Soviet Playwright Alexei Arbuzov Dies

MOSCOW — Alexei Arbuzov, a sometimes unconventional playwright whose most acclaimed works have run for years in Soviet theaters and some of which have been produced in the United States, died Sunday, the official Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva said.

Arbuzov was 78 and was known for his tales of young Soviets seeking more out of life than running tractors and meeting government quotas.

His first big success, the 1939 play “Tanya,” depicts an immature woman student who grows into a serious professional physician. It is still highly popular with Soviet audiences.

Perhaps Arbuzov’s biggest hit was the 1959 play “An Irkutsk Story,” a love drama played out against the background of the construction of a Siberian power plant.

The play is distinctive because of its use of a chorus to comment on the action, somewhat in the manner of the ancient Greeks or the modern German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. It has been seen outside the Soviet Union, primarily in Western Europe.

A third work, “Tales of Old Arbat,” portrays a 60-year-old artist falling in love with a woman aged 20.

Arbuzov ran his own studio for much of his career and, although loyal to the authorities, never won the full approval of the Soviet critical establishment. Pravda once called him a “talented” writer whose work wandered from Soviet doctrine.

In the United States and Britain, Arbuzov’s “The Promise,” a story of teen-agers living in Leningrad during the wartime German siege, was staged to mixed reviews. One of the characters questions whether Russians of his generation still adhere to, or are inspired by, Bolshevik ideals.

In 1978, Mary Martin chose Arbuzov’s “Do You Turn Somersaults?” as the vehicle for her return to the Broadway stage after a long absence.