RUSSIAN THEATRE IN THE AGE OF MODERNISM Also by Robert Russell VALENTIN KATAEV V. MAYAKOVSKY, KLOP RUSSIAN DRAMA OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD YU.TRIFONOV,OBMEN Also by Andrew Barratt YURY OLESHA'S 'ENVY' BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE MASTER AND MARGARITA A WICKED IRONY: THE RHETORIC OF LERMONTOV'S A HERO OF OUR TIME (with A. D. P. Briggs) Russian Theatre in the Age of Modernism Edited by ROBERT RUSSELL Senior Lecturer in Russian University of Sheffield and ANDREW BARRATT Senior Lecturer in Russian University of Otago Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-20751-0 ISBN 978-1-349-20749-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20749-7 Editorial matter and selection © Robert Russell and Andrew Barratt 1990 Text © The Macmillan Press Ltd 1990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990 ISBN 978-0-312-04503-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Russian theatre in the age of modernism / edited by Robert Russell and Andrew Barratt. p. em. ISBN 978-0-312-04503-6 1. Theater-Soviet Union-History-2Oth century. I. Russell, Robert, 1946-- . II. Barratt, Andrew. PN2724.R867 1990 792' .0947'09041--dc20 89-70291 OP Contents Preface vii Notes on the Contributors xii 1 Stanislavsky's Production of Chekhov's Three Sisters Nick Worrall 1 2 Boris Geyer and Cabaretic Playwriting Laurence Senelick 33 3 Boris Pronin, Meyerhold and Cabaret: Some Connections and Reflections Michael Green 66 4 Leonid Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped: Who Gets Slapped? Andrew Barratt 87 5 Kuzmin, Gumilev and Tsvetayeva as Neo-Romantic Playwrights Simon Karlinsky 106 6 Mortal Masks: Yevreinov's Drama in Two Acts Spencer Golub 123 7 The First Soviet Plays Robert Russell 148 8 The Nature of the Soviet Audience: Theatrical Ideology and Audience Research in the 1920s Lars Kleberg 172 9 German Expressionism and Early Soviet Drama Harold B. Segel 196 v vi Contents 10 Down with the Foxtrot! Concepts of Satire in the Soviet Theatre of the 1920s J. A. E. Curtis 219 11 Mikhail Bulgakov: the Status of the Dramatist and the Status of the Text Lesley Milne 236 Index 260 Preface Few periods in the history of modem culture have witnessed a greater upsurge of energy and ferment than the first three decades of this century in Russia. These were the years in which political and social instability combined with a characteristically Russian tendency for maximalism to produce exciting new developments in all areas of human endeavour. In the arts, this was Russia's age of modernism, an age whose major representatives - such as Chekhov, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Chagall and Kandinsky - have long been known throughout the world. But despite the eminence of such individual figures, the full range of the Russian experience of modernism, its uniqueness, and its significance both as a national and international phenomenon are perhaps only now beginning to be fully appreciated. This is especially true of the Russian theatre and it is the purpose of the present volume to bring some of the major achievements of these years to the attention of a wider audience. The essays collected here do not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of theatrical life in early twentieth-century Russia. Each is a self-contained study which may be read independently of the whole. Taken together, however, they provide a picture not only of the sheer diversity of the dramatic enterprise during these turbulent years but also of the central issues confronting the student who would wish to understand them better. For most people the modem Russian theatre is synonymous with the name of Konstantin Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre. Inevitably, these are names which feature prominently on the pages that follow. In most instances, however, the focus is placed not so much upon the Art Theatre's long-acknowledged role in the professionalisation of the Russian theatre and the development of dramatic naturalism as upon its role as a catalyst for the many anti-naturalistic experiments which followed in its wake. Nick Worrall's article, with which the collection opens, is the exception to this rule. Drawing upon a detailed examination of Stanislavsky's working notebooks, Worrall reconstructs one of the Art Theatre's most famous productions, the staging in 1901 of Chekhov's Three Sisters. The importance of this production, which vii viii Preface even today has the status of a 'canonical' reading, can scarcely be overestimated, and Worrall's commentary draws attention to many of the interesting questions of interpretation which it raises. The rise of the Russian cabaret in the years following the abortive revolution of 1905 was one of the most characteristic features of artistic life, reflecting both the sense of 'crisis' voiced in so many contemporary articles on the arts and an intense theatrical self­ consciousness which is the essence of the modernist spirit. The next two articles deal with the contribution to the Russian cabaretic movement of two of its most influential figures. Laurence Senelick looks at the career of Boris Geyer, a man whose endeavours were devoted entirely to the so-called 'miniature' theatre. Placing Geyer's work first of all against the tradition of nineteenth-century satirical writing, Senelick proceeds to discuss his often difficult collaboration with Nikolay Yevreinov at the celebrated 'Crooked Mirror' theatre. Senelick is particularly alert to the pessimistic, misanthropic vision which finds expression in Geyer's most important work, and sees in his theatrical experiments a prefiguration of techniques later employed by Pirandello, O'Neill and Brecht. If it has been Geyer's fate to have been upstaged by a more flamboyant collaborator, the same is true also of another Boris ~ Boris Pronin - who has lived very much in the shadow of his erstwhile colleague, the legendary Vsevolod Meyerhold. Michael Green seeks to restore the balance in a sketch of Pronin's theatrical life. Tracing his development from his painful first attempts to establish a cabaret to the highly successful 'Stray Dog' (perhaps the most famous of all Russian cellars) Green sheds valuable light on Pronin's breach with Meyerhold. He concludes by considering the place of the 'Stray Dog' in the life and work of three major poets, Blok, Akhmatova and Mayakovsky. Although the contribution of the Russian Symbolists to the theory and practice of theatre does not come in for detailed consideration in any of the essays represented here, the Symbolist heritage provides the focus for Andrew Barratt's re-examination of Leonid Andreyev's well-known play He Who Gets Slapped. Arguing against the tendency to read the drama as a straightforward piece of neo-Romanticism, in which the central figure of He is cast in the role of rejected prophet, Barratt suggests that Andreyev's presentation of He is thoroughly ambivalent and that the playas a whole may be viewed as a brilliantly effective critique of the Symbolist hero. Preface ix Three other dramatists to follow in the train of Symbolism were also important poets - Mikhail Kuzmin, Nikolay Gumilev and Marina Tsvetayeva. Simon Karlinsky identifies the dramatic works of these three writers as representative of a post-Symbolist neo­ Romanticism. Drawing on the corpus of their plays, he provides a workable typology of the Russian neo-Romantic drama, tracing its connections both with the national theatrical tradition and with European trends. Nikolay Yevreinov is one of the most prolific and controversial writers associated with the Russian modernist theatre. His career was also one of the longest, spanning both the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods, and continuing into the years of emigration in Europe. Spencer Golub presents a comprehensive survey of Yevreinov's work in the theatre, which he describes as a 'drama in two acts'. Drawing extensively on archive materials, Golub adds significantly to our understanding of Yevreinov's less­ well-known later works, showing how, to use his own words, these plays 'filter and magnify' the themes and techniques in his earlier dramatic productions. Our last five articles deal specifically with the theatre of early Soviet Russia, a period no less turbulent and exciting in its own way than the first seventeen years of the century. One of the central questions of the era - and perhaps of Soviet literature as a whole - was the desire by Russia's new leaders to make the theatre into a vehicle for the propagandisation of socialist Utopianism. This is the subject of Robert Russell's essay, 'The First Soviet Plays' . Surveying the attempts by contemporary dramatists to harness their work to the demands of the military and political struggle, Russell examines both the primitive agitki and the larger-scale productions by writers associated with the Proletkult movement. If drama and theatre were to be effective as propaganda, then the impact of productions on the audience, and indeed the very nature of the audience itself, had to become a subject of scientific study. In his essay Lars Kleberg discusses the different approaches to audience research in the Soviet theatre of the 1920s and shows how Russian theatre specialists, motivated by their heightened awareness of the propaganda potential of theatrical productions, were decades ahead of their Western counterparts in this field. Harold B. Segel takes up another neglected area of early Soviet theatre, namely the strong presence of an Expressionist tradition which had its roots in contemporary Germany. Segel traces the x Preface connections between the work of Russian and German dramatists, showing how Expressionist concerns and techniques informed plays by such pre-revolutionary dramatists as Blok, Andreyev and Yevreinov, but became a dominant feature only in the 1920s.