YEGOR BULICHOV & OTHERS
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Still, you get the sense that the 64-year-old Gorky, however comfortable under Stalin, yearned for something else, perhaps for something the October Revolution had left unfulfilled. Yegor Bulichov & Others, written 15 years after the upheaval of 1917, is the work of a man who, if not at his creative end, certainly feels at an end of some sort. Maybe it’s just the end of an era–the era of revolutionary expectation. So Yegor Bulichov & Others–like many of Gorky’s postrevolutionary writings–is a work of nostalgia. Indeed, its final curtain is accompanied by a rousing version of “The Internationale.”
The play concerns itself with Yegor Bulichov, a provincial merchant dying of cancer, and his household, including an illegitimate daughter and a domestic named Glaphira with whom he is having an affair. As news spreads of Yegor’s illness among his relatives and associates, all but the daughter and the maid plot in some way to get his money, his house, and his business. In the meantime, news of civil unrest is also spreading, matching Yegor’s own spiritual restlessness. Still, he is no revolutionary. While he hints at supporting the rebels, ultimately he makes no commitment.
But the ambivalence is also there in P.O.C. Repertory’s production, which treats the script as a tame historical drama and Gorky as nearly folkloric. P.O.C. somehow misses the fact that Gorky, however critical of the revolution, was never ambivalent: he was always committed.
