Madame Polina

Madame Polina tells the story of the 19th century love affair between the Russian novelist and liberal Count Ivan Turgenev and the Spanish/French opera singer Pauline Viardot, whom he knew as Polina. The two first met in Berlin in 1846, and renewed their affair in 1848 in St. Petersburg, when Viardot embarked on an epoch making operatic tour of Russia. But by this time, Pauline had already married the impresario Louis Viardot, and so developed the continent's most famous 19th century menage à trois, since Pauline's husband was not only her impresario, but alsoTurgenev's French translator. The kernel of the menage à trois (which Pauline wants to conceal, and Turgenev wishes to expose), is the paternity of her child Paul, and, as an attempt to force the issue, Turgenev presents Pauline with his illegitimate daughter by a peasant girl, Paulinette, to look after. Notice the proliferation of names beginning with Paul... here, and it's all true.

This play is also a tale of revolution, the first act centring around the revolutions of 1848, the second around the Paris Commune of 1870/71. The link is that Turgenev when young was a close friend of the world's first terrorist and anarchist Prince Mikhail Bakunin, with whom he shared rooms when they were both studying at Berlin University in the mid-1840s. Which is where the play begins...

The first 19th biography of Polina Viardot was English, but the story is not well known in the UK. Not so on the continent, and even in the Soviet Union they taught children the story of Ivan Turgenev and Polina, but that version has them married. Communism was very good at rewriting history, but it remains a bad idea.

Cast: 5 men, 5 women, plus extras!

Production history: Edinburgh Festival 1984 (earlier version, under the title Viardot), Genesius Guild, New York, 2003 (revised version, under the title Madame Viardot)

Thoughts pdf