A Russian troika—humor, tragedy, and magic are featured in three stories that come from an evening at Symphony Space entitled Russian Tales: Classic and New, two by the classic writers Anton Chekhov and Isaac Babel, and one by a contemporary Russian woman.

We’ll start with the Isaac Babel story “My First Goose,” translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler. Babel was a Russian Jew, born in Odessa in 1894. Encouraged by Maxim Gorky, he soon started writing stories and achieved acclaim with the collection Odessa Stories which included the unforgettable character of the Odessa waterfront Jewish gangster, Benya Krik. In 1926 he published Red Cavalry, from which “My First Goose,” is taken. In the story, an intellectual Jewish soldier, to gain the respect of his Cossack comrades, is forced to commit a barbarous act. The performer is Joe Morton, the Broadway and film actor, whose credits include Hair, Art, and Raisin for which received a Tony Award nomination.

Lyudmilla Petrushevskaya is the author of our next Russian tale, “The Father,” which was translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers. Petrushevskaya is considered the progenitor of the Women’s Fiction” movement in Russian letters, and is also a playwright. Her most recent book is wonderfully entitled There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. And “The Father” is in a similar vein as you can tell from its opening sentence, “There once lived a father who couldn’t find his children”. The performer is a young actress who has recently scored a Broadway success on Broadway in “Venus in Fur.”

Shorts literary commentator Hannah Tinti notes, “There are elements here which kept reminding me of “Alice in Wonderland.” It’s a stretching and compressing of time.

In Anton Chekhov’s “Rothschild’s Fiddle,” a miserable personality rediscovers his humanity, and in between, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has created a strange fairy tale in which three lost souls become a family. The performers are Joe Morton, Denis O’Hare, and Nina Arianda.

We close this program with a story by the great Russian playwright who also wrote volume after volume of short stories, Anton Chekhov. The Chekhov story chosen for the Russian Tales evening at Symphony Space was “Rothschild’s Fiddle,” in an English translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

“My First Goose,” by Isaac Babel, performed by Joe Morton
“The Father,” by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, performed by Nina Arianda
“Rothschild’s Fiddle,” by Anton Chekhov, performed by Denis O’Hare

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