A summary of Alexander Galich’s "Dress Rehearsal" Automatic translate

This autobiographical novella was written in 1973. It seamlessly blends the author’s personal recollections of Soviet theater censorship with the full text of his own banned play, "Sailor’s Silence." Based on the play contained within, director Vladimir Mashkov made the successful feature film "Papa" in 2004.

In the winter of 1958, playwright Alexander Galich and his wife arrived at the entrance to the Pravda Factory’s Palace of Culture. There, the young theater studio, the future Sovremennik, headed by Oleg Efremov, was performing a dress rehearsal of the play "Sailor’s Silence." The play formally had a Glavlit approval number, but party officials had already given an unofficial order to halt production. In the half-empty auditorium, two party ladies, Sokolova and Solovieva, sat in the front row. The fate of the production depended on their word.

The play begins on stage. It’s August 1929, in the town of Tulchin, in Rybakova Balka. A small-time storekeeper, Abram Ilyich Schwartz, forces his twelve-year-old son, David, to endlessly play Auer violin exercises. The father passionately dreams of a great future for the boy. An old acquaintance, Meyer Wolf, returns to town from Palestine, having found no happiness at the Western Wall. The neighbor girls, Hana Gurevich and Tanya, come into the courtyard.

Observing the empty hall, Galich immerses himself in distant memories. He describes his childhood on Chistye Prudy in Moscow and an old, grimy stamp album he bought from the widow of a drunken janitor. As a boy, he found an extremely rare "Russian Telegraph" stamp. A cunning philatelist, Uncle Mesha, from the Main Post Office, took the stamp for examination, then publicly declared it a crude counterfeit and threw it away. The author compares the cold gaze of this market swindler with that of the high-ranking theater director Alexander Solodovnikov. They both brazenly declare the deceived man a liar.

The play’s second act transports the audience to Moscow in 1937. David is studying at the Conservatory. The father of his dormmate, Slava Lebedev, is suddenly declared an enemy of the people. Abram Schwartz unexpectedly arrives with his pockets full of prunes. The son is painfully ashamed of his awkward, loud, provincial father in front of his friends from the capital — the party organizer Ivan Kuzmich Chernyshev and the poetess Lyudmila Shutova. The old man quickly understands his son’s mood, leaves him the money he’s saved, and quietly leaves. David realizes his own meanness and apologizes into the void, but what has happened can no longer be undone.

During intermission, Galich reminisces about his youth in the theater. He talks about studying at Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky’s Opera and Drama Studio. The great actor Leonid Mironovich Leonidov wrote a stern note on his application: he wouldn’t make it as an actor, but he’d make something of himself. Galich later transferred to the Valentin Pluchek and Alexei Arbuzov Studio. The studio’s students wrote and staged a play, "City at Dawn," which is now completely false, as the author now realizes. The students sincerely believed in the party rhetoric, justifying the surrounding state terror with stilted romanticism.

The author’s memory then transports him to the autumn of the first year of the war. In Grozny, he fell head over heels in love with the Russian beauty Yulia Dochaeva, the wife of the regional party secretary. The Chechen poet Arbi Mamakayev brought horses at night and urged Galich to flee to the mountains from the advancing Germans. The playwright declined in favor of a meeting with Yulia, but she never came. Her husband shot himself after being ordered to conduct a punitive raid on Chechen villages. Yulia herself was later deported along with the Chechens to Kazakhstan, where she died of tuberculosis.

The play’s third act unfolds in the autumn of 1944 on a hospital train. In the Krieger train car, the seriously wounded Senior Lieutenant David Schwartz is delirious. Nurse Lyudmila Shutova tends to him. In a feverish dream, David sees his dead father. Abram calmly recounts how the Germans led Jews to be shot in Tulchin. The old man struck the Nazi henchman Filimonov in the face with David’s child’s violin. David tells his father that his tank unit liberated Tulchin and he personally executed the traitor on Station Square. His son dies to the sound of a radio announcement announcing the Soviet troops crossing the border into East Prussia.

This scene evokes a whole new series of hospital memories for the author. He tells of Sergei Dontsov, a schoolteacher who became a morphine addict due to a shortage of cheap analgin at the Botkin Hospital. Later, Galich himself found himself on the operating table at Leningrad’s Erisman Hospital with severe blood poisoning. Frontline surgeon Anna Ivanovna Goshkina stayed by his bedside for days. She miraculously saved his arm and his life. Galich silently thanks the ordinary doctors, contrasting them with heartless nomenklatura writers like Nikolai Gribachev and Arkady Vasiliev, who would later harshly judge him at the secretariat.

The play’s fourth act begins. It’s May 1955. David’s widow, Tanya, listens to Wieniawski’s mazurka on the radio. A portrait of her deceased husband hangs in the room. An aging Meyer Wolff comes to visit. Misha Skorobogatenko, the old woman’s grandson, arrives from Vladivostok. The boys examine slides about life on Mars. David Jr. puts on a recording of his father playing. The performance ends to the sounds of the Victory Day fireworks. The curtain closes on the oppressive silence of the auditorium.

The party officials leave the Palace of Culture dissatisfied. Sokolova loudly calls the play false, causing an enraged Galich to hurl the word "fool" in her face. Director Solodovnikov cowardly utters empty phrases about the need to find a different, more life-affirming repertoire. Director Georgy Tovstonogov helpfully suggests a way to cancel the performance. The production is permanently banned. Young actors Oleg Tabakov and Yevgeny Yevstigneyev are devastated.

Ten days later, Galich visited Sokolova at the Central Committee building on Staraya Square. The official, with alarming frankness, laid out the essence of state anti-Semitism. She bluntly stated that a play depicting a Jew defeating the Nazis was absolutely forbidden in central Moscow. According to her, it was the Russian people who fought, while the Jews meekly went to the slaughter, evoking a sense of shame.

Listening to these monstrously offensive words, the playwright recalls the great actor Solomon Mikhoels crying over photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the executed green-eyed poet Peretz Markish. Markish once rudely ejected the young Galich from a meeting of the Jewish Writers’ Section to save him from impending arrest. The author recognizes the absolute impossibility of assimilation in a country where nationality has become an eternal stigma. The bureaucratic system deliberately creates varying levels of inequality, separating people with closed distribution centers, special passes, and personal data.

The book concludes with the author’s bitter reflections in a creaky wooden house in Serebryany Bor. The rehearsal ended without the traditional banquet or friendly applause. Galich makes a firm decision to leave the Soviet Union forever. He takes with him his authentic, inner Russia — old Cossack songs, the faces of Russian women, the smell of wet snow, and the memory of the fallen. No officials can take this spiritual homeland from him.