“An Actor Is a Priest in Buffoon’s Clothes”

The article raises the actual questions: if the theater can be Christian and who in that case the actor is — “a priest” or “a buffoon”. The purpose of this article is to consider the issue of “Christian theater” at different levels: historical, psychological, social. The article analyzes the issues of actors’ personalities formation and their religious sear­ches. There are considered the conditions of Christian upbringing in families and faith preservation in the complex historical period of the Russian history of the late 19th — mid-20th century. The no­velty of this study lies in the fact that it introduces into scientific circulation little-known manuscript materials stored in the Manuscripts Department of the Russian State Library: 44 autobiographies of recognized actors, which were published in 1928 in edited form by the writer V.G. Lidin; as well as some other unpublished documents. The sources show that actors brought up on Christian ideals followed them in their work, despite the difficult conditions of socio-political life in the country. Among them are well-known actors of the Moscow Art Theater, Moscow Art Academic Theater, State Academic Maly Thea­ter, Vsevolod Meyerhold State Theater, Bolshoi Drama Theater, Vakhtangov State Academic Theater (and others): V. Kachalov, I. Ilyinsky, R. Apollonsky, L. Vivyen, G. Ge, A Koonen, A. Orochko, G. Martynova and other masters. The article also uses some little-known writings of the actors, their questionnaires on the psychology of acting, photographs, as well as manuscripts and published memoirs of their contemporaries (E.D. Golovinskaya, E.A. Korotneva, V.D. Markov, Yu. Panich), allowing to consider the issue of “Christian theater” from different sides.

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