The Love-Girl and the Innocent
Encyclopedia
The Love-Girl and the Innocent (also translated The Tenderfoot and the Tart) is a play in four acts by Russian
Russians
The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....

 author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...

. It is set over the course of about one week in 1945 in a Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

-era Soviet prison camp. As in many of Solzhenitsyn's works, the author paints a vivid and honest picture of the suffering prisoners and their incompetent but powerful wardens. Most of the prisoners depicted in the play are serving 10 year sentences for violations of Soviet Penal Code Article 58.

In this play, the author first explores the analogy of the camp system to a separate nation within the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

, an analogy which would dominate his later work, most clearly in The Gulag Archipelago
The Gulag Archipelago
The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. The three-volume book is a narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a prisoner in a gulag labor camp...

.

The play has a fairly large cast of characters, mostly prisoners at the camp. The play has many difficult staging and set directions. Truckloads of prisoners arrive onstage, characters appear onstage pouring (and spilling) molten iron in a camp foundry
Foundry
A foundry is a factory that produces metal castings. Metals are cast into shapes by melting them into a liquid, pouring the metal in a mold, and removing the mold material or casting after the metal has solidified as it cools. The most common metals processed are aluminum and cast iron...

, and one scene calls for a three-story building in the foreground of the set, with layered barbed wire and bare steppe
Steppe
In physical geography, steppe is an ecoregion, in the montane grasslands and shrublands and temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biomes, characterized by grassland plains without trees apart from those near rivers and lakes...

 stretching into the background "as far as the eye can see," with an excavator
Excavator
Excavators are heavy construction equipment consisting of a boom, stick, bucket and cab on a rotating platform . The house sits atop an undercarriage with tracks or wheels. A cable-operated excavator uses winches and steel ropes to accomplish the movements. They are a natural progression from the...

 operating in the distance. Despite this, the play has been performed in public many times, making its American premiere at the Guthrie Theater
Guthrie Theater
The Guthrie Theater is a center for theater performance, production, education, and professional training in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is the result of the desire of Sir Tyrone Guthrie, Oliver Rea, and Peter Zeisler to create a resident acting company that would produce and perform the classics in...

 in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Minnesota
Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

, in 1970.

A television adaptation of the play was produced in 1965 by the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

, as part of the series Play of the Month
Play of the Month
Play of the Month is a BBC television anthology series featuring productions of classic and contemporary stage plays which were usually broadcast on BBC1. Each production featured a different work, often using prominent British stage actors in the leading roles...

.

Plot summary

The prisoner Nemov, apparently the story's hero, is an honest man serving a term of 10 years for violations of Article 58. At the play's start, Nemov is the production chief of his work group and is later replaced by, Prisoner Engineer Khomich. One of the play's clear recurring themes is the idea that Nemov's honesty is worthless in the face of the realities of camp life. All of the characters who prosper in the play can only do so by means of moral compromises.

The most accessible and traditional plot element is the romance between the two prisoners Nemov (the "innocent" of the title) and Lyuba (the "love-girl"). Nemov learns that Lyuba is having sex with the camp doctor Mereshchun in exchange for better food and living conditions. When Nemov demands that she stop seeing Mereshchun, Lyuba refuses and a conflict arises.

This lovers' conflict does not arise until almost the end of the play, in the final scene of Act III. Their dilemma is apparently resolved in the very brief Act IV, at the end of which an injured and dejected Nemov watches Lyuba enter Mereshchun's office yet again.

The title of the play suggests that the romance of Nemov and Lyuba is meant to be the central plot element, but the romance occupies relatively little stage time. Most of the play is spent in developing the characters of Nemov and Lyuba as they live and work in total ignorance of each other, and in exploring the realities of camp life. Much of the play develops characters and situations that have little or nothing at all to do with the specifics of the romance.
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