Fear at Vassar

Fear is the name of a four-act play by A. N. Afinogenow which, for the last two years, has been the outstanding theatrical attraction of Soviet Russia. Unlike most recent Russian literary works, Fear, though written by a proletarian, is not Soviet propaganda. It aims to show the miseries of the proletariat under Soviet rule, to make a case for the survivors of the Tsarist aristocracy. Its hero, Ivan Ilich Borodin, scientific director of the Institute of Physiological Stimuli, is patently patterned after Physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1904. At first Fear was banned by Soviet authorities as counterrevolutionary. Later its production was permitted as part of the U. S. S. R.'s self-criticism plan. Last week it received its first performance in the U. S., not on Broadway, where producers had been, too stupid to see its merits, but at the Vassar College Experimental Theatre at Poughkeepsie, N. Y. Translated by two Vassar seniors and their Professor Nikander Sterlsky, Fear was acted by a cast recruited from students and faculty. Ivan Ilich Borodin was Vassar's own bald-headed president. Dr. Henry Noble MacCracken--an experienced amateur actor, who entertains his students with burlesque speeches on Founder's Day and two years ago performed as Theseus in Euripides' Hippolytns. Professor Sterlsky played the part of a Cossack. Fear has two main plot themes: 1) Ivan Borodin's efforts to deal with his political superiors, who appoint incompetents to assist him and interfere with his scientific researches; 2) the sad case of Amalya, a withered female aristocrat. Borodin makes Amalya his housekeeper while officials appoint her ignorant daughter-in-law his assistant. This coincidence brings together Amalya and her Communist son. At the end of the play, the son has lost his membership in the Party and, with old Amalya, sets off to become a mendicant. The part that Russian audiences enjoy most in Fear occurs in the second scene of the third act, when Borodin, addressing an audience in a public hall, eloquently summarizes the results of his researches in the emotion which gives the play its name. Says he: "The dairymaid fears confiscation of her cow; the peasant, forcible collectivization; the Soviet worker, perpetual purging of the Party; the political worker, the accusation of lukewarmness; the scientific worker, the accusation of idealism; the technical worker, the accusation of sabotage. "We live in an epoch of great fear. Fear forces the talented intelligentsia to deny their mother ... to falsify their social origin. . . . Man is becoming suspicious, secretive, disloyal, slovenly, unprincipled. Fear breeds idleness, train delays, interrupted production, general poverty and hunger. No one does anything without orders, without reference to the blackboard, without threat of arrest or deportation. . . ."

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