“Crime is a fine thing, both in history and in poetry, both on canvas and in marble,” wrote the cheerfully perverse Diderot. (The crime he was referring to was Christianity.) And likewise on the stage, one might think, in anticipation of the Soviet émigré director Yuri Lyubimov’s production of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which played at Washington’s Arena Stage theater this winter.[1]

Until his exile in 1984, Lyubimov’s artistic career in the USSR was an emblematic one, marked by those veerings between compliance with the regime and minute acts of rebellion which characterize the working life of the contemporary Soviet artist. Born in 1917, he served during World War II in an ensemble organized by Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s Minister of Internal Affairs, to entertain the troops and to jolly up Party officials on the home front. In 1964, after a full career as an actor, he became the director of Moscow’s Taganka Theatre, a position he held for two decades, during which time he produced his own dramatizations of the work of Pushkin, Mayakovsky, and the songwriter and singer Vladimir Vysotsky, as well as staging theatrical versions of such politically ambiguous novels as Yuri Trifonov’s The House on the Embankment and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita(which Lyubimov will be reviving this May at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge). Rejecting the Stanislavskian naturalism which had dominated the Soviet theater for seventy years and proved a fitting vehicle for socialist-realist drama, Lyubimov resurrected a tradition