Dress Rehearsal: A Story in Four Acts and Five Chapters

Alexander Galich, born Alexander Arkadievich Ginzburg in 1918 ("Galich" is a literary pseudonym he assumed in 1947), is best known as the cult author of poem-songs surreptitiously disseminated throughout the Soviet Union in the millions as part of the magnitizdat phenomenon. "Dress Rehearsal" was written by Galich in 1973, only a year before his forced emigration from the Soviet Union and four years before his tragic death. Galich wrote "Dress Rehearsal" to reflect not only on his own life but on the psyche of his Soviet contemporaries. A major theme of "Dress Rehearsal" is the dilemma of Russian-Jewish identity in Soviet times, written from the perspective of an eyewitness to and victim of the various anti-Jewish campaigns throughout the Soviet period. Although the Soviet Union has since collapsed, and its society has been almost totally transformed by the radical changes that followed, "Dress Rehearsal" remains more relevant than ever for anyone who wants to acquire an insight into the post-Soviet mentality and into the acute identity crisis facing post-Soviet society today.