Page:My Further Disillusionment In Russia.djvu/146

 Lodging" was especially powerful. Real art was also presented in the Stanislavsky Studio. These were the only oases in the art desert of Russia. But even the Art Theatre showed no trace of the great revolutionary events Russia was living through. The repertoire which had made the Art Theatre famous a quarter of a century before still continued night after night. There were no new Ibsens, Tolstois, or Tchekovs to thunder their protest against the new evils, and if there had been, no theatre could have staged them. It was safer to interpret the past than to voice the present. Yet, though the Art Theatre kept strictly within the past, Stanislavsky was often in difficulties with the authorities. He had suffered arrest and was once evicted from his studio. He had just moved into a new place when I visited him with Louise Bryant who had asked me to act as her interpreter. Stanislavsky looked forlorn and discouraged among his still unpacked boxes of stage property. I saw him also on several other occasions and found him almost hopeless about the future of the theatre in Russia. "The theatre can grow only through inspiration from new works of art," he would say; "without it the interpretive artist must stagnate and the theatre