De Profundis

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.--Lady Markby in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband.

Oscar Wilde, who tried to set quite a few fashions himself, might have been amused to know that last week Moscow took the same disapproving view of him and his works as his most disapproving Victorian contemporaries ever did. For stooping to put on a brilliant performance of his entertaining An Ideal Husband, the famed Moscow Art Theater shivered under simultaneous critical broadsides from the 16-inch guns of Izvestia and Pravda.

The trouble lay in the comedy's innocence of ideology. In Moscow manners are no substitute for Marxist morals, or elegance for Engelsian ethics. Izvestia, speaking in terms recognizable to Western criticism, denounced "the all-corrosive and therefore all-justifying irony of Wilde's esthetic principle" as being "far from the true realistic satire" of Swift and Dickens. Izvestia dubbed it "the principle of decadence," and flayed the performers for entering "so deeply into their parts that they lost their touch with reality. They seem to have forgotten whom they are portraying--who the play's heroes are in sober social reality."

Pravda spoke in its own esoteric tongue. From the turgid depths of Marxist dialectics it dredged up the basic criterion for Soviet art: "The significance of the ideological and creative evolution of the Moscow Art Theater . . . consists in its recognition of partisanship in art."

The New York Times's Brooks Atkinson, an old professional playgoer himself, blandly drew the moral: "The wayward leaders of the Moscow Art Theater at least have learned the importance of being earnest."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.