The Green Ring (Russian: Зелёное кольцо, romanized: Zelyonoye kol’tso) 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.

To our utter amazement the local old geezers, while praising its literary merits, refused to accept it as 'immoral', on the grounds that children there read Hegel and behave without proper respect to their elders," Gippius wrote in her 1933 memoirs.

"Apparently Gippius' play had awakened in her deep memories of the youth spent in a dysfunctional family, with her own mother, no dissimilar to Elena Ivanovna," the theatre historian Irina Arzamastseva suggested.

Not only did Gippius' play look like a development of Turgenev's ideas concerning the right of the youngsters to make their own decisions in life, but it was also close to it stylistically, having been described as the psychological drama with elements of satire and featuring fragments written as if they were pieces of prose.

[2] Also, the play's storyline echoed those of the Christmas tale "Young Heroine" (Маленькая героиня) by the children's author Alexander Fyodorov-Davydov, as well as, to some extent, Netochka Nezvanova by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, both featuring a 'strong schoolgirl' who arrives into the adult world to bring to it radical change.

[2] 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.

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, 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.

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'.

[2] Savina, not just a turn of the centuries Russian theatre superstar, but also the legendary 'Turgenev's last true love'[7] has been following Stanislavski throughout the 1900s trying (unsuccessfully) to convince him she could be useful to his MAT troupe, making much of her 'Turgenev connection'.

"In this respect Finochka looks like the lost child of Chekhov's last dysfunctional loafers, a daughter of 'the eternal student' and the degraded landlady [Ranevskaya]," the critic argued.

[9] On 7 December 1916 The Moscow Art Theatre Second Studio opened with the premiere of The Green Ring, directed by Vakhtang Mchedelov (Stanislavki conducting several final rehearsals), featuring Alexey Stakhovich as Uncle Mika, Alla Tarasova as Finochka, Sofia Holliday as Zoya, Nikolai Batalov as Petya, and Nina Litovtseva as Elena Ivanovna, among others.

[10] Central to the history of this production was the inspired performance given by the 18-year old Alla Tarasova, whose choice for the role of Finochka, the emotionally troubled heroine, proved to be a contentious issue right from the start.

[12] The Green Ring ran in the Moscow Art Theatre up until 1922, which was in itself remarkable, considering that Stakhovich had committed suicide, outraged by the atrocities of the new regime, and the Merezhkovskys left the country in December 1919 to become extremely harsh critics of the Bolsheviks.

[3] The Green Ring was revived on stage in 1933 in Warsaw and Prague, as well as Paris, where the teenage actors of the Mchedelov-directed production were now cast as the adults, like Vera Grech, once a schoolgirl, now Elena Ivanovna, the troubled mother.

This had been predicted by Dmitry Merezhkovsky who, writing for the 1 March 1915 issue of Birzhevye Vedomosti (Stockbroker's News) suggested that "the opinions will be polarized due not to the generations' divide portrayed in the play, but rather the schism that exists in the public and among the so-called critics.

"[1] Alexey Gvozdev criticized the author's "cold, strictly intellectual approach to life, which freezes the thought lifeless in abstract schemes," and "the false joys of optimistic hope for 'happy Renaissance'," – the drawbacks which in his opinion "stifled even the possibility of there being created in it some lively characters.

[18] Both sympathetic and optimistic was the review by the young Nikolai Slonimsky who expressed his delight with the way The Green Ring totally succeeded both in "highlighting all the most urgent questions" and "suggesting the new, exciting answers, providing the material for endless discussions.

"[19] Several reviewers, including Gurevich, noted the way Meyerhold had for once abandoned his experimentations and, by trying to totally serve the purpose of the play, has probably saved the production from being the utter disaster.

[20] Writing for Gorky's Letopis in February 1917 Lev Vygotsky (the future renowned psychologist, then a theatre critic) made much of the text's sparseness which enabled the cast to create the masterpiece of their own out of it.

"[Gippius's] disgust with the [modern forms] of 'marriage and famuily' is so sheer and intense in The Green Ring, there's almost something monastic about it," he opined, going so far as to interpret it as a true implementation of the "be like children" testament.

[21] While the contemporary critics' reaction was in many ways determined by the political climate in Russia at the time, more recent reviewers approached it bearing a broader social and artistic context in mind.