page_title: The Green Ring
section_title: Plot summary
hierarchical_section_title: The Green Ring / Plot summary
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Alexei Stakhovich. 1911. Oil on canvas. The Memorial Museum of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Moscow, Russia.
context_page_description: The Green Ring is a four-act play by Zinaida Gippius written in January 1914 and premiered at the Alexandrinsky Theatre on 18 February 1915, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold. The Moscow Art Theatre production, directed by Vakhtang Mchedelov, opened on 7 December 1916. The play was first published in Petrograd in 1916 by the Ogni Publishers.
context_section_description: Finochka, an emotionally disturbed 16-year-old expelled from a gymnasium for violent behaviour, lives in Saratov with Elena Ivanovna, her neurasthenic mother, slowly recuperating after a botched suicide attempt.
  She arrives at Moscow (with her mother who needs medical treatment) and visits her father Vozhzhin in his place which he shares with a middle-aged journalist friend Uncle Mika. The latter has no place of his own, "has lost  interest in life" and now seeks solace in co-hosting a circle of schoolchildren, friends of Seryozha (the son of Vozhzhin's female partner Anna Dmitriyevna who lives next door) and his own niece Rusya, calling themselves The Green Ring. Finochka arranges for her parents' meeting, Vozhzhin is determined now that the girl should live with him.
  The boys and girls of the Green Ring are engaged in earnest (even not entirely congruous) discussions, trying to find their own ways to sort out their future. Determined to break up with the corrupt world they live in, they decide they should be 'lenient' and 'merciful' towards the old and will build up their own new world having taken from the past only things that matter.
  Finochka, shaken by the scandal given her by jealous Elena Ivanovna who hates the idea of being left alone (and whose 'suicide' now appears to be more like a 'botched fake', intended to draw sympathy from her ex-husband) is eagerly accepted by the Ring. Its members are now keen to help out of the domestic hell the girl who is now in such a bad way that she steals her mother's revolver, even if still being unsure, apparently, as to how she's going to use it. More distress is caused when Vozhzhin tells Anna Dmitriyevna that's he is through with her, while the girl is shocked to learn that her father has a lover who lives next door.
  Finally, the Ring hits upon a radical solution for Finochka's troubles: she is to enter the marriage of convenience with Uncle Mika, her father's flatmate. This way she will be able to stay with her dad, attend regularly the meetings of the Green Ring (which she's turned dependent on, too) and bring her own mother in too, so that she won't be left alone.
  Uncle Mika, slowly succumbing to his young friends' scheme, is torn by conflicting emotions. Marveling at how his teenage friends have decided his fate for him, he still wonders if this new generation of 'idealists' whom  he'd been doting on (and always expressed his desire to be 'useful' to), haven't turned a bit too pragmatic for his liking, by inventing for him such a peculiar 'use'.
caption: Uncle Mika in MAT was played by Alexey Stakhovich (portrayed here by Valentin Serov), a former army general, much admired by both Stanislavski and the young generation of actors. Outraged by the 1917 Bolshevik coup, he hung himself in 1919. "He was followed to his last resort mostly by youngsters, and among them were the young members of the Second Studio, his very own Green Ring," Marina Tsvetayeva wrote in a piece called "The Death of Stakhovich".[4][6]
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