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Eugene Onegin” on the Stalinist Stage

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Eugene Onegin” on the Stalinist Stage 21 “EUGENE ONEGIN” ON THE STALINIST STAGE Th e discovery, by Simon Morrison in 2007, of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s stage adaptation of Eugene Onegin (1936) in the Prokofi ev holdings of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), Moscow, was for me a very happy accident. For over thirty years, moving Pushkin off the page and into some other form of art had been my most durable focus in the realm of Russian culture. Th e adaptor’s name was unfamiliar — indeed, unpronounceable; the Moscow theater in which the event was to happen did not enjoy the fame of Meyerhold’s or Stanislavsky’s. But the boldness of the transposition (and the promise of Prokofi ev’s music written to it) took my breath away. Access to this archive opened up a new world. From that time dates my interest in SK’s writings on drama, as well as his original comedies, stage and radio-show adaptations, prose tales, wartime libretti, feuilletons of Moscow in legend, history, and under siege, essays on theater (both as philosophy and as technical craft), and interpretations of classic English repertory, especially Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. What follows is a sketch of Krzhizhanovsky’s life and creativity. My initial publication on this author appeared in 2008: an investigation into the aborted 1936 “scenic projection” of Onegin (introduced at the end of the entry 20 and excerpted below). Since then, my attention has turned to a just published original work by SK: his 1937 historical farce Th at Th ird One [«Тот третий»]. Th e play takes its title from the nameless third volunteer for Cleopatra’s Wager (certain death for one night of love) as depicted in Pushkin’s famous poem on the Egyptian queen. But there the similarities with Pushkin end. SK’s travestied Cleopatra play builds on Pushkin (1828), Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra, 1607), and Bernard Shaw (Caesar and Cleopatra, 1898) to parody Silver-Age myths about the tyranny of female beauty and the prototypical “poet of genius” who worships it as his Muse. More illicitly, the play mocks the incompetence of a worldwide spy network and bumbling secret police that try to bring the fugitive Th ird to justice. Along the way and never ceasing to laugh, the play manages to mock political power of every sort: arbitrary, capricious, serving accidental good as often as accidental evil. If Pushkin’s Boris Godunov qualifi es, in my estimation, as a “tragicomedy of history,” then Krzhizhanovsky’s Tot tretii takes the corrosion of piety one step further: imperial history as tragifarce, wherever it is found — in Ancient Rome, Mussolini’s Rome, or Stalin’s “Th ird Rome,” Moscow. SK’s comedy was read aloud once by its author at a private gathering in 1938 (Meyerhold, already disgraced, was present that evening and liked it) but it was never performed, and published only in 2010. — 378 — ------------------------------------- 21. “EUGENE ONEGIN” ON THE STALINIST STAGE ------------------------------------- SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY 18871950 BIOBIBLIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 2010 Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky [SK], Russophone writer of Polish descent, was born near Kiev and died in his adopted city Moscow, largely unpublished and unperformed. His tall thin person with pince-nez was a familiar fi gure in the literary salons of Kiev and, after 1922, among avant- garde circles of the capital. Over a span of fi fteen years SK wrote 150 prose works — resonant, dense, as cerebral as a metaphysical poem — ranging in length from novellas to one-paragraph miniatures, often organized loosely in cycles. His hero everywhere was the idea [mysl’] trapped in the brain. Th is idea, the product of individualized thought responsibly confronting the phenomena of the outside world, has one task: to survive and grow potent by searching out the freest possible carrier (the person, plot, or sound) that would least obstruct or obscure it on its journey. Parallels can thus be drawn between SK’s “travelers” and the world’s classic adventure and quest literature, immensely popular in the Soviet period. SK’s contexts are cosmopolitan. Among his favorite themes and books were Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (in 1933, SK helped edit Alexander Ptushko’s animated fi lm Th e New Gulliver); the fantastical German eighteenth-century adventurer and fi b-master in the Russian service, Baron von Münchhausen (in the 1920s, SK wrote a novella called Th e Return of Münchhausen); and, of course, the scientifi c romances of H. G. Wells. His closest academic friends were the Moscow “Anglophiles,” scholars and translators of Shakespeare, Dickens, Swift, Th ackeray, Wells, Bernard Shaw. But SK’s own style and character types owe little to the methodical half-mad British scientist, the Shavian superman, or for that matter to the French surrealists or to Kafka, about whom SK heard only late in life. Th e “thought” as he portrays it cannot get on a ship and sail off to exotic continents. It is land-locked, stubborn, restless — and fi nds itself blocked by hunger and poverty, on the border between waking and dreaming, in a tiny room. It wants to roam but everywhere it is clipped, stuck behind a wall, forced to sneak out through a fi ssure or chink [щель] and re-splice in a seam [шов]. Th us the “real life of the dream” must become a serious option for the thought, as it was for the imprisoned Prince Segismundo, hero of Calderón’s 17th-century drama Life is a Dream, which SK greatly admired. Th e trappings of a Krzhizha- novskian dream are more cerebral than sentimental, resembling at times a scientifi c Wellsian thought experiment. SK’s Memories of the Future (1929) — 379 — ------------------------------------ PART III. MUSICALIZING THE LITERARY CLASSICS ----------------------------------- features a recluse building a time-travel machine; in “Quadraturin” (1926), a cramped Muscovite in a communal apartment applies a magic ointment to expand Newtonian space to infi nity (recalling the anti-gravity mixture Cavorite in Th e First Men in the Moon). Members of SK’s Letter-Killers’ Club (1927) meet on Saturday nights to recite tales of medieval carnival monks and ancient Roman slave-courtesans, to project bio-terrorist dystopias, and to rewrite Hamlet by breaking down its players into parts; their aim is to learn to live without the crutch of books — those enemies of imagination and free-ranging thought.1 For all these pan-European resonances, however, a Russian edge of starvation, shabbiness, Bolshevik craziness and desperate lyricism separates Krzhizhanovsky from his illustrious predecessors among the intellectual circles of the bourgeois West — even their most eccentric fringe. For domestic benchmarks we should look to Evgeny Zamyatin, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrei Platonov. Krzhizhanovsky was known as an excellent reader of his own work at literary evenings. Th e fact that his prose was orally “performed” — and by its author — with far more regularity than it was published must have reinforced SK’s sensitivity to the aural, acting core of the utterance. In the 1920s, SK’s long-standing interest in Kantian philosophy and dream psychology combined with revolutionary theories of time-space perception to inspire a vision of theater as an analogue for human thought and a crucial mediator between fantasies, shadows, and objects.2 Th e properly-balanced sound has weight and takes up space, like a thing. Th e contours of a sound, when articulated fully, could almost be seen performing an action. SK had his favorite consonants, murmuring under his text in the mind’s ear: the obstruent dentals (t, z, zh, ts [т, з, ж, ц]), obstruent palatals or “hushings” (shch, sh, ch [щ, ш, ч]), the hissing clusters “zr” [зр] and “st” [ст], all suggesting a force slithering along or pushing up against a surface, suddenly to break out through an explosive “k” [к] or “p” [п]. Th ese consonants predominate in the Russian verbs that SK uses for cracking, splitting, splintering, snapping shut, 1 Th ese SK stories all exist in English, in the mesmerizing translations of his Moscow- based translator Joanne Turnbull. See Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, 7 Stories (Moscow: GLAS Publishers, vol. 39, 2006), which won the Rossica Translation Prize in 2007; SK, Memories of the Future (New York: New York Review Books, 2009), and SK, Th e Letter Killers’ Club (New York: New York Review Books, forthcoming 2010). 2 For a brief (and to date the only) overview of the writer’s life and works in English, see the excellent pioneering monograph by Karen Link Rosenfl anz, Hunter of Th emes: Th e Interplay of Word and Th ing in the Works of Sigizmund Kržižanovskij (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), biography on 1–21. — 380 — ------------------------------------- 21. “EUGENE ONEGIN” ON THE STALINIST STAGE ------------------------------------- clinging, hooking into, intersecting, groping by touch. Th e tiny slit through which we can escape into wide open space becomes a master metaphor in SK’s soundscape: an eyelid, the cleft in a stage curtain concealing a world, a crack in the plaster or along the ridge of a cliff , even the precipitous fl ight of an idea or a word out of a public offi cial’s unhooked briefcase. When SK arrived in Moscow from Kiev in 1922, age 34, he was without work and often without food. He found housing in a tiny, closet-like room in a former private mansion (Arbat 44/5). Th e letters of introduction from Kiev led nowhere; but walking the streets looking for employment in the noisy capital under NEP, he fell in love with the city. His ritual was to set out daily at 9:45 sharp, on his «блуждания по смыслам Москвы» [wanderings in search of the meanings of Moscow] to study whatever he could see, touch, and hear.
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