The Lower Depths (Moscow Art Theatre USSR production)

The play takes place in Russia in the early 20th century, during years of severe economic crisis. Throughout the country, impoverished peasants and workers wander in search of work, only to find that their efforts are in vain—and gradually they end up at the very “bottom.” Their desperate situation is exploited by the owners of damp, foul basements, who turn them into grim flophouses. In one such flophouse, kept by Mikhail Ivanovich Kostylev—someone who is ready to squeeze out the last kopeck even from the most unfortunate lodgers—the subsequent events unfold. Under low, gloomy vaults of this shelter, people of the most diverse characters and fates have gathered, representing almost all layers of the society of the time. Each has come here by his own path; they could all have deserved a different life, but for most an inevitable moral—and sometimes even physical—ruin is in the offing. And yet it is here, “at the bottom,” among maimed drifters, in an atmosphere of darkness and hopelessness, that a debate about man and the meaning of his existence is born. Here, too, as if sounding like a solemn hymn, an assertion is heard: … “Man—here is the truth! All—within man, everything for man! There exists only man; everything else is the product of his hands and his brain! Man! This is magnificent! This sounds—proud!” ! “He-lo-vek!” One must respect man! Don’t pity… don’t degrade him with pity… you must respect him!