Theater As Metaphor in the Drama of Alexander Ostrovsky

Olga Kuptsova Theater as Metaphor in the Drama of Alexander Ostrovsky Theatrical metaphors in Alexander Ostrovsky’s dramatic work can be found first of all in his meta-theatrical plays (The Forest, Guilty Without Fault, Talents and Admirers) as well as in plays with inserted theatrical fragments, references to dramatic art, and recurrent dramatic motifs (Poverty Is No Vice, The Deep, An Ardent Heart, and others). Theatrical metaphorics may also be observed in his plays describing the theatrical behavior of characters who play roles and dis- guise themselves in real life, being deceitful and underhanded (Enough Stupid- ity in Every Wise Man, The Marriage of Belugin, Money to Burn, and others). Ostrovsky, who may be considered the father of Russia’s national theatrical repertoire, occupies a place between Mikhail Lermontov (Masquerade) and Anton Chekhov (The Seagull) in Russian meta-theater of the nineteenth century. In Lermontov’s Masquerade, theatrical metaphors can be found according to the following dichotomies: life–play/masquerade, face–mask, natural– unnatural, true–false. In addition, “play” is closely connected in this drama to card games (games of chance or fortune). Some curious things come to the sur- face when we compare Lermontov’s early play A Strange Man, its protagonist being the first Arbenin or a sort of proto-Arbenin, to Masquerade.InA Strange Man, characters’ lines are demonstratively packed full with mentions of theater (various types of theater being mentioned for no apparent reason: home theaters of the nobility in their two versions—with children and adults acting, French theater companies, etc.), but all of them, while attesting to some man- datory theatrical quality of social life in general, nonetheless keep away from metaphorical generalization. Already the very title of Masquerade implies theat- ricality (unnatural, wrong, and deceitful behavior, in Lermontov’s perception) as the main key to understanding the events in the play, namely the develop- ment of the plot and the characters’ behaviors. In this regard, it is also notewor- thy that certain authors highlight the dramatic nature of Lermontov’s narrator, making him akin to the main character of his dramas and, importantly, of his prose as well, thus turning the whole literary world of Lermontov into a metaphorical theater of passions, fatal choices, tragic mistakes, and so on.1 1 See, for instance, S. Savinkov, “Dramatis personae lermontovskoy dushi” [The Dramatis Per- sonae of Lermontov’s Soul], in: Filologicheskie zapiski, vol. 7, 1996, pp. 35–45. Open Access. © 2019 Olga Kuptsova, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110622034-014 208 Olga Kuptsova At the other pole of theatrical metaphorics, we find Chekhov’s The Seagull, written as a prophecy, a premonition of “director’s theater”, which the Russian stage had not yet seen. The Seagull would later be staged in the Alexandrinsky Theater (without a director in the modern sense of the word), and then in the psychologically oriented Moscow Art Theater by Konstantin Stanislavski; Vse- volod Meyerhold turned out to be a natural for the role of Konstantin Treplev, which he eventually performed in the Moscow Art Theater. When compared to Romantic drama of the early nineteenth century, the symbolic and metaphysi- cal play, written by a debutant playwright and staged by him at an amateur countryside theater, employed a different kind of theatrical metaphorics, with a demiurge director, creation of the world, and the concept of the world-as-a-theater (already not only in a social, but in a universal sense). Otherwise speaking, we are dealing with one interpretation of William Shakespeare’s famous formula—“All the world’s a stage”—in the case of Ler- montov and a different, diametrically opposed one—theater as the world (in a broad, cosmic sense)—in the case of Chekhov. Ostrovsky’s theatrical metaphorics has a somewhat different dimension, al- though it can be regarded as a bridge between Lermontov and Chekhov. Ostrov- sky’s early play Poverty Is No Vice, which was extremely popular among his Slavophile friends, is set in an idyllic patriarchal uyezd town. It tells the story of Lyubim Tortsov, an impoverished alcoholic with a noble heart, who flees from his native town to Moscow after his father’s death. In this city of sin, this new Babylon, Tortsov wastes all of his inheritance on public houses and—theater. It becomes obvious from Lyubim’s lines that he regularly goes to the theater to watch the most famous tragedian of Russian Romanticism, Pavel Mochalov, performing onstage. Theater has a narcotic effect on him, taking him to a different reality, making him experience strong feelings, and tantalizing him with vivid imagery. Unable to find anything resembling that in real life, Lyubim turns to wine as a substitute for the theater drug. Ostrovsky uses the story of this character (and some other characters from his earlier plays) to articulate a bitter and dramatic résumé of the obsession with theater among his generation of “men of the forties”. Inspired by Vissarion Belinsky’s articles on theater as a “magical world” and the image of a genius actor exercising a magnetic and irra- tional effect on the crowd, students of the 1840s looked up to Mochalov as the incarnation of that “magician” of the scene. They eventually created a cult of his personality, which was in no small part accountable for the transformation of Mochalov’s roles into behavioral models, above all the so-called “kitchen- sink Hamletism”. During the 1870s–1880s, Ostrovsky wrote three meta-theatrical plays: The Forest, Guilty Without Fault, and Talents and Admirers. They share the specific Theater as Metaphor in the Drama of Alexander Ostrovsky 209 feature of the protagonists being actors. However, the actors are never de- scribed acting on a theater stage—instead, they act on the stage of life. The comedy The Forest is the most curious example in terms of theatrical metaphorics, as the reader can distinguish several layers, interconnected and autonomous at the same time. Ostrovsky wrote The Forest in the middle of his career, in a sense summarizing it, being disillusioned with the former theatrical ideals and worried about the future of the Russian theater. As a result, through- out the following decade, he would assume responsibility for that future, con- tribute to theater reforms, engage in theatrical translation, consider changing his occupation, and delve into history and the history of theater in particular. The first theatrical-metaphorical layer in The Forest is about the actor being recognized as an artist. In the wake of Belinsky, who presented Mochalov as an artist equal to Shakespeare in his famous article Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: Mo- chalov as Hamlet, Ostrovsky presents two provincial actors, Grigory Neschas- tlivtsev and Arkashka Schastlivtsev, whose dramatic talents are doubtful and whose everyday behaviors are flawed, as far superior to and more noble than the residents of the Penki Estate (the shabby-genteel nobility and the emerging ravenous entrepreneurs). It is interesting (from a historical perspective, too) in this regard to observe the successive set of the actors’ self-characterizations in the play, their gradual evolution from skomorokh (the nomadic type—“un- mounted travelers”), court jester, actor—to noble artist. The generation of the forties witnessed a growth of self-awareness in the theatrical milieu. An imperial edict of 1839 granted the right to obtain the hereditary Freedom of the City to first-class actors of imperial theaters upon twenty years of service. “Before that, the title of Imperial Court Artist did not imply any specific social standing. As such actors and their descendants did not belong to the tax- paying class, they did not benefit from any civil rights”, recalls Pyotr Karatygin.2 Changes in actors’ civil rights brought about changes in their self-perception and in the social attitudes toward them. The developing system of benefit performances required actors to get involved in selecting plays for such performances, among other things. Actors had to take up the task of writing (translations, theatrical adaptations, vaudevilles—anything the theater would need), but they were also becoming—in this case, voluntarily—part of the corpus of Russian literature with their poems, prose, memoirs, and reflections on the art of acting. Writing actors were getting to know the literary and university milieus, joining literary cliques, and attending salons, especially in Moscow, where spectators called the Maly Theater “the second university”—that is, a 2 Zapiski: Ch. 2 [Notes: Part 2], Leningrad 1930, p. 12. 210 Olga Kuptsova full-fledged competitor to the Moscow State University—as early as in the 1840s. Mikhail Shchepkin, one of the most famous actors of that age who had been born as the son of a serf, was friends with Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Herzen, and other outstanding writers; another famous actor, Alexander Martynov, befriended Ostrovsky, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolay Nekrasov and Sovremennik-associated literary men. These friendships drew the actors from their closed theatrical circles, integrating them into the common habitat of Russian art. Over time, this tendency spread to provincial actors as well. The second layer has to do with actors’ self-representation. The roles they play in life correspond to the characters they play on stage, Neschastlivtsev being a tragic, Schastlivtsev a comedic actor. The Romantic repertoire of the Russian (and European) theater of the 1840s–1850s was built around the em- blematic playwright Shakespeare. Hamlet was a must for Romantic tragic actors, a proof of their commitment to the stock character. For Ostrovsky, one of the paramount themes in Hamlet was the problem of boundaries and possibili- ties in acting and theater as such.

Load more