Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology 9781442682580

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Knight’s Move: From Theory to Theatre
2. Some Old Photos: Russian Formalism in Russian Avant-garde Theatre
3. Epic Theatre in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
4. In the Hands of Angelus Novus: Form and Ideology
Afterword: Retro Estrangement
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

T H E AT R E O F E S T R A N G E M E N T: T HE O RY, P R A C T I C E , ID E O L OG Y

GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES General Editor: James Retallack

SILVIJA JESTROVIC

Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology

UN IV ERS ITY OF TO RO NT O P RES S Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN-13: 978-8020-9068-3 ISBN-10: 0-8020-9068-0

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Jestrovic, Silvija, 1970– Theatre of estrangement : theory, practice, ideology / Silvija Jestrovic. (German and European studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-9068-0 1. Experimental theatre – Germany – History – 20th century. 2. Experimental theatre – Soviet Union – 20th century. 3. Experimental drama, German – 20th century – History and criticism. 4. Experimental drama, Russian – 20th century – History and criticism. 5. Soviet drama – History and criticism. 6. Experimental theater – Political aspects – Germany – History – 20th century. 7. Experimental theater – Political aspects – Soviet Union – History – 20th century. 8. Alienation (Social psychology). I. Title. II. Series. pn2654.j48 2006

792.9043909041

c2006-902879-6

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For Ana Isabella and Dragan

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1 The Knight’s Move: From Theory to Theatre

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2 Some Old Photos: Russian Formalism in Russian Avant-garde Theatre 42 3 Epic Theatre in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 4 In the Hands of Angelus Novus: Form and Ideology Afterword: Retro Estrangement Notes 159 Select Bibliography Index 177

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Christopher Innes for most generously supporting this book through the Canada Research Chair in Performance and Culture Postdoctoral Fellowship and Publication Grant, providing me with time, space, and resources without which this project would not have been possible. I am also very grateful to the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, and to James Retallack and Jeffrey Kopstein in particular, for their support. I am most indebted to Veronika Ambros for being not only a wonderful supervisor for my doctoral thesis – out of which this book emerged – but also a true friend and a source of inspiration; Michael Sidnell for sharing his great knowledge and expertise with me; Domenico Pietropaolo for his feedback; Josette Féral for her insightful advice and support; John Ashington for much needed encouragement; the Department of English at York University; the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto; the Munk Centre, Brecht Archive, and Professor Herta Schmid for enabling my research in Germany; Joanne Mackay-Bennett for her editorial help and for her friendship; Carmen Queeneville for proofreading this work; the Drama Centre staff – Jean Glasgow, Luella Massey, and Robert Moses – for their helpfulness; my friends Erith and Adam for great conversations; Dragan Todorovic for patience and understanding; and Ljiljana and Miloje Jestrovic for always unconditionally believing in me. Last but not least, I am most grateful to Jill McConkey, my editor at the University of Toronto Press, for all her wonderful work and for her dedication to this project. Excerpts from ‘The Curtains,’ ‘Everything Changes,’ and ‘My Audience,’ by Bertolt Brecht, are reproduced by permission.

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T H E AT R E O F E S T R A N G E M E N T: T HE O RY, P R A C T I C E , ID E O L OG Y

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Introduction

In Harun Farocki’s film Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989), spectators assume that archival aerial photographs taken by American pilots in 1944 document a factory complex in Poland. It was not until 1977 that two CIA officers recognized the rows of barracks, the crematoria, and the long lines of blurry figures in the snow for what they really were – images of Auschwitz. Through a simple shift in context or angle an image can reveal itself in a surprising, sometimes horrific, new light. What we see depends on how we see it. In theatre, one of the most important questions concerning its role and relevance is how to subvert the stock responses of an audience and make the well known fresh and meaningful again. In order to examine the phenomenon of theatrical estrangement and restate its contemporary relevance, this book turns to the theory and practice of defamiliarization as explored within the period of the historical avant-garde (1910–35) and searches for theoretical and aesthetic paradigms that could be further applied and reworked within our current context.1 Even though artistic devices and theories of estrangement can be traced throughout the history of theatre, art, and critical thought – from Aristotle and Horace to Hegel and Freud – artists of the historical avant-garde reveal this notion in its full aesthetic and political complexity, turning it into a language of the Epoch. They viewed art as a reverse mimesis, and believed – as Oscar Wilde put in ‘The Decay of Lying’ – that ‘life imitates art far more than art imitates life’ (789). As a result, estrangement became a way of thinking, a means of comprehending the world, and even a lifestyle. The art of estrangement strove to change aesthetic conventions to correspond to a reality marked by images of trenches on the one side and dreams of a new society on the other. Although totalitarian regimes were quick to sup-

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press avant-garde artists, their political apparatus appropriated some devices of avant-garde spectacles for propaganda purposes (i.e., Nuremberg rallies; Stalinist parades and show trials). Political reality imitated art through the most violent means, marking the end of the historical avantgarde by silencing, exiling, and executing the artists. Between the beginning of the twentieth century and the mid-1930s, two major estrangement theories emerged from avant-garde art and critical thought – those of Viktor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht. They laid the foundations for further analysis of the defamiliarization concept and its application to various forms of theatre and drama. In 1917 Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, focusing primarily on literary examples, coined the term ostranenie to describe the artistic technique of making the familiar strange.2 Estrangement (ostranenie) is a means of counteracting one of the most deadening forces in both art and life – habitualization or automatization – that, as Shklovsky puts it, ‘devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war’ (‘Isskustvo kak priëm’ 12). In his literary works, including the memoirs Sentimental Journey and Third Factory, Shklovsky applied artistic techniques of estrangement and turned his theory into practice. Other formalist scholars illuminated various aspects of the estrangement phenomenon – Jurij Tynjanov through his study of parody and literary evolution, Boris Ejxenbaum in his observations on grotesque estrangement, and Pëtr Bogatyrëv in his writings on the defamiliarizing quality of puppet theatre. Roman Jakobson also contributed to the discussion on estrangement through his theory of poetic language. In 1929 he became one of the founding members of the Prague Structuralist School, where the concept of estrangement was further developed and viewed against the backdrop of cultural norms, conventions, and values. Bertolt Brecht’s estrangement theory is embodied in his well-known concept of Verfremdung – the main feature of his epic or non-Aristotelian theatre and drama. Brecht’s concept presupposes a certain ideological goal – it distances the audience from the stage work to enable them to see the well known in its true state. Even though Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung was not fully formulated until 1935, hints of it were evident in one of his earlier plays where he has suggested, ‘even if it’s not very strange, find it estranging / even if it’s usual, find it hard to explain’ (The Exception and the Rule 109). Brecht’s concept is often treated as the norm for theatrical estrangement. Comparative analysis of the two concepts and their embodiments in artistic practices of the historical avant-garde opens up many questions:

Introduction

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Is Brecht’s concept broad enough to cover all the possibilities of theatrical estrangement and is it transferable to other media? What kind of analytical possibilities does the transfer of the formalist estrangement from literature to the field of theatre and drama open? Is the main divergence between Shklovsky’s and Brecht’s estrangement that they apply to different media of representation, or is it rather in their modes, strategies, and goals? Contemporary scholars and practitioners too readily ascribe the label Brechtian whenever a distancing device is used on stage. Even though Russian formalist scholars address estrangement in theatre and drama sporadically, formalist ideas are epitomized in the stage experiments of Russian avant-garde artists, most notably in the work of the celebrated director Vsevolod Meyerhold. He is well known for breaking with naturalism in theatre and for abandoning the staging paradigm established by yet another bard of the Russian avant-garde – Konstantin Stanislavsky. Meyerhold employs strategies that Shklovsky recognized as estrangement techniques – laying the staging devices bare, epic elements, and a montage of attractions (influenced by Eisenstein) – all of which emphasize the theatrical stage as a place of play and artifice that does not copy reality, but rather makes it strange. Meyerhold’s production notes, writings, and observations further contributed a possible theatrical side to the formalist theory of ostranenie. Various forms of stylization and conventionality (in Russian symbolism, Russian formalism, and Meyerhold), as well as devices of theatricality and metatheatre (Nikolai Evreinov, Russian futurists) also provide means of breaking theatrical illusions and encouraging new seeing of the habitual. Formalist literary theory and Meyerhold’s theatrical practice, for instance, offer the possibility of viewing theatrical intertextuality and the grotesque as estrangement phenomena. This suggests that Brecht’s theory and theatre might be just one model within a diverse range of avantgarde practices for making the familiar strange and also that similar estrangement strategies can be used in different genres and to various aesthetic and ideological ends. However, Shklovsky’s and Brecht’s estrangement theories are variations of the same artistic phenomenon or technique and both reveal the complex relationship between form and ideology and between art and life. In both theories, the goal of making the familiar strange – often by employing the aesthetics of naivety – is to enable a new seeing of the well known. In Brecht’s case – whether the subject of estrangement is the theatrical convention or society itself – the new seeing always unmasks a

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socio-political phenomenon. Shklovsky’s perceptibility in some cases enables rejuvenation of worn-out artistic conventions; in others it is not necessarily limited to aesthetic experience only, but has the potential to reach out into extra-artistic reality. Brecht’s concept targets the cognitive faculty of the receiver, while for Shklovsky a sensual experience also has a capacity to evoke perceptibility. Yet the reception process is central in completing the effect of estrangement, as both approaches demand that the audience be simultaneously distanced from the art work and drawn into it even more strongly in order to complete its meaning. Comparing himself to his rival Stanislavsky, Meyerhold wrote: ‘Konstantin Sergeyevich and I are like contractors building a tunnel, he works from one side, I from the other’ (Meyerhold Speaks 167). The affinities and differences between Shklovsky and Brecht could be described in a similar way. Even though not quite the polar opposites that Meyerhold and Stanislavsky were, Shklovsky and Brecht were also digging the same tunnel from different ends – the former engaged with the aesthetic aspects of estrangement, the latter focused on its ethical dimensions. This difference in emphasis between Shklovsky and Brecht has prompted one-sided interpretations of their estrangement theories based on ideological grounds: the former is seen as focused solely on aesthetic devices, while the latter has been identified as politically committed. Even though the ideological/political potential of ostranenie is often downplayed, its effect of perceptibility, as counteracting the automatization of perception, goes way beyond the notion of art for art’s sake and concerns various spheres of reality. Brecht tends to focus on the impact of theatre on social and political reality, but he is equally concerned with aesthetic devices. Moreover, Shklovsky’s concept calls for ‘form conscious’ devices that will make the meaning more complex and even impede the reception process, while Brecht’s approach is more often than not bound to a realist aesthetic framework as it aims to bring meaning closer to audiences’ understanding. Is the difference between the two concepts, then, rather in their aesthetic strategies of estrangement than in their ethical goals? Is it possible to isolate the aesthetics of estrangement from its – either intentional or unintentional – ethical underpinnings? And likewise, could ethical goals of estrangement be achieved without a set of aesthetic devices to carry the process through? A closer reading of both estrangement theories and of their authors’ creative works suggests that formal (i.e., aesthetic) choices might in themselves have strong political or ideological bearing.

Introduction

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The first chapter of this book deals with the role of estrangement in the historical avant-garde and with the specific features and qualities of estrangement in theatre and drama. It closely examines Shklovsky’s theoretical postulates and Brecht’s estrangement concepts and the ways in which they correspond to each other. Critical attention is also paid to the phenomena of theatrical estrangement such as theatricality, metatheatre, stylization, and epic strategies. The two middle chapters are concerned with the applications of these estrangement theories to various forms and strategies of avant-garde theatre. In chapter 2 Russian formalist theory is used as an analytical tool to discuss various forms of ostranenie in avantgarde practice including estrangement on the level of language in futurist performances as well as various distancing approaches in Meyerhold’s theatre that involve elements of grotesque, intertheatricality, and perspectival estrangement. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Brecht’s Verfremdung: its background, its development, and its specific dramaturgical and mise en scène features. The last chapter explores the relationship between form and ideology. It considers avant-garde distancing techniques as means of politicizing theatre and theatricalizing an extra-artistic reality against the backdrop of the political drama that was unfolding in both Germany and Russia in the 1930s. Discussing the context-specific nature of defamiliarization strategies and the relationship between art and reality, Brecht writes: ‘Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new’ (‘Popularity and Realism’ in Taylor, Aesthetics and Politics 82). Devices of making the familiar strange are destined to erode in one historical and cultural context and become rediscovered in another, to rejuvenate stale art forms and open the door to a fresh and more critical perception of reality. This book is an attempt at such rediscovery.3

1 The Knight’s Move: From Theory to Theatre

To explain the dynamics of literary history, Viktor Shklovsky uses the chess metaphor of the knight’s move (khod konia), claiming that literary succession is not a linear development ‘from father to son, but from uncle to nephew.’ I am borrowing this trope to further explain the network – or rather Borghesian labyrinth – of influences that connects critical, literary, and theatrical concepts of estrangement within the culture of the historical avant-garde. The knight’s move applies to the development of the estrangement concept in Russian formalist avant-garde, in the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, and in the theory and theatre of Bertolt Brecht. All these theories and practices emerged as products of a zeitgeist and as a result of inter- and intracultural cross-fertilization that gave way to new approaches in literature, visual arts, and particularly in theatre and drama. Avant-garde theatre turned to forms of stage tradition that were grounded in the principles of breaking the illusion, such as classical theatre, medieval spectacles, the Elizabethan and Spanish tradition, commedia dell’arte, the anti-illusionist tendencies of romanticism, and symbolist and expressionist theatre. The cultural context of the historical avant-garde conditioned the role of estrangement in art differently than in other periods of history. Kazimir Malevich’s painting of ‘black quadrant on white surface,’ Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the subconscious, Ernst Bloch’s utopian and Martin Heidegger’s archaic linguistic ontologies, and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity determined the modernist and avant-garde sense of the world. This rendered the conventional ways of artistic expression obsolete and inadequate to express anything new. Technological innovations marked this period, with the inventions of photography, the phonograph, film, cars, and telephones, and with the

The Knight’s Move: From Theory to Theatre 9

overall tendencies towards urbanization and industrialization. This led to new ways of representing the human body in art that broke with preexisting conventions and the concept of art as a mirror held up to nature. The symbiosis between body and machine was expressed in visual arts (constructivism, Max Ernst’s paintings), in dance (Jaques Dalcroze’s choreographies of new rhythmical awareness, Oscar Schlemmer’s famous performance Triadic Ballet), in drama (plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Karl Cm apek’s play R.U.R.), and in theatre (Erwin Piscator, Vsevolod Meyerhold). Both the theory of relativity and quantum theory brought about a shift in the perception of the world, which was paralleled in art through the challenging of the static relationship between the observer and the observed. It has become clear that with the unfolding of the presentation the audience is not left unchanged either. Cubism introduced a perspectival approach, where the viewer is no longer treated as an element outside of the work. Futurist art, as Roman Jakobson observes, introduced a new aesthetics where ‘everything is moving, everything is being quickly transformed,’ so that static, isolated perception in the nature of classical art becomes a pictorial anachronism (‘On Futurism’ 30). Avant-garde art tends to depart radically from mimetic principles and generate meaning, not as content but as form – through composition and montage. This practice of abolishing the form and content dichotomy, which prompted Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky to conclude that form is content, points out that aesthetic form is no longer considered to be a vehicle of meaning but is meaning itself. Artists looked for aesthetic means of challenging the passive, voyeuristic relationship between the audience and the artwork. Devices for distancing the familiar became tools for altering the reception process, which in theatre, by breaking the stage illusion, involved the spectator in the action intellectually, sensually, and at times even physically. The stage was no longer a place of mimetic illusions divided from reality by the proscenium arch, but rather a space where reality was made strange in order to be seen better. Language was no longer treated as objective and able to encompass all of nature. This sense of crisis of communication made artists search for forms that went beyond linear language, such as the futurist zaum or transrational language, Dadaist poetry, concrete poetry, and various experiments that explored the simultaneity of language, sound, image, and movement. Theatre scholar Erika FischerLichte observes that language, body, and perception were three aspects in which the shift in avant-garde consciousness and art took place. This triad in the avant-garde theatre transforms into the actor-text-spectator relationship (‘Wahrenehmung – Körper – Sprache’ 9).

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The Great War and the Soviet Revolution strongly influenced both the aesthetic and the political contexts of the historical avant-garde, bringing about the feeling of crisis. Modernist philosopher T.E. Hulme writes that ‘the re-emergence of geometrical art may be the precursor of the reemergence of the corresponding attitude towards the world, and so of the break-up with Renaissance humanistic attitude’ (78). He states that naturalist art expresses a ‘happy pantheistic relation between man and the outside world’ (78), while the tendency to abstraction brings about an attitude that is the exact contrary to naturalist art. The notion of art as defamiliarization in the historical avant-garde has some affinities with romanticism. Both periods share the cult of novelty and the idea of art as making the familiar strange. They also have in common the tendency to challenge pre-existing concepts of beauty. Moreover, the role of the avant-garde artist as a figure at the forefront of social change echoes the romantic myth of the artist as prophet. Novalis claimed that art should make objects strange, and yet at the same time familiar and attractive (301). However, while the romantics indulged in discovering the almost mystical strangeness of the well known, the modernists displayed a sense of discontinuity between the individual and the world. The difference between the romantics and the historical avantgarde is embedded in their ideas of the world. One of the most prominent theorists of the avant-garde and modernism, Mathei Calinescu, describes the split between feudalism and romanticism from the ideological point of view of the God versus Man relationship, where Man is viewed as the sole hero who makes and transcends historical processes. As for the avant-garde, Calinescu observes that ‘historically, the emergence and the development of the avant-garde seem to be closely linked to the crisis of Man in the modern desacralised world’ (125). The point of view avant-garde and modernist art brings about through defamiliarization devices is rooted in the fragmentation of self, in the sense of separation between the world and I: Distorting and often eliminating man’s image from their work, disrupting the normal vision, dislocating the syntax, the cubists and the futurists were certainly among the first artists to have the consciousness that Man had become an obsolete concept, and that the rhetoric of humanism had to be discarded. (125)

The art of modernism, including the avant-garde, relied on devices that showed reality as deformed, which Ortega y Gasset recognized as dehu-

The Knight’s Move: From Theory to Theatre 11

manizing. Strategies of distancing the familiar were used to express this sense of the world where the notion of Man became suspect. Devices of defamiliarization employed to distort image, shifting the conventions of both representation and reception and challenging the communicational potential of language, become strategies through which the avant-garde reacted to and formed its relationship with reality. This aesthetic approach in the first place became a way of thinking, a lifestyle, or a means of seeing and comprehending the world. The concept of defamiliarization was an overt mark of crisis in the consciousness of the epoch, but also a way of redeeming the individual’s relationship with the world (Shklovsky) and intervening, changing reality (Brecht). The devices for distancing the familiar were within the context of the historical avant-garde tools for dehumanizing art, and a means through which artists believed they could humanize reality. However, the historical avant-garde was a unity of opposite approaches: committed/autonomous; rational/irrational; scientific/primitive; mass culture/hermetic culture; individual/collective. The atmosphere of the period wavered between the utopia of futurism and the celebration of a new social order epitomized in Vladimir Tatlin’s sculpture Monument of the Third International on the one hand and the dystopia envisioned in Evgenii Zamayatin’s novel We and later Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World on the other. It does not really come as a surprise that avant-garde artists often appropriated the devices of making the familiar strange to very different aesthetic and ideological ends. The sense of relativism and transition makes the estrangement aesthetic a logical choice that enables a dialectical relationship between messages and codes. It opens, as Umberto Eco observes, ‘new semiotic possibilities,’ forcing the audience to reconsider the usual codes and their interpretation. Eco stresses that to change the semantic systems means ‘to change the way in which culture sees the world’ (A Theory of Semiotics 274). The art of distancing the familiar, in its most ambitious incarnations within the historical avant-garde, strove to reach that goal, changing aesthetic conventions to correspond to reality marked by images of trenches on one side and dreams of a new man and a new society on the other. It aimed to radically extend the domain of art by changing the system of artistic creation and reception, relating to reality on a new level. Brecht’s Russian Connection The major estrangement theories and practices that are attributed to the

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Russian Formalist School and Russian avant-garde theatre and those attributed to Brecht do not emerge in isolation from one another. On the contrary, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the early 1930s a vibrant intercultural exchange took place particularly between Moscow and Berlin. In a way, Brecht’s Verfremdung and Shklovsky’s ostranenie are embodied and paralleled in the avant-garde theatrical practices of the two capitals that had a lot in common, including the culture of the avant-garde and the experience of totalitarianism. A photo from the First International Dada Exhibition in Berlin depicts two well-known German visual artists, Georg Grosz and John Heartfield, holding a slogan that says: ‘Art is dead / Long live the new machine-art of Tatlin.’ After he created the renowned sculpture, Monument of the Third International, Russian constructivist painter Vladimir Tatlin became very influential among German Dadaists and other artists who favoured the so-called Produktion or Maschinenkunst – machine art – as a new art based on the construction and interaction of different materials in tune with the spirit of modernity and urbanity. The Dada exhibit and the special issue of the art journal Ararat dedicated to new tendencies in Russian visual art – constructivism and supermatism – had a great impact on avant-garde German movements, particularly on Dadaism and new objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), whose most prominent artists included painters Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckman. In turn, Russian neoprimitivist painters Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova were very close in form and sensibility to German expressionist artists. Painter Wassily Kandinsky and graphic designer El Lissitzky, who combined supermatism and constructivism, leaving a lasting impact on twentieth-century design and typography, spent a long time in Berlin, yet they kept Russia up-todate about new developments in German avant-garde art. In the spheres of film and theatre, the relationship between the two avant-garde cultures was equally symbiotic. The popularity of Russian cinema in Germany started with Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin in 1926, and followed with his movie Strike, while at the Berlin premiere of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s film Storm over Asia police had to intervene to handle large crowds of movie goers. Plays of the leading German dramatists Gerhart Hauptmann and Frank Wedekind were produced in Moscow immediately following their Berlin premieres. Along with the emerging symbolist playwrights in Russia and expressionist playwrights in Germany, theatre directors including Germans Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner, and Russians Vsevolod Meyerhold, Evgeny Vakhtangov, and Alexander Tairov started to search for a new stage language that would

The Knight’s Move: From Theory to Theatre 13

correspond to the new dramaturgical tendencies based on estrangement devices. When in the early 1920s Tairov’s theatre company came to Berlin to perform E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Princess Brambila and Jean Racine’s Fedra, with the star of Russian stage Alisa Koon in the leading role, Russian theatre sealed its reputation as a forebear of theatrical innovation. Also Latvian theatre director Asja Lacis, her friend Walter Benjamin, and German theatre critic Herbert Ihering spread the legend of Meyerhold as an ingenious director. Meyerhold was indeed at home in Berlin; he was friends with famous German directors Leopold Jessner and Max Reinhardt and he discovered jazz, the foxtrot, and cabaret in this city, as well as other forms and materials that he incorporated in his theatrical productions. In Russian and German cultures, there was a strong sense of connection between art and social life. Both German and Russian avant-gardes were heavily politicized and thus unfolded almost as a revolutionary process. After the Great War, it became clear that by and large the avantgarde artists of Moscow and Berlin embraced leftist ideas, feeling close to the Revolution, and seeing themselves as revolutionaries of culture and spirit. While the Soviet avant-garde indulged in the success and ideals of the October Revolution, Germany, with its strong leftist political tradition, was believed to have become the new centre of the proletarian revolution. Yet Berlin in the 1920s was both the most important outpost of the Third International – the proletarian network aiming to spread socialist revolution across the world – and a safe haven for Russian emigrants who had fled from the Red Army. Shklovsky, who had not endeared himself to the Soviet regime, was among the Russian exiles in Berlin too. He did not last long as an émigré though; after he spent some time in Berlin, Shklovsky apologized to the Soviet authorities and returned to his home country. Berlin and Moscow were stages where two major spectacles of the twentieth-century European history and culture took place – the performance of avant-garde estrangement and the drama of totalitarianism. The Russian avant-garde is the cross-cultural connection that most strongly influenced Brecht’s concept of defamiliarization. In her book Revolutionaries in the Theater, Christine Kiebuzinska stresses the impact of Russian formalism and Russian avant-garde theatre on the development of Brecht’s estrangement theory and practice: Brecht’s ideas penetrated Western theatre and literature before the writings of Russian formalist critics were translated systematically. As a result, Brecht

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Theatre of Estrangement is often credited with creating attitudes and theories that were very much the subject of discussions among the Russian formalists and which were later expanded to include aesthetic function, norm and values as social facts by the Prague Linguistic Circle. Because Brecht knew how to borrow wisely and selectively, what seems to be original in Brecht is often an adaptation of someone else’s methods. For example, his famous V-effekt had already been part of the methods of the Russian revolutionary theatre of Meyerhold. (76)

While living in Berlin, Brecht had quite a bit of exposure to the experiments of the Russian avant-garde. In 1926 Brecht saw the camera-eye films of Dziga Vertov, as well as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and encountered the famous and powerful estrangement device – the montage of attractions. Eisenstein’s movie even inspired Brecht to write a poem about the ill-fated marines. In 1930 Sergei Tretiakov’s play Roar China, which had first premiered in 1926 in Moscow directed by Meyerhold’s assistant Vassily Fyodorov, came to Berlin and received mixed reviews. Brecht was one of its defenders, praising the experimental and the socio-political aspect of the performance. Brecht also received information about Russian avant-garde theatre from journalist Bernard Reich, playwright Sergei Tretiakov, Asja Lacis, and Walter Benjamin. In his Moscow Diary, Benjamin describes performances he saw in the Russian capital, including Meyerhold’s famous staging of Gogol’s The Inspector General. In her memoir, Professional Revolutionary (Revolutionär im Beruf ), Asja Lacis, who also worked in Berlin from 1928 to 1930 as a Soviet representative for documentary films, describes her conversations with Brecht about the theatre of Meyerhold, Tairov, Mayakovsky, and other directors and writers of the Russian avant-garde. She and Brecht collaborated on the 1924 staging of Marlow’s Edward II in Munich. Lacis, who directed Soviet revolutionary spectacles and worked with Meyerhold, served as the assistant director on the set of Edward II and imported some of her Soviet theatre experience. The soldier scenes of Edward II, staged by Lacis, have much more in common with the mass revolutionary spectacles she had previously directed in the Soviet Union than with the German avant-garde tradition of Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner. The faces of the soldiers were covered in white make-up and had a clownlike character. They resembled the masks of clowns like Karl Valentin and Charlie Chaplin, but they also evoked a sense of the spooky grotesque often seen in Meyerhold’s theatrical productions. Although the styles of estrangement in Brecht’s and Meyerhold’s the-

The Knight’s Move: From Theory to Theatre 15

atre differ, Brecht’s theory in many instances echoes Meyerhold’s innovations. Both directors insisted on adapting classics in order to make them communicate better to the contemporary world and worked towards renegotiating the role of the audience in theatre. They both turned to Oriental theatrical traditions (Meyerhold as early as 1910 in staging Molière’s Don Juan) in order to violate canonized conventions of the Occidental theatre. They had a number of distancing strategies in common, including episodic dramaturgy, which Brecht used in his playwriting, while Meyerhold often segmented the dramatic text to stage it in short fragmented scenes. In Meyerhold’s acting method of biomechanics and in Brecht’s Verfremdung approach to theatre, the actor was asked to perform a role, showing to the audience the demarcation between the character and the performer. Also, Meyerhold’s notion of a conscious attitude or pose in the presentation of a stage figure was very close to Brecht’s concept of gestus. In short, versions of Brecht’s key concepts that shaped his Verfremdung methodology were often foreshadowed in Meyerhold’s theatrical strategies.1 Brecht’s first two visits to Russia – in 1932 for the premiere of his film Kuhle Wampe and in 1935 – came almost too late. The formalist school had already been proclaimed decadent, and Meyerhold, the star director of the Soviet revolutionary theatre, was slowly falling into political disgrace as the cultural politics of Andrei Zhdanov – Stalin’s main authority on culture – imposed Socialist realism on Russian literature, theatre, and art, subjecting leading writers, directors, and visual artists to attack. Even though Brecht encountered the last remains of a movement he had heard so much about in the early and mid 1920s, he saw two performances that had a crucial impact on the formulation of his estrangement concept – Nikolai Okhlopkov’s staging of Nikolai Pogodin’s play Aristocrats at the Realist Theatre, which combined realist dialogue and costumes with a technique of stylization from Asian theatrical tradition, and the Beijing Opera performance by Mei-Lan-Fang. Okhlopkov, who was trained by Meyerhold, based his theatrical work on the aesthetics of making the familiar strange. Two aspects of the show are particularly relevant for Brecht’s development of Verfremdung – the technique of laying staging devices bare and his emphasis on the audience’s imagination in completing the production process. In the staging of Aristocrats, the process of breaking the illusion was achieved through the presence of stagehands dressed in black body stockings, who supplied actors with props and carried out stage effects, causing snowflakes made of white confetti to fall, in full view of the audience. In one scene

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Okhlopkov’s stagehands knelt down and bent over, covered with a cloth, to represent a table, shifting the stable delineation between body and object on stage. In another – where the characters engaged in an underwater struggle – the stagehands, by gently raising and lowering a canvas cloth painted with a design of waves to represent water, foregrounded the dynamics between theatrical illusion and distancing. They were simultaneously creating the stage illusion and unmasking it – revealing the means of its production. This type of making stage effects by laying the staging devices bare – where stagehands are not hidden but do their work in the full view of the audience – came from kabuki theatre. As Marjorie Hoover observes, the performance was executed ‘in a childlike naiveté, which laid bare the illusory means employed, thus forcing the audience to complete in imagination the reality alluded to’ (48). Pogodin’s play dealt with a well-known Soviet subject – the building of the Baltic–White Sea Canal. The Soviet state mobilized people with criminal records to work on the project – from thieves and prostitutes to politically unfitted intellectuals. The socio-political message of the play and its production is unambiguous in emphasizing the benefits of ‘the rehabilitation of society’s derelicts through confrontation with nature and a collective effort toward a goal’ (Hoover 48). The theatricality and stylization of the performance did not take away from the play’s political dimensions, even though Okhlopkov involved defamiliarization techniques in more radical ways than Brecht was used to. Brecht liked the show so much that years later he urged Okhlopkov to revive it, failing to ever see Pogodin’s play and Okhlopkov’s show in a new light. In the context of Stalin’s Russia and within the dystopic reality of Soviet gulags, the positive socio-political dimension of the show turned into its own nightmarish caricature. In retrospect, the childlike naivety established through means of theatricality became an involuntary expression of political naivety that celebrated a slave labour camp without questioning. Even though Asian theatre is often considered to be Brecht’s most important cross-cultural connection, it too came to Brecht, to a great extent, through the Russian avant-garde. Russian avant-garde directors as well as German directors, Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner, used elements of Asian theatrical traditions from 1914 and continued experimenting with them in the early 1920s. Even though Brecht was exposed to these theatrical techniques through German and Russian sources, his first direct encounter with authentic Beijing Opera took place during his visit to Moscow. After the experience of the Beijing Opera performance, where estrangement devices had more of a traditional and ceremonial

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character, Brecht wrote his famous essay ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Theatre’ (Brecht on Theatre 91–100). In this essay he outlines some of the most important aspects of defamiliarization in acting, including the idea of using elements from a foreign tradition as means of rejuvenating Western theatre forms. Very different theatre artists of the historical avant-garde turned to Chinese, Japanese, and Indian dramatic conventions, including Alexander Tairov, Evgeny Vakhtangov, and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Brecht’s essay calls attention to the estrangement strategies in Beijing Opera and their application to the Western theatre, which had in fact already been put in practice in Russian avant-garde productions. In the article ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Theatre,’ written in 1936, Brecht introduces the term Verfremdung (alientation) for the first time. An earlier version of this article, written in 1935, differs from the later essay in that it uses the term Fremdheit (strangeness) instead of Verfremdung to explain the same theatrical phenomenon. Even though Brecht had inclined towards estrangement forms and strategies in theatre and drama since the early 1920s, the full formulation of his concept coincided with his discovery of the neologism Verfremdung. In an early article, ‘From a Dramaturgy’ (Aus Einer Dramaturgie), Brecht writes that the playwright’s task is to employ aesthetic devices that could achieve the effect of ‘strangeness.’ The more wonder (Merkwürdikeit) the playwright evokes in the spectator, the richer the work. Later he uses the terms Seltsamkeit (strangeness, oddity) referring to the characteristics of a theatrical performance and Befremdung (shock, surprise) as an effect that the performance should have on the audience. Shortly before he appropriates the famous neologism, Brecht uses the terms Erstaunlichkeit (astonishment) and Befremdlichkeit (unfamiliarity). However, none of these terms fully expresses the core of Brecht’s concept, which is not about presenting the strange, foreign, and odd, but about unmasking the foreign and ‘unnatural’ in what is assumed to be familiar: We are by no means supposed to understand the word strange (fremd) as odd (seltsam). It is not to our benefit to present things in the realm of curiosity and as actually incomprehensible; since, on the contrary, they have to become comprehensible. There is a distinction between the ‘natural’ and ‘foreign’ in our heads, whence the foreign and unmanageable is simply understood as unnatural, since it does not fit in our familiar concepts of nature. (Schriften II 212)

The appropriate naming of the concept Brecht had already been devel-

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oping was more than putting a label on a finished product. The more adequate terminology enabled a greater precision in the elaboration of the concept and became a trademark of his theatre of epic estrangement. In his memoir, Bernard Reich claims that the term Verfremdung was first spelled out to Brecht, in very good German, in 1935 by Sergei Tretiakov, who was translating Shklovsky’s neologism ostranenie to describe the show of Chinese performer Mei-Lan-Fang (371–2). Soon after this encounter, Brecht appropriated the neologism that translates into German as Verfremdung. Since Shklovsky coined this neologism in 1917, many reprints of his work have appeared. A copy of Victor Erlich’s book Russian Formalism: History and Doctrine, which came out in 1956 shortly before Brecht’s death, is in Brecht’s library in former East Berlin. We do not know if Tretiakov revealed more about Russian formalism than just the term during his encounters with Brecht.2 After his visit to the Soviet Union, Brecht indeed wrote some of his key articles on Verfremdung in acting, showing that what started as an idea in the 1920s became an elaborate concept in the 1930s. Nevertheless, no matter how much Brecht borrowed from the Russian avant-garde theatre and literary criticism, he shaped and adapted the material to fit his own vision of theatrical estrangement. Even though there is a lot of common ground, Brecht’s and Shklovsky’s approaches to estrangement differ – they are in a way two aesthetic variants of the same phenomenon. Making the Stone Stony: Ostranenie, Aktualizace, Verfremdung In his famous 1917 article ‘Art as Device’ (Isskustvo kak priëm) Shklovsky defined his concept of estrangement: Art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The aim of art is to offer the perceptibility of things, as they are perceived, not as they are known. The device of art is to make things strange (ostranenie), to make forms difficult (zatrudnënnaya forma), increasing the complexity and the length of reception, for the process of reception in art is self-sufficient and needs to be prolonged; art is the device of bringing an object to life, while the object itself is not important. (14)

When Shklovsky coined the term ostranenie, he was naming the concept of distancing the familiar already present in various forms throughout the history of art. Yet, Shklovsky’s work outlined the notion of defamiliar-

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ization, not as a mere by-product of aesthetic representation, but as the core of art and its reception. Ostranenie is established through form-conscious devices and by taking material out of its habitual context and organizing it into an aesthetic object. Ostranenie is a device of separating art and life that enables the perception of the well known as if seen for the first time. The term ostranenie is translated to English as defamiliarization, distancing, or estrangement. Czech structuralists, primarily Jan Mukarovský and Bohuslav Havránek, introduced the notion of aktualizace in their theories of poetic and practical language.3 Aktualizace (foregrounding), the Czech version of making the familiar strange, is based on the principles of subverting the receiver’s expectations by violating the automatized aesthetic canon, and/or the norm of the standard utterance. The notion of aktualizace also includes the process of making something topical, which may not always result in the process of ‘making strange.’ This is the case, for instance, with the reaffirmation of Shakespeare’s work at the beginning of romanticism and against the backdrop of classicist tradition. The concept of making the familiar strange has never figured as a static principle, with an unchangeable set of rules. It evolved within the work of its theorists, showing its variety and multitude. Shklovsky’s own thinking on this concept oscillates between an ostranenie that brings about a new perception of reality and ostranenie as an intertextual phenomenon. The notion of ostranenie developed from Shklovsky’s principle of device and effect to Jurij Tynjanov’s notion of artwork as a system; it is complex whole characterized by interrelations and dynamic tensions among the components. Tynjanov’s studies in parody point to the intertextual dimension of ostranenie, seeing parody as a form that, by making fun of conventions turned into degenerate clichés, enables a more perceptible set of conventions to emerge. In that light the phenomenon of making the familiar strange becomes the spiritus movens of artistic changes. Aktualizace, which shares common ground with Tynjanov’s notion, places the concept into a semiostructuralist framework. Shklovsky’s mechanical principle of material and device, in which the material is the extra-artistic phenomenon utilized through artistic devices into an aesthetic object, is replaced with the concept of sign. The notion of aesthetic sign elaborated by the structuralists, especially Jan Mukarovský, is an evolution of Shklovsky’s mechanistic concept and establishes the basis for a more complex grasp of the defamiliarization phenomenon in art. While aesthetic devices liberate the material from its practical purpose and isolate it from its extra-artistic aspects, the concept of sign stresses

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the systematic and structural nature of an aesthetic phenomenon and its relation to the extra-artistic reality. Mukarovský, who developed the three-part concept of linguistic sign (signifier, signified, and referent), introduces the notion of functions after the Bühlerian communication model.4 According to Mukarovský an artwork is dominated by its aesthetic function, and it does not exclude the presence of other functions. The notion of making the familiar strange is not seen simply as the result of a certain aesthetic treatment of material, but as depending on the hierarchy of the components and their relation to the dominant component within an artistic structure. The structuralists’ concept of defamiliariztion is viewed within the framework of an aesthetic system and through the relation of this system to other structures (ideological, social, political, and so on). Although the notion of aktualizace has been conceived within the linguistic discourse, the structuralists’ interest in theatre and other artistic fields enables a multidisciplinary study of signs, suggesting that the transfer of concepts from one medium to the other can be a fruitful adventure. Brecht elaborated the notion of defamiliarization as the concept of Verfremdung, which became one of the main trademarks of his epic or non-Aristotelian theatre. Although ostranenie is translated into German as Verfremdung, Brecht’s concept embodies a different variant of making the familiar strange. Verfremdung is a calculated, Socratic device to distance the spectator in a certain direction of comprehension. It is at the same time a construction of disbelief and belief. Through the devices of Verfremdung, Brecht breaks the illusion of reality on the stage, to establish the illusion of breaking the illusion. Verfremdung was not present from the very beginning in Brecht’s theory, but developed together with his theoretical and practical work. In the concept of Verfremdung an amalgam of influences can be found, among which are Shklovsky’s ostranenie, Russian avant-garde theatre, Piscator’s ideas, Chinese theatre, and some theoretical notions present in Aristotle, Friedrich Schiller, G.W.F. Hegel, and Karl Marx. The relationship between content and form in Brecht’s Verfremdung and the economy of devices that epic dramaturgy and staging involve to bring meaning closer to the audience’s understanding also resemble some key theoretical notions of Russian literary constructivism. Brecht’s ideas parallel the constructivist theory of unity of all the elements of a literary work, which challenges the artificial delineation between content and form, as well as ‘the postulate of the maximum “weight” of meaning in the smallest possible textual unite’ (Mozejko 61).5

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The word Verfremdung is most often translated into English as ‘alienation,’ which causes confusion in interpreting Brecht’s ideological beliefs and his aesthetic of estrangement. The German word for alienation is Entfremdung or Entäußerung (in Russian otchuzhdenie). Entfremdung is one of the central notions of Hegel’s theory, which was later revised by Marx. The term ‘alienation,’ however, bears different meanings in Hegel and Marx. In Marxism, Entfremdung has a negative connotation meaning the alienation of a person from his/her own self and from the products of her/his work. Marx’s version of estrangement is rooted in Hegel’s concept, but modified and taken out of the framework of Hegelian idealism into the philosophy of dialectical materialism. The term Entfremdung in Hegel’s work embodies his theory of knowledge and is a positive epistemological device.6 Brecht defines Verfremdung in Hegelian terms as the negation of negation in the 1938 note ‘Dialectic and Verfremdung.’7 He also uses the term Entfremdung, which is often confused with his theatrical concept of making the familiar strange. He employs Verfremdung devices to show the alienation (Entfremdung) that the social and political power structure creates. So Brecht’s Verfremdung, as a Hegelian concept, has a positive connotation and is an epistemological device. The alienation (Entfremdung) in society is habitualized, no longer perceptible, taken for granted, understood as natural or as inevitable. Verfremdung in theatre shows alienation (Entfremdung) as a matter of causality, as a historical and alterable situation, not as a human condition. Therefore, alienation (Entfremdung) is the subject matter of Brecht’s theatre, while Verfremdung (estrangement or in Russian ostranenie) is the methodological procedure of representing and distancing that subject matter.8 The specific characteristics of the three theoretical approaches to defamiliarization in art – ostranenie, aktualizace, Verfremdung – show that when we talk about making the familiar strange we are not necessarily referring to one and the same concept. The principle of making strange is the umbrella that covers at least a few variations of this concept or even a few different concepts of distancing. Ostranenie, aktualizace, and Verfremdung are by no means synonyms; they have in common the process of making the familiar strange, as a point of departure, but differ as concepts in either their devices or in their goals, and sometimes in both categories. Keir Elam in his book The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama points to the common ground between Brecht’s Verfremdung, the structuralist aktualizace (foregrounding), and Shklovsky’s ostranenie. Elam observes that aktualizace, despite its origins as a linguistic concept, ‘is essentially a spatial metaphor and thus well adapted to the theatrical text’ (18). He

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stresses the transition of the defamiliarization concept from a literary and linguistic context to theatre, connecting formalist, structuralist, and Brechtian principles: Aktualizace derives from, and bears a strong family resemblance to the Russian Formalist notion of ostranenie (defamiliarisation or making strange). It is not only the granting of the unusual prominence or autonomy to aspects of the performance which serves to foreground them, but the distancing of those aspects from their codified function. When theatrical semiosis is alienated, made strange rather than automatic, the spectator is encouraged to take note of the semiotic means, to become aware of the sign-vehicle and its operations. This was, as it has been suggested, one of the aims of Brechtian epic theatre. (17–18)

The concept of making the familiar strange has undergone a transition from formalism to structuralism and to Brecht as it moved from the context of literature to the context of theatre. This transition does not mean that one notion mixed into another more superior notion and wove its way towards the medium of theatre; this transition instead opened up a wider field for theorizing defamiliarization in art. The affinity among ostranenie, aktualizace, and Verfremdung that Elam highlights is certainly present, but what matters more is the divergence among them, the specificity of each concept that distinguishes it from the other variants. This is not the first attempt to draw a demarcation line between estrangement concepts, especially when it comes to Shklovsky’s ostranenie and Brecht’s Verfremdung. In his study Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value, Jurij Striedter finds in Brecht’s Verfremdung the embodiment of defamiliarization in theatre. His brief comparison of Brecht’s and Shklovsky’s notion of distancing the familiar implies that both operate with the same concept in two different media. Thus the main divergence between ostranenie and Verfremdung would be that they apply to different genres. Striedter suggests that Brecht’s Verfremdung fully explains all the possibilities of estrangement in theatre and drama, overlooking numerous stage experiments in estrangement that by far surpass the framework of Brecht’s concept. In her comparison between ostranenie and Verfremdung, Christine Kiebuzinska claims that the main difference between ostranenie and Verfremdung is in Brecht’s approach to aesthetic reception: What Brecht accomplished was to synthesize the conventionalization of the-

The Knight’s Move: From Theory to Theatre 23 atrical signs into a theory of aesthetic reception in the theatre that took into account the spectator’s aesthetic response and intellectual engagement. It is in his attention to the spectator and to the process of aesthetic reception that Brecht goes beyond the Russian formalists. (77)

Kiebuzinska rightly points out the key role audience plays in completing the estrangement process, but giving prominence to Brecht’s Verfremdung undermines the complexity of Shklovsky’s notion of perceptibility. The two estrangement strategies involve the audience in different ways: Shklovsky’s perceptibility allows for a freer interplay of sensual, intellectual, and even metaphysical experiences in the reception process, while Brecht tries to manipulate the reception – with various degrees of success – so as to trigger the audience’s intellectual engagement and communicate a socio-politically charged message. The other attempts to distinguish ostranenie and Verfremdung mostly point to the divergences on political and philosophical grounds. Russian and Marxist scholars ‘obliterate the traces’ that tie Brecht’s Verfremdung to Shklovsky’s ostranenie (or at least show Brecht’s notion as superior) in order to make a clear distinction between the Marxist playwright and the ‘decadent’ formalist thinker. German scholars also seem prone to place Verfremdung as far away from ostranenie as possible, in order to root Brecht’s concept within the context of local tradition, primarily the ideas of Hegel and Marx. Political and philosophical demarcations between Brecht’s and Shklovsky’s notions have often assumed a linguistic guise. In her article ‘Brecht’s Soviet Connection: Tretiakov,’ Marjorie L. Hoover points to the effort among the critics in the Soviet Union to disassociate Brecht’s aesthetic from formalism: Fradkin as early as 1956 substituted for ‘ostranenie’ the term ‘otchuzhdenie’ (literally ‘Entfremdung’). Fradkin insists, Brecht’s ‘priëm otchuzhdenia’ (die Methode der Entfremdung) has nothing in common with the infamous formalist theory of ‘ostranenie.’ Fradkin and other Soviet critics – Lev Kliuev, who argues against Fradkin, for one – use further variations to translate ‘ostranenie’; for example, not ‘ot-’ but ‘o-,’ ‘ochuzdenie.’ (44)

These critics view Brecht’s concept as the ‘ideologically correct’ version of the estrangement aesthetics rooted in Marxism. In the article ‘Verfremdung,’ Jan Knopf also stresses the distinction between Shklovsky and Brecht on both a linguistic and a philosophical basis. He rightly ties Verfremdung to Hegel and treats the notion of distanc-

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ing the familiar as an epistemological device to express a Marxist content. Nevertheless, he argues that Verfremdung is not ostranenie because the terms are not synonyms. For Knopf, the correct German translation of the formalist term ostranenie is Seltsamkeit. The term Seltsamkeit in English means ‘strangeness,’ ‘oddity,’ which in Russian translates as stranost. Knopf’s translation choice is problematic since the term ‘strangeness’ is descriptive, taking into account a certain quality or state, but not the process of turning something familiar into something strange, which both the prefix o- in Russian and the prefix ver- in German suggest. Both Verfremdung and o-stranenie are terms that stress a continuous process, a transition from one point to another – from the point of familiarity with the represented object to the point where this familiarity is challenged and renegotiated. Thus, ‘strangeness’ is just one aspect of the e-strangement phenomenon. In both Brecht’s and Shklovsky’s cases, the other aspect is familiarity – the recognition of the well known; yet, the well known is seen in a new light (Shklovsky) or in its true state (Brecht). What these interpretations overlook is that both theories are modelled after specific artistic practices. Shklovsky formulated his theory after examining a variety of case studies – from Miguel de Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, and Lev Tolstoy to Russian futurism and Sergei Eisenstein’s films. Likewise, Brecht’s theory emerged as the result of his theatrical and dramatic practice inspired by a variety of artistic sources – from Elizabethan theatre and the paintings of Brueghel the Elder to Beijing Opera, Russian avant-garde theatre, Piscator, and German cabaret. The distinction between Verfremdung and ostranenie is rooted primarily in different artistic renderings of the estrangement concept that are not necessarily bound to one specific medium of representation. Political and ideological demarcations between Brecht’s and Shklovsky’s notions are often the results of various interpretations of the concepts and their aesthetic resonance in different political and cultural contexts, rather than eminent characteristics through which Verfremdung and ostranenie could be fully differentiated from one another. Aesthetics of Naivety Paul Klee’s drawing Fishing (1919) serves as an illustration of the aesthetics of naivety in which estrangement phenomena in art are often grounded. The drawing depicts a fisherman from the perspective of the fish, so that the fisherman seems grotesquely tall and disproportionate. The viewer of this work, executed in the two-dimensional simplicity of a

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child’s drawing, is forced to see beyond the fishing theme, and into the comic yet disturbing metaphor of violence. In his essay ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ (1796), Friedrich Schiller recognizes two types of naivety – one springs from the cast of mind, from the way of thinking, and moves the audience (Naïve der Gesinnung), and the other comes from surprise and gives pleasure (Naïve der Überraschung). The latter is to some extent the naivety of making the familiar strange that Brecht’s and Shklovsky’s concepts share, but often use in different ways. Manfred Wekwerth, who worked with Brecht, notes that a few days before his death (1956) and while staging The Days of the Commune (Die Tage der Commune), the playwright expressed dissatisfaction with his theoretical postulates, and claimed that the aesthetic of naivety should be considered the key principle of epic theatre. In Brecht’s case, it is the naivety of simplicity that takes the audience by surprise.9 Naivety is not only a stylistic quality; it hides the author’s political agenda as well. Brecht’s Verfremdung is a strategy to represent material as if the author has little previous knowledge of it. In other words, it is as if the author has no premeditated judgment and interest in the material, while in fact he knows exactly what to present and why. The sender – playwright, director, or actor – is in the role of a narrator, a passer-by who reports on a car accident, without anything to gain or lose in the presentation, except the interest of the audience, as described in Brecht’s ‘Street Scene’ (in Willett 121–30). In Plato’s Dialogues, Socrates uses this type of naivety, questioning the attitudes of his interlocutors to lead them to correct conclusions. Brecht takes a naive attitude towards the subject matter in his plays and stage presentations in order to show it in a new light and to unmask political contradictions in society. This attitude also implies the pretence that there is no direct calculation or strategy to affect the reception, so that the audience has the impression of coming to terms with both the work and reality on its own. To execute this ‘naive’ Verfremdung, Brecht introduces the notion of narration within dramatic and theatrical structures, through epic elements such as titles and summaries for the scenes that add to the character of storytelling. In performance, the narrative quality is also present through direct addresses to the audience, when the actor as stage figure is at the same time the embodiment of the character and outside the role narrating it (verbally and physically). This technique triggers Schiller’s naivety of surprise in the audience, which sees the constellations of well-known situations and patterns shown from a different and uncommon perspective. Further, it aims to invite the spectator to undergo a journey from sur-

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prise to comprehension. Naivety as the core of Brecht’s Verfremdung has an epistemological function, through which the spectator realizes his/ her own naivety in taking the world for granted. Shklovsky’s approach is closest to Brecht when he explains ostranenie by describing defamiliarization techniques in the literature of Lev Tolstoy. Shklovsky calls attention to Tolstoy’s tendency to describe objects as if he had no previous knowledge of them. He particularly analyses strategies of naivety in Tolstoy’s short story Kholstomer where the effect of estrangement is used as a means of social criticism and established through a shift in perspective – namely, Tolstoy describes the world as seen through the eyes of a horse. Yet, Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization and its inherent childlike naivety most strongly depart from Brecht’s concept when it comes to the formalist demarcation between poetic and practical language and the idea of zaum (trans-sense language). The notion of ostranenie becomes a means of shifting and breaking standard relationships between word and meaning, object and image. This aspect of ostranenie is not only bound to the realm of poetry, but can also be used to describe the aesthetics of surrealism, the absurd and the grotesque, for instance, in cases when the conventional relations between the signifier and signified are subverted. This kind of naivety does not reside in the simplicity of perspective but in its playful openness, in the sense of surprise invoked by a naivety that believes in the beauty ‘of the fortuitous meeting of a sewing machine and umbrella on an operating table’ (Lotreamont, in Breton 275). The notion of Verfremdung is tied to reality in order to provide historical and ideological grounding for the theatricalized material, and is therefore aesthetically limited to the naivety of simplicity and a more or less realist framework. Through Brecht’s Verfremdung, the individual’s relationship to reality is renegotiated, while ostranenie allows the possibility of recreating this relationship without real-life logic being the necessary parameter. This does not imply that estrangement phenomena in art that exceed the boundaries of Verfremdung are incapable of conveying a political dimension; in such a case, for instance, Pablo Picasso’s famous antiwar painting Guernica, where images of people, animals, and buildings overlap in a highly stylized depiction of the Guernica massacre, would be no more than a ‘purely’ formal experiment. Making and Unmaking Illusions: Estrangement in Theatre and Drama Even though there are affinities among estrangement strategies in visual art, literature, poetry, film, and drama, the process of theatrical estrange-

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ment cannot be fully comprehended without understanding the specific nature of theatre. From its dithyramb origin to the present day, breaking the illusion, distancing the familiar, suspending make-believe has been the art of theatre as much as creating illusion and embodying as-if worlds. Pierre Corneille’s play Theatrical Illusions (L’illusion comique) deals with the notion of theatrical illusion and its power, when one of the main protagonists searching for his son finds him in the theatre performing a tragedy. The father confuses the theatrical illusion with reality, considering his son’s stage death to be true. Corneille’s play ends with the words of the magician, who, reassuring the father, points out that creating a convincing sense of make-believe is theatre’s great art. Nevertheless, Corneille did not follow completely the words he put in the mouth of this character. While the theatre company in the play created an almost perfectly convincing illusion for the father character, who represented a naive spectator, the playwright, by the same token, pushed the stage illusion to the breaking point for the actual audience. It is not possible to glorify the notion of theatrical illusion in drama or on stage without arriving at the verge of breaking it. Yet anti-illusionist drama and theatre cannot sustain itself without some illusionist components, which are made to be broken. Make-believe is theatre’s essence and its great paradox, while the interplay between illusion and breaking the illusion is theatre’s great operation. In his study of Russian formalism, Jurij Striedter discusses Shklovsky’s approach to theatrical estrangement. He works with a small piece of Shklovsky’s writing on Don Quixote where the notion of defamiliarization, through the disruption of the epic function in the novel, is compared to asides and direct addresses to the audience in the theatre.10 At that point Shklovsky makes a digression in the analysis of Cervantes’ famous novel and states that illusion in the theatre must be of a flickering kind. Striedter’s comment on that section suggests a possible transfer of ostranenie from literary theory to theatre studies: He [Shklovsky] recognizes that defamiliarisation, by canceling illusion, presupposes the prior creation of illusion, and that the deliberate interplay of generating and destroying illusion can produce special theatrical effects, indeed constitutes a special form of drama. This is probably the chief reason why it was in drama that theory and techniques of defamiliarisation were to develop most radically. Unlike lyric and epic, in which only language makes reality perceptible, drama has another kind of palpable reality in its scenery and actors. This duality of planes – the contrast between actor and role, stage reality and stage illusion – permits both an interplay of the two and the dissolution of one or the other. (Literary Structure 25–6)

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Theatrical illusion is based on the spectator’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ (Coleridge), on her/his acceptance of the rules of the game. The spectator willingly overlooks those signs of the presentation that stand for nothing else than theatre itself, such as the stage curtain or the lights or the stage itself. The rules of the game presuppose, on the one side, establishing the convention that the incomplete stage world, or ‘scenic synecdoche,’ and its inner logic is in fact a complete and whole universe, and on the other, the full acceptance of that convention. Eric Bentley summarized the notion of theatrical presentation with the formula: ‘A represents X, while S looks on’ (158). This formula could be further extended to define the process in illusionist theatre as ‘A represents X while S looks on’ pretending to believe that A and X are identical. In the theatre of estrangement, ‘A represents X while S looks on’ by means that overtly remind S of the fact that A and X, or in semiotic terms signifier and signified, are not identical. Through the separation of the signifier and the signified, the actors become perceived as embodiments of the signifier, and the communication process that takes place between the author and the audience (via actors) is laid bare. In Munich in 1912 the painter Wassily Kandinsky published his famous essay ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ (‘Über das Geistige in der Kunst’), promoting abstract representation as a means of expressing spiritual value. Inspired by Kandinsky, many painters such as Frantisek Kupka, Piet Mondrian, Francis Picabia, Natalia Goncharova, and others exhibited works that had very few figurative references. Visual arts turned to colours, lines, and surfaces to abolish the mimetic representation of an image and the stock associations connected with it. There was a similar tendency in music embodied in the experiments that challenged the tonal system. Claude Debussy, for instance, used a ‘hexatonal’ scale to transcend the clichés that tonal grammar imposed. Arnold Schönberg elaborated the system of an atonal scale, while Igor Stravinsky stayed in the tonal realm by parodying it. Kandinsky experimented in theatre and had a huge impact on Oscar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus. Schlemmer tried to abolish the traditional notion of the human body on stage by putting it in rhythmical motion in order to explore its relationship to space. Schlemmer’s experiments, Beckett’s short plays, and the works of other artists who aimed towards so-called non-verbal theatre bring theatrical representation close to the style of abstract painting. In different ways, all these experiments trigger the process of defamiliarization at least insofar as they subvert the prevailing artistic norms, highlighting that art is not about making ‘A and X,’ or signifier and signified, as iden-

The Knight’s Move: From Theory to Theatre 29

tical as possible; but they choose rather to place them apart and distort the likeness – the iconicity of the signifier – beyond recognition. Nevertheless, theatrical representation, unlike other artistic forms, is bound to its corporeal character and to the presentation of as-if worlds as here and now, which renders impossible an absolute non-mimetic, or objectless, presentation such as in abstract painting. Paradoxically, the notions of defamiliarization and mimesis are not mutually exclusive approaches in theatre. Even Bentley’s formula ‘A represents X, while S looks on’ implies that a theatrical performance can never be totally figureless. Herta Schmid theorizes the possibility of abstract representation in theatre and drama by analysing Samuel Beckett’s short play Quadrat 1+ 2, which was influenced by the ideas of both the Bauhaus and Kandinsky. Although the play does not contain a dramatic character in a traditional sense, nor a dramatic dialogue, Schmid finds in the interplay of colours, sounds, and plans the dialogic and character functions that establish both the mimetic and diegetic elements of the play.11 Even though this play comes very close to abstract painting and architecture, its structure still reconfirms the mimetic constancy of dramatic art: The whole play can be regarded as metatheatrical play, which by the absence of all traditional means of drama reveals the constant inner form of dramatic theatre that means a theatre, which is governed by the verbal element. (‘Samuel Beckett’s Play’ 286)

I would like to add that the mimetic and diegetic functions, as well as the notions of the dramatic figure and the verbal act, have in Beckett’s play a similar role to that of Kandinsky’s ‘hidden imagery’ in painting (78). In order to subvert the mimetic representation of the object, Kandinsky proposed hiding its physical aspects through the combination of veiling and laying bare (das Kombinieren des Verschleierten und das Blossgelegten). The process of veiling involves placing the object where it would not be expected, which is analogous to Beckett’s procedure of separating the components and functions of the dramatic structure, which in traditional theatre would be represented simultaneously. The process of laying bare involves simplifying the object, for instance, to a partial outline, which is again analogous to Beckett’s minimalism in Quadrat 1+ 2. Minimalism and the separation of traditional theatrical functions in this play produce the union of veiling and laying bare, outlining the paradigmatic dramatic structure, which cannot sustain itself as objectless in the mode of Kandinsky’s notion of hidden construction (versteckte Konstruktion).

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Although the bodies in Beckett’s play are ageless and sexless, it is hard to perceive them as exclusively geometrical entities. They fulfil the function of stage figures even through the reduction of everything that reminds us of traditional dramatic characters. These figures challenge the notion of dramatic character, and at the same time re-establish it. Beckett makes the notion of dramatic structure the subject of his work and through radical minimalist reduction reveals its paradigm. The concept of dramatic structure is the signified; the structure of the play is the signifier. By separating the components that in a traditional concept of dramatic structure occur simultaneously, Beckett establishes the largest possible distance between the signifier and the signified, which brings his play to the borderline of abstract painting. Although the receiver undergoes the process from confusion to understanding, he/she is constantly aware of the author’s intervention (mediation) in the work, like Kandinsky’s viewer faced with the hidden construction. Theatre is corporeal and multidimensional and there is a level of iconicity that establishes itself even when the actor is a puppet – Gordon Craig’s ‘Übermarionette’ – or when the actor’s body is used to represent a lifeless object and vice versa. There are always components of theatrical representation that are mimetic, even when the overall concept of the presentation strives to be non-mimetic. In such cases the mimetically represented components do not dominate the performance structure. The imitative pattern of mimetic representation can be challenged, subverted, and exposed in theatre, but mimesis itself cannot be fully expelled from the stage. A theatrical performance makes use of mimetic representation to create an as-if world of make-believe, but it relies on a certain amount of mimetic iconicity even when its goal is to create a stage world of ‘making strange.’ The freedom of theatrical signs, described by the Czech structuralist scholar and theatre director Jindrich Honzl, enables both mimetic representation and its subversion. Honzl bases his approach on the ideas of the Czech aesthetician Otakar Zich that prefigure contemporary semiotic approaches to theatre: Everything that makes up reality on stage – the playwright’s text, the actor’s acting, the stage lighting – all these things in every case stand for other things. In other words, dramatic performance is a set of signs. (‘Dynamics of Signs in Theatre’ 76)

The specificity of the theatrical sign, notes Honzl, is in the potential of any stage vehicle to stand for any signified class of phenomena; thus,

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there are no fixed representational relations. This transformability of theatrical signs enables free play with theatrical signifiers, which is at the core of antimimetic subversions and the breaking of illusion. Honzl describes the set used in Meyerhold’s staging of The Death of Tarelkin, a cylindrical construction that looks like a meat grinder, ‘It is only when we see the actor pacing back and forth in the cylindrical structure like a prisoner and clutching its slats like bars that we realize the function of this prop: it is a cell’ (‘Dynamics of Signs in Theatre’ 78).12 Honzl uses this example to demonstrate that we know for certain what the props in a theatrical production signify only through the ways actors use them. Similarly, in contemporary performances such as Robert Lepage’s production 12th House, an ironing board represents an exercise machine in one scene and a car in another. In Théâtre de Complicité’s production The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, a broom used for sweeping the stage in one scene turns into a horse in the next. The actors in the same production perform stage characters, but at times, when needed, they ‘turn into’ trees and bushes. Thus, the actor’s body on stage too becomes a set of transformable signifiers. These examples point to the relationship between mimetic and non-mimetic representation in theatre. The set of Meyerhold’s production does not represent a prison cell mimetically, nor does Lepage’s ironing board resemble a mirror image of an actual car. Nevertheless, one realizes what Meyerhold’s set stands for through the actor’s mimetic representation of a prisoner’s behaviour in jail, and one easily sees that Lepage’s ironing board signifies a car as the actor imitates the action of driving. There are productions (from the experiments of Bauhaus to some of the postmodern works of Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, Théâtre de Complicité, Robert Lepage, and others) that are non-mimetic insofar as they freely rearrange, mechanize, and endlessly repeat various mimetically represented components challenging the logic and order of illusionist representation. The notion of mimesis can be problematized and defamiliarized, but not fully abolished. Even when the stage work is recognized as abstraction, such as in Beckett’s play, the mimetic quality of the paradigmatic dramatic structure is established at least through antimimetic subversions, as long as theatrical performance, in order to establish itself, is in need of a body of some sort to perform the stage action – even stage idleness. Therefore, the process of defamiliarization in theatre is always realized in emphasizing the tension between the real and the fictional, presence and absence, actor and role, the imitative and the conceptual.

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The presentational nature of theatre, its corporeality, its ‘here and now’ condition, enables the illusion of immediate utterance, of the absence of mediator, as well as the spectator’s indulgence in the world represented on stage. In other words, the presentational nature of theatre has this potential to create the illusion of completeness of an as-if world, where the spectator becomes an eyewitness and is let into the pleasure of suspending her/his disbelief. The lack of a mediating circle is considered to be the key element of divergence between dramatic and narrative structures. The absence of the narrator, of the voice that tells the ‘story’ is replaced with the simulation of an immediate utterance.13 Nevertheless, a total lack of a mediating system in drama and theatre is almost impossible to achieve. The mediating function can be split among a few characters, it may be executed outside the action of the inner circle, or it can be ‘disguised.’ Medieval theatrical tradition played with mediation by putting the prompter on the stage to give directions to the participants throughout the performance and, thus, making his mediating function visible to the audience. Tadeusz Kantor, one of the most prominent Polish directors of the twentieth century, used a similar concept in many of his productions. For example, in his famous show Dead Class, Kantor was on stage not as a character performing the role of the director, but rather in a function similar to that of an orchestra conductor. Illusionist theatre tends to hide, mask, or subordinate the mediation as well as its narrative components, while anti-illusionist theatre or theatre of estrangement often strives to expose mediation. Whenever a dramatic or stage work calls attention to its mediating system it destabilizes the action within the inner circle of the dramatic structure, challenging the notion of the completeness of an as-if world. The foundation of the mediating system in theatre always reinforces the tendency towards breaking the stage illusion. Whenever the dramatic and narrative elements are put together in a theatrical structure they establish a relationship of dialectic antinomy that triggers a defamiliarization effect rooted in the tension between drama and narrative, in the tension between the completeness and incompleteness of a dramatic world, actor and object, illusion and breaking the illusion. Removing the Footlights Epic devices – asides, prologues, epilogues, direct addresses to the audience, songs, the chorus – are traditional means of exposing the system of mediation, breaking the illusion, and of making the familiar strange in

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theatre. Even though epic devices are at the core of Brecht’s concept of theatrical estrangement, they are not the only ways of breaking the illusion and distancing the familiar. Theatricality, metatheatre and stylization are also means of reinforcing the tension between the illusionist and anti-illusionist forces that disrupt the convention of make-believe. Theatricality is analogous to the Russian formalist notion of literariness – the distinct quality of the literary work that differentiates it from other arts. As Hansen-Löve, who wrote one of the most comprehensive studies on Russian formalist ostranenie points out, literariness is a reduction principle. He traces this Russian formalist notion to Edmund Husserl and his Logical Investigations (Logische Untersuchungen), where the phenomenological epoch is described as a reduction, a ‘bracketing’ (Einklammerung), by taking from the object (phenomenon) its outside factors – historical, social, individual, and existential.14 Yet literariness does not presuppose that a work exists in a kind of self-serving vacuum; rather it defines, positions, and differentiates a specific literary work in relation to other literary works and also to extra-artistic reality. This notion is closely linked to the concept of ‘divergence quality’ (Differenzqualität) that Russian formalists borrowed from the German aesthetician Broder Christiansen. His premise is that the aesthetic object loses its effect and the process of perception is aborted when something is familiar. Deformation and distortion of the familiar establishes the divergence quality, which enables the sensation of difference (Differenzempfindung), detectable against the backdrop of given norms and conventions (Differenzbasis).15 To describe the distinction between poetic and practical language, and between the aesthetic object and its analogous aesthetic or extra-artistic phenomena, Shklovsky takes from Christiansen’s theory two concepts: the emphasis on the receiver’s role in the reception process, and the notion of ‘difference quality’ as a divergence from conventions. Literariness often involves an estrangement quality as a result of diverging from the norm, which evokes a special kind of perception as seeing (videnie) or sensing (ošchušchenie). Christiansen’s aesthetic theory and Shklovsky’s application of it shift the focus from production to reception in the literary process, understanding the reception activity as a sensual rather than an intellectual phenomenon. The divergence quality stresses the dynamic character of an aesthetic object that relates to other aesthetic objects.16 Analogous to the literariness of narrative works, theatricality – theatre’s eminence and the divergence quality – makes a theatrical event distinct from any other artistic or extra-artistic phenomena. When established as an estrangement con-

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cept, theatricality makes the theatre’s divergence quality perceptible to counteract the habitualization of perception. The notion of the re-theatricalization of theatre, advocated by Meyerhold and other avant-garde directors, is a way of performing theatre’s own divergence quality. However, theatricality can be present in the context of illusion without a self-referential aspect, but whenever theatre’s conventions and processes become the subject of a performance, theatricality turns into a conceptual approach. Theatricality functions as a distancing device when it foregrounds that which is eminent to theatre, including the difference between the character and the actor, the exaggeration of body language and make-up, the display of the theatre’s means of production, and so on. Theatricality calls attention to the fictionality and incompleteness of the represented as-if world. In an early note from 1914, Meyerhold describes theatricality in the manner of Russian formalist scholars: ‘Theatricality presupposes an inevitability of form ... Theatre is art and the laws of art should determine everything in it. Art and life are governed by different laws’ (Meyerhold on Theatre 147). Theatricality reinforces the notion of the theatrical stage as a place of play and artifice, which does not copy reality but represents it through its eminent theatrical means. It often makes use of romantic irony – a literary concept elaborated by Friedrich Schlegel – that enables the authorial discourse (or quasiauthorial discourse) to enter the discourse of dramatic figures. Romantic irony is established when the author shows what she/he is doing while doing it – when the narrative refers to the creative process itself and makes the artistic toying with the medium the subject of the work. In theatre, romantic irony usually takes the form of a play within a play, consciously revealing the fictionality of the dramatic/stage action. When romantic irony is used, a conflicting semiotic activity takes place contributing to the effect of theatricality – the signifier and the signified are simultaneously shown as identical (through the protagonist’s voice) and different (through the authorial voice). Metatheatre shows reality as theatrical, often through the devices of theatre within theatre and play within play. As in Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, metatheatricality emphasizes that the line between life and stage illusion is very thin. It tends to represent ‘life as a dream’ (Calderon) and to show that ‘all the world’s a stage’ (Shakespeare). Metatheatre is a device for establishing a dramatic and theatrical metaphor through which life is shown as an endless play, an ongoing theatre of sorts. The difference between theatricality and metatheatre is that the former emphasizes the divergence between theatre and life,

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stressing that theatre does not reflect reality, but corresponds to life through its eminent means and logic. The latter points to the affinity between theatre and life, not by trying to make stage events lifelike, but by showing that the conventions of real life are in fact theatrical. The notion of stylization in its broadest sense is an umbrella for all the forms and tendencies that challenge, subvert, or distort the concept of the mimetic representation of reality in theatre and drama. It is the artistic approach of foregrounding a certain style, calling attention to the author’s intervention and choices made in the treatment of the material. Stylization and conventionality as estrangement devices are particularly prominent in Meyerhold’s theatre of conscious stylization. The idea of conscious stylization and conventionality (uslovnost) comes from the Russian symbolist poet Valeri Brjusov and stresses the complex interplay between art and reality. Meyerhold’s theatre is conscious of the process of what we would call today semiotization, as each element of the performance turns into a ‘stylized’ sign. A director of stylized theatre, as well as an author who relies on the techniques of ostranenie, uses various structural modifications of the material to partially orient the associative process, forcing the receiver to renegotiate his/her stock relationship to well-known objects and notions. The spectator is made conscious of the artificiality of the stage figure, being constantly reminded that the actor is performing a role, rather than incarnating the totality of a character. Leonid Andreev’s letter, quoted by Meyerhold, defines precisely the anti-illusionist character of conscious stylisation: ‘In stylised theatre the spectator should not forget for a moment that an actor is performing before an audience, with the stage beneath his feet and the set around him’ (Meyerhold on Theatre 63). Both Meyerhold’s practice and symbolist ideas of conscious stylization are rooted in Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion of stylization. According to Schopenhauer, it is an anti-illusionist strategy that stresses the divergence between art and life, and activates the recipient’s imagination. It presupposes that art deliberately insists on the incompleteness of the representation; otherwise there would be very little left to the imagination of the beholder. Meyerhold’s concept of stylization in theatre is a means to activate the role of the spectator that echoes Schopenhauer’s notion that the aesthetic object exists fully only through the understanding of the receiver. As early as 1907 Meyerhold proposes ‘the theatre of the straight line’ in opposition to the closed ‘triangle model’ (writer-director-actor) that excludes the audience from the creative process. The theatre of the

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straight line adds to the roles of author, director, and actor the role of the spectator as the fourth creator. This approach stands in opposition to Konstantin Stanislavsky’s school, which assumes the notion of the invisible fourth wall, where the audience is offered the sensation of peeking through a keyhole at the life on stage.17 In Meyerhold’s performances, the relationship between the inner and outer circle of stage communication remains open and dynamic. His acting methodology is deliberately antipsychological; the actor is not expected to internalize the character, as in Stanislavsky’s method, but rather to treat the role as a mask. For Stanislavsky the proper stimulation of the actor’s mind would lead to a more truthful stage expression. As Alma Law and Mel Gordon argue, Meyerhold and his most prodigious pupil Eisenstein believed quite the opposite: Expression in movement – the actor’s motor functions – could lead automatically to feelings and inspired emotions. They [Meyerhold and Eisenstein] argue that the function of acting is not merely to fill the performer with hidden thoughts and feelings, but to communicate expressively with the audience. Whether an actor feels ‘correctly’ or not becomes immaterial if the spectator cannot see and feel the result. Theatre is much more than an exercise in truthful emotion; it involves an entire spectrum of scenic elements, acting being one of them. (2)

Moreover, the spectator is made conscious of the artificiality of the stage figure, is constantly reminded that the actor is performing a role, rather than incarnating the totality of a character. ‘Theatre of the straight line’ calls for staging and acting techniques that do not recreate an as-if world in minute realistic detail, but rather stylize it, so that the divergence quality between theatre and life is deliberately exposed. In this way the passivity of the audience is somewhat counteracted, since the spectators become compelled to use their imagination creatively in order to fill in the gaps of the stage world. This approach shares a common ground with Shklovsky’s notion of perceptibility, closely linked to his phenomenon of ostranenie. Perceptibility requires the author’s and, consequently, the receiver’s consciousness of the form. The strategy of creating the sense of seeing the well known as if for the first time not only makes the artistic form palpable, but also triggers a certain way of aesthetic thinking – on the part of the author and on the part of the recipient – through which the divergence between the familiar and the defamiliarized is comprehended. In

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Shklovsky’s theory and Meyerhold’s practice, the phenomenon of perceptibility is based on the notion of apperception as introduced by G.W. Leibniz to describe a perception in the second degree, or the perception one is conscious of. Perceptibility, therefore, is a perception of a perception. The spectator in Meyerhold’s theatre is made conscious of the stylization and theatricality of the work, but also of his own role in the aesthetic process, as is the reader when encountering literature based on defamiliarization and the form-conscious devices that Shklovsky and other Russian formalists studied. Echoing Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of Dionysian and Apollonian theatre, Russian symbolist Viacheslav Ivanov asserts, ‘There arose the magic barrier, which even today, in the form of footlights, divides the theatre into two opposite camps, the performers and the onlookers’ (in Meyerhold on Theatre 63). Meyerhold puts Ivanov’s thoughts into practice saying, ‘Having removed the footlights, the stylised theatre aims to place the stage on a level with the auditorium’ (Meyerhold on Theatre 62). In his book The Audience, Herbert Blau also connects the removal of footlights with anti-illusionist theatre practice pointing out, ‘Since Brecht, and his assault on illusion, the lights are not always hidden now’ (212). Removing the footlights becomes in a way a symbolic gesture that epitomizes various estrangement practices – from epic devices to conscious stylization – in the anti-illusionist theatre of the avant-garde. The notion of ‘removing the footlights’ also embodies the paradox of distancing in theatre. On the one hand, the spectator is distanced from the event as the ‘Apollonian illusion’ is broken and the voyeuristic sense of peeking through the fourth wall into someone else’s life is disrupted. On the other hand, the distinction between the stage and the audience is established as unstable. At times, distancing devices involve the audience in the stage event even more strongly by turning them into participants, providing either the possibility or the illusion of cocreation. Asides, removed footlights, and direct addresses to the audience are bonding strategies between the stage and the auditorium. In the illusionist theatre the audience is ‘invisible’; it is a discreet intruder into the as-if world. The theatre of the avant-garde disrupts the spectator’s pleasure of invisibility through distancing devices, while simultaneously inviting the audience to participate – intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, or physically – in the theatrical event. Theatricality, metatheatricality, and stylization emphasize indirectly the presence of the author and the artificiality of the stage world, impeding the spectator’s suspension of disbelief and the safe voyeuristic

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approach to performance. Epic elements, theatricality, and stylization are, of course, not devices that exclude one another; very often they are used interchangeably. The notion of making strange can be achieved even in those works that rely entirely on introducing an as-if world when this world is presented as a distortion of either the prevailing artistic conventions or the logic of reality. Forms such as the grotesque, parody, and pastiche in theatre and drama often involve the phenomenon of making strange and breaking the illusion. Nevertheless, Brecht figures as the icon of theatrical distancing. Dramatic and theatrical practice challenge this understanding, showing that Brecht’s notion embodies just one aspect of distancing the familiar in theatre and drama, while Shklovsky’s concept could be used to encompass those aspects of the phenomenon that Brecht’s Verfremdung only partially covers, or does not include at all. One could argue that unlike practitioners in other periods of theatre history, Brecht used the concept of distancing consciously as a calculated and strategic device, but so did many other members of twentieth-century avant-garde. Theoretical works and notes to the productions of, say, Piscator, Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Evreinov, and many others show that these artists were also aware of the concept and used it as one of their basic stylistic principles. Yet the mode of defamiliarization in their works differed from Brecht’s approach, since their works were more strongly based on theatricality, stylization and conventionality than on traditional epic devices. Vakhtangov’s famous 1922 production of Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot, for instance, combined epic devices and elements from Asian theatre with forms of theatricality and metatheatre. Vakhtangov’s actors explored a concept of distancing that was similar to the one that made Brecht famous. The actors went in and out of their roles, showing both the dramatic figures and themselves representing those figures. Vakhtangov’s production depicted the world as theatrical and fairytale like. Brecht’s distancing is of a different kind; his estrangement technique is meant to communicate a socio-political critique of the world. Brecht’s Verfremdung is not a broad enough concept to be the very embodiment of the overall defamiliarization principle in modern theatre. A brief comparative analysis of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Bertolt Brecht’s didactic play The Measures Taken (1930), and Eugene Ionesco’s tragic farce The Chairs (1952) illustrates the difference between Brecht’s dramaturgical strategies of Verfremdung and other defamiliarizing possibilities in twentieth-century drama. All three plays make a conscious and strategic use of defamiliarization through the devices of theatre within the theatre, but otherwise have very little in

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common. In this case only the dramatic text is considered, even though, of course, it is not only the textual but also the scenic component that partakes in the defamiliarization process. Pirandello presents theatre within theatre in the form of romantic irony, the dominant distancing device in his play, establishing three levels of fictionality: the actors and the director in the process of rehearsing the play titled ‘The Rules of the Game’ by an author with the same name as the actual one; the six characters who interrupt the rehearsal to enact their dramatic destinies; and the actors who imitate the representations of the mysterious characters. The notion of distancing in this case enables Pirandello to establish theatrical process and theatrical reception as the central theme of the play. The playwright toys with making and unmaking the illusion, leaving the audience in a state of ambiguity between contemplating theatricality as a metaphor and indulging in the as-if worlds that the play has to offer. The process of distancing established in Pirandello’s play serves to shift the line between theatre and life, illusion and reality. In the play Measures Taken, Brecht uses devices of theatricality not to make theatre the theme of his work, but to represent and problematize reality. He employs the device of the play within the play in the form of a flashback and through songs and quotations – the well-known elements of Brecht’s epic dramaturgy that often serve as Verfremdung strategies. The Control Chorus plays the role of the internal audience, while the four agitators enact the situations that lead towards the execution of one of them during their mission. The play within the play is used not to highlight theatricality, but to represent a body of evidence, while the songs and questions of the Control Chorus are meant to keep the spectator alert and to offer a guideline for assessing the presented evidence. Brecht uses Verfremdung not only to distance the familiar, but also to ensure the correct comprehension of the material and to influence the reception process. In Ionesco’s The Chairs, an old couple invites a non-existent crowd of people to hear a professional orator, hired specially for this occasion, deliver the old man’s last message. The space begins to be filled with chairs instead of people, which divide the mimetic space into the podium for the orator’s performance and the auditorium. The couple addresses empty chairs in a polite conversational mode as if they were real people. At last, one person arrives – the king himself – and the orator turns out to be dumb and able to utter only a few nonsensical sounds. Ionesco labels the play a tragic farce mocking the traditional genre con-

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ventions. The conversations with the empty chairs, and the inability of any message to be delivered, distance both real-life and theatrical logic. Ionesco’s distancing technique is the grotesque, where the author toys with distortions of reality, replacing and rearranging the material. While Brecht’s Verfremdung is an epistemological device that has to bring meaning closer to our understanding through distancing the familiar, defamiliarization in The Chairs is governed by principles much closer to Shklovsky’s notion, which calls for an increased complexity of form. Ionesco establishes the illogical world of his play so that the well known is seen as if for the first time. Brecht’s Verfremdung places the material in an artificial theatrical framework, and represents it from various angles, but keeps its undistorted, realistic image. Shklovsky’s ostranenie provides a more suitable conceptual framework to describe the process of making the familiar strange in Pirandello’s and Ionesco’s plays, than does Brecht’s Verfremdung. The different versions of the defamiliarization technique in dramatic and stage works depend on the hierarchy of the components and their relation to the dominant component within the structure. Roman Jakobson defines the notion of the dominant element ‘as a focusing component of a work of art: which rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. The dominant guarantees the integrity of the structure’ (‘The Dominant’ 82). In Brecht’s theatre, distancing the familiar and breaking the illusion function as subversions of the work’s own dominant principle. Brechtian theatre has a realist framework, and the representation has a metonymic character. His dramaturgy relies on the notion of the subject – the dramatic figure who is the carrier of the action. Although this figure is often shown as inconsistent or represented through fragments, it still preserves the semblance of a traditional dramatic hero. The audience’s identification with the protagonists in Brecht’s theatre is never fully abolished. The defamiliarization devices in this context function as disruptions of the stage illusion. Songs, asides, commentaries, and film projections in Brecht’s theatre remind the audience to construct, every once in a while, their disbelief. The realist framework is often the dominant component in Brecht’s work, while breaking the illusion is a strategic and calculated disruption that marks the dramaturgical character of Verfremdung. In cases where a dramatic work or a performance relies not only on epic devices, but also on various kinds of stylization, illusionist components are scarce since they can hardly come into being. Ionesco’s play shows this very clearly. The traditional notion of the dramatic hero is

The Knight’s Move: From Theory to Theatre 41

abolished. So is the audience’s identification with Ionesco’s protagonists, since they are often reduced to linguistic units and shells or pieces of traditional dramatic heroes. Yet, the illusionist components do not function to disrupt the dominant principle of the work, but to reinforce the sense of something familiar that the dramatic or stage presentation makes strange. Estrangement techniques in Brecht’s, Pirandello’s, and Ionesco’s plays establish different ideological connotations as well. A certain ideological kinship can be found between Brecht and Ionesco, although they use very different aesthetic devices and their plays were written in different historical contexts. Defamiliarization devices in Brecht’s plays are employed to achieve an ideological and political goal through drama and theatre. The Marxist, leftist orientation of the play is apparent as the relationship between the individual and the collective is made strange and by the same token opened for re-examination. In Ionesco’s play, where the logic of everyday reality is broken into pieces, distancing devices render common bourgeois social and communicational conventions nonsensical. Yet, the pro-leftist ideology of Ionesco’s play is, by means of absurdist defamiliarization, close to the formalist ostranenie, elevated from a didactic to a metaphysical plane. Pirandello, who uses some devices of theatricality similar to those employed in Brecht’s play, differs ideologically from both Brecht and Ionesco. Through defamiliarization techniques, Pirandello creates an effect of ideological relativism by blurring the line between illusion and reality. Even though the famous Six Characters in Search of an Author shifts the boundaries of dramatic conventions, the absence of a material basis for the comprehensible in the play – since in the play political, private, and artistic reality is but a game on the verge of being illusory – could be understood as an invitation to an imposition of form (reality) through power.18 In other words, the sociohistorical context of the play becomes almost dangerously absorbed and neutralized in the aesthetics of metatheatricality. These three examples point out that the relationship between the ideological level of a work and its aesthetic devices is a very complex one. Any clear-cut distinction between Brecht’s Verfremdung as the set of aesthetic strategies that bring about politically committed and ideologically charged works, and formalist ostranenie as the idea of art as self-indulgent and self-sufficient, does not hold true.

2 Some Old Photos: Russian Formalism in Russian Avant-garde Theatre

A few preserved photos from the early 1920s depict Victor Shklovsky, his lover Elsa Triollet, Lylia Brik, the wife of formalist Osip Brik and the love of the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Mayakovsky himself.1 In the centre of one of the photos are Shklovsky and Mayakovsky sitting back to back on the sand in bathing suits. This position – back to back, arm to arm – is a visual metaphor that describes almost literally the relationship between Russian formalism and the avant-garde. Shklovsky wrote about his friend, Mayakovsky. Avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold staged Mayakovsky’s plays. Shklovsky and Meyerhold both read the literary and philosophical works of one of the most prominent figures of Russian symbolism, Andrei Bely. The film director Sergei Eisenstein began his career as Meyerhold’s pupil and was the first to elaborate his most prominent cinematic concepts in theatre. Russian formalist film theory in return dealt with the cinematic work of Sergei Eisenstein, and its devices of distancing the familiar. Formalist Roman Jakobson wrote about the futurist poet Velimir Xlebnikov, securing for him a place in the literary canon. Xlebnikov experimented with drama, writing a play in zaum or transsense language that the constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin put on stage (1923). In short, the paths in the labyrinth of influences that connect formalist scholars with the avant-garde artists are almost endless. The Formalist School of Literary Criticism has a number of characteristics in common with avant-garde artistic practice, in its tendency to provoke, in its aspiration to a science of literature, in advocating artistic novelty, in breaking with pre-existing aesthetic and critical conventions, and in its close affiliation with Russian futurism. Russian formalism was provocative in its negation of the prevailing and preceding critical approaches, including those that proved to be at the root of formalist

Russian Formalism in Russian Avant-garde Theatre 43

thinking, such as the literary theories of influential symbolist critics Alexander Potebnja and Alexander Veselovsky.2 A more radical version of this tendency to provoke was paralleled in futurist iconoclastic allusions to the Russian classics, and in performances meant as a ‘slap to bourgeois taste.’ Mayakovsky, for instance, never missed the opportunity in his plays to make a mocking reference to Anton Chekhov and Lev Tolstoy. The formalist provocations were less ‘performative’ and most often expressed through assertions such as ‘Evgeny Onegin would have been written anyway, even if Puškin had never been born. America would have been discovered without Columbus’ (Brik 213), ‘Words are dead and language is their graveyard’ (Shklovsky, ‘Voskreshenie slova’ 2), and ‘We don’t ask for social justification of life; why then do we need social justification of art?’ (Tynjanov, The Problem of Verse Language 181). The provocative and somewhat rebellious tone of these statements is self-evident. Formalism sparked a radical shift in literary criticism and gave rise to a new theoretical method showing that the proponents of the ‘old schools’ were no longer masters of critical thinking. Russian avant-garde artists as well as Russian formalist critics did not view artistic representation as a mirror held up to nature; they found art to be a ‘crooked mirror’ through which one could see more clearly. The key viewpoints of Russian formalism have their analogies in the artistic approaches of the avant-garde. The formalist notion of literariness as the eminent quality of a literary work is both paralleled in the theatre and the visual arts. Meyerhold and Tairov operate with the term ‘theatricality’ as theatre’s intrinsic and self-referential quality. The theatre of Meyerhold, Okhlopkov, Tairov, Evreinov, and Vakhtangov was decidedly antipsychological, which paralleled the formalist idea that the psychology of the hero did not govern the plot structure, since motivation is artificial and arbitrary in art. These directors used a variety of defamiliarization devices including epic elements, the concept of theatre within theatre, stylization, and baring the devices of theatrical representation. The avant-garde theatre often deliberately displaced the priorities within a performance structure, thereby shifting the emphasis from the text to other elements of the presentation, or to the reception processes itself. In the visual arts, Russian futurism was concerned with the intrinsic quality of painting – paintedness – putting the emphasis on texture, colour, and form. Neoprimitives Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov insisted on the conscious juxtaposition of horizontal, diagonal, and vertical lines of the objects in their painting, shifting the viewer’s focus from the figurative representation to the devices used in the creative process. Like formalist

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notions of defamiliarization and perceptibility, the focus in theatre and visual arts turns to the process of aesthetic creation and perception, rather than to the work as a finished product ready for consumption. Formalists find Russian futurism to be the embodiment of a new aesthetics, which, by subverting the habitual ways of artistic production and reception, is the artistic force able to, in Shklovskian terminology, ‘resurrect’ the stale language of art and bring about the sense of ‘a new seeing’ of both art forms and reality. The empowering of art forms that this critical school took upon itself was analogous to futurist notions of a new man and a new society that have their roots both in Russian symbolism and in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. The question rarely posed, paraphrasing Osip Brik’s assertion about Cervantes, is: Would Russian futurist poetry and drama be at the core of the modernist literary canon, even if Russian formalism had not existed? The role of Russian formalism in establishing futurist writers has often been overlooked. Brik published Mayakovsky’s poems when everyone else rejected them. Shklovsky, and more so Jakobson, wrote extensively on futurist poets in some of their most famous articles. Not only did formalist theories take Russian futurist art as a point of departure in formulating their key concepts including distancing, ‘impeded form,’ and trans-sense language, but they also secured a place for futurists in the literary hall of fame.3 Nevertheless, there was clearly a tendency to dissociate Russian formalism from Russian avant-garde, as the story about Mayakovsky and the Briks illustrates. Mayakovsky, in his brief autobiography, notes that the day he met Russian formalist Osip Brik and his wife Lylia, who from then on became his first readers and critics, was the most important day of his life. Furthermore, his essay titled ‘How Are Verses Made?’ reveals a great deal of formalist influence. Even though Brik’s later essays are very much of the Marxist-Leninist orientation, Soviet cultural officials had a tendency to literally erase the Briks from Mayakovsky’s life. In light of the anti-Semitic attitude within Stalinist Russia, Lylia Brik, with her Jewish bourgeois background, was not a good companion for the man who epitomized the revolutionary poet. Soviet cultural officials of the Stalinist era found it hard to swallow the possibility that a formalist scholar and a love affair had more impact on Mayakovsky’s work than the Revolution. The recently published book of Mayakovsky’s correspondence with Lylia Brik includes two photos: the first photo shows Mayakovsky and Lylia standing by a tree; the second photo is identical except Lylia is missing. A closer look reveals the heel of Lylia’s shoe – as a trace the censors forgot to erase.4

Russian Formalism in Russian Avant-garde Theatre 45

Formalist criticism had a strong tendency to be scientific, to deal with ‘literary facts’ and with the ‘science of literature.’ The notion of literature as science is not just positivist residue in the formalist approach, but rather an aspect deeply embedded in the character of the historical avant-garde. The view of art and literary criticism as exact aesthetics is the result of the symbolist influence, particularly that of Bely, on both the formalist school and the avant-garde. The belief in science as a means of creating a new society and the idolizing of everything technical and scientific was present in very different and diverse movements within the avant-garde. As is well known, the notion of science and fascination with modern technology were crucial to both Italian and Russian futurism even though they were of very different ideological orientations. For Russian futurists, a Ford tractor was much more of an artefact and more aesthetically pleasing than a painting by the Russian classical master Ilja Repin. The futurist concentration on contrivance and structure is evident in Mayakovsky’s typographical organization of verse. In visual art the scientific element was very pronounced. David Burliuk, the father of Russian futurism, attempts to reduce art to an exact science.5 The painter Kazimir Malevich expresses the tendency to place all art within the framework of technological creation. Similarly, Kandinsky’s scientific attempts at artistic synthesis in early 1920, Meyerhold’s multifunctional constructivist sets, his acting methodology of biomechanics, and the notion of modern industrial society in the literature, theatre, and film of the time, all reveal the idea of art grounded in science and a fascination with technology. For the Soviets, science was a means of progress implying the notion of man conquering nature through technology. In the early days of the Revolution, there was a sense of identification between art and the new state. The proletarian state sounds like a futurist equation when described by Lenin as ‘the Soviet government plus electrification.’ In short, science was seen as germane to the creation of a new society and its art forms. However, the distinction between formalist critics and Soviet avantgarde art was that the former, by disseminating the exact laws of scientific aesthetics, searched for the eminent qualities of art. By the same token, the latter believed that art would become a mass phenomenon, intelligible to all, able to influence and alter social relations. In any case, science was the icon of modernity whether through the creation of art and aesthetic theory ‘for the scientific age’ or through a scientific engineering of society. Russian formalism asserted itself as the literary criticism of the scientific age, in as much as Russian futurism wanted to be

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the art of the new Soviet state. Even though formalism succeeded in becoming the avant-garde school of literary criticism, Marxist theorists later denounced it. Futurism and constructivism marked the early years of the Revolution, but did not eventually become the chief art of the proletarian culture. The Soviet government required a synthetic culture, a new totality of art and life embodied in the positivist collective society. The modernist paradigm of discontinuity and fragmentation present in both avant-garde art and Russian formalist theory was not sufficient to serve the Soviet concept. Leon Trotsky used the expression ‘fellow travellers’ (poputchiki) for those writers who were not opposed to the Revolution, and were in a way shaped by it, but could not really be described as communist. Among the ‘fellow-travellers’ were Alexander Blok, Boris Pilnyak, Sergei Yessenin, and the ‘Serapion Fraternity,’ whose members included Shklovsky. This diverse fraternity, named after a character from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s grotesques, aimed to resist the prevailing cultural tendencies towards subordinating literature to ideological and political demands. The quest for an independent literature should not be confused with the notion of art for art’s sake though, or described as escapist. Most of the members of the group have come, as Trotsky puts it, not to the Revolution through literature, ‘but into literature through Revolution’ (Literature and Revolution 69). Vsevolod Ivanov, Boris Pilnyak, Isak Babel, and Victor Shklovsky all write about the Revolution, dealing in different ways with the most important and dramatic events of their time. The avant-garde magazine Noviy LEF also brought together the formalists and the artists of the Revolution. In LEF, where Mayakovsky published his avant-garde poetry, and Babel published his novels that depicted the cruelty and violence of Revolutionary struggles, Shklovsky’s research on Tolstoy appeared for the first time. Trotsky claims that the ‘fellow travellers’ would be impossible without the Revolution; the theorist Aleksandar Flaker finds that they are in fact the most important group partaking in the revival of Russian prose after the October Revolution.6 In a way, the ‘fellow travellers’ make the journey. Russian formalists fulfil most of the prerequisites to be full members of the Russian avant-garde in their break from traditional literary criticism, in their provocative statements, and most of all in their view of artistic development as a process of subverting the prevailing conventions, taking the audience by surprise, and evoking a ‘new seeing’ of the well known. Theatre historian Siegfried Melchinger calls the theatrical experiments that preceded the October Revolution ‘Revolution before the

Russian Formalism in Russian Avant-garde Theatre 47

Revolution.’ Melchinger points out that the destruction of the prevailing ‘bourgeois’ artistic forms through the experiments and provocation of the Russian avant-garde indirectly contributed to the revolutionary changes in Russian society. In a way, the Revolution first started in the domain of art and critical theory. The notions of the new man, symbiosis between humans and nature, subversion of aesthetic norms, and the changing ways reality is perceived through new aesthetic means all prefigure the Revolution. Russian formalists play a role in the destruction of the aesthetic conventions that were considered intrinsic to bourgeois culture, which makes them a part of the overall ‘Revolution before the Revolution.’ In this context, Shklovsky’s metaphor of the ‘knight’s move’ goes beyond its original meaning of a relationship among literary works; rather, it describes the relationship of formalism to the world outside ‘literary facts.’ This chapter will further explore ways in which Russian formalist estrangement theory moves from literary theory to theatre. Futurist practice of zaum (trans-sense) stage language and Meyerhold’s theatrical strategies – that I describe as grotesque, trans-theatrical, and perspectival estrangement – will be viewed as theatrical embodiments of formalist theories that not only exemplify the notion of ostranenie but use this concept to renegotiate their relationship to the given cultural and political reality. How to Defamiliarize Things with Words Changara Zangezi has come! Speechmaker! Speak to us! (Xlebnikov, Zangezi)

The famous futurist poet Alexei Kruchonych exclaimed: ‘The word is broader than its meaning’ (in Steiner 66) to describe one of the key concepts of the Russian avant-garde – that of trans-sense or zaum language. Zaum was the poetic language of Russian futurists that inspired Russian formalist scholars to elaborate their theories of language and defamiliarization. The distinction between poetic and practical language enters formalist discourse through the critical thinking of Alexander Potebnja and Alexander Veselovsky – against which Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, and others formulated their ideas. Some of the main postulates of Shklovsky’s famous essay ‘Isskustvo kak priëm’ are direct reactions to the notions of Potebnja and Veselovsky. Shklovsky writes that artistic thinking (‘chudozhestvenoe myslenie’) is not thinking in images as Potebnja would have it, but thinking in a way in which the empirical

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order of reality shifts. Artistic thinking is thinking from the perspective of estrangement. The goal of art is therefore not ‘to bring meaning closer to our understanding’ but ‘to increase the complexity and the length of reception’ (14). Shklovsky reverses Veselovsky’s notion of art and poetic language as based on the ‘economy of artistic efforts,’ saying that poetic language, based on postulates of maximum effort, is one which is made difficult and hampered to invoke a sense of unpredictability and estrangement (11).7 Russian formalists find in the futurist zaum a practical embodiment of their theories. Zaum is a radical instance of poetic language that defamiliarizes the notion of aesthetic communication. It is a new expressive device, a fresh and complex form of poetic language that shifts stock associations and gives rise to new meanings. The poetic language of Russian futurism tends to provoke and to challenge the audience instead of trying to appeal to them. Zaum subverts worn out conventions, making familiar linguistic patterns strange and forces the recipient to perceive language beyond its usual communicational function. Jakobson offers a description of poetic language as based on the principles of estrangement: The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical with its referent. Why do we need to be aware of this? Because along with the awareness of the identity of the sign and the referent (A is A1), we need the consciousness of the inadequacy of this identity (A is not A1); this antinomy is fundamental, since without it the connection between the sign and the object becomes automatized, the event stops taking place, and the perception of reality reaches its deadend. (‘Was ist Poesie?’ 415)

In the essay Jakobson defines poetry as ‘a message oriented towards expression’ (quoted in ‘Novejshaja russkaja poezija,’ 30). He revises Bühler’s communicational model of art adding the poetic function (in Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ 1987). The poetic function is the selfreferential quality of poetic language particularly reinforced in cases such as futurist zaum. The communicational function of language becomes subordinated and the referential function of the social and practical phenomena viewed outside the work is minimized. In zaum, not only are the sign and the referent not identical – they are independent of one another. Zaum is an attempt to establish artistic language as an autonomous sign, by rejecting its referential function. In ordinary speech the message is intended to refer to the object; in zaum the message is the object.

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Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of language as a set of conventions that are not organically motivated is abandoned in the search for a language that will renegotiate the relationship between the linguistic sign and the object that it represents. Saussure’s arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is counteracted by Xlebnikov’s concept of word/object (slovo/veshch), and by Kruchonyh who sees language as objectless (bespredmeten). Zaum is in both cases the subversion of logical thinking. For Russian futurist practitioners of zaum, the basic constituent of language is not the word but sound, moving from gnoseological to ontological thinking. For Xlebnikov, zaum is a universal language rooted in a primordial past that is constantly renewing itself. For Kruchonyh, newness, innovation, provocation, and shock are zaum’s most important features. In both cases zaum takes the receiver by surprise, imposing ontological language on the communication process where gnoseological language has been the norm. Fragmentation and montage are the favourite devices of the futurist practitioners of zaum. In the essay ‘Trans-sense Language’ (‘Zaumny jazyk’), Xlebnikov compares speaking a language with ‘playing with word dolls,’ a game in which the speaker determines the rules and is allowed to make new ’dolls’ (in Lonnquist 23). Kruchonych names this artistic strategy of the dissolving and rearranging of language faktura. Faktura is the making and construction of words, the montage of letters and terms in various combinations and permutations. This strategy subverts the traditional notion of composition, often by mixing lines that sound conventionally poetic with ‘prosaic’ conversational passages. To replace the patterns of communicational language, zaum uses glossolalia, children’s language, onomatopoeia, linguistic disorders, foreign idioms, and neologisms. Language as a communicational device is transformed into a defamiliarization device that shifts the boundaries of aesthetic reception and counteracts worn-out artistic conventions and clichés. Here are a few lines from Xlebnikov’s play Zangezi, which the author identifies as soundwriting: VÉH-O-VEYA – the green of tree, NEEZHEÓTY – the dark tree trunk, MAM-E-ÁMEE – that’s the sky, POÓCHE CHÁPI – a blackbird. MAM-EE-ÉMO – that’s a cloud.

(355)

In another scene in the same play, the poet uses onomatopoeia to depict a dialogue among birds: ‘Yellow Bunting Tsuey-suey-suey-ssuey (rocks

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back and forth on a twig) / Blue Jay Peeo! Peeo! pyak, pyak, payak! – Barn Swallow Tseeveets! Tseezeets!’ (332); and glossolalia to create the language of gods: The Gods in Chorus Na-na-na! Echee, oochee, ochee! Kezee, nezee, dzeegaga! Neezareezee ozeeree. Mayahmoora zeemoto! Peeps! Mazacheechee-cheemoro! Plyan!

(334)

Formalists describe poetic language as based on a deformation of practical language. It is a deliberate linguistic disorder of a standard utterance. In his article ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,’ Jakobson uses a particular language disorder, aphasia, to describe the notions of metaphor and metonymy as aspects of poetic and practical language. He demonstrates how a medical disorder that needs to be treated in everyday life becomes an aesthetic device in art, rich in signifying potentials. Jakobson sees the disorder, the disturbance of the norm, and the deviation from the commonplace not only as symptoms of aphasia and the basis of metaphor and metonymy, but as the aesthetic means of deautomatizing worn-out expressions and enriching linguistic conventions with new meaning. In the case of zaum the deformation of language and the breakdown of standard, logical communication is carried almost to extremes in order to establish a new, trans-rational quality. However, like other defamiliarization devices, zaum is not a strategy of pure distortion, but the interplay between distortion and non-distortion. In his book on futurism, Vladimir Markov describes Xlebnikov’s poetry in the following way: The familiar meters were not destroyed but made impure and imperfect by mixing. The words were used not quite correctly; in fact, the famous motto of ‘the best words in the best order’ was abolished and replaced by the principle of ‘the wrong word’ so that clichés looked new and fresh and additional meaning was created. (13)

Standardized conventions, distorted through zaum, are still established in the consciousness of the receiver at least as a meaningful absence – as

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‘minus devices’ (Lotman).8 The expected but not fulfilled aesthetic and communicational norms and functions still exist in the audience’s memory; the poet makes this lack deliberately apparent and the receiver is provoked into taking notice of that meaningful absence. The trick with zaum, as with other distancing strategies, lies in using a standard device, but playing with it in unpredictable ways that subvert both the norm and the audience’s expectations. Since the goal of zaum is to reach the nonrational human faculty, the poet is free to arrange and rearrange the elements of language, taking away their common, logical meanings, allowing more sensual and associative meanings to come forward. Zaum in part represents the non-cognitive components of the artist’s consciousness attempting to address the same spheres of the receiver’s mind. Nevertheless, the idea of zaum as an autonomous system, as an organic linguistic totality, is somewhat paradoxical. Inasmuch as artists aspire to cancel the sign/referent binary through zaum, the recipient cannot withhold his/her urge to interpret. Wittingly or unwittingly, our semiotic instinct tends to re-establish the sign/object binary – to link the signifier to its referent. Zaum is theatrical and polyvalent. In his essay ‘The Resurrection of the Word,’ Shklovsky talks about language purified of meaning, suggesting the affinity between poetic language and music. Zaum is in many aspects analogous to atonal music, to abstract painting, to collage, and experimental performances. Russian futurists went beyond the medium of poetry and took zaum to theatre. The question is, how does zaum perform? What is its role in the process of theatrical semiosis? Clearly, zaum brings forward the poetic function and paralinguistic quality of the dramatic dialogue. Manfred Pfister, applying the notion of poetic function to drama, points out: ‘The poetic function that refers back reflexively to the specific essence and structure of the sign is linked with the message – as verbal super structure’ (106). Through the poetic function, the auto-textual or auto-expressive level that determines the immanent quality of the dramatic work is established. In prosaic language, as well as in some forms of poetic language less radical than zaum, the poetic function competes with referential, expressive, appellative, phatic, and metalingual functions. In dramatic dialogue, even when it deliberately violates the codes of ordinary language or established conventions of dramatic language, the appellative function plays the crucial role in defining the nature of the given dramatic dialogue. The expressive function, relating back to the speaker, is an important means of characterization, while the referential function plays its role in asserting

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narrative components into a dramatic structure. However, dramatic language differs from ordinary language since it always has a double orientation towards another stage character and towards the audience. Furthermore, it often deliberately violates the norms of linguistic primary codes by its usage of neologisms, archaisms, metaphors, rhetorical stylization, verse, and so on. The notion of defamiliarization on the level of language in drama takes place through deviation from both ordinary language and from established conventions of dramatic language. Zaum in drama is a radical version of defamiliarization on the level of dramatic language, since the poetic function dominates all the others. The message becomes neutralized, oriented towards itself, constituting zaum as a self-determined language. This trans-sense language belongs to those avant-garde staging devices that tend to renegotiate, even overturn, the usual ways of aesthetic presentation and reception. Kruchonych pointed out that zaum enabled a creative process governed by chance. Trans-sense language contains the highest degree of chance, so that words, characters, and images pop up unpredictably, surprising even the author.9 Two famous productions of the Russian avant-garde, Victory over the Sun (1913) and Zangezi (1923), were multimedia spectacles envisioned as futurist zaum performances. Victory over the Sun prefigured the contemporary notion of environmental performance, premiering at Luna Park Theatre in St Petersburg. The production used elements of the circus and the fairground booth, which were among the favourite devices of avant-garde directors at the time. Even though it was labelled opera, the chaotic and absurd nature of this production subverted all the genre conventions, and broke with existing theatrical and philosophical traditions. Kruchonych wrote the prologue and Xlebnikov the libretto, while Mikhail Matiushin composed the musical score and Kazimir Malevich did the set and costumes. The text depicted a mechanical world of the future liberated from all the aspects of the human condition including our dependence on the sun, which was captured and controlled by futurist strongmen. The text itself of course was written in zaum, using neologisms and free associations of sounds and images that liberated the words from their customary meaning. In a way, the notion of zaum was not only a feature of the stage dialogue, but also the unifying component of the mise en scène. By subverting the audience’s stock associations, this dramatic language aimed to communicate the inner state of the speaker directly. The verbal aspect and new quality of meaning that it wanted to generate depended on dissonant music, while the actors’ movements were governed by both lighting and sound effects. Zaum was the feature

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through which the theatrical space was created, and as a result the set and costume design radically departed from any kind of objective mimetic representation, resembling a cubist painting more strongly than any kind of everyday reality. Charlotte Douglas draws an analogy between Malevich’s set design for Victory and Kruchonych’s zaum poetics: Just as Kruchonych derived his zaum language from the splintering and reordering of words, Malevich here begins to slice objects apart. It is important to note that he was not concerned with reducing or simplifying or idealizing the object, but simply with showing partial views, cross sections and distortions of perspective. ‘We have cut the object!’ Kruchonych cried, ‘We have begun to see through the world.’ (364)

The set was black and white, made of cloth sheets painted with geometrical forms prefiguring the black and white suprematism of Malevich’s paintings. The costumes were cardboard cylinders, cones, and cubes challenging the common idea of the human figure on stage. Amidst Malevich’s futurist iconography of speed, technology, and the machine – embodied through fragments of airplanes, bombs, clocks, and cosmic bodies – the human body on stage also turned into a depersonalized mechanical object. The costumes, sounds, and text dictated a specific movement pattern to the actors, so that they were not vehicles through which the text was communicated, but Übermarionetten of sorts partaking in the creation of an overall zaum stage language.10 Benedikt Livshits, who saw the performance, described it in following way: These figures were cut up by the blades of the lights and were deprived alternatively of hands, legs, head, etc., because for Malevich, they were merely geometric bodies subject not only to disintegration into their component parts, but also to total dissolution in painterly space. (164)

The defamiliarization of zaum stage language – according to which art should not make use of new objects, but throw new and fantastic light upon old ones – found its embodiment in Malevich’s trans-sense stage design, where lights focused on random pieces of set and backdrops, distorting familiar objects beyond recognition. Vladimir Tatlin’s adaptation of Xlebnikov’s zaum play Zangezi involves a certain combination of colours and forms that corresponds to certain linguistic sounds. Xlebnikov often describes sounds through colours in some of his stage directions for Zangezi, which advise on how the sounds

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should be uttered or perhaps understood: ‘the sounds are sometimes bright blue, sometimes dark blue, sometimes black and sometimes red’ (354). In his introduction to Zangezi, Xlebnikov, describing the play as supersaga, brings forth his architectural approach to language: The supersaga resembles a statue made from blocks of different kinds of stone of varying colors – white for the body, blue for the cloak and garments, black for the eyes. It is carved from the varicolored blocks of the Word, each with its own different structure. Thus do we discover a new kind of operation in the realm of verbal art. Narrative is architecture composed of words; an architecture composed of narratives is a ‘supersaga.’ (331)

Tatlin, who was the director, actor, and scenic artist for this production, tried to use Xlebnikov’s pattern of word construction, where sound was the primary building element, in his creation of the set built with a variety of materials of different shapes and surfaces. Both performances used zaum language as a structural principle to provoke a new kind of theatrical representation. Movement, lights, images, music, and costumes in these performances do not enable the communicability of the representation but rather complicate the communication process making the common pattern of logical thinking insufficient. These performances aimed to expand the boundaries of language as a system in both its function and its form, establishing zaum as a language of floating signifiers. Such a language is meant to reach its audience through aesthetic stimuli wherein, as Umberto Eco explains, ‘it is not possible to isolate a particular sign and connect it univocally to its denotative meaning: what matters is the global denotatum’ (‘Analysis of Poetic Language’ 36). This kind of trans-sense language differs from the nonsense language and grammelots of commedia dell’arte for instance, where its usage often had a satirical function, while its translatability and communicational potential was secured through the actor’s gestures and movements. In the commedia scenario Jealousy of Isabella, the main heroine talks in a nonsense language, but her speech is motivated by madness. The usage of zaum in futurist plays and performances deliberately excludes any apparent psychological motivation. Zaum also differs from contemporary linguistic experiments, such as in Tom Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet where the characters speak in an artificially constructed language, which provides enough linguistic and paralinguistic keys for the receiver to learn the codes. Stoppard’s artificial language is indeed the exact opposite of zaum, for it is based on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and is

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rooted in the idea of the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. While Stoppard’s artificial language demonstrates that language rooted in logos is nothing but a negotiable linguistic contract, the futurists used zaum to search for an ontological language in order to show an organic connection between language and the world. Gnoseological language is the language of fragmentation and discontinuity, while zaum is an attempt to go beyond the logocentrism that almost prefigures Derridian postmodern theory. In artistic practice, to reach the spheres beyond gnoseological language, zaum needs sound, image, and movement. In short, it needs more than the written word alone to ‘resurrect’ and recreate the relationship to the world. The mise en scène of Victory over the Sun and Zangezi embody this idea by involving movement, lighting, images, sound, and music as organic parts of an overall zaum stage language. These elements of the stage language are not used as a means of translation, through which trans-sense would attempt to make logical sense of the performance, but as devices for creating a new language and challenging the dominant linguistic and communicational codes. The performativity of zaum is rooted in its paralinguistic elements. Futurist and Dadaist concrete poetry, Hugo Ball’s ‘audible poems’ (Lautgedichte) and Kurt Schwitters’ ‘visual poems’ (Bildegedichte) explore these paralinguistic dimensions of trans-sense language. Russian formalist Boris Ejxenbaum pointed out the performativness of language that involves verbal mask and gesture, calling for a rethinking of the notion of the written word: We always speak about literature, the book, the writer. Written-printed culture has inculcated the letter in us ... We often totally forget that the word has nothing to do with the letter, that it is a living, ongoing activity created by the voice, articulation, and intonation and joined by the gestures and facial expressions (mimika). We think that the writer writes. But it is not always so, and in the realm of the artistic word it is more often just the opposite. The German philologists (Sievers, Saran, et al.) began to argue a few years ago that the philology of the ‘eye’ (Augenphilologie) must be replaced by its ‘aural’ counterpart (Ohrenphilologie). (In Steiner 162–3)

Zaum in poetry and theatrical performance acts on both the visual and aural axes of language. Speech act theory describes performative utterances as those whose function is not to inform or to describe, but to carry out a ‘performance,’ to bring an act through the very process of enunciation.11 In zaum the process of enunciation is an act and an end in itself. J.L. Austin’s speech act theory shows ‘how to do things with words’; in the

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case of zaum, the performative is of a different nature. Zaum words ‘are doing’ by their very act of being or self-realization. In zaum the word is the thing. Austin’s ‘doing with words’ is measured through its concrete, practical effect, while the aim of the zaum-linguistic performance is to liberate things and words from their practical everyday meaning and function. The goal of zaum-action is to make familiar things, notions and words strange. Also, the parameters for successful or unsuccessful speech acts based on communicational potential and adequacy cannot be applied to zaum performances, since zaum is deliberately inadequate for communication. It challenges the process of communication and the notion of verbal action as the conveying or receiving of a message. However, the category of success from the speech act theory can be applied in a non-traditional sense to zaum. Considering the reception of Zangezi, the performance was a failure, while the responses to Victory over the Sun were mixed. For the Russian avant-garde poet Livshits, the performance of Victory over the Sun ‘could not but astound the spectators – who ceased to feel like an audience the moment the black gulf of the ‘contemplacle’ yawned before them’ (163). While Livshits recognized in the abstract form of the performance ‘a form which completely absorbed the entire Luciferan futility of the world’ (164), the following description shows that the majority of the audience members did not share his enthusiasm: In the end it became boring, and it was the audience itself that came to the rescue of the weary futurists. Almost every cue was followed by some witty word or other, and soon the theatre was hosting not one, but two performances: one onstage, and the other in the auditorium. Whistling and booing replaced the ‘music’ which, by the way, harmonized very well with the crazy decors and the delirium that resounded from the stage.’ (‘Petersburg,’ Muzy [Kiev], 1913 no.1:20; quoted from Bowlt 69)

Even though this performance provoked the audience to actively react to the stage event, it did not really succeed in securing the right ‘uptake’ (to use another term from speech act theory) of the zaum. In other words, it did not quite reach the targeted non-cognitive faculty of the spectators, with the exception of a few futurist artists and formalist scholars in the audience. In Manifestos and Programs (Manifesty i programmy), Kruchonych addresses the relationship between form and meaning in a way that closely approximates formalist thinking: ‘A new content is born only when new expressive devices, new forms are achieved. Once there is a new form, the

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new content follows. Thus, the form determines the content’ (in Markov, Manifesty i programmy 72). Yet, this is not merely about defamiliarizing worn-out linguistic and artistic conventions through a new language, but an attempt, by coining new words, to create new worlds. The proponents of zaum took over a provocative and ambitious task – to find a language beyond logos. It epitomized the utopian world view of the avant-garde being also in part a reaction to the symbolist obsession with the apocalyptic. Xlebnikov’s attempt to find a universal language through the defamiliarization of linguistic conventions, and Kruchonych’s parodies of symbolists’ apocalyptic art could be understood as death-defying acts. In Victory over the Sun, complete control of the world and life is established. The only boundary is death. By capturing the sun, all the natural processes and the eschatological sense of the world are counteracted. The play begins and ends with the following lines: ‘A konchaetsja? Konca ne budet’ (It’s going to end? There is no ending). In Zangezi, personified Laughter plays the leading role representing liberation from the limitations of reason. Zaum language, attempting to erase the binary between sign and object, manifests itself further in futurist performances as a tendency to renegotiate the relationship between art and life. Russian futurism, like some other movements of the historical avant-garde, intended to create an aesthetic system that could penetrate social life and transform it. Zaum as a linguistic utopia paralleled the dream and attempted construction of a social utopia, which the Revolution sparked. The idea of changing the conventions of communication and the linguistic system is not a trivial artistic matter; rather, it is a tendency to change the ways we see, comprehend, and consequently act in the world. It opens new semiotic possibilities, forcing the audience to reconsider the usual codes and their interpretation. In other words, changing the language is always very close to changing the world. This specific linguistic utopia shows once more that in the attempt to engineer the world by coining new words or new social orders, utopia and dystopia are never too far away. Intertextuality as Estrangement The crooked road, the road on which the foot senses the stones, the road which turns back on itself – this is the road of art. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘The Connection between Devices of Syuzhet Construction and General Stylistic Devices’

The relationship between the aesthetic phenomenon of estrangement and intertextuality is symbiotic. The notion of intertextuality has the

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potential to transform, redefine, and show referential text in a new light. In return, the concept of making the familiar strange at times makes use of devices that lay bare the text’s intertextual relationships. The concept of intertextuality can be established in two basic ways – as an intended or unintended relationship of a text to the given aesthetic canon and/or other texts, and as a conscious inscription of other texts and textual codes on the new text.12 Theorizing the phenomenon of intertextuality in its broadest sense can be traced from Plato’s idea of reality as a copy of the ideal image to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacrum. The phenomenon of intertextuality has most often been linked to Mikhail Bakhtin and to some extent to Prague structuralism, but rarely to Shklovsky and Russian formalism.13 Part of the reason for overlooking the Russian formalists in respect to intertextuality might be that they did not fully take into account various aspects of the cultural and historical context, which often conditions the relationship of a new text to its predecessors. In that sense, Prague structuralism indeed broadens the scope of the formalist inquiry into intertextuality and defamiliarization phenomena. Nevertheless, the formalist Tynjanov established a base for a theory of intertextuality by introducing the notion of the literary system. He points out that literary works cannot be understood in isolation, but must be considered through their dynamic relationship with other literary works.14 In addition to Tynjanov’s system, the structuralist Mukarovský later introduces the notion of the text as a system of codes viewed not only in relation to other texts, but also against the backdrop of the cultural superstructure. Yet, unlike the structuralists, Shklovsky calls attention to the receiver in the interplay between the devices of intertextuality and defamiliarization, introducing the notion of ‘seeing’ or perceptibility.15 Structuralists view the notion of aktualizace and intertextuality in relation to the canon. Shklovsky, on the other hand, focuses on artistic strategies for establishing a certain text quality that would have an impact on the receiver’s perception. In other words, his main focus is on the relationship of author (aesthetic devices) – text (ostranenie) – receiver (perceptibility). Ostranenie, being the core of art for Shklovsky, establishes its value not merely by bringing about aesthetic newness, but as a strategy that changes the ways of seeing the well known. Using intertextuality, among other devices, to make forms palpable, ostranenie aims to counteract the automatization of perception. Shklovsky often views artistic technique as a strategy through which defamiliarization and intertextuality, as means of evoking perceptibility, are made visible. And if the effect of distancing

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is based on intertextual play, it becomes palpable when an artwork not only overtly displays the traces of well-known texts and conventions, but also emphasizes their transformation, taking the receiver by surprise. Shklovsky is interested in intertextuality as a form of estrangement that activates the role of the receiver, prefiguring the contemporary reader response theory of aesthetic reception. In the broadest sense, every performance is intertextual if it is viewed as the result of the reading and interpretation of the director, the dramaturge, the actors, and the audience. The notion of intertextuality as a distancing device has the potential of breaking the illusion and highlighting theatre’s own theatricality. The process of mixing and crossing aesthetic and cultural codes exceeds the dramatic text, establishing references to other performance texts and conventions. The intertextuality of theatre includes all the other properties and specifics of the performance as well – imagery, soundscape, acting and directing style, and, in a way, the audience. The very term intertextuality becomes too limited to describe the relation of a mise en scène to other performances, theatrical traditions, and canons. I propose the term ‘intertheatricality,’ or even ‘transtheatricality,’ which is analogous to Gérard Genette’s ‘transtextuality,’16 to name the phenomenon of the performance text that incorporates, transforms, and transcends prior theatrical patterns, granting them a new life. Thus, transtheatricality can be defined as the relationship between a particular performance and all other performances, theatrical styles, and representational modes. Transtheatricality suggests that not the textual, but the performative links dominate the relationship of one performance to others. Estrangement and transtheatricality have the following aspects in common, and they apply to both literature and theatre: the notion of doubling, memory action, and the quality of divergence. In her book Memory and Literature, Renate Lachmann states that the two basic operational principles of intertextuality are memory and simulacrum. Since the concept of transtheatricality is analogous to the concept of intertextuality in literature, each performance is seen in part as the result of memory – of knowing or overcoming other theatrical codes and conventions. Each performance has its effigy, bearing traces of the other performance styles and traditions that it copies, simulates, and transforms. Transtheatricality brings into a new performance well-known devices to be laid bare, played with, and deautomatized. The estrangement concept also functions on the premise that the well known is that which has already been stored in the memory of artistic or

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life experience, and is now going to be brought out, transformed, re-represented, and finally seen in a new light. The recognition of the divergence quality (Christiansen) between the familiar and its transformation is what becomes actualized within the here and now of aesthetic reception. The palpability of transtheatricality and estrangement phenomena relies on this interplay of memory and transformation. Through memory the quality of divergence, the duality between the well known as familiar and as strange, is established. In other words, the sense of strangeness appears as an effigy of the well known. The notion of intertextuality or transtheatricality is very broad and can be ascribed to a variety of phenomena – from mere allusions, which do not create the sense of distancing, to parody and pastiche, where more violent clashes of different textual codes take place. Although each new text (performance) adopts traces of other texts (performances) and transforms their formal elements, redefining the referential one, not every intertextual or transtheatrical manifestation brings about the effect of defamiliarization. In his essay ‘Dostoevsky and Gogol: Towards a Theory of Parody,’ written in 1921, Tynjanov explores the relationships between parodic intertextuality and estrangement. He recognizes two kinds of parody: literary parody – the parody of a particular literary work; and stylistic parody – parody that does not necessarily refer to a particular work, but to a certain style or genre. Tynjanov analyses parodic references to Nikolai Gogol in F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel The Manor of Stepanchikovo, established mostly through inscriptions, quotations, allusions, parallels, or mechanical repetitions of the prior text in the new one. The parody in Dostoevsky’s novel shines through only if the reader is familiar with Gogol’s work, particularly his Correspondence with Friends. While Dostoevsky’s novel contains other more visible links, such as the one to Molière’s Tartuffe and to the conventions of melodrama, the parodic tenor of Dostoevsky’s novel, as Tynjanov notes, escaped the attention of critics since, perceived apart from the forgotten model that it subverts, the work inevitably loses its parodic effect. Estrangement devices often play a key role in marking and highlighting this discrepancy or divergence quality between the new text and the referential one. In Dostoevsky’s novel, the estrangement devices are not foregrounded; they do not dominate the structure of the work, and therefore the parodic dimension of the work remains on the level of allusion. Tynjanov’s notions share a common ground with the avant-garde director Nikolai Evreinov, who staged synthetic parodies – parodies that did not refer to particular dramatic works, but to staging styles and conventions,

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such as these in The Inspector General (1912) and Fourth Wall (1915). Evreinov’s synthetic parodies are among the most overt examples of transtheatricality, since they were not so much parodies of a dramatic text, but rather of a performance. However, in order for these parodies to be successful, the audience has to have the experience of the performance style that is the subject of parodic transformation. The parodied material has to be a part of a shared theatrical and cultural experience. Intertextuality functions as an estrangement device since the presence of other texts in the new one provides conventions and aesthetic devices to be mechanized (parody), problematized (palimpsest), quoted and rearranged (pastiche), and so on. It brings into a new text well-known devices to be laid bare, played with, and deautomatized, so that the duality between the familiar and the strange establishes itself and takes the audience by surprise. When the notion of distancing occurs as a transtheatrical phenomenon it is the result of two clashing textual/performative codes, where the maker of the new text lays bare the devices of the prior text. The prior text figures in the new text as both presence and absence. As absence, it resides in the memory of the audience; as presence, it is transcended within a new work. In the case of parody, for instance, the prior text is reincarnated in a mocking light and experienced as familiar, yet strange, because of the distortion. The spectator is placed in the middle of this game of doubling the aesthetic devices, and is constantly reminded of the quality of divergence between the well known and its transformation. The work of Meyerhold is a case study for demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between theatrical ostranenie and transtheatricality. In all its different phases Meyerhold’s work is a transtheatrical model established through a self-conscious incorporation of other performance styles and representational modes. His acting methodology – biomechanics – his notion of stylized theatre, and his theatricalization of the theatre and conventionality are based on incorporating in the new work elements of theatrical traditions such as commedia dell’arte, Asian theatre, the circus, and puppet theatre. These theatrical forms have at least two things in common: the dominance of theatricality and artificiality over illusionist elements, and the dominance of performance over written text.17 Meyerhold bases his theatrical practice on those forms and conventions that establish theatrical defamiliarization and make transtheatrical relations palpable. His theatre reinforces theatricality as both transtheatrical and as an anti-illusionist mode of performing in the following ways: by renegotiating the status of the dramatic text within the performance

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structure, by laying the staging devices bare, and by inscriptions, combinations, and transformations of other performance styles. Dramatic Text as Intertextual Reference Meyerhold shifts the emphasis from the dramatic text to the actor’s body by using masks, clowning, and improvisation. Even in his early writings on theatre, he is opposed to the idea of performance as a mere embodiment of the dramatic text, stating that theatre is not in the service of literature. The literary text is no longer seen as the basic element without which a performance would cease to exist. For Meyerhold, the actor is the key and the minimal unit that enables a theatrical event to take place even when the performance is stripped of all other components and properties. Thus, the dramatic text is treated as the material for making a performance and Meyerhold therefore allows himself to manipulate and rearrange the text to enhance its theatricality and its signifying potential. In other words, Meyerhold adapts the dramatic text as a component of the performance. The controversial staging of Gogol’s The Inspector General illustrates Meyerhold’s treatment of the dramatic text in ways that reinforce the theatricality and artificiality of the performance. Staged in 1926 in the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg, after Meyerhold’s revolutionary phase, The Inspector General appears when the emphasis again shifts to the theatricality and conventionality of theatre.18 Meyerhold uses the dramaturgical technique of montage and restructures the play into fifteen episodes with titles, evoking the traditional pattern of wagon staging and tableaux vivants. Most of the action takes place on a movable platform that rolls slowly to the proscenium, so that, as Shklovsky ironically remarks, the ‘actors were served up in portions on small platform-plates’ (‘Fifteen Portions of Major’s Wife,’ Krasnaia gazeta 22 December 1926; quoted in Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director 391). Yet the movable platforms localize the play’s episodes so that they come across as plastic visual compositions resembling paintings. The idea to ‘serve’ the actors ‘on small platform plates’ also enhances the cinematic quality of the entire performance enabling a more precise characterization in the style of cinematic close-ups. Furthermore, the show is structured rhythmically more like a musical composition than a dramatic one (the influence of Adolphe Appia and Georg Fuchs), which becomes the spiritus movens of the production more strongly than Gogol’s own plot. Meyerhold recomposes the text using all six surviving author’s editions, including lines that were censored in Gogol’s time, and other frag-

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ments from the playwright’s finished and unfinished work. Even though Meyerhold’s textual adaptation and staging approach alter Gogol’s play and present it from a new angle, they do not quite betray the playwright’s intentions. Even though the play is originally set in some faraway provincial town, it has been generally assumed that Petersburg was indeed the object of Gogol’s satire. Meyerhold abandons the idea to set the play in the atmosphere of provincial dust and dirt, as inscribed in the text, and instead places it right in the heart of imperial Petersburg. Konstantin Rudnitsky describes Meyerhold’s world of the play as quite different from its original setting: He showed not a dead and dismal province, but the gleaming capital of Empire; he lovingly reproduced the majesty of the Russian Empire, its porcelain, bronze and brocade, mahogany and Karelian birch furniture, its secretaries, bureaus, clavichords, its sparkling crystal ... Each scene offered the audience elegant interiors and still-lifes of incredible beauty. (Meyerhold the Director 389)

Nevertheless, Meyerhold insists that the show is played as a tragicomedy to create a sense of inevitable catastrophe hanging over all the imperial beauty and luxury. He urges the actors to avoid his otherwise favourite devices such as buffoonery and commedia dell’arte to emphasize the ominous undercurrent of the play – the disturbing and almost grotesque Russia of Gogol’s Dead Souls hiding behind the splendour. This way Meyerhold deepens and brings forth the darkness of Gogol’s social satire but also makes a radical shift in the play’s genre by staging the comedy in a tragic key. Meyerhold’s dramaturgical concept also alters the characters. This is most visible in the figure of the false Inspector General – Xlestakov – played by the renowned Russian actor Erast Garin. In his previous stage incarnations Xlestakov was usually depicted as a disoriented and starved young man caught in an unforeseen situation that turns to his advantage. Garin’s and Meyerhold’s Xlestakov is quite the opposite; he is an arrogant, sinister chameleon, an impostor who skilfully controls the situation. However, this interpretation is not at all arbitrary, especially given that Meyerhold takes his cue from Gogol himself, who describes Xlestakov as a ‘phantasmagorical individual who, as a false, personified lie, dashes off in a troika, to God knows where’ (quoted in Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director 392). Meyerhold additionally alters the dramatic text by creating a stage double of the main hero Xlestakov in the figure of the

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Visiting Officer – a quiet traveller, always a bit drunk, who follows Xlestakov everywhere. The double further enhances Xlestakov’s infernal qualities. Here is how Meyerhold explains this dramaturgical choice: Reading the final version of The Inspector General (the one which was played in Gogol’s time), I constantly feel what in it is Gogol and what are the simplifications Gogol made on someone’s advice. I see that Gogol listened to everyone, as happens when a dramatist wants desperately to have his play produced without delay. For example, in one scene in the first version, he had three characters, but only two remained. On consideration, I see that with three it was much more interesting. This was clearly a concession on Gogol’s part. (Gladkov, Meyerhold Speaks 143)

The double is mostly silent, following Xlestakov, handing him props and occasionally reminding the hero of his lines. This doubling is both intertextual and intertheatrical. It can be viewed as a reference to Dostoevsky’s novel The Double, Gogol’s own short story The Nose, and as an allusion to the notion of automaton in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s grotesque stories. On the other hand, the stage figure of the double, by its very mechanical nature, takes on the performative patterns of pantomime and puppet theatre. Meyerhold’s The Inspector General shows that references to other dramatic or literary texts in performance are not bound necessarily to linguistic means. In other words, mise en scène has the potential to transform intertextual patterns into interperformative codes. The notion of doubling becomes here both a staging device, marking the divergence of the literary text from the performance, and a metaphor of theatricality. Meyerhold’s methodology stresses the transformation that the dramatic text undergoes from literature to theatre. This transformation of the literary into the theatrical is established through the process of doubling and memory. Meyerhold’s performance offers a re-representation (and a new reading) of Gogol’s play, creating a distancing effect by violating the conventions for staging the Russian classic and subverting the audience’s expectations. The performance provoked one of the most heated debates in theatre history. Among its opponents were such unlikely figures as Victor Shklovsky and theatre director Sergei Radlov. Shklovsky particularly criticized the unnecessary expansion of the role of the Mayor’s Wife played by Meyerhold’s wife Zinaida Raikh. Others objected mostly to the transposition of Gogol’s play into a tragedy and to the somewhat surprising mixture of realism and artificiality that the production introduced.

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Among the defenders of Meyerhold’s The Inspector General were very different figures, from symbolist Bely to futurist Mayakovsky. They praised various aspects of the production, most notably its treatment of social motifs placed within a mannequin-like automatic world and the show’s musical structure. Even the Soviet minister of culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, defended Meyerhold’s The Inspector General stressing that the production ‘was something new, and the new requires some thought and does not come in without an effort’ (quoted in Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director 419). In general, the style of Meyerhold’s work, based on experiment and reinforced theatricality, radically differed from Lunacharsky’s positivist aesthetics and his concept of staging classics for mass audience.19 The fact that the Soviet minister of culture embraced Meyerhold’s rendering of The Inspector General did not mean that the performance succumbed to the state-recommended aesthetics summoned under the slogan ‘Back to the classics,’ but rather, as Daria Krizhanskaya points out, ‘Meyerhold was keen to manipulate the communist vocabulary’ (158) to reach his theatrical goals. Thus, in this light, it becomes even more surprising that Shklovsky did not recognize Meyerhold’s controversial staging as a unique example of theatrical estrangement that took the dust off a well-known work by transforming and exposing it in a new and unexpected light. Meyerhold’s show, prompting a heated theatrical discussion, establishes a dialogue not only with other literary works and with past productions of Gogol’s play, but also with future stage interpretations. For instance, Meyerhold was unwittingly provoking a transtheatrical debate by inspiring Stanislavsky’s production of Gogol’s Dead Souls (1932) – a virtual polemic against Meyerhold’s staging of The Inspector General. The estrangement effect of Meyerhold’s production is brought about not only by a reinterpretation of Gogol’s well-known play against the memory of other productions as a backdrop, but also by means that stress the conventionality and theatricality of theatre. The estrangement strategy works here as a reference signal that points to the very foundation of Meyerhold’s production as a crossing and mutual transformation of literary and performance codes. Meyerhold’s performance recreates Gogol’s play as an effigy, playing out the dialogue between identity and difference. The play text is taken from the realm of the dramatic into the realm of the theatrical. It becomes inscribed into the performance structure, and is transformed during the process of theatricalization. The relationship between the performance and the dramatic text is analogous to the relationship

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between the new and prior text. The dramatic text within Meyerhold’s performance becomes a transtheatrical inscription – a reference to another work, rather than its embodiment. Laying the Devices Bare In his analysis of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky describes a particular defamiliarisation strategy as ‘baring the device’ or revealing the device of plot structure. This defamiliarization strategy allows Sterne to set the prologue in the middle of the novel, to make chapter 9 only one sentence long, to interrupt or never finish a number of stories in the novel. Sterne radicalizes the notion of playing with the device so that the parallels, clashes, and betrayals of various textual patterns and conventions become central parts of the novel and grab the reader’s attention. By means of defamiliarization, the interplay between the different narrative conventions is foregrounded, and the divergence quality between different textual codes becomes perceptible. Baring aesthetic devices in theatre involves showing in full view of the audience the process of theatricalization. In his novel Zoo: Or Letters Not about Love, Shklovsky offers a vivid illustration of baring the devices in performance: In Czech theatre of the same variety type as the Scala, I had occasion to see one other device, which has apparently been used for a long time in circuses. At the end of the show, a clown runs through all the acts, parodying and exposing them. For example, he does magic tricks standing with his back to the audience, which sees where the missing card disappeared. (82)

The strategy of baring the device does not hold a mirror up to nature, but up to another fictional world and its devices. Yet this mirror is somewhat crooked, and the distorted copies of the supposedly well-known textual or performance convention take the receiver by surprise. The concept of laying the artistic devices bare is a form of estrangement based on shifting the stylistic laws of another fictional world and/or subverting the empirical order of reality. Meyerhold and others turned this device into a dramaturgical strategy in order to retheatricalize the theatre, reminding the audience that what sets the production in motion is nothing but ‘a motivation of an artifice’ (Shklovsky, ‘Parodnii roman’ 244). This approach makes the very process of creating a performance the theme of the performance itself, and ultimately breaks the illusion. The strategy of baring

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the staging devices is self-referential, and although it establishes the autotextual level of the performance, it does not necessarily close the work in on itself, but often opens it to other theatrical traditions and styles. The 1906 production of Alexander Blok’s Balagan illustrates that Meyerhold’s strategy of baring the devices is a distancing effect based on transtheatricality. More precisely, he lays bare the devices of producing Blok’s play, which makes use of commedia characters and fairgroundbooth conventions, by incorporating the norms of puppet theatre into the performance of live actors. Meyerhold places a little booth on stage with its own curtain and prompter’s box, creating the structure of theatre within theatre. The prompter climbs into the box and lights a candle in full view of the audience. The wires and ropes of the booth are not masked, so that the audience can see the whole process. The action takes place in the booth, while the actor who represents the Author occupies the main stage. Both the actors in the booth and the one playing the Author are given puppet-like qualities. The Author is pushed on and off stage by someone hidden who controls him, which enhances the notion of romantic irony inscribed in the text.20 The Author is no longer fully in control of his creation; rather he becomes just one of the stage figures. In other words, he is just one of many elements of the performance text, controlled by the theatricality and artificiality of the stage world. The movements of the other stage figures are restricted, imitating the economical movements of puppet theatre. In staging the scenes with ‘mystics,’ who in the play are gravely awaiting events, Meyerhold combines live actors with cardboard cut-outs of figures on which the suits and cuffs are drawn. The painted cardboard mannequins are empty vessels that come to life only when the actors put their arms and heads through the round holes cut in the cardboard busts and collars. Being an amalgam of live actors’ bodies and lifeless cardboard objects, the ‘mystics’ turn into hybrid stage figures. Meyerhold enhances the estrangement and theatricality in the production by adding to the epic devices – asides and direct addresses to the audience – a quality of puppetry, which, as Pëtr Bogatyrëv observes, is ‘one of the most explicitly conventional forms of theatre’ (57). Puppetry always reminds the spectator that the performance is just a simulation of life, not life itself. The puppet-like quality of the stage characters draws attention to the acting process, preventing the audience from considering the actor to be the embodiment of the character. Rudnitsky points out the scope of Meyerhold’s theatrical innovation achieved through unmasking the production’s tricks and devices:

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Theatre of Estrangement For the first time, theatre plainly told the audience that it was not ashamed of being theatre. In Blok’s remarks there was a note that ‘a hand from behind the curtain grabs the Author by the scruff of the neck.’ Of course, it was this remark that gave such a sharp jolt to Meyerhold’s imagination and caused him to construct a theatre within the theatre, to let the Author out on a leash, to pull him behind the stage with a rope, and to show the public how decorations are changed in the theatre, whose upper curtain Meyerhold had removed without hesitation. (Meyerhold the Director 108)

However, on the opening night of Balagan, Meyerhold’s bold assertion of theatricality took the audience by surprise causing uproar as the admirers of the show went ecstatic and gave it a standing ovation, while others greeted the production with whistles and hisses. For Meyerhold, such a passionate and open reaction of the audience was a validation of the show’s theatricality. He comments on it in the following way: Even though part of the audience did hiss at Blok and his actors, the theatre was theatre. And possibly, this very circumstance – that is, that the public dared to whistle so hysterically, best proves that this marked the establishment of an attitude toward the production as to a presentation of the theatre. (Meyerhold the Director 111)

In his book Pierrot in Petrograd, Douglas Clayton stresses that Meyerhold’s anti-illusionist approach to the stage achieved by means of estrangement and theatricality has also political dimensions. He points out that wornout conventions of theatre ‘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’ (81). Associating Meyerhold’s anti-illusionism in the staging of Balagan with antiestablishment tendencies, Clayton’s observations highlight (almost along formalist lines) the potential that aesthetic choices have in generating meaning (content) of the work and the role the reception process plays in determining cultural and even political dimensions of that meaning. The self-referentiality of Balagan, governed by the production’s transtheatrical links to both the puppet theatre and commedia dell’arte, establishes the notion of the performance about making a performance. Yet it shows that theatre within the theatre does not only bare the production devices, but also unmasks the reception process itself. It makes the audience conscious of their own role in the unfolding of a theatre

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production. The transtheatrical elements enable the crossing of different performative codes and reception conventions, whose amalgamation often takes the audience by surprise. These links highlight not only the anti-illusionist aspects of the production, but also the role of the spectator in shaping theatre’s own theatricality and its relationship towards a wider cultural context. Transtheatrical Inscriptions I define the notion of transtheatrical inscriptions as a stamp that resurrects another production, theatrical style, or another work of art. Transtheatrical inscriptions have the potential to bring the theatricality of the performance to the foreground. For instance, Meyerhold’s inscription of the fairground booth into his performances (mostly from 1908 to 1917) makes for an apotheosis of performance based on mask, gesture, and movement. It is a performative style that inevitably highlights antiillusionist performance tendencies and theatre’s own theatricality. Meyerhold’s implementation of folklore by using the notion of the fairground booth, as well as the elements of other theatrical traditions, not only has the potential to break the illusion of theatre, but also to foreground aesthetic principles that remain marginalized in mainstream culture. Transtheatrical inscriptions make the inscribed elements topical, often mixing ‘high brow’ and ‘low brow’ art, marginalized conventions with popular ones, and the Occidental theatrical tradition with the devices of Oriental performances. In this process of inscribing and combining, marginalized conventions and styles are resurrected, but also modified within the body of the new performance. Furthermore, transtheatrical inscriptions not only reinforce the theatricality of the work, but also use estrangement devices to deautomatize worn-out stage conventions, enabling a more conspicuous set of conventions to emerge. The process of combination and association governs the nature of these inscriptions. The creative approach is not based on an arbitrary interplay of performance texts; rather, it is a way of conveying the gist of the work. The transtheatrical relations need to be precise, as Meyerhold puts it: ‘from the old theatre one must select those architectural features, which best convey the spirit of the work’ (Meyerhold on Theatre 98–9). The background and nature of the theatrical material determines the validity of the transtheatrical inscriptions and combinations. In his book Meyerhold the Director, Rudnitsky points out that for the staging of Molière’s Don Juan, Meyerhold recreates the atmosphere of a

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court performance from the era of Louis XIV not by subjecting the production to a minute archaeological reconstruction, but through a ‘free, contemporary variation on the theme of a French Court production of the late seventeeth century’ (148). While the details of Alexander Golovin’s set and costumes convey the splendour of Louis XIV’s Versailles, Meyerhold also uses some of his own innovative staging devices not present in Molière’s time, such as removing the footlights, eliminating the stage curtain, placing two prompter boxes on the stage, and playing on the proscenium very close to the auditorium. According to Meyerhold, this approach – even though not historically accurate – recreates better the spirit and style of the private court theatres of Molière’s time and draws the audience more directly into the atmosphere of the period. Moreover, Meyerhold does not shy away from combining elements of Japanese performance with period elements of the Don Juan production. Inspired by kurogo – the black-clad stagehands of No theatre – Meyerhold introduces little blackamoors, dressed in Golovin’s period costumes, to place and remove props and furniture during and between acts. They are partly within the world of the play and partly exposing it as a stage artifice as they pick up a lace handkerchief dropped by Don Juan, offer a stool to a tired actor, summon the public with tinkling bells, and announce intervals. As the kurogo in Japanese theatre, these stagehands clad as courtiers of Versailles are a means of theatrical stylization. Yet, in staging Don Juan, Meyerhold is able to combine the theatre conventions of Molière’s time with the devices of Japanese No and kabuki drama only after detecting a similar strive towards stylization and theatricality in both traditions. Various directors of the historical avant-garde including Craig, Fuchs, Schlemmer, Tairov, Copeau, Artaud, Brecht, and, of course, Meyerhold found in foreign theatrical traditions, particularly those coming from the Far East, a means of rejuvenating European theatre and reaching beyond the psychological, realistic theatre of illusion.21 These artists familiarized themselves with various forms of Asian theatrical traditions through reports, performances and discussions. From the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1920s and early 1930s troupes from Japan and China made several guest appearances in major European cities. Between 1900 and 1902, Sada Yakko and the Kawakami Otojiro Company toured Berlin, Paris, London, and St Petersburg. It is known that Meyerhold, like Georg Fuchs, saw the 1902 production from Japan, which sparked his interest in Asian theatre. As early as 1905 Fuchs pub-

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lished his work The Stage of the Future (Die Schaubühne der Zukunft), which became well known among the European avant-garde and had a considerable influence on Meyerhold’s ideas on theatre. Fuchs called attention to Japanese theatre techniques as a means of renegotiating the relationship between the actor and the audience and eliminating the magic barrier between the stage and the auditorium.22 Thus, when Meyerhold used elements of Japanese theatre as a means of stylization in his staging of Don Juan, he was making a double-coded transtheatrical reference – to a foreign theatrical tradition and to the cross-cultural strivings that were part of the theatrical zeitgeist within the cultural context of the historical avant-garde. Meyerhold comments on his staging of Molière’s Don Juan as theatre of the mask: ‘The mask enables the spectator to see not only the actual Arlecchino before him but all the Arlecchinos who live in his memory. Through the mask the spectator sees every person who bears the merest resemblance to the character’ (Meyerhold on Theatre 131). Transtheatrical links, made visible through estrangement devices, are not only links to other performances and theatrical conventions, but also links to history. The symbiotic relationship between transtheatricality and defamiliarization confronts a performance text with the performative and ideological structures of a period in time. Different aesthetic and ideological contexts become united through mutual transformation, enabling both the theatrical and the topical dimension of the work to come to life. Meyerhold’s retheatricalization of theatre is a strategy based on the symbiosis of transtheatricality and distancing that grants the various aesthetic forms a new life, not on the ground of permanent and unchanging significance, but on the grounds of change and adaptation. The View from Below and the View from Above Perspectival estrangement presupposes an unusual or changeable viewpoint, position, or angle implemented into the work that brings about a new seeing of the well known by disrupting the static and dynamic elements of representation. This kind of estrangement occurs when the specifics of the given viewpoint are foregrounded. The less neutral the perspective, the more likely it is to create a sense of distancing the familiar. Drama ‘proper’ does not know perspective. It is, in Aristotle’s words, a kind of representation where the poet never speaks, and where all the characters engaged in the mimesis are ‘actually doing things.’ In narra-

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tive works, perspective is created through the character or characters who tell the story, or through whose eyes the author chooses to present the material. In film, the camera eye induces perspective in the structure and leads the spectator’s gaze. In both cases, the represented subject is mediated through the perspective of the narrator or of the camera. Peter Szondi talks about the ‘absolute nature’ of drama, which is established through the absence of a mediating communication system and manifests itself most often in the theatre of the ‘fourth wall.’ ‘Absolute’ drama tends to resist the insertion of perspective as much as possible. However, as Manfred Pfister points out, Szondi’s ‘absolute autonomy’ of drama is purely a theoretical construct that does not really exist: ‘it is fictional, and may therefore be broken at various times – by an aside, a monologue ad spectatores or by commentary by the chorus, for example – causing alienation and awareness of its fictionality’ (5). From gods who influence or comment on the misfortunes in tragedies to clowns who make comic asides to the audience, absolute drama is more of an exception than a rule in theatre. Narrative disruptions of the dramatic structure, as old as theatre itself, introduce the phenomenon of perspective and function as epic devices. Epic devices often establish perspectival estrangement in dramatic works. The audience becomes an addressee, while the inner and the outer circles of theatrical communication temporarily merge. The perspectival aspect can also be implemented within the inner structure of the dramatic works, through characters that at times have a commentary function, or, as in some cases of expressionist drama, by depicting a world seen through the mind’s eye of the main protagonist. In expressionist performance, the set, costumes, make-up, and acting creates the atmosphere of a subjective inner world through which the external reality is usually seen as distorted. In drama, narrative elements and the insertion of perspective have a stronger potential for use as defamiliarization devices than in prose. Narrative perspective is an assumed convention in novels, while in drama, if perceived against the backdrop of ‘absolute drama,’ it is always a disruption of the dramatic. Perspectival estrangement often brings about a point of view alien to the mainstream. Darko Suvin recognizes two basic perspectives in Brecht’s epic dramaturgy: the view from below, which sees the world from the margins of the power structure, and the view from above, which is the position of intellectual and ethical independence: The view from below is the anarchistic, humorous ‘Schweyk look’ of plebeian tradition; it is inherent in the stance, which Brecht’s (and Hašek’s)

Russian Formalism in Russian Avant-garde Theatre 73 Good Soldier assumes in facing the world. Its richness streams from a constant juxtaposition of the official and the real, the sentimental and the naïve, the ideological and the practical. Figures like Azdak are obvious protagonists of this comic look. The view from above on the other hand, is the rationalist ‘Diderot look’ of intellectual tradition; it is inherent in the stance, which the author of Jacques the Fatalist (or Candide, or of The Persian Letters) assumes in facing the world. It critically illuminates the most intimate structures of bourgeois life and art. (124)

The view from below sees the world from the margins of the power structure; the view from above is the perspective of intellectual independence regardless of the onlooker’s position in the social hierarchy. The defamiliarization of Tolstoy’s story Kholstomer, analysed by Shklovsky, is an example of perspectival estrangement that invokes the ‘view from below’ as the parabola of the world seen through the eyes of the horse. However, in Brecht’s case, the one who views is often more important that the object viewed. Brecht’s onlooker is always a strongly socially contextualized figure. In theatre, literature, and film the defamiliarized perspective is introduced most often through characters who are positioned either below or above the mainstream. The gods and prophets of the ancient tragedies appropriate the perspective from above, the perspective of those who know more than the protagonists. However, the perspective from below is more common and it takes place, for instance, whenever the subject is represented through the eyes of a child. The only female proponent of Russian futurism, Elena Guro, was attracted to the themes of childhood and often distanced the familiar by presenting things as seen or imagined by a child. Writers like Bruno Schultz and Danilo Kiš also use this strategy to poeticize their material. Movies such as Federico Fellini’s Amarcord and Emir Kusturica’s Father on a Business Trip appropriate the perspective of a child to personalize the conflicts and contradictions of two dramatic historical periods. Characters that are strangers to internalized conventions also bring about this perspective of childlike naivety, such as the horse in Tolstoy’s story. Wim Wenders, in the movie Wings of Desire, uses angels as strangers through whose eyes the modern Berlin is seen anew. The TV sitcom Third Rock from the Sun bases its humour on the cast of characters from another planet who research human ways of life, as a means of mocking the habitual conventions of Western society. Clearly, the examples of perspectival estrangement are numerous and present in different genres and media. Yet, they often have at least two

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aspects in common: dramatic irony and characters who are in some way strangers. Perspectival estrangement always challenges the dominant and automatized view by presenting the well known through characters who usually have less familiarity with the conventions of understanding and perceiving the given subject than the audience. Whether a character that determines the defamiliarized perspective in the given work (or part of the work) is conceptualized as superior (angels) or inferior (horse), it is usually assumed that the receiver is more familiar with the conventional view on the represented subject than the character through whose eyes the story is told. The dramatic irony here – the receiver’s superior knowledge of the conventions – is a premise for defamiliarization. It is a clash between the automatized perspective of the receiver and the estranged perspective of the fictional character often grounded in naivety. The fictional character through whose eyes the author chooses to represent the world is always somewhat of a stranger. Whether the protagonist is from a marginal social stratum, lacks the experiences of conventions as children do, or comes from a foreign place, he/she most often embodies the notion of perspectival estrangement. Thus, the perspectival defamiliarization could be defined as ‘looking at the well known through the eyes of a stranger who does not fully understand and accept the long established codes.’ Moreover, perspectival estrangement is rarely ideologically neutral, since it attempts to influence a new seeing of a certain, usually political or social, reality. In the essay ‘Isskustvo kak priëm,’ Shklovsky notices that Tolstoy distances well-known objects by pretending that he encounters them for the first time. In other words, in order to establish the sense of seeing the well known anew, the author needs to appropriate an unusual approach to the material. In War and Peace, Tolstoy describes a theatrical performance through the eyes of teenager Natasha Rostova, who is in the theatre for the first time and refuses to suspend her disbelief. The material is represented through a double lens: the perspective of Natasha watching the performance and the perspective of the fictional narrator describing Natasha in the theatre. Natasha does not see an as-if world on the stage, but the mechanics and conventions of its making. The scenery is described as cardboard painted to represent trees; the maiden in white does not wander through the woods but walks towards the prompter’s box; a man is playing with the maiden’s hand to fill the time while waiting for the cue to start singing with her, and so on. Describing these images through the eyes of Natasha

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Rostova, Tolstoy shows that everything that takes place on stage is nothing but the ‘motivation of an artifice’ (Shklovsky, ‘Parodnii roman’ 244). Through his terminological choices Tolstoy stresses Natasha’s reaction to the performance: ‘man and woman on the stage that represented (izobrazhali) a couple in love.’ Tolstoy’s heroine is conscious of stage makebelieve, and through her gaze all the objects and images described signify something that they are not. She almost reads the stage signs as a semiotician, taking notice of the signifiers, and pointing out what they stand for. However, part of the reason why stage make-believe is not at all convincing for Natasha Rostova is the fact that she is watching an opera performance. The long-established and elaborate conventions of an opera performance function unwittingly for a naive spectator, like Tolstoy’s heroine, as devices that break the stage illusion. Events during the intermission are shown as conventions of everyday life that come across as more theatrical than the actual stage performance. Natasha and Kulagin glance at one another from their boxes. She turns her more beautiful profile towards him. She is conscious of his gaze. The fictional stage world is juxtaposed with the fictional world in the auditorium through Natasha’s and the narrator’s alternating perspectives. The fictional world on stage is twice removed (through the eyes of Natasha and the voice of the narrator), which exposes its artificiality. This multiple perspective is an amalgamation of Natasha’s gaze and the narrator’s voice. It enables the stage world to become a crooked mirror of the events in the auditorium through which the social conventions are seen in a new light as motivations of a social artifice. These alternate perspectives create an effect close to Eisenstein’s montage of attractions, metaphorically bringing together the performance of courtship on the stage and in the auditorium, pointing out ironically that the stage conventions cannot quite compete with social role-playing. Tolstoy invokes a special semantic shift by portraying the social roles as the conventions of theatrical make-believe, while at the same time describing an actual theatrical performance through the eyes of someone who does not suspend her disbelief. Therefore the phenomenon of defamiliarization takes place here on several levels, where not only the opera performance, but also the artificiality and theatricality of social conventions are made strange. However, the example from Tolstoy does not explain the nature of perspectival estrangement in drama and theatre. Rather, it unmasks the theatricality of real life and eventually describes the reception of a highly conventionalized genre such as opera. In drama, perspectival estrange-

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ment involves destabilizing the position of dramatic character by shifting it from activity to passivity – from the role of a subject to the role of an object. Yet, the character function is not the only component in drama and especially in theatre through which perspectival estrangement can be achieved. Elements such as space and time can also be involved in introducing perspective and challenging the coordinates of the stage world. In theatre and drama this kind of distancing is closely linked to the unifying component(s) of the work, which can be established through character, action, space, time, set, movement, or even music. The unifying component in theatre secures the coherence of the stage world. It is a base for creating a scenic synecdoche, which determines the character of the representation and the nature of the as-if world. When the unifying principle in theatre and drama is static, the perspective is backgrounded. The door for perspectival estrangement opens when the unifying component of the work enters into a dynamic relationship with other components, that is, when its position is destabilized, when it can be altered or even replaced. This is the case with Mayakovsky’s play The Bedbug, highlighted even more by Meyerhold’s staging of it.24 In The Bedbug, medium and stylistic setting aside, Mayakovsky, like Tolstoy, describes the well known as if encountered for the first time. The Bedbug is a fantastic comedy in nine acts that establishes a satirical and ambiguous vision of the given social reality. The play has two parts – one takes place in the present, 1929, and the other some fifty years later. At the centre of the play is Ivan Prisypkin, a former worker and Communist Party member, who is engaged to a manicurist and turns bourgeois. The first part of the play, written in an absurdist manner where characters break into verse without any particular motivation, ends with the wedding and a fire in which most of the protagonists vanish. The second part, which takes place in the future, depicts a social utopia where a relic from the past, Prisypkin, is discovered, reanimated, and displayed in a zoo. The main character is thus introduced as an active subject, but through the course of the play his function changes as the protagonist is turned into a passive object. Perspectival estrangement takes place in the second part of the play where the present is described from the vantage point of the future. Mayakovsky mocks the present state of affairs, ending the first part of the play with everything in flames – a metaphorical punishment and purification. The future world, actually situated in 1979, has been cleansed of all backward inclinations. Mayakovsky uses his unethical and self-

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indulged central character as a symbol of the contradictions and problems of the Soviet social reality. Prisypkin epitomizes social ailments that need to be treated. In the first part of the play, Prisypkin’s former friends, whose sole dramatic function is to provide narrative commentary, criticize his behaviour and bourgeois transformation: He’s [Prisypkin] the farthest thing from a worker! He quit his job today. He’s getting married – to a hairdresser’s daughter. She’s the cashier, and she’s a manicurist besides. From now on he’ll be getting his claws clipped by Mademoiselle Elzevira Renaissance. (Complete Plays 153)

In the second part of the play, the people of the future view Prisypkin’s habits and vices as alien and display him in the zoo. The zoo director describes the hero by comparing him to a bedbug that was discovered when Prisypkin was defrosted: director: There are two parasites, differing in size but the same in essence: the famous Bedbugus normalis and – and the Philistinius vulgaris ... When the toiling humanity of the Revolution was writhing and scratching itself, scraping away the filth, these parasites built their nests and homes in that same filth, beat their wives, swore by false gods, and took their blissful ease in the shady tents of their own riding breeches. But of the two types, Philistinius vulgaris is the more frightful. (Complete Plays 193)

Both passages are examples of narrative commentary inserted into the dramatic action. While the first commentary describes the subject from the perspective of familiarity, the second one treats the same subject as a scientific rarity. The inhabitants of the future describe the Moscow citizen from 1929 as if seeing such a creature for the first time. Thus, the first narrative commentary introduces a perspective, but does not create the effect of distancing, while the second is an example of perspectival estrangement. The juxtaposition of two chronological perspectives – the present and the future – establishes the didactic aspect of the play, unmasking the inherent corruption in Mayakovsky’s social reality that threatens the future of the communist world. The Bedbug’s ideological complexity lies in its ambiguous and satirical view of reality through the usage of perspectival estrangement. In the following lines the juxtaposition of the old world and the new world of the future alludes to the political problems of Mayakovsky’s time as the Old Man and the Young Man discuss the voting system:

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Theatre of Estrangement young man: Do you still remember how it was in the old days? Must have been pretty silly, uh? old man: ... A lot of people just ducked out of voting. They used to tell about one man who sat out a whole meeting – and a very important one, too – in the men’s room. He was too scared to vote. So he just sat there thinking how to keep his nose clean. young man: And did he? old man: Oh, yes! But they assigned him to a new job – a new specialty. Seeing how much he liked the men’s room, they made him headman there in charge of the soap and towels ... (Complete Plays 168)

This dialogue clearly targets hypocrisy and signs of totalitarianism in society, and society’s way of dealing with politically unsuited members of the party, which would soon lead to Stalin’s famous show trials. The satire is established through the perspective of naivety from which the Old Man reminisces about the past, taking the story of the party-memberturned-janitor at face value. Furthermore, perspectival estrangement is used here to disrupt the logic of the view, establishing the satirical edge of the play when, for instance, the old system is considered primitive not because of its hypocrisy, but because the voting technicalities were not sophisticated enough. In other parts of the play, Mayakovsky uses perspectival estrangement to mock bourgeois social conventions, for instance, when the zoo Director continues to describe Prisypkin’s contemporaries: director: ... These birds built nests in box seats at the theatres; perched on oaks at the opera, rubbed their legs together in the ballet, to the strains of the ‘International’; hung head down from the twigs of their verses; made Tolstoy look like Marx; complained and shrieked in disgustingly large flocks; and – please forgive the expression, but this lecture is scientific – excreted in quantities which could not be considered mere small bird droppings. (Complete Plays 194)

Even though Tolstoy is a relic of the past here, the Director’s description of theatrical events are somewhat analogous to Natasha Rostova’s perspective – she sees theatrical performance for the first time; he has never experienced theatre but has observed proof of its existence. Neither of the two has any knowledge of the conventions established between the stage and the audience that enable theatrical communication to take place. Mayakovsky uses a direct reversal of the strategy Tolstoy employed

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to defamiliarize social reality in his short story Kholstomer, where humans are seen through the eyes of an animal. Here, humans of the present, depicted through the eyes of a man from the future, are seen as an alien animal kingdom. Yet, both writers use elements of fable in their strategy of perspectival estrangement to make satirical allusions. Not only is this device used to make politically subversive references to the present and, in an anarchistic avant-garde spirit, to mock bourgeois social and aesthetic conventions, it is also employed to question the axioms of the world as we know it, such as love and death. The Reporter comments on the case of a love-struck girl: reporter: Poor thing ... The professor said it was an acute attack of ‘love’ – the name given to a disease of ancient times when sexual energy, which should be rationally distributed over one’s entire lifetime, is suddenly concentrated into one inflammation lasting a week, leading to absurd and incredible behaviour. (Complete Plays 181)

Tolstoy’s strategy of describing well-known notions and objects as if encountered for the first time is taken to its limits by Mayakovsky when, for instance, characters look through a dictionary to find the meaning of terms that we consider self-explanatory: professor: ... You’re talking a language I can’t understand – just like a dictionary of obsolete words. What does ‘bad business’ mean (Looks through a dictionary) Business ... business ... Let’s see. Bohemia ... bubliki ... Bulgakov ... bureaucracy ... business. Ah yes! ‘Business, comma, bad: a kind of human activity that obstructs all other activity.’ zoya: Fifty years ago, that ‘activity’ almost cost me my life. I even went so far as ... well, I tried to commit suicide. professor: Suicide? What’s suicide? (Looks into dictionary) Suffragette ... sugar ... suggestive ... Here it is – ‘suicide’ (In amazement) You shot yourself? On orders from a court? From a revolutionary tribunal? zoya: No. On my own. professor: On your own? Out of carelessness? zoya: No. Out of love. (Complete Plays 173)

Perspectival estrangement is achieved by presenting familiar notions through the eyes of a character that is a stranger to the well-known conventions of our world. Yet Zoya’s perspective is a counterpoint to the Professor’s view. She inhabits the present and the future world and

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understands the ‘languages’ of both. Through the character of Zoya, the perspective of the audience collides with that of the fictional inhabitants of the future, pointing out that the axioms of the present could become nothing more than obsolete words in the dictionary of the future. Zoya, and in a way Prisypkin, are characters from the present transposed into the future world, representing the familiar within the unfamiliar. Mayakovsky’s perspectival estrangement creates a vision of the future that is both utopian and frightening. The future communist world of the The Bedbug oscillates between utopia and dystopia, playing out the aporia of revolutionary visions and dreams of technological society where, in the process of improving and engineering the lives of humans, humanity is on the verge of being lost. Mayakovsky uses a specific time-space framework to juxtapose the two perspectives – the familiar and the defamiliarized. The well known is described not only through the eyes of a character who encounters it from an unusual position, but also from a different chronological context. Perspectival estrangement is employed in a chronotopic manner to establish the ambiguous vision of the future in the play. Bakhtin describes his notion of chronotope, conceptualized in the domain of narratology, yet applicable to drama, in the following way: In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. (Dialogic Imagination 84)

In this play, Mayakovsky uses two chronotopes – one of the present and one of the future. The spatial component is seemingly static, since in both cases the action takes place in Moscow, while the time framework changes. In other words, the same, familiar topos is used in both chronotopes. Nevertheless, the chronotope of the future modifies the familiar topos beyond recognition. In Meyerhold’s 1929 Moscow production of the play, these metamorphoses of space by way of changing the time frame are further emphasized in the director’s choice to have different designers for part 1 and part 2. The Kukrinksy cartoon group designed the first part, staging it in the manner of vaudeville. They made the stage world topical by the costumes and props that were bought over the counter in Moscow, satirically displaying the familiar iconography of the period. Part 2, designed by Alexander Rodchenko, represents the future as a mechanized envi-

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ronment of gadgets and signal lights in full contrast to the gaudy colours of crowded and chaotic street scenes in the first chronotope. Rodchenko dressed the people of the future in uniforms so that they came across as depersonalized and faceless characters. At the same time they embodied the idea of the new man freed from all human limitations. Rodchenko’s stage creation of Soviet supermen matched the futurist and Marxist ideas of symbiosis between man and machine. Critics were confused, suspecting that the communist utopia represented on Meyerhold’s stage was in the first place a parody of socialism’s achievements. Boris Brodsky, in the article ‘The Psychology of Urban Design in the 1920’s and 1930’s,’ comments on this production: Who were they, these people facing the prospect of migrating to the future under the protection of blooming mills, Towers to the Third International, or skyscrapers on stilts? The question, raised in the staging of Mayakovsky’s comedies, where the conflicts are based entirely on the move from today to the future and back again, found an answer in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s and Rodchenko’s staging of The Bedbug. The people of the future appear on the stage – in uniforms. (81)

Several elements make the depiction of the future in this production dystopic. The uniformed Soviet supermen represent social utopia, while they also prefigure the totalitarianism that was about to sweep the theatrical avant-garde off stage. Furthermore, not only does the familiar space (Moscow) become unfamiliar within the chronotope of the future, but also the characters become aliens within their own, familiar, and wellknown context. The juxtaposition of two chronotopes within one fictional world enables the defamiliarization of well-known notions and terms. In other words, introducing the present from the perspective of the future foregrounds the time component, turning the current context into an archaeological relic. The future does not understand the language of the present, turning all its axioms into ‘a dictionary of obsolete words,’ and this is exactly what makes Mayakovsky’s social utopia so unsettling. The future does not come across as a prolonged and improved present life, but as a graveyard, a mausoleum, a dictionary, or a zoo where what survived the fire Mayakovsky set to the characters in the first half of his play is displayed as an alien and atavistic relic. In other words, Mayakovsky’s depiction of a social utopia turns into a dystopia and brings about a sense of doubt that the faceless, uniformed Soviet supermen of the future will even be able

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to recognize their own most passionate visionaries and engineers. Furthermore, this play and Meyerhold’s staging of it defamiliarizes the whole ideology of a bright future, and transforms it into a man-made nightmare. Shklovsky points out correctly that the notion of ostranenie in general is not necessarily used to express negativity. However, perspectival estrangement is often employed as a device of satire, irony, and social criticism. Whether coming from Tolstoy or Mayakovsky the strategy of perspectival estrangement renders the familiar context and conventions strange, and brings doubt about what used to be taken for granted, pointing to an intrinsic element of strangeness in everything we consider our own and well known. The Grotesque – Defamiliarization in the Second Degree You will scarcely, my dearest reader, mistake my courage for mere love of mischief, but see in it rather my pardonable eagerness to lure you out of the narrow confines of everyday life and to let you enjoy yourself as you please in an unfamiliar region. Yet, this region, after all, is enclosed within the realm, which, in true life and being, the human spirit governs according to its own pleasure. Hoffmann, Princess Brambilla

The process of defamiliarization contributes elements of strangeness to the habitual, while grotesque estrangement takes the process one step further – familiarizing the strange and the hideous. Meyerhold, whose productions were often the very embodiment of grotesque stylization in theatre, defines this phenomenon in the following way: The grotesque is the second stage in the process of stylisation, when the final link with the analysis has been severed. Its method is strictly synthetical. Without compromise the grotesque ignores all the minor details and creates a totality of life ‘in stylised improbability’ (to borrow Pushkin’s phrase). Stylisation impoverishes life to the extent that it reduces empirical abundance to typical unity. The grotesque does not recognize the purely debased or the purely exalted. The grotesque mixes opposites, consciously creating harsh incongruity and relying solely on its own originality. (138)

Notions of distancing the familiar discussed so far have always been related to showing habits of representation against which their distortions are contemplated. The grotesque, like other modes of ostranenie,

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involves the representation of ‘the familiar’ as unfamiliar, but with a shift in emphasis. Even though the ambivalent mixing of levels of familiar and strange still exists, the relational component is lost and all the elements are placed on the same level of importance. The strategy of distortion is carried to its limits, where the dynamics of the estrangement principle become almost destroyed, bringing about a disorienting effect. The grotesque realm is not so much based on the interplay between the familiar and the defamiliarized, but on establishing an uncanny universe of its own by appropriating features of our familiar world. Wolfgang Kayser defines the grotesque in the following way: The grotesque world is – and is not – our own world. The ambiguous way in which we are affected by it results from our awareness that the familiar and apparently harmonious world is alienated under the impact of abysmal forces, which break it up and shatter its coherence. (37)

Freud uses the term uncanny (unheimlich) to describe the grotesque as that class of frightening which leads back to what is known as familiar. It implies that what was once well known and familiar has become repressed. The term unheimlich is an aporia since the word home (Heim) is hidden in it. The Freudian definition of the term unheimlich connotes both the familiar and its transformation into strange, as well as the discomforting effect that this transformation, specific to the grotesque, has on the receiver. Unheimlich – derived from Heimlich (hidden, secluded) – also means uprooted. Grotesque uproots (decontextualizes) the familiar from its customary context, often exposing that which is hidden or repressed. The uncanny strangeness specific to the grotesque involves the notion of making the familiar strange, not necessarily as a device of perceptibility, but as a means of blurring the line between familiar and strange, and between real and imaginary. Grotesque estrangement transcends artistic media and is in nature theatrical. Meyerhold’s brand of tragic-grotesque combines a variety of sources, not all of which are directly connected to theatre, including the pictures of Jacques Callot and the novels of E.T.A Hoffmann – Meyerhold’s main arsenals of commedia dell’arte devices. Meyerhold is inspired by Hoffmann’s rendering of commedia dell’ arte where the humorous and the frightening coexist. The commedia aspects of Hoffmann’s grotesque tales are rooted in the plays of Carlo Gozzi and the famous drawings of Callot that depict commedia masks and scenes. Hoffmann’s use of romantic irony and other techniques of digression, analo-

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gous to theatrical asides, as well as his placement of a summary at the beginning of each chapter in the style of commedia scenarios, breaks the illusion of imagined realities within the reading process. Images of masquerades, buffoonery, street performances, parades, and disguises in Hoffmann’s tales establish the uncanny world of his story, attesting to the theatrical quality of the grotesque style within the narrative works. Writing about grotesque estrangement in Gogol’s work, Russian formalist Boris Ejxenbaum also finds grotesque qualities theatrical. He points out that Gogol’s narrative technique (skaz), strongly based on the manner of verbal delivery, is performative in nature: [It] often seems to be concealing an actor, so that the skaz here becomes a kind of play-acting, and the structure is determined not by the simple linkage of one comic episode with another, but by a system of articulated phonic gestures of various kinds. (‘How Gogol’s Overcoat Was Made’ 269– 70)

The world of Gogol’s grotesque is performative, created through phonic gestures. The very name of the protagonist in The Overcoat, Akaki Akakevich, is an example of a phonic gesture since, as Ejxenbaum observes, it imitates an articulated sound. The personal tone in which the story is told ‘takes the character of a grotesque leer or grimace’ (285). It could be added that the phonic gestures in Gogol make the sounds performative, while the ‘grotesque grimace’ gives a face to the voice that tells the story – a face that wears a theatrical mask. There is a sense, in other words, that Gogol’s narrative does not tell the story, but creates a verbal enactment of it. To further stress the theatricality of the grotesque, Ejxenbaum turns to Gogol’s dramatic works comparing the ending of the story The Overcoat, when the ghost of Akaki Akakevich returns to reclaim the overcoats of passers-by, with the mute scene at the ending of The Inspector General. In both cases, Gogol, alternating and mixing the sentimental with the comic, brings the audience back to the beginning, and the melodramatic episodes resolve in laughter. This results in the effect that Ejxenbaum compares to the strategy of breaking the theatrical illusion, ‘when the actor seems to step out of his role and begins to speak like a real person’ as in The Inspector General when the lines ‘What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourself’ are uttered directly to the audience (286). Ejxenbaum suggests that there is not only an analogy between defamiliarization devices in narrative and dramatic works, but that these devices

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could be transferred from one artistic medium to the other to create a grotesque effect. Exaggeration and breaking the logic of reality are fundamental principles of the grotesque. In his theory of the grotesque, Ejxenbaum points out that hyperbole is carried out by operating within an extremely small fictional world – Gogol’s grotesque realm is no bigger than the world of a joke or anecdote: The grotesque style requires first of all that the situation or event being described should be enclosed in a fantastically small world of artificial experience ... that is completely isolated from reality at large and from the true fullness of inner life; and second that this should be done not with didactic or satirical intent, but rather to make it possible to play with reality, to break up its elements and displace them freely, so that normal correlations and associations (psychological and logical) will prove inoperative in this newly constructed world, and any trifle can grow to colossal proportions. (288)

Gogol achieves his grotesque effect by stretching and exaggerating the framework of a joke to the proportion of novelistic material. In The Overcoat, the small world of clerk Akaki Akakevich allows for the hero’s obsession with the lost overcoat to grow comically out of proportion. Ejxenbaum describes Gogol’s grotesque as play with reality where reallife logic and order is distorted so that the small can be exaggerated out of proportion, and the large undermined. The author treats the exaggeration of the small world not as fantasy, but as reality. It is this process of ‘normalizing’ the fantastic that contributes to the grotesque effect. In his famous story The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung), Kafka uses a similar strategy – in order to normalize and familiarize the fantastic, he reverses logical priorities. The story deals with the self-inflicted isolation of a man who is transformed into an insect and has to learn to manage his new body. Neither the author in his treatment of the material, nor the other fictional characters in the story consider it extraordinary that a human being turns into an insect. Rather, the surprise occurs only when the man/insect, Gregor Samsa, violates conventional social behaviour. The breakdown of the rules and logic of everyday reality is often motivated by a character on the verge of madness in the centre of a small and self-enclosed grotesque world that resembles our own. In Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, the story is narrated from the perspective of a man who loses his senses. The grotesque effect is achieved gradually as the narrator’s realistic depictions of the world become invaded by illogical and non-

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sensical elements. In Hoffmann’s grotesque tales, such as The Sandman and Princess Brambilla, the illogical and fantastic events can be partly explained by the madness, fever, and nightmarish visions of the protagonists. In Meyerhold’s production of Columbina’s Scarf (1910), the heroine is in a nightmarish state during the wedding dance that leads to her death. In his production of Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade (1917), the emphasis is shifted to the figure of the Stranger clad in black with a ghastly white mask, who is depicted as the dark force that leads the protagonist into madness and murder. In Hoffmann’s and Meyerhold’s grotesque, madness is often directly and indirectly induced by the presence of a demonic figure, who influences the hero only to further challenge the possibility for a rational explanation of events. The function of motivation here is not really to explain the fantastic, strange, and illogical, but to heighten ambiguity and to disorient the audience. Meyerhold describes the grotesque as ‘the artist’s constant desire to switch the spectator from the plane he has just reached to another, which is totally unforeseen’ (Meyerhold on Theatre 139). Freud claims that the author, using grotesque estrangement, deceives the audience ‘by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all overstepping it’ (224). The grotesque world can never be fully justified through the logic of reality. It does not offer the comfort of a rational explanation of the uncanny with which to restore traditional order. Meyerhold points out that the grotesque is based on the conflict between content and form, aiming to subordinate psychologism and logic to a decorative task. In theatre, this style requires a special treatment of the production components in order to establish a self-enclosed grotesque world on the stage. Meyerhold dramatizes and modifies the text according to an inner logic, which is different from reality. For the performance of Columbina’s Scarf, a grotesque in the manner of Hoffmann, Meyerhold broke Arthur Schnitzler’s pantomime, inspired by commedia dell’arte, into fourteen episodes.23 The episodic structure had a disorienting effect, intensifying the rhythm of the action and shifting the gravity of the performance from the text to its stage design and imagery. The set and props determined the gestures and poses of the actors that were always slightly or significantly different in pace from everyday movements. Designer Nikolai Sapunov made the stage of Columbina’s Scarf claustrophobic, filling it with pretentious and kitschy furniture that echoed the small, closed, and obsessive world of Gogol’s novels and plays.24 The character of the Kapellmeister, who sat on a stool and conducted four weird musicians, dictated the pace and movements

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of the performance. An eyewitness described the grotesque, nightmarish dance, which was the culmination of the show, in the following way: What drove the dancers was the Absurdity itself; its will was fatal yet farcical. Every single pause, every arrest in the movement, was employed by the director to stress the readiness of the guests at any given moment to tear themselves from their places and surrender to the Satanic power of the music. Breathless, they preened themselves, straightening their gaudy red, green, orange, pink, and yellow costumes; the ladies rearranged their tall hats and their outlandish coiffures ... At Giglio’s imperious gesture, the whole crowd would resume the dance. (Meyerhold 99)

For this production, Sapunov designed grotesque costumes based on the principles of contrast and transformation, turning the human body into an object or an animal. He was inspired by Renaissance grotesque ornamentation, which was based on unusual combinations of imagery including masks, garlands of fruit, satyrs, centaurs, and so on. Meyerhold describes Sapunov’s design, which for the sake of a grotesque effect ‘transformed Giglio into a parrot by combing his wig from back to front to resemble feathers, and by arranging his frock-coat in the form of a real tail’ (140). Meyerhold’s stage figure became an amalgam of human and animal – a kind of tragicomic centaur. The contrast and combination of the human and the mechanical, of body and object, of the live and the inanimate is governed by montage principles. In a way, grotesque is a special kind of ‘montage of attractions’ (Eisenstein) where elements and images are placed together not only in unexpected combinations, but so as to transform one another, challenging the logic of reality. The contrast of the human and mechanical, body and object, live and inanimate is a common feature of the grotesque ‘montage of attractions.’ Meyerhold’s and Sapunov’s approach to the representation of the human body recalls the grotesque pictures of the Maximilian portraitist Arcimboldo based on similar montage principles and famous for depicting human faces as collages of various objects. In his portrait titled The Cook, the face is a collage of edible items – the cheeks are onions, the mouth is a sausage, the hair is a bunch of lettuce and the helmet is a dish. As Roland Barthes points out in his essay ‘Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur,’ the painter radically exploits linguistic concepts using comparisons, analogies, metaphors, and metonymies. Arcimboldo’s linguistic thinking starts with a comparison, but is taken to the point where it destroys itself, where ‘the helmet is no longer like a dish, it is a dish’

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(Barthes 131). These paintings generate meaning through interaction and an uncanny assembly of seemingly unrelated images brought together to conjure a human face. Wax tapers, baby’s legs, fruits, vegetables, and dishes in Arcimboldo’s paintings determine new images – that of a human face – through a playful interaction with one another. For instance, the prune in the painting Autumn is identified as an eyeball, a part of a human face, only when the viewer recognizes its relation to the other objects that make up the unusual portrait. The uncanny effect of Arcimboldo’s portraits occurs not only as the result of a mere decontextualization of the objects, but also because the image of human face turns out to be a combination of elements that do not normally belong to it nor are they necessarily of a human origin. The grotesque estrangement is further enhanced by the sense that Arcimboldo’s human faces are portrayed through the decomposition and dismemberment of other objects, which in a way reverses the natural order and suggests a world where death precedes life. Descriptive names in drama and literature often play on the same grotesque principles of contrasting and ambiguous man/animal and man/ object combinations, as Gogol does in naming the characters of Dead Souls: Korobochka derived from the Russian korobka meaning box, Sobakievich is derived from the Russian sobaka meaning dog and so on. Even though these names are an obvious means of characterization, they also create a verbal image. Gogol describes some of Dead Souls’ personages in a manner that is the verbal equivalent to both Arcimboldo’s painting and Sapunov’s costume design: As he drove up to the porch, he noticed two faces which were peeping out of the window almost simultaneously: one was a woman’s, long and narrow as a cucumber, crowned with a cap; the other a man’s, broad and round as the Moldavian pumpkins, which go by the name gorlyanki from which Russians make balalaikas. (96)

In this brief passage, Gogol contrasts the female and male images – the ‘cucumber’ and the ‘pumpkin’ faces. The transformation of a human face into an inhuman one is accomplished by means of simile and comparison. The male face is first described as pumpkinlike and is then further associated with a balalaika – a traditional Russian musical instrument similar to a mandolin. There is a sense of the transformation that the human face undergoes in this description, turning into a vegetable (pumpkin) and then into a lifeless object (balalaika).

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In the essay ‘Man and Object in Theatre,’ Czech structuralist Jirí Veltruský points out that the distinctive character of theatre is its ability to transform a lifeless object on stage into a performing subject, and to turn a live actor into a thing. In the case of grotesque estrangement this transformability of animated and lifeless objects on stage is carried to the extreme, with the living body turning into a marionette and vice versa. This interchangeable relationship between human body and object often establishes both comic and uncanny effects. The comedy of this transformability springs, in Bergsonian terms, from the sense of ‘something mechanical encrusted’ on the living; ‘we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing’ (Bergson 57). This kind of transformation of a person into a thing is often the core of the comic in the circus and commedia clowns that inspired the work of Meyerhold. Through his acting techniques, including biomechanics and other strategies, Meyerhold was in fact searching for gestures, movements, and poses that make the liveliness of the actor’s body on stage ambiguous. The strategy of dissimulating the common parameters between the live and the lifeless creates the grotesque effect that Meyerhold describes, quoting Hoffmann: Hoffmann’s doll complains that she has a clockwork mechanism instead of a heart. The element of deception is important in the dramatic grotesque, just as it is in Hoffmann. The same is true of Jacques Callot. Hoffmann writes of this astonishing graphic artist: ‘Even in the drawings from life (processions, battles) there is something in the appearance of the lifelike figures, which makes them at once familiar yet strange. Through the medium of the grotesque the comic figures of Callot yield mysterious allusions to the perceptive observer.’ (141)

This ambiguity between the familiar and the strange renders the notion of mechanizing and transforming the lifelike both laughable and unsettling. The defamiliarization of the lifelike is achieved by transforming it into something uncanny that has human features, but is at the same time made of something inhuman. Max Ernst’s paintings from the early 1920s, which depict engines instead of organs inside human bodies, illustrate this concept. The frightening effect is in the ambiguity between identification and strangeness that remains. The grotesque heightens this ambiguity by letting the lifeless merge into and viscerally ‘encrust’ the living. As a result, the mechanization of the human (and the humanization of the mechanical) through grotesque exaggeration comes across as deadening.

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The grotesque, blurring the line between realism and fantasy, the familiar and the strange, identity and otherness, creates a self-enclosed world that cannot turn back to restore the comforting order of the everyday. In that sense Meyerhold is right when he asks the following: ‘Grotesque is the title of a genre of low comedy in literature, music and plastic arts.’ Why ‘low comedy’? And why only ‘comic’? It is not only humorous artists who for no apparent reasons have synthesized the most diverse natural phenomena in their works. The grotesque need not necessarily be comic (the aspect examined by Flögel in his Geschichte des Groteskkomischen); it can easily be tragic, as we know from the drawings of Goya, the horrific tales of Edgar Allen Poe, and above all, of course from E.T.A. Hoffmann. (139)

The grotesque, Meyerhold writes about, prefigured in the works of Hoffmann, Gogol, Edgar Allen Poe, Francisco Goya, Arcimboldo, and others, has a different function than in medieval and Renaissance art, where it had an ornamental character. The grotesque in the works of Hieronymous Bosch and Dante Alighieri indeed brought about an unsettling vision of the world, but it was primarily a means of imagining religion. In neoclassicism the grotesque was used to represent what was considered the weird and bizarre. The twentieth-century grotesque more often than not is a dystopic depiction of the world. In modernism the grotesque becomes a true defamiliarization device, since it does not exist merely for its own sake, but to play out the dichotomy between illusion and reality, self and otherness. Meyerhold’s tragi-grotesque is prefigured in Alfred Jarry’s and Frank Wedekind’s plays, in Luigi Pirandello’s teatro dell’ grotesco, and Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck where the world resembles a puppet play and the main hero a giant wooden doll. Grotesque estrangement suggests the sense of crisis of personality embodied in Freud’s notion of the double to which he ascribes the effect of uncanny strangeness: ‘The subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling and interchanging of the self’ (234). This notion of the double is similar to the sense of self that Hoffmann ascribes to his hero, Giglio Fava, the protagonist of the tale Princess Brambilla: ‘I can’t understand my self, and my accursed self is attacking me with a dangerous weapon, but I’ll play and dance it to death, and than I shall be myself and the Princess will be mine!’ (The Golden Pot and other Tales 172). The modernist sense of grotesque invokes an identity crisis estranging the idea of the world and reality as stable and logical categories.

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For Meyerhold the tragic-grotesque is a point of departure marking his pre-Revolutionary years. In the mid-1920s he returns to this style that embodies the notion of theatricality, remaining faithful to it until his violent death. The grotesque, in both phases of Meyerhold’s career, estranges the comforting attitude towards existence, depicting through commedia masks and comic glares the sense of crisis interwoven in the modernist sensibility. It manifests itself as the discrepancy between the world and self and as a discontinuity of identity. Grotesque estrangement suggests that the process of seeing the well known in a new light is not always an enlightening journey nor a necessarily pleasant one. The ‘double’ inherent in everything we consider familiar and our own can reveal itself as a figure of true terror. In the late 1920s and 1930s, for instance, the uncanny double of revolutionary dreams and utopias was unlashed from the nightmarish and dystopic visions of modernist grotesque estrangement into reality. Totalitarian realities that ensued in both Russia and Germany operated in many ways though grotesque principles, particularly in their attempts to normalize the horrors of political violence. However, the main difference between theatrical and historical grotesque estrangement is that in the latter anguish almost never resolves in laughter.

3 Epic Theatre in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

New technological possibilities gave way to new dramaturgical and mise en scène solutions, through which both the methods of representation and the represented events were defamiliarized. Technical innovations and their impact on socio-political reality is a theme in the writing of the expressionists, futurists, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Cm apek, and in Fritz Lang’s film classic Metropolis, to mention a few. The advance of technology was viewed as both scary and fascinating in opening possibilities for new experiences in art and life. Performances of Bauhaus and the experiments of futurists and Dadaists explored different ways of merging the body and the machine. Documentary film projections, used as a means to abolish illusion on stage and to inspire political action, were one of the trademarks of Piscator’s and to some extent Brecht’s political theatre. Behind both Piscator’s and Brecht’s concentration on machinery lay the consciousness that technology had started to play a determining role in humanity’s command of the world, altering both its themes and its representational modes of art. New technologies gave rise to new media of representation – film and radio – and shifted both the aesthetics and the politics of performance in theatre. In his famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Walter Benjamin points out that the new technology has changed the perception of both art and reality, by means of the speed with which new artistic media are able to capture and freeze images, enlarge them, and slow them down. This, according to Benjamin, counteracts the passivity of perception, forcing the receiver to take an active and critical position towards the object. The role of technology is seen in the decline of autonomous art and in the rise of a politically committed one, in the transformation of the production apparatus, and in disturb-

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ing the habitual modes of reception. For Brecht, Benjamin, and Piscator the promise of new technology was to establish a new political function of art, by enabling new aesthetic strategies, and renegotiating the relationship between artwork and the audience. Brecht conceptualizes his epic theatre as one suited for the ‘scientific age,’ offering estrangement strategies as a means of seeing and relating to reality in a new way. My examination of this particular brand of estrangement will be to some extent framed by the aesthetic and political dimensions of modern technology that influenced the development of the concept, particularly the cinematic thinking inherent in Brecht’s notion of Verfremdung and Piscator’s contribution to its development. In order to determine the specific features of Brecht’s Verfremdung and to reach beyond the over-ideologized interpretations of this theatrical strategy, I will analyse ways in which estrangement devices work both on the level of dramatic text and in staging.1 Even though Brecht’s concept carries specific political connotation through its strategies of unmasking theatrical illusions, it is not always immune to the manipulative potential of the medium. As we will see, Verfremdung more often than not reveals a specific paradox – it does not fully abolish the illusion of reality on stage, but rather it provides the ‘illusion’ of breaking the illusion. The Role of Piscator Technology and its new media (film and radio) entered Brecht’s work from both aesthetic and political perspectives, influencing the development of his dramaturgical concept of Verfremdung. Brecht was aware of the impact of film on the establishment of new staging strategies and its capacity to generate political meaning. In expressing his view on theatre and modern technology, Brecht indirectly describes Piscator’s staging practice: It was through technical achievements that the stage was made capable of ... integrating narrative elements into the dramatic presentation. The possibility of projection, the increased flexibility of the stage through its motorization, and the film: these completed the equipment of the stage. In order to make the action comprehensible, it became necessary to represent the environment in which men lived, in all its breadth and ‘significance’ ... The stage began to narrate. (Schriften zum Theater 62–3)

Piscator’s and Brecht’s theatre, as well as the historical avant-garde in

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general, were coming of age in a period within which modern technology altered the conventions and concepts of both art and war, bringing about new devices of representation and new methods of warfare. On the one hand, new technology opened new possibilities of creative expression and new ways of improving the quality of life; on the other, it enabled new methods of violence and destruction. The character of the Great War was determined by technological advance too. The First World War, which marked the views and modes of artistic representation in Germany and Europe in general, further reinforced the need for a new political and aesthetic function of art. It was modern, industrial warfare, and so the old conventions for depicting war scenes in art were no longer sufficient. The artists of the European avant-garde including German expressionists, French cubists, and Italian and Russian futurists, rejected the rules that had previously governed war painting in favour of broken lines and bursting colours, while the atmosphere of their paintings ranged from dystopia to irony. Max Beckman created chronicles of the war in the forms of drawings and engravings; Fernand Léger portrayed dehumanized automata; Pablo Picasso drew the surrealist poet and soldier Guillaume Apollinaire in the form of a pastiche of popular prints depicting Napoleon’s glory (Gunner Guillaume de Kostrowitzky 1914). The reaction to the Great War in Europe, especially in Germany, ranged from exaltation at the beginning of the war to disillusionment and a sense of the world as the danse macabre depicted in Otto Dix’s paintings (The Flare 1917). In his Self-portrait as a Soldier from 1914, the dominant red colour is violent, bringing about the sense of an almost pleasurable intoxication with destruction. In his later paintings, after the Great War had been experienced in its full deadly scope, Dix depicted reality through images of abandoned corpses in a destroyed dugout and of plants taking root in crownless skulls. The reality and images of the Great War were too absurd for traditional means of representation. Only through the distortion of conventions and images in art and clashes of colours that intensified violence could the actual violence of reality be depicted. The chaos of post-war society, the daily strikes and protest marches, rendered absurd the pre-war theatre of illusions and selfabsorbed theatricality embodied in the renowned productions of Max Reinhardt. His notion of art as Gegenwirklichkeit (antireality) became outdated as the sights and sounds of war filled both art and life. The social and political climate demanded a different means of expression that could stand up to the urgency and drama of war-inflicted reality. Expressionist director Leopold Jessner described the context within which Piscator’s and Brecht’s theatres were conceived:

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After the time of War and Revolution left its mark ... the stage of pure theatricality was not able to bring pleasure anymore. The flickering world has been destroyed in the attacks of reality. Shining colours have been blurred by the visions of bloodshed. The most powerful music has been suppressed by cries from the streets. (60)

Brecht and Piscator had similar views on the role of theatre in society and used similar artistic strategies to achieve their goals. Yet, Piscator had always been a few years ahead in conceptualizing ideas and approaches. Piscator spent the First World War as a soldier in the trenches. His introduction to Marxism came through the German Dadaist movement. The contexts of the November Revolution and the Great War determined his approach to the stage. After the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Piscator joined the Spartacus movement, the most radical of all the leftist parties in Germany at the time. Very early, in the 1920s, he searched for a theatre of crisis and urgency that would be able to cope with reality. Brecht, five years Piscator’s junior, was also recruited in 1917, but spent his military service in an Augsburg office. Although he followed the events of the November Revolution, Brecht was still far from being politically committed. His writing, notes, and most notably his theatre reviews for Augsburger Zeitung from 1919 and 1920 show that Brecht had not yet become completely dissatisfied with the illusionist and naturalist theatre, although he criticized bourgeois conventions. Only after moving to Berlin in 1920, did Brecht start to formulate ideas that would later shape his concept of Verfremdung and epic theatre, which at that time Piscator had already put into practice. Brecht’s ‘Notes to the Mahagonny Opera’ (1930), outlining the crucial postulates of epic or non-Aristotelian theatre, bore a striking resemblance to Piscator’s notions published a year before in the book Political Theatre. The term epic theatre was first formulated in 1924 by Piscator to describe the staging strategies he employed in Alfons Paquet’s Flags, a full two years before Brecht used it for the first time. In 1928 Brecht joined the Piscator Collective and worked on the adaptation of Jaroslav Haš ek’s war classic Adventures of the Brave Soldier Schweyk together with Felix Gasbarra, Piscator, and George Grosz. This project, that made a strong antiwar statement, was also relevant to the further development of Brecht’s theatre of epic form and Verfremdung, since it proved that the Piscator Collective’s adaptation of Hašek’s novel would be impossible without modern technology. The point of departure for the Piscator Collective was Max Brod and Hans Reimann’s play based on Hašek’s novel.2 Their adaptation had a conventional plot structure built

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around a love affair theme, reducing Hašek’s epic, Rabelaisian novel to a closed dramatic form that enabled its staging by traditional theatrical means. The adaptation by the Piscator Collective followed the epic development of the novelistic material. It combined theatrical and film dramaturgy, to preserve the picaresque nature of Hašek’s book. The dramatization was based on a fast-paced montage of selected episodes from the novel, forming a play text that was impossible to stage in a traditional way. The Piscator Collective’s project was conceptualized with stage machinery in mind, and as a theatrical equivalent to the novel’s episodic form. To evoke the sense of journey, Piscator made a treadmill the central design feature. It provided an illusion of movement and became the motivational force of the stage action as well. The stage figure of Schweyk was embodied through mechanical movement – he was taken in a wheelchair to a medical examination and in a train to the battlefield; he also ‘marched’ on the treadmill for days to find his regiment. The technology thus became truly an organic part of the character and of the stage event, symbolically foregrounding the perpetual, mechanical motion of war machinery through the theatrical image. George Grosz’s over-sized marionettes representing army, church, and military figures further reinforced the stage defamiliarization. The stage backdrop, featuring Grosz’s caricatures and a satirical cartoon film, represented Schweyk’s surroundings. The defamiliarization established by juxtaposing the over-sized, relatively static marionettes and Grosz’s twodimensional drawings on one side, and the body of the live stage figure in almost perpetual motion on the other, acquired a grotesque dimension. The performance ends in a march, which Schweyk joins, of crippled soldiers towards God. This scenic adaptation by the Piscator Collective preserves the novel’s comic and satiric tone, as well as the sense of war’s tragic absurdity, finding in a multimedia theatrical representation a stage analogy for Hašek’s novelistic strategies. The treadmill march of the Brave Soldier Schweyk has been reincarnated in the march of Brecht’s Mother Courage (1949) and in the wanderings of Gruscha in the Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945), further enabled by the machinery of expansion. Brecht’s notes to his own version of Hašek’s work, in the play Schweyk in the Second World War (1943), admit that his adaptation strategy followed the principles of the Piscator Collective by creating a dramaturgy of montage out of the novelistic episodes. In the staging, he makes use of caricatures and projections too. Like Piscator, he ends the play with a confrontation between Schweyk and God, who is represented as an oversized grotesque commander figure with an allu-

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sion to Hitler as the war God. In the 1971 staging of Brecht’s Schweyk by the Berliner Ensemble, a projector was used to show Hitler’s oversized shadow doubling the grotesque God figure. The direct influence of Piscator on Brecht’s dramaturgy and staging practice is apparent in the insertion of titles, commentary, and screen projections. Both directors connected politics, technology, and presentation – Piscator through a theatre of ‘scientific objectivity,’ Brecht through ‘theatre for the scientific age.’ The epic core of Piscator’s productions was based on the insertion of documentary footage, slide projections, backdrop inscriptions of facts, and complicated stage machinery that made the traditional acting approach impossible. All these elements had a commentary function serving as a modern, high-tech chorus. Brecht echoes Piscator commenting on the usage of film in epic theatre: Film in its own right can be used in the epic theatre as a kind of optical chorus ... Obviously numbers, statistical formulations, maps, etc., are pure objects of reality and suitable for choruses. In connection to the set or an acoustical chorus the sharpest dialectic possibilities must be created and exploited. Since film can represent reality in such an abstract way, it lends itself to confrontations with reality, that it can confirm or dispute. (Brecht on Film and Radio 7)

The extensive use of film in Piscator’s performances enabled interpretation and commentary, which had an anti-illusionist effect, subverting stage conventions. These new representational strategies call for a different kind of acting that is not grounded in psychology and the internalization of the character. Piscator named it ‘objective acting’; Brecht reworked the same technique formulating his ‘epic acting.’ Piscator also claimed that his theatrical model conformed to the new standards of technology. However, Brecht’s and Piscator’s theatrical approaches do differ. Whereas Piscator views theatre as a kind of applied art that justifies its existence through its impact on and relation to socio-political circumstances, Brecht’s theatrical strategies are based on the interplay between efficiency (political, social, moral) and aesthetization. Unlike Brecht, Piscator replaces the notion of the stage as a fictional world with the notion of the stage as a truthful document. The spectator of Piscator’s theatre is involved, activated, and at the same time distanced from the stage events by a simultaneous performance activity that takes place on a number of levels – projections, film, machinery, noise, sound, two-

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dimensional figures versus the interaction of live actors, and so on. Within Piscator’s stage world of documentary film footage, statistics projected on-screen, and reduced stage figures, theatrical devices do not fictionalize factuality – they signify it. The core of Brecht’s Verfremdung resides in fictionalizing the real, demonstrating that fixed relations between the individual and social reality are fabrications as well. Piscator’s Verfremdung is based on the presentation of the factual through the theatrical. It is a theatre that strives to be topical; thus, the epic commentary is the dominant component, not just a disruption of the dramatic (as is often the case in Brecht). Furthermore, Piscator uses the device of Verfremdung in a more playful way, which is to some extent paradoxical since his theatre is derived from the morality play, while Brecht is more strongly rooted in the cabaret tradition and the work of German comedian Karl Valentin. Brecht makes use of the aesthetic means of Piscator’s political theatre in a less ludic, modernist manner. He strove to make social and political facts more palpable through stage fiction and Verfremdung. However, as much as he was interested in the role of theatre in society and its political efficiency, Brecht was even more engaged with the development of its aesthetics. Piscator was in the first place concerned with theatre’s political role. He made a choice to be immediately socially effective, using many more devices that were less permanent. It could be said that Piscator politicized theatre through Verfremdung, while Brecht, applying the same concept, aestheticized politics. Dramaturgy Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung is an aesthetic principle with an ideological goal. It is executed on two planes – on the level of written text and on the level of performance. The notion of making the familiar strange in Brecht’s drama has never been a static concept but a methodology and aesthetics-in-the-making that has undergone several phases. It is possible to outline three stages in the formation of Brecht’s dramaturgy to demonstrate how his concept of Verfremdung varied in both its methods and aims. The first phase concerns Brecht’s early plays where the defamiliarization devices are primarily used to make strange the medium of theatrical representation and to break with traditional dramaturgical laws. During this phase, Brecht focused more on making a new theatre than on developing his concept of Verfremdung. The second phase concerns the epistemiological potential of defamiliarization phenomena, particu-

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larly the dramatic form of didactic plays (Lehrstücke). Verfremdung here is closest to Socrates’ methodology in its almost undisguised didactic aim. In the third phase, which primarily includes Brecht’s later plays, the didactic dimension is less direct, giving way to ambivalence and shifting towards dialectics. This phase coincides with Brecht’s full formulation of the Verfremdung concept, which deals not only with the dramatic text but also with various aspects of acting and staging methodology. In the early phase of its development, Brecht’s Verfremdung is primarily a device that challenges the bourgeois dramatic tradition. His first plays, Baal (1918) and Drums in the Night (1919), bear the most resemblance to expressionist dramaturgy, while at the same time creating a parody of expressionism. Even though neither Brecht’s political views nor his Verfremdung concepts were fully formulated at that time, these plays anticipate his future methodological and ideological approach. Drums in the Night, which takes place during the Spartacus uprising and is about a bride who awaits the return of her soldier but is pregnant with another man’s child, is not yet a fully realized theatre of epic estrangement. Nevertheless, the epic commentary is present through the songs, including Brecht’s famous Ballad of the Dead Soldier, sung in a pub full of drunkards and prostitutes. The pacifist message of the song is established through grotesque estrangement embodied in the image of the dead soldier whom people dress up and parade around. The ballad evokes the atmosphere of Albrecht Dürer’s medieval Gothic woodcuts, while it provides a topical political statement in the manner of George Grosz’s caricatures.3 In the stage directions close to the ending of the play, Brecht bares the devices describing the stage action of Kragler, the main protagonist in the play, ‘he whips round and hurls the drum at the moon, which was a street lamp. Drum and moon fall into the river, which has no water in it’ (161). Brecht insisted on the presence of a visibly artificial paper moon and childlike backdrop drawings in the first staging of the play at the Deutsches Theater in Munich (in 1922). Verfremdung here is different than in Brecht’s later plays, not only because it is not very epic, but also because its function is ambivalent. Typically, Brecht’s Verfremdung strategies summarize the action, provide commentary, break the theatrical illusion, and tend to influence the reception process. In this case Verfremdung not only disrupts the illusion, calling attention to theatricality, but also foregrounds the metatheatrical character of the play. The metaphor of theatre is used in this play as a defamiliarization device to represent the social and political alienation of the world in the period of the Great War. The protagonist of Drums in the Night says: ‘Cheap theatricals, that’s

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all it is. There is some boards and paper moon and the butcher shop in the back – that’s the only real part’ (161). The realities of the play and the outside world are both defamiliarized by means of theatrical metaphor. This kind of Verfremdung does not fully break the theatrical illusion, but rather points to the ambiguity between reality and make-believe by showing the world as theatrum mundi. Brecht’s Verfremdung is usually a means of addressing the outside world from within the play, yet in Drums in the Night, the effect of estrangement (Verfremdungseffekt) spreads both outward and inward, to distance and at the same time merge the theatrical and the real. The Verfremdungseffekt in this play occurs in the juxtaposition between the private world of the petit bourgeois family and the historical and political events that surround it. Brecht depicts the duality between these two worlds through distinct spatial delineations. The first part of the play takes place in the closed space of the family’s home; the second part is set in a public space (pub), where characters from different social strata gather. The Spartacus uprising penetrates the world of the play through gunshots and screams, until the protagonist, the soldier, joins the riot. The clash between private and public worlds is further reinforced by the genre delineation – the petit bourgeois story is presented as a comedy, the political events as a drama. The Verfremdung takes place through this artificial combination of the intimate and the political, inside and outside worlds, comedy and drama. The hierarchy of these two worlds in the play is turned upside down since the emphasis of the play is on the love triangle, while the momentous political and historical event is often nothing more than a backdrop. What does Brecht defamiliarize in Drums in the Night – the style of expressionist drama, the bourgeois world view, leftist politics, or something else? Brecht won the Kleist Prize for this play, but with the exception of the critic Herbert Ihering who claimed that Brecht was introducing a new theatre, reviews point rather to confusion in the first reception of Drums in the Night.4 The bourgeois critics focused on Brecht’s anti-expressionism, criticizing his naive realism, and some found the leading Expressionist playwrights still superior. The left-wing critics pointed to Brecht’s bourgeois background and the fact that he was less than a mere observer of the Spartacus League’s attempt at Revolution; thus, he did not understand the political events he tried to depict in the play. Drums in the Night does not outline a model for a new theatrical aesthetics, nor does it present a well-defined ideological point of view, but it still implies the need for a new theatrical methodology able to match the

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changing political reality. Through the contrast between the private and the political in the play, the relationship between theatre and reality is explored. The bourgeois theatre of intimate dramas, love triangles, and paper moons no longer had any place in a reality altered through wars and revolutions. Drums in the Night is, in a way, a parody of the theatre as a medium and its worn-out conventions that are no longer relevant. This quest for a new dramaturgy and a theatre that relates to contemporary society marks the first phase in the development of Brecht’s Verfremdung. The Lehrstück phase begins in the late 1920s and ends in the early 1930s with the adaptation of Maxim Gorki’s Mother – Brecht’s full-length Lehrstück. His didactic plays were a continuation of the search for the distinguished aesthetic and ideological features through which, in the mid1930s he fully established the concept of Verfremdung. The common thematic denominator of these plays (including Measures Taken, Exception and the Rule, The One Who Said Yes, and others) is the relationship between the individual and the collective. Brecht’s didactic plays link the aesthetic concept of Verfremdung with Marxist ideological tendencies. Most of Brecht’s didactic plays are labelled operas, and music has an important role in their structure. The One Who Said Yes (Der Jasager) was staged as a school opera with the music of Kurt Weill and a chorus of schoolboys. The Measures Taken (Die Massnahme, music by Hanns Eisler) and Lindbergh’s Flight (Der Flug Der Lindberghs, music by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith) were both conceptualized with a musical framework in mind and were performed in music festivals. Brecht and the composers he worked with defamiliarized the medium of theatrical representation as well as the classical genre delineation, shifting the boundaries of drama, theatre, and music. Japanese No drama, which relies equally on text, music, and dance, had a very influential role in these experiments. Some mise en scène elements that bring about the sense of defamiliarization are also inscribed in texts, such as the use of masks and theatre within the theatre in The Measures Taken. Yet there are also estrangement strategies achieved through music and spatial solutions that do not exist on the level of the written text, such as Brecht’s idea of charting the space of action on the blackboard for the production of The One Who Said Yes. Brecht’s didactic plays present the condensed version of his epic dramaturgy based on Verfremdung. Their main quality is a simplicity that brings meaning closer to the audience’s understanding. The Verfremdung dramaturgy in these pieces is most apparently Socratic (Benjamin, Understanding Brecht). The notion of the dramatic figure oscillates between the

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role of the protagonist and the role of the critic; a similar position is given to Socrates in Plato’s Dialogues – he both presents and criticizes the presentation. In Brecht’s theatre, the representation of events is exposed as a simulation. The scheme is simple and often grounded in the model of a play within a play – at the beginning of the play a problem is stated, usually via the agency of the Chorus. In the second phase the problem is enacted, and with the help of the Chorus, the habitual response to the problem is defamiliarized. At the end, the problem is seen in a new light and a solution is found. Like Socrates’ didactic discipline, Brecht’s Verfremdung dramaturgy in his didactic plays tries to eliminate ambiguities. The issue is polarized, not problematized, and shown in relation to assumptions about what is right or wrong, true or false. Although this technique of estrangement breaks the illusion and opens the discourse, Brecht’s dramaturgy is not a truly open structure since it not only questions an issue but also provides ready-made solutions. Once the desired and ‘truly’ new perception of the well known has been achieved the problem is closed. Even though Verfremdung in his didactic plays is the elemental model of Brecht’s distancing dramaturgy, it is too reduced and limited to be thoroughly theatrical. It is more a learning model for acquiring the methods of theatrical estrangement than a pretext for a performance. Although the devices and the methods in these plays are of an epic and dialectical nature, the effect is more static than truly dynamic and dialectical. The didactic plays differ from Brecht’s later works, and from his earlier works for that matter, in as much as they are a presentation of dialectics. In other words, Brecht’s didactic plays in most cases strive to demonstrate or teach dialectics rather than to create a real dialectical tension among various aspects of the presentation and its meanings. As in Socrates’ defamiliarization methodology, the epic devices in Brecht’s didactic plays are tools for emancipating the participants and the audience. The audience, indeed, is the central target in this learning process. Brecht’s quest for new theatrical forms is of course also an attempt to bring about a new seeing that alters the communication process in theatre and drama. This attempt begins as early as the first production of Drums in the Night. Brecht insisted that the line ‘Don’t stare so romantically’ be printed on the play’s poster. His didactic plays provide the model of the ideal spectator, usually through the role of the chorus. This spectator participates and reacts in accord with the playwright’s ideas. Brecht claims that the didactic plays do not need an audience, even though ‘it can still be used.’5 The role of the audience is in a way to learn the model

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of dialectical thinking and staging, so that it can become a more active participatory factor in a theatrical event. The Lehrstück phase is, in a way, the utopia of epic theatre in both an aesthetic and a political sense. Brecht’s didactic plays provide the formula of epic dramaturgy, but in order for this dramaturgy to achieve the effect of epic and dialectic defamiliarization its formula needs to be problematized and even subverted. Brecht’s later plays, using estrangement devices to various degrees, both reconfirm and depart from the Verfremdung formula outlined within the learning experiments. Estrangement devices are used in a wide variety of playful combinations, not all of which are necessarily textbased, replacing the univocal dramaturgy of Brecht’s didactic pieces with the notion of duality. This duality principle of Verfremdung, for instance, is epitomized in the split, cross-gendered figure of Brecht’s Good Person from Szechuan, who is both the humanist Shen-Te and the rootless Shui-Ta. In the Caucasian Chalk Circle, the principle of duality is replaced with the notion of multiplicity through a dramatic structure that utilizes the ‘play within a play.’ The play opens with a discussion in a farmers’ co-op (kolkhoz) about the ownership of the land. When the dispute is resolved, the peasants are presented with an instructive play about the maid Grusha who saves a noble child and wants to keep it, but the real mother, who abandoned the child, shows up. The theatre-withintheatre situation is further complicated by the figure of the Singer, who acts as an MC and comments on Grusha’s story through songs. The commentary function is then duplicated by the presence of the musicians who also occasionally reflect on the action through songs. The play enacted for the kolkhoz peasants further uses the pattern of theatre within theatre in the form of a flashback through which the story of Judge Azdak is represented. This episode suspends the progression of Grusha’s story and functions as a digression. Yet all the different stories and enactments illuminate the main issue of the play – the question of the right to ownership – from multiple perspectives that replace the didacticism, often inherent in Brecht’s estrangement, with a dialogical and even at times dialectical quality. Unlike the one-dimensional concept of the ideal spectators in Brecht’s didactic plays, in the Caucasian Chalk Circle the internal audience has several incarnations – the peasants, the Singer, the musicians, and all the participants watching the enactment of the Azdak story.6 The notion of the internal audience is established in various aspects of the play with different degrees of involvement, and this destabilizes the fixed position of the ideal spectator, leaving the text more open to different, even opposing viewpoints.

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Brecht’s distancing strategies could be classified in the following way: (1) traditional epic devices that often break the illusion of the play’s world and establish the illusion of an ideal spectator, (2) dramaturgical devices bid bare, that are often established through the pattern of play within a play, and (3) perspectival estrangement that is to some extent implicit in all versions of Brecht’s Verfremdung that aims to change the habitual lens through which we are used to seeing things. All these estrangement devices are, however, present in the works of many other dramatists as well as in other artistic media. So is there a specific Brechtian dramaturgy of Verfremdung after all? Brecht’s dramaturgy, in all its phases, involves various degrees of interplay between the epic and the dramatic. The epic structure is not the abolition of the dramatic, but is a distortion through which the pattern of subverted structure is reconfirmed. In his early plays Brecht is in search of his theatrical language, in his didactic phase his search results in a dramaturgical paradigm, and in his later plays the paradigm is disrupted in favour of toying with the possibilities of estrangement. In his early plays, Brecht’s goal is to subvert bourgeois conventions and establish a more dynamic relationship between theatre and reality, while Verfremdung devices are not fully used to manipulate audience’s response. In Brecht’s didactic phases, devices of Verfremdung are canonized and used in a calculated manner. The early plays are more ambivalent and potentially more dialectical, while the didactic plays, even though they are intended to ‘teach dialectics,’ are rather unequivocal. In his early works, devices of Verfremdung are used to defamiliarize reality and theatrical conventions; in his later plays, this defamiliarization is also aestheticized, while at the same Brecht’s ideological thinking grows more complex. Brecht’s later writing brings about a more mature approach to estrangement techniques as both didactic and dialectical means. Even though Brecht’s dramaturgy is an almost allusive category involving a wide variety of developmental stages and borrowing from various sources, it still presents a unique combination of means that calls for a perspective in the process of dramatization that is never neutral and always attempts to influence a new seeing of a certain social and political reality. The Mise en scène You must project the titles of the following Incidents, for the sake of tension and that The right thing may be expected. And please make

Epic Theatre in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction My curtain half-height, don’t block the stage off. Leaning back, let the spectator Notice the busy preparations being so Ingeniously made for him, a tin moon is Seen swinging down, a shingle roof Is carried in; don’t show him too much But show something. And let him observe That is not magic but Work, my friends.

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(Brecht, ‘The Curtains’)

Brecht’s theatre of estrangement has never been focused solely on the notion of written text. The episodic structure of Brecht’s plays, the frequent spatial changes, the long time span they usually cover, direct addresses to the audience, the notion of duality, and other aspects of the dramaturgy of estrangement call for a mise en scène able to accommodate these features. Therefore it is impossible to understand Brecht’s Verfremdung dramaturgy without taking into account the distancing potential of the entire performance. The development of Brecht’s Verfremdung mise en scène is particularly noticeable in his later works where the methodological and theoretical postulates of his theatre are established. In some plays, such as the Good Person from Szechwan and Caucasian Chalk Circle, estrangement strategies are inscribed in the dramatic text suggesting a certain mise en scène. In others, like Mother Courage and Life of Galileo, estrangement elements on the level of the dramatic text are reduced, while the so-called Verfremdungseffekt is almost solely achieved through staging. Thus, the dramatic text may contain a minimum of Verfremdung devices, but the effect of defamiliarization may still take place in the performance on the levels of design, music, and acting. Design In close collaboration with the designer Caspar Neher, Brecht bases the design of his productions on two estrangement components: laying the staging devices bare and juxtaposing realism and theatricality. The 1928 production of The Threepenny Opera, for instance, makes visible the lights, organ pipes, and curtain wires. The songs in the 1950 staging of Herr Puntila are sung in front of the half-curtain. The half-curtain and the abolition of footlights become to some extent obligatory features of Brecht’s theatre. This staging strategy makes clear that the world Brecht’s characters inhabit is the fictional world of theatre. China, America, British

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India, London, and the other locations and historical periods within which Brecht situates his plays are in the first place represented as the artificial space of the stage, which by default always takes place in the real of here and now. All the elements of the set that belong to the world of the play – furniture and props – are realistic to the most minute detail and made of authentic materials. The costumes and the setting historicize the presentation. These aspects of the production bring social and political reality onto the stage. The function of the set is in the first place stripped of its symbolic and metaphorical meanings. The set sketches of Neher feature the furniture and props, but also the stage figures using these objects. The drawings not only suggest the mise en scène, but also politicize the objects used for the set. Through minute realistic detail and in the way stage figures relate to the set and props, these objects become contextualized within a certain political and historical moment. This staging concept does not recreate the world of the play in a naturalistic manner, but reduces the material to its most significant features. It is a design based on precise selection, so that those objects that are the most relevant to the story and characters are displayed. Brecht’s and Naher’s notion of scenography is based on exposing the world of the play as a scenic synecdoche. This approach is close to Lessing’s concept of the ‘pregnant moment,’ which he describes in Laocoon comparing the work of a visual artist to that of a poet. Lessing stresses that the artist, in depicting a certain situation, can only chose one single moment that is most suitable and that in itself carries the whole story: ‘This single moment he [the painter] must make as pregnant as possible, and deck it out with all the illusion that his art possesses, and which that of a poet does not possess, in the representation of visible objects’ (153). The stage design in the majority of Brecht’s plays represents a part, a microcosm – the bath of Herr Puntila, the study of Galileo, the cart of Mother Courage isolated on stage and surrounded by ‘black’ space – that stands for the contradictions of the characters and the world they inhabit. The three-dimensional realist component is balanced by the use of two-dimensional elements such as slide projectors, banners, and painted backdrops. This design concept creates the effect of Verfremdung by juxtaposing reality and theatricality, history and fiction, the iconic (projections, backdrop drawings) and the quasi-authentic (furniture and props). Brecht’s and Neher’s notion of stage design calls attention to theatre as a signifying system, rather than as an embodiment of a possible world or a reflection of reality. This again goes back to Lessing’s

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notion of telling a story in visual art by selecting a moment – an episode – most potent in meaning that will engage the viewer more strongly than any other: This single moment, and the single point of view of this single moment, must be chosen. That alone is fruitful of effect which leaves free play to the power of imagination. The more we see, the more must we aid our sight by thought; the more we aid our sight by thought, the more must we believe that we see. (70)

In the scenography of estrangement, the moment most potent with meaning is achieved by reducing the production to those visual features that most effectively and pointedly communicate the idea of the work. Music At the time Brecht begins his experiments with estrangement through music in theatre, various artists have already been exploring and implementing various means of subverting theatrical and musical genres and conventions. Among the greatest artistic innovations of that period are certainly the works of Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, Oscar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, and Carl Orff’s Schulwerk, to mention a few. The Baden Baden and Donaueschingen music festivals, where Brecht performed his first didactic plays, were playgrounds for new composers in Germany. The music and theatre of that time finds a common point of departure in anti-Wagnerianism. Directors subvert the purity of theatrical conventions and styles by the intrusion of music, which no longer has only the purpose to set the mood of the production, but determines its structure, pace, and genre. Composers defamiliarize the orchestral and operatic apparatus by their theatralization of music. Stravinsky’s L’Historie du Soldat is written for narrators, dancers, and seven musicians.7 Sergei Diaghileff choreographs Satie’s ballet Parade. Darius Milhaud writes Le Boeuf sur le Toit, in collaboration with Cocteau, for an orchestra and performs it with the Fratellinis and other clowns featuring characters such as a Boxer, a Negro Dwarf, and a Bookmaker. Brecht’s own operas and pseudooperas are indebted to such composers as Weill, Hindemith, and Eisler. The experiments combining theatre and various forms of popular music shift the delineation between ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ art. The intrusion of jazz in ‘high brow’ orchestral and operatic music equals the

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implementation of the ‘plebeian spectacle’ (Suvin) in drama and theatre.8 In collaboration with Weill, Brecht creates The Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny Opera that subvert the norms of both musical and theatrical genres by means of jazz, folk, popular music, and cabaret, suiting both Brecht’s and Weill’s anti-Wagnerianism.9 Weill’s music for The Threepenny Opera uses popular nostalgic ballades to mock the sentimental aspects in the play, and is performed by both actors and cabaret singers. Brecht describes the use of music in The Threepenny Opera: This was the first use of theatrical music in accordance with a new point of view. Its most striking innovation lay in the separation of music from all other elements of the entertainment offered. Even superficially this was evident from the fact that the small orchestra was installed visibly on stage. For the singing of the songs a special change of lighting was arranged; the orchestra was lit up; the titles of the various numbers were projected on the screens at the back. (Brecht on Theatre 85)

Brecht’s approach to the staging of the Mahagonny Opera is more radical. The music, dominated by nostalgic jazz tunes, runs throughout the work. Stage utterance alternates between rhythmical and free dialogue, sometimes with the orchestra, sometimes unaccompanied. In both productions, the notion of opera ‘proper’ is shifted, and the estrangement is achieved by subverting the audience’s expectations. The scripts of Mahagonny and The Seven Deadly Sins (music also by Weill) more apparently than in Brecht’s other plays reveal ‘gaps’ in Brecht play text that need to be filled by music, movements, and other elements of the mise en scène. Even though the script of Mahagonny Opera contains descriptions of the mise en scène in the stage directions, these two plays can hardly sustain themselves as dramatic literature, but give the impression of librettos – pretexts for a performance. The new role of music in theatre not only challenges the conventions of the medium, but influences new staging strategies based on the form of cabaret, breaking the illusion and laying the theatrical devices bare. Brecht describes the function of music in theatre as gestic: To put it practically, gestic music is that music which allows the actor to exhibit certain basic gests on the stage. So-called ‘cheap’ music, particularly that of the cabaret and the operetta, has for sometime been a sort of gestic music. Serious music, however, still clings to lyricism, and cultivates expression for its own sake. (Brecht on Theatre 87)

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Music not only defamiliarizes the conventions of representation, but also makes use of contrast as a Verfremdung device, providing a new angle of reception. As Lotta Lenya, Weill’s wife, performs the songs of Brecht and Weill, the contrast between the lyrics that depict the world of prostitutes and drunkards full of cruelty and violence and the bittersweet nostalgic music is evident. Lenya’s harsh and at the same time seductive voice reinforces these contradictions. The relationship between the musical performance and the lyrics is based on the alternate effects of nostalgia, irony and sentimentality. Even though the atmosphere of cabaret romanticizes the musical aspects of Brecht’s theatre, the contrast between what is seen and what is heard still remains. What is heard influences the meaning of what is seen and vice versa. The notion of music in Brecht’s performances is the antipode of the function of music in Hollywood horror films and thrillers. The music in Hollywood horror movies usually manipulates the audience’s expectations. It heightens the atmosphere and creates suspense, reinforcing the spectator’s sensory relation to the representation. Its function is to immerse the audience emotionally as deeply as possible into the world of the movie. This notion of music in genre movies is quite conventional. The convention can, however, change if a different kind of music is set to a event, which has, for instance, a comic character (as in Chaplin’s movies that influenced Brecht’s approach). In that case, the audience is taken by surprise, its sensory indulgence is disrupted, and even the meaning of the scene tends to shift. The audience is faced with a contradiction and forced to figure out its significance. In short, the audience’s attention refocuses, interested not in what is going to happen next, but in how it is going to happen. Brecht’s collaboration with composers, who all had their individual views on new music, concerned more than just formal experimentation to render familiar musical and staging conventions strange. It was also an expression of a political attitude towards the given culture and society. The context of the Weimar Republic in the late 1920s and the early 1930s was one of economic crisis and growing nationalism. The works of modern composers were the first to suffer cutbacks due to Germany’s economic difficulties. There was also considerable sentiment against ‘decadent’ avant-garde art on the part of Hitler’s followers. In 1933, a day after the Reichstag burned, Brecht and his family left the country. Weill and Lenya followed. Most avant-garde artists were forced into exile. The first production of Brecht and Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, written for yet another German émigré, the dancer Tilly Losch, and directed by

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George Balanchine, had its première in Paris. Its German première was no earlier than 1960. The function of the new music in Brecht’s work was politically subversive since it counteracted the manipulative and seductive use and misuse of both theatrical and musical representation. This approach to music and performance is still relevant today, since it works against the exploitation of music in shopping malls and Coca-Cola commercials.10 It also works against the music in Hollywood movies that makes the audience indulge more and think less, as well as against the manipulative music of war songs and marches (that Hitler liked so much), which invoke national pathos and irrational animosity towards the Other. The music in Brecht’s work has a Verfremdung function in as much as it reveals a certain attitude. It is gestic, not hypnotic. However, Verfremdung through music still exerts a certain influence on the audience, since by unmasking manipulative patterns it reinforces an alternative ideological and political attitude. Acting In the mid-1930s, Brecht elaborated the acting methodology of Verfremdung inspired by the performance of the Chinese actor Mei-Lan-Fang he saw in Moscow. The acting technique of the Beijing Opera had a crucial impact on the development of Brecht’s own acting theory and the formulation of his acting exercises. In the article ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,’ Brecht describes the presentation of Mei-Lan-Fang: In the Chinese theatre the principle of breaking the illusion is employed in the following way: in the first place the Chinese actor does not play as though the fourth wall existed apart from the three that surrounded him on the stage. He makes quite clear that he knows he is being observed ... No longer can the public be under the illusion that they are unseen spectators of a real event. (Schriften III 965)

The actor shows how the character is mediated on stage. This acting concept of the Chinese theatre that inspired Brecht relies on a double signification – the actor represents both the dramatic character and the person representing that character. The estrangement is twofold – the actor distances the character from both the audience and him/herself. The stage figure (actor + character) is not shown as a unified entity. Brecht makes clear the distance between the signifier and the signified on stage through the actor, who signifies both the theatrical representa-

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tion and the character. Defamiliarization in acting thus occurs through a metaplay of signifiers. This kind of acting not only shows the dramatic character, but also acts out the politics of representation itself. The estrangement in acting functions according to the principles of a play within a play. Brecht stresses that the Chinese actor not only quotes the character instead of merging with it, but also looks at the character (sometimes with astonishment, sometimes calmly observing the movements she/he makes to represent the character) and studies it. Brecht stresses that this acting technique is not based on a stylization of the character; rather the actor ‘quotes’ the character in a realistic manner and with the utmost naturalness. Verfremdung in acting has two components – the showing of the character’s attitude, and the ‘showing of the showing,’ laying bare the actor’s attitude towards the character. Brecht advises that in order to reveal a character’s attitude, the actor should not become one with the character: The actor is not Lear, Harpagon, Schweyk he shows them. He reproduces their remarks as authentically as he can, he puts forward their way of behaving to the best of his abilities and knowledge of men; but he never tries to persuade himself (and thereby others) that this amounts to a complete transformation. (Brecht on Theatre 137)

Even when the actor needs to show emotions, his tears, Brecht stresses, should come from the brain. This approach echoes Denis Diderot’s idea expressed in his famous ‘Paradox of the Actor’ (Paradoxe sur le comédien) where he asserts the necessity of retaining an inner distance from the affects whose portrayal move the audience. Brecht’s actor needs to go a step further: he is asked to lay bare his inner distance to the character. To fix that attitude Brecht suggests the following strategy for the actor in the rehearsal process, ‘Before memorizing the words, the actor must memorize what he felt astounded at and where he felt impelled to contradict’ (Brecht on Theatre 137). In Brecht’s concept, the actor observes the character as other than himself in order to distance the audience. All the principles of a play within a play are fulfilled in this concept of acting: the representation of a character, the representation of the representation, and the internal audience – achieved by turning the actor into an observer of the character he/she portrays. The role of the actor as the internal spectator is to provide the audience with the optimal model of reception.

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Brecht’s Verfremdung is constructed on a duality principle in its various conceptual and practical forms. It is the duality of showing action and its commentary, emotion and its rationalization, actor/stage figure in its naturalness and in its artificiality. It is a duality that often embraces contradictions (familiar/strange, emotionality/distance) and through their clashes creates effects. Brecht proposes acting exercises in Verfremdung as duality. In order to establish a character’s attitude Brecht’s actor should go through the procedure of ‘fixing the not ... but.’ Brecht stresses that every sentence and every gesture signifies a decision, and the character remains under constant observation. The ‘not ... but’ exercise shows the opposite of any decision or assertion the character makes. It is the act of representing the other possibility, the unrealized path of the character. This exercise also helps the actors acquire the presentational attitude of showing what the object of their enactment is and at the same time what it is not – to play out both presence and absence, identity and difference. Brecht proposes a few similar exercises for defamiliarizing the action and the character that help the actor adopt the ‘right attitude of detachment’: (1) Transposition into the third person to establish the character’s identity as Other to the actor’s; (2) Transposition into the past to create distance from the here and now of the stage event; (3) Speaking the stage directions out loud to establish the idea of spatial otherness, which fixes for the actor the stage space not as reality, but as theatricality. These exercises are devices for establishing the stage figure as the Other to both the dramatic character and the actor who presents it. The distance between the actor and the character enables the performer to show the structure of the presentation and that of a character with an attitude. Distancing in acting is closely linked to Brecht’s notion of gestus. Gestus in acting resides in the mid-zone between the actor and the character, and between the actor and the spectator. Patrice Pavis defines it in the following way: Gestus may be a simple bodily movement of the actor (facial expression) or a particular way of behaving (gestuality), or a physical relationship between two characters, or a stage arrangement ... or a common behavior of a group, the collective attitude of characters in a play, or the gesture of global delivery from the stage to the public via the mise en scène. (‘On Brecht’s Notion of Gestus’ 41)

Gestus, which is both action and its commentary, is not limited to acting and it can be expressed through other performance components such as

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music or scenery. In Brecht’s theatre it is represented as social gestus determined and governed by the character’s status and condition in society. Unlike the gestic representation in Chinese theatre that is conventionalized, Brecht’s gestus has a political component. The notion of gestus is the key element that grants to the aesthetic device of Verfremdung a political dimension. Brecht’s Verfremdung then is gestic, eliciting meaning that is both aesthetic and political. Through the notion of gestic Verfremdung the overall political and ideological attitude of the play is asserted and suggested to the audience. In other words, gestus determines the meaning that comes out of the process of making the familiar strange. Cinematic Thinking Brecht’s Verfremdung, rooted in principles of montage and gestus, is a cinematic concept. His theatre of distancing is based on breaking the illusion of theatre as an immediate utterance by showing the material as mediated, narrated, and retold. The theatrical presentation is viewed as reproduced and reproducible as opposed to the idea of theatre as an unmediated and immediate aesthetic phenomenon. Brecht in a way places theatre in line with other artistic media based on mechanical reproduction. He aims to bring into theatre the advantages of cinema and photography by altering perception, since as Benjamin believes, ‘a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man’ (238-9). Brecht points out that the filmic perspective existed long before the emergence of cinematic technology, which therefore did not really bring a new visual thinking into literature.11 For Eisenstein, Meyerhold’s pupil, cinematic thinking starts in theatre, and through that collaboration he first formulates his montage of attractions. The first film Eisenstein ever made was indeed intended for the theatrical stage – for the 1923 production of Alexander Ostrovsky’s play Enough Simplicity in Every Sage at Proletcult Theatre. Russian formalist film theory, which views the montage of collision as an estrangement phenomenon, stresses its literary and linguistic origins. Episodic dramaturgy, which juxtaposes and mirrors the events, is in a way a precursor to the montage technique and can be traced as far back as the Elizabethan theatre. Nevertheless, film technology has reworked to some extent traditional episodic dramaturgy. It has enabled the further fragmentation of the structure through a faster pro-

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gression and more frequent alternation of images, noticeable in both literature and drama (i.e., novels of Alfred Döblin, Georg Kaiser’s plays). This opens up new possibilities for framing the selected image by means of total and close-up shots. The relationship between the ‘whole’ and the ‘episodes’ in Brecht’s dramaturgy, for instance, can be described in cinematic terms as an alternation between the ‘totals’ and ‘close-ups.’ Brecht often uses the term ‘montage’ to describe the structure of his work and to detach it from traditional theatrical discourse. His epic theatre implies the selection of material and its fragmentation in gestic episodes. The montage technique in Eisenstein’s films is based on similar principles. It does not create film narrative as a succession based on development, but as a differential succession of shots based on contrast and collision. This approach is analogous to some aspects of episodic dramaturgy in theatre and to disruptions of the narrative development in a novel. Eisenstein describes his aesthetic strategy and its impact on the audience, ‘The spectator not only sees the represented elements of the finished work, but also experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and assembly of the image just as it was experienced by the author’ (The Film Sense 32). The ‘montage of attraction’ generates its meaning through the juxtaposition of images, and affects the spectator by pointing to the process of their selection. This cinematic technique resembles the notion of ‘laying the staging devices bare’ in theatre, as used by Brecht and Meyerhold, in showing the work of art not only as a finished product but as a process-in-the-making. Eisenstein’s cuts are not ‘masked’; they are sharp and foregrounded. Human beings and objects are treated as signs of film language isolated in close-up, while their potential meaning is fully determined through montage. Brecht’s epic dramaturgy, which strives to treat each scene as a whole in itself, establishes the effect of fragmentation, as in film montage, to estrange the representation. Brecht’s montage functions as a defamiliarization device by freely displaying the artificiality of the work. Montage in epic theatre is not only reduced to dramaturgy but it also becomes part of the mise en scène typology. For instance, Verfremdung in acting is a montage technique as well. It is based on selection and on showing how this selection is made. Brecht’s acting technique is mounted on a montage that juxtaposes the character and the actor representing that character. The split between the actor and the role counteracts the amalgamation of the two, appearing to be the result of an ‘editing’ process. Brecht’s concept of ‘sister arts’ and ‘each art for itself’ is based on similar montage principles. Scenery, text, acting, and music

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in Brecht’s theatre have a degree of independence insofar as they are based not on a principle of fusion (as in Wagner) but on a principle of juxtaposition. Epic mise en scène of Verfremdung is a montage of theatrical elements that are semi-independent of one another and unified through the ‘editing.’ In other words, montage is the unifying principle in structuring the work, so that contrasts and contradictions of the represented material are more important than the unfolding of a story as an organic whole. By juxtaposing different components of the performance (text and image, set and costume, music and stage event) Brecht often achieves Verfremdung through irony, comparing and contrasting different aspects of the story, hence generating a political commentary. Eisenstein creates a similar kind of ironic effect by juxtaposing, for instance, images of war and images of slaughtered cattle in his movie Strike. Brecht’s montage is metonymic, while Eisenstein’s is metaphoric. Metaphor does not tend so much to present as to signify, creating new meaning from the unexpected transposition of one well-known element (object) to another. In the essay ‘The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,’ Eisenstein points out that his montage is postulated on the principle of hieroglyphs where, for example, a picture of water and a picture of an eye signify ‘weeping,’ and a picture of a knife and a heart means ‘sorrow’ (Film Form 30). Hieroglyphs (ideograms) are often based on principles of substitution, and thus are metaphoric in nature. The famous scene from Strike where the shot of a slaughtered bull is superimposed over a scene of massacred workers is an example of montage based on the principle of an ideogram to create cinematic metaphor. Brecht’s gestic montage is closer to the one pioneered by the American film director D.W. Griffith, since they both use details or significant elements as metonymies for representing the characters of which they are a part. Brecht views a story as the gestic framework of the presentation, while each of its particular fragments is a microcosm of gestus. Gestic representation is a technique for stressing the meaning of a scene, a shot, or a pictorial tableau. It brings forth the ‘semantic gesture’ (Mukarovský), the ‘intentionality’ of the work that at times can be suggested by nothing more than a detail (or close-up), metonymically as in the scene when Mother Courage bites the coin to verify its authenticity, or metaphorically when the babycarriage rolls down the steps in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. In both cases, the action is summarized in a micro unit that shifts the focus from the whole event to a detail that epitomizes it. This capacity for framing and leading the spectator’s gaze is more in the nature of cinematic technology than in theatrical tradition.

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In his essay entitled ‘Weniger Sicherheit’ (Less Security), Brecht describes the famous scene in Chaplin’s movie The Gold Rush (1925) where the actor eats his shoe while preserving proper table manners (Schriften zum Theater 220). This scene is a perfect tableau and the epitome of gestic Verfremdung as understood by Brecht. Cinematic montage and the framing of this most potent scene makes this segment stand out from the rest of the movie. Brecht defines gestus as the domain of the attitudes that characters have towards one another, and as the unity of performance. Roland Barthes compares Brecht’s epic dramaturgy to Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’ and Diderot’s tableaux as an intellectual feature that ‘has something (moral, social) to say’ and it ‘knows how it must be said’ (‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’ 91). Barthes stresses that all three artists, by creating a theatrical scene or a pictorial tableau, construct meaning and at the same time show the production of that meaning. This technique is gestic, according to Barthes, based on the author’s accuracy in choosing the most meaningful moment of the story. This then becomes ‘a hieroglyph in which can be read at a glance the present, the past, and the future, i.e., the historical meaning of the represented gesture’ (‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’ 93). Barthes asserts, ‘gestus is in my own vision’ (ibid. 96). Nevertheless, it is not the choice of the spectator, but the result of the author’s selection and strategy, which inserts gestus in the audience’s vision. Brecht’s epic dramaturgy of Verfremdung and gestus is a strategy for leading the spectator through the stage world in a way that is similar to how the audience sees the world through the eyes of Eisenstein’s camera. In Brecht’s theatre, this strategy brings to the audience the illusion of cocreation or participation. Even though the participation of the audience is limited, the incorporation of elements and devices that belong to the reproducible nature of cinema and photography in the here and now of theatre affect the habitual patterns of reception. Cinematic thinking in theatre changes the way of seeing by distorting the sense of immediacy and by disrupting the continuity of the work and its reception. In a political sense, Brecht’s approach to theatre has two utopian creeds: belief in the possibility of breaking the manipulative structure of representation, and belief in the capacity of theatre to seriously alter the course of history and politics. Through the devices of Verfremdung, Brecht attempts to replace the plot pattern with the narrative pattern, to expose the ‘puppet master,’ the voice that tells the story, to perform both the stage event and the process of its mediation. It is an effort to unmask manipulation by exposing the forces that control the performance.

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However, the question, ‘who controls the narrator?’ remains unresolved, and turns the notion of breaking through the seductive and manipulative process of theatrical representation into another stage illusion. Thus, dramatic theatre seduces its audience while epic theatre controls its audience. Both seduction and control are categories of manipulation. Brecht does not always succeed in breaking through the manipulative pattern of theatrical representation, but rather he replaces one kind of manipulation with another. The pleasure of the Brechtian spectator lies in the illusion of breaking the illusion and in the unreal sense of power in the hands of both artists and audience to alter social realities.

4 In the Hands of Angelus Novus: Form and Ideology

The notion of making the familiar strange has two components that are often very tightly interwoven: the aesthetic (or technical), which in the case of theatre focuses on dramaturgical methods and mise en scène solutions, and the ethical (ideological, philosophical, sociological, political, didactic). Hansen-Löve finds the roots of the technical side of estrangement to be in Aristotle’s ‘formalism,’ which he links to Shklovsky, while the ethical paradigm is rooted in Socrates’ didactic methodology (19– 33). The ethical aspect concerns the meaning generated through the estrangement techniques. Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung and epic theatre is reputed to emphasize this ethical dimension, as Benjamin points out when he calls Brecht’s epic theatre Socratic.1 Even though aesthetic and ethical sides of the estrangement phenomenon are not mutually exclusive, these two aspects have often been understood as the embodiment of the rift between committed and autonomous art. In his article entitled ‘Commitment,’ Theodor Adorno challenges this distinction, probing the relationship between aesthetic choices and ideology. He stresses on the one hand, that there is no art that comes ex nihil, entirely divorced from extra-artistic reality. On the other hand, he addresses the problem of committed art using examples of Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Bertolt Brecht’s dramatic works. Adorno asserts that the problem with Sartre is his placement of new ideological and philosophical thought within the framework of a worn-out theatrical form – the bourgeois melodrama. The problem with Brecht is that he finds a new aesthetic form, but one would end up becoming a incompetent Marxist if educated on the ideology of Brecht’s plays. Adorno finds the right relationship between ideology and form, one that challenges the distinction between autonomous and committed art, in the works of Samuel Beck-

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ett. He points out that autonomous art communicates an ethical perspective as well, and gives the example of Paul Klee’s painting: During the First World War or shortly thereafter, Klee drew caricatures showing Kaiser Wilhelm as an inhuman iron-eater. Out of these came in 1920 the Angelus Novus, the machine angel, which no longer carries any overt marks of caricature or commitment but far surpasses both. With enigmatic eyes, the machine angel forces the viewer to ask whether it proclaims complete disaster or the rescue hidden within it. It is, however, to use the words of Walter Benjamin, who owned the picture, an angel that does not give but takes instead. (92)

The relationship between form and ideology in both Verfremdung and ostranenie has often been treated one-sidedly: Verfremdung has always been related to a critical and Marxist world view, while ostranenie has often been criticized for promoting the philosophy of art for art’s sake. Russian formalism, especially when Shklovsky’s work is in question, is reputed to be too rigid in isolating aesthetics from other cultural and social phenomena. This view is further reinforced through various interpretations of formalism both in the Soviet Union and in the West as an essentialist and non-historical theory. The main points of criticism are the formalists’ lack of historicity and their tendency to isolate art from extra-artistic reality. The problem with the critical reception of Verfremdung is in accessing Brecht’s theatrical practice predominantly in ideological terms. Even though it is impossible to detach a work of art from its theoretical underpinnings, the analyses of Brecht’s Verfremdung suffer a range of presuppositions of ideology from Marxist readings to the poststructuralist interpretations of the concept. Brecht’s theory and ideology is misunderstood as a standard for his practice rather than its dialectic accompaniment. What is the true relationship between form and ideology established through estrangement devices? Does the application of the formalist concept of ostranenie to theatre (and other media) inevitably reduce an artistic phenomenon to a sum total of aesthetic devices? Is it a contradiction in adjecto to talk about the social, political, and ideological implications of Shklovsky’s ostranenie? Is Brecht’s Verfremdung an ideological emancipation of Shklovsky’s concept? When does form become ideology? In the attempt to answer these questions, I will revisit the complex relationship between form and ideology in the notion of ostranenie as well as in Brecht’s Verfremdung concept, viewing the former against Marx-

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ist criticism of the Formalist School and examining the latter in the light of the Expressionist Debate – the famous quarrel among left-wing intellectuals concerning the issues of art and political commitment. The relationship between artistic estrangement and reality will finally be viewed against the backdrop of the historical context of the 1920s and 1930s, where artistic defamiliarizations and theatricalizations of real life intersect and subsequently clash in most imaginative, absurd, and violent ways. Apology of Ostranenie The concept of estrangement (ostranenie) that the Russian formalists have introduced is nothing but a need to see. Ostranenie is a peculiar ophthalmologic diagnosis – the majority of mankind has serious problems with its eyesight (and not only with the eyesight). The duty of an artist is to see better, which means to see differently than the rest of the mankind. (Kiš, Skladište) Quit writing about how, how, how much you love me, because at the third ‘how much,’ I start thinking about something else. (Shklovsky, Zoo: Or Letters Not about Love)

Marxist scholars criticized formalists, especially their notion of ostranenie, the concept of motivation of the devices, and their interest in trans-sense (zaum) language. Formalism was recognized as non-sociological, since it isolates the given ideological domain (literature) from other ideological domains. Although Marxist theorists rooted their methodology in the ground already set by formalists, the basic tenets of this movement were attacked. Pavel Medvedev in his 1928 critique of formalism writes, ‘Formalists were inspired by the discovery of new words and new meaning in the sound of the word, as they were by the subtraction of meaning by the word’s meaningful sound’ (Medvedev and Bakhtin 84). The concept of ostranenie was not understood as the means of enriching an object ‘with new positive meaning’ but rather as a negation of the old meaning. Medvedev asserts, ‘The novelty and strangeness of the word and the object it designates originates here in the loss of its previous meaning’ (Medvedev and Bakhtin 90). This criticism is problematic, for it does not take into account the phenomenon of aesthetic reception. The process of distancing a well-known object subverts the stock associations related to it and highlights its previously unnoticed aspects. The estrangement

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procedure does not have the power to automatically make the receiver forget what she/he has previously experienced or known about the represented object. In other words, something utterly unknown or unfamiliar cannot be made strange. Ostranenie marginalizes the habitualized aspects of the object and makes it perceptible in a novel light. In a poetic metaphor for instance, the words do not lose their common meaning but rather gain new connotations and the receiver becomes aware of their rhythmical quality. Ostranenie, rather than reducing meaning, expands it, since it relies on both the familiar and the new inherent in the defamiliarized object. Medvedev mocks Shklovsky’s analysis of Tolstoy’s story Kholstomer, pointing out that Tolstoy does not distance the familiar for its own sake, to ‘make a stone stony,’ but for the sake of moral value against which such a background stands out all the more sharply. Yet Medvedev does not mention that Shklovsky briefly acknowledges Tolstoy’s usage of defamiliarization as a means for social criticism. Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement on the level of plot structure is viewed as a rearrangement of scenes that is self-sufficient and deprives the work of its meaning, reducing creativity to mere editing. The Marxist critique oversimplifies Shklovsky’s notions, limiting the possibilities of formalist theory while at the same time borrowing its scientific and dialectical approach. Leon Trotsky recognized the formalist school as the only serious opponent to the Marxist theory of art in Soviet Russia. He attacked the formalists’ concept of literary history and described their approach as art for art’s sake and as a reduction of poetry to etymology and syntax. Nevertheless, Trotsky found Russian formalism worth consideration for its scientific approach that advanced literary scholarship from ‘alchemy’ to ‘chemistry’ (Literature and Revolution 162). He also claimed that the formalist method, confined within legitimate limits, had the potential to perhaps ‘open a path – one of the paths – to the artist’s feeling for the world, and may facilitate the discovery of the relations of an individual artist, or of a whole artistic school, to the social environment’ (164). Even though Trotsky, like other Marxist scholars of his time, reduced aesthetic forms and their history too simplistically to the conditions of the social environment, this approach was important for breaking with an essentialist view of art. Trotsky suggested that different peoples and different classes made use of the same topics but adapted them to their experience and understanding. Fredric Jameson’s contemporary Marxist critique of formalism is concerned with similar issues. Jameson criticizes Shklovsky’s concept for

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being ahistorical and essentialist. He sees in Brecht’s Verfremdung the emancipation of ostranenie: The originality of Brecht’s theory was to have cut across the opposition between the social and the metaphysical in a new way, and to throw it into a completely different perspective. For Brecht the primary distinction is not between things and human reality, not between nature and manufactured products or social institutions, but rather between the static and the dynamic, between that which is perceived as changeless, eternal, having no history, and that which is perceived as altering in time and as being essentially historical in character. (58)

Jameson stresses that Brecht’s concept of distancing the familiar is primarily political and criticizes Shklovsky’s ostranenie, where the ‘content,’ whether metaphysical or social, is never treated from a political point of view. He misreads Shklovsky by treating the notion of form as a vehicle of meaning, not as the meaning itself. Shklovsky abolishes the form and content dichotomy to show that the meaning of a work is inherent in its form – that form is content. Jameson fails to see that formal choices determine the creation of meaning, and therefore the ideological, political, or metaphysical level of an artwork cannot exist outside its formal structure.2 Although Verfremdung can be viewed as a vehicle for generating ideological and political meaning, Jameson overlooks the fact that it is also the core of Brecht’s aesthetic methodology. Jameson’s approach, even though from a Marxist point of view, is not truly dialectical. Brecht, like the Russian formalists, understands the temporality of distancing methodology, while Jameson treats Verfremdung as a doctrine. The antipsychological and antimimetic approach of formalism, as well as its notion of literariness, has often been confused with a quest for pure form. The state of literary scholarship at the time when formalism developed explains to some extent its tendency to isolate artistic phenomena. Formalist Boris Ejxenbaum describes the Russian academic climate during the first decade of the twentieth century: At about the time the Formalists emerged, academic scholarship – with its utter disregard of theoretical problems and its nonchalant making-do with obsolete aesthetics, psychological and historical ‘axioms’ – had lost the sense of its own proper object of study to such a degree that its very existence became illusory ... Authority and influence gradually passed from academic scholarship to the scholarship of what might be called ‘the jour-

In the Hands of Angelus Novus: Form and Ideology 123 nalistic style’ – works by the critics and theorists of Symbolism. (‘The Theory of the Formal Method’ 6)

In this light, the formalist tendency to approach a work of art on its own terms should not be understood as mere blindness towards other inherent phenomena, but rather as a strategic move. Formalist theory was a reaction to worn-out conventions in literary scholarship, as much as the art of the historical avant-garde was a rebellion against habitualized aesthetic canons. The existing methodology in the academic world was not sufficient for the kind of views that the formalists wanted to express, and they had no choice but to invent their own methodology, often by violating the dominant academic approach. Roland Barthes defends the formalist position suggesting that its focus on the dynamics of forms inevitably involves the question of their history: Less terrorized by the spectre of ‘formalism,’ historical criticism might have been less sterile; it would have understood that the specific study of forms does not in any way contradict the necessary principles of totality and History. On the contrary: the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism. To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it. (Mythologies 112)

Shklovsky’s theory, even though to some degree mechanistic in nature, establishing bipolar relations – material/device, automatization/perceptibility – does not take aesthetic laws as static principles. Ostranenie and its final aim – perceptibility – presuppose the dynamics between old and new, habitualized and defamiliarized. Defamiliarization as a process and the ideas of change and transformation are inherent in Shklovsky’s concepts. Therefore, the historical aspect of Shklovsky’s approach, although limited, cannot be absolutely denied. His theory suggests that literary history is a process of modification and deformation of aesthetic devices. For another formalist scholar, Jurij Tynjanov, history, specifically in literature, plays the central role. Tynjanov’s notion of a literary system and his studies in parody and literary evolution all aim towards figuring out historical processes and dynamics. Tynjanov points out the dual and often contradictory relations on the path to literary change, where the parody of tragedy is comedy, and the parody of comedy then becomes tragedy, revealing a profoundly dialectical aspect of his theorizing. Dragan Kujundzic, in his book The Return of History: Russian Nietzscheans

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after Modernity, points out that Tynjanov’s reflections on the temporality of literary forms reveal the intrinsic relationship that connects literary forms and history: It is precisely the fact that Tynjanov started writing about literary history that allowed his writing to achieve larger interpretative insights about history in general. It is something of a paradox that the question of history dominates the work of a writer who in his time has often been accused of the Formalist reductionism of history. (24)

In the Prague Structuralist Circle, the alleged indifference – or rather, ambiguity – of formalism when it comes to the historical and ideological aspects of distancing the familiar is reconciled. Structuralist ideas, shaped to some extent by formalist scholars, most notably by Jakobson who was one of the founding members of the circle, show that neither ethical nor aesthetic aspects of the estrangement phenomenon can be addressed in isolation from the historical and cultural framework.3 A work of art is not only subordinated to aesthetic norms, but can often be viewed from the perspective of other norms such as legal or moral ones. The structuralist concept of ‘norm’ historicizes aesthetic conventions and aesthetic reception. This notion places the artwork in the context of a system that includes a complex structure of social norms, technical conventions, normative standards relevant to particular genres, cultural norms, and norms of individual subjects involved in the process of the creation and reception of the artwork. The principle of structure, therefore, not only denotes the organization of particular elements within the artwork, but also the socially shared set of norms that determine the creation and reception of the work. Estrangement is a dialectical process that includes the author’s context and approach to the work, the work itself, and the receiver’s context. The structuralist concept of aktualizace (foregrounding) emphasizes the relative and dialectical nature of this phenomenon, viewing it against the backdrop of other structures. It is clear in a number of instances that the formalist approach of isolating an artistic phenomenon from its extra-artistic reality does not express indifference for the issues of that reality. Shklovsky’s book The Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922, where he describes the catastrophes of the war, is proof in itself. His notion of ostranenie suggests that both the aesthetic and ethical value of an artwork are inherent in the way in which it systematically works against one of the most powerful forces both in life and in art – automatization or habitualization. Formalism

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emerged in a period within which a crisis of humanism became overt. To de-automatize the automatized by means of distancing the familiar is a way of humanizing both art and life. Ann Jefferson offers a new reading of formalist aesthetics by linking its vocabulary to the violence associated with the lives and times of the Russian formalist thinkers and their contemporaries. Jefferson points out that a notable degree of conflict and aggression emerges as an aspect of their thinking, even though it was not explicitly intended to theorize violence. Shklovsky’s principle of defamiliarization is defined according to Jefferson through the metaphors of incipient aggression: ‘Habitualisation,’ says Shklovsky using another term for automatisation, ‘devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.’ Literature counters this insidious and deadening process by creating difficulty in a manner which often carries its own counter violence. This, to begin with, may be no more than a matter of vocabulary, but its effects can also include reminders of the existence of the violence itself – the passion and the fear of war which Shklovsky alludes to. (129)

There is a discrepancy between the highly dramatic historical context within which formalism came to life, including the First World War and the Soviet Revolution, and the formalist tendency towards isolating artistic phenomena. Jefferson’s article suggests that this discrepancy is not as big as it may seem. Shklovsky’s premise is that when our perception becomes automatized, we recognize things around us but we do not see them. The goal of ostranenie does not end in the artwork itself, but in the process of challenging the automatization of perception. This, however, reaches beyond the treatment of art as the sumtotal of artistic devices. The notion of habitualization suggests that our perception becomes desensitized and art through the devices of ostranenie counteracts this dehumanising indifference. Ostranenie is, therefore, epistemological, yet in a different way than Brecht’s Verfremdung, for through it one learns to see and sense things again. Even though the notion of perceptibility is not well enough understood historically, Shklovsky is aware of the erosion of perceptibility and of the dialectical nature of the estrangement procedure that needs to be always created anew. Furthermore, whenever life becomes indifferent to art, or when art is not able to find its relevance within a given society, which is often the case in turbulent political circumstances, art needs to find justification for its existence. The formalist technique of defamiliarization as a prin-

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ciple of rejuvenating artistic forms and the notion of literariness as a way of understanding literature in its own right, suggest that art has its own dignity and ethics and does not need any additional social justification. Formalist theory emerged as an avant-garde movement, violating the prevailing academic approaches, to express a new view of art, which Tynjanov explains in a provocative manner: I do not deny the existence of links between literature and life. I merely doubt whether the problem is posed correctly! Can we talk about life versus art, when art too is life? Do we need to prove the social usefulness of art, if we do not bother to demonstrate the usefulness of life? (The Problem of Verse Language 181)

The core of the ethical aspect of ostranenie is expressed in Shklovsky’s famous sentence, ‘Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war’ (‘Isskustvo kak priëm’ 12), while the role of art is to counteract this automatization by establishing the process of making the familiar strange. Shklovsky’s approach indirectly suggests that aesthetic choices are always in a way political, ideological, or ethical choices as well. In his study of Russian formalism, Victor Erlich summarizes this relationship between aesthetics and ideology in the following way: Since the artist comes to terms with the world through the agency of style, the choice of device is not a trivial matter. In literary art ideological battles are often acted out on the plane of the opposition between metaphor and metonymy, or meter and free verse. (178)

A certain aesthetic preference can be in itself an ideological or political statement in as much as it conforms with or subverts conventions embraced by the dominant system. The historical avant-garde, for instance, often challenged the artistic mainstream, not only for the sake of artistic newness, but also as an act of rebellion against bourgeois ideology and morals. Furthermore, this violation of the canon figures as artistic necessity rather than as a matter of choice. In the article ‘Form as Social Commitment,’ Umberto Eco writes that the composer Schönberg refused to employ the tonal system because its structure embodied a view of the world as coherent and ordered, a view in which he no longer believed: To speak of today’s man, however, art has no choice but to break away from all the established formal systems, since its main way of speaking is as form.

In the Hands of Angelus Novus: Form and Ideology 127 In other words – and this amounts to an aesthetic principle – the only way in which art can speak of man and his world is by organizing its forms in a particular way and not by making pronouncements with them. Form must not be a vehicle of thought; it must be a way of thinking. (142)

Ideology is not an aspect outside the formal properties of a work; the choice to defamiliarize reality and art through aesthetic means is a political position in itself. Brecht’s Verfremdung is used as an aesthetic tool that foregrounds the political and ideological, often asking for an art that is critical and corrective of both itself and society. Ostranenie is not bound to ideology in the same way as Brecht’s concept is. However, even when ostranenie is used so that it seemingly marginalizes the ideological level of an artwork, the ideological approach can still be detected, at least in a function similar to Iuri Lotman’s notion of a ‘minus device.’ Hence, even in those works that tend to be politically neutral, a certain ideological perspective is still perceived at least as a ‘meaningful absence.’ The Ideology of Verfremdung What has happened has happened. The water You once poured into the wine cannot be Drained off again, but Everything changes. You can make A fresh start with your final breathe. Brecht, ‘Everything Changes’

The ideological aspects of Brecht’s Verfremdung have been understood in different ways. Brecht had to leave Russia in the mid-1930s because he was considered too bourgeois for the Soviet state, yet in 1947, while living in American exile, he was summoned to appear before the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee in Washington. In both the East and the West, Brecht has secured a place in the literary canon and is considered a classic, but while one side perceives him as bourgeois, the other categorizes him as left wing. Marxist critics also understand Brecht differently throughout the twentieth century. To Adorno, one could never become a good Marxist learning from Brecht. Hans Mayer, discussing Brecht’s concepts in relation to the new audience of then East Germany, ascribes to him a negative dialectic, pointing out that paradoxically Brecht’s theatre for workers does not in fact reach them. Furthermore, Brecht’s dialectic is for Mayer ‘threatening’ (bedrohlich) since it sees ‘alienation’ (Entfremdung) in what has officially been described as ‘liberation’

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(Befreiung). For Fredric Jameson, Verfremdung is superior to other aesthetics of distancing the familiar, since it embodies a progressive ideological aim. Brecht’s Verfremdung is assumed to be a Marxist aesthetic device, even though elements of the concept are present in Brecht’s writing before he becomes familiar with Marxism. The development of his Verfremdung concept does not necessarily coincide with his discovery of Marx, Lenin, and Hegel. Rather, it grows through Brecht’s encounters with defamiliarization practices in theatre, which include the work of Piscator, performances by the Peking Opera, and the experiments of the Russian theatrical avant-garde. The later or mature phase of Brecht’s work is commonly understood as the embodiment of Marxist dialectical materialism. For Marx, however, dialectics is primarily a historical process, and he focuses on the dynamic contradictions within the structuring of economic systems. He and Engels turn to the domains of language and logic to show the universal character of dialectics. Brecht applies dialectics to a quite different field than the two philosophers. His concern is with human communication and relationships, not necessarily progressive dialectics. Brecht often deals with the dialectical patterns of altering concepts and meanings that result from a change in viewpoint or context, which at times turns into didacticism. Marx in return has distaste for tendentiousness and didacticism in art. Finally, Brecht’s left-wing ideological orientation in the 1930s within the context of Hitler’s Germany has a very different political weight and character than his Marxism from the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he lives in East Berlin, has his own theatre (the Berliner Ensemble) and writes eulogies to Stalin. Most of the interpreters of Brecht’s theory and practice, as well as the proponents of the foggy notion of ‘post-Brechtian theatre,’ take the relationship between Brecht’s aesthetic devices and ideology for granted. This critical attitude treats Brecht’s entire rich and dynamic opus as a homogeneous entity. By remaining silent about these other aspects of Brecht’s theory and practice, scholars use a common strategy of orienting the reception of his work in one direction, marginalizing other possibilities for its rethinking. In any case, the ideological interpretations of Brecht’s Verfremdung result in treating the concept as a static principle and validating it by ideological criteria. Brecht’s dramaturgy varied in different stages of its development, and so did the ideological position it conveyed. Brecht’s early works combined nihilism and a Nietzschean celebration of life force. As Hitler came to power and also during the Second World War, the ideological underpinnings of Brecht’s dramaturgy were marked

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by an antifascist and pacifist political commitment that found its embodiment in Marxism. During his final years in East Germany, on the other hand, Brecht’s Marxism was no longer a means of counteracting the manipulative power structure, but the ruling ideology. Although Verfremdung can be viewed as a vehicle for generating ideological and political meaning, it is also the core of Brecht’s aesthetic methodology. Brecht’s Verfremdung is often in danger of being the principle that brings about the ‘truth of the matter.’ This presupposes a certain degree of power suggesting that one owns the knowledge and is able to communicate it to others. Although it is the knowledge of the world as dynamic, historical, and alterable, this knowledge, represented as ‘truth,’ becomes static and even dogmatic. There is this notion of revealing the truth underneath things that are taken for granted, and controlling its transmission by means of Verfremdung, which establishes the illusion of dynamics, as opposed to creating a real tension between the dynamic and static forces. Brecht takes part in the famous Expressionist Debate that postulates the problem of aesthetics and ethics, representation and ideology, realism and modernism. The expressionist controversy started in the 1930s in the German expatriate magazine Das Worth (The Word) as a reaction to Georg Lukács’s essay against the avant-garde, which claimed that expressionism’s abstract and ahistorical aesthetics appealed to the irrationality of fascist ideology. This quarrel involved writers and thinkers such as Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, and Brecht.4 As Lukács pointed out, the debate was not only concerned with a condemnation on one side and an apology of expressionism on the other, but ‘more important issues’ were also at stake. After Hitler came to power, the Third International switched to Popular Front politics against Naziism, joining the forces of the intelligentsia and the workers movement to reconcile intellectual ‘elitism’ and the masses in the face of the common threat. Lukács focused on the issues of the Popular Front, problematizing the relationship between art and mass culture. The debate behind the debate, however, also involves the question of form and content as a ‘responsibility of artistic forms’ (Barthes) and the problem of the aesthetic integrity of committed art. Lukács’s attack on expressionism is most notorious in his linking of the movement to the irrationality of fascism. Ironically, the fascists criticized this movement and labelled it ‘decadent’ too. For Brecht and the other opponents to this viewpoint, it was necessary to counterbalance Lukács’s statement and provide an apology for expressionism, but more importantly to resist a

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militant approach to aesthetics. The univocality that makes Lukács’s approach militant presupposes that certain formal choices bring about fixed ideological views regardless of the content and context of the work and the circumstances of its reception. In other words, it categorizes aesthetic forms and styles per se as progressive or regressive, left wing or right wing, Marxist or fascist, formalist or committed, while taking these forms in isolation from the cultural context. Lukács championed the European realists of the nineteenth century, primarily Balzac and Tolstoy. Even though he viewed these writers as bourgeois, Lukács claimed that their literary achievements should serve as a guideline to proletarian and socialist writers of the twentieth century. Lukács also criticized the discontinuity inherent in modern art’s aesthetic strategies of montage. He qualified these aesthetic devices as self-absorbed and insufficient to show real life in its totality. Brecht objects to this point, defending the capacity of aesthetics to generate a relevant perspective on reality, not by means of reflection but via strategies of distortion. He criticizes Lukács’s essentialist view of art as a passive reflection of life. Brecht considers himself a realist, stressing that there are many ‘realisms.’5 For Brecht realism is not a fixed model, a stylistic formula, but a changeable set of aesthetic devices that convey the gist of reality. While Lukács advocated an aesthetic model of realism that was progressive in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century modernist reality was indeed a very different one marked by the traumas of the Great War, by political revolts, the Soviet Revolution, and the rise of Naziism. The modernist sense of reality was distorted and fragmented; Lukács saw the possibility of restoring its totality through the artistic models of Tolstoy and Balzac. Brecht’s counterclaim was that neither these models nor that reality existed any longer in their contemporary context. Brecht shows that different aesthetic approaches, even if not mounted on the postulates of nineteenth-century realism, have a capacity to provide a ‘realist’ perspective on reality: In theatre, reality can be represented both in objective and in imaginative forms. The actor may not use make-up – or hardly any – and claim to be ‘absolutely natural’ and yet the whole thing can be a swindle; and they can wear masks of a grotesque kind and present the truth. It is hardly open to debate that the means must be questioned about the ends they serve. The people understand this. Piscator’s great theatrical experiments in which conventional forms were constantly destroyed, found their greatest support in the most advanced circles of the working class. (‘Popularity and Realism’ in Taylor, Aesthetics and Politics 83)

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The Brecht–Lukács debate goes back to the concept of mimesis as an artistic presentation of reality (Aristotle), or as showing reality in a certain way through art (Brecht) versus the idea of mimesis as a mere copying (Plato) or reflection (mirroring, Widerspiegelung) of reality (Lukács). Nevertheless, Brecht and Lukács are not entirely at opposite ends of the spectrum. They are on the same political front. Both denounced their bourgeois backgrounds and embraced Marxist ideas and communist ideology.6 Both were concerned with the role of art as a cultural foundation that impacts reality, offering aesthetic models, asserting social and cultural values, and influencing ways of thinking. Both were preoccupied with the idea of a social, political, and even aesthetic truth that art has to uncover. They shared a belief in the epistemological dimension of art. Brecht and Lukács both saw in art the possibility of addressing reality in a socially relevant manner. However, they chose to advocate different aesthetic paths to similar goals, viewing art as the possibility of altering (Brecht) and probing (Lukács) reality. Lukács views reality as an objective totality, an organic whole that art must reflect. For Brecht, reality is a discontinuity, which can only be revealed through an individual’s relationship to it. There is no ‘real’ as a totality for Brecht; there is just the relationship to the real, which uncovers the ‘truth’ about reality. He shows subjective perspectives in order to represent the objective truth that reveals social and political contradictions. MatthiasJohannes Fischer names Brecht’s approach subjective-objectivity. Even though Brecht views reality as fragmented, disrupted, and contradictory, epitomized in his estrangement dramaturgy of montage and rapture, he still finds a fragile harmony in the ‘totality’ of Marxist ideology. Yet, Lukács’s notion of totality, embodied in the reflection theory of art, is not easy to dismiss. His theory suggests that what had hitherto seemed a purely formal aesthetic phenomenon could reveal the political and ideological content of the work. Jameson finds Lukács’s mediation theory to be ‘a precursor of the most interesting work in the field of ideological analysis today – that which, assimilating the findings of psychoanalysis and of semiotics, seeks to construct a model of the text as a complex and symbolic ideological art’ (Taylor 201). Lukács and Brecht approach art from different points. Whereas Lukács enters aesthetic ground from the ideological point of view using Marxism and Leninism as aesthetic parameters, Brecht is primarily concerned with the aesthetic devices and their ability to generate political meaning. Brecht accused Lukács of formalism since he proposed one fixed aesthetic model as a timeless, universal, and accurate artistic approach to reality. Lukács made the same accusation against Brecht. Yet

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there is a paradox inherent to the theories of both thinkers. Lukács’s notion of art as a dynamic reflection of reality advocates a realist poetics of an ideal type. Even though Lukács was against avant-garde aesthetics that made use of devices of distancing and distortion, he suggested Tolstoy’s work as a model, whose perspectival estrangement in the story Kholstomer, used to convey social criticism, anticipates Brecht’s defamiliarization concept. Unlike Brecht’s theory, Lukács’s theory was not so much oriented towards the idea of art as a means of changing the world, but rather towards art as a means of probing reality. Brecht, on the other hand, shared some of the avant-garde’s aspirations to change reality through new and often iconoclastic artistic choices and strategies of representation. The modernists’ arrogance that endows art with the power to shift world views, to affect culture, and to disrupt theatrical pleasure, appeals to Brecht. In theory, he views realism as a quality of artwork that corresponds to a given reality, rather than as an aesthetic formula. In practice, like other avant-garde artists, Brecht canonized his aesthetic devices as well as the relationship between art and reality established through them. This was a way of empowering art forms, but also a process of aestheticizing the realist quality. Aesthetization was a much-needed means of renegotiating the conventions of representation as well as the relationship between art and reality. Nevertheless, in their search for aesthetic devices capable of empowering art, modernists often lost the interventionist component of their work that critically probes life. Ideology is slippery ground in both art and life. Lukács condemned expressionism as fascist aesthetics, while Nazis labelled it ‘degenerate’ art and condemned it too. His advocacy of realism as an ideal type to some degree inspired Zhdanov’s imposition of ‘socialist realism’ on Soviet writers. On the other hand, Bloch, the defender of expressionism and the ‘good guy’ in the debate, was complicit in the infamous Moscow trials that resulted in the imprisonment and liquidation of Stalin’s political opponents, including numerous artists and intellectuals of the avantgarde. Lukács, the ‘villain’ of the debate, held a less compromizing position during the trials. Brecht’s work unmasked the views of the German petit bourgeoisie that led to fascism but he, like many other leftist intellectuals, found himself in the embrace of totalitarian Stalinism. Even though he was not fully uncritical of the Stalinist regime, Brecht’s notes against Stalinism were discovered only posthumously. In his lifetime, however, Brecht never took a public stand against it; instead, he wrote a few odes to Stalin. The ideology of both art and artists is an unstable cat-

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egory, prone to uses and misuses. Both Lukács’s allegedly formulaic approach to art and Brecht’s seemingly flexible and versatile concept of Verfremdung ultimately had the same goal – to ensure that art and artists remain free of misconceptions, misinterpretations, and compromising choices and attitudes. Neither Lukács nor Brecht fully succeeded. Lukács’s model turned into literary terrorism. Brecht may have had a better grasp of the relationship between representation and ideology, offering a more dialectical aesthetic, but the concept of Verfremdung and gestus in his theatrical works did not always have the ideological and aesthetic impact that he envisaged in theory. Furthermore, Brecht’s tendency to control aesthetic reception through the devices of Verfremdung and gestus often jeopardized the dialectical quality of his work, bringing about the illusion and simulation of dialectical tensions, rather than a truly dialectical process. The paradox lies in Brecht’s canonization of the aesthetic devices that defamiliarize reality and in his aesthetization of ‘realism.’ Brecht writes, ‘Literary works cannot be taken over like factories; literary forms of expression cannot be taken over like patterns’ (‘Popularity and Realism,’ in Taylor, Aesthetics and Politics 81). This assertion suggests a certain relativism of aesthetic forms and devices, which is particularly true for the concepts of making the familiar strange that aim, in one way or another, to take the receiver by surprise. Brecht presents Verfremdung as a versatile concept with the capacity to accommodate to a changing reality in order to provide a better grasp of it. Nevertheless, in textualizing his methodology, he makes the devices more permanent than immediate, and in so doing canonizes Verfremdung not as a flexible strategy but as aesthetics. Heiner Müller’s work stresses the fact that to perform Brecht today without betraying him is a betrayal of Brecht’s theatrical principles. Robert Wilson, who seems like a strange bedfellow for Brecht, explores this point in staging the performance The Ocean Flight (Der Ozeanflug) for the Berliner Ensemble in 1998 – a triptych involving Brecht’s radio play, Heiner Müller’s play Landscape with Argonauts, and Wilson/Kuhn’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House. Brecht wrote The Ocean Flight in 1929 for, at that time, the new medium of modern technology – radio – in search of new possibilities of theatrical performance that the traditional theatre was no longer able to offer.7 The play, performed in 1929 at the Baden-Baden Music Festival, is an almost biblical parabola for the ‘scientific age’ mounted around Charles Lindbergh’s legendary first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. In Wilson’s staging, Brecht’s play is treated as a transtheatrical link that ties different parts of

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the show together. Wilson’s strategy of putting Brecht’s text and staging devices in a postmodern framework alters both Brechtian dramaturgy and its ideological consequences. It becomes a reference and quotation within the production, but also material for an intertextual and ideological polemic. Wilson incorporates elements of epic theatre such as the direct address to the audience, epic commentary, and Brecht’s acting methodology of Verfremdung. These devices do not have the power of aesthetic innovation or relevant ideological meaning, since the play embodies the Marxist notion of progress through man conquering nature in a manner of naive optimism. In Wilson’s theatre, Brechtian Verfremdung almost becomes an ornamental feature, not necessarily because the postmodern director neutralizes its aesthetic and ideological force, but because this concept taken as a staging formula is no longer able to carry out its ideological goal with conviction. Josette Féral points out the different sense of history and reality that distinguishes Brecht’s Verfremdung from defamiliarization phenomena in contemporary theatre: Brecht believed that history had meaning, and that the stage was a starting point for discovery of truth through discourse. Performance art gave up the search for such a starting point, putting again in question both the status of reality and meaning of history. (‘Alienation Theory in Multi-Media Performance’ 471)

In Wilson’s parodic interpretation, the character of Lindbergh looks like a movie star from the 1920s and 1930s. The powerful machine that took him across the ocean becomes a desk hanging from the ceiling, while the actor who plays Lindbergh sits on a bicycle and pedals the ‘mighty engine.’ Lindbergh’s plane – the technological wonder from the 1920s, at the end of the century looks like a poorly constructed toy. The figure of Lindbergh, as an icon of progress and of the belief in a better future that the advance of technology is to bring, becomes in Wilson’s staging a naive dream from the childhood of the twentieth century. The theatre of Wilson and also of Heiner Müller survived the future that Lindbergh’s flight announced. In the context of Wilson’s production, Müller’s Landscape with Argonauts could be understood as an answer to Brecht. This answer comes after the experience of the Second World War, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after the planes were used not only for exceptional acts of human endeavour, but as weapons for the destruction of other human beings. Interweaving Müller’s and Brecht’s text, Wilson confronts the preholocaust theatre of Brecht with the postholo-

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caust one, showing that both the aesthetics of Verfremdung and Marxist ideology assume a different shape at the end of the twentieth century. In other words, through the aesthetics of both Brecht and Müller (who is considered to be Brecht’s official successor), Wilson demonstrates that the paradigms of Verfremdung and epic theatre are relevant today only through a re-negotiation of the Brechtian canon, through its parody and betrayal. This production still establishes a Verfremdungseffekt of sorts by means of defamiliarizing Brecht’s concept of defamiliarization. Paradoxically, Wilson’s theatre is truly Brechtian, since he understands and treats Brecht’s concept dialectically in the context of postmodern sensibility. Wilson’s staging of Brecht implies that even though formal choices imply an ideological aspect by either subverting or conforming to the given canon, the ideological relevance as well as the aesthetic force of the artistic devices is relative in nature. Thus Brecht’s estrangement needs to be reestablished and renegotiated with every new interpretation, and within every new context. Pavis describes the ideological level of an artistic work in the following way: The ideological is not limited and locatable like a theme at the specific point in a literary text, but present at all levels, especially in a text’s structure, form and materiality. The ideological is a mediating force between production and reception, between the text and the social context, as well as between literary form and social content. (‘Production, Reception and Social Context’ 130–1)

Pavis stresses that there are several constraints governing the manner in which ideology is textualized and located by the reader/spectator in dramaturgical and stage forms. He finds that the two processes occur simultaneously – the textualization of the ideological when a given ideology culminates in a specific text, concretized in a signifying system, and the ideologization of the text when the text is linked to ideology. He also notes that ideology is more often subtly located on the level of formal, rather than thematic, properties: Ideology thus encourages focus on the form of a work of art. This has an immediate effect of enabling the receiver to escape from the autonomous work and to link the text to the discursive referent outside it. Ideology is not located on the ‘direct’ level of content, nor on the level of pure forms, which are meaningless until linked to the Social Context. (135)

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The ideological level of an artwork is not a permanent stable category that is always, in all conditions and contexts, expressed overtly. However, there is an ideology of one kind or another inherent in the work of art, which springs from its authentic ideological context. When the context changes, the ideology of the work tends to shift as well. Neither the ideological nor the aesthetic features of the work can stop this process of transformation. The relationship between aesthetics and ideology within a work of art becomes reevaluated and renegotiated with each new generation or class of audience and takes place both synchronically and diachronically. Different receptions of Brecht’s work in his time prove this too. The ideological repercussions of aesthetics are always reinstituted in the act of reception as a process of concretizing (Ingarden, Vodicmka) the artwork. Jameson concludes that the Brecht-Lukács debate has no real winner, since the aesthetic strategies of Verfremdung that posit reality as discontinuity have become conventionalized and do not surprise the audience anymore. He suggests that artistic strategies that evoke the notion of totality might defamiliarize and rejuvenate the aesthetics of Verfremdung, and counteract the habitualized fragmentation of the world view. The devices and strategies of Verfremdung within Brecht’s artistic world do not necessarily work as universal patterns of making the familiar strange. Two of its qualities are stable though – in order for Verfremdung to be called Brechtian it needs to have an ethical or ideological goal and to involve strategies of controlling the reception. Although Verfremdung is a concept that renews and challenges dominant artistic forms, ideologies, and perception, its devices and strategies are replaceable. Brecht himself asserts the following: Methods become exhausted; stimuli no longer work. New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new. (‘Popularity and Realism,’ in Taylor, Aesthetics in Politics 82)

The discussion about the relationship between form and ideology, within the framework of the historical avant-garde and reflected through the Expressionist Debate, reveals perhaps unwittingly a fundamental question concerning the role of art in society and its impact on political and social reality. At the time when the debate took place, the Russian avant-garde was already crumbling under Stalin’s totalitarianism, while

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the German avant-garde witnessed Hitler’s rise to power. The historical avant-garde was at the point of no return – under the iron wings of Klee’s Angelus Novus. The forcefulness of the Expressionist Debate over the most effective aesthetics that would be capable of answering the challenges of reality could be interpreted as the first sign of doubt among the avant-garde artists and intellectuals that art can seriously impact the course of history. The postwar conflict in the arts, involving the antagonism between Adorno and Brecht, could also be read as a consequence of the same doubt that goes back to the Expressionist Debate – art, no matter how revolutionary and iconoclastic, is in the political sense close to powerless. It is perhaps this same kind of disillusionment that prompted Adorno to problematise the possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz, and that incited George Grosz, one of the most political artists of his time, to negate any political significance of painting in his 1947/8 series of works that he named The Painter of the Hole. Theatricalization of Art and Life Life should imitate art, should find in it fresh new sensations, and not the reverse. Oscar Wilde

Even though avant-garde art and theory work toward the re-aesthetization and re-theatricalization of art, they also clearly tend to shift and renegotiate the boundaries between art and life. For the avant-garde practitioners of estrangement, the relationship between art and reality is one of reverse mimesis. Iuri Lotman recognizes three ways in which art and life relate: (1) ‘Art and extra-artistic reality are regarded as realms between which the difference is so great and fundamentally inseparable that even comparing them is impossible’; (2) ‘Active influence is directed from the realm of art to the region of extra-artistic reality’; (3) ‘Life serves as the region of modeling activity – it creates the examples that art imitates’ (‘Theatre and Theatricality’ 34–5). Lotman relates the first case to classicism, the second to romanticism, and the third to realism. The approach of the historical avant-garde is the closest to a romanticist view of the relationship between art and life. Lotman bases this article on Bogatyrëv’s studies in theatricality starting with the premise that not only does the actor undergo a transformation on stage, but also the whole world becomes theatricalized, where things become the signs of things. Thus it is not only possible to examine the process by which the

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extra-theatrical world influences that of the theatre, but also the other way round. ‘We, too, will show you life that’s real – very! / But life transformed by the theatre into a spectacle most extraordinary!’ writes Mayakovsky in the prologue to his famous Mystery Bouffe (Complete Plays 46). This transformation of life ‘into a spectacle’ both on stage and in reality is one of the most distinct features of the phenomenon of theatricality. It is to some extent the metamorphosis of the real, habitual, ordinary into the theatrical. In her study on theatricality, Elizabeth Burns recognizes two sets of conventions involved in this phenomenon: the rhetorical, which is eminent in the theatrical performance and its production; and conventions whose function is to authenticate the performed, in other words, to establish ‘a connection with the world of human action of which theatre is only a part’ (32). Theatricality in real life, according to Burns, combines rhetorical grammar with authenticating conventions. Making a crossover between theatricality as eminent to stage performance and as an aspect of real life, Burns prefigures the contemporary notion of performativity. Michael Sidnell defines performativity, a term borrowed from speech act theory, using Coleridge’s notion of ipseity – a performative attribute of self-realization – in the following way: In performance theory – still in its incipience – the performative in the given sense is what is never merely rehearsed, even in rehearsal; the quality which, in its ingenuous form, actor training seeks to sublimate; that is the kind of ipseity that the rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream cannot but enact in all its uniqueness. (98)

Sidnell points out that theatre is a place for playing out the ambivalence between discourse and performativity: The what of the theatrical performance may be understood as an inescapably citational, decentred and discursive text (whether or not it has been scripted); on the other hand, it offers itself a unique act (whatever its textual or discursive citationality) determined by the pragmatics of its social context, and, as such, instantiating its authors or subjects. (109)

It could be asserted that performativity, having its distant roots in both literariness and theatricality, works in fact in two directions. As an extraartistic, non-rehearsed, immediate quality, performativity enters a work of art and becomes only partially aestheticized in the process. On the

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other hand, performativity is also present as an artistic, fictional, constructed aspect that wittingly or unwittingly enters into everyday behaviour altering the relationship between reality and representation. Theatricality in both art and life highlights the fictional and the conventionalized, often challenging the parameters of the real and the lifelike. Performativity in both art and life cuts through that which is immanently theatrical and that which escapes theatricalization. While theatricality is always in need of asserting itself, at least partially, as an aesthetic quality, performativity inhabits a much broader realm. Performativity both reinforces and limits the potential of theatricalization. Josette Féral explains the distinction and codependence of these two phenomena: Theatricality does not exist as a pure form, nor does performativity. If ‘pure theatricality’ existed, it would be a repetitive, dead form of art, where all signs would be identifiable, decidable and meaningful – a kind of ‘museum play’ that would recreate old art forms as museum pieces. Not as living art forms ... On the other hand, a performance based on performativity alone would be carried away by the action itself, without any possibility for the spectator to understand it as a meaningful process linked to signs, codes or references. If it is easier to imagine such performances (sport events, car races, fireworks), we know also that this performativity is meaningless if not enriched by theatricality. (‘Theatricality’ 5)

The avant-garde experiments moving from the re-theatricalization of theatre to the theatricalization of reality as they aim to influence reality through art, make a shift of emphasis from theatricality to performativity. There is a metatheatrical dimension in the avant-garde experiments, where the familiar reality is represented as theatrical. Through this metatheatrical dimension the avant-garde cuts across theatricality and performativity challenging the demarcation between the artistic and the extra-artistic. In the most radical experiments of the avant-garde, shifting the line between reality and performance, life and illusion, is no longer metaphoric. In other words, for some of the avant-garde artists metatheatre is not only a mode of dramatic and theatrical representation, but also a fact of life. The notion of theatricality, aiming to renew our sensation of life by aestheticizing theatre’s relationship to reality, comes again close to Shklovsky’s ostranenie that is meant to counteract the automatization of perception, enabling us to see the well-known in a new light. Shklovsky’s premise is that our perception becomes automatized; we recognize things around us but we do not see them. Arguing

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against the prevailing interpretations of ostranenie and literariness as concepts that reinforce the idea of art for art’s sake, Svetlana Boym elucidates the relationship between art and life vis-à-vis the notion of estrangement: Estrangement is what makes art artistic but by the same token, it makes everyday life lively, or worth living. It appears that Shklovsky’s ‘Art as Device’ harbours the romantic and avant-garde dream of a reverse mimesis: everyday life can be redeemed if it imitates art, not the other way round. So the device of estrangement could both define and defy the autonomy of art. (515)

Most of the avant-garde experiments in theatricality and estrangement were not only a search for new art forms, but were also attempts to find an eminent artistic structure of life. The theatricalization and ritualization of certain aspects of the extra-artistic world was very deliberate. Avant-garde theatre artists often used estrangement devices to impact reality through theatricalization in various aspects – political, aesthetic, and spiritual. Piscator and Brecht overtly attempted to influence political reality through performance. In outlining the program of his Piscatorbühne, Piscator claims that his theatre wants to free art from politics. This, however, could not be further from the notion of art for art’s sake, since for Piscator ‘pure art’ would only be possible in a classless society. But before that is achieved, theatre has no other choice or mission but to be political and in that way contribute to social change. Piscator searches for revolutionary aesthetic means to re-theatricalize the relationship between the stage event and the audience, so that political action on stage could flow through the proscenium arch into reality. The last words uttered in Piscator’s staging of Ernst Toller’s play Hoppla, wir leben! were ‘Dammed world – one has to change it.’ According to Piscator, at the premiere of the play, its young proletarian audience took these words as a cue, stood up, and sang the Internationale – political theatre on Piscator’s stage turned into political performance in the auditorium. Even though Piscator’s theatricalization is meant to politicize both art and society, the spectacle itself, with its epic devices as a means of bonding the participants and onlookers, has the effect of total theatre where the ‘forces’ of theatricality and performativity are in a constant flux. The spectacle, wanting to politically agitate and alert the audience, did not communicate solely on the cognitive level, but energized the masses on the subliminal level

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too, which prompted the young spectators of Hoplla, wir leben! to jump from their seats and finish the show singing the Internationale. This is a theatre of heightened political consciousness aiming to awaken political passions and actions. It is a theatre where form (theatricality) becomes action (performativity). In conceptualizing his theories Brecht looks for inspiration in predominantly performative models, rather than purely theatrical ones, such as sports events and street scenes. Brecht searches for new means to renegotiate the relationship between art and life on the fringes of the cultural and social power structure. He finds new forms of theatrical communication in the mass sports spectacles such as boxing matches, where the audience does not observe passively and quietly the stage action from the darkness of the auditorium, but reacts to the events in the ring shouting, cheering, and booing. The audience Brecht tries to attract does not belong to the same social stratum as the audience that goes to the Deutsche Oper or to the theatres on Berlin’s trendy Kurfürstendamm Boulevard. In the staging of The Measures Taken, where Brecht used a boxing ring, he attempted to bring his new audience literally on the stage by featuring an amateur chorus of workers, for whom the composer Eisler specially wrote the musical score. Brecht aims to contribute to changing social reality through theatre not only by raising political consciousness, but also by breeding a new kind of spectator. In his poem My Audience, Brecht addresses a new member of his audience: The other day I met my audience. In a dusty street He gripped a pneumatic drill in his fists. For a second he looked up. Rapidly I set my theatre Between the houses. He Looked expectant.

(Bad Time for Poetry 2)

Even though Brecht was against the notion of theatricalization as blurring the line between art and life, he aimed to set his theatre ‘in the dusty street’ and ‘between the houses’ by bringing on stage timely and provocative issues that showed the reality of a social strata whose subjectivity petit bourgeois theatre for subscribers and socialites had never cared to represent. The theatricalization of art and life in the historical avant-garde was not solely political in nature; more often than not, it aimed towards a broader and deeper restructuring and renegotiating of real life conven-

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tions. Expressionist theatre, in spite of its dystopic character, searches for new spirituality. Rudolph Laban creates his theatre of rhythmical awareness not only to establish new choreographical principles and break with the prevailing conventions of representing the human body and movements on stage, but also to propagate a new extra-artistic relationship to the body. In her daring dance performances, Anita Berber theatricalized sexuality challenging social norms and bourgeois morals. Walter Groppius envisioned a kind of total theatre grounded in technology. German Dadaists were among the most iconoclastic in blurring the line between theatre and reality. Nihilistic and disillusioned after the horrors of the Great War, they practised their art as if there was no divergence between the absurdity of life and the absurd quality of their work – blurring the distinction between the theatrical and the performative. For German Dadaists, as for Nikolai Evreinov and Russian futurists, estrangement was more than an artistic strategy – it was a lifestyle. In the experiments of the Russian historical avant-garde the notion of theatricality becomes established in several variants that are often combined. As previously mentioned, the first variant is present in the works of Tairov, Vakhtangov, Meyerhold, and others as the re-theatricalization of theatre. It emphasizes theatre’s self-referential aspects, where theatre and the process of theatrical production become the theme. Here the notion of theatre within the theatre is most often employed as a defamiliarization device. Like Brecht, who favoured cabaret and other liminal theatrical events, these artists also used yet another variant of theatricality, which involves bringing ‘the street’ and ‘the plebeian’ spectacle into the framework of theatre. This kind of theatricalization canonizes artistic forms that previously belonged to the cultural fringes such as elements of the fairground booth, folklore, and the circus, subverting the delineation between ‘high brow’ and ‘low brow’ art, defamiliarizing stale theatrical conventions, and surprising the audience. Theatricalization renegotiates the relationship between the audience and the stage, shifting the boundaries of theatrical space and action. Two aspects of theatricality as the aesthetization of life seem to be most prominent: the notion of transforming everyday existence, which Evreinov theorized in his books The Theatre as Such (Teatr kak takvoj, 1912) and The Theatre for One-self (Teatr dlja sebja, 1915, 1917), both books intended to be a kind of theatre in printed form; and the futurist and to some extent Dadaist liminal theatrical experiments intended to influence a new community by joining art and life. The latter could be partly described as the phenomenon of carnivalization.

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Evreinov, who himself claimed to be a harlequin, emphasized that the notion of transformation is at the core of theatricality as a rejuvenating principle that brings back the sensation of life. He urges us not to be ourselves, and goes back to pretheatrical ages claiming that primitive man came to realize that in addition to the conscious, waking I there is a second I that exists in his dreams. It could be added that in modernism this realization, which inspired Evreinov to exclaim ‘Do not be yourself,’ implies an even further split of the I. In other words, it suggests that the I is the Other; thus the notion of self is not one closed intact unity, but a fragile formation with many faces. The I in Evreinov’s context can be understood as a construct, an interchangeable mask in a continuous role-playing exercise. He views the notion of self as a theatrical or rather metatheatrical phenomenon. The intrinsic theatricality of the I is played out through transformation. By doing so, one deliberately transforms the I into Other, turning the familiar, supposedly intrinsic self, into his/ her own stranger. For Evreinov, theatricality based on transformation is played out more as the theatricalization of real life than of theatre. However, the problem of the modern world is its abandoning of its own intrinsic and organic theatrical sense: We were born with a concern for our daily bread and for truth and justice – but with the complete atrophy of the feeling of theatricality, the instinct for the transformation of life, the will to the creation of the fantastic. And so it happened as it was bound to happen: the more people came to neglect theatricality, the more they turned from art to life, the more tedious it became to live. We lost our taste of life. Without seasoning, without the salt of theatricality, life was a dish we would only eat by compulsion. (Golub, Evreinov 52)

Evreinov’s notion of theatricalizing life oscillates strangely between two very different thinkers, Antonin Artaud and Victor Shklovsky. With Artaud he shares the idea of theatricality as a primordial and almost mystical trait that human beings have suppressed in their everyday existence. Yet there is also some affinity between Evreinov’s concepts and those of the Russian formalists, whom he read and admired. His notion of theatricalization could be understood as a quest for a lifestyle practice of making the familiar strange. Furthermore, the process of transformation plays an important part in the formalist notion of ostranenie. Through the devices of ostranenie a transformation of the commonplace occurs, so that the well known is seen as if for the first time. The concept of ostranenie in

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the context of Evreinov’s notion of theatricality approaches contemporary forms of happening and environmental theatre where everyday surroundings and routines become transformed into a theatrical space and event. Furthermore, Evreinov understands the effect of theatricality on both art and reality in the almost Shklovskian sense of a perceptibility that has the potential to rejuvenate life. The difference between the two could be described by saying that Shklovsky’s perceptibility is an artistic strategy, a possible effect of aesthetization on our perception of both art and life. For Evreinov theatricality, together with its rejuvenating potential, is at the core of human nature, thus being at the same time artistic and extra-artistic, theatrical and performative. Futurist experiments in the theatricalization of life are close to Evreinov’s notions. Yet they were more radical and more practical in their attempts to theatricalize art than Evreinov was. Even though Evreinov led an eccentric ‘theatricalized’ life, his ideas are communicated more strongly in his theories. The futurists, on the other hand, brought theatre out into the streets. They themselves became jesters and wandering poets. Evreinov, in his book The Theatre in Life (Teatralizacija zhizni), described the performances by the artist Vasil Kamenski, who promoted futurist theatricality not only as an aesthetic approach but also as a way of living and seeing the world. Kamenski made a guest appearance in a circus in Tiflis where he rode a horse while reciting his poetry. In 1927, inspired by the legend of Russian hero Stenka Razin, he staged an outdoor spectacle on the local river. He asked his friends to dress in period costumes, decorated a procession of boats, and then went for a costumed boat ride to the bewilderment of the passers-by. It is hard not to notice elements of contemporary performance practice such as happening and walk-about performance in Kamenski’s experiment. David Burliuk and Mayakovsky scandalized the public by appearing on a number of occasions with painted faces. So did the futurists who toured Russia dressed in colourful eccentric clothes to promote their art in 1913 and 1914. These tours, in which poets like Mayakovsky, Xlebnikov, Kamenski, and others took part, were meant to spread the idea of the theatricalization of life and the new futurist approach to beauty. Barbara Lonnqvist suggests that there is an affiliation between the futurist practice of theatricality and the notion of carnivalization: The Futurist performances in Simferopol on 7 January (svajtki) was announced as Olimpiada futurizma, and according to the poster the Futurist Ignatiev held a ‘lecture’ entitled Velikaja futurnalia. ‘Futurnalia’ is obvi-

In the Hands of Angelus Novus: Form and Ideology 145 ously meant to recall the Roman carnival ‘Saturnalia’ and suggested that the lecturer or whoever designed the poster perceived an intrinsic similarity between the Roman New Year festivities and the program of the Futurists, which called for a rejection of the old (‘brosit’ parohoda sovremennosti’) and greeted the new (futurist art). (18)

Futurists theatricalized reality by means of carnival. They masked their faces with paint and shifted the boundaries between participants and the audience who was actively engaged in the events, whistling, booing, and laughing. Futurist performances also abandoned theatrical institutions for the streets, recalling the atmosphere of the market place where the actors entered freely into dialogue or disputed with the crowd. These elements of carnival became means of defamiliarization turning everyday existence, where the prevailing norms and conventions of society were usually acted out, into a place of play, buffoonery, and freedom. Bakhtin’s definition of the carnivalesque involves a sense of a communal body that undermines the distinction between observers and participants. Bakhtin writes that ‘carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order: it marks the suspension of hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions’ (Rabelais and His World 10). However, carnival brings about a temporary defamiliarization of the well-known environment and its conventions, where liberation from the subscribed norms is only permitted within the duration of the carnival festivities. When the carnival is over the prevailing order is reestablished. The futurists dreamed of a more radical change that would introduce a new lifestyle through art. In an interview from 1913 entitled ‘Why Are We Painting Ourselves?’ (‘Pochemu my raskrashivaemsia?’), futurist painter Mikhail Larionov reveals the agenda behind their carnivalization of reality, showing that the futurist’s carnivalesque theatricalization of everyday life has a utopian quality: The new life requires a new community and a new way of propagation. Our self-painting is the first speech to have found unknown truths. We have joined art to life. After the long isolation of the artist we have loudly summoned life and life has invaded art, it is time for art to invade life. The painting of faces is the beginning of the invasion. (In Gutkin 169)

Lotman’s study of the relationship between romantic art and reality applies to some aspects of the futurist carnivalesque theatricalizations. For nineteenth-century Russian culture and its romantic gentry, as

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Lotman explains, theatre was the source of revolutionary consciousness that transformed a person into a character liberating him/her from customs and norms: Theatrical life represented a chain of events. A man was not a passive participant in an inchoate passage of time: liberated from everyday life, he lead the existence of a historical personage – he himself chose his type of behaviour, actively influencing the world around him, perished or achieved success. (‘Theatre and Theatricality’ 56)

The futurist ‘revolutionary gentry,’ being active in the period around the Great War and the Revolution, saw themselves as makers of a new cultural history and innovators of new forms of behaviour. They viewed both art and life as an ongoing spectacle. Using the example of nineteenth-century Russian culture, which is to some extent applicable to the early twentieth-century, Lotman explained, ‘It is precisely because the life of theatre differs from everyday existence that the view of life as spectacle gave man new possibilities for behaviour’ (56). Avant-garde artists turned life into art. In his novel Sentimental Journey, Shklovsky quotes Ejxenbaum who says that the distinction between an ordinary life and a revolutionary one is that in the latter the sensation of things is awakened. Revolutionary life, it seemed, ‘made the stone stony.’ However, Oscar Wilde’s notion that ‘life should imitate art,’ which marked the avant-garde experiments and way of thinking in both Russia and Germany, came true in unforeseen, even tragic ways. The avant-garde theatricalization of both art and life played out, in various ways, the symbiosis between theatricality and performativity. The most radical shifts in the relationship between reality and performance in the Russian avant-garde emulated the real life mise en scène of battles, protests, processions, and parades. Evreinov’s staging of The Storming of the Winter Palace, produced to commemorate the third anniversary of the October Revolution, explored exactly this kind of theatricality that inhabits the liminal zone between social and theatrical spectacle. The action took place on three huge platforms in front of the actual Winter Palace, with theatrical figures appearing at its windows. A large number of performers was involved including professional actors, dancers, circus performers, students, workers, and whole sectors of the Red Army. Crowd scenes portrayed the masses as a collective hero. This was a way not only to establish the mass as the main protagonist of the spectacle, but also to theatricalize the actual masses. The Storming of the Winter Palace

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prefigures the contemporary notion of environmental theatre, as it suggests the idea of theatricality as the aesthetization of life. Similar spectacles of political propaganda were organized in Germany, in the period from 1920 to 1924, as mass celebrations of the Workers’ Movement and to commemorate the Spartacus uprising. While Russian mass spectacles were closer to sports events, perhaps even to the vision of theatre as a mass sport spectacle that Brecht had embraced, the German Massenfestspiel was based more on text and movement and involved a spectacular mobile chorus (Bewegungschore) as their main feature. Later, in the mid-1930s, the form of Massenfestspiel will be appropriated by Goebbels and turned into Nazi spectacles of strength and power. As political life and reality in both Russia and Germany acquired totalitarian features during the late 1920s and particularly through the 1930s, theatricality was used to impose meaning and significance on the absurd performativity of ideology and power. In other words, avant-garde devices of theatricality and estrangement were appropriated by the political apparatus and turned into devices of manipulation. Parades, battle enactments, and outdoor spectacles that Evreinov and other directors, including Asja Lacis, staged not only as celebrations of the revolutionary sentiment, but also as infusions of theatricality into life and everyday reality, turned into stale political decorum and propaganda postcards of Stalinist Russia. They ceased to epitomize theatricality and a renewed sensation of life, but rather became symbols of totalitarian culture and state controlled art. The ludic spirit of the avant-garde and its carnivalesque reenactment of the Revolution turned, under Stalin, into ominous parades of marching athletes and military, resembling similar ceremonies in Nazi Germany. The situation with mass spectacles in Germany was even more ironic as the workers’ mass spectacles (Massenfestspiel) of the 1920s that celebrated the Spartacus uprising became appropriated in the mid1930s by Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry and transformed into the means of theatricalizing and celebrating the so-called Blut und Boden (blood and soil) ideology. These spectacles of power were open-air performances with Nazi flags in the backdrop, involving up to 50,000 participants grouped to symbolize the transformation of formless masses into a strong national force personified in the figure of the Führer. Only the chorus, being the main feature of Massenfestspiel, was considered Marxist and eliminated from the Nazi version of the spectacle. Goebbels and Hitler embraced theatricality and liminal performance as the means of their propaganda machinery, basing the iconography and performativity of Naziism on the dramaturgy of mass spectacle and ritual. Nuremberg ral-

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lies, depicted in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens 1934), as well as in Goebbels’s ritualistic bonfires set to consume the ‘decadent’ literature and art of the avant-garde, are prime examples of the theatricalization and ritualization of politics, within which political pragmatics give way to political performativity and pathos. Brecht pointed out Hitler’s theatricalization of self, describing his everyday performances in public life as the assumption of different roles – from the great leader of his people to a common citizen who donates small amounts of money to charity. Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will captures Hitler ritually exchanging blessings with his troops. His public persona is priestly and godlike, while at the same time projecting the image of himself as a soldier ‘arisen’ from the common people. It is known that he took acting lessons to shape different variants of his public persona, developing a repertoire of gestures and rhetorical devices. Ironically, Hitler’s theatricalization of identity echoes Evreinov’s notion of role-playing in real life. The deliberately theatricalized identity of the Führer turns into an uncanny grotesque version of Evreinov’s Harlequin. Evreinov’s idea of the theatricalization of everyday life and individual behaviour is taken here to the extreme ends of political manipulation. However, theatricality of politics goes beyond political propaganda. A prime example of the theatricalization of reality as a means of totalitarianism, with very direct and bloody consequences, is Stalin’s show trials – fabricated processes to eliminate political opponents. These processes are strikingly reminiscent of surrealist show trials. At the end of the 1920s when disagreements and intrigues reached their peak in the surrealist circle, artists decided to theatricalize and act out their differences through show trials, which in retrospect can be viewed as early, bloodless versions of the Stalinist purges. Both used the same dramaturgy, with one important distinction – in surrealist purges the action was theatrical and symbolic; in Stalinist purges the action was performative, real, and often deadly. Evreinov liked to quote a story by Oscar Wilde about the man who wandered away from his village every morning returning with wonderful stories about a faun playing on a reed pipe, dancing elves, and sirens frolicking in the waves. One day he wandered away as usual and actually saw a faun playing on a pipe, dancing elves, and sirens. When he returned that evening and the villagers asked him what he had seen, he replied ‘I did not see anything’ (in Golub 54–5). This story metaphorically describes the distinction between surrealist and Stalinist purges, and between avant-garde and totalitarian theatricalizations of life – namely, theatrical trials, battles, and spectacles end once there is real bloodshed.

In the Hands of Angelus Novus: Form and Ideology 149

In his essay ‘The Apporias of the Avant-Garde,’ poet and one of the leading contemporary German social critics Hans Magnus Enzensberger points out that the military and violent rhetoric of some avant-garde manifestos is harmless only because it is confined within the framework of art. This includes André Breton’s assertion that ‘the simplest surrealist deed consists in walking out into the street with guns in the hand and shooting as long as possible blindly into the crowd,’ as well as Salvador Dali’s conclusion that ‘Hitler is the greatest surrealist.’ However, with the exception of Italian futurism, only a few avant-garde artists embraced fascism while others, including Russian futurists and the majority of surrealists, were of a pacifist orientation. Still, is there a kinship between avant-garde and totalitarianism? Was the historical avant-garde, with its theatricalization, estrangement, and spectacles, blurring the line between reality and illusion, ethics and aesthetics so effectively that it led the modernist Odyssey towards fascist politicized aesthetics and Stalinist theatricalized ethics? Enzensberger, criticizing the avant-garde tendencies that came into being in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the beatniks, finds in their selfcentredness an affinity with totalitarian movements: The kinship with totalitarian movements lies close to hand, their centre being precisely, as Hannah Arendt has shown, empty kinetic activity, which spews forth thoroughly arbitrary, indeed manifestly absurd, ideological demands and proceeds to implement them. (256)

Still, he releases the historical avant-garde movements from this accusation: The historic avant-garde perished by its apporias. It was questionable, but it was not craven. Never did it try to play it safe with the excuse that what it was doing was nothing more than an ‘experiment’ ; it never cloaked itself in science in order to be absolved of its results. That distinguishes it from the company of limited responsibility that is its successor; therein lies its greatness. (264)

There is more to be said in opposition to the hypothesis that the historical avant-garde, through its allegedly irresponsible toying with estrangement and theatricalization invited or set the ground for the grand performances of totalitarianism. The artistic tendencies of the historical avantgarde were very diverse, embracing a wide spectrum of ideas from collec-

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tivism to individualism, from political engagement to autonomous art, from primitivism to scientism. The avant-garde was heteroglosic, to use Bakhtin’s term that describes a variety of voices not dominated by one consciousness. It was too heterogeneous to create a climate of a univocal collective consciousness out of which a culture of totalitarianism could have grown. The avant-garde was international and cosmopolitan in nature, often finding its favourite estrangement devices in different cultures and foreign theatrical conventions, while totalitarian culture is by default closed, univocal, and xenophobic. Even though totalitarian propaganda machinery used avant-garde dramaturgical devices of performance and spectacle, its art was completely different from avant-garde tendencies. While avant-garde movements were urban phenomena intended to break with the mainstream and challenge traditional values, fascist art was archaic in nature, promoting the idea of ‘eternal’ values often embodied in images of rural life. It is hard to find any kinship between the scenes of idealistic Arian family life in Adolf Wissel’s painting, which epitomized Nazi art and values, and the avant-garde art of estrangement based on distortion, montage, and decoupage. Using populist styles to appeal to the lowest common denominator, socialist realism was to some extent similar to the official art of Nazi Germany, as it produced images that confirmed the official state ideals and goals. Soviet art from the early years of the Revolution, marked by Eisenstein’s movies, Mayakovsky’s plays, and Meyerhold’s staging, has very little in common with the state promulgated aesthetics of socialist realism embodied in numerous kitschy portraits of comrade Stalin surrounded by his followers and party members. Both the aesthetics of the avant-garde and its heteroglossic polemical nature are antithetical to totalitarian disciplinary cultural politics. Even though avant-garde artistic means of theatricalizing life became reworked to serve totalitarian regimes, the art of estrangement still served as a device for unmasking political manipulation. Brecht’s antifascist work written in exile and John Heartfield’s Dadaist montages published in left-wing magazines are among those that prove the existence of the subversive art of estrangement in the 1930s at least as an underground activity or within the communities of exiled artists. The avant-garde, in its various forms, was too subversive to fit within the tight grip of totalitarian regimes. As early as 1927 Hitler founded the Nazi Fighting League for German Culture, dedicated to fighting against the ‘degenerate’ art of the avantgarde ‘contaminated’ by foreign elements that included communism, cubism, and jazz. In 1933 Hitler’s regime launched a nationwide crack-

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down on modernist art and suppressed artistic liberties in the Reich. Books by alleged left-wing authors and proponents of ‘degenerate’ art, including the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, were burned in public squares. Notorious Nazi aesthetician Alfred Rosenberg used expressions such as ‘half-cast art,’ ‘bastardy,’ and ‘intellectual syphilis’ to describe the paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckman, Oscar Kokoschka, Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and others. In March of 1938, in the rooms of the former Japanese Embassy in Berlin opposite the burned-out Reichstag, a mocking exhibit of degenerate art opened. The exhibit closed in flames – more than 1000 oils and 4000 watercolours were burned in the ritual bonfires as part of the campaign of purifying German culture. The strategy of defamiliarizing both art and life was officially taken away from the artists and theorists of the Russian avant-garde after the Writers’ Congress in 1934, when experiments in art were forbidden. In his book Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage, Nick Worrall describes the cultural atmosphere of this period: In the grimly serious climate of these years, when the revolutionary gains of the previous ten years were seen to be under threat, an attempt was made to harness all the forces of art to assist in the rapid industrialization process and the agrarian revolution based on the collectivization of a formerly independent peasantry. Anyone who was not a ‘realist’ during this period was, by definition, an ‘unrealist’ or in contemporary jargon, a ‘formalist.’ To be designated as such was not merely constructed as potential hostility to officially promulgated artistic tenets, but was likely to be interpreted as hostility to the communist state itself. (17)

These cultural purges in both Germany and Russia violently suppressed the avant-garde. The means of theatricalization were appropriated and turned into weapons to fabricate reality. The political apparatus of the Stalinist era used techniques of montage and decoupage to manipulate actual facts and historical documents. In the 1996 issue of TDR, two identical photos are published that show a group of artists gathered in Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre. In the photo are, among others, Chekhov, Stanislavsky, and Meyerhold. The other photo is the same, except that Meyerhold has ben removed. He was in general removed from Soviet publications from the late 1930s until the mid-1950s. In 1936, as the Party’s campaign against ‘formalism’ became more ferocious, numerous artists denounced aesthetic experimentation and claimed to

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have embraced socialist realism. Meyerhold gave a speech in Leningrad entitled ‘Meyerhold against Meyerholditis’ where, instead of repenting for his avant-garde sins, he defended the avant-garde composer Dmitri Shostakovich against the attacks in Pravda, and affirmed the right of all artists to creative freedom and experimentation. A few days after the speech, when he was himself furiously attacked in Pravda, Meyerhold replied with a bold critique of socialist realism that sealed his fate. In January 1938, before being shut down, Meyerhold’s theatre company gave its final performance, The Lady of the Camellias, with Meyerhold’s wife, celebrated actress Zinaida Raikh, in the title role. Among Meyerhold’s friends who offered support were the poet Boris Pasternak, the film director Sergei Eisenstein (who also was in political disgrace after a ban had been placed on his movie Bezhin Meadow), and Meyerhold’s artistic rival, Konstantin Stanislavsky, who offered him a job at Opera Theatre. For a short time Meyerhold was partially rehabilitated and allowed to work again. Then, in 1939, he gave a speech at the Writers’ Union congress where he criticized iron-handed cultural politics again. In his book Revolution in Theatre, Edward Braun describes the content of this seemingly politically neutral address, which turned out to be Meyerhold’s point of no return: Citing the inspiring example of Dovzheko’s latest film Shchors, he called for a new popular heroic theatre that would burst the bounds of the ‘box-stage’ and free actors from the drudgery of ‘rummaging around in narrow, everyday subject-matter.’ (294)

Meyerhold believed that his political and artistic prospects had recuperated and that he was soon to choose between a position in Stanislavsky’s Opera Theatre in Moscow and the Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad. Instead, the last ‘performance’ on which the director unwittingly collaborated was his own show trial. Meyerhold was arrested in June of 1939 and it is believed that the order for his arrest came directly from Stalin. After a long ordeal involving psychological pressure and physical torture and after numerous performative acts where Meyerhold had to ‘repent’ for crimes he did not commit and sign fabricated confessions, the leading director of the Russian avant-garde and the former star of the Soviet revolutionary theatre was sentenced to death. The final indictment stated, ‘In 1930 Meyerhold was the head of the anti-Soviet Trotskyite group “Left Front,” which coordinated all anti-Soviet elements in the field of the arts’ (Brown in Meyerhold 303). Among the ‘anti-Soviet elements’ were also writers Ilja Ehrenburg, Boris Pasternak, and Yury Olesha. In the fall of

In the Hands of Angelus Novus: Form and Ideology 153

1940, in a totalitarian theatricalization of politics, Meyerhold was executed. Soon following Meyerhold’s arrest, his wife Zinaida Reikh was found stabbed to death in their flat; her assassins were never caught. Many other avant-garde artists in both Russia and Germany were killed, arrested, or forced into exile. In 1930, allegedly disillusioned with the results of the revolution, Mayakovsky committed suicide; Asja Lacis, whom Benjamin described as the ‘Russian revolutionary from Riga, one of the most remarkable women’ he have ever met, spent several years in a Soviet correction camp; in 1940 Benjamin decided to end his attempts to escape from the Nazi regime and committed suicide; Brecht and Piscator, together with many others, were forced into exile. Svetlana Boym, writing on Shklovsky’s ostranenie and his experience of exile, observes the following: After the Revolution and civil war, defamiliarisation turned into a fact of life, while the everyday manner of existence and the maintenance of bare essentials became exotic. Moreover the practice of aesthetic estrangement had become politically suspect. In her 1927 diary Lidiia Ginzburg (literary critic and student of Shklovsky) observed: ‘ The merry times of the laying bare the device have passed. Now is the time when one has to hide the device as far as one can.’ (519)

On the one hand, the concept of estrangement presupposes a duality, even plurality, of vision and is therefore antithetical to totalitarian practice and consciousness. On the other hand, when defamiliarization turns into a fact of life it no longer evokes perceptibility; rather, it blurs the perception of reality. When the theatricalization of life becomes a device of political manipulation it no longer encourages our ‘will to play’; rather, it becomes deadly. The only solution, and it is not a simple one, for the practitioners and theorists of theatricality and estrangement is to radically reinvent their methods in order to deautomatize consciousness and counteract alienation in political, social, cultural, and artistic reality.

Afterword: Retro Estrangement

People talked as if there were no dramatic or descriptive music before Wagner; no impressionist painting before Whistler; whilst as to myself, I was finding that the surest way to produce an effect of daring innovation and originality was to revive the ancient attraction of long rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens. George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

Although the notion of making the familiar strange has taken different shapes and features in different periods and contexts, it has always been tied to a quest for novelty as a means of rejuvenating both artistic production and reception. Artists continue to introduce (or rather reintroduce) defamiliarization as a device that brings about an ‘effect of daring innovation,’ while in fact it is based not on new aesthetic inventions, but on the revival of old ones. Since this concept can be traced from Aristotle and Horace to Hegel and Marx, it becomes clear that in the twentieth century it is inevitably a revival. Ideas analogous to Shklovsky’s ostranenie and Brecht’s Verfremdung have been found in the writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The ‘daring innovations’ of the historical avant-garde were borrowed from their sources in medieval and Elizabethan theatre, commedia dell’arte, romanticism, and traditional Japanese and Chinese theatre. In short, there is nothing new about the notion of artistic novelty embodied in the concept of making the familiar strange. On the one hand, distancing the familiar as a means of evoking artistic newness is always a retroconcept. On the other hand, the principle of novelty as a revival of the old and well-known but forgotten (or backgrounded, to use

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Czech structuralist terminology) in regards to the estrangement phenomenon is not even very paradoxical. The duality between innovation and revival is inherent in the very nature of the concept and establishes itself through the interplay of the habitual and the strange, the familiar and the defamiliarized, automatization and perceptibility. Moreover, renderings of this complex of concepts in the theatre and theory of the Russian avant-garde and in Brecht show that its revivals do not leave the notion of distancing the familiar static and unchanged. This concept is very context specific, and as a result, each epoch and cultural milieu will search for its own ways to restore the role, relevance, and power of art by subverting prevailing aesthetic and cultural norms. As one looks at the accumulation of distancing devices used throughout different cultural and historical contexts, it becomes clear that the good old concept of making the familiar strange has not only been reinvented, but also modified and transformed. In this book I have analysed the two major defamiliarization theories of the twentieth century – the Russian formalists’ theory and Bertolt Brecht’s theory – as well as the art of the historical avant-garde to address the specific features of this particular revival in the field of theatre and drama. Cultural milieu, medium of representation, aesthetics, and ideology have been taken into account as aspects that condition the reinventions of the defamiliarization phenomenon in general, and within the framework of the historical avant-garde in particular. I have tried to challenge the notion of making the familiar strange as a universal principle, showing that this concept is not only context specific, but that even within the same historical and cultural framework it has had very different aesthetic and ideological incarnations. The overall epoch of the historical avant-garde was identified as one of crisis of language and religion reflected in the sense of separation between self and the world. The Great War and the revolutions in both Russia and Germany determined the political and aesthetic dimensions of the concept as a reaction to the distorted and absurd manifestations of the world. In addition, the advance of modern science and technology brought about changes in the process of artistic production and reception. The media of modern technology entered the work of Piscator, Brecht and Meyerhold through cinematic elements in theatrical structure, as well as through concepts such as theatre for the ‘scientific age’ (Brecht), ‘science of literature’ (formalists), ‘ theatre of scientific objectivity’ (Piscator), acting as biomechanics (Meyerhold), and so on. These each involved a different treatment of the actor’s body on stage, which

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was no longer seen as identical with the represented dramatic character, but was seen as a stage figure (Zich, Mukarovský) – a combination of the actor and the role, where the differences between the two are often laid bare. Furthermore, communicational language and dramatic text, no longer occupying the central place in the artistic production, were subverted by futurist zaum, Meyerhold’s restructuring of classical plays according to the pattern of episodic dramaturgy, and Brecht’s notion of ‘sister arts’ that treated all the performance components equally. The most important shift in theatre concerned the role of the audience, which was included in the performance structure as an integral part of the performance through Meyerhold’s ‘theatre of the straight line,’ and Piscator’s and Brecht’s notions of the spectator as participant. The historical avant-garde viewed art as reverse mimesis, establishing in the overall language of the epoch the notion of making the familiar strange. Very different artists, therefore, from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to Vladimir Mayakovsky and from Bertolt Brecht to Ezra Pound, used this strategy to various aesthetic and ideological ends. Neither aesthetic devices nor ideologies in works of art have a timeless and static effect and function. Thus, the concept of making the familiar strange is not immune to the erosion of time and to the processes of automatization that devour art’s potential for newness and perceptibility. Devices of defamiliarization are not permanent, but need to be reinvented in order to maintain the effect of seeing the well known ‘as if for the first time’ (Shklovsky). The destiny of artistic norms, as Mukarovský has observed, has been their constant violation. A work of art deliberately and perceptibly destroys the previous forms. Yet when the developmental process is accomplished, what used to be topical becomes an element of historical heritage, and the devices that violated the norm initially, bringing aesthetic newness, turn into standardized and repetitious conventions. Even though Brecht claimed that his defamiliarization concept was more suitable for the ‘scientific age,’ he admitted that nothing is permanent (and one could add: including devices of making the familiar strange). Even still, he asserts, ‘You can make a fresh start with your final breath.’ The concept of making the familiar strange is bound to relativism, while at the same time being a principle of artistic vitality and newness. René Wellek and Austin Warren explain the phenomenon in the following way: Novelty is the criterion ... How far can this criterion carry us? As applied by Russians, it is admittedly relativist. There is no aesthetic norm, says Mukarov-

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ský, for it is the essence of the aesthetic norm, to be broken. No poetic style stays strange. Hence, Mukarovský argues, works can lose their aesthetic function and then later, perhaps, regain it – after the too familiar becomes again unfamiliar ... So, as literary history moves on, some poets grow strange again, others remain ‘familiar.’ (253)

If one agrees with Shklovsky, for whom art is a method of deautomatizing our perception of the world, then the notion of making the familiar strange is crucial to the aesthetic and ideological impact of artistic production and reception. In the case of theatre, the idea of estrangement and subverting the audience’s expectations often further concerns the issues of theatre’s cultural relevance and social role. Mukarovský writes, ‘There is always something in the work of art which is bound to the past and something which points to the future’ (Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts 35). Given very different cultural, political, social, and even technological conditions, defamiliarization phenomena in the theatre and theory of the historical avant-garde set a paradigm for the experiments and notions of a similar kind in the second half of the twentieth century. The avant-garde of the 1960s and postmodern theatre, its revival, and subsequent canonization of modernist defamiliarization devices for different aesthetic and ideological ends, has often limited its quality of newness, experiment, and surprise. Instead of closing this discussion, let me make a Brechtian ‘fresh start’ by suggesting the possibility for further investigation into this topic with a question: In today’s world, flooded with information, images, and sounds, where the distinction between real and simulated becomes increasingly blurred, how might theatre subvert the stock responses of an audience and make the well known fresh and meaningful again?

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Notes

Introduction 1 I use the term historical avant-garde to indicate artistic movements and experiments that took place in the period from the beginning of the twentieth century to the mid-1930s. 2 Shklovsky was a member of the Russian Formalist Circle – an avant-garde school of literary criticism active from 1914 to the late 1920s. Russian formalist scholars were very close to the avant-garde; they dealt with the issues of poetic language and literary and film theory. The term ‘Russian formalism’ refers to literary scholars who were affiliated with two groups: the Moscow Linguistic Circle, with talented young thinkers such as Pëtr Bogatyrëv and Roman Jakobson, and the Petersburg OPOJAZ, which included Boris Ejxenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky, and Jurij Tynjanov. In Stalinist Russia, the term ‘formalism’ became a label, or rather a stigma, for a large number of avantgarde artists and theorists whose experiments and approaches did not comply with the officially promulgated aesthetics of socialist realism. 3 All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 1. The Knight’s Move: From Theory to Theatre 1 In her book The Theatre of Meyerhold and Brecht, Katharine Eaton Bliss focuses on Brecht’s Russian connections and influences, drawing parallels between Meyerhold’s and Brecht’s staging techniques. 2 Brecht and Tretiakov were corresponding between 1933–7 (the letters are held in the Brecht-Archive, Berlin), but their letters are predominantly concerned with finding a practical outlet for Brecht’s work during his exile years.

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3 See Havránek, ‘The Functional Differentiation of the Standard Language,’ and Mukarovský, ‘Standard Language and Poetic Language.’ 4 Karl Bühler’s 1934 model includes sender (psychophysical system a), receiver (psychophysical system b), sign, things, and factual situations. Mukarovský’s 1936 concept is similar. It includes the creative subject (subject from whom the utterance is going out), the perceiving subject, the poetic work or poetic denomination, and their relation to reality. See Bühler, Sprachtheorie (Theory of Language 1990). For a comparison of Bühler and Mukarovský, see also Schwarz, ‘Some Remarks on Mukarovský’s Term Semantic Gesture.’ 5 There is no evidence that Brecht was directly familiar with the work of Russian literary constructivism, but it is likely that some of the constructivists’ theoretical postulates made their way into the conversations Brecht had with his Russian friends. The relationship among Brecht’s notions, Russian formalism, and Russian literary constructivism and their possible cross-fertilization has not been truly explored so far. Yet this topic requires a separate study. 6 See Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Mind 665–76. 7 See Brecht, Schriften I 401–2. 8 German scholarship has not been in agreement when it comes to this subject, partly because Brecht has not used the terms precisely. In explaining the staging process for the didactic play Jasager-Neinsager, Brecht asserted in 1936 that the audience in his theatre was no longer able to feel for the dramatic personage and identify with the stage action in a non-critical way: ‘ The representation sets the material and the course of events in the process of estrangement (Entfremdungsprozeß). This estrangement (Entfremdung) is needed to enable comprehension.’ Käthe Rülick-Weiler claims that Entfremdung in this case means in the first place strangeness, and that it has nothing to do with Marx and his concept of alienation (Die Dramaturgie Brechts). Reinhold Grimm is of an entirely different opinion, directly connecting Brecht’s usage of the term with Marx and Engels. ‘Von Novum Organon zum Kleinen Organon: Gedanken zur Verfremdung,’ Das Ärgernis Brecht, 45–70. 9 The notion of simplicity as an aesthetic category is taken from French classicism and was established in the mid-eighteenth century by the German playwright and essayist Johann Gottsched (1730). 10 See Shklovsky, ‘Kak sdelan “Don Kikhot”?’ 91–124. 11 The term diegesis is used to designate the narrative aspects of the material that are not presented through stage action, but rather by telling a story. 12 For more on Meyerhold’s staging of The Death of Tarelkin, see Law, ‘The Death of Tarelkin.’

Notes to pages 32–44

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13 On the communication model in drama and the foundation of the mediating system, see Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama. 14 Hansen-Löve stresses that the Russian formalists practised a reduced form of phenomenological thinking described as ‘positivistischer Phänomenologismus.’ See Der Russische Formalismus 181–8. 15 See Christiansen, Philosophie der Kunst 117. 16 For Ferdinand de Saussure, whose work also influenced the Russian Formalist School, elements of a system were defined by their divergence from other analogous elements as well. See Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. The Russian formalists’ notion of divergence quality is echoed in Jacques Derrida’s famous concept of différance, even though he used it to push Saussure’s theory of language to its limits. The term différance is ambiguous; it is both to differ from and to defer, postpone. Writing does not copy spoken language, it differs from it; meaning is continuously deferred since each word leads us to another word in the system of signification. Thus, text can be viewed as an endless sequence of signifiers that lead to other texts. See Derrida, Writing and Difference. 17 In the article ‘Stanislavsky und Meyerhold,’ Herta Schmid offers a systematic comparative analysis of their acting and staging approaches. 18 Brecht’s leftist orientation and anti-Fascist views are well known. Ionesco also made his anti-Fascist stance clear and approached political reality through his critique of bourgeoisie hypocrisy and values, while Pirandello through his sympathy for the Fascist ideology inclined to the opposite side of the political spectrum of the late 1920s and 1930s. 2. Some Old Photos: Russian Formalism in Russian Avant-garde Theatre 1 Reprinted in Jangfeldt Love Is the Heart of Everything. 2 Alexander Potebnja (1835–91), a very influential linguist, was the first to introduce the distinction between poetic and practical language in Russia. Even though Russian formalists often use Potebnja’s poetics as a point of departure, they make every effort to dissociate themselves from Potebnja and his followers – the Russian symbolist literary critics. Alexander Veselovsky (1838–1906) is another big name in Russian linguistics; in his unfinished Historical Poetics he differentiates between poetic and prose style reworking Spencer’s idea of economy of energy in the creative process. Formalists did not fully disagree with Veselovsky either, but often built their postulates by reversing Veselovsky’s notions. 3 For more about the relationship between formalists and futurists see Shklovsky’s memoir, Mayakovsky and His Circle.

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Notes to pages 44–61 The photo is published in Jangfeldt, Love Is the Heart of Everything. See Burliuk, ‘Faktura.’ Flaker, Heretici i Sanjari (Heretics and Dreamers), 5–32. Herbert Spencer’s positivist theory of art asserts the principles of minimal effort and economy of artistic energy as universal laws of style. ‘The way an unused element, a minus device, is related to the structure of the recipient’s expectations, and the way the latter, in turn, is related to the probability that a textually fixed element will be used in a given constructional position, also makes the information carried by the minus device a wholly real, an measurable quantity’ (Lotman, The Structure of Dramatic Text 51). See Kruchonych, Sdvigologija russkogo stiha. The performances of Oscar Schlemmer use the human body in a similar fashion, creating the effect of its dissolution into a geometrical object. In postmodern performance, the work of Laurie Anderson is characterized by similar experiments. Namely, she uses costumes such as a ‘drum suit’ and a ‘light suit’ that restrict her movements in order to produce certain sound or lighting effects. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words. This concept is elaborated primarily in respect to literature, although Gérard Genette deals with dramatic texts in his notion of palimpsest (text as a second ‘overwriting’ through which the first can be seen partly); Linda Hutcheon focuses on visual arts in her theory of parody; Jurij Lotman and later Julia Kristeva seek ways of applying this phenomenon to the theory of culture; and Patrice Pavis views this concept as a way of understanding dramatic and performance texts (however, this last possibility does not seem fully explored). Renate Lachmann, in her book Memory and Literature, links the concept of intertextuality to some key ideas of Russian formalism, but still deals primarily with Bakhtin’s theory. See Lachman, Gedächtnis und Literatur: Intertextualität. See Tynjanov, ‘On Literary Evolution.’ The notion of perceptibility invoked through subverting the recipient’s expectations is, of course, implicitly present in the structuralist aktualizace, but it is not foregrounded in the concept. Genette introduces the term ‘transtextuality’ in his book Palimpsests as the broadest category encompassing and describing the various ways in which texts are linked to one another. In most of these theatrical forms the literary text is only loosely sketched (commedia, circus), opening a wide potential for improvisation (again a

Notes to pages 62–95

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technique that includes both physical and verbal components and which cannot be fully transcribed). The Asian theatrical forms, although including dramatic plots, are highly conventionalized and defined more strongly by performative canons than by the textual. For a detailed reconstruction of Meyerhold’s Inspector General, see Rudnitsky’s Meyerhold the Director. For the latest reconstructions of Meyerhold’s productions based on newly recovered documentation see Sitkovetstkaya and Feldman, Meyerhold Repetiruet. For more on the relationship between Meyerhold and Lunacharsky, see Pesochinsky ‘Meyerhold and the Marxist Critique’ and Clark ‘Meyerhold’s Appropriation of Gogol for 1926 in the Soviet Union.’ For more details on Meyerhold’s staging of Blok’s play, see Braun in Meyerhold on Theatre and Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director. For more on Asian influences on Meyerhold and the theatre of the historical avant-garde, see Fischer-Lichte, ‘Inszenierung des Fremden’; see also Fischer-Lichte, Riley, and Gissenwehrer, The Dramatic Touch of Difference. Meyerhold was further exposed to the techniques of Asian theatre through the works of Tairov and Reinhardt, who were among the first to produce the Chinese drama The Yellow Jacket in 1913 and 1914. Japanese No theatre had a particularly strong influence on Meyerhold as a model for his new acting style. In 1910, he even engaged Japanese artists to coach his actors in movement technique, and in his writings from 1912 and 1913 he also frequently discussed forms of Japanese and Chinese theatre. In the collection of Schnitzler’s plays Paracelsus and Other One Act Plays, Columbina’s Scarf appears under the title The Veil of Pierrette. For more details on Meyerhold’s production of Columbina’s Scarf, see Zolotinsky, Zori teatralnogo Oktiabria, and Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd.

3. Epic Theatre in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 1 Brecht’s presupposed ideological position is the point of departure for the aesthetic analysis of his work, even in some of the studies of renowned German scholars such as Jan Knopf, Reinhold Grimm, Hans Mayer, Klaus-Detlef Müller, and others. 2 The Piscator Collective used the dramatization of Hašek’s novel by Max Brod and Hans Reimann as a point of departure. Brecht’s notes regarding his work on this project, as well as the notes written in the margins of his copy of the novel (courtesy of Brecht-Archive in Berlin), suggest that the Collective’s adaptation was using much more of the novel itself than Brod/Reimann’s work.

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3 The grotesque Verfremdung that Brecht usually takes from urban folklore and moritats (ballads sung on the street and used as at the beginning of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera) is less prominent in Brecht’s later writing, which relies more on traditional epic devices. 4 See Wyss, Brecht in der Kritik, 1–13. 5 ‘Prinzipiell ist für das Lehrstück kein Zuschauer nötig, jedoch kann er natürlich verwendet werden.’ (In general, didactic plays need no audience, however, it can still be used of course.) (Brecht, ‘Zur Theorie das Lehrstücks,’ Gesamelte Werke 1024). 6 I have not taken into account here the two courtroom scenes, Azdak’s trial and Grusha’s trial, which also can be viewed as sequences that use metatheatrical patterns. 7 L’Histoire du Soldat was performed in 1923 in Frankfurt and the CocteauStravinsky Oedipus Rex premiered at the Berlin State Opera in 1928. French experiments in theatre and music have apparently also had an impact on German artists. 8 The influence of jazz is evident in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat and most notably in Ragtime (1918) and Piano-Rag-Music (1919). In 1920 Ravel wrote his ‘sung ballet’ L’Enfant et les Sortilèges influenced by Cole Porter. 9 Brecht’s anti-Wagnerianism is, like his anti-Aristotelianism, ambiguous. Some aspects of epic theatre, the spectator’s role in the process, and other elements that could be found in Brecht, Piscator, and also Meyerhold are present in Wagner’s opera Ring as well as in his theatre theory. Furthermore, just as Shklovsky established his theory of poetic language and ostranenie through a direct reversal of symbolist poetics, so Brecht established his concept of theatre as ‘sister arts’ reversing Wagner’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerke. Brecht’s ‘Notes to the Mahagonny Opera,’ even though written as a polemic against Wagner, still shared common ground with Wagner’s theatre theory. For more on this topic, see Kesting, ‘Wagner/Meyerhold/Brecht oder die Erfindungdes “epischen” Theatres.’ 10 Some works of composers like Weill have also been appropriated and used for commercial purposes in contemporary culture. 11 See Brecht, ‘Glossen zu Stevenson,’ Werke, 21:117. Originally published in Berliner Börsen-Courier, 19 May 1925. 4. In the Hands of Angelus Novus: Form and Ideology 1 Unlike Benjamin, Nietzsche, in his radical interpretation of tragedy, uses the term ‘Socratic’ in a very negative sense. For Nietzsche the happy union of Apollonian/Dionysian dualities was lost with Euripides who renounced

Notes to pages 122–33

2

3

4 5

6

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Dionysus to create an art based on Socratic rationalism and morality. See Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik [The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music]. See also Benjamin, Understanding Brecht. In a lecture at Innis College, University of Toronto (2001), Jameson, exploring the idea of national cinema, arrived at a very similar conclusion regarding the relationship between form and content to the one that had been proposed by Shklovsky. Jameson approached the stylistic and formal aspects of the given national cinemas in order to point out their unifying artistic and political principles. Mukarovský introduces the notions of norm and value, which determine the aesthetic and ethical function of an artwork. The artistic norm in structuralism is not a prescriptive or metaphysical category; it is rather a guideline for generating meaning when either fulfilled or violated. Mukarovský stresses the instability of the artistic norm, since it accepts the influence of other systems (Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts). The key texts of this debate are published in English in Taylor, Aesthetics and Politics. Brecht’s notion of many ‘realisms’ is similar to Jakobson’s position in his essay ‘On Realism in Art.’ Jakobson talks about various artistic models that are perceived as realist, demonstrating the changing nature of the style. However, both writers point out that there is no fixed, paradigmatic model that sets the framework of realism; rather it is the matter of different aesthetic strategies viewed as realist in different periods of time (Jakobson) and the question of the capacity of an art work to grasp reality. Lukács was a prominent member and activist of the party. Brecht never officially became a member of the Communist Party, but was close to it and embraced Marxist views. Brecht wrote in regards to this play: ‘Any other reproduction of our theatre play is doing it more justice than the theatrical one ... Radio is a technical innovation that offers fruitful possibilities for our plays, since it meets the needs of the masses, and does not throw itself into fulfilling the worn out expectations’ (Brecht on Radio 189).

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Selected Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. ‘Commitment.’ Notes to Literature. Vol. 2, ed. R. Tidemann. Trans. S. Weber. New York: Columbia UP, 1976. 72–8. Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962. Baer, Nancy van Norman, ed. Theatre and Revolution: Russian Avant-garde Stage Design, 1913–1935. San Francisco: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. M. Holquist. Trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. – Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Barthes, Roland. ‘Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur.’ The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation. Trans. R. Howard, Berkley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1985. 129–49. – ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein.’ The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation. Trans. R. Howard. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1985. 89–97. – Mythologies. Trans. Anette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Beckett, Samuel. Collected Short Plays. New York: Grove Press, 1984. Benjamin, Walter. Moscow Diary. Ed. Gary Smith. Trans. Richard Sieburth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986. – Understanding Brecht. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: NLB, 1973. – ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zahn. London: Fontana/Collins, 1982. Bentley, Eric. The Life of Drama. London: Methuen, 1965. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell. London: Macmillan, 1911. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. Bloch, Ernst. Literary Essays. Trans. Andrew Joron and others. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998.

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Blok, Aleksandr. Teatr: Balaganchik. Berlin: Slovo, 1922. Bogatyrëv, Pëtr. ‘A Contribution to the Study of Theatrical Signs.’ The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929–1946. Ed. Peter Steiner. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. 55–63. Bowlt, John E. ‘The Construction of Caprice.’ Theatre in Revolution: Russian Avant-garde Stage Design, 1913–1935. Ed. Nancy Van Norman Baer. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. 60–89. Boym, Svetlana. ‘Estrangement as a Life Style: Shklovsky and Brodsky.’ Poetics Today: International Journal of Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communucation 17.4 (1996): 511–24. Braun, Edward. Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre. London: Methuen, 1979. Brecht, Bertolt. Bad Time for Poetry: Was It? Is It? Ed. John Willett. London: Methuen, 1995. – Brecht on Film and Radio. Ed. and trans. M. Silberman. London: Methuen, 2000. – Brecht on Theatre. Ed. and trans. John Willett. London: Metheuen, 1978. – Drums in the Night. Trans. Frank Jones. New York: Grove P, 1966. – The Exception and the Rule. The Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays. Trans. Eric Bentley. New York: Grove P, 1965. 109–45. – Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1982. – The Measures Taken. Trans. C. Mueller. London: Methuen, 1977. – Schriften I–III. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992. – Schriften zum Theater. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963. – Werkausgabe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967. – Werke: Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, 30 Bände. Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988–9. Breton, André. Manifestos of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1972. Brik, Osip. ‘Formalny metod.’ Lef 1 (1923): Brodsky, Boris. ‘The Psychology of Urban Design in the 1920’s and 1930’s.’ Journal of Decoration and Propaganda Art 5 (1987): 78–91. Bühler, Karl. Theory of Language. Trans. D.F. Goodwin. Philadelphia: J. Benjamin, 1990. Burliuk, David. ‘Faktura.’ Poshcheshchina obshchestvennomu vkusu. Moscow: G.L. Kuzmina 1912. 105–6. Burns, Elizabeth. Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life. Harlow: Longman, 1972. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University UP, 1987. Christiansen, Broder. Philosophie der Kunst. Hanauh: Clauss, 1909. Clark, Katarina. ‘Meyerhold’s Appropriation of Gogol for 1926 in the Soviet Union.’ Theater 28.2 (1998): 27–33.

Selected Bibliography 169 Clayton, Douglas. Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’arte / Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978. Douglas, Charlotte. ‘Views from the New World A. Kruchenykh and K. Malevich: Theory and Painting.’ The Ardis Anthology of Russian Futurism. Ed. Ellendea Proffer and Carl R. Proffer. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980. 353–70. Eaton Bliss, Katharine. The Theatre of Meyerhold and Brecht. London: Greenwood P, 1986. Eckhardt, Juliane. Das Epische Theater. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983. Eco, Umberto. ‘Analysis of Poetic Language.’ The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. 24–43. – ‘Form As Social Commitment.’ The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. 123–58. – A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976. Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Ed. and trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949. – The Film Sense. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1947. Ejxenbaum, Boris. ‘How Gogol’s Overcoat Was Made,’ Gogol from the Twentieth Century. Trans. Robert A. Maguire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974. 269– 91. – ‘The Theory of the Formal Method.’ Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1978. 3–38. Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London and New York: Methuen, 1980. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. ‘The Aporias of the Avant-garde.’ Zig Zag: The Politics of Culture and Vice Versa. New York: New P, 1997. Erlich, Victor. Russian Formalism: History and Doctrine. London: Mouton, 1965. Evreinov, Nikolai. The Chief Thing. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1926. – Istoriia russkogo teatra. Letchworth, Herts: Bradda, 1972. – Teatr kak takvoj. Berlin: Academia, 1923. – Teatr dlja sebja. Petrograd: Butkovskoi, 1917. – The Theatre in Life. Trans. Alexander I. Nazaroff. New York: Brentano, 1927. Féral, Josette. ‘Alienation Theory in Multi-Media Performance.’ Trans. Ron Bermingham. Theatre Journal 39.4 (1987): 461–72. – ‘Theatricality: Foreword.’ Substance 31.2 & 3 (2002): 3–13. Fischer, Matthias-Johannes. Brechts Theatertheorie: Forschungsgeschichte – Forschungsstand – Perspektiven. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989.

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Fischer-Lichte, Erika. ‘Inszenierung des Fremden: Zur (De-) Konstruktion semiotischer Systeme.’ TheaterAvantgarde. Tübingen and Basel: Francke Verlag, 1995. 156–242. – ‘Wahrnehmung – Körper – Sprache.’ TheaterAvantgarde. Tübingen and Basel: Francke Verlag, 1995. 1–14. Fischer-Lichte, E., J. Riley, and M. Gissenwehrer, eds. The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and Foreign. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990. Flaker, Aleksandar. Heretici i Sanjari. Zagreb: Naprijed, 1988. Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psycho-analysis. Trans. Joan Riviere. New York: Liveright. 1935. – ‘The Uncanny.’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. 17. London: Hogarth and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955. 217–57. Fuchs, Georg. Die Schaubühne der Zukunft. Berlin and Leipzig: Schustee and Loefflee, 1905. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests. Paris: Seul, 1982. Gladkov, Alexandr. Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1997. Gogol, Nikolai. Dead Souls: The Reavy Translation Backgrounds and Sources Essays in Criticism. Ed. George Gibian. New York and London: Norton, 1985. – Diary of a Madman: Nevski Prospect. Trans. Beatrice Scott. London: Lindsey Drummond, 1945. Golub, Spencer. Evreinov: The Theatre of Paradox and Transformation. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research P, 1984. Grimm, Reinhold. ‘Verfremdung: Beiträge zu Ursprung und Wesen eines Begriffs.’ Revue de littérature comparée. 35 (1961): 207–36. – ‘Von Novum Organon zum Kleinen Organon: Gedanke zur Verfremdung.’ Das Ärgernis Brecht. Ed W. Jaggi. Basel and Stuttgart: Basilius, 1961. 45–70. Gutkin, Irina. ‘The Legacy of Symbolist Aesthetic Utopia: From Futurism to Socialist Realism.’ Creating Life: An Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism. Ed. I. Paperno and J.D. Grossman. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1994. 168–96. Gyseghem, Van André. Theatre in Soviet Russia. London: Faber and Faber, 1943. Hansen-Löve, Aage. Der Russische Formalismus: Methodologische Rekonstruktion Seiner Entwicklung Aus dem Prinzip der Verfremdung. Vienna: Verlag der Öserreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1978. Havránek, Bohuslav. ‘The Functional Differentiation of the Standard Language.’ A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style. Ed. P. Garvin. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1964. 3–16. Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of the Mind. Trans. J.B. Baillie. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967.

Selected Bibliography 171 Heidegger, Martin. Unterwegs zur sprache. Pfullingen: Neske, 1971. Hoffmann, E.T.A. The Golden Pot and Other Tales. Trans. Ritchie Robertson. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Honzl, Jindrich. ‘Dynamics of Signs in Theatre.’ Semiotics of Art. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and Titunik R. Irvin. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1976. 71–8. – ‘The Hierarchy of Dramatic Device.’ Semiotics of Art. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and Titunik R. Irvin. Cambridge MA: MIT P, 1976. 118–27. Hoover, L. Marjorie. ‘Brecht’s Soviet Connection: Tretiakov.’ Brecht Heute – Brecht Today: Jahrbuch der Internationalen Brecht- Gesellschaft 3 (1973): 39–56. Hulme, T.E. ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy.’ Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924. 73–111. Hutcheon, Linda. Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000. Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1958. Ionesco, Eugene. Plays. Trans. Donald Watson. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962. Jakobson, Roman. ‘The Dominant.’ Readings in Russian Poetics. Ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1978. 82–7. – ‘Futurism.’ Language in Literature. Ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. 28–34. – ‘Linguistics and Poetics.’ Language in Literature. Ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. 62–95. – ‘Novejshaja russkaja poezija.’ Texte Der Russischen Formalisten. Ed. J. Striedter. Munich-Fink Verlag, 1969. 18–133. – ‘On Realism in Art.’ Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1978. 38– 47. – Selected Writings. Preface by Stephen Rudy. The Hague, New York: Mouton, 1981. – ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.’ Language in Literature. Ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. 95–121. – ‘Was ist Poesie?’ Texte Der Russischen Formalisten. Ed. J. Striedter. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1969. 410–21. Jameson, Fredric. The Prison House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974. Jangfeldt, Bengt, ed. Love Is the Heart of Everything : Correspondence between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik, 1915–1930. Trans. Julian Graffy. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1986.

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Jefferson, Ann. ‘Literariness, Dominance and Violence in Formalist Aesthetics.’ Literary Theory Today. Ed: P. Collier and H. Geyer-Ryan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. 125–33. Jessner, Leopold. Das Theater, Ein Vortrag. Berlin: Szene, 1928. Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2000. Kandinsky, Wassily. Complete Works. Vol. 1. 1910–1921. Boston, Hall, 1982. – Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Bern: Bümpliz Benteli, 1952. Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963. Kesting, Marianne. ‘Wagner / Meyerhold / Brecht oder die Erfindungdes “epischen” Theaters.’ Brecht Jahrbuch 7 (1977): 111–30. Kiebuzinska, Christine. Revolutionaries in the Theater: Meyerhold, Brecht, and Witkiekicz. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan UP, 1988. Kiš, Danilo. Skladište. Bograd: BIGZ, 1995. Knopf, Jan. ‘Verfremdung.’ Brechts Theorie Des Theaters. Ed. Werner Hecht. Frankfurt: Suhkramp, 1986. 93–137. Kopelew, Lev. ‘Brecht und die Russische Theaterrevolution.’ Brecht Heute – Brecht Today: Jahrbuch der Internationalen Brecht-Gesellschaft 3 (1973): 19–39. Kristeva, Julia. Polylogue. Paris: Seuila, 1977. Krizhanskaya, Daria. ‘Meyerhold – Revizor – Revolution.’ Theatre History Studies 20 (2000): 157–70. Kruchonych, Alexei. Izabrannoe. Ed. Vladimir Markov. Munich: Sagner, 1973. – Sdvigologija russkogo stiha. Moscow: Avtora, 1913. Kujundzic, Dragan. The Return of History: Russian Nietzscheans after Modernity. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. Lachmann, Renate. Gedächtnis und Literatur: Intertextualität in der russischen Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhkramp, 1990. Lacis, Asja. Revolutionär im Beruf: Berichte über proletarisches Theater, über Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin und Piscator. Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1971. Law, Alma. ‘The Death of Tarelkin: A Constructivist Vision of Tsarist Russia.’ Russian-History / Histoire-Russe 8 (1981): 145–98. Law, Alma, and Mel Gordon. Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996. Leach, Robert. Vsevolod Meyerhold. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Leibniz, G.W. New Essays Concerning Human Understanding. Trans. A.G. Langly. New York: Macmillan, 1896. Lermontov, Mikhail. Masquerade. Trans. Roger Philips. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1973. Lessing, G.E. Laocoon. Trans. R. Phillimore. London: Routledge, 1905.

Selected Bibliography 173 Livshits, Benedikt. The One and a Half-Eyed Archer. Trans. John Bowlt. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Pr, 1977. Lonnquist, Barbara. Xlebnikov and Carnival: An Analysis of the Poem Poet. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1979. Lotman, Iu. M. Izabrannie Stati: v trekh tomakh. Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992. – The Structure of Dramatic Text. Trans: Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1977. – ‘Theatre and Theatricality in the Order of Early Nineteenth-Century Culture.’ Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union. Ed. H. Baran. Trans. W. Mandel, H. Baran, and A.J. Hollander. White Plains, NY: International Arts and Science P, 1976. 33–57. Markov, Vladimir, ed. Manifesty i programmy russkich futuristov. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1967. Marx, Karl. Selected Writings. Trans. and ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Mayakovsky, Vladimir. The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Trans. Guy Daniels. New York: Washington Square P, 1968. – How Are Verses Made? Trans. G.M. Hyde. London: Cape, 1970. Mayer, Hans. Bertolt Brecht und die Tradition. Pfullingen: Neske, 1961. – Brecht in der Geschichte: Drei Versuche. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971. Medvedev, Pavel. ‘The Formal (Morphological) Method or Scholarly Salieriism.’ Trans. Ann Shukman. Bakhtin School Papers. Oxford: Russian Poetics in Translation 10, 1983. 51–65. Medvedev, Pavel, and M.M. Bakhtin. The Formal Method In Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Trans. Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Melchinger, Siegfried. Geschichte des politischen Theaters. Velber: Friedrich Verlag, 1971. Meyerhold, V.E. Meyerhold on Theatre. Trans. and ed. Edward Braun. London: Methuen, 1969. Mozejko, Edward. ‘Russian Literary Constructivism: Towards a Theory of Poetic Language.’ Tradition and Innovation in Slavic Literatures, Linguistics, and Stylistics. Ed. Z. Folejewsky, E. Heier, G. Luckij, and G. Schaarschmidt. Ottawa: Canadian Association of Slavists, 1978. 61–9. Mukarovský, Jan. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1970. – ‘Intentionally and Unintentionally in Art.’ The Word and Verbal Art: Essays by Jan Mukarovský. Trans. and ed. J Burbank and P. Steiner. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1977. 89–120. – ‘Standard Language and Poetic Language.’ A Prague School Reader on Esthet-

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ics, Literary Structure and Style. Ed. P. Garvin. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1964. – Structure, Sign, and Function. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1978. Müller, Heiner. Hamletmachine: And Other Texts for the Stage. Trans. Carl Weber. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984. Müller, Klaus- Detlef. Die Funktion der Geschichte im Werk Bertolt Brechts: Studien zum Verhältnis von Marxismus und Ästhetik. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik. Munich: Hanser, 1967. Novalis, Gesammelte Werke. Bd. IV. Zurich: Manesse Verlag, 1946. Ortega y Gasset, José. The Dehumanization of Art. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968. Pavis, Patrice. ‘On Brecht’s Notion of Gestus.’ Trans. Susan Merlose. Languages of the Stage – Essays in the Semiology of Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. 37–51. – ‘Production, Reception and Social Context.’ On Referring in Literature. Ed. A.Whiteside and M. Issacharoff. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 122–38. Pesochinsky, Nikolai. ‘Meyerhold and the Marxist Critique,’ Theater 28.2 (1998): 35–45. Pfister, Manfred. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Pirandello, L. Collected Plays. Trans. and ed. R. Rietty. London: Calder, 1987. Piscator, Erwin. Das politische Theater. Berlin: Adalbert Schultz, 1929. Pogodin, Nikolai. Aristocrats. Four Soviet Plays. Ed. Ben Blake. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972. Potebnja, Aleksander. Iz zapisok po teorii slovesnosti. Moscow: Charkov, 1905. Reich, Bernhard. Im Wettlauf mit der Zeit: Erinnerungen aus fünf Jahrzehnten deutscher Theatergeschichte. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1970. Rudnitsky, Konstantin. Meyerhold the Director. Trans. George Petrov. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981. – Russian and Soviet Theatre – Tradition and Avant-Garde. Trans. Roxane Permar. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988. Rülick-Weiler, Käthe. Die Dramaturgie Brechts: Theater als Mittel der Veränderung. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1968. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. and ed. W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959. Schiller, Friedrich. Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung. Ed. William F. Mainland. Oxford: Blackwell, 1951. Schmid, Herta. ‘Samuel Beckett’s Play QUAD: An Abstract Synthesis of the Theatre.’ Canadian-American Slavic Studies 22.1–4 (1988): 278–86. – ‘Stanislavsky und Meyerhold.’ Konstantin Stanislavsky Neue Aspekte und Perspektiven. Ed. G. Ahrends. Tübingen: Harn, 1992. 65–84.

Selected Bibliography 175 Schnitzler, Arthur. Paracelsus and Other One-act Plays. Trans. G.J. Weinberger. Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1995. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Zürich: Diogenes, 1977. Schwarz, W.F. ‘Some Remarks on Mukarovsky’s Term Semantic Gesture.’ Issues in Slavic Literary and Cultural Theory. Bochum: Universitätverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, 1989. 153–78. Shklovsky, Victor. ‘The Connection Between Devices of Syuzhet Construction and General Stylistic Devices.’ Trans. Jane Knox. Russian Formalism. Ed. Stephen Bann and Jonathan E. Bolton. Edinburgh: Scottish Academy P, 1973. 48–73. – ‘Isskustvo kak priëm.’ Texte Der Russischen Formalisten. Ed. J. Striedter. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1969. 2–36. – ‘Kak sdelan ‘Don Kikhot’?’ O teorii prozy. Moscow: Sov. pisatel, 1925. 91–124. – Khod konia: sbornik statei. Dusseldorf: Antiquary, 1986. – Mayakovsky and His Circle. Ed. and trans. Lily Feiler. New York: Dodd Mead, 1972. – ‘Parodnii roman: “Tristram Shandy” Sterna.’ Texte Der Russischen Formalisten. Ed. J. Striedter. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1969. 245–300. – Povesti o proze. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1966. – ‘The Resurrection of the Word.’ Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation. Ed. S. Bann and J.E. Bowlt. Trans. Richard Sherwood. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1973. 41–7. – A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922. Trans. Richard Sheldon, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984. – Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1990. – Third Factory. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1977. – ‘Voskreshenie slova.’ Texte Der Russischen Formalisten. Ed. J. Striedter. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1969. 1–17. – Zoo: Or Letters Not about Love. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1971. Sidnell, Michael. ‘Authorisations of the Performative: Whose Performance of What and for Whom?’ The Performance Text. Ed. Domenico Pietropaolo. New York and Toronto: Legas, 1999. 97–112. Sitkovetstkaya, M.M. and O.M. Feldman, eds. Meyerhold Repetiruet. Vol. 2. Moscow: Artist, 1993. Spencer, Herbert. First Principles. London: Williams & Norgate, 1904. Steiner, Peter. Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984. Striedter, Jurij. Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism Reconstructed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. – ‘The Russian Formalist Theory of Prose.’ PTL 2. Trans. M. Nicolson. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1977. 429–70. – ed. Texte der Russischen Formalisten. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1969.

176

Selected Bibliography

Suvin, Darko. To Brecht and Beyond: Soundings in Modern Dramaturgy. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1984. Szondi, Peter. Theorie des modernen Dramas. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959. Taylor, Ronald, ed. Aesthetics and Politics. Afterword by Fredric Jameson. Trans. R. Taylor. London: Verso NLB, 1977. Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Trans. Rose Strunsky. New York: Russell & Russell, 1957. Tynjanov, Jurij. ‘Dostoevskij i Gogol: K teorii parodii.’ Texte Der Russischen Formalisten. Ed. J. Striedter. Munich: Fink Verlag, 1969. 300–73. – ‘On Literary Evolution.’ Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed: L. Matejka and K. Pomorska. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1978. 66–79. – The Problem of Verse Language. Ed. and trans. Michael Sosa and Brent Harvey. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981. Veltruský, Jirí. ‘Man and Object in Theatre.’ A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style. Ed. Paul Garvin. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1964. 83–91. Veselovsky, Aleksander. Istoricheskaja poetika. Ed. V.M. Zirmunskij. Leningrad: Literatura, 1940. Vodicmka, Felix. ‘The Concretization of the Literary Work.’ The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929–1946. Ed. Peter Steiner. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. 103–33. Wekwerth, Manfred. ‘Auffinden einer ästhetischen Kategorie.’ Sinn und Form: Beiträge zur Literatur 9. Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1957. 260–9. Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942. Wilde, Oscar. ‘The Decay of Lying.’ Collected Works of Oscar Wilde. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1997. 775–801. Willett, John, ed. Brecht On Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Trans. By John Willett. London: Methuen Drama, 1990. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel T. Coleridge. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. London: Routledge, 1991. 241–73. Worrall, Nick. Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage: Tairov – Vakhtangov – Okhlopkov. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Wyss, Monika. Brecht in der Kritik – Rezensionen aller Brecht Uraufführungen. Munich: Kindler Verlag, 1972. Xlebnikov, Velimir. Zangezi. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1978. Zich, Otakar. Estetika dramatického umegni. Prague: Panorama, 1986. Zolotinsky, David Iosifovich. Zori teatralnogo Oktiabria. Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1976.

Index

Adorno, Theodor, 118, 127, 129 aktualizace, 19, 21–2, 124, 162n15 Anderson, Laurie, 152n10 Appia, Adolph, 62 Arcimboldo, 87–8, 90 Aristotle, 3, 20, 71, 118, 154 Artaud, Antonin, 70, 143 Austin, J.L., 55–6, 162n11 Babel, Isak, 46 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 58, 80, 146, 150 Balanchine, George, 110 Ball, Hugo, 55 Balzac, Honoré de, 130 Barthes, Roland, 87–8, 110, 116, 125 Baudrillard, Jean, 58 Bausch, Pina, 31 Beckett, Samuel, 28–31, 118 Beckman, Max, 12, 94, 151 Bely, Andrei, 42, 45, 65 Benjamin, Walter, 13–14, 92–3, 101, 113, 118, 129, 153, 164–5n1 Bentley, Eric, 28–9 Berber, Anita, 142 Bergson, Henri, 89 Blau, Herbert, 37 Bloch, Ernst, 8, 129

Blok, Alexander, 46, 67–8, 163n20 Bogatyrëv, Pëtr, 4, 67, 159n2 Bosch, Hieronymous, 90 Boym, Svetlana, 140, 153 Braun, Edward, 152, 163n20 Brecht, Bertolt, 4–8, 11–18, 37–41, 70, 72–3, 92–119, 125, 127–37, 140–2, 148, 153, 155–7, 159n1, 160nn5, 7, 8, 161n18, 164nn3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 165nn5, 6, 7 Breton, André, 149 Brik, Lylia, 42, 44 Brik, Osip, 42–4 Brjusov, Valeri, 35 Brod, Max, 95, 163n2 Brodsky, Boris, 81 Büchner, Georg, 90, 160n4 Bühler, Karl, 20, 48 Burliuk, David, 45, 144, 162n5 Burns, Elizabeth, 138 Calinescu, Mathei, 10 Callot, Jacques, 83, 89 CM apek, Karl, 9, 92 carnivalization, 142, 144 Cervantes, Miguel de, 24, 27, 44 Chagall, Marc, 151

178

Index

Chaplin, Charlie, 14, 109, 116 Chekhov, Anton, 43, 151 Christiansen, Broder, 33, 60, 161n15 chronotope, 80–1 Clark, Katarina, 163n19 Clayton, Douglas, 68, 163n24 Cocteau, Jean, 107 Coleridge, Samuel, 28, 138, 154 Corneille, Pierre, 27 Craig, Gordon, 30, 70 Dalcroze, Jaques, 9 Dali, Salvador, 149 Dante Alighieri, 90 Debussy, Claude, 28 Derrida, Jacques, 161n16 Diaghileff, Sergei, 107 Diderot, Denis, 111, 116 divergence quality, 33–4, 60 Dix, Otto, 12, 94, 151 Döblin, Alfred, 114 Dostoevsky, F.M., 60, 133 Douglas, Charlotte, 53 dramatic irony, 74 Eaton Bliss, Katharine, 159n1 Eco, Umberto, 10, 54, 126 Ehrenburg, Ilja, 152 Einstein, Albert, 8 Eisenstein, Sergei, 5, 12, 14, 36, 42, 75, 87, 114–16, 150, 152 Eisler, Hans, 101, 107 Ejxenbaum, Boris, 4, 55, 84–5, 122, 146, 159n2 Elam, Keir, 21–2 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 149 Erlich, Victor, 18, 126 Ernst, Max, 9, 89 Evreinov, Nikolai, 5, 38, 43, 60, 142–4, 146–8

Farocki, Harun, 3 Fellini, Federico, 73 Féral, Josette, 134, 139 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 9, 163n21 Flaker, Alexander, 46, 162n6 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 8, 83, 86, 90 Fuchs, Georg, 62, 70–1 Gasbarra, Felix, 95 Genette, Gérard, 59, 162nn12, 16 gestus, 15, 112 Goebbels, Joseph, 147–8 Gogol, Nikolai, 14, 60, 62–5, 84–6, 88, 90 Golovin, Alexander, 70 Goncharova, Natalia, 12, 28, 43 Gordon, Mel, 36 Gorki, Maxim, 101 Goya, Francisco, 90 Gozzi, Carlo, 38, 83 Griffith, D.W., 115 Grimm, Reinhold, 160n8, 163n1 Groppius, Walter, 142 Grosz, Georg, 12, 95–6, 99, 137 grotesque, 5, 38, 82–7, 89–91 Guro, Elena, 73 Hansen-Löve, Aage, 33, 118, 161n14 Hašek, Jaroslav, 95–6, 163n2 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 12 Havránek, Bohuslav, 19, 160n3 Heartfield, John, 12, 150 Hegel, G.W.F., 3, 20–1, 23, 128, 154, 160n6 Heidegger, Martin, 8 Hindemith, Paul, 101, 107 historical avant-garde, 3–4, 7, 10, 126, 142, 149, 156–7 Hitler, Adolf, 109, 128, 147–50

Index Hoffmann, E.T.A., 13, 44, 64, 82–3, 86, 89–90 Honzl, Jindrich, 30–1 Hoover, Marjorie, 16, 23 Horace, 3, 154 Hulme, T.E., 10 Husserl, Edmund, 33 Hutcheon, Linda, 162n12 Huxley, Aldous, 11 Ihering, Herbert, 13, 100 Ingarden, Roman, 136 intertextuality, 5, 57–9 Ionesco, Eugene, 38–41, 161n18 Ivanov, Viancheslav, 37 Jakobson, Roman, 4, 9, 40, 42, 44, 47– 8, 159n2, 165n5 Jameson, Fredric, 121–2, 128, 131, 165n2 Jarry, Alfred, 90 Jefferson, Ann, 125 Jessner, Leopold, 12–14, 16, 94 Kafka, Franz, 85 Kaiser, Georg, 114 Kamenski, Vasil, 144 Kandinsky, Wassily, 12, 28–30, 45, 151 Kantor, Tadeusz, 32 Kayser, Wolfgang, 83 Kiebuzinska, Christine, 13, 22 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 151 Kiš , Danilo, 73, 120 Klee, Paul, 24, 119 Knopf, Jan, 23, 163n1 Kokoschka, Oscar, 151 Kristeva, Julia, 162n12 Krizhanskaya, Daria, 65 Kruchonych, Alexei, 47, 52–3, 56–7, 162n9

179

Kujundzic, Dragan, 123 Kupka, Frantisek, 28 Kusturica, Emir, 73 Lachmann, Renate, 59, 162n13 Lacis, Asja, 13–14, 153 Lang, Fritz, 92 Larinov, Mikhail, 12, 43, 145 Law, Alma, 36, 160n12 Léger, Fernand, 94 Leibniz, G.W., 37 Lenin, 128 Lenya, Lotta, 109 Lepage, Robert, 31 Lermontov, Mikhail, 86 Lessing, G.E., 106 Liebknecht, Karl, 95 Lissitzky, El, 12 literariness, 33 Livshits, Benedikt, 53, 56 Lonnquist, Barbara, 49, 144 Losch, Tilly, 109 Lotman, Iuri, 51, 127, 137, 145–6, 162n12 Lukács, Georg, 129–33, 136, 165n6 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 65, 163n19 Luxemburg, Rosa, 95 Malevich, Kazimir, 8, 45, 52–3 Mann, Thomas, 151 Marinetti, Filippo Thommaso, 156 Markov, Vladimir, 50 Marx, Karl, 20–1, 23, 154, 160n8 Matiushin, Mikhail, 52 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 9, 14, 43–4, 46, 65, 76–82, 138, 144, 150, 153, 156 Mayer, Hans, 127, 163n1 Medvedev, Pavel, 120–1 Mei-Lan-Fang, 15, 18, 110 Melchinger, Siegfried, 46–7

180

Index

metatheatre, 5, 34, 37 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 5–9, 12–15, 17, 31, 34–8, 43, 45, 47, 61–71, 76, 80– 3, 86–7, 89–91, 114, 142, 150–3, 155–6, 159n1, 160n12, 163nn18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 164n9 ‘minus device,’ 51, 127, 162n8 Molière, 60, 69–70 Mondrian, Piet, 28, 151 Mukarovský, Jan, 19–20, 58, 115, 156– 7, 160nn3, 4, 165n3 Müller, Heiner, 133–5 Müller, Klaus-Detlef, 163n1 Neher, Kaspar, 105–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 37, 44, 164–5n1 Novalis, 10 Okhlopkov, Nikolai, 15–16, 43 Olesha, Yury, 152 Orff, Carl, 107 Ortega y Gasset, José, 10 ostranenie, 4–6, 19–26, 35–6, 47, 58, 82, 118–27, 139–40, 143, 164n9 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 113 Paquet, Alfons, 95 parody, 19, 38, 60–1, 123 Pasternak, Boris, 152 Pavis, Patrice, 112, 162n12 perceptibility, 5, 23, 36, 58, 125, 153 performativity, 138–9, 141, 144, 147–8 perspectival estrangement, 71, 76, 78, 80, 104 Pesochinsky, Nikolai, 163n19 Pfister, Manfred, 51, 72, 161n13 Picasso, Pablo, 26, 94 Pilnyak, Boris, 46 Pirandello, Luigi, 34, 38–41, 90, 161n18

Piscator, Erwin, 9, 20, 24, 38, 92–8, 128, 130, 140, 155 Plato, 25, 58, 102, 131 Poe, Edgar Allen, 90 Pogodin, Nikolai, 15 Potebnja, Alexander, 43, 47, 161n2 Pound, Ezra, 156 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 12 Radlov, Sergei, 64 Raikh, Zinaida, 64, 152–3 Ravel, Maurice, 164n8 Reich, Bernard, 18 Reimann, Hans, 95, 163n2 Reinhardt, Max, 12–14, 16, 94, 163n22 Repin, Ilja, 45 Riefenstahl, Leni, 148 Rodchenko, Alexander, 80–1 romantic irony, 34 Rudnitsky, Konstantin, 63, 65, 67, 69, 163nn18, 20 Rülick-Weiler, Käthe, 160n8 Sapunov, Nikolai, 86–7 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 118 Satie, Erik, 107 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 49, 161n16 Schiller, Friedrich, 20, 25 Schlegel, Friedrich, 34 Schlemmer, Oscar, 9, 28, 70, 107, 162n10 Schmid, Herta, 29, 161n17 Schnitzler, Arthur, 86, 163n23 Schönberg, Arnold, 28, 126 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 35 Schultz, Bruno, 73 Schwitters, Kurt, 55 Shaw, Bernard, 154 Shklovsky, Viktor, 4–9, 11–13, 18–27,

Index 33, 36–7, 40, 43–4, 46–8, 51, 57–8, 62, 64, 66, 73–5, 82, 118–26, 139– 40, 143–4, 146, 153–4, 156–7, 159n2, 161n3, 164n9, 165n2 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 152 Sidnell, Michael, 138 Socrates, 25, 99, 102, 118 Spence, Herbert, 161n2, 162n7 Stalin, Joseph, 15–16, 128, 132, 136, 147–8, 152 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 5–6, 36, 65, 151–2 Sterne, Laurence, 24, 66 Stoppard, Tom, 54–5 Stravinsky, Igor, 28, 107, 164nn7, 8 Striedter, Jurij, 22, 27 stylization, 5, 35, 37, 43 Suvin, Darko, 72, 108 Szondi, Peter, 72 Tairov, Alexander, 12–14, 17, 43, 70, 142, 163n22 Tatlin, Vladimir, 11–12, 42 theatricality, 5, 33–4, 39, 43, 61–2, 65, 69, 137–9, 141–4, 146–7, 153 Toller, Ernst, 140 Tolstoy, Lev, 24, 26, 37, 43, 46, 73–6, 78–9, 130, 132 transtheatrical inscription, 66, 69 transtheatricality, 59–62, 65, 71 Tretiakov, Sergei, 14, 18 Triollet, Elsa, 42 Trotsky, Leon, 46, 121 Tynjanov, Jurij, 4, 19, 43, 58, 60, 123– 4, 126, 159n2, 162n14 Vakhtangov, Evgeny, 12, 17, 38, 43, 142

181

Valentin, Karl, 14, 98 Veltruský, Jirí, 89 Verfremdung, 4, 7, 12, 14–15, 17–18, 20–6, 38–41, 93, 98–106, 109–16, 125–9, 133–6, 164n3 Vertov, Dziga, 14 Veselovsky, Alexander, 43, 47–8, 161n2 Vodicmka, Felix, 136 Wagner, 115, 164n9 Warren, Austin, 156 Wedekind, Frank, 12, 90 Weill, Kurt, 101, 107–9 Wekwerth, Manfred, 25 Wellek, René, 156 Wenders, Wim, 73 Wilde, Oscar, 3, 137, 146, 148 Wilson, Robert, 31, 133–5 Wissel, Adolf, 150 Wordsworth, William, 154 Worrall, Nick, 151 Wyss, Monika, 164n4 Xlebnikov, Velimir, 42, 47, 49–50, 52, 53–4, 57, 144 Yessenin, Sergei, 46 Zamayatin, Evgenii, 11 zaum, 9, 26, 47–57, 156 Zhdanov, Andrei, 15, 132 Zich, Otakar, 30, 156 Zolotinsky, David Iosifovich, 163n24

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GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES General Editor: James Retallack 1 Emanuel Adler, Beverly Crawford, Federica Bicchi, and Raffaella Del Sarto, The Convergence of Civilizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region 2 James Retallack, The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination 3 Silvija Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology 4 Susan Gross Solomon, ed., Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia between the Wars 5 Laurence McFalls, Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Revisited