The Knight of the Rueful Countenance. M.A. Bulgakov’s Play Don Quixote. Characters, Actors, and the Contemporaries’ Reviews on the Performances

Abstract

M.A. Bulgakov created his play Don Quixote, based on the novel by M. de Cervantes, by order of the Moscow Vakhtangov Theatre within a short period of time between finishing the novel The Master and Margarita and starting Batum, the play about I.V. Stalin. This article is devoted to two performances of M. Bulgakov’s Don Quixote staged at the Leningrad Pushkin Theatre (directed by V.P. Kozhich) and the Moscow Vakhtangov Theatre (directed by I.M. Rapoport). The author of the article compares the director’s concepts and interpretations of the principal parts of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and analyses the critical reviews of contemporaries (A.K. Dzhivelegov, G.N. Boyadzhiev, N. Ya. Berkovsky, P.A. Markov, Yu. Yuzovsky) on the premieres. Of particular interest are the reviews of the Main Repertoire Committee members who were first to review the play, the discussion of the Moscow Vakhtangov Theatre performance which unfolded on the pages of The Vakhtangovets internal theatre newspaper, and the materials of the Vakhtangov Theatre artistic expert board meetings. The article highlights an appeal to the speeches of Stalin (in relation to his mention of the name of Don Quixote), examines and places in the historical and cultural context of the 1930s some later reviews on the premieres, which took place in the year of the 325th anniversary of Cervantes’ death, and reflections on the interpretations of the characters who were given a new life in M. Bulgakov’s play.

Keywords

• novel dramatization
• performance genre
• director’s concept
• character interpretation
• the problem of the finale