1936 On the Continent

called
Playtime in Russia
. The book was compiled by some of the leading dramatic critics of London, Mr. Baughan of the
News Chronicle
, Mr. Wilson of the
Star
, and Mr. Geoffrey Whitworth of the British Drama League; by Mrs. Ashley Dukes of the London Ballet Club; by Dr. Henitz Unger, the well-known conductor, as regards music in the Soviet Union; by Miss Ethel Mannin on the subject of Children and Children’s Theatres; by Mr. Huntly Carter on the Soviet Cinema; and by myself.
    The general agreement of opinion among the London experts—not one of whom was a Communist, and several of whom were extremely the reverse—was that the theatre in modern Russia is “alive” to an extent undreamt of in any other country in Europe at the moment.
    I will quote two passages. The first from Mr. Baughan. “Nothing astonished me more in my visit to the Union than the fact that it can turn aside in its gigantic task of creation and reconstruction to encourage the arts and, above all, to foster the cult of the theatre. There is some superb sanity and vision in a nation which, struggling with economic difficulties and social problems and confronted at many times by enemies on many borders, can do this without interruption.” From Mrs. Ashley Dukes, herself a Russian, with knowledge of pre-revolutionary Russia. “What nonsense to talk of the bleak ugliness of the Soviet regime! No one who has been there can fail to appreciate their love and understanding of beauty in all its forms.”
    Most of these opinions were formed when we were all of us together at the Moscow Theatre Festival of 1934. Recently I went to a long series of theatres when I was alone in Moscow in February, and there was no question of a particular Festival “staged” for the benefit of foreign visitors.
    The theatres everywhere were packed every night. The repertory included
five
Shakespeare plays, another English classic, “The Spanish Curate” of Fletcher, a play made out of the
Pickwick Papers
, and a play by Shaw, as the Englishcontribution alone. It also included classic plays from Germany and France; many Russian classics of the Ostrovsky-Gogol-Chekhov period; and countless modern Soviet plays, one of them, in my estimation (Afinogenov’s “Dalekoe”), a masterpiece. I am speaking on my own expert subject at the moment, knowing well the theatres of Paris and Berlin, and having been a dramatic critic in the London theatre for the past fifteen years—and I can say, without any fear of contradiction, that the present Moscow stage, in its range and variety, is superior to the stage of any other capital in the world.
Some Obvious Reasons
    These, then, are some of the more obvious reasons for going to Russia: It has every sort of climate, from the Arctic to the sub-tropical. It has countless places of interest and beauty to see—the cities of Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev and Rostov, the stately Volga, the Crimea and the Caucasus are only a few of them. The pageant of the wide Russian “steppe” itself is something new and interesting to English eyes. It is a trip that is as cheap as, or cheaper than, any other trip in Europe. And it has the doubled interest afforded by no other country—side by side with its magnificent monuments of a vanished pasts it has a teeming wealth of new creations, born of the new life of the present—its new buildings, new flats, hospitals, schools, crèches, theatres, factories, extending to the grandiose schemes of whole new cities, its Dnieprostroys and its Magnetogorsks.
    The idler, on pleasure bent, can go to Russia for a holiday, and can have a charming one. The professional man, be he scientist, architect, doctor, lawyer, engineer, artist or actor, can go there with the heightened interest of seeing how his own specialised activity is being handled under the Soviet regime.

TURKEY
by
MEMDUH M. MORAN
    TABLE OF CONTENTS

TURKEY
The Land of many Civilisations
    No country in the world presents, perhaps, more interesting associations to the geographer, the historian, and the antiquary than Turkey. It is no exaggeration to say that there is scarcely a spot of ground, however small, throughout this extensive peninsula, which does not contain some relic of antiquity, or is not more or less connected with that history, which through an uninterrupted period of more than thirty centuries, records the most stirring events in the destinies of the human race, and during which time this country attracted the attention of the world as