To Hear Out the Young: The Past and the Future in Two Plays about Komsomol Building Sites

This article focuses on two plays about socialist construction: The City at Dawn (1941), a collective composition by the students of the Moscow State Theatre Studio under the direction of Alexei Arbuzov and Valentin Pluchek, and The Three of Us Went to the Virgin Land by Nikolai Pogodin (1955). Written in different eras, these two texts are inextricably linked: the young creators of The City at Dawn could not help but look back to Pogodin’s ‘industrial plays’ of the 1930s, while in the 1950s Pogodin was openly inspired by the new dramaturgy, the foundations of which had been laid in The City at Dawn before the war. Both plays reflected the times in which they were created, but ended up very differently: The City at Dawn was supported by the state during the Stalin era, while the performance of The Three of Us Went to the Virgin Land at the Central Children’s Theatre was scandalously withdrawn during the Thaw. The article examines the theme of past and future on several levels: from the seeds of new theatre hidden in both dramaturgical texts to the ways in which the authors of the plays interpreted the categories of time. The article makes use of numerous archival materials: audience reviews of both plays, censors’ conclusions, transcripts of discussions around the plays, and other documents.