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Home , Alexander Ostrovsky, Poverty is No Vice, Talents and Admirers

Olga Kuptsova Theater as Metaphor in the Drama of

Theatrical metaphors in Alexander Ostrovsky’s dramatic work can be found first of all in his meta-theatrical plays (The Forest, Guilty Without Fault, ) as well as in plays with inserted theatrical fragments, references to dramatic art, and recurrent dramatic motifs (, 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 ’s national theatrical repertoire, occupies a place between Mikhail Lermontov (Masquerade) and (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 meta- phorical 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 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-the- ater (already not only in a social, but in a universal sense). Otherwise speaking, we are dealing with one interpretation of ’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 differ- ent 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 , 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 the- atrical 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 performan- ces required actors to get involved in selecting plays for such performances, among other things. Actors had to take up the task of writing (, theat- rical adaptations, vaudevilles—anything the theater would need), but they were also becoming—in this case, voluntarily—part of the corpus of 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 —as early as in the 1840s. , one of the most famous actors of that age who had been born as the son of a serf, was friends with Alexander Pushkin, , , and other outstanding writers; another famous actor, Alexander Martynov, befriended Ostrovsky, , and -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 ac- tors, 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. It is not only The Mousetrap but also Hamlet’s instructions for actors on how to act in the play within the play that made sense to the Russian playwright. Shakespeare’s scene describing the arrival of the co- medians to Elsinore, for instance, is comparable to the encounter of two actors on horseback in The Forest in terms of their narratives. However, Hamlet op- poses himself to a comedian as he welcomes the actors, while Neschastlivtsev “tries on” the role of Hamlet and greets his colleague Schastlivtsev from the ele- vated perspective of the Prince of Denmark. All of the quotes from Shake- speare’s pronounced by Neschastlivtsev (whether appropriately or not, whether they be small or very important fragments of the role) in The Forest “rhyme” the story of Penki residents with that of the Prince of Denmark. In both cases, deception, hypocrisy, and crime are discovered with the help of comedians. In the end, Hamlet from Penki (this is the name of the estate, owned by the widow Gurmyzhskaya, where the actors arrived) is not destined to be realized. There is no fertile soil for Hamletism there. The crowd prevents Hamlet from playing out his role. This unfinished role of Hamlet is comical, the great enthu- siasm being totally wasted. Having started as Hamlet, Neschastlivtsev is forced to finish his stay at Penki playing two other theatrical roles, which are textually intertwined. In the final part, one of the two dramas in the prompter Arkashka Schas- tlivtsev’s parcel turns out to be the five-act The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller, whose influence on Russian Romantic theater was at least as significant as that of Shakespeare. The robbers theme is represented in The Forest in two parallel dimensions. On the one hand, the social perception of skomorokhs/actors and Theater as Metaphor in the Drama of Alexander Ostrovsky 211 robbers is very much identical. On the other hand, the theme of “noble robbers” is of central importance in the Romantic repertoire. Therefore, the forest fellow- ship of “noble robbers” and the guild fellowship of “noble artists” act as con- textual synonyms, forming a unique theatrical metaphor. The thick Bohemian forest with its owls and eagle owls resonates well with the forest surrounding the Penki Estate, “where any fugitive and any beggar will find shelter”. Neschastlivtsev himself tells Schastlivtsev that they are “simi- lar to robbers”. Schastlivtsev, in his turn, describes the tragic actor as follows: “His manners are all robber-like, a sheer Pugachev!” In the scene where the widow Gurmyzhskaya is robbed of her money, Neschastlivtsev fiddles with a fake handgun, pulling it out, putting it onto the table, and putting it back after getting the money—all of this being part of the theatrical “Robin Hood toolkit” as well. The simple fact that Ostrovsky ranks his characters together with those of Shakespeare and Schiller is very telling. The monologue quoted in The Forest is spoken by Karl Moor in the second scene of the first act of The Robbers (that is, compositionally it refers to the set-up), and its misanthropic narrative explains every move that Moor makes afterwards, having entered on the path of robbery, revenge (albeit of a noble sort), and, eventually, crime. Neschastlivtsev, pro- nouncing the same lines, also leaves the widow’s estate at the height of his per- sonal and professional success. Another plotline is presented by the comic actor Schastlivtsev. In the third act of The Forest, Schastlivtsev surrenders very reluctantly to the tragic Gen- nady Neschastlivtsev’s request to play a servant—a role well suited to his theat- rical skills as a comic figure—not onstage but in a real-life situation (in Gurmyzhskaya’s Penki Estate) and presents himself to Karp, another domestic servant of Gurmyzhskaya, as Sganarelle. From that point on and up to the mo- ment when the actor stops performing as a servant, Ostrovsky creates the image of Arkashka Schastlivtsev based on the “flickering” outlined in this short dialogue—between the character-specific traits (recognizable, Molierian, typical of the original Sganarelle) and the generalized characteristics of an “alien” comical mask of the European theater. Arkashka-Sganarelle, representing the comical theatrical plotline, plays his role within one of the consistent and central scenarios of the preceding Euro- pean comedy tradition of folklore and literary theater (Roman, Spanish, Italian, French, English). Arkashka Schastlivtsev is a “foreigner” indeed; unlike Ne- schastlivtsev, he does not build his historical and theatrical reminiscences around Russian archetypes. This Schastlivtsev–Sganarelle plotline can be con- ventionally referred to as the Harlequin plotline and Arkashka’s behavioral model may be seen as Harlequinade, the Harlequin character being understood 212 Olga Kuptsova broadly, as it was later interpreted in the Silver Age of . Alterna- tively, it may be said, in the terms of Vsevolod Meyerhold, that Schastlivtsev playing Sganarelle demonstrates the possibilities of the “trickster” stock character.3 In The Forest, Arkashka Schastlivtsev is not completely equated with Sga- narelle and his behavioral patterns. He simply resembles a Molière-style trickster servant, so he plays this role easily. However, the play has two segments—before accepting the role and after throwing off the mask—in which Arkashka is not identified with his scenic stock characters. The romantic finale of Ostrovsky’s comedy, where actors who lose financially turn out to be winners in terms of personal freedom and human dignity, is a hymn to acting as an altruistic game. Yet, Neschastlivtsev and Schastlivtsev fulfill their scenic function in real life at the same time by helping, as servants are supposed to do in the commedia dell’arte, the enamored couple Aksyusha and Pyotr (even though these latter two do not belong to “the nobility”). There is another curious, historically authentic detail that contributes to the play’s theatrical metaphorics, which is contained in the list of cities that appear in the actors’ dialogues and monologues when they are talking about where they have performed in the past. The tragic character’s (i.e., Neschastlivtsev’s) list of locations is longer than that of the comic character (Schastlivtsev): Ar- khangelsk, Astrakhan, Kishinev, Irkutsk, Poltava, Pyatigorsk, , Kremen- chug, Lebedyan, Crimean Karasubazar (it is unlikely that this town had a theater, but Neschastlivtsev has been there somehow), Tiflis, Novocherkassk, Ye- katerinburg. Neschastlivtsev also says that he could perform in Kostroma, Yaro- slavl, , and Tver in the future. In fact, the play shows him on a journey from Kerch to Vologda. He has traveled a longer distance than Schastlivtsev, whose theatrical locations are rather limited (Arkhangelsk, Kremenchug, and Kursk) and who travels in the opposite direction, from Vologda to Kerch. It is tempting to attempt an analysis of this geography, e.g. by comparing the actors’ locations to their prototypes’ places of work. Such an approach defi- nitely makes sense. However, there could be a different perspective on this ex- tensive geography of the actors’ travels, which covers nearly the whole of the European part of the . It may be the case that it is not about the nomadic lifestyle of provincial actors, but about the universal nature of the art of acting—an element not referring to a singular case, but with universal applicability.

3 Ivan Aksenov, Valery Bebutov, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, Amplua aktera [Actor’s Stock Char- acters], Moscow 1922, p. 6. Theater as Metaphor in the Drama of Alexander Ostrovsky 213

Nomadism (freedom), the basis of the actor’s profession since the era of wandering troupes (skomorokhs), is emphasized in the finale, the two actors symbolizing the theater of the Romantic, virtually bygone era, literally “vanish- ing scenery”. Wandering actors vanish into nowhere. The tragic actor Neschas- tlivtsev does not appear anywhere else; tragic figures of the Mochalov type are a thing of the past. Appearing as a Robinson, a voluntary “court jester” of Para- tov in the play , Arkashka Schastlivtsev lowers his standards as a comic. The third layer in The Forest is represented by theater/acting in real life, namely the bigotry of Gurmyzhskaya and the hypocrisy of Bulanov. It also in- cludes the initial situation of the actors’ plotline, i.e. the deceitful behavior of Ne- schastlivtsev and Schastlivtsev who conceal their occupation from the Penki Estate residents. Neschastlivtsev pretends to be a military retiree, passing Schas- tlivtsev off as his servant. However, this self-interested deception is gradually transformed as the intrigue evolves. The art that the actors serve transforms and frees them, revealing the best of their qualities and encouraging them to perform noble actions. For Ostrovsky, Neschastlivtsev, and Schastlivtsev embody a fare- well to the Romantic philosophy that ranked any artist (including actors) above “philistines” and “non-creators” (regardless of social class) by default. The Forest is a hymn to Romanticism and a sober recognition of its problematic effects at the same time. The Forest became a reference point for two subsequent meta-theatrical plays by Ostrovsky. The drama Guilty Without Fault raises the question of two types of acting (“to be” or “to seem”), which reminds the reader of the discus- sion of The Paradox of the Actor by Denis Diderot. This text had just been trans- lated into Russian at the time Ostrovsky’s play was written. The very name of the drama Talents and Admirers points to the importance of the spectator for theater, the mutual influence of the stage and the audience. In Talents and Ad- mirers, Ostrovsky definitively says goodbye to the Romantic philosophy of a proud-hearted and independent, free artist. However, Ostrovky’s late theatrical-metaphorical phraseology requires fur- ther in-depth analysis, which is beyond the scope of the present article.