Only a Dead Man

by Anatoly Smeliansky
Translated by Julia Smeliansky and Robert Duffley

To stage Moira Buffini’s new English language adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide (Dying For It) is an important artistic gesture. The Suicide is not simply a banned Russian play of the 1920’s. Continuing the satirical tradition of Nikolai Gogol and Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin, this play is a pinnacle of Russian dramatic literature.

The first instance of a character committing suicide for the political gain of others probably appears in Dostoevsky’s Devils. The provocateur Pyotr Verhovensky, plotting a murder, asks Kirillov, who is about to take his own life, ” why don’t you just write on a piece of paper that it was you who killed [the student]?”

Erdman’s play turns this device toward tragic farce, targeting the core idea of a Soviet utopia.  The miserable life of a “common man,” supposedly only manure fertilizing a brighter Soviet future, turns out to be the true essence of humanity.

When Semyon Podsekalnikov decides to commit suicide because he can no longer enjoy even his favorite food (blood sausage), he awakens an anthill of self-serving ideologues. Lured by the prospect of a death for their cause, representatives of conflicting credos jockey for inclusion in Semyon’s suicide note. A priest, a writer, a merchant, and an intellectual all offer to help Semyon make sense of his useless life. (Semyon also briefly and disastrously considers saving himself by taking up the tuba). From this comic uproar appears a tragic image of the country at a historic crossroads.

Podsekalnikov is tempted to become a hero, but it all blows up in the end: this simple man decides not to end his life after all. He addresses those gathered around his coffin with a monologue exemplifying the double entendres and sparkling hidden meanings of classic Russian literature.

Erdman started his career as a poet, and this play was written in the time between two incredibly important suicides in Russian culture: in 1925, poet Sergey Yesenin took his own life, and right after Erdman finished his play, Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide, leaving a mysterious last note. Both poets were Erdman’s close friends.

The play is written on the cusp of times and is filled with the polyphonic clutter of the 1920’s. Above all, the play captures the dim and deadly rhetoric of the approaching Stalinist rule. In the 1920’s, Erdman was already known as a brilliant and successful satirical writer, and he was a collaborator of the celebrated (though later indemnified and murdered) director Vsevolod Meyerhold.  After The Suicide was prohibited for the stage, Erdman’s fate completely changed.

In 1934, in relatively permissive or “vegetarian” times, as the great Russian poet Anna Akhamatova termed them, Erdman was arrested and exiled to the Siberian town of Yeniseysk. Urban legend is that the exile was prompted by a limerick Erdman wrote in the style of a classical Russian fable, supposedly read aloud at a Kremlin communist party reception by a drunken Moscow Art Theater star, Vasily Kachalov:

“God once sent a crow a piece of cheese–”
“There is no God!”
“Shut up, you quibbler! There’s no cheese, either.”

This limerick is commonly blamed for Erdman’s exile, but there is actually no historical proof that this harmless joke caused the persecution of one of the most powerful voices of new Russian drama of 20th century.

Rather, I think that The Suicide was a much more serious reason for Stalin to persecute the playwright, who among many paradoxes proposed this one to his country: “Nowadays, only a dead man can say what the living man is thinking.”

Anatoly Smeliansky, Co-Head of Dramaturgy at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training and former Head of the Moscow Art Theater School, is a leading Russian theater writer, scholar, and critic. His many publications include the books The Russian Theatre After Stalin and Is Comrade Bulgakov Dead? Bulgakov and the Moscow Art Theater. 

This article was originally published in the A.R.T. Guide.