Herbert Marshall Colections

Resources (1)

• This archive, basically the personal acquisitions of Professor Herbert Marshall over more than 45 years in the Soviet Union and abroad, contains many rare and unique publications (especially periodicals) as well as manuscript holdings. It is particularly rich for the subjects of Russian and Soviet theater and film. For example, on the Soviet cinema, there are original manuscripts, stills, and photos of the famous directors Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Over 1,000 slides cover Russian and Soviet theater history; a collection of still photos, illustrations, slides, and filmstrips concerns Soviet cinema, Eisenstein, V. Pudovkin, A. Dovzhenko, and related topics. The Huntley Carter collection, named for a journalist and historian of avant-garde art in Russia and Germany in the 1920s, includes correspondence with Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Tairov Theater, Soviet institutions, and others, plus photographs and clippings, ca. 10 boxes. The Lionel Britton papers include shorthand verbatim transcription of a lecture delivered by Eisenstein in London in 1929. Other holdings include a large number of programs and brochures about theatrical productions of Meyerhold. Some material pertains to the Negro tragedian Ira Aldridge in Russia.

  In the world of music, there are records of folk songs and more formal compositions, in Russian, Ukrainian, and other languages. Among the works for which Herbert Marshall has rendered English translations, and of which the archives holds usually the Russian (published or unpublished) and the English, are works by S. Prokofiev, D. Shostakovich, G. Sviridov, and N. Rimskii-Korsakov. Among the songs for which Marshall has provided English lyrics are the National Anthem of the Soviet Union (A. V. Alexandrov-S. Mikhailkov), Wait for Me (M. Blanter-C. Simonov), Times Are Not the Same (M. Koval-N. Aseyev), Happy Fellow Theme (Dunayevsky-Lebedyev-Kumach), Our Soviet Fatherland (Lebedyev-Kumach-Dunayevsky), and The Partisans Song (L. Knipper-V. Gusev).

  Other materials in this repository are taped interviews with Soviet personalities and poets, Herbert Marshall's taped lectures on Soviet poetry, theater, cinema, and other topics, and a substantial number of translations of poetry and plays. Among the translated plays are Eugene Schwartz's The Shadow, A. Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri, and 3 works by Alexis Parnis: The Island of Aphrodite, The Wings of Icarus, and The Highway of Pasternak (on events of the Stalin era). Parnis was a Greek dramatist resident in the USSR. Poetry translations include Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, Joseph Utkin's The Story of Ginger Motele, Mr. Inspector, Rabbi Isaac and Commissar Bloch (about the 1917 Revolution and a Jewish settlement in Kishinev), Victor Bokov's Siberian Cycle (only part of this epic about life in a Siberian prison camp has been published; the English version is complete and unexpurgated), and Alexander Tvardovsky's Beyond the Beyond.

  Other translations of plays: S. Aleshin, Once in Seville: Don Juan and Alone; Alexei Arbuzov, Years of Wandering; Maksim Gorkii, The Barbarians and Vassa Zheleznova; the Ukrainian playwright and Bolshevik leader Aleksandr Korneichuk, The Mission of Mr. Perkins in the Land of the Bolsheviks; L. Leonov, The Apple Orchard of Polovchansk; Tour and Sheynin, Face to Face and Smoke of the Fatherland; A. Grach, What Would Grandpa Have Said?; Yuri Germann, Bon Voyage; Igor Vsyevolozhsky, The Celebrated Wife; Valentin Zub, No Need to Get Upset; N. M. Karamzin, Sophia; M. Iu. Lermontov, Masquerade; Ivan S. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (translated and adapted by Lionel Britton); and A. K. Tolstoi's historical trilogy, The Death of Ivan the Terrible, Tsar Fyodor, and Tsar Boris.

  Another large part of the archives concerns the Yiddish theater in Eastern Europe. Some items of interest in this section are: correspondence of the Moskauer Judisches Theater (between Huntley Carter and Alexis Granowsky in the 1920s); bibliographies of over 450 works on the Yiddish theater in the USSR, in Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, German, etc., compiled by O. I. Lubomirsky, and of all works on the Yiddish and Byelorussian theater and culture housed in the library of the Jewish Academy in Cincinnati; and playbills, programs, and pamphlets on the Yiddish theater in Moscow, 1964, Vilna, 1966, and Petrograd, 1919.

  A rough "Listing of materials in the Archives" (photocopy) is available.