MG (aka I want a baby! reimagined) : a feminist, speculative, queer exploration of the content and context of Tret’iakov’s 1926 play, I want a baby!

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This dissertation, “M.G. (aka I Want a Baby! Reimagined),” is a scholarly and artistic examination of Sergei Tret’iakov’s play Хочу ребëнка (I Want a Baby!), originally written in 1926. Central to Tret’iakov’s plot is Milda Grignau, a cultural worker dedicated to building a collective nursery, who decides that she would like to birth the ”perfect” proletarian without a participating father/partner. Tret’iakov’s play is of great interest for its place in 1920s Soviet theatrical history, for its depiction of the themes of sex, sexuality, and gender, topics that were hotly debated at the time, and for the proposed stagings by Igor Terent’ev and Vsevolod Meyerhold, involving multimedia elements and audience participation, which were strikingly innovative for the Soviet 1920s. The play, however, was censored by Glavrepertkom (Soviet theatrical repertoire committee) in 1927, and it never saw the stage during the lifetimes of both Tret’iakov and Meyerhold. The original play was not published in full until 1988 and not performed on a Russian stage until 1990.
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May 2020
School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
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