Page 58 - DENG104_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_I

Unit 5: The Spark Neglected Burns the House by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s creation of the “Stories for the People” and their publication by The Intermediary Notes
attracted the attention of persons interested in producing plays for the common people, and
Tolstoy wrote two plays for them. The first, called “The First Distiller” (“Pervyi vinokur”),
was an enlarged, dramatized version of “The Imp and the Crust.” It follows very closely the
plot and style of this story for the people, which concerns the attempts of the Devil to seduce
a stolid, hard-working peasant away from his life of virtue. First staged in 1886 at an open-
air theatre in the factory village of Aleksandrovskoe, near St. Petersburg, it was Tolstoy’s only
play “for the people” actually to be performed in such a venue. Its success frightened the
censorship, and further popular performances of plays by Tolstoy were banned.
Of much larger significance is Tolstoy’s second popular drama, The Power of Darkness (Vlast’ t’my),
also written in 1886. At the particular insistence of KP Pobedonostsev, the Procurator of the
Holy Synod and an intimate adviser of Tsar Alexander III, its production was forbidden in
any theatre. It was first produced only a decade later, in 1895, by various theatres, including
the Maly Theatre in Moscow and the Aleksandriinskii Theatre in St. Petersburg. In 1902 the
play was one of the first great successes of Konstantin Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre.
The Power of Darkness is a curious amalgam of traditional (i.e., literary) dramatic forms and
devices and the style of language and speech which Tolstoy developed in writing the “Stories
for the People.” Organized in the manner of the well-made play of the neo-classical era, it is
divided into five acts with an introductory exposition in Act I, the further development of
characters and situation in Acts II and III, the catastrophe in Act IV, and the denouement in
Act V. The neo-classical unity of place is carefully preserved (the entire action of the piece is
set in the interior of the leading character’s house) and the one incident of gross violence
which the play contains, the murder of an illegitimate baby, takes place off stage.

The main theme of the play is expressed by its epigraph which, as so often in the “Stories for
the People,” takes the form of a folk saying: “When the claw is caught, the whole bird is lost”
(“Kogotok uviaz, vsei ptichke propast’”). The play’s main character, a peasant named Nikita,
commits a small sin by dallying with the wife of his aged master and is, by degrees, led into
the commission of one further crime after another. The action of the play is centered upon the
slow moral destruction of Nikita as he sinks gradually into a morass of evil, culminating,
however, in his final repentance and redemption.
The main characters are all peasants. They and their lives are depicted realistically, more
unsparingly, in fact, than in any of the “Stories for the People.” The play’s realism is reminiscent
of two works of young Tolstoy (“A Landowner’s Morning” and “Polikushka”) which portray
the darker side of peasant life, and anticipate the harsh realism of some of Anton Chekhov’s
stories of peasant life, in particular his “Peasants” (“Muzhiki”). At the same time, the peasant
characters symbolically represent universal types and values. Thus, Matrena, the protagonist’s
mother, represents evil while his father, Akim, represents good. Nikita himself is cast between
his two progenitors, played upon now by the power of evil, now by the power of good.
Symbolically, the play becomes the representation of the struggle between good and evil for
the soul of a human being.

In contrast to the very positive representation accorded to peasant characters in general in the
“Stories for the People,” The Power of Darkness is something of an anomaly among Tolstoy’s
writings for the popular audience. Not only is the power of evil much more palpably to be felt
here than in the stories, but the overtly sexual themes presented in the play have no counterpart
anywhere in the stories. Even so, the play was enthusiastically received by the popular audience.
It remains the only dramatic work by Tolstoy to have received positive acknowledgement
during the writer’s lifetime and to have stood the test of time by becoming a part of the
standard repertory of the Russian theatre.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 53