Vassa Zheleznova / The Exception and the Rule

 

With the creation of his new plays in the 1930s, the work of Maxim Gorky (1868 – 1936) underwent a new flourishing period between 1932 and 1934. Outstanding among these works are Yegor Bulichov and Others (1932) and Vassa Zheleznova (1935, first version 1911). Vassa makes every effort to be bourgeois and to carve out of her family a bourgeois family. Her efforts, however, are doomed to failure, since in the face of an obstinate and resistant Russian reality, one can only realize a bourgeois ethics through very non-bourgeois means, with the tools of eastern despotism.

 

 

German playwright, poet, and director Bertolt Brecht (born February 10, 1898, in Augsburg and died August 14, 1956, in Berlin) helped renew theatre in the twentieth century. With Brecht's instructive play The Exception and the Rule, we come to know the story of a journey. An exploitative merchant, two victims of exploitation, the driver, and the luggage-toting coolie are heading for Urga, where the merchant hopes to extend his contracts and get the better of his competitors, who are right at his heels. The first to arrive will get the business. At one station, the driver sits beside the coolie. The merchant bids him farewell. Then, the driver advises the coolie how to cross the dangerous Mir River, gives him a flask to hide and to keep in reserve, and warns him that the merchant is a bad man.