Dostojewski on the Polish stage

Throughout much of the world, if not England, Dostoevsky’s novels have had a rich afterlife in the theatre, one mischievously encouraged by the author’s most famous detractor, Vladimir Nabokov. In his influential lectures delivered at Wellesley and Cornell in the 1940s and 50s, Nabokov cast Dostoevsky as a dramatist manqué who seemed “to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but took the wrong turning and wrote novels”. The chief exhibit Nabokov put before his student juries was Besy (1871–2), which, following Constance Garnett, he called The Possessed, but which in recent English translations goes by the more literal, if less evocative title Demons or Devils. An eccentric chronicle of revolutionary intrigue and murder in a Russian provincial town c.1870, The Possessed, Nabokov declared, “is incredible nonsense, but it is grand booming nonsense with flashes of genius illuminating the whole gloomy and mad farce”.
Over in France, Albert Camus was busy turning this 700-page “farce” into actual theatre, working from a position of awe rather than ambivalent hostility and trying to capture the arc of Dostoevsky’s heterogeneous text from, as Camus rightly saw it, comedy to tragedy.
Just before the premiere of Les Possédés in the Théâtre Antoine in January 1959, he gave a detailed television interview to explain why Dostoevsky’s characters are “infinitely closer to us than might seem at first glance”. The Russian author’s premonition of a universe defined by “the emptiness of the heart, the impossibility of holding to any faith or belief” (“le vide du coeur, l’impossibilité d’adhérer à une foi ou une croyance”) had, Camus claimed, become the reality of his own time.
Fifty-five years later, a striking adaptation of Camus’s adaptation, directed by Krzysztof Babicki, is drawing packed audiences at the Gombrowicz Theatre in the port city of Gdynia in northern Poland, a country little loved by Dostoevsky. In modern dress, and on a stage bare but for the odd chair and a large mirror employed for effects both erotic and morbid, Babicki’s Biesy goes to the nub of the dramatic potential of Dostoevsky’s great novels and shows why they should remain of prime interest to brave directors everywhere. This potential is not only, and not so much, a matter of “the scenes where all the people are brought together . . . with all the tricks of the theatre” that Nabokov mentions; there is also a more elusive quarry that Babicki succeeds in capturing. To the extent that Dostoevsky’s fiction is about the gradual and imperfect search for self-knowledge through the stripping away of self-deception, dramatization can allow this psychological process to be visualized and given flesh – sometimes, paradoxically, at the expense of more obviously theatrical and melodramatic elements.
Such is the case with Babicki’s Biesy.Out goes the Gogolian and highly entertaining narrator; out goes all the French used by his ageing, logorrheic “friend” and teacher, Stepan Trofimovich; out goes much, if not all, of the satire of provincial gentry and officialdom. What is left is a relentless succession of scenes of verbal and physical confrontation (accentuated by the use of a catwalk running right through the audience) and incomplete disclosure. Characters enter and exit in the swirling, blizzard-like movement evoked by the Pushkin poem, also called “Besy”, that Dostoevsky took for his first epigraph and that is aptly reinstated as the opening words of this production, before the play proper begins. If the ringleader of revolutionary chaos remains Stepan’s son, Pyotr, played with tireless impishness by Maciej Wizner, a source of dramatic coherence is surprisingly supplied by Shigalyov (Piotr Michalski), the “methodical”, bespectacled socialist with a theory of total freedom as total despotism, who appears much earlier here than in the novel, and serves at times as a surrogate narrator.
At one point we see Shigalyov holding cards – a metaphor, perhaps, for Babicki’s daring reshuffling of Dostoevsky’s text, notably of its most scandalous scene: the “confession” of the rape of a young girl made to a monk by the conspirators’ idol, Nikolai Stavrogin. This chapter was cut during and after Dostoevsky’s lifetime, and now usually appears as an appendix to the novel. Here, it is placed at the very beginning of the play and delivered at breakneck speed, away from the monk and straight at the audience, by the impressive Szymon Sędrowski. Is Stavrogin a demon or merely possessed by demons? A cause or a consequence? Sędrowski’s performance, like Krzysztof Babicki’s powerful and intelligent production, retains this critical ambiguity.