Maria (play) - Reception

Reception

Maria is rooted in Babel's work as an investigative reporter for Maxim Gorky's Menshevik newspaper, Novaya zhizn (Новая жизнь). Babel published there between March and July 1918, when Vladimir Lenin ordered the closing of all newspapers not controlled by the CPSU.

Babel later recalled, however,

"My journalistic work gave me a lot, especially in the sense of material. I managed to amass an incredible number of facts, which proved to be an invaluable creatice tool. I struck up friendships with morgue attendants, criminal investigators, and government clerks. Later, when I began writing fiction, I found myself always returning to these 'subjects', which were so close to me, in order to put character types, situations, and everyday life into perspective. Journalistic work is full of adventure."

After the completion of Maria in the mid-1930s, Babel allowed the unpublished manuscript to be examined by Gorky, who remained his friend and mentor. Noting the play's implicit rejection of socialist realism, Gorky accused Babel of having a "Baudelairian predilection for rotting meat." Gorky further warned his friend that "political inferences" would be made "that will be personally harmful to you."

According to Babel's common law wife, Antonina Pirozhkova,

"Once Babel went to the Moscow Art Theater when his play Mariya was being given its first reading, and when he returned home he told me that all the actresses had been impatient to find out what the leading female role was like and who would be cast in it. It turned out that there was no leading female character present on the stage in this play. Babel thought that the play had not come off well, but he was always critical of his own work."

Although intended to be performed by Moscow's Vakhtangov Theatre in 1935, the premiere of Maria was cancelled by the NKVD during rehearsals. Four years later, Isaac Babel was arrested, tortured, and shot as part of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. His surviving manuscripts were confiscated by the NKVD and destroyed. As a result, Maria was never performed in Russia until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.