Оригинални научни рад 821.111(73).09 Tesich S.

Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar1 Faculty of Dramatic Arts University of Arts, Belgrade

TESICH AND TOLSTOY

In his interviews, Steve Tesich often referred to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. This is not surprising because he is of Slavic origin and because, as an undergraduate student in Indiana, and graduate student at Columbia, he studied Russian Literature. The influence of Dostoevsky is obvious in his play On the Open Road, where the second coming of Christ (reference to the Grand Inquisitor chapter in The Brothers Karamazov) is central to both the plot and the overall meaning of the play. This paper will highlight Tesich’s less obvious connection with Tolstoy, and focus on the importance that Tolstoy’s evolving views on war and peace (and the Tolstoy-Gandhi-Martin Luther King connection and tradition) had on the development of Tesich’s own ‘historical sense’ and anti-war art and activism. This paper argues that in his late plays, preoccupied with ethical questions, Tesich was composing his own version of Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, and clarifying his own “New Theory of Life”. Key words: Tesich, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Philippe Diaz, Thomas More, George Orwell, Tony Kushner, Raymond Williams

Stojanovic: You speak about the lack of humanism in today’s world. What do you mean? Tesich: This new era is a time of post-truth and post-art. Truth and art don’t exist anymore because man has been diminished. The artist today is a clown, an entertainer. I fight against this image, and I would rather die than become the same. Art is the only religion for me, because at least while I write I can believe in a truth. This is a hard time. It is when neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky are read. All the conditions exist, except the most important ones, for man to become a human being. Man has been turned into something else. (...)We would like to be freed from the responsibility of being human.2 1 [email protected] 2 In Stojanovic’s interview Tesich gave his own version of the reasons why Gore Vidal, or playwright David Hwang, call America the United States of Amnesia: “We should have carried with us everything that has happened to us as human beings and proceeded to a higher and higher ground from where we can see further into the future, instead of freeing ourselves completely from history, religion, morality, and memory”. This is contrary to president Obama’s appeal to Americans to turn to the future with no concern for the past. American writer Alice Walker shares Tesich’s view that radical systemic change (the kind Tolstoy , Martin Luther King and Tesich wished to see) is possible only if the past is faced Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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Steve Tesich, interview by Dejan Stojanovic, in the Serbian Magazine Views (Pogledi) No. 107, April 1992

On April 1, 2013, the Internet site Countercurrents posted a short text written by John Scales Avery3, entitled “Count Leo Tolstoy, We Need Your Voice Today”. The text gives a brief account of Tolstoy’s life and concentrates (the way the Count himself did) on the contradictions that plaque our nominally Christian civilization, most morally reprehensible of these being social inequality and war. Among other things, Avery notes Tolstoy’s observation that “Between us, the rich and the poor, there is a wall of false education”, and his insistence that before we can help the poor, we must tear down that wall. He also quotes, from A Confession, the conclusion reached by Tolstoy in 1880,4 that “Our own wealth is the true cause of the misery of the poor”. This is not unlike the point made by the filmmaker Philippe Diaz in his 2008 masterful documentary The End of Poverty? In the film we are reminded that in the 21st century every 3.6 seconds somebody dies of starvation and that 20.000 children die daily, “because they are poor, and they are poor only because we are rich”5.One of the experts Diaz interviews, Susan George, explains what is in progress behind the facade of our seemingly civilized and just world: “Sub-Saharan Africa”, reports George, “which is and examined carefully, and regret expressed for the destructive traditions and habits it has left us as a legacy. She specifically mentions millennia of women’s silence, during which kindness and compassion were ridiculed, and their opposites, competition and exploitation, admired and extolled as roads to true success. See Alice Walker reading her poem “Democratic Womanism” on Democracy Now!, September 28, 2012. 3 John Scales Avery (b. 1933), is an American theoretical chemist and peace activist, who lives and works in Denmark. As a professor of Copenhagen University he helped to organize a summer school called “Towards a Non-Violent Society”, at the International College in Elsinore, and a course “Science and Society”, which has been given every year since 1989. He worked on a bibliography “Health Effects of War and the Threat of War”, because war is the world’s major health problem. He is still active through the projects of the Danish Peace Academy. He loves scientific work, but when doing research, he admits, he feels like the Emperor Nero, who is said to have played the violin while Rome burned. He is profoundly aware that we are living at a time of crisis for civilization, and that everyone should give a high priority to the great task of abolishing war. 4 А Confession was first published in Geneva in 1884.The Introduction states that it is ”the drama of a soul who has sought from his earliest years the path of truth, or as the author refers to it, ‘the meaning of life’.” This places Tolstoy in the Socratic tradition, and links him with Viktor Frankl and his logo therapy, which helps patients discover (or recover) the sense of meaning of life. 5 Philippe Diaz, The End of Poverty? (2008). Born in Paris, Philippe Diaz studied Philosophy at the Sorbonne. He produced his first feature in 1986. In 1991, he moved his production and distribution company to Los Angeles. His directorial debut was the 2001documentary New World Order (Nouvel Ordre Mondial: Quelque Part en Afrique) shot in Sierra Leone. It won the Grand Prix at the Festival of African film in Montreal and well as a Special Prize at the 1 World Film Festival in Prague. It is virtually impossible to find information about this film on the Internet. It must have been exceedingly offensive to the US and NATO officials, since it presents the same threesome (Madeleine Albright, James Rubin and Richard Holbrooke) destroying Africa in the same way they destroyed Yugoslavia in 1999, a year before Diaz’ s film was completed. In 2006, Diaz made The Empire in Africa, which also won numerous international awards. The End of Poverty? premiered in 2008 at the Cannes Film Festival. The film should be mandatory viewing. Through the facts he presents, to support his arguments against poverty, Diaz, like Tesich, makes it impossible for his viewers to “free themselves from the responsibility of being human”.

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the poorest part of the world, is paying $25.000 every minute to Northern creditors. Well, you could build a lot of schools, a lot of hospitals; (create) a lot of jobs –if you were using $25.000 a minute differently from debt repayment. And I think people don’t understand that it is actually the South that is financing the North. If you look at the flow of money from North to South and then from South to North, what you find is that the South is financing the North to the tune of about $200 billion every year”. As Diaz points out, this intolerably unjust situation started a long time ago, with the colonial expansion of Europe. “If you think about it”, says Diaz, “how do these small countries, like Great Britain or France or, even worse, Holland and Belgium, become those huge empires? They were very small countries with almost no resources whatsoever, and they become the greatest empires. How? Well, by taking by force, of course, all the resources from the South, creating therefore a huge workforce” -the dispossessed who in their own country become slaves of the conquering “civilizers”. Later on Diaz clarifies: “Now we are not taking the land and the resources by way of the gun: we are taking the resources by way of debt, privatization and hit men, … in order to continue the same policy.”6 The historical roots are actually much deeper. In the last few pages of Utopia (1516, 1551), written in the so called early modern period, Thomas More protested against the same type of injustice that later Tolstoy, Diaz (and in his own time Tesich) refused to adjust to. More was one of the first ‘conspiracy theorists’: in Utopia, his Hythlodaeus concludes that when he considers any social system that prevails in the world, he cannot, so help him God, “see it as anything but the conspiracy of the rich to advance their own interest under the pretext of organizing society. They think up all sorts of tricks and dodges, first for keeping safe their ill-gotten gains, and then for exploiting the poor by buying their labour as cheaply as possible. Once the rich have decided that these tricks and dodges shall be officially recognized by society – which includes the poor as well as the rich – they acquire the force of law. Thus an unscrupulous minority is led by its insatiable greed to monopolize what would have been enough to supply the needs of the whole population”7. More (1478-1535), was eventually beheaded, and for making similar observations Tolstoy (1825-1910) eventually excommunicated. Not 6 It is important to note that the criticism of Aime Cesaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism (1955), is even more radical. Cesaire claims that Europe is morally and intellectually indefensible, not only because of what it did abroad, to the other continents, but also because of what it did at home, to its own working classes. 7 More writes: “Elsewhere, people are always talking about public interest, but all they really care about is private property. In Utopia, where there is no private property, people take their duty to the public seriously. And both attitudes are perfectly reasonable. In other ‘republics’ practically everyone knows that, if he does not look out for himself, he’ll starve to death, however prosperous his country may be. He is therefore compelled to give his own interest priority over those of the public; that is, of other people. But in Utopia, where everything is under public ownership, no one has any fear of going short, as long as the public storehouses are full. Everyone gets a fair share; so there are never any poor men or beggars.” Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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much has changed. In our time, the 99% movement is simply facing new ways the old “tricks and dodges” are made to work today: as in More’s time, they become international laws, all the better to protect the ill gotten privileges of the latest 1% elites. The modern day protestors (whose wages are slashed, whose jobs are cut, who cannot afford health insurance, and whose pensions disappear in bank speculations and government scams) certainly agree with More, when he asks: “Can you see any fairness or gratitude in a social system which lavishes such great rewards on so-called noblemen, goldsmiths, and people like that, who are either totally unproductive or merely employed in producing luxury goods or entertainment, but makes no such kind provisions for farm-hands, coal-heavers, labourers, carters, or carpenters, without whom society could not exist at all? And the climax of ingratitude comes when they’re old and ill and completely destitute. Having taken advantage of them through the best years of their lives, society now forgets all the sleepless hours they’ve spent in its service, and repays them for all the vital work they’ve done, by letting them die in misery. What’s more, the wretched earnings of the poor are daily whittled away by the rich, not only through private dishonesty, but through public legislation. As if it weren’t unjust enough already that the man who contributes most to society should get the least in return, they make it even worse, and then arrange for injustice to be legally described as justice”. Tesich (like Diaz after him) was eminently of the More and Tolstoy tradition. Modest and unpretentious to a fault, this is how he answered the question why, as an accomplished playwright performed in most prestigious theatres, and Oscar winning screenwriter, he continued to be a sharp critic of social and political conditions in the US: “When one achieves success, one’s outlook becomes even sharper. I have gotten much more than I ever hoped for, and that is why I now feel I should observe problems that affect the whole world. I don’t think I have achieved anything extraordinary; others have helped me a lot, and perhaps there are greater writers than I am whom no one has helped. I never forget that. I have talent, but there are others who also have talent. Now that I have accomplished more than I expected, I look at how life flows for those who are held down. I write about those things – what holds man down.” The gift of life seemed so great to him that “man could become crazy from happiness” just thinking about it. He wrote “because of the enormous forces that want to convince us how life is just a little thing, that it is nothing, that man is nothing”. (Stojanović) When asked about the obligation that the West has taken upon itself to help former communist countries reorganize, Tesich answered: “Western countries would have to have a morally clean house to be able to do that. Money can be given, of course, but the houses in the West are not clean, and there is no moral strength. If we point our finger toward Russia and say, ‘This is what happened in Russia’ in the same way that finger can 20

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be pointed toward the streets of New York and Chicago. What is happening here, how do we behave toward our own people? How do we treat those that work, work, and work, and suddenly there is no work and they fall and don’t exist anymore? How can we say then that in other countries life is not respected? Where is it respected here? What is respected is power and money. The West can hardly be an example to follow. The only hope, in my view, is a tradition that existed in Russia. There was an idea in literature, in music, Dostoevsky wrote about it; Tolstoy too. And that idea really existed in the Russian people, regardless of the fact that terrible things have happened there. The only hope for the world is in cooperation and mutual help. …If the countries of the East only imitate the West, then everything will collapse.”8 In several never published texts written after 1992, Tesich repeatedly wrote about the destruction of Yugoslavia. In the eighties, drawing an analogy with deceased friends he still vividly remembers, he said that his childhood is supposedly gone, and yet it is still with him every day of his life. “I left the country where I was born” he added, “but after I got over the pain my native country moved right back inside and I now have two”.9 (Rothmayer p. 307) In the 1992 interview with Stojanović he elaborates: “I loved Yugoslavia tremendously; I loved the idea that many different people lived together. What is happening now is a tragedy. When it was sensed that some new connections could be established, in Slovenia and Croatia, greed was awakened to get connected with the West. That was terrible. Only money is important. They are ruining something good for something worse. …I still cherish the idea of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was like a small Slavic America10, or it could have been at least. That it does not exist anymore is a huge tragedy. I cannot think about it in any other way.“ Rejecting the idea that the changes in the region were made for the sake of a wider union, Tesich complained that there are no ideals any more and no unity, only a Western European market: “Wider union is that I am a human being. We don’t need to make any other union. That is an idea, 8 In Rothmayer, on page 252, we are reminded that 1992, the year Teisch’s play On the Open Road premiered, was also the year of the beating of Rodney King and the consequent Los Angeles racial riots, in which 54 people died, over 2000 were injured and over 700 million dollars in property damage incurred. Tesich saw the riots as a manifestation of the unacknowledged civil war between the poor and the privileged in America, caused by traditional forms of exploitation but also by the rising level of accepted criminal behavior among the leaders of the US political and business establishment in the Nixon/Reagan era. He turned this situation into the background for his play. It was becoming more and more obvious that America he was once in love with did not intend to make its rewards available to all. As he had foreseen in his 1991 New York Times interview, there was “absolutely no agenda for helping those on the bottom of this country”. Nobody was really interested in them, and Tesich no longer knew what the country stood for. The plays he wrote helped him renegotiate his understanding of America. 9 This statement is part of the speech Tesich gave during the memorial service for Bob Foss, who was his friend. 10 Tesich was initially delighted that in America people from very different parts of the world shared the same neighborhood. In that sense, on a much smaller scale, Yugoslavia was comparable to America: it was a country shared by many different nationalities living in the republics that constituted the federation. Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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but of course not an economic one. And now, economy is prevailing. … Countries that are not ready to enter that game will become resorts. These resorts can be visited, so we could talk how nice the “savages are.”11 His comments, with the exception of the reference to Huxley’s Brave New World (the source of the comparison of countries excluded from the newly invented connections to savage resorts or reservations the ‘civilized’ can visit to enhance their sense of superiority over the ‘nice savages’) everything else in these answers is in the spirit of Tolstoy, not because Tesich was plagiarizing but because he was maturing and reaching Tolstoy-like insights from his own personal intuitions and experiences. *** In his text “Count Leo Tolstoy, We Need Your Voice Today”, John Scales Avery provides the following introduction to Tolstoy’s second complaint against inauthentic Christianity: “Tolstoy’s book, What Then Must We Do? tells of his experiences in the slums and analyses the causes of poverty. Tolstoy felt that the professed Christian beliefs of the Czarist state was a thin cosmetic layer covering a structure that was fundamentally built on violence. Violence was used to maintain a huge gap between the rich and the poor, and violence was used in international relations. Tolstoy felt especially keenly the contradictions between Christianity and war. In a small book entitled The Kingdom of God is Within You he wrote: “All other contradictions are insignificant compared with the contradiction which now faces humankind in international relations, and which cries out for a solution, since it brings the very existence of civilization in danger. This is the contradiction between Christianity and war.…The sharpest of all contradictions can be seen between government’s professed faith in the Christian law of the brotherhood of all humankind and the military laws of the state, which force each young man to prepare himself for enmity and murder, so that each must be simultaneously a Christian and a gladiator’.” Avery proceeds to tell the familiar story of how in 1894 Gandhi read Tolstoy’s book The Kingdom of God is Within You, wrote a review of it, and several years later, in 1909, wrote to Tolstoy about the civil rights struggles of Hindus in South Africa12. One year before his death Tolstoy replied with the following comment: 11 In Stojanović’s interview, talking about the need for cooperation and mutual help, Tesich said that “It would be exceptionally good if brotherly help would come into existence”, instead of the pressure put on Eastern European countries to imitate the West. “Countries like Serbia, Romani, or Russia have something to offer to America, and if America doesn’t see that, it is bad for America.” 12 Mohandas Gandhi wrote in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Part II, Chapter 15) that Tolstoy’s book The Kingdom of God is Within You “overwhelmed” him and “left an abiding impression.” In 1908 Tolstoy wrote, and Gandhi read, A Letter to a Hindu, which outlines the notion that only by using love as a weapon and through passive resistance could the native Indian people overthrow the colonial British Empire. This idea ultimately came to fruition through Gandhi’s organization of nationwide non-violent strikes and protests during the years circa 1918-1947. The two continued a correspondence until Tolstoy’s death in 1910. Tolstoy’s last letter was to Gandhi.

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“...The longer I live, and especially now, when I vividly feel the nearness of death, the more I want to tell others what I feel so particularly clearly and what to my mind is of great importance, namely that which is called passive resistance, but which is in reality nothing else but the teaching of love, uncorrupted by false interpretations. That love, i.e. the striving for the union of human souls and the activity derived from that striving, is the highest and only law of human life, and in the depth of his soul every human being knows this (as we most clearly see in children); he knows this until he is entangled in the false teachings of the world. This law was proclaimed by all, by the Indian as by the Chinese, Hebrew, Greek and Roman sages of the world. I think that this law was most clearly expressed by Christ, who plainly said that ‘in this alone is all the law and the prophets’...” “...The peoples of the Christian world have solemnly accepted this law, while at the same time they have permitted violence and built their lives on violence; and that is why the whole life of the Christian peoples is a continuous contradiction between what they profess, and the principles on which they order their lives - a contradiction between love accepted as the law of life, and violence which is recognized and praised, acknowledged even as a necessity in different phases of life, such as the power of rulers, courts, and armies...” Since the contradictions and paradoxes were not resolved but intensified, they reappear as the slogans of Orwell’s 1984: “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”. These slogans are becoming more and more descriptions of the actual lives most people are forced to live today: worldwide secret prisons, and other government institutions comparable to Orwell’s Ministries of Love, practice torture. Ministries of Truth fabricate lies to start wars, which then rage endlessly, allegedly to bring to the terrorized population peace, security and ‘democratic governance’. In Orwell’s world the only kind of human being that is allowed to survive is the one that denies love. “Do it to Julia”, cries Orwell’s faithless Romeo, as the system squeezes out of him the last drops of his capacity for friendship, love, and human dignity. Avery’s essay ends with a long list of rhetorical questions aimed at shocking the public into awareness how much worse our world has become 100 years after Tolstoy’s death. Quoting Avery’s first question will suffice: What would Tolstoy say about the 1.700.000.000.000.00 dollars which the world spends each year on armaments while 11 million children die each year from poverty and starvation? After the review his text provides of our appalling failure to protect our humanity, it becomes clear why Avery thinks that the voice of Count Leo Tolstoy, great author and humanist, pioneer of nonviolent resistance, is desperately needed again!

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*** John Scales Avery is not the only concerned citizen who, under the current threats of global war, remembers the pacifist tradition of Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. In 2011 the BBC aired Alan Yentob’s new two part documentary The Trouble With Tolstoy, where the through line of Tolstoy’s life runs from his childhood search for the magic green stick that would make all the people in the world happy, to the participation in, and subsequent disillusionment with, the traditional aristocratic links with militarism and war, to the inspiration gained from the Doukhobors who helped him resolve his crises and see clearly that the spiritual battles are the ones worth winning and that love is the most powerful instrument of peace. “To love without a motive is what defines a human being. That is the free for what of freedom,”13 says Al in Tesich’s play On the Open Road, adding that if we do not demean this definition (if we do not ridicule it, as Alice Walker claims we have ridiculed kindness and compassion; if we do not call kind men Idiots, as Dostoevsky observed we are taught to do), we will no longer feel disoriented or lost. Erich Fromm wrote the Art of Loving, as well as all his other important books, in the same spirit: Escape from Freedom, To Have or to Be, The Sane Society, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying No to Power, Nature of Man, The Dogma of Christ, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy, etc. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl celebrated it, claiming that it is not a lot of money that invests life with meaning, but that lives, meaningfully lived with others and for others, make human existence such a potentially glorious phenomenon and experience.14 Italian Filmmakers Roberto Rossellini and Liliana Cavani, excellent students of European history, discovered and highlighted this tradition, as well. They both made films about St Francis, a precursor of Tolstoy, who rejected having (unearned privileges and wealth) for the fuller and more complete way of being human. In the film Europa ’51, Rossellini created a more modern version of the same awakening and moral transformation, explaining to Ingrid Bergman (in the film an upper class lady who is led by tragic circumstances to reject the callousness and greed of her class and embrace solidarity and compassion for the poor), that she was to be a female Saint Frances. In Europa ’51, the woman is ridiculed by the ‘sane’ society and punished for her disregard for class distinctions by being confined to an insane asylum. Rossellini also made films about Socrates and Jesus (The Messiah, 1975), and died with a finished screenplay for a film about Marx (Working for Humanity was the title of the manuscript)15. 13 Two important questions - Free from what? Free for what? - are raised by Tesich’s characters, traveling to the Land of the Free. Similar investigations into the meaning of freedom are undertaken by Kushner in Angels in America. On this point the similarities between Tesich and fourteen years younger Kushner are striking. 14 Viktor Frankl, “Why to believe in others”, video clip from 1972, on TED (Internet) 15 See accounts of Rossellini’s films in Peter Brunette’s book Roberto Rossellini, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1996. The book traces the development of Rossellini’s ‘historical

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Liliana Cavani, on the other hand, made a film about the Tibetan yogi Milarepa16, the Socrates of Asia, inviting her audience to relate the European humanist tradition to the culture of the continent that gave to us the tradition of Buddha, Ashoka and Gandhi. In the US, besides being praised by the influential literary critic Harold Bloom, who included him among the 26 great authors of The Western Cannon, Tolstoy has been frequently referenced by the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner. Most significantly Kushner mentions Tolstoy in his essay A Modest Proposal, published in 1998 in the January issues of American Theatre.17 The essay is concerned with the decline of American education. Kushner deplores the transformation of education into mere vocational training and sees the possible remedy in ‘subversive’ actions through which the students can be given a chance to develop what conservative America is trying to deprive them of: ethics. Kushner says that education, as opposed to training, addresses not what you do, or will do, or will be able to do in the world: it addresses who you are, or will be, or will be able to be. He sees the dumbing down of students “who are being trained, but not how to think” as a deliberate strategy of the conservative government, afraid of the resurgence of the revolutionary spirit of the sixties.18 Half jokingly, Kushner gives the following advice to teachers: ”make them read The Death of Ivan Ilych and find some reason why this was necessary. Then at least you’ll know that when you die and go to the judgment seat you can say ‘But I made 20 kids read Tolstoy!’ and this, I believe, will count much to your credit”. “We should turn our students, and ourselves, into activists” says Kushner, and lists the causes he is prepared to fight for: “We should have democratic socialism, clean air, clean water, clean food. Our children, all children, should feel safe – should be safe. The Messiah should come, or should come again, whichever you prefer. Until then, and to hasten his or her arrival, we must teach undergraduate theatre majors how to read Kant. Even if that means we have to learn how to read Kant ourselves”. It is interesting to note that Tesich’s play On the Open Road in sense’, and clarifies the reasons that led Rossellini to make films about key figures of Western history. 16 The only study of Liliana Cavani’s films is the book by Gaetana Marrone, The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani, Princeton University Press, 2000. Chapter 7 of the book is referred to in the text. The title is The Architectonics of Form: Francesco and Milarepa. 17 Besides Tolstoy, who figures prominently in The Western Cannon: the Books and School of the Ages, 1994, Harold Bloom included Tony Kushner on one of the extended lists of great writers appended to the book. Tolstoy is said to have changed the life of Gandhi, as well as Wittgenstein. Tony Kushner’s “A modest proposal” was published in American Theatre, January 1998. The text begins on p, 20. Pdf version is available on the Internet. 18 See the documentary Berkeley in the ’60 (directed by Mark Kitchell, 1990), and the 618 pages anthology The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (2002), edited by Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik. These sources make it abundantly clear what kind of ideas and ideals the conservative government feared. In one sequence, talking about the ‘knowledge industry’ that the Universities had come to serve, Michael Rossman describes the astounding perception of the elite students that the education at the best American universities was actually the worst. It severed, Rossman says, ”technology from values, the intellect from the heart”, turning students into willing accomplices and servants of the most conservative and destructive government institutions. Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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fact deals with the second coming of the Messiah, and that in the closing section of the play Tesich’s characters (crucified because they refused to kill Jesus) quote Kant’s “A starry sky above me, and a moral law within me”. *** It is also interesting to note that Kushner and Tesich (both admirers of Tolstoy, preoccupied with moral themes) wrote their plays at approximately the same time. (In fact, the conclusion of Angels in America, part one, was published in 1992, in the same July/August issue of American Theatre that contained a report on the Los Angeles riots, and Stephen Coen’s conversation with Tesich concerning his new play. The interview was titled “The only kind of real rebel left, he figures, is a moral person”, and opened with the questions: How do political plays function in an apolitical society, and what is the purpose of art in a bankrupt culture?) Performances of Angels in America started in 1990, and the play won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Tesich’s On the Open Road, after three drafts written in the previous years, premiered at the Chicago Goodman Theatre in March of 1992. It is painful to read the reviews of Tesich’s play by critics dumbed down, it would seem, by the kind of education Kushner went on to describe and criticize: their texts make it evident that critical examinations of the abuses of Christianity continue to be unwelcome and unpopular. Especially with the rising conservative, militant Right, addicted to parading its devotion to Christ and claiming monopoly on faith. Entrenched, unexamined dogmas prevail, and interpretations of Biblical motifs which deviate from the authorized readings are met with incomprehension. The philosophical references Tesich makes in his play are offensive to the critics and remain fragments which they are unable (or unwilling) to connect. If they did, a “New Theory of Life” would emerge, different from the one cherished by the Nixon/ Reagan establishments. The Angel that appears in Kushner’s play announces: “A marvelous work and wonder we undertake, an edifice awry we sink plumb and straighten, a great Lie we abolish, a great error correct, with the rule, sward and broom of Truth!” Tesich’s intention in On the Open Road is the same (to abolish error and use the broom of Truth to free America from accumulated political lies and prejudices), but significant differences in the specific strategies Kushner and Tesich employ exist. Angel, in Tesich’s play, is an ordinary human being, one of the characters. As if desiring to dramatize Tolstoy’s claim that the ills of the world are caused by false education and false teachings (about everything, including Christianity), Tesich makes the relationship between his Al and Angel pedagogical. Al, who has internalized the ‘best’ education the system offers and who endorses the values that keep the system in power, acts as a mentor to the physically strong but uneducated (and for that reason exploitable) Angel. The situation is analo26

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gous to Iago teaching Rodrigo, or Othello, how things are done in cities like Venice, centers of civilization where love does not exist, where passions of the blood and appetites of the body are quenched by putting money in your purse and buying sexual favors on the competitive market, and where the supremacy of the system is assured by the wealth of the merchants and politicians, and military interventions of the generals). Al epitomizes the type of intelligence the new world order requires. He understands the gist of everything, and feels nothing. He is like the male version of Madeleine Albright: little children could bleed before his eyes, he would get it, and before anything could get to him - move on. He teaches Angel, who from the opening scene of the play seeks companionship and love, to throw away the violated little girl he goes out of his way to find and save, because such act of compassion, which he as the mentor ridicules and dismisses, would bring the pupil no profit, only irksome obligations and entanglements. Still, in the end, what is ridiculed and dismissed triumphs. It is not Al’s rationalizations that prevail. When he comprehends the last thing left for him to understand – what kind of human being he has become – like Conrad’s Kurtz, Al screams in horror. The play ends with an important reversal: it is the simple humanity of Angel that triumphs, and not the false and sterile sophistication of the ‘educated ’dehumanized world that Al represents. At the end of his journey Al finds himself where Angel was at the beginning. He sees in the shadow cast by the cross on which he is crucified the truth about man: that he is a being capable of loving without a motive (i.e. profit), and that he is capable of opening his arms wide, ready to embrace (not conquer and devastate) the universe. In Angels in America, love is examined in the context of the Zeitgeist of the Reagan era. “What’s it like to be Reagan’s kid?” asks one of Kushner’s characters: “Enquiring minds want to know. …I think we all know what that’s like. Nowadays. No connections. No responsibilities. All of us …falling through the cracks that separate what we owe to ourselves and …what we owe to love. …Land of the free. Home of the brave. Call me irresponsible.” Joe, the young man who is being initiated into this kind of freedom, comments that the proposition is terrifying. The answer he gets is: “Yeah, well, freedom is. Heartless, too”19. (Act 2,7 p. 77) The seduction seems to work and Joe responds: “I just wondered what a thing it would be …if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really 19 In Act 2,6 p. 69 Kushner wrote a prediction that has, unfortunately, become completely true, even if the person sitting in the White House at the moment is a Democrat. Talking about the election of the new president, one of the lawyers proclaims: “It’s a revolution in Washington, Joe. We have a new agenda and finally a real leader. …By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the Federal bench – Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And we’ll get our way on just about everything: abortion, defense, Central America, family values, a live investment climate. We will have the White House locked till the year 2000. And beyond. A permanent fix in the Oval Office? It’s possible. …It’s really the end of Liberalism. The end of New Deal Socialism. The end of ipso facto secular humanism. The dawning of a genuinely American political personality. Modeled on Ronald Wilson Reagan”. Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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gone away. Free. It would be …heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and … Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one, and then walk away, unencumbered, into the morning.”(Act 2,7 p. 78) In the relationship between Louis and Prior (the lover Louis abandons because he has AIDS), the ailing young man sees his friend’s betrayal as an outcome of a world deliberately set on producing men like him: men whose hearts are deficient, who love but whose love is worth nothing. (Act 2,9 p. 85). Later on Louis, the betrayer, who compares himself to Cain and Judas, speaks of the fate of men who ”in betraying what they love betray what’s truest in themselves.” (Act 3,2 p.105) Yet, he is prepared to avoid personal responsibility and blame his ethical weakness on the difficulty of being “too much immersed in history”. Kushner’s characters demonstrate what Tesich meant when he said that modern men would like to be free from the responsibility of being human. Louis refuses to be bound by personal commitments, and says: ”…this reaching out for a spiritual past in a country where no indigenous spirits exist – only the Indians, I mean Native American spirits and we killed them off so now, there are no gods here, no ghosts and sprits in America, there are no Angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there’s only the political.”(Act 3,2 p.98) We have already noted what Victor Frankl had to say about the spiritual bankruptcy of the West. Warning America that freedom without responsibility is destructive, he advised Americans to create the necessary symbolic balance by erecting, on the West coast, a Statue of Responsibility. The central and most Tolstoy-like moment in Kushner’s play comes in a scene in the hospital where a black male transvestite nurse, Belize, cares for the sick and abandoned AIDS patients. Since most of the clientele are Washington DC lawyers, Belize is in a position to warn these worldly lawmakers about one important thing. He says: “I’ve thought about it for a very long time, and I still don’t understand what love is. Justice is simple. Democracy is simple. These things are unambivalent. But love is very hard. And it goes bad for you if you violate the hard law of love”. (Act 3,2 p.106) That is precisely the point Tolstoy was repeatedly making in his final years: “Love is the highest and only law of human life, and in the depth of his soul every human being knows this (as we most clearly see in children); he knows this until he is entangled in the false teachings of the world”. Tesich and Kushner take their place with Shakespeare and Tolstoy (the paradox that Tolstoy did not like the Bard notwithstanding), as playwrights who looked into these ‘false teachings’ and related the failures of Western Civilization to the turning away from love that patriarchal cultures and systems of domination require.(Eisler: 1987, 1995) The most corrupting agent of patriarchy in Kushner’s play is the lawyer Roy Cohn, historical figure politically active in the second half of the XX century, trained in what More would call legal ‘trick and dodges’ by the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy. In one of the most important seduction scenes in the play, Cohn says to young Joe: “Everyone who makes it 28

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in the world makes it because somebody older and more powerful takes an interest. The most precious asset in life, I think, is the ability to be a good son to a father who pushes them farther than they would otherwise go. I’ve had many fathers, I owe my life to them, powerful, powerful men. Walter Winchell, Edgar Hoover. Joe McCarthy most of all. He valued me because I am a good lawyer, but he loved me because I was and am a good son….The father-son relationship is central to life. Women are for birth, beginning, but the father is continuance. The son offers the father his life as a vessel for carrying forth his father’s dream. …Love; that’s a trap. Responsibility; that’s a trap too. Like father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you. Don’t be afraid; people are so afraid; don’t be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone… Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way”. (Act 2,4 p. 62-3) In case we missed the point Kushner is trying to make, Roy Cohn proudly declares his greatest achievement to be not the making and breaking of presidents, major and judges, or amassing a fortune, but the execution of Ethel Rosenberg. He is proud to have been instrumental in putting “that sweet unprepossessing woman, two kids, boo-boo-boo, reminded us all of our little Jewish mamas” in the chair. He would have pulled the switch if they had let him. He did it, he says, because he hates traitors and communists. “Was it legal? Fuck legal. Am I a nice man? Fuck nice. They say terrible things about me in the Nation. Fuck the Nation. You want to be nice, or you want to be Effective? Make the law, or subject to it” is his last attempt to educate his young portage. (Act 3,4 pp.115-14) The presence of Ethel Rosenberg in the play is important. It is connected with the opening scene of the play in which homage is paid to the mothers of Europe who brought their children to America, to be safe. The New World, however, did not manage to be new, since the old patriarchal model prevailed. Mothers, like Ethel Rosenberg, who wanted social justice and change, and lived by the law of love that embraced all, presented real danger to the entrenched discriminatory and exploitative legacies of the West. An interesting, but not fully developed theme runs through the works of both Tesich and Kushner: in various ways they are approaching Orwell’s insight (derived from Shakespeare) concerning the difference between the world of mothers, and the conquering world of Big Brothers that has replaced it. *** The Proust Questionnaire, page 126 in the book Tony Kushner in conversation, displays a list of prose writers Tony Kushner considers his favorites. Among the world’s greatest novelist (Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, etc) it is nice to see that Kushner has included Raymond Williams. With so many shared themes and concerns (Columbia University Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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as well, where Tesich got his MA in 1967, and Kushner his BA in 1978), perhaps Tesich, too, would have acknowledged the enormous contribution Williams has made to our understanding of modern drama. Williams’ final points, in Drama From Ibsen to Brecht, certainly go a long way to help us understand better the structure of feeling out of which Tesich created his plays. Williams’ claim is that modern drama, beginning with major naturalism, is an inherently critical form: “it showed the (bourgeois) world as unacceptable by showing directly what it was like, and then how impossible it was when people really tried to live in it”. Today, the life of modern drama continues to be defined by the need of dramatists to make their critical insights explicit, by creating for them appropriate dramatic forms. Aware of the danger of revolutionary naturalist conventions being confused with counter revolutionary, inauthentic naturalist habits, Williams warns: “The driving force of the great naturalist drama was not the reproduction of rooms or dress or conversation on the stage. It was a passion for truth in strictly human and contemporary terms. It is one of the great revolutions in human consciousness; to confront the human drama in its immediate setting, without reference to ‘outside’ forces and power.” It involved a long prepared redefinition of sources of human understanding and of the objects of human concern. It was a successful revolution and it is from its central purposes that nearly all serious modern drama derives.(pp. 384-5) Tolstoy became part of this revolution when he rejected the authority of outside forces and proclaimed that “the kingdom of God is within us”. Playwrights’ courage to question the relation between men and their environment (seen no longer as ordered by God, or by immutable social hierarchies) was enormously liberating. As Williams states, Ibsen had to make rooms on the stage, in order to show men trapped in them, to show creative forces inside the people in these rooms which could not be realized in any available life (390). Nora had to walk out and slam the door of her doll house in order to be free to explore the potentials of her thwarted life. The newly won freedom to criticize society, and show men how they become trapped in their own creation, implied both readiness of the artists to assume responsibility, and courage to believe in the possibility of liberating change. But the revolution initiated by naturalism has not been completed, because the will to change has not been sufficient (or not sufficiently shared by all) to produce the desired, changed world. The question “What has to be done to get truly outside” (p. 339) continues to be crucial, and attempts to provide the answer involve today not only modern dramatists and other artists, but concerned individuals from all walks of life. Williams’ notion of a “room as a trap” appears in Tesich’s plays in several different ways. In On the Open Road (1992), what traps Al is his mind, his perception of the world adjusted to the demands of survival dictated by the forces that control it. In the already referred scene 4 in Act two of the play, in a moment of self awareness, Al realizes than an insa30

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tiable-I-get-it-God in his head has made a mouse-trap of his mind.”The trap keeps tripping and snapping the spines of moments that could have lived on in my life”, says Al, “but I get them and they die and then I move on. And wherever I go the I-get-it gospel goes with me. I get it. The gist of things. The gist of everything. I get it. I get it all before anything can get to me. I get it so I can get it all over with, And then, when there’s nothing left to get, my mind, like a scorpion striking at itself, will get me, the gist of me, over and over again I’ll get myself because that’s all that’s left to get and I, I, I will get me, me, me… (He starts to scream in horror).” The confrontation with this truth carries Al beyond the trap and, having recovered his humanity, he is mentally liberated, healed and made whole. Twenty years earlier, in the very strange and disturbing play The Carpenters (1971), Tesich shows Daddy’s traditional patriarchal house to be the trap20. The daughter of the house, Sissy, conveys how demoralizing and spiritually debilitating life inside it is, both for her and for the other inmates. In an early scene in the play, having told her brother that she has again flunked her exam, she continues: ”It’s kind of sad, don’t you think. I was going to go to law school and defend the poor and then I was going to med school and heal the poor….Now it looks as if I am not going anywhere. I am just going to stay home”. When he suggests that she can leave home and start her own family she answers: “I couldn’t, I tell you. The very thought of “my family” TERRIFIES ME. My anything, for that matter. Even “my life” is too much for me. The fact that I have to live it, that I’m expected to do something with it …it’s all too much for me, I’m a dependent. Whatever desire to act I might have had has been amputated out of me. I look at Mother and Father and I don’t understand it ….they’re not terribly clever or strong and yet somehow they’ve put this house together. True, I hate the house, I hate everything about it, but I couldn’t have done what they did. Don’t you see…I am even dependent on them to create things for me to hate. ”When Mark reminds her that there are new families, without family heads and family rules, without family ties tying you to roles you don’t want to play, she snaps: “ You sound just like Daddy …Family…Family…he expects the family to do everything, and all the time there is no family. There’s only an old house with a new family room added on. Why it’s called a family room I’ll never know…Perhaps because nobody ever goes there. Nobody but Daddy. He sits there for hours waiting for the family to show up and have a family chat…When he thinks nobody’s listening he plays those old recordings of us when we were kids.” It is quite amazing how accurately Tesich perceived and how successfully he transposed into drama the failures of the patriarchal tradition that still underpin the conventional, ‘normal’, American, but not only American, way of 20 Several films are built around the same metaphoric presentation of Western Civilization as a house, a structure, which has become a trap. The most brilliant are Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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life. He provided proof that it is possible to get truly outside the patriarchal trap in the play he wrote soon after, about a very different kind of house. Goya’s house (Tesich’s mother was called Goya), in Nourish the Beast (1974), is an establishment where all the physical and spiritual orphans of patriarchy can find a home and become a family. In this play Sissy becomes Silvia, and 7 other very colorful characters appear. Even the new title (the original was Baba Goya) plays into the thesis that is being expounded: women discussing history in Donna Read’s documentary Goddess Remembered summarize the catastrophic shift from matrifocal cultures to patriarchy by pointing out that “the nurturer was replaced by the conqueror”. Not in Goya’s house. The title of the play Nourish the beast refers to the reminder, on the list of Things to be done (sooth Sylvia, brighten Bruno, meliorate the mean old man, nourish the beast) to get dog food for Dodo, the new arrival to the establishment. No one is overlooked. Everyone is nourished. Love is shared by all. The trap and how to get out of it is both the theme, and the structuring principle of Square One (1990). Very skillfully Tesich’s plays operate on two levels: the naturalistic, often reminiscent of television dramas he loved to watch as a child, and the archetypal, the one that disturbs the critics, or that the critics completely fail to get. Square One is a good example. The names of the characters are quite telling. The interaction on the naturalistic level is between a young man called Adam and a young woman called Diana. But in fact, what Tesich channels through the naturalistic and plausible plot is a milder version of the conflict between the world of mothers and the world of Big Brother found in Orwell. Adam is the paradigmatic Biblical man, drilled to be obedient and respect external authority and hierarchical order unquestioningly. Diana, on the other hand, is the pagan Goddess of our first world, seduced into his trap but adamant in her determination not to stay. She walks out of it, and out of their compromising marriage, and returns to the park, her Edenic Garden, where life can be lived according to the laws of nature, and not according to the laws of patriarchal culture. When Professor Lionel Trilling of Columbia University wrote Beyond Culture, in his own professorial way this was the kind of criticism of culture he had in mind. Arts & Leisure (1996), the last play Tesich completed and saw performed before he died, also provides support for the suggested interpretation. Aleck Chaney’s mind is a variation of Al’s. Patriarchal ideas of what is normal, which he defends throughout the play, using tricks and doges generated by his well informed but instrumentalized mind, are judged and condemned by the women whose lives he has destroyed: his mother, his wife who is the mother of his child, his child who cannot become a mother because the very thought of him causes her to abort the babies she is carrying. The idea that they would grow in the world he defines is deadening. The structuring conflict in the play is the one posited by Tolstoy, and Kushner. It is the conflict between people who need love and the world (the room, 32

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the trap) whose order depends on love’s complete denial. Preparing herself to meet her father, Alex Chaney daughter, who is reminiscent of Sissy and who eventually commits suicide, says: ”To be young, gifted and dead is to be finally embraced by your culture and your country. You can come home again. Just don’t forget to be dead. You know how your father gets when you come home alive. The “look” is dead. But deliciously, delightfully dead. Dead in a life-affirming way.” Despairing about their encounter, the father confesses to the audience: “I have told my daughter I love her and I have told it to her over and over again. In person. On the telephone. In birthday cards, attached to birthday gifts. The problem is not that I haven’t told her. The problem is that my daughter does not want to be told. She wants to be loved instead. I care for her. I worry about her. I want her to be happy. My time is hers. When you put it all together it’s just like love, but she does not want love that’s just like love, she wants to be loved instead.” In the final confrontation, when his daughter tells him that she ran away from home because he did not love her, and that she is back to check again, since she failed to have a child of her own, to love and find consolation, all Chaney can say is “Oh sweetheart. I know you’re hurting. I know the nature of your pain and what you need to make the pain go away. But why must it be love? Why won’t something else do? We are not trapped, after all, in some Greek tragedy where standards of human conduct are set in stone and where to deviate from the standard and settle for less is seen as spiritual annihilation that’s worse than death. So what are we to do?” Indeed, “What is to be done, or What then must we do? is the question Tolstoy asks in the title of one of his more important books. The answer may lie in some of the biographical details of Tolstoy’s life. What Raymond Williams says about “too much evident tension between the critical positions and the varying creative practices” of great artists is true, and may be extended to the inconsistencies and tensions present in their personal conduct. Regardless of the troubled relationship with his wife in his final years, and his general troubling weakness for women, when the inner voice told Tolstoy not to write a novel about Peter the Great but about Anna Karenina, he consented. He disliked the idea, but obeyed the authority within. The wisdom of the advice was indisputable. It changed him. It made him realize many specific things about love, the feeling he so passionately promoted, when in writing the novel he had to imagine it and experience it from Anna’s point of view. One of the things to be done, it was beginning to dawn on him, was stop the patriarchal crimes against women, liberate women from the tyranny of patriarchal law, and liberate the feminine in men, permitting them and encouraging them to use their “mother mind”21. Related and equally important was relentlessly to oppose 21 On the Globaloneness site, on the Internet, it is possible to watch Riane Eisler speak about Caring Economics, attitudes which can take us from the traditional patriarchal domination models of society to the partnership models which can save us; Varsamazulu Credo Mutwa speak of the necessity to awaken the mother mind in modern man, and end the domination of the warrior mind; Duramunmun Lipar / Journal for Literature, Language, Art and Culture

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war. Clearly these measures would make the world of love, kindness and compassion easier to achieve. In the late XX century Tesich and Kushner were moving in the same direction. This paper has not addressed Tesich’s currently most popular anti-war play, The Speed of Darkness, and Kushner’s numerous anti-war activist plays. It covered a lot of ground, but a much longer journey through these plays, in part II, still lies ahead .

REFERENCES Avery 2013: J. S. Avery, Count Tolstoy, we need your voice today! Countercurrents, April 1, 2013. Bloom 1994: H. Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and The School of the Ages, New York: HarcourtBrace, 1994. Briggs 1997: A. D. P. Briggs, Editor, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underworld & Lev Tolstoy, A Confession, London: Everyman Library, J. M. Dent, 1994, 1997. Brunett 1996: P. Brunette, Roberto Rossellini, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Coen 1992: S. Coen, Steve Tesich: The Only Kind of Real Rebel Left, He Figures, Is a Moral Person, American Theatre Volume 5, Summer 4, July/August 1992. Cohen 2002: Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik, Editors, The Free Speech Movement Reflections on Berkeley in the ’60, Berkeley: 2002. Diaz 2008: P. Diaz, The End of Poverty? documentary film. Eisler 1987: 1995: R. Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, HarperCollins, 1987, 1995. Frankl 1955: V. Frankl, The Doctor of the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Knopf, Vintage Book, 1973. Fromn 1962: E, From, The Art of Loving, New York, Harper and Row, 1962 Fromm 1998: E. Fromm and Rainer Funk, Love Sexuality and Matriarchy, Fromm International, 1998. Kitchell 1990: M. Kitchell, Berkeley in the Sixties 1990 documentary film. Kubrick 1980: S. Kubrick, The Shining, 1980, feature film. Kushner 1992: T Kushner, Angels in America, New York, Theatre Communications Group, 1992, 1995. Kushner 1998: T. Kushner, A Modest Proposal, American Theatre, January1998. Steindler 2011: Tony Kushner, The Paris Interview, No.201, Summer 2012: The Art of Theatre No. 16 Marrone 2000: G. Marrone, The Gaze and the Labyrinth, The Cinema of Liliana Cavani, Princeton, 2000. More 1516, 1965, 2003: T. More, Utopia, 1516, translated by Paul Turner, Penguin Classics. 2003. Orwell 1949: G. Orwell, 1984, Penguin Modern Classics, 1949, 2003. Polanski 1976: R. Polanski, The Tenant 1976, feature film. Read 1989: D. Read, Goddess Remembered, National Film Board of Canada, 1989, documentary film. Rothmayer 2002: M. Rothmayer, The Drama of Life Unfolding, The Life and Work of Steve Tesich, Doctoral Dissertation, Lincoln Nebraska, 2002. Max Harrison, from the Yuim North Australian Aboriginal tribe, speak about the Aboriginal sense of oneness of all nature; Vandana Shiva speak of the sacredness of the Earth, etc. These are all modern variations of Tolstoy’s idea that love and responsibility should bind us to one another. Efforts to promote and practice these attitudes would constitute, as Tesich put it, the demonstration of “the free for what of freedom”.

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Shakespeare 1603: W. Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice, The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, Editors Stanley Wells et al., 1987. Shakespeare 1597: W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, The Complete Oxford Shakespeare, Editors Stanley Wells et al., 1987. Stojanović 1992: D. Stojanović, Interview in Pregledi (Views), No. 107, April 1992. English version available on the Internet Ourmedia site. Tarkovsky 1986: A. Tarkovsky, Offret (The Sacrifice), 1986, feature film. Tesich 1971: S. Tesich, The Carpenters, New York: Samuel French, 1971. Tesich 1974: S. Tesich, Nourish the Beast, New York: Samuel French, 1974. Tesich 1990: S. Tesich, Square One, New York: Samuel French, 1990. Tesich 1992: S. Tesich, On the Open Road, New York: Applause Theatre Book, 1992. Tesich 1996: S. Tesich, Arts & Leisure, New York: Samuel French. 1996. Tolstoy 1879: L. Tolstoy, A Confession, translated by David Patterson, New York and London: Norton, 1989. Tolstoy 1886: L. Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do? Translated by Aylmer Maude, 1925, 1935 Tolstoy 1894, 2006: L. Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You. 2006 Trilling 1967: L. Trilling, Beyond Culture, Penguin, 1967. Vorlicki 1998: Tony Kushner in Conversation, Edited by Robert Vorlicki, University of Michigan.. 1998. Williams, 1968: R. Williams, Drama From Ibsen to Brecht, Penguin, 1968. Yentob 2011: A. Yentob, The Trouble With Tolstoy, BBC documentary, 2011. All Tolstoy’s books can be read on the Internet. The following list of his philosophical works (taken from Wikipedia) illustrates the range of his concerns:

A Confession (1879); A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology (1880); The Gospel in Brief, or A Short Exposition of the Gospel (1881); The Four Gospel Unified and Translated (1881); Church and State (1882); What I Believe (also called My Religion) (1884); What Is to Be Done? (also translated as What Then Must We Do?) (1886); On Life (1887); The Love of God and of one’s Neighbour (1889); Timothy Bondareff (1890); Why Do Men Intoxicate Themselves? (1890); The First Step: on vegetarianism (1892); The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893); Non-Activity (1893); The Meaning of Refusal of Military Service (1893); Reason and Religion (1894); Religion and Morality (1894); Christianity and Patriotism (1894); Non-Resistance: letter to Ernest H. Crospy (1896); How to Read the Gospels (1896); The Deception of the Church (1896); Letter to the Liberals (1898); Christian Teaching (1898); On Suicide (1900); Thou Shalt Not Kill (1900); Reply to the Holy Synod (1901); The Only Way (1901); On Religious Toleration (1901); What Is Religion? (1902); To the Orthodox Clergy (1903); Thoughts of Wise Men (compilation; 1904); The Only Need (1905); The Grate Sin (1905); A Cycle of Reading (compilation; 1906); Do Not Kill (1906); Love Each Other (1906); An Appeal to Youth (1907); The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908); The Only Command (1909); A Calendar of Wisdom, compilation (1909)

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Ljiljana Bogoeva Sedlar

Љиљана Богоева Седлар / Тешић и Толстој Резиме: Овај рад покушава да дубље истражи Тешићево бављење руским класицима, посебно Толстојем. Познаваоцима Тешићевог драмског опуса познато је да у драми На отвореном друму постоји сцена инспирисана поглављем о Великом Инквизитору из романа Браћа Карамазови, Фјодора Достојевског. Овај рад скреће пажњу на чињеницу да је у истој драми, као и у осталим Тешићевим делима, веома присутно Толстојево поимање љубави. Посебно је за ту тему значајна Толстојева књига Царство Божије је у вама, због које га је Православна црква екскомуницирала. Рад истиче и везу између Толстоја и Гандија и њихов заједнички допринос борби за мир и сарадњу међу народима. Поред тога, рад се посебно бави сличностима које постоје између Тешићеве драме На отвореном друму и драме Анђели у Америци Тонија Кушнера, који је такође био обожавалац Толстоја. У драмама оба аутора љубав је мерило успешности људске заједнице. Какве су последице кршења овог првог закона људскости Тешић је показао у изузетним раним комадима Карпентерси и Нахрани звер, из седамдесетих, као и у драми Повратак на почетак, из 1990. Рад истиче архетипске елементе ових Тешићевих драма који га, заједно са Толстојем и Кушнером, повезују са још радикалнијом критиком патријархалног друштва од оне због које су имали непријатности. У теоријском смислу за тумачење Тешића и Кушнера коришћен је приступ Рејмонда Вилијамса, кога је Кушнер ставио на посебну листу омиљених прозних ствараоца. Кључне речи: Тешић, Толстој, Ганди, Томас Мор, Филипе Дијаз, Џорџ Орвел, Тони Кушнер, Рејмонд Вилијамс Примљен: 12. августа 2013. Прихваћено за штампу августа 2013.

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Липар / Часопис за књижевност, језик, уметност и културу