114 sharon marie carnicke
[of loss . . .] it seems to us that we have lost everything. But that is
precisely when we can find ahead of us a life that is a thousand times
richer than what we have lost.
(Knebel 1967: 570)
Dismissal from the Moscow Art Theatre was her ‘cherry orchard’; and only by turn-
ing her back on her first company could she find her own voice as an artist at the
Central Children’s Theatre. In her autobiography (written at about the same time that
she was staging The Cherry Orchard ), she describes her experience in just this way:
Very slowly and gradually did I come to realize that what was most
important and dear to me were not the walls of the Moscow Art Theatre,
but what I had taken from within them. Having lost my home, I found it
within myself. . . . And only after understanding that with all my soul,
with all my being, did I feel free and able to work.
(Knebel 1967: 484)
With the help of her designer (Yury Pimenov), Knebel used her autobiographical
insight to break away from an illusionist set, replacing the trees of the orchard and
the walls of the house with a kaleidoscope of projected images that suggested both
the play’s locales and the Chekhovian literary landscape (Loehlin 2007: 149).
Knebel also positioned the widow and landowner, Lyubov Ranevskaya, as the
production’s centrifugal force. Russian theatre critic Konstantin Rudnitsky saw
Ranevskaya as a ‘noble, pure, strong and wilful woman, admirable, to be sure, but not
without her flaws’ (Rudnitskii 1974: 143). Through this characterisation, Knebel
seems to describe herself. Not only had she, too, lost a home, but she, too, was a
complex woman. As theatre historian Zoia Vladimirova writes, ‘For all Knebel’s
generosity of soul, one can’t say that she was a gentle angel. She could be sharp
and sarcastic, unflagging in her convictions.’ But, to her credit, she did not blame
her enemies. She simply moved on, because she ‘understood that it is stupid to bear
a grudge, to nurse it, if one can overcome it, especially when one can create
something equally dear to the offended and the offender’ (Vladmirova 1991: 20). In
short, Knebel invested her production of The Cherry Orchard with this complex
sensibility and offered through the play optimistic advice about dealing with life’s
difficulties.
CONCLUSION
It is time for the West to discover Russia’s most important theatrical voice since
Stanislavsky.
Not only does Maria Knebel serve as an admirable model of a theatrical artist
who remained true to her calling in tough times, but, as an eye-witness to major
theatrical developments from the turn of the twentieth century to the century’s end
she can teach us much that is still unknown about the history of the globally famous
Moscow Art Theatre tradition. Through her, actors and directors can see clearly
how Michael Chekhov did not so much depart from Stanislavsky as build upon his
teacher’s holistic approach to theatre. Moreover, through Knebel we learn that
Stanislavsky shared with Michael Chekhov a deeply held belief in the transcendent
power of theatre, a belief that, like Chekhov’s, was actively quashed by the Soviets.
