ANTONIN ARTAUD - Dramatic Theorist

Author of the seminal Manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty (1932) and The Theatre and Its Double (1938), Monsieur Artaud has left an indelible mark on twentieth-century drama. His radical theories, promoting a theatre of the surreal and the subconscious, have had a profound impact on such anti-Realist playwrights as Ionesco, Beckett, and Genet. Artaud has been neglected for the better part of his career, thanks largely to his attenuated sanity. He died in a French insane asylum in 1948.

DJUNA BARNES - Author

Born in New York, the artist and journalist Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was a leading light of the Parisian literary scene in the 1920s and '30s. Ms. Barnes has enjoyed limited recognition in literary circles after the publication of her second novel Nightwood (1936), much praised by T. S. Eliot, relates the doomed homosexual and heterosexual loves of five grotesque men and women in an elaborate Elizabethan prose style. Her earlier works, including Ladies Almanac (1928) and A Night Among the Horses (1929), were well received by the avant-garde in Paris. She returned to her native New York in 1940, where she wrote little and lived reclusively in Greenwich Village until her death in 1982 at the age of ninety.

LAWRENCE DURRELL - Writer

Born in India to British parents in 1912, Lawrence Durrell has resided in Britain, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Cyprus, Corfu, America, Rhodes, and France. His oeuvre includes works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and he is best remembered for the novels of The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60). Mr. Durrell died in 1990.

CONSTANCE GARNETT - Translatrix

Constance Garnett (1861-1946) was the first English translator to render Dostoevsky and Chekhov into English. After a brief but promising career as a primary school teacher, Ms. Garnett, who was born in Brighton, England, in 1861 and studied Latin and Greek at Newnham College, Cambridge, has devoted her life to translating Russian literature. Her first translations, all completed in 1893, were of a Goncharov short story; Turgenev's novel Rudin; and The Kingdom of God is Within You, two volumes of essays by Leo Tolstoy, whom Ms. Garnett met while visiting Moscow in 1892. Ms. Garnett has since translated a vast quantity of literary and dramatic texts, including works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, and Ostrovsky. To this day, some fifty-three years after her death, she holds exclusive translation rights to several works by Chekhov and other authors. Her son David was a novelist, the author of Aspects of Love and Lady into Fox.

GRUSHENKA - Temptress

The "common harlot" loved by both Fyodor and Dimitri Karamazov, Grushenka spends the first half of Dostoevsky's novel flirting and the second half wracked with guilt and remorse.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY - Author

Constance's butler bears a striking resemblance to Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), one of the finest American novelists. Born in Illinois in 1899, Mr. Hemingway has been employed as a foreign correspondent and copy editor for several North American newspapers. He made his literary breakthrough with The Sun Also Rises (1926), quickly followed by his great novel of the First World War, A Farewell to Arms (1929). Mr. Hemingway spent much of the 1930s in Spain, fighting in the Civil War and attending bullfights. He recorded memories and observations of this period in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and his principal dramatic work, The Fifth Column (1938). Mr. Hemingway has been married four times and has three sons. In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1961 he killed himself with a shotgun.

FYDOR PAVOVICH KARAMAZOV - Father

Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov was a landowner well known in our district in his own day and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago.

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV - Brothers

The eponymous heroes of Fyodor Dostoevsky's epic novel, first published in 1881, the brothers comprise Dmitri, a sensualist; Ivan, an intellectual; Alyosha, a monk; and Smerdyakov, a bastard - figuratively and literally.

HENRY MILLER - Author

Best known for his sexual candor and considerable ego, Mr. Miller has titillated generations of readers with such semi-pornographic, autobiographical novels as Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Several volumes of his correspondence with, inter alias, Lawrence Durrell and Anaïs Nin have achieved widespread popularity since Miller's passing in 1988 at the age of eighty-eight.

ANAÏS NIN - Diarist

The French writer Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) spent most of her adult life in New York, where she published novels and short stories at her own expense and to little critical acclaim. Madame Nin has made a name for herself playing the role of dramatic heroine and femme fatale in many of the most significant literary and artistic lives of the century, including those of Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Gore Vidal, Antonin Artaud, and Salvador Dali. Her romantic liaisons have also included tempestuous affairs with her father and her psychiatrist. The details of these relationships are fictionalized in Madame Nin's novels and short stories, including House of Incest (1936), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), and the posthumous Delta of Venus: Erotica (1977). The eight published volumes of her diaries chronicle her life in libidinous detail. Born in France of Latin parentage, she died in Los Angeles in 1977 at the age of seventy-three with former husbands and lovers strewn around the globe.

MARY ELLEN O'NEILL - Mother (aka Mary Tyrone Karamazov)

Ella O'Neill has been immortalized by her son Eugene as Mary Tyrone, the crazed dope fiend of Long Day's Journey into Night (1941). Before her death, Ella was married to James O'Neill, an actor who performed the title role in Charles Fechter's The Count of Monte Cristo for more than thirty years.

In photo: Claire Bloom as Mary Tyrone in the A.R.T.'s 1996 production of Long Day's Journey into Night.

FATHER ZOSSIMA - Saint

Dostoevsky based his characterization of Father Zossima, the pious monk of The Brothers Karamazov, on the life of Staretz Amvrosy, a Russian spiritual leader. When he died in 1891, ten years after the publication of Dostoevsky's novel, Amvrosy's corpse gave off "a pleasant smell like that of fresh honey," thus proving his sainthood beyond dispute.