Pierrot in Petrograd: Commedia dell'Arte/ Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama 9780773564411, 0773564411

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Preface (page ix)
Illustrations (page xi)
Prologue (page 3)
1. Who Was That Masked Man? (page 16)
2. Improvisation and Dissonance: Commedia dell'Arte and the Crisis in Theatre (page 44)
3. Pierrot Comes to Petersburg: 1903-17 (page 75)
4. Red Harlequins: The Balagan as a Theatrical Genre (page 103)
5. Pierrot or Petrushka? Russian Harlequinades (page 125)
6. Russian Pirandellos: The Balagan as a Dramatic Genre (page 159)
7. Harlequin's Shadow: The Film as Balagan (page 205)
8. The Empty Throne: Theatre as Metahistory (page 229)
Appendix A: The Beggar Harlequin (Elena Guro, page 239)
Appendix B: Today's Columbine (Nikolai Evreinov, page 245)
Appendix C: Fiametta's Four Corpses (page 250)
Appendix D: The Lovers (Vsevolod Meyerhold, page 254)
Appendix E: Harlequin the Card-Lover (Vladimir Solov'ev, page 257)
Appendix F: The Apes Are Coming! (Lev Lunts, page 272)
Notes (page 297)
Bibliography (page 335)
Index (page 349)

Citation preview

Pierrot in Petrograd

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Pierrot in Petrograd The Commedia dell’'Arte/Balagan

in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama J. DOUGLAS CLAYTON

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston « London « Buffalo

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 1993 ISBN 0-7735-1136-9

Legal deposit first quarter 1994 Bibliothéque nationale du Québec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of grants from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and from the Research and Publications Committee of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Clayton, J. Douglas Pierrot in Petrograd: the Commedia dell’arte {SBN 0-7735-1136-9

1. Commedia dell’arte — History and criticism. 2. Russian drama — 2oth century — History and criticism. 1. Title.

PG3086.C53 1994 891.72'409 C93-090542-3 Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractéra production graphique inc., Quebec City

This book is lovingly dedicated to my parents Ron and Jessie Clayton

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Contents

Preface ix Illustrations xi Prologue 3 1 Who Was That Masked Man? 16 2 Improvisation and Dissonance: Commedia dell‘Arte and the Crisis in Theatre 44

3 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg: 1903-17 75 4 Red Harlequins: The Balagan as a Theatrical

Genre 103 5 Pierrot or Petrushka? Russian Harlequinades 125 6 Russian Pirandellos: The Balagan as a Dramatic Genre 159 7 Harlequin’s Shadow: The Film as Balagan 205

8 The Empty Throne: Theatre as | Metahistory 229 Appendix A: The Beggar Harlequin 239 ELENA GURO

Appendix B: Today’s Columbine 245 NIKOLAI EVREINOV

Appendix C: Fiametta’s Four Corpses 250

viii Contents

Appendix D: The Lovers 254 VSEVOLOD MEYERHOLD

Appendix E: Harlequin the Card-Lover 257 VLADIMIR SOLOV EV

Appendix F: The Apes Are Coming! 272 LEV LUNTS

Notes 297 Bibliography 335

Index 349

Preface

In this study I have used transliteration system II as described in J. Thomas Shaw, The Transliteration of Modern Russian for EnglishLanguage Publications,’ except for those names that have recognized Western spellings, for example, Eisenstein and Meyerhold. The following abbreviations are used in the text: LTA: Liubov’k trem apelsinam

(the journal published by Meyerhold from 1914-1917 under the pseudonym Dr Dapertutto); Lrs: Leningradskaia teatral’‘naia biblioteka imeni Lunacharskogo; TMB: Teatral’nyi muzei imeni Bakhrushina (Moscow). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in the book are my own. This book was researched and written during the period 1982-02. I benefited from several sabbatical leaves and research grants from the University of Ottawa during this time, and I gratefully acknowl-

edge this support. I would also like to express my thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the generous grant that enabled me to complete this research. I would

like to express my gratitude to Dr Domenico Pietropaolo for kind permission to reprint a part of an article originally published in a collection that he edited,? and Joe Andrew and Robert Reid for similar permission to republish material that appeared in Essays in Poetics.°

My thanks go to the many friends and colleagues in different coun-

tries whose advice and suggestions have been invaluable — especially | to Laurence Senelick, Daniel Gerould, and Naomi Ritter for taking the time to read the draft and make very useful suggestions — and to the staff of the numerous libraries I have used in the ussr, Helsinki, Stockholm, and elsewhere, as well as the interlibrary loan staff at the University of Ottawa, without whose selfless help this would

be an infinitely poorer book. Finally, | would like to record my

x Preface

gratitude to my indefatigable research assistant, student, friend, and colleague Joanne Ledger, whose cheerful assistance has been invaluable during the final stages of this project, and to Shannon Matheson, for her work on bringing the manuscript into publishable form.

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| ill v3 S07) ie | | ae s|| |@ 7Segeab? ‘PL i | own ; , salt 4 | } # Se ey | ie Le ar Picts ‘te| ;oa | || ||alt WAN paar abas a “< y. | -& ITE n At f” J a i , Ue SLE SU Li a4 a” a } cS 17 By eee arr, 1, : In Miklashevskiis view, the attempt to create a wholly literary theatre in Italy had been a failure, and commedia stepped in to fill the breach.

66 Pierrot in Petrograd

Miklashevskiis account of this fusion is satisfying because it provides a logical motivation for a puzzling phenomenon; moreover, it accounts for the heterogeneous nature of commedia, with its masks, lazzi, improvisation, and bawdy elements on the one hand and its “high” characters and plots lifted from literature on the other. In a broader perspective, the notion of fusion of two opposing theatrical traditions fits in with a broader perspective that emerges from Miklashevskii’s study of commedia as a baroque phenomenon, containing such essentially baroque features as contrasting worlds (those of the masks and the “high” characters), grotesque (the coexistence of the masked zannti with the realism of the Innamorato and Innamorata), and

the macaronics of the contrasting dialects and styles of speech (flowery conceits from the lovers, scholasticisms and dog-Latin from the Dottore, and Venetian and Bergamese or Neapolitan dialects from

the various masks). Most baroque of all is the vitality and passion

with which this fusion took place. It is hard not to agree with Miklashevskii that the vitality was quickly lost and that decadence set in early in the seventeenth century,” as the form only was retained and the unique élan that had propelled it was lost. Miklashevskiis study is most interesting because it illustrates the extent to which scholarly work in Russia was in tune with developments in contemporary theatre and, indeed, with the world of politics as well. This is manifested in the idealized notion of the commedia troupe as a primitive commune and in the insistence on the popular sources of commedia (especially the common people as a source of the vitality of spirit). In the second half of the sixteenth century, after the death of Macchiavelli (1527) and Ariosto (1533), [the Italian theatre] having fallen into the hands of pale imitators, lost all its attractiveness even in the eyes of the cultivated and erudite. But while the literary theatre was undergoing this crisis, from the depths of the people, for whom the scenic art was a real need, there was born a new theatre, imbued with the humour, the imagination, and the spirit of observation of the people and that not only completely satisfied the aspirations and tastes of the public at large, but even won over the upper classes and brought them back to the theatres they had deserted.”

It is this historical development, as described by Miklashevskii,

that served as a model for the renewal of Russian theatre on a theatrical, rather than a literary basis in the early years of the twentieth century. His ideas of the popular roots of commedia — and the necessity for an infusion of this vitality to renew Russian theatre —

67 Improvisation and Dissonance

have remained a feature of Russian thinking on the subject throughout the Soviet period.

COMMEDIA IN RUSSIA AFTER 1917 The October revolution of 1917 placed before the theatres of the country, and all who worked in them, a number of important questions.”* These were all related, essentially, to the question of the form

that the theatre would take in the new Soviet state. First, it was necessary to define the attitude of post-Revolutionary Russia towards its theatrical heritage. In 1917 there existed in Petrograd and Moscow a number of important theatres, both state-owned and private ones. What role, if any, would these be allowed to play in the new order?

If, on the “theatrical left” (which included the futurists and such avant-garde figures as Meyerhold), it was felt that all vestiges of preRevolutionary “bourgeois” culture should be abolished, in the party this type of theatre had considerable defenders, including the Narkompros (commissar of enlightenment) Lunacharskii, under whose direction fell the cultural institutions of the country, and Lenin himself, who was lukewarm to avant-garde culture. In fact, the former state theatres — the Aleksandrinskii and the Mariinskii in Petrograd and the Bol’shoi and the Malyi in Moscow — were preserved by the

new government and, as a sign of their protection, designated as “academic.” This designation was also granted to one private theatre that had become a symbol of the old culture at its best (although it was anathema to the avant-garde) — the Moscow Art Theatre.” The preservation of the “academic” theatres, though significant,

was only one aspect of the problem of pre-Revolutionary culture. More important even than the institutions, perhaps, was the question of repertoire. What type of plays should be staged in revolutionary theatre? Was it appropriate to produce plays written by “bourgeois”

writers? Or must new plays be written to respond to the new age and the new proletarian audience? To this there was no clear-cut answer, but rather a variety of different responses. There was, for example, a vast effort put into the writing of “proletarian” plays, and a special workshop, “Mastkomdram,” was created in Moscow in 1920 to serve as a sort of assembly line of play-writing.” The quality of

the production was, however, low, and the experiment proved a failure, especially when it attempted to produce the results of its work.*! The answer of the “academic” theatres to the problem of repertoire was rather to seek out pre-Revolutionary plays (some of

68 Pierrot in Petrograd

them banned before the Revolution) by “progressive” writers such as Schiller, Gor’kii, Beaumarchais, Pushkin, Ostrovskii, A.K. Tolstoi, and so on. However, as Zolotnitskii points out, “the content of a play and the content of the actual theatrical production are two different things.’® That is to say, such changes in repertoire meant (and were

seen by the perspicacious to mean) adroit trimming of the sails to catch the new wind rather than a fundamental rethinking of the nature of the theatrical spectacle. Thus one of the aspects of the battle that enveloped Russian theatre in the period immediately after the Revolution was the struggle with “literature,” that is, with the written text. In discussing the “dependence of agitkomediia on the poetics and methods of folklore,” Zolot-

nitskii notes: “Folklorization was not a goal but a means. The agittheatre turned to it to shake off the shackles of ‘literature’ and to declare itself an independent form of creativity. ‘By his improvisation

the actor will help the theatre to kill that noxious creature, the closetted penpusher, writing words in the quiet of his study for the theatre; Radlov believed, even when his theatre Narodnaia komediia had died.’® Thus, to the question of repertoire the theatrical avantgarde had a radical response. Since, clearly, not enough new “Soviet”

plays could be written overnight to sustain Soviet theatre, it was necessary to reorient the theatre away from the written text and to use the text, if at all, simply as a starting point, a scenario, which the collective of actors working under a director could modify at will to give a new, “revolutionary” content and presentation. In this way the problem of repertoire could be simply side-stepped and resolved rather on the level of the production and the theatrical values inherent

in it. As Meyerhold put it in 1920 at a speech before his troupe at the Teatr rsFsr-1: “In as much as all this is literature, let it rest in peace in the libraries and the state book repositories. We will need scenarios, and we will frequently use even classical works as the canvases for our scenic constructions ... Collective work with the troupe on the text will be part of our basic task. It is possible that in the process of this collective work we will realize that principle of improvisation that is being talked about so much nowadays and that can indeed be extremely fruitful.’* It is not difficult to see reflected in these remarks the notions put forward by Miklashevskii about the nature of commedia, namely that it involved a process of creation by the collective of actors around a scenario or a canvas (canevaccio ). What

remains unstated in Meyerhold’s remarks, however, is the role to be played in all this by the director: is he simply primus inter pares, as Miklashevskii believed was the case in the heyday of commedia, or was the director going to impose himself insidiously on every facet

69 Improvisation and Dissonance

of the production while proclaiming all the while that the production

is a collective one? In this case, as in so many others, the more distanced observer might be inclined to believe that the practice in Meyerhold'’s productions was at least somewhat at variance with the noble ideal of collective labour.

What is clear from these remarks is that in the atmosphere of struggle between the old and the new that took place after 1917, commedia was destined to play an important role. It was to the popular (narodnyi) tradition of the “Italian comedy of masks” and its Russian folkloric homologue that the theatrical left looked for models of how to reform the theatre and make it responsive to the needs of the common people. In all cases, the immediate task was to offer an alternative to the “bourgeois” realism of the pre-revolutionary theatrical tradition represented by the “academic” theatres. Thus it was

that the period from 1917 to 1921 was the heyday of commedia dell’arte on the Russian stage.* Up to the end of the era commonly known as “War Communism,” that is, until the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, the theatrical left had considerable influence, especially through the important role played by Meyerhold in the TEo (Theatre Depart-

ment) of the Commissariat, so that it is commonly referred to as “Theatrical October” However, this situation was not to last into the new era, and the avant-garde was to become increasingly embattled as the twenties wore on. This was especially true since after 1921, theatres were expected to pay their way and could no longer rely on state subsidies to underwrite their experiments.

““CIRCUSIZATION © The post-Revolutionary situation in Russian theatres led to another

phenomenon closely related to the problem of commedia or the balagan, namely, the wave of interest in the circus.* To be sure, there were other analogous sources of renewal proposed and used to some _

extent, especially the music-hall, the sports event — Eisenstein’‘s boxing match in the play Meksikanets - even the medieval mystery and Japanese Noh theatre. It is easy to see the source of this list in the program of Fuchs — still only ten years old — quoted above. The

sports event and the circus spectacle offered performances that engaged the spectator because of the presence of risk and danger. It was pure presentation, focusing on the performer's ability to carry out the feat, and as such broke with the notion of literature, which is pure representation. The central issue is iterability. Essentially, the circus act or the sports event is a pure, unique occasion that cannot

70 ©6Pierrot in Petrograd

be repeated. True, the circus performer tries to achieve a feat that he

has rehearsed before. Frequently he may not succeed, and yet the audience applauds. It is unlikely that an audience would applaud an actor who failed to perform Hamlet! Iterability is the essence of the performance of the literary text. Moreover, in the circus act or the sports event, the audience's presence is irrelevant. The performer is, so to speak, alone with his or her body. A world record is no less a world record if there are no spectators in the bleachers. The literary text, on the other hand, is performed precisely for the benefit of the audience. *’

The following report on a speech given by Shershenevich in the House of the Circus (Dom tsirka) captures the spirit of the times: The first to speak was Vadim Shershenevich, who repeated the slogan of the

Italian futurists: “Down with the theatre, now we must have the reign of muscles”; “The future lies not with thought, but with muscles”; and: “The future is not in the theatre, but in the circus.” The true path of the circus is the enjoyment of the body to its fullest extent; the circus is a harlequinade, the kingdom of laughter and merriment. In the circus there should be not dances and music, but displays of muscles, tricks, and clownery. We have no reason to be ashamed of tricks, for the laughter of the clown and displays of muscles are also art. *

This is, of course a fairly strident statement of the role that circus might play in the new circumstances, but it echoed the somewhat more moderate opinions of the Narkompros, Lunarcharskii himself.* It was generally perceived that an infusion of circus into the theatre could do a lot to renew the theatre. Konstantin Derzhavin wrote: At the present time in the Popular Comedy Theatre [Narodnaia komediia] they are conducting extremely interesting experiments in the area of the rapprochement of theatre and circus. This initiative is totally free in its idea — to have circus performers on the stage; — and not only working on it as a separate number or an entertaining trick, but as real performers of real scenic tasks ... The result of a circus presentation is a series of constituents without the sum; that of a theatrical presentation is an ideally constructed problem, raised to a power ... The circus strikes us with its particularities, its minor details in the dangerous or amusing numbers. The theatre more than anything fears division, any kind of deviation from the unity of action — the basic law of its works. In the experiments of S.E. Radiov we sometimes see the desire to blend these arts, we see the attempt to find a third item — the unknown theatro-circus ... the vaccination of the theatre with elements of the circus is necessary, and where S. Radlov turns to the ring for enlivening

71 Improvisation and Dissonance juices for his stage — he is more than justified before the laws of these two branches of art.”

The injection of circus elements was thus a way of creating the balagan, with its lack of stylistic unity, its shifts of perspective, its montaging of presentation and representation. Attempts to combine circus and theatre were of course not new.

One of the first to attempt it was Gordon Craig, who had put on Helen of Troy in a circus in London.” But whereas Craig’s experimentation related to the place of the theatrical spectacle (as did other, later experiments by Lugné-Poe and Max Reinhardt cited by Loeffler), in

Russia it was perceived that the nature of the circus performance could be used to restructure both the play-text and the movement of the actor.

One place where the circus invaded the theatre was the Studio on Liteinyi Street (Studiia na Liteinom), about which Zolotnitskii tells us:

The Studio ... accepted devoted Meyerholdians. One of them ... was Gibshman. He wrote a comedy-revue “Tsirk” which became part of the repertoire of marionnette shows. It was a parade of circus roles, headed by a portly ringmaster. A bare-back rider Arabella demonstrated equestrian acrobatics. The jugglers took turns to compete in feats of dexterity and speed.

They were followed by the dwarfs Pups and Ugolino, a tightrope dancer, a trapeze acrobat, and, to top it all, a comic duet of jokers [balagurov] with comic couplets [chastushki] and dances. In the poster Gibshman described his marionette revue as “urbanistic” as the latest version of the balagan. In this way the epidemic of “circusization” of the stage touched the marionette theatre.”

These experiments with the circus reached their most radical extreme in the productions of Sergei Radlov, which Zolotnitskii describes thus:

Many central roles were performed by circus actors: the aerial gymnasts and

acrobats Serzh (A.S. Aleksandrov) and I.V. Taureg, the clown and floor acrobat Zhorzh Del‘vari (G.I. Kuchinskii), the musical eccentric and clown Bob (B.D. Koziukov), the change-artist V.E Ernani (Bel‘iani), the rubber man

A. lu. Karloni, a few jugglers, including the Japanese Takoshimo, and the ringmaster P.J. Aleksandrov ... Radlov prized the divine lightness and perfect acrobatic technique of Serzh and the all-conquering, all-shaking comic

talent of Zhorzh Del’vari, who controls the laughter of the crowd, as a conductor does an orchestra. But the synthetic actor was visible to the

72 Pierrot in Petrograd director as yet only as a prospect. The synthetic spectacle was constructed by actors of narrow range working each in his own sphere. Annenkov, who had been the first to bring together Gibshman and Del’vari in search of such a synthesis, now pointed to the incompleteness of Radlov’s experiments: “The circus elements were not dramatized, saturated with a new meaning, or given a new form. The circus performer came out onstage with tricks already prepared, each given on a separate plate, in the usual circus way, like a concert ... Similarly, the dramatic actor was not circusized [otsirkachen]

and remained true to the canons of his art.” This was why, according to Annenkov, in Radlov’s productions “no sparks flew, even from bringing together Del’vari and Gibshman, — they came together and separated coldly,

unnecessary to one another and as foreign as a slate-pencil and writingpaper.”

The attempts at “circusization” thus remained on the level of (largely unsuccessful) experimentation, although the lessons of circus acro-

batics were absorbed by Meyerhold and generally applied in his productions of the 1920s.

BIOMECHANICS One of the controversial innovations made by Meyerhold during the 1920s was his training of actors in corporal expressivity, known as biomechanics.” This technique can be understood as an attempt to create a pure gestural language that would have no referents outside theatre. It can be compared with the attempt of Eisenstein to develop a purely cinematic language through montage. Biomechanics was the realization of Meyerhold’s search for a “plasticity that does not cor-

respond to words,” which he posited in his article on Wagner. No source has been suggested for these gestures, it being assumed that they sprang from Meyerhold'’s imagination. However, it is easy for a historian of commedia dell’arte to recognize in them the contortions of the commedia dell’arte zanni as depicted by Jacques Callot.* As we have seen, his etchings were first popularized by Hoffmann, who saw them as a visual equivalent of his own literary grotesque. Meyerhold, who, as we have seen, had styled himself “Dr Dapertutto,” was

a major propagator ot Hoffmann’s ideas, especially his notion of grotesque, which for Meyerhold was part and parcel of the commedia

dell’arte. The distortion of the human figure in Callot’s prints of commedia dell’arte actors and in Meyerhold’s biomechanics was the theatrical, corporal version of literary grotesque. In its expressivity, biomechanics distorted the human figure, disrupting the harmonious effect of a realistic theatrical style and substituting pure balagan.

73 Improvisation and Dissonance

CONCLUSIONS The problem that surrounded commedia dell’arte in Russian theatre in the pre-revolutionary period can be resumed as the relationship

of the new Russian theatre to inherited forms. The various

approaches can be generalized as follows:

1 the “museological” exercise (one might call this the pastiche) — recreating the whole of the theatrical spectacle of the past as faithfully as possible. The prime example was the Starinnyi teatr, which recreated in different seasons different epochs of past theatre. The problem of the relationship of spectacle to audience was left unresolved. Rather the spectacle was left to speak for itself. The planned season devoted to commedia dell’arte remained unrealized, but it did serve as the motivation for the research by Miklashevskii, and

thus played a very important, though indirect role in the history of commedia dell’arte in Russia. 2 the “stylized” production, in which the form and style of the past theatrical epoch was invoked, but nevertheless the production was

recognizably one of the twentieth century. An example of this approach would be Meyerhold’s production of Moliére’s Dom Juan. 3 the “exercise,” or experiment, which began with as faithful a repro-

duction of the past, not to impress the audience, but as a way of exploring the methods of the commedia dell’arte troupe and integrating the techniques into contemporary theatre. The examples of commedia dell’arte productions, such as Harlequin the Marriage Broker, by Dr Dapertutto’s studio, best exemplify this approach.

There was, in fact, a considerable irony in this, for the primitive commune of actors collectively producing their improvised work of art, which Miklashevskii invoked in his book and Meyerhold

attempted to emulate, clearly contradicted the authoritarian manner and the master-pupil relationship that prevailed in the Studio. 4 commedia dell’arte as balagan. This was a purely twentieth-century

way of integrating a past theatrical style into a present-day production so that it would contrast ironically with other elements of the production and create the grotesque effect that became the hallmark of Russian “cubist” and “expressionist” theatre. Examples of this are Meyerhold’s Balaganchik, Evreinov’s A Merry Death, Tairov's Princess Brambilla, and Vakhtangov'’s Turandot.

The introduction of commedia dell’arte into Russian theatre in the first two decades of the twentieth century signified the creation

74 Pierrot in Petrograd

of a new kind of theatre, which would in turn require a new kind of dramaturgy, as it required a new approach to direction and to the work of the actor. Numerous words were used to describe this theatre at different times: commedia dell’arte, the Italian comedy of

masks, the harlequinade, the clownade, music-hall, conventionforegrounding theatre (uslounyi teatr), and finally the balagan. This

plethora of terms is an expression of the searching that went on among Russian theoreticians (and practitioners) of the theatre, to define the new genre, its sources, its content, its nature. It is the last term, balagan, which I prefer to all the others, since it expresses the popular sources of the Russian version of commedia and since it is used by Meyerhold in his seminal article on the subject. It is theatre as balagan, with its characteristic features of grotesque, distortion of

perspective, theatricality, and so on, that was to be the dominant theatrical form of the 1920s and was to die hard with the advent of socialist realism in the 1930s. To understand the generic differences between realist theatre and the balagan is to understand the duality that motivated the struggle of this era. If the period up to 1917 was one of searching and experiment, in which the precise nature of the new theatrical genre of balagan was being worked out, the post-Revolutionary period was the heyday of the genre; it was in the 1920s that Russian playwrights — Evreinov, Maiakovskii, Bulgakov, Zamiatin, and others — began to write the

texts that have become classics of the Russian theatre and have

provided the inspiration for the renewal of Soviet Russian theatre in the 1980s. The details of the integration of commedia dell’arte as balagan into Russian theatrical practice, its successes and its failures, will be the subject of the following two chapters.

CHAPTER THREE

Pierrot Comes

to Petersburg: 1903-17 Il teatro e la vita Non son la stessa cosa Pagliacci

The modern history of commedia/balagan on the Russian stage begins in the little Russian town of Kherson’ in 1903. There Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had recently broken with Stanislavskii’s Moscow Art Theatre, organized a season with his own actors. The repertoire that the young troupe served up to this provincial town was generally unremarkable, with one exception: One notable success was a little-known melodrama of circus life, The Acrobats,

by the contemporary Austrian dramatist Franz von Schénthan, jointly translated by Meyerhold and another member of the company. What impressed the local critics was the authentic depiction of the backstage scenes, on which Meyerhold lavished particular attention. But of equal importance for him was his own performance as the ageing and failing clown Landowski. The modern transformation of the once rollicking clown Pierrot had begun with Deburau pére at the Thédtre des Funambules in the 1830s. Over the years he became the new Everyman, the hapless butt of every cruel jest that an inscrutable fate chose to play on him. Successively he has been taken up by Leoncavallo, Picasso, Stravinsky, Chaplin, Carné, Fellini, Bergman. But, as we shall see, the genealogy would be far from complete without the name of Meyerhold, so this early acquaintance with Sch6nthan’s Landowski should not go unmarked. !

With this production of a play that was apparently never again presented on the Russian stage, a new theatrical image, or set of images, entered the vocabulary of the Russian theatre. For Meyerhold the clown

(later transformed into Pierrot) expressed the alienation and victimization of the artist, an ineffable combination of comedy and melancholy, more poignant than tragedy itself. Moreover, the image of the clown, though profoundly unrealistic, was theatrically expressive,

76 «6Pierrot in Petrograd

full of potential, and even subversive. It was through the clown that the path to the future of the theatre lay. Another aspect of Meyerhold’s production of the play was to prove highly influential in Russian modernist theatre, namely the physical arrangement of a metatheatrical situation. Meyerhold describes in the following terms the stage set for the third act in the circus: The scene represents the back-stage area of a large circus. In the background

a large opening six metres wide and eight metres high is covered with a heavy quilted, divided curtain. When this curtain is opened, part of the circus ring can be seen. On the other side is a large exit door, above which is a large loge. To the left and right of the door and loge there are evidently audience seats; the audience can be seen sitting in them. (It is desirable that

it should not be a painted representation, but rather that there should be mostly children with some adults sitting there.) It should be clearly understood that when the quilted curtain is closed, neither music nor the noise from the ring should be audible, and, when it is opened, they should be not too clearly audible. The open areas to left and right comprise a part of the

corridor that runs round the entire circus, the right-hand passage being linked to the stables, while the left-hand one leads to the changing-rooms.’

This arrangement, which is evidently a description of how Meyer-

hold himself solved the problem in his own production, was to provide the inspiration for a number of metatheatrical productions, including Bulgakov’s Moliére and Eisenstein’s planned production of Tieck’s Puss-in-Boots (see below, chapters six and seven). To be sure,

Meyerhold was aware of the difficulties this kind of arrangement might create: “to show a live audience in the background seems impracticable on our small provincial stages.” It is in the experimentation with a live “audience” onstage that Meyerhold tackles for the first time one of the central problems of Russian modernist theatre,

especially that connected with commedia dell’arte, namely the “double audience” (and hence double perspective) of metatheatre. It is conceivable that his experience acting as Treplev in Chekhov's The Seagull, with its metatheatrical first act, was an inspiration here. BALAGANCHIK

Perhaps the most crucial production in twentieth-century Russian theatre was Meyerhold’s mise en scéne of Balaganchik (The Fairground

Booth; also translated The Puppet Show), written by Aleksandr Blok expressly for Vera Komissarzhevskaias Theatre on Ofitserkii Street

(Teatr na Ofitserskoi), of which Meyerhold had been appointed

77 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg

director.’ The play, which premiered 30 December 1906, was offered

in a double bill with Maeterlinck’s The Miracle of St Anthony; the juxtaposition of the two plays was no accident — it was as if the director was bidding farewell to his experiments with symbolist drama and ushering in a new type of theatre.* Blok’s play was a succés

de scandale, provoking wild enthusiasm and equally strongly expressed antagonism from the audience. Georgii Chulkov describes the scene in the theatre as follows: “Never before nor since have I observed such implacable opposition, and such ecstasy among the admirers, in the audience. The furious whistles of the enemy and the thunder of friendly applause were mingled with shouts and hoots.

This was fame. It was a real triumph. The editors of the newspaper for which I wrote theatre reviews at the time refused the next day to print my review, which was favourable to Blok and to Meyerhold, alluding to the fact that I was too close to the poet and the theatre and therefore biased in my evaluation.”® The reaction reflected the divisions within Russian society, which had just been through the equivocal experience of the 1905 revolution. It seems clear that the ferocity with which sides were taken in the audience was deliberately provoked by the director, who played the part of Pierrot. This intended reaction, which was clearly political in nature, was provoked by a play that, to all appearances, was an innocuous lyrical

drama expressing the despair and melancholy of the poet and did not espouse any political position or deal with any social controversy. Rather, the vehemence was aroused by the specifics of the production itself, which was daring in its subversion of accepted theatrical forms. For example, the stage machinery was exposed to view and its artificiality stressed when the fairground booth that was at the centre of the stage and formed a theatre-within-the-theatre was hoisted up, or when at the end Harlequin jumped through the flat representing the

sky. The intervention of the “author” who was tethered on a long rope and pulled back into the wings when he tried to interfere, was another feature of the most stridently anti-illusionistic — that is, antiestablishment, for the dominant mode was mimetic — play that Peters-

burg had yet seen. But central to the production was the image of Pierrot, a figure that was challenging, expressive, and pregnant with all the associations that nineteenth-century France had been able to

give it, as incarnated by Meyerhold himself. Here was decadence personified in a figure that both parodied and subverted bourgeois culture.

That the entire production was a four de force is clear from the account given by Verigina, who played the second innamorata; it is worth quoting at length.

78 Pierrot in Petrograd It seemed simply impossible to give substance to such an abstract play and transfer it to the stage, in which everything is so material, yet the director immediately found the appropriate scenic form. Without any excessive discussion, and without any special analysis of the text ... Meyerhold began the rehearsals. In a particular way of which only he was capable (mostly through his charm as a director) he managed to make the orchestra of actors sound the way it should. The director helped the actors perceive Blok’s true personality as a poet. Meyerhold himself played Pierrot quite remarkably, giving the role an eerie seriousness and depth.

N.N. Sapunov constructed a miniature theatre on the stage with the traditional curtain that could be pulled up. When the curtain was raised, the audience could see in the back of the stage, in the centre, a window. Parallel to the footlights was a table covered with black cloth behind which sat the “mystics, the president being in the centre. They sat behind black cardboard cutouts of frock-coats. Their hands protruded from the cuffs, and their heads stuck out of the collars. The mystics talked differently - some in a muffled voice, and others almost resonantly. They strained to hear an unheard of, horrific, but desired approach. When Meyerhold was rehearsing with them behind the table, he demonstrated several of the roles himself, always closing his eyes as he did so. He did it involuntarily, concentrating as he strained to

hear something unseen. This concentration and creative tremor of the director helped the actors in their work, which was totally new and different for many of them. Into the musical pattern of the mystics there burst Pierrot’s theme, which struck an individual note. After the line “An event is approaching,” Meyerhold’s role of Pierrot began in a quite unexpected tone. Mumbling distinctly the short and pained exclamation, “O eternal horror, eternal gloom,” he continued on a high register (as much as he could), “Faithless one where are you?” — and then a little lower, “Through the sleepy streets stretched the long chain of streetlights ...”

The dry shading of his voice and the almost wooden intonations were extraordinarily successful and appropriate. Meyerhold played on them with incomparable skill like some eccentric musical virtuoso. Behind the empty sound of his speech you could hear real sadness. Sometimes the words were pronounced unexpectedly piteously, as if someone were pressing a spring in the wooden heart of a doll and making it emit a groan, “Where are you? (with lowered voice) ... why should we not join the appointed round after the jast couple? ..." At times the piteous groans were drawn out, “Do you hear, Columbine, how my poor heart dra-ags out, dra-ags out its sad song?” The author's direction reads, “Pierrot came to life and fell a-dreaming.” Meyerhold haplessly waved first one, then the other sleeve, and in this clown's

79 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg

movement was expressed the joy of his suddenly dawning hope. The repeated waves of the sleeves expressed different meanings. The musical essence of the image gave birth to the stylized [uslovnye] gestures, which were eloquent, I repeat, because they suggested the internal rhythm of the role. The gestures always followed the words, rounding them out, completing the song, as it were, speaking without words of things only Pierrot understood. In the silence he attracted the audience's attention even more. The musical content of the image subordinated him to its rhythm. Pierrot seemed to be straining to hear a song that he was singing at the whim of his heart. His expression was strange: he was looking intently within himself. The author ran out and hastily assured the audience that the actor was

talking nonsense. This trivial tone burst in like a sharp dissonance that immediately dissolved in the consonance of a sigh expressed by Pierrot and Columbine. After the dialogue of the mystics, who were waiting in sweet

horror for their guest — death, the dreamy words “Columbine! Come!” sounded like a continuation of their melody. Not for a second did Meyerhold

slip out of the general harmony, not for a second did Pierrot’s theme fall silent, even though he was sitting silently with his hands folded on his knees and face upturned ...

Columbine appeared. The mystics exclaimed in reverent ecstasy: “She has come! How white are her clothes! She is death!” Then unexpectedly Pierrot said simply, “Gentlemen, you're wrong!” Then, in a higher tone, “This is Columbine!” Even higher, “This is my bride!” The mystics were horrified at such blasphemy, the president exclaiming, “You don’t recognize death!” The author states, “A perplexed smile passes over Pierrot’s face.” Meyerhold

did not smile, but he seemed to be smiling. A confused smile could be detected in the humbly and simply pronounced words, “I’m going away. Either youre nght and I’m a wretched madman, or you have gone mad and I’m a lonely, misunderstood admirer.” These words were followed by the stylized [uslounyi] sound of a sigh and a wave of the sleeves. Full of resig-

nation, in the tone of a martyr, he pronounced the words: “Carry me, blizzard, through the streets! O eternal horror! O eternal gloom!”

At the end the curtain fell behind Pierrot and he remained facing the audience. He stared at it and it seemed as if Pierrot were looking into the eyes of every spectator. In his look was something irresistible: “And so I stand, pale of face, but it is sinful for you to mock me. What can I do? She fell face down ... | am very sad. But is it funny for you?” Then Pierrot turned his eyes away, pulled a pipe out of his pocket, and started to play the song of a rejected, unappreciated heart. This moment was the most powerful one of the role. Behind his lowered eyelids there seemed to be a serious expression, full of reproach.°

80 Pierrot in Petrograd

To this description of the play as it appeared to an actor in it, we may add Chulkov’s view of the impact on the audience: “Everybody who was at the opening night of Balaganchik remembers the passionate excitement that seized the audience, the commotion that began in the parterre, when the last sounds of Kuzmins sharp, heady, alarming and sweet music died away and the curtain divided the spectators from the enigmatic and magical world in which Pierrot lived and sang.”’ Not incidentally, Balaganchik had the side-effect of raising Meyer-

hold to the status of a cult figure. More importantly, as Rudnitskii points out: “In this little play of Blok’s Meyerhold first discovered the

philosophical and concretely existential content of [the harlequinade]. It permitted the director in an almost declarative way to pronounce on a question that was practically speaking the most important for him at that time, namely the relationship of art and reality, of Russian theatre and Russian life ... In retrospect Meyerhold himself considered that Balaganchik marked the real beginning of his

directorial biography.”* He was to appear once more as Pierrot in February 1910, when he danced the role in Mikhail Fokin’s ballet Carnival, at a ball organized by the journal Satirikon.? But it was as a

director that he was to be inspired with the imagery and the metatheatrical possibilities of the harlequinade, possibilities that pointed the way to a new form of theatre in Russia which would be neither realist nor symbolist. Rudnitskii's comparison of this 1906 production with Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles dAvignon suggests an important parallel: Meyerhold’s “cubist” theatre heralded a revolution

in theatre as great as that proclaimed in the visual arts by Picasso's painting. What was it exactly that Meyerhold found in commedia which lent itself to his purposes? More even than the images of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine, it was the possibility for metatheatrical commentary afforded by the commedia tradition — especially when seen

through the prism of Tieck’s theatre-within-the-theatre — that attracted Meyerhold. More than a play, Balaganchik was a play about play-acting. Like so many forms of modernist art, the theatre becomes self-contemplative as it examines its own conventions and critiques its claims to represent reality. As in Puss-in-Boots, in Balaganchik the

“author” and “prompter” became characters in a play surrounding the play. The “text” of the play becomes a fictive element that is conspicuous by its not being fulfilled (as the interventions and protests of the “author” reminded the audience). The “little theatre” (teatrik) that Meyerhold had placed in the centre of the stage served as a concrete representation of the real theme of the evening: tonight

81 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg

the subject is theatre itself. Does this mean that Blok’s play represented a retreat by the poet from reality into self-contemplation? Paradoxically, it can be argued that this is not so. What it meant was a shift from art as the metonymic representation of reality (Chekhov and Hauptmann’s naturalism) to the metaphoric commentary on reality — the play as a metaphor for life (a return to the baroque notion of theatrum mundi: “all the world’s a stage”). The tired conventions of the “theatre” that are parodied in Blok’s play (and especially in Meyerhold’s production of it) are metaphors for the outworn structures of society itself. To challenge one is to challenge the other. The

meaning was not lost on the audience. It should be noted, however, that a important element of Russian reality was present in the production in the form of Sapunov’s decorations. Meyerhold pointed out in 1925, “If Chulkov thinks that Balaganchik had such a stunning success because Harlequin jumped through the window and through a sky made of paper, permit me,

as someone who observed the audience, to say that of course the strongest impact on the audience was achieved by Blok through the

provincial masked ball, the masked ball of a remote provincial town.” Matskin comments, “He mentions Blok, but has in mind both himself and that aesthetic of Sapunov’s of the Old Russian provincial balagan that he was so interested in during the pre-revofutionary years.”"' It was, of course the paradoxical bringing together of realistic and symbolic elements that constituted the strength of Meyerhold’s grotesque. One might add parenthetically that Meyerhold’s insistence on the realistic elements of the production may be considered a sign of the times. Considered by many in post-1917 Russia to be a turncoat and a false friend of the Revolution, he was, most likely, embarrassed by the lack of “progressive” elements in his pre-1917 work. To refute that old symbolist Georgii Chulkov was, in this context, a shrewd move.

DR DAPERTUTTO AND HIS SHADOW In his work as director at the state theatres in Petersburg, a position to which he was appointed in 1908, Meyerhold applied himself to a variety of tasks, including several operas. While working in the state

theatres, Meyerhold led a double life (under the pseudonym “Dr Dapertutto”!*) as an experimenter in small theatrical forms at several

cabarets, as well as developing and teaching new techniques in a series of “theatre-studios,’ where he was to begin a role as teacher that was to last the rest of his life.

82 Pierrot in Petrograd If we are to exclude the unsuccessful “Lukomor’e” [The Cove, a reference to Pushkin’s Ruslan and Liudmila] (this theatre was born in a Petersburg theatre club in December 1908, the same evening as the Crooked Mirror [Krivoe zerkalo], but quickly faded away), the House of Interludes [Dom intermedii]

was Meyerhold’s first experiment in directing “small forms” ... from the generic point of view the character of the theatre was made up of short comedies, pantomimes and popular entertainment numbers. Here Dr Dapertutto (Meyerhold) directed the pantomime The Lovers [Vliublennye] by Debussy and the pantomime Columbine’s Scarf [Sharf Kolombiny] by Schnitzler

and Dohndnyi with decorations by N.N. Sapunov (E.A. Khovanskaia and A.E Geints took turns playing the main role) ... Later Meyerhold was to recall bitterly: “There were few people in the audience; evidently the idle Petersburg bureaucrats did not need the prematurely born theatre of Dom intermedii.” Everything seemed right about the words of Meyerhold except for one thing: the theatre was right for its time, so full of alarming forebod-

ings. But it was a theatre for the refined intelligentsia, a theatre for the initiates, and the next step after it could only be an even more intimately arranged theatre. Each such step evoked, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, new bitterness in Meyerhold.”

The House of Interludes opened on 9 October 1910 with a number of lightweight pieces of burlesque and musical comedy, including The Lovers, a piece by Meyerhold himself to music by Debussy. There followed the only memorable production, Arthur Schnitzler’s pantomime Pierrettes Veil (Der Schleier der Pierrette — here given the title Columbine’ Scarf [Sharf Kolombiny]) — directed by Meyerhold, with Ernst von Dohndanyi’s music and settings and costumes by Sapunov. This production actually predated the Viennese premiere, which took place in the Operntheater on 20 September 1911. Braun comments: The first three items were greeted with reactions ranging from indifference to derision, but Meyerhold’s contribution remains a haunting memory for

those present. Freely adapted by himself and with the title altered to Columbines Scarf, the work bore little resemblance to Schnitzler’s original. The aim was to eliminate the cloying sweetness so often associated with pantomime and to create a chilling grotesque in the manner of E.T.A. Hoffmann. The three scenes were broken down into fourteen brief episodes, in order that the spectator should be shocked by the constant abrupt changes of mood and have no time to doubt the play's own ghastly logic. It was fitting that Meyerhold should dedicate the production to Blok, for in style, content, and atmosphere it bore a marked resemblance to the 1906 version of The Fairground Booth [Balaganchik].

83 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg

It is difficult to agree with Braun’s assertion of the “cloying sweetness” of Schnitzler’s original (an assertion derived from Matskin’s partisan interpretation of events).’’ Rather, Meyerhold appears to have fulfilled Schnitzler’s intention quite well. The fact that the play, though written in dialogue, was intended to be mimed, invited the kind of adaptation

and improvisation that it received in this first Russian production. The best description of this production is to be found in a review by M.M. Bonch-Tomashevskii in Maskt: The Petersburg House of Interludes chose to treat Schnitzler’s pantomime as a commedia dell’arte. To this end, firstly, the score of the first act was cut, with its impossible, unnatural, mawkish longueurs. The style of the setting was infused with a primitivistic, dazzling spirit. A pallid Pierrot moped on

a huge crimson cushion casually thrown on a raised area under an old chiming clock. Pairs of merry dancers, friends of Pierrot who had come to take him off, ran up the broad steps into the auditorium. The insignificant

roles of the Kapellmeister, the servants, the father and mother, and the dancing master, were emphasized. All these were characters whose brilliant antics served to underline the tragedy of the graphic Pierrot and Columbine and Harlequin, who was adroit, flattering, arrogant, and hence cruel in his

anger. Against the background of a brilliant, subtly coarse commedia dell’arte, through an overlay of unnatural, invented gestures and fantastic costumes, there emerged with striking brilliance the basic tragedy; against the laughable the inevitable was so terrible. And when I recall the nightmarish polka that the comic musicians played on broken instruments, under the direction of a one-eyed, diabolically unhappy Kapelimeister, when I recall

that nightmarish whirlwind of brighly-coloured and loutish bodies that whirled, embracing in their circle Gigolo, the diminutive dancing-master, with his hair puffed up in a quiff like a coxcomb, even now, after three years, I can feel that shiver that ran up my spine as I sat in the audience. And I understand what the external, apparently empty and laughable form means for commedia dell’arte, for behind it lurks the face of Eternity. I understand how it is possible to laugh and at the same time to feel all the abyss of horror, all the blackness of desperation."

That the production was in the best tradition of the Meyerholdian harlequinade (and indeed served to define it more sharply) can be see from Znosko-Borovskiis description of the finale. The ball begins; then whilst an old-fashioned quadrille is playing, Pierrot’s flapping white sleeve is glimpsed first through the windows, then through the doors. The dances, now fast, now slow, turn into an awful nightmare,

84 Pierrot in Petrograd with strange Hoffmanesque characters whirling to the time of a huge-headed Kapellmeister, who sits on a high stool and conducts four weird musicians.

Columbine’ terror reaches such a pitch that she can hide it no longer and she rushes back to Pierrot. Harlequin follows her and when he sees Pierrot’s corpse he is convinced of his brides infidelity. He forces her to dine before the corpse of the love-stricken Pierrot. Then he leaves, bolting the door fast.

In vain Columbine tries to escape from her prison, from the ghastly dead body. Gradually she succumbs to madness; she whirls in a frenzied dance, then finally drains the deadly cup and falls lifeless beside Pierrot.”

Where Balaganchik stressed the melancholic side of the “Pierrotic” tradition (still visible here in the flapping of Pierrot’s sleeves, a quotation from the Balaganchik production), Columbine’s Scarf leaned towards the horrific (an aspect that went back to Deburau and Hoffmann, as we have seen in chapter one above) and provided a perfect

embodiment of Meyerhold’s notion of the theatrical grotesque, a notion that had its roots in his studies of commedia, as Braun points out: In making great play with objects as an aid to mime in Columbine’s Scarf (a letter, a rose, a glove, the fatal cup) Meyerhold was paying implicit homage to the commedia delil’arte from which the principal characters were drawn. Of similar origin were the devices used to involve the audience more closely in the action: the Kapellmeister's flight through the auditorium, the nightmarish polka of the wedding guests weaving among the tables; the asides

to the audience from the blackamoor “proscenium servant.” Much of the impact derived from the inspired designs by Nikolai Sapunov. No artist was closer in spirit to Meyerhold’s understanding of the grotesque than Sapunov.”°

The grotesque, Hoffmannesque variant of commedia that Braun refers to is, of course, not the original Italian strain, but that of Schnitzler’s eroticism filtered through the Deburau tradition of the masochist Pierrot. The essence of the grotesque is paradox, and it was this element that Meyerhold found in Schnitzler in abundance: the paradoxes of love and hate, sex and death, comedy and tragedy, fused together in an ironical grimace. Also important in the organization of the production was the musical

dimension. In combining mime, gesture, dance, and music with the sumptuous visual effects of Sapunov, Meyerhold reflected the tendency that is clear in all his work towards the theatrical spectacle as Gesamtkunstwerk. As Braun notes: “The rhythm of the entire production was dictated by the hideous Kapellmeister and his sinister band.

85 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg

When the corpses of Pierrot and Columbine were discovered he fled in terror through the auditorium, as though acknowledging his manipulation of the tragedy.”21 One is almost inclined to see here the Kapell-

meister as a sort of grotesque and ironic reflection of the personality of the director himself. Certainly the lyrical organization of his work, especially in the pre-Revolutionary period, suggests the deep subjectivity of Meyerhold’s mises en scéne as a means of individual expression.

Meyerhold was fortunate in being able to call upon a number of actors who were familiar with his expectations of a new, commedia-

based theatre and able to fulfil them. The career of Geints, for example, reads almost like a history of commedia in Russia. “A.F Geints and E.A. Marsheva formed a perfect duo. Geints had her debut in Meyerhold’s pantomimes in 1907, played Columbine in the premiere of Columbines Scarf by Schnitzler and Dohndanyi in the House of Interludes in 1910, then worked in the Theatre of Antiquity, and in 1913 went over to Baliev.’"~ An even more central figure was

the ubiquitous Gibshman, who had already been with Meyerhold for several years: “In the pantomime Columbines Scarf Gibshman played the Kapellmeister, a figure of almost Hoffmann-like delineations. In the scene of the ball, clambering up on a tall stool, with his big head, and blind in one eye the bandleader directed the music of four absurd musicians.”” Much of the effect of the production was derived from Sapunov’s decorations. Of his treatment of the central ball scene Matskin has the following to say: We can learn a great deal from this composition — about the range of colours, resolved by the theatre in motley, canary, mainly lemony-yellow and smoky-

orange tones; about the rhythms of the action, which were angular, fragmented, emphatically eccentric and had nothing in common with the slow, smooth-flowing preciosity of the traditionally stylized pantomime; about the asymmetry that was the basic device in the portrayal of these mummers that

were half-doll, half-person; about the sinister, fantastic, sometimes, for example, bird-like masks (the dance-leader Gigolo was made up as a parrot) that seemed to be borrowed from Goya’s capriccios and in which the essence | of the characters could be glimpsed; and about the existential links of this art which, despite its illusory quality, let nature show through in some detail

or other, for example the vulgar patterned wallpaper in the house of Columbine’s parents.”

Columbines Scarf was the logical continuation of the line that Meyer-

hold had begun with Balaganchik. Indeed, it was the second great

86 Pierrot in Petrograd

balagan of this director's pre-Revolutionary period, incarnating a nightmarish world of grotesque distortion, in which the actors are dolls manipulated by a sinister fate. It was a vision resembling that of Gordon Craig, as several have pointed out. Gorchakov traces this element in Russian theatre of the period to Stanislavskii's 1907 production of Leonid Andreev’s The Life of Man.”6 While this derivation

may be correct, it seems that Meyerhold pushed the vision further and that, rather than a borrowing from Stanislavskii, we have to do with two different expressions of the mood of the times, a mood that was going beyond mere pessimism in its reflection of the social and

artistic climate in post-1905 Russia, and beyond impressionism towards a new expressionistic theatre.

This period saw an important production by Meyerhold at the Aleksandrinskii Theatre of Moliére’s play Dom Juan (premiere g November 1910). This production, rather than a museological recreation such as Evreinov was attempting at the Theatre of Antiquity, was a stylized impression of the period. As such, it incorporated a number of commedia-type techniques, such as Sganarelle’s impro-

vised repartee with the audience and the use of blackamoor stage attendants,” a device taken from Meyerhold’s production of Calderon’s The Adoration of the Cross in the apartment of the poet Viacheslav Ivanov and incorporated in Columbine’ Scarf, so that Benois was con-

strained to call the production an “elegant balagan.’** In other ways,

too, the production showed Meyerhold’s latest thinking on the restructuring of the theatre. For example, he dispensed with the curtain, and built a thrusting forestage over the orchestra pit, thus greatly approaching the actors to the audience. Clearly, Meyerhold’s work at the Aleksandrinskii Theatre benefited greatly from his simultaneous involvement as Dr Dapertutto in experimental productions. As Rudnitskii put it: “There existed an unbreakable bond between Doctor Dapertutto and Vsevolod Meyerhold ... the bold, daring and risky experiments created in little cabaret-type theatres were precursors of the confident and large-scale solutions for the shows on the Imperial stage ... Doctor Dapertutto, who directed enthusiastic ama-

teurs and shy students, was the author of the sudden impromptus and unexpected sketches for the mature, well-thought-out creations of Meyerhold the director, who worked with professional, experienced actors.””?

CABARETS AND STUDIOS In the teens of this century commedia was very much alive and well

in the cabarets that succeeded one another, usually with the same group of players only slightly reshuffled each time, on the night

87 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg

scene in Petersburg.* Zolotnitskii sketches Meyerhold’s role in this maelstrom. When the House of Interludes closed in 1912, the theatre-cabaret The Stray Dog [Brodiachaia sobaka] — a literary and artistic cellar - began its nocturnal existence on the Mikhailovskii Square in Petersburg. And when it perished another similar basement — the Players’ Rest [Prival komediantov] — flourished

during the years 1916-19 in a house on Marsovo pole. There Meyerhold devised productions of Russian balagan, Paris street theatre and Italian com-

media dell’arte, but his intentions were only partly realized. To open the Players’ Rest Columbines Scarf was revived with parodies of contemporary theatre. But Meyerhold inevitably cooled towards his own enterprise, and in his place would appear Evreinov with his play A Merry Death or K.K. Tverskoi with a production of Kuzmin’s vaudeville “The Dancing-master” in which appeared the Crooked Mirror actors larotskaia, Antimonov, and Gibshman, and even a real dancing-master — the dancer and choreographer from the Mariinskii Theatre B.G. Romanov, who put on many miniature ballets for the “small stage.”™

Nikolai Evreinov was a perpetual denizen of these boites de nuit, director of spectacles and writer of plays and playlets, even creating music for them. Two of his more successful pieces were Todays Columbine (Kolombina sego dnia) and A Merry Death (Veselaia smert’). In 1909 Evreinov joined forces with Fedor Komissarzhevskii to create a new theatre called the Merry Theatre for Grown-Up Children (Veselyi

teatr dlia pozhilykh detei) where A Merry Death was first produced” with Evreinov’s own music. On the role of the music in the piece, Moisson-Franckhauser tells us: In this harlequinade nothing was allowed to slow down or weigh down the rhythm of the production. Right at the beginning Harlequin plays the first bars of the melody that will define his character and notes that the strings

of his instrument are worn down, then the Doctors couplets create the atmosphere with the help of bubbling music. Then Columbine’s tune is heard — graceful, with its light notes and its tenderly chromatic refrain, and Pierrot plays the “dance of love” on the guitar. Harlequin taking the guitar in turn

sings his joyful serenade: but the strings break and Death makes her entrance. The flavourful music of the “dance of death” is heard, punctuated

here and there by the sharp sounds of the xylophone and the clack of castanets. Harlequin’s tune resumes softly in the distance, to stop precisely at the moment when the lamp goes out.*

Today's Columbine received its premiere on the 16 November 1915

at the Crooked Mirror (Krivoe zerkalo), directed by Evreinov and

88 Pierrot in Petrograd

with his music. The scenery and costumes were by Miss* and the choreography by Presniakov. A description of the plot of this pantomime is given by Moisson-Franckhauser. The characters are Columbine, Pierrot, Harlequin, Cassandra, and the Negro.

The author gives us a minute description of this ballet: a little garden in front of Columbine'’s heart-shaped little house, which bears the description

“Columbine House” In the fore-ground, on both sides one can see two pianos which determine the width of the proscenium. A musician is sitting at each piano. The one on the right plays Columbine’s music, while the one on the ieft plays the music of her admirers. This lay-out determines the position of the characters during their dialogues with Columbine: her place of choice is on the right, while the other characters stand on the left. The music consists of a lyrical prelude which, according to Evreinov, depicts the virginal innocence of Columbine. Then the composer outlines Pierrot’s character in music; the timidity of his declaration of love, his sentimentality, then his despair at the failure of his attempt to win the heart of his beloved. More audacious and more fortunate, Harlequin forces open the door to Columbine'’s heart. Having become a courtisan, Columbine sells herself to a rich American and realizes what she has done only at the moment of the tragic dénouement — Pierrot'’s suicide. The final pistol-shot is echoed by the loud sound of the

left-hand piano being slammed closed. The pianist lowers his head and is motionless.*

Although the setting of the play suggests Dowson's Columbine of the

Minute and Misss drawings are pure pastiches of Beardsley, the intrusion of the American and the brash tones of the gunshot suggest

an interesting contrast at the end: a rapid switch from the elegant charm of the eighteenth century to the horrors of modernity. In genre lodays Columbine resembles not only Evreinov’s other pantomime, A Merry Death, but Meyerhold’s Columbines Scarf and The Lovers, as well as the playlet Fiametta’s Four Corpses,*° combining as it

does music and pantomime in a way that was half-way to ballet.

TERIOKI Although he may have been a somewhat peripatetic figure on the cabaret scene, the centre of the theatrical revival of commedia in Russia remained Meyerhold, who, under his pseudonym of Dr Dapertutto and together with his associate Vladimir Solov’ev, worked with a group of young actors at Terioki (now Zelenogorsk), a Finnish

summer resort, studying commedia and putting on playlets. A favourite (and the first play to be chosen) was one that Solov’ev

8g Pierrot Comes to Petersburg

himself had created in the commedia idiom called Harlequin the Marriage Broker (Arlekin ~ khodatai svadeb) that managed to combine a variety of lazzi. In it “Meyerhold tried to return to the popular sources

of naive comedy, to revive the genuine traditions of commedia dell’arte in its pure, unadulterated form.’* Such indeed was the intent of its author, who had created a pastiche of the traditional scenarios

with Pantalone, the Doctor, Harlequin, Smeraldina, and a second pair of innamorati, Silvio and Aurelia. The set likewise strove to reproduce the traditional one, as described by Miklashevskii in his book on commedia: “On the stage of the Noble’s Meeting Meyerhold

and the artist K. I. Evseev had placed to right and left two painted screens. One gave a schematic representation of the house of the Doctor, the other of the house of Pantalone. In all the presentations of this production symmetry was pointedly and strictly observed, all the movements being carried out in a gay, moderate tempo. This naive gracefulness was broken by moments of deliberately coarse antics that had been agreed upon earlier, or by improvised /azzi.’% A fascinating account of the birth and work of the Terioki group has been given by Verigina, in which she shows the highly improvisational nature of the production of Harlequin the Marriage Broker. The author outlined concisely the relationships of the dramatis personae, each of which had its own mask and characteristic music; for example, Harlequin eats flies from hunger, so Smeraldina gives him a pie; other similar moments were accompanied with special music. The plot of the pantomime is not a complex one. Pantalone is opposed to his daughter Aurelia’s wedding

to the young suitor Silvio and wants to marry her to his friend, an old rich dottore from Bologna. The servants — Harlequin and his sweetheart Smeraldina — try to help the lovers. Smeraldina flirts with the dottore to attract his attention away from Aurelia, and with Pantalone, to persuade him to agree

to his daughter's wedding with Silvio. Harlequin places the dottore in a laughable situation. Everything ends satisfactorily: Aurelia and Silvio get her father to agree to the marriage; Harlequin and Smeraldina are overjoyed at their success; only the doffere ends up with a sour expression.”

The outline is of a typical commedia scenario, the kind of thing that the leader of a troupe would post up for the actors to study. Indeed, the entire Terioki experience seems to a large extent to have

been an attempt to recreate the ideal of the commedia troupe. The difference was that Meyerhold evidently took a considerably greater

role in ordering the detail of the production than was traditionally the case; that is to say, the Terioki troupe seems to have been much less actor-oriented and much more director-run than its historical

go Pierrot in Petrograd

counterpart. If in previous productions the commedia element had seemed to be in quotation marks, here was one attempt to eliminate the “stylization’: the bracketing elements of modernity around and permeating the attempts at commedia. Verigina is careful to stress this characteristic in her account of how she herself acted in the play:

“Let me take for example the entry of Smeraldina. She came out with a tambourine in a curved line. This entrance could be done in different ways, for example, as in the circus: ‘Here I am!’ But the beginning of the show was preceded by a sort of parade of masks. And I would do it differently, coming out to my music in little mincing steps, with my eyes downcast, as if the main task of Smeraldina was

to seem to follow a preordained line and only that. She seemed not to pay attention to anyone, and yet to know that Harlequin was there, and that he was looking at her.’*

The play had been put on for the first time in November 1911. About this performance a reviewer wrote: “On the whole the students of the Presniakov school and the ‘School of Scenic Art’ acted pretty

well. In the production of the harlequinade Harlequin the Marriage Broker one felt the experienced hand of a lover of stylized art. In it Miss Chelidz’ looked very well as a nymph of the Dnepr [sic] while Miss Vedrinskaia was a charming shepherd.” The performance at Terioki itself (in the early summer of 1912) was reviewed by Mikhail Babenchikov in Novaia studiia. He wrote: Revived on the stage of the theatre in Terioki, the harlequinade had undergone considerable changes in this short period of time, both in the text of the scenario, and consequently in the way it was reproduced on the stage. This, it should be said, was an undoubted improvement. Thus, in the second version the feeble and pallid music of Spiess-Eschenburg was scrapped, to be replaced by new music composed after Haydn and Francesco Araia by Debuhr ...

The general tone of Dr. Dapertuttos production of the pantomime was in the manner of Callot. The extremely simple set, the brightly coloured costumes, in which brownish-red, yellow, and green tones dominated, the decorations painted by Kulbin ~— everything was intended create an appropriate setting for a naive, bright, somewhat buffonade-like character of the Italian comedy. The backdrop represented the sky with an intentionally crude depiction of part of a tiled roof on it, on the narrow ridge of which clambered or sat a Harlequin painted with flour and throwing handfuls of stars. Lower, at the very edge of the roof could be seen the bent figure of another Harlequin falling head-first, while to the sides, on the background of a thick dark-blue sky one could clearly distinguish, on the left, the stupid yellow disc of the moon, and to the right, a mask.

g1 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg The atmosphere in the town, which in the action of the play was located in front of the rich and opulent house of Pantalone, was expressed by screens placed at the sides with commedia dell’arte accessories painted on them — a fan, perhaps, or a mask or tambourine. Green, dark-blue, red, silver and yellow were the dominant colours of the decorations ... Of the costumes of the actors (of whom there were only six), Harlequin’s black costume stood out most, and that of the author. The actors’ movements, mimickry, and gestures were precise, light, and, as it were, sharply delineated (for example, Pantalone’s gesture when he divides the lovers) ...

Of the most memorable individual scenes one must first mention those in which the link between the audience and the action on stage was particularly stressed ... for example, the author's address to the audience at the beginning and the end of the spectacle, the joint scene when the author and Harlequin ran out into the audience, and the moment when the action reestablished itself after this, and the author made himself comfortable on the edge of the forestage. In these, as in a series of other at first sight seemingly unnoticeable details that were in reality extremely significant (one cannot help thinking here of the scene with Silvio cutting off Pantalone’s “paper” nose with his “wooden” sword on one side, while on the other side the doctor stuck on a “new” nose) one saw the loving insight of the directors of the theatre into the theatrical spirit of things that are insignificant in life, but come to life on the stage. The “paper” nose and “wooden” (not, note, tin) sword all helped the audience to be absorbed into the unreal world.”

These studies and experiments in commedia, apparently so esoteric (other material staged included Strindberg, Calderon, and Cervantes)

were to lead directly to the popular techniques that Meyerhold applied in his own theatres after the Revolution. Meyerhold’s and Solov’ev’s didactic work led in September 1913 to

the creation of a “theatre-studio.’* Much of the course work there was concerned with the history and technique of commedia, and it is not surprising that the productions which Meyerhold directed using students from the studio leaned heavily in this direction. Thus in April 1914 two plays by Blok were staged at the Tenishev Academy: a revival of Blok’s Balaganchik and The Unknown Woman (Neznakomka).™

In the first play the part of Pierrot was not played by Meyerhold (he

took the part of the Author), and the performance was given in a semi-circular setting, which detracted from the mystery that had impregnated the 1906 production. Accounts of the play suggest that it did not reach the heights attained earlier, for both these reasons. Another revival took place at Boris Pronin’s new cellar theatre in Petersburg, the Players’ Rest. Here, in April 1916 a new production of Columbine’s Scarf was presented. “However, the designs by Sudeikin

92 Pierrot in Petrograd

were poor by comparison with Sapunov’s for the original production, and the work was not a success. One feature of note was a rudimentary flying ballet performed by Harlequin on a wire from the flies” ;* the latter trick was later incorporated into the 1918 version of Mystery-

Bouffe (Misteriia-Buff), when Maiakovskii did something similar: descending from on high on a wire while reciting his lines as “Simply Man.”* Another planned production at the Players’ Rest was Tieck’s Puss-in-Boots. This was not the last time that a production of this play would be planned but not materialize.” The cabaret was represented

in Moscow by the Bat (Letuchaia mysh’), founded in 1908 by N.E Baliev and N.L. Tarasov as an after-hours haunt for actors from the Moscow Art Theatre. Like its Petersburg counterparts, it was modelled after cabarets in western Europe, such as the Fledermaus in Vienna and the Uberbrettl in Munich, and reflected the interest in Kleinkunst (the theatrical expression of the Jugendstil).** The harlequinade was an integral part of this style, as Efros stresses in the volume that he published to celebrate ten years of the Bat’s existence.” He mentions a harlequinade “Lunar serenade” (“Lunnaia serenada’”)*

and includes photographs of a sketch, “By the Light of the Moon” (“V lunnom svete,’! subtitled “A French Song” and most likely a

staging of Lully’ famous song “Au clair de la lune”), as well as photographs of a Pierrot doll in the likeness of Baliev and a poster of Baliev in Pierrot costume.” TURANDOT

Carlo Gozzi's Turandot (Printsessa Turandot) was staged for the first time in Russia in 1912 at the Nezlobin Theatre (Teatr Nezlobina) by EE Komissarzhevskii, with decorations by Sapunov. Most likely the choice was inspired by Max Reinhardt's production of the play at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin (premiere 27 October 1911).*? According to the notice in Maski, the play was the last part of a triple bill with Evreinovs A Merry Death (Veselaia smert)) and Schénthan’s Renaissance.~*

The second play [Turandot] and its direction were intended for different tastes.

But the audience, having gotten its aesthetic pleasure from K. Nezlobin’s production [of Renaissance |, was afraid to spoil the impression and began gradually to thin out. Still, the tasteful parts of the production evidently got to the audience. And the bitter humour pricked them. While the liveliness of the performance concealed at times the internal impotence of the author. So that the end of the harlequinade was listened to with greater interest than the beginning.”

93 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg

The reviewer in Teatr i iskusstvo felt that the problem of the play was to find a female actress with the contradictory features — the “power of a woman and the charm of someone almost a girl” — necessary to

perform Turandot. Noting that Reinhardt had mobilized his best forces ~ Gertrud Eysoldt and Alexander Moissi — and failed, the reviewer goes on: The Nezlobin theatre avoided this fatal mistake. It made of Turandot simply a page from the history of theatre. It became involved in form and in mood of a purely external variety. And it created a spectacle that was to a certain degree intimate. It gave the comfort of a stylized olden time. Maybe this is, if you like, not the whole truth. Maybe it’s only a study for Turandot. But it's a study in such delightful, splendid colours. And Turandot herself, and Kalaf, and all these Chinese ceremonies, and all this business of the riddles don’t excite one. They're simply the canvas on which the hand of the director has

embroidered the multi-coloured design of an oriental cloth. And in this design only the patches of colour and music are important. They delight the eye and soothe the ear.®

At least one reviewer, Sakhnovskii, was positive to the point of being ecstatic. The artistic design of the director has made an elegant mannerism and cunning, smiling eyes emerge from a play that is saturated with youthful romanticism, a play enveloped in the motley and vulgar satire of the Italian street. Positively, if on these bright and rich colours of the decorations, on the motley costumes, so entrancing in the harmony of their contrasts, the rays of real, bright light were to splash, or the quiet blue light of night were

to pour, the stage, with its oriental pale-lilac, crimson, woven pieces of material, with its bluish, yellow lanterns in black frames, with its light whimsical screens and hangings inspired by the motifs of the orient, would be transformed into a romantic dream. And the music, now languid, now a

passionate dance, and the fluent gestures, and fragmentariness of the moments of action alternating with apparently empty parts that had some significant development underlying them — in all this one can see unquestionable theatrical art. E E Komissarzhevskii glimpsed through Sapunov’s fantastic game of colours this fantastic game of life and believed in it. And thus the Chinese ceremonies, the clowning, and the pathos were necessary for this motley crowd of comedians, not external, not imposed. Without these clowns among the comedians all would have been false and unnecessary, and everything said by them differently would have sounded not as mockery or as irony and somewhere deep down a chaste truth, but as a flat fair-ground farce, for the tinsel of this conscious clowning would have been

94 Pierrot in Petrograd rubbed out of this show and there would have remained the skeleton of a coarsely constructed old comedy.

This is why it was so fine that the director introduced the pantomime about the cunning Lavinia into the play. We had to believe totally in the truth of what was happening with Princess Turandot, since it was to her that

the scene was presented, not us. And it must be said that the completely different style of acting in this interlude gave its imagery a different scenic meaning and the two planes of characterization were brought out even more clearly. The first was that of the Princess, Kalaf and Adelma, the other — that of all the others.”

The critic was not ecstatic about the actress who played Turandot and was less than happy with Adelma, but waxed very positive about the commedia elements in the play — Brighella, Tartaglia, and Pan-

talone — and concluded: “In this production there are so many refracted rays from the past and so much fantasy, so much reflection of contemporary taste and thought. In this production there is theatre as it should be.”%* By far the most informed and thoughtful review — indeed it has the depth of a scholarly article — was that by Vladimir Solov’ev in Liubov ’k trem apel ‘sinam. Since this article is an important

example of Solov’ev’s own thinking on commedia, it is worth examining in detail. Solov’ev begins by pointing out that the version of the text used in the Komissarzhevskii production was translated from the German; that is to say, the production, which purported to be of Gozzi’s play, was in fact infused with the values of Schiller’s version. The difference between Gozzi and Schiller Solov’ev describes as follows: In translating, or rather adapting, Gozzi's Chinese fable Schiller was taken mainly with the peripatetic story of the beautiful princess; to a significant degree he spoiled the original by trying to motivate and justify the actions of the characters. In Schiller’s version Gozzi’ss ironic smile disappeared, to be replaced by psychological motivation. Gozzi's theatre of wonders was sacrificed

to verisimilitude and poetry. For the orthodox representative of Sturm und Drang Princess Turandot is a woman whose cruelty can be explained by the desire for limitless freedom and by a feeling of revenge towards men for the many years of female enslavement. For Gozzi Turandot, the daughter of the Chinese Emperor Altoum, is a fabulous sphinx, driven one knows not where by a secret and vague instinct, a sphinx that loses its wisdom and power as soon as the three riddles are solved. In Gozzi Turandot captivates Kalaf most of all with her “bella voce” whereas in Schiller there is a whole series of terms of a cognitive nature. Tartaglia, Brighella, and the other masks of the improvised comedy form in Gozzi’s version a special world existing

95 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg

independently of what is happening on stage, even when this world is intertwined with the basic plot of the play. In Schiller the masks are too firmly implicated into the course of the basic movement of the tale, so that they even lose their merry insouciance and, abandoning their lazzi, become like the courtiers of a little German principality, imbued with a petty ambition

and the desire to work their way up the ladder.

Solov’ev manages to describe the difference between the two versions with perfect accuracy and irony. One wonders, from the description of the production given in the

two reviews already cited (with its stress on the decorative values over plot and characterization), whether Komissarzhevskii even did the research to discover whether the two versions were different and

if so, which one was preferable.” From the tongue-in-cheek tone with which Solov’ev describes Schiller’s version, it is clear that he favours Gozzi. Where, one wonders, did Komissarzhevskii stand? Solov’ev's sketch of the likely motivation is devastating but convincing: “The theatre, having undertaken a production of Turandot, evidently breathed a sigh of relief when it discovered in Schiller a psychological motivation for the unexpected scenic structure, and thus did not find the only appropriate interpretation of the play — as an exaggerated parody.”* There follows a series of criticisms of the director's use of space; in particular, Solov’ev reproached Komissarzhevskii for not creating any contact between the audience and the actors through a “forestage.”® He equally criticizes the production for the costumes, which he finds excessively concerned with ethnographic correctness, noting that the director “forgot that the action takes place in the fabled Italian Orient of the eighteenth century."® Unlike Sakhnovskii, Solov’ev does not appreciate the episode of Lavinia: “The romantic-sentimental interlude ‘about the cunning Lavinia, arbitrarily introduced into the general course of the action by

the director and evidently composed by him, was, thanks to its psychologically realistic basis, precisely the sort of thing against which Gozzi fought so passionately during his lifetime. In its content,

and in the way it was acted, it was (evidently totally unexpectedly for the director?) a parody of tender scenes in the spirit of Signor Goldoni.”* Many other aspects of the production were criticized by Solov’ev: the inappropriate and un-Gozzian use of music by Rameau;

the scene with the head of the Prince of Astrakhan’, “conceived by Gozzi in the grotesque manner” and evoking in the audience “that unpleasant horror that is so unavoidable in the anatomical theatres

of provincial panopticums”;® the placement of the thrones; the “pathetic” appearance of the masks in the audience and the final

96 Pierrot in Petrograd

procession out through the auditorium; the bad verse of the translation and the Schillerian “romantic pathos” of its declamation; the incongruity of Sapunov’s decorations and the psychological realism of the interpretation; the insufficient instruction of the masks in the techniques of commedia dell’arte; and the insufficient lighting of the forestage, where the masks would return after their sallies into the public and which was the most important area of the stage. The only positive word that Solov’ev is able to write about the action has to do with the acting of Kramov (Altoum) with its “grotesque” and its “pointed duality:” “As soon as the audience began to get used to the image of the Chinese emperor, immediately the actor Kramov would, with an imperceptible chuckle or a sharp nod to the audience, remind it that it had to do with an actor playing the emperor, and not with the emperor himself, for he does not exist, but only seems to.” Solov’ev'’s critique of the Komissarzhevskii production is detailed

and incisive; it is clearly based both on a profound study of the subject and on a carefully thought-out philosophy of the stage. As the final words of praise for Kramov suggest, in Solov’ev’s view the need for grotesque and the concomitant undermining of the conven-

tion of the mimetic illusion are paramount. This was not to be the last production of Turandot on the Russian stage. Clearly Solov’ev’s article, though brief, was to prove very influential in the conceptualizing of a play that was to become a permanent fixture of Soviet theatrical culture.

THE BONDS OF INTEREST Solov’ev was even more dismissive of another Moscow production, Tairov’s version of Benavente’s Los Intereses creados (The Bonds of Interest;

in Russian Iznanka zhizni), which opened at the Russian Dramatic Theatre in December 1912. First, he was critical of the play itself, commenting: “Benavente did not fulfil his promise to recreate the old Italian farce. His comedy resembles neither of the two variants of the old Russian street play [balagan].’* Solov’ev notes that the production was the work of three principal artists: the scene-painter S. lu. Sudeikin, the director A. Ia. Tairov, and the choreographer B. G. Romanov. Although Solov’ev found the contribution of Sudeikin the most important, he was by no means uncritical, remarking “these decorations, although they are very beautiful in themselves, represent

a step backward for the artist.” Discussing Tairov’s direction, Solov’ev notes the lack of movement, while Romanov’s work is criticized for its tastelessness, and the actors are found to lack the expe-

rience necessary for this type of comedy. Curiously, Solov’ev has

97 ~©Pierrot Comes to Petersburg

nothing to say about the music of Mikhail Kuzmin, who had made a sideline out of writing music for commedia productions. Underlying Solov’ev’s criticism is his own artistic program, expressed succinctly in the following remark: “[The comedy’s] realization on stage requires a lot of time and a special technique: the stylized [uslovnaia] plasticity

of the old theatre, gymnastic and perhaps even acrobatic agility, as well as the peculiar scansion of romance speech.” Tairov’s production was no better received by the critic “Homo novus” (A.E Kugel’), who found that Tairov had tried to “buy” success with expensive decorations. “This is all they [directors] have to do: find a brilliant set-designer, a corresponding composer and choreographer.””? This reviewer expressed his scepticism at the possibility of producing commedia dell’arte in Russia: “This genre is foreign to the Russian stage. Naturally, in the land where comedy sprang up and developed out of commedia dell’arte there exist a living historical link and tradition in the art of ‘reciting’ the dialogue which we do not have since our theatre is of literary and bookish origin. Comedy dialogue in the West (I am speaking principally of the Romance countries) arose out of the improvisation of commedia dell’arte — which is why it is lively, uninhibited, natural, and seems newborn in its freshness.””! Kugel’, in other words, shares Solov’ev’s criticism of the actors as being unprepared for this type of play and goes on devastatingly to

conclude that the public did not at all understand the play, but was blinded by the brilliance of the decorations. The reaction of the purist Solov’ev to the productions by Tairov and Komissarzhevskii indicates the deep divisions between the Meyerholdians on the one hand and

other theatre directors. If for the latter commedia dell’arte was a colourful and exotic style to be recreated for its visual qualities, for

Meyerhold and his disciples it was a program that aimed at the | creation of a new genre of theatre: the balagan.” PIERRETTE’S VEIL October 1913 saw another commedia production in Moscow, this time another version of Schnitzler’s pantomime Der Schleier der Pierrette, translated more literally as Pokryvalo P eretty (Pierrettes Veil), which had its premiere on 4 November 1913.” The play was directed

by A. la. Tairov at Mardzhanov’s Free Theatre, with Dohnanyi's music, decorations by A.A. Arapov, and a verse prologue by the poet Iu. Baltrushaitis.“ In his sketch of Tairov’s career, P- Markov notes that at that time Moscow was not familiar with Meyerhold’s experiments.” He continues:

98 Pierrot in Petrograd There was a lot of talk about the pantomime in those days — talk, not action ... At the Free Theatre Tairov turned theory into practice in his own way. At

the time he objected to realistic detail on the stage and still accused the Moscow Art Theatre of naturalism. As before he rejected the laws of the stylized [uslovnyi] theatre, in the practice of which he saw insurmountable aesthetic contradictions. Tairov then boldly proclaimed the art of the pantomime, the liberation of the theatre from literariness, and the development of a “synthetic” actor. I recall the impressions left on me in my youth by his early productions. The thematics of Pierrettes Veil were secondary. The core of the pantomime was the ball scene, enacted against a background of silver

columns created by the artist Arapov. In the unexpected combination of Alisa Koonen’s lyricism and the tragic grotesque of Chabrov as Harlequin the mysterious appearance of Pierrot and even the theme of death came across in a theatrically festive way, without any mystical colouring.”

Markov’s comments are somewhat belied by Baltrushaitis’s prologue to the production, which was not in the tradition of commedia prologues (such as we find, for example, in Evreinov’s Merry Death or Benavente's Bonds of Interest). Rather than a monologue by one of the masks, it took the form of a somewhat heavy-handed dialogue, reminiscent of Goethe's Faust, between a sibyl and the characters Pierrot and Pierrette (who are, it should be recalled, silent in the play itself). At their insistence, the sibyl reveals to Pierrot and Pierrette what their fate will be in the course of the play. The prologue is a conceit on the “life’s a dream,” or theatrum mundi, idea that recurs in metatheatrical drama. The two will forget their encounter with the

sibyl and enact their fate as she has foretold it. “Go off into your dream, your brief and troubled delusion, and you will remember this

reality, which is not false, having learned what is known to those who sleep in their graves. Go off then into reality, to that gloomy golgotha, and you will have to bear this dream deep in your breast, like a vague presentiment with which you, a chosen one, will wend your weary and thorny way through your days.”’” The prologue has the effect of strengthening the metaphysical connotations of the play,

and it stresses the role of fate in a way rather typical of Russian literature. It also has the effect of placing the events of the play, which are (as we have seen in discussing Schnitzler'’s original) specific as to time period and place, in a timeless context, symbolized by the ancient, mythical figure of the sibyl.

Pierrettes Veil was produced again by Tairov in 1916 in his own theatre, the Kamernyi. Essentially the production was a somewhat modified revival of the earlier production.” In his notes on the production, Tairov stresses the incantatory power of Dohnanyi’s music.

99 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg How fascinating was our ignorance when we gave ourselves up hour after hour to the music of Dohndnyi; in limitless, fantastic spaces the speechless figure of Pierrot glided before us, with the senseless Pierrette, her wedding veil lost, sweeping after him in a vortex of harmony. And then there was Harlequin, with his mighty swellings of brass resounding over the whole world, and his guests, the obsequious issue of his power and fantasy — all these suddenly died away when Columbine appeared to the rising strains of the harp. The rising fury of the schnell-polka crowned the phantasmal revelry of Harlequin, and in the quavering expirations of the flutes, the light of reason flew out from the enfeebled body of Pierrette.”

Tairov’s objective in the production was to find in pantomime gestures and movements adequate to express the emotive content of the music (which took primacy over Schnitzler’s “wordless dialogue’).

Tairov welcomed the wordless pantomime as a way to give back to the actor his central place in the theatre. According to Torda, Ara-

pov set for the second production closely resembled the first. A description is given by Tairov’s wife and principal actress, Koonen, who played Pierrette. The first act was to take place in Pierrot's room — severe lines on the gray walls and gray cloth curtains, two simple armchairs, also gray, and a table. The sole bright spot is the red tablecloth. In the rear, the huge window of the garret. Reflections of blazing carnival fires flicker on the window. The second act was to take place in a hall in the home of the wealthy Harlequin; it is the wedding ball. The stage is divided into two levels united by a broad staircase. The orchestra is to be placed in the upstage area ... and the crowd of guests in the downstage area. Dark silver columns and sprayed silver on the rich brocaded costumes, with the help of the quickly shifting stage lights, created the impression of a whirlwind, as if a wicked silver snowstorm were

raging on stage. The third act was again in Pierrot’s garret, but with a different appearance from before ... Here a principal role was to be played by the lighting, which was to aid in the creation of the tragic atmosphere of this act.*"

Although at least one critic prefered Meyerhold’s grotesque to Tai-

rov'’s tragic style in the play, the production was an overwhelming success.” Critics generally found Sapunov’s scenery for the Meyerhold production more suggestive and profoundly reflective of the age, as Pozharskaia noted: “Behind the extravagantly generous decorativeness of Sapunov’s rich, saturated color is hidden a deeply contemporary perception of life, an expressive acuity laying bare the ugly, narrow-minded banality and stagnation of that period ... The

100 Pierrot in Petrograd

contradictoriness of the time when Sapunov lived and worked, and his intimate association with the ideas of symbolism, called forth this dark side of his creativity, in which one observes — thanks to his passionate emotionality — a deep expression of the main points of the philosophy of pessimism, of his tragic perception of reality.”"* The Meyerhold-Sapunov production, that is to say, captured the specific tragedy of the age, while Tairov-Arapovss reflected only the tragic in general.

In 1919 Tairov’s production travelled to Petrograd. Although the critic Andrei Levinson was positive about the three main characters (Isereteli as Pierrot, Koonen as Pierrette, and Ferdinandov as Harlequin), he observed sourly: “the three protagonists eclipse and reduce to nothing the rest of the production. All these intermezzos of various dances, scenes by the harpsichord, a painfully drawn-out ball, the , fashions of old Vienna, snuffboxes — all this stylistic mishmash in the style of the Bat [Letuchaia mysh’] has been seen and seen again. This sort of artistic ‘in the mood’ variété seems to the experienced eye of the Petersburger to be somewhat simple-minded dilettantism.”* As for Arapov’s sets, it seemed to Levinson that “their elegant design is successful, but the painterly execution is banal.” In general the critic found the acting too psychological, calling Koonen a fledgling from the flock of the Moscow Art Theatre. Although he appreciated the co-ordination of music and gesture, Levinson was merciless about Dohndnyi’s music with its “multitude of longueurs, insertions, dances in the style of the elder Strauss,’ and he concluded, “To cut The Veil three times would be to intensify the impression that much.’ Most telling is Levinson’s comparison of Tairov’s production with that of Meyerhold. This [cutting] was the path taken by Meyerhold in his time in Columbine’s Scarf. He took the risk of throwing out Dohnanyi’s music and taking different music. The action developed with somnambulistic rapidity; not one grouping or gesture was repeated; each was final. The ball in ColumbinesS Scarf was not

a party in good old Vienna, but a masquerade of fearful and lascivious masks, visions of Colombine’s obsessive nightmare. In the ironic twist of the

spine of Harlequin, who seemed to have stepped out of the transparent canvas of Picasso, was captured all his demonic image. In ColumbineS Scarf the music was only the emotional background ... In Tairov’s production the psychological detailing and the abundant pictorial effects based on the music and in the milieu of a historical style were paramount. In Meyerhold’s there was the extreme laconicness of the symbolic gesture in the atmosphere of the grotesque; in the first — the expressiveness of faces, in the second the allegory of masks.*

101 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg

Although it might seem unfair to Tairov to leave the last word with Levinson, his evaluation of the two productions has considerable authority and conviction.

GOLDONI In 1915, Tairov produced Goldoni’s Il Ventaglio (The Fan; in Russian, Veer) as the fourth production of the Kamernyi Theatre.®” The play,

which premiered 27 January, evoked most comment because of its scenery, which was designed by Natal‘ia Goncharova. She had had a stunning success the previous year with her primitivist designs for Diagilev and Fokin’s production of Rimskii-Korsakov’s Le Cog d’or in

Paris. This time the result, though charming, left some critics annoyed by its “leftist” tendencies towards abstraction and uninhib-

ited use of colour, while Tairov himself felt that it did not go far enough towards breaking with symbolist art — in short, it was a compromise that satisfied few. This was not, however, Tairov’s last production with elements of commedia dell’arte, as we shall see in the following chapter. Two other productions of a Goldoni play in the pre-Revolutionary period both chose La Locandiera (The Landlady; in Russian, Khoziaika gostinitsy). Aleksandr Benois (Benua) directed the play at the Moscow

Art Theatre (MAT) during the winter season of 1913-14, as well as

creating the decorations.* Benois, who notes that the production required 125 rehearsals, declares, with characteristic modesty, that it was a “total success.”® Sakhnovskii, however, was highly critical of the production, finding the detailed, psychologically realistic style of the MAT unsuitable for the stylized comedy of Goldoni.” The other production of the play was by V.E Komissarzhevskaia.”! The history

of Goldoni on the Russian stage of the period is a footnote rather than a major event in the history of commedia in Russia; his salonized version of the Italian tradition appealed to the sensibility of the World of Art group, with its cult of eighteenth-century preciosity and visual elegance. In theatrical terms this current lacked theoretical

substance and was to disappear with the Revolution. Other, related phenomena are the plays and productions of Mikhail Kuzmin. MASKARAD

The last great achievement of Meyerhold before the Revolution was his production of Lermontov’s Maskarad (Masquerade), which premiered in February 1917 at the Aleksandrinskii Theatre. This pro-

duction, which has gone down in the history of modern Russian

102 Pierrot in Petrograd | theatre as one of the great productions, was the swan-song of preRevolutionary modernist theatrical culture. As Rudnitskii writes: The masks and balagan motif that had absorbed Meyerhold for many years acquired a new, profound meaning in this production. In [Balaganchik] the mask had protected the lyrical hero from the banality and lifelessness of life and allowed him to cover his suffering face with an ironic and motionless smirk. In Meyerhold’s studio variations on the themes of commedia dell’arte the masks had invoked the rowdiness and the merriment of the entertainments of simple folk, removing the audience from contemporary neurotic reflexes by contrasting them with the passion and health of street theatre. In Masquerade these two motifs were synthesized and given new meanings.

The figure of the Incognito appeared to enter the play from the world of Blok’s theatre, bringing with it the romantic image of unalterable Destiny and the fearful inevitability of the tragic end. In the movement of the masquerade itself, in its eery and garish enactment, the masks now denoted the fraudulence and ambiguity of existence, the chameleon-like and inscrutable nature of each and every person. The masquerade image was read as the image of the illusoriness and ghostliness of life.”

SETTING THE STAGE The Russian stage productions from before the Revolution that incorporated elements of commedia were not overwhelmingly numerous, but some of them were highly significant for the future evolution of Russian theatre. If Tairov’s and Komissarzhevskii's productions were essentially theatrical essays in a historical style, the productions by Meyerhold — whether his experiments at Terioki or the lavish productions at the Aleksandrinskii (Dom Juan, Maskarad) that incorpo-

rated stylized elements of commedia - were to prove an essential stage on his evolution as a major theatre director, and the lessons he

derived from these experimental productions were to be incorporated, often in bizarre and startling ways, in his post-Revolutionary evolution. Beyond this “stage-setting” aspect of commedia before the Revolution, we have to recognize the commedia revival as an essential element in the flowering of Russian cabaret theatre in Moscow and Petersburg. This scene, itself an expression of the satirical Kleinkunst trend in international culture, was largely to die with the Revolution.

It lived on to some extent in certain satirical plays of the 1920s — those by Maiakovskii and Erdman in particular — but it was to prove too subversive and uncontrollable an element for the postRevolutionary bolshevist state.

CHAPTER FOUR

Red Harlequins: The Balagan as Theatrical Genre

1917-22 On a crucifié en moi toute I‘innocence Et la candeur de ma confiance En toi, lespoir qui rit en haut de la colline; Mais voici que ma mandoline Fst fatiguée de murmurer des chants d’amour Et ma voix hurlera peut-étre quelque jour Une révolte de patience lasse'

It would seem that there were few productions of the theatrical avantgarde in the period immediately after 1917 that did not contain some echoes of commedia, whether as a pure imitation of the Italian theatre —a sort of museological exercise — or, more frequently, incorporating

commedia as a theoretical model or attempting to realize a new “popular” Soviet theatre on the analogy of commedia, with elements of such familiar forms of commedia-like spectacle as the “clownade,” the circus, the balagan, acrobatics, the music-hall, and so on. Some manifestations of this phenomenon were new, although others were simply a continuation of pre-Revolutionary productions, for example, that of N.N. Evreinov’s A Merry Death (Veselaia smert ) at the Crooked

Mirror.” The period after 1917 was one in which many of the experiments that had been conducted before the Revolution were put into practice on a large scale, and it may even have seemed, perhaps, to

the onlooker of the time as if this was to become the permanent idiom of the new Soviet theatre. The results were, however, highly varied, and in many cases the problem of the unity of a production that contained inserted episodes of commedia alongside other acting styles proved insurmountable. In other cases, such as the 1922 production The Gadfly (Oved) at the Moscow Terevsat (Theatre of Revolutionary Satire), the use of commedia was suggested by the setting

of the action of the play. “The director tried to brighten up the melodramatic action ... with inserted episodes. The commedia scene or the presentation of an itinerant Italian circus introduced national

104 Pierrot in Petrograd

and historical colour. But at the same time they heightened the illustrative nature of the production.”?

KING HARLEQUIN The period beginning with the February revolution (when for a short

time there was no censorship in Russia) and including War Communism (1917-21) saw the introduction onto the “Academic” and private stages of a number of plays, by such writers as Hauptmann, Verhaeren, Gor‘kii, Wilde, and Tolstoi, that had been difficult or impossible to put on in Russia under the old regime, mainly because they were deemed offensive to morality or subversive. Among these was Lothar’s King Harlequin (Kénig Harlekin), which was presented

simultaneously at two Moscow theatres. At the private Nezlobin theatre was N.N. Zvantsev’s production, entitled A Fool on the Throne (Shut na trone), which was proclaimed to be the “authorized translation.”* I have been able to discover little information about this pro-

duction. The competing interpretation was King Harlequin (Korol’ Arlekin) at the Kamernyi Theatre, directed by A. Ia. Tairov.° In addition to the Moscow productions, in 1918 the newspaper Novyi vechernii chas announced that King Harlequin would open in Petrograd. It is planned to reopen the season at the Aquarium [Akvarium] at the end of February. A. Dolinov will be responsible for the productions, which will begin with the repertory production of F Lothar’s King Harlequin. This play

is enjoying a huge success at two Moscow theatres — Nezlobin and the Kamernyi. Performance of the play has been banned for a long time in Germany, Austria, England, and Spain; it managed to “slip through” on certain stages in Italy, and remained for a long time in the repertory of the Odeon Theatre in Paris. The direction of the play has been entrusted to Mr Lapitskii; new costumes and decorations are being made.°

It is not clear whether this announced production actually materialized. However, The Fool on the Throne was definitely staged at the Troitskii Theatre in Petrograd.’

Of these productions, the one that has left its mark is that by Tairov, which had its premiere on 29 November (12 December) 1917.8

The text for this production had a different fourth act from that described in chapter one above. Torda summarizes the contents of the act as follows: The final act begins with the players setting their stage and announcing the harlequinade [requested at the end of act m1 by Harlequin]. Just as the play

105 Red Harlequins is about to commence, with Scapino making a pitiful attempt to play the distraught Columbine’s partner Harlequin, the real Harlequin suddenly appears in his own guise and costume, chasing Scapino from the scene and plunging into an improvised drama in which he reveals what has actually been happening. He affirms the precious value of the harlequinade by remarking that it is better to be a good Harlequin than a bad king. The troupe is once again tightly united, and Harlequin and Columbine are married. They bid the astounded courtiers farewell and depart in a boat that Columbine had prepared for her own clandestine escape for a rendez-vous with someone pretending to be Bohemond (even Columbine was temporarily unfaithful!); they are gone before the audience realizes that what they were

seeing was the truth and not just an improvized drama. Just after the elopement of Harlequin and Columbine, the assassin Bravo, hired by Tancred to kill Harlequin, bursts into the astounded court bearing aloft only the wig

and robe of the pretender-king; just as Gisa, he too has failed to get his target.’

Thus, the last act incorporated a play-within-the-play, which gave Tairov the opportunity of developing his experiments in the use of pantomime. The exaggeration of the masks was extended to other “real-world” characters as well; thus Bravo “was given an enormous nose and the same exaggerated make-up as the commedia players.”

Tairov’s production was most noteworthy for the suprematist scenery designed by a young artist, B.A. Ferdinandov: “Tt consisted of movable rectangular and pyramidal screens; steps leading up to a gigantic throne centre stage; several movable boxes, two-folds, and truncated pillars; and several hanging forms at the top of the stage,

including quadrilaterals, triangles, and circles. For the fourth and final act, there was a black background. The throne and its surrounding pillars were set awry at various angles; ‘strange, angular lanterns’ swung from the sky.’" As in the earlier pantomime, Tairov placed the emphasis on the freedom of the actor, which the pantomime (and the abstract scenery) were intended to facilitate. The critics for the most part reacted positively to the achievements of the actors, especially Tseretelli, who played Harlequin, in meeting the challenge of the abstract scenery by the freshness and plasticity of their technique and their acrobatic agility. The most appreciative comments were by Oliver Sayler. King Harlequin in itself affords Tairov some excuse for interpreting it as a cubist commedia dell’arte, for the play within the play characters of Harlequin and his comrades are figures from such an environment. The extension of their world to all the other personnages of the drama, however, is a gratuity

106 Pierrot in Petrograd

on the part of the producer whose boldness is rewarded by the transformation of a rather ordinary, sentimental tale into an ingenious bit of knowing gesture. I saw the same play under the title “The Fool on the Throne” at the

Nezlobin Theatre ... and there as a conventional, realistic production it revealed all its inherent dullness. At the Kamerny, however, sophistication has discounted sentimentality and has all but obliterated it by subordinating it to the amiable artificialities of the harlequinade. In the original, the figures of the Queen and the Princes and all the courtiers and ministers of state are semi-pasteboard. Tairoff revivifies them by making them all pasteboard.%

As Torda points out, this production continued in the idiom of earlier commedia productions, Meyerhold’s and Tairov’s own, in the

stress on the actor's agility and expressiveness as the centre of the pantomime, in the grotesqueness of the detail of the production, costumes and set, and in the simplification of the scenic space. New for Russian theatre was the cubist/suprematist scenery, with which the avant-garde nature of modernist commedia was quite at home. The idiom elaborated here by Tairov would be picked up shortly by Vakhtangov for Turandot. Tairov later considered his production of King Harlequin to be a preparation for his work on the stage version of E.T.A. Hoffman’s Die Prinzessin Brambilla (Printsessa Brambilla),

noting that in the production “elements of pantomime and drama alternated every few words, [and in it] the actor was expected to know not only how to speak on stage, but how to act, to be comprehensible without words, to use not only commonly understood platitudinous gestures, but gestures born of the freedom and the joy of the human body, acrobatic gestures.” Tairov’s next production, Debussy’s The Toybox, was a pantomime that continued the interest in commedia, but in a lighter vein. Sayler describes the plot as follows: “The Dolls and the Soldiers and the Shepherds and Polichinelle and Harlequin and the Elephant and all the rest simply come to life, examine each other curiously and with mild satisfaction, and then take their places once more in the booth and the box from which they first emerged. There is a hint of a love story with its attendant jealousies which a child can comprehend — but that is all. The rest is simply naive incident and frolic and gesture.” The highly decorative cubist set and the emphasis on movement and gesture continued Tairov’s work in pantomime. The “dollcomes-to-life” motif is one of the consistent features of modernist versions of commedia (e.g., Stravinskii’s Petrushka) and is really a Hoffmannesque element, as we are reminded by Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, which was based on a story by Hoffmann. It emphasized the fantastic and enchanted aspects that commedia could assume.

107 Red Harlequins

By common agreement, Tairov’s most important production of his commedia period was a stage version of Hoffmann'’s Die Prinzessin Brambilla (Printsessa Brambilla; premiere 4 May 1920). Here Tairov’s own experiments in the commedia dell’arte, as well as his reading

of the theories of Meyerhold and his school, were crowned with remarkable success. In this “cappriccio of the Kamernyi Theatre” the spirit of Gozzi, Callot, and Hoffmann found one of its finest incarnations on the Russian stage, alongside Meyerhold’s Columbine’s Scarf and Vakhtangov'’s Turandot. The dramatization of the tale was by L. Krasovskii, and took the form of a short scenario with a verse epilogue by Pavel Antokolsku.” Georgii Iakulov designed the setting,

which “was an intensely colourful vision in pink and gold which looped and folded, jutted and whirled in a kaleidoscope of levels, abutments, friezes, columns decorated with flaming white fire, and

baroque curvature.”** The set was designed “as a spiral which occupied the whole stage floor.” Rudnitskii goes on to observe, “This worked particularly well in conjunction with the circular movements of the carnival crowd,” and he notes that the spiral was typical of the blocking movements of Tairov’s commedia productions.’ In style the

set and costumes have moved on beyond the tight preciosity of the World of Art into an exuberant and uninhibited expressiveness of garish colours and exaggerated detail more reminiscent of expressionism than the cubism of Rudnitskii’s description. Typical of Tairov

was the musical element, which was characteristic not only of his productions but of many commedia productions of the period, and brought them closer to operetta and ballet. “The action was conducted in the inflammatory rhythm of the tarantella. The dancing characters tirelessly played flutes and beat copper basins.’ Tairov described his objective as being not to give a “correct interpretation”

of Hoffmann, but to “unite the new discrete elements of harlequinade, tragedy, operetta, pantomime, and circus, and ... refract them through the modern soul of the actor and the creative rhythm allied to it."*! The results combined commedia dell’arte with Hoffmann’s grotesque in a remarkable way that Torda describes as “expressionist theatre.” Worrall’s description of the production, which is worth quoting at length, shows how Tairov went beyond a simple theatrical exercise,

giving his play carefully conceived artistic focus on the Hoffmannesque interplay between the fantasy of theatre and the reality of life that was reflected in every aspect of the staging. The carnival glittered and flickered before the audience's eyes in an endless exchange of masks which combined the fantastic and the real. Reality was

108 Pierrot in Petrograd represented in the spontaneous love of the actor Giglio Fava for the poor seamstress Giacinta — a love which, overcoming all obstacles ... established its own reality in opposition to the world of illusion, deception and dream ... Against a background of carnival, the drama of the two lovers was played out. In this pursuit of shadows, the central characters changed their appear-

ance and their personalities so that they could rid themselves of fruitless fantasizing and fall in love once again. Dances, interludes, pantomime episodes, duels, tragi-comic burials, comic processions, all formed the basis of the action. The head-spinning changes of mask, together with the faerie-like complexity of the scenic design, the brightly coloured carnival costumes, all combined with the extraordinarily inventive mise-en-scéne.”

The fantastic action included an inserted commedia that reflected,

as it were, in parvo the overall theme of joy, optimism, and the triumph of love over dark forces that pervaded the production: “Espe-

cially fine was a pantomime episode staged in a fairground theatre [i.e., balagan] on the town square in which the admirers of Columbine

‘killed’ their successful rival, Harlequin, cut his body into pieces, and hurled the bits about the stage. Columbine, weeping inconsolably, proceeded to gather them up in a huge basket. Suddenly a ‘sood fairy’ appeared and gave her a magic wand, with a wave of which Columbine succeeded in retrieving her loved one.” Clearly, the lessons of the study of commedia, carried on over the past ten years or so by Meyerhold, Evreinov, Miklashevskii, and others, had been well and truly learned by Tairov. However, this episode appears to be a stylization in the genre of the commedia invented by the director, rather than an actual commedia play. In this sense, the production seemed atypical of Meyerholdian thinking

about the harlequinade and more in the tradition of Reinhardt and Komissarzhevskii, in that the metatheatrical aspects seem not to have

been paramount, but to have ceded to the play as spectacle. That is to say, Tairov’s art was theatrical and colourful, and it manipulated the potential of the theatre for instantaneous metamorphoses of character. It corresponded well to Zhirmunskii’s formula for Hoffmann’s theatre — the “theatre of pure joy” (see chapter two above) — and may,

indeed, have been inspired by it. However, it does not appear to have been self-reflective in the way so much avant-garde art was, to have focused on theatre itself, on the problem of the theatrical sign. It is

perhaps because of this lack of an intellectual stance, this pure, unintellectualized theatricality, that Tairov has been less discussed subsequently. It is also, possibly, for this reason that he managed to survive the ravages of High Stalinism relatively unscathed.

109 Red Harlequins

PUL CHINELO A play that was apparently inspired by Lothar’s was Pul chinelo, a “tragic harlequinade” in three acts by $.D. Razumovskii.* Although it had been published in 1905, the play had to wait for fifteen years for its one and only production.» It opened on 22 April 1920 at the Theatre of the Presnia region of the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies (Teatr Presnenskogo raiona M.S.R.K.D), formerly

the Alkazar Theatre. There is a list of characters and a detailed

synopsis in Vestnik teatra: “Dramatis personae: Pulcinello; Columbine,

his daughter; Harlequin; Pietro, Pulchinello’s servant; a Signor; the Signor’s son; a favourite [mistress]; Spavento (Spezzafer); Deputies; _ a Jesuit; Leandro (a nobleman); Scaramuccio (a warrior); Pantalone (a merchant); Scapino (a burgher); Rusante [sic] a fool; Tartaglia, the master of ceremonies; the treasurer; Harlequin’s mother; the inquisitor; Bravo (Beniamino’s brother); an old executioner; a young exe-

cutioner; a shepherd; friends of Pulcinello, courtiers, townsfolk, guards.” The synopsis read as follows: In the play Pul chinelo we see the conflict of the people with a despotic power.

Against the background of an old Italian commedia dell’arte, behind the mask of laughter through tears is enacted a drama of wounded human feelings which are eventually avenged. The spectator meets Pulcinello, the hero of the play, on the day of his daughter Columbine’s marriage to Harlequin. Invoking the ancient privilege, the landowner Signor sends servants to

the wedding to bring the bride to his castle. Harlequin indignantly chases the envoys away. They then abduct Columbine, wound Harlequin when he rushes to defend her, and seize Pulcinello himself with his servant Pietro. Meanwhile, in the castle the Signor’s son hatches a plan with the Signor’s favourite to kill the Signor. Their conversation is interrupted by a deputation that has come to greet the Signor. At the same time the abducted Columbina is brought in; she offers the Signor such valiant resistance that the lascivious

old man, struck by her refinement and dignity, gives her her freedom. Nevertheless, Pulcinello and Pietro, thrown into prison by the inquisition, are condemned to death for plotting the death of the Signor. However, the villagers rise up against the Signor, and, hastening to the court with Harlequin, who has recovered from his wounds, set free the condemned men. The play ends with the triumph of Pulcinello and the young lovers.”

The play was directed by A.A. Chabrov, with decorations and costumes based on drawings by V.N. Shishmanov. The production seems to have left no trace in the history of Russian theatre. No

110 Pierrot in Petrograd

doubt the simple-minded plot was partly to blame for this. The play is neither fish nor fowl, — neither tragedy nor comedy (as well as being unsure what country it is taking place in, Italy or Spain). The theme — the oppressed masses rising in revolt against the iniquity of the authorities (specifically the jus primae noctis) — is melodramatic

and puerile. The heaviness of the style is made worse by the fact that the play is written in iambic pentameter, a verse metre that is ill-matched with any comic pretensions the author may have had. The list of characters suggests that Razumovskii had carefully researched the masks of commedia (he accompanied the text with reproductions of drawings of commedia figures from Maurice Sands

book). The problem is that they are irrelevant to the action, which would be as well off with normally named characters. For example, the character of Pulchinello,who, as Sand shows, is an Italian version of Pierrot, is given to a father who is marrying off his daughter. In Razumovskiis play his profession is that of a “fool” (shut), but beneath this disguise he behaves like a social critic, a literary maquisard, as

we learn from Columbine'’s defiant speech about her father to the Signor: “He was never your servant: To you he was a fool, but he served the country, he served the people by exposing you, he served

the poor when, hungry, they knocked on his door. He gave them bread, he warmed them with his kindness, and sang songs to them or amused them with a tale. Lastly, he served his family, but never was he your slave!””’ Moreover, there is no attempt to exploit the theatrical opportunities

afforded by the presence of the masks, and the play contains not a hint of their metatheatrical function. In that sense, it seems to owe much to Lothar’s Kénig Harlekin, the commedia motifs serving simply

as a sort of signal that the play was intended to be subversive. The fact that it was published by the organ of the Social-Democratic Party,

and that it was banned from the stage by the censorship, places it in a similar context to the Austrian play. It is difficult for the modern reader to appreciate why it should have been perceived as so dangerous.

MYSTERY-BOUFFE

One of the most important productions of the immediate postRevolutionary period was Mystery-Bouffe (Mistertia-Buff) by Maiakovskii, which was directed by Meyerhold at the Musical Drama Theatre

in 1918 on the first anniversary of the October revolution. That this

production happened at all can be attributed to the influence of Lunacharskii, who put pressure on the Theatre Department of

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Petrograd to obtain the auditorium.” Rather than attempting to revive pure commedia, the play corresponded closely to the theoretical notions that Meyerhold had developed of a new uslovnyi theatre which would incorporate elements of different theatrical traditions, in this case a satirical fusion of the mystery play and the bouffonade. It is instructive to compare this approach with the view of Miklashevskii that commedia dell’arte represented a fusion of the literary theatre in Italy with the popular commedia all’improviso. The difference lay in the evaluation of the various elements, for while, in commedia,

the happy ending and the intrigue of the servants to bring about the well-being of their masters and mistresses had symbolically confirmed the social structure reflected in the play — the low remaining low and the high, high — in Mystery-Bouffe the two were placed in conflict, and the “low” triumphed over the “high.” “The fact that the mystery and the bouffon elements changed places had for Maiakov-

skii and for Meyerhold a meaning that was not only objectively historical, but also deeply rooted in their personal creativity.” In the play the “subject” was the biblical tale of the flood, and the treatment was made satirical and grotesque by the exaggerated, antinaturalistic acting and characterization that drew on the experimental work that Meyerhold had done in his studios before the Revolution. In 1936 he noted: “Only after 1917 was it possible to use the interesting devices that I had developed from 1905 to 1917. These devices are still alive today, for the problem of the so-called uslovnyi theatre turned out to be a vital one inasmuch as we were able with the use of these devices to switch from an apolitical theatre to a political one. And it is a political theatre that we were building.”™ It is important to note that for Meyerhold the question of uslovnyi theatre (which has its roots to a considerable extent in his work on commedia) was

related to the problem at hand, namely, the politicization of the theatre. The apolitical stance of the old theatres was tantamount to an anti-Revolutionary one for Meyerhold, who was to resign from his position at the Mariinskii theatre a week later. (Similarly, Eisen-

stein later denied the notion of an apolitical cinema.). It is also important to note that Meyerhold had now gone beyond his experiments with commedia as such, and was engaged in the development of a theatre that would incorporate these lessons in a creative way.*! Rudnitskii notes: “There was only one director in the world whose experience could be useful in the production of such a spectacle. This was the point when Meyerhold reaped the benefits of his earlier experiments in the area of the old commedia dell’arte, his interest in the balagan, and his exercises in the numerous studios, especially the Studio on Borodinskaia Street.”*2 The result in theatrical terms is

112 Pierrot in Petrograd

described by Zolotnitskii: “Instead of smoothing out the angularities and irregularities in the play, the director sharpened its provocative and audacious elements, giving them the features of a propagandistic (plakatnyi) political review and a street spectacle (estradnost), with characters running out off the stage into the audience, and repartee between the actors and the public.”® In the production the effects

were heightened by the decorations and costumes, which were designed by Malevich.

THE POPULAR COMEDY On 8 January 1920 the Popular Comedy theatre (Narodnaia komediia) opened in Petrograd. Headed by S.E. Radlov, who had been a student of Meyerhold’s at the Studio on Borodinskaia Street (Studiia na Bor_ odinskoi) before the Revolution, it inherited a tradition that had been briefly upheld by two other theatres — the Studio on Liteinyi Street (Studiia na Liteinom) and the Hermitage Theatre (Ermitazhnyi teatr) in the Winter Palace —- as a hotbed of Meyerholdian experiment.*

Radlov was interested in the possibility of a renewal of theatre through circus and incorporated clowns in a number of his productions, beginning already with a production of Tolstoi's The First Distiller (Pervyi vinokur) at the Hermitage. The results were inspired by and similar to those of commedia productions that Meyerhold had already produced, the goal being essentially to create a new popular theatre based on improvisation and circus tricks that would appeal

to the masses and would offer an alternative to naturalism and realism. Other effects derived from commedia could be found in Radlov’s productions, for example, the use of masks in his production of The Twins by Plautus® and the reliance on scenarios for improvi-

sation rather than a written text. Thus, in the first play to be presented, The Dead Man's Bride, or The Wooing of a Surgeon (Nevesta mertvetsa, ili Svatovstvo khirurga ), “the plot, which was sketched by

Radlov for improvisation by the actors, had no fixed text and was derived from the ‘night scenario’ of the Italian commedia dell’arte.”*

In a rather similar spirit, in July 1920 Konstantin Miklashevskii directed a play that he had composed entitled The Last Bourgeois (Poslednii burzhui), in which the role of the bourgeois was played by the ubiquitous Gibshman and which used several of the clowns who had joined the Popular Comedy. Miklashevskii began the rehearsal “having in my head a plot, a few tricks, a few jokes and that’s all. Much was thought up by the actors, and if a great deal was never-_ theless suggested by the author, this did not exclude improvisation,

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although there were about fifteen rehearsals ... There was no prompter, but at the first shows the author stood in the wings to help the actor if he should somehow get stuck, but not much help was needed.”?’

At the beginning of the 1920/21 season another director, Meyerhold’s former associate V.N. Solov’ev, joined Radlov at the Popular Comedy. One of his first productions there, Smeraldina’s Escapades (Prodelki Smeral diny), had its premiere on 25 December 1920.* In it were such traditional characters as Pantalone, Aurelia, Silvio (appar-

ently the Innamorata and Innamorato), Diana, Pantalone’s second daughter, and Smeraldina. In an interview about the production, Solov’ev had the following comments: Recently too much has been said about commedia dell’arte, but so far there have been few theatrical achievements. My production is an attempt to create a theatrical representation in the manner of Italian improvisational comedy. The play is based on the text of the scenario The Majestic Marquis of Gascony from the so-called Collection of Comedies of 1733-1735 (Sbornik komedii 1733-

1735 22) which were played in St Petersburg in the 1740s by Italian actors who had come to Russia from Germany. I have written a proper text based on the scenario, but some scenes are performed by the actors on the principle of improvisation.”

Zolotnitskii quotes from the interview: In producing Smeraldina's Escapades the director paid the greatest attention to the two episodes in which the servants took part. In one, against a tablecloth

that turned a dining-room into a theatre, Harlequin (played by [the clown] Del’vari) and Brighella (Koziukov) acted out a merry pantomime under the direction of Smeraldina (played by Basargina) ... In the second episode the same characters, along with other servants of the Marquis Silvio (Piccolo, played by Gibshman, Diabolo played by Serzh, and Malatesta played by Taureg), dressed up as devils and frightened the old man Pantalone. “This scene is accompanied by the appearance through the trap-door of infernal characters and is full of acrobatics and juggling numbers,” Solov’ev stated in an interview. The director considered both scenes “underpinnings” for the action, although they rather resembled interludes.”

The production — partly recreation, partly stylization — seems to

have been in the best traditions of the Studio of Dr Dapertutto, in the work of which Solov’ev had been a tireless participant. Although it was doubtless a magnificent piece of theatre, it seems also curiously

114 Pierrot in Petrograd

anachronistic in the hard times of War Communism. Meyerhold himself had by this time moved on to a contemporary, politically engaged version of balagan. Another harlequinade at the Popular Comedy was directed by N.V. Petrov. It was entitled simply A Pantomime of the Italian Comedians (Pantomima ital lanskikh komediantov), with such characters as Pierrot,

Harlequin, the Doctor, Pulchinello, Capichon, the Fairy Columbine

(Irth), dancers, three Pierrots, and three Harlequins. No doubt as a gesture to political relevance, the program included another piece called How Ivan the Fool Sought the Truth (Kak Ivan-durak pravdu iskal)."'

About this production Mikhail Kuzmin wrote: The Pantomime of the Italian Comedians and Reisner’s fairy-tale about Ivan the

fool belong to the category of ideological allegories. The pantomime is perhaps less adapted than all other varieties of theatrical art for the expression of abstract ideas, especially complicated ones that almost go into the detail of party politics. Despite the verbal prologue, where the content is explained, even the Italian Comedians leave much to be desired in the area of comprehensibility. But in essence this is not so important. They move about on the stage, they fight (commedia is always unusually attractive), they free a ballerina from a cage and put Pantalone in it (of course it would be even better to completely destroy the cage), they dance, they tumble and adopt poses. All this is accomplished merrily, with no special pretensions, and makes a lively impression, though it hardly gets across the political idea.”

Kuzmin’s praise was not entirely disinterested, since he was responsible for both the pantomime and the music.* Finally, it is worth noting that at the same theatre Miklashevskii

directed two pantomimes attributed to Deburau, The Bear and the Watchman (Medved’ i chasovot) and Harlequin the Skeleton (Arlekin-

skelet), in which Harlequin was played by the director himself.“ As Zolotnitskii notes, these productions had a “retrospective character,’ that is, they were more or less the swan-song of the Popular Comedy. However, the scene that a newspaper correspondent conjured up for his Moscow readers of the theatre in its last months (it closed on 22 January 1922) still sounds exciting: “It's below zero in the theatre, but the auditorium is full of ‘Petrograd types’ — workers, Red Army men,

teenagers — a real street crowd — the hum of the people. But then the bells announce the beginning, the crowd quietens down, and the primitive curtain opens to reveal the stage of the old Italian theatres — it’s all from commedia dell’arte, but it's all been transformed

into an understandable, improvised form — understandable for the

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given audience. It's unrestrainedly gay and witty; the audience echoes every witticism of Radlov’. It’s really a theatre of the people.”*

THE MAIN THING The Petrograd Free Comedy (Vol‘naia komediia) theatre opened its doors on 7 June 1920. Its first productions were satirical playlets on burning topics of the day, one of them produced by Nikolai Evreinov,

a “refugee,” like some of the other actors and directors, from the Crooked Mirror (Krivoe zerkalo). Others came to the theatre from the Stray Dog (Brodiachaia sobaka) and other cabarets. The Free Comedy is in retrospect most noteworthy for the production of Evreinov’s play The Main Thing (Samoe glavnoe), directed by N.V. Petrov with designs by Iu. P. Annenkov, which was in a much more ambitious vein than the petty “agitational” pieces with which the theatre began. The Main Thing was a highly experimental and virtuoso work,

a “tragifarce that combined the parodic grimaces of The Crooked Mirror with the grotesque uslovnost* of Pirandello.”* Concerning the play-within-the-play in the second act, which consists of a rehearsal of a play based on Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis, Zolotnitskii writes: The squalor of the trade and the behind-the-scenes spats, the posturing of the hard-boiled stage-folk — all this went back to the targets of the satire at the Crooked Mirror, and at the same time was directed at theatrical and literary “workshop” problems. The denizens of the wings were depicted in grotesque fashion: the quick-witted businessman and theatre manager, played by Rubinshtein, and the haughty actress performing the role of Crispinilla — played by Slepian. The scruffy director Aristarkh Petrovich, played by Zhukov, gestured and showed off, as he instructed that novice to the stage, the red-nosed, mustachioed, naively impressible electrician Timo-

shenko, in the mysteries of art ... A participant in the production, E. P. Gershuni, recalled that Timoshenko here “sat by the footlights, wiped the

light-bulbs, and delivered his lines as if randomly. He did it with such genuine humour, so sincerely, that the audience laughed at every word.” The lazy indifference of the half-drunk technician fitted perfectly into the backstage scene. The conventions of the theatre, seen through the eyes of a noninitiate, had a special impact.”

As regards the role of Evreinov in the production, Zolotnitskii goes on to tell us: “The director Petrov worked in close contact with the dramatist Evreinov. The production reflected the ideas on directing that Evreinov had expounded in his numerous books on the over-all

116 Pierrot in Petrograd

concept of the ‘theatre for oneself’ and the techniques of momentary illustrative parody of the Crooked Mirror, from which both Evreinov and Annenkov had come.’* Clearly, although Zolotnitskii is reluctant

to say so, the play was a hit, and it remained one of the most important elements of the repertoire of the theatre until its closure in 1925, registering 100 performances by 18 November 1922 and more

than 125 performances altogether.” Moreover, it went on to be a success in numerous productions in Europe and North America. However, its strange philosophical message was clearly out of step with the leftist satirical environment that others were trying to create

in the theatre.

On 10 January 1922 Evreinov’s harlequinade A Merry Death (Veselaia smert’) and the “ballet-pantomime” Todays Columbine (Kolombina sego

dnia) were revived by the same theatre, with a third short playlet, Such a Woman (Takaia zhenshchina), to commemorate fifteen years of work by Evreinov in the theatre; they appear to have left little impact

and did not remain in the repertory. In September 1922 Evreinov moved to Moscow, where he became chief director at the cabaret the Crooked Jimmy (Krivoe Dzhimmi); there Todays Columbine and Such a Woman were revived under the direction of M.G. Dyskovskii.°! Evreinov left Soviet Russia in 1925. The hostile attitude towards the Pierrotic in certain circles is documented in the following anecdote: The Kaluzhskii terevsat [theatre of revolutionary satire] created its own emblem. It was derived from the images of a dramatic prologue, “The Mouse.”

In this prologue the terevsat announced its programme of “struggle with realism,’ which included all bourgeois art. The action of the prologue consisted of a certain Krysolov [rat-catcher], after a long monologue, plunging his rapier into a Pierrot in a white smock. The “specialist” was an old man of 132, that is to say, born at the time of the French revolution, which in 1921 was 132 years old, so this must have been meant as a symbol. A mouse

in a top hat with a cane was a caricature of H.F Baliev and his “letuchaia mysh”™ [bat; literally, “flying mouse”]. Pierrot and the Mouse, run through with the rapier as explicit shadows of the “big” and “small” art of the past, became the emblem of the Kaluzhskii terevsat.”

OTHER PRODUCTIONS: PETROGRAD The year 1921 was a banner one for commedia dell’arte in Petrograd. There was, for example, the production of Gozzi's La Donna serpente (Zhenshchina-zmeia) at the Bat in the spring of 1921. This “was seen

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as an attempt to revise and renew the [theatre's] method. The theatre, ‘offending no-one and making everyone laugh, introduced into the play topical interludes, poked fun at MAT-like pauses, and gave free

rein to the improvisations, the dance and the fight routines of the actors. For all that the troupe only managed an approximation of those experiments that Meyerhold had initiated during the infancy of the Bat.” At the Comic Opera (Komicheskaia opera) there was a version of Benavente'’s Los intereses creados (Igra interesov), advertised as a “doll

comedy.”* Apparently this was the production reviewed by Kuzmin. The inexhaustive inventiveness of K.A. Mardzhanov has taught us to expect

from each of his productions some new technique, some new idea. The expectation was not disappointed by the production of Los intereses creados, since the director's interpretation made this essentially languid and insufficiently witty, overly simple-minded play work in a new way and bubble. Los intereses creados is given sparkle and colour not only by episodes of pantomime and even ballet, but by frequent musical numbers as well. This is its principal

novelty. Not only almost all the appearances of the characters, but many places in the monologues and dialogues are accompanied by corresponding musical phrases. This witty and attractive technique is slightly compromised by the thoroughness with which it is applied. Occasionally it overly embellished and slowed down the tempo ... although towards the end of the play this technique was put aside somewhat and the magnificently mounted scene of the trial proceeded almost without music, being accompanied only by the uninterrupted laughter of the audience. Certain hints at the “doll-like” nature

of the production were very insignificant, and it would probably be too artificial and simply boring to conduct the entire play “in the marionette

style” The use of music in this play was brought to its logical conclusion only much later, in the opera version Marionettar by the Swedish composer Hilding Rosenberg. Another commedia dell’arte production that took place in 1921 was Aleksandr Benois’ staging of Carlo Goldoni’s I! Servitore di due padrone

at the Bolshoi Dramatic Theatre (Bol’shoi dramaticheskii teatr), in a

new translation by Amfiteatrov. This production was running in Petrograd simultaneously with three other commedia dell’arte productions: The Main Thing, Los Intereses creados, and Smeraldina’s Escapades. As if this were not enough, a new production of Lothar’s Kénig

Harlekin by V.A. Bertel’s was announced in June of that year at the

Theatre in the Tauride Gardens (Teatr v Tavricheskom sadu).% Theatre-goers could see Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci (Paiatsy) at the

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Summer Maly Opera Theatre (Letnii Malyi opernyi teatr),°” as well as the ballet Harlequinade (Arlekinada) by Drigo and Petipa at the Tauride Gardens. In October M.M. Fokin’s “pantomime-ball” Carnival (Karnaval) was produced at the Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (Akademicheskii teatr Opery i Baleta; formerly the Mariinskii) to music by Schumann. Its characters were Columbine, Harlequin, Pierrot, Chiarina, Estrella, Butterfly, Pantalone, Esebius, and Florestan. Interestingly, the fashion was over almost as unexpectedly as it had appeared, for by 1922 practically all the commedia dell’arte productions had gone from the repertory of Petrograd theatres; only Evreinov’s The Main Thing at the Free Comedy and Fokin’s Harlequinade at the Mariinskii had survived. Evidently, the fashion faded rapidly with the changing tastes of the theatre-going public and the changing economic atmosphere of the New Economic Policy (NEP). TURANDOT

It was, however, thanks to a single production in Moscow that the influence of commedia and the flavour of this extraordinary period in the history of Russian culture was to linger well beyond the 1920s in the Soviet theatre. The production in question was the 1922 version of Gozzi's Turandot by Evgenii Vakhtangov, which was staged at the E.B. Vakhtangov Studio (Studiia E.B. Vakhtangova), first known as

the Third Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre (Tret‘ia studiia M.Kh.a.T.).© The production began as studio work on the Schiller

version of the play, but then Vakhtangov (inspired, perhaps, by Solov’ev'’s review of the Komissarzhevskii production in LTa) decided

to work with the Gozzi original in a new translation by Mikhail Osorgin.® The history of the production is given in a commemorative volume that appeared in 1923, after Vakhtangov’s death from cancer. The volume contains the text of the translation used, photographs of

the production, reproductions of the set designs and costumes, and the score written for the occasion. The text differed from that of Gozzi in one important detail: the third riddle (which in Gozzi has to do with the Venetian lion) was changed for Schiller’s “Rainbow” riddle. The change reflected the style of the production, which by no means strived for museological accuracy, but aimed to be contem-

porary, though not, as the author of the history of the production stressed, topical. “The contemporaneity of the play was to emerge not in the topicality of the text, not in funny remarks about topical matters, but in the way the very form of the production corresponded to the spirit of the age.”®

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In terms of the set, “spirit of the age” meant constructivism, and the design that I. Nivinskii created was a prime example of theatrical constructivism. The working space of the stage should give the impression of part of a circus

arena, cut off to the rear by a wall which thus forms a spherical surface around the space: in the wall are gates, a balcony, and, beneath the balcony a trap; in the centre of the space is an arch (later replaced by a column). In _ order to give as great an expressivity as possible to the actor’s body, and also to give as great a scope as possible to the director's imagination while he is composing the mise-en-scéne, Nivinskii proposes to make the space not horizontal, but sloping, with a fairly steep incline from the footlights to the back of the stage. Both space and wall are of a neutral, grey colour and, if today you want to play Turandot on this space (which is essentially good for

any play), then all you have to do is give the space the corresponding cosmetics, dress it up just as the actors have to dress up.

Fedor Stepun described the impression that this set had on him. “For some reason it always seemed to me that Gozzi's play was being

played on a ship. Whether it was because of the sloping surface of the actors’ space, with its mast hung with multi-coloured hangings, or the flimsy, rope-like moveable ladders — but the inexplicable feeling

of a deck always stirred me in a sad way, while I was watching the merry production of this merry and edifying play.’® The principle of improvisation was deeply ingrained in this production of Turandot, which showed its origins as a student exercise.

Thus, the music was played on a paper and a comb, and the dress and props consisted of a variety of objects pressed into service for the purposes of the production. Kalaf twists on his head a turban made out of a towel; as a cloak he uses a ladies’ coat belonging to one of the female student actors; in his belt he sticks

a fencing foil as a sword or rapier — and there he is, a fairy-tale prince. Barakh puts on pantaloons from some vaudeville and ties the sleeves of a woman's cardigan across his chest to make a splendid cloak; as a dagger he uses an ivory knife for cutting open books, which in subsequent scenes will be used as necessary by Kalaf and Adel’ma. Instead of a beard Timur puts on a muffler, and for a cloak uses a burlap back-drop from the little theatre. One of the wise men ties on a clothes brush for a beard and triumphantly holds a wig-maker’s dummy in his hand. One of the slave-girls has a pair of pantaloons on her head instead of a shawl, and carries a hand-bag, etc. Finally the basket is empty and nothing is left for poor Brighella. Now what?

120 Pierrot in Petrograd Without much thought, Glazunov (Brighella) takes the empty basket and tying it to his belly, becomes an unbelievable fatty.©

If, as commentators such as Markov insist, Vakhtangov’s Turandot transcended the limitations of the uslouvnyi theatre, it used the means

of that theatre to do so. For example, the actors got into their costumes and made up on the stage. Before our eyes a group of completely contemporary-looking young people were transformed into the characters of an eastern fable. This scene was quite brief and was played in a joking way, to the strains of a rather slow waltz ... The actors’ costumes were prepared and waiting for them on the stage, yet it seemed that this masquerade was born of the inspiration of the minute. The make-up, too, was established in advance, yet the audience was convinced that the actors were making up for the first time without knowing how it would turn out, whether it would not be too bold to put on a muffler or a towel instead of a beard. Then the waltz faded away and the improvisation started, captivating us from the first moments with its inexhaustible imagination and bold transitions from the serious to the laughable; the play continued on two parallel levels; we were not surprised at the most unexpected

| transformations and waited with happy impatience for the development of the events, although the plot of the fable did not particularly absorb us.”

Thus the improvised costumes were worn over formal evening wear, in a typical mix of the contemporary and the bizarre.® As Markov points out, the appearance of improvisation was in fact the result of carefully practised techniques and endless work on the part of the actors. Vakhtangov had studied first under Stanislavskii, and although he moved toward Meyerhold’s conception of theatre during his career, the underlay of Stanislavskian technique remained in his approach. Thus “Vakhtangov wanted his actors to behave like mem-

bers of an imaginary Italian troupe and to find an emplot which suited each of them.” They were, in other words, to create a bracketing, fictional world — they were to portray actors who were improvising. In fact, the layers of imagined theatrical worlds were threefold:

there were the “actors” who dress up before the audience at the beginning; then there were the “masks” — Tartaglia, Pantalone, Truf-

faldino, and Brighella - who appear in costume and mask from the beginning and remain thus throughout. A third level was provided by the so-called zanni, whose role was to move the scenery around and who were “invisible” (i.e., generally excluded from the action) except for an inserted mimed interlude in which they enacted the plot of the play with a tragic conclusion.”

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The most controversial aspect of this production was the problem of the actors’ approach to their roles. This is how Matskin describes it:

Vakhtangov found a witty device to stimulate the imagination of the actors: he recommended that they act, not Gozzi’s fantastic characters, but the totally real Italian actors that had once played the characters following the voice of their inspiration, without a fixed scenario, without a ready text. The students liked their teacher's idea, and they felt comfortable as the wandering comedians of the ancient commedia dell’arte. But each mask in Turandot had a third face, the face of the contemporary actor, who set the tone in this merry representation. Vakhtangov insisted on the word “representation” [predstavlenie|, declaring that the studio had the right to “play our production as a ‘representation.’ We have the right to do so since we are capable of giving a pure ‘experience’ if we want.””!

It was in this way that Vakhtangov strove to distance his style of production from the “experiential” drama of Stanislavskii, placing the

acting of the roles, so to speak, within double quotation marks. Vakhtangov’s solution was a new attempt to meet the kinds of problems that had been presented by so many attempts in the preceding ten or fifteen years to recreate a “stylized” representation of a past theatrical style. It aimed to “quote” the past style (that of commedia dell’arte in the present case) and yet find a way for the audience to receive the spectacle as more than a museological exercise, a gorgeous

spectacle (such as Komissarzhevskiis production had been), or an ironical imitation. His insistence on the actors’ ability to act the roles in an experiential way should they desire is very telling. It suggests that the actors should be able to “lift the quotes” at crucial moments in the production and elicit the audience's involvement by a shift from representation to presentation. It seems that this interplay of irony and sympathy, laughter at and identification with the characters was central to Vakhtangov’s production. The shifting perspective created makes this production one of the finest balagan productions to have existed on the Russian stage. Markov’s comments in the commemorative volume also stress the

irony that resulted from the uslovnyi technique of the production, and the way that irony was lifted at certain points: Irony [was] the basic element of the production; the irony was marked by the mix of styles which functioned despite the affirmation of the basic and unified method of the production; the irony illuminated the theatrical structures and made them commonly accessible; the irony was Vakhtangov'’s

122 Pierrot in Petrograd subjective relationship to all the devices permitted in the presentation of the fairy-tale — the smile thrown across the vanquished material. ... But nevertheless, the fairy-tale remained a fairy-tale ... At. the most creative level the irony disappeared, giving way to totally different currents. The production of Turandot was a confirmation of life in all its absurdity, its accidents and deceptions, its vain tears and errors, and its unfailing joy.”

What is evident from the remarks of all the commentators (generally ecstatic) on the subject is that Vakhtangov’s production represented a brief moment of balance between the total automatization of the actor and the unrelenting irony of the uslounyi theatre on the

one hand and the affective, involving acting of the Moscow Art Theatre on the other. It was a moment of balance that represented a turning-point in the history of the theatre, away from the experiments of the past. It could hardly be repeated, not only because Vakhtangov died shortly after opening night, but more importantly because the centre of gravity in Soviet culture was shifting irrevocably. Far from announcing a new age in Soviet theatre, Turandot marked the end of one. To be sure, the production remained in the repertory for many years, as a Sort of living fossil while the theatrical world around it changed, but it was the last significant production of a commedia dell’arte type of play in Soviet theatre, at least for many years.

WHY THE FALL? The reasons for the decline in interest in commedia in Russian theatre

are several. First, we may simply attribute it to the playing out of a fad. Fashions come and go in theatre, just as in other forms of art. The public no doubt tired of the endless harlequinades, and the style itself began to have less and less to say to both audience and stage artist. As I have suggested, there was also an important political and sociological shift taking place in Soviet Russia with the end of War Communism and the introduction of the NEP. The power in Soviet culture moved away from the avant-garde élite that had dominated it during the early years. It was precisely this élite that had adopted commedia and used it as a theatrical style for its own experiments in a revolutionary theatre. Mass culture and tastes had remained much more conservative and much more attached to a realist poetic. One exponent of the latter type of theatre was P.P. Gaideburov, who with N.E Skarskaia operated a travelling theatre in Petrograd and published a journal, Notes of the Travelling Theatre of PP. Gaideburov and N.E. Skarskaia (Zapiski peredvizhnogo teatra PP. Gaideburova i N.F.

Skarskoi), containing articles of a rather academic and conservative

123 Red Harlequins

nature on aesthetics and theatre. The repertoire of Gaideburov’s the-

atre tended to the classics: Shakespeare, Turgenev, Ostrovskii, Bjornson. It was, in short, the kind of theatre that reflected the inclinations of Lunacharskii, who was progressive in politics but conservative in art, and believed in retaining the best of the past heritage.

Gaideburov habitually attacked Meyerhold in his journal, for example in a review of Lermontov’s Masquerade.”* It was therefore interesting that he wrote an appreciative article on Turandot, which was nevertheless a critique of avant-garde theatre as a whole. In the theatrical world, my dear comrade, there are many words that cover without remainder what you in your naivety would have considered an absence of theatrical talent and a lack of artistic content. Of course, you've heard of constructivism, exhibitionism [fsirkachestvo; derived from tsirk “circus”], commedia del’arte [sic] and suchlike. You were ready to conscientiously be carried away by enthusiasm and veneration of the conquerors of the artistic values hidden behind these fancy words, and you truly suffered, contemplating them in selected theatres, studios, and laboratories, when your vain efforts to arouse in yourself at least some human feelings were branded by the connoisseurs as pathetic remnants of spiritual philistinism and backwardness.”

How, then, to justify the real enthusiasm invoked by Turandot? Quite simply, for avant-garde theatre the search — the experiments — had become the end. In Gaideburov’s view, Vakhtangov’s production

had found what the others had been seeking. “For those who never find anything their whole life long — and they are the great majority

— the search remains in a state of permanency, so that the very existence of these people in the theatre turns into a search, and so the search is for them the truth they seek, and thus the labels I have enumerated, like many others, serve as the expression of the search for searches.”” Gaideburov’s review is weak on specifics, and his praise of Vakhtangov is backhanded and grudging, a sneer at Meyerhold and others of his school. Yet there was more than a grain of truth in Gaideburov’s position: much of the theatrical experimentation was indeed over the head of the common theatre-goer. The eclipse of the craze for commedia was, I would argue, at its most basic a reflection of the disenchantment of the masses with the élitist experiments. Forces were in motion in Soviet Russia that would take the initiative away from the avant-garde and shape a new middle-brow culture that would be intolerant of the exotic and foreign, the fantastic and abstract, the intellectual and the experimental — in short, all the

124 Pierrot in Petrograd

things that commedia meant in the Russian context. The new economic situation in Russia, which meant among other things that theatres would no longer enjoy the subsidies they had received in the past, obliged the theatrical world to cater to the tastes of the new mass audience. Paradoxically, the native Russian balagan, as documented by Catriona Kelly, never played an important role here, despite its popularity among the masses before the Revolution. The intellectual élite, who had appropriated the balagan, had preferred by and large to use foreign motifs and sources, rather than building directly on the Petrushka tradition. A further paradox, I would argue (against Kelly) is that there was something very Russian about the interest in commedia, — which was, after all, a mass genre in its origins. That élite culture, although operating on a different level from the fairground balagan and using foreign sources, had much of the same appeal as, and on a deeper level was indeed inspired by, those Petrushka plays that every Russian, of whatever class, had seen in his or her childhood.

The decline of commedia productions in Russia did not mean, however, that the balagan as a theatrical genre was dead. It was to survive in an embattled way in Meyerhold'’s theatre, in the many productions of that theatre of the 1920s and, to a much lesser extent, the 1930s as well. Moreover, through the Ukrainian director Les Kurbas, the notions of the balagan were to be transmitted to Germany,

where they were to be exploited by Bertolt Brecht. In due course, the balagan was to be revived in Russia itself, in Liubimov’s produc-

tions at the Taganka theatre, inspired in the first place by Brecht, then more directly by the history of Russian theatre of the 1920s.

CHAPTER FIVE

Pierrot or Petrushka? Russian Harlequinades See: cheek pressed to cheek and hand in hand The mirror shows us in a ghostly guise; These shadowed forms which float before our eyes Dwell surely in some far, enchanted land.’

One of the intriguing aspects of the history of the commedia dell’arte forms in Russia in the early twentieth century is the coming together and interaction of the two layers of Russian life that had been divided by the reforms of Peter the Great. These reforms had created a thin, educated layer of society that was exposed to foreign cultural influences, assimilating and developing them. By and large this class was

composed of the nobility, although as the nineteenth century wore on, it absorbed other enlightened social elements as well, in particular

the class of the artists whom we have been studying. The second, much larger layer comprised the Russian “people”: the masses of illiterate peasants and smaller groups of merchants, artisans, and others. This latter class had inherited its popular culture from the festivals and events of the peasant village. As the economy of Russia grew more sophisticated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these festivals had developed into larger affairs centred in the cities and towns of Russia, where fairs (iarmark1), usually marking saints’ days and other religious festivals, attracted large throngs. One of the largest was that of Shrove-tide (Mardi Gras; in Russian maslennitsa) in Petersburg. These popular fairs (narodnye gulianiia) included various forms of primitive entertainment — ice slides (ledianye gory), sleigh rides, and swings (kacheli) — as well as the object of our interest,

the play-booths (balagany). Nekrylova gives us a vivid description of the typical Russian fair: The playbooths [balagany], swings, roundabouts and slides comprised, of course, the basis of the popular fairs. However, they were by no means the only objects of the attention of the holiday-making public. The inimitable colourfulness and uniqueness of the midway was enhanced by the various forms of advertising: the wit of the loud-mouthed hucksters at the sales-

126 Pierrot in Petrograd booths, the picturesque multitude of signs and posters, and the theatrical

antics of the “old boys” at the swings and roundabouts, as well as the pantomimes, comic dialogues and entire playlets enacted on the balconies of

the playbooths, and on the specially designed platforms of the swings, roundabouts and circuses.°

The unique colour, primitiveness, and theatricality of these fairground activities is stressed by Nekrylova, who notes, “From the visual point of view the signs and posters were extremely close to the lubok, both in colour and humour, as well as in the way the material was presented, the relationship to the object depicted, and the way they were targeted at the popular audience with their folkloric perception of the visual forms of the fair’* The /ubok, the cheaply

printed, garish, and primitive woodcut that the Russian peasant bought to adorn his hut, served for modernist Russian artists such as Larionov and Goncharova as the visual source of that primitivism which modernist theatre found in the balagan and Petrushka play.

One of the most primitive and ancient types of entertainment to be found in Russian folklore was the so-called “bear comedy” (medvezh ia komediia). This was an entertainment involving a tamed bear and his itinerant owner, generally a gypsy. At Christmas the owner (vozhak) would dress as a goat to join the mummers (riazhenye) as they visited the farms.° The bear and his trainer also became a feature of the popular festivals in the towns and cities of Russia, lasting as

late as the 1920s. Another traditional folk entertainment was the marionette show, which dated back at least to the seventeenth century and was performed by itinerant players (skomorokhi); by the nineteenth century it was an essential element in the popular fair. The first examples were offered by itinerant Germans, but Russians quickly mastered the art, so that the Petrushka play, enacted with marionettes to the sound of a hurdy-gurdy (sharmanka), became a standard feature of the Russian fairground.® By the 1870s one could buy a Petrushka play tor children, brightly illustrated, with a brief

note on where to buy dolls and how to enact the play. The plays themselves were simple affairs in rhyming, rhythmical prose. The characters were Petrushka, his friend the musician (who continually plays the hurdy-gurdy and answers Petrushka's questions), a gypsy

who tries to sell a horse to Petrushka, a doctor, a corporal, and a dog (Sharka or Shukhlarka), who finally drags Petrushka away by his nose.” After the Revolution the Red Army tried to capitalize on

the tradition by developing the Petrushka doll-play as a form of propaganda, with Petrushka as the Red Army hero battling a series of villains: the kulak, the seredniak, the capitalist, and so on.* This

127. Pierrot or Petrushka?

was, however, the last gasp of the tradition of the Petrushka doll, which had its heyday in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Petrushka play took three forms: as the performance of itinerant players wandering from fair to fair, as the offering of city-based

players (usually with a trained monkey or other animal to pass the hat), or as part of the mixed program of the balagan, or show booth.’ These latter were the popular shows put on in Petersburg at Shrovetide and form the basis of Stravinskii’s Petrushka.° An interesting aspect of them was that they frequently involved repartee with “special ‘hecklers’ [ponukaly] or ‘respondents’ who, standing in the crowd

in front of a screen, conducted a free and familiar conversation with

Petrushka. The complete illusion of an uninhibited chat with the spectator was created, especially when there were several of the ‘hecklers.”" This breaking down of the barrier between the audience and actors through repartee was to become an element in modernist theatre, for example, in Meyerhold’s production of Dom Juan. Another

device of the Petrushka play that was to be adopted by modernist

theatre was the framing interlude between acts. “In the break between acts dances were usually performed by two blackamoor girls, and occasionally there was an entire interlude about a lady who

is bitten by a snake; here too two clowns [paiatsy] would perform tricks with balls and a stick.” As a Russian folk hero, Petrushka has generally been believed to have a long history. As early as the 1630s, Adam Olearius, travelling with the embassy of Holstein to Muscovy and Persia, had described and depicted an itinerant player with a portable theatre and a scene

with a horse. Russian historians have taken it for granted that this is a scene from the Petrushka play, where he is inspecting the horse that the gypsy wants to sell him." Kelly disputes this belief, arguing cogently that “there is no support for a view that Petrushka existed before the nineteenth century.”1* However, a piece of business involving a horse is to be found in the typical Petrushka play; generally, for an encore, Petrushka examined his bride Var‘iushka or Pigas ‘ia in the same way he had examined the horse: inspecting her teeth, and so on.’ This fact leads one to surmise that the Petrushka

play, though derived, as Kelly suggests, from Pulchinello texts brought to Russia by itinerant Italian performers in the early nineteenth century, had acquired some elements of an earlier tradition in the process of russification. Though the Petrushka play was a Russian refinement, it certainly appears to have had its roots in foreign importations. Itinerant circus troupes are known to have visited Russia in the eighteenth cen-

tury and always included harlequinades in their performances."

128 Pierrot in Petrograd

Moreover, history records that Russia was visited by troupes of Italian

actors in the early eighteenth century. The first known visit was by the troupe of Tommaso Ristori, which came to St Petersburg from

Warsaw in 1733 and stayed until 1735.’ Around this period the Russian capital was visited by the famous Arlecchino Costantini and a Pantalone from Padua, Antonio Vulcani. The existence of a collection of eighteenth-century scenarios in Russian attests to the importance of commedia in Russian theatre of this period. In his overview

of the history of commedia in Russia, Lo Gatto stresses the links between the Italian harlequinade and the native Russian balagan, the popular entertainment of the Russian showbooths and maslennitsa (Shrove-tide) fairs, which flourished in Russia throughout the nine-

teenth century. Moreover, the first barrel-organ players were also foreign — Italians, as noted by D.V. Grigorovich and Dostoevskii.'®

Thus we can say that the history of Russian theatre in the first decades of the twentieth century is the encounter between two strains of the foreign commedia dell’arte, one introduced by itinerant

foreign players, and incorporated and russified in the Petrushka puppet-play and the balagan, the traditional folk theatre, and and the

other a high-brow tradition, in which commedia was brought to Russia directly, as a theatrical and literary form, by the educated theatre specialists and dramatists. On this confluence of traditions Zelentsova writes that “the folkloric, popular spectacle — the popular drama, the interlude, the fairground balagan, the Petrushka theatre, street theatre — had a different system of representation [from that

of established theatre]. During the period of the civil war the two systems came into contact and interacted explosively; this was to determine the specifics of the development of Soviet theatre:””’ It is true that the civil war brought with it a dramatic change in the nature of the audience, which contributed enormously to the popularity of

this type of theatre. For the first time in the history of Russia, the masses flooded into the theatre, bringing with them a fresh, uninhibited attitude towards the events onstage, which they were not afraid to comment on and even to interfere with.2° However, the process had already begun somewhat earlier — in the first years of the twentieth century — as a conscious attempt by members of the artistic intelligentsia to seek out their native roots and adopt essential elements of this theatre. These included formal aspects — the nonrealistic representation of time, space, and action — and thematic ones, especially Petrushka as a folk hero.

Thus, a number of artists, especially those associated with the World of Art group, turned to the tradition of Petrushka at the beginning of the twentieth century. The most important of these was

129 Pierrot or Petrushka?

Aleksandr Benois, who recalled in his memoirs his childhood visits to the balagany, which took the form of wooden theatres set up, along with the rides and other entertainments, on the Admiralty Square. Later they were moved to the Champs de Mars, then finally banished to the outskirts of Petersburg, before being closed down in 1898.”! The performance of a harlequinade in Egarev’s balagan described by

Benois seems very similar to the pantomimes that Deburau performed in the Théatre des Funambules, including as it did Pierrot, Harlequin, Cassandra, Columbine, and a fairy, who engaged in various slapstick episodes and tricks. Interestingly, one of these involved Pierrot cutting up Harlequin. Each having begun their work, Pierrot and Harlequin soon begin to quarrel and get in each other's way; they start to fight and — oh horror! — silly, clumsy

Pierrot kills Harlequin. Not only that, he straightway cuts up his dead comrade into pieces, plays with the head, legs and arms as if they were skittles (I am amazed that there is no blood), finally takes fright at his dastardly deed and tries to bring his wretched victim back to life. He places

one limb on another, then, leaning them against the upright of the door, prefers to scram. It is then that the first miracle happens. From the hill, which has become transparent, there steps out a fairy all gleaming with gold and precious stones; she approaches Harlequin’s heaped-up body, touches it,

and in a trice the limbs grow back together. Harlequin comes to life; not only that, at a second touch of the fairy’s wand Harlequin’s scruffy costume falls away and, to my delight, he assumes the form of an incredibly handsome youth covered with gleaming spangles.”

It was precisely such a trick — cutting up Harlequin — that Tairov later included in his production of Princess Brambilla. Egarev’s was not the

only balagan at the Shrove-tide celebrations. He mentions Berg’s (which disappointed because it was not in mime and Harlequin had a beard), Malafeev’s, and Leifert’s. The harlequinade, he recalls, was

swept away in the 1880s in a wave of xenophobic nationalism, as Russian folkheroes replaced their exotic counterparts.”

It was perhaps not the specifics of the Shrove-tide harlequinade that were important for Benois so much as their association with the magic age of childhood. Thus, he recalls that the very first theatrical

events he witnessed as a child were the visits of Petrushka to the courtyard of his home: “Quickly the brightly-coloured canvas screens

are set out; the ‘musician’ puts his hurdy-gurdy on folding horses; the pitiful nasal sounds that it emits put one in a special mood and fire one’s curiosity. And behold there appears above the screens a miniscule and very ugly little chap. He has a huge nose, and on his

130 Pierrot in Petrograd

head is a pointed cap with a red top. He is unusually lively and quick; his hands are tiny, but he gesticulates with them very expres-

sively, having neatly tossed his skinny legs over the ledge of the screen.”*4 Petrushka gets involved in the usual Punch-and-Judy plot, including the obligatory scene in which he beats the policeman (his rival for the charms of the ugly Akulina Petrovna), an interlude with blackamoor jugglers, and one in which he takes the Devil for a lamb

and rides on his back before being dragged into hell. Benois notes that, in cases when the performance was for a lower-class audience, Petrushka’s repartee became correspondingly coarse, but he continues: Next to this democratic guise of Petrushka’s his aristocratic one remains in my memory. Petrushka in those days was an obligatory feature at Christmas parties and children’s balls. In the elegant apartments of the gentlefolk the

Petrushka show was normally set up in the doors of the drawing-room, almost always hung with sumptuous drapes, which gave the performance an incomparably more grand and theatrical character. And it wasn’t some simple, dirty old Petrushka-man who was invited off the street to give the show, but a “drawing-room” one, practically dressed in tails. His screens were silk with a velvet ledge and a golden fringe, and the hurdy-gurdy man was clean-shaven and neatly dressed. He had a new instrument with a less squeaky sound and without those annoying breaks that resulted when the drum was worn out.”

It is the coexistence of the aristocratic and the squalid, the magical

and the obscene, that Benois finds fascinating in the image of Petrushka, just as the drunkenness of the crowd at Shrove-tide adds to his childish awe at the balagany. “The universal drunkenness of the simple folk, who became towards evening the true proprietors of the spaces that were given over to these merriments, gave them a downright demonically dashing character, splendidly conveyed in the fourth scene of Stravinskii's Petrushka”* But also, tor Benois, the

commedia figures are linked with the doll or marionette: “I had marionettes ... that my grandmother Cavos brought me from Venice. There were ‘just like real’ mannequin cavaliers in felt hats and tunics

with gold tinsel, a gendarme in a tricorn with a sabre in his hand, Harlequin with his batte, Polichinelle with a miniscule lamp, and Columbine with a fan.”?’ Last but not least, Benois derived from these

entertainments of his childhood a love of and identification with the

figure of Harlequin. “I felt towards this masked rascal a sort of ecstatic tenderness.”

131 Pierrot or Petrushka?

PETRUSHKA AND COMMEDIA The revival of interest in the balagan at the beginning of the twentieth

century, which achieved its most splendid incarnation in the ballet Pefrushka, was one facet of the paradoxical tendency in the Russian avant-garde to look both forward to the technological progress of the new machine age and backwards to the primitivism of folk art and the revival of styles of different ages and traditions.” However, the native tradition, though colourful, was far from the only, or even the main, source for the Russian writers, directors, and artists who were intrigued by the possibilities of commedia dell’arte in the Russian context. It was, indeed, the exotic, non-Russian aspects of commedia that many found appealing. As we saw in chapter one, by the beginning of this century the characters of commedia dell’arte, especially in the form given them by nineteenth-century French romanticism, had become the stockin-trade of playwrights and composers in a number of countries: Lothar and Schnitzler in Austria, Benavente in Spain, Dowson in England, Huysmans and Laforgue in France, and Leoncavallo in Italy. It was therefore not surprising that this highly theatrical set of motifs

should enter the work of Russian playwrights and poets. Virginia Bennett links the Russian craze for commedia partly with the impact of Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings (e.g., his illustrations for Dowson’s Pierrot of the Minute) on the World of Art group of Benois and Diagilev.” She also notes the popularity of I Pagliacci, which premiered in Russia

in 1893, and of the ballet Harlequinade (1899) to music by Ricardo Drigo.*? Of the latter, Benois tells us that it was “produced already [at the Mariinskii theatre] under [.A. Vsevolozhskii, who wanted to res-

urrect in this project some of his own childhood memories of the shows at the Paris Chatelet.” He adds: “Harlequinade is a charming ballet, the charm of which is particularly helped by the music of Drigo, which included the world-famous, and now somewhat too hackneyed serenade. In general this ballet consists of all sorts of tricks: a candle grows to improbable height, the balcony of the house falls in, fairies

keep appearing, and, most important, Harlequin himself takes the form of an elegant young blade dressed in a multi-coloured costume gleaming with gold.” Fokin danced the serenade with Anna Pavlovna in Petipa’s production of this ballet in 1900, while Kiaksht danced

Harlequin and Legat, Pierrot; in 1903 Harlequin was danced by Fokin.* The ballet was revived in November 1910.*4

Harlequinades were an important tradition in the ballet, and they

appear to have spilled over from there into the theatre. There are

132 Pierrot in Petrograd

Harlequin and Columbine dolls in Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker and a harlequinade in Glazunov’s ballet The Temptation of Damis (Ispytanie

Damisa), which was popular in the early years of this century. One

harlequinade ballet that remained long in the repertory in Russia was M.M. Fokin’s Carnival, set to the music of Schumann. In the premiere of this ballet, which took place in February 1910, Meyerhold

played Pierrot.* Diagilev took the ballet to Berlin, and in 1911 it premiered at the Mariinskii Theatre. Krasovskaia describes the plot as follows:

Its centre was the love affair of Columbine (Karsavina) and Harlequin (Nizhinskii), but the real hero was the unsuccessful dreamer Pierrot ... Harlequin embodied the spirit of the Carnival. The slender youth with a black half-mask, not real, but sketched on, and seemingly showing the real face of the character, in clothing decorated with brightly-coloured lozenges, came out embracing his fair Columbine, who resembled a porcelain statue ... The brilliant claim to the generalized expressiveness of dance turned into pantomime dialogue. It was refined and witty. The lovers tenderly quarrelled

and made up. Harlequin placed at the feet of Columbine the heart that he had symbolically taken from his breast.

If the plot of the ballet was the familiar triangle of the three stock figures, the decorations for the Berlin production were resolutely in

the style of art nouveau, a style which complemented the harlequinade: “Diagilev rejected the decorations of a terrace in a part that Bakst had suggested, and Carnival was put on with backdrops. Before

a dark blue curtain with a wide border of stylized dark gold lilies there stood on both sides of the stage two divans in the style of the 1830s. The curtain, however, was reminiscent of the applied arts of most recent times: stylized irises and lies were then coming into use for ornamentation, firstly in architecture and printing, then in household items (vases, lampshades, screens), and finally as the trim on women’s clothes.”°’

Commedia, then, was deeply engrained in the culture of the age. As we have seen in discussing Petrushka, it was linked to the cult of the doll, puppet, marionette, and mask in the art and literature of the time, symbolizing variously the falseness of appearances, the automatization of social relations, and, Bennett suggests, even the Nietzschean notion of the mask concealing chaos. This imagery was especially popular in various cabaret entertainments, as Segel points out: “Reflecting the contemporary discovery of the marionette by the serious artist as well as the theme of the animation of the inanimate in which the fin-de-siécle took such a particular interest, the ‘living

133 Pierrot or Petrushka?

doll’ numbers of the Bat featured actors and actresses who assumed the roles of inanimate dolls — figures in paintings, statues, characters in a lubok scene for example — who come to life at a certain point, dance, sing, recite dialogue in verse or prose, and then at the end of the number return to their original lifeless state.” The specifically “Pierrotic’ was imported into Russia from French

Symbolist poetry and served to enrich the work of such poets as Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, Elena Guro, and Boleslaw Les‘mian. Samples of Laforgue’s poetry, for instance, were translated by Ilia Erenburg, and his Pierrot fumiste by Vadim Shershenevich in 1918.”

THE COMMEDIA/BALAGAN AND THE PROBLEM OF STRUCTURE Although the work of the playwrights using commedia in various countries differs enormously in its scope and purpose, two basic solutions to the problem of the integration of commedia into the theatre can be mentioned. First, it is possible to include it by giving it a naturalistic setting. An example of this is I Pagliacci, in which the commedia takes the form of a play-within-a-play framed in a naturalistic (“verist”) setting. Such a technique might be classified as the “Hamlet” approach, for the use of the play-within-the-play (“the mousetrap”) in Hamlet is one of the most famous and influential

uses of the device. It permits the playwright to preserve a logical, realistic framework for the commedia, while indulging in the montage of theatrical styles that the play-within-the-play facilitates. Other examples of such realistically motivated uses of commedia include Lothar’s King Harlequin and Sacha Guitry’s Deburau (discussed above in chapter one). In a sense this “realistic” solution to the problem of

the modern use of commedia motifs can be seen as a continuation of the original form of the commedia, in which the commedia world of the low characters stood in contrast with the realistic world of the “high” characters and provided a comic relief from it. The second approach is to plunge the spectator unapologetically into the world of the commedia without any realistic setting to frame it. This approach offers the commedia as a fantasy world, an escape into a theatrical dream (or nightmare) inhabited only by commedia characters, usually reduced to a stock few centred around the PierrotHarlequin-Columbine triangle. Examples of this type of commedia include Dowson’s Pierrot of the Minute, Schnitzler’s Der Schleier der Pierrette, Hennique and Huysman’s Pierrot sceptique, and Laforgue's Pierrot fumiste. Commedias of this type generally take the form of a

134 Pierrot in Petrograd

lyrical fantasy, an intimate expression of the poet that may or may not be intended for the stage, and the form contains a strong tendency towards wordless pantomime and ballet. Both the approaches to the use of commedia in the modern theatre that I have sketched here can be found in Russian plays of the period. Russia, until the Revolution, and indeed for some time after it, was not cut off or insulated from trends in other European countries, and

therefore a number of Russian playwrights were attracted to commedia, which they exploited differently depending on their theoretical views and on their artistic objectives. There were, however, certain features of Russian commedia/balagan plays that serve to distinguish them and to make them a recognizable group. First, unlike the plays of the Russian symbolists that imme-

diately preceded them, the Russian commedias were non-literary. That is to say, they generally grew out of theatrical practice and the concerns of directors and actors; they were meant to be acted; and, by the same token, they were not intended as the expression of the poetic genius of the writer, the symbolist prophet or seer whose objective had been to turn the theatre into a shrine or temple to his mystical beliefs. Indeed, a number of the early Russian commedias satirize this Maeterlinckian current in dramaturgy, with its cult of death and stasis. second, the plays of the Russian commedia were polemical or subversive in intent. They grew out of a common dissatisfaction among Russian avant-garde directors and playwrights with the realist aesthetic that ruled in Russian theatre at the turn of the century. The

satire in the plays was directed mainly at the expectations of the audience, who entered the theatre with a preconceived notion of what theatre was: theatre as a “reflection” of contemporary reality; unity of theatrical style; verisimilitude of gesture, speech, dress, and

so forth; the passive, voyeuristic role of the audience (versus the “active” role of the actors); strict maintenance of the theatrical space,

with no contact between actors and audience; no disruption of the mimetic illusion through metatheatrical inserts. The other targets of the satire were the practitioners of realist theatre — in particular, Stanislavskii.

The response of directors (and the playwrights who stepped in to

serve them with appropriate scripts) was to oppose realism and mysticism with a concept of theatre as play and fantasy. Instead of contemporary reality they offered the antithesis: a theatrical world inhabited by characters whose exotic origin was self-evident and who

existed either outside time or in a fantastic version of some exotic chronotope — eighteenth-century Italy, say, or even Gozzi’s fantastic

135 Pierrot or Petrushka?

China of Turandot. Thus, the settings and the characters of Russian

commedia were an affront to the demands for realism and social concerns. They asserted the primacy of art over life, of play over seriousness, of fantasy over sobriety. Moreover, the coexistence of masks on the stage with “real” personages served another important purpose: the destruction of the unity of style and imaginary world. The world of the commedia was a macaronic one in which different styles, dialects, forms of dress, and theatrical comportment (e.g., the “normal” Tuscan language and natural gesture of the innamorati juxtaposed with Harlequin’s acrobatics and the Venetian and Bergamese dialects of the masks) were “montaged” to bizarre effect. In their very structure, the Russian commedias served to subvert theatrical expectations in other very important ways. Generally, the element of metatheatre was highly developed in them. Throughout its history, commedia had tended to develop this type of structure. It grew naturally out of the kind of situation that existed in the street theatre: repartee with the audience, forgetting of roles (or deliberate slipping out of them to comment on the action), and the “conventional” nature of the scenario, which served as a pretext for the play, but was not coextensive with it. These features, as we have seen, were developed further by Tieck, who diminished the scenario to a “play in the making” (to quote Pirandello’s term), which was conspicuous by its non-fulfilment, or its purely ironical fulfilment as a footnote to the real action — the metatheatrical one, the “theatre-inthe-theatre”” He further developed a series of metatheatrical characters: the poet, the machinery-operator, the prompter, members of the audience. Russian commedias exercised considerable ingenuity in adding to this number. Besides disrupting the unity of illusion, metatheatre served to satirize different aspects of theatrical practice: the

craze for spectacular effects, the clichés of all kinds, the squalid reality of backstage life, and so on. It was also the expression of the

“self-directedness” of modernist art in general, which tended, in many branches of the arts, to take itself as subject.

Important in Russian types of metatheatre is the oscillation between two or more distinct dramatic worlds. There is, firstly, the

world of the “play in the making,” a world inhabited by certain characters (W,); secondly, there is the world of the “theatre” — the fictional “theatre-within-the-theatre” — (W,), which may contain certain purely metatheatrical characters who do not enter W,, as well as some (but not necessarily all) the “actors” who play the characters in W,. A third world which may be superimposed upon these is the world of the audience (W,).*! Some or all of the characters may enter this world to address the audience directly; or, alternatively, the work

136 Pierrot in Petrograd

may be structured in such a way that only certain privileged characters may do so. The oscillation (and frequently the clash) between the different coexistent or superimposed worlds in the metatheatrical play served to create what Wylie Sypher has called “cubist” theatre.

In the sense that the result is a disruption of the illusion of reality in the theatre (as cubism undermined the represented reality of the pictorial image), the term is a felicitous one. PETRUSHKA*? It is, as Benois reminds us, in Stravinskii’s ballet Petrushka (1910), for which he collaborated in the development of the scenario (as well as

designing the set), that the raucous popular entertainment of the balagany, the doll-figure of Petrushka, and the music of the hurdygurdy come together in a pointed evocation, not of the nostalgia of childhood, but of the contradictoriness and grotesqueness of the impressions to which a child is exposed. As Benois relates it, the device of having the marionette come to life was a natural solution to the problem of presenting Petrushka in a ballet. If we removed the screens then, naturally, they had to be replaced on the stage by a little theatre. The dolls of this little theatre would have to come alive, without losing, however, their doll-like nature The dolls would come alive at the command of some wizard, and this coming to life would have a certain painful character. The more sharply the contrast would thereby emerge between the living people and the enlivened automatons, the more the whole thing would become “interesting” and “piquant.” It would be necessary to give over a significant part of the stage to masses of living people, the public “at the fair” whereas there would be only two dolls: the main character of the play, to whom the whole thing owed its origin — “Petrushka’ — and his lady.“

One is reminded here of the associations through Tchaikovskii’s Nutcracker with Hoffmann’s tale of dolls coming to life, a common conceit

in the tolk-tale and in the arts derived from it. The doll/actor dichotomy was, of course, an important theoretical notion in mod-

ernist theatre, especially in the work of Gordon Craig.* A third element that Benois decided to add was again remembered from his

childhood, namely the Moor (two of whom had appeared in the interlude), who was added to create the love-triangle, a role generally played by Harlequin. “If Petrushka was the incarnation of everything that is inspired and suffering in humanity, and if his lady, Columbine

the ballerina, was the personification of the Ewig Weiblichen [the

137. Pierrot or Petrushka?

eternal feminine], then the ‘luxurious’ Moor personified the senselessly captivating, powerfully masculine and undeservedly triumphant element.”* Petrushka is the most famous of the Russian commedia pieces, since it has earned a place in the international repertoire through Stravin-

skis music and the popularity of Russian ballet. Yet, it is a most Russian piece in its evocation of the Shrove-tide festivities in a specific

year, 1830. The year is not chosen at random, for the World of Art group tended to see Nicholas I's reign as a lost golden age of Russian values. Moreover, this was the age of Gogol’, whose grotesque tantasies were being re-evaluated by the symbolists. There is more than a slight echo of Gogol’s Overcoat in the ending of Petrushka, when the ghost of the puppet appears above the theatre and shakes his fist at the tyrannical Showman.”

Petrushka is commedia transformed into the Russian context, although it is not hard to see in Petrushka a Russian Pierrot, pathetic in his baggy trousers (not the ugly old Punch of the Punch-and-Judy show or the Petrushka marionette play). The derivation of his name

from Petr is a significant coincidence, for this is the name of the founder of the Russian capital and a figure that has dominated the thinking of Russians about their history since Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. Petrushka is, as it were, the pathetic and downtrodden alter ego of the mighty Peter. Harlequin is transformed into the Moor,

redolent of Pushkin and the age of Peter the Great, who imported Pushkin’s black ancestor Annibal. There was, in the symbolist period, a considerable cult of the black, who seems to have symbolized sex,

virility, and the exotic. One might note that Harlequin’s black-face mask already contains a suggestion of some Moorish ancestry, so that his transformation into the Moor is a quite appropriate original twist. Of the Ballerina less needs to be said: she is another version of Columbine, eternally desirable and eternally fickle. One aspect of the ballet is typical of modernist Russian versions of commedia, namely the metatheatrical structure. The second and _ third scenes take place in Petrushka’s and the Moor’s rooms respec-

tively. In these two scenes the dolls appear as almost human, although they still retain their awkward, wooden movements. In scenes I and IV the focus is not the interior of the little theatre of the Shrove-tide scene, but the “real world” dominated by the figure of the Showman, Petrushka’s tyrannical controller and enemy. Reality blends into fantasy in the first scene as the dolls start to move, first in doll-like movements, then, in the Danse russe, with ever greater verisimilitude until they jump out of the little theatre into the snow, only to be ordered back into their compartments by the Showman.

138 Pierrot in Petrograd

Similarly, the puppets invade the Shrove-tide revelry in the last scene when the Moor chases Petrushka and strikes him over the head with his sword. The calming assurances of the policeman that he is only

a puppet of wood and sawdust are belied by the appearance of Petrushka’s ghost, which shakes its fist at the Showman, so that he drops the puppet and runs away.

, It is not difficult to see in the structure of the ballet Petrushka a | variety of interpretations. Symbolically, it asserts the primacy of fan-

tasy and art over the tawdriness of reality, as well as representing the important theme of the doll character and his relationship to his evil manipulator (discussed above in connection with Meyerhold’s production of Columbine Scarf). Petrushka, though killed, is triumphant over his manipulator. The relationship of Petrushka to the Showman is a monstrously elaborated version of the simple repartee that Benois saw Petrushka exchange with the hurdy-gurdy man in

his childhood. The differences, however, are important, for in the ballet it is Petrushka who is the maligned one.* His revenge may even be seen to portend the potential revolt of the downtrodden against those in authority. The presence of a devil among the masked

mummers who appear in the final scene is also reminiscent of the simple Petrushka show.” However, he seems now to be a warning for the Moor and the Showman rather than for Petrushka.” BALAGANCHIK

The first play to be discussed is also the most important one in Russian literature incorporating motifs from commedia dell’arte. As we have seen in chapter three, Blok’s Balaganchik had an electrifying effect on Russian theatre when it was first produced by Meyerhold in 1906. However, its importance cannot simply be confined to the sphere of theatre, for as a piece of literature (and especially literature

for the stage) its place in the history of Russian culture is equally assured. Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) was the most important of the symbolist poets, of which Russia produced a Plétade. His poetry was torn between a mystical strain that he inherited from such predecessors as Vladimir Solov’ev and the ever-growing stridency of an age that was one of the most turbulent in Russian history. In Blok’s personal life his idealization of his wife Liubov’ Dmitrievna Mendeleeva contrasted with his passionate relations with a series of other women and prostitutes. These paradoxes find their reflection in the ironies and ambiguities of his writing, exemplified in the text of Balaganchik.

This is not to say, however, that we should seek unequivocal

139 Pierrot or Petrushka?

correspondences between the characters in the play and the personalities who played a key role in Blok’s private life. Like his lyrics, Balaganchik reflects these relationships indirectly at best. The contradictions and torments of Blok’s private life are, as it were, objectified in the text of the play, but as symbols that, by their very nature, are ambiguous and resist any simple-minded, one-for-one interpretation. Despite the brevity of the text, the “plot-lines” are complex and difficult to summarize.*! Apart from the three basic commedia personages — Pierrot, Columbine, and Harlequin — there is a group of “Mystics,” a “president of the mystical assembly,’ three pairs of lovers,

a paillasse (paiats), and the “Author.” The play moves in a series of parallel actions involving different characters who make contact only at certain points. Thus, the play opens with the Mystics sitting at a table and Pierrot some distance away. The Mystics are awaiting some special event; Pierrot is dreaming of his “faithless one.” At his words “I will rouge my pale, moony face, will pencil in eyebrows and glue on a moustache, can you hear, Columbine, my poor heart chanting, chanting its mournful song?” the Author (the third parallel element of incomprehension) rushes on to protest the liberties taken with his text. The appearance of a pale girl fulfils the expectations of both the Mystics and Pierrot. For the Mystics she is Death with a scythe over her shoulder; for Pierrot she is his bride, Columbine.*

It is at this point that he addresses them for the first time, and contact is established between them. The president of the Mystics concludes that Pierrot is a madman. Pierrot decides to leave; Columbine declares she will follow him. It is then that Harlequin enters and tells Columbine that he will wait for her. Pierrot falls down, and Harlequin leaves with Columbine. Then Pierrot jumps up and runs off. This action provokes a second appearance by the Author, who disclaims responsibility for the events on stage. In the ensuing ball scene, Pierrot sings of the loss of his “cardboard” bride to Harlequin. Then there are three different dialogues by three pairs of masked lovers. In the first, “she” is frightened by a “dark one” standing by a column; in the second dialogue, “he” has left his bride in a fit of passion and now is accompanied by a “black double.” As they disappear in the whirl of cloaks, a third figure, resembling the man but dressed in black “like a supple tongue of black flame,” seems to emerge from the crowd. In the third dialogue, the couple are dressed in mock medieval costume. He is earnestly explaining the meaning of the role they are playing and draws a circle on the ground with his wooden sword. When one of the paillasses emerges

from the whirl and sticks out his tongue at him, he strikes the intruder with the wooden sword. A stream of cranberry juice spurts

140 Pierrot in Petrograd

from his head. There is a commotion and a choir emerges singing of the “rain of pitch”; Harlequin steps forward as the leader of the choir and disclaims his discontent with the nether world. To return to the celestial regions he jumps through the window, but the view turns

out to be made of paper. Beyond can be seen the sky illuminated with the approach of dawn. The figure of Death appears with the scythe over her shoulder, and all are transfigured in panic. Pierrot slowly advances towards her, and as he does so, she is transformed into Columbine with a lock of hair behind her. As they are about to touch, the Author intervenes and triumphantly claims that he is vindicated — the young couple will be united despite the obstacles. Suddenly, however, all the decorations disappear, and the Author, left

alone with Pierrot, runs off. The play ends with Pierrot’s song of complaint at being left alone. The question of the source of the play is at the same time simple

and vexing. We know that Blok was approached by the “Fakely” group, a coterie of symbolists led by Georgii Ivanov, when in 1905 they mooted the project of opening a theatre, to write a play based on his poem of the same title.“ In fact, as Rodina shows, the play that resulted combined motifs from a number of different lyrics of Blok’s from the years 1902-05. These include “Svet v okoshke shatalsia” (“A light was staggering in the window”); “Iavilsia on na stroinom bale” (“He appeared at an elegant ball”), “Ia byl ves’ v pestrykh loskut‘iakh” (“I was dressed all in motley rags”), “V chas,

kogda p‘ianeiut nartsissy” (“At the hour when the narcissi get drunk”), “Ty odenesh’ menia v serebro” (“You will dress me in silver”), “Balaganchik,” and “Balagan.” The last poem contains the image of the balagan itself that is central to the play. However, in the lyric it is a mobile, horse-drawn play-booth that wanders from fair to fair, with the itinerant players Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine. The atmosphere in the poem is one of weariness, resignation, and disgust with the worn-out truths of the stage. The image of the balagan recurs in the poem “Balaganchik,” but in a diminutive form that has ironic connotations of endearment. In this poem the perspective is not that of an actor in the play-booth, but of the boy and girl who watch the performance (this is the most likely reason for the diminutive, which is typical of children’s speech). A “third-person” introduction and conclusion ring two small speeches

by the boy and girl, in which they disagree about whether a suite that appears on stage is “the queen's” or “a suite from hell.” This ambivalence of perception becomes an important theme in the play.

Other major elements from the poem that find their way into the play are the paillasse who bleeds cranberry juice, the cardboard

141 Pierrot or Petrushka?

helmet and wooden sword (here wielded by the paillasse ), and the torches (fakely) that accompany the suite that comes onstage. Most important is the fact that the poem is a mini-drama, in which the dramatic circumstances that characterize Blok’s lyrics are developed into an embryonic dramatic form. A feature of this dramatic form that we find developed further in the play is the metatheatre: we see an audience (the children) watching a play and one of the actors (the paillasse) directly addressing the audience.

In the other poems, the puppet-theatre as such is absent, but the triangle of characters — Harlequin in white and red, the white-clad Pierrot, and the taciturn and passive Columbine — is present in var-

ious hypostases. The earliest poem, “Svet v okoshke shatalsia,” focuses on Harlequin, who wanders alone outside in the dark while

“he” and “she” (not named) act out a “masquerade of buftoons” (shutovskoi maskarad), “He” draws words with his wooden sword while “she” is in ecstasy. It is not difficult to see in this pair the third couple in the play, with their fake chivalry, and the excluded paillasse (who in the play is struck with the wooden sword). The identification of the couple as Columbine and Harlequin and the deceived lover as Pierrot is made explicit in the poem “Javilsia on na stroinom bale.” In the poem “Ia byl ves’ v pestrykh loskutiakh,” the “I” is identified

with Harlequin, “dressed all in multi-coloured rags, white, red, in an ugly mask.” It seems, however, that the poet is identified not with

the lyrical “I,” but with the someone “who felt pain” in the third quatrain (by inference, Pierrot), while someone else laughed “long and senselessly.” This motif is echoed in Pierrot’s last speech in the play, “I am very sad. And are you amused?” (“Mne ochen’ grustno. A vam smeshno?”). The poem “V chas, kogda p‘ianeiut nartsissy” is centred on the figure of the lyrical “I” as paillasse. Someone weeps for him — he does not know if it is “Harlequin, who has forgotten his role,’ or “you, my quiet-eyed doe.” The atmosphere of wounded resignation comforted by the perfume of the flowers is an exquisite

definition of the complex state of the poet, another expression of which is the last speech of the play. This poem has the paillasse on a stage (while someone weeps for him in the wings), so that the theatrical metaphor is made concrete. Two frightening lines suggest something that had only been there potentially in the other poems: “An abyss looks through the lamps ~ an insatiably hungry spider.”

The abyss, that is, is equated with the invisible, but all-seeing audience. This relation with the audience, which observes the tortured goings-on between the members of the triangle and mocks or misunderstands, became absolutely concrete in the real audience of the play, which alternately cheered and jeered.

142 Pierrot in Petrograd

Thus the close relationship between the play and Blok’s lyrics is established. However, the play goes beyond the poem in objectifying Blok’s private fantasy world, as we learn from his biographer, Avril Pyman: “The poetry and diaries of the late summer and autumn of 1902 provide further proof of how unbearable Blok had become to himself. He began to project the ‘doubles’ on to archetypal figures: Pierrot and Harlequin (first on 6 August); the rich man and Lazarus (2 September); the Blessed Virgin and Antichrist (6 September). Strange and pestilential little demons that bang and rustle in the darkness invaded his verses (18 September). He became jealous even of himself ... For the first time, Lyubov’ was cast as Columbine (7 October 1902).”5° Pierrot and Columbine functioned, that is to say, as

poetic images in Blok’s lyrical output, much as others did (e.¢g., Hamlet and Ophelia), except that the insertion of a third figure, Harlequin, produced a new series of resonances. This much is clear;

what is obscure is exactly what sources Blok derived his imagery from. Essentially the play contains a triangle: Pierrot, Columbine, and Harlequin. These Blok almost certainly took directly from nine-

teenth-century French poetry (Verlaine? Laforgue?), although his familiarity with the French poets was not all that great and occurred mostly through his mother’s translations. The detailing of the figures

in the play is so sparse (they are as much poetic abstractions or symbols as they are flesh-and-blood characters) that we receive little

clue as to where Blok found his literary inspiration for them. The presence of the paiats (paillasse or pagliaccio) suggests that Leoncavallo’s opera (called Paiatsy in Russian), with which he was presumably familiar, served as an additional source for the imagery.* What is certain is that “Pierrotic” imagery was beginning to invade Russian poetry at about this time, for example, in the work of Elena Guro, which we shall discuss below; Andrei Belyi (with whom Blok and Liubov’ were in a “triangular” relationship in the early 1900s, and whom some have identified as the Harlequin to Blok’s Pierrot in

the play); and the Polish poet Boleslaw Lesmian, who published poetry in Russian in the symbolist journal Vesy and who wrote a pantomime “Pierrot i Kolombina” (c. 1910).°” Additional details in the

play, however, seem to be derived elsewhere. Thus, the role of the Author, and the metatheatrical structure of the play (play-within-a-

play, or rather, play framed by a theatrical representation of the theatre) seem to be borrowed from Tieck, while the ball scene in which the lovers appear in costumes is a topes of Russian literature reminiscent of Lermontov’s Masquerade (Maskarad) and even, before it, Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (Gore ot uma).

143 Pierrot or Petrushka?

Although one could not pretend that it is dominant, the imagery of the commedia dell’arte continues to recur in the writings of Blok himself, and of others about Blok, during the crucial years 1906-08. Thus Pyman comments on Balaganchik, “So, laconically and irreproachably, Blok told the story of himself, Lyubov’, and Bely; of himself, Lyubov’, and his doubles; of himself and his ‘wonderful dolls’; of himself and Lyubov’”** Belyi, visiting Blok and Liubov” Dmitrievna in October 1907 after a long separation, writes, “I saw the coming crash because the fun they had abandoned themselves to was nothing but a game, a kind of commedia dell’arte, no more.” Commedia, with Blok as Pierrot and Liubov’ Dmitrievna as Columbine, was, that is to say, one of the theatrical modes of their bizarre existence, one of the ways in which their life imitated art, if it did not actually become it. (It is interesting to note that Liubov’ herself actually played Columbine when Balaganchik went on tour).®

The two basic themes that run through the play and give it its meaning are the love triangle and the falseness of reality. The basic triangle of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine is echoed in the dialogues of each of the three couples in the ball scene, for in the first and second there lurks a dark double, while in the third the paillasse bursts in to mock the sublimity of the man’s bliss. The Author, too, tells us of the triangle that is the basis of his conception. “We have

to do with the mutual love of two youthful souls! Their path is blocked by a third person, but the hurdles fall at last and the lovers are joined for ever in a legitimate marriage!”*! The Author's “most realistic” plan is foiled at the end, however, for far from a union of Pierrot and Columbine, we are left with the lonely, pining figure of Pierrot. The play entertains no resolution of the problem, and the song of Pierrot at the end returns us to the lyrical roots of the play, rather than offering some fake theatrical conclusion. This rejection of falseness is the basis of the second theme, which

is worked out in a variety of ways: the “shimmering” reality of Columbine/Death, with her braid/scythe, who escapes the grasp of the Mystics, Harlequin, and finally Pierrot as well. Columbine represents the ambiguity of existence and the elusiveness of the ideal. Like the Mystics and the third couple at the ball, she turns out to be a mere cardboard mock-up. The sarcastic mockery of the pompous death-seeking of the Mystics is echoed in the high-flown rhetoric of Harlequin, who appears as the leader of the chorus with the torches (fakely in Russian, a transparent reference to the group of symbolists who had founded the theatre and commissioned the play). The strong links between Harlequin and the Mystics were made more explicit

144 Pierrot in Petrograd

on the stage by Meyerhold’s having him emerge from under their table. Harlequin’ leap into the celestial turns out to be simply a

jump through a paper landscape. All this served Blok’s purpose, | which was to distance him from Maeterlinckian symbolist drama, with its cult of the static and its air of mystery. Since the immediate objective of Vera Komissarzhevskaia’s theatre was to bring symbolist

drama to the Russian stage (indeed, the other play presented with Balaganchik was Maeterlinck’s Miracle of St. Anthony), the effect of Blok’s play was provocative, and subversive of the very theatre that gave it its home. Understandably Belyi, who recognized himself as the “existential referent” of Harlequin, was enraged by the play. If the various male lovers in the ball scene are different hypostases

of Blok’s poetic persona, they are far from being devoid of irony, especially the last one, in which he is represented as a rather pedantic

cardboard version of a medieval knight. Belyi was reported to be incensed by the cranberry juice shed by the paillasse (presumably recognizing in it a suggestion of the falseness of the sufferings he protested). The self-directed irony reaches its most acute in Pierrot’s last song — about his sufferings from unrequited love for the “card-

board” Columbine. Pierrot, the principal extension of Blok’s own

lyrical persona into the play, is trapped in a web of ironies and contradictions, and stands helpless and suffering before us at the end, daring us to mock him. The play can thus be seen to express at its deepest, Blok’s despair at the falseness of the competing realities

that he perceived in the world and at the very decay of the word, the logos, which can take on different meanings to different people and no longer obeys the poet's command. It is, however, a despair tempered with the suggestion of a more real, sublime reality beyond it all; just as the night sky is revealed when Harlequin jumps through

the scene in the window, and from that sky the vision — Death becoming the beautiful Columbine ~ emerges. The irony of the falseness and tawdriness of reality not only finds a literary expression in the play, it is inherent in the structure of the work. Blok saw the theatre, with its deceptive, apparent reality, as a metaphor for existence. In a way, his notion of the everyday world as a sham that conceals a more real existence was an updated version of the baroque theatrum mundi. It finds its perfect expression in the theatre-within-the-theatre device that he employs in Balaganchik. The theatrical technique of unmasking the falseness of the decorations,

by having Harlequin jump through them and by having the little puppet-show booth hoisted up into the air at the end of the play, and the conventionality of character (for example, by having the third

male lover say, “Do you understand the play in which we have far

145 Pierrot or Petrushka?

from the last role?”) thus complement and reinforce the underlying assumptions about existence that are expressed in the play. Beyond that, Blok’s sarcasm at the tawdriness of the established “realistic”

theatre of the day (personified in the comments of the “author”) parallels his disgust at the sophistry of the Mystics. Far from being at odds with the underlying themes of the text, its theatrical form reinforces those themes, adding new dimensions to them and giving them a greater force and concreteness than they could ever hope to

have in a simple lyric poem. :

Blok’s playlet is the greatest example of the harlequinade in Russian. It was to prove programmatic on a number of levels. First, its name was to suggest a whole new genre in theatre (Meyerhold’s title for his essay on the future of theatre is clearly endebted to it). Second, it was to provide a practical example of the genre through its destruction of temporal and spatial perspective, its use of metatheatre, and the fantastic chronotope in which it was set (but which was palpably a transformation of the perceived squalor of Russian reality). Finally, the satirical purpose of the play was in line with the subversive role

that had been adopted by the Pierrotic since the beginning of the nineteenth century, if not earlier: the play was revolutionary (“decadent”) not only in the theatrical and literary sense, but, by analogy, in the political sense as well.® {n the figure of Pierrot, Blok was to find a challenging poetic persona

that expressed the pathos of his situation. The image of Pierrot becomes overlaid on the image of Christ in his dramatic poem on the Russian revolution, “The Twelve,’ thus acquiring added richness and depth.™ Ultimately, both are images imposed on the life of the poet. The parallels between the events in the play and those in Blok’s stormy life were clearly evident to those involved. The commedia dell’arte

had become a life-style, a set of images for the poetic coteries of symbolists,® life as theatre, or rather as farce (balaganchik). It is life as

artifact, the crucifixion of the poet on the contradictions of society, that is dramatized in Balaganchik. Blok’s life (like that of Maiakovskii a little later) was a monodrama, focused ona single, tormented subject. In that sense, Blok fulfils admirably — and tragically — Evreinov’s notions of monodrama and the theatricalization of life.

ELENA GURO.: THE BEGGAR HARLEQUIN The poetry of Elena Guro (1877-1913) is among the arcana of Russian

literature.“ An early futurist, Guro both painted and wrote impressionist poetry that now gives off the fragile fragrance of a decadent

146 Pierrot in Petrograd

flower-child. There is a charming disingenuousness and vulnerability to her first volume, entitled Sharmanka (The Hurdy-Gurdy), a collection of prose pieces, verse, and playlets, which has now become a bibliographical rarity. In it her typical themes find their expression: medieval exoticism, urban squalor and vice perceived through the eyes of a defenceless girl, and a fine lyricism. Her poetry is in a radical form

of free verse that reads as archaic and has some of the rhythms of the bylinas (traditional Russian folk poems). The book is illustrated with line drawings, evidently by the artist herself. Several of the poems in the book contain commedia dell’arte motifs. The first of these is entitled “Skuka” (“Boredom”). The following prose translation of the poem gives only a vague impression of the charm of the verse, which is in lines of varying length, with crossed lines: In the darkness of the burning foliage are paper spheres. In the hurdy-gurdy the rollers turn, hum, howl. The footlights burn with a bright fire. Above the forgotten little table, in the garden, there is a lantern or lamp. Pierette [sic] agitates her black fan. The confetti rustles in the rubbish-filled allée. “Oh, maestro puillasse, you are mad -— fatally. Why do you look at me, at me,

ideally? Why have you now, again, blushed, wanted to say something, and weren't able to? Is it that you are offended because of me, me? Or are you simply ashamed to be with me?” But he looks past her: he is in love with

the little lantern ... the little burning sphere in the alder bush. He hears someone running, he hears the stamp of little feet: the marionettes are dancing in the heat, the dance of centipedes. The black night of summer is wedded to the lantern there. A red rocket shoots up, whistling and snorting. “Oh, little orange lantern, come to me" cries silly Pierrot. His face burns with multi-coloured blobs of light.*

The Beardsleyesque situation, the slightly tawdry surroundings, the hot summer night with its potential for passion, the questionable morals of Pierrette, her dismay at Pierrot’s infatuation for the orange Jantern, which ends up marrying the night — all this is the quintessential symbolist harlequinade. The aura of an unreal farce is rein-

forced by the inhuman music of the hurdy-gurdy, the paper decorations, and the dance of the marionettes. There is no movement,

there is no resolution, there is not even hope — only boredom and stasis, in a world where all is not very convincing appearances. Pierrot’s fascination for the orange-coloured sphere is partially explained in the next poem, entitled “Detskaia sharmanochka’ (“A Children’s Hurdy-Gurdy”).

147 Pierrot or Petrushka? Sparklets from the icicles, and the dust of snowflakes ... and the little hurdygurdy plays a merry little quadrille. Oh, its edges have been worn down a

little! Let's all gather under the Christmas tree; the night's term is short; Columbine, Harlequin and a monkey are jumping rope. Up high the stars glisten, of golden paper, and two paillasses are fighting, crossing their swords.

Harlequin is singing a song: “Far, far beyond the round blue sea there are red oranges under the golden moon. Silvery walnuts hang; Owlet lanterns

sit on the branches.” And the kitten dances a quadrille in a hole-filled stocking, and the fluffy monkey swings in a hammock. And the blue stars look at the happy mandarins and laugh at the golden spangles to the tinkle of the mandolin.®

The relationship of the harlequin and other figures to the doll-world

of child’s play is here made explicit. The worn-down edges of the hurdy-gurdy suggests that it is a remembered world of childhood Christmases. Pierrot's infatuation with the red sphere of the lantern is here glossed in an unexpected way in Harlequin’s song, which is a pastiche of Mignon’s song from Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjehre, “Kennst du das Land.” The oranges symbolize the dolls’ (Har-

lequin and Pierrot here seem interchangeable) longing for their southern, Italian home. A third poem in the volume is more remotely (at first sight) connected with the Harlequin motifs. Lunar Above the roofs the empty moon wandered, the smoke-stacks seemed lonely ... Gracefully the fool stretched out his lips to the moon. We somehow saw

the moon in a night-cap, and oh, how we laughed! “There are bells, there are bells on the fool! ... ” Time passed, and the minutes remained. There are bells, there are bells on the fool ... They laughed so much! The moon illuminated the attic. And the cats got excited. Someone wandered without end, without end, he danced and peered in the windows, and from there the emptiness winked at him ... Ha ha ha, chuckled the panes ... You can spend the night on the roof, but there's room on the square too! The lantern smiles at the shop sign and the hackney’s horse.

Here the commedia figure (unidentified, but presumably Pierrot) appears simply in the guise of a moon-struck, night-time wanderer begging for attention, whose loneliness is mocked. The commedia

148 Pierrot in Petrograd

motifs thus meet the urban themes — factory chimneys, city streets, winter scenes — that are also an essential ingredient in Guro’s mixture of the exotic and the contemporary Russian reality. As with Blok, we find many of the motifs of the poetry united in the harlequinade playlet (Guro even wrote accompanying music for it, which she placed at the end of the volume) entitled The Beggar Harlequin (see appendix A). The playlet consists of three short scenes,

set on the street, in the children’s nursery, and back on the street again.” The only commedia figure in the play is Harlequin, who is depicted in the first scene on a Russian street. His first conversation is with a lonely, tired woman teacher who thinks that he is accosting her. Harlequin, it becomes clear, is that other who can appreciate her

beauty: she is, he tells her, his dream. In turn, he awakens her imagination so that she can appreciate his “sad, expressive face.” His

revelation that he is “the son of Ahasuerus, the Eternal Jew” is a surprising, even shocking turn (for the children in the second scene he becomes “the Jew on the roof”). His further revelations of unsavoury details — his bald head, the many women he has had —- provoke

the teacher's disgust, and she hastens away. The attraction to and tenderness toward woman, then the rejection of contact once established (through a revelation of the character's lascivious nature) is a typically Pierrotic trait (to be found, for example, in Laforgue’s notorious Pierrot fumiste). Harlequin continues his scandalous behaviour

by then accosting a man, who calls the police. The scene fades out and Harlequin appears to sing a delightful canzonet (to Guro’s music),

which contains many of the motifs of the poetry already discussed:

the melancholy of his longing for the orange-blossom and blood oranges of his native Italy, while communing with the street-lamp (that same fonar’ that had attracted him in the first poem) surrounded

by the snow and icicles of his northern exile, to which he has been brought by an Italian opera diva. The Mignon theme recurs; this time she is Harlequin’s fantasy and merges with Columbine as the incarnation of southern merriment. The mingling of the Italian and Russian motifs here (albeit through a German intermediary) is a delightful high point to the playlet. Harlequin is for Guro the incarnation of the marginals of society, who recur elsewhere in her work with a realistic setting. It is only the marginals — those on the edge of society — who are capable of seeing

who he is and appreciating him. In the first scene it is a burnt-out teacher, in the second it is the children in the nursery to whom he appears through the window and for whom he is the doll that they had thought lost under the chest of drawers. When the children’s mother enters with a lamp and goes over to the window, Harlequin disappears.

149 Pierrot or Petrushka?

If in the first two scenes Harlequin’s appearance is an inexplicable

intrusion of the fantastic into the real world, in the last he appears

under a more realistic guise as a tired, cold, and hungry street entertainer, who is nevertheless able to throw the stars into the sky. Interestingly, one of the voices in the crowd surrounding him calls him a “stray dog,” the name later given to the most important cabaret in Petersburg (opened in 1911), which was, as we have seen, a hotbed of Russian experiments in commedia. Harlequin is finally banished from the playlet (and the world?) by the reasonable voice of a Solid Gentleman from the audience. It is not difficult to see in the red and black image of Harlequin a symbol for the poetic and the exotic, and in its injection into the prosaic and miserable reality of a Russian city a plea for poetry and beauty in life. His unceremonious banishment at the end appears as a challenge to the audience and a gesture of alienation. Guro’s playlet is undeservedly forgotten. Although it does not rise to the heights of Blok’s Balaganchik, its definition of the poetic is charming and it manages to skirt sentimentality, mainly through the intrusion of the diabolical elements in the character. That these do not entirely mesh with the world of children can be seen as a contradiction or a paradox: beauty and vice being closely related (a point made also in Blok’s poem “Balaganchik”).

NIKOLAI EVREINOV: A MERRY DEATH AND TODAY'S COLOMBINE

At least as important a role as those of Blok and Meyerhold in the popularization of commedia dell’arte in Russia was played by Nikolai Evreinav.”” Moreover, Evreinov was both a playwright and a

director, being associated with the Petersburg cabaret the Crooked Mirror for seven years, during which time he directed about one hundred plays, of which fourteen were his own.” He even wrote music for the theatre, having studied under Rimskii-Korsakov and

Glazunov, and composed the score for his pantomime Today's

Columbine. Much of the debate about Evreinov centres on his theories about the theatricalization of life. This proselytizing tended to

vitiate his works for the theatre, which appear as piéces a these designed to prove his theories. Nevertheless, the harlequinade that will be discussed here is among his best works and one of the major achievements of Russian commedia writing in the first part of this century.

150 Pierrot in Petrograd

A MERRY DEATH (VESELAIA SMERT’)

Evreinov’s first harlequinade, A Merry Death, was also one of his most successful works, being first produced at the Merry Theatre for Grown-up Children organized in Petersburg in 1909 by Evreinov and Fedor Komissarzhevskii.” Subtitled “a harlequinade in one act with

a small but extremely entertaining prologue and a few concluding words from the author,” the playlet fits into the genre of Blok’s Balaganchik and Guro'’s The Beggar Harlequin. That is to say, it uses the traditional situation of the nineteenth-century French romantic har-

lequinade, characterized by the Pierrot-Harlequin-Columbine triangle. The only additional figures are the (medical) doctor and Death

- “a gleaming white skeleton in a filmy gauze dress resembling Columbine’s; on her skull she wears a similar tricorn” The action of the play takes place in a room with a few important props: a bed, a large clock, a large thermometer, a lamp, and a lute. Here already the division between the realism of most of the props

and the oversize clock and thermometer give a visual clue to the contrasting theatrical styles that will mark the play; the lute is a commonplace commedia prop.“ When the curtain rises, Harlequin is on the bed and will die, as Pierrot informs the audience, at exactly midnight. When Harlequin wakes up, Pierrot informs him that it is

six o'clock, although it is eight on the clock. When Pierrot tries to take Harlequin’s temperature, the thermometer catches fire. The arrival of the doctor heightens the farcical atmosphere, with comic details of the examination of the patient, such as the sticking out of Harlequin’s tongue, and double entendres. The doctor tells Harlequin

that he will live a long time, then in an aside to the audience, comments that he will die very quickly. The doctor's efforts to get paid result in further witty dialogue. When Harlequin suggests the doctor may have lied, the latter is forced to tell the truth. The doctor

reaches for the money that Harlequin holds out, but Harlequin dodges him. Harlequin parodies the way the doctor will die, then offers him advice, taking as big a fee as the doctor has demanded from him. His advice is short and simple: “Go and live, but live not as if you were immortal, but like a man who could die tomorrow.’” When the doctor leaves, Harlequin asks Pierrot to lay the table for three, the third being Death. Then Harlequin changes and says that the third is Columbine, whose voice is heard at that moment singing about her affair behind her husband's back. Pierrot is horrified at the news of their affair, but Harlequin comments, “I love you both. Would you like me to love just you and is that why you are jealous?”” Pierrot

151 Pierrot or Petrushka?

threatens Harlequin with death, although Harlequin says that Pierrot has long grown cold to his wife, and goes to find Columbine. While he is out, Pierrot jumps on the bed and moves the hands of the clock forward two hours. Columbine is angry when she learns from Har- | lequin that Pierrot is in agreement with their affair. To punish Pierrot, Columbine asks Harlequin to kiss her. Pierrot does not react, since he knows that his revenge is near. Harlequin asks Pierrot to accompany him and Columbine on the lute in their dance of love. The roaring of Harlequin’s heart announces the closeness of death. Pierrot regrets the passing of his friend, reflecting that Columbine deserves nothing better since she has bad taste. He confides his remorse to the audience.

Columbine relates that on the way she met the doctor, who had approached her. She tells him he is thirty years too late. Then Pierrot announces that Harlequin will die soon. Harlequin consoles her with his carpe diem philosophy and assures her that he does not fear death. The trembling of the lamp announces the proximity of Harlequins death. He sings a song of love, but then breaks off and the strings of the lute break. Death appears, and, at Harlequin’s invitation, does her dance of love. He gives her the lamp and kisses Columbine on the bed. Their kisses and sighs are heard as Death hides the couple. The light goes out. Then as the scene is illuminated by the moon, we see the clock at twelve and Columbine kneeling at Harlequin’s deathbed. Pierrot enters and pronounces an ironic epilogue. Although trivial at first sight, A Merry Death is a complex work that is skillfully designed to bring into conflict a number of theatrical

styles. The most evident of these is the fantasy world of the commedia dell’arte, a world that is realized to great effect in the opening

scene. “As the curtain rises, Harlequin is sleeping on the bed face up, his arms by his sides; he has grey hair, but is otherwise he is a typical Harlequin. The buzzing of flies can be heard; Pierrot chases them away from Harlequin’s face, naturally — with the ends of his long sleeves and naturally catching the sleeper’s nose."” These sleeves later are a feature of Meyerhold’s version of Pierrot in the 1910 production of Columbine’ Scarf. The simplified set and grotesque props

(e.g., the thermometer) and the manipulation of light combine to underline the artificiality of this highly theatrical play. The flies func-

tion in two ways: as a satirical comment on the hyperrealism of Stanislavskii, but also as one of the traditional excuses for fazzi.” Numerous physical gags also exploit the tradition of commedia dell’arte in typical ways, such as the play with the doors when the doctor tries to grab his money from Harlequin. Theatrical effects are paralleled by appropriate verbal gags; for example, the doctor's remarks to Harlequin with asides to Pierrot:

152 Pierrot in Petrograd

He has a high fever. If my ear and cheek don’t burn up, it'll be by pure chance. (To Harlequin). Yes, you're very sick, but let's hope you'll soon get better. (To Pierrot). There's no hope, the machine's broken. (To Harlequin, while sounding his chest again). You'll live for a long time yet. (To Pierrot). He'll die very soon. (To Harlequin). You did a fine thing sending for me. (To Pierrot). You should have sent for the undertaker. (To Harlequin). You have a healthy organism. (To Pierrot). But it won't hold out. (fo Harlequin). All you have to do is take the medicine. (To Pierrot). Nothing can help here.”

For all this, the traditional device of the Dottore spouting pig Latin

is absent here. Rather, Evreinov relies for his humour on clown effects, visual gags, and misunderstandings. This does not mean, however, that we should read the play as an attempt to revive commedia in any pure form. Carnicke points out that the characters are from different periods in the history of commedia.” That is to say, they function rather as quotations from the history of theatre than as figures whom we should “take seriously.” If Stanislavskiis theatre is presented satirically in the play, this irony is counterbalanced by that directed towards commedia itself.

This conclusion is confirmed if we turn to the music and the sounds, of which there are many indications in the text. Some are

traditional, lyrical types of music, presented with considerable irony as catering to the squalid tastes of the audience. As Evreinov puts it in a footnote, “The music of the harlequinade should be arranged in a tendentiously primitive way so that its childishly cute sounds will remind old men of the wretched charm of the street show.”® Exam-

ples of this treatment are the lute that stands on the set at the beginning and that Pierrot uses to accompany the song of love;* Columbine’s and Harlequin’s songs; the “tasty violin music, deliciously sprinkled with the piquant sounds of the xylophone and the castanets” that accompanies the dance of Death; and finally “Harlequin’s music” that is heard in the distance as he dies.** Contrasting with these parodies of sentimental stage lyricism are the amplified sounds of Harlequin’s heart that represent the warning intrusion of

a grotesque naturalism into the play: first as the puffing of a locomotive; then as “the loud pounding of the heart, as if canons were being fired, and the furious puffing of a locomotive.”* These latter are a hint of the “anatomical” theatre of Evreinov’s “mono-drama’” Backstage of the Soul (V kulisakh dusht). The sentimental harlequinade is thus “taken off” by the contrasting modernity of the medical detail.

The most intriguing part of the play is the metatheatrical world, which is developed most clearly in the prologue and epilogue, both pronounced by Pierrot. As Olle Hildebrand has shown, Pierrot serves

153 Pierrot or Petrushka?

as a go-between linking the audience with the world of the play. “Thus in Pierrot’s monologue there are two levels, that of the play and. the characters, and a pseudo-real, the supposed actors’ level. Until further notice one can state that Pierrot is not able to distinguish

these two levels.”*” Essentially, Hildebrand argues, Pierrot is both character and spectator — a spectator, for example, in the scene where

Harlequin and Columbine kiss. He notes: “Thus, Pierrot is characterized not only by his inability to distinguish between play and reality, but also by the division between the two worlds — the spectator’s and Harlequin’s. The spectator’s behavioural norm (the desire for revenge) — in Evreinov’s thought the spectator is the representative

of the new class of the bourgeoisie ~ is fulfilled by Pierrot, in direct opposition to Harlequin ‘for whom no laws are valid’”** Similarly, Hildebrand discerns in Harlequin two functions: “Like Pierrot Harlequin is both ‘actor’ and character, but what for Pierrot is a conflict between represented and ‘real’ action, between theater and life, is for Harlequin himself a precondition for his superiority. Harlequin plays all the time ... Harlequin is however more than an actor who always in the part. He is also ‘director’ In the scene with the doctor

this directorial function is clearly marked; Harlequin directs the course of the action to such a high degree that he forces the doctor to take the role of the patient.’® Theatrically speaking, then, the contrast between the world of the

action and the world of the spectator is polemically intended to critique the expectations of the bourgeois audience. The presence of a character, Pierrot, who is able to address the audience directly — he

stands, as Hildebrand notes, “with one foot in each camp”™ - is extremely useful for this purpose (and continues a tradition that goes back to Tieck). Harlequin is intended, by his example of total play, to show the desirability of a different approach to life — the theatrical one. Hildebrand fails to note, however, a further, complicating feature of Pierrot, namely, the fact that he becomes, in the epilogue, an ironic mouthpiece of the author himself: “Here’s a business! I absolutely don’t know what I should cry over first: the loss of Harlequin, the loss of Columbine, my own sad fate, or yours, dear public, to whom we have showed the production of this frivolous author ... Ladies and gentlemen, I forgot to tell you that neither your applause nor your hissing of the play will likely be taken seriously by the author, who preaches that one should be serious about nothing in life.”™

Although Pierrot speaks of the author in the third person and professes not to understand his intentions in having him relate the anecdote of Rabelais’ dying minutes, one feels behind the mask the mocking voice of the author himself. Thus Pierrot, far from being

154 Pierrot in Petrograd

simply a chameleon-like mimic of the audience, is a highly disingen-

uous figure. That is to say, although he differs functionally from Harlequin in being able to address the audience directly, he shares with him the ultimate purpose, which is that of the author himself — to propagate Evreinov’s message of “serious frivolity,’ of the primacy

of theatre over life. This is conveyed with a discomfiting seriousness

in Harlequin’s message to the Doctor quoted above. Harlequin’s parody of the Doctor's death contains more than a message; it is an

example of the didacticism that is endemic in Russian literature (although, to be sure, Evreinov’s ideal is different from that of Tolstoi, say, or Dostoevskii). Oh deary me! I’m still so young ... I haven't yet had time to live properly ... Why did I spend my whole life in abstinence? I still have a heap of all sorts of desires ... Turn me to the window ... I’m still not tired of looking at God’s world ... Save me! ... I haven’t managed to do the half of what I wanted ... I never hastened to live, because I continually forgot about death. Help! Help! I haven't yet had my fill of pleasure, I kept conserving my health,

my strength, my money for tomorrow. I kept loading down my tomorrow with beautiful hopes and rolled it forward like a snowball that kept getting bigger and bigger! Don't tell me that tomorrow has rolled away beyond the realms of the possible never to return! Rolled off down the slope of my wisdom about life! Oh deary me! (He stretches out for a last time, shudders and is still. The doctor cries. Harlequin jumps up with a chuckle and claps his hands). No! Harlequin isn't going to die like that.”

This mock death that Harlequin enacts is, of course, in contrast with his own “real” death at the end of the playlet, when he dies making

love to Columbine in the presence of her husband Pierrot. This, Harlequin (but also, unequivocally, the author) is telling us, is the way to go. As Hildebrand, Carnicke, and Segel have all indicated, Evreinov’s playlet is a “repudiation of Maeterlinck’s morbid fixation on death in favor of an affirmative philosophy of life unafraid of death.”® This is expressed in the satirical aspects of the figure of death, as Carnicke points out: A ... collision of dramatic modes occurs at the moment of Harlequin’s death. Pierrot, Columbine, and Death herself treat the situation as a tragedy. Pierrot and Columbine cover their eyes in fear, while Death majestically extends her hands to stop the clock. In her seif-importance and her personification of an

abstract idea, Death prefers to play tragedy in the Symbolist vein. In her character Evreinov adds yet a third dramatic mode to his play, that of the

155 Pierrot or Petrushka? Symbolists, and thus gives a subtle jab to the “Maeterlinckian” attitudes of theatrical abstraction and at the popular Symbolist theme of death. Harlequin, however, insists on keeping the scene light-hearted. He asks Death to

dance for him and keeps time with the music ... Thus, the reactions of Pierrot, Columbine, and Death herself, when viewed in light of Harlequin’s own enjoyment, seem out of proportion and thus part of a ludicrous and farcical melodrama in which the characters over-react to common everyday occurrences. Tragedy has again been deflated to melodrama.™

Carnicke’s comments are especially important because they draw attention to an essential feature of Russian commedia: the montage of incongruous theatrical styles for satirical ends. The dissonance of these incongruent styles is also detectable, as Carnicke shows, in the conclusion of the play: Evreinov sets up a dissonance between what is seen and what is heard. After Harlequin’s death, the lights are dim, suggesting moonlight; the clock stands still at midnight, the hour of his death; and Columbine kneels at the foot of the bed. The picture is romantically mournful and strongly contrasts with the quality of Pierrot’s epilogue. While the playwright, as Pierrot tells

us, has asked him to set the scene against the dying words of Rabelais, “Lower the curtain, the farce is over,” ... Pierrot cannot refrain from adding

his own comments. He tells us the play is lacking in all serious and is a strange mockery of the audience. His words have a ring of truth.®

As Carnicke points out, the net result is that Pierrot appears in the play as the comic figure, not the pathetic one of tradition, while the death of Harlequin — who is usually associated with comedy — has a

tragic air. “The entire play has been carefully constructed for this moment of reversal.”% She sees in this reversal, incarnated in the paradoxical title itself, a deliberate strategy by Evreinov to evoke the threatening and the tragic in comedy — in short, the grotesque.

Although the polemical purpose of the play has dated badly, its capacity for evoking the paradox of a comedy that has an edge of seriousness, a joking about the most serious things in life — death, love, friendship — is still disturbing. Most disturbing of all, perhaps, is the resolute flippancy of the notion of a theatricalized life, where

all is theatre and nothing is real. It is for this reason, and for his unflinching aristocratism, that Evreinov was anathema in the Soviet Union (unlike Blok). It is not surprising that many have considered

the play a marionette show, in which the fate of all is ultimately manipulated by the author, and thus where nothing need be taken seriously. This “doll” conceit is something that is already present in

156 Pierrot in Petrograd

Blok’s Balaganchik, both in the title and in the poses that the characters assume at the end. “The Masks, pressing themselves motionlessly to

the walls as if crucified, look like dolls from an ethnographic museum.” It is pursued, as we have seen, in Guro’s Beggar Harlequin and is the master image in Stravinskii’s Petrushka.

The sources for this craze for the doll are complex. No doubt the example of Ichaikovsky’s Nutcracker had something to do with it, but

the marionette was generally very much in vogue at this time, both

in the theatrical practice of the cabaret and also in Gordon Craig’s idea of the “super-marionette.”* Carnicke points to the irony inherent in Meyerhold and Craig’s interest in commedia, since they were both

notoriously authoritarian directors who manipulated their actors rather than giving them their creative freedom, and she writes: “[Evreinov’s] ‘super clown’ uses improvisation to its fullest in order to assert his independence as a creator ... [Gordon Craig’s] ‘Uber-

marionette’ was conceived as a control mechanism for the actor's independence.”” To this one might add that Evreinov, though apparently “libertarian,” was just as despotic in his imposition of a text on

his actors. There is no scope for improvisation in A Merry Death either. Harlequin’s “freedom” in the play is a sham. Whether we see this as the ultimate irony or a defect in the logic of the play depends on our point of view.

THE VENETIAN MADCAPS A final, crucial figure in the history of the commedia dell’arte in pre-

Revolutionary St Petersburg was Mikhail Kuzmin (1875-1936). Kuzmin, in addition to being an important poet and prose writer of the period, was active as a composer, writing the incidental music for Meyerhold’s Balaganchik (1906), Tairov’s production of Los Intereses

creados (1912), Meyerhold’s production of Maskarad (music later dropped in favour of Glazunov’s), and other notable productions of

the period. In addition, he wrote light, ephemeral pieces, often inspired by pantomime, for the St Petersburg cabaret Brodiachaia sobaka (Stray Dog) and other private theatres.!° However, his most substantial and important play in the commedia genre was The Venetian Madcaps (Venetsianskie bezumtsy, 1912), an extract from which forms the epigraph to this chapter. An evocation of eighteen-century Venice, the play is in the precious, decorative style of the World of

Art paintings of such artists as Somov and Benois. At its centre is an imbroglio involving a Venetian nobleman, Count Stello, and mem-

bers of a commedia dell’arte troupe in a homosexual love-triangle. Finette, Harlequin’s mistress, has set herself the challenge of making

157 Pierrot or Petrushka?

Stello fall in love with her. In fact, it is Stello’sS lover Narcisetto who becomes infatuated with her. Stello arranges that he and Narcisetto disguise themselves as Finette and Harlequin respectively and act in

the play which the troupe is about to stage, “so that no one will be able to tell who are the real Harlequin and Columbine and who their doubles.”*" Stello is murdered by Narcisetto before the performance can begin, and Harlequin announces that the troupe cannot perform and must leave immediately. The play ends with a song from Finette/ Columbine which elaborates on the theme of the play, that we are all actors and playthings in the hands of fate. “In life we all play parts, some well, some ill, / But in the giddy whirl of change and chance /

We serve another's will." The Venetian Madcaps is atypical in that there is no true Pierrot figure: the count is certainly a dupe and a victim, but he is not the focus of the anguish in the same way as Blok’s Pierrot is, and it is not he who is in love with Columbine/ Finette. Indeed, the homosexual love-triangle in the play is, as Naomi

Ritter has pointed out, unique in commedia literature.’ Moreover, there is no true play-within-the-play in the piece, and the theme is rather the interplay of illusion and reality in love, not the selfreflective issues of theatrical experience that we have come to associate with the Russian commedias, beginning with Balaganchik. The carnivalesque atmosphere, the “far-enchanted land” of Venice, is, of course, a transposition of that “Venice of the North” St Petersburg,

and the intrigue, one suspects, had a real-life referent in the biography of the homosexual Kuzmin, so that the piece can be seen as a sort of autobiographical masque, a piece of biographie romancée.'™

DOLLS AND HARLEQUINS The play-texts, ballets, and poems incorporating the harlequinade that Russians wrote in the period before the Revolution were offshoots of the myth of Pierrot found in nineteenth-century French poetry. The childhood experiences of this generation of Russians with

the balagan versions of the harlequinade and the Petrushka puppet shows gave their readings of these texts a special resonance and coloured their readings of them. As an image, Pierrot tended to be a projection of the poet himself into the text, and the world that is invoked is an oneiric, doll-like one, that of childhood mystery and enchantment, but also one fraught with potential nightmares and horror. Pierrot is an orphan figure with neither father nor mother, a victim of life and the cruelties of his controller or his rival, Harlequin. As such he “rhymed” with the theme of “fatherlessness” or orphan-

hood that pervaded the literature of the period. That he is forsaken

158 Pierrot in Petrograd

by Columbine for the black-faced doll is further confirmation of his passivity, his haplessness, and his sexual inadequacy. Stylistically, the Russian harlequinades can be related to the international artistic fashions of art nouveau or Kleinkunst. As those styles were super-

seded by the stridency of the post-impressionist movements of expressionism and cubism, the harlequinade, too, was shouldered aside by more substantial texts that developed out of the commedia tradition in quite a different way. These will form the subject of the following chapter.

CHAPTER SIX

Russian Pirandellos: The Balagan as a Dramatic Genre

Oh darling, darling, what a horrid comedy you've got to play! What a wretched part they've found for you! A garden ... a fountain ... look ... just suppose, kiddie, it's here. Where, you say? Why, right here in the middle. It’s all pretence, you know. That's the trouble, my pet: it’s all make-believe here. It's better to imagine it though, because if they fix it up for you, it'll only be painted cardboard for the rockery, the water, the plants ... . Ah, but I think a baby like this one would sooner have a make-believe fountain than a real one, so she could play with it."

The evolution of the balagan as a theatrical genre on the Russian stage inevitably led to the development of the balagan as a dramatic genre in Russian literature. At first, Blok’s Balaganchik stood alone as the exemplar and precursor of this genre. However, by the beginning of the Soviet period playwrights began to respond to the new situation in theatre, writing plays that were as revolutionary in theatrical terms as the world had become politically. A rough dividing line between the “old” and “new” generations can be drawn in Russia around the

revolution of 1917. After 1917 the situation changed drastically in Russian theatre. The entire life of a people, it seemed, was being lived out in theatre; everywhere groups of amateurs were involved in theatre productions under the most difficult of circumstances (almost as if their life depended on it). Theatre ceases to dominate the cultural scene in the Soviet Russia after the beginning of the NEP in 1921, but lives on as one element in a complex situation until the early 1930s. This period was to be the golden age of the balagan as a dramatic genre. In early examples of commedia-revival plays, the problem of com-

media in the play had been resolved simply: the playwright integrated the commedia characters “realistically” by showing them as itinerant actors (who frequently acted a play-within-a play, Hamiletstyle) — the solution of Leoncavallo, Lothar, Benavente, or Razumov-

skii. The function of the commedia dell’arte masks in these plays

160 Pierrot in Petrograd

was largely to provide colour and dramatic interest. The montage of styles created when commedia elements were integrated with realistic ones as a play-within-the-play, or when the theatrical illusion was eroded by the theatre-in-the-theatre, resulted in its initial stage simply from the search for more colour and exotic effects. The plays still retained a dominant, bracketing, realistic illusion that contained the play-within-the-play, the latter being simply a realistically and psychologically motivated piece of business.

In a second stage the commedia became a symbolist fantasy, stripped of any realistic frame — the solution of Blok’s Balaganchik or

Evreinov’s A Merry Death, which were both in the Pierrot tradition of nineteenth-century France. Theatre-within-the theatre comes to play a growing role: the intervention of the director and the author in Balaganchik, for example. Play-within-the-play and theatre-withinthe-theatre are clearly related, the second growing out of the first, but the second is much more reflective on the nature of theatre itself, which becomes elevated to a central theme. Moreover, the desideratum of a realistic frame is abandoned (Balaganchik deliberately satirizes realism). With the post-Revolution generation of playwrights, the conflict

between depicted worlds sharpened, and the very discontinuities between them became a central theme, none of them having primacy over the others. The plays that I have assigned to the balagan genre

are all highly theatrical - a manifestation of what Evreinov called teatr kak takovoi (the theatre as such) — and therefore represent a complete break with the realist poetic of Russian drama. To be sure, they have affinities with symbolist theatre and with the preRevolutionary commedia plays that we examined in the previous chapter, but they are recognizable as a distinct genre. They can be related closely to those by Alfred Jarry, Witkacy, Bertolt Brecht, or Luigi Pirandello. They are deeply integrated in the debate on the nature of the theatrical spectacle, as well as representing in theatrical terms, contemporary philosophical trends towards subjectivism and

relativism. The balagan is theatre about theatre, theatre that selfconsciously or parodistically draws attention to its conventions and plays with them. In order to belong to the balagan genre, a play does not necessarily need to contain traditional commedia dell’arte, with its masks, its costumes, its stylized plots. However, (as in the case of Pirandello or Brecht) it is fair to say that the Italian tradition played a considerable direct or indirect role in the evolution of the balagan as a dramatic genre, as a substratum, a readily recognizable idiom or model to be quoted here and there. The playwrights in question were very influenced by the productions of the 1910s and 19205,

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some of which I have discussed in the preceding chapters, when Russian avant-garde directors, especially Meyerhold, Tairov, and Evreinov, were experimenting with commedia dell’arte. The plays to be discussed here all represent, in different ways, the desire to break with the traditions of psychological realism in theatre; specifically, they are hostile to Stanislavskii's Moscow Arts Theatre and its productions of Chekhov and Gor‘kii. They share very consid-

erable common features, which it is important to enumerate (although some of these can be seen as different aspects of the same thing). First, the plays all exhibit elements of metatheatre.? This is

evident in the structure of the character and in the employment of such metatheatrical devices as the play-within-the-play and the stepping out of role. In this context, the problem of audience is frequently a central one and must be reviewed carefully. Second, the accepted

features of a realistic perspective are disrupted, for example, the space-time continuum of the imagined world of the play. Generally, this world is marked in the balagan by non sequiturs and discontinuities. Incoherence and dissonance are elevated to structural principles. The world depicted is illogical, grotesque, a deformed version of life; it is the world adumbrated in Gogol’s famous epigraph to The Government Inspector, “Don’t blame the mirror if your snout is crooked {Ne peniai na zerkalo koli rozha kriva]” — except that here the mirror

itself is crooked (i.e., a distorting mirror), as we are reminded by the name of the cabaret theatre that was a hotbed of commedia/balagan in Russia, the Crooked Mirror (Krivoe zerkalo). Perspective in the balagan as a dramaturgical genre is characterized by its instability, with frequent shifts from an external perspective to an internal one, from representation to presentation. Third, the theatrical sign itself breaks down in the balagan, becoming ambivalent and unstable. This breakdown of the coherence of the theatrical sign can be compared to the decay of the linguistic sign noted by Shklovskii (in his essay “Voskreshenie slova,” 1913). Fourth, the conventions of theatre are foregrounded and held up to scrutiny and ridicule. In this sense, the plays in question give substance to the uslovnyi theatre proclaimed

by Meyerhold: that is to say, they are really anti-theatre. As such, they owe much to Tolstoi’s critique of theatrical convention, which, paradoxically, served as the ideological basis for both Stanislavskii’s experiments and their antithesis, the balagan. The balagan as a dramatic genre is the response of Russian drama-

tists to the needs of Russian theatre directors for texts that would realize the theatre as balagan. The balagan plays blend in with, and in a theatrical sense have no greater validity than, such adapted foreign texts as Meyerhold’s Magnanimous Cuckold, Vakhtangov’s

162 Pierrot in Petrograd Turandot, and Tairov’s Princess Brambilla. Russian dramatists were able

to add a content that was Russian, with typical concerns and themes related to such questions as the Revolution, the social and economic problems of Soviet Russia in the 1920s, and so on. The purpose of the balagan is diverse; if at times it seems to be purely satirical, at others it can be seen to be conveying an important message, even a philosophy. Mostly, it is as subversive socially and politically as it is aesthetically, achieving its objectives through irony and ambiguity. Ultimately, this subversiveness was to prove its downfall, as a new age and a new audience demanded a return to the naively realistic, the unironic, the unambiguous.

This is one period in theatre history when we find the dramatist following, driven by the evolution of events in the theatre. ‘Theatrical

practice and experimentation reacted creatively with “literature” to create a new vitality — authors responding, that is to say, to the challenges posed by directors and by the new artistic realities they had created. It is important that these plays (unlike symbolist drama, which was weighted far too heavily towards the author and literature a la Maeterlinck) were almost all staged successfully — or could have been if political circumstances had permitted. Their vitality and inno-

vativeness were more than skin-deep, and they represent a golden age in Russian dramaturgy, one that is only now being discovered by a new generation of Russian directors and theatre specialists.

CHEKHOV AND METATHEATRE In his book on metatheatre, Lionel Abel suggests that with Hamlet begins a new type of self-conscious theatre, and he examines a whole range of plays in this context. Of them he says: Some of them can, of course, be classified as instances of the play-withinthe-play, but this term ... suggests only a device, and not a definite form. Moreover, I wish to designate a whole range of plays, some of which do not employ the play-within-the-play, even as a device. Yet the plays I am pointing at do have a common character: all of them are theatre pieces about life seen

as already theatricalized. By this I mean that the persons appearing on the stage in these plays are there ... because they themselves knew they were dramatic before the playwright took note of them ... unlike figures in tragedy, they are aware of their own theatricality. Now, from a certain modern point of view, only that life which has acknowledged its inherent theatricality can be made interesting on the stage. From the same modern view, events, when

interesting, will have the quality of having been thought, rather than of

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having simply occurred. But then the playwright has the obligation to acknowledge in the very structure of his play that it was his imagination which controlled the event from beginning to end.

Abel's observation about theatre is very important for our purposes.

Among other things, it suggests that metatheatre does not simply imply the presence of the play-within-the-play or theatre-within-thetheatre device — although the presence of those devices can be very significant — but that it is inherent in the structure of the characters,

or rather, in the presence of a gap between the character and the role. This division, or gap, in the sign designated as “character” is essential to all metaplay, and is of the essence of balagan, where it is one of a series of such gaps in all the signs — plot, decoration, text, word — in short, a general fissure between presentation and representation.

CHEKHOV AND BALAGAN In Russian drama, metatheatre can be traced first in Chekhov. Indeed,

it can be argued that the plays of Chekhov mark the passage to modern drama in Russia, however his contemporaries and the writers of the generation immediately after him may have seen them. Recent

critics have asserted that in Chekhov's plays there is an inherent tension between the emploi,* that is to say the stock roles that Chekhov’s main characters perform, and their inner life, their perezhivanie (emotions). For Herta Schmid, there is a difference between the major

and the minor characters in this regard, the main characters being split between these theatrical roles and their internal life, while the minor characters are all role — the difference, say, between Vania and Waffles in Uncle Vania.

Chekhov constructs dramatic characters who are too weak to fulfill their own claim of becoming autonomous individuals. These psychologically constructed characters are mirrored in the non-psychological minor characters in an openly ironical way, the ultimate intentional object of this irony being not the fictional dramatic characters, but the non-fictional counterparts which they represent, namely the neurasthenic intellectuals of Chekhov's time. The

mirror relation between main and secondary characters creates a distance from where the spectators look upon the main characters and laugh at them. At the same time, the scheme of standard roles which, since it is necessary for the representation of the main characters, overshadows the psychological,

individualizing manner of acting, demands that the actors create an inner

164 Pierrot in Petrograd distance to their roles. This enables them to make clear for the spectator that the characters they are going to represent, voluntarily or involuntarily, fall back into traditional theatrical patterns.°

It seems to me that this splintering of the structure of the theatrical sign we call “character” is here equivalent to the metatheatre of Abel. Each of Chekhov's main characters is, as it were, a role from a comedy behind which a real person is lurking. It is the fate of us all, Chekhov

seems to be saying, to enact the squalid roles of an old comedy, however genuine may be the emotions that rule us. Moreover, it seems clear that here is the model for the commediaderived metatheatre of the balagan. It has frequently been shown that

the texts of Chekhov's plays are an example of people talking at cross-purposes, their “conversations” being composed of non sequi-

turs and discontinuities. Pogrebnichkos recent production of The Seagull as balagan at the Youth Theatre of Krasnaia Presnia (Moscow,

1990) indeed showed all the ruptures and discontinuities in Chekhov’s text, and demonstrated that this is a viable reading for a Chekhov play. If we take Abel's observation as correct, namely, that characters in metadrama are their own dramatists, then we can say

that each character is acting a role in a different play. When this process is driven to an extreme, the very coherence of plot breaks down and the events that occur in the plays relate in only very oblique ways to the inner processes of the characters.

PIRANDELLO AND THE PROBLEM OF ““AUTHOR-ITY” On the thematic level, the effect of the introduction of commedia into the dramatic illusion was to call into question the illusion itself, and to make the illusion the subject of the drama. The best-known examples of plays of this type are Luigi Pirandello’ “trilogy”: Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Each in His Own Way (1924), and Tonight

We Improvise (1929); each of these is a play about play, in which the

theatre itself is the topic and the hero.® Before looking at Russian plays that integrate elements of Pirandellian metatheatre, I shall examine some of the issues raised in the works of Pirandello himself, and also the problem of modernist metatheatre as a whole. Theatre, as it evolved in the western European tradition, had been

characterized by a shifting locus of “author-ity,”” the actor, the director, the playwright, and even the audience all becoming dominant at different periods in the history of theatre. That is to say, each had, in turn, been the author of the spectacle. Of course, it is possible

165 Russian Pirandellos

to imagine other centres of author-ity as well - the audience, the set designer, and so on — but these are the four main ones. Philosophically, the conflict of realities — the reality of the audience, the reality of the actors, the reality of the playwright, the reality of the characters — can be seen as the expression of the modernist world in which all

is subjective, all is relative, and in which there is no commonly agreed-upon reality, which is to say no over-arching author-ity. Each,

locked in his/her own subjectivity, eschews the responsibility that author-ity would imply.

The question of author-ity is central to Pirandellian theatre in general and to the play Six Characters in particular, where the characters appear as fatherless orphans. THE FATHER. We act that rdle for which we have been cast, that r6le which we are given in life ...

THE MANAGER. Well, well, that will do. But you see, without an author ... I could give you the address of an author if you like ... THE FATHER. No, no. Look here! You must be the author. THE MANAGER. I? What are you talking about? THE FATHER. Yes, you, you Why not? THE MANAGER. Because I have never been an author: that's why.*

We are reminded that traditionally the father was the locus of author-

ity, just as authorship is fatherhood in a metaphorical sense.’ The Manager is reluctantly persuaded to assume the mantle of author-ity and become the progenitor of the characters — bring them to life.

It is ironical that this dialogue should take place between the reluctant author of the characters and the Father, who is their biological progenitor. What is more intriguing is the stance of Pirandello,

who, as it were, denies his own authorship — and author-ity — becoming one more character in the fiction, the writer of the text that the actors have gathered to rehearse, and a figure criticized by the Manager. The Manager's reluctance to assume the mantle of author-ity thus parallels the withdrawal of Pirandello himself. We can

see the seeds of Pirandello’s philosophical dilemma in Chekhov, whose characters are locked in their own self-centred and mutually exclusive worlds. However, Chekhov preserves the contract between author and audience concerning the credibility of the theatrical illu-

sion in which his characters are entrapped; that is to say, he does not deny his own author-ity. To this extent, his work contains a philosophical contradiction, for what coherent author-ity can there be over author, actors, and audience, given his world-view of the subjectivity of all humanity and the impossibility of communication?

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Pirandellian theatre, seen in this light, can be considered as the application of the logic of Chekhov’ world to the theatrical event itself.!° In this modernist theatre, communication has broken down, not only, or not primarily, among the characters, but between characters, actors, director, and audience. The result is a chaos of com-

peting realities in which all are at cross-purposes, and the plot culmination (e.g., the shot at the end of Six Characters), although anticipated, happens ironically, in a totally unexpected way. The six characters are orphans in a world without a father (an image pretigured in Vershinin’s description of his daughters during the fire, or indeed in the plight of the three sisters themselves). They exist in a state characterized by Lukacs as “transcendental shelterlessness.”" Thus Pirandello as “author,” that is, playwright, ostensibly denies his own author-ity, reducing it to a level no higher than that of any other subject involved in the spectacle. (This is especially clear in cases

where he is actually referred to in his own play, tor example, in Six Characters.) 1 say “ostensibly” denies because it is a curious fact that Pirandello, while writing plays that portray an authorless chaos, in fact exerted extremely tight control over every element of the theatrical production.’ His portrayal of an authorless world is in fact disingen-

uous: he is a highly controlling authority figure who denies his own existence. It is this trick, the trompe-l’oeil, that is the paradox of so much modernist art. Having posited the death of God, the modernist author in fact becomes the God whose existence he continues to deny. Were he not to do so, his own authorship would be impossible. A further premiss can be seen to be operative in Luigi Pirandello’s dramas — and in a number of the works that I am going to discuss

in this chapter — namely the notion that all life is play, that our personalities (and hence the personalities of the characters in plays), far from coherent wholes, are themselves a series of different masks,

or social roles and performances, superimposed one on top of the other. As Father puts it in 5ix Characters in Search of an Author: “For

the drama hes all in this — in the conscience that I have, that each one of us has. We believe this conscience to be a singular thing, but it is many-sided. There is one for this person and another for that. Diverse consciences. So we have this illusion of being one person for

all, of having a personality that is unique in all our acts. But it isn't true.”!> Hence, in the Pirandellian world there is no unity, not only in the world itself, but also in the human personality. This lack of unity is in its turn the symptom of the lack of author-ity, of the lack of an author, whom the characters in vain seek and who would give them coherence. The cruelty of Pirandello’s theatre is the cruelty of a world in which paternity has been withheld.

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Pirandello’s drama raises another major issue that we find also in

the metatheatrical plays of late Russian modernism: the contrast between a theatrical reality that is marked as “real” (although it is, of course, conventional) and that which is marked as “conventional” (uslounyi). Sypher points out that the “real” characters in Six Characters function like the real materials in a Picasso collage, and he sees in this conflict of the real and the conventional the essence of Pirandello: “the six displaced characters who blundered into the commercial theatre from reality ... are like the things Picasso ‘assassinated’ in the interest of total representation.”’* However, Sypher forgets that in drama even that which is tagged as “real” is in fact conventional,

a sign standing for the real, which is always, by definition, absent from the stage, since the six characters, for example, are represented by actors, not by “themselves.” The conventionality of the “real” in the theatre is tacitly recognized in Sypher’s essay by the quotation

marks, so that the “real” is a constantly receding illusion, like the horizon. The montaging of worlds always implies another world beyond that designated “real,” like the reflections in two mirrors facing each other, which curve off into eternity.

SPECULARITY AND THE PROBLEM OF AUDIENCE The reference to Gogol’s epigraph in the name of the Crooked Mirror cabaret hints at an important aspect of theatre: theatre as mirror. This

should not be read as the realistic analogy of Flaubert’s mirror as a reflection of “reality”; in both cases the image reflected in the mirror is that of the spectator. In Gogol’s formula, it is the viewer's mug that is ugly; potentially, at least, the epigraph seems to lay claim to its own objectivity. In the description of the cabaret, the reflecting mirror itself is the distorter, disclaiming any realism, or perhaps disclaiming the possibility (and certainly the desirability) of realism. Both metaphors, however, offer the image of spectacle as speculum. That is to say, when we go to the theatre, we are offered a reflection of ourselves, or rather, we are invited to compare the image onstage with our own, which we project onto it. Essentially, the “original sin” in the theatre is the division of those who assist at the spectacle into actors and spectators. The dividing line between the two torments directors, actors, and playwrights alike. Whether it is seen as the fourth wall or as the surface of a mirror, the division between the two is the iron law of theatre, one that no end of experiments at audience involvement, theatre in the round, and so on, can solve. As we have seen in the discussion of

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the theoretical problems associated with the theatre (in chapter two above), the locus of authority can be located either side of the line

or, indeed, it can traverse back and forth. When it does so, the presence of the line is foregrounded, and an unspoken convention is made into the theme of the spectacle itself. The problem becomes more complex in metatheatre, for there we find the action offered, not to the real spectator, but to a fictional audience, which may be composed of actors or may be a theoretical construct off-centre to the real audience. The audience in the theatre may not, in other words, be that audience towards which the action of the play is directed. The Soviet structuralists Uspenskii and Florenskii have drawn attention to this phenomenon and see it as a defect of the play-within-the-play structure. “During the theatrical performance of Hamlet, we encounter insurmountable difficulties: the viewer in the theatre inevitably sees the play within the play from his own point of view, and not from the point of view of the characters of the tragedy; he sees it with /its own eyes, and not, for example, with the

eyes of Claudius.” Seen from the perspective of realism, with its assumption of stable subject/object structures, this is indeed a problem. However, this oscillation between the subject onstage and the spectator subject is precisely the point of the cubist theatre of the balagan. A similar effect obtains in a number of Renaissance paintings, especially Las Meninas, in which the painter shows a painter painting

two subjects who are reflected in a mirror behind him and who are the fictional viewers of the scene.’® It is precisely the oscillation between the fictional subjects in the mirror and the spectator viewing the painting that is the theme of the painting. The intention is to foreground and make strange the procedure of representation itself — that very basis of realism which must not be questioned. The spectator may be as much voyeur in a balagan as in Stanislavskii’s theatre, excluded from the transaction between actor and “spectator” and only

at brief moments reminded of his/her illegitimate presence, for example, as the spectator in a play in which actors are planted in the audience. Far from increasing spectator involvement, this approach

tends to alienate the spectator further from the spectacle, since it brings the invisible line right into the audience, separating him/her from the actor-spectator in the seat next to him.

NIKOLAI EVREINOV There are numerous parallels between Evreinov and Pirandello: they both wrote extensively on the theory as well as the practice of theatre; they both were extremely interested in metatheatre; they both

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flourished at approximately the same time. Moreover, Evreinov, who emigrated from Soviet Russia in 1925, managed to have at least one of his plays staged in Italy at the instigation of Pirandello himself (as

well as in New York), and his work was generally well known in Western countries in the 1920s. However, the fact of his emigration led to a vast difference between Evreinov and Pirandello: whereas the latter is celebrated in his native Italy, Evreinov became a nonperson in Russia, beginning in the 1930s, and is still only mentioned in passing, not as a subject of study in his own right. If Pirandello’s theatre centred around the battle between life and art, between reality and form, Evreinov was for art over life, for form over reality. The high subjectivity of his philosophy was clear already in the notion of monodrama, discussed above (chapter two); thus he

wrote, “All our sensual activity is subordinated to the process of projection of purely subjective transformations onto the external object.” In his essays published in the characteristically named collection Teatr kak takovoi (The Theatre as Such),!* Evreinov develops his

subjective philosophy into the notion of the “theatricalization of life.”

He believes that man has a very special instinct: “the instinct of transformation, the instinct to oppose the images coming from the outside with images arbitrarily created by man, the instinct to transform the appearances of Nature, an instinct that quite clearly reveals its essence in the concept of ‘theatricality’”? It is in theatrical play that man realizes himself, according to Evreinov. Theatre is an inde-

pendent mode of existence. “The time has come to give back to theatre its true meaning. The theatre should not be a shrine or a school, a mirror, a tribune or a lectern, but simply the theatre ... Yes! The theatre must be above all the theatre, i.e., a self-sufficient artistic entity, the aesthetic essence of which lies in the synthesis of all the arts, but without diminishing the independent value of the stage — that alpha and omega of true theatrical art.”* Theatricality, then, is a special value that may express itself not only in art, but also in human behaviour. “By the term ‘theatricality’ I mean an aesthetic phenom-

enon of a clearly tendentious character such as even far from the walls of the theatre evokes with one delightful gesture, with one finely pronounced word, the stage and settings and lightly, joyfully, and surely frees us from the fetters of reality.”) It is this application of the theatrical principle, the playing of masks, in everyday life that forms the subject of Evreinov’s mature plays. Evreinov's innovative ideas appear already in a number of the plays he wrote before the revolution. The Foundation of Happiness (Fundament

schast ia, written in 1902), which takes place in an undertaker’s shop, is a moral fable with very strong links to Pushkin’s short story “The

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Coffin-Maker” (“Grobovshchik”) and some resemblance to Dickens's A Christmas Carol. In it a miserly old undertaker, Chernukhin, refuses

to countenance the marriage of his daughter to an impoverished young medical assistant. In the last act we witness a nightmare that he has after drinking too much vodka (partly because his daughter

has spiked his beer with it). In a scene parallel to, and doubtless inspired by, Adrian Prokhorov’s nightmare in Pushkin’s story, Cher-

nukhin is visited by a Lady in Black (a transformation of a client with whom he had been uncompromising in the matter of a down payment). The visitor turns out to be Death herself. The scene is a highly successful transposition to the stage of the notion of individual point of view, the equivalent in dramatic terms of a shift from first-

person to third-person narrative. Chernukhin’s awakening has the same impact as Prokhorov’s, as the circumstances switch abruptly from the subjective and distorted world of the nightmare to “reality,” certain aspects of which — for example, the fact that his daughter has just made love to her beau for the first time — he is blissfully unaware.

The irony of the play turns on this presentation of the subjective point of view of this man who defends, throughout the play, the most materialistic positions (and tries to get his would-be son-in-law to read a book of philosophy, presumably materialist-positivist in its content). Thus the scenic effects echo the philosophical content: his dream forms a contrast in acting styles and offers a fantastic world

(marked by a tulle curtain, through which the scene is perceived) that is sharply marked off from the “real” world of the rest of the play in what amounts to a play-within-the-play. The philosophical and psychological content (for the scene represents all the fears that the undertaker has repressed) behind the metadramatic form is typical of Evreinov’s work.” The Beautiful Despot (Krastvyi despot, written in 1905) is subtitled,

metadramatically, “the last act of a drama.” In it a progressive intellectual has given up journalism and the propagation of socialist ideas in order to live the life of his great-grandfather of a hundred years ago, an autocratic country squire. He is surrounded by several others who have renounced the platitudes and vulgarity of contemporary lite in a like protest and who act out “supporting roles”: mistress, serving-wench, valet, even fool. The squire’s mistress recounts the “folk-tale” of an educated, enlightened man with socially acceptable ideas who lives in the same body with a despotic savage. One day the latter, in a rage, kills the former and becomes dominant. A similar

conversion had overtaken the serving-wench, formerly a leading feminist who had really wanted to be dominated and abused by men. This justification of the return to the unenlightened past is not

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Nietzschean — the squire pointedly says he sees no prospect of a superman anywhere in the future — but is rather based on aesthetics. Contemporary culture is ugly and only destroys beauty. “Venal love,

self-interested crimes, extravagant yankee millionaires, dreams of winning big, picturesque ragamuffins — everything that gives interest

and colour to our lives — everything will fall to dust, everything,

everything.” Rooted in despair at the greyness of the modern emphasis on equality and uniformity, the squire’s philosophy, which embraces even war — “that beautiful catastrophe” — adumbrates that of the futurists and Scythians. His romantic return to the past (with

its emphasis on the triumph of the strong over the weak and the rejection of equality and progress) adumbrates fascism. Visually, it creates the impression of a painting by Benois or Somov of the World of Art group, recreating eighteenth-century preciosity and extravagance: the little microcosm that the squire has created around himself even includes such baubles as a monkey and a blackamoor (arapchonok) to go with the fool.

The metadrama in the play is created through the incursion into the eighteenth-century microcosm of a friend of the squire. His references to the railway meet with “incomprehension” from the serving-wench, which is not surprising, since the squire is the absolute despot in this little world and has ordered that the members of his household continue to act as if they are in 1808. What is more important is the squire’s own “genuine” emotion at events occurring in 1808, that is, in the life of his great-grandfather that he is living (thanks to a diary which has survived). “The meeting between the

Emperor Alexander and Napoleon happened recently. Can you believe it, our hands even trembled when Manichka and I learned about it."** Ultimately, in Evreinov’s art, there is no “reality” that has primacy over any other. The squire and his entourage, although they are in one sense play-acting, are, in another sense, no less living this

life than they were their preceding, modern one. For Evreinov, life is acting and acting is life. For him, metatheatre is a serious philosophical system. Theatre creates a utopia that permits one to evade reality into a more desirable world; at the same time, it relies on the absolute despotism of the creator of the utopia — in this case, the squire — since utopia requires absolute (and impossible) unity, the imposition of a single perspective on all its inhabitants. One cannot help seeing in the squire a case of psychosis; the “fairy-tale” related by the squire’s mistress of one body inhabited by two men is one manifestation of his schizophrenia. Having thrown out his contemporary, progressive, socialist half in favour of his regressive, animal self (i.e., in search of an impossible unity), the squire has decided

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to (re)live the life of his forebear, a decision that results in a new character split, as illustrated by the dizzying shift of deixis in the following exchange:

SQUIRE. Read what I was approximately busy with today. SQUIRE'S FRIEND. “Hunted this morning with middling success, whereof the

cause was my mighty sad rumination anent the health of Anna Sergeevnal!” ...

SQUIRE. That’s his auntie.*° Of course, the squire cannot truly repeat every detail of his forebear's life; he would then cease to exist (this is the meaning of the adverb “approximately” in the above exchange). In particular, he has to read the “script” — his forebear's diary — in order to know what to do, an activity that immediately makes him different from the character he is enacting. Evreinov’s play is thus a reductio ad absurdum of the Stanislavskian notion of perezhivanie (experiencing a role); one

cannot be two people at once. Rage that this should be so fills the squire. “How often do I stand in front of this very portrait [of his forebear] and grind my teeth from jealousy.’** Already in this play we confront the main problem with Evreinov’s work (and, arguably, with all modernism): in its uncompromising subjectivism, it under-

cuts its own claim to authority. If there is no authority, no reality outside the subjectivity of play-acting, then Evreinov’s view is subjective, like all others — or at best the arbitrary authority of a beautiful

despot. His stance is ultimately ironical, undercutting his own authority at the same time that he wilfully asserts it. If Evreinov’s early plays (published in the first volume of his collected plays) had been “literary-theatrical,” then, as he points out in the introduction, the second volume registers a shift to “theatricoliterary” works. In this way Evreinov marks the shift in the centre of gravity and focus of his work as he becomes more implicated as an actor and director, as well as an author. This theatricality is reflected in the play The Three Magi (Tri volkhva), in which most of the action

is taken up with the anticipation and reactions of the medieval onstage “audience” up to and during the enactment of a medieval mystery play during the black death. Essentially, this has the effect of establishing the point of view firmly with the common folk who have gathered to witness the spectacle. They, enraged at the cruelty of Herod’s decision to kill the innocents, break up the end of the play as they rush towards the church into which the actors playing Herod's soldiers have disappeared. The play, although slight, is recognizably Evreinov’s in its mingling of life and spectacle. In a passing reference

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to the strict punishment meted out to actors who miss as much as a line from the play, we can see another of Evreinov’s concerns, namely his disdain for the reverential treatment of the play as literature. (The fact that the mystery being enacted is in Latin emphasizes its remoteness from the common folk.)?’

The best play in the second volume is one that has apparently never been staged. A farce [predstavlente ekstsentrikov] in three scenes, Unfailing Infidelity (Neizmennaia izmena)** is pure theatre, a play that

plays — with the language (through puns and double entendres), with logic, with the notions of character, decoration, props. The play is “opened” by a very sexy “female intermediary between the author and the audience” dressed in leotards and a Harlequin corsage, who at one point fires a pistol into the spectators as a warning that they should appreciate the play. Inasmuch as it has a plot, the play relates the marriage of the four sons of the director of a school to an exotic billionairess. The four sons, who appear as a cavalry officer, a hunter, a postman, and a shepherd, are “examined” as to their maturity, and hence ability to get married, by the six professors in the school.

In the second scene Regina, the rich bride, prepares to meet her grooms in a tropical setting; a sorceress is preparing a love potion out of bananas, the better to cement the marriage. To the bride's dismay, a stool that she has bought turns out to be a young mulatto. (Later we discover that he is the missing fifth son of the director, the result of an infidelity.) The third scene is dominated by the marriage bed for five. The jealous husbands suspect the teachers of having an

affair with their bride; the teachers take refuge under the bed. In their rage the husbands then decide to destroy the bride's property, beginning with the stool, who manages to hide, Little do they realize

that it is with the “stool” that their beloved Regina has been unfaithful. At the end all is well, as the actors take to the stage in a general carnival. Unfailing Infidelity is a piece of decadent farce, a grotesque in which all seriousness has been banished, except for the sexy lady’s prologue,

in which we learn that “this play was written for the sated, for all those who are fed up to the teeth with our squalid little life and the squalid little photographs of that squalid little life and all kinds of ‘ideas, ‘psychologies, ‘exposés’ and ‘parodies.”” In a sense, the play is programmatically “decadent,” to use the terminology of the time. It is a response to a theatre that has been invaded by the untheatrical, a return to the untranslatable language of theatre, a protest against the notion of any form of allegory, realism, or relationship between

theatre and the nontheatrical. The depiction of character indicates this, for the “characters” are simply bundles of grotesquely assorted

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attributes. Indeed, in the extreme case, one character, the young mulatto, is at the same time a property, the stool. His slipping back and forth from one to the other could be seen as a serious statement on the ambiguity of the sign in avant-garde theatre; or it could be seen as the exploitation by Evreinov of the unique possibilities of theatre, as happens in a variety of speeches, but best of all perhaps in the following: STOOL (getting up). This is a fine situation and no mistake. To think these are my brothers. If I reveal myself to them, they’ll turn me into a cripple; if I stay still, they’Il turn me into matchwood.”

Unfailing Infidelity is a splendid example of the balagan genre in Russian; it combines the grotesque, the absurd, with hyperbole and non sequitur to create a uniquely theatrical experience. Reminiscent of Jarry, it has unjustly been forgotten because of the subsequent career of its author, and because it eschews, deliberately, all political statements — unless we take their deliberate absence to be a kind of statement.

During his period as director of the Crooked Mirror, Evreinov wrote a number of highly original and resourceful farces that manage at the same time to be light pieces of entertainment, yet reflect his

views on theatre in a variety of ways.*! A central device in these farces is “recoding”: parodistic re-enacting the same material in a variety of ways to satirize different styles of directing or writing. Thus his farce The Inspector General: A Directorial Buffonade (Revizor: Rezhisserskaia buffonada) consists in the re-enactment of the opening

of Gogol’s play in a variety of different styles: those of traditional theatre, Stanislavskii, Max Reinhardt, Gordon Craig, and a “cinematic” version in the style of the Pathé company. The ironical juxtaposition of the different styles applied to the same scene required a sophisticated background from the audience and served to satirize the work of the different directors. The metatheatrical aspect of the production was emphasized by the use of a “public servant on special

assignment” (“chinovnik osobykh poruchenii’) to give an ironical introduction to each version. Essentially, the device is the familiar one of the prologue, a time-honoured feature of comedy, especially commedia. The theme of the piece is contemporary theatre, in which

the text is subordinated to the genius of the director. There is, as Golub points out,” more than a small amount of self-ironization here, since Evreinov’s theatre was precisely director-dominated, although he was an author as well.

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The satire directed against Stanislavskian naturalism was renewed in the play The Fourth Wall (Chetvertaia stena), in which we see a rehearsal of Gounod’s Faust in a theatre run on Stanislavskian lines.*

In the second half, as in the Gogol’ piece, a scene is presented, an interesting example of the metatheatrical use of the fragment or quotation. The targets for Evreinov are the attempts to create a theatre

without convention, in which the actor is supposed to become the character portrayed (in this case, Faust). One by one the conventions of theatre are stripped away through the logic of the artistic director's search for experience (perezhivanie) instead of representation (predstavlenie), so that at the end the opera has turned into a naturalistic play in medieval German with practically no music. The spectator

views the proceedings (or what he can see of them) through the windows in the wall of the house in which Faust is contemplating suicide. This is the famous “fourth wall)” which, since it too is a convention, has ceased to be invisible, a humorous suggestion of the

assistant director that the director takes seriously. The play ends when the actor playing Faust, apparently driven crazy, downs what is supposed to be a cup of real poison. In fact, the assistant director has substituted a flavored vodka (nastoika), which he himself has

been drinking with the property-man and the prompt during the rehearsal, so that the panic at the end is not motivated by a “real” event.** The action is further distanced by the fact that the assistant director, still slightly drunk, reads the last line from a crib-sheet in

his hand, thus suggesting that he — possibly in cahoots with the actor playing Faust — has usurped the role of director-author in order

to control the action himself and to make a pompous undertaking into a farce.* Evreinov’s best-known play is The Main Thing (Samoe glavnoe).*° The

title of this play is an expression that occurs several times in Evreinov’s writings, for example, in “An Introduction to Monodrama.” “I am close to Gordon Craig, when, outraged by the absence of scenic intelligence in contemporary authors, he declares: ‘we will get by without them if they don't give us the main thing [samogo glavnogo], namely the scenically beautiful’”*” The principal character’s name is Paraclete (Paraklet in Russian); derived from the Greek parakletos, this name signifies both “comforter” and “advocate,” and is more generally applied to the Holy Ghost.* Like the Holy Ghost, Paraclete appears in a number of guises, one of them being “Doctor Fregoli,” an apparent reference to Leopoldo Fregoli (1867-1936). About this Italian contemporary of Evreinov, we learn that “using scenarios of which he was the author, he performed throughout the world true

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comedies in miniature in which he sometimes went so far as to portray more than sixty different characters. His metamorphoses have become legendary.’“ Thus, in the very structure of the play, we encounter the central theme: the playing of multiple roles in order to comfort and advocate. The characters themselves can be divided into characters, roles,

and “audience,” the receivers, or dupes, of the roles, who take the play for the real thing. This intricate triple structure can be represented as follows: 1 Multi-role characters (“actors”)

Character Roles “in “Quo Vadis?”; **in boarding-house) Paraclete

fortune-teller Doctor Fregolhi

Karl Ivanovich Schmidt**

monk Harlequin Romantic lead (Svetozarov) Marcus Vinicius” detective (searching for the bigamist) insurance agent (Victor Antonovich)** Barefoot dancer Assyrian slavegirl* Aniuta™*

Comic (Semen Arkadevich Deriabin) Vitelius*

retired doctor*” 2 “Audience” (naive characters who do not change roles)

Mar‘ia Iakovlevna, boarding-house landlady; Lidiia Fedorovna,

typist (her daughter); Aglaia Karpovna, deportment mistress; Nikolai Savel‘evich, retired civil servant; Fedor Nikolaevich, law student (his son). Thus the metatheatrical function of actor/audience representation is built into the structure and thematic content of the play. Paraclete is the privileged character because he plays a role at all times, even with the actors whom he co-opts to carry out his experiment in the boarding-house. He is the organizing intelligence, the subject, the “author” of the events that take place. We are thus not surprised that he enforces a high degree of discipline (a discipline that is beyond the reach of the regisseur of the play-within-the-play “Quo vadis?”).

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His hegemony is a projection into the play of the controlling power of the author-director in the theatre. In the first act we see Paraclete as fortune-teller. This particular hypostasis is more important than it may appear, since the fortuneteller, by “foretelling” the future, in fact writes the scenario that the characters who visit her are going to enact. Those who come to see her are stricken by some misfortune: an old civil servant by the threatened suicide of his son and the barefoot dancer by the lack of interest of her husband. The fortune-teller functions thus as the comforter and advocate of those naive characters, a function equivalent to the “Robin Hood” role we have see in other plays by Evreinov,

for example, that of the assistant director in The Fourth Wall. Thus the fortune-teller collects money from the rich lady with the little dog to give to the poor. An important part of Paraclete’s function is to deceive: the audience receives hints that he is at the same the bigamist

who has married three women (including the lady with the dog, who comes to see him in the fortune-teller role) for their rich dowries

~ in order, presumably, to give them to the poor as well. It is this fact, which it is left to the audience to divine, that gives the opening scene its piquancy, as the fortune-teller receives, first the lady with the dog, then Svetozarov, the actor (“romantic lead”), who is at the same time a detective trying to find the bigamist (i.e., Paraclete) for the lady. Paraclete amuses himself at the detective’s expense, tearing

the latter’s false beard off; at the same time the bigamist has, according to Svetozarov, removed his own beard in order to escape detection. At the end of the act, the fortune-teller becomes trans-

formed into Fregoli and concludes a contract with the provincial theatre director. Only at the very end do we get a glimpse of the Paraclete underneath. DIRECTOR. Tell me frankly, are you really so convinced you have found the path to the salvation of the world? DOCTOR FREGOLI (his features seem transfigured, his eyes are turned up as if

inspired). Perhaps it was for this I came into the world, to give witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth will harken unto my voice. DIRECTOR (mockingly). But what is the truth? (He looks searchingly at Doctor Fregoli, like Pilate at Christ. After a pause during which Doctor Fregoli with loving condescension resists the intent stare of the theatre director, the latter exclaims: “Let's go!” with the intonation of a croupier at Monte Carlo who announces warningly: “Rien ne va plus.” They go out.)”

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Of course, the only evidence that we have that the character is Paraclete playing Fregoli and not vice versa is the listing of the characters in the program. In other words, we have to make a leap of faith: we too are offered the choice of being a disciple, a believer, or, like the director, Pontius Pilate. This theme of belief or scepticism, which is central to both religion and theatre (suspension of disbelief), plays a central role in the evolution of the play.*

The second act, which is reminiscent of the satirical metatheatre of the Crooked Mirror (and more remotely inspired by Tieck), represents a dress rehearsal of a play, “Quo vadis?” based on the novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, in the provincial theatre.“* The description of the set, costumes, and actors by Evreinov in the stage directions is a classic and very amusing exposure of the worn-out conventions of realist theatre worthy of Tolstoi. The “rehearsal” is frequently interrupted — by the prompter, by the extraneous comments of the actors, by the interventions of the regisseur, and so on. The choice of text for the play-within-the-play is by no means fortuitous: the court of Nero as it waits for the coming of Christianity is consciously paralleled with the actors as they wait for their saviour, Fregoli. It is when the actors finally “notice” the presence of “strangers” (i.e., the real audience) and address the audience with the request to clear the hall that Fregoli appears among them and climbs up onto the stage to invite the actors to sign on with him to play in the theatre of Life. He declares: “Since we are not able to give happiness to the deprived, then we must give them at least the illusion of happiness. That is the

main thing ... It is my sincere conviction that the world will be transformed by the actor and his magical illusion.”* The need for the unnatural, for illusion, is emphasized by Paraclete (Schmidt) in the

third act in a discussion with the deportment mistress, when she objects, in a very Tolstoian manner, “But the unnatural is based on a lie, on untruth,’”* to which Paraclete replies with a paraphrase of Eliot's view that “mankind cannot bear very much reality” — in other words, accepting defiantly the deportment mistress’s thesis that the unnatural is a lie. In the third act we see Paraclete’s ideas in practice; he and three of the actors have come to live in a boarding-house to improve the lives of the inmates by their intervention. They improvise their roles

according to their assigned scenarios: the barefoot dancer has to make the suicidal student fall in love with her and thus achieve a more positive view of life; the romantic lead has to do the same to the sickly typist, the daughter of the landlady; the comic has to cheer up the life of the retired civil servant, who misses his son Vladimir, and to court the deportment mistress; and Paraclete, as Schmidt, the

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American importer of gramophone records, enlivens the entire atmosphere. This playing out of Evreinov’s view of the need for untruth to ensure the happiness of mankind is a perversion of the idea of theatre. Whereas the spectator in the theatre willingly enters

into a contract to suspend his or her disbelief, the victim of the bigamist or the confidence trickster does not. There is something cruel and patronizing in Paraclete’s intervention in the lives of the denizens of the boarding-house. It is also a perversion of the Bible, for they do not seek out the comfort and advocacy of the Holy Ghost, but rather have it thrust upon them. While there may indeed be, as Evreinov believed, a theatrical element in all human activity, just as the formalists saw a pervasive poetic element in language, this does not mean that this theatrical activity is a lie. To believe so is to believe,

as Evreinov (like Tolstoi) seems to have done, in the spectator as victim. Indeed, the view defended by Paraclete/Schmidt of children whose “naturalness” and innocence is destroyed as they learn roles from their adults fits in closely with the Tolstoian views of education.*”

The fourth and final act operates a further transformation, both to the scene — for the boarding-house of the third act has been decorated for Shrove-tide with garlands and drawings of the balagan figures of

Pierrot pursued by devils, a tender scene between Harlequin and Columbine, the face of the Prince of the Carnival, a red heart beneath a black mask, and a picture of the commedia dell’arte Dottore — and

to the characters, among whom the barefoot dancer is dressed as Columbine and the comic as the Dottore. The prosaic theatre of the

boarding-house has thus been transformed into the bright, joyful world of the balagan, the Shrove-tide harlequinade. The costume for Aglaia Karpovna, as the “mortifying principle of life” is a death’s

head surmounting a long white shroud. The celebration of the last act coincides with the departure of the four actors from the boarding-

house. Among the startling revelations of this act is the news that Vladimir, the brother of Fedor, has been dead for over a year and that Fedor, believing that the news would kill his father, has been writing letters to him as if they came from Vladimir. The ironies are already painfully obvious, but Evreinov spells them out to us. “I’m acting, you understand, like an actor ... you want to say one thing,

but you say something else, you want to grieve your brother, but youre obliged to smile, to express hope.”* In this last act the theme of belief/faith (vera) reaches its dramatic climax when the comic, piqued because Paraclete stops him borrowing 5,o00 roubles from Aglaia Karpovna, tries to reveal the deception. Then we learn of the (unsuccessful) suicide of Aglaia Karpovna, who has been stricken by

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despair after overhearing the details of the deception. She has “believed” the comic, and thus been stricken with “disbelief” towards Paraclete.

In the mean time Paraclete/Schmidt has disappeared, to return in the guise of a monk (another transformation!). He is confronted by his three wives: the lady with the dog, a deaf-mute, and a “fallen woman.” The last defends him against the reproaches of the first, for having saved her and the deaf-mute. She throws herself at Paraclete’s feet in a gesture reminiscent of Mary Magdalene. Paraclete responds

with the words “Get up, get up, I am not God! ... May justice be accomplished and may I be punished for that pity that drove me to the salvation of you all! Maybe prison is indeed the right place for me! ... For there are so many in need of Paraclete, their adviser, helper, and comforter! ... The way of Paraclete leads always to Golgotha! ... — that is in the order of things.”* The bathos of this speech turns, however, to laughter as Paraclete mocks the idea of living with

the three women. The monk then confronts Pierrot, the detective who has pursued him for four acts, and hands him the payment for his work, telling him, “You are a Pierrot who has been made a fool of,” and reminding him that that is indeed the role of Pierrot when he neglects his true calling, love.*° When Pierrot reminds him that it is always Harlequin who makes a fool of him, Paraclete throws off the monk’s cowl and reveals the Harlequin costume underneath. In a last speech directed at the audience, Paraclete offers them a variety of possible endings to the play — comic or tragic. He is interrupted by the theatre director, whose practical mind believes that “the main

thing is to finish the play on time,” so that the audience can get home. Typically for Evreinov, however, it is the regisseur, the theatrical animal, who has the last word, to the effect that “the main thing

is to have a spectacular ending to the play,” for which purpose he produces a roman candle and calls for music, dancing, laughter, and confetti.*!

The Main Thing, by placing the spotlight, not on the pessimistic image of Pierrot (played by Svetozarov, who has the “face of a disappointed Pierrot”), but on the positive (in Evreinov’s reading) character of Harlequin, attempts a corrective to the preceding literature (e.g., Blok’s Balaganchtk). His Harlequin-Christ, the comforter and the

advocate, is a deliberate antidote to the suffering, alienated PierrotChrist, not Christ the scapegoat, but Christ the Redeemer. In this sense we may say that Evreinov’s play is expressionist, the image of the redeeming hero-saviour being the essence of this last phase of the modernist movement. For Evreinov, salvation, redemption, comfort, is thus to be found in the deception of art. For him, however,

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the distinctions between good and bad, holy and profane, are meaningless. Paraclete, the hypostasis of Christ (and projection of Evreinov himself into the play) is at the same time a bigamist, a “blue beard”;

the comfort he offers is illusory. As he tells the provincial theatre director, “The whole of humanity, if we are to believe the psycholo-

gists, instinctively prefers a pleasant deception to an unpleasant truth.’ The director's response to this mirrors (and predicts!) our response to Evreinov’s play. “When one listens to you, one absolutely

doesn't know whether you are serious or joking.” For Evreinov the theatre of life is both a temple and a brothel, and neither is dominant, since everything is role playing. At best, Evreinov’s response to the increasing horror and hopelessness of the world consists in a simple Robin Hood - like redistribution of riches — “with the rich I am merciless” — and in the notion that a fool’s paradise is better than no paradise at all. The world of his play is a baroque one

— baroque in the sense that the religious imagery is fused with the theatrical: the world as theatrum mundi, the crucifixion as play, as cruci-fiction. In that sense it contains post-modernist resonances — and outrageous offences against good taste — that might make it

playable again. Ultimately, however, the play is a piece of selfindulgence, since its “message” does not bear scrutiny and cannot be taken seriously as a social or political programme; it therefore appears to be a vehicle for Evreinov to display his theatrical virtuosity

and to glory in the instant transformations and manipulations of illusion at which he is so adept.” It is in these transformations, these transcodings, that the meaning of the play resides, a play that has a lot to tell us about theatre, but loses itself when it tries to apply those lessons to life.

VLADIMIR MAIAKOVSKII Although the following discussion is intended to focus on the dramaturgy of Vladimir Maiakovskii (1893-1930), the point has been made

many times that Maiakovskii’s life, his poetry, and his dramatic writing were all theatre; that is to say, Maiakovskii never stopped acting, his whole life was a balagan. As A.M. Ripellino writes: “Each

of his appearances was a performance. Like the actors in the commedia dell’arte, he engaged with the audience in arguments glittering with witticisms and puns. Every evening became for him a challenge to the public and the universe, but at the same time it was an agony

and a torture.” This seamlessness of life and art was a more successful amalgam than Evreinov was ever to achieve; the theatricali-

zation of life was the essence of the futurists’ program, and

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Maiakovskii was the most theatrical of the futurists. The difference between them and Evreinov was that, while Evreinov sought this theatricalization for the whole of humanity, the futurists were interested only in turning their own lives into theatre. They needed the untheatrical bourgeoisie as a scandalized audience, as they sought to become actants on the stage of history. When history, in the shape of the bolshevik revolution, obliged, their megalomanic utopian ges-

, turing became, for a brief period, the dominant art form in the young republic. It could not, of course, last — as Trotskii pointed out in his book Literature and Revolution (1924). The avant-garde, far from being

the revolutionary movement that it thought itself to be, was a deeply bourgeois phenomenon. Although it is fair to say that all of Maiakovskii’s poetry is highly theatrical — it was intended, after all, to be declaimed from the height

of a tribune — there are certain texts that especially need to be examined in the context of this chapter. His first play, entitled simply Vladimir Matakovskit,? was staged for the first time in December 1913,

alternately with Kruchenykh’s Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem), by the Union of Youth in the Luna-Park Theatre in Petersburg (the former theatre of Vera Komissarzhevskaia on Ofitserskaia

Street). Maiakovskii’s “tragedy” is a classic avant-garde piece and exhibits many of the features of the balagan.© The world of the play is one in which the traditional proportions of art have broken down and in which the poet, stripped of any guise and surrounded by the incarnate images of his poetry, glares intransigently at the audience and indulges in a sort of Publikumsbeschimpfung. The world has

broken down into the dialogue of two subjects, the poet and the bourgeoisie/audience, and the objects of the world — the victims with whom the poet empathizes — are in full revolt. The conflict is clear

already in the structure of the language of the prologue, with its insistent confrontation of the first-person singular (dramatized by occupying a whole line to itself or else the beginning or end of the line) and the second-person plural. The play itself, which is slight, is, like Blok’s Balaganchik, an exercise in translating poetry to the stage. The space-time co-ordinates of the action bear no semblance to any known reality, and the hyperbole and grotesque of Maiakovski's imagery became, in the 1913 production, grotesque, over-lifesize uslounyi properties drawn with a child-like naivety — tears, for example, or the figure of the poet's woman friend, which was some five metres tall. The mutilated characters were dressed in white, with cardboard shields in front of them illustrating their deformities. The entire style of the production, notes Ripellino, was that of a grotesque a la Hoffmann.

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Maiakovskii’s second exercise in dramatic writing, The MysteryBouffe (Misteriia-Buff), was much more ambitious, and a further advance in the balagan genre. This play, which was staged for the first time in 1918 by Meyerhold on the anniversary of the October revolution, and then in a new version in 1921 on the occasion of the

meeting of the third International in Moscow (see chapter four above), exhibits several elements clearly derived from Evreinov. First, the play is an application of religious imagery to a temporal subject,

namely, the story of the flood and the Revolution. As such, it fits into the widespread use of religious and apocalyptic imagery to describe the events in revolutionary Russia; for example, in Blok’s The Twelve, but also, as we have seen, in Evreinov’s and others’ writings

on the sacred nature of theatre. Second, the form of the play is a hybrid of two genres that Evreinov introduced and experimented with: the medieval mystery, which was the focus of a whole season at Evreinov’s Theatre of Antiquity, and the bouffe, yet another name for the balagan.*! Even closer are the ties that bind Maiakovskiis

conception of theatre to that of Meyerhold, who was to stage his three major plays with Maiakovskii’s co-operation. As Ripellino notes: “All Maiakovskii’s theatrical activity was marked by the influence of Meyerhold. ... even the production of his first play bears the mark of Meyerhold’s experiments of 1906-7 with Vera Komissarzhevskaia. The slow diction and the monotonous swaying of the anatomical dolls in Vladimir Matakovskii go back to Meyerhold’s productions,

in which the actors, like lifeless symbols, like Maeterlinckian puppets, move in front of painted flats or curtains and drop their words ‘like drops of water into a deep well’” Nevertheless, the relationship of Maiakovskii's play to the balagan genre is more complex than, say, that of Meyerhold or Evreinov. The difference is analogous to that between impressionism and cubism.

Maiakovskii, far from attempting to imitate or experiment with a foreign genre from the theatrical past, was creatively using whatever came to hand for his goal, which was to propagate the revolution —

both political and artistic. He is closer to the street traditions of Russian popular theatre, and The Mystery-Bouffe should be seen in

the same light as the Petrushka plays that were adapted after the Revolution to the propaganda purposes of the Red Army. In the new theatrical art that coalesced during and immediately after the cata-

clysms of war and revolution, the influence of commedia, though present, is more diffuse and more integrated with other phenomena — it has, in other words, become absorbed and russified as the genre of the balagan. Visually, Maiakovskii was close to the lubok, the primitive mass-produced print that adorned the peasant hut, as his sumple,

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brightly coloured drawings for the costumes indicate.® Probably this concern with popular art motivated his choice of religious material for the play as well, since his rewriting of the myths of the flood, of heaven and hell, and of the sermon on the mount would be readily

comprehensible to simple folk. Whether it was indeed the simple peasant and worker or the left-wing intellectual who came to the play is open to some question. But the links to the notion of theatre as a “sacred ritual” that had been dear to the symbolists are here realized in the ending of the play, in which actors and audience are supposed to be swept away in an outpouring of revolutionary unity. What is certain is that the “first Soviet play,” as it has been called, exhibits typical features of the balagan genre. This is illustrated, for

example, by the grotesque of the space-time structure, beginning with the biblical flood of revolution and the struggle of the antirevolutionary “clean” forces with the “unclean” proletariat in the ark,

and proceeding through the stages of hell and heaven to the promised land. Whereas in traditional commedia the scenario had — at least since Gozzi — been a fairy-tale designed to entertain, here we have an allegory designed to illustrate the Marxist myth of revolution. In the second version of the play we find such metatheatrical features as the “red harlequins” who open the play and the locomotive-driver's

invitation at the end to spectator, set designer, poet, and director to come up onstage and join in the singing of the Internationale. In Maiakovskii’'s second full-length play, The Bedbug (Klop), the balagan tradition is as firmly established as in his first two plays, with

satirical figures and a fantastic space-time structure that moves the spectator from contemporary Soviet reality into an aseptic future. The modelling of the satirical portrait of the degenerate NEP hero Prisypkin contrasts grotesquely with the portrait of a scientific world fifty years on. Meyerhold accentuated this contrast in his production (1929) by employing the three artists who signed their work Kukreniksy to design the first part, while the scenes from the future were designed by the constructivist Rodchenko. Concerning this production Ripellino notes the clown-like depiction of Prisypkin’s role by Igor’ Il‘inskii: “In a flowered shirt and bow tie, he played the role of a doltish clown, a mixture of vulgarity and absurd conceit. But at times the pretentiousness of this buffoon disappeared, to be replaced by a melancholy and haplessness that made him resemble Charlie Chaplin.” It is, indeed, the figure of the clown (paillasse, fool) in various manifestations, the hapless little man, the pathetic, yet comic victim of circumstances beyond his control, that was the most central image of the theatre of the 1920s in Russia, and one of the most lasting legacies of Pierrot. He can be traced not only in the plays

185 Russian Pirandellos

discussed in this chapter, but also in such other plays as Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide (Samoubiitsa) and The Mandate (Mandat) and Turii

Olesha’s novella Envy (Zavist). Prisypkin is a typical example of this hero in the way the author both satirizes him and yet identifies with

him, an ambivalence that marks the period when Russian intellectuals were becoming aware of their growing irrelevance and the fact that their days were numbered. This ambivalence runs right to the core of the text of the play. The montage of styles in The Bedbug is part of Maiakovskii’s debt to the commedia dell’arte. If the satirized characters — Prisypkin, Baian, and the Renaissance family - were commedia masks transcoded into the situation of Soviet Russia during the Nep, the serious and aseptic characters from the future can be compared to the innamorati. This replacement of the traditional love plot with communist heroics represents Maiakovskiis transformation of the commedia tradition, one that corresponds to Meyerhold’s similar post-1917 restructuring of

the tradition in certain productions. In this transformation the “happy end” of the commedia love-plot was replaced by the fusion of actors and audience in the white heat of communist endeavour (e.g., in The Mystery-Bouffe or Moscow's Burning, discussed below). While Maiakovskii intellectually may have felt he should favour the

communist utopia of 1979, his artistic preference lay with the grotesque, expressive, theatrical masks who were the object of his satire. Their rascally humour and colourfulness was quite simply more inter-

esting and entertaining than the high seriousness of communist heroics, just as generations of audiences had found the antics of Scaramuccio, Arlecchino, Pantalone, and the Dottore more enjoyable than the anodyne Flaminias and Gratianos, whose chaste love is the ostensible reason for the comedy. Ripellino stresses the circus-like sequence of attractions that comprise The Bedbug. It was, however, not the only time that Maiakovskii’s interest in circus was apparent.© In particular, he wrote several sce-

narios specifically for the circus. One of these, entitled Moscow's Burning (Moskva gorit, 1930), was written to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1905 revolution.® In it we find a “montage of attractions”” that satirize the tsarist regime — sometimes

in the crudest terms, for example, the conveyer belt that carries the Tsar’s soiled underpants to the laundry as he panics at the prospect of revolution.® Far from telling a story in the conventional sense, this circus balagan relates selected stages of the failed revolution — a sort of ideological interpretation — through a chain of circus acts and set pieces that displayed the prowess of the circus artistes. From 1919

to 1922 Maiakovskii had worked in the rosta telegraph agency and

186 Pierrot in Petrograd

then for other organizations, producing slogans and advertising jingles with drawings to go along with them.” His experience of this kind of work is very evident in the style of the verse and the at times crude appeal to a base sense of humour. However, the structure of the scenario and the nature of the “attractions” owes a great deal to Eisenstein.” In particular, the depiction of Kerenskii is a direct quotation from Eisenstein’s film October. There is also a clear link with Evreinov’s mass re-enactment of the first anniversary of the Revolu-

tion in 1918 (and beyond it, Max Reinhardt’s mass spectacles); although here too the intermediary may be Eisenstein. The stylistic montage present in The Bedbug is equally evident in Moscow’s Burning

in the division between the satirical anti-Revolutionary masks (including foreign leaders such as Pilsudski and Ramsay MacDonald),

generally played by clowns, and the heroic figures of the workers and Lenin. The “attractions” in these scenarios represent a curious combination of presentation and representation, for while they present feats of acrobatics or other circus skills, they at the same time represent a certain historical event or ideological concept. That is to say, the circus activity of the clown or acrobat was clearly visible behind the

narratological function, behind the “role,” as we see from the following example: “The clown playing Kerenskii leaps up the steps, diving through a hoop.”? This curious presentation/representation dichotomy is also to be found in the set pieces, or “attractions”: “The

circus ring is floodlit. In it there is a pyramid. The bottom row is composed of workers toiling in shackles, the second row comprises

greedy bureaucrats, the third — priests, mullahs, and rabbis, the fourth — the government, senators, and ministers, the fifth — capital-

ists and landowners; on the very top is a little tiny tsar wearing an enormous crown.” The pyramid is both a spectacle, a visual “attraction,’ such as is traditionally presented at the end of a circus, and at the same time a historical tableau with a particular meaning that has nothing to do with the circus attraction — except the chance fact that a pyramid is both a common trick of acrobats and a certain Marxist way to imagine the social structure in tsarist Russia. We may see this as an example of an arbitrary theatrical sign or, as Ripellino suggests,

as the kind of “realized metaphor” that was a feature of Russian futurist poetry.” Maiakovskii's last major play, The Bathhouse (Bania, 1929), which was written for Meyerhold’s theatre, shows that the tradition of the

balagan was as alive and productive in his work at the end of his short career as at the beginning. As Ripellino notes: “The abundance

of stage-effects and transformations, as well as the use of the

187 Russian Pirandellos

fantastic, give The Bathhouse the character of a stage-machinery play, a fairy-tale spectacle of the popular festival. The fireworks, the explo-

sions, the ‘wheel of time’ and even the appearance of the woman from the year 2000 are reminiscent of the harlequinades of the fair.” However, there are other elements in the play that are reminiscent of

the traditions of commedia and the Russian Petrushka play. The foreigner Pont Kich, for example, who either makes a series of grunts

or speaks a gobbledygook of Russian words that sound English, clearly harks back to the German in the Petrushka play, and to the transposition of this character from the Ukrainian version of the balagan, the vertep, onto the classical Russian stage: the German doctor in Gogol’s Government Inspector. The Ukrainian dialect of the

secretary Optimistenko provides humour in the same way as the commedia masks, and the speeches of his boss, Pobedonosikov, which are replete with the clichés of Soviet bureaucratese and some jumbled notions of Marxist theory, are similar in their effect to the pseudo-Latin jargon of the Dottore. The “plot” of the play could be described as Gogolian, in that it, like The Government Inspector, depicts satirically the corruption and

immorality of the Soviet bureaucrats, especially in the figures of Pobedonosikov and his secretary, Optimistenko. The earnest “Phosphorescent Woman,” who is conjured out of the future by the inventor Chudakov’s time machine, serves the same function in this play as

the real inspector in Gogol’s. Reminiscent, too, of Gogol’ is the ending, in which the bureaucrats who had hoped for a free ride into

the future are spat out by the machine, so that they are left confounded. The fantastic and preposterous “plot” serves, as in Maia-

kovskii’s other plays, to mock the notion of credulity and psychological realism. In this sense it functions as a polemic with the newly popular — since the 1926 production of Bulgakov’s White Guard — Moscow Art Theatre. The theatrical polemic was reinforced by the slogans that Maiakovskii wrote to be displayed onstage during the performance and in the audience. The Bathhouse is of particular interest for our topic in that it is the most “Pirandellian” of Maiakovskii’s plays. If the stylistic division in the earlier plays had been between “bourgeois zanies” and “revolu-

tionary puritans,’ in The Bathhouse there is a new, overriding dichotomy (already adumbrated in The Bedbug) between Maiakovskii and society. The bloated capitalists who formed the target of his pre-

Revolutionary ire had been transmuted into corrupt bureaucrats whose treachery was the worse since it could not be removed by a new revolution. Maiakovskii's quarrel was with the entire apparatus of administration in the Soviet state, with the materialism of NEP

188 Pierrot in Petrograd

society, and with the recrudescent “bourgeois” culture symbolized by the Moscow Art Theatre. The poet's alienation was as complete as in his first play, but without the ray of hope for revolution. More-

over, the new social and political situation had spawned a new, virulent criticism that saw Maiakovskii as the enemy. His response to this literary context was one that found its sources in the theatre, namely, a highly original use of metatheatre. Having created his fantastic plot in the first two acts, Maiakovskii “steps back” from the fiction in the third act to enclose the action within a metatheatrical frame — a frame that is, ingeniously, inserted in the centre (rather than being located at the chronological extremities of the play). Moreover, the focus is not, as is usually the case with metatheatre, on the actors slipping out of the role, but on the fact that, Pirandello-like, they retain their character outside the play. The audience that is represented in this act comprises the “negative” characters from the play — Pobedonosikov, Optimistenko, the journalist Momental‘nikov, Ivan Ivanovich, and Mezal‘iansova — as well as the director, with whom they become embroiled in an argument about the verisimilitude of the play without realizing that it is they who are portrayed. Thus Pebedonosikov says about himself: “This is all exaggerated; it’s not like that in life. Take, for example, that Pobedonosikov. It’s embarrassing. Judging by everything it’s a responsible comrade who is being depicted, yet for some reason they've shown him in such a light and for some reason they've even called him a ‘gslavnachpups. We don’t have any people like that. It’s unnatural, unlifelike, unreal.” The theatre-in-the-theatre thus takes the form of

a critical, even sarcastic portrait of the audience, and the point is made that the play itself is a portrait of the audience. In this sense, Maiakovskii follows the same line that Gogol’ had suggested by his epigraph to Ihe Government Inspector. Maiakovskii mocks popular taste in the (hilarious) suggestions for other types of entertainment that the characters make and the director's response to them, which

takes the form of a symbolic tableau on the theme of labour and capital that Pobedonosikov calls “true art.”

Because of his premature death and subsequent canonization by Stalinist literary policy, Maiakovskii has too long been reviewed out of the literary, theatrical, and critical context of the Russian avantgarde. Ripellino goes some way — but not far enough — towards dressing the balance. Maiakovskii needs to be considered, it seems to me, in a single context with Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Eisenstein, as directors, and the authors Blok, Evreinov, Erdman, Bulgakov,

and Zamiatin, as well as, beyond the limits of Russia itself, with Pirandello, Brecht, Jarry, and Artaud. Like them he is a practitioner

189 Russian Pirandellos

of the dramaturgical genre I have called the balagan; like them he exploits metatheatre in a radical reconsideration of the nature of theatre, its means and purposes.

LEV LUNTS A member of the literary group known as the Serapion Brothers, this writer of short stories and plays died at the age of twenty-three. His play The Apes are Coming! (Ob eztany idut!),” although one of the most

obscure of those considered here, is at the same time one of the most Pirandello-lke. Essentially, the entire play is built around manipulation of convention. The play is dominated by the Fool (shut), the only character (apart from such metatheatrical figures as the prompter and voices from the audience) who is aware that he is in a play. He

tries throughout to impose a theatrical order on the balagan. The situation is a satirical comment on post-Revolutionary theatre as played by Red Army units. The set is a weird, uslovnyi amalgam of a peasant hut, a stone mansion, and a Petersburg garret. The play that is intended is one entitled “In Serried Ranks” (“Somknutymi riadami’).” Of this play the Fool tells us that “this is a remarkable, instructive and edifying play, but since all instruction is boring, they put me here to make you laugh and amuse you so that you don’t run off after the white rolls and pies” (see below, page 276). Later he gives us a little more detail, and we learn that it is an allegorical play that shows different classes overcoming their differences to join the Red Army in the face of the White threat. This pedestrian piece of revolutionary theatrical propaganda is overwhelmed by the realities of the situation outside the theatre, although these, in a strange way, are a distorted, more extreme version of the situation envisaged in the ‘play, as the Fool points out: “I guess there's been some misunderstanding. There's a blizzard outside today, and our city, wouldn't you know it, really has been besieged by some army, supposedly of apes” (see below, page 291). Thus none of the characters that wander through the door onto the set is aware that he or she is in a theatre.

They have simply blundered onto the stage of a theatre from the horrifying reality of a Red-held city under siege by the Whites during

the civil war in the middle of winter. Since they are ignorant of the conventions of the stage, they make such mistakes as falling through the “fourth wall” into the orchestra pit. The play oscillates in an amusing way between theatrical convention and reality. For example,

the boys who wander in are selling pies, but when the Fool throws one into the audience, it is discovered that they are made of paper. Also, the Fool knows the name of the Man in Cap, Dyriavin, but

190 Pierrot in Petrograd

whereas for the Fool this is the name of the actor, for the Man in Cap it is his real name. The plot becomes more serious when a coffin is brought in containing a man who has been shot by the secret police. The conflicting reports on his death mirror in a grim fashion the conflicting realities in the play — theatre versus “reality.” As a Voice points out: “Which one of them is right? They each give a different story” (see below, page 284). Thus the form of Lunts’s play reflects the sharp political and social divisions in Russia itself, with each party in the crowd onstage (not to mention the divided audience) clinging to its own version of “truth.” The Fool tries to divert the audience with acrobatics, but three circus acrobats appear and outdo him. Then there is a raid by a Red Army patrol with searches and arrests. The chaos of the raid is interrupted when the threat of the approaching enemy

forces all to unite in the common cause. They join forces to tear down the flats of the theatre and build barricades, and stand united at the end of the play, awaiting the approach of the enemy and ironically fulfilling the intention of the unacted “play” — “In Serried Ranks.”

Luntss play, apparently, has never been staged. Nevertheless, it represents a highly original manipulation of the conflict between uslovnost” and reality, emphasizing, as Evreinov did, the ambiguity of the theatrical sign. It has serious overtones, reflecting the brutal conflict of the times, and yet it realizes at its best the intention of the balagan, reflecting in theatrical form the comic and sinister chaos of

the balagan that was Russia itself - where theatre and reality had become hopelessly intertwined. Theatrically speaking, it represents certain problems in staging, especially the problem of the audience, for there is a theatrical audience that indulges in repartee with the Fool, and even joins in the chaos of argument and conflict onstage. Possibly, at certain points, one could imagine that the perspective of the “audience” would merge with that of the real spectators in the theatre. However, such a time has now long passed, and this aspect of the play is highly anachronistic.

EVGENII ZAMIATIN Evgenii Zamiatin (1884-1937), who is best known for his dystopian novel My (We), also wrote a number of plays. One of these, which was produced twice with decorations by Kustodiev — at the Moscow Art Theatre 2 (1925) and the Bolshoi Dramatic Theatre in Leningrad (1926) — is among the most interesting and typically Russian of the balagany.”® Entitled Blokha (The Flea), it is a stage version of the well-

191 Russian Pirandellos

known story by Leskov entitled “Levsha’ (“The Left-Handed Smith”),

based, according to the author (although he later denied the fact) on

a Tula folk-tale. By taking a tale that was familiar to audiences, Zamiatin was following the tradition of Gozzi and Tieck; the differ-

ence lay in the story, which was very Russian in its content and language. Briefly told, it concerns the achievement of a left-handed Russian smith from Tula who manages to make a set of shoes for a steel clockwork flea. Thematically, the play shows the peasant cunning of the Russian craftsman pitted against the engineering technology of the English, and it takes place in the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I. Narratively, the plot contains such a hyperbole that a grotesque effect is guaranteed if the tale is transferred to the stage. This is reinforced with many other grotesque details in the tale (e.¢., the cossacks tear off the roof in which the craftsmen are working in their impatience to know the result); these details are reproduced in the stage version, and many others are added or developed (e.g., the drunken smith’s encounter, along with the English skipper, with a red-haired devil/blackamoor).” Zamiatin develops a situation, — and creates an atmosphere, that resembles in many respects those of Balaganchik and Petrushka — quite

deliberately so, as he points out at the beginning of his foreword: “Blokha is an experiment in recreating the popular Russian comedy.”

Thus, there are three Russian zanies, whom Zamiatin, on the authority of Olearius, calls khalder (Chaldeans): “The very word khaldei is the name of the old Russian comedians.” One of the “Chaldeans” is a woman. These three figures play several roles in the course of the comedy. The opening scene presents a theatrewithin-a-theatre comparable to Blok’s play. “The first, theatre curtain

goes up. Behind it is a proscenium and a second, brightly-coloured balagan curtain.”®! In the second act there is a raeshnik, the portable balagan puppet-show on a pole, again, clearly inspired by Olearius’s description. Moreover, the Chaldeans present the action at the beginning of the play and also in several interludes, thus heightening the folk-play effect. The integrity of the character as such is shattered by the use of the same Chaldean to play several characters; thus the

female Chaldean plays both the left-handed smith’s girl-friend, Mashka, and the young English girl with whom the Englishmen try to tempt the Russian in order to learn his secret. Rapid changes of costume heighten the sense of the conventionality of the play. This is also reinforced by the use of the “rhyming prose” of the Petrushka play for the speeches of the Chaldeans and other characters, especially the cossack Platov, whose role is considerably expanded in the play and given more colour.

192 Pierrot in Petrograd

An essential element of Leskov’s story is the language, which, although in the third person, reflects the primitive point of view of the simple, uneducated Russian peasant. Mostly the effect is achieved

by “folk-etymology” distortions of foreign and Russian words, for example, vodoglaz (water-eye) tor vodolaz (diver). Zamiatin goes much further in his use of skaz (first-person narrative in lower-class dialect),

which is extended to all the characters, including the Emperor and the Englishmen. In effect, all his characters appear as simple Russians playing the different roles. The effect of the language is to create a constant metatheatrical effect. A visual correlative of the skaz

of Leskov’s language is the decorations and costumes. Thus, the “Petersburg” that is presented in the opening act is qualified as follows: “But it's a Tula Petersburg, the kind about which a passing wanderer tells fantastic tales of an evening on the mound outside a peasant hut.”*®? The primitivism of the decorations and props reflects perfectly the folk language of Leskov’s tale. For example the Cossacks’

horses are boards with horses’ heads and bast tails, which they ride at breakneck speed to the traditional cries and whistles. The effect of these stylized, folkloric props and decorations is to evoke the lubok or the balagan in its traditional guise. Skaz as a technique poses the question of the visibility of the educated writer behind it all, manipulating the language. Potentially, it runs the risk of an unintentional doubling of the point of view: that of the peasant being a transparent mask for the writer-intellectual. The effect achieved by Zamiatin in this play (as in some of his early prose) is much more complete and convincing than that of Leskov. Nevertheless, on a deeper level the spectator was aware that the “folk actors” onstage were in reality sophisticated, well-trained actors, just as she/he him/herself was not a Russian peasant in the market-place. In essence, we have to do with a willing suspension of disbelief. The result, in theatrical terms, was no doubt a highly entertaining play. However, a serious problem on the thematic level is that the irony and political satire of Leskov’s tale (in which the smith dies without being able to transmit to the Emperor his observation that the English do not clean their rifles with brick-dust, information that would, we are to believe, have averted the débacle of the Crimean war) is lost without any compensating point to the play being introduced, so that

its lesson is simply the power of Russian natural genius over the science and technology of the West. Seen next to the politically engaged works of Maiakovskii, for example, Zamiatin’s play appears to be a cute exercise in theatrical virtuosity; it is difficult to see how it responds in any profound way to the issues either of theatre or of its age.

| 193 Russian Pirandellos OBERIUTY: KHARMS AND VVEDENSKII The last, and most advanced, stage of the Russian avant-garde was represented not by the Futurists, but by a small group of Leningrad poets, which existed from 1927 to 1930 and was known collectively as the Oberiuty.® The name, which sounds like the “transrational language” (zaum’) of the futurists — ironically, since the tendency of the group was to distance itself from this technique — was an approximate acronym for Ob”edinenie real‘nogo iskusstva (Association for Real Art). The two principal representatives of this group were Daniil Ivanovich Kharms (real name, Iuvachev; 1905-1942) and Aleksandr

Ivanovich Vvedenskii (1904-41). The group began to form around 1926, when the two poets became associated with a Leningrad student theatre, Radix, an experimental theatre that combined various

arts and used parodistic and estranging techniques. At Radix an improvised production entitled “My Mom is All in the Clock” (“Moia mama vsia v chasakh”) was mounted; it comprised a string of num-

bers based on the poetry of Kharms and Vvedenskii.** Stone Nak-

himovsky points out the dramatic nature of much of their early poetry. The link with Radix also permitted the poets to perform their work before audiences at improvised happenings. The name Oberiu was inaugurated at a performance in the Dom pechati (House of the Press) on 24 January 1928. Entitled “Three Left Hours” (“Tri levykh chasa”) the evening included the premiere of Kharms’s play Elizaveta Bam and coincided with the publication of the Oberiu manifesto.®

Kharmss poetry is quite frequently dramatic in content, but in a totally different way to that of Maiakovskii. What is missing is the overwhelming presence — the self-dramatization — of the poet, of the

poetic subject. The poetry may be incantatory, or it may recount a perplexing, disjointed vision of things and people. Their interaction, for example, in the poem “The Fire” (“Pozhar,” 1927), suggests a dramatic scenario, and indeed this poem exists also in that form.® Some, for example, “The Temptation” (“Iskushenie,” 1927), “The Measurement of Things” (“Izmerenie veshchei,” 1929), and “Kevenge”

(“Mest’,” 1930), and numerous others, exist already in dialogue and

take the form of embryonic playlets. In them we can perceive the unique poetic of the Oberiuts’ dramaturgy, a poetic that had its antecedents, as Aleksandrov points out, in Gogol’ (especially the short stories “Nose” and “The Overcoat”), Blok’s Balaganchik, and Maiakovskii's Vladimir Maiakovskit.*”

The central point of Kharmss poetic is the denial of logic, a subversion of received mental structures. In an anecdote one of his

194 Pierrot in Petrograd , friends recounts visiting the poet and finding in his room a fantastic

machine. When asked what kind of machine it was, Kharms told him, “No kind, just a machine.”* In the poem “The Measurement of Things” a similar point is made by the character Liapolianov. I now think this: there is no measure. Instead of a measure there are our thoughts contained in the object. All objects come to life, embellish existence with themselves.”

A continuation, in a sense, of Maiakovskii’s notion of the “revolt of things,” Kharms’s vision is of the autonomy of objects and of the words that contain them, their refusal to be “measured.” This primacy of the object — or rather, of the thoughts contained in it — is what is meant by the “real” in the name of the group; it is the opposite of realism, which implies the submission of objects and words to pre-

determined hierarchies: logic, a set perspective, a recognized authority or subject (in the context of the poem, measurement). It is here that we see clearly the balagan origins of Kharms’s dramaturgy, with its refusal of all authority, even that of the poet (which makes it the most radical manifestation of all). In his poetic practice Kharms reduces himself (and other “people”) to the status of an object with no greater significance than any other object. The subject is erased, as the voice shifts from one person or object to another. In this sense the dialogic structure of the poetry reflects the apparently subjectless vision of the poet. The result is a sort of whimsical haplessness as the poetic conscious is bowled along — now by grammatical similarities, now by melodic parallels, now by rhyme, now by other, less obvious, but apparently random associations. The poem is a “verbal machine” which is “just a machine.”” In the Oberiu manifesto, the drama part of which was apparently written by Kharms to explain his play Elizaveta Bam, the sort of poetic principles we have outlined here are applied to the theatre. The relat-

edness of the Oberiu theatre to the balagan is made clear from the start: “Suppose two people walk out on the stage, say nothing, but tell each other something by signs. While they are doing that, they are solemnly puffing out their cheeks. The spectators laugh. Is this theatre? Yes it is. You may say it is a farce [balagan]. But a farce is theatre.”*! The argument goes on to point out that theatre possesses its own means, which have nothing to do with narrative.

195 Russian Pirandellos Until now, all these elements have been subordinated to the dramatic plot —

to the play. A play has been a story, told through characters, about some kind of event. On the stage, all have worked to explain the meaning and course of that event more clearly, more intelligibly, and to relate it more closely to life.

That is not at all what the theatre is. If an actor who represents a minister begins to move around on the stage on all fours and howls like a wolf, or an actor who represents a Russian peasant suddenly delivers a long speech in Latin — that will be theatre, that will interest the spectator, even if it takes place without any relation to a dramatic plot. Such an action will be a separate item; a series of such items organized by the director will make up a theatrical performance, which will have its plot line and its scenic meaning. This will be a plot which only the theatre can give.”

The view of theatre thus proposed is a purely theatrical one, close to

Eisenstein and others’ notion of theatre as circus, music hall, a

“montage of attractions.” | Kharmss play Elizaveta Bam,?* which resulted from this theory, is

one of the most fascinating and original pieces of dramatic writing in Russian. As its commentators have pointed out,” there is a vague “plot” focused on the figure of Elizaveta, who is about to be arrested at the beginning of the play by two men. The play ends as the two men, dressed as firemen, come to arrest her for the murder of one of them. However, the course of the text is composed of a chain of theatrical episodes (nineteen in all). As Kharms noted in the Manifesto: “The dramaturgical plot of the play is shaken asunder by many apparently extraneous themes which single out the object as a separate whole existing outside any link with the others. Thus the dramaturgical plot will not be evident to the spectator as a clearcut plot shape; it glimmers, as it were, at the back of the action. It is replaced by the scenic plot which arises spontaneously out of all the elements of our production and which is the focus of our attention. But at the same time the separate elements of the production are valuable to us in their own right.’ The reader by now hardly needs to be reminded of the scenario-lazzi relationship between the narrative plot on the one hand and the antics of the actors onstage on the other that we have noted in discussing the features of commedia dell’arte. Moreover, in the individual episodes that form the action of the play, the very characters are transformed and lose their unity. That is to say, the tendency for the coherence of the theatrical sign “character” to break down, which we have noted in the cubist balagan (and which has its roots in the metatheatre of commedia dell’arte), is here driven

196 Pierrot in Petrograd

to its extreme, so that no one incarnation of the character can be interpreted by the spectator as being dominant.

In the most recent edition of Kharms, Aleksandrov lists the descriptions that the author gave the individual episodes or “bits” (kuski) comprising the action.% These help a great deal to see how the production worked and how the play was intended - as a string of studies in poetic mood. 1 “A realistic bit, melodrama.” 2 “Realistic, comic genre.” (with a note in the margin by the author “Bobchinskii,” suggesting that the two men were to be acted — at least in this “bit” — like Gogol’s characters in The Government Inspector).

3 “Absurdly comic, naive.” 4 “Realistic. Genre of social comedy.’ 5 “Rhythmical Radix [i.e., in the style of that student theatre].” 6 “Social Radix.” 7 “Solemn melodrama emphasized by Radix.” 8 “Shifting heights.” (“Presumably, this ‘bit’ was named thus both

because of the contrasting physical actions [Bam gets up on a chair, and Ivan Ivanovich lies down on the floor], and because of the different tones used by the characters to say their lines.”) g “Landscape bit.” 10 “Monologue aside, bilevel bit.” 11 “The speech.” 12 “Chinar’ bit.”” 13 “Radix.” 14 “Classical pathos.” 15 “Balladic pathos.” 16 “Chimes.” 17 “Physiological pathos.” 18 “Realistic, drily official.” 19 “Finale, operatic.”

When the text is read as a series of theatrical “numbers” in this way,

what appears in Gibian’s translation to be a highly alogical, even incoherent text (and has been read as such by some early western readers) makes perfect theatrical sense. Each “number” possesses a high degree of stylistic, poetic, and atmospheric coherence, evidently underlined in the production by changes of scene, lighting, voice, acting style, costume, music, and other elements, as well as by striking changes in the verbal texture of the text: from prose to verse, from pompous speeches to nonsense rhymes, to parodies of

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realistic drama and melodrama, and so on. One of the episodes (15) is even couched in the form of a play-within-the-play, with appropriate introductions, but this is a further extension of the system of the entire play, in which each episode is in contrastive relation with every other and none creates a dominant frame. Brilhant, moving, funny, deeply theatrical, Elizaveta Bam is one of the best Russian plays of the century. It is also — along with one or two other texts, such as Blok’s Balaganchik and Vladimir Maiakovskti —

one of the finest examples of the balagan as a dramaturgical genre. It has been compared to Kafka, and there is indeed something deeply disturbing about the oneiric flitting from episode to episode. At the end, in episode 18, Bam’s hauntedness and guilt of the first episode returns. She is accused of the murder of Petr Nikolaevich, one of the

men who had come to arrest her but he is visible beneath the fireman's uniform, and it is he who voices the accusation. In episode 15 the character Petr Nikolaevich had been killed by Elizaveta’s father. In episode 17 it is the mother who accuses Elizaveta of murdering

her (the mother’s) son. The inexplicable web of anxiety and guilt closes around Elizaveta at the end and forms a sharp contrast with the comic tone of the play. In this contradiction, too, we should see an aspect of the play's deep theatricality. This is best described by Aleksandrov: In the play two forces are revealed. One seeks to construct a plot and to bring it to a conclusion. The other tries to disrupt the plotline, to fracture it.

Tt turns into a circus, into balagan, into buffoonery, The first conveys a disturbing theme. The second is festive, filled with fireworks. Both forces compete with alternating success. But in the end, despite the gloomy beginning and finale, it is the clowning and the uninhibitedness that remain in

the memory. A large role in the tonality of the play belongs to its basic character — the direct, irrepressible, enchanting and sensitive Elizaveta Bam.”

Kharmss play is a reminder that comedy can be as profound, as theatrical and as moving as tragedy, if not more so. The resemblances between the work of Kharms and that of Aleksandr Vvedenskii are striking. Dialogue dominates in Vvedenskii'’s poems too; essentially they form a “verbal flow” of associative images

that defies not only grammar but rational interpretation in a way reminiscent of, say, the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Vvedenskii also wrote plays, several of which have survived, but none of which, apparently, have been produced onstage. These include Minin 1 Pozharskiu (Minin and Pozharskiu, 1926), a lyrical drama tocused on the

problems of death and God, behind which “glimmers” a plot based

198 Pierrot in Petrograd on the events in Russia in 1612;!° Krugom vozmozhno Bog (There may

be God all over, 1930-31), also to be read as a poem rather than presented onstage, exhibiting Vvedenskii’s critique of reason as an eschatological drama; and Kupritanov i Natasha (Kupriianov and Natasha, 1931), which describes an aborted act of love-making against

the background of the icon of the Saviour. Although all these pieces are couched in dramatic form, they would present extreme difficulties onstage. Nevertheless, the balagan form is visible in the disruption

of structure, in the apocalyptic treatment of the time-space continuum (in the second, for example, the central character is executed, but continues to “be,” so that much of the action takes place after his death), which bears no resemblance to experienced reality (and can be compared with that of Maiakovsku’s Mystery-Bouffe), and in the uslovnyi nature of the theatrical sign “character.” Other balagan elements include the parodic use of language and the almost baroque juxtaposition of sex and death. One might say that in Vvedenskii the form of the balagan has been taken over by the dramatic poem. This

is demonstrated by the fact that the “stage directions” contain the same non sequiturs as the text and are sometimes written in verse. Vvedenskii’s most important play is Elka u Ivanovykh (Christmas at the Ivanovs’, 1938).'*! In this play the poetic of Vvedenskii’s absurdist

balagan comes clearly into focus; however, it must be read in the context of his earlier works, for the thematic structure of the play is one that is worked out through the poetry and cannot be understood on its own.'” Central to understanding the play is the instability of the verbal sign (and its theatrical incarnation). This principle intervenes in numerous situations throughout the play, but especially in the delineation of the dramatis personae. Thus, the Ivanovs mentioned in the title are not to be found in the text of the play. In the list of characters there are a mother and a father Puzyrev. The “children or simply devils” listed all have different surnames, most of them in a pseudo-anagrammatical relationship to each other: Perov, Serov, Petrov, Pestrov, and so on. Their grotesquely different ages — from one to eighty-two — are only one of the many paradoxes that deform the simple plot, in which the children’s nurse kills one of the “children,” Sonia Ostrova. Subsequent “events” include the nurse's fiancé, Fedor, working as a woodcutter; her appearance in the police station and removal to an insane asylum; Fedor’s tryst with a servant girl, whom he finds boring;'® the appearance of the parents with the Christmas tree; and the dying off of all the children. A second principle is the underlying eschatological structure of the play, with its complex thematic matrix inherited from the preceding pieces, combining the erotic with questions of death and immortality. .

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This matrix is signified by Vvedenskian “keywords” such as elka (Christmas tree), which apparently encodes sex and is used in proximity with svecha (candle), a code-word for religion. It is clearly important that a Christmas tree is usually decorated with candles.

This is the hidden context of what is apparently a nonsensical exchange between the children at the beginning of act one, but in fact contains a phallic quibble when Sonia Ostrova remarks, “I don’t need candles. I have a finger”!4 — an evident reference to masturba-

tion.’° This sequence culminates in her having her head cut off. Other keywords include zvezda (another religious sign); skuchno (used to describe sex in both Kupriianov and Natasha and Christmas at the

Ivanovs’); and pero (pen; also present in the forms “operen’e,”' “Perov’),*°” which seems to connote the female form: “U pera dva prekrasnykh bedra” (“A pen has two beautiful hips”).?°° Meilakh’s notes on the plot matrix in Kupriianov and Natasha give an inkling of the complexity of the encoded thematics, which still needs much further elucidation.’ In particular, I suspect that the first names are also semantically loaded: “Sonia” (who is killed by the nurse) is short for “Sophia” (wisdom), and the name of the dog Vera means “faith” However, this kind of relationship has to be treated with considerable scepticism; we are far from having here a simple encoded message.

The disruptions and juxtapositions of the various linguistic signs militate against an allegorical interpretation, and deliberately so. The many hilarious non sequiturs, puns, and parodies in the play suggest the underlying meaning, that language itself has shattered to the point of absurdity, as can be seen in the following passage:

FEDOR. Only she’s very nervous, that fiancée of mine. But what can you do, the work’s hard. The family’s large. A lot of children. But what can you do. WOODCUTTER. Fruit. (Although he spoke, he said something inappropriate. So that this doesn't count. His fellow-workers also always say inappropriate things.) 28D WOODCUTTER. Jaundice.

FEDOR. After I've had her, I’m never bored and never disgusted. That's because we love each other a lot. We have a single close soul. 382 WOODCUTTER. Suspenders.

Words mean and do not mean, connote and do not connote. Like the actors in the commedia dell’arte, they slip in and out of their roles. They perform in different plots at once. In this last, unperformable

200 Pierrot in Petrograd

play in the sequence, language itself has become the balagan, in which each word is a discrete, unreachable character in an eschatological metadrama, which is about the end of the world as a set of linguistic signs. It is striking that lust seems to be the source of the decay, suggesting that the destruction of language is a moral drama as well.

MIKHAIL BULGAKOV One of the most important Russian writers of the twentieth century, Mikhail Afanas‘evich Bulgakov (1891-1940), wrote both prose and

plays, two activities that he considered as essential to his art as a pianist’s right and left hands.'? The comment is revealing, since it is clear that the two activities sprang from the same creative source and that they each shaped the other.’ Bulgakov’s first great success as a playwright was The Days of the Turbins (Dni Turbinykh, 1926), his stage version of his novel The White Guard (Belaia gvardiia, 1925). The play

helped revive the fortunes of Stanislavskiis Moscow Art Theatre in the Soviet period. The second play of Bulgakov’s to be staged with success in Moscow was Zoika’s Apartment (Zotkina kvartira, 1926), a

piece in the genre of NEP satires and comparable to Maiakovskii'’s The Bedbug and Nikolai Erdman’s plays The Mandate (Mandat, 1924) and The Suicide (Samoubtitsa, 1928). A light genre influenced by the new tendency to uslovnyi theatre, this type of satire combined “melodrama, farce, and vaudeville elements.”"? The uslounyi elements and humour, which had been latent in Bulgakov’s Days of the Turbins and Flight, are clearly evident in Zoika’s Apartment, but the play is not of any great theoretical interest. Bulgakov’s play The Crimson Island (Bagrovyi ostrov) was staged by

Tairov at the Kamernyi Theatre in 1928. It is the play by this author

that is the most influenced by Evreinov and the Crooked Mirror tradition, especially Unfailing Infidelity and The Fourth Wall.* Even the target is the same — Bulgakov’s experience with Stanislavskii and the Moscow Art Theatre seems to have inspired the image of Gen-

nadii Panfilovich, although Proffer sees detail from Meyerhold as well.15 The play shows the dress rehearsal of a play that must pass the representative of Glavrepertkom (the censorship board) in order to be put on. There is thus a framing play in the theatre, which is the main source of the satire, consisting of a prologue, an epilogue — when the play is saved from banning by an improvised change of ending — and a number of (often quite humorous) places where the actors “slip out of role.” In the prologue the author Vasilii Arturovich Dymogatskii (whose pseudonym is Jules Verne) appears, three days

201 Russian Pirandellos

late, with the text of the play, and Gennadii Panfilovich interrupts the rehearsal of the “ball scene” from an unknown play that is in progress, in order to rehearse Dymogatskii’s play in the presence of Savva Lukich before the latter leaves for the Crimea. The “theatre-in-the-theatre”

contains a number of typical figures familiar in this type of work since Tieck and, in Russian, since Blok and Evreinov: author, director,

assistant director, prompter, and an (invisible) technical assistant, Volodia, who is constantly making comic mistakes. The introduction of the censor is a audacious stroke, since the play actually had to be

passed by one. As Proffer points out, if the play had been turned down, it would have meant admitting the truth of the satire. As an example of metatheatre, that is to say, the imposition of one theatrical fiction on another, Bulgakov’s play is an interesting, even paradoxical case. First, it ilhustrates the theoretical reticence expressed by Uspenskii about the double point of view in this type of theatre.1"

Inevitably, the audience “forgets” that it is supposed to be watching a play within a play, so that the bracketing tends to disappear, despite the slipping out of role. Second, since this is supposed to be a dress rehearsal, the audience’ presence in the auditorium is “illegimitate,’ yet at several points Gennadii actually addresses the audience. It is

a paradox, too, that what is supposed to be a dress rehearsal of a play the text of which the actors have just received runs smoothly, with music, decorations, and props; this is true even of the improvised section at the end. The moments where the actors stop to complain, for example, about the readability of the text, which is written in the old pre-Revolutionary orthography, are too few to make a difference.

Thus the pleasure for the audience must come from the text of Dymogatskii’s play rather than the metatheatrical superstructure. In

the inner play we find a quite thoughtful text masquerading as a piece of South Sea fantasy. Essentially an allegory of the Revolution,

with such bold insertions as characters corresponding not only to Kerenskii (Kiri-Kuki), but also to Lenin and Trotskn, the play continues the line of Flight in that it shows certain characters who leave the revolutionary “crimson” island only to repent of their flight and return. It is this that leads Savva Lukich, initially, to condemn the play as advocating the “changing landmarks” point of view.!!” More intriguing is the play’s central function in a triply articulated, deeply ironical portrait of the author. This portrayal is already suggested in the list of characters: “Vasilii Arturovich Dymogatskii, alias Jules Verne, alias Kiri-Kuki, an upstart at court.” Dymogatskii is a ladies’ man, as is Kiri-Kuki, and a bit of a dreamer who stands in ironical contrast to the very down-to-earth and practical Gennadii. Driven

202 Pierrot in Petrograd

equally by his love for theatre and his desire to eat, Dymogatskii is forced finally to swallow his writer's principles and change the ending in order to have his play accepted. By depicting Dymogatskii in the

role of Kiri, a coward who has betrayed the Revolution, but who returns repentant and is forgiven at the end, Bulgakov seems to be giving a self-deprecating and ironical portrait of his own ideological position. He had, we recall, tried to emigrate at one point during the Revolution, and he had never accepted it, so that he was considered one of the “fellow-traveller” writers, along with Zamiatin, Pilniak, and others. The most deeply felt scene in the play is in the epilogue,

when Dymogatskii thinks that his play is going to be banned and, demented, he rails against his misfortune and the censorship. It is this outburst that makes one suspect his sincerity and revolutionary fervor when the ending is changed to an appropriately revolutionary one. In the name of survival and creature comforts, Bulgakov seems to be saying, he is willing to give a little. But the ideological correctness of his play is a forced one that has nothing to do with his true view as a writer. Thus, the metatheatre in The Crimson Island serves

a very clear purpose: to satirize the censorship (and popular taste) in the theatre and to define, in a witty and ironical way, the writer's position in relationship to Soviet society. One of Bulgakov’s abiding theatrical interests, and one which was

to bear fruit in a number of projects, was Moliere, perhaps not surprisingly, since Moliére’s plays, themselves strongly influenced by the Comédie-Italienne, lent themselves to metatheatrical elaboration

(as in Meyerhold’s production of Dom Juan), Such an offshoot of Bulgakov’s interest in Moliére was The Halfwit Jourdain (Poloumnyi Zhurden, written in 1932), a sort of pastiche of Moliére, or “Molieriana,” based mainly on Le Bourgeois gentilhomme."® It is of interest in that it has a framing in the theatre reminiscent of The Crimson Island (i.e., the distribution of roles at the beginning) or Vakhtangov’s Tur-

andot, not surprisingly, since the play was commissioned by the Theatre-Workshop of lurii Zavadskii, who had acted in Vakhtangov’s

production." The most striking moment is at the end, when a “double unmasking” takes place: Cléanthe and Coviello take off their Turkish disguise, and then Jourdain tears the “disguise” off Hubert, who is playing his wife. LUCILLE (throws herself into Jourdain's embrace). Father! I'm happy! JOURDAIN. No, no! Everything in the world is deception! (Jo Madame Jourdain.) I don’t believe that you are my wife! (Tears the female clothing

off Madame Jourdain.) Of course not, this is Hubert! It seems I’m really going mad! Hold me!}°

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If the first unmasking takes place within the inner play (which is itself a masking, since it is not by Moliére, the purported author), the second terminates the inner play. The “deception” of the inner play breaks down and the underlying deception — the “actors” as actors — shows through. It is at the collision of these two fictions that

Béjart feels himself going mad. His assertion that everything is a deception can be read as a veiled comment on Soviet society, in which it was becoming increasingly more difficult to separate decep-

tion and reality. However, the final deception, in Bulgakov as in Chekhov, with whom he has often been compared, is left intact: the actor behind the “actor” remains hidden, and the embracing fiction of a theatrical presentation remains unbroken. Bulgakov'’s best play, and one of the finest plays in Russian, Moliére, or the Cabal of Hypocrites (Mol’er, or Kabala sviatosh, begun in 1929, premiere in 1936), also deals with the life of Moliére, here treated as

a melodrama in which the playwright is persecuted by a group of religious intriguers because of his play Tartuffe. The work received only seven performances at the Moscow Art Theatre before being taken off after an unfavourable review in Pravda.'?! In it, as in The Crimson Island, the autobiographical resonances are very evident: as a result of intrigues and denunciation to Louis because of his possibly incestuous marriage to Armande Béjart, Moliére is refused permis-

sion to play anything but light comedies. In the last act, he dies onstage in Le Malade imaginaire, abandoned by Armande and faced

by a musketeer who has come to the theatre and threatened to kill him. The helplessness of the artist in the face of the despot described here is no doubt a reflection of the situation surrounding Bulgakov in the late 1920s, when he wrote the play. The theme, in a nutshell, could be described as the conflict between the authority of the artist in his theatre and the greater, and more arbitrary, power of the tyrant in society. Although its theme treated an apparently innocuous subject, the play had clear resonances in the fate of the artist in Stalinist Russia.

The text of Moliére begins and ends with oblique glimpses of the performance of plays at the Palais Royal, as seen from the backstage

vantage point of the dressing-rooms. At the beginning of the first act, we see Moliére at a moment of triumph composing an extemporaneous compliment to the Sun King. At the end, hounded by the church and out of grace with the king, he is performing in the same place when he dies. This metatheatrical ring serves to enclose the scenes that deal with all that is of the theatre, but not on stage: the intrigue of the religious fanatics and the duellist One-Eye, Start Praying! who is enlisted in the plan to kill the actor-author; the scenes

204 Pierrot in Petrograd

in the royal palace with Louis; the seduction of Armande Béjart by Moliére’s adopted son, Moirron; the cathedral scene, where Madeleine Béjart confesses to Charron, archbishop of Paris. But the focus remains the theatre, with its colourful masks and make-up, the excitement of the backstage, the roar of the crowd that makes the candles

flicker. In these scenes Bulgakov reminds us that the commedia dell’arte had taken root in France and found a brilliant offshoot when Jean-Baptiste Poquelin had met Tiberio Fiorelli or Scaramouche. It is fitting that this, the last Russian play to emerge from the encounter

of Russian dramatic art with the commedia tradition, should describe, symbolically, the victory of the tyrant over the artist.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Harlequin'’s Shadow:

The Film as Balagan L’équerre et fe cordeau s’accordent si bien avec Ja maniére de voir des souverains absolus, que les angles droits sont l’écueil de l’architecture despotique.'

The age of modernist culture that I have been describing in this book was also the period of the birth of the “tenth muse” — of cinema. The mania for commedia dell’arte was destined to affect the evolution of the cinema in several ways, both superficial and profound. This is by no means surprising if we consider the early history of film and the reaction of contemporaries to it. First, film was, like the traditional forms of commedia — the street theatre and the puppet show — a popular genre that catered to the masses. Moreover, early film was silent. That is to say, the film actor was in the position of Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who was forbidden by police order to include dialogue in his performances. Thrown back on the resources of gesture and the

visual gag, the early movie actor not surprisingly came up with similar results to the nineteenth-century Pierrot. In particular, he had to develop a “type”: a recognizable mask or persona that would offer the viewer a short-cut to deciphering the character. Charlie Chaplin, an example of such a mask or type, was recognized to be a continuation of commedia in film; Miklashevskii pointedly dedicated the French version of his book to him.? David Madden?

has recently attempted to explore in more detail the link between

Chaplin and commedia, but the comparison he makes between Charlie and Harlequin is unfortunate, since Charlie is the quintessential Pierrot: unlucky in love, pathetic, white-faced. His stick, unlike Harlequin’s, is never used for beating his protagonists. Nevertheless, Charlie was a very important figure in Russia in the 1920s, as for example, in the play A List of Assets (Spisok blagodetanii) by lurii

Olesha. Eisenstein knew Chaplin personally and was photographed with him in Hollywood. This cult of Chaplin had close generic links with the interest in commedia and flourished in the same circles that propagated the commedic.

206 Pierrot in Petrograd

THE REAL VERSUS THE REALISTIC Such links between film and commedia are, however, relatively superficial; it is in the work of Eisenstein that we see the creative absorp-

tion of commedia at its profoundest and most interesting. The problem of the theatre for Eisenstein, as for other avant-garde theoreticians of theatre discussed in chapter two, reduced itself essentially to the problem of the real versus the realistic, or, to put it in more theoretical terms, the structure of the theatrical sign. This problem manifested itself as a struggle against traditional, illusionistic theatre, also called “realistic” or “naturalistic” theatre. All of this debate harkens back, ultimately, to Briusov’s seminal article about the opposition between the real and the realistic (i.e., the non-real, or uslouny?) in the Moscow Art Theatre, “Nenuzhnaia pravda” (1902), which concludes, “From the unnecessary truth of contemporary theatre I say we should return to the conscious conventionality of ancient theatre.”4

In their reductivist enthusiasm the avant-garde iconoclasts indeed stated their task in even more stark and hyperbolic terms, stripped

of adjectives, as the “destruction of theatre” tout court. In this struggle, film was to assume a central role.

This change did not happen overnight, however, for the early history of cinema in Russia was marked by a hostility between theatre — even avant-garde theatre — and cinema. It was felt that cinema would, in time, come to replace the older medium. In part this hostility was due to the fact that, before the Revolution, the Russian cinema was a largely escapist mass medium with few, if any,

pretensions to art or intellectual content.° As such, it appeared an instrument of control by reactionary forces, another “opium of the masses.” Meyerhold, for one, expressed his hostility to cinema in his book O teatre (On Theatre, 1913). Whenever the question of the rebirth of the fairground booth [balagan] is raised there are people who either completely reject its advantages or who extol the cinematograph and call for its enlistment in the service of the theatre.

Far too much importance is attached to the cinematograph, that idol of the modern city, by its supporters. The cinematograph is of undoubted importance to science as a means of visual demonstration ... But there is no place for the cinematograph in the world of art, even in a purely auxiliary capacity. And if for some reason or other the cinematograph is called a

theatre, it is simply because during the period of total obsession with naturalism (an obsession which has already cooled off considerably), everything mechanical was enrolled in the service of the theatre.

207. Harlequin’s Shadow

This extreme obsession with naturalism, so characteristic of the general

public at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, was one of the original reasons for the extraordinary success of the cinematograph.

The romantics’ vague dreams of the past excluded the strict limits of classical tragedy. In its turn, romanticism was forced to yield to the proponents of naturalistic drama. The naturalists proclaimed the slogan “depict life as it really is,” thereby confusing the two separate artistic concepts of form and content. Whilst reproaching the classicists and the romantics with their obsession with form, the naturalists themselves set about perfecting form and in so doing transformed art into photography. Electricity came to the aid of the naturalists, and the result — a touching union of photography and technology — was the cinematograph.

Having once banished imagination from the theatre, naturalism, to be consistent, should have banished paint as well, not to mention the unnatural diction of actors. After all, the cinematograph took advantage of the development of verisimilitude, whilst replacing painted costumes and sets with the colourless screen and dispensing with the written word.

The cinematograph, that dream-come-true of those who strive for the photographic representation of life, is a shining example of the obsession with quasi-verisimilitude.°®

Meyerhold thus saw in the cinema an absurd extension of the preoccupation with photographic realism that he had rejected when he left Stanislavski's theatre. His antidote to this photographic realism, that is, his weapon in the destruction of “theatre,” was the balagan, not film. True, he was quick to recognize his error in rejecting film, for shortly after this was written he participated in the film Dorian Gray (1916). In the years that followed, however, Meyerhold was to maintain his allegiance to the balagan in his struggle against theatrical

realism; it fell to Eisenstein to carry on the struggle in the new medium.

The crucial discovery — which eluded Meyerhold — can be summed

up in the equation “balagan = film.” This equation becomes explicit

in an early essay by Maiakovskii on film, “Theatre, Cinema, Futurism” (1913). Another early expression of the hostility of the avant-garde towards naturalistic-realistic “theatre,” this text echoes many of the concerns of Meyerhold, but for the first time actually sees film as a solution, that is, a weapon in the destruction of that theatre. —

Present-day theatre, by trying to convey a photographic depiction of life, lapses into the following contradiction:

208 Pierrot in Petrograd The art of the actor, which is by its nature dynamic, is shackled by the dead background of the decorations. This blatant contradiction is abolished by the cinema, which neatly captures the movement of the real. Theatre has brought about its own destruction, and must yield its heritage to the cinema. And the cinema, by turning the naive realism and artifice of Chekhov and Gorky into a branch of industry, will lead the way to the theatre of the future — to the uninhibited art of the actor.’

Maiakovskii here makes plain the link between the term of opprobrium “theatre” and the “naive realism” of the Moscow Art Theatre, an association evident to the reader in the reference to Chekhov and Gorkii. Like Briusov, Maiakovskii objects to the theatrical sign as practised in Stanislavskuis theatre, a sign that made an embarrassing fetish of the real. Briusov pointed out that whether one had live trees onstage or simply a sign proclaiming “forest,” as Shakespeare did, the effect would be the same, since both would be conventional signs standing for the idea “forest.” We can leave aside for the moment the question of what is the real, although ultimately Maiakovskuis criti-

cisms led to that as well. His iconoclasm reflects closely that of Meyerhold. What is important, however, and puzzling at first sight, is that Maiakovskii sees cinema — a photographic medium, as Meyerhold had pointed out — as an antidote to the “photographic realism”

of naturalist theatre, a position opposite to that proposed earlier by Meyerhold. This apparent contradiction — actually a brilliant insight on Maiakovskii’s part ~ was an early reference to a central notion in avant-garde cinema, one that was to shape the poetic of Soviet film in the twenties, namely, the use of the real to combat realism.

SERGEI EISENSTEIN AND THE COMMEDIA DELL’ ARTE Avant-garde theatre, with its search for new forms and its emphasis on theatricality, was a training ground for the individual who was to play the leading role in the history of Soviet cinema: Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein. Eisenstein’s path to cinema led through theatre, a fact that is generally not given sufficient stress, for much of what he can be seen to have achieved in cinema was, so to say, “theatre by other means.” His early work in the theatre included some brief but important contact with Meyerhold.*® Eisenstein later described his relationship to Meyerhold (and hence to Meyerhold’s theatre) in startling terms. The Oedipus complex, standing out from Freud's teaching so disproportionately and exaggeratedly — in the play of passions within the school itself: the

209 Harlequin’s Shadow sons encroaching on the father. Though they did so rather in reaction to the father’s tyrannical regime, a father more like Saturn devouring his children than like Oedipus’ father, the unoffending spouse of [Jocasta] ... Why am I getting so worked up about the inner atmosphere of a group of scientists long dispersed? ... Of course, I long ago stopped describing Freud's court and am now writing about the atmosphere in the school and theatre of the idol of my youth, my theatrical leader, my teacher. Meyerhold!?

The problems Eisenstein had with the Oedipal complex are well known; it is therefore not surprising that he should project them upon that notoriously authoritarian figure, Meyerhold. As this quotation shows, there were perhaps reasons beyond the intellectual or

aesthetic ones to explain Eisenstein’s departure from theatre and espousal of cinema. But it is clear that, although he quickly outgrew

his mentor and became a fully fledged member of the Ler (Levyi front iskusstva: The Left Front of Art) avant-garde movement, the lessons absorbed in Meyerhold’s theatre continued to shape Eisenstein’s thinking to the end. According to Eisenstein himself, it was Komissarzhevskii’s production of Turandot at the Nezlobin Theatre, which he saw in 1912 at the age of thirteen when it was on tour in Riga, which first focused

his attention on theatre.’° To this love for theatre can be added an equally important passion for the circus." Other productions seen by Eisenstein in his formative years were to confirm his interest in avant-garde theatre: Meyerhold’s staging of Calderon's The Steadfast Prince and the theatre of Evreinov (1916), and Meyerhold’s production of Lermontov’s Masquerade (1917)."2 In the civil-war period 1918-20

Eisenstein served in the Red Army; during that time he worked on designs for a huge number of plays. To be found in Eisenstein’s archive were, among others, Goldoni’s La Putta onorata (September 1917); Les Millions de Pierrot, a “pantomime by Eisenstein” (November 1917); Gozzi's LAmore delle tre melarance (1917-18); Moliére’s Les Fourberies de Scapin (February 1918); Les Douze Heures de Colombine, a “Grand Colombino-Arlequinade” by Eisenstein; and Benavente’s Los Intereses creados (1920). It seems that none of these projects was ever

realized; however, the impressive list of plays that Eisenstein tried to conceptualize is eloquent testimony to his commitment to theatre, and to commedia in particular. Eisenstein defended this commitment

to the painter Eliseev, who had organized an army theatre in the town of Velikie Luki, where Eisenstein was posted at the end of 1919."

In 1920 Eisenstein moved to Moscow and managed to get taken on at the Moscow Proletcult theatre. Among the plays that Eisenstein

worked on at that time (especially the decorations) were two

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productions that incorporated commedia dell’arte. The first was a version of Schnitzler’s Columbine Scarf, for which, we are told, the drawings strongly emphasized the vertical.’ Of Eisenstein’s work on this production, Ivanov has the following to say: The early theatrical experience of Eisenstein himself made him familiar with

the principles of the theatre of masks. In “A Method” [an unpublished manuscript of his theoretical writings] Eisenstein recalled the pantomime Columbine’ Garter [Podviazka Kolombiny} for a production of which he and S. lutkevich collaborated on the scenario and costumes at the Foregger theatre. According to Eisenstein, he later used some things from this pantomime in The Sage. Dohnanyis pantomime had been revived three times on the stage of the theatre in the teens and twenties. The first time Columbine’ Scarf was staged with decorations by Sapunov — this production was known to Eisenstein only by descriptions and word-of-mouth accounts, but he was enthu-

siastic about it.*° The second time it was produced as Pierrette’s Shawl [Pokryvalo P erretty] by Tairov, a production that Eisenstein rejected. (In this

particular he closely agreed with his mentor Meyerhold.) In Eisenstein’s version Dohnanyi’s pantomime was “urbanized”: “Harlequin appeared in a checked cap and automobile goggles and went by the suggestive name of the detective Ned Rocker” i.e., the mask of the commedia dell’arte was replaced by the “mask” (typage) of the hero of a contemporary genre that in its standardization rivaled the commedia dell’arte — the detective story (which was to remain in the centre of attention for Eisenstein as theoretician throughout his life). In Eisenstein’s pantomime Columbine is strangled during the dance by the dead Pierrot, who has been galvanized to life by the Avenger Harlequin.”

One is struck in this passage by the tendency of Eisenstein to modernize the commedia dell’arte and to replace the traditional mask with a contemporary one. Clearly, the Italian tradition was important to Eisenstein as a theatrical situation, a matrix of conventions that he

could choose to modernize and manipulate in his own way. He nevertheless thought of it as a continuation of the tradition, and he retained the idea of commedia as a sort of metaphor for the kind of theatre he was interested in creating.’ It is also interesting that for Ivanov the terms “masks” and typage are synonyms (see discussion below).

Eisenstein’s second major unrealized production of the Proletcult period was Tieck’s Puss-in-Boots, to be presented as a political revue

under the auspices of the Meyerhold workshop (GvyRM) in the Manége Hall in Moscow in 1922.'° Tieck’s play, we recall, had been translated and published in Meyerhold’s journal Love for Three Oranges

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(LTA).*° Neither of these projects was ever realized. The drawing of the set design for the latter production focuses on the problem of the audience: it presents the view from the fictive rear of the stage onto the footlights, prompter’s box, and an imaginary audience beyond the stage — “the real audience in front of the stage views the action as if from backstage.””! In other words, Eisenstein’s conception of the play strongly foregrounded its metatheatrical aspects. The set design itself was an exercise in the constructivist idiom.”

EISENSTEIN: MONTAGE It is in the theoretical writings — and artistic practice — of Eisenstein

that the precise role to be played by film in the struggle against Stanislavskii’s ‘theatre (now, since the Revolution, branded as “bourgeois”) was to become explicit. However, Eisenstein’s famous essay “The Montage of Attractions” (1923) was written, not about cinema, but about the theatre. Moreover, it has underlying it a metaphor that

was important in the debates about Soviet theatre in the twenties, namely theatre as circus. In the essay Eisenstein proposes to use circus as a weapon to destroy “theatre”, that is, perform a similar function to that proposed by Meyerhold for the balagan and Maiakovskii for film. Essentially, as I have said, for Eisenstein balagan, commedia, circus, and music-hall are coterminous; it is my contention. that film was one more extension of this term. That is to say, Eisenstein’s films were balagany: balagan = film = circus = musichall. Clearly, it is important to ask what it was that all these elements had in common which would make them allies in the struggle against theatrical realism.

Eisenstein sees his new theatre as a structure composed of units called “attractions” — we might call them “numbers” or “circus acts” — that are strung together sequentially or can occur simultaneously,

and that achieve new meaning through the collision of their individual meanings. Eisenstein sees theatre, not as story-telling, the unfolding of a literary narrative, but as an abstract art more akin to the collage (which was very popular in the 1920s in the work of Rodchenko and others). Essentially, what he proposes in this essay is a new grammar of theatre, a new way of looking at the structure of the theatrical event, in which the word “attraction” is a synonym for “theatrical sign” and can be compared to such minimal units in linguistics as the word or morpheme. Here the term “grammar” serves as more than a metaphor: it suggests Eisenstein’s importance as a proto-semiotician developing film as a “secondary modelling system,” a role that has been elucidated recently by V.V. Ivanov.” This

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is not surprising, since associated with LEF (which was edited by Maiakovskii) were also a number of theorists of literature and poetics from the OPOIAZ group who had begun with linguistic analysis of the literary text — the so-called formalists.™ It is important to understand that the theory of theatre that Eisen-

stein was propounding in his essay was derived, in some of its essential details, from the concept of theatre as commedia, for in commedia the plot, as embodied in the scenario, served simply as the “pretext” (fabula, in the terms of the literary theory proposed by the opoiaz), whereas the “text” (siuzhet) was the string of lazzi, the chains of events that stood in ironic relationship to the “plot” and served to deform it. These /azzi can be seen as “attractions” in embryonic form. Indeed, the genetic and historical links between commedia and the circus proper were very strong. The division between fabula and siuzhet, which the “formalists” perceived in all literature, was especially pronounced in commedia, and also in Meyerhold’s concept of theatre, with its hegemony of the theatrical production over the literary text.% The similarity of the scenario: lazzi and fabula: siuzhet homologies to the grammatical notions of deep structure and surface structure is worth noting here. This similarity should be understood

less as the function of grammar as a metaphor for narrative and theatre, than as the similarity and, mutatis mutandis, interchangeability of the pattern from the one system to another, with no system

necessarily dominant; there is a striking unity in the thinking of Russian specialists in different fields in the 1920s. Eisenstein’s interest in commedia had very protound roots in his search — both theoretical and practical — for a renewal of art. This had led him back to Veselovskii’s hypothesis of a “syncretic ritual act” that had then splintered into the various art forms. Eisenstein, like many modernists, was motivated by the search for a Gesamtkunstwerk that would reunite the long divorced muses. Since commedia’s sources lay in the folkloric layer of expression, it was an expression of a primitive form of art closer to the prelapsarian unity. Moreover, Veselovsku had posited that, of the modelling systems that had been bundled in the original syncretic act, gesture was more central and more ancient than speech; hence it was commedia, with its enforced mutism and heightened use of gesture, that in this way also pointed back to the origins of art.”

THE REAL AND THE REALISTIC AS ASPECTS OF COMMEDIA In the very first film sequence that Eisenstein created — the famous “Glumov’s Film Diary,” which was inserted in his version of Ostrov-

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skii’s Enough Simplicity in Every Sage (renamed by Eisenstein simply The Sage) — the presence of commedia is very clearly visible in the

clown-like dress of the actors, their grotesque gestures, and /azzi. Here Eisenstein found a way to continue the discovery he had made in his earlier production of The Mexican. “As the first feature [of cinema] we noted the cinematographic tendency, which strives to capture phenomena and their elements with minimal distortion, focusing on the factual reality of the element or the fragment per se ... One of the features of my factual participation [in The Sage] and its result were expressed precisely in the element of this focus on the

directness of the phenomenon — the element of cinematographism, as opposed to ‘the play of reactions to events’ — which is a purely theatrical element.’”*” Here Eisenstein develops a dichotomy already evident in the quotations from Meyerhold and Maiakovskii given above (and one that harkens back to Briusov’s article “Nenuzhnaia pravda’), namely, the opposition between the real and the realistic (i.e., the non-real). Film, which records and presents the real, can be used as a weapon to destroy the dead, illusory, conventional realism of the theatre. It foregrounds, as Maiakovskii pointed out, the life of the actor against the dead “realistic” scenery. If this contradiction had always been present in theatre (but ignored as a convention, a contract between players and audience), modernist theatre (following not only Briusov, but also Chekhov’ critique of Stanislavskii and, ultimately, Tolstoi’s “estranged” description of the theatrical spectacle in War and Peace) had become vitally concerned with the contradiction

in naturalist theatre between two types of theatrical sign: one in which the the signified (“reality”) is real and the signifier (“painted sets,” “makeup,” etc.) artificial, conventional, “dead”; and another in which the signifier (“reality”) and the signifier (“actor”) were both real, non-conventional.” The essence of commedia dell’arte, in its modernist recension, was the interplay between the real and the realistic (= conventional): the real street dialect of the masks as against the “realistic” poetic language of the innamorati, the real improvisations and repartee with the audience as opposed to the artificiality of a fictional text, the real voice and body of the actor versus the dead immobility of the mask. The genius of commedia was that, instead of ignoring or striving to etface the differences between the two types of sign, it foregrounded them. In short, the theme (skvoznaia tema) of commedia/balagan is the conflict between two types of theatrical sign.

When he turned to cinema, Eisenstein found (as Maiakovskii had

predicted) in the reality of the photograph a weapon to fight the realism of theatre — a realism that in the early days found its equivalent in film in pot-boiler melodramas performed by actors in front

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of studio sets.” The reality of the photographic image (the cinematographic sign) was so complete that it could not literally mean what it represented, but had to mean, through synecdoche or metaphor, something else.*° The shot (and later, as Eisenstein discovered, components of the shot) could, and must, be used as a conventional sign, an “attraction,” to be manipulated like the conventional theatrical signs of commedia, to achieve an expressiveness that was in opposition to its literal depiction. It was this semantic shift of the image

that enabled Eisenstein to develop his grammar or “rhetoric” of cinema. It is, moreover, the tension between the real referent depicted in the shot and the meaning of the shot that constitutes for Eisenstein the theme of cinema. Since all shots are photographic depictions of reality (or were until it was discovered that one could mingle cartoon characters with photographed shots), cinema swept away the problem

of theatre, namely, the contradiction between the real and the con-

ventional — to replace it with a new problem: the conventional (uslounyt) use of the real. About his work on the production of The Sage Eisenstein writes: The eccentricity of the production, which heightened all the elements of theatre to a paradoxical degree, exposed this line [the “new, different, factually material element”] to the extreme among the grotesqueness of the juxtapositions.

In the production this tendency was particularly sharply stated in the emphasis on the physical fact of acrobatics rather than illusionistic, representative play-acting. Gesture shifts into acrobatics, rage is expressed through a somersault, ecstasy through a salto mortale, lyricism by going up onto “the mast of death” ... The eccentric grotesqueness of the style of the production

permitted shifts from one type of expression to another, as well as unexpected intertwinings of both.™

Characteristic in this statement is the implied rejection of the “illusionistic” (i.e., “realistic”) in favour of the “physical fact” (i.e., “the real”). It is, we note, important from Eisenstein’s perspective that he create “unexpected intertwinings” of the real and the illusionistic, in order to foreground the borderline between them. The effect is that of a stylistic montage with the characteristic shock effect aimed at by montage as the spectator experiences the shift from one to the other.” Moreover, whereas illusionistic acting purports to represent the reality it refers to, the “real” gestures of the acrobat or the commedia mask referred, not to reality directly, but to concepts which it realized metaphorically: rage, lyricism, and so on. Thus, in the gestural and acrobatic resources of the clown and the mask, Eisenstein

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found the theatrical equivalent of the physical reality that is the essence of the cinema - a physical reality that stands as a sign for something else.

The inserted film sequence within the play served in similar fashion to stress the metatheatrical aspects of commedia. The reality of the photographic image dramatically contrasted with the highly conventionalized theatre environment. We are reminded that metatheatre is also a form of montage, in which two images, two worlds, are brought together like the poles of a magnet to create a force field. The montage of conflicting realities was given a physical, concrete reality in the stage set, as can be seen from Eisenstein’s description: For the production of The Sage the stage took the form of a round carpet like

a circus arena, with red cloth arranged around the edge to form a barrier, and three-quarters surrounded by the audience. The back was hung with a curtain of striped ticking, in front of which stood a small raised platform, with steps on each side. The scene with Mamayev took place below “in the ring” as we called it at the time, while the one with Mamayeva occurred on the platform. Instead of a smooth change of scenes, Glumov in our production flew from the one area to the other and back. He would pronounce a fragment of dialogue from the platform, only to break off and continue it from the ring. The final words of one series of fragments would collide with the beginnings of the other to acquire a new meaning and sometimes create a punning play on words. The very leaps themselves created, as it were, caesurae between the playacting of the separate episodes.*

Not only did the metatheatre of commedia lead to the notion of montage; it was montage — a montage of styles that implied a montage

of conflicting realities, foregrounding the boundaries (caesurae)

between them. The macaronic, baroque world of commedia thus provided the direct inspiration and the model for the discovery of montage. To the question of where the montage in The Sage came from, Eisenstein offers the following characteristic reply: I think that first and foremost it was the influence of the principle of composition or montage of the circus or music-hall programme. I had been a passionate follower of this genre since childhood. But this early love grew luxuriantly through the influence of the French, of Chaplin (about whom we knew only by hearsay), and the first news of the fox-trot and jazz. Together, remember, with the Feks, Foregger, the Theatre of Popular Comedy, and our own earlier circus-style production, The Mexican.

216 Pierrot in Petrograd This music-hall element was evidently most conducive at the time to the emergence of a “montage” pattern of aesthetic thinking. Sewn from motley patches, Harlequins costume grew into a model for constructing the programme of a whole type of spectacle that sprang up in place of that in which he had once ruled unchallenged.*

Montage, then, was “in the air,’ and that air was permeated with commedia dell’arte or balagan, as well as its variants, the circus and the music-hall. Indeed, for Eisenstein, montage was, as he goes on to show in the same passage with a quote from Flaubert, an inherent principle of art, one which becomes dramatized at certain moments

in the evolution of art. One of those moments, we might note in parentheses, was the beginning of film, which, with its high-speed juxtaposition of frame after frame, was montage in its purest form. This is not to say that montage means absolutely the same thing

in film as it does on the stage; to make such an assertion would clearly be absurd (although Eisenstein himself was guilty of passing his generalizations from medium to medium a little too easily), In

fact, the evolution of Eisenstein’s film technique represented the difficult process of translation into another modelling system of the lessons learned from the balagan. In particular, in Eisenstein’s notion of film the struggle between the realistic and the conventional was already decided in favour of the conventional: Eisenstein’s films — certainly the early ones and even, I would argue, the post-Nevsky ones as well — were pure balagan; that is to say, they were totally conventional (uslounye) and as remote from the conventions of realism (use of professional actors, fabricated sets, literary story-line) as it is

possible to be.** To be sure, other influences were included in the conventional soup of his films, especially those of the Japanese theatre, but these, too, Eisenstein read as a type of balagan and hence as confirmation of his original ideas.** As a sign that Eisenstein still had the example of the balagan — and precisely the Italian variant, commedia dell’arte — in mind even at a late date, we may note that the figure of the old Ivan the Terrible, with his long, pointed beard, is a “quotation” from that tradition — the visual appearance of Pantalone as depicted by Jacques Callot (see illustration).°’

An important part of Eisenstein’s theory of montage is his linear conception of theatre as a string of events, or “attractions.” This was

determined by the fact that, beyond the possibility of a certain number of simultaneous events (limited by the audience's ability to absorb them), theatrical events occur sequentially in time. Such a point might seem trivial until we see the application of Eisenstein’

notions to the unrelenting linearity of the strip of celluloid. The

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theories that he developed in his work in theatre adapted themselves easily to the problems of film, at least as far as the problem of linearity went. However, the fact that the events are perceived sequentially does not, as Eisenstein stressed, mean that they should be seen as a simple addition of information: A + B + c. Notionally, the grammar of the montage of attractions that Eisenstein was developing might rather be expressed as A X B X C*. That is to say, the montaging of events (in film — shots, and also elements within the shot) occurs according to complex laws of interaction. Eisenstein considered that these laws were to a degree universal and, surprisingly, drew again the parallel with commedia, showing how deeply he had studied it, as we can see in his discussion of The Battleship Potemkin: “In the foreground is a common compositional variation: an even number of persons is replaced by an odd number. Two replaced by three. This ‘golden rule’ of alternating scenes has behind it a tradition that goes

right back to the Italian commedia dell’arte. At the same time the direction of the actors’ eyes intersects.” There is, however, an important difference, which is worth underlining, between the tradition of commedia dell’arte and Eisenstein’s films (and was equally operative in Meyerhold’s assimilation of the tradition). The nature of the traditional Italian theatre of masks had been a highly democratic, actor-centred one that allowed the actor to express him or herself freely through improvisation. As commedia was assimilated into literature (e.g., in the French tradition and subsequently in the German romantic one), this centrality of the actor was set aside in favour of the hegemony of the authorial text. With the modernist revival, it is neither the author nor the actor who is dominant (despite certain attempts to promote improvisation), but the director. The hegemony of the director's authority was absolute, as Eisenstein himself pointed out speaking of Meyerhold. It was a

paradox that a theatrical form that traditionally had been highly democratic (and that had been espoused in the name of a revolutionary rejection of authority in the theatre) should, in fact, have been exploited in a highly authoritarian manner that allowed no freedom to the actor As some theoreticians of film have noted, Eisenstein too, despite his rejection of authority in the theatre, was authoritarian to the point of violence in his manipulation of the elements of film. Essentially, his theory of cinema amounted to a kind of cinematic Taylorism that would manipulate the viewer in a Pavlovian manner. As the late Andrei Tarkovskii put it: “The film-

maker deprives the spectators of the possibility of using in their feelings their own attitude towards what they have seen. That is to say, the means of construction of the image becomes a goal in itself;

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as for the director, he launches a massive assault on the spectator,

imposing on him/her his own attitude towards the events.” The control and violence was expressed even in the structure of the shot, as Bonitzer points out, “He does not let the shot ‘breathe’; the space is always composed, given a rhythm, written, dominated — never free, never leaving anything to chance.”” Eisenstein himself was not only aware of this violence and control in his cinema, he welcomed it. “Cinema, like the theatre, can be understood only as ‘one form of

violence.“ Here, perhaps, is the most important lesson he learned from Meyerhold.

In the drawings and designs Eisenstein created in 1921 for the unrealized production of Tieck’s Puss-in-Boots, the metatheatrical element was expressed by the device of having the real audience “back-

stage” “looking out” past the actors onto the “audience.” Notably lacking in Eisenstein’s discussion of theatre is any mention of the audience as an integral part of the spectacle, partaking in the theatrical experience in the way that the proponents of symbolist “cultic”

drama (and Georg Fuchs before them) had suggested. Rather, in Eisenstein’s model (influenced, perhaps, by its retrospective nature) the audience is to be acted upon by a series of psychological stimuli

activated by the shock of montage. Of course, the inability of the audience to react to the actors and modify the theatrical experience is a feature of the cinema. It is ironical that in this particular, at least,

cinema, which was to destroy the “bourgeois” realistic theatre of Stanislavskil, reproduced its “keyhole,” voyeuristic effect.” Moreover,

this power of cinema to suggest and exert psychological control is the logical conclusion of the tendency to subject all aspects of the theatrical experience to the will and control of the director that we had observed in Meyerhold (no matter what lip-service was paid to the independence of the actor and the importance of the audience in a collective experience). This control was the ultimate violence that the director inflicts on his audience — and on himself.”

COMMEDIA AND THE PROBLEM OF PERSPECTIVE Much of the recent writing on Eisenstein’s film theories has tended to focus on the problem of the sign and the realistic/real opposition — essentially the problem of montage that I have discussed in the preceding pages. Although montage was a central issue in commedia and constituted the most important lesson Eisenstein was to derive from it, it was not the only one. In particular, he was concerned with

another aspect of realistic theatre which he read as symbolic of

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authority and to which he reacted with the Oedipal viscerality that was to characterize his thought and that was, as Carl Schorske has pointed out, the hallmark of the modernist revolution. The representation of an object in the proportions that are actually (not relatively) appropriate to it is, of course, simply a tribute to orthodox, formal logic, to the fact of subordination to an inviolable order of things. And both in painting and in sculpture it periodically and invariably returns in periods

of the establishment of absolutism, transforming the expressiveness of archaic disproportionality into a regular “table of ranks” of officially established harmony. Positivistic realism is by no means the correct form of perception. It is simply the function of a definite form of social structure, which, as a result of the unity of state power, implants a unity of state thought. Ideological uniformization, resulting pictorially in the serried uniforms of the guard regiments.*

Reading between the lines, we can say that, for Eisenstein, “absolute” realism was the expression of the ideology of the newly vanquished régime; the hegemony of realistic perspective signifies the authority of tsarism. To destroy realism is a political program, signifying the

total rupture from the past. The task of destroying realism lies, therefore, not only in restructuring the theatrical sign, but in “destroying perspective” as well. In fact, of course, we have to do, not with the destruction of perspective altogether, for that is impossible, but the replacement of one kind of perspective by another, just

as the formula “destruction of theatre” meant the replacement of bourgeois theatre by a new, non-bourgeois type of theatrical spectacle.

In order to understand the nature of Eisenstein’s revolt against “perspective, it is necessary to consider exactly what was meant traditionally by the term and the special circumstances of its application to theatre, which is where Eisenstein’s revolt has its roots, and subsequently to film. Traditionally, the term “perspective” has been

applied in the literal sense to the visual arts; its extension to the other arts, and to other fields of activity, can been seen as a metaphor.* The notion of perspective in theatre is a relatively undeveloped

one. In his discussion of prose composition, Boris Uspenskii discusses point of view in the theatre in what are essentially terms borrowed from the nineteenth-century realist novel with its shifting point of view (using the example of War and Peace).* It is clear that for our purposes Uspenskiis notion of perspective as point of view needs modification. Essentially, the problem is that in theatre (and

220 Pierrot in Petrograd

in cinema) there are at least two different types of perspective, each derived from a related art form, but applied rather differently in the theatrical context, and interacting with each other. The first kind of perspective is that to be found in the visual arts: “external perspective.”” In the visual arts, the notion of perspective arises during the Italian renaissance, the quattrocento, as a hypothetical model for the representation of a three-dimensional space in the two-dimensional medium of a painting or drawing. The postulates of this kind of perspective are well known: the receding lines that merge at a “vanishing point” that is the conventional representation of the horizon. Most important, quattrocento perspective presupposed a single, immobile eye observing space as a pyramid turned on its side. As Guillén points out, this is an artificial convention that does not correspond to the reality of the human eyes, of which there are two placed in a mobile body that permits objects to be viewed from many angles. What the quattrocento artists had “invented” (hundreds of years before it became technically possible through the refinement of the lens and the invention of photosensitive chemicals) was the (single-lens) camera, just as Leonardo invented the helicopter long before the discovery of the internal combustion engine made it feasible.

We should note, in particular, that visual external perspective implies harmony of proportion as well, as Eisenstein stresses in his attack on it; that is to say, every element in the picture should be of the appropriate scale so as not to disrupt the illusion of reality that

is created. It is not, as Uspenskii has shown in his study of the semiotics of the Russian icon, the only kind of perspective in visual arts;** in fact, it is internal perspective — a perspective that places the

viewer, not at a point external to the picture, but within the picture itself ~ that is more prevalent in world culture. It is internal perspective that is generally adopted by children at the initial stage of their development.” In theatrical terms the importance of the model of quattrocento (external) perspective in ordering the visual scene is self-evident. The

introduction of the proscenium arch as the theatrical equivalent of

the frame of the picture is the crucial event in the imposition of external perspective in the theatre. The visual aspect of the theatre, the scene, is thus conceived as a picture, albeit in three dimensions rather than two. Most important, the spectator is placed outside the picture: as in the visual arts, the eye of the observer views the scene depicted as if through a sheet of glass. In theatrical terms this sheet of glass was to become the convention of the “fourth wall.” It is clear from the quotation from Eisenstein given above that he has external

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perspective in mind. He was not the first to see this problem; Meyerhold, too, had railed against the “peep-hole” (zamochnaia skvazhina) effect of the proscenium arch, which had removed the spectator and

| placed him beyond an invisible wall from which he could not participate in the action. “Destruction of perspective” in terms of the visual aspect of theatre meant the removal of the proscenium, contact between audience and actor (e.g., repartee, sorties of the actors into the audience), restructuring the theatrical space, and, in a more subtle fashion, the disrup-

tion of the unity of visual scale of objects on stage that had contributed to the harmony of visual impression. In all of these areas, commedia dell’arte served as a model for a theatre that predated the

imposition of external perspective in the theatre. This event had been, as Eisenstein believed, coincident with, and indeed signitied, the evolution of monarchical authority in the seventeenth century; the harmony and unity of impression that external perspective strove to achieve thus signified the harmony and unity of the state under the benevolent despot. If the theatrical spectacle was reduced to a framed moving picture, then the privileged viewer was the roi-soleil

himself, sitting in the royal box directly opposite to the stage. Nineteenth-century bourgeois theatre had uncritically appropriated this model, conveniently ignoring the fact that only one person, the king, could sit directly opposite the action and be the privileged viewer; all the other spectators were voyeurs watching the king watch

the spectacle, of which their own view was necessarily distorted to a greater or lesser degree. When Eisenstein turned to cinema, he was presented with similar problems of perspective. Of course, cinema is by its nature twodimensional, with a framed image projected onto a two-dimensional surface, unlike theatre, which was three-dimensional, and had had external perspective imposed on it unnaturally. In early cinema the theatrical model had, ironically enough, been imposed on cinema: wordless melodramatic playlets were performed by actors in front of a stationary camera that replaced the eye of a spectator in the theatre.

The solution in cinema to the problem of external perspective was different from that in theatre — naturally, since its means were different. In cinema the spectator was obliged to be stationary, of course,

but the camera, acting like a surrogate eye, did not. Moreover, the

film camera, with its lack of depth and its ability to be closer or farther from the object filmed, naturally creates grotesque disproportionalities in the size of objects.~ These disproportionalities were skilfully exploited by Eisenstein and others to create an unrealistic art form, thus realizing Maiakovskii’s vision of a non-realistic theatre.

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It is not only in montage, but in the close-up, the use of distorting lenses, the travelling shot, the fade-in, and so on, that Eisenstein finds the tools to destroy (external) perspective, inserting the viewer into the action, often in ways that are mutually exclusive from shot

to shot, thus destroying the unity of impression and harmony that is the essence of perspective and replacing it with disproportion — visual grotesque — and a splintered, multiple point of view.” A study of the shots in Eisenstein’s films suggests a further, very important lesson that he learned from commedia dell’arte concerning the physical appearance of the human figure; this lesson fits in with the anti-realistic tendency of that theatrical form and of the kind of cinema he was trying to create. Visually, Eisenstein spoke of the antiperspective composition of his shots. That is to say, they were conceived, not to convey the human (or other) figure in a “natural” pose,

but to distort it. Analogous to this is the distortion of the human figure achieved in commedia by the acrobatics of the servant masks, whose bodies are constantly twisted into grotesque shapes that defy the desire for harmony and coherence which is the essence of realism.

This distortion of the human form by commedia acrobatics was recorded by the French printmaker Jacques Callot, whose grotesque depictions of commedia characters were used by Hoffmann as illustrations to his “Capriccios in Callots Manier” and who was frequently referred to in the context of modernist commedia in Russia. However, (and this coincidence of historical examples with modern practice is typical of Eisenstein, and indeed of the period) it is also reflected in Meyerhold’s experiments with “biomechanics,” in which the human body is distorted acrobatically to create a language of gestural expressivity. Biomechanics is an attempt to codify and give a scientific basis to the expressiveness of the acrobatics of the actor. The distortion of the human figure that is part and parcel of Eisenstein’s rejection of realist perspective in film is derived from biomechanics, but is realized in certain ways that are proper to film. Examples of this are the close-up (synecdoche), frequently of an unusual part of the body from an unusual angle (the close-up of the woman’s face or the girl's hands on her belt in the “Odessa Steps” sequence) or of the whole of the body in an unusual position (Vakulinchuk’s body hanging in the ngging). Visual perspective is, however, only one of two types of perspective

that operate in the theatrical spectacle. If theatre is a visual art, it is

also a literary one, in the sense that it recreates or creates (in the case of improvisation) a “literary” text that has several of the features

of formal prose narrative. Inherent in any literary narrative, as Ingarden has shown, is the imaginary world of the narrative, a world

223 Harlequins Shadow

that in crucial ways coincides with the real world to which it partially

refers, and in crucial ways differs from it. Within the imaginary world, there are time and space co-ordinates that structure its semantics. It is in the proportions of the spatial and temporal co-ordinates that we find the harmony or disharmony, the unity or the disunity,

that enables us to say whether the work is realistic or not. In this sense we can speak (as Eisenstein did) of perspective, by which he meant a realistic narrative or fictional perspective in which the space-

time co-ordinates give the illusion of the real world, although they do so in a purely conventional way. It is in this sense, likewise, that classical Marxist critics, for example, Lukacs or Gukovskii, speak of “historical perspective” in the realist novel. Realistic theatre, then, observed “narrative perspective,” by which I mean proportion, harmony, and continuity in the structure of each of the theatrical signs that signify the imaginary world. This type of

realist perspective is the equivalent, in narrative fiction, of the external perspective of the quattrocento. It requires that certain ref-

erences to time be inserted in the text to create the illusion of a coherent temporal continuum. It also requires that references to the spatial structure of the imaginary world appear to respect the laws of the real spatial world. It should be noted, however, that we have to do with a series of conventional signs here. The imaginary world is a fiction, and is known by everyone to be a fiction; it is a convention

that the self-evident incongruities in the imaginary world will be ignored; how this happens is more complex than we think and is the essence of the craftsmanship of the realist artist. In commedia the laws of spatial and temporal harmony are generally ignored; no attempt is made to structure the theatrical space in a way that would ape a believable reality; they may even be held up to ridicule by the requirement that the text make absurd jumps in time and space, for example, the structure of the kingdoms in Tieck’s The Topsy-Turvy World. Frequently a character may step out of his role to comment on the absurdity of the conventions — the device of metatheatre — or two simultaneous and incompatible plot-lines may be going on at once. Where realist theatre strives for credibility and harmony, commedia abounds in discontinuities and promotes incredulity and incoherence — in short, the grotesque. Fisenstein’s films promoted the disruption of spatial and temporal perspective in a variety of ways. Obvious examples of disruption of temporal perspective are the sequences where the same movement is repeated again and again from different angles: the same soldiers descending and redescending the Odessa steps, the same bridge over

the Neva rising again and again, the figure of Kerenskii walking

224 Pierrot in Petrograd

endlessly up the same flight of stairs in the Winter Palace. Examples of the disruption of spatial perspective are to be found in the use of

camera angles (e.g., the bow of the Potemkin heading straight for the camera) and distorting lenses, and the montaging of shots of different spaces. Most important, his films eschewed entirely the notion of narrative in the traditional sense, and he was especially hostile to the romantically erotic content of the narrative in the typical

Hollywood movie. In short, Eisenstein, in his films up to Bezhin Meadow, chose to film the real in perspective-disrupting ways (whereas realistic cinema filmed the unreal — sets and actors — in perspective-enhancing ways). Beginning with Alexander Nevsky, Fisenstein was obliged to use sets (e.g., the battle on the lake, filmed in mid-summer), although his use of camera angle was still distortive, the obsessive close-ups in particular destroying the sense of depth necessary for a realistic perception of space.

THE PROBLEM OF THE MASK In particular, it is the use of metatheatre, a typical feature of the modernist balagan, that undermines the credibility of the spectacle by disrupting the coherence of the theatrical sign we call “character.”

As an actor slips in and out of role, a sort of oscillation is set up

between two realities: the character in the fiction and the actor who is acting the character in the fiction. In fact, of course, the character “actor” is also a theatrical sign, not to be equated to the real actor. This blurring of the coherence of the human figure, of the theatrical sign we call “character,” that results from metatheatre is comparable to the effect of cubist painting. To use Eisenstein’s terminology, we can say that the collision between the two signs “actor” and “character” is a form of montage. The meaning so created lies neither in the one character nor in the other, but in the collision between the two. The theme of commedia (as a modernist genre) is disruption of the theatrical sign, rejection of the harmony and coherence of the realist fiction, and its replacement by dissonance and disharmony, just as the theme of a cubist painting is not the realistic portrayal of

a particular human figure, but conflict with the conventions and expectations of such a realistic portrayal. The disruption of the sign “human figure” is achieved in two further ways that are the essence of commedia dell’arte: by the use of the mask and by the acrobatics of the servant masks. The use of a mask to cover the face montages the immobility and grotesqueness of the mask with the living plasticity of the body. Mask in a larger sense means, however, not simply the physical device that covers the face, but the stock character, with

225 Harlequin’s Shadow

his costume and his typical regional accent — Bergamese, Venetian,

Neapolitan, and so on. That is to say, the appearance onstage of a particular mask invokes a set of expectations in the spectator. However, any particular performer will stand slightly off-centre, out of focus, with respect to these expectations. Again, a kind of oscillation is set up that further disrupts the coherence of the theatrical sign. Instead of exploring the gap between actor and character, as modernist commedia had tended to do, Eisenstein developed out of his studies of the commedia system of masks his notion of ftipazh (typage), an essential element in his theories of film. About this Jay Leyda tells

us: “Eisenstein has said that one might define typage as a modern development of the commedia dell’arte — with its seven stock figures multiplied into infinity. The relationship lies not in numbers, but in

audience conditioning. Upon entrance of Pantalone or the Captain, his mask tells the audience immediately what to expect of this figure.

Modern film typage is based on the need for presenting each new figure in our first glimpse of him so sharply and completely that further use of this figure may be a known element. Thus new, immediate conventions are created.”

Fisenstein’s use of the type in his films was one of their most controversial aspects, for it went against the concept of cinema as an extension of traditional naturalist (Stanislavskian) theatre; it was, in particular, a stick that was used to beat him at the All-Union Congress of Film-Makers in 1935. Rather than choosing professional actors, Eisenstein preferred to use “found” faces whose acting ability was secondary. It was in the montaging of the shots of these “types,” not

in their acting out a realistic plot, that the dynamic impetus of the film consisted. Moreover, the face and body, rather than running a gamut of expressive grimaces and gestures, was limited to one or two that made the human face function as a “mask” (e.g., Kerenskii’s characteristic lowering of the face and his Napoleonic tucking of his right hand into his tunic in October). For Eisenstein the human face

~ reduced to a mask —- is just another sign, of no greater or lesser significance than any other object that might be filmed. For example,

the shot of Kerenskii’s lowering face is of the same value as the figurine of Napoleon with which it is juxtaposed. The problem of the real versus the realistic is solved in interesting terms when it comes to the faces of historic personages. Although he could film the events of October in the places — Smolny, the Winter Palace — where they took place, Eisenstein could not film Lenin, who was dead, or Kerenskii, who had fled the country. The realist solution

would have been to find actors whose appearance approximated that of the individual in question, a resemblance that might be enhanced

226 Pierrot in Petrograd

by make-up, and so on; the audience would have thus accepted the

semi-resemblance as it did other approximations in realism, for example, painted sets. Ideally, Eisenstein might have used film clips from newsreel footage, a procedure that would certainly have been

the logical result of his theories. But there were, no doubt, two practical difficulties: there was little footage to be had, and he could

not control the composition of the shot. Instead, he found “lookalikes” among the general population who did not require elaborate make-up and were not required to act, but simply master one or two characteristic gestures. Instead of an actor striving to represent Lenin or Kerenskii with the greatest verisimilitude possible, he had a sign “Lenin” or “Kerenskii” that could be montaged with other signs to achieve meaning — the exact opposite of realism, in other words.

PERSPECTIVE AND AUTHORITY Ultimately, as Eisenstein makes clear, the question of perspective signifies a deeper political and social problem, namely, a general rejection of authority. Realistic external perspective implies the impo-

sition of an external subject or authority upon art, and signifies the unity of political power. The political and social implications of the avant-garde’s rejection of authority were plainly apparent to those members of the bourgeoisie who whistled and hooted at performances of decadent art (e.g., Meyerhold as Pierrot in Blok’s Balaganchik).

To make their challenge to “phallic” authority even more strident, the modernists deliberately chose as their emblem Pierrot, an androg-

ynous and sexually ambivalent figure at best, and one that had no observable referent in any known reality.

Thus we may say that Eisenstein does not destroy perspective (which is indestructible), but replaces external perspective with an alternate “grotesque” perspective that is disharmonious, discontinuous, and composed of multiple, conflicting points of view, represented in film by contradictory camera angles that can in no way be equated to the vantage point of a single individual. Attempts have been made to equate this splintered perspective with a deeper psychological reality, for example, with the internal monologue, which would be an alternative model to the notion of an external viewer viewing a harmonious sequence of events in the unified and coherent space-time continuum that is posited in realism; in effect, the internal monologue is the narrative equivalent of internal perspective in the

visual arts. It has been noted, in this regard, that Eisenstein met James Joyce and that he was enthusiastic at the idea of filming Molly Bloom’s monologue. I am inclined to go even beyond this notion of

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the internal monologue. It seems to me that realistic theatre, with its rigid, conventional perspective, had signified a certain fixed subject-

object relationship in which neither subject nor object underwent any doubt. The internal monologue still posits the existence of a coherent subjectivity. With its shifting, splintered perspective, it seems to me, Eisenstein’s balagan, and the cinema that was derived from it, expressed a world in which both subject and object — the creative subject and the “reality” that is its object — are deprived of certainty and coherence. If anything, Eisenstein’s films are the expression of their creator's own splintered subjectivity, a strange, fissured amalgam of ideological certainties and deeply contradictory emotions. Ivanov describes how the latter — viewed by Eisenstein himself as “regressions” — almost led him to abandon the cinema altogether. This self-castration would have been the logical outcome of Eisenstein’s quest for a new certainty: essentially, the imposition by the artist on himself of a new authority, a new, radical, inhuman perspective.°> The nostalgia (inherited from Briusov and Veselovskii) that seems to run through Eisenstein’s thinking at certain points for the primeval, prehistoric syncretic act (detstvo), the Urgesamtkun-

stwerk, can indeed be interpreted as the desire for a new, unified authority that this act would sanctify. The balagan can be seen as some kind of half-way house — primitive in its forms and playfully spontaneous, but subversive rather than affirmative of authority. Eisenstein’s revolt against perspective and other canons of realistic art can be seen, as I have said, as a rejection of authority with Oedipal overtones. As such, it is both typical of modernism as an international movement and very specific to the situation in Russia that led to the overthrowing of political authority — an event symbolized in October

in the shot of the little boy sitting on the Emperor's throne (and ironically echoed in a photograph of Eisenstein sitting on the same throne, suggesting that the little boy is a projection of the film-maker himself into the movie). Without making too long a diversion into the facts of Eisenstein’s own biography, we can note that his notoriously hostile and strained relationship with his own father added a personal! element to this rejection of authority. Eisenstein’s discovery of commedia — the balagan — thus became a vehicle to give his rebel-

lion concrete form, harking back to an idealized art form that represented a golden age of theatrical freedom before the imposition of authority — Freudians would call it castration — in the form of the dictates of external perspective. As Bulgakov realized, there is here a poignant parallel between the fate of modernists such as Eisenstein who espoused the freedom of the grotesque world of the commedia/ balagan and that of Moliére. The French actor and playwright had,

228 Pierrot in Petrograd

we recall, creatively absorbed the lessons of the Comédie-Italienne into his theatre. It was his misfortune to live in an age of increasing central authority, culminating in the banishment of laughter when the Comédie-Italienne was closed at the instigation of Mme de Maintenon, forced out onto the streets of Paris at the Pontneuf, where it survived as the théatre forain, castrated by an enforced mutism that led to the pantomime. Moliére’s fate — to be increasingly hounded by critics of his theatre, and to depend more and more on the whims of the roi-soleil — resembled closely that of Eisenstein. It would, how-

ever, be wrong to see Eisenstein’s dilemma as one simply imposed from without; as I have said, the logic of Eisenstein’s own art was

leading towards silence, as he struggled to reconcile in his own subjectivity the contradictory forces of progression and regression, the conflict between the desire to overthrow authority and the lust for a new, more absolute one. Vygotskii persuaded him not to give

up his art, but the contradictions remained. It was the paradox of Eisenstein’s career, as it was of Moliére’s, to try to press the grotesque,

laughter-driven, subversive commedia/balagan form (espoused as a

rejection of the old authority) into the service of a new and more repressive one. This is why Eisenstein’s films, like Moliére’s late plays,

give a curious double message of suppressed laughter, a humour that

is in tension with a serious purpose. This conflict between signs denoting laughter and the serious content of his films is evidence of a new semantic shift - unforeseen, but expressive of the contradictions of the age — that constitutes their true theme.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Empty Throne: Theatre as Metahistory Wir stehen immer auf dem Theater, wenn wir auch zuletzt im Ernst erstochen werden.!

In examining the diverse aspects of human activity, whether social, political, or cultural, one is inevitably drawn to the conclusion, as was Michel Foucault, that there is a harmony of style and pattern — what Foucault calls an episteme — that goes to mark a certain age. To make such an observation is not to advance any view on how this comes about, or on the primacy of one field of activity over another (as the Soviet Marxists were to do during the 1920s). This unity of style and pattern is particularly true of the age of the Russian revolution, essentially the age that has been discussed in this book. In that period, as in that of the French revolution, there was an inter-

penetration of theatre and revolution. One might say that certain revolutionary activities in theatre prefigure the revolution; when that revolution occurs, it becomes itself a theatre text, to be re-enacted

and represented. But more than that, the “actors” on the “stage of history” are so conscious of their “roles” that the theatrical imposes itself as a metaphor. The fact that revolution had been realized in the

theatre (and other arts) as a change of style, of content, of poetic, before it took place in the streets or halls of power, makes us conclude that the metaphor, the “transcoding,” works both ways.

As a period of the transition of power, the Revolution in Russia could not help but have a theatrical dimension. Indeed, it was this characteristic that struck visitors to the young Soviet state: during the period of War Communism especially, there was feverish theatrical activity behind the bolshevik lines. To be sure, a part of this activity was utilitarian, rising out of the need to raise the consciousness of the Russian masses through “agitprop,” in accordance with

Lenin’s program. However, on another level, the theatre itself expressed the joy of liberation, the enthusiasm and utopianism of the revolutionary intellectuals. For them, revolution meant the

230 =©6Pierrot in Petrograd

theatricalization of life, of the whole of Soviet society, and the dispersion of a focused subject-object relationship throughout society, so that the boundary between actor and spectator would be erased. As we have seen, this “theatricalization of life” constituted a vision of revolutionary utopia.

Ultimately, in this period, we have to do with the theatre as an | instrument for constituting and consecrating power (or celebrating its deconsecration). The Revolution represented a severance of the unity of the power and the individual, in the person of the emperor.

The monarch was a sign in which signifier — the person - and signified — the authority — were seamlessly joined; they were, in fact,

one. To kill the monarch was to destroy this semiotic unity and to displace the locus of authority. Psychoanalytically, this act of destruction of the monarch was tantamount to parricide, since the monarch

was the father of his people and since the father was the locus of authority in the family. Ultimately, it symbolized something even deeper — deicide — since the monarch’ authority was derived from God and since the monarch was the symbol on earth of God's presence.

In the French revolution, this destruction of the monarch as sign

was marked by the guillotining of the king. During the Russian revolution the execution of the emperor was less “dramatic,” since he

had already abdicated before the bolsheviks seized power and the destruction of the royal family, far from being presented as a public spectacle as was the guillotining of Louis XVI, was accomplished furtively by a local authority far from the centre of power. Nevertheless, Russians of the time were aware of the profound implications of the transition from gosudar’ (tsar) to gosudarstvo (state) — from a living bearer and wielder of power to an abstraction — which was the culminating event of this historic period. The destruction of one sign implied the realignment of all the other sign systems in society. The profound legal, political, social, and theatrical implications of regicide-parricide are analyzed by Marie-Hélene Huet. “The end of a cycle — Louis XVI, King of France, was executed, but the death of the Father was simultaneously the constituting of an inheritance; the

fallen father left a vacancy over which the parricidal sons would quarrel.”? On a lower order of things, this change symbolized for the bolsheviks the separation of property and individual as well as the

restructuring of the lines of authority and property within society and other sign systems: the severance of the unity of church and state, the reorganization of the family, and so on. As Huet has shown, in the French revolution the act of regicide was mirrored in the death of Marat, and the death of Marat was then

231 The Empty Throne

itself subject to constant iteration as (theatre) text.* Essentially, she argues, Marat filled the gap and became the new monarch whose

life, unlike that of the murdered king, could form the legitimate theme of a theatrical spectacle. In Russia, there is no event that can be compared to the death of Marat (although history nearly repeated itself with Dora Kaplan’s attempt on Lenin’s life). It is, however, fascinating to note that Vladimir [lich Ulianov, who took the codename Lenin, seems to have received spontaneously from admirers

the first name “Nikolai,” as if to set him up as an alternative to Nicholas U.4 In this way he was, as it were, inserted in the tradition of Russian rebels; for example, Pugachev, who claimed to be the murdered Emperor Peter III. The “outlaw as monarch” syllogism is

an important notion in the whole question of the authority of the monarch. Traditionally, the monarch had been outside the law, since he was the impartial father, judge of his children (and hence unjudgeable); after he has survived trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal, Marat assumes an analogous position: “an outlaw, a renegade, a regicide, and a king all in one, through his love for the fatherland, hence for the people.”> Lenin appears to have resisted this natural tendency to consecrate him as the new monarch. But the problem was a real one. For the utopian intellectuals, authority, formerly constituted in one individual, would be totally dispersed. This dispersion of political authority was the political equivalent of the balagan, which, as we

have seen, is characterized by an unstable locus of authority, and Lenin assumed the role of Petrushka, the anti-monarch, the “fool on the throne,’ to quote Lothar’s (clairvoyant) formula. The realities of the political situation, of course, led to a more pragmatic solution to this question. As a feature of the theatricality of revolution, the desire to iterate, to re-present the Revolution, becomes a political imperative on the anniversary of October. Thus, revolution becomes text in a striking way in Evreinov’s re-enactment of the bolshevik coup d’éfat on the anniversary of that event in November 1918; Eisenstein only con-

tinued the tradition in his filming of the events for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution in 1927, in the film October. The same need to iterate (to create a myth of revolution that would provide greater

legitimacy to the bolsheviks) leads to an interest in the French revolution during the period 1917-20, since, to some extent, the Russian revolution itself was a re-enactment of the “text” of the French revolution, a fact of which people were acutely aware. The continuity was expressed, for example, in the name of the Communist Party

(which the bolsheviks adopted in 1918), which went back in its associations, through the Commune, the revolutionary government

232 Pierrot in Petrograd

of Paris of 18 March 1871, and the name of the Manifesto of the Communist Party of Marx and Engels, to the original Commune — the

revolutionary government of Paris of 1789, which was installed in the Hotel de Ville after the storming of the Bastille on 14 July (an event that is compared in Russia to the taking of the Winter Palace). However, the strong similarities between the two revolutions tended — and were intended — to foreground the equally important dissimi-

larities, that is, the fact that this was the first Marxist, rather than bourgeois, revolution.

It is significant, therefore, that Georg Btichner’s play Dantons Tod should be presented at Korsh’s Theatre in 1918. The production used

the parallels between the Russian and the French revolutions to underscore a critical message about the bolsheviks. Far from being a description of a remote event in another country, the play serves as an almost literal description of the bolshevik terror, which was then at its height, a point the reviewer in Izvestiia understood very clearly. Biichner’s play in the adaptation by Al. Tolstoi is the first drama from the period of the French Revolution to be seen on the Russian stage. It is being presented at a time that is in many ways reminiscent of the long-gone days of the bourgeois revolution of the end of the eighteenth century. Therefore, we cannot approach the play at Korsh’s theatre simply as a more or less interesting and effective production. Neither does the public. The play is too topical for that. Korsh’s theatre and Tolstoi, who have perpetrated this rehash of Biichner’s work, have shown one more time that for them any revolution is just a revolt of rude “sans-culottes” against the refined, educated, talented classes and individuals. Evidently, neither the author nor the actors was able for a second to grasp what revolution is, nor the revolutionary temperament. Not for a single minute does the grand and majestic spirit of revolution waft from the stage.®

In fact, of course, the play itself serves as a profound criticism of revolutionary terror, but it was convenient for the reviewer to blame the translator and the theatre for the impact of the production. Possibly because of this review, a newspaper story appeared three days later suggesting that the theatre would be asked to close the production, which was seen as a deliberate provocation.’ The production

must have had the impact of a live hand-grenade. For example, Mercier’s words were a clear evocation of the processes underway in

Russia, and an uncomfortable confirmation of the morphological identity of revolutions (and of the transcodability of speech and action, theatre and violence): “These wretches, their executioner, and the guillotine are your speeches come to life.”* Even worse, Dantor’s

233 The Empty Throne

words were a prediction of future events which was brutally accurate

(as no doubt the audience sensed): “One day one will recognize reality. I see a great misfortune coming over France. It is dictatorship; she has torn her veil, she carries her head high, she is stepping over our corpses.”°

The anniversary of the October revolution was seen to be an important political and theatrical occasion, one that must be marked by a re-enactment either of the Revolution itself or of revolution as a symbolic event. In this context the question of repertory was of prime importance, as we find in a story in a Moscow newspaper entitled “Preparing for the October celebrations.” On Saturday in the section of fine arts O.D. Kameneva presided over a meeting of representatives of the Moscow theatres — state and private theatres, and the circus, as well as representatives of theatrical organizations (the theatrical society, the theatre committee, etc.) — concerning the problem of

the repertory in the theatres during the celebrations ... O.D. Kameneva suggested Kamenskii’s Sten ka Razin and Mystery Bouffe, a new play by Maiakovskii intended for production in Petersburg, which has been read in certain

circles in Moscow and highly praised. The play is colourful, original, and completely appropriate for the occasion.”

We read in another newspaper that “in the theatrical section of the Moscow Proletcult feverish work is under way to prepare the October celebrations. In the studio they are studying Verhaeren'’s The Uprising (Vosstanie), which will be presented during the festivities.’1! Hence it

was political necessity, among other things the need to counter the anti-revolutionary nature of the Korsh production on the first anniversary of the October revolution, that led to the production of V. Kamenskii’s Sten ka Razin (a portrayal of a Pugachev-like rebel of the seventeenth century). This production was later cited, along with that of the Biichner play, as an example of the political impact of theatre. “It was interesting to see the hostile reaction of a part of the audience to the Jacobin period of the Great French Revolution in the perform-

ance of Dantons Tod, just as the approving exclamations of the proletarian spectators were important at the production of Razin.”” The desire to show the French revolution in an appropriate light (perhaps as a response to the Korsh production of Dantons Tod) was no doubt behind the decision on the same occasion by “former actors of Korsh’s Theatre” to stage Arthur Schnitzler’s The Green Cockatoo (Der griine Kakadu), a play that deals with theatre during the French

revolution.’ Schnitzler’s play describes the events in a basement drinking tavern on 14 July 1789. The clear homologies between the

234 Pierrot in Petrograd

storming of the Bastille and the taking of the Winter Palace made it an appropriate play to mark the anniversary of the latter event — fitting in neatly to the web of correspondences. On the thematic level, the play turns on the oppositions of truth/lie, action/acting, fidelity/

promiscuity. Towards the end of the play the oppositions become inextricably intertwined — to the confusion of the onstage audience: some young noblemen and a police commissioner incognito. Henri,

the greatest actor in a troupe that performs in the basement, has married the actress Léocadie and wants to live in the country and have children. He wants, in other words, a life based on truth and fidelity. He recounts a fictional scene in which he has killed the Duke, his wife's “lover.” He then learns that the Duke wes indeed her lover; then he does indeed stab him to death, although the onlookers have to be told that the act is real, not theatre. As events would have

it, this turns out to be not simply an act of personal vengeance, but a revolutionary act; with the coming of the revolution, it is open season on aristocrats. As a text The Green Cockatoo (“a grotesque in one act”) plays skillfully with the web of correspondences in which revolution and theatre interact; the ambiguity of the action/acting signs in the text illustrates the transcodability of these from one to the other. It also dramatizes the fine line between comedy (representation) and the high seriousness of life (presentation). The play ends with the reversal of the power structures, so that the police commissioner, whose presence has been a threat and who tries to close down the “performance” and arrest Henri, finds his power suddenly gone. Schnitzler’s play is very much a self-conscious play about the nature of theatre and revolution. It is in revolutionary Moscow that it finds its true audience. With its quick reversals and its realistic depiction of the ambiguity of the theatrical sign, it is related to the commedia dell’arte/balagan tradition, with which Schnitzler was so familiar. In particular, with the presence of audience figures onstage and the confusion between acting and action (which the real audience shares with the represented audience at certain moments), the play creates the oscillation in the identity of the subject that is one of the features of the balagan genre as we have defined it. The role of the commedia dell’arte is intimately related to the question of the theatricalization of revolution. As we have seen, in eighteenth-century France the Italian comedy was closed down and the tradition transferred to the théatre forain, where it was symboli-

cally castrated by enforced mutism. Since to speak is a sign of authority, the power to speak is hesitatingly and under certain controls surrendered to the actor by the king (the king’s speech being a sign of his authority). The pantomime of the commedia tradition in

235 The Empty Throne

France is both a symbol of its deprivation of authority and a testimony

to its potential subversiveness. This subversiveness is realized by Deburau in the Théatre des Funambules and becomes, as we have seen, an essential feature of the tradition, to be harnessed in the

cause of revolution, but also to be potentially feared by a new authority. The theme of the fool on the throne — King Harlequin — is

symbolic of revolution (and echoed in the famous photograph of Fisenstein on the Tsar’s throne, taken during the filming of October). The ability of the fool to ascend the throne results from the destruction of its lawful occupant; but it is temporary, until a new authority appears.

The ascendance of the commedia/balagan is essentially possible only during the Revolution — that is, after one authority has been overthrown and before another has been established. It was at this point that the balagan came out of the streets and play-booths to which it had been banished and into the theatre. The consecration

of Petrushka/Pierrot as king could not last. It was a sign of the overthrowing of power, a confirmation by the theatre of the political anarchy reigning in society. The balagan in the theatre mirrored, as it were, the balagan on the streets of revolutionary Petrograd. The motley figures of the masks who cavort and mock power are, in time, swept away by a new authority. Authority — at least in the Russian context — can tolerate neither mockery nor ambiguity. It must, as we

have seen in the discussion of Eisenstein in the previous chapter, reassert itself, both within the theatre and without. If patterns established in the evolution of a nation are permanent, it may be that Russian culture is destined eternally to oscillate between extremes of authority and anarchy, logos and ambiguity, seriousness and balagan. It may indeed be that Peter and Petrushka are doomed to do an eternal dance on the stage of Russian history.

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Appendices

The following are translations of six short plays, none of which has been translated into English before and several of which have not been published in any language. A The Beggar Harlequin (Nishchit Arlekin), by Elena Guro. Translated from her collection of poetry and verse Sharmanka: p esy, stikhi, proza (St Petersburg: “Sirius,” 1909) B Today's Columbine (Kolumbina sego dnia), by Nikolai Evreinov. Translated from the typescript 19408 in the manuscript division of LTB. Bears the censor’s stamp “15 October 191[?]” (last digit indecipherable). C Fiametta’s Four Corpses (Chetyre mertvetsa Fiametty), by “N.N” Translated from typescript in trp dated 1 September 1911. Permission to stage and censor’s stamp: SPb., 2 September 1911. Performed at the Crooked Mirror

by Mme Khovanskaia and Messrs Granovskii, Ikar, and Donskoi (see drawings by A. Liubimov in Teatr 1 iskusstvo, 1911, no. 39, 725-6).

D The Lovers (Vliublennye), “a composition of Dr Dapertutto” (Vsevolod Meyerhold). Translated from Ms in exercise-book marked “Collection of pantomimes” (“Sbornik pantomim”) in LTB. E Harlequin the Card-Lover (Arlekin pristrastnyt k kartam), by Wolmar Luscinius (pseudonym of Vladimir Solov’ev, collaborator of Dr Dapertutto). Published in LTA, 1914, 17-35. F The Apes Are Coming! (Ob eziany idut!), by Lev Lunts. Translated from his Ob eziany idut! in Veselyt al manakh (Moscow-Petrograd: “Krug,” 1923), 11449.

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APPENDIX A

The Beggar Harlequin BY ELENA GURO

DRAMATIS PERSONAE Harlequin Thirty-year-old woman teacher Two children, six and seven years old Mother Passer-by

A kept woman

, Crowd

A solid gentleman from the audience

SCENE ONE Above the chimneys lines of storm-clouds and smoke stretch across the red sky. A stormy evening. A house in Petersburg. Harlequin sits at the grand entrance, dressed in tights and bells, and follows the passers-by with his eyes. A woman teacher goes past. Music can be heard as if from afar. It fades as the conversation begins, as if borne away by the wind. HARLEQUIN. Allow me to walk with you. TEACHER. How dare you! Speeds up.

HARLEQUIN. Oh no, please, allow me to walk with you — but at a distance. TEACHER. And no policeman to be seen. HARLEQUIN (with slight affectation). My autumnal love ...

TEACHER. Leave me alone... HARLEQUIN (with conviction and unbelievable power). O queen! ... (Teacher is silent.)

240 Appendix A HARLEQUIN. I love you ... you are so beautiful ... Are you always so

beautiful on autumn evenings? TEACHER (as if in a rage). You're making fun of me! You dare make

fun of me ... I’m alone, a girl, I'm skinny, I get twenty roubles, like a kitchen wench; I'm tired, my voice is hoarse ... You hear — I’ve gone hoarse in those endless lessons; I can't have fantasies in my dreams. HARLEQUIN. Oh no, it just seems to you that way. J had a dream ... it was you. TEACHER (slowly looking round). You have dark eyelashes and big

eyes and your face is pale like a dying person’s or a child’s ...

HARLEQUIN. I have black eyelashes and the big eyes of a dying child. TEACHER. You have a sad, expressive face. HARLEQUIN. I have a sad, expressive face. TEACHER. Your pale lips ... HARLEQUIN. My pale lips are almost always closed. The wind knocks

me off my feet. TEACHER. You have big sad black eyes, Harlequin. HARLEQUIN. Yes, you see, it's no wonder, o queen. [I’m of slightly

Jewish origin; you see, I’m the son of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.

TEACHER. 50 that’s why you're so trembling and sad! You've been

so terribly tormented! It’s true, on your red and black clothing I can see traces of blood. On your pale hands - scratches and bruises. There’s horror in the colours of your clothes. People have mocked you so for all these centuries. You're trembling, you're suffering ...

HARLEQUIN. Oh no, my queen, I’m just cold. On the earth there have been so many chilled and merry carnivals, and people drink so much, and I’ve had so many women that I’ve got a little bald, and now I simply freeze under my cotton cap. You see, I inherited it: my poppa was very sensitive to cold, and then I find it so devilish cold in this Petersburg of yours. TEACHER (turns in disgust and walks away quickly). HARLEQUIN (runs after her). I'm cold, I’m very cold, and the wind

knocks me off my feet ... TEACHER (speeds up). HARLEQUIN (turns pale and disappears).

An empty street. Fog. The lonely voice of Harlequin.

241 The Beggar Harlequin

HARLEQUIN. And in the sleepless mirrors of Alcazar, full of bright folly, the poor unsleeping Devil whirls, not opening his

lips, and when he takes off his cap, then, laughing at the ceiling, his bald head echoes the reflections of the gleaming candelabras. The fog disperses. A passer-by appears. Next to him ts Harlequin. HARLEQUIN. Allow me to walk with you.

PASSER-BY. You walk with men? You have no shame ... I’m going to call the policeman ... You bum!.. You want to make me run away, and I am short-winded. HARLEQUIN. I’m short-winded myself. Don’t make me run so quickly.

I’m obliged to walk with everybody on stormy evenings. Don't I seem to you fantastic even? PASSER-BY. You? ... Youre a hooligan. Police! The passer-by and Harlequin disappear.

An empty street. Harlequin appears. HARLEQUIN (sings a canzonet).

See the will o’ the wisps dance on their slender legs. I pick the blood oranges of the stars’ beads. Strange dreams grow in the frost; Icy flowers grow on the panes; Two swallows, two frozen birds have clung to the cornice; The throat of an Italian diva is enveloped in sable. The streetlight once asked me: “Where did you come from, pale one? Your eyes have sunk, o pale Harlequin!” The southern night gave birth to me To the jingle of bells,

| To the sound of crazy drinking-cups, To the laughter of fools. They brought me, wrapped in sable, From the warm lands where Mignon Picks the orange blossom. Dance, Mignonnette, Harlequin’s fantasy.

We dance to the drum Of the strict gentleman. They christened me with wine To the tinkle of a glass, And then They raised me triumphantly

242 Appendix A

Onto the boards of a street-show. Dance, Mignonnette, Columbine my dream, Dance and give kisses Harlequin’s fantasy.

Oh merry the carnival, spangles, Oh the icicles are dripping tears ...

And when I remained alone, The night sighed: You have come to us from afar To the snowy lands; Little icicles,

Mocking little snowflakes cling To your brows, Oh ...

Curtain

SCENE TWO Night. The set represents a children’s nursery. The blind is raised. A lamp is burning on the table. A night-light. Two children are in bed.

FIRST CHILD. Let's say good-bye to the night-light. It’s going to go out shortly. They think we're already asleep. SECOND CHILD.The blind isn’t lowered today. You can see the street. (He notices Harlequin pressing his face to the windowpane. He's now more good-humoured and fatter.) Oh, it’s our old

Harlequin. Let's play. HARLEQUIN. Let's. Sh-sh-sh. I’ve come back, but don’t break the spell. He puts his finger to his lips and smiles. Be as quiet as you can, don't you wake the bogeyman.* SECOND CHILD.His nose isn't broken off at all.

FIRST CHILD. God will heal his nose in Heaven. Maybe he wants to

come into the nursery. Harlequin, can’t you get through the transom? HARLEQUIN. I'm just fine here. I’ve got a whole room here on the windowsill. I’ve brought you a few things. * Literally: “Quiet, quiet, there's a Jew on the roof.”

243 The Beggar Harlequin Takes a lot of paper cockerels out of his pocket and spreads them out on the windowsill.

CHILDREN. Cock-a-doodle-doo. Cock-a-doodle-doo! HARLEQUIN. Cock-a-doodle-doo-o-o-o ... I was far, far way. CHILDREN. We thought that you were lying all the time under the

chest of drawers and that they’d thrown you out. Aren't you afraid on the street, Harlequin? HARLEQUIN. No, the streetlights wink at me. Their gas-jets dance like my bells. SECOND CHILD. You've got a snowflake melting on your nose. FIRST CHILD. Arent you cold?

HARLEQUIN. Earlier I was chilly, but I’m warm in here.

FIRST CHILD. Qh, how I'd like to let Harlequin in through the window. Shouldn’t I open the transom in any case? SECOND CHILD.I'm a little scared. Mother's footsteps. She comes in.

CHILDREN. Mummy, mummy, our Harlequin has come to visit us. There he is standing in the window. We’ like to bring him into the nursery to warm up. FIRST CHILD. But he’s afraid to. Their mother strides over to the window with a lamp in her hand. An expression of suffering crosses Harlequin'’s pale face, pressed to the window. He disappears.

CHILDREN. Oh, he panicked and left. Harlequin, will you come back? Mummy, you frightened him by mistake! What a shame! Their mother lowers the blinds. The scene changes.

SCENE THREE A street. A crowd. Harlequin.

HARLEQUIN. Walk along with me. I’ve lost my way.

KEPT WOMAN. People who've lost their way don't dance the matchiche in the middle of the street. HARLEQUIN (putting on airs). But maybe I lost the way while I was dancing, my little kitten. (In another tone.) I’ve lost my way. It’s very difficult to find ones way in the dark streets. Look, I can do tricks. (Takes a handful of stars from the sky out of his pocket and throws them into the air.) They’ll fly

away right now, like swallows, straight into the sky. The stars turn into stones and fall into a puddle. People around laugh. Harlequin smiles with embarrassment.

244 Appendix A VOICE FROM THE CROWD. You're getting old, Harlequin.

HARLEQUIN. You eat chops with peas today and every day. I’m hungry. (Turns in the other direction.) Yl dance if you want. PASSER-BY. No time, no time, my friend. CRUDE voices. Dance. Since you're a Harlequin, give us a show. HARLEQUIN _ (hops about once or twice, then staggers and goes pale. In embarrassment.) I can't. I’m frozen. (People around him laugh.)

VOICES. He’s a tightrope walker who’s run away from the circus. A stray dog. A curious figure. Pretty sad. HARLEQUIN. You're hurting me.

VOICE. His paleness is really obscene. People should be ashamed to be pale like that. HARLEQUIN. Show me the way. I'm frozen and I’m sick. (People around him laugh.) Excuse me, most honoured ladies and gentlemen. While I was dancing I lost a shoe off my foot. I admit it’s very indecent. Excuse me, please. VOICE OF A WOMAN (squeakily). How dare he. He's having us on: he’s

got both his shoes. HARLEQUIN. Please help me find my shoe. I beg you most humbly. One of those sitting in the front rows of the parterre can stand it no longer. He gets up onstage, takes Harlequin by the shoulder and speaks pityingly. SOLID GENTLEMAN FROM THE AUDIENCE. Please listen, my friend. Cut

it out. You should understand by now that here, on a

most ordinary evening, on a main street, you and your bright costume are out of place. Harlequin is embarrassed and disappears for good.

Curtain

APPENDIX B

Sf *

Todays Colombine.

A Pantomime Written by N.N. Evreinov and Miss. Music by N.N. Evreinov.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE Colombine Pierrot Harlequin Cassandra Negro Death

Time of action: today (All participants are dressed in modern dress: Colombine, Pierrot, Harlequin, et al.)

Setting: a little garden surrounding Colombine’s heart. In the middle

of the heart there is a door; leading to the door are several steps which are fragile in appearance; there is a window above. At the front of the stage are two pianos, one on each side, their size limiting

the width of the portals. Sitting at each piano is a musician. Colombine’s music is entrusted to the piano on the right; the music of the heroes of her heart, to the piano on the left. (This situation corresponds as well to the positioning of the characters during their dialogues with Colombine: she is always situated on the right side of the stage, the heroes of her heart on the left.)

When the curtain rises Colombine is watering the flowers surrounding her heart (andantino). She is dressed modestly; she is still innocent; she is cautiously glancing around her. A theme of 21 to 28 beats andantino expresses the maximum moral purity of Colombine. At the 43rd beat she freezes, listening to a man’s footsteps coming

246 Appendix B

from the left. Enter Pierrot (allegretto). In his hands is a white lily. He is shy. The theme of the 3rd beat of the allegretto expresses daring,

broken off by his shyness. Beats 17 to 18 express the loving ardour of Pierrot; he presents the lily to Colombine and declares his love. Colombine evades Pierrot’s timid caresses (andantino), Pierrot asks for permission to photograph Colombine (allegro). She agrees. He takes

out his Kodak and aims it at her; she poses (moderato for 4 beats). “Good-bye” — she holds out her hand to him (allegretto for 2 beats) “Already?” his eyes ask (allegretto on the 3rd beat). “Let go of my hand!” Colombine teases (4th and 5th beats allegretto). Pierrot appeals to her compassion (molto expressivo tor 4 beats). Colombine expounds

to him about virtue (allegro for 4 beats). Pierrot repeats his entreaty (andante for four beats). Colombine, already at the threshold of the door to her heart, pushes him aside (allegro non troppo). Pierrot wants to enter (5 to 8 beats allegro non troppo), but she shuts the door in his face. He knocks at the door to her heart (F.F., allegro non troppo). Columbine appears at the window, shakes her head negatively and disappears (glissando F.¥.F.), slamming the door. Pierrot wrings his hands in despair (allegro non troppo beginning from the 17th beat)

and he goes off left in tears. As soon as he is gone, Columbine appears at the window with an expression of repentence on her face and follows him with her eyes; sorrowfully and lovingly she remembers Pierrot’s tender music, and — gloomily — the music of her virtue

(from the 32nd to 2oth beats allegro non troppo right up to allegro molto). At the beginning of the allegro molto, Colombine turns her head to the opposite side, the right, and listens, her nostrils flaring. On the 5th beat of the allegro molto Harlequin enters. He comes to a halt at centre stage, not noticing Colombine, and he draws on his pipe with composure. His manly, decisive figure captivates Colombine at once and unequivocally. Her face expresses unusual agitation.

Hastily she throws him the lily which Pierrot had given her. Harlequin lifts his head; with pleasant surprise his eyes meet Colombines. He picks up the lily, sniffs it, and answers Colombine with gestures of mutual affection, asking her to let him into the door of her heart, which has been resisting his efforts. (25 beats allegro molto and subsequent [beats])

At this point Colombine is herself burning with the desire to be nearer to Harlequin, but her innate coquettishness makes her fuss for a while, teasing the evermore enflamed Harlequin. His entreaties become extremely insistent (4 beats accelerando). Then Colombine moves away from the window and apparently goes down the stairs (4 beats praesto). She opens the door of her heart! Harlequin rushes towards her, but she manages to lock the door from the outside with

247 ‘Today's Colombine

a key and to evade Harlequin, teasing him with the key, which is dangling on a little red ribbon in her hands. Harlequin’s loving pursuit is expressed by a reprise of the allegro molto (beginning with

the 5th beat) at a faster tempo (approaching a praesto). Harlequin seizes Colombine (at the reprise of the allegro molto); he embraces her

powerfully, kisses her, snatches the cherished key from her (coda allegro molto), and gaily dances with her (polka érotique), teasing [her]

with the key. At the end of the dance Harlequin opens the door to her heart and hurriedly runs in, embracing Colombine. On the left are heard heavy, limping footsteps, which come closer and closer (commodo). On the 13th beat of the commodo, Cassandra appears with

a sack of money in his arms, in the guise of an American yankee, with a Negro holding an umbrella over him. Cassandra’s gouty lame-

ness is expressed by 17 to 20 beats commodo, while the Negro manoeuvres, trying to forestall his master’s fall. They both ceremoniously walk all around the stage. On the 30th beat Cassandra knocks at the door to Colombine’s heart. At beats 39 to 42 he expresses the

ardour of his love. On the 43rd beat Colombine appears at the window, blushing strongly, her hair in disorder from Harlequin’ embraces. In ecstasy Cassandra knocks more and more strongly at the door; the Negro repeats the knock (imitational fourths in the octave of beats 49 to 50 and beats 53 to 54 of the commodo). Colombine

nods her head affirmatively on the 6oth beat of the commodo and disappears. Cassandra, rubbing his hands, once again walks all around the stage in delight, accompanied by the Negro, who shares his happiness and comes to a halt, petrified with love, in front of the door to Colombine’s heart (beats 76 to 79). The music of Colombine’s pure soul is heard, although vulgarly - Americanized (from the 80th beat of the commodo). At Cassandra’s call Colombine comes out in a low-cut dress. She needs necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and a lot of money. Cassandra is startled by her greed (beats 90 to 91). Colombine asks how much money he has (beats 92 to 97). “How much do you need?” asks the yankee (beats 98 to 99). Colombine’s music at this point profanes the theme of Colombine’s virtue. She bargains with Cassandra (sequences of the profaned theme of virtue). For her love she wants the entire sack of money which is in Cassandra’s hands (beats 104 to 107).

Compliantly, he lets her roughly estimate his capital, which she does, taking the coins out of the sack in handfuls and letting them

stream back into the sack (beats 108 to 109). On the 110th beat Colombine takes possession of the sack and dances gaily with Cassandra, charmingly making fun both of his stout stomach and of his lameness. At the end of this dance they enter the door to the heart,

248 Appendix B

while Colombine with exaggerated politeness passes in front of Cas-

sandra, in order to wink at the Negro, before disappearing in the wake of her new tenant. The Negro remains alone. He closes the umbrella, licks his fingers, flares his nostrils, bares his teeth voluptuously, sighs like a steam-engine and flirts with the public, seeking

its sympathy towards the passion which was aroused in him by Colombine. Little by little his “act” changes into a full-blown cakewalk.

His dancing, during which he keeps running up the steps before

the door of the heart and knocking at the door, leads to what he longs for: Colombine, half-dressed, appears in the window (on the 29th beat of the cakewalk); she smiles approvingly (the Negro appears

amusing to her) and comes out to him (37th beat of the cakewalk). She is increasingly drawn into the impetuous gaiety of her black admirer. Her theme of virtue takes on an African flavour, becoming a frenzied cakewalk. A half-human, half-animal dance of tropical, savage love (beginning with the 57th beat of the cakewalk and to the end). They hurriedly run off into the door of the heart. Pause. Pierrot runs in from the left (andantino). With anguish he looks at the door of the heart, which is locked to him. He pulls out the snapshot of Colombine (the theme of the photograph is in beats 4 to 7 of the andantino). He kisses it with sad tenderness (beats 8 to 11), then

seems to come to his senses; he realizes his rejection and gives himself up to despair and to tears. (Grand jeu of the pantomime, beginning with the 12th to 2oth beats of the andantino right up to the allegro agitato). Beginning with the allegro agitato, Pierrot knocks

at the door to the heart, filled with the torment of expecting anew to see the one who has rejected him. After the fermata, Colombine, with the face of a drunken slut and in a revealing costume,” swaying, opens the door and standing on the threshold, beckons to the snowpure Pierrot with the gestures of a whore* (polka). Behind her Harlequin and Cassandra are seen laughing boisterously in the doorway,

while the Negro is leaning out the window baring his teeth, trying to spit on the chaste [Pierrot]. Pierrot motionlessly fixes his eyes on Colombine. “But why don’t you want to come into my heart?” she asks with affected gestures during the last beats of the polka (12th to 13th beats). “Well, as you like,” she shrugs her shoulders in answer to Pierrot’s senseless gaze, which is full of inexpressible reproach, and she goes back in, to the impetuous exultation of her tenants. As soon as they have closed the door and the window, Pierrot

instantly pulls a revolver out of his pocket and shoots himself * Crossed out by censor.

249 ‘Today's Colombine

(F.F.F.F.). Death comes out of the heart; slowly and affectionately she kisses the dying Pierrot on the lips (pedal andantino 3 beats) and then

she disappears instantly. The music repeats the theme of Pierrot’s chaste love.

The curtain falls slowly.

APPENDIX C

Fiamettas Four Corpses Pantomime based on the tale by Millaud. Libretto by N. N. Music by V. Karat [crossed out] D, A. [crossed out]

DRAMATIS PERSONAE Silvio, a tailor, a hunchback in a clown’s or Pierrot’s overalls Fiametta, his wife, in Colombine’s costume Lorenzo

Giacomo and Andrea, the lovers of Fiametta, in clown or Pierrot costumes Beggar in Harlequin costume

The action takes place during a carnival. The setting is a room in Silvio’ house. To the right (of the audience) is the entrance door, to the left is a window looking out onto a lane. Opposite the audience, in the centre, is a large window with a balcony. Next to it, by the back wall, closer to the entrance door, is a large, long trunk, in which,

one must suppose, Silvio stores the clothes for his customers. A mandolin is hanging on the wall, next to a large pair of scissors. Silvio is squatting in a tailor’s, or Chinese, position. He is sewing. Fiametta is a little behind him. The distant sound of the carnival can be heard. All the while Fiametta keeps turning towards the balcony,

trying to peep through the window. Silvio does not stop sewing; from time to time he glances angrily and spitefully at Fiametta. He grabs her by the arm and, bending it, forces her to give him the tailor'’s trimmings.

Evening begins to fall. In the distance the lights of the carnival are glimpsed fleetingly, and, for a short time, the noises of the carnival processions burst in suddenly. Fiametta is in agony; she wants to go to the carnival, but the jealous Silvio knows this and takes delight in her misfortune. After he has finished sewing, Silvio gets ready to leave. “I am going away for a short time,” he says to Fiametta. “Sit

251 Fiametta’s Four Corpses

here and don’t fidget. Now make sure to close the door to the balcony

tight. Look at me ...” And he threateningly waves with the large scissors. No sooner is he at the door when Fiametta makes a move towards the balcony. Silvio turns around, he looks at her angrily and

picks up the scissors, as if getting ready to strike her with them. Finally he leaves.

Fiametta runs up to the door and makes sure that her husband has left. It is getting dark. Fiametta approaches the balcony with barely audible footsteps. The song of a serenade is faintly heard, and there is a gentle, inviting knock at the balcony. Lorenzo jumps up,

dressed as a clown, like Fiametta’s other lovers. In his hands there is | a mandolin. He kisses Fiametta, but she puts a stop to his flattery at once, explaining that Silvio might return any minute and that he is terrifying in his anger and jealousy. Lorenzo, however, persists, and little by little Fiametta begins to give in. But at that moment a gentle knock is heard again and several beats of a mandolin accompanying the couplets of a song. “That's Giacomo,” Fiametta concludes.

“Come here, Lorenzo.” And she sits him down on the far edge of the trunk, while she herself leans out the balcony window. Straight away Giacomo jumps up. The same game as with Lorenzo. Fiametta

again explains that Silvio might return, and she dodges Giacomo’ embraces. He overtakes her at the trunk and notices Lorenzo. They comically make low bows to one another. At that moment a mandolin

is heard again and a knock at the balcony. Fiametta sits Giacomo down beside Lorenzo and heads for the balcony. “It'S Andrea,’ she concludes. Indeed, Andrea jumps into the room ... “The most ardent of all her lovers.” He makes a declaration to Fiametta, laughing at Silvio’s jealousy, and embracing the waist of Fiametta, who is weakly

resisting, he begins to circle the room with her; she laughs as he lowers her onto the trunk. But Lorenzo and Giacomo gloomily strum on their mandolins. Andrea notices them. Comic bows are exchanged, and to the general laughter and gaiety, everyone dances with Fiametta. But Silvio'’s foot-

steps can be heard in the distance. Turning pale from fear, Fiametta listens. “It’s Silvio,” she says. “We will leave through the balcony,” say her lovers. “You will give me away if you all leave together, what will

my friends and neighbours say? There is only one way out — hide in

the trunk ... ” And in turn Lorenzo, Giacomo and Andrea proceed into the trunk. The lid closes, then it opens and all three appear with their mandolins and then they disappear again. So that they will not suffocate, Fiametta leaves an opening, placing a piece of wood in between the lid and the trunk. Fiametta scarcely manages to finish this operation when Silvio enters. As soon as he appears,

252. Appendix C

it is evident that he has been watching the house and that he knows what has taken place. “No one has been here?” asks Silvio. “No one,” Fiametta answers, pretending to be calm. “You're a good wife ... ” says Silvio, and he embraces Fiametta. In a frenzy Fiametta defends herself, but with lustful sadism and cruelty Silvio topples Fiametta over onto the trunk, at the same time pulling out the piece of wood

from the opening. He sits down on the trunk, bouncing up and down several times, coming down with all his weight on the lid, and

holding down the prostrate Fiametta with his arm. Silvio laughs ominously and seems to be listening for something. “Let go ... ” pleads Fiametta, exhausted. “Well, wait a little bit longer, are you really so averse to being close to your spouse.” At last, Silvio satisfies

himself, evidently, that the deed is done. He laughs loudly, and, seizing a bundle of clothing, he leaves, blowing a kiss to Fiametta. Silvio has scarcely left when Fiametta rushes over to the trunk and opens it. But the prisoners in the trunk do not stir. She leans over, stoops down, touches them with her hands. “Oh my God, they’re dead ... ” She steps back in horror. “They're dead ... And in a few minutes Silvio will return and see the corpses.” She's as good as dead. What's to be done. The corpses must be taken away. Silvio must not see them. But how to remove them? Where to? She rushes over to the balcony, then to the window. Someone is walking along the street ... a beggar. She calls him, showing him a gold coin. After

a while the beggar enters, very drunk. She attempts to explain to him, more or less coherently, that she has in her room the body of an unfortunate wretch, who died as a result of an unforeseen incident. “Here he is ... ” She walks up to the trunk and lifts up Andrea’s

corpse, leaning his head over the wall of the trunk. | The corpse must be got out of the room, then the beggar will get the gold ... “Here’s the corpse, and here’s the gold ... ” The beggar, staggering, walks up to the trunk, seizes the corpse from behind

like a porter, hoists it up on his shoulders, and throws it out the window, not without difficulty. While the beggar is leaning out the window, Fiametta extracts Giacomo’s corpse from the trunk, putting it in the same position as the corpse of Andrea. Having finished his task, the beggar turns around and demands his gold. — “But look, you have not yet done your job ... ” answers Fiametta, pointing to the corpse which has been pulled out of the trunk. The beggar rubs his eyes in bewilderment. “I could have sworn I threw the body out

the window,’ he says. But since he is drunk and feels it, without thinking twice, he decides that he is mistaken and that he has not yet done his task. He hoists the second corpse up onto his shoulders and throws it out the window. And once again Fiametta, in a trice,

253 Kiametta’s Four Corpses

prepares the next corpse, that of Lorenzo. “Give me the gold ... ” says the beggar, having finished with the second corpse. “What do you mean, the gold?” answers Fiametta, “look, you still have not done your job.” And she points to the corpse. “What the devil ... ” babbles the drunk, “some kind of trick ... ” Fiametta entices him with the gold and after a bit of a struggle, the beggar throws the third corpse out of the window. At that moment Silvio enters. Turning

and noticing Silvio, who has hidden himself behind the trunk (all four are dressed in white clown’s overalls), the beggar thinks he’s lost his mind, and when Silvio moves, he flings himself at him and in a

frenzy he begins to strangle this indestructible apparition. Having strangled Silvio, the beggar quickly throws the corpse out of the window and hurries to get away from the cursed house. Fiametta throws the gold after him. She is free ... She draws herself up to her full height, looks around, and flies about the room in a whirlwind of dance. Dizzy happiness seizes her. The sound of the approaching carnival procession is heard. She grabs a cloak in an impetuous motion, wraps herself up, and, spinning like a top, flies to meet the triumphant parade. Curtain

APPENDIX D

The Lovers A sketch in one act by Dr Dapertutto, inspired by a painting by the Spanish painter Anglada Camarasa’ and set to two preludes by Claude Debussy.”

(For silent actors who love the language of bodily motion.)

DRAMATIS PERSONAE First gypsy girl Second gypsy girl Third gypsy girl First Spaniard (an old man) Second Spaniard Third Spaniard

On the stage are two screens, set up such that they form three entrances for the actors: two on the sides and one in the middle. By the way the actors’ faces are turned up to the sky as they come out from behind the screens, it is evident that the moon has broken out. And that is why, willy-nilly, the men are strumming the chords of a serenade popular in Toledo, while the women look with loving eyes

at those who more passionately pluck the strings and who more passionately steal kisses.

SCENE ONE The old man enters from the centre with a guitar in his hands. He walks to the very edge of the stage, bows to the spectators and again

plays his guitar. The second Spaniard enters from the right, the dullest and most dried out of all of the inhabitants of Toledo. Like the old man, he walks to the edge of the stage, but, carried away by the sight of the moon, he shoves the old man and almost knocks the

guitar out of his hands. The old man in turn flashes an ominous gesture and plays on.

255 The Lovers

SECOND ENTRANCE But now the youngest, handsomest, most passionate of the serenaders enters. And behind him, embracing (the way, during their walks, lovers embrace who are already bored with one another) the gypsies who are in love with him walk onto the stage. They admire

both his serenade and the moon dust, which has shrouded both them and this passionate singer like a veil.

THIRD ENTRANCE The third gypsy enters, dancing: she is the one whom the passionate singer loves, the one to whom he sings his serenade, to her and not to the other two who are standing now dejectedly, and who have not been able, in time before the dancer’s entrance, to break into a dance around him while he was howling his serenade like a dog at the moon.

But watch what the dancer does. The passionate singer has been waiting for her, but she does not even hear. Dancing, she has directed her gaze towards the tallest and most dried out of all of the inhabitants of Toledo! — and the one who has lived there the longest! As soon as he had arrived he had sat down on the left side of the stage, forming a symmetry with the old man, as if waiting for the dancer. The passionate singer — a jealous Spaniard — grabs his rival. A struggle ensues.

The gypsies have begun to bustle about; they run to separate them. And this scene of the struggle between the two Spaniards who are seized by the gypsies coincides with the basic theme of Debussy, his Sérénade interrompue. The characters’ gestures compete with the singing of the second a fempo. A tableau of loving couples.

SCENE FOUR A Little Solo

One of the gypsy girls has remained without a lover. She is in despair.

The moon is shining. She wants so much to be in love, but with whom? Certainly not with that old man, although with his tenacious, long fingers he skilfully plucks from the strings of his guitar such an intoxicating melody. The lonely gypsy girl complains to the audience; she bewails her fate to the old man.

SCENE FIVE The old man has become tired of the frozen poses of the two lovers; he has become tired of the wailing of the lonely gypsy girl. The old

256 Appendix D

man taps out with his foot the signal to dance. The Spaniards form one group; the girls form another group. They stretch their limbs, tune their guitars, and all get ready for a combined dance. The plastic modulations of the beginning dance are indicated by Debussy’s note: nerveux et avec humeur. The gypsy girls nervously jerk their shoulders,

come together and part in the grand movement of a traditional Spanish bolero. With flamboyant gestures of their arms, they throw their bright cloaks off and on again. As in the painting by Anglada, the Spaniards hunch over; their noses now point down at their guitars, now reach for the silly moon. The old man knows when and how to disrupt the plastic patterns of the gypsies, who are dancing all about the stage. The old man likes to replace the merriment with terror. Soon they begin Debussy’s Moqueur. The old man has already winked to the passionate singer: it is time to set in motion the spring of the usual escapade. They have brought with them under their cloaks a wooden sword and the mask of Death. Here the beats of the Moqueur are heard. The passionate Spaniard has already arrayed himself in white and is

grimacing with the mask of Death. The gypsy girls run in panic. Death follows on their heels. The Spaniards break up the comedy, but the gypsy girls swirl together in a garland and pray for mercy. At the old man’s signal the mask is thrown off. The Spaniards laugh;

the gypsy girls laugh too. The Spaniards dance; the gypsy girls dance.

The End

APPENDIX E

Harlequin the Card-Lover An Interlude with Ballet, Music, and Singing Composed by Wolmar Luscinius

DEDICATION The author, being a person of high morals and utterly courteous, and still remembering the lessons of a good upbringing that he received in his childhood, dedicates this interlude to a certain most beautiful

and noble lady, the hair of whom is more beautiful than the astounding golden-coloured hair of Signora Beatrice, about whom the captains in this commedia dell’arte play have a heated argument.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE The author, who also reads the prologue Maestro di capella Campanielli Harlequin, a card-player Smeraldina, Harlequin’s wife

Brusquamabile | Garguil players, friends of Harlequin Mezzetino

Two captains servants of Harlequin and at the same Two Polichinelles time commedia dell’arte characters Two Scaramouches Brighella, a commedia dell’arte mask Dancer Danseuse Musicians in Campanielli’s orchestra The author opens the curtain, the sort of curtain that one should have in productions of plays that can never be put on in the present nor the future, but only in the distant past. The author opens the curtain and thus begins the interlude.

258 Appendix E

PROLOGUE Gracious ladies and gentlemen, worthy pearls of the love of our most beautiful ladies.

We, that is, I, humble poet Volmar Luscinius, our glorious and famous maitre de scene Doctor Dapertutto, maestro di capella Campanielli, and all comedians in the interlude, we give thanks as deep as

the waters of the ocean for the glory and the honour of performing before this resplendent company so full of refined taste. You have been excessively wearied by five-act tragedies, with their murderings of faithless wives, in which all the characters in the first

act die in the third, so that in the fifth act it is their grandchildren and great-grandchildren whose actions you see. No longer can you behold without indignation the comedies of those despicable histrions in which there are so many philosophical problems and so much boredom, and so little true laughter and genuine scenic art.

And therefore we, that is, I, the humble poet Valmar Luscinius, our glorious and famous maitre de scene Doctor Dapertutto, maestro di capella Campanielli, and all comedians in the interlude, have decided

to bow to your desire and, not without fear and trepidation, present for your strict examination the interlude Harlequin the Card-Lover,

written strictly according to the rules and framework of the old commedia dell’arte.

It is incumbent on me, the author and performer of the prologue, to relate the contents. The contents of the interlude? They are practically non-existent. Harlequin is the husband of Smeraldina. Smeraldina is the wife of Harlequin. They quarrel and they make up. They make up and they quarrel. That's all. I can also tell you as a secret that, thanks to Fate's good graces towards me, I myself will take part directly in the play, as will our most kind maestro di capella, who, seated behind his rostrum, is burning with impatience to begin

directing the music that he has composed himself. I have said all that it behooved me to. Olé! Let us begin. FIRST POLICHINELLE (rattling the little bells of his ridiculous hat). Ding, ding, ding. And who told you that he was our friend? SECOND POLICHINELLE. Ding, ding, ding. The miserable, the tearful,

melancholics, carambolics, lunatics, and fanatics can never be the comrades of old but merry Polichinelles. SECOND SCARAMOUCHE. I swear by Melpomena, whose glory and

honour are trampled underfoot by all the

259 Harlequin the Card-Lover

theatres of our town that if you don’t cease your chatter, you old good-for-nothings, and

if you start beating my venerable friend Mister Scaramouche No. 1 (since I’m Scara-

mouche No. 2), my cane will make you be silent, you wretched hunchbacks. The polichinelles take fright at Scaramouche’ words and for a moment hang their heads in silence.

FIRST SCARAMOUCHE. Let me continue. I understand totally the

anguish and eternal sadness of our poor friend. Mezzetino, poor Mezzetino, you

| were in love when you were born. While you were still in your nursemaid’s arms, you composed sonnets according to all the rules

of our strict versifying, and would send them to Signora Isabella, who could not wait

for you to grow up, but upped and married the aged Dottore. After that you were in love

with Rosaura, Aurelia, Octavia, Diana, Eularia, Ennelia ...

FIRST POLICHINELLE. Most worthy of worthies Mister Scaramouche No. 1, if you're going to go through

all the most beautiful and not so beautiful ladies that this sentimental ninny has been in love with, you will waste a lot of time and

get sent packing by the director of our theatre, who is unusually strict and expects an interesting program and entertaining numbers from his actors. SECOND SCARAMOUCHE. You don’t understand anything. You're talking rubbish. You forget that this is a the-

atre, not a circus. For thirty years you've been working in the theatre and still you don’t understand anything. You and that theatre director of yours expect the actors to

make up their own play and play it themselves. But let me ask you, you most worth-

less little hunchback, then what are the authors and stage directors going to do? Maybe you think with your tiny mind that they should leave their noble, highly useful, and moral profession? Leave the theatre for-

ever and become bootblacks and theatre ushers?

260 Appendix E

FIRST POLICHINELLE. Incomparable, wise, and honoured Mister Scaramouche No, 2, it is not I but you who

do not understand anything about the the-

atre. There are all sorts of authors, depending on their nose, the colour of their

hair, and the slant of their eyes. Some of them may have long legs, but others absolutely have to be hunchbacks. Some authors

are honoured and respected by everyone. They write plays. They have the approval of

the most learned of the learned. The plays of these respected authors are put on in all theatres. They bring happiness to the theatres and bring in lots of ticket sales. But there

are other authors whose plays never see the footlights. FIRST SCARAMOUCHE. [don't know why you mention the footlights,

when in our new theatre they have been done away with long ago. SECOND POLICHINELLE. The plays of authors like that fill their cup-

board shelves and their desk drawers. No self-respecting theatre would put on such

garbage. They are condemned to go hungry. There's not a single actress who would invite

them into her salon for white wine and

cookies. These gents are obliged to spend their whole lives cooling their heels in the ante-rooms of theatres, begging in vain to have their plays put on. FIRST POLICHINELLE. _[ quite agree with what my venerable friend

Polichinelle No. 2 is saying. As far as | am concerned, I consider our author, that is to

say, the author of the very play we are playing right now, to be just such a one. His plays will never be put on in any respectable

theatre. What vulgarity! What arrogance! Forcing us, the most respectable of respectable actors, to take part in this rubbish. Such actors, such actors, the very appearance of whom on the stage brings forth thunderous applause and produces excellent ticket sales — such actors he obliges to study all sorts of

stupid things, to jump, hop, and then —

261 Harlequin the Card-Lover

imagine the arrogance — he obliges us to depict such intolerable and stupid clowns

and to act out such nonsense without a nickel's worth of sense in it. FIRST SCARAMOUCHE. Hey Polichinelle, you'll end up badly. The

author whose play youre bad-mouthing is

sitting here right next to us with his legs dangling into the orchestra pit. SECOND SCARAMOUCHE. He takes all your roles away.

FIRST POLICHINELLE. What's that he’s saying? What’s that he’s saying? The play will never be put on stage. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. SECOND POLICHINELLE. 50 now I know, Scaramouches, why our sen-

timental ninny is so sad. He's caught the damned disease of our honourable author, whose eternal unrequited love has already become proverbial. Unrequited love, trala, trala. Oh how difficult it is! Trala, trala. Oh how funny it is! Trala, trala. Oh how silly it is! Trala, trala. First and second Polichinelle run forward and interrupt each other as they

shout: Authors, if youre going to write plays that will never be put on, we swear by our glorious humps that you'll never be loved by a single beautiful lady. Voices are heard approaching.

The Polichinelles and Scaramouches hide, wrapping themselves in the ribbons of the backdrop. Mezzetino follows their example. Enter the two captains.

FIRST CAPTAIN. Hey, whos here? SECOND CAPTAIN. Hey, who are you?

FIRST CAPTAIN. I, glorious captain, was born in Naples and am the bravest of all knights. White knights, that is.

SECOND CAPTAIN. No, I am the glorious captain, and you are a liar and a cheat. I, glorious captain, was born

in Naples and am the bravest of all White knights. I have learned to perfection the art of the rapier. I swear by the garlic and the

onions of the nearest tavern and by the honour of my great-grandmother that I have caught on the end of my rapier more than a few rascals, and that I will not be slow to do

262 Appendix E

the same with you, if you should try but once to woo Signora Lucrezia.

FIRST CAPTAIN. What sort of a captain are you? He says he’s a captain. He is in love with Signora Lucrezia and thinks he can be a real captain like me. Signora

Lucrezia. Signora Lucrezia. Signora Lucrezia. Signora Lucrezia. Signora Lucrezia. If you were a

true captain you would be in love with Signora Beatrice. You don't believe it. You're trying to pull

your sword out of its scabbard. Don't get excited and don't hurry. You forget that it’s fake, like mine.

I think that we'll have to settle our quarrel with fists or with the Scaramouches’ canes. SECOND CAPTAIN. How do you dare say such things about Signora Lucrezia? Who is this Signora Beatrice, Signora Beatrice?

FIRST CAPTAIN. He's a barefaced liar and a loud-mouth. Signora Beatrice is Signora Beatrice, that’s all. When I visit

her in her house ...

SECOND CAPTAIN. You mean they let you in? I’m amazed. You make

so much smoke with your pipe that I bet Signora Beatrice falls in a swoon. FIRST CAPTAIN. _ Rascal! Signora Beatrice has astonishing hair. Oh, what beautiful golden hair. SECOND CAPTAIN. What kind of a captain are you? I can’t stand

golden hair. Signora Lucrezia has hair. Beautiful hair as black as pitch. FIRST CAPTAIN. Liar ... golden hair. SECOND CAPTAIN. Youre not saying what you're supposed to at all. FIRST CAPTAIN. No, it's not me, it’s you who’ not saying what you're

supposed to. SECOND CAPTAIN. I don’t understand how they can keep actors in the

theatre who can't even learn their roles. I know that they only keep you because your'e a friend of the author, and that you're a friend of the author

only because you agree with him about everything. The only thing I can’t understand is how one can be a glorious captain from Naples and praise the golden locks of Signora Beatrice to please some author. Now as for the locks of Signora Lucrezia — that’s another matter. FIRST CAPTAIN. No, Signora Beatrice’s locks ... SECOND CAPTAIN. Signora Lucrezia’s ...

263 Harlequin the Card-Lover FIRST CAPTAIN. Signora Beatrice’ ... SECOND CAPTAIN. Signora Lucrezia’s ...

The captains seize their fake swords and begin a theatrical duel, which the inquisitive old hunchback Polichinelles and the sensible, but not particularly smart Scaramouches and even the melancholic Mezzetino with his lute run over to watch. During the captains’ duel Smeraldina enters in high dudgeon.

SMERALDINA. Rascals, bums, scallywags! I shout and yell, run through the streets, shout again, yell again, run through the streets again. And you're nowhere to be found. Where is your ne’er-do-well master? Where is Harlequin, who is as much a layabout as you are? Where's Harlequin? Where's Harlequin? Where's Harlequin? Music. The servants sing:

Hey Harlequin, hey Harlequin, Be quick and hasten home. Our master, our master, Get home as quickly as you can. Smeraldina and the servants go off.

PANTOMIME Harlequin comes on and tells the public with appropriate pathos that a misfortune has befallen him. He has gambled away his money, his hat with the hare’s tail, his silver-embroidered camisole, his jewelled snuff-box, his ring, and his cane with the silver knob.

Harlequin turns out his pockets, which are empty, and swears that he will never again play the cursed game of basset.

Smeraldina comes out, notices Harlequin and, in high dudgeon, asks where he had spent the night. Harlequin is silent. Smeraldina repeats her question. Harlequin is silent. Smeraldina, beside herself, seizes Harlequins arm and asks a third time.

Harlequin, seeing that he cannot avoid an unpleasant conversation, assumes the pose of an honest man and says that he had spent the night in the company of honourable and virtuous people discussing human weaknesses, and, to prove the truth of his words, shows Smeraldina a treatise on morality.

Smeraldina takes the book, out of which there suddenly falls a pack of cards.

264 Appendix E Smeraldina immediately understands everything and starts to beat Harlequin. He submits to the blows. Smeraldina does not want to live with Harlequin; she demands a divorce

and says: “I'll take you to court.” Smeraldina goes off. Harlequin sits and mopes.

CAMPANIELLO, Mister Harlequin, Mister Harlequin, don’t mope

around like that. I assure you this is quite a minor problem. Smeraldina will be angry for a day or two, and then, like any woman, she will get bored of this useless activity and will probably forgive you. And so that you won't be bored, Mister Harlequin, I have composed some jolly music which | hope will cure you of your sadness. An orchestra musician breaks into Campaniellos conversation with Har-

lequin. Worthy maestro, may I make so bold as to point out that Mister Harlequin is not greatly moved by your music. In itself it’s excellent. The variations on the basic theme show that you are a great master but, don’t you see, Mister Harlequin is a card-player. Only such a player as he — that is, I —- can help him. Mister

Harlequin, cheer up. Your luck has to change. Here is a pack of cards. So that the game doesn’t take too long we will limit the time. When the orchestra plays the ritornello, we will stop playing. AUTHOR. Come come, my good man, that’s enough nonsense. We all know your idea of a quarter-of-an-hour game of basset. You'll play until morning, wear out the audi-

ence and the actors, and once again my play will not be finished. Forget it, Mister Double-Bass Player, take your honourable place in the orchestra. As for you, Mister Campaniello, you will get a talking-to. You've let your musicians go to the dogs. That’s no way to do things in the theatre. And you, Mister Harlequin, stop paying so much attention to the anger of your wife, Mistress Smeraldina. You keep clasping your breast and acting out a tender love scene. You think that it's incredibly new and interesting. In the first place, it’s

not new, and everybody’ pretty bored with it; secondly, from the technical angle you do the scene of tender love very badly, and everyone in the audience

can see that this is not a noble knight sitting before

265 Harlequin the Card-Lover

them, but a painted-up wooden doll; thirdly, you keep mumbling “love, love, love.” Only such fools as Polichinelles can mope around on that account in this day and age. I’ve been in love myself. In the course of one

night I hanged myself, but they cut me down. | drowned myself, but they pulled me out of the pond.

[ poisoned myself, but instead of poison my friend the apothecary gave me a good dose of rhubarb. And after all that, you can see, Mister Harlequin, that I’m still alive and kicking. Fourthly, you're to blame for the whole business. Why did you get married? Why did you get married? Didn't I tell you a thousand times not to do such a dumb thing? But you're a nasty piece of work, like all actors. You're always dissatisfied with your

role. At every rehearsal you kept on at me, “Please, Mister Author, kind Mister Author, let me get married not at the end of the play, but at the beginning.” I did what you wanted, and now you're dissatisfied. CAMPANIELLO. But, Mister Author, there's no need to get angry like

that. Why upset Mister Harlequin even more. Remember, you’ve been young yourself. You've made

a whole lot of mistakes in life. Have pity on Mister Harlequin, Mister Author. Have him make up with Smeraldina and finish the interlude happily, without any conflict. Do it just for me, Campaniello, most worthy relative. Campanitello waves his baton. His orchestra strikes up a minuet.

PANTOMIME The dancer and danseuse come out. They are about to dance “Colin-Maillard.” Harlequin creeps towards the wings and wraps himself in the folds of the front curtain. The dancer and danseuse begin to perform their number of the program. He tries to kiss her. She refuses in the politest and most courteous manner. She quietly calls to Harlequin and before the eyes of her cavalier he helps her put on a bandage as long as the white gloves of a forain Pierrot. The dancer and Harlequin take advantage of the helpless situation of the

third partner and have a merry time dancing the minuet. Harlequin then goes off to the side. The danseuse takes the bandage off her cavalier, He is annoyed and angry. She consoles him and goes off with him, sending

a cordial greeting to Harlequin.

266 Appendix E Harlequin thanks Campaniello and his orchestra for the jolly music and makes a few unpleasant gestures at the Author. Harlequin tells the public that his sadness is gradually passing. Harlequin goes off. Maestro Campaniello is flattered by Harlequin'’s approval and continues

to play along with his orchestra, despite the protests of the Author and the whole series of characters, who with their hands and feet incite him to stop, at least for a while, this activity which is so pleasant for him, but not for the others. Scene Two of Pantomime

Two ranting, self-assured commedia dell’arte Captains meet.

FIRST CAPTAIN. Again this rascal and I meet. SECOND CAPTAIN. Die, despised one.

FIRST CAPTAIN (parrying a thrust with his fake sword and leaping

around the stage). Aha, aha, aha, aha, how selfconfident he is. He thinks that I am so stupid that I will immediately submit to all his stupid commands. No, you good-for-nothing. I hate liars, phi-

losophers and their doctrines, academics, and solemn university meetings and assemblies, but most of all I despise such loud-mouths as you, Mister Phony Captain. (Penetrates him with the fake sword.) SECOND CAPTAIN. Help! My heart! I’m dying.

FIRST CAPTAIN. If you agree to concede that the locks of Signora

Lucrezia are more beautiful than the locks of Signora Beatrice, you may get up and go your way unhindered to the wings to await your next scene.

SECOND CAPTAIN. What? The locks of Signora Lucrezia? The locks of

Signora Lucrezia? You simple simpleton! You are quite out of touch. You understand nothing in life. You fight for the honour of the locks of your donna, but let me be so bold as to ask if you are convinced that the locks of Signora Lucrezia are real ones and

that she doesn’t wear a wig made by the skilful hands of some Italian barber. (Drags a woman's black wig out from under his cloak.) You are silent. You are

embarrassed. I have won. For I know only one thing — Signora Beatrice’s locks are the real thing, and no beautiful woman has finer locks than she.

267 Harlequin the Card-Lover

AUTHOR. Youte talking nonsense and impinging on my role. You will be severely punished. Next scene. From behind the wings one can hear noise and the cries of the hapless Mezzetino, who ts being beaten by the enraged Polichinelles and the sensible,

but not particularly smart Scaramouches. | MEZZETINO. Where is my lute? Where is my lute? They've smashed it. Captains, save me. Help, help! The captains go to defend Mezzetino, but when they realize that the two of them will have to deal with four opponents, they simply adopt the noble poses of defenders.

FIRST CAPTAIN. Why are you beating Mezzetino? SECOND CAPTAIN. Rogues and cowards. Four against one. FIRST CAPTAIN. That’s not a fair fight! SECOND CAPTAIN. Why are you beating him?

MEZZETINO. I don’t know why they are beating me. I didn’t do them any harm. I didn't steal the suckers, I didn’t break the old-fashioned clock in your drawing-room. FIRST SCARAMOUCHE. _ He didn’t steal the suckers. SECOND SCARAMOUCHE. He didn't break the old-fashioned clock.

FIRST POLICHINELLE. Oh, how cunning he is! Our sentimental ninny. He didn’t steal the suckers. He didn't

break the old-fashioned clock in our

drawing-room. SECOND POLICHINELLE. He stole our honour. He sullied our good name. The captains and the Scaramouches almost die laughing. They roll around the floor, trying with all their might to hold themselves together.

FIRST CAPTAIN. These rascals have honour!

SECOND CAPTAIN. The good name of the Polichinelles! FIRST SCARAMOUCHE. Mezzetino stole the young man’s role from these honourable old actors in the new play. SECOND SCARAMOUCHE. He courted their wives, he serenaded under

the windows of their houses! BOTH CAPTAINS. Bravo, Mezzetino, bravo, Mezzetino!

Mezzetino throws off his commedia tuntc. |

MEZZETINO. Captains! Scaramouches! Understand me and forgive me for my thoughtless act. Cap-

tains, Scaramouches, how glad I am, how glad I am! Towards the end of the play I was

cured of the terrible illness of unrequited love and became light-hearted. How brightly

268 Appendix E

the candles burn in the chandeliers! How sweetly and languourously Campaniello’s orchestra plays! Thanks be to the author, who unlike other authors obliged me to pay court to not one but five beautiful ladies. What joy! What happiness! One failure is

followed by another. One pair of eyes is replaced by a second pair, the second pair by a third, the third by a fourth, the fourth by a fifth. Sitting in one lady’s drawingroom, one always remembers another ... Bewilderment. Mezzetino slowly pulls on his tunic, and again becomes melancholy.

The little bells on Harlequin’s costume can be heard. The captains, Polichinelles, and Scaramouches become Harlequins servants.

THE SERVANTS’ SONG The servants of Harlequin are we. We love our master tenderly. But he by a quandary is tossed All his money he has lost. He came back early in the morn And met Smeraldina, his ferocious spouse Then Harlequin wished he had never been born. (bis) The servants dance. Enter Harlequin. HARLEQUIN.

I by a quandary am tossed — All my money I have lost. SERVANTS.

We love our master tenderly. Ready to help Harlequin are we.

PANTOMIME The servants confer among themselves and find the means to get their master out of his awkward situation. The captains, the Scaramouches, the Polichinelles, and Mezzetino carry on a large writing-desk covered with cloth, an armchair, bundles of documents, an inkwell, goose-quills, and a seal.

269 Harlequin the Card-Lover The servants bedeck Harlequin with appropriate solemnity in the costume of Doctor of Laws, and quickly struggle into clerks’ garments.

Smeraldina enters and makes an obeisance to the judge, who does not notice her. The judge is busy hearing urgent cases. The servants pass the documents smoothly from hand to hand. The judge can hardly sign them fast enough. The clerk (Mezzetino) continuously stamps the documents with the seal. Smeraldina tries to approach Harlequin from various angles, but the sea of documents gets in the way each time. Finally Smeraldina, beside herself at the unusual officiousness of the judge,

hurls herself at Harlequin through all the obstacles. Mezzetino throws a heap of manuscripts at her that he has pulled out of a basket.

AUTHOR. What are they doing? What are my actors doing with me?

Oh no! Those are my manuscripts of plays that have not been put on anywhere. The servants hastily lead the author from the stage.

SCENE WITH HARLEQUIN AND SMERALDINA Smeraldina explains to the judge her petition for a divorce from her husband, the no-good card-sharp Harlequin. The judge keeps on writing. Smeraldina drags the judge out onto the forestage and explains her petition a second time. The judge agrees to divorce her from her husband, the no-good card-sharp Harlequin, on one condition: that she give him (the judge) a kiss. After some hesitation Smeraldina carries out his request. Harlequin throws off the cloak of Doctor of Laws and with exaggerated

indignation declares: Now I have you, you hussy! Smeraldina is bewildered. She is ready to forgive Harlequin if he will forgive her.

Campaniellos orchestra strikes up a jolly tune. Bengal lights. Invtstble hands remove Harlequin’ and Smeraldina’s “marquis” and “marquess” costumes, and they appear before the audience in the traditional dress of commedia dell’arte characters. Harlequin’s and Smeraldina’s wigs are made to fly up with a system of very fine threads. Harlequin and Smeraldina declare their love for each other and dance the concluding dance. As soon as they approach each other, sounds of thunder are heard. Light-

ning. The candles go out in the chandeliers. Illuminated by the torches of the servants, the figure of a third individual — Brighella, a mask from the

270 Appendix E Italian commedia dell‘arte — appears from under the table. He tries to divide the lovers’ hearts.

HARLEQUIN. Brighelia is the rival of Harlequin, He's always in love with Smeraldin’. SMERALDINA. We're tired of tragedies, tired of feud, Let's have a simple interlude.

BOTH. Let the Italian under the table lurk.

To dance the old dance we'll not shirk.

The audience accepts the actors’ invitation. Brighella gets under the table. The candles come on again in the chandeliers. The servants with the torches disappear. Harlequin and Smeraldina dance the dance they have just performed, but at a faster tempo, which is made possible by Campaniello’s conductor's baton and the nimble fingers of the musicians in his orchestra.

When Harlequin and Smeraldina have finished their dance, there is thunder and lightning, but in the orchestra pit, not onstage. The candles almost go out, but stay lit. Brighella timidly and cautiously emerges from under the table. Harlequin and Smeraldina are no longer frightened of him. They call the servants, who drive him away with blows of their sticks and pinches.

Harlequin and Smeraldina turn to the audience with their “plausum date.”

We beg you as a favour In your applause don’t waver. They continue to dance the final dance. Carried away by their dancing, Campaniello and the musicians of his orchestra come up onto the stage one by one. When only one violinist is left, loud sounds of music are suddenly heard from backstage. It immediately becomes clear that the orchestra has been playing all the time backstage and that Campaniello and his musicians are just actors who have been transplanted to the orchestra pit at the whim of the author and the stage-director. Everyone onstage dances with gusto. Suddenly Brusquamabil and Garguil run out. BRUSQUAMABIL. Just a little game of basset. (bis)

GARGUIL. Who would like to play basset? (bis) Garguil and Brusquamabil quickly realize that they have come onstage at the wrong time. BRUSQUAMABIL. What cheek! Where's the author, where’s the author

who wrote this rubbish. There's neither sense nor merriment in if.

271 Harlequin the Card-Lover

HARLEQUIN. Excuse me, that’s not true. There is merriment. Because I and my tenderly beloved wife have been merrily and comically dancing the monferini.

GARGUIL. What has he done with us? Just think what he has done with us. He's made a cruel mockery of us. He's

made us, actors respected by the public and the direction of the theatre, he’s made us come to theatre before the beginning of the play, he’s made us dress

up in clowns costume and get made up. BRUSQUAMABIL. He's made fools of us. We, honoured actors, have

turned out to have mere bit parts in his play. Brusquamabil and Garguil run across the stage, looking for the author. The Polichinelles and the Scaramouches start beating Mezzetino. The captains again quarrel about Signora Lucrezia and Signora Beatrice. Harlequin and Smeraldina have already started to quarrel again. THE AUTHOR = (pulling across the curtain and trying to shout over the voices of the actors, who have started to do the interlude

all over again). Honoured public. My play has remained unfinished not because of me, but solely because of the actors, who would not submit to my will. But you know what, beautiful ladies and noble gentlemen, come to our theatre again tomorrow, for half-price, as our good old friends. Maybe tomorrow you will see the end of my play. Mezzetino will sing

you a few new songs. Harlequin will not be as sad as he was today. Tonight he will definitely win at the

basset game. But this is the trump card in my invitation to you to come to the theatre tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow among you in the audience you will meet that most beautiful lady to whom my interlude is dedicated. You can spot her by the colour of her hair. She has just the same beautiful golden-coloured hair as Signora Beatrice.

The End |

APPENDIX F

The Apes Are Coming! A play by Lev Lunts

A large room. The left wall is a stone palace wall with columns, a fireplace,

and a golden candelabra. The centre wall is that of a peasant hut; it is of gigantic proportions with sleeping platforms and tiny windows. To the right is the tiny wall of a Petersburg garret. The furniture corresponds in style

to the wall next to it. To the right ts a low doorway. There are windows only in the centre peasant-cabin wall. The entire structure appears clumsy, unnatural, incomprehensibly strange. It is totally dark onstage. Offstage a blizzard is wailing. To the left the Fool is asleep in an armchair. Two peasants in sheepskin coats and felt boots, stooping and grunting, burst

through the door on the right. Behind them is a man in a worn overcoat and fur cap of indeterminate shape. The peasants are carrying bundles and bags. The man in the cap has an empty briefcase.

MAN IN CAP. Listen, comrades. You can’t burst into someone else’s

house without knocking. (Looks around, coughs.) Looks like there's no one in. (Comes out to centre stage, looks around again.) Nobody. 2D PEASANT _—— (bewilderedly). No answer. Hey, whoever’s here, answer! 1s™* PEASANT. They don’t answer — don’t bother. (Gropes for the bench in the centre wall, sits, putting his bundle next to him.) Sit down, Shiriaev.

MAN IN CAP. _ I feel badly. After all ... ah ... after all, however you look at it, it's somebody else’s apartment. 2ND PEASANT. iI guess it Is ...

1s™ PEASANT. It's OK. It'll be all right. Sit down. Shiriaev. 2N> PEASANT. But where are you, dammit? 18* PEASANT. This way, over here. Sit down.

273 The Apes Are Coming!

MAN IN CAP _ (after short pause). Listen, comrades. Can I come and join you?

2NP PEASANT. Sure, sit down. It’s a big bench. There’s room for everybody. Silence. The man in the cap starts to fidget.

MAN IN CAP. What lousy weather. I still don’t understand how I ended up here. I was going along the street, blizzard,

snow, couldn't see a thing. Lousiest god-damn weather. Suddenly IJ get lost, everything's mixed up, sidewalks disappear, houses disappear, pitch black. I sure as hell don’t know what would’ve happened to

me if I didn’t come across this house. I actually wouldn't have dared come in without an invitation, only you insisted, comrades. 18* PEASANT. What's the big deal whether it’s someone else’s house or not? You lost your way, you see a door — in you go. Right, Shiriaev? 2ND PEASANT. I guess it is ...

18* PEASANT. __ If they won't let us in for free, then we'll pay.

MAN IN CAP. Well, you know best, but I still feel badly. Listen, comrades, anybody got some matches? Let's get some

light. My lighter’s not working, of course. ({ries to light it.) VOICE FROM AUDIENCE. Want mine?

MAN IN CAP (startled). Huh? What's going on? Someone called me.

No, it just seemed like it. So you don’t have any matches? (Gets up.) V’ll go and see if there's a light switch. (Gropes along the wall.) Listen, this place is a peasant hut! 18} PEASANT. Sure it is.

MAN IN CAP. How come there's a hut in the middle of the city?

And what a huge hut. I keep going and the wall doesn’t stop. (Reaches corner.) Now this wall is stone.

Columns, a grand piano ... I don't get it. 1% PEASANT. Siddown. Do us a favour. What are you running around like crazy for? Look, Shiriaev’s gone to sleep. Pipe down. Man in cap bumps into armchair in which the Fool is sitting.

MAN IN CAP. Hey, what's this — a person?

FOOL (waking up). What the hell? (Hits the man in cap hard.) MAN IN CAP (staggering). Ah. He's violent. I told you, you can't go into a strange house without permission.

274 Appendix F

FOOL. Hey, come on, who is this? You can’t tell in the dark. Oh my Gawd. This is the “man in fur cap.” What's

going on? Did | oversleep? Has the play started already? But how come it’s dark onstage? Hey, listen you, what's your name, man in fur cap, has the play started already? MAN IN CAP. You talking to me? What play?

FOOL. Quit pretending. Just tell me: has the play begun? Well, say something! If I overslept I’m really going to get it from the director. The light goes on. Everybody screws their eyes up. Man in cap and first peasant look around. Second peasant is sleeping on a bench with his head on his bundle.

MAN IN CAP. _ I don’t understand a thing. Where am I? What's happening to me? What kind of a building is this? What

are these walls? Is it a palace, a peasant hut, or a garret? (Turning his face to the audience.) And this wall is just black and strange — I can't see a thing. (Takes a few steps toward the audience.)

FOOL. Hey you, man in fur cap. Look out! You'll go head first down there and break your neck. MAN IN CAP. What’ up — is there a hole there?

FOOL. What do you mean “hole”? You'll just fall into the orchestra pit. MAN IN CAP. What orchestra? What are you on about? (Looking him

up and down.) What kind of a costume do you have on? Are you a clown?

FOOL. I’m a fool.

MAN IN CAP _ (looking around). Say, while we're on the subject, where's the light coming from? The lights are all off and there's no candles.

FOOL. What are you talking about? You in the theatre for the first time or something? That's the footlights. MAN IN CAP. You gotta be crazy. So youre a clown?

FOOL. I just told you. I’m a fool. MAN IN CAP. You in a circus?

FOOL. I’m not a clown. I’m a fool. The Fool in this play. MAN IN CAP. What play?

FOOL. This play. The one you and I are in right now. “In Serried Ranks,’ a play in one act, with revolutionary content. MAN IN CAP. Just as I thought, he’s cuckoo. (Cautiously.) Listen, why don’t you tell me, who are you?

275 The Apes Are Coming!

FOOL. I’m telling you in plain Russian — I’m an actor, just like you. I play the Fool. My duty is to amuse the audience. MAN IN CAP. What are you talking about? I've never been an actor in my life.

FOOL. Quit fooling around. You're an actor Your name is Dyriavin. MAN IN CAP (astonished). Quite right. How do you know? But honestly, I was never an actor.

FOOL. You play the man in fur cap, the stupid intellectual. You're the stupid one. Laughter in the audience.

MAN IN CAP _ (insulted). You're forgetting yourself. (Listening to the laughter of the audience.) What's that? Sounds like an

animal roaring.

FOOL. That's the audience in the theatre laughing. At our stupidity. MAN IN CAP. _ I'd advise you to quit your idiotic jokes. (Moves decisively towards the orchestra pit.) V'll go and see what

kind of animal that is.

FOOL. Hey, stop walking about. There'll be an accident. You'll drop into the orchestra pit.

MAN IN CAP. Well, you and your orchestra can just drop dead. (Trips and falls into orchestra pit.).

FOOL (helping him climb out). Feel ox? MAN IN CAP = (moaning). Help me get to a chair. I don’t understand

a thing.

FOOL. You weren't supposed to — youre playing the stupid one.

MAN IN CAP. Listen!

FOOL. OK, OK, I'll drop it. Anyway, I wasn’t talking about you — but about your part. ‘Cause you're an actor. MAN IN CAP. Comrade clown, do me a favour, leave me alone! I’m tired, I’m beat. 1st PEASANT. _ That's right — leave him alone. You see the man’s tired

~ so don't go on at him. You're fidgeting about like you have ants in your pants.

FOOL. Oh, Village Poverty! Hi. 1st PEASANT. _‘ That's right about the poverty. So who might you be?

FOOL. I’m the Fool. Mean you don’t know what a fool is? No? Oh, what a dum-dum I am. I completely forgot that I was supposed to read the prologue to the play. Right at the beginning. But I overslept. Well, better

276 Appendix F

late than never. Listen, Village Poverty, I'll tell you right now who I am, and while I’m at it, I'll tell those dummies who are out there looking at you and me, blinking their eyes and not understanding a thing. That right, guys, you’re bored, eh? VOICES IN THE AUDIENCE. Yeah, we're bored.

FOOL. Don’t worry, it's going to liven up. Just wait till the show's over, there'll be refreshments. Classy refreshments. VOICES IN THE AUDIENCE. Oh yeah?

FOOL. So help me God. Tea with sugar, white rolls and pies. Movement and murmur of approval in the audience.

MAN IN CAP. Whos this nut talking to?

FOOL. Comrades and citizens, allow me to introduce myself — I'm the Fool. You’ve come here to see a good play,

a fine play with revolutionary content entitled “In Serried Ranks.”

1st PEASANT. Listen, you're a nice gentleman, just wait a sec. I'll wake up Shiriaev. Let him listen too, you really talk interesting. Shiriaev, hey Shiriaev!

FOOL. Comrades and citizens! Of course, this is a remarkable, instructive, and edifying play, but since all instruction is boring, they put me here to make you laugh and amuse you so you don’t run off after the white rolls and pies. Comrades and citizens, I’m a fool. I'm a very good fool. I can really liven up an audience. You don’t think so? You're wrong. Well, anyway, it’s understandable. You see, I’m awfully

tired today. But I’m not drunk, oh no. And while were on the subject, that guy, the one in the front row, boy, does he stink of alcohol. Listen, comrade, where did you buy it, eh? Don't worry, they won't hear. Won't tell me? Later, you say? Well, ox — after the show. Only youd better level with me. Well, as I was saying, comrades. I’m not drunk. But I had to

get in line at three this morning for firewood and spent all day dragging it in on a sled from way out in the sticks. So please excuse me, comrades. By the way, So you won't be bored, I’m ready to walk on my hands. I can always do that, if worst comes to worst. (Notices an acquaintance in the audience.) Excuse me. (Waves his hand.) Aleksandr Ivanovich, my respects,

277. The Apes Are Coming!

and how come you didn't come over to my place last sunday? (He starts to tumble.) 18ST PEASANT. _—_ Shiriaev, hey, Shiriaev, you'll sleep through it, you

dope. Look, dammit. MAN IN CAP (triumphantly). I said he was crazy. Fool tumbles around the stage. Just when he is running on his hands past the right-hand door, it bursts open and hits the Fool on the back. He makes an arc through the air and lands on the ground.

A gang of boys bursts noisily into the room with cigarettes, pies, and other items of street trade in their arms.

1st BOY. In here. He won't find us here. 2ND BOY. He's chasing after us. 3P> BOY. He'll find us. 4™ BOY. I’m scared. Let's get out of here. GIRL (hiding in the fireplace). V'll hide here. MAN IN CAP. What's this? Whos this gang?

187 BOY. He won't find us. He’s lost us. 2ND BOY. Close the door.

FOOL. Hey you. Who’s chasing you? BOYS (interrupting each other). The policeman. He caught us at the corner. We were selling cigarettes. He’s chasing us. 15ST PEASANT. Kids, you wouldn't have any tobacco? 187, 2ND, AND 38> BOYS. Sure, here you are.

4™ BOY. I'm afraid he'll find us.

BOYS. Stepka the coward. Knock at the door.

BOYS. Oh oh oh - the policeman. (Hide behind the columns.) POLICEMAN (running in). Stop, you won't get away. Where are the little devils? (Looks around.) They’re not here. They've

cleared off. Well, just wait. Next time they won't get away. Boy, what weather! I’m dog-tired. (Sits down noisily on bench and leans heavily against wall so that it shakes. )

FOOL (on the floor). Hey you, listen. Be careful you hamfisted mutt! You'll knock a hole in the wall. These

are decorations. POLICEMAN. What?

FOOL. Decorations, you deaf coot. You're on the stage in a theatre.

1st PEASANT. In a theatre? So we're in a theatre? Shiriaev, hey, Shiriaev, wake up, I say. We're in a theatre. 2ND PEASANT = (sleepily). Whazzat about a feater? Leave me alone.

278 Appendix F

POLICEMAN (fo Fool). And who might you be, you striped bastard?

FOOL. I’m a Fool. (Does a trick.) BOYS. Guys, there's an acrobat, a clown. (They jump out.) POLICEMAN. Hey! There they are! Stop! (Grabs 4th boy.)

BOYS. (Continue to shout, paying no attention to policeman.) An acrobat ... an acrobat ...

GIRL (emerging from fireplace). An acrobat. (Seeing the policeman, tries to hide again, then is enchanted as she sees the Fool.) An acrobat.

POLICEMAN. Stop, you won't get away. Come on down to the precinct. 18T PEASANT. _Shiriaev, look, boy, is this fun.

FOOL. Listen, comrade policeman, leave the kids alone.

| What are you getting so worked up about? And where are you going to take them? It’s freezing and there’s a blizzard outside. POLICEMAN. Well, to hell with them! Get lost!

BOYS (surrounding Fool). Hey mister, do some more tricks. Mister, do it again.

FOOL. Just you be patient. I'm tired. (Turning to audience.) See that? They like it. So what about you? No? Hon-

oured audience, don’t be bored. Fool's word of honour, I'll liven it up soon. (Knock on the door.) Oh oh — someone’s coming. Look out! Come in. Enter two ladies in fur jackets. LADY IN ASTRAKHAN JACKET. Can we warm up a little? There’s such

a blizzard. MAN IN CAP. Be my guest. LADY IN SKUNK JACKET. Where are we?

MAN IN CAP. _ I don’t know myself. Some sort of incredible structure. There’s nobody at home, and the doors are wide

open. In this season. But it's warm, and, besides, who stands on ceremony nowadays? (Gives up his armchair.) Please take a seat.

LADIES (together). Oh, please don’t disturb yourself. There

. are so many armchairs here.

Offstage there is a long drawn-out cry: The enemy is nigh! The enemy is nigh!

MAN IN CAP. Of course, the enemy is at the gates of the city. I guess the sentries were ordered to warn us of the danger.

LADY. But there’s such a blizzard outside. You can’t even hear the cannons. Who’ that shouting like that?

279 The Apes Are Coming!

FOOL (gallantly). Permit me to explain, madam, that you are on the stage of a theatre. Do you hear the blizzard wailing behind the wall? Don't worry, that’s our boys

from the automobile platoon at work. As for the roaring voice — that’s the Red Army man Sakharov,

who used to be a deacon in the church at Vladimir. Were you ever in that church? He was a real topnotch deacon. The ladies look inquiringly at the man in cap. MAN IN CAP = (quietly, to the ladies). Don’t pay any attention to him. He's crazy.

LADIES. Oh! (Move away in panic.)

FOOL. Dont you be afraid, madam. (Quietly, pointing to man in cap.) Don’t pay any attention to him. Hes crazy.

LADIES, Yow! (Move even further away.) FOOL. Hee hee. (Does a salto mortale between the armchairs of the two ladies.) LADIES AND MAN IN CAP. Oh! Oh! (Jump up and run to sides. The boys surround the Fool, shouting and squealing.)

BOYS. Mister, do it again! Mister, do it again! FOOL (to Ist boy). How about a cigarette? (Boy retreats.) (Jo 2nd boy.) How about a pie? Won't give me any! Lousy cheapskates!

4™ BOY. Here you are, mister.

GIRL. And here's one from me. FOOL. Thanks a lot, kids. You’re good, nice kids. But as for you meanies — shoo! 1st, 28°, AND 3®° BOYS (chastened). Here's some from us too.

FOOL. Thanks, guys. Boy, now I’m rich. (Jo audience.) Hey you, anybody want a pie? VOICE IN AUDIENCE. Give us one, then.

FOOL. You would. How about a kick in the pants. Let's see your money.

VOICE. How much are they? 2ND VOICE. What's in them?

FOOL. Manure.

157 VOICE. Cut the malarkey. I bid ten.

FOOL. Any advance on ten?

VOICES. Fifty. Sixty.

FOOL. OK, here! (He throws one. Commotion in the audience.) What's up, they come apart?

VOICE. It's made of paper.

280 Appendix F

FOOL. (Chuckles.) Whadya expect, one made of the finest flour, with a nice fat pork filling? On stage all pies are made of paper. Aw, to heck with you. (Throws pies, cigarettes, and sugar into the audience.)

BOYS. Mister, mister, stop! What are you doing? Think we gave you the stuff for that? We thought you'd jump around for us, and you give it away to these bums!

FOOL (to audience). Hear what they call you? Out of the mouths of babes. This is for your pies. (Tumbles and jumps around stage. Runs up to the ladies and jumps around them. Ladies run away from him squealing. He pursues them.)

FOOL. Tallyho!

Boys pursue the ladies shouting and surround them. Ladies squeal piercingly and call for help to the man in cap, who has taken the precaution of

hiding behind a column. |

1ST PEASANT. Ho ho! Oh, too much. Shiriaev, just look at the ladies. (2nd peasant stretches reluctantly and sits up on bench. Both hoot with laughter.)

LADIES. Mister policeman! Comrade policeman! Defend us. Look at this disgraceful behaviour. Leave us alone, you hooligans. Mister policeman! POLICEMAN __ (lazily). Hey you in the stripes, leave the ladies alone. Fool and boys continue their antics.

LADIES. Policeman! For goodness’ sake, policeman!

FOOL. Don’t you go bothering the police. We'll quit ourselves when the time comes. Hey fellers, that’s enough fooling about. That'll do, I say ... See, madam scaredy-cats. May I offer you a chair? LADY IN SKUNK JACKET. How dare you! LADY IN ASTRAKHAN JACKET. Take no notice of him. He's crazy.

VOICE OFFSTAGE. The enemy is nigh. The enemy is nigh! (Everyone is startled.)

FOOL. Hear that? Boy what a voice! What a guy that Sakharov! (To audience.) Would you say he was a bad deacon? I'll bet none of you has heard a better one. Bet a hundred thousand. Any takers? VOICE IN AUDIENCE. I'll bet you. The one we had in Tsarevokokshaisk

was better.

FOOL. Baloney. Your guy from Tsarevokokshaisk can't touch our Sakharov. Sakharov is the deacon to end all deacons. Youre full of baloney!

281 The Apes Are Coming!

VOICE. Baloney yourself! FOOL. You watch your language. Mind your own business. VOICES. Quiet, quiet. Cut that out there. VOICE. What do you mean, my own business — I’m a deacon myself.

FOOL. The one from Tsarevokokshaisk?

VOICE. The one and the same.

FOOL. Now I get it. Like to blow your own horn. You've gotta nerve!

Offstage a banging, rumpus, and stamping of feet. The door to the right opens and the stage ts filled with a highly motley crowd. There are students, high school students, fat bourgeois, workers, soldiers and sailors, peasants, cooks, office girls, conductresses, ladies, and just plain folks. They mill around the stage, examining the set in astonishment. Hum of voices. Questions are raised on all sides. The conversation is loud and involves everyone. The crowd breaks into groups, each with its respective conversation. Housewives talk about the high prices, the cooks curse the yids, the black marketeers

talk tn whispers between the columns, a man who pronounces his words with a “ye” argues with one who pronounces them with a “yat’,” the boys hawk cigarettes and pies, while the ladies are besieging the peasants and trading for flour. Both peasants quickly empty their sacks, climb on the sleeping shelves, and fall asleep. The other peasants follow their example.

FOOL. Ladies and gentlemen. Comrades, your attention tor a moment. Cut the racket. Silence, silence. This is not the line for firewood. Silence. EVERYONE. Silence, silence. (The noise gets even louder.)

FOOL. Silence. Oh heavens, I’ve strained my voice. Hey, Sakharov, give us a roar back there. VOICE OFFSTAGE. The enemy is nigh! The enemy is nigh! (Everyone falls silent.)

FOOL (to audience). All rightee. Deacon from Tsarevokokshaisk — think you could do as well? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this peaceful abode. I can see

you've all landed here by chance and don't know where you are and what's happening to you. But that’s not important. Make yourselves at home, spread out, there’s plenty of room. My, is that a terrible blizzard out there. It seems the heavens have

decreed we must stay here. What are we going to do? How about getting some sort of social game soing? What do you think, comrades? HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT. Let's play forfeits.

282 Appendix F

HIS MAMA. Artur, be quiet. OFFICE GIRL. Why don't we dance? FASTIDIOUS BURGHER. But Id still like to know where we are. Maybe it's a trap. Maybe they're going to arrest us. Nowadays

its more than dangerous to spend the night in

some dive. Who's the owner here? Where's the doorman? MAN IN CAP. There was no janitor. There was nobody at all. FAT BURGHER. How do you mean there was no one? How do you know? MAN IN CAP. _ I was here before everybody and didn't find anyone except this nut. VOICE OFFSTAGE. The enemy is nigh, the enemy is nigh. (A knock at the door. Silence. The knock is repeated, insistently.)

FOOL. Come in.

The door opens. Enter Man in black. Silence. MAN IN BLACK. Excuse me. There’s a terrible blizzard outside. We've lost our way. But here there's light and it’s warm. Can we come in?

FOOL. Come in. Don’t stand on ceremony. We've all lost our way. You have as much right to be here as we do. Don't even ask, come on in. MAN IN BLACK. But I’m not alone.

FOOL. So what? Call the people you're with. There's room enough for everybody. MAN IN BLACK. I’m afraid our companion will upset you.

FOOL. What do you mean, upset us! Who is your companion? Not the devil, I hope. MAN IN CAP. Worse. It's a dead body. Commotion in room.

dead man. ,

FOOL. What do you mean, a dead body?

MAN IN BLACK. There's a coffin behind the door. We're burying a

FOOL. Er ... yeah. You're right. Your companion is not exactly pleasant. But listen, leave the coffin behind the door and come in yourselves. He doesn't care about the blizzard. MAN IN BLACK. They won't agree.

FOOL. Who are “they”? Are there many of them? MAN IN BLACK. The wife and mother of the dead man. They won't agree to leave him.

FOOL. Nonsense. That's just women’s talk.

283. The Apes Are Coming!

MAN IN BLACK. They won't agree to leave him. Not for a minute will they leave him. Silence.

FOOL. What can we do? You can't freeze out on the street because of a dead man. Hey, what's wrong with us? Comrades, really, what are we so scared of? Are we afraid of dead men or something? Comrades, how about it, let’s let them in, eh? Come on, it'll just liven things up. Come on. Commotion.

VOICES. No no, don’t let them in. FOOL. Boy, what a bunch of old women. At such a heroic era, so to speak, and these guys are scared of a dead

man. Come on in, comrade, don't worry. Bring in your companion. MAN IN BLACK. I’m embarrassed. I can see theyre all scared.

FOOL. Take no notice of them. They’re nothing to worry about. MAN IN BLACK. Well, you know best. (Goes out. Returns. Two in black are carrying a coffin. On either side are two women in deep mourning in black veils.) MAN IN BLACK. Place the coffin here by the door. (Sits down on bench nearby. The two women sit on the floor on either side of the coffin. There is a long silence.)

FOOL. Listen, madam, you'll catch a cold on the floor.

Permit me to bring you armchairs. |

The ladies in black do not answer. Silence.

FOOL. Hey, come on, this is getting boring. How come everybody's so down in the mouth? (Silence.) I don't get it. There's something weird about today’s show. There’s none of all this in the play. Should I get the

author or something? I hate to. (Quietly.) Hey, prompter, prompier. PROMPTER (quietly, from his booth?). Huh?

FOOL. Listen, friend, do you understand any of this? PROMPTER. Not a thing. Everybody’s doing his own thing. I stopped prompting a long time ago.

FOOL. Just try emceeing with this bunch. A dog’s life. Why don’t you say something, goddammit? Move, do something. (Silence. He does a somersault. Silence.) Not

even that helps. I’m desperate. | don’t know what to think. Silence.

284 Appendix F

VOICE. How come they’re burying him at night, and in weather like this? MAN IN BLACK. It's a state job. They shot him and gave the wife the body provided she bury him at night. Silence.

SAME VOICE. What did they shoot him for? Man in black does not reply. OLD LADY IN BLACK. They shot him because he was an honest man,

because he fought for justice, because he made an attempt on the life of the murderer who is ruling the country illegally. LADY IN BLACK WITH YOUNG VOICE. They were not to blame. He was

shot by mistake. | VOICE. Which one of them is right? They each give a different story. Silence.

OLD LADY. May you be eternally cursed, you murderers who killed him! O holy martyr, I envy you, because you are in paradise. May every drop of your blood add more sufferings to your murderers. YOUNG WOMAN. Don't speak. Don’t curse the innocent, they did not

know what they were doing. They were mistaken. They are not guilty. There was a misunderstanding. LADY IN SKUNK JACKET (to grey-haired lady). Madam, forgive me, I do

not know your name. You have my sympathy. You ... You ... lam speaking to the mother of an unfortunate one. Your son is a saint. I hate his murderers. LADY IN ASTRAKHAN. Marie, shh ... be careful.

MAN IN CAP. What is there to say? SOMEONE'S VOICE. I'm hungry! OTHER VOICE. I’m cold!

THIRD voice. I feel awful! FOURTH VOICE. This is worse than any death!

FOOL. Well, they're off. Any minute they'll start talking about potatoes and they'll be going until tomorrow morning. (Jo audience.) How about you listen, eh? What was I saying? The crowd onstage has begun to move, to talk and to argue. Some curse the government, others talk of the price of produce and political rumours. Sighs and groans. Everybody shouts. Everybody jumps up. Everybody gets excited. The crowd sways and swishes, like a field of wheat. It throws off all caution. The shouts are redoubled. They are searching, hunting for someone to vent their anger on.

285 The Apes Are Coming!

MAN IN CAP (pointing to a group of workers). Who's to blame? That's

who's to blame! They brought us to this. They seized power. Theyre the murderers. CROWD (pressing in on a worker in a half-circle). They're to blame ... They are ... Bastards ... Idlers. They brought us to this. They took away our bread ... our sugar ...

our flour ... our jewels ... our mattresses ... our galoshes ... our suspenders .., our potatoes ... You're the ones who are feeding us water, while you're gobbling rolls ... pies ... steaks, stuffing yourselves ... kasha ... pies ... oysters ... vodka. They're the ones

who are getting drunk, stealing ... robbing ... pillaging churches ... They’re the ones who took away our money. And our furniture ... And our typewriter.

They threw us out on the street. They killed our children ... husbands ... friends. They took my bicycle. I haven't had any butter for half a year. VOICE OFFSTAGE. The enemy is nigh! The enemy is nigh! He’ getting

closer. Be on guard. He's getting closer! (Everyone ts silent.) TRIUMPHANT VOICE IN CROWD. The liberation is coming ... That’s the

end of your reign, you bloodsuckers. The liberation is near.

CROWD. The liberation is near! The liberation is near! They’re coming ... they're coming ... they will come ... They will liberate us. We'll eat rolls and butter. We'll get our money back. We'll get our freedom. The restaurants will open. They’ll set us free ... They'll set us free ...

MAN. It's a lie ... It's a lie ... Gumping up on a table.) It's a lie, I tell you, it’s a lie.

CROWD (howling threateningly). Bloodsucker ... murderer ... Get him.

MAN. It’s a lie, it's not true that they'll set us free. Who are they? You know them. You don’t know them, you haven't seen them because the city is surrounded by fogs and blizzards. They’re not people, they're animals, they're apes. An army of apes has surrounded us. We may be robbers, but we are people, while they're hairy animals. You look to them for salvation,

but they will come and kill you, they’ll rape and torture you. You lady in skunk, who will you curse, when the apes’ hairy hands throw you to the ground,

286 Appendix F

when their thick animal lips press into your gentle cheeks, and their curved claws scratch your breasts? And you, lady with child, who will you call to when these claws tear out your infant's eyes and stuff them

into your mouth so that you swallow them, when

their sharp teeth bite your nipples to drink your mother’s milk? And you, man in fur coat, you will be able to put the money you get back into a pocketbook made of your own skin. And you, fat jew, you will be able to speculate with your friend, dangling

from a lamp-post. Can you hear the blizzard howling? That's them howling, the saviours you're | waiting for, that’s the apes howling who have surrounded the city. Silence.

VOICE OFFSTAGE. The enemy is nigh! The enemy is nigh! He's getting

closer! Be on guard! The enemy is nigh! (Wailing of the blizzard.) INDISTINCT VOICES IN CROWD. I have a brother who was among them.

— I have a husband they killed because he was a yid. ~ They tortured my father ... my son ... my son...

my son ... — They raped my wife ... my wife ... sister ... daughter ... daughter ... daughter.

MAN. Aha, now you realize. You've stopped yelling at me that I’m lying. VOICES IN THE CROWD (at first timidly, then with more and more convic-

tion). But we're dying ... We have nothing more to eat ... Were cold ... We're hungry. — What can we do? What's the way out? There's death

here, there’ death there. It’s not true that they're animals. My brother saw them, they’re people, they're people just like us ... But they killed my husband ... That's not true ... What do you mean, not true? They raped my wife ... my daughter ... my daughter ...

my daughter ... That's not true ... What do you mean, not true? What do you mean, I’m lying? It’s a lie ... Its a lie ... That's not true, it’s not a lie. They’ll

give us our freedom. They'll give us food. They’ll give us freedom. They'll set us free. — They'll give us food ... they’ll give us food ... they'll give us food. — They’ll kill us ... They'll kill us. Its a lie. They'll kill us ... They’ll give us food.

287 The Apes Are Coming!

— They'll give us freedom of the press. They'll give us food ... They'll give us food ... — Freedom of speech ... They’ll give us bread ...

MAN. And do you still wait for them? Don’t you believe me? You say they will give you food. They'll give you

bread. Fine. You'll get your bread. Do you hear? Do you hear? Do you hear, they’ve burst into the city, they're coming this way, the apes ... are coming ... VOICE OFFSTAGE. The enemy is breaking into the city! The enemy is

scaling the walls. To your weapons. The enemy is breaking into the city. (Mighty gusts of wind from the blizzard.)

MAN. Run, then, meet your saviours. Go get your bread, your apes’ bread. Do you hear, theyre coming. The apes are coming. (Strong gusts of wind.) The apes are coming.

Panic in the crowd, shouts: The apes are coming! The apes are coming! Save us! The apes! Save us! (The crowd mills around in horror. The wailing of the blizzard offstage gets louder and louder.)

MAN. What are you afraid of? That's your saviours coming, your apes. The apes are coming. They will bring you freedom. They’ll bring you bread, you hear, bread. The apes are coming. Wailing of the blizzard. The panic gets worse and worse. Shout: Close the door. The crowd rushes to the door and closes it. Everyone hides wherever he can. The peasants sleep on the sleeping shelves. The two ladies in mourning sit on the floor near the door to either side of the coffin, and not far from them the man in black sits on the bench. VOICE OFFSTAGE. The enemy is breaking into the city! To arms! The enemy is breaking into the city! (The crowd surrounds the man in horror.)

CROWD. Save us. Save us. The apes are coming. Save us. Protect us from them.

MAN. So now you want me to save you? What do you want? Go and meet your deliverers. They'll give you bread.

CROWD. We don’t want their bread. The animals are coming. The apes are coming. They wiill kill us. Save us! The apes are coming. A final gust of wind, then everything unexpectedly goes quiet. Silence.

VOICE OFFSTAGE. The enemy has been driven off. The enemy has been driven off. But he is close. Be on guard. (Silence. The crowd disperses to the corners in confusion.)

288 Appendix F

FOOL (who has partictpated like the rest in the general panic. To audience.) Did you see? This is some kind of madhouse. I bet you were pretty scared too when that red started to yell: “The apes are coming. The apes are coming”? (Teasingly.) Where did he get that bit about the apes? Boy, what a show. I don’t understand

a thing. Just try being a fool in a show like this. (Quietly.) Prompter, hey prompter. He's run off, the s.o.b., he got scared. Still, we can’t leave things like this. Just feast your eyes on this lot. They're all hidden

in the corners, the dears, and are sitting there with

their tails between their legs. Nice people, quit slinking around the walls. What are you scared of? (To man in red.) Comrade, what are you doing frightening the people? Can't you see that these dum-dums have really gotten scared? Folks, let's liven things up,

stop sulking. Have to think of something. Folks, don't be scared, let's liven things up. Students, you should be ashamed of yourselves! The girls are bored,

while youre skulking in corners. Don’t be cowards. Man in fur cap, sir, entertain the ladies. Comrades from the Red Army, light up, don’t be embarrassed. Mister singer, sing us something catchy. Comrade journalist, get out your notebook and jot down your

impressions, they’ll make a nice feature. Young people, old folks, girls, ladies, wake up, damn you. Kids, so you wanted to go home to your mamas, too?

Don't worry, the apes won't come, and if they do, there'll be all the more fun, they’re nice, funny apes. Boy, how funny they are! Would you like me to pretend I’m an ape? Here, look. (Tumbles, jumps, hops, and whirls around, bumping into everyone and stirring them up. Pours soup into a womans bowl, takes away an old man's crutch, bows to a dandy.) The scene comes to life. The boys greet every trick of the Fool with a

whoop. Gradually they join in. Then the high school boys start to move around and make noise. The men light cigarettes, the women make up their faces. Everyone begins to talk. The young men approach the girls, the ladies talk about domestic matters and the price of food, while the fat burghers haggle in a corner. Everybody returns to his business, while in the middle the Fool and the crowd of children get wilder and wilder.

FOOL. That's it! That's it! Livelier, livelier! Turn up the heat! Give it more gas! Livelier!

289 The Apes Are Coming! Someone strikes up a song. Someone else begins to screetch away on an accordion which has appeared from somewhere. Someone starts to whistle a march, Everybody 1s talking, moving about and laughing.

FOOL (in a thundering voice). The apes are coming! Confusion.

FOOL (bursting into laughter). Ho ho! Scared you! Dummies ... (To audience.) Did you see these idiots? Ho ho ho. (Tumbles about.) The crowd chuckles with relief. The commotion begins with renewed force. The mood gets merrier and merrier.

FOOL. Let the music play. Someone sits down at the piano and plays a dance tune. The crowd joins

in in chorus. Someone shouts: Let's dance. A circle forms for dancing. Everyone talks, dances, and squabbles with his neighbour, with no distinction

of rank, class, or age. An unbridled merriment reigns. Only the peasants are asleep on the sleeping shelves, while by the right-hand door the two ladies in mourning sit on either side of the coffin, and near them stands the man in black.

FOOL. This I understand. That's more like it. (To audience.) Well, guys, is that a little livelier now? Just wait. You ain’t seen nothing. Suddenly a clown drops down the chimney into the fireplace, followed by a second, a third, and a fourth. The crowd gets excited.

18? CLOWN (speaking with a strong foreign accent). Greetings. You're

having a fine time. So here we are come to visit you. We knocked at the door, but it was locked, so down

the chimney we go, seeing we're clowns. Alfred, serge, come here, show them your art. A clown show begins. The clowns sing, jump around, tumble, dance, make circus jokes, and have mock fights. With shouts of joy the crowd circles around them.

FOOL. Stop! What's all this? Who are these people? Hold it, folks. Why, these are clowns. No, God knows what they are. (Seizing Ist clown.) Hold it, what right do you have to come in here? Who asked for you? Clear off.

1st CLOWN. Go to the devil yourself. We're clowns, we're from the circus. Lemme go, don’t you see the people are waiting ?

FOOL (indignantly). Just wait. It’s not nice to take the bread out of someone else’s mouth. I’m the Fool here. I’m supposed to entertain the public, not you.

CROWD. Let him go, let him go ... We're waiting ... Like we said, let him go.

290 Appendix F

2NP CLOWN (to Fool). So who are you to be giving the orders?

FOOL. I’m the Fool, the Fool in this play. 32 CLOWN. Sure, sure. He put on some striped pants and thinks he’s a clown. You ever work in the circus? You a member of the trade union?

FOOL. I’m not a clown, I’m a fool, the Fool in this play. 1st CLOWN. So keep your nose out of other people's business. So youre a fool — big deal. Bug off and keep your nose

out of our business, or it’ll be the worse for you. Guys, this striped guy is stopping us from having fun, drag him off.

CROWD. Leave them alone, leave them alone, clear off!

FOOL. Folks, folks, wait a minute. I can do that stuff too. Look, I can do it better than they can. (Tumbles, tries to imitate the clowns, but with no success. They work together, in co-ordination, with more variety, and amuse the audience more. Everybody ignores the Fool.) Comrades! Folks! Look. They're not looking. No gratitude.

I was the guy who got them out of their depression. Kids. They’re looking at them too. (Td audience.) Com-

rades, why don't you at least help me to chase out these smart-asses. What, so youre entertained too and don’t want to look at me any more? So you too think their tricks are better than mine? So you prefer some know-nothings to me as well? Oh, damn this

show! I don’t get it. Everything's confused, it’s all mixed up. Nobody knows his role, everybody’s doing

whatever he wants. What bums. So what can I do? Come on, folks. I'm responsible for the show. We have permission to put on only a revolutionary show, but what the hell is revolutionary about all this? Curtain, curtain. (Jo audience.) Comrades, for goodness’ sake don’t pay any attention to these crazies. Believe me, there's not a word of truth in all this. The play is

a good one, a revolutionary one. The plot is as follows: At night in a city besieged by counter-

revolutionary forces, in this house, some people gather, symbolizing, so to speak, all the classes of society. You can see what strange decorations we have: one wall from a peasant hut, one from a garret,

and this stone palace wall, kind of from the old regime. Yes, well ... These people have differing attitudes towards the revolution. As a result, hmm, as a

291 The Apes Are Coming!

result, after some lofty conversations and pretty speeches they all decide to join the Red Army ... Ah ... AS you can see, it's a good, revolutionary plot ...

But anyway, I guess there's been some misunderstanding. There's a blizzard outside today, and our city, wouldn't you know it, really has been besieged

by some army, supposedly of apes. And outside there's a blizzard, you can’t see a thing, and these people burst onto the stage. Hmm... hmm ... Everything’s mixed up. VOICE FROM THE AUDIENCE. Hey you in the stripes, go to hell, don't block our view.

FOOL. Comrades, comrades, how could you. (Turns to the crowd, which is still in a turmoil.) Folks, folks, careful, don’t knock over the flats. A loud knock at the right door. No one pays any attention. The knock

gets louder. A voice: Open up, open up. In the name of the revolutionary authorities, open up. (The noise onstage subsides.) “Who's there?” — Open up. In the name of the

revolutionary authorities, open up. We'll break the door down. ~ Open up, this is a raid. (The crowd freezes.) Open up. (The door creaks.)

FOOL. Oh boy, this is it. Now they’ve done it with their dancing. Well, clowns, you’ve calmed me down. You're going to get it. (Reaching into his pocket.) Damn,

I’ve forgotten my papers. VOICE OFFSTAGE. Hey you, you going to open up or not?

FOOL. Well, comrades, there's nothing to be done. Open up. (Heads for the door.)

CROWD. Don't ... don’t ... Don’t open. (Door creaks.)

FOOL. But what if they break the door down? (Opens up.) Please come in. Into the room pours a Red Army patrol headed by a commissar.

COMMISSAR. What kind of an assembly is this? The city is in a state of siege, all meetings are forbidden. Do you have a permit?

FOOL. You see ... comrade ... this is a show ... a revolutionary play ... The theme is: “Long live the

Red Army!” It's a revolutionary play, it's been approved ...

COMMISSAR. Don’t you go pulling the wool over my eyes. Stand by the doors. Do you have a permit?

FOOL. Here you are!

292 Appendix F

COMMISSAR. “This is to certify that the play ‘In Serried Ranks’ has been approved for presentation in the theatre”? What

kind of theatre is this? What kind of production is this? Where are your papers?

FOOL. Well, you see, I forgot my pocket-book. COMMISSAR. ‘Take him away.

FOOL. Please, please, you have no right. I’m a famous actor. COMMISSAR. We know your kind — deserters.

FOOL. Comrade, comrade ... Honestly, I’m no deserter. I’ve a medical exemption. (Quietly.) I have a hernia. COMMISSAR. Off you go to headquarters, they'll figure it out there. Folks, get your papers ready. Guys, start the search. The Red Army men spread out over the stage, checking documents and groping under the chairs and benches. They even open the piano. RED ARMY MAN. Comrade commissary, like, there’s some flour here.

What should I do? COMMISSAR. A lot? RED ARMY MAN. ‘Bout thirty or forty pounds. LADY IN SKUNK. Oh gracious me no. There's only ten pounds.

COMMISSAR. Take it. LADY IN SKUNK. Mister commissar, mister commissar, how could

you? Leave the flour ... It's not mine ... I just bought it from those peasants. COMMISSAR. Whether it’s yours or not is none of my business. We found it on you, we're taking it off you. LADY IN SKUNK. Mister commissar. Listen, you have no right. Do you

hear, you have no right!? LADY IN ASTRAKHAN. Marie, give up. You'll end up in a scandal. How

can one talk to roughnecks? COMMISSAR. = Wha-at? You calling me a roughneck? Let's see your papers.

LADY. I don't have any papers. I’m on my husbands. COMMISSAR. Arrest her.

LADY IN ASTRAKHAN. You have no right.

COMMISSAR. No talking. (Sarcastically.) How can one talk to a roughneck! (The Red Army men take away their groceries. )

RED ARMY MAN (searching fat lady). Boy, comrade, are you ever fat. (Squeezes her, tries to get under her blouse.)

FAT LADY. How dare you! RED ARMY MAN. Hey, hey ... you be quiet. OTHER RED ARMY MAN (holding the fat burgher). Are you a black mar-

keteer? Take your coat off. Let's see what you've got hidden in that belly. Orlov, give us a hand.

293 The Apes Are Coming!

FAT LADY. How dare you! How dare you! Mister commissar, stop him. Mister commissar! The search continues with greater and greater activity. The Red Army men confiscate the produce bought from the peasants. They search people, turning out their pockets. They take the boys’ wares. They demand to see peoples papers. Several people are arrested. Among them are two clowns, whose arrest is greeted with shouts of joy by the Fool. The people in the crowd grumble, get excited, shout, and swear.

CROWD. Let me go ... Bastards ... Let me go ... I got this bread from the co-op on ration cards. Bums ... Hey,

you in the coat, be quiet ... Mister, those are my cigarettes, I swear. I’m not a black marketeer, let me go ... Where's your registration book? . . How dare you ... Arrest him ... Let my son go ... They’ll figure

it out at headquarters ... I lost my purse ... Don't touch me, I'll take it off myself ... Thieves. Swine. Bums. Bloodsuckers. Quiet ... quiet ... Bloodsuckers ... Murderers ... Careful ... Thieves ... Idlers ... Bums...

Foul language. A fight breaks out. The crowd surrounds the Red Army men, uttering threats. COMMISSAR. _ Silence! Retreat backwards. Step back. Just try some-

thing. I’ll give the order to fire ... Retreat backwards.

lll give the order to fire.

CROWD. Murderers ... Rustlers ... Swine ... Just wait ... Our time will come. You’ve sucked our blood enough ... They'll come. You'll answer to them ... We’ll meet

again ... They’ll come ... They'll come ... They’ll come ... They'll come ... They’ll come, our saviours ... They're outside the city ... They’re coming ... They'll come ... They'll avenge us ... We're waiting for them ... They’ll come ... We're waiting. There is a sudden thunderclap. Lightning. The flats tremble. A thunderous

voice offstage: The enemy has broken into the city. The enemy has broken into the city. Flee, flee ... The enemy is in the city. Flee. The apes are coming. (Thunder, lightening, rumbling. Offstage there is a deafen-

ing animal roar. There is a shout:) The apes are coming.

CROWD (in an even greater panic than the first time. The Red Army men mingle with the civilians, searchers with searchees. Clown runs next to Fool, boy with policeman, etc.)

The apes are coming, the apes are coming. Flee ...

Help ... The apes are coming. We don’t want them

294 Appendix F

to come ... The apes are coming ... The apes are coming ... The apes are coming ... The apes are coming...

Thunder, lightning, rumbling. The flats tremble. Offstage there is an animal roar. Shouts: The apes are coming. (fanic.)

MAN. (During the preceding scene he had disappeared somewhere. In a thunderous voice.) Be calm, be calm. Build

a barricade. Everyone to the barricade. We'll drive them off. Only be calm. Who wants to go and meet them? No one? Who wants to fall into their grasp?

No one? Then build a barricade. The apes are coming. Old men, women and children. The apes are coming. Everyone to the barricade. The crowd is still exctted, but there is no more panic. The thunder and lightning continue without a break. From time to time particularly loud rolls of thunder and animal roarings provoke short outbreaks of horrified panic, accompanied by shouts: The apes are coming. But the loud shouts of the man restore order.

CROWD. Build the barricade ... Build the barricade ... Be calm ... be calm ... Everyone to the barricade ... The apes

are coming ... Flee ... The apes are coming ... The apes are coming ... Help ... Be calm ... Be calm ... Build the barricade ... Everyone. All together. Eve-

ryone ... Wake the peasants ... Wake the peasants ... All together. Build the barricade ... Build the

| barricade. (They drag over armchairs, benches, chairs, piano.) What shall we build the barricade of? Where should we build the barricade? We don’t have anything to build it of. What shall we build the barricade of? What of?

MAN. Break up the walls. CROWD. Break up the walls ... Break up the walls ... Build the barricade ... Everyone, everyone. The apes are coming. The apes are coming. Help. The apes are coming. Be calm ... Build the barricade. Break up

the walls ... Break up the walls ... All together. Everyone. You too ... and you ... Everyone ... To the

barricades. The apes are coming ... The apes are coming. Build the barricade. (They take down the prompter’s booth. The bald head of the prompter appears.)

Everyone. To the barricade. (The prompter joins the crowd.) Everyone ... Everyone ...

The flats fall down. They are smashed to pieces and piled up in the barricades. Columns, furniture, coats, walking-sticks are all jumbled up.

295 The Apes Are Coming!

Only the coffin remains. The two women in mourning sit on the floor on either side of the black coffin.

CROWD. Drag over the coffin. Drag over the coffin. To the barricades. The coffin. Build the barricade.

They rush to the coffin and drag it over. The ladies in mourning on both sides of the coffin hold on tight to the dead man and will not let him go.

CROWD. Drag over the coffin. To the barricade. Tear the women off it. Let go of the coffin. Drag the coffin over. Tear the women off it. Throw the dead man out and grab the coffin. To the barricade. They throw out the dead man in his black shroud. He suddenly comes to life and jumps up on his feet.

CROWD. The dead man has come to life. The dead man has come to life. The apes are coming. The apes are coming. Be calm. The dead are coming to life. The dead man has joined us. The dead man has joined us. Everyone to the barricade. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone. The dead man and the two ladies in mourning join the crowd building the barricade.

MAN. To the barricades. All together ... Everyone ... (Jo the audience.) Comrades, join us. Everyone. Everyone.

Don’t be afraid. Everyone against the common enemy. Against the animals. The apes are coming. Everyone against them. For the common cause. (The audience clambers up out of the auditorium onto the stage

and joins the crowd.) That's right, that’s right. All together. Everyone. Peasants, workers, intellectuals, ladies, people. Everyone to the barricades. Arm yourselves ... Arm yourselves ... The apes are coming. From somewhere guns appear, pistols, sabres, axes, pitchforks, tridents. Everyone arms himself with whatever comes to hand. Onstage an enormous barricade is piled up of canvas, planks, furniture, the coffin, etc. The crowd intently awaits the enemy behind the barricade. In the centre stage the man

in red holds a red banner. Thunder. Lightning. Offstage there is an approaching animal cry and shouts: The apes are coming.

The End

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Notes

PREFACE 1 J. Thomas Shaw, The Transliteration of Modern Russian for EnglishLanguage Publications (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967).

2 Clayton, “From Gozzi to Hoffmann.” 3 Clayton, “Eisenstein and the Commedia dell’Arte: The Film as Balagan.” PROLOGUE 1 E.g., Taviani, La Fascinazione del teatro, esp. chapter 1. 2 See Kelly, Petrushka, 1-13. 3 Green and Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot. 4 The problem of uslounyi teatr is discussed in chapter two, especially the

coining of the term by the modernists and its application to the theatre by Meyerhold in his article bearing that title. Here, as elsewhere, we have a problem of translating Russian terminology: the term uslovnyi is derived from uslovnost’ (“convention”); however, it means exactly the opposite of “conventional” Approximate translations would be “modernistic,” “non-realistic,” or, most accurately, “convention foregrounding.” 5 The question of ostranenie is a well-known topos of formalist criticism (see Shklovskii, “Art as Technique”). 6 Green and Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot, xvi. 7 Ibid., 11-12. 8 Gasparov, “Poema A. Bloka ‘Dvenadtsat” i nekotorye problemy karnavalizatsii v iskusstve nachala xx veka.” 9 The association of Pierrot with the moon (a feminine emblem suggestive of womanhood, since it was associated with both Diana and the Virgin) contrasts with the obsession of the modernists with the sun,

298 Notes to pages 9-16 symbolizing the father. This contrasting sun/moon imagery in modernism would be worthy of a separate study (cf. Kruchenykh’s Victory over the Sun).

10 Nordau, Degeneration. 11 Donchin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry , 12. 12 Green and Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot, 30.

13 The importance of the circus in Russian culture and theatre in the period of modernism is a subject worthy of a book-length study. Among Russian writters of the time who were interested in the topic were Kuprin who wrote a one-act play, The Clown (Kloun, 1897), as well as numerous stories based on the circus, and Leonid Andreev, whose play He Who Gets Slapped (Tot, kto poluchaet poshchechiny, 1915) was a

major attempt to use the circus milieu. 14 See Segel, “Russian Cabaret in a European Context.” 15 See Green and Swan, The Triumph of Pierrot, 163-92. 16 Ibid., 139. 17 For more on this problem, see Richard Stites’s discussion of the LeninBogdanov polemic (Bogdanov, Red Star, 1-16, esp. 10). 18 For more discussion on this topic, see my forthcoming article “Povesti Belkina and the Commedia dell’Arte: Callot, Hoffmann, and Pushkin,’ to appear in Canadian-American Slavic Studies. 19 For a brief history of the term balagan, see Kelly, Petrushka, xiii.

| 20 The subliminal affinities between modernism and the baroque are suggested, among other ways, in des Esseintess admiration for Bossuet, the quintessential baroque figure. 21 Astrov’s remark may be an echo of Canio’s “La commedia é finita” at the end of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892); it is also Pechorin’s remark after he has killed the “clown” Grushnitskii in the duel in A Hero of Our Times (Gerot nashego vremeni) — a more certain source, perhaps.

22 For some interesting discussion of Chekhov's plays and the commedia dell’arte, see Schmid, “Cechov’s Drama and Stanislavskij‘s and Mejerchol’d’s Theories of Acting,” 27-8.

CHAPTER ONE 1 The classical version of the history of commedia is to be found in the seminal studies by Riccoboni, Histoire du thédtre italien, and Sand, Masques et bouffons, translated as The History of the Harlequinade. For a

more recent survey with many documents, see Taviani and Schino, I! Segreto della commedia dell’arte, translated into French as Le Secret de la commedia dell’arte. Molinari, La Commedia dell’arte, gives a superb collec-

tion of visual documents.

299 Notes to pages 16-21 2 See Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell’‘Arte, 8. This volume con-

tains a useful collection of documents in translation that serve to highlight different aspects of the question. 3 See, for example, the accounts by Kennard, Masks and Marionettes, (who relies a great deal on Sand), Nicoll, The World of Harlequin, and Lea, Italian Popular Comedy.

4 In particular, the collection of texts published by Pandolfi, La Commedia dell’arte.

5 Zorzi, “Intorno alla commedia dell’arte,” 123. 6 See Mariti, “Le collocazioni del teatro nella societa barocca,” and Tessari, “La Commedia dell’arte come forma di una embrionale industria del divertimento,’ 80-96. Mariti argues that the commedia dell’arte arose in opposition to the dilettanti spectacles of the religious festivals of the counter-reformation, that instead of symbolizing the unity of all the classes in the carnival, it served as “diaballein, separation, disintegration, fragmentation” (ibid., 68). It was as such that the commedia dell’arte attracted the vituperation of the religious authorities. 7 Richards and Richards, The Commedia dell’Arte, 113. 8 Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, 1:41.

9 For a contemporary view, see Richards and Richards, The Commedia dellArte, 11-19. The supposed ancient lineage of commedia was an attractive feature for the Russian modernists, who were in the vanguard of the return to primitive and primal forms of art, as were many philosophers and theoreticians of art, from Nietzsche to Veselovskii and Evreinov in his theoretical writings. 10 Riccoboni, Histoire du théatre italien, 1: ag. 11 The influence of commedia on English drama is discussed by Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, and Cantero, Studies in the Influence of the Commedia dell’Arte on English Drama: 1650-1800; for information on French assimilation of commedia, see Duchartre, The Italian Comedy; on German commedia, see Kutscher, Die Commedia dell’arte und Deutsch-

land; the influences of commedia on Spanish theatre are documented by Newberry, The Pirandellian Mode in Spanish Literature from Cervantes to Sartre, and Falconieri, Historia de la commedia dell’arte en Espania.

12 The use of the word “mask” is to some extent a conventional one; the Latin term “persona” is in some senses better. The early masks were literally so, and their ancient derivation and putative function (as devices for amplifying the voice) are discussed by Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, 1: 16. The masks could be highly expressive, and had little to do with the conventional black domino that we find as a feature of the modern Harlequin costume. 13 Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, 1:49.

300 Notes to pages 21-7 14 Nicoll, The World of Harlequin, 22. 15 Quoted in Kennard, Masks and Marionettes, 72. 16 Ibid., 55. 17 Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, 1: 115. 18 Kennard, Masks and Marionettes, 60. 19 Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, 2: 18. 20 Kennard, Masks and Marionettes, 87-8.

21 Ibid., 52-3. 22 Riccoboni, Histoire du théftre italien, 1: 56. 23 Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, 2: 137. 24 Kennard, Masks and Marionettes, 58-9. 25 Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, 1: 155-6.

26 See the diagram and discussion in Zorzi, “Intorno alla commedia dell’arte,” 132. 27 Nicoll, The World of Harlequin, 35-9. 28 Riccoboni, Histoire du théatre italien, 1: 65. 29 Nicoll, The World of Harlequin, 16.

30 Ibid. 31 For a discussion of this problem, see Clayton, “The Play-within-the-play as Metaphor and Metatheatre in Modern Russian Drama,” 74. 32 An account of the history of the Italian comedy in France is given in Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, 1: 33-55.

33 Ibid., 77 34 Ibid., 45-6. 35 Ibid., 54. 36 Thus Storey writes, “It is this Pierrot, characteristically refined by Watteau to a higher pitch of delicacy, that will fascinate the Romantics: The Gilles-Pierrot who appears in the painting of Les Comédiens Italiens, for example, standing apart from the other members of the company and radiating a certain naive sincerity, a ‘being likeable but strange’ (Storey, Pierrot, 27).

37 Ibid., 40. 38 Ibid., 38. 39 Mokul’skii, “Karlo Gotstsi i ego skazki dlia teatra,” 15. 40 Gozzi, Printsessa Turandot, 88. 41 The play was adapted into Russian under the title Liubou’ k trem apel’ sinam by K.A. Vogak, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and VI. N. Solov’ev and published in LTA, 1914, no. 1: 18-47; Gozzi's play provided the name for Dr Dapertutto’s (Meyerhold’s) journal, where the title served as a sort of manifesto (see chapter two). Subsequently, Meyerhold suggested the play to Prokof’ev as a suitable subject for an opera. In 1926 Sergei Radlov produced the opera, written by Prokof’ev in 1921, at the Leningrad State Ballet (now the Kirov). Another play by Gozzi that was

301 Notes to pages 28-33 translated quite early was The Woman Snake (Zhenshchina-Zmeia), which

was translated by la. Blokh and appeared in LTa, 1916, nos, 2-3: 11-82. However, a collection of all ten of Gozzi’s dramatic fables in Russian translation announced in LTA in 1915 failed to materialize. The first collection of Gozzi's “fables for the theatre” appeared in Russian in 1923. 42 Gozzi, Printsessa Turandot, 334. 43 Ibid., 341. 44 Ibid., 354. 45 Ibid., 355. 46 On the role played by Gozzi’s plays in the modernist revival of commedia, see the discussion in chapters three and four, of Komissarzhevski's and Vakhtangov’s productions of Turandot. Gozzi was more, however, than simply a source of texts; his name was interwoven with that of Hoffmann as an emblem of theatricality for the Russian modernists. Thus the room that housed the St Petersburg cabaret Prival komediantov (The Players’ Rest, opened 1916) was called “The Hall of Carlo Gozzi and Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann” and painted by Sudeikin with scenes redolent of Gozzi's Venice, as well as Hoffmann’s “Princess Brambilla.” See Malmstad, “Mixail Kuzmin,” 203. 47 Nicoll, The World of Harlequin, 175. 48 Tieck, Der gestiefelte Kater, 39, (I have changed the translation somewhat

to convey better the sense of the original.) 49 Ibid., 47, 49. 50 Ibid., 63. 51 The play was translated into Russian by Vassilii Gippius as Kot v sapogakh and published in LTA, 1916, no. 1: 7-62. S. M. Eisenstein worked on a planned — but alas, unrealized ~ production of the play (see chapter seven). 52 Tieck, Die Mérchen aus dem Phantasus, 341-2. 53 Ibid., 335. 54 Ibid., 287. 55 The metatheatrical inventions of Tieck appear to have been especially influential on Blok’s play Balaganchik and Evreinov’s Samoe glaunoe (see chapters five and six). 56 Gozzi, Printsessa Turandot, 288. 57 Ibid., 307. 58 Ibid., 294. 59 The Schiller version of Turandot was staged by Tairov in 1912 following Reinhardt'’s production of same at the Deutsches Theater (see chapter

three). Vakhtangov began his work on the play with a Russian translation of Schiller’s version, but then switched to a new Russian version of Gozzi’s original text (see chapter five). The play was the subject of two popular operas during the modernist period — by Ferrucio Busoni (1917)

302 Notes to pages 34-7 and Puccini (1923) — using Schiller’s version. It is the later version which, although not quite finished before the composer's death, has survived in the international repertory. Turandot is thus a classical text of international modernist theatre.

60 On the question of Hoffmann and his relationship to Gozzi, see Rusack, Gozzi in Germany, 144-72. The importance of Hoffmann for the Russian modernists is discussed in chapter two; see also the discussion of Tairov’s stage version of his tale Princess Brambilla in chapter four.

61 To be sure, Duchartre’s opinion is rather different: “It would be futile to attempt to trace his affiliation with any of the characters in the Italian comedy. His white costume without collar, the loose blouse, and the black skull-cap made Deburau as much like Pagliaccio as Pierrot, and, unlike either, except that he wore a white make-up as they did. Deburau-Pierrot, ‘pale as the moon, mysterious as silence, supple and mute as the serpent, straight and tall as the gallows.” (The Italian Comedy, 260; the quotation is from Baudelaire [see Storey, Pierrot, 104)). 62 Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, 1: 194. 63 Janin, Deburau, 1: 82. 64 Ibid., 1: 114. 65 Ibid., 1: 112. 66 Ibid., 2: 118. 67 At least one of Deburau’s scenarios ~ Arlekin-skelet (Harlequin the Skeleton) — was translated into Russian by A. Khorin (manuscript in LTs; censor’s stamp 16 March 1898); it was staged in Petrograd after the Revolution (1920-21). 68 Guitry, Deburau, 6. 69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., 7. For a discussion of this pantomime, see Storey, Pierrot, 103. As Storey points out, the macabre ending was a break with tradition and “did not sit well with the Funambules’ public.” However, it would appear that this injection of the macabre and death into the commedia tradition was extremely influential in literary terms, even if the theatre was obliged to substitute a conventional happy ending. 71 The character of Jean-Gaspard Deburau was recreated by Jean-Louis Barrault in Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du paradis (1944), which also

contains the pantomime (here entitled “Chand d’habits”). 72 Lehmann, “Pierrot and Fin de Siécle.’” 73 Storey, Pierrot, 101-20. 74 Ibid., 109-10.

75 Ibid., 97-9. 76 The complexities of the decadents’ cult of Pierrot are brilliantly analyzed in de Palacio, Pierrot fin-de-stécle.

77 Lehmann, “Pierrot and Fin de Siécle,” 220.

303 Notes to pages 37-41 78 Laforgue, Pero. The drawings reproduced in the translation that I have been able to identify are to be found in Beardsley, Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley, plates 48, 52, 54, 73, 77, 119, 126, 145, and 148. 79 The opera was translated into Russian by N.M. Spasskii as Patatsy; it was to remain a favourite component of the repertory of Russian opera houses right through the Revolution. 80 Lothar, whose real name was Spitzer, was born and died in Budapest. 81 Despite this plethora of translations, the play is a bibliographical rarity today; I have based my analysis on the French version, Arlequin-roi, and the third edition of the German, Konig Harlekin. 82 Its rather vague chronotope and the fool-king conceit suggest Baudelaire’s prose-poem “Une Mort héroique” as a prototype. See the discussion in Ritter, Art as Spectacle, 24-8.

83 In his preface Jullien notes that “first he thought of a rather sombre tragedy, something Shakespearean that would take place in Scotland and would have Marlowe for its hero” (x). This original conception explains the gloomy and ponderous mood of the play, which contains none of the levity or gaiety that one would expect from its commedia trappings. 84 There are four translations of Lothar’s play in irs. The first, bearing the title Arlekin, was subtitled “Sole authorized translation by Evg. Sharantsev from the third revised edition,” and was published in Riga (Tipogtrafiia Miullera, 1906); it was forbidden by the censor (stamp 29 November 1906). The second, a clumsy, unwieldy version by E. Leifert with the Russian title Shut na trone, was apparently made from the first version of the play, which had a different ending (typescript; forbidden by censor in 1910). A third (verse) translation of the play as Korol” Arlekin, “a play in masks in four acts,” by PN. Olaev, was forbidden by the censor on 11 May 1910; it had been made from the same German text as that by Leifert. The fourth translation, an anonymous one with the title Korol* Arlekin, “a harlequinade in 4 acts,’ was also evidently made from the revised, third edition of the play. 85 Benavente, The Bonds of Interest (Los Intereses creados), 19.

88 Ibid., 123. :

86 Ibid., 21. 87 Ibid., 35.

8g Ibid., 169. go Marionettar (1939), by the Swedish composer Hilding Rosenberg. g1 Benavente, The Bonds of Interest, 65. 92 Benavente’s play seems to have been translated into Russian first by E. Adamov (Evgenii Aleksandrovich Frenkel) under the title Sozdannye interesy (typescript in LTB; censor’s stamp 12 December 1911). On Russian productions of the play see chapter four.

304 Notes to pages 41-6 93 The text was set to music by the Austrian composer Ernst von Dohnanyi. 94 Schnitzler, Die Dramatischen Werke, 2: 327.

95 Schnitzler’s text was to play a central role in the artistic evolution of three of the most important figures of the Russian theatre: Meyerhold, Tairov, and Eisenstein (see chapters three and four). It was translated in 1910 by M.M. Bonch-Tomashevskii as Sharf Kolumbiny (in typescript LTB; censor’s stamp 21 September 1910).

96 Among other commedia texts that were translated into Russian during the modernist period from various foreign sources are the following: Edmond Rostand'’s “Pierrot qui pleure et Pierrot qui rit,” translated by A.A. Miussar-Viket’ev as “P’ero plachushchii i P’ero smeiushchiisia,’ in Teatr 1 iskusstvo, 1901, no. 38 (16 September): 677-8; “P’erro — otets i syn” (Pierrot — Father and Son), a one-act play by Jules Claretie (?),

translated by Z. L’vovskii, with four characters: Gaspard Deburau, Charles Deburau, Popier, and Madame Coche (LTB; censorship approval 9 November 1913); Kolombina, “a contemporary Harlequinade in one act,” translated by PI. Chardynin from an unidentified original, apparently a Viennese play in the style of Schnitzler (typescript in LTB censorship approval 2 February 1908); and Carlo Goldoni, I! Servitore di due padroni, translated by Amfiteatrov as Sluga dvukh gospod (typescript in LTB; no date).

CHAPTER TWO 1 Schnitzler, Die Dramatischen Werke, 1: 541. 2 Blok, Sobrante sochinenit, 8: 440-1; quoted in Matskin, Portrety 1 nabliudentia, 294.

3 For a deft evocation of the spirit of this period, imbued with such various delights as commedia, Oscar Wilde, Isadora Duncan, and the theatricalization of life, see Golub, Evreinov, 1-15. 4 Efros, Teatr “Letuchaia mysh” N.E. Balieva, 8.

5 An important figure in the transmission of Nietzsche's ideas to Russia was the poet Viacheslav Ivanov; see, for example, his essay “The Essence of Tragedy” in Senelick, Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, 210-22, as well as Senelick’s introduction (ibid., xxxix-xl).

6 On the theatrical sign, see Eco, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance,” 107-17, and Bogatyrev, “Les Signes du théatre.’ 7 Briusov, “Nenuzhnaia pravda.” 8 Gitovich, Letopis’ zhizni t tvorchestva A.P. Chekhova, 520.

g Briusov, “Nenuzhnaia pravda.” 10 Ibid., 69. 11 Tolstoi, “Chto takoe iskusstvo?”

305 Notes to pages 46-50 12 Tolstoi, “O Shekspire i o drame.” 13 Tolstoi, War and Peace , 678.

14 This question is discussed in detail by Shklovskii in his article “Iskusstvo kak priem” (“Art as Technique”), where he points out that there are “several hundred” examples of the use of this technique in Tolstoi’s work. 15 Tolstoi, War and Peace, 850.

16 My use of the terms “presentation” and “representation” here coincides with that to be found in a series of articles in the journal Representations. See, for example, the articles by Pye, “The Sovereign, the Theater, and the Kingdom of Darkness,’ Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation,” and Kniser, “Presentation and Representation.” 17 Aucouturier, “Theatricality as a Category of Early Twentieth-Century Culture,’ 12. Teatr kak takovoi (the theatre as such) is Evreinov’s formula for the theatricalization of life. It bears striking analogies to such expressions as the Russian futurists’ “samovitoe slovo” or the Italian futurists’ “parole in libertad” — all attempts to erase the fateful boundary between signifier and signified. 18 Ibid., 19. 1g Consider, for example, D-503's evocation of dance (prompted by a description of a machine): “Why is this beautiful? Why is dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance lies precisely in the absolute, esthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom. And if it is true that our forebears abandoned themselves to dance at the most exalted moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), it means only one thing: the instinct of unfreedom is organically inherent in man from time immemorial” (Zamiatin, Sochinenia, 3: 115). Among many other things, Zamiatin’s remarkable novel is a critique of the utopian notion of the theatricalization of life and the Taylorism of biomechanics. 20 Pursuing this logic to its conclusion, we can see that ultimately the director too would have to conform to the dictates of an even more imperious subject: Stalin. The hegemony of the director in the theatre, and the imposition of his will on the actor, reflected in parvo the eventual political outcome in the Soviet Union, when the director in turn would be subjected to the higher authority - Swan and Green's “rigorism.” For a discussion of these issues see Golub, “The Curtainless Stage and the Procrustean Bed.” 21 Briusov, “Nenuzhnaia pravda,” 73. 22 Senelick, Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, 134-5 (I have substituted “ego” for “T” in Senelick’s translation). 23 Fuchs, Revolution in the Theatre, 110.

24 Ibid., 42.

306 Notes to pages 50-6 25 Ibid., 138. 26 On the role of circus and acrobatics as forms of presentation in avantgarde theatre, see Senderovich, “The Roman Legacy.”

27 On the use and understanding of the term uslovnyi, which was to become a key concept in much of twentieth-century Russian aesthetics, see the prologue, note 1. 28 For details on Meyerhold’s life and career, see Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meterkhol d, and Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold. 29g Styan, Max Reinhardt, 18. 30 Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre.

31 Ibid., 125. 32 Ibid., 121.

33 One manifestation of this interest in primitive art (which had its analogies in other countries) was the cultivation of such traditional Russian forms as the lubok (primitive Russian print) and the icon by the painter Natal‘ia Goncharova. Of more interest for this study is the ballet Petrushka by Igor’ Stravinskii, which presents a traditional Russian balagan in a play-within-the-play structure. The triangular love-plot involving Petrushka, the Ballerina, and the Moor echoes the typical Pierrot-Harlequin-Columbine situation of modern commedia plays. The historical relationship of the Russian Petrushka to Pierrot and Pedrolino may be open to dispute, but the artistic links in the work of a modernist like Stravinskii are clear. His ballet is discussed in more detail below in chapter five. 34 Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 49-58.

35 Ibid., 56. 36 Ibid., 125. 37 Ibid., 127. 38 Ibid., 99.

39 Ibid., 63. | 40 A by-product of improvisation in the theatre is the solution of a problem that arises when plays are kept in repertory, sometimes for years, as frequently happened with Meyerhold’s, especially after 1917, namely the decline in vitality and the “staleness” of the actors. Matskin writes that “when I became acquainted with the Meyerhold archive I found out that the ‘problem of incompleteness’ in art had attracted him for many years, and that once at a discussion at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences — GAKhN (in May 1925) he had heard an interesting presentation by V.G. Sakhnovskii on the cocreativity of the audience

and the latter's need for improvisation and had said: ‘Disaster lurks for those directors who try to lick clean their work in the process of rehearsal. If someone tells you that someone took five years to put on a play’ you may conclude that this ‘director brought his piece closer to

307 Notes to pages 56-9 incompleteness. And, to explain this paradox, Meyerhold continued: ‘For when a director spends a long time on rehearsing, he ends up in a period of new discoveries and naturally upsets all his preceding work. After each new period we get a new version, the prime concern of which is to annul the preceding one. And of course, when he drags himself to opening day, again he’s in a new set of clothes [sorochka]. The incomplete piece — that’s the secret of theatre, that’s what's attractive about theatre’’ (Matskin, Portrety i nabliudenita, 277-8).

41 In 1913 Meyerhold took the step of formalizing his researches into commedia dell’arte at Terioki and the House of Interludes (Dom intermedii) by creating a studio (sfudiia). Here his students could pursue their training in the techniques of commedia dell’arte and receive theoretical and historical instruction as well. Not everyone was inclined to react positively to this venture, as we may judge from this intemperate review: “The pantomime of the studio, which pretends to recreate the old Italian popular commedia dell’arte, in reality is a slander of it. Mssrs. Meyerhold and Solov’ev, the ‘maitres de la scéne,; have thought up with their feeble imagination a falsification of the ancient ‘actors’ guild’ [komediantstva]. The confusion that the students ‘improvised’ and the ‘maitres’ corrected has, we may affirm a priori, nothing in common with the theatre of Pulcinellos, Harlequins, and Colombines” (N. Tamarin, Teatr 1 iskusstvo, 1915, no. 8: 128). 42 Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 119-42.

43 For a more detailed discussion of Meyerhold and the grotesque, see Symons, Meyerhold’s Theatre of the Grotesque, 65~g. Symons writes that

“the idea of the grotesque in the theatre was not for Meyerhold a choice of mode or convention; for him, the theatre was inherently a grotesquerie: i.e., ‘a deliberate exaggeration and reconstruction ... of nature and the unification of objects that are not united by either nature or the customs of our daily life’ Consequently, to say that Meyerhold practiced a theatre of the grotesque would be, by his definition of theatre, a redundancy” (ibid., 69). 44 Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 137.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., 139. : 47 Ibid., 142. 48 By “external perspective” I mean the type of perspective we find in post-quattrocento Italian painting; internal perspective is to be found in children’s art and the Russian icon. See Uspenskii, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, 31-47.

49 The following discussion of Hoffmann’ role in transmitting commedia dell’arte motifs to the Russian avant-garde theatre is taken from my article, “From Gozzi to Hoffmann.”

308 Notes to pages 60-3 50 LTA, 1915, nos. 4-7: 179-82. The French printmaker Jacques Callot (1592-1635) was closely associated with the commedia dell’arte because of the grotesque prints depicting commedia actors that he executed while in Italy; the most famous were in a suite entitled “Balli di Sfessania.” Hoffmann used eight plates from Callot to illustrate the first edition of Die Prinzessin Brambilla, which he described as a “Ein Capriccio nach Jakob Callot.” 51 Ibid., 181. 52 Ibid., 183. 53 Zhirmunskii, “Komediia chistoi radosti.” 54 Ibid., 86. 55 Ibid., 86-7. 56 Ibid., 88. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 91. 59 The theatre flourished for two seasons, 1907-08 and 1911-12; the first season involved a “Medieval Cycle” and the second a “Spanish Cycle.” For details of the productions, see Golub, Evreinov, 223-6. 60 Ibid., 109. 61 Ibid., 137. 62 The question of reconstruction was a hotly debated one; Meyerhoid, in particular, took a critical stance towards Evreinov’s experiments at the Theatre of Antiquity. However, as Golub points out, in his own attempts at reconstructive theatre, he was not far from Evreinov, since both of them leaned to a greater or lesser degree towards stylization rather than an “archeological reconstruction” (see Golub, Evreinov, 122-5).

63 Ibid., 125. 64 Cf. Uspenskii's observation that “during the theatrical performance of Hamlet ... the viewer in the theatre inevitably sees the play within the play from his own point of view, and not from the point of view of the characters of the tragedy” (Uspenskii, A Poetics of Composition, 3). 65 Evreinov was not the only one to espouse this notion of the unity of perspective: Gordon Craig's production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre (1911) had similarly conceived the work as a monodrama focused on Hamlet (Golub, Evreinov, 10; Senelick, Gordon Craig's Moscow Hamlet, esp. 28-31).

66 First delivered as a lecture, the article in question was later published as a pamphlet (1909); my quotations are taken from the translation by senelick, Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, 183-99. 67 Ibid., 191. 68 Ibid., 196.

309 Notes to pages 64-71 69 This is the version to which I have had greater access and to which the page references refer; however, the content of the book is substantially the same, except for the bibliography, which is updated in the French book, and the polemic with Duchartre’s La Comédie Italienne (1924 and 1925). An Italian translation, with a long essay on Miklashevskii and commedia dell’arte in Russia, was published in 1981 by Carla Solivetti as La Commedia dell’arte o il teatro det commediantt italiani net secoli xv1, XVII € xvii, con un saggio di Carla Solivetti.

70 Miklashevskii, Teatr ital t1anskikh komediantov xvi, xvit i xvi stoletit, 1: 18.

71 Ibid., 1: 13; emphasis in the original. 72 Ibid., 1: 26. 73 Ibid., 1: 213-15. 74 Ibid., 1: 80-9. 75 Ibid., 1: 231. 76 Ibid., 1: 233-4. 77 Ibid., 1: 218. 78 The discussion that follows is focused on the centres of Moscow, which became the capital of Russia again in 1918, and Petrograd. There were, of course, numerous other provincial cities with important theatrical activities. It was, however, in the two main cities that the great questions were for the most part debated and the lines of cultural policy developed. 79 More detailed discussion on the complex political situation surrounding policy towards the theatre in the early years of Soviet rule is to be found in Mailand-Hansen, Mejerchol ds Theaterdsthetik in den 1920er Jahren, 25-77, and Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral nogo Oktiabria, 7-098. 80 Zolotnitskii, Zort teatral nogo Oktiabria, 140-7. 81 Ibid., 147-51. 82 Ibid., 32. 83 Ibid., 227. 84 Ibid., 99. 85 See chapter four. 86 Of course, the circus was another popular theme in the theatre — witness such plays as von Schénthan'’s Cirkusleute and Leonid Andreev's He Who Gets Slapped (Tot, kto poluchaet poshchechiny).

87 Iam indebted to Senderovich, “The Roman Legacy,’ for his discussion of circus and the avant-garde theatre. 88 Vestnik teatra, 1919, NO. 15: 7.

89 See Lunacharsku, “Zadachi obnovlennogo teatra.” go Derzhavin, “Akter 1 tsirk”; quoted in Zolotnitski, Zort teatral nogo Oktiabrid, 245. g1 Loeffler, Gordon Craigs friihe Versuche zur Uberwindung des BiihnenrealiSMUS, 20.

310 Notes to pages 71-83 92 Zolotnitskii, Zort teatral nogo Oktiabria, 230-1. 93 Ibid., 244.

94 Photographs of an actor performing biomechanical gestures can be seen in the Drama Review 17, no. 1 (March 1973): 113-6. 95 I have in mind, particularly, the series “Balli di Sfessania.” See the illustration comparing two actors performing biomechanical gestures and two actors depicted by Callot. CHAPTER THREE 1 Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold, 30; for a photo of Meyerhold in this role see ibid., 31. 2 Ibid., 70. 3 See the descriptions of the production, ibid., 67-73, and Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meterkhol d, 87-94.

4 This is not to say that symbolist drama, with which he had experimented in his productions of Maeterlinck and Przybyszewski, left no trace in Meyerhold’s work. On the contrary, numerous researchers have stressed the continuing element of symbolism in later productions. 5 Chulkov, Gody stranstvii, 221-2. This scene was typical of the generally critical reaction of the press, both in Petersburg and Moscow; see Zonov, “Letopis’ teatra na Ofitserskoi.’ 6 Vendrovskaia, Vstrechi s Meterkhol ‘dom, 39. 7 Chulkov, Gody stranstvit, 221. 8 Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol d, 88. g Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold, 71; Rudnitskii, Meyerhold the Director, 147-8.

10 Quoted in Matskin, Portrety i nabliudeniia, 280. 11 Ibid. 12 The pseudonym was supposedly suggested by Mikhail Kuzmin (Malmstead, “Mixail Kuzmin,” 150). 13, Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral nogo Oktiabria, 174.

14 An English translation of the text of this pleasant, minor piece, which has never been published, can be found as appendix D to this book. It is a whimsical piece in the Spanish style with commedia touches (e.g., the wooden sword) and a (typical for Meyerhold) combination of eroticism and death, in the form of a mask. 15 Schnitzler, Brandstatter and Urbach, Arthur Schnitzler, 95. Meyerhold had seen the production at the Dresden Opera; see Berthold, “Die Commedia dell’arte im russischen Theater des 20. Jahrhunderts,’ 30. 16 Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold, 102.

17 See Matskin, Portrety i nabliudentia, 284 and further on in this chapter. 18 Bonch-Tomashevski, “Pantomima A. Shnitslera v ‘Svobodn. Teatre.”’

311 Notes to pages 84-8 19 Znosko-Borovskii, Russkii teatr nachala XX veka, 311-12; translated in Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold, 103. 20 Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold, 104. 21 Ibid., 103. 22 Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral nogo Oktiabria, 165. 23 Ibid., 177. 24 Matskin, Portrety i nabltudentia, 285. The other play of Schnitzler’s that had some popularity in Russia during this period was Der griine Kakadu (Zelenyi popugai), which, interestingly enough, also has important metatheatrical implications. It was put on by the Letuchaia mysh’ in 1919, although the production was criticized as “superficial” (Zolotnitskii, Zort teatral nogo Oktiabria, 171). It corresponded to a number of other pro-

ductions of the period that depicted the French revolution (e.g., Aleksei Tolstois translation of Bitchner’s Dantons Tod [Smert” Dantona] at the Korsh theatre in 1918; Danton at the Petrograd Bol’shoi; and Karman ola, adapted by G.I. Chulkov presumably a translation of the play Théroigne de Méricourt (1902) by Paul Hervieu (1857-1915) at the Dvorets Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsti in Moscow on 3 July 1919 [ibid., 92]). See the discus-

sion in chapter eight. 25 Senelick, Gordon Craigs Moscow Hamlet, 71~2; Gorchakov, Rezhisserskie uroki Vakhtangova, 47.

26 Ibid., 46. 27 Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold, 107-14; see also Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol ‘d, 149-56.

28 Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold, 113. Meyerhold’s other notable production at the Aleksandrinskii Theatre was Lermontov’s Masquerade, which premiered in February 1917. It had elements that reflected Meyerhold’s

interest in theatricality and, to a considerable extent, commedia as well. See Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meterkhol‘d, 230~40.

29 Ibid., 147. 30 For a stimulating discussion of the pre-Revolutionary cabarets in Russia (as well as their foreign antecedents), see Segel, Turn of the Century Cabaret.

31 Zolotnitskii, Zort teatral nogo Okttabria, 175. 32 Moisson-Franckhauser, “Evreinov et la musique,” 28.

33 Ibid., 30; Harlequin’ tune and the music for the dance of death are reproduced on 37-8. 34 See sketches in Teatr i iskusstvo, 1915, no. 47: 879-82. 35 Moisson-Franckhauser, “Evreinov et la musique,” 32-3. For an English translation of the text of the play, which has never been published, see appendix B to this book. 36 See the English translation in appendix C to this book. I give an analysis of Evreinov's play A Merry Death in chapter five.

312 Notes to pages 89-95 37 Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol‘d, 149.

38 Ibid. 39 Vendrovskaia, Vstrechi s Meierkhol dom, 51.

40 Ibid. 41 Teatr 1 iskusstvo, 1911, no. 46: 876. 42 Novaia studiia, no. 7 (19 October 1912): 7-8.

43 Reports on the activities in the school were published regularly in ira. For a detailed and informed discussion of the work of the studio, see Solivetti, “La commedia dell’arte in Russia e Konstantin MiklaSevskij,” 151-63. 44 Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold, 128-0.

45 Ibid., 131. 46 Ibid., 150. 47 Ibid., 131. The director was the brother of the celebrated actress Vera Komissarzhevskaia, in whose theatre Meyerhold had worked briefly and who died in 1910. Komissarzhevskii was to go on to do several other productions in the commedia style after the Revolution before emigrating. 48 Segel, “Russian Cabaret in a European Context,” 86; Efros, Teatr “Letuchaia mysh” N. FE Balieva, 7, 42. 49 Efros, Teatr “Letuchaia mysh” N.F. Balieva, 43.

50 Ibid., 44. 51 Ibid., 23 and preceding unnumbered page. 52 Ibid., 4o. 53 Reinhardt’ production was the subject of a review by A. Dokhman in the Moscow journal Studia, no. 5 (29 October 1911): 23. As Dokhman notes, the production was a “resurrection from the dead” of a play that had been “forgotten by everyone.” 54 Maski, 1912, no. 2: 86.

55 bid. 56 Teatr i iskusstvo, no. 44 (28 October 1912): 845. 57 Sakhnovskii, “Assambleia i Printsessa Turandot,’ 55.

58 Ibid., 56. Sakhnovskiis interest in the play was to have practical consequences. “[In 1920 Sakhnovskii] of the [Pokazatel’nyi] theatre [in Moscow] continued his search for a synthesis of spectacle. In Goldoni's comedy Pamela the Servant he again looked back to the experiments of his teacher, particularly Gozzi’s Princess Turandot (Printsessa Turandot),

which was produced by Komissarzhevskii in the K.N. Nezlobin theatre in 1913” (Zolotnitskii, Zort teatral nogo Oktiabria, 96). 59 LTA, 1914, NO. 2: 47.

60 However, the note in Maski concerning the forthcoming performance suggests considerable work on the director's part. “The translation has been significantly changed in rehearsal to conform to the Italian text;

313 Notes to pages 95~—101

an interlude entitled’ Lavinia’s Cunning’ has been inserted in the play in the style of the tragic [sic] harlequinades of the xv century” (Maski, 1912, no. 1: 96). In his production Max Reinhardt used a new version of Gozzi's play by Karl Vollmoeller. See Leisler and Prossnitz, Max Keinhardt und die Welt der Commedia dell’arte, 18-30. 61 LTA, 1914, no. 2: 48; emphasis in the original.

62 This term for the Russian prostsenii is adopted from Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold.

63 LTA, 1914, no. 2: 48.

64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 49. 66 Ibid. 67 Novaia studiia, no. 1 (24 December 1912): 40. 68 For photographs of the production see illustrations. 69 Ibid., 42. 70 Teatr t iskusstvo, 1912, no. 50: 999. 71 Ibid., 997-8. 72 Benavente’s play was also put on in Khar‘kov at the theatre-studio of PI. Il’in (stsenicheskaia studiia PI. lina) on 19 December 1915 (program in TMB, fon 197 [Orlov, D.N.], no. 428). 73 The theatre's log lists forty-three performances between 4 November 1913 and 16 April 1914 (TMB, fon 158, Mardzhanov, K.A., no. 1). 74 A version of the prologue in the author's hand is to be found in TMB; it differs somewhat from the published version (1948, 62). 75 Markov, “O Tairove,” 12.

76 [bid., 12-13. 77 BaltruSajtis, Liltia i serp, 62. 78 ‘lorda, “Alexander Tairov and the Scenic Artists of the Moscow Kamerny Theater,” 162-7.

79 lairov, O teatre, 81; translated in Torda, 164. 80 Torda, 168. 81 Koonen, “Stranitsy iz zhizni,” 107, translated in Torda, “Alexander Tairov and the Scenic Artists of the Moscow Kamerny Theater,’ 168. 82 lTorda, 172-3. 83 Pozharskaia, Russkee teatral no-dekoratsionnoe iskusstvo kontsa XIX nachala XX veka, 291-2, translated in Torda, “Alexander Tairov and the Scenic Artists of the Moscow Kamerny Theater,’ 178. 84 Zhizn iskusstva, no. 97 (14 March 1919): 2.

85 Ibid., 3. 86 Ibid. 87 Torda, “Alexander Tairov and the Scenic Artists of the Moscow Kamerny Theater,’ 128-32. 88 Benois, Moi vospominaniia v piati knigakh, 4-5: 531.

314 Notes to pages 101-7 89 Ibid. go Sakhnovskii, “Komediia Gol’doni ‘Khoziaika gostinitsy’ v Khudozhestvennom teatre.” 91 Gurevich, “Na putiakh obnovleniia teatra,’ 192. g2 Rudnitskii, Meyerhold the Director, 239; | have considerably altered the translation, which conveys only a vague sense of the original.

CHAPTER FOUR 1 Albert Fleury, Pierrot; quoted in de Palacio, Pierrot fin-de-siécle, 205-6. 2 Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral nogo Oktiabria, 158. 3 Ibid., 216. 4 Vesinik teatra, no. 6 (1918): 11. 5 Vestnik teatra, no. 4 (1918): 3. 6 Novyi vechernit chas, no. 31 (23 February 1918): 4. 7 Lhizn’ iskusstva, nos. 770-2 (6, 7, 8 July 1921): 2. 8 For a description of the career of Tairov, see Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage, 15-75. g Torda, “Alexander Tairov and the Scenic Artists of the Moscow Kamerny Theater” 260. 10 Ibid., 267. 11 Ibid., 264-5. 12 Ibid., 268-71. 13 Sayler, The Russian Theater, 173-4, 176-7. 14 Tairov, O teatre, 270.

15 The libretto was composed by Tairov himself and the production opened on 21 December 1917 (Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage, 30). 16 Sayler, The Russian Theater, 177-8.

17 | have relied for the account of the production, including the quotations from reviews and memoirs, on the detailed description by Torda, “Alexander Tairov and the Scenic Artists of the Moscow Kamerny Theater,’ 308-31; see also Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage, 33. A discussion of Hoffmannis tale and its relationship to Gozzi’s fiabe is to be found in Rusack, Gozzi in Germany, 150-4. Rusack writes, “It is very

apparent that Hoffmann had Gozzi continually in memory when he wrote his fantastic fairy story” (151). 18 Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage, 33; for photographs of

the production and reproductions of some of Iakulov’s studies for the set, see Rudnitskii, Russian and Soviet Theater, 144-7. 19 Rudnitskii, Russian and Soviet Theater, 147, 105. 20 Ibid., 105. 21 Tairov, O teatre, 148; translated in Torda, “Alexander Tairov and the Scenic Artists of the Moscow Kamerny Theater,” 311.

315 Notes to pages 108-13 22 Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage, 33.

23 Ibid. 24 Razumovskii’s first play, written in 1899, was forbidden by the censor because it criticized the tsarist army. He wrote over sixteen plays, of which the most successful was Iunaia buria (The Young Storm), which premiered at Korsh’s theatre in 1905; after 1917 he was involved in the Red Army theatre (unsigned biographical note, “Iubilei dramaturga [k 40-letiiu deiatel’nosti],” Sovremennyt teatr, 1928, no.7: 158).

25 Razumovskii, Pul chinelo. The literary censor approved the text for publication: “Permitted by the censorship, Moscow, 21 May 1904”; however, the theatrical censor M. Alferov was of a different opinion, as the copy in LTB bears the following note: “Considered inappropriate for performance, SPB, 1 August 1905.” 26 Vestnik teatra, no. 21 (1919): 23. 27 Razumovskii, Pul chinelo, 36.

28 A detailed description of the political struggles surrounding this production, and the production itself, may be found in Zolotnitskii, Zori featral nogo Oktiabria, 65~77; see also Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol d,

226-33. The most detailed account of the history of the play and its productions is to be found in Fevral’skii, Pervaia sovetskata p esa. “Misterita~-buff” VV. Maiakovskogo.

29 Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral‘nogo Oktiabria, 68. 30 “V.E. Meierkhol’d ob iskusstve teatra,’ Teatr, 1957, no. 3: 125; quoted in Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral nogo Oktiabria, 72.

31 Interestingly, in Granovskiis 1921 production of this play in German for the meeting of the third congress of Comintern, there was an actual “red Harlequin” (Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral nogo Oktiabria, 127). 32 Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol‘d, 229. 33 Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral nogo Oktiabria, 72.

34 The complex history of these theatres is to be found in Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral nogo Oktiabria, 228-34. 35 Ibid., 240. 36 Ibid., 246.

37 Miklashevskii, “Chto takoe improvizatstia [What is Improvisation],’ Zhizn” iskusstva, nos. 610-12 (19-20 November 1920): 2; quoted in Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral‘nogo Oktiabria, 255.

38 According to an announcement, the text was by Solov’ev himself and the music by Iu.G. van Oren (Zhizn’ iskusstva, nos. 646-8 [31 December 1920, 1, 2 January 1921]: 4). 39 “K postanovke ‘Prodelok Smeraldiny’ v Zheleznoi zale. (Beseda s VI. N. Solov’evym),” Zhizn” iskusstva, nos. 640-2 (24-26 December 1920): 1. Solov’ev also recognized the work of the scene-builder: “The costumes, props, and decorations by the artist E.P. Iakunina form a colourful, free variation on the theme of the commedia dell’arte” (ibid.).

316 Notes to pages 113-18 40 Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral‘nogo Oktiabria, 260—1.

41 Zhizn’ iskusstva, nos. 655-7 (15, 16, 18 January 1921): 2. 42 Zhizn’ iskusstva, nos. 653-4 (12, 13 January 1921): 1. 43 Ibid., 4. 44 Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral nogo Oktiabria, 262. The second playlet was probably that in LTB (see chapter one). 45 K. Sergei, “Pis’ma iz Petrograda [Pis’‘mo pervoe],’ Vestnik iskusstva, 1922, no. 1: 14-15; quoted in Zolotnitskii, Zort teatral nogo Oktiabria, 263. 46 Zolotnitski, Zori teatral nogo Oktiabria, 271. Zolotnitskii's account of the production is somewhat negative, perhaps because Evreinov shortly thereafter left Soviet Russia and his plays were removed from the repertoire of Soviet theatres. For an amused, but sceptical contemporary reaction, see Aleksandr Belenson’s witty review “The Chief Thing about The Chief Thing,” which purports to be an account of the reactions of the audience as they leave the theatre (Zhizn° iskusstva, nos. 682-4 [2, 3, 4 March 1921]: 1). For an analysis of the play, see chapter six. 47 Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral‘nogo Oktiabria, 271. It is interesting to note that a stage version of Quo vadis (Kamo griadeshi) was produced at the New Theatre (Novyi teatr) in Petrograd in 1920 (Zhizn‘ iskusstva, nos. 562-3 [21, 22 September 1920]: 4).

48 Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral‘nogo Oktiabria, 272. | 49 Ibid., 277, 285. A new review of the production appeared over the name “Klingzor” in Zhizn’ iskusstva to mark the hundredth performance. He noted, “Now this play is performed a little carelessly, although this does not mean that the basic idea has lost its edge and its original correctness” (no. 47 [870] [28 November 1922]: 3).

50 The philosophical content of the play is discussed in Hildebrand, Harlekin Frélsaren.

51 Zolotnitsku, Zori teatral nogo Oktiabria, 277, 279. 52 Ibid., 188. 53 Ibid., 172. 54 Zhizn’ iskusstva, nos. 672-4 (9, 10, 11 February 1921): 2. 55 Zhizn’ iskusstva, nos. 677-8 (19, 20 February 1921): 1. 56 Zhizn iskusstva, nos. 761—3 [25, 26, 28 June 1921]: 2. According to Nik. Noskov, the reviewer in Zhizn‘ iskusstva, the premiere of this produc-

tion, which was performed by the troupe of Smolny Theatre (Smol‘ninskii teatr), took place in a thunderstorm (nos. 770-2 [6, 7, 8 July 1921]: 2).

57 Zhizn’ iskusstva, nos. 767-9 (2, 3, 5 June 1921): 2. 58 Zhizn’ iskusstva, nos. 770-2 (6, 7, 8 July 1921): 2. 59 Zhizn’ iskusstva, no. 811 (4 October 1921): 3. 60 Sources for information about this production are numerous. They include the collective volume published at the time of the production

317 Notes to pages 118-26 (Gozzi, Printsessa Turandot); Gorchakov, Rezhisserskie uroki Vakhtangova,

95-184; Matskin, “Vakhtangov, staraia i novaia “Turandot,’ in Portrety 1 nabliudentia, 342-58; Simonov, Stanislavskys Protégé, 141-231; PA. Markov, ‘Iz Iektsii o Vakhtangove/ in O teatre, 1: 418-26, and 3: 79-85. The most comprehensive and judicious description in English is to be found in Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage, 127~39. 61 The simultaneous work by Puccini on the opera Turandot was purely coincidental, although a note about it by G. Milanese was published in Zhizn’ iskusstva, no. 10 (833) (7 March 1922): 5. 62 Vakhtangov considered, then rejected, the idea of having topical riddles about the theatre, e.g., Stanislavskii (Gozzi, Printsessa Turandot, 26). 63 Gozzi, Printsessa Turandot, 27; italics in the original. 64 Ibid., 22; see photos in Rudnitskii, Russian and Soviet Theater 1905-1931, 82-3. 65 Gozzi, Printsessa Turandot, 60. 66 Ibid., 19. 67 Ibid., 349-50. 68 According to Worrall, this device was probably taken from Meyerhold’s Terioki production of Harlequin the Marriage-Broker (Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage, 77). 69 Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage, 129.

70 For a discussion of the interplay of different scenic worlds in the production, see Ledger, “Transgression of Boundaries in Vaxtangovs Production of “Turandot.” 71 Matskin, Portrety 1 nabliudentia, 349. 72. Gozzi, Printsessa Turandot, 49. 73 Zapiski peredvizhnogo teatra PP. Gaideburova i N.E. Skarskoi, no. 56 (8 March 1923): 1.

74 Ibid., 2. 75 Ibid.

CHAPTER FIVE

1 Kuzmin, Selected Prose and Poetry, 369. 2 This chapter was written before the appearance of Catriona Kelly's seminal book Petrushka: The Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre; in revising it I have tried to take some of Kelly's views into account. For a fuller dis-

cussion of many matters touched on lightly at the beginning of this chapter, the reader is referred to her study. 3 Nekrylova, Russkte narodnye gorodskie prazdniki, uveseleniia 1 zrelishcha, konets xvit ~ nachalo xx veka, 22.

4 Ibid., 32. 5 Ibid., 40; ill., 51.

318 Notes to pages 126-30

6 Ibid., 59. , 7 See, for example, such popular editions as Petrushka: narodnyi kukol ‘nyi teatr, with drawings by V.V. Spasskit (Moscow: Izd. A. Sputina, 1907, 29); Petrushka (Moscow: Izd. I. Sytina, 1918, 20); and “Poteshnyi teatr: Petrushka” (free supplement to the magazine Svetliachok [Moscow, 1905]]).

8 See, for example, the volume Petrushka v lageriakh, in which the traditional figures are replaced with more topical ones: Petrushka (dressed as a Red Army man, a worker, or a peasant), the kulak, the seredniak, the imperialist, the old man, the girl, the Red Army man, the commander, and the worker. 9 For more details on the history of the Petrushka play, see Tsekhnovitser and Eremin, Teatr Petrushki; Peretts, “Kukol’‘nyi teatr na Rusi”’; and Alferov, “Petrushka i ego predki.” 10 See further on in this chapter. The history of the Petersburg balagany is given by Leifert (Balagany), whose father owned the largest of them. 11 Nekrylova, Russkie narodnye gorodskie prazdniki, uveselentia i zrelishcha, konets xvint — nachalo xx veka, 74.

12 Peretts, “Kukol’nyi teatr na Rusi,” 165. 13 Olearius’s description of a Petrushka play is found in his book Vermehrte Moscovitische und Persianische Reisebeschreibung (Schleswig, 1656); for

information on Olearius, see Peretts, “Kukol‘nyi teatr na Rusi,’ 98-9; Rovinskii, Russkie narodnye kartinkt, 5: 224-7. 14 Kelly, Petrushka, 49-54. 15 Peretts, “Kukol’nyi teatr na Rusi,” 165. 16 Dmitriev, Tsirk v Rossii ot istokov do 1917 goda, 62. 17 Lo Gatto, “La Commedia dell’‘Arte in Russia; 178.

18 Grigorovich, “Peterburgskie sharmanshchiki” (on Italian sources, especially Pulcinello); Dostoevskii, “Dnevnik pisatelia, 1 glava, ianvar’ 1876 g (chernovye zapiski).” 19 Zelentsova, Narodnyi revoliutsionnyi teatr v Rossii epokhi grazhdanskoi voiny t nachala 20-kh godov, 22.

20 Ibid., 21. 21 Benois, Moi vospominaniia v piati knigakh, 4-5: 646; Leifert, Balagany, esp. introduction by Benois. 22 Benois, Moi vospominaniia v piati knigakh, 1-3: 295. 23 Ibid., 296. 24 Ibid., 284.

25 Ibid., 285-6. 26 Ibid., 289. 27 \bid., 287.

319 Notes to pages 130-6 28 Ibid., 293. 29 Other manifestations included the cult of the /ubok, or primitive print, among such painters as Larionov and. Goncharova, and the futurist poets’ interest in ancient linguistic roots. Also strongly expressed in Petrushka is the World of Art group’s fascination with the eighteenth century. 30 Bennett, “Russian Pagliacci,” 150. There was indeed a veritable cult of Beardsley in Russia in the first two decades of this century. Evreinov

published a book on him, and his drawings were used as illustrations for Shershenevich’s translation of Laforgue'’s Pierrot fumiste (see chapter one, note 78). 31 I Pagliacci had its Russian premiere in 1893 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on 11 November 1893 (Teatral‘naia Entstklopedita, 4: 298) and remained a firm favourite in the Russian lyric theatre thereafter. 32 Benois, Mot vospominantia v piati knigakh, 1-3: 383. 33 Krasovskaia, Russkii baletnyi teatr nachala veka, 1: 157.

34 Ibid., 449. | 35 Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol d, 130; Krasovskaia, Russkii baletny1 teatr nachala veka, 1: 350. Apart from Landowski in Akrobaty and Pierrot in

Balaganchik, he had already played Petrushka in a comedy of that name by P. Potemkin at the Lukomor’e in 1908-09 (see Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol d, 120).

36 Krasovskaia, Russkti baletnyi teatr nachala veka, 1: 351.

37 Ibid. 38 Segel, “Russian Cabaret in a European Context,” 92. 39 Erenburg, Poety Frantsti 1870~-1913, 58-63; Laforgue, P ero. 40 On the direct links between traditional commedic practice and modernist theatre, see Nef, “Das Aus-der Rolle-Fallen als Mittel der Illusionszerst6rung bei Tieck und Brecht.” 41 For more discussion on this problem, see Clayton, “The Play-withinthe-play as Metaphor and Metatheatre in Modern Russian Drama.” 42 Sypher, “Cubist Drama.” 43 For a fine contextual reading of Petrushka, see Ritter, Art as Spectacle, 177-200. 44 Benois, Mot vospomtinantia v piati knigakh, 4-5: 522. 45 See, for example, Loeffler, Gordon Craigs friihe Versuche zur Uberwindung

des Biihnenrealismus. Craig's theories linked into the larger question, much in vogue in the first decades of the twentieth century, of the reduction of the human being to an automaton — a question that expressed itself in such phenomena as Taylorism in industry and biomechanics in theatre. The whole notion is satirized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.

320 Notes to pages 131-45 46 Benois, Moi vospominaniia v piati knigakh, 4-5: 522.

47 My discussion of the plot of Petrushka is based on the program in the liner notes of the record Igor’ Stravinskii, Petroushka (Columbia Ms 6332).

48 Kelly makes a similar point in her discussion of the piece (Kelly, Petrushka, 168). 49 Benois, Moi vospominaniia v piati knigakh, 4-5: 524.

50 Another Russian opera based on commedia was to follow some years later: Prokof‘ev’s Love for Three Oranges, inspired by Meyerhold’s translation of Gozzi’s play.

51 There are numerous English translations of the play; see bibliography. The Russian text I have used is in Blok, Teatr, 59-72. Quotations are from this text in my own translation. 52 Blok, Teatr, 60.

53 The double image comes from the ambiguity of the Russian word kosa, which has both meanings. The punning double image is a reminder of the ambiguity of the linguistic sign — itself for Blok an emblem of deeper divergences between the language of the poet and that of the world. I am grateful to Herta Schmid for pointing this out. 54 Rodina, Aleksandr Blok 1 russkit teatr nachala xx veka, 128. 55 Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, 1: 116-17.

56 The question of the sources of the Pierrotic imagery in Balaganchik is discussed in Bennett, “Russian Pagliacci.” Bennett describes the broad range of sources available to Blok (but omits Tieck). The resemblance between Blok’s play and Tieck’s was first noted by Zhirmunskii, “Komediia chistoi radosti.” 57 “Lunnoe pokhmel’e,’ Vesy, 1907, no. 10, 7-18; LeSmian, Skrzypek opetany, 127-72. For a discussion of Lesmian’s links with the Russian symbolists, see the introduction by Rochelle Stone (ibid., 5-126), as well as the same author's article “Aleksandr Blok and Boleslaw Lesmian as Proponents and Playwrights of the New, Symbolist Drama.” 58 Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, 1: 235. 59 Belyi, “Vospominaniia 0 Bloke,’ 290-1; translated in Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok, 1: 311. 60 Ibid., 321. 61 Blok, Teatr, 65. 62 Rodina, Aleksandr Blok i russkii teatr nachala xx veka, 142.

63 See chapter one. 64 On the relation between these two poems, see Masing-Delic, “The Symbolist Crisis Revisited,” 222-3. 65 Represented, among other things, in dress: Bakst’s drawing of Zinaida Gippius in Harlequin dress is a case in point.

321 Notes to pages 145-56 66 Basic information on Guro is to be found in Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism, 14-21, and in Nils Ake Nilsson’s introduction to his collection of her work (Guro, Elena Guro: Selected Prose and Poetry, 7-18). 67 Guro, Sharmanka, 152-4.

68 Ibid., 155-6. 69 The theme of children and the nursery was very close to Guro at this time. As Lifshits tells us, she had lost a son just before Sharmanka was published (Lifshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, 135). 70 For information on Evreinov, see Carnicke, The Theatrical Instinct, 9-45; Golub, Evreinov, 17-34; Hildebrand, Harlekin Fralsaren, 8-12; and the informative collection of essays Nicolas Evreinov. 71 Evreinov, Dramaticheskie sochinenita, 3: 5.

72 According to Hildebrand, it was written in 1908 for Sergei Ratov, who intended to open a theatre called Harlequin (Hildebrand, Harlekin Frasaren, 59). The most sensitive and probing analysis of the play is Carnicke’s (The Theatrical Instinct, 115-42). 73 Quotations are from Evreinov, Dramaticheskie sochinentia, 2: 89. 74 Carnicke, The Theatrical Instinct, 131. 75 Evreinov, Dramaticheskie sochinentia, 2: 72.

76 Ibid., 75. 77 Ibid., 57. 78 Carnicke, The Theatrical Instinct, 131. 79 Evreinov, Dramaticheskie sochinenita, 2: 65. 80 Carnicke, The Theatrical Instinct, 1109. 81 Evreinov, Dramaticheskie sochineniia, 2: 61.

82 Ibid., 82. 83 Ibid., 89. 84 Ibid., go. 85 Ibid., 70. 86 Ibid., 83. 87 Hildebrand, Harlekin Frdlsaren, 61; my translation. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 62. go Ibid., 63. g1 Evreinov, Dramaticheskie sochinentia, 2: 90.

g2 Ibid., 71. 93 Segel, “Russian Cabaret in a European Context,” 93; see also Hildebrand, Harlekin Fralsaren, 67-70. 94 Carnicke, The Theatrical Instinct, 132-3. 95 Ibid., 133. 96 Ibid., 134. 97 Blok, Teatr, 71.

322 Notes to pages 156-66 98 On Craig’s “Uber-marionette,” see Carnicke, The Theatrical Instinct, 196. 99 Ibid., 97. 100 For more on Kuzmin’s theatrical activities, see Malmstad, “Mixail __ Kuzmin,’ esp. 196-205; and Green, “Mikhail Kuzmin and the Theater” 101 Kuzmin, Selected Prose and Poetry, 408. 102 Ibid., 416. 103 Ritter, Art as Spectacle, 197. 104, Kuzmin, like Stello, had lost a lover, the Pierrotic poet Vsevolod Kniazev, who became infatuated with Ol’ga Sudeikina, the wife of the artist. This real-life drama also ended in death — the suicide of Kniazev. See Malmstad, “Mixail Kuzmin,’ 178-86. CHAPTER SIXx

1 Pirandello, “Six Characters in Search of an Author” in Naked Masks, 238.

2 This term is taken from Abel, Metatheatre. 3 Ibid., 60-1. 4 This is the Russian term (borrowed from the French) for the stock characters as they existed in nineteenth-century theatre: the ingénue, the soubrette, etc. 5 Schmid, “Cechov’s Drama and Stanislavskij’s and Mejerchol’d’s Theories of Acting,” 31.

6 The date given is in each case that of the first performance. For a useful study of Pirandello, see Bassnett-McGuire, Luigi Pirandello; I have also been inspired in this chapter by the essay by Sypher on “Cubist Drama.’ 7 I use the hyphen to point out the etymological - and semantic — links between the two terms “author” and “authority.” It is important to distinguish the notion of authority from that of authorship (which is loosely used to designate the identity of the playwright: the individual who wrote the playtext, who may, or may not, be the author of the spectacle). 8 Pirandello, Naked Masks, 235.

9 It is, however, worth noting that Pirandello uses both paternal and maternal images to designate author-ity; for example: “Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Don Abbondio? Yet they live eternally because — live germs as they were — they had the fortune to find a fecundating matrix, a fantasy which could raise and nourish them: make them live for ever!” (Pirandello, Naked Masks, 218). He uses similar images of maternity in the preface to the play (ibid., 364). 10 Conversely, one might characterize Chekhov's plays as the realistic depiction of a world in which realism is impossible.

323 Notes to pages 166-74 11 “For Lukacs ... the experience of the world war led to the conviction that the novel was the adequate expression of a world which had lost its ‘wholeness’ The individual had been left ‘shelterless’ (transzendentale Obdachlosigkeit) and alone in the search for meaning” (Striedter, “Three Postrevolutionary Russian Utopian Novels,” 178). 12”... It is clear that Pirandellos concept of theatre involved rigid discipline and dedication on the part of the actors” (Bassnett-McGuire, Luigi Pirandello, 21).

13 Pirandello, Naked Masks, 231. 14 Sypher, “Cubist Drama,” 69. 15 Uspenskii, A Poetics of Composition, 3; italics in the original. 16 See Foucault, The Order of Things, 3-16. 17 Evreinov, Vuedenie v monodramu, 18.

18 The resemblance of the title to such phrases as the Russian futurists’ “slovo kak takovoe” (the word as such) or the Italian futurist objective, “parole in liberta,’” is clear. Compare also Artaud: “Le théatre, comme la parole, a besoin qu’on le laisse libre” (Artaud, Le théatre et son double, 184). The parallels between Artaud (hostility towards “psychology” and “the text” in theatre) and the theories underlying the balagan are too evident to require further comment. In general, the avant-garde stressed the independence of art from life and from such other systems as religion and political ideology. For a concise description of Evreinov’s position in the ideological systems of his time, see the English abstract to Hildebrand’s Harlekin Fralsaren, 110-11, 115. 19 Evreinov, Teatr kak takovot, 27. 20 Ibid., 20. 21 Ibid. 22 For more information on the play, see Golub, Evreinov, 22, 38-9. 23 Evreinov, Dramaticheskie sochinentia, 1: 347. 24 Ibid., 1: 348. 25 Ibid., 356; emphasis added. 26 Ibid., 360.

27 The play was first presented at the Theatre of Antiquity in December 1907 (Golub, Evreinov, 223; Segel, Twentieth-Century Russian Drama from Gorky to the Present, 74-5. 28 Golub’s translation, The Unalterable Betrayal, does not really capture the

flavour of the pun, which hinges on the common root of the words neizmenny! (“true, faithful”) and izmena (“infidelity”). 29 Evreinov, Dramaticheskte sochinentia, 2:176. 30 Ibid., 258.

31 For the history and a description of these plays, including an account of the participation of A.R. Kugel’ and others in their development, see Golub, Evreinov, 159-74.

324 Notes to pages 174-8 32 Ibid., 164. 33 There is an English translation of the play by Laurence Senelick in Russian Satiric Comedy, 75~99.

34 This point is totally missed by Golub, who therefore takes the “death” at the end to be real (Evreinov, 174). 35 This victory through trickery of the oppressed over the pompous and self-important is an important theme in Evreinov’s work; compare the playlets in his Laughter Workshop (Kukhnia smekha), also written for the Crooked Mirror and also involving “recoding,” this time of a single

anecdote in the theatrical styles of different theatres: German, French, American, and Russian. 36 The title of the play is translated by Segel as The Chief Thing. However, I have followed Collins’ translation, since it then functions as a quotation from the text itself. 37 Evreinov, Vvedenie v monodramu, 9.

38 I have used the names of the characters to be found in Christopher Collins's translation (Evreinov, Life as Theater, 33-118). Quotations are from the 1921 Revel’ edition in my translation. 39 Grand Larousse encyclopédie (1960), s.v. “Paraclet”; Encyclopedia Americana, (1973), s.v. “Paraclete.” Hildebrand also connects the name with Christ, and he notes that Evreinov had planned to call the play Khristos-Arlekin

and that on the cover of the first and only Soviet edition of the play (Evreinov, Samoe glavnoe) was a drawing of a crucified Harlequin by Iurii Annenkov (Hildebrand, Harlekin Frélsaren, 91; Hildebrand reproduces Annenkov’s drawing on the cover of his own book). Annenkov was also responsible for the decorations and costumes of the first production at the Free Comedy (Evreinov, Samoe glavnoe, 3). 40 Le Petit Robert 2 (1988), s.v. “Fregoli.” For more information on Fregoli see Gerould, “Fregoli, Witkiewicz, and Quick-Change,’” and Nohain and Caradec, Fregoli 1867-1936. 41 An example of the dictatorship of Paraclete is the comic actor's objection to his use of the term “are obliged to” (tell anecdotes) (Evreinov, Samoe glavnoe, 75).

42 Ibid. 28. 43 Thus, for example, in the third act, the detective, having received a letter from the fortune-teller with the name of one of the bigamist’s wives, tells Fregoli, not realizing that he (the fortune-teller) and the bigamist are one and the same, “I believe in the fortune-teller as I believe in God” (ibid., 73). 44 Interestingly, it begins in “fictional time” before the end of the first act, a fact that is stressed by Evreinov’s note that there should be no intermission. 45 Evreinov, Samoe glavnoe, 45.

325 Notes to pages 178-85 46 Ibid., 79. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 91. 49 Ibid., 103. 50 Ibid., 106. 51 Ibid., 108. 52 Ibid., 15. 53 Ibid., 26. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 27. 56 Cf. in recent Québécois theatre, the “gay” re-enactment of the immolation of St Anthony in Marc-Michel Bouchard’s play Les Féluettes or the strikingly Evreinovian actor-Christ conceit in Denys Arcand’s film Jésus de Montréal.

57 E.g., the changes of role in the play in the second act after Fregoli has selected the actors for his mission or the fortune-teller to Fregoli transformation in the first act. 58 Ripellino, Maiakouski et le thédtre russe d’avant-garde, 28.

59 The title ~ characteristically ~ was an inspired mistake. When the play was submitted for censorship, the censor mistakenly took the signature for the title. The result was more appropriate than either of the titles that the play seems to have borne in draft: The Railway and The Revolt of Objects Gibid., 51).

60 For links between the play and Blok’s Balaganchik, see ibid., 68, 73. 61 Derived from the Italian opera buffa, the term signifies a light comic opera and, more particularly, Italian comedy (Le Petit Robert 1 [1990]: 204).

62 Ripellino, Maiakouski et le thédtre russe d’avant-garde, 280-1. 63 See the reproductions in Maiakovski, Polnoe sobranie sochinentt, 2: 224-5, 320-1. 64 Ripellino, Matakouski et le thédtre russe d’avant-garde, 220.

65 For a detailed account of Maiakovskii’s circus connections, see ibid., 253-06.

66 There are two different versions of the scenario (Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenit, 11: 355-406). For an English translation of this scenario and another, entitled “The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle,” written in 1920, as well as introductions to both, see The Drama Review 17, no. 1 (March 1973): 47-89. 67 The term “attraction” is Eisenstein’ (see chapter seven); the more usual term in English is “number” I have kept Eisenstein’s term in English because of the loaded connotations that it bears. 68 As Ripellino points out, Maiakovskii had an obsession with trousers, which form a sort of leitmotiv in his poetry.

326 Notes to pages 186-94 69 See Duwakin, Rostafenster. 70 Eisenstein’s cinematic theory, and its relationship to the balagan, is discussed in chapter seven). 71 Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenti, 11: 372. 72 Ibid., 11: 368. For a photograph of this “attraction,” see The Drama Review 17, no. 1 (March 1973): 83. Maiakovskii got the idea from a political cartoon of 1900 (ibid., 64). 73 Ripellino, Maiakovski et le théatre russe d'avant-garde, 317. 74 Ibid., 240. 75 Matiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenit, 11: 307.

76 For an English translation of the play, see appendix F to this book. For the original Russian text, see bibliography. Information on the life of Lunts may be found in Day, “Zur Biografie von Lev N. Lunc, as well as the introduction to the volume Serapionovy brat ia,, xi-xiii. For details on other plays by Lunts, see bibliography. 77 The title is a cliché of the journalism of the times; see, for example, the article with that title by V. Tikhonovich in Vestnik teatra, 1919, no. 13: 2-3. 78 Some idea of the style of the decorations may be had from the set of drawings that Kustodiev made to accompany a witty parodistic tale by Zamiatin based on the Moscow and Leningrad productions (Zamiatin, Sochinenta, 3: 507-22).

79 The ambiguity of perception is a central device in the play — different things are different to different people; cf. the pun on the word kosa (“scythe” and “braid”) in Blok’s Balaganchik. 80 Zamiatin, Sochinenia, 3: 341.

81 Ibid., 343. 82 Ibid., 344; the scene representing “London” is equally fantastic. 83 For a description of the group's tendency and achievements, see Stone Nakhimovsky, Laughter in the Void, on which the following description of their performances is based, and the introductory articles “Charodei” by Anatolii Aleksandrov in Kharms, Polet v nebesa, 7-48, and by Mikhail Meilakh in Vvedensku, Polnoe sobranie sochinenit, 1: 1x-xxxiil.

84 See the accounts by Bakhterev and Katsman in Vvedenskii, Polnoe sobranie sochenenti, 2: 230-5. 85 Translated in Gibian, The Man in the Black Coat, 245-54. 86 Kharms, Polet v nebesa, 63~4, 511.

87 Ibid., 26-7, 521. 88 Stone Nakhimovsky, Laughter in the Void, 7. 89 Kharms, Polet v nebesa, 76. go Ibid., 513. 91 Gibian, The Man in the Black Coat, 252. I have changed the translation slightly to show the use of balagan in the sense of “farce” — a pejorative name for theatre. Here, as in Blok’s Balaganchik (which was doubtless in

327 Notes to pages 195-9 Kharms’s mind), the term, used with contempt by the uncomprehending and conservative, is proudly waved as a banner. g2 Gibian, The Man in the Black Coat, 252-3. 93 Text in Kharms, Polet v nebesa, 175-205; translation in Gibian, The Man in the Black Coat, 155-77 (missing numerous stage directions given in

the most recent Russian edition). I have left the title in Russian; the last name, as Aleksandrov points out, evokes both the noise of a tambourine and the tolling of fate (Kharms, Polet v nebesa, 27); it also is suggestive of a gunshot, so that an English title might be “Elisabeth Bang” (Stone Nakhimovsky, Laughter in the Void, 38). 94 Aleksandrov in Kharms, Polet v nebesa, 27-8; Stone Nakhimovsky, Laughter in the Void, 25-41; Gibian, The Man in the Black Coat, 39-40. 95 Kharms, Polet v nebesa, 521.

96 Ibid., 521-3. g7 A neologism sounding like something out of Khlebnikov, Chinar’ was a word that Kharms and Vvedenskii applied to themselves. Judging from the language in this “bit,” it seems to be a reference to the nonsensical word-games the poets played together (see Meilakh in Vvedenskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenti, 1: xv). 98 Segel, Twentieth-Century Russian Drama from Gorky to the Present, 232-5;

Gibian, The Man in the Black Coat, 39-40. 99 Kharms, Polet v nebesa, 28. 100 Vvedenskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenit, 5-21. 101 The translation is approximate: elka means “little fir tree” and hence

“Christmas tree.” However, in a larger sense it refers to a Christmas party, when guests were invited to trim the tree. Elka is a loaded word in Vvedenskii’s vocabulary, especially as it occurs several times rhyming with the words shchelka (tiny crack) and pchelka (little bee) (ibid., 172).

This melodic surface of the text is very important, as it switches to and from prose to incantatory nonsense verse. 102 For a cogent and subtle contextual reading of the play, with attention to the subtle stylistic shifts in the text, see Stone Nakhimovsky, Laughter in the Void, 143-52.

103 Meilakh suggests a biographical referent for this parallel to the Kupriianov and Natasha poem: the break-up of Vvedenskiis first marriage to Lipavskaia (Vvedenskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenit, 280-3). 104 Ibid., 158. 105 Compare in Kupriianov and Natasha: Kupriianov, “(Sitting on a chair in

solitary enjoyment) I am entertaining myself. There, I’ve come”; Natasha, “Uidite ia na vas smotret’ ne khochu, / sama sebia ia shchekochu / i ot etogo prikhozhu v udivitel’noe schast’e” (“Go away | don’t want to look at you / I tickle myself / and derive remarkable happiness from it”; ibid., 105). 106 Ibid., 103.

328 Notes to pages 199-208 107 Ibid., 157. 108 Ibid., 163. 109 Ibid., 280-5. 110 Ibid., 160. 111 Proffer, Bulgakov, 178. 112 Although I have, somewhat arbitrarily, limited this discussion to Bulgakov’s plays, it should be noted that the principles of metatheatre spill over into his novel The Master and Margarita, in the use of the framing narrative and fantastic characters. 113 Proffer, Bulgakov, 229. 114 Smelianskii also stresses the link with the harlequinade. “Beneath the surface of the play with its Shchedrin-like themes and motifs Tairov discovered the ancient and powerful current of the ‘comedy of masks. Here Bulgakov’s theatre locates itself precisely in the genre of the

: improvised bouffonade (the play is composed, as is proper according to the laws of commedia dell’arte, before the eyes of the audience)” (Smelianskii, Mikhail Bulgakov v Khudozhestvennom teatre, 153).

115 See Proffer’s detailed analysis of the play (Bulgakov, 289-304); see also my analysis in “The Play-within-the-play as Metaphor and Metatheatre in Modern Russian Drama,’ 79-80. 116 Uspenskii, A Poetics of Composition, 3. 117 A political position that evolved among some émigrés advocating an acceptance of the Revolution as a historical reality and a return to Russia. See Terras, Handbook of Russian Literature, 427-8. 118 Other pieces of “Molieriana” in Bulgakov’s ceuvre are his biography of the French playwright and his version of LAvare.

119 Proffer, Bulgakov, 342-3, 363-4. 120 Bulgakov, Pesy, 416. 121 For a description of the difficult gestation of the production, which ran to 290 rehearsals, see Proffer, Bulgakov, 421-35, and Smelianski, Mzkhail Bulgakov v Khudozhestvennom teatre, 256-315.

CHAPTER SEVEN 1 Custine, La Russie en 1839, 2: 73. 2 Miklashevskii, La commedia dell’arte. 3 Madden, Harlequin’ Stick, Charlies Cane. 4 Briusov, “Nenuzhnaia pravda,’ 73. 5 Leyda, Kino, 17-89. 6 Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 134-5. 7 V.V. Maiakovskii, “Teatr, kinematograf, futurizm,” in Matakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1: 277. Maiakovskii continued his battle with contem-

porary theatrical realism in two subsequent articles (“Unichtozhenie

329 ©Notes to pages 208-11

kinematografom ‘teatra’ kak prizrak vozrozhdeniia teatral‘nogo iskusstva,” ibid., 1: 277-80; “Otnoshenie segodniashnego teatra i kinematografa k iskusstvu,” ibid., 1: 281-5); in his view, photography and cinema would democratize the need for realistic depiction and thus obviate the need for realism in painting and theatre, which could then be rethought along new lines. His idea, developed here, that the emergence of new art forms capable of mass-reproduction would revolutionize art, anticipated that of Walter Benjamin. 8 For an account of Eisenstein’s life, especially his early work in theatre, see Endzina, “‘Zhil, zadumyvalsia, uvlekalsia ... ’ (Perepiska $.M. Eizenshteina)”; Swallow, Eisenstein; and Barna, Eisenstein. g Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, 159-60 (translation by Herbert Marshall of Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedenita, 1: 417.) | have changed Marshall's translation slightly to make it correspond more closely to the original. 10 Swallow, Eisenstein, 24; Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 3. 11 Swallow, Eisenstein, 24. 12 Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 3.

13 Ibid., 7-10. 14 Barna, Eisenstein, 41-3. 15 V.V. Ivanov, Ocherki po istori1 semiotiki v SSSR, 80. According to Leyda

and Voynow, “a typescript has survived for an elaborate three-act satirical pantomime, The Columbian Girl's [sic] Garter, signed by Eisenstein and Yutkevich and dedicated to the ‘patriarch’ Meyerhold” (Eisenstein at Work, 10).

16 Strangely, Ivanov omits to tell us that this version was actually directed by Meyerhold, who also played the Kapellmeister; he also ignores | schnitzler's authorship of the pantomime. 17 Ivanov, Ocherki po tstorit semiotikt v SSSR, 165.

18 Apparently the influence of Foregger can be discerned here. “He also worked tor a ‘Workshop Theatre’ run by Foregger — a former German baron — who happened to share his interest in the circus and the Commedia dell’Arte, and was himself experimenting in the use of masks. He refused to ‘stylize’ them in the manner of the Commedia dell’'Arte, or of the old popular theatre of France, and instead chose his masks from contemporary life, so that one might be a girl communist, another a poet, a third an intellectual philosopher, and a fourth a city merchant. He transferred to the stage many of his observations of real life, and a great part of the action and the dialogue was improvised by the cast on the spot” (Swallow, Eisenstein, 35-7). 19 Hoover, Meyerhold, 93-4; ul., 95.

20 In 1921 he had asked his mother to send him the journal; see Endzina, “Lhil, zadumyvalsia, uvlekalsia ... ‘ (Perepiska S.M. Eizenshteina),’ 279.

330 Notes to pages 211-16 21 Hoover, Meyerhold, 95. Apparently the original conception for this production came from Meyerhold, who provided an initial sketch (Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, 10-11).

22 According to Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein worked (chiefly as a designer) on two other commedia productions: Honest Harlequin (1921) and Masks (1922), to music by Debussy (Eisenstein at Work, 10). 23 V.V. Ivanov, Ocherki po istorii semiotiki v SSSR.

24 Some of the formalist critics were to write important theoretical works on film; see, for example, the essays in Eikhenbaum, Poétika kino. Recent semioticians have devoted considerable effort to the analysis of Eisenstein’ poetics of cinema; see, for example, Ropars-Wuilleumier, “The Function of Metaphor in Eisenstein’s October”; Salvaggio, “Between Formalism and Semiotics”; and Selden, “Vision and Violence.” 25 For a discussion of the use of commedia as a metaphor by Viktor Shklovskii, see my article, “Evgenii Onegin.” 26 V.V. Ivanov, Ocherki po istorti semiotiki v SSSR, 26-7. 27 Eisenstein, [zbrannye proizvedeniia, 5: 59.

28 See the more detailed discussion of this problem in chapter two. 29 See Pudovkin’s description of early cinema in Arnheim, Film as Art, 88. 30 Eisenstein adhered to his preference for the real over the realistic up to his film Alexander Nevsky, which for the first time incorporates the use of movie sets rather than shooting the film in the “real” place — not a film shot in Novgorod, but one shot on a set made to look like thirteenth-century Novgorod; in this way the difference between signifier (“movie-set”) and signified (“Novgorod”) is maintained. The nature of the photographical image as sign in cinema is discussed by Jakobson in “Is the Film in Decline?” 31 Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedentia, 5: 61. 32 This borderline shock characteristic of montage was later to develop, in Eisenstein’s theory of film, into the notion of caesura (Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, 14).

33 Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedentia, 5: 66. 34 Ibid., 5: 70.

35 Meyerhold, too, had left behind the conflict between warring theatrical styles by the beginning of the twenties, in favour of a theatre that was all balagan, all uslovnyt.

36 On the question of the Japanese Kabuki theatre and Eisenstein, see Levine, “The Influence of the Kabuki Theater on the Films of Eisenstein”; and Kuiper, “The Stage Antecedents of the Film Theory of 5.M. Eisenstein.” 37 Such “quotations” from international culture are common in Eisenstein’s films, e.g., the beginning of Bezhin Meadow, which is deliberately shot

in the style of a Japanese print filtered through French impressionism

331 Notes to pages 217-27 (Leyda, Kino, 329); the sloping deck of the bridge in October, which is reminiscent of a Mayan pyramid; or the horse and carriage in that same _ episode, which was inspired by a scene from Méliés’s 400 Farces du diable (Leyda and Voynow, Etsenstein at Work, 31). 38 Eisenstein, [zbrannye proizvedentia, 2: 88.

39 Tarkovskii, “de la figure cinématographique,” 36. 40 Bonitzer, “La notion de plan et le sujet du cinéma: voici,’ 14. 41 Eisenstein, “Le montage des attractions au cinéma,” in his Au-dela des étoiles, 1: 128.

42 A contradiction noted by Barthes in his discussion of Diderot, Brecht, and Eisenstein (Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,’ 91). 43 Selden, “Vision and Violence,” 317. 44 Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedenita, 2: 288.

45 For a detailed discussion of perspective as a concept in the arts and as a metaphor in philosophy and criticism, see Guillén, “On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective”; on perspective in literary texts, see Uspenskii, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon and A Poetics of Composition. 46 Uspenskii, A Poetics of Composition, 3-5.

47 The term, and much of the discussion that follows on external versus internal perspective, is derived from Uspenskii, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon. For an exhaustive study of the history of perspective, see Guillén, “On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective.” 48 Uspenski, The Semiotics of the Russian Icon. 49 See, for example, Eisenstein’s discussion of a child's drawing of a stove, in which the largest, central element is a box of matches (Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 2: 288).

50 “The lack of depth brings a very welcome element of unreality into the film picture” (Arnheim, Film as Art, 60-3). 51 See Bordwell’ discussion of Eisenstein’ “expressionist” use of camera, “Narration and Scenography in the Later Eisenstein.” 52 As Briusov pointed out (“Nenuzhnaia pravda,” 69). 53 Leyda in Eisenstein, Film Form, 9. 54 It should be noted that I imply a coincidence of the position of the director and the spectator, whose perception of the events of the film is mediated by the use of camera, montage, etc. The spectator re-enacts, as it were, the subjectivity of the director, which is thus imposed on the spectator; this is the nature of the violence perpetrated on the spectator, as discussed above. However, since both the spectator and the director are subject, the violence is perpetrated equally on the director. It is this self-directed violence that is characteristic of Eisenstein’s films. 55 For a discussion of the struggle between the forces of reason and “ecstasy,” the regressive nature of art, in Eisenstein, see L6vgren, “Trauma and Ecstasy,’ 93-5.

332 Notes to pages 228-33 56 Several critics have pointed to this subliminal “poetic” or “obtuse” meaning in Eisenstein’s images that transcends what Barthes calls the “obvious meaning” and gives the lie to the Saussurean notion of the arbitrariness of the signifier. See Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” and Hudlin, “Film Language.” CHAPTER EIGHT 1 Biichner, Dantons Tod, 36. 2 Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution, 8.

3 With the caveat that the notion of iteration (representation) belongs to the spectator; as Artaud has argued, “the actors know very well that the theatre is not, cannot be repetition; for the spectacle is a unique production, never entirely foreseeable, and impossible to repeat with exactness” (i.e., presentation — see Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution, 108).

4 “As author, editor, journalist, and leader, Lenin often wrote under the pseudonym of ‘N. Lenin’ ... The ‘N’ does not stand for anything. He was never Nikolai Lenin” (Fischer, The Life of Lenin, 4; 1am endebted to Carter Elwood for this information). However, the introduction to John Reed’s book Ten Days that Shook the World is signed “Nikolai Lenin,’ an

error which, if Fischer is right, we must attribute to Reed. Similar myths surround the name “Lenin,” which is first attested in a note he wrote to the typography of the newspaper Iskra between 22 May and 1 June 1901, almost eleven years before the massacre of workers in the Lena goldmines, to which some have assumed the name to be a reference. However, the association with the Lena river seems clear, since it would continue the tradition established by two literary prototypes — Pushkin’s hero Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin, named after the rivers Onega and Pechora respectively. 5 Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution, 76. 6 Izvestiia, no. 224 (488) (15 October 1918): 5. A Russian play entitled

simply Danton by Mariia Levberg, and existing only in manuscript, is described in the repertoire section of Zhizn’ iskusstva, no. 382 (26 February 1920): 1, further evidence of the importance of this theme during the pre-NEP period. 7 Teatral nyi kur er, no. 27 (18 October 1918): 4. 8 Biichner, Dantons Tod, 56. 9 Ibid., 68. 10 Vechernie izvestiia, no. 73 (15 October 1918): 4. 11 Teatral nyi kur‘er, no. 27 (18 October 1918): 4. This mise en scéne of Verhaeren’s poem “La révolte” from his cycle Les Villes tentaculaires was first

presented on 6 November in the presence of Lenin; see Zolotnitskii, Zort teatral nogo Oktiabria, 331-4.

333 Notes to pages 233-54 12 Eikhengol’ts, “Revoliutsiia i teatr.” As another example of a revolutionary play worth staging, Eikhengol’ts mentions Romain Rolland’s Vztatie Bastilti (The Taking of the Bastille; presumably a reference to his Le Quatorze-Juillet (1902).

13 Teatral nyi kur’er, nos. 23-4 (13-14 October 1918): 4.

14 As Huet shows, the symbolism can be more complex, since the text intervenes: “The text was bestowed on the theatre like a title of nobility on a meritorious family” (Rehearsing the Revolution, 18). Thus, the king's speech was always frozen in writ, the lettre de cachet (ibid., 57); the

French revolution instituted the primacy of the spoken word in the system of justice — but not in the theatre, where the text had primacy. Of course, no such ban had existed in Russia. Moreover, as I have shown in chapter two the Russian revolution posed the new problem of representation versus presentation; in revolutionary France, the shift in theatre (as in the system of justice, to which it was closely related) was to representation. APPENDIX D 1 Apollon, 1911, no. 9, Pp. 35.

2 Debussy, Préludes pour piano (1° titre) (Paris: A. Durand et Fils, 1910), préludes xi et x1.

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Index

A realibus ad realiora. See Aieksandrov, PL, 71 Apollo, 63

Blok, A. Alexander Nevsky. See Appia, Adolphe, 45, 53

Abel, Lionel, 162-3, 164 Eisenstein, Sergei Aquarium, 104

“Abenteuer der Sylvester- Alkazar Theatre, 109 Araia, Francesco, 90 nacht, Die.” See Hoff- All-Union Congress of Arapov, A.A.: designs for

mann, E.T.A. Film-Makers, 225 Tairov’s Pierrettes Veil,

Academic Theatre of Amfiteatrov, Aleksandr 97-100

Opera and Ballet, 118 (translator of Goldoni's Arcand, Denys: Jésus de

Academic theatres, 104 Il Servitore di due Montréal, 325n56

acrobatics, 35, 50, 51, 56, padrone), 117, 304n96 Ariosto, 66 135, 214, 306n26 Amore delle tre melarance: Arlecchino, 21; in SchnitAcrobats (Zirkusleute). See (play), see Gozzi, Carlo; zler’s Der Schleier der

Sch6nthan, Franz von (opera), see Prokof’ev, Pierrette, 41. See also

Adamov, E. (ps: Evgenii Sergei Harlequin

Frenkel’; translator of Anatol. See Schnitzler, Arlekin — khodatai svadeb.

Benavente’s Los Intereses Arthur See Solov’ev, Vladimir

creados), 303n92 Anatols Hochzettsmorgen Arlekin-skelet: (play), see Adoration of the Cross (the- (Anatol’s Wedding). See Deburau, Jean-Gaspard;

atre production). See Schnitzler, Arthur (theatre production), see Meyerhold, Vsevolod Andreev, Leonid: He Who Miklashevskii, Kon-

Ahasuerus the Eternal Gets Slapped (Tot, kotoryt stantin

Jew, 148 poluchaet poshchechiny), Arlekinada (ballet). See

Akademicheskii teatr 298n13; The Life of Man Drigo, Ricardo. See also

Opery i Baleta, 118 (Zhizn’ cheloveka), 86 Fokin, Mikhail; Petipa, Akhmatova, Anna: Poéma Annenkoy, [urii, 72; Marius

bez geroia, 5 designs for The Main arlekinada. See harle-

Akvarium, 104 Thing, 115-16, 324n39 quinade

Aleksandrinskii Theatre, Annibal (ancestor of Arlequin, 21. See also Har-

53, 67, 86, 101-2, Pushkin), 137 lequin

311n28 Antimonov (Crooked Arlequin: (play), see Lothar,

Aleksandrov, A.S. (ps: Mirror actor), 87 Rudolf; (theatre producSerzh), 71, 113 Antokolskii, Pavel, 107 tion), see Tairov, AlekAleksandrov, Anatolii, Apes Are Coming! See sandr, and Zvantsev,

193, 196, 197 Lunts, Lev N.N.

350 Index Arlequin poli par l'amour. festo, 326-7n91; Russian Bedbug. See Maiakovskii,

See Marivaux fairground, 10, 81, 124, Vladimir

Arlequin-Rot: (play), see 125-30, 136-8, 157, 159- Beggar Harlequin. See Lothar, Rudolph; (the- _ 95 passim, 318n10; vertep Guro, Elena

atre production), see as a version of, 187; Belaia gvardiia. See BulTairov, Aleksandr, and Vladimir Maiakovskii as, gakov, Mikhail

Zvantsev, N.N. 182 Bel‘iani. See Ernani, V.E “Art as Device.” See Balaganchik: (play), see Belyi, Andrei, 3, 133, 142-3 Shklovsku, Victor Blok, Aleksandr; (the- Benavente, Jacinto, 6, 39—

art nouveau, 5, 10, 132, atre production), see 41, 43, 131, 159

158 Meyerhold, Vsevolod ~— Los Intereses creados (The

Artaud, Antonin, 188; and _— Baliev, H.E, 86, 92, 116 Bonds of Interest), 39-41,

balagan, 323n18 ball motif in Russian liter- 43, 98, 209; translated Association for Reali Art, ature, 5, 11, 142 as Sozdannye interesy,

193 “Balli di Sfessania.” See 303n92; translated as Attelanz, 20 Callot, Jacques Iznanka zhizni, 96-7;

Attellan comedy, 54 Baltrushaitis, fu.: prologue translated as Igra inter“Au clair de la lune.” See to Tairov's Pierrette’s Veil, esov, 117; produced in

Lully 97-8 Khar‘kov, 313n72

Aucouturier, Michel, 48, Bania. See Maiakovskii, Benjamin, Walter, 329n7

63 Vladimir Bennett, Virginia, 131, 132

audience, problem of, 62— _— Banville, Théodore de, 36 Benois (Benua), Alek-

3 Baptiste. See Deburau, sandr, 13, 86, 101, 131,

Aus-der-Rolle-Fallen, 31 Jean-Gaspard 136-8, 156, 171; produc“author”: as character in baroque, 11, 14, 24, 65, tion of Goldoni’s [1 Ser-

play, 77, 80, 139-40, 181 vitore di due padrone,

142~3, 201-2 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 117, 129-30 author and problem of 302n71 Beolco, Angelo (Ruzauthority, 164-6, 322n7 Basargina, 113 zante), 20 Bastille, 232, 234 Berg, 129

Babenchikov, Mikhail, go Bat (Moscow cabaret), 92, Bergman, Ingmar, 75

Backstage of the Soul. See 100, 116, 132-3 Berlin, 5, 56, 92, 132 Evreinov, Nikolai Bathhouse. See Maiakov- Bertel’s, V.A.: production

Bagrovyi ostrov. See Bul- skii, Vladimir of King Harlequin, 117,

gakov, Mikhail Battleship Potemkin. See 316n56

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 5, 8, 57 Eisenstein, Sergei Bezhin Meadow. See Eisen-

Bakst, Leon, 9, 132; Baudelaire, Charles, 36 stein, Sergei

drawing of Zinaida Gip- Bavarian passion-play, 50 Biancolleli, Dominique,

pius, 320n65 Bear and the Watchman. See 21, 25

“Balagan.” See Meyerhold, Miklashevskii, Kon- biomechanics. See Meyer-

Vsevolod stantin hold, Vsevolod

balagan: definition of term, bear comedy. See medve- Bjornson, Bjornstjerne, 123

54; as a dramatic genre, zh ia komediia blackamoor: in theatre 159-64, 174, 184, 188; Beardsley, Aubrey, 7, 9, spectacle, 127; harlequin

film as, 205-8 passim; as 37, 88, 131, 146, as, 158 genre, 58, 71, 72, 102, 303n78, 319n30 Blagochestivaia Marta. See

111, 145; Kharms and, Béatrix, 25 Molina, Tirso de

194; Maiakovskiis life Beaumarchais, 68 Blok, Aleksandr, 6, 14, as, 181; as metaphor, Beautiful Despot. See 76-7, 78, 82, 91, 133, 13-14; In Oberiu mani- Evreinov, Nikolai 149, 155, 188, 201

351 Index — A realibus ad realiora, 11 Brecht, Bertolt, 35, 124, “By the Light of the

— Balaganchik (The Fair- 160, 188 Moon.” See “V Lunnom ground Booth): (play), 12, Brighella: origin of mask, svete” 54, 57, 58, 61, 102, 138- 22; in Turandot, 27, 45, 149, 150, 159, 160, 94-5, 119-20; In Sme- Cabal of Hypocrites. See

180, 182, 191, 193, 197, raldina’s Escapades, Bulgakov, Mikhail

226, 301n55; ambiguity 113 cabaret, 5, 102, 311n30; In of language in, 320n53; Briusov, Valeril, 9, 50, 227; Moscow, 92; in St

sources of pierrotic “Realism and Conven- Petersburg, 81-8 imagery in, 320n56; tion on the Stage,” 51; Calderén de la Barca, (theatre production), see “Unnecessary Truth” Pedro, 6, 91; The AdoraMeyerhold, Vsevolod (“Nenuzhnaia pravda”), tion of the Cross (theatre — “The Twelve” (“Dven- 45-6, 49, 52, 206-7, 208, production), see Meyer-

adtsat”’), 145, 183 213 hold, Vsevolod; The

— The Unknown Woman Brodiachaia sobaka (St Steadfast Prince (theatre (Neznakomka), 58, 91 Petersburg cabaret), 87, production), see Meyer-

Blokh, Ia., 301n41 115, 149, 156 hold, Vsevolod Blokha. See Zamiatin, Bronze Horseman. See Callot, Jacques, 5, 33, 59, Evgenii Pushkin, Aleksandr 60, 72, 90, 107, 216,

Bloom, Molly, 226 Biichner, Georg: Dantons 222, 308n50; “Balli di

Bob. See Koziukov, B.D. Tod (Danton'’s Death, Sfessania,” 310n95; “The Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 13 translated as Smert* Fan,” 60; “Primo interBolshoi Dramatic Theatre Dantona), 232-3, 311n24 medio,” 60; “The Tour(Petrograd/Leningrad), Bulgakov, Mikhail, 5, 74, nament in Florence,”

117, 190, 311n24 188, 200-4, 227 60

Bol’shoi dramaticheskii — The Crimson Island (Bag- | Capitano (the Captain),

teatr. See Bolshoi Dra- rovyi ostrov), 200-2, 203; 22, 40, 225

matic Theatre link with commedia “Capriccios in Callots Bol’shoi teatr. See Bolshoi dell’arte, 328n114 Manier.” See Hoffman,

theatre — The Days of the Turbins E.T.A. 67 — Flight (Beg), 200, 201 Carné, Marcel, 75; Les

Bolshoi theatre (Moscow), (Dni Turbinykh), 200 Captain. See Capitano

Bonch-Tomashevskii, - The Halfwit Jourdain Enfants du paradis, M.M., 83; translator of (Poloumnyi Zhurden), 302n71

Schnitzler’s Der Schieier 202-3 Carnicke, Sharon M., 152,

der Pierrette, 304ng5 — The Master and Marga- 154-6

Bonds of Interest. (play), see rita (Master i Marga- Carnival. See Fokin, Mik-

Benavente, Jacinto; (the- rita): metatheatre in, hail

atre production), see 328n112 Cassandra (Cassandre), Tairov, Aleksandr — Moliére, or The Cabal of 21, 25, 34; in Kolombina.

Bossuet, 298n20 Hypocrites (Mol er, or sego dnia, 88; in Russian Bouchard, Marc-Michel: Kabala sviatosh), 76, 203- balagany, 129. See also

Les Féluettes, 325n56 4 - Pantalone

bouffonade, bouffe, 111, — The White Guard (Belaia Cervantes, 91

183 gvardiia), 187, 200 Chabrov, A.A., 98,

Bourgeois gentilhomme, Le, — Zoika’s Apartment 109

202 (Zoikina kvartira), 200 Champfleury, xi

Brahm, Otto, 53 Burgess, Guy, 8 Champs de Mars (MarBraque, Georges, 7 Busoni, Ferrucio, 301- sovo pole, St Peters-

Braun, Edward, 82, 84 2n59 burg), 87, 129

352 Index “changing landmarks” media dell’arte, 212; Princess Brambilla, 108; (smenovekhovstvo): defi- Maiakovskii’s scenarios in ‘Ichaikovsku’s Nut-

nition of, 328n117 for, 185-6; in theatre, cracker, 132

Chaplin, Charlie, 5, 75, 69-72, 112-13, 123, 195, Columbines Garter. See

184, 205, 215; in Modern 211, 298n13, 309n86 Eisenstein, Sergei Times, 319N45 Claretie, Jules: “Pierrot — Columbine’ Scarf: (play), Chardynin, PI. (translator Father and Son” (trans- see Schnitzler, Arthur; of Kolombina), 304n96 lated as “P’ero — otets i (theatre production), see

Chekhov, Anton, 12, 14- syn’), 304n96 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 15, 81, 161, 203, 208; clown, 10, 75-0, 127, 184- Comédie-Frangaise, 25,

and commedia dell’arte, 5, 213 26, 35

298n22; critique of Stan- “Clown.” See Kuprin, Comédie-Italienne, 17, 24—

islavskian naturalism, Aleksandr 6, 202, 228

45-6, 49, 52, 213; and “Coffin-Maker.” See “Comedy of Pure Joy.” See

metatheatre, 162-6; and Pushkin, Aleksandr Zhirmunskii, Viktor realism, 322n10 Collection of Comedies of Comic Opera, 117 — The Seagull (Chaika): 1733-1735, 113 Comintern: third congress (play), 76; (theatre pro- Colombina, 23. See also of, 315n31

duction), see Pogreb- Columbine commedia dell’arte: as balnichko, lurii Columbine, 9; as Ballerina agan, 73-4; created by

— Swan-Song (Lebedinaia in Stravinskii’s collective of actors, 52,

pesnia), 11 Petrushka, 136~7; in 56, 65, 68; difficulty of

— Uncle Vania (Diadia Blok'’s Balaganchik, 139- defining, 16

Vania), 14-15, 163 44; as a doll, 130; in — features: love triangle Chelidz’, Miss, 90 Eisenstein’s Columbine’ in, 143; masks, 20-3, Chetvertaia stena. See Garter, 210; in Evrei- 105, 159-60, 299nN12; Evreinov, Nikolai nov’s Kolombina sego montage of theatrical Chiari, Pietro, 26 dnia, 88; in Evreinov’s styles in, 11, 24, 29, 52, chinar* definition of, The Main Thing, 179-80; 155, 160, 186, 212-8

327N9Q7 in Evreinov'’s A Merry passim; pantomime in,

Chinese motifs in com- Death, 150-5; in Fokin’s 34, 52; pantomime in media dell‘arte. See Carnival, 118, 132; in Schnitzler’s Der Schleter Carlo Gozzi: Turandot the French pantomime, der Pierrette, 42; pantoChrist: and Pierrot, 145; 25, 34, 36-7, 38-9, 78-9, mime in Tairov’s King

and Fregoli/Harle- 158; in Guro’s poetry, Harlequin, 106; scenario

quin,177, 180~1 147; in Kuzmin's The as an element of, 52;

Christmas at the Ivanovs’. Venetian Madcaps, 157; slipping out of role in,

See Vvedensku, Alek- Liubov’ Mendeleeva as, 58

sandr 142; in Lothar’s King ~— and film, 205-28 passim

Christmas Carol. See Harlequin, 105; in love — grotesque as a compo-

Dickens, Charles triangle, 306n33; in nent of, 29, 33, 51, 52,

Chto takoe iskusstvo? See Meyerhold’s Sharf Kolom- 66, 72, 106

Tolstoi, Lev biny, 83-5; in A Panto- — historiography of, 16-19

Chulkov, Georgii, 77, 80, mime of the Italian — history of: origins, 20; 81; Karman ola (transla- Comedians, 114; as Pier- as international phe-

tion of Hervieu's Thé- rette in Tairov’s Pter- nomenon, 7; Italian roigne de Meéricourt), rette’s Veil, 99; in troupes in Russia, 13,

311n24 Razumovskiis Pul chi- 113; in modernism, 4—

circus, 5, 10, 11, 50, 58, nelo, 109-10; in Russian 15; modernist revival of, 306n26; links with com- balagany, 129; in Tairov’s 37-43, 319n40; French

353 Index symbolist version of, Crooked Jimmy cabaret. Del’vari, Zhorzh. See

34-7, 131; romantic See Krivoe Dzhimmi Kuchinskii, G.I.

revival of, 29; romantic Crooked Mirror (Krivoe Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les.

version of 25; “saloniza- zerkalo) cabaret theatre, See Picasso tion,’ 25~6; as a sensi- 63, 82, 87-8, 103, 115- Derzhavin, Konstantin, 70

bility, 7-8; in pre- 16, 149, 161, 167, 174, des Esseintes, 298n20

Revolutionary Russia, 178, 200, 237 Deutsches Theater, 92, 75-102; projected cubism, cubist, 10, 73, 80, 301N59

season at Theatre of 106, 107, 136, 158, 168, Diagilev, Sergei, 7, 8, 101,

Antiquity, 62; in post- 183, 195, 224 131-2

Revolutionary Russia, Dickens, Charles: A

67-9, 114; transcoded in “Dancing-master” See Christmas Carol, 170

Maiakovskii, 185; trans- Kuzmin, Mikhail Dionysus, 63 coded in Eisenstein, Danton. See Biichner, “director” as character,

329n18 Georg; Levberg, Mariia 188, 200-2

~ language in, 21, 66, Dantons Tod (Danton’s directors: role of, in the135, 213; problem of Death). See Biichner, atre, 68, 89, 217-18,

structure, 133-6; and Georg 305n20

the Russian revolution, Dapertutto, Dr. See Meyer- = Dn Turbinykh. See Bul-

234-5; sociological study hold, Vsevolod gakov, Mikhail

of, 4; subversive nature Dawns. See Meyerhold, Doctor. See Dottore

of, 26, 35, 40, 134-5, Vsevolod Dohnanyi, Ernst von, 82, 162; and uslounyi teatr, Days of the Turbins. See 85, 97-100, 210, 304Ng3

51-2; world as, 64 Bulgakov, Mikhail Dolinov, A., 104

commedia erudita, 20; Dead Man's Bride, or The doll: the actor as, 11, 86, fusion with street the- Wooing of a Surgeon. See 155-6, 319N45; comes to

atre to form commedia Radlov, Sergei life, 106, 136

dell’arte, 65-6 Death: Columbine as, 79, Dom intermedii. See

Commune, 231-2 87, 139, 143-4, 150-2, House of Interludes

Communist Party: name 184-5 Dom Juan: (play), see

of, 231-2 Death of Tintagiles. See Moliére; (theatre pro-

Costantini, Arlecchino, Meyerhold, Vsevolod; duction), see Meyerhold,

128 Maeterlinck, Maurice Vsevolod

constructivism, 10, 119, Debuhr, go Dom pechati, 193

184, 211 Deburau. See Guitry, Sasha Dom tsirka (House of the

convention in the theatre, Deburau, Charles, 36 Circus), 70

45. See also uslovnyi Deburau, Jean-Gaspard Dominique. See Biancolleli Cog d’or, Le. See Rimskii- (Baptiste), 34-6, 43, 75, Donskol, 237

Korsakov 84, 129, 204, 235; Harle- | Dorian Gray, 59, 207

Course of General Linguis- quin the Skeleton, 114, Dostoevskii, Fedor, 59, tics. See Saussure, Ferdi- 302n67; his representa- 128, 154

nand de tion in Les Enfants du Dottore (the Doctor), 22, Coviello, 13 paradis, 30271; his 34, 66; in Evreinov’s The Craig, Gordon, 45, 49, 64, transformation of Gilles, Main Thing, 179; in

71, 86, 136, 156, 174, 302n61 Evreinov's A Merry

175, 319n45; Helen of Debussy, 82, 106; The Death, 150-4; in Maia-

Troy, 71; and mono- Toybox, 106 kovskiis plays, 185, 187; drama, 308n65 decadence, 8-10 in A Pantomime of the Crimson Island. See Bul- “defamiliarization.” See Italian Comedians, 114;

gakov, Mikhail ostranenie in Solov’ev’s Harlequin

354 Index the Marriage-Broker, 89—- Pierrot, 209; Puss-in- — — book on Aubrey

91 Boots (Kot v sapogakh, _ Beardsley, 319n30 Douze heures de Colombine. translation of Tieck’s ~ and ideologies of his See Eisenstein, Sergei Der gestiefelte Kater), 76, time, 323n18 Dowson, Ernest, 131; The 218, 301n51; The Sage — as playwright, 168-81 Pierrot of the Minute, 37, (Ostrovskii's Enough — plays: Backstage of the

88, 131, 133 Simplicity in Every Sage), Soul (V kulisakh dushi), Drigo, Ricardo, 170; Arlek- 210, 212-16 152; The Beautiful Despot inada (Harlequinade), — theatre productions (Krastvyt despot), 170-2;

118, 131 (realized): The Mexican The Foundation of Happr-

Duncan, Isadora, 304n3 (Meksikanets), 69, 213, ness (Fundament

Duplessis, Marie, 35 215 schast 1a), 169-70; The

Dvorets Oktiabr’skoi revo- _ Elliot, T.S., 8, 178 Fourth Wall (Chetvertaia

hutsii theatre, 311n24 Eliseev, 209 stena), 175, 177, 200,

Dyskovskii, M.G., 116 Elizaveta Bam. See Kharms, 324n33; The Inspector

Daniil General: A Directorial

E.B. Vakhtangov Studio, Elka u Ivanovykh. See Buffonade (Revizor:

118 Vvedenskii, Aleksandr Rezhisserskaia buffonada),

“E.T.A. Hoffmann on the emploi, 163, 322n4 174; Laughter Workshop Stage.” See Ignatov, Enfants du paradis, Les. See (Kukhnia smekha),

Sergei Carné, Marcel 324n35; The Main Thing

Each in His Own Way. See Enough Simplicity in Every (Samoe glavnoe), 114-15,

Pirandello, Luigi Sage. See Ostrovskii, 118, 175-81, 316n46,

Efros, N.E., 44, 92 Aleksandr 324n36; A Merry Death Egarev, 129 Envy. See Olesha, Iurii (Veselaia smert), 92, 98, Fisenstein, Sergei, 6, 69, Erdman, Nikolai, 102, 103, 116, 150-6, 160;

111, 186, 188, 205-28 188; The Mandate Such a Woman (Takaia

passim, 235; “The Mon- (Mandat ), 185, 200; The zhenshchina), 116; The

tage of Attractions,” Suicide (Samoubiitsa), Three Magi (Tri volkhva),

185, 195, 211-12; 185, 200 172-3; Today's Columbine

recoding of commedia Erenburg, Ilia, 133 (Kolombina sego dnia),

dell’arte, 329n18; theory Ermitazhnyi teatr, 112 116, 237, 245-9, 311N33; of montage, 72, 211-18; | Ernani, VE (ps: Bel‘iani), Unfailing Infidelity (Neiz-

theory of typage, 224-6; 71 mennaia izmena), 173-4,

violence in, 331n54 “Essence of Tragedy.” See 200, 323n28

— films: Alexander Nevsky, Ivanov, Viacheslav — theatre productions: 216, 224, 330n30; The estrangement. See osfra- mass reenactment of

Battleship Potemkin, 217, nenie October revolution, 186, 222, 224; Bezhin Evreinov, Nikolai, 5, 6, 8, 231; A Merry Death

Meadow, 224, 330-1n37; 10, 48, 74, 86, 87-8, 98, (Veselaia smert’), 73,

“Glumov's Film Diary,’ 103, 108, 149-56, 161, 87-8, 103, 116; Todays 212-13; October, 186, 183, 188, 190, 200, 201, Columbine (Kolombina

223-4, 225, 227, 231, 209, 299Ng sego dnia), 87-8, 116, 330-1N37 — articles: “Introduction to 149

— theatre productions Monodrama” (“Vved- Evseev, K.L., 89

(planned): Columbine's enie v monodramu”), ewig Wetbliche, Das, 136 Garter (Podviazka Kolom- 63, 175; “The Theatre exoticism, 8 biny), 210, 304ng5; Les as Such” (“Teatr kak experience (perezhivanie). Douze heures de Colom- takovoi”), 160, 169, See Stanislavskii , Kon-

bine, 209; Les Millions de 305n17 stantin

355 Index expressionism, 73, 107, atre production), see Geints, A.H, 82, 85

158 Zvantsev, N.N. Gelosi, 20

Eysoldt, Gertrud, 93 Foregger, N.M., 210, 215, Germany, 19, 35, 104, 124

329n18 Gerot nashego vremeni. See

Fairground Booth: (play), foregrounding of conven- Lermontov, Mikhail see Blok, Aleksandr; tions, 30. See also ostra- Gershuni, E.P., 115

(theatre production), see nenie Gesamtkunstwerk, 49, 84, Meyerhold, Vsevolod formalists, 64, 212 212

Fan: (play), see Goldoni, Foucault, Michel, 229 gestiefelte Kater, Der. See Carlo; (theatre produc- Foundation of Happiness. Tieck, Ludwig tion), see Tairov, Alek- see Evreinov, Nikolai Giangurgolo, 23

sandr Fourberies de Scapin, Les. Giaratone, Giuseppe, 25,

“Fan.” See Callot, Jacques See Moliére 26

fascism, 8, 9, 171 fourth wall: convention of, | Gibian, George, 196 Fausse prude, La. See 62, 167-8, 175, 189, 218, | Gibshman, 71~2, 87, 112-

Moliére 220-1 13; as Kapellmeister in

Faust: (play), see Goethe; Fourth Wall. See Evreinov, Sharf Kolombiny, 85;

(opera), see Gounod, _ Nikolai “Tsirk” (comedy revue),

Charles Fregoli, Leopoldo, 175-6 71 Feks, 215 Frenkel’, Evgenii. See Pierrot Fellini, 75 Adamov, E. Gippius, Vassilii (transFéluettes, Les. See Bou- Freud, Sigmund, 208-9, lator of Tieck’s Der geschard, -_Marc-Michel 227 tiefelte Kater: Kot v February revolution, 104 “French Song,” 92 Gilles, 21, 35. See also

Ferdinandov, B.A., 100, Friihlings Erwachen. See sapogakh), 301n51

105 Wedekind, Frank Gippius, Zinaida, 9; as

fiaba, 26 Fuchs, Georg, 45, 50, 51, Harlequin, 320n65

Fiametta’s Four Corpses 53, 54, 56, 69, 218; Rev- | Giavrepertkom, 200 (Chetyre mertvetsa Fia- olution in the Theatre, 50 Glazunov (actor in Vakhmetty), 88, 237, 250-3 Fundament schast ia. See tangov'’s Turandot), 120

film and commedia Evreinov, Nikolai Glazunov, Aleksandr, 149; dell’arte, 205-28 passim Future (image), 8 Ispytanie Damisa (The fin-de-siécle, 12 futurism, 10, 171, 181-2, Temptation of Damis), First Distiller. See Tolstoi, 186, 319n29; Italian, 70, 132; music for Meyer-

Lev 323n18; Russian, 67, hold’s Masquerade, 156

216 Eisenstein, Sergei

Flaubert, Gustave, 167, 323n18 “Glumov’s Film Diary.” See

Flavio, 23 Gadfly, 135 Godunov, Boris, 8

Flea. See Zamiatin, Evgenii Gaideburov, PP. 122-3; Goethe, 98; Faust, 98; Wil-

Fledermaus (Vienna cab- Zapiski peredvizhnogo helm Meisters Wander-

aret), 92 teatre PP. Gaideburova 1 jahre, 147 hail Travelling Theatre of PP. Government Inspector

Flight. See Bulgakov, Mik- N.E. Skarskoi (Notes of the Gogol’, 59, 137, 175; The

Florenskii, 168 Gaideburov and N.E (Revizor), 161, 167, 174, Fokin, Mikhail, 7, 80, 101, Skarskaia), 122 187, 188, 196; “The

131; Arlekinada (Harle- GAKhN (State Academy of Nose” (“Nos”), 193;

guinade), 118; Karnaval Artistic Sciences), “The Overcoat”

(Carnival), 80, 118, 132 306n40 (“Shinel”), 137, 167, 193

Fool on the Throne: (play), Gautier, Théophile, 25, 34, | Goldoni, Carlo, 5, 6, 16,

see Lothar, Rudolf; (the- 35 17, 22, 23, 26, 29, 95; La

356 Index Locandiera (The Landlady, | Greek sources for com- as Christ, 32439; in

translated as Khoziaika media dell’arte, 20 Deburau'’s Harlequin the gostinitsy), 101; La Putta Greek theatre, 45 Skeleton, 114; as a doll, onorata, 209; Il Servitore Green, Martin, 5, 8, 9 130; in Drigo’s Harledi due padrone (The Ser- Green Cockatoo. See quinade, 131; in Eisen-

vant of Two Masters, Schnitzler, Arthur stein’s Columbine'’s translated as Sluga Griboedov, Aleksandr, 5, Garter, 210; Evreinov as, dvukh gospod), 29, 117, 11; Gore ot uma (Woe 64; in Evreinov’s The 304n9g6; Il Ventaglio (The from Wit), 142 Main Thing, 179-80; in Fan, translated as Veer), Grigorovich, D.V., 128 Evreinov’s A Merry

101 “Grobovshchik.” See Death, 150-6; in Evrei-

Golub, Spencer, 62, 174 Pushkin, Aleksandr nov'’s Today's Columbine, Goncharova, Natal‘ja, 10, griine Kakadu, Der. See 88; and film, 205; Fokin 306n33, 319n29; designs Schnitzler, Arthur as, 131; in Fokin’s Carfor Tairov’s The Fan, 101 Guignol popular theatre, nival, 118, 132; in

Gorchakov, Nikolai, 86 11 Guro'’s Beggar Harlequin, Gore ot uma. See Gni- Guillén, Claudio, 220 148-9; in Guro’s poetry,

boedov, Aleksandr Guitry, Sacha, 35-6; 146-7; Kiaksht as, 131;

Gor‘kii, Maksirn, 12, 68, Deburau, 35-6, 133; in Kuzmin’s The Venetian

104, 161, 208 “Marrchand d’habits,” Madcaps, 156-7; in

Gounod, Charles: Faust, 35 Lothar’s King Harlequin,

175 Gukovskii, 223 38-9, 104-5; and Maia-

Government Inspector. See Guro, Elena, 133, 142, kovskii, 185; in Meyer-

Gogol’, Nikolai 145-9; The Beggar Harle- hold’s Columbine's Scarf,

Goya, 85 quin (Nishchii Arlekin), 83-4, 92; Milashevskii

Gozzi, Carlo, 5, 6, 17, 19, 148-9, 150, 156, 237, as, 114; as Ned Rocker, 26-9, 32, 33, 43, 44, 59, 239-44; Sharmanka (The 210; in A Pantomime of 60-1, 184, 191; LAmore Hurdy-Gurdy), 146, 237; the Italian Comedians,

delle tre melarance (Love theme of children, 114; in Razumovskii'’s

for Three Oranges, trans- 321n66 Pul chinelo, 109-10; in lated as Liubov’k trem GVYRM, 210 Russian balagany, 129;

apel‘stnam), 26-7, 39, 59, in Smeraldina’s Escapades, 209, 300n41; La Donna Halfwit Jourdain. See Bui- 113; in Solov’ev’s Harle-

serpente (The Woman gakov, Mikhail quin the Marriage Broker, Snake, translated as Hall of Carlo Gozzi and 89-91; in Tairov’s Pier-

Zhenshchina-zmeia), 116— Ernst Theodor Ama- rette’s Veil, g8—100; in

7, 301n41; and Hoff- deus Hoffmann, 52, Tairov’s Princess Bram-

mann, 301n46, 302n60, 301n46 billa, 108; in Tairov’s The 314n17; Il Re cervo (The Hamlet, 142; cult of 9, 36, Toybox, 106; in Tchaikov-

King Stag, translated as 159 skii’s Nutcracker, 132; on Korol’ olen), 26; Turandot Hamlet. See Shakespeare the throne, 235 (play), 26, 27-9, 134-5; Hanneles Himmelfahrt. See Harlequin the Marriage

Turandot (theatre pro- Hauptmann, Gerhard Broker: (play), see

duction), see Komissar- Hanswurst, 29 Solov’ev, Vladimir N.; zhevskii, Fedor, and Harlequin, 4, 9, 21, 22, (theatre production), see Vakhtangov, Evgenii 24, 25, 34, 38-9, 40, 57, Meyerhold, Vsevolod Granovskii: production of 77, 136, 157; in Blok’s Harlequin the Skeleton:

Mystery-Bouffe, 237, Balaganchik, 80-1, 139- (play), see Deburau,

315n31 44; in Blok’s poetry, 142; Jean-Gaspard; (theatre

357 Index

production), see Mik- Hollywood, 205 Inspector General: A Direclashevskii, Konstantin “Homo novus.” See Kugel’, torial Buffonade. See

Harlequinade. See Drigo, A.E Evreinov, Nikolai

Ricardo; Fokin, Mikhail; homosexuality, 5, 9 “Introduction to Mono-

Petipa, Martus Hétel de Ville (Paris), 232 drama.” See Evreinov, harlequinade, 9, 57, 62, House of interludes, 53, Nikolai 74; in a balagan, 129; in 82-6, 87, 307N41 “Iskusstvo kak priem.” See the cabaret, 92; in eight- House of the Circus, 70 Shklovskii, Victor eenth-century Russia, House of the Press, 193 Ispytanie Damisa. See Gla127; in Glazunov's The How Ivan the Fool Sought zunov, Aleksandr Temptation of Damis, 132; the Truth. See Petrov, Italian satire, 22

in Komissarzhevskii’s N.V. Italians in Russia, 128 Turandot, 92; Maiakov- Huet, Marie-Héléne, 230 Italy, 4, 23, 24, 33, 65,

skiis Bathhouse as, 187 Hugo, Victor, 35 104, 110

Hauptmann, Gerhard, 12, Hurdy-Gurdy. See Guro, iterability of theatre, 68-9,

81, 104; Hanneles Him- Elena 332n3 melfahrt, 12; Die Weber, Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 9, lunaia buria. See Razumov12 37, 131; Pierrot sceptique, skii, 5.D.

Haydn, go 133 lutkevich, S., 210 He Who Gets Slapped. See Iuvachev, Daniil. See Andreev, Leonid Iakulov, Georgii, 107 Kharms, Daniil

Helen of Troy. See Craig, Jakunina, E.P.: designs for _Ivan the Terrible (in Eisen-

Gordon Solov’ev'’s Smeraldina’s stein’s Ivan the Terrible),

Hennique (co-author with Escapades, 315139 216

Huysmans): Pierrot scep- _ larotskaia, 87 Ivanov, Georgii, 140

tique, 133 Ibsen, 53 Ivanov, V.V., 210, 211, 227

Hermitage Theatre, 112 icon, 220, 306n33 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 63, 86, Hero of Our Times. See Ler- _—_ Ignatov, Sergei, 59-60; 304N5

montov, Mikhail “E.T.A. Hoffmann on Iznanka zhizni: (play), see High Stalinism, 108 the Stage,” 59g—-60 Benavente, Jacinto; (theHildebrand, Olle, 152-4 Igra interesov (Los Intereses atre production), see

Hoffmann, E.T.A., 5, 33- creados): (play), see Tairov, Aleksandr 4, 43, 84, 107-8, 136, Benavente, Jacinto; (the- — [zvestiia, 232 222; “Die Abenteuer der atre production), see

Sylvesternacht” (“The Mardzhanov, K.A. Janin, Jules, 34-5

New Year's Eve Adven- Ikar, 237 Japanese Kabuki theatre: ture”), 59; and Gozzi, ‘in, P., 313n72 and Eisenstein, 330n36 301n46, 302n60, 314n17; _—s‘iI‘insku, Igor’, 184 Japanese print: and Eisen-

and grotesque, 11, 43, Illusionsbruch, 30 stein, 330n37

82, 182; popularizer of impressionism, 183; Japanese theatre, 45, 216.

Callot, 72, 308n50; French, 330n37 See also Noh theatre

“Princess Blandina,” 59; improvisation, 5, 23-4, 27, Jarry, Alfred, 160, 174,

Die Prinzessin Brambilla 28, 55-6, 65, 68, 89, 188

(Princess Brambilia), 59, 306n40 Jazz, 5, 215

60, 107-8, 301n46, Ingarden, Roman, 222 Joyce, James, 226 308n50; and Russian innamorati (Innamorato, Jugendstil, 10, 92

modernism, 59-60 Innamorata), 23, 66, 135,

“Hoffmaniana.” See Kni- 213; in Harlequin the Kabala sviatosh. See Bul-

azhnin, Vladimir Marriage Broker, 89-91 gakov, Mikhail

358 Index Kafka, Franz, 197 Kloun. See Kuprin, Alek- Kruchenykh, Aleksei: Vic-

Kak Ivan-durak pravdu sandr tory over the Sun, 298n11 iskal. See Petrov, N.V. Kniazev, Vsevolod, Krugom vozmozhno Bog.

Kaluzhskii terevsat, 116 322N104 See Vvedenskii, Alek-

Kameneva, O.D., 233 Kniazhnin, Viadimu, 59; sandr

Kamenskii, Vasilii: Sten ka “Hoffmaniana,’ 59 Kuchinskii, G. (ps:

Razin, 8, 233 Kolombina. See Chardynin, Zhorzh Del‘vari), 71-2,

Kamernyi Theatre, 98, PI. 113

104-8, 110, 200 Kolombina sego dnia. See Kugel’, A.F (ps: “Homo Kamo griadeshi. See Sien- Evreinov, Nikolai novus”): critique of Taikiewicz, Henryk Komicheskaia opera, 117 rov'’s Los Intereses Kaplan, Dora, 231 Komissarzhevskaia, Vera, creados, 97; and Evrei-

Karloni, A.lu., 71 76, 101, 144, 182, 183 nov’ plays, 323n31 Karman ola. See Chulkov, Komissarzhevskii, Fedor, Kukreniksy, 184

Georgii 87, 102, 108, 150, Kulbin, go

Karnaval. See Fokin, Mik- 312n47; theatre produc- Kupriianov i Natasha

hail tion: Turandot (Printsessa (Kupriianov and Natasha).

Karsavina, 132 Turandot), 92-6, 118-19, See Vvedenskii, AlekKelly, Catriona, 4, 124, 209, 312n58, 312n60 sandr 127, 317N2 Komu na Rusi zhit” kho- Kuprin, Aleksandr: The Kennard, Joseph Spencer, rosho. See Nekrasov, Clown (Kloun), 298-13

22, 23 Nikolai Kurbas, Les, 124

“Kennst du das Land,” 147. = Kénig Harlekin: (play), see Kustodiev, Boris, 190,

Kerenskii, Aleksandr, 186, Lothar, Rudolf; (theatre 326n78

210, 223, 225 production), see Tatrov, Kuzmin, Mikhail, 5, 80, Kharms, Daniil (ps: Daniil Aleksandr, and Zvan- 101, 114, 117, 156; “The

luvachev), 193-7; Eliza- tsev, N.N. Dancing-master,” 87; The

vela Bam, 194-7, Koonen, Alisa, g8—100 Venetian Madcaps (Venet327n93; poetry of, 193- ~— Korol” Arlequin: (play), see sianskie bezumtsy), 156-7

4 Lothar, Rudolf; (theatre

Kherson’, 75 production), see Tairov, Laforgue, Jules, 9, 36-7,

Khorin, A., 302n67 Aleksandr 43, 131, 133, 142; Pierrot Khovanskaia, E.A., 82, Korolenko, Vladimir, 12 fumiste (P ero), 36, 133,

237 Korsh’s theatre, 232, 233, 148

Khoziaika gostinitsy. See 311n24, 315n24 Landlady. See Goldoni,

Goldoni, Carlo Kot v sapogakh. See Gip- Carlo

Kiaksht, 131 pius, Vassilii Landowski. See Schén-

King Harlequin: (play), see Kotzebue, 30 than, Franz von: ZirkusLothar, Rudolf; (theatre Koziukov, B.D. (ps: Bob), leute

production), see Tairov, 71, 113 Lapitskii, 104

Aleksandr Kramov, 96 Larionov, Mikhail, 10,

King Stag. See Gozzi, Krasivyi despot. See 319n29

Carlo Evreinov, Nikolai Last Bourgeois. See Mik-

Kirov Ballet, 300n41 Krasovskaia, V., 132 lashevskii, Konstantin Kleinkunst, 5, 10, 11, 92, Krasovski, L., 107 Latin, 22, 173

102, 158 Krivoe Dzhimmi cabaret Latin mimes, 20

Klop: (play), see Maiakov- theatre, 116 lazzi, 15, 24, 56, 65, 66, skii, Vladimir; (theatre Krivoe zerkalo cabaret 89, 95, 195, 212, 213 production), see Meyer- theatre. See Crooked Leandro (Léandre), 23,

hold, Vsevolod Mirror 25

359 Index Lebedinaia pesnia. See Che- _— Literature and Revolution. “Socialism and Art,’

khov, Anton See Trotskii, Leon 50

LEF, 209, 212 Liubimov, A., 237 “Lunnaia serenada”

“Left-Handed Smith.” See Liubimov, Iurii, 124 (“Lunar serenade”), 92 Leskov, Nikolai Liubov’ k trem apel’sinam Lunts, Lev, 5, 189-90;

Legat, 131 (LTA), 94, 300N41 The Apes Are Coming!

Legrand, Paul, 36 Lo Gatto, Ettore, 128 (Ob eziany idut!), 189Lehmann, A.G., 36 Locandiera, La. See Gol- 90, 237, 272-95; life of,

Leifert, E., 129; translator doni, Carlo 326n76

of Lothar’s Kénig Har- Loeffler, Michael Peter, 71 — Luscinius, Wolmar. See

lekin, 303n84 Los Intereses creados: (play), Solov’ev, Vladimir N. Lenin, Vladimir, 7, 13, 67, see Benavente, Jacinto; L’vovskii, Z. (translator of 186, 201, 225, 229, 231) (theatre production), see Claretie’S “Pierrot —-

as Nikolai, 332n4 Tairov, Aleksandr Father and Son”),

Leningrad State Ballet, Lothar, Rudolf (ps: Rudolf 304n9g6

300n41 Spitzer), 38-9, 41, 43,

Leonardo (da Vinci), 220 109, 131, 133, 159, 231, MacDonald, Ramsay, 186

Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 7, 303n80 Mach, Ernst, 12 37, 75, 131, 159; Pag- — Kénig Harlekin (King Machiavelli, 66

liacei (translated as Harleguin) (play), 38-9, Maclean, Donaid, 8 Paiatsy), 9, 37, 117, 131, 43, 133, 303n83; theatre § Madden, David, 205

133, 142, 298n21, production of ({trans- Maeterlinck, Maurice, 53,

319n31 lated as Korol’ Arlekin), 77, 134, 144, 155, 162,

Lermontov, Mikhail: A see Tairov, Aleksandr; 183, 310n4; The Miracle Hero of Our Times (Gerot Russian translations of, of St Anthony, 77, 144 nashego vremeni), 298n21 110, 117, 303n84; trans- § Magdalene, Mary, 180

~ Masquerade (Maskarad) lated as Shut na trone Magnanimous Cuckold, 161 (play), 11, 142; (theatre (The Fool on the Throne), Magnifico (Pantalone), 22

production), see Meyer- 104, 106 Maiakovskii, Vladimir, 5,

hold, Vsevolod Louis XIV, 25 8, 74, 92, 101-2, 181-9,

Leskov, Nikolai: “Levsha” Louis XVI, 230 192, 193, 212, 213, 221; (“The Left-Handed Love for Three Oranges: article: “Theatre, Smith”), 191-2 (journal), 59, 210; (opera), Cinema, Futurism,” Les’mian, Boleslaw, 133, see Prokof’ev, Sergei; 207-8; obsession with 142; links with Russian (play), see Gozzi, Carlo trousers, 325n68 symbolists, 320n57; Lovers. See Meyerhold, — plays: The Bathhouse

“Pierrot i Kolombina,’ Vsevolod (Bania), 186-8; The 142 lubok, 126, 133, 183, 192, Bedbug (Klop), 184-5,

Letnii Malyi opernyi teatr, 306n33, 319Nn29 187, 200; Moscow's

118 Lugné-Poe, 71 Burning (Moskva gorit),

Letuchaia mysh’ (Moscow __ Lukacs, Georg, 166, 223; 185-6; Mystery-Bouffe

cabaret). See Bat and shelterlessness, (Misteriia-Buff), 183-4,

Levberg, Mariia: Danton, 323n11 185, 198, 233, 315n28, 332n6 Lukomor’e (St Petersburg 315n31; Vladimir MaiaLevinson, Andrei, 100-1 cabaret), 82, 319n35 kovskii, 181, 193, 197, “Levsha.” See Leskov Lully: “Au clair de la lune,’ 325n59

Life of Man. See Andreev, g2 — theories on film, 328—

Leonid Luna-Park Theatre, 182 gn7

List of Assets. See Olesha, Lunacharski, Anatolii, Main Thing: (play), see

lurii 50, 67, 70, 110, 123; Evreinov, Nikolai; (the-

360 =6Index

atre production), see see Meyerhold, Vse- 188, 195, 202, 208-0,

Petrov, N.V. volod 210, 211, 223, 224

Maintenon, Mme de, 25, Maski, 83, 92 metonymy, 81

228 maslennitsa (Mardi Gras), Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 8,

Majestic Marquis of Gas- 5, 10, 11, 54, 125, 128-9, 11, 33, 35, 44, 50, 60,

cony, 113 136-8, 179 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74,

“making strange.” See masquerade. See ball motif 75-86, 87, 99-100, 101—

ostranenie in Russian literature 2, 107, 108, 117, 123, Moliére Lermontov, Mikhail; 200, 208, 210, 213, 218,

Malade tmaginatre, Le. See Masquerade: (play), see 124, 149, 156, 161, 188,

Malafeev, 129 (theatre production), 308n62; archive, 306n40; Malevich, 112 see Meyerhold, Vse- as Dr Dapertutto, 11,

Malyi teatr (Moscow), 67 volod 14, 57, 59, 65, 72, 73,

Mandat (Mandate). See mass theatre, 48, 53 81-6, 90, 97, 113, 221, Erdman, Nikolai Master and Margarita. See 237, 300n41; German Manége Hall (Moscow), Bulgakov, Mikhail influences on, 52; as

210 Mastkomdram, 67 inventor of biomeParty, 232 Theatre 305n19, 310Ng94, 310NY5;

Manifesto of the Communist MAT. See Moscow Art chanics, 33, 72, 222,

Marat, 230-1 Matskin, A., 81, 83, 85, as Landowski, 75; as Mardi Gras. See maslen- 121; on improvisation, Petrushka, 319n35; as

nitsa 306n40 Pierrot, 52, 77-80, 132,

Mardzhanov, K.A.: pro- Mayan: brutality, 8; pyr- 226; studio of, 307n41,

duction of Benavente's amid, 331 312n43; and symbolism,

Los Intereses creados, 117. medieval (mystery) the- 310n4 Mardzhanov’s Free The- atre, 45, 51, 62, 69, 111, — productions: Adoration

atre, 97-8 183 of the Cross (Poklonenie

Mariinskii Theatre, 67, 87, Medved*i chasovoi. See Krestu), 86; Balaganchik

111, 118, 131, 132 Miklashevskii, Kon- (The Puppet Show), 73,

Marinetti, 8 stantin 76-81, 82, 84, 85, 91, Marionettar. See Rosen- medvezh ia komediia, 126 102, 156, 157, 149; The

berg, Hilding Meilakh, Mikhail, 199 Bedbug (Klop), 184; Col-

marionettes, 60 Méliés: zoo Farces du umbines Scarf (Sharf Marivaux, 5, 26; Arlequin diable, 331 Kolombiny), 58, 82-6, 87, poli par l'amour, 23 Mendeleeva, Liubov’, 138, 88, 91-2, 99-100, 107,

Markov, Pavel, 97-8, 120 143 138, 151, 210, 304n9g5; Marmontel, 21 Meninas, Las, 168 The Dawns (Zor), 53;

“Marrchand d’habits”. See Merry Death. See Evreinov, The Death of Tintagzles,

Guitry, Sacha Nikolai 55; Dom Juan, 86, 102,

Marsheva, E.A., 85 Merry Theatre for Grown- 127, 202; Harlequin the Marsovo pole (Champs de Up Children, 63, 87, Marriage Broker (Arlekin

Mars, St Petersburg), 150 khodatai svadeb), 73, 8987, 129 metadrama. See meta- 91, 317n68; MagnaniMarta la Piadosa. See theatre mous Cuckold (VelikoMolina, Tirso de metaphor, 81 dushnyi rogonosets,

Marxism, 184, 223, 229 metatheatre, 6, 11, 15, 24, translation of Fernand Marxist revolution, 232 28, 29-32, 33, 62, 76, Crommelynck’s Le Cocu Maskarad: (play), see 80, 98, 135-6, 137, 141, magnifique), 161; The Lermontov, Mikhail; 142, 161, 162-7, 170, Lovers (Viiublennye), 82, (theatre production), 171, 174, 175, 176, 178, 88, 237, 254-6, 310N14;

361 Index Masquerade (Maskarad), Miracle of St Anthony. See Moskva gorit (Moscow's

11, 101-2, 123, 156, 209, Maeterlinck, Maurice Burning). See Maiakov-

311n28; Mystery-Bouffe Miss, 88 skii, Vladimir (Mistertia-Buff), 53, 92, Misteriia-Buff: (play), see “Mouse,” 116

110-12, 183, 315n28; Maiakovskii, Vladimir; Munich, 10 The Steadfast Prince (Sto- (theatre production), see § music-hall as theatre, 69,

ikii prints, translation of Meyerhold, Vsevolod 74, 195, 211, 215-16 Calderén), 209; The Miussar-Viket’ev, A.A. Musical Drama Theatre, Unknown Woman (Nez- (translator of Rostand’s 110

nakomka), 91 “Pierrot qui pleure Musset, 35

— theoretical writings: 52- et Pierrot qui rit”), My. See Zamiatin, Evgeni

9; “Balagan” (“The Fair- 304n96 “My Mom is All in the ground Booth”), 53-4, modernism: and com- Clock,” 193

74, 145; on grotesque, media dell’arte, 4-15, Mystery-Bouffe: (play), see

56-9, 307N43; on impro- 37-43, 227; and the Maiakovskii, Vladimir;

visation, 55-6, 306n40; baroque, 298n20 (theatre production), see on pantomime, 55-6; “Moia mama vsia v Meyerhold, Vsevolod On Theatre (O teatre), chasakh,” 193 206-7; “Uslovnyi the- Moissi, Alexander, 93 Napoleon, 225

atre;’ 55 Moisson-Franckhauser, Narodnaia komediia, 68, Mexican. See Eisenstein, Suzanne, 87, 88 70, 112-5, 215 Sergei Mol er (Moliére). See Bul- naturalism, 6, 12-13, 98, Mic, Constant. See Mik- gakov, Mikhail 133, 206-7 lashevskii, Konstantin Moliére (Jean-Baptiste Neapolitan origin of PulciMignon, 147; “Kennst du Poquelin), 6, 25, 202-4, nella, 22 das Land,” 147 227-8; Dom Juan, 25, 86; Neapolitan variant of CapMikhailovskii Square (St La Fausse prude, 25; Les tain, 23 Petersburg), 87 Fourberies de Scapin, 209; Negro, 88. See also blackaMiklashevski, Konstantin, Le Malade imaginaire, moor; Moor 18, 59, 64-7, 68, 73, 203; Tartuffe, 203 Neizmennaia izmena. See 108, 111, 205; book on Molina, Tirso de: Marta la Evreinov, Nikolai commedia dell’arte, Piadosa (Blagochestivaia Nekrasov, Nikolai: Komu

64-7, 89, 309n6q; at Marta), 64 na Rusi zhit® khorosho, 13 Theatre of Antiquity, monodrama. See Evreinov, Nekrylova, A.F, 125-6

62 Nikolai “Nenuzhnaia pravda.” See

~ theatre productions: The “Montage of Attractions.” Briusov, Valerii Bear and the Watchman See Eisenstein, Sergei neo-romanticism, 61

(Medved’i chasovoi), 114; | Moor, 136-8; blackamoor NEP. See New Economic

Harlequin the Skeleton stage attendants, 86 Policy (Arlekin-skelet), 114; The Moscow, 10, 67, 92, 97, Nevesta mertvetsa, ili Sva-

Last Bourgeois {Posledniti 114, 116 tovstvo khirurga. See burzhui), 112-3; two Moscow Art Theatre, 2, Radlov, Sergei pantomimes, 114 44, 45, 52, 62, 67, 75, Neosky, Alexander. See

Milanese, G., 317n61 g2, 98, 100, 101, 117, Eisenstein, Sergei miles gloriosus, 22 121, 161, 187-8, 190, New Economic Policy

Millions de Pierrot, Les. See 200, 203, 206, 208 (NEP), 69, 118, 122, 159, Eisenstein, Sergei Moscow Proletcult theatre, 184, 185, 187, 200

Minin i Pozharskii (Minin 209, 233 New Theatre, 316n47

and Pozharskii). See Moscow Terevsat theatre, Nezlobin, K., 92; theatre pro-

Vvedenskii, Aleksandr 103 duction: Renaissance, 92

362 Index Neziobin Theatre, 92-3, Assets (Spisok blagodet- ‘ev's Smeraldina’s

104, 106, 209, 312n58 anit), 205 Escapades, 113

Nicholas I, 137, 191 “On Shakespeare and Pantomima ital ianskikh Nicholas II, 231 Drama.” See Tolstoi, Lev komediantov. See Petrov,

Nicoll, Allardyce, 21, 24 Opéra-Comique, 25 N.V.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 45, operas: based on com- pantomime, 55-6. See also

132, 299Ng, 304N5 media dell’arte, 13; commedia dell’arte

Nishchii Arlekin. See Guro, Wagnerian, 55 Pantomime of the Italian

Elena Operntheater (Vienna), 82 Comedians. See Petrov,

Nivinskii, I.: designs for Ophelia: Liubov’ Mende- N.V.

Turandot, 119 leeva as, 142 Paris, 5, 10, 11, 20, 25, 34,

Nizhinskii, Vatslav, 132 OPOIAZ, 212 64, 101, 104, 228, 232 Noble’ Meeting, 89 Orient (image), 8 Paris Chatelet (theatre), Nodier, Charles, 34 Osorgin, Mikhail (trans- 131

Noh theatre of Japan, 51, lator of Turandot), 118 Pathé movie company, 174 54, 69. See also Japanese _ostranenie (“making Pedrolino, 22

theatre strange,” estrangement, perezhivanie. See experiNordau, Max, 9 “defamiliarization’), 6—- ence

“Nose.” See Gogol’ 7, 46-8, 55, 297N5, P ero. See Laforgue, Jules

Notes of the Travelling The- 305N14 “P’ero plachushchii i P’ero atre of PP. Gaideburov Ostrovskii, Aleksandr, 68, smeiushchiisia.” See

and N.F. Skarskaia. See 123; The Sage (Eisen- Rostand, Edmond Gaideburov, PP. stein’s version of Enough Perrault, Charles, 29 Novaia studiia, 90 Simplicity m Every Sage), “Perro — otets i syn.” See

Novalis, 60 210, 212-13 Claretie, Jules

Novyi teatr, 316n47 “Overcoat.” See Gogol’, perspective: external,

Novyi vechernii chas, 104 Nikolai 307n48; internal,

Nutcracker. See Tchaikov- Ovod, 103 331n49; in theatre, 6,

skii, Petr 47-8, 58, 63, 76, 121, Pagliacci. See Leoncavallo, 161, 170, 190, 218-24

Ob” edinenie real‘nogo Ruggero passim

iskusstva, 193 Pagliaccio, 34 Pervyi vinokur: (play), see

Oberiu, 193-200, 326n83 Paiatsy. See Leoncavallo, Tolstoi, Lev; (producOb eziany idut! See Lunts, Ruggero; Spasskii, N.M. tion), see Radlov, S.

Lev Pamela the Servant. See Peter I (the Great), 14,

October. See Eisenstein, Goldoni, Carlo 125, 137, 235

Sergei Pantalone (Pantaloon, Peter Il, 231

October revolution, 48, Pantalon), 21, 22, 25, Petersburg. See St Peters-

206; first anniversary 28, 32, 34, 40, 225; burg

of, 110, 183, 186, 231-4 Antonio Vulcani as, 128; Petipa, Marius, 170; Arlek-

Odeon Theatre (Paris), in Fokin’s Carnival, 118; inada (Harlequinade),

104 in Gozzi’s Turandot, 94, 118, 131

Oedipus complex, 208-9 120; in Harlequin the Petr. See Peter I Olaev, P.N. (translator of Marrtage-Broker, 89-91; Petrograd, 67, 100, 104, Lothar’s Kénig Harlekin), Ivan the Terrible as, 216; 112, 114, 116, 117. See

303n84 in Maiakovskii, 185; in also St Petersburg

Olearius, Adam, 127, 191, A Pantomime of the Petrograd Free Comedy.

318n13 Italian Comedians, 114; See Vol‘naia komediia

Olesha, Iurii, 5, 49; Envy in RazumovskiisS Pulchi- Petrov, N.V., 114-16; the-

(Zavist }, 185; A List of nelo, 109-10; in Solov- atre productions: How

363 Index Ivan the Fool Sought the 148; in Guro’s poetry, 164-7; Tonight We Impro-

Truth (Kak Ivan-durak 146-7; as image in vise, 164 pravdu iskal), 114; The Soviet culture of 19208, Pirosmanishvili, 10 Main Thing (Samoe 184; Legat as, 131; Mey- _Plautus, 22; The Twins, 112 glavnoe), 115-16, 117, erhold as, 53, 77, 226; play-within-the-play, 6, 118, 316n46, 316n49; A in Meyerhold’s Sharf 11, 24, 29, 39, 105, 115, Pantomime of the Italian Kolombiny, 83-5; and 133, 135-6, 142, 159, Comedians (Pantomima the moon, 295-6; in A 160, 161, 162-3, 168, ital ianskikh komediantov), Pantomime of the Italian 170, 176, 178, 197,

114 Comedians, 114; 306n33 Petruccio, 10 Petrushka as a type of, Players’ Rest, 87, 91, 92, Petrushka: Lenin as, 231; 136-7; in Russian bala- 301n46 relation to Pierrot and gany, 129; at Schall und = Pobeda nad solnisem. See

Pedrolino, 306n33 Rauch cabaret, 53; in Kruchenykh, Aleksei Petrushka. See Potemkin, Schnitzler’s Der Schleter Podviazka Kolombiny. See

P.; Stravinskii, Igor’ der Pierrette, 41-3; in Eisenstein, Sergei Petrushka folk play, 4, 5, symbolist poetry, Poéma bez geroia. See Akh10, 13-14, 19, 124, 126- 302n76; in Tairov’s Pter- matova, Anna 30, 132, 136-8, 183, 191, rette’s Veil, g8—100; at Pogrebnichko, lurti: The

318ng; children’s play, Uberbrett! cabaret, 56-7 Seagull (production of 318n7; Maiakovskii’s “Pierrot — Father and Son.” Chekhov's Chatka), 164

Bathhouse and, 187; Red See Claretie, Jules point of view in theatre.

Army version, 318n8 Pierrot fumiste. See See perspective Picasso, Pablo, 7, 11, 75, Laforgue, Jules Pokryvalo P eretty: (play), 80, 167; Les Demoiselles “Pierrot 1 Kolombina.” See see Schnitzler, Arthur;

d’Avignon, 80 Les‘mian, Boleslaw {theatre production), see Pierrettes Veil (Der Schleter Pierrot of the Minute. See Tairov, Aleksandr

der Pierrette): (play), see Dowson, Ernest Polichinelle, 40. See also Schnitzler, Arthur; (the- “Pierrot qui pleure et Pulcinella atre production), see Pierrot qui rit.” See Ros- = Poloumnyi Zhurden. See

Tairov, Aleksandr. See tand, Edmond Bulgakov, Mikhail

also Eisenstein, Sergei; Pierrot sceptique. See Hen- Popular Comedy Theatre,

Meyerhold, Vsevolod nique; Huysmans, Joris- 68, 70, 112-15, 215

Pierrot, 4, 9-10, 12, 21, Karl Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste. 22, 25, 26, 75, 110, 116, “Pierrotic” (pierrotique), See Moliére

157-8, 160, 184, 235; 4-5, 36, 57, 84, 133, Pornographe illustré, 37 Baliev dressed as, 92; 145; in Russian poetry, Poslednii burzhui. See MikBlok as, 142; in Blok’s 142, 148; hostile attitude lashevskii, Konstantin

Balaganchik, 157, 139-45; towards, 116 Potemkin, P.: Petrushka, created by Deburau, 34-— _—Pilniak, Boris, 202 319N35 7; in Eisenstein’s Colum- _— Pilsudski, 186 Pozharskaia, 99 bine’s Garter, 210; in Pirandelip, Luigi, 115, Pravda, 203 Evreinov’s Kolombina 135, 164-7, 168-9, 187, presentation, 48, 50, 52, sego dnia, 88; in Evrei- 188, 189; and actors’ 58, 69-70, 161, 186, nov’s The Main Thing, discipline, 323n12; and 305n16, 306n26, 333N14. 179-80; in Evreinov’s A problem of authority, See also representation

Merry Death, 150-5; and 322n9g; Presniakov, 88

film, 205; in Fokin’s Car- —_ —_ plays: Each in His Own primitivism in art, 5, 10

nival, 118, 132; in Way, 164; Six Characters “Primo intermedio.” See Guro’s Beggar Harlequin, in Search of an Author, Callot, Jacques

364 Index “Princess Blandina.” See Horseman, 137; “The Reed, John, 332n4

Hoffmann, E.T.A. Coffin-Maker” (“Gro- Reinhardt, Max, 45, 53, Princess Brambilla. See bovshchik”), 170; Ruslan 71, 108, 174, 186; proTairov, Aleksandr and Liudmila, 82; Tales of duction of Turandot, 92-

Princess Turandot: (play), Belkin, 13 3, 301N59, 312N53, 312see Gozzi, Carlo; (the- Puss in Boots. See Tieck, 3n60

atre productions), see Ludwig religious experience in Komissarzhevskii, Putta onorata, La. See Gol- theatre, 45, 49, 183, Fedor, and Vakhtangov, doni, Carlo 184, 227 Evgenii Pyman, Avril, 142-3 Renaissance, 6, 168; the-

Printsessa Turandot: (play), atre of, 62

see Gozzi, Carlo; (the- 400 Farces du diable. See Renaissance: (play), see

atre productions), see Méliés Schénthan, Franz von;

Komissarzhevskii, Quo vadis. See Sienkie- (theatre production), see

Fedor, and Vakhtangov, wicz, Henryk Nezlobin, K.

Evgenii representation, 47, 50, 52,

Prinzessin Brambilla, Die: Rabelais, 57, 153, 155 58, 69-70, 161, 175, 186,

(tale), see Hoffmann, Radix, 193 305n16, 333n14. See also E.T.A.; (theatre produc- Radlov, Sergei, 35, 68, presentation tion), see Tairov, Alek- 112-3, 300N41; experi- Revizor: Rezhisserskaia buf-

sandr ments with circus, 70-2, fonada. See Evreinov,

Prival komediantov. See 112 Nikolai

Players’ Rest — productions: The Dead Revolution, French, 116, Prodetki Smeral‘diny. See Man's Bride, or The 229-35, 311N24 Solov’ev, Vladimir N. Wooing of a Surgeon Revolution, Russian Proffer, Ellendea, 200, 201 (Nevesta mertvetsa, ili (Soviet), 6, 50, 68, 81, Prokof’ev, Sergei, 7; Love Svatovustvo khirurga), 112; g1, 101-2, 111~12, 159, for Three Oranges (Liubov’ The First Distiller (Tol- 162, 184, 229-35. See

k trem apel‘sinam), stoi’s Pervyi vinokur), also October revolution 300N41, 320n50 112; The Twins (based Revolution, Russian (of

Proletcult, 209 on play by Plautus), 112 1905), 6

“prompter”: as character raeshnik, 191 Revolution in the Theatre.

in play, 80 Rameau, 95 See Fuchs, Georg

Pronin, Boris, 91 Ratov, Sergei, 32172 Revue de Paris, 35

provincial theatre, 309n78 Razin, Stenka, 8 Riccoboni, Luigi, 17, 18, Przybyszewski, Stanislaw, Razumovskii, $.D., 109- 20, 24, 25

310n4 10, 159, 315n24;;lunaia Richards, Kenneth, 17

Puccini, Turandot, 302n59, buria (The Young Storm), Richards, Laura, 17

317n61 315n24; Pulchinelo, 109~- ~=—-“rigorism,” 8, 305n20

Pugachev, 231 10, 315n25 Rilke, Rainer-Maria, 7

Pul chinelo. See Razumov- Re cervo. See Gozzi, Carlo Rimskii-Korsakov, 101,

skii, $.D. “Realism and Convention 149; Le Cog d'or, 101

Pulcinella (Pulcenello, on the Stage.” See Ripellino, Angelo Maria,

Punch), 22 Briusov, Valerii 181, 182, 183, 184, 185,

Puppet Show. See Meyer- realism in the theatre, 6, 186, 187, 188

hold, Vsevolod 51, 122, 134, 159-61, Ristori, Tommaso, 128

puppets, 14, 48. See also 167, 187, 206-7, 211, Ritter, Naomi, 157

doll: the actor as 213 ritual: sources of drama

Pushkin, Aleksandr, 5, 11, Red Army, 126, 183, 189- in, 45 57, 68, 82, 137; Bronze 90, 209; theatre, 315n24 Rocker, Ned, 210

365 Index Rodchenko, Aleksandr, St Petersburg, 4, 10, 14, Schleier der Pierrette, Der:

184, 211 62, 77, 81-6, 113, 125, (play), see Schnitzler,

Rodina, T.M., 140 128-9 Arthur; (theatre producRoman theatre, 62 Sakhnovskii, Vasilii: cri- tions), see Tairov, AlekRomanov, B.G., 87, 96 tique of Benois’s La sandr; and Meyerhold, romanticism, 25, 61, 207; Locandiera, 101; critique Vsevolod

French, 8-9, 25, 36; of Komissarzhevskiis Schnitzler, Arthur, 41-3, German, 29-34, 60-1, Turandot, 93-4; on 57, 82, 83, 84, 85, 131,

217 improvisation, 306~ 304n96; Anatol, 41; Ana-

Rosenberg, Hilding: Mart- 7n4o; production of tols Hochzeitsmorgen onettar, 117, 303 Goldonis Pamela the Ser- (Anatol’s Wedding), 41;

ROSTA telegraph agency, vant, 312n58 Der ertine Kakadu (The

185 Salomé, 8 Green Cockatoo, trans-

Rostand, Edmond: Samoe glavnoe: (play), see lated as Zelenyi popugai),

“Pierrot qui pleure Evreinov, Nikolai; (the- 128, 233-4, 311n24 et Pierrot qui rit” atre production), see ~ Der Schleier der Pierrette

(translated as “Pero Petrov, N.V. (Pierrettes Veil) (play), plachushchiiiP’erosme- Samoubiitsa. See Erdman, 41-3, 133, 31015; as

iushchiisia”), 304ng6 Nikolai Pokryvalo Peretty (Pier-

Rouault, Georges, 7 Sand, George, 35 rette’s Veil), 97-8; as Sharf Rouffe, Louis, 36 Sand, Maurice, 17-18, 20, Kolombiny (Columbine's

Rubinshtein, 115 22, 23, 34, 110 Scarf), 57, 82-6; as

Rudnitskii, Konstantin, Sapunov, Nikolai: designs Columbine'’s Garter 80, 86, 102, 107, 111 for Balaganchik, 78, 81, Podviazka Kolombiny),

Ruslan and Liudmila. See 82; designs for Colum- 210 Pushkin, Aleksandr bine'’s Scarf, 57, 84-5, 92, Schonberg, Arnold, 7 Russian avant-garde the- gg; designs for Turandot, Schénthan, Franz von, 75,

atre, 6 92-3, 96 92; Renaissance, 92; Zir-

Russian Dramatic Theatre Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8 kusleute, 11, 75

(Moscow), 96 Satirikon, 80 School of Scenic Art, go

Russian folk-tale, 8 Saussure de, Ferdinand: Schopenhauer, Arthur, 12 Russian theatre: com- Course of General Lin- Schorske, Carl, 219

media as the solution guistics, 45 Schumann, 118

to, 51-2; crisis in, 43; Sayler, Oliver, 105-6 Scythians, 8, 171 perspective and nature Sbornik komedit 1733-1735 Seagull: (play), see Che-

of subject in, 47-9; 88, 113 khov, Anton; (theatre

problem of repertoire Scala, Flaminio, 17, 20, 23 production), see Pogreb-

in, 67-8; problem of the Scales. See Vesy nichko, Iurii

sign in, 45~7, 213; Scaramuccia (Scaramouche, Segel, Harold B., 132, 154 renewal of, 43-4, 62, 66; Scaramuccio), 23; in semiotics, 3, 6, 45-6, 211, symbolism in Meyer- RazumovskiiS Pul chi- 220, 230; and Eisen-

hold’s productions, nelo, 109-10; in Tieck’s stein’s poetic, 330n24 310n4; symbolist mani- Topsy-Turvy World, 31 Serapion Brothers, 59,

festos on, 49-51 “Schall und Rauch” (cab- 189

Ruzzante. See Beolco, aret), 53 Servitore di due padrone, Il

Angelo Scheherezade, 8 (Servant of Two Masters). Schiller, Friedrich, 68; Tur- See Goldoni, Carlo

Sacchi, Antonio, 19, 21, andot, 32-3, 39, 94-6, Serzh. See Aleksandrov,

22, 26 118, 301N59 A.S. Sage. See Eisenstein, Sergei Schlegel, 60 Séverin, 36

366 Index Shakespeare, 36, 39, 123; “Socialism and Art.” See Spengler, 9 Hamlet, 39, 70, 133, 159, Lunacharskii, Anatolii Spezzafer. See Spavento

168 Socialist realism, 13 Spiess-Eschenburg, go

Sharantsev, Evg. (trans- Sologub, Fedor, 49; “The Spisok blagodeianti. See

lator of Lothar’s Kénig Theatre of a Single Olesha, Turii

Harlekin), 303n84 Will,” 49 Spitzer, Rudolph. See Sharf Kolombiny: (play), see Solov’ev, Vladimir N., 44, Lothar, Rudolph Schnitzler, Arthur; (the- 59, 88, 91, 307N41; cri- sports event as theatre,

atre production), see tique of Komissarzhev- 69 Meyerhold, Vsevolod ski's Turandot, 94-6, Stalin, Joseph, 10, 305n20 Sharmanka. See Guro, 118; critique of Tairov’s Stalinism, 108, 188

Elena Los Intereses creados, 96— Stanislavskit, Konstantin:

Shershenevich, Vadim, ‘70; 7; Harlequin the Card- 65, 75, 161, 168, 200, translation of Laforgue’s Lover {Arlekin pris- 213, 225; Meyerhold as Pierrot fumiste, 37, 133, trastnyi k kartam), 237, an apprentice of, 53, 55;

319n30 257-71; Harlequin the Mar- _ naturalism of, 6, 12,

Shishmanov, V.N., 109 riage Broker (Arlekin — 134, 207-8, 218; object Shklovskii, Victor, 285; khodatai svadeb), 89-91; of parody, 151-2, 174; “Art as Device” (“Iskus- theatre production: Pro- problem of the sign in stvo kak priem”),. delki Smeral diny (Smeral- his theatre, 45-9, 52, 305n14; “The Resurrec- dina’s Escapades), 113-14, 58, 206~7; production of

tion of the Word” (“Vos- 117, 315N39 Andreev’s Life of a Man, kreshenie slova”), 161 Solov’ev, Vladimir S., 138 86; theory of “experiShrove-tide. See maslen- Somov, Konstantin, 156, ence” (perezhivanie), 46,

nitsa 171 48, 120-1, 163-4, 172,

Shut na trone: (play), see Souvenirs des funambules. 175 Lothar, Rudolf; (theatre See Champfleury Starinnyi teatr. See Theatre

production), see Zvan- Soviet cinema, 7, 208 of Antiquity

tsev, N.N. Soviet critics, 13 State Academy of Artistic

Sienkiewicz, Henryk: Quo Soviet Russia, 10, 116, Sciences, 306n40 vadis (Kamo griadeshi), 122-3, 159, 162, 169, Steadfast Prince: (play), see

115, 178, 316n47 195 Calder6n; (theatre pro-

signs in the theatre: real Soviet school of structural duction), see Meyerhold,

and conventional, 45-7 poetics. See semiotics Vsevolod Six Characters in Search of Soviet theatre: political Stenka Razin. See Kamen-

an Author. See Piran- background, 309n79 ski, Vasilii dello, Luigi Sozdannye interesy: (play), Stone Nakhimovsky, Skaramuz. See Scara- see Benavente, Jacinto; Alice, 193

muccia (theatre production), see Storey, Robert EH, 26, 36

skaz, 192 Tairov, Aleksandr Strauss, Johann, 100 Slepian, 115 Spain, 5, 19, 20, 104, 110, Strauss, Richard, 7

Sluga dvukh gospod. See 131 Stravinskii, Igor’, 7, 75,

Goldoni, Carlo Spanish conquerors of 106; Petrushka, 106, 127, Smeraldina’s Escapades. See Italy, 22-3 130, 131, 136-8, 156, Solov’ev, Vladimir N. Spasskii, N.M. (translator 191, 306n33

Smert” Dantona. See of Pagliacci: Paiatsy), Stray Dog cabaret (Brodi-

Biichner, Georg 303N79 achaia sobaka), 87, 115,

Smolny, 225 Spavento, 22; in Razumov- 149, 156

110 10 Struwelpeter, 10

Social-Democratic Party, skii’s Pul chinelo, 109- Strindberg, 91

367 Index Studiia E.B. Vakhtangova, (Pokryvalo P eretty; “Theatre, Cinema, (formerly Tret‘ia studiia translation of Schnit- Futurism.” See Maiakov-

M.Kh.A.T.), 118 Zler’s Der Schleier der skii, Vladimir

Studiia na Borodinskoi Pierrette), 97-101, 210, Théatre de la Foire, 26. (Studio on Borodinskaia 304n95; Princess Bram- See also théatre forain

Street), 111, 112 villa (stage version of Theatre Department of Studiia na Liteinom Hoffmann’s Die Prin- Petrograd, 110 (Studio on Liteinyi zessin Brambilla), 59, 73, Theatre Department of the

Street), 71, 112 106, 107-8, 129, 162, Commissariat (TEO), 69 Sturm und Drang, 94 314n17; The Toybox, 106 Théatre des Funambules,

Styan, J.L., 53 Takata zhenshchina. See 18, 34, 35-6, 75, 129,

subject in the theatre. See Evreinov, Nikolai 235. See also Deburau,

perspective Takoshimo, 71 Jean-Gaspard

Such a Woman. See Tales of Belkin. See théatre forain, 10, 25, 26,

Evreinov, Nikolai Pushkin, Aleksandr 34, 65, 228, 234 Sudeikin, Sergei, 91, Tarasov, N.L., 92 Theatre in the Tauride 301n64; designs for Tai- Tarkovskii, Andrei, 217 Gardens, 117, 118 rov's Los Intereses Tartaglia, 22, 27-9, 32, 94- Theatre on Ofitserkii

creados, 96 5, 109, 120 Street, 76, 182

Sudeikina, Ol’ga, 322n104 ~—— Tartuffe. See Moliére “Theatre of a Single Will.”

Suicide. See Erdman, Taureg, 1.V., 71, 113 See Sologub, Fedor

Nikolai Taviani, Ferdinando, 18 Theatre of Antiquity, 62—

Summer Maly Opera The- _— Taylorism, 48, 217, 3, 64, 85, 86, 183,

atre, 118 305N1g9, 319N45 308n59, 308n62

suprematism, 105, 106 Tchaikovskii, Petr: Nut- Theatre of Revolutionary

Swan, John, 5, 8, 11 cracker, 106, 132, 136, Satire. See Moscow Ter-

Swan-Song. See Chekhov 156 evsat theatre

symbolism, 8, 11, 12, 61, Teatr 1 iskusstvo, 93, 237 Theatre of the Presnia

160; French, 9, 133; “Teatr kak takovoi.” See region of the Moscow

Russian, 49, neo- Evreinov, Nikolai Soviet of Workers’ and romanticism, 61, 134, Teatr, kniga o novor teatre, Peasants’ Deputies, 109

137, 144, 154-5, 184 50 Theatre-Studio (Meyer-

symbolist drama, 55, 162 Teatr na Ofitserskoi, 76, hold's), 91, 102

Sypher, Wylie, 136, 167 182 theatre-within-the-theatre, Teatr Nezlobina. See 11, 35, 54, 77, 144, 160,

Taganka theatre, 124 Nezlobin theatre 162, 188, 191, 200-1

Tairov, Aleksandr, 96-101, Teatr Presnenskogo raiona Theatrical October, 69

102, 161, 162, 200 M.S.R.K.D., 109 theatricality; theatricaliza-

— theatre productions: The Teatr RsFsR-1, 68 tion of life. See Bonds of Interest (Iznanka = Teatr v Tavricheskom Evreinov, Nikolai

zhizni; translation of sadu, 117, 118 theatrum mundi, 11, 14, 24, Benavente’s Los Intereses Temptation of Damis. See 81, 98, 144, 181

creados), 96~7, 156, Glazunov, Aleksandr There may be God all over. 313n73, 313n74; The Fan THO. See Theatre Depart- See Vvedenski, Alek-

(Veer, translation of Gol- ment of the Commis- sandr

doni’s I] Ventaglio), 101; sariat Théroigne de Méricourt. See

King Harlequin (Korol’ Terioki, 88-91, 102, Hervieu, Paul Arlekin, translation of 307N41, 317n68 Third International, 183 Lothar’s Kénig Harlekin), “Theatre as Such.” See Third Studio of the

104-6; Pierrette’s Veil Fvreinov, Nikolai Moscow Art Theatre.

368 Index See Studiia E.B. Vakh- duction), see Tairov, 189-90, 198, 216;

tangova, 150 Aleksandr uslounyi theatre as

Thomas, Dylan, 197 Treplev (in Chekhov's Sea- genre, 6, 7, 58-0, 74,

“Three Left Hours,” 193 gull), 76 111, 120, 161, 200, 206,

Three Magi. See Evreinov, Tretia studiia M.Kh.A.T. 297N4

Nikolai See Studiia E.B. Vakh- “Uslovnyi teatr.” See Mey-

Tieck, Ludwig, 5, 29-32, tangova erhold, Vsevolod

33, 43, 58, 59, 60-1, 80, “Tri levykh chasa,” 193 Uspenskii, Boris, 3, 21992, 135, 142, 153, 178, Tri volkhva. See Evreinov, 20; on point of view

191, 201, 301N55 Nikolai and the play-within-

— Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss — Troitskii Theatre, 104 the-play, 168, 201, in Boots; in Russian, Kot Trotskii, Leon, 201; Litera- 308n64 v sapogakh), 29, 59, 60- ture and Revolution, 182 utopia, 48-9, 50, 64, 171,

1, 76, 80, 92, 210-1, Truffaidino, 21, 22, 27, 28, 182, 185, 229-31,

218; as a source for 120 305N19 Blok’s Balaganchik, Tsereteli, 100, 105

320n56 “Tsirk.” See Gibshman V kulisakh dushi. See — Die verkehrte Welt (The Turandot: (play), see Gozzi, Evreinov, Nikolai

Topsy-Turvy World), 23, Carlo, and Schiller, “V lunnom svete,” 92

29 Friedrich; (theatre pro- Vakhtangov, Evgenii, 73,

Time of Troubles, 8 ductions), see Komissar- 106, 188; production of

Timoshenko, 115 zhevskii, Fedor, and Turandot, 73, 106, 107,

Today's Columbine. See Vakhtangov, Evgenii; 118-22, 123, 161-2, 202,

Evreinov, Nikolai (opera) see Puccini 301N59, 317n62 Tolstoi, A.K., 68, 232, Turgenev, 123 variety, 50 311N24 Tuscan language, 23, 135 vaudeville, 50 Tolstoi, Lev, 6-7, 104, 154, ‘Tverskoi, K.K., 87 vecchi, 21, 22, 23

178, 179; critique of the- Twelve. See Blok, Alek- “Vechnyi zov.” See Belyi,

atrical convention, 46-8, sandr Andrei

55, 161, 213; The First Twins: (play), see Plautus; Vedrinskaia, 90 Distiller (Pervyt vinokur), {theatre production), see —_—- Veer: (play), see Goldoni,

112; “On Shakespeare Radlov, Sergei Carlo; (theatre producand Drama,” 46; War typage, 210 tion), see Tairav, Alek-

and Peace, 46-8, 213, sandr 219; What is Art? (Chto Uberbrettl cabaret (Berlin), Velikie Luki, 209

takoe iskusstvo?), 6, 56, 92 Venetsianskie bezumtsy 46 Ul‘ianov, Viadimir H‘ich (Venetian Madcaps). See

Tonight We Improvise. See (Lenin), 231 Kuzmin, Mikhail

Pirandello, Luigi Uncle Vania. See Chekhov, Venice, 5, 19, 26, 28, 32,

Topsy-Turvy World. See Anton 66, 130, 156-7, 301n46 Tieck, Ludwig Unfailing Infidelity. See Ventaglio, Il: (play), see

Torda, Thomas Joseph, Evreinov, Nikolai Goldoni, Carlo; (theatre

104 Union of Youth, 182 production), see Tairov,

“Tot, kotoryi poluchaet Unknown Woman. See Blok, Aleksandr

poshchechiny.” See Aleksandr Verhaeren, 104; “La Andreev, Leonid Uprising. See Verhaeren, Révolte” (“The “Tournament in Florence.” Emile Uprising,” translated as

See Callot, Jacques Urgesamtkunstwerk, 227 “Vosstanie”), 233, ,

Toybox: (composition), see uslovny1, uslovnost’, 51, 56, 332n11

Debussy; (theatre pro- 79, 98, 115, 121, 182, Verigina, 77, 89-90

369 Index verkehrte Welt, Die. See Pozharskii), 197-8; There Youth Theatre of Krasnaia

Tieck, Ludwig may be God all over (Kru- Presnia, 164 Verlaine, 36, 142; “Pierrot gom vozmozhno Bog), 198

Gamin,” 16 Vygotski, Lev, 228 Zamiatin, Evgenii, 48, 74,

vertep, 187 188, 190-2, 202; ; The Veselaia smert’. See Wagner, Richard, 8, 45, Flea (Blokha), 190-2,

Evreinov, Nikolai 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 72 326n79; We (My), 8, 48,

Veselovskii, Aleksandr, War and Peace. See Tolstoi, 190, 305nN19

212, 227, 299ng Lev zanni, 18, 21-2, 23, 29, 30,

Veselyi teatr dlia pozhi- War Communism, 10, 69, 66, 72, 120

lykh detei, 63, 87, 150 104, 114, 122, 229 Zapiski perdvizhnogo Vesy (The Scales), 9, 142 Watteau, 17, 26, 37 teatra PP. Gaideburova i Victory over the Sun. See Waugh, Evelyn, 8 N.E Skarskoi. See Gai-

Kruchenykh, Aleksei We. See Zamiatin, Evgenii deburov, P-P Vienna, 10, 82, 92; as Weber, Die. See Haupt- Zavadskii, Iurii, 202

evoked by Schnitzler, mann, Gerhard Zavist”. See Olesha, [urii

42, 100 Wedekind, Frank: Friihl- Zelenogorsk, 88

Viennese censorship, 38 ings Erwachen, 53 Zelentsova, Nina, 128 Vladimir Maiakovskii. See What Is Art? See Tolstoi, Zelenyi popugai. See

Maiakovskii, Vladimir Lev Schnitzler, Arthur

Vitublennye. See Meyer- White Guard. See Bulgakov, Zhenshchina-Zmeia. See

hold, Vsevolod Mikhail Gozzi, Carlo

Vogak, K.A., 300n41 Wilde, Oscar, 9, 59, 104, Zhirmunski, Viktor, 60-1,

Vollmoeller, Kari (trans- 304n3 108; “The Comedy of lator of Turandot into Wilhelm Meisters Wander- Pure Joy,” 60

German), 313n60 jahre. See Goethe Zhukov, 115

Vol‘naia komediia, 115-16, | Windsor, Duke of, 8 Zirkusleute. See Schén-

118 Winter Palace, 112, 224, than, Franz von

Vosstanie. See Verhaeren 225, 232, 234 Znosko-Borovskii, 83 Vsevolozhskii, I.A., 131 Witkacy, 160 ZLoikina kvartira (Zotka’s Vulcani, Antonio, 128 Woe from Wit. See Gri- Apariment). See Bul-

“Vvedenie v monodramu.” boedov, Aleksandr gakov, Mikhail See Evreinov, Nikolai Wolzogen, Ernst von, 57 Zolotnitskii, David, 68, 71, Vvedenskii, Aleksandr, Woman Snake. See Gozzi, 87, 112-13, 115

193, 197-200; Christmas Carlo Zori. See Meyerhold, Vse-

at the Ivanous’ (Elka u World of Art, 5, 10, 37, volod

Ivanovykh), 198-200, 101, 107, 128, 131, 137, Zorzi, Ludovico, 18-19

327N101, 327N105; 156, 171, 319n29 Zvantsev, N.N., 104; proKupriianov and Natasha Worrall, Nick, 107 duction of The Fool on

(Kupriianov i Natasha), the Throne (Shut na trone; 198-9, 327n103; Minin Young Storm. See Razu- translation of Lothar’s

and Pozharski (Minin i movskii, S.D. Kénig Harlekin), 104, 106