Last week I interviewed dramatist and author Mike Walker, who has adapted a number of Russian literary classics, including ‘Crime & Punishment’ and ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ for BBC Radio 4. He has also written a number of original historical dramas, most recently ‘Tsar’, which tells the stories of Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov and Peter the Great.
AP: What inspired you to write Tsar?
Mike Walker: Over the years I’d written a number of historical series for the BBC. We did the Caesars over three years, three series of three [episodes each], we then did the Plantagenets, and after that the Stuarts. We kind of didn’t want to do the Georgians as they’re a bit boring… well, they’re not, but to a degree they have a reputation for that, and they’ve been done to an extent, for example there’s The Madness of King George III.
I had always loved, in translation I have to say, Russian literature of the late 18th and particularly 19th century. When I was young I tended not to read English classics, but I read Russian classics in translation, not just Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky but also Lermontov, Turgenyev, and Leskov. And there was also Sologub, who’s an interesting Symbolist. That was a sort of background; it was a world that always fascinated me. I haven’t been to Russia a lot but we were at the beginning of Glasnost, which was an absolutely amazing period, it was kind of the Wild West, there were bits of the past bits of the future. I got two really strong feelings - first, Russia is different. It’s not like the rest of Europe. There’s also this huge divide between Moscow and St. Petersburg, Asia and Europe. Ultimately though, if you want to do a project, you’ve got to be able to sell that project because it’s all about budget.
AP: Was it a difficult ‘sell’, given that it’s not a period of Russian history that we’re particularly familiar with in the UK?
MW: There were two things we sold it on, basically. The BBC loves an anniversary and of course we’ve got the anniversaries of the two Russian revolutions coming up next year. At the same time, we’d got the reputation for delivering good historical drama. So we came up with a game plan for the commissioners; this is what we’d like to do and we delivered them the whole concept, tying it to the present day. How do you understand Putin? Because obviously, the West is saying, ‘why is he doing this, why’s he doing that?’ and we’re saying that in order to understand him, you have to understand Russian history, the Russian people, the need for discipline, all of those kinds of aspects.
AP: And their self-perception?
MW: Hugely their self-perception! And how you do that is you look at what led to Putin. First with the creation of the absolute power of Ivan the Terrible, then all the way through to the loss of it with Nicholas II. Then, there’s the ‘Red Tsar’, almost, with Stalin. I think Putin is also very keen on Nicholas I, who put down the Decembrists’ Revolt, extended Russia’s territory and was absolutely draconian. Then he’s followed by poor old Alexander II, who introduces education and frees the serfs and is blown up for his pains. It’s a sort of lesson if you’re a Russian leader.
AP: You’ve given a description of yourself that I liked very much, you said you were, ‘not a historian but a Cossack pillager of the grain stores of more learned folk’. Who were these ‘more learned folk’, who did you read in preparation for writing the series?
MW: A lot of different things! One of my minor talents is that I am a very good pillager, and I retain very little of what I pillage. When I’m doing research, I’m looking at a great mass of history, but you’re looking at for drama is the dramatic moments.
Many Russian historians have a very populist side to them, I read a wonderful book called The Five Empresses and it starts with Peter the Great’s wife, the one-time washer-woman. Ditto with Alexander II, it’s a Russian historian that I’m reading. And It’s not just the facts that you learn, it’s also their attitudes to the facts; you’re picking up atmospheres. In a sense, you are a pillager as you are only picking the ‘best bits’, the bits that suit you, and hoping that the people who really know aren’t going to be too angry with you! When you write that kind of drama, you’re always writing for two people. You’re writing – and you’ve got to do this – for someone who’s never even heard of Boris Godunov or Peter the Great, but also for people who know quite a lot, sometimes a damn sight more than you do, so you’ve got to balance it.
AP: There are some, I’m tempted to say larger than life, but of course they are historical figures in these stories. Who was the most fun to write and who was most difficult?
MW: In a sense Ivan the Terrible was very tricky; we’ve all seen the Eisenstein movie…
AP: Actually, it’s on my list…
MW: Well, in a sense, we’ve all seen bits of it, but you’ve got to forget all that and find your own Ivan. I actually really enjoyed writing them all. I wrote the first two, Ivan and then Boris Godunov, and in both cases, with these first two episodes, the directors said to me, ‘that’s interesting, Mike’. And when a director tells you that something is interesting, it means they don’t really like it! They said let’s go back and really look at these stories and re-do them and this was one of those occasions where the directors were absolutely spot-on, because I hadn’t felt I’d caught the God-haunted nature of Ivan.
AP: On that point, I really liked the use of scripture, the way he’s quoting biblical passages, partly to himself, partly to whoever happens to be listening… The thing you read about him is that on the one hand, he does all of this horrific stuff, and then he feels incredibly guilty about it because he knows that he really shouldn’t be doing it!
MW: We were very lucky with Boris and Ivan in that we could use a lot of biblical stuff because that biblical language gives it its own solemnity and power. I remember being in those churches in the Kremlin, with those great Christs on the ceiling looking down at you. Or, walking around St. Basil’s Cathedral… We think of a cathedral as having these big open spaces, but it has these tiny little enclosed spaces. It’s sort of paranoia in stone. There are these corridors and windows and tiny chapels and you go up and down stairs and it’s very dark as well. There’s this feeling of always being observed. And of course, no one observes the Tsar except God. The Tsar answers to God and it’s something that I was helped to approach by thinking of the Plantagenet kings, because they were right at the top, they were above the people, the nobility and the church and everything else, but they weren’t above God. And God looked down, and God judged. And I suppose for Ivan, the relationship with God, was he trying to provoke Him when he was ordering these incredibly cruel things? Or was it just a trait in his character and would we all try to do these sorts of things if we thought we could get away with it?
AP: Then of course, there’s his first wife dying, that seemed to flip a switch in him, or at least that was the interpretation you went with in the show.
MW: I think it did. As a young tsar, he was certainly autocratic, but he was also a kinder man.
AP: I read somewhere that he set up a sort of people’s assembly and that was a sounding-board at least if nothing else.
MW: Yes, absolutely. And obviously, one of his battles was, like the medieval monarchs in Europe, was to control the nobility, in his case the boyars, because their power was immense. One wonders whether his whole strategy of retiring from Moscow and going to live in in the monastery is to show them, ‘this is what happens when you don’t have the hand of an all-powerful tsar over you: you quarrel amongst yourselves.’
AP: Of course prior to that, ‘Russia’ so to speak, had been a very fragmented place and that was one of the things that made the Mongol invasions harder to resist.
MW: They really did need that almost super-human strength to keep them together. And for me, Boris Godunov, who came after, and again, one is never quite sure when one is dealing with history, seems to have been a character who tries to have a less brutal, less autocratic regime, and in a sense, fails. There’s almost a pattern in Russian history, whenever you get anybody decent, it all goes to hell!
AP: It’s tempting to compare Godunov to Khrushchev coming after Stalin. He’s a sort of guy who participated, he was complicit because he didn’t want to lose his head, but at the same time realised on some level, ‘this isn’t good, this is not how we should be carrying on…’
MW: …And then of course, you have Gorbachev. One of the writers I’m reading at the moment on Alexander II keeps making the point that his reforms were very much like Perestroika and that they led toward a chaos of a kind.
AP: Going back to the initial couple of episodes, you actually have this English character, Sir Jerome Horsey. Now, when I first encountered him I wondered if he had just been put there for the benefit of the audience as someone that we could more easily identify with. But then I thought about the name. There’s no way anyone would make up a name like that for a character, OK Dickens might. So I looked him up and it turned out he was a historical figure. Anyway, it sounds like he was a fascinating guy, could you tell us a little more about him?
MW: Well, we were actually slightly disingenuous, in that we conflated him with half a dozen English ambassadors and merchants, because, as usual once the new market opened up, the English got over there and started trading and I believe that that early embassy is still there. So really our Horsey goes on longer that any diplomat really would have done. It was partially, and I’ll fess up to this, the commissioning editor said, ‘I think, at least at the beginning, our listeners, at least those who don’t know the story are going to need a ‘way in’.
AP: Ah, so my hypothesis was correct! It’s good to know that I have sound commissioning instincts!
MW: You are absolutely right! But at the same time, these were some fascinating characters; many of them married Russian women or had relationships with Russians and lived there for a long time. Actually, Ivan really did ask Elizabeth if he could move to England. That would have been interesting, wouldn’t it? And many years later of course, Peter the Great did come to England as part of his tour of Europe. He came to study shipbuilding at Greenwich. And he stayed in the house of John Evelyn. After he left, the government had to pay him £300 to clear up the mess! There’s this wonderful story about the holly, and wheelbarrows…?
AP: No, I hadn’t heard that one…
MW: Well, Evelyn was a great gardener, and in his gardens he had wheelbarrows, which the Russians had never seen before. And there was this big holly hedge, so the Russians invented this game, which Peter played, like anybody else, they’d gamble a bit and whoever lost would have to sit naked in the wheelbarrow…
AP: Oh no, I think I know where this is going…
MW: Yes, and somebody else would push them through the holly!
AP: There’s some hard-hitting stuff in the series, especially for Radio Four on a Sunday Afternoon. One scene that I found particularly upsetting was when Peter I was being married to his first wife Evdokiya, she is whipped during the ceremony. Is that history or artistic licence?
MW: It’s history. It was more symbolic, one has to say, but it was done and the bride would get down and kiss the groom’s feet. Peter did change that later. But it was aristocratic, older Russian tradition. And with Peter of course there’s always this tension between the old Russia and the new Russia that he wants to create.
AP: Moving on to the final episode, we have the incredible story of Martha, or Catherine the first as she comes to be known.
MW: David Mamet once said, ‘nobody goes to drama for facts, they go to drama for drama’. But historical drama is a bit different because people do go to it for facts so you’ve got to deliver the drama but I think that any historical storyteller or dramatist has a duty to the listener or the reader to be as honest as they can. I think you can adapt but you can never lie. So I was looking at Peter and thinking, ‘what is a great audience story, to bring Peter out but to come at it at another angle?’ And then finding that was like finding gold!
AP: Just in case anyone hasn’t caught that particular episode, what happens with Martha?
MW: Basically, the Russians are invading Lithuania and they essentially enslave a lot of the local population and you have this laundry maid called Martha who is transported to Russia, where Peter the Great’s sidekick, Alexander Menshikov, one of his ‘company of fools and jesters’ picks her up. Peter’s first marriage is pretty barren and he hates his wife and doesn’t like his son. So, Menshikov thinks, ‘this is the sort of woman Peter likes’, but there’s something about her that just makes her slightly different. He educates her, although she never learns to read. He then introduces her to Peter at just the right moment. And he falls for her. She’s sensible enough not to jump into bed with him straight away, and there is something about them both that attracts the other. They’re kind of a natural couple. They’re sympathetic, they actually fall in love. It’s wonderful, they fall in love. The story in the play of Peter being surrounded by the Turks and her being there as part of the expedition and actually having brought the tsarina’s treasure, even though she technically wasn’t tsarina at that time, and suggesting to him and his commanders the way of getting out from a hopeless position is absolutely true! In some books, she does more and in some books a little less but the core story is certainly true. She was obviously an extremely practical, shrewd woman and that, I think appealed to Peter, who was never a theoretician. He was practical, he loved to make things, he loved to know how things worked; ships, clocks, you name it.
AP: I guess you could say that without her, he might easily have not been remembered as Peter the Great, but ‘that tsar who got himself surrounded and killed’. Or more likely, he’d have been remembered for that in Russia but completely forgotten in the west.
MW: Absolutely!
AP: How involved are you in the production process?
MW: Radio is good in that you are there as a writer and it’s a much lighter production process than telly is. There are far fewer people involved, so you are there and you are close when they make it. With film and television nobody wants the writer! You’re on the end of a phone line if somebody wants a change, and they might get you on the set, but you’re miles away, whereas in radio it’s still very much the writer’s medium. You don’t get to cast it, but you can certainly make suggestions. You’re there at the read-throughs and you can talk to the actors and they can come and ask you questions about their characters. It’s a much closer process, which for a writer is much nicer.
AP: You’ve got quite a track-record with Russia, I understand you did an adaptation of War and Peace a number of years ago?
MW: Yes, I did War and Peace years ago with Marcy Kahan. I first read War and Peace when I was eighteen or nineteen and like all eighteen or nineteen year-olds, I thought Pierre Bezukhov was a really great character. Then I read it again before we adapted it, when I was probably in my late forties. Prince Andrei seemed so much more interesting. I can remember sitting on a train, coming into Waterloo actually, and reading his dying scene and I was just weeping on the train!
AP: I’d also like to talk to you a bit more about Life and Fate, which is a less well-known book than some of the other ones you’ve adapted. What’s it about and how did you end up being involved with the adaptation?
MW: It tells the story of the Battle of Stalingrad and the defeat of the German Army, the moment when the war hinges. It follows dozens of characters, some of them Russian, some of them German. Some of them are related, others are fairly contingent. One of them is a physicist who is working on atomic power, who falls out of favour.
It was the favourite novel of the then controller of BBC Radio 4, who really wanted to do it. They had spoken with one or two writers who had said, ‘it’s too big, it’s too diffuse’, and it is a very long book! So Alison Hindell, Jonathan Myerson and I worked on it and together we came up with this idea of doing it across one week, not trying to link all the stories but saying it’s all happening at the same time and we basically took over every single drama slot on Radio 4 for that week, apart from The Archers, which of course is sacred, so nobody should touch that! When we were looking at the book and dividing it up and thinking, ‘how will we deal with this and how will we deal with that?’ was that we kept feeling that it was kind of weird. You see, it starts and it assumes that we know these characters and yet, why would you do that, you’d surely introduce a character? And then we found out that actually, Life and Fate is a two-part novel and there’s a shorter first part that hasn’t been translated yet, which is fascinating. We actually worked with a fantastic translator, Robert Chandler. So Jonathan Myerson and I went to talk to him and he gave us a huge amount of information and was incredibly helpful. He was so much a part of making it a success.
AP: What is it that keeps you coming back to Russian literature and Russian themes and settings?
MW: It’s an immense sense of life, faith, hope. In Russia, whatever happens, people hope and fight. Sasha Yevtushenko, one of the directors who worked on Tsar, once said that Russians are really Italians stuck in the snow! They have this immense sense of life. In spite of appearances, there’s nothing dour about them and there’s this huge sense of, ‘whatever happens, we’ll get through it, it’s going to be great’. They just drink more than the English! There’s also something about the culture too, it’s the fact that it’s the same and yet very different. With another culture, and I think it’s one of the great things about other cultures, is that it allows you to see yourself as well. I love the art as well, I really like Repin especially.
AP: So, what’s next, is there going to be more Tsar?
MW: Yes, so we’ve got, probably coming out around March next year, Catherine the Great, Alexander I and the ‘national epic’ with Napoleon. We miss Nicholas I and go on to Alexander II and the beginning of 'the People’s Will' movement and the terrorism but also the freeing of the serfs. Then in the final part coming out in October, we’ve got Nicholas II, the early years, and then another one with him and the revolution. Then there’s Stalin, and finally, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin!
AP: I look forward to hearing those and it will be interesting to see what the Russians make of them. Perhaps that last one especially! Thank you so much for your time.
'Life and Fate', adapted by Mike Walker and Jonathan Myerson and featuring Kenneth Branagh, David Tennant and Greta Scacchi, is available from Audible.
