The empty flat with its three rooms can create a special theatrical atmosphere, which has become during the last seasons the home of the troupe of Maladype that is fifteen years old. The middle biggest room can serve as a place of performances with a size of a studio with the miniature auditorium (with the huge advantage of free organisation). The doors, which open to the side rooms and to the hall, offer themselves naturally as walking paths. The intimate place requires puritan performing style, and those kinds of plays and adaptations which can take into consideration eminently that the most monumental events have to be able to take place in about five times four metres. Virtue can come from need too – by the close connection with the viewers, a special and intensive theatrical experience can come possibly to live.

Viktor Kravchenko: I Chose Freedom

The flat has a role here as a place of a so called, friendly reunion, as a place of flat university – so in its own reality – the lines of chairs, which are put in order of a U shape, refer to the theatrical situation. The viewers are sitting in when Zoltán Balázs arrives; he welcomes us, takes off his coat and starts organising his things – meanwhile he is explaining the situation – it should be organised to get the light into the right height next to his text. He builds a tower on a kept piece of set – which could be seen anyway in another performance – on a furniture, from the books by Kravchenko, and finally he places the reading lamp on it. (We may think that it is a spontaneous solution which was born that evening, but we can realise: all the other performances start that way.) It is a civilian-like introduction, which serves as a basis, to make it possible for Balázs to keep the personal contact with the viewers all through the evening.

According to the preparation we can expect a reading theatre; but the line under the title refers to something else: “one-man manifesto with Zoltán Balázs’ performance”. And it is real: Balázs has selected and learnt a three-hour long material from the thick book, that way while he is telling it he can keep continuous eye contact with the viewers. However, the text is in front of him, he hardly looks into it – when he does, we can have the impression: he does it just on behalf of the form, by getting into the position of the writer, who interprets the manuscript. But he moves his seemingly never-ending set of energy not only from this point of view: work of many years can be found in it, to be able to find the place of it, to get the rights of the translation and edition, and finally the Troupe of Maladype published the book according to their own edition. According to the website of the theatre, the performance is the part of an educational programme, which has more phases, which in the future, together with experts and teachers would like to start a speech about the “case of Kravchenko”, so about “the inheritance of the totalitarian systems, about the survival of the consequences of thinking of the earlier regime, and about the discussion of these surviving tendencies”.

The writer’s work, who has been unknow in Hungary so far, appeared in America in 1946, so only some years after the English publishing of Koestler’s novel of the Darkness at noon. While Koestler’s work was published in the middle of the 80s in a Hungarian samizdat (and since then in the first publicity too) Kravchenko’s political and social historical memoir has not been translated into Hungarian so far. However, this personal report is such a shocking reading about the chasm between the attractive world of the high-level ideas and the everyday practice of Stalin era, as the world-wide famous novel is.

But who is Victor Kravchenko, whose work Zoltán Balázs interprets now? He was a faithful communist and active activist of the party from his early age (one of Stalin’s close colleague took care of his fast professional and movement promotion). The need viewing clearly and the wish of telling the truth are not those virtues, which are expected of him.

Soon he gets against the power, and he cannot be sure that the well-known NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), would ever let him go. Then he could escape anyway, and he could find himself on important positions. When during the war, as a member of a committee was sent to the United States, he decided to leave the Soviet mission, and relied himself on “the protection of American public opinion”. During two months he wrote his book, which was sold worldwide in many million copies. (It was accepted well everywhere, even besides the Soviet Union: the French left wing – with Aragon as the leader – accused him to be a liar, according to them the lagers were just imaginations, the arrests and executions were rightful actions. There is nothing new under the sun: after the publishing of his novel, the French press of the party, called Koestler also to be an English spy, and accused him with the organisation of fascist terror groups.)

Zoltán Balázs tells the cross section of this book. He tells the sentences fast, seemingly he is always afraid of that the text is too long, and it is too tiring for the viewers – however, it is not at all. (If it can be hard for some reasons, that is that fast tempo.) The places and times get congested on one another, the personal and social events move fast; they are moving, tragic and sometimes of course – in their own tragi-grotesque way – funny too. We can see from close distance the starving ones, the poor ones but the everyday life of the aristocratic members’ of the party. We can see soldiers of the party, informers and lovers – and sometimes with the all three of them in one person. We can see situations, which has strong crosstalk with our present too.

At the end of the evening, the performer quotes the follower words of the Kravchenko book: “I dedicate this book to the progressive and social-minded people everywhere, who help in the struggle for a free democratic Russia.” Then he asks the viewers: let’s repeat the last sentence together: “Without a free democratic Russia there can be no enduring peace on earth.” It is a heavy truth. It cannot be told enough times.

Adrienne Dömötör, Criticai Lapok, 2016

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)