A few weeks ago the Art Institute opened “Windows on the War,” a show of domestic propaganda posters produced by the Soviet Union during World War II. It was just the tip of a sizable cultural iceberg. Thanks to a 16-month project called The Soviet Arts Experience, there are eight other, similar exhibits opening in the Chicago area this summer and fall—including one with the fascinatingly agrammatical name, “Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary.” Also, a bunch of concerts (lots of Shostakovich) and lectures. Independently, the Judy Saslow Gallery will be running its own propaganda poster show, “Soviet Slander.”
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I’m sure practically everybody would agree that the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the final collapse of the USSR two years later were great and marvelous things. But the world has gotten so much more . . . various . . . since then. Threats pop up unexpectedly and everywhere. Under post-9/11 circumstances, it’s not all that absurd to think we might feel a little longing for the days when superpowers came in pairs, everybody else was a proxy, and you could aim all your warheads in one direction, confident that mutual assured destruction was the ultimate deterrent—since, after all, who would intentionally blow up others knowing he’d be blown up, too?
All is not butterflies and flowers between them, however. The American, John Honeyman, is initially hostile to the very notion of informality. Cannily written as an earnest midwestern idealist who’s never negotiated at this rarified level before—a relative rookie, in other words—Honeyman doesn’t want to lose his hard-ass, eyes-on-the-prize edge by making friends with the Russian he’s supposed to be outthinking.
Brooks, meanwhile, is just plain brilliant. She carries off Botvinnik’s odd, potent mix of wiles, world-wearyness, and wonder with enormous intelligence, gradually disclosing the existential reality underlying the character’s bright manipulations. She also manages an amazingly realistic physicalization of a person standing outside on a winter’s day. It’s kind of alarming, really.
