The Love-Girl and the Innocent Book

I love Russian literature, so I expected to like this, but it just isn't for me. First of all, the title doesn't accurately depict what the play is about. It's not about Lyuba and Nemov at all, really. It's about Russian work camps right after the war: the corruption, the labor, the deprivation, and the corruption again. Basically, all the workers (prisoners or not) are trying to get by and make the best out of a horrific situation. Lyuba and Nemov are just two types, not only as literary characters but even within the world of the play itself. They don't have a particularly dominant or even a particularly interesting storyline.
Second of all, the stage directions are too complex for reading. I couldn't really picture the scenes. I love reading plays, and I can usually follow along and see them in my mind, but this one was just not a well-written play. Maybe it's much better performed, but good plays are ones that can be read as fluidly as they can be seen. I love Peter Shaffer. Amadeus is just as excellent to read as it is to see (the movie, I mean; I never saw a stage production). Shaffer's stage directions are intricate; he is not a minimalist by any means. Still, I can follow his plays. I know what's happening and where.
Third of all, there are far too many characters. This is a play, not War and Peace. In a thousand-page novel that spans many years, tens or hundreds of characters make sense. In a four-act play, however, too many characters hinder character development and plot momentum.
I still own One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and would like to give it a try. I'm not sure I will want to, though. I still love Russian literature and always will. This play really isn't for me, though, so I can't recommend it.

After thinking about it some more, the number of characters makes sense. Too many people were confined to work camps, just as there are too many characters in the play. The reader/viewer isn't supposed to get to know the characters because people in the camps either died, got released, or were transferred before they could make any real connections with each other. I need to give Solzhenitsyn more credit than I initially did. That being said, I change my rating to a 2.5. It's still low because I still don't feel a connection to the play. He could have done a better job really highlighting the disconnect, the emotion, the struggle. Maybe he didn't want to because it's better to disconnect from the emotion to get by (after all, Solzhenitsyn lived in a labor camp himself, so he knew what mental labor people had to complete to keep from being "goners"), but I like character-driven literature. I can, then, recommend this to people who don't mind a more distanced view of work camp life and who don't mind plot- and setting-driven works.
Sorry to belabor this review (pun intended, of course).