“Down with literary supermen!”: Vladimir Lenin
One of the 20th century’s most significant revolutionaries is also one of the main players in Tom Stoppard’s TRAVESTIES
Tom Stoppard’s Travesties — onstage at Lantern Theater Company September 8 through October 9, 2022 — is a comedy about art and revolution. While James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Henry Carr are more obviously artists, one of the 20th century’s most significant revolutionaries joins them on the stage: Vladimir Lenin, who ushered in the world’s first Communist state.
Lenin was born in Russia in 1870 as Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov. His family was warm, loving, well-educated, and middle class. They were also the target of government intimidation, due to mistrust of public education — a fact that contributed to Lenin’s later revolutionary zeal. Lenin’s older brother was executed in 1887 for plotting to assassinate the tzar; this loss further radicalized Lenin, and eventually every one of his surviving siblings would join him in the movement.
Lenin’s political activities began early. He was expelled from college for protesting, then exiled to Siberia for his Marxism, in which he became immersed during his expulsion. He was joined in Siberia by his fiancee, Nadezhda (Nadya) Krupskaya, who would go on to become his wife, secretary, and partner in his revolutionary struggles. Over the coming years, he published a revolutionary magazine and worked ceaselessly to consolidate and drive to power the Communist factions in Russia.
When food shortages precipitated the strikes and protests that grew into the 1905 Russian Revolution, Lenin was abroad, but he hoped it would be the occasion for remaking Russian society through a Marxist lens. This revolution failed, however, and Tzar Nicholas II implemented some democratic reforms in an effort to appease the restless population. By 1907, Lenin was exiled from Russia. He ended up — like Tzara, Joyce, and Carr — in Zürich, living in a neutral country in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I. He was, in fact, Tzara’s neighbor; Tzara could not be sure they had met, but professed that it was very likely they played chess at the cafe once or twice.
Lenin opposed the war, dubbing it imperialist, and hoped the worldwide unrest could be turned to civil war, allowing the proletariat to rise up and seize control of their respective countries’ governments. He was disappointed by how quickly many turned to patriotism and support of the war, and watched from Zürich as his hopes for a civil war faded. However, by 1917, the war had taken an unimaginable toll. Food and fuel shortages were widespread, and Russia faced several million casualties both in the military and in the civilian population. Moderates began joining radicalized factions to support overthrowing the tzar, and after days of protest in March 1917 — which persisted through state violence — the tzar abdicated and a provisional government formed.
It was in this climate the Lenin left Zürich and returned to Russia with the help of the Germans. Though he did not support the Germans any more than he did the Russian government, Lenin accepted their help to get home, and they happily gave it in the hopes that his return would destabilize the government even further. They were right: by November 1917, there was a second Russian Revolution — the Bolshevik Revolution, headed by Lenin, who became the head of state after their successful coup.
But the transition was not peaceful. Three years of civil war followed between Lenin’s Bolshevik forces and those loyal to the monarchs and capitalists who opposed Lenin’s vision of nationalizing industry and redistributing land to the peasant class. Lenin’s forces eventually won out (with the help of a secret police force and a spate of executions dubbed the Red Terror), but he would not live to see the results of the revolution he wished for all his life. Lenin died in 1924, only a few years after forming the United Socialist Soviet Republic (U.S.S.R.) and acting as its first head of state.
“Today literature must become party literature… Literature must become a part of the common cause of the proletariat, a cog in the Social democratic mechanism,” Lenin wrote (and Stoppard quotes in Travesties). For all their shared revolutionary fervor, Tzara and Lenin viewed art extremely differently. The latter saw it as a tool of the state, of politics, and the former saw it as a way to tear both of those things down. For Travesties’ central questions about artists and revolutionaries, these two characters — neighbors, possible chess opponents, seekers of a new world—would answer them very differently.
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Travesties by Tom Stoppard is onstage September 8 through October 9, 2022, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
