw special attention to the 'liberating, life-enhancing quality' of the play or its 'unified understanding'. The scholars who emphasise the joyful, morally affirmative and/or politically optimistic outlook provided by the play's dénouement are usually also the ones who believe its two stories are organically linked. Their opinion runs counter to the authoritative view of John Willett and Ralph Manheim for whom the work is an 'awkward combination of two largely unrelated stories', despite which it is nevertheless 'a truly epic work embodying many of Brecht's special ideas, tastes, and talents'.

Disagreement over the play's structure and its implications for the meaning of the whole is an inevitable consequence of Azdak's arriving so late in the piece. By this time Grusha's story has almost run its course. The revolt led by the fat prince against Georgi Abashvili, Governor of Grusinia, has taken place, as a result of which the Governor is executed.

In October 1946 Brecht wrote from American exile to his oldest friend and collaborator, the designer Caspar Neher: 'It would be nice if the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, for instance, were available to us again.' The war and Hitler's reign over, Brecht had set his mind on getting a theatre of his own and finally achieving what must have been an ultimate goal that never before had seemed attainable. In a letter to Neher of December the same year, he stated: 'I'm convinced that we'll build up a theatre again.'

It took Brecht little more than two years to realise his ambition. In April 1949 the East Berlin authorities, that is, the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party, agreed to provide the financial support for his project: a company under Brecht's artistic guidance that was to be managed by his wife Helene Weigel as 'Intendant'. She would also be the company's leading actress. His plan to take over the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, however, had to wait until the company in residence would move into the Volksbühne theatre, still to be rebuilt from its ruins at Luxemburg Square. The Intendant of the Deutsches Theater, Wolfgang Langhoff, offered Brecht his two houses, the Deutsches and the Kammerspiele, as a provisional home where the company could perform two to three times a week.

Introduction: Dialectics

The most damaging yet most common error in discussions of Brecht's theory has been to see it as fixed and unchanging, and to view it therefore as either dogmatic, communist-inspired abstraction or revered holy writ. Behind these views lie different perceptions of Marxism and the rights and wrongs of political art. Brecht began to think through the ideas with which he is most commonly associated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His emphasis and terminology changed in these years, as well as subsequently, and many see in his later remarks and essays (especially A Short Organum for the Theatre, 1948) a belated acceptance of the conventions of realism and the realities of emotional experience suppressed by the supposed sterile intellectualism of his earlier years. In this way Brecht has often come to be admired as a great writer, particularly in the West, in spite of his theory: as at once reconciled with his own youthful hedonism and with the forms and verities of an art above theory and politics. In fact, this is simply to read Brecht in terms of one favoured aesthetic ideology rather than another, and to compromise his art and ideas as much, though in another direction, as a protective state socialism ever did. If we are to approach his ideas more constructively, we need to understand how they emerged and changed in particular artistic and social circumstances, and see them, moreover, as belonging with clusters of related terms and concepts in what was a developing self-critical aesthetic and theatre practice.

Whatever else he was writing, Pushkin’s energy for lyric poetry rarely seemed to dim. If he wrote for a coterie of friends and poets in early life, he looked forward in his late poems to a time when he would be a truly national poet, and many of his more than 700 lyrics have become canonical works of Russian literature. The corpus encompasses a wide range of genres, displaying Pushkin’s mastery of the song, the poetic epistle, the elegy, epigram, the political ode, the landscape poem, the soliloquy, the poetic cycle, the fragment.

Poetry is often both a pragmatic and imaginary assertion of the self. The relationship between the first-person speaker and the author in Pushkin’s lyric poems is no less complex than in Evgenii Onegin (see Chapter 3). Whatever the connection to the lived life, lyric poems project the sense that identity is continuous but also highly precarious. Lyric poetry also projects alternative senses of identity to different, sometimes overlapping readerships. By moving through Pushkin’s career, this chapter discusses the shape of self-representation in his lyric works with a focus on the connection between poems that project the identity of a poet and poems where an inner and more private self speaks.

Brecht asserted in a 1935 essay that it was music which 'made possible something which we had long since ceased to take for granted, namely the “poetic theatre”' (BT, pp. 84-90). Music provided him with a powerful mechanism to reclaim and refunction in 'epic drama' the presentational mode of address, long a standard convention in most forms of music-theatre but discarded by modern drama after the 'fourth wall' had been dismantled by naturalism and realism. Brecht's relationship to music, therefore, was as essential as it was complex. Although little interested in musical repertoire or issues extraneous to his efforts in the theatre, ironically Brecht first gained wide public recognition through the musical settings of his works: opera librettos, plays with music, a ballet, dramatic cantatas, an oratorio, musical films, even commercial jingles. By 1931, music critic Hans Mersmann could even proclaim: 'New Music in Germany has found its poet. This poet is Bertolt Brecht.' Although Brecht thereafter showed little interest in serving the modernist agenda of 'New Music', only one of his nearly fifty completed dramatic works lacks music. Over 600 of his more than 1,500 poems refer to musical genres in title or structure; intended as songs, most were set as such during his lifetime. Subsequently, despite copyright disincentives, there have been well over a thousand additional settings, including many by major composers.

One of Brecht's favourite sayings was: 'The proof of the pudding is in the eating.' Although his essays, poems and plays tell us a great deal about both his aesthetics and his dramatic theories, it is to his practice (and to that of others engaged in performing his work) that we must turn for meaningful insight into Brechtian performance. The aim of this essay is to examine the implications of Brechtian theory and practice for the performer. This will be done by means of a brief discussion of Brecht's ideas on acting, followed by a fuller consideration of the views and experiences of actors who have played major roles in Brecht's plays. Brecht was first and foremost a man of the theatre, a playwright who also directed, so that one might well suppose that without his sixteen years in exile, during which time the practice of his directorial skills was necessarily limited, the world would have received many fewer words about his dramatic theory. Certainly as a director Brecht seems to have referred very little even to the most famous of his theoretical ideas.

One of the most popular anecdotes about Brecht's early years in Munich involves a significant encounter with the popular comedian Karl Valentin (1882-1948).

In October 1922, following on from the success the previous month of the première of Drums in the Night at the Munich Kammerspiele, Brecht was appointed to the dramaturgical team of the theatre and was immediately given the task of rewriting and adapting Marlowe's Edward II. The writing took place over the winter of 1922/3, but the eight-week rehearsal period, then the longest in the Kammerspiele's history, did not start until January 1924. In one of his conversations with the essayist and critic Walter Benjamin on 29 June 1938, Brecht told the story of how 'the idea of Epic Theatre first came into his head' at one of these rehearsals:

A few years later, Brecht himself wrote a version of the same story in The Messingkauf Dialogues: 'When the Augsburger was producing his first play, which included a thirty minutes' battle, he asked Valentin what he ought to do with the soldiers. “What are soldiers like in battle?” Valentin promptly answered: “White. Scared.”' (pp. 69-70).

In Russian, the long poem (poema) is generally defined as an extended verse narrative in contrast to the shorter and less plot-oriented lyric (stikhotvorenie). Like all genre classifications, the term has its limitations. The long poem need not be antithetical to the lyric (indeed, lyric insertions are frequent), and some forms of the lyric can be dependent on plot. Such ambiguities notwithstanding, Pushkin himself used the term, and it has become traditional in editions of his work. Pushkin turned to the long poem throughout his career, completing ten and leaving substantial fragments of others. The present chapter focuses on Ruslan and Liudmila (Ruslan i Liudmila, 1818- 20), The Gypsies (Tsygany, 1824) and The Bronze Horseman (Mednyi vsadnik, 1833).

Epic and mock-epic (Ruslan and Liudmila)

Epic and mock-epic (Ruslan and Liudmila): To the end of his life, Pushkin was as much a product of the Russian eighteenth century as he was of contemporary European Romanticism. Russia’s eighteenth-century poets had established a hierarchy of genres, each of which demanded a specific style and vocabulary. At the pinnacle was the epic (poema), for the creation of a national epic was deemed the ideal means of ‘legitimising’ both the country and its nascent literary tradition. In practice, however, the eighteenth-century poets had far less success with the epic than with the solemn ode (torzhestvennaia oda), a relatively lengthy and formally strict poem commemorating events of national significance (battles and court festivities).

Pushkin’s masterpiece Evgenii Onegin (1823-30) is universally recognised as the starting-point of the classic nineteenth-century Russian novel, and has challenged generations of readers and critics. The period of writing Evgenii Onegin spanned an amazing epoch in the poet’s creativity, and, as the leading nineteenth-century Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky aptly remarked, 'to evaluate this work is to evaluate the poet himself in the full range of his literary endeavours'. The first impression Evgenii Onegin gives is of striking simplicity and disarming transparency - with its minimalist plot, formal elegance and economy and crystalline purity of language. Closer analysis reveals ever-new depths of philosophical, psychological and literary meaning, characteristic not only of great poetry but stemming from the work’s radically innovative narrative structure. In its self-conscious play with narrative form and fictionality, Evgenii Onegin joins the novelistic tradition of Cervantes, Diderot and Sterne, while expanding the potential of mock-epic and burlesque poetry.

Outdoing Byron

A useful starting-point for approaching Pushkin’s innovation is its acknowledged debt to, and differences from, Byron’s 'novels in verse'. Like Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, Evgenii Onegin was written in numbered verse stanzas for which Pushkin devised a variant of the sonnet, in fourteen iambic tetrameter lines, that has become known as the 'Onegin stanza' (on which see the Appendix). It was published in chapters that appeared irregularly over many years, with no ostensible end point envisaged, and featured a loose framework associated with the adventures of an eponymous hero that allowed the poet to incorporate disparate material (literary, historical, cultural and quasi-autobiographical).

The centrality of the Lehrstück (learning play) to Brechtian theory was only slowly understood by a wider circle of international, critical audiences. Whether it was the lack of a comprehensive theory dealing with these works, or the Cold War hangover that rendered their texts particularly unpalatable, the result was a more-or-less total misunderstanding of this group of plays written between 1926 and 1933. A prominent and influential example of misreading was Martin Esslin's interpretation of the learning plays in his book Brecht: The Man and His Work. It is significant that Esslin translated the term Lehrstück as 'didactic plays', because in his view Brecht was writing communist thesis if not propaganda plays. Not until 1972, when Reiner Steinweg published his first volume dedicated to the construction of a coherent theory of the Lehrstück, which Brecht had provided in fragments and sketches only, was the relation of the learning plays to the rest of Brecht's work fully appreciated.

Conceived and written contemporaneously with works like Mahagonny and Radiotheorie, the learning plays belong to the nexus of Brecht's most innovative writing. In his 'Notes to Mahagonny', he drew a sharp line between renovative art, which is designed merely to stimulate audiences' appetites for cultural consumption in an effort to save the existing institutions, and genuine innovations which aim at a transformation of the entire cultural apparatus 'from places of entertainment into organs of publication'.

Mother Courage and Her Children was written in 1938 and 1939 at a particularly difficult time for 'progressive' or 'radical' writers, especially those with affinities with the avant-garde of previous decades. Politically, in the face of rampant Nazism and fascism, Stalin had decreed that Communists must work for a 'popular front' of anti-fascist forces, which seemed to require artists to seek new forms of 'popular culture'. But in Soviet Russia, there was no such 'popular front', and the slightest deviation from the increasingly tortuous 'Party line' was being viciously stamped on. The Great Terror and the Show Trials silenced all dissent at home and left foreign well-wishers baffled.

Meanwhile, the Party's artistic line caused fearsome debate to rage about the nature of progressive, especially Communist, literature, and Brecht found his own ideas frequently denigrated and his work dismissed in circles where he ought to have felt welcome. The debate centred on notions of 'reality', and the writers' relationship to it. The period of mass industrialisation, as Marx had pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, was characterised by 'constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation . . .' If contemporary life was fragmented and chaotic - and modernist writers and artists agreed that Marx was correct about this - how should they deal with this phenomenon? Various methods were tried: many of the 'isms' of twentieth-century art, futurism, imagism, cubism, constructivism and others, began as fresh attempts to penetrate the fragmentation.

As political trauma decreased and conditions improved slowly in the 1930s, the opportunity of higher education and the growth of a middle class increased the confidence and raised the profile of Irish women writers, after a national cultural revival in which they played a secondary role. The political rationale on all sides in the Anglo-Irish debate, while acknowledging and protesting ethnic and religious restrictions, had rested on unacknowledged gender and class restrictions which consumed or distorted many voices prior to independence. This national or political debate disappears in the work of most Irish women writers, although the related religious divide continues to be important, particularly in Northern Ireland. Ignoring divisive political debates enabled women to attend to the very distinctions and restrictions which buttressed these debates and continued to affect most women negatively. This close link between subject and writer, between the real and the fictional life, might have produced emotional or pedantic work, but the important novels of the period reflect the wisdom, detachment and humour of disciplined artists, related no doubt to the financial and educational privilege of the writers themselves. Uninterested in either the fantasies of the Irish Literary Revival or the formal experimentation of the modernists, subject matter being the locus of their attention, women novelists embraced realism, occasionally achieving poetic beauty.

The political novel before 1969

For the Irish novelist, the usual concerns of the English novel - personal morality and relationships - have tended to be subordinated to the more pressing issues of race, religion and nationality. The early Irish novelists, Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), attempted a reconciliation between Ireland's two nations, Edgeworth through social reform and political unionism, Owenson through Ascendancy commitment to a romantic nationalist movement which, in literature, would culminate in the work of W. B. Yeats. The big house theme inaugurated by Edgeworth and Owenson (see chapter 3 above) has continued to fascinate novelists to the present day, as Jennifer Johnston's The Captains and the Kings (1972), The Gates (1973), How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974) and The Old Jest (1979) would indicate. These novels, written at the height of the Northern Troubles, offer an oblique perspective on the conflict, and the setting of the novels in the past, in the south, suggests flight from the intractable reality of contemporary Northern Protestant unionism/loyalism in 1970s Ulster.