A Play and Playwright Rediscovered:
 Nikolai Erdmans “THE SUICIDE”

        The name of Russian playwright Nikolai Erdman (1902-70) is not a familiar one.  As far as is known, he wrote only two plays, both while in his twenties.
      The Mandate was produced by the noted director Vsevolod Meyerhold in 1925.  The play was hailed by the then Commissar for Culture as the “first truly Soviet play,” as well as the best comedy of the year.  It was against this background that three theatres vied to produce Erdman’s second play, The Suicide.  The Vakhtangov Theatre worked on the play first, but appeared not to have gone far with it. Then Meyerhold and Constantin Stanislavsky competed to produce it.  Maxim Gorki, who praised Erdman as “our new Gogol,” favored a production by Stanislavsky, and Stanislavsky, in an attempt to circumvent possible censorship, sent the play directly to Stalin.  Stalin replied that “I do not have a very high opinion of the play The Suicide.  My closest comrades consider it empty and even harmful.”  Nevertheless, he allowed the play to continue rehearsing, under the guidance of the Cultural Propaganda Department.  “Comrades will judge who know about artistic matters,” he wrote.  “I am a dilettante in this.”
      Although both Meyerhold and Stanislavsky continued working on the play, it was Meyerhold’s production that carried it furthest.  In 1932, after eighteen months of rehearsal—during a closed dress rehearsal—the Central Licensing Board refused permission to open the play.  Consequently, The Suicide has never been performed publicly in the USSR, nor has it been published there.  Recently, it has been “rediscovered,” and was presented in 1979 by the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, and in early 1980, by the Trinity Square Repertory Company of Providence, Rhode Island, in a production by Jonas Jurasas.
      Following Meyerhold’s aborted production, despite conflicting reports, Erdman does not seem to have been arrested or sent to a labor camp, but certainly he suffered unmistakable disfavor, for Nadezhda Mandelstam, who knew him, writes in her memoirs that during the thirties, Erdman lived in a “poky little hole of a room with a bunk to sleep in and a small table” in Kalinin, about 150 kilometers outside Moscow.  There is evidence that he was sent into further exile in Vyshny Volochek sometime later for political fables he had written.
      Mandelstam also comments that “not for nothing was the best play in the Soviet repertoire called The Suicide, and if in the end the hero Semyon chooses life, then Erdman like his hero also chose life.”
      He lived out his life in relative obscurity in Moscow, where he died in the spring of 1970.
Based on the introduction to The Suicide by Peter Tegel, Pluto Press Ltd. London, 1979; and on Nikolai Erdman by Marjorie Hoover, Russian Literature Triquarterly #2, Winter, 1972.