Pierrot in Petrograd: Commedia dell'Arte/ Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama 9780773564411

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Pierrot in Petrograd

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Pierrot in Petrograd The Commedia dell'Arte/Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama J. DOUGLAS CLAYTON

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1993 ISBN 0-7735-1136-9 Legal deposit first quarter 1994 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

This book has been published with the help of grants from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and from the Research and Publications Committee of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Clayton, J. Douglas Pierrot in Petrograd: the Commedia dell'arte ISBN 0-7735-1136-9 1. Commedia dell'arte - History and criticism. 2. Russian drama - 2oth century - History and criticism. 1. Title. PG3086.C53 1994 891.72'409 C93-090542-3

Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractera production graphique inc., Quebec City

This book is lovingly dedicated to my parents Ron and Jessie Clayton

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Contents

Preface ix Illustrations Prologue

xi

3

1 Who Was That Masked Man? 16 2 Improvisation and Dissonance: Commedia delTArte and the Crisis in Theatre 44 3 Pierrot Comes to Petersburg: 1903-17 75 4 Red Harlequins: The Balagan as a Theatrical Genre 103 5 Pierrot or Petrushka? Russian Harlequinades 125 6 Russian Pirandellos: The Balagan as a Dramatic Genre 159 7 Harlequin's Shadow: The Film as Balagan 205 8 The Empty Throne: Theatre as Metahistory 229 Appendix A: The Beggar Harlequin 239 ELENA GURO

Appendix B: Today's Columbine 245 NIKOLAI EVREINOV

Appendix C: Fiametta's Four Corpses 250

viii Contents

Appendix D: The Lovers 254 VSEVOLOD MEYERHOLD

Appendix E: Harlequin the Card-Lover 257 VLADIMIR SOLOV'EV Appendix F: The Apes Are Coming! 272 LEV LUNTS Notes 297 Bibliography Index 349

335

Preface

In this study I have used transliteration system II as described in J. Thomas Shaw, The Transliteration of Modern Russian for EnglishLanguage Publications,1 except for those names that have recognized Western spellings, for example, Eisenstein and Meyerhold. The following abbreviations are used in the text: LTA: Liubov'k trem apel'sinam (the journal published by Meyerhold from 1914-1917 under the pseudonym Dr Dapertutto); LTB: Leningradskaia teatral'naia biblioteka imeni Lunacharskogo; TMB: Teatral'nyi muzei imeni Bakhrushina (Moscow). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in the book are my own. This book was researched and written during the period 1982-92. I benefited from several sabbatical leaves and research grants from the University of Ottawa during this time, and I gratefully acknowledge this support. I would also like to express my thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the generous grant that enabled me to complete this research. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Domenico Pietropaolo for kind permission to reprint a part of an article originally published in a collection that he edited,2 and Joe Andrew and Robert Reid for similar permission to republish material that appeared in Essays in Poetics.3 My thanks go to the many friends and colleagues in different countries whose advice and suggestions have been invaluable - especially to Laurence Senelick, Daniel Gerould, and Naomi Ritter for taking the time to read the draft and make very useful suggestions - and to the staff of the numerous libraries I have used in the USSR, Helsinki, Stockholm, and elsewhere, as well as the interlibrary loan staff at the University of Ottawa, without whose selfless help this would be an infinitely poorer book. Finally, I would like to record my

Preface

gratitude to my indefatigable research assistant, student, friend, and colleague Joanne Ledger, whose cheerful assistance has been invaluable during the final stages of this project, and to Shannon Matheson, for her work on bringing the manuscript into publishable form.

Right: Caruso in Pagliacd. Teatr i iskusstvo, 1911, 891. Below: The Crooked Mirror. Fiametta's Four Corpses, a pantomime. Miss Khovanskaia and Messrs Granovskii, Ikar, and Donskoi. Drawing by A. Liubimov. Teatr i iskusstvo, 1911, 725. See pages 88, 250-3. •$*.-•'*:!*!£''* "^ •**'•«"

',

'

'

The Russian Dramatic Theatre. Benavente's The Bonds of Interest, act III. Set and costumes by S. Sudeikin. Novaia studiia, no. i (24 December 1912): 15. See pages 96-7.

The Crooked Mirror. Fiametta's Four Corpses. Mr Fenin and Miss Khovanskaia. Teatr i iskusstvo, 1911, 726. See pages 88, 250-3.

The Russian Dramatic Theatre. Benavente's The Bonds of Interest, act II. Set and costumes by S. Sudeikin. Novaia studiia, no. i (24 December 1912): 17. See pages 96-7.

The ballet of the Bolshoi Theatre in the circus ring. Pierrette (E.Iu. Andersen) and Pierrots (L.A. Zhukov and L.L. Novikov). Rampa i zhizn', no. 14 (1916): 8.

Above: The Russian Dramatic Theatre. Benavente's The Bonds of Interest. Columbine (Miss Kosareva) and Harlequin (Mr Grebenshchikov). Set and costumes by S. Sudeikin. Novaia studiia, no. i (24 December 1912): 21. See pages 96-7. Left: The Russian Dramatic Theatre. Benavente's The Bonds of Interest. Polichinelle (Mr Aleksandrovskii). Set and costumes by S. Sudeikin. Novaia studiia, no. i (24 December 1912): 25. See pages 96-7.

Above: Anglada-Camarasa, The Lovers. Apollon, no. 9 (1911): 35. Inspired Dr Dapertutto's play with the same title (see pages 82, 88, and 254-6). Right: The Russian Dramatic Theatre. Benavente's The Bonds of Interest. Leonard (Mr Borisoglebskii). Set and costumes by S. Sudeikin. Novaia studiia, no. ^ (24 December 1912): 23. See pages 96-7.

Left:

Pantalone or Cassandra. From Jacques Callot, Three Italian Comedy Performers (Three Actors, Three Pantaloons), a series of three etchings, 1618/19. See page 216. Reproduced from Callot, Callot's Etchings, with the kind permission of the publisher. Below: The Tsar waiting for the procession to invite him back to Moscow. From S.M. Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible. See page 216.

Pasquariello Truonno and Meo Squaquara. From Jacques Callot, Balli di Sfessania, ca. 1621/22. See page 72. Reproduced from Callot, Callot's Etchings, with the kind permission of the publisher.

Two Russian actors demonstrating Meyerhold's exercises. From The Drama Review, 17, i (March 1973): 111. See page 72. Photo by Lee Strasberg. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Lee Strasberg from Lee Strasberg's collection.

Above:

Title-page of Elena Guro's Sharmanka: rasskazy (St Petersburg, 1909). See page 146. Above right:

Pierrette and Harlequin. On the production of Schnitzler's pantomime in Vienna. Teatr i iskusstvo, 1911, 655. See page 82. Right: Cover of Elena Guro's Sharmanka: rasskazy (St Petersburg, 1909). See page 146.

Pierrot in Petrograd

Deux classes seules comprennent la pantomime et en jouissent: les gens nai'fs sans science, les gens nai'fs a force de science. Ceux-la ne peuvent comprendre qui n'ont jamais ouvert qu'un livre, le Grand-Livre, qui ne connaissent qu'un dieu, 1'Argent, qui n'admirent qu'un monument, la Bourse. Champfleury, Souvenirs des Funambules, iii

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Prologue Lipkoi griaz'iu okachennyi vdrug, Poblednevshii utikh Arlekin. [Drenched suddenly in sticky mud, Harlequin went pale and fell silent.] Andrei Belyi, "Vechnyi zov"

The study of literature and culture has been brought to such a level of theoretical sophistication that it seems impossible to begin a book of this sort without arming oneself with a set of allusions to various theorists who might serve as reference points, if not underpinnings, to the arguments expressed. The problem with the hegemony of theory is that by the time the scholar actually arrives at the set of facts he has chosen to study, he or she is overly burdened by theory, is anxious to establish his/her credentials on one side or other of this or that debate, and lacks the energy to focus on what is properly the object of concern. It is, however, equally undesirable and even absurd in this day and age to begin an investigation of this kind without in any way taking into consideration theoretical models. My way lies somewhere between the naive approach and the totally theoretical work; that is to say, I do operate, rather eclectically, with certain theories that it will be useful to mention at the outset. Chief among them is my use of the insights of the Soviet school of structural poetics (or semiotics), especially those of Boris Uspenskii on perspective. I can, in a more general way, not help but be influenced by the structural/semiotic discourse that dominates in my chosen field, the study of Slavic culture, and is manifested in some recent books on Slavic culture. The reader will find, however, that in many places I adopt the stance of a historian of theatre and culture, or that of a literary critic of an older school offering "close readings" of a poetic text. In many places I boldly rely on my own instinctual judgment, the necessary recourse of any researcher who is, in the last analysis, creating his own image of the cultural past as much as he is engaging in any "objective" activity. Nevertheless, the reader will recognize this work as fitting into a genre of books that has

4 Pierrot in Petrograd

become popular in the last few years and that strives to give a broad, "holistic" picture of a cultural phenomenon. Much recent research on commedia dell'arte has concentrated on the sociological aspect.1 In the Russian context, an important work is the study of Petrushka by Catriona Kelly. Kelly shows that the Petrushka play as it existed on the streets of St Petersburg and other cities in the nineteenth century was a spontaneous expression of popular culture. But she also shows how deeply divided Russian culture was, and is, into such phenomena of the popular on the one hand and an intellectual discourse that she designates as "elitist and hegemonic" on the other.2 The subject of the following book is precisely that "high culture." My difference with Kelly lies not in the perception that such a high culture existed and exists in Russia and that it was indeed elitist - but in the belief, which she seems to argue against, that it is still worthy of study. Hence I am working within a traditional cultural context, in which aesthetic and literary values are paramount, rather than in a sociological context. My choice to do so is a reflection of my own interests, not necessarily a value judgment on the importance of one or the other. In fact, Kelly's book serves as an important counterbalance to mine, since it engages those sociological issues that I chose to ignore. One of the premisses of my book is that commedia dell'arte in Russia was primarily an intellectual, poetic, and literary phenomenon, rather than a sociological one (with the exception of Petrushka). True, the attraction of commedia dell'arte for Russian artists lay in its popular roots (as much in Italy and France as in Russia), in its perceived legitimacy as an expression of popular culture. But the fascination of Russian modernists with primitive cultural phenomena of all kinds (of which commedia dell'arte was one) was expressive of a desire to appropriate them, not the result of a broadly based, popular cultural movement. Commedia dell'arte was for the modernists what the folk-tale or the ballad was for the romantics. Hence, though the icons - Pierrot, Harlequin, and the rest - remain substantially the same, the sociocultural context is totally different from that of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, for example. The eclecticism of this book reflects its subject: is the commedia dell'arte a motif, a set of themes, a style (the "Pierrotic"), a theatrical program, a motley group of images, a metaphor? The answer, surely, is all of these, at least for some people some of the time. It is, in short, not one phenomenon, but a series of interconnected ones, some reinforcing each other, others distancing themselves. For example, we have, in the theme I am exploring in the Russian context, a tangle of related elements: the pierrotic myths inherited by Russian

5 Prologue symbolist poetry from the French nineteenth-century poets; the texts of Carlo Gozzi, Tieck, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, which coalesce with the images of commedia by Jacques Callot to create a generalized Hoffmannian grotesque that was an important style in Russia in the teens and twenties of this century; the tradition of the Russian folk theatre of Petmshka, associated with maslennitsa (Mardi Gras), itinerant players, and children's cut-out doll theatres; the cult of the circus and the clown, both in Russia and in the West; a revival of eighteenthcentury preciosity by the World of Art group and associated playwrights (Kuzmin and Evreinov), which reflected a refined Goldonilike or Marivaudian sensibility (not to mention homosexuality). These elements shade into others that are more remote, but clearly contiguous: the cult of things Spanish or Venetian in modernist Russian culture; the interest in improvisation (whether by the commedia actor or the jazz player); primitivism of all kinds in art; the motif of the (frequently masked) ball in Russian literature from Griboedov, Pushkin, and Lermontov right up to Akhmatova's Poema bez geroia (1942); the cabaret; Kleinkunst and art nouveau; and the popularity of Charlie Chaplin in Russia in the 19203. In short, it becomes difficult to draw the line between what is relevant and what is not, so that there is a danger, in the period under study, of seeing commedia wherever one looks (as Martin Green and John Swan discovered).3 Of course, not all these elements appealed or v re relevant to every practitioner of the various branches of art whom we shall be examining. Much depended on whether their lines of development emerged from London, Paris, Vienna, or Berlin; on individual tastes and predilections; on the happenstance of ideological commitment, personal reading, or biographical encounters; and, finally, on the specific time period when the individuals were most active. We are dealing with a fissured, fragmented phenomenon that by its diversity, its baffling incoherence, and its defiance of definition appears to sum up the cacophony of modernism. It seems certainly an inadequate approach to label the entire phenomenon (pace Bakhtin) "carnivalesque" and leave it at that. Instead, I have chosen to examine some of the many trees that go up to make this motley forest, in the hope of deepening our understanding both of the individual manifestation and of the phenomenon as a whole. The history of the gestation of this book may go some way to explain its rather heterogeneous features and enlighten the reader as to its structure and approach. My first interest in the subject of commedia dell'arte in the period in question was aroused by Russian dramatic literature of the 19205: the works of Maiakovskii, Bulgakov, Olesha, and Lev Lunts. The study of these plays led me to examine

6 Pierrot in Petrograd the underlying poetic that formed them, principally the problems of metatheatre (play-within-the-play) and the theatre of convention (uslovnyi teatr), of which they are a manifestation.4 This anti-realistic mode was the dominant idiom of Russian avant-garde theatre in the 19205. Where, however, did it come from and what was its raison d'etre? The investigation of these questions drew me back in time, before the Russian revolution, to the experiments of modernist theatre in Russia in the first decades of this century. It is there, in the period between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, that one finds a veritable craze for commedia dell'arte. The phenomenon took a number of forms that varied from attempts to recreate the Italian street theatre in as pure a form as possible (using a scenario and actorial improvisation) through productions (incorporating commedia dell'arte elements) of classical plays more or less associated with commedia dell'arte, by such authors as Moliere, Calderon, Gozzi, and Goldoni, to productions of contemporary plays by Blok, Evreinov, Benavente, and others that borrowed and incorporated elements of commedia dell'arte. The variety of forms that this theatrical phenomenon took - experiment, tour-de-force, theatrical short-hand, even cliche in some instances - makes it extremely difficult to define. It was neither a school nor a unique style nor a new aesthetic program, although it can be said to contain elements of all of these. Most certainly, however, it had a semiotic function - signifying, by the insertion of certain theatrical signs borrowed from the history of theatre, the author's or director's allegiance to the revolution in theatrical art. This revolution was characterized by the assertion of "theatricality," by which was meant a theatre no longer dominated by notions of photographic realism or (literary) psychological verisimilitude, a theatre no longer dominated by the text, but one that would express itself in its own theatrical way, true to its own conventions and its own unique resources. Such a "theatrical" theatre, it was felt, was represented by the tradition of the commedia dell'arte. The negative side of this upheaval was the rejection of realism, or, as Eisenstein would later put it, the disruption of perspective, by which he meant the notions of external perspective that had dominated the visual arts since the Renaissance and were implicit in literary realism and the theatrical naturalism of Stanislavskii. Positively speaking, the goal of the theatrical revolution signified by the insertion of commedia dell'arte elements into the theatrical performance was a new theatre that would provoke and challenge both actor and audience, and force both to see afresh the nature of the relationship between them that is the essence of the theatrical experience. Seeing things afresh, as if for the first time - since Tolstoi's What is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo? 1898) this objective had been central to

7

Prologue

the artistic renewal that we now call modernism. Moreover, in the "estranged" image of theatrical convention with which he begins this essay, Tolstoi, despite his apparent opposition to decadence, gave ideological backbone to the program of the avant-garde theatre, which, like Tolstoi's description of the theatre as seen from the wings, sought to expose and ridicule accepted conventions - all in the name of new conventions, however. In this sense, the injection of commedia dell'arte into the theatre was in line with the developments that were sweeping all the other branches of art, for it permitted the slipping out of roles, the mocking of conventions, and the creation of an inexpensive, improvised, popular theatre. There are important parallels between Tolstoi's use of ostranenie ("making strange," a technique whereby the author mimicks the incomprehension of a child who does not understand the conventions) in his descriptions of the opera and the mockery of theatrical conventions by the primitive art of the commedia.5 Commedia dell'arte was thus a central element, a catalyst, and a metaphor for uslovnyi teatr. To be sure, by the 19205 the theatre no longer needed to signal its revolutionary nature so overtly: the elements and lessons of commedia dell'arte had been assimilated and were taken for granted, so that they are present rather as structural features than as overt allusions or quotations from commedia. If this investigation began in the area of theatre, I soon realized, as I pursued my research, that the theatrical interest in commedia dell'arte was but one aspect of a broader-based movement. Moreover, it was plainly an international phenomenon that did not begin in Russia. In different countries at the turn of the century commedia dell'arte was a sign of adherence to modernism, whether it be in the visual arts (Beardsley, Picasso, Braque, Rouault), in opera (Leoncavallo, Richard Strauss), in ballet (Diagilev, Mikhail Fokin), in music (Schonberg, Stravinskii, Prokof'ev), or in poetry (Rilke). The lozengecovered figure of Harlequin became a sort of icon of the modernist revolution, rather as Lenin was to signify the political one later on in Soviet Russia. I have therefore gone beyond the theatrical revolution and its further development in early Soviet cinema to touch on, though by no means exhaust, the topic of the commedia dell'arte in Russian literature - both dramatic and poetic. SENSIBILITY OR MANIFESTO?

In their book on the modernist Pierrot, Green and Swan examine the international evolution of this phenomenon, which they dub "the commedic."6 To them it is essentially a sensibility, a taste that characterizes the middle stage of modernist art: between the high

8 Pierrot in Petrograd

seriousness of Wagnerian symbolism on the one hand and "rigorism" - the intellectuals' unironic embracing of ideology, whether it be religious (Eliot, Waugh) or communist (Sartre, Maiakovskii, Burgess and Maclean)7 - on the other. Curiously, fascism is omitted from the list of possible orthodoxies of rigorism, although it too was an option (e.g., for Marinetti or the Duke of Windsor). Green and Swan make a very important contribution in placing the "commedic" on the intellectual map of twentieth-century Europe, and their insights form a useful introduction to this book. However, their work is necessarily less detailed, since it has a very broad, comparatist sweep, and they are (understandably) less sensitive to national traditions than I am in this study. In particular, it seems fair to say that the commedic sensibility is only part of the story in Russia, and perhaps a less important part than in western Europe. Underlying the apparent frivolity of Diagilev or Meyerhold lay a very earnest purpose, or purposes. In other words, the marginality of the commedic sensibility, expressed by Western writers as the transcription of their feelings, was embraced by Russians as a programme, a manifesto that would/could/might change the world. (This Utopian messianism led, among other things, to the grotesque theatrical philosophy of Evreinov.) Moreover, the commedic was, in Russia, one of a cluster of master images that dominated the arts of the period and can be seen as its mythic content. As such, it coexisted with other master images such as the Russian folk-tale (skazka), Stenka Razin, the Time of Troubles (Boris Godunov), the Orient (Scheherezade, Salome), the Scythians, preChristian mythology in general, and the Future. The closest we can find to a common denominator in all this material is its colour, its primitivism (even in the Future: Zamiatin's We has an almost Mayan brutality), and its exoticism (remoteness in time or space). Bakhtin's term "carnivalesque" is the closest anyone has come to unifying these disparate elements under one rubric.8 Thus I am far from making any extravagant claims for the commedic in Russia, seeing it as only one, albeit important, element in the thematic constellation, and have consequently cast my net less widely (and perhaps more judiciously) than Green and Swan in selecting the material I discuss. EMBLEMS OF DECADENCE

Where did this modernist commedia dell'arte originate? Its roots are to be found partly in French romanticism and its discovery of the Theatre des Funambules. The fascination of the French romantics with the imagery of the French version of commedia dell'arte was

9 Prologue

matched only by the cult of Hamlet, although we should note that, as Green rightly points out, the commedic becomes the subject of literature (rather than simply an object of enthusiasms) with the second generation of symbolistes, or decadents. Nothing seemed to incarnate better the essence of decadence than the moonstruck figure of Pierrot.9 Inhabiting a bizarre night world signaled by his pallor and his infatuation with the moon, androgynous, effeminate, yet potentially sadistic, Pierrot expressed the revolt of the decadents (Huysmans, Laforgue, Wilde) against all that was healthy, normal, and mediocre - in a word, he served to epater le bourgeois. Pierrot exhibited - flaunted even - all those characteristics that Max Nordau, in his influential book, condemned as "degenerate."10 On the sexual level, there were in Pierrot strong hints of homosexuality. In the typical scenario, Pierrot loses Columbine to a stridently male Harlequin. That Harlequin was in some versions black (e.g., in Stravinsky's Petrushka) hints at another obsessive modernist theme: the coupling of white woman with, it was implied, sexually superior black man. Pierrot was the enfeebled scion of the white race, his ineffectual, homoerotic posturing contrasting with the brute animal force of the primitive races that were to sweep away decadent Western society. The pseudo-Darwinist link between modernist art (symbolism, decadence) and the biological "degeneracy" of European intellectuals was made very explicit in Nordau's book, which was early translated into Russian and read, for example, by Briusov as early as 1893.n Pierrot thus expressed a sort of master myth that shaped thinking at the turn of this century and found other expressions in such diverse phenomena as the cult of ragtime and then jazz in the 19105 and 2os, Spengler's pessimistic vision of the decline of the West, and the rise of fascism. Pierrot flaunted his, and his espousers', decadence, to the rage of the reactionary, the militarist, and the believer in white supremacy. Viewed psychoanalytically Pierrot was a wayward son who refused to fulfil his father's expectations of masculinity and dominance.12 Politically speaking, his partisans were on the cultural left, espousing a radical rejection of Nordau's position, with its emphasis on health and science. The microbes of the commedic entered Russian culture initially from French symbolist/decadent poetry and infected the younger symbolists with particular virulence. Its manifestations were diverse: from the poet Zinaida Gippius letting herself be drawn by Leon Bakst as a Harlequin figure, to the illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley that appeared in the symbolist journal Vesy (The Scales), to the immense popularity of 7 Pagliacci in Russia. The French commedia dell'arte, or harlequinade (in Russian arlekinada), had a Russian

io Pierrot in Petrograd equivalent to which it became instantly assimilated, the balagan, or fairground show, performed by itinerant players who travelled from fair to fair and frequented the Mardi Gras celebrations in Petersburg. This Russian version of the theatre forain had as its main figure Petrushka, in whom it was easy to see a Russian version of the paillasse (paiats) or fool (shut) Petruccio/Pierrot/Struwelpeter. Thus balagan becomes a key word in Russian versions of commedia dell'arte, called in Russian ital'ianskaia komediia masok (Italian comedy of masks). In addition to its direct meaning of the fairground show (and the booth in which this was held), the word had come to be a general term of opprobrium for any manifestation of disorder or scandal, rather like the English "farce." CONTIGUOUS PHENOMENAh

The modernists' fascination with street theatre, both indigenous and foreign, acquired an added impulse from their cult of primitivism, which expressed itself in the visual arts in the interest in signpaintings (Pirosmanishvili), icons (Natalia Goncharova), and garish colours and inverted perspective (Larionov's soldier paintings). To view commedia dell'arte more fully, it is important to see it as one element in a matrix of contiguous phenomena that coexisted with it, expressed a similar sensibility, and, in some instances, coalesced with it. First, there is the cult of the circus (tsirk) and the clown (kloun or ryzhii, literally, "red-head"), whose common ancestry with the figures of the street theatre was clearly apparent. The interest in the circus, which was to be of great importance in Russian theatre, especially during the period of War Communism, can be considered a further development of our theme, one that was to have a lasting impact on Soviet reality, the enduring popularity and political acceptability of the circus even in Stalin's time being a legacy of the debate about the role of the circus in Soviet culture that took place in the context of avant-garde theatre (although the attempts to rejuvenate theatre with injections from the circus were short-lived).13 Second, there is Kleinkunst, the miniaturization of culture that was itself an aspect of the German version of art nouveau, the Jugendstil. This movement spread to Moscow and Petersburg from Paris, Munich, and Vienna through the popularity of the cabaret.14 It expressed itself in the success of puppets and the puppet theatre and in the mini-drama (e.g., Evreinov's "Monodramas"). Third, there is cubism, which may be lumped together, for the purpose of this discussion, with such other "isms" as futurism and constructivism; the link between the commedic and cubism is clear in the work of

ii Prologue Picasso, as John Swan shows.15 Fourth, we frequently find the commedic in the revival of eighteenth-century rococo and preciosity that was espoused by the World of Art group in Russian visual arts. These contiguous phenomena merge with a set of topoi that may or may not be present in different manifestations of the commedic. First, the notion of actors as dolls (implicit already in Kleinkunst and in the depersonalizing use of masks by the actors) brings with it the conceit of the author or theatre director as the (frequently diabolical) puppetmaster.16 One specific version of this - Meyerhold's choice of the pseudonym Dr Dapertutto - leads to another topos: the Hoffmannian grotesque. To an extent that has not been sufficiently appreciated, the commedic and the Hoffmannesque were intertwined in the modernist revival. Hoffmann provided one source of the sinister that underlay the cute, doll-like world evoked in many presentations of commedia dell'arte; another source was the Guignol popular theatre of Paris. Where a commedia production had a naturalistic setting, it was generally that of the fun-fair (in Russian, maslennitsa, or Mardi Gras), the circus, or the squalid reality of provincial commercial theatre. These settings are often associated with another topos: that of the old actor's swan-song, the setting of Chekhov's Swan-Song (Lebedinaia pesnia), for example, or the clown Landowski in Schonthan's Zirkusleute. A final topos that is specifically Russian and which Russian modernists retrieved from their own literary past is the masked ball or masquerade, a commonplace of Russian literature since Griboedov, Pushkin, and Lermontov. Its most striking manifestation in the period under discussion is Meyerhold's 1917 production of Lermontov's Masquerade (Maskarad), although there are others. Above all, however, one is struck by the importance of commedia in promoting the notion of competing realities. The frequent device of play-within-the-play, theatre-in-the-theatre, in commedia revives the baroque notion of theatrum mundi, the montage of different worlds. The stylistic difference between the worlds becomes important in modernism because that period was characterized precisely by the competition of incompatible styles and forms - the realistic one of naturalism and the theatrical, exotic one of symbolism. (In this way we see the profound attraction of commedia for symbolism, which claimed a "more real" world behind the shadows of the "real" - expressed in the title of a cycle of poems by Blok: A realibus ad realiora.) In the device of metatheatre could be found an "objective correlative" of an absurd world marked by profound hostilities and contrasts, for the notion of the theatrum mundi implies, at least in its modernist form, not a one-for-one correlation between the composing elements of the different worlds, but a tragic disharmony, a lack of

12 Pierrot in Petrograd

equivalence that boded ill for the future of the culture as a whole. It is in the boundaries between the different realities presented on the commedic stage that the disharmonies of the age are expressed, and some of the more striking examples of modernist commedia work to dramatize these boundaries, as, for example, when Blok's Harlequin jumps through the painted backdrop in Balaganchik. THE COMMEDIC AND NATURALISM

It should also be understood that the modernist commedia dell'arte was, as it were, one side of the cultural coin of the fin de siecle, especially its literature. In Russia, as indeed in other countries, there were two distinct cultural strands that it has become normal to consider hostile. The first of these was naturalism, which had developed out of the realism of the middle of the nineteenth century. While keeping a realist poetic (e.g., the notions of verisimilitude, temporal and spatial perspective, and unambiguous, metonymic use of language), naturalism had been shorn of the optimism and belief in the improvement of humanity's lot through science and enlightenment that had informed realism. In naturalism, the central figures tended to be the downtrodden, whose lot was in no way improved and who at best could lash out against circumstances. In the Russian context, naturalism was associated with such "progressive" (later, in some cases, Bolshevik) writers as Maksim Gorldi and Korolenko and, in the theatre, Stanislavskii, who had staged Chekhov and Gorldi, both writers with elements of naturalism. Its ideology, like its poetic, was archaic - clinging to the shipwrecked remnants of positivism. At first sight, there is nothing in common between naturalism and symbolism. And yet, such an outstanding naturalist as Gerhard Hauptmann was able to write a naturalist play such as Die Weber and then a symbolist play such as Hanneles Himmelfahrt, the latter a favourite of pre-Revolutionary audiences in Russia. Essentially, the distinction between symbolist and naturalist writers can be seen as a difference of poetic - where naturalism was metonymic, unambiguous, and realistic, symbolism was metaphoric, ambiguous, and surrealistic - and a difference of philosophy - unlike naturalism, which was still positivist, symbolism had absorbed the subjectivism of Mach and Schopenhauer. Yet, despite these differences, there were important similarities, especially in the nature of the central figure, for Pierrot was essentially a transcription into a surreal world of the helpless victim of naturalism; capable, at best, of lashing out at or mocking his tormentors, but still a victim at the end. That is to say,

13 Prologue

both naturalism and the symbolist commedia dell'arte encoded the absurdities of a world torn by ever greater contradictions. Both sought in their own way to offer a critique of the contemporary world, and both were in their own way "progressive" or revolutionary: naturalism in the political sense only commedia both politically and artistically. It is this realization that has largely escaped Soviet critics, and for a very simple reason: the rejection by Lenin of the subjectivist philosophy of his age, in particular in his polemic with Aleksandr Bogdanov, a fellow Bolshevik, scientist, and writer of science fiction.17 Lenin's predilection for naturalist writing was the expression of his philosophical conservatism; his polemics split progressive culture into good (naturalist) and bad (symbolist) and in the long run led to the imposition of Socialist realism as the only "progressive" form of creative activity. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that during the Revolutionary period Lenin's voice was far from the only one heard and that symbolist culture, especially the commedia dell'arte, was by and large politically progressive (although the political content was usually expressed metaphorically in the rejection of "bourgeois" aesthetic values) and, in the artistic sense, truly revolutionary. Moreover, the split between the two "movements" that we take for granted today was far less clear-cut in the culture of the time and is, to some extent, a reading into the cultural situation through hindsight. BALAGAN AS METAPHOR

As a motif in Russian culture, commedia dell'arte had been present at least since the eighteenth century, that is, since the visits of Italian theatre troupes and, more important, since the sojourn of such Italian composers as Coviello, who created operas based on commedia motifs. I have argued elsewhere that there is an admixture of commedia motifs in Pushkin's "little comedies," the Tales of Belkin. An example is the portrait of Sil'vio, where there is a considerable play with the word shut ("clown" or "fool"). The question of whether Sil'vio is a shut or whether he is serious seems to me to be central to the story. His function is to reveal the sinister, malevolent underlay to the notion of comedy, the step that separates the sublime from the ridiculous.18 Later, itinerant players imported commedia-type plays that took root in the popular consciousness as the figure of Petrushka, a development seems to be related to the phenomenon of Pierrot in France. Nekrasov in his satirical poem Komu na Rusi zhit' khorosho describes a typical Petrushka show, or balagan, at a country market. It is this Russian tradition of the balagan that Aleksandr Benois

14 Pierrot in Petrograd

invokes in his memories of childhood, discussed in chapter five of this book. The term itself, with its strong figurative connotations of disorder and misrule, becomes a central term in Russian modernist culture.19 In this book I appropriate the term balagan to denote the theatrical and dramaturgical genre that grew out of modernist experimentation. Viewed subliminally, "Petrushka" is a comic diminutive of the name of the founder of Petersburg and creator of the world in which nineteenth-century Russians lived. Peter the Great himself was wont to create a tsar'-shut in his court who would parody the holder of power. The realization that Petrushka is a sinister, evil phenomenon, a devil, is important to our understanding of the full significance of the image of Petrushka the sinister clown in the Russian context. Russian history can thus be read as a sinister commedia dell'arte yet another version of the apocalypse. The baroque metaphor of theatrum mundi suggested the balagan onstage to be a reflection of the balagan in the streets of Petersburg, where the audience had to live. That city was, Blok and others suggest, a balagan dominated by clowns, reflecting by baroque extension the Russian empire itself and, further still, a world in which the director/creator of the puppets - God - was dead and the clowns had run amok. This modernist version of the baroque differed, then, in one very profound way from the original, for where the baroque had at the centre of the onionskin layers the image of God, for the modernists God was dead and the world out of control, or in the control of sinister, diabolical forces - Dr Dapertutto himself.20 The popularity of commedia dell'arte in Russia at the beginning of this century was by no means confined to the Russian stage. It penetrated literature, the visual arts, poetry, criticism, and the letters, dress, and mores of prominent artists. In this, as in most artistic fashions, Russian culture can be seen to be following the dictates of the time; however, the balagan seems to have a peculiar resonance as a metaphor for the disorder and destruction through which Russia was passing. C H E K H O V AS P R O P H E T

In Chekhov's play Uncle Vania, Astrov encounters Elena Andreevna as she is leaving the Voinitskii house. He comments bitterly, "Finita la commedia." After their prolonged kiss, he repeats "Finita," as if to underline the point. Within the confines of the play the meaning of his remark is clear enough: for Astrov the love intrigue in which he has been involved with Elena Andreevna is now ended. However,

15 Prologue his characterisation of it as a "comedy" can be seen to be bitterly ironic, since, as he points out, she had sown confusion among the denizens of the Voinitskii household and his relationship with her would have ended in his own destruction and perhaps hers too had it been allowed to continue. His comment further suggests that the "comic" part of his life - the happy times in the Voinitskii household and, more important, the potential "happy ending" of the AstrovSonia relationship, which had been frustrated by Elena Andreevna's intrusion on the scene - is now over. Such would be the conventional interpretation of Astrov's remark in a "psychological" and realist reading of the play. But, intriguingly, there is another mode of viewing Chekhov, namely as the beginning of a new theatre that would be based not on a realist aesthetic but on a theatrical, antirealist one. That is to say, his work is poised between the real and the unreal, between mimesis and symbol. To be more specific, we may read Uncle Vania as a kind of commedia dell'arte in which each of the characters is acting out a pre-set theatrical role.21 Each is a "type" with specific procedures and actions that trap their characters into caricatures of themselves, and the gestures of each can be seen as the modern equivalent of the lazzi of the commedia dell'arte comedian.22 An example of this is the firing of the gun by Vania. The way the gun is fired - he misses - and the consequences - none - parallel exactly the farcical use of a weapon (for example, a wooden sword) in traditional commedia dell'arte. The entire action of Uncle Vania - in which characters talk past each other, no love intrigue is brought to a successful conclusion, and each character is locked into a set of caricatural gestures and actions - is in general farcical and in particular points the way forward in theatre. Paradoxically, forward means back - to the conventions of popular drama, of which the Italian commedia dell'arte is the most salient example. We may therefore read in Astrov's remark not only a realistic detail but also a metatheatrical comment by the author himself: the "comedy" of Uncle Vania is over, but the commedia is just beginning on the Russian stage. It is the thesis of this book that the remark was an act of prophetic intuition on Chekhov's part.

CHAPTER ONE

Who Was That Masked Man? Va, frere, va, camarade, Fais le diable, bats 1'estrade Dans ton reve et sur Paris Et par le monde, et sois 1'ame Vile, haute, noble, infame De nos innocents esprits! (Verlaine, "Pierrot Gamin")

It is generally assumed that the kind of theatre we know as commedia dell'arte developed in Italy some four hundred and fifty years ago.1 It subsequently spread to other countries and has a long and complex history as an international phenomenon of the theatre. However, as scholars are coming to realize, the more one studies the subject, the more it becomes difficult to pin down exactly what the commedia dell'arte was in its early stages, and even more difficult to say what were its origins. For example, the term commedia dell'arte itself does not seem to have been in general use before the eighteenth century, when Carlo Goldoni uses it.2 By that time it was essentially a thing of the past and therefore subject to definition and codification. Moreover, the understanding of commedia dell'arte was shaped by a number of different forces whose relationship to the reality was and is problematic: the literary heritage, in descriptions and in written scenarios; the iconographic tradition - in prints, paintings, and china figurines - which no doubt tended to emphasize the colourful and grotesque aspects; and the simplification that commedia dell'arte underwent as it became an international phenomenon, more and more remote from its Italian roots and divorced from the Italian dialects and the specific social and economic situation that gave it birth. To these forces we have to add the literary incorporation of simplified and stylized features of commedia dell'arte into plays, a phenomenon that begins in the eighteenth century with Goldoni and Gozzi, and the historiography of commedia dell'arte, which itself undergoes several stages in its evolution. Thus, what is meant by the term "commedia dell'arte" in this book is much wider than, and only tangentially related to, the original phenomenon, since we are discussing a feature of Russian modernist literary and theatrical culture. We have to do, essentially, with a literary or artistic myth.

17 Who Was That Masked Man?

The historiography of commedia dell'arte is marked by a number of major studies of the subject which helped shape the myth of commedia dell'arte. Some of the writings - for example, by Flaminio Scala - are contemporary contributions by actors themselves. But the first attempt at a total description of commedia dell'arte was by Luigi Riccoboni, an Italian actor who returned to France when the Comedie-Italienne was revived in 1716. Like all sources of information, Riccoboni was influenced by his age, his objective being to make commedia dell'arte respectable and to revive the scripted drama instead of the play all'improvise. In that endeavour he was joined by Carlo Goldoni, whose plays, while incorporating commedia dell'arte characters, were shaped by eighteenth-century notions of taste, symmetry, and precision. Goldoni, instead of improvised dramas, created written texts with mask-characters. In so doing, he went further than his contemporary Carlo Gozzi, who still left room for improvisation by the masks in his dramas. That is to say, the eighteenth century saw the incorporation of commedia dell'arte into literature. It ceased to be the complex, partly spontaneous, improvised art form that it had been in its heyday and turned into a set of standardized, codified masks to be incorporated in the literary texts. Riccoboni and Goldoni's work served to create a myth that was undoubtedly at variance in some particulars with the reality. Riccoboni's study, for example, served to codify the variety of masks that commedia dell'arte had produced. It was in the eighteenth century also that the "iconographic tradition" (as Richards and Richards call it) of commedia dell'arte developed with the famous paintings of Watteau. Hereafter, literary myth and iconography were to have at least as great an importance in the evolution of commedia dell'arte as were questions of theatre and broad societal movements. In the nineteenth century there appeared a major study by Maurice Sand, who focused on the colourful and attractive elements of commedia dell'arte, especially the masks, of which he offers a compendium. Sand's study was undoubtedly an element in the French symbolists' revival of commedia dell'arte, which was to have direct repercussions in Russia. The works by Riccoboni and Sand were principal sources of information for the Russian modernists. As a form of dramatic literature, "commedic" texts of the nineteenth century - plays incorporating commedia dell'arte masks - were an attempt to capture or recreate that elusive elixir of spontaneity and vitality that was seen to be the spirit of commedia dell'arte. As with other forms of literary desire, the object proved to be a receding horizon that, the more energetically he pursued it, the more stubbornly escaped the writer's grasp. It is perhaps the search for the

i8 Pierrot in Petrograd

genuine, the original, the authentic that underlies Maurice Sand's book, with its careful catalogue of the different masks and their regional variations, and its assertion of the ancient origins of the tradition of the commedia dell'arte. Yet Sand's book catalogues a dead tradition, and it was rather in the Theatre des Funambules that the tradition lived on - transformed, but alive, with some semblance of its original vitality. Twentieth-century studies tended to build on, or repeat, the work of Riccoboni and Sand.3 An exception is the study by Konstantin Miklashevskii (Constant Mic) that is discussed in the following chapter. But at the same time a wealth of new documentary evidence, discovered and published,4 cried out for a reappraisal of commedia dell'arte. This has come in the 19705 and 8os in the form of a new emphasis on the sociological and economic forces that shaped commedia dell'arte, as well as a healthy scepsis towards the romantic focus on the colourful and grotesque aspects of commedia dell'arte. Work by such Italian researchers as Ferdinando Taviani, Ludovico Zorzi, and others has properly refocused research on commedia dell'arte and given a new impetus to the research, which has become more careful of its sources, methods, and assumptions. Typical of this new approach is the following remark by Ludovico Zorzi, "The object 'Commedia dell'Arte' is one of those themes about which the more we come to know (or think we come to know), the less we are able to define and fix."5 Central to the new thrust of Marxist and structural research on commedia dell'arte are several notions. First, the commedia dell'arte meant a professional theatre, the earliest "entertainment industry," which was driven by a high degree of professionalism (this being the sense of the term "dell'arte," as opposed to the theatre of the dilettanti) and was shaped by the favourable economic and social forces at play in sixteenth-century Italy;6 when seventeenth-century Italy underwent an economic crisis, the commedia dell'arte declined. Second, the improvised comedy could be adapted to audiences of different social status - nobility (who frequently served as patrons and would command private performances), the middle classes (who could permit themselves a visit to the theatre), and the lower classes (who could be entertained at fairs and carnivals from trestle stages) - thus assuring a larger public and greater receipts for the actors. The presence of a multiplicity of zanni, representing different regional types and dialects, reflected the linguistic disunity that characterized the Italian peninsula and ensured a popular reception for the itinerant players in the different locales where they were likely to find themselves. Third, the structures of the stage productions were formalized and susceptible of

ig Who Was That Masked Man?

analysis along formal lines. Thus, the contrast between masked and unmasked players was indicative of different theatrical planes. "Curiously, notwithstanding their powerful visual presence, the effect of the 'masks' was to highlight those figures who did not wear masks by pointing to the greater kinship of the unmasked to the spectators. In the theatrical event there were three planes of reality: that of the 'masks/ that of the unmasked, and that of the audience."7 Such analysis implies a reflection of the underlying social structures (e.g., the master-servant relationship) and the resolution of social conflict. The existence of this body of new research on the origins and nature of commedia dell'arte represents an important step forward in understanding the phenomenon. However, it should be stressed that this research really relates only to the original phenomenon and not to its further propagation outside the spatial confines of Italy and the temporal confines of the approximate period 1550-1740. In France, Germany, Spain, and, much later, Russia, elements of commedia dell'arte were transplanted out of their social and economic context. As a result, their meanings changed totally, and a new, international tradition was created. This tradition may have been, as researchers such as Zorzi have suggested, a composite of cliches. Nevertheless, it existed and thus needs to be researched, for it is to that tradition that the theatre will turn at some crucial moments of its evolution in order to absorb the commedia's energy and derive the impetus for a new direction. Such a moment was the period of modernism in Russia. Again, it should be stressed that the tradition which the Russian modernists inherited had been transformed by international culture into a set of images and icons that differed in crucial ways from their original source. This chapter is intended as no more than an outline of the main features of that history as it touches on our topic, focusing on the main turningpoints and trends in the evolution of the tradition, and trying to recreate the image of commedia as it existed for the Russian modernists. I shall also be analyzing certain (often obscure) texts that played a crucial role in the Russian modernists' reflection on the tradition or were historically important on the Russian stage in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although Italian actors, including Antonio Sacchi, the Venetian collaborator of Gozzi, visited Russia in the eighteenth century, the modernist revival of commedia relied heavily on certain Western sources, since native traditions existed principally in the form of the Petrushka play. As it happens, the sources of texts and information about commedia that the Russians used were relatively few, and it is on these that I propose to concentrate.

2O Pierrot in Petrograd ROOTS

There is much debate and little certainty about the origins of the commedia dell'arte, some historians, for example, Maurice Sand, tending to derive it from a native stock of popular comedy going back to ancient Latin and even Greek sources. 'The Italian comedy is directly descended from the performances of the ancient Latin mimes; and the genre called commedia dell'arte in particular is none other than that of the Attelanae. It is the only theatre in Europe which has preserved the traditions of antiquity."8 In this view Sand closely adheres to the position of Riccoboni. Recent research has been much more sceptical about such possible links.9 Whatever the case may be, it is clear that commedia dell'arte as we know it grew out of the activities of itinerant players and charlatans who inhabited the fringes of sixteenth-century Italian society and formed a sort of boisterous and often bawdy opposition to the so-called commedia erudita, with its scripted texts and its decorous actions. Beginning as a rudimentary entertainment offered at fairs on saints' days, it crystallized as a form of professional theatrical expression in the work of such actors as Ruzzante (Angelo Beolco, 1502-42) and found its first major "literary" expression in the scenarios of Flaminio Scala.10 It quickly travelled to other countries, in the first instance to France, when in 1571 the Gelosi company visited Paris. Visits to Spain ensued, and from this point on, Italian improvised comedy could be reckoned an international phenomenon with important repercussions for the evolution of French, Spanish, English, and other theatrical traditions.11 Until the early eighteenth century, native commedia dell'arte remained a productive force in Italian theatre, although scholars argue about the extent to which it retained its "classical" form (or indeed if it ever had one). As I have mentioned, the term itself commedia dell'arte - seems to date from the eighteenth century and may be a symptom of the mythologizing that went on as the vitality of the tradition waned. To be sure, that tradition was continually modified by succeeding generations of actors, so that it is difficult to generalize about exactly what it constituted. There would seem, however, to be at least three principal features that serve to characterize the tradition and remain throughout its various manifestations. MASKS

The first of these is the presence of the "masks," that is to say, a set of characters that invoked certain known expectations in the audience, although the functions that they actually performed varied from

21 Who Was That Masked Man? scenario to scenario.12 The definition of a commedia mask is in itself an interesting methodological problem, since the character varied in time as new actors took it over and modified it, and since the name of the character could be changed in a particular play. For example, in French versions, Pierrot could become Gilles, Pantalone become Cassandre, and so on.13 Some unity was provided by the traditional costumes ascribed to the different masks, although these also were modified; additional unity came from the association of different masks with different dialects (a distinction that is obviously only operative in Italian); and, last but not least, there were typical plot functions and character traits (including social features) ascribed to different masks, although these too might become modified somewhat in time and space. In his discussion of this problem, Nicoll rightly rejects the notion of "stock figures, constantly expressing the same sentiments and always fulfilling the same roles in different plots, as in melodrama," and suggests instead the notion of an "accumulative personality."14 The commedia characters are indeed personalities that migrate from play to play. What is essential in them is the interplay of the familiar and the unexpected: the name may be the same and the role different, or vice versa, or his/her character may be a mix of traditional and unexpected traits. Nicoll does not give sufficient weight to the importance of the individual actor in the accumulation of personality traits in the character, for almost always the character is associated with a particular actor or series of actors - Arlequin with Dominique, Truffaldino with Sacchi, and so on. The "accumulative personality" is thus comparable to the folk-tale in that it has a series of authors, the difference being that the authors - at least the most important ones - are not in this case anonymous. The kernel of the structure of the commedia play was composed of four masks: two old men (vecchi) and their two servants, or zanni. The most important masks are the following: Arlecchino (Harlequin). A zanni, he was recognizable by his black mask, his stick, his original patched clothing, which later turned into the familiar lozenge pattern, and his Bergamese dialect. Marmontel's description of Arlecchino is the classical one: "This character is a mixture of ignorance, wit, silliness and grace. He is a rough sketch of a man; a big child with gleams of reason and intelligence, whose mistakes are amusing. He has a cat's agility and his coarseness is only superficial. He is the faithful, credulous, greedy valet, always in love, always in trouble; who grieves, who consoles himself like a child."15

22 Pierrot in Petrograd

Brighella. This was another zanni from Bergamo. His traditional costume was a brown mask with a beard and a livery-like white coat and pantaloons with green trim; his principal characteristic was his thievery.16 Pulcinella (Polichinelle, or in English, Punch). Although usually a zanni, according to Sand he might, depending on the play, be "master, servant, magistrate, poet or dancer, but never an acrobat."17 Of Neapolitan origin, he is a bully who enjoys beating others with his stick and picking quarrels. Pedrolino (Pierrot). Another zanni, he served as an auxiliary character for the young lovers and a resourceful inventer of intrigues - "the symbol of victorious cunning."18 Tartaglia and Truffaldino were two other zanni. The former was a Neapolitan mask who was characterized linguistically by his stammer and his inability to express himself, while the latter, a variation of Harlequin, the cunning servant, was the preferred role of Antonio Sacchi. Pantalone, or the Magnifico, was the classical old man (vecchid) in various scenarios in which he may appear as "sometimes a father, sometimes a husband; sometimes a widower or an old bachelor, still ambitious to please [the fair sex], and consequently very ridiculous; sometimes he is rich, sometimes poor, sometimes miserly and sometimes prodigal."19 His characterization is that of an elderly Venetian merchant, and Kennard describes his typical appearance in Goldoni's comedies thus: It was the mask the least masked. His tall figure, pointed beard, dark clothes, big cloak; his slippers, most appropriate for the few steps separating Rialto from Piazza; his supple gestures, measured tones, politeness, affable manner, long discourses, rough scoldings and facile gentlenesses; his cleverness at unravelling complicated affairs and his ability to make the best of good opportunities; his amiability to strangers; his complaisance toward his superiors - all this was as familiar in the city [Venice] as in the theatre.20

// Dottore (the Doctor). Another old man, he was the typical pedant; Kennard describes him as "a savant, lawyer, physician, philosopher, rhetorician or diplomat; a chattering, conceited ignoramus. He spouts Bolognese dialect interlarded with Latin quotations and grotesque etymologies ... his learned imbecility matches the Captain's warlike adventures and amorous conquests."21 // Capitano (the Captain). Ultimately from Plautus's miles gloriosus, he was often called Spavento and was essentially, in this incarnation, an Italian satire on the seventeenth-century Spanish conquerors of

23 Who Was That Masked Man? Italy.22 Sand gives his appearance as follows: "This captain, with his tiger-cat moustachios, his colossal ruff and his plumed hat."23 Kennard characterizes him as a bully and "wholesale killer" and notes: "He thinks that by a glance, a nod, a word, he can win any woman. He winks at the courtesans, caresses the slaves, robs the honest woman; but in the end he is derided and mocked."24 About Giangurgolo, the Calabrian version of the Captain, Sand writes: "He is boastful, a monstrous liar, timid beyond all measure, and moreover as famished as a savage ... If by good fortune he can put his hand upon victuals, it is amusing to see the quantity [of things] whose disappearance he can contrive ... But for the sake of a few pounds of macaroni, a few dishfuls of polenta, one or two salami, how much shame must he not endure."25 Scaramuccia (Scaramouche). A Neapolitan variant of the Captain, he is generally a valet masquerading as a wealthy nobleman. Other characters, who did not wear masks, included the following: Colombina. A pretty and resourceful soubrette, she is a coquette who is pursued by Arlecchino and usually ends up marrying him. The young lovers (innamorati). These were "straight" parts whose names varied: Flavio, Flaminia, Leandro, and so on. They were characterized by the fact that they spoke pure Tuscan, not dialect, and were not comic characters. In the classical form of commedia dell'arte scenario, there would be two pairs of innamorati, with the zanni and vecchi forming a set of satellites around this nucleus.26 IMPROVISATION

The second distinguishing feature of the commedia is the use of improvisation. As published by Scala, true commedia plays appeared in the form of scenarios for improvisation rather than final texts. It was the role of the actor to improvise his or her role according to the scenario set out by the leader of the troupe and apparently usually nailed up backstage. In performing this task, he/she usually employed a repertoire of set speeches, mots, and gestures that could be combined to achieve different ends depending on the play and role.27 Improvisation as a distinguishing feature of commedia began to disappear as playwrights started to write plays using commedia characters and techniques. This tendency, which began in France and spread to Italy with Goldoni, led to the increased "respectability" of commedia and its divorce from the popular drama that lay at its roots. In a way, the process is symbolized in Marivaux's play Arlequin poli par I'amour. However, improvisation remained as an ideal of "true" commedia and was a powerful notion in the revival of commedia in

24 Pierrot in Petrograd

Russia, since it enshrined the independence of the actor from the playwright and hence the freedom of the theatre from "literature." LAZZI

The third feature that distinguishes commedia is related to improvisation, namely the use of a set of stock tricks known as lazzi. These are described by Riccoboni as follows: "Lazzi is the name we give those things that Harlequin or the other masks do in the middle of a scene when they use sudden expressions of fear or irrelevant gags to interrupt the action, to which one must nevertheless return afterwards. They are simply those useless pieces of business that the actor invents through his genius and which the Italian actors call lazzi."23 In this regard, Nicoll stresses the dependence of the lazzi on the spoken word and on word-play, and he notes, "Often those who, in our own times, make an attempt to describe commedia performances tend to stress the movements of the actors and to insist upon their purely physical tricks."29 Here it seems that a distinction must be made between commedia in its classical form and its adoption as an acting style in later theatre traditions. It is, however, salutary to note Nicoll's comment that "the core of the commedia was a play in which clownish episodes might and did assuredly occur but that was not designed simply as an assemblage of largely unconnected farcical incidents."30 The fourth, less clear, distinguishing feature of the commedia is its tone, which is an interplay of the serious and the farcical or parodistic. In particular, commedia, because of the nature of the improvisation and the meta-dramatic play of the lazzi, which are essentially digressions from the plot, offers an opportunity for metatheatre, play-within-the-play, and other commentary on the dramatic illusion. The contrast between the pallid realism and conventionality of the "straight" characters and the grotesqueries and theatricality of the masks created an inherent intertextual contrast. To a considerable extent, the battle of dramatic worlds that is implied by the montage of theatrical styles inherent in commedia is a baroque or "manneristic" feature, and reflects the notion of theatrum mundi that was a feature of baroque thought.31 THE COMEDIE-ITALIENNE

As I indicated above, commedia early travelled beyond the borders of Italy and came to play an important role in a number of countries.

25 Who Was That Masked Man? Most important was the coining of Italian theatre to France, where its influence lasted several hundred years.32 Among the figures who played a major role in the evolution of the Italian comedy in France one may cite Dominique Biancolleli, whose refinement of the character of Harlequin was to prove decisive;33 Giuseppe Giaratone, who early developed the figure of Pierrot; and Louis (Luigi) Riccoboni, whose history and description of commedia, the first volume of which appeared in 1728, is a vital source of information on the subject and provides authoritative illustrations of the costumes of the different masks. In 1697 tne Comedie-Italienne was expelled from Paris, apparently because of its production of La Fausse Prude, which contained allusions to Mme de Maintenon. The hostility towards the Italian theatre, fanned by the Comedie-Franc.aise, lasted until the end of Louis XIV's reign, and led in 1709 to the trashing of forain theatres that had appropriated the Italian tradition.34 The new Comedie-Italienne was founded in 1716 and in 1762 was merged with the Opera-Comique. The gallicized version of the Italian comic tradition had begun at least as far back as Moliere, who used commedia figures in Dom Juan. It led to the pantomime, a schematic version of commedia in which the number of masks was reduced and their roles became stereotyped. The pantomime is described by French romantic Theophile Gautier as follows: With four or five types, it suffices for everything. Cassandre [i.e., Pantaloon] represents the family; Leandre, the stupid and wealthy fop, favoured by parents; Columbine, the ideal; Beatrix, the dream pursued, the flower of youth and beauty; Harlequin, with the face of an ape and the sting of a serpent, with his black mask, his many-coloured lozenges, his shower of spangles, represents love, wit, mobility, audacity, all the showy and vicious qualities; Pierrot, pallid, slender, dressed in sad colours, always hungry and always beaten is the ancient slave, the modern proletarian, the pariah, the passive and disinherited being, who, glum and sly, witnesses the orgies and the follies of his masters.35 The reader can readily perceive in this description of Pierrot in particular the beginnings of the romantic cult of this figure, one that was to have a profound impact on the modern notion of what commedia is about, and which was highly influential in the Russian symbolists' reading of the figure. This romantic version of commedia, which went far beyond the original conception, owes much to the "salonization" (or sanitization) of the genre in the eighteenth century

26 Pierrot in Petrograd in the works of such writers as Marivaux and Goldoni, and its sentimental depiction in the paintings of Watteau, with whose name the commedia tradition in France is indissolubly linked.36 Paradoxically, there was a counter-phenomenon, namely the "abasement" of the commedia figures in eighteenth-century French popular theatre, the Theatre de la Foire. This process is described by Storey, who in his study of Pierrot notes: "The Pierrot that appears early at the fairs inherits, it is true, the immaculate livery and personable traits of Giaratone's moon-faced creation - his occasional playfulness, his naive candour, his laziness, his confident sententiousness. But he also inherits the old traditions of itinerant performers and the taste of their publics, a taste for dancing, singing, and acrobatics."37 The monopoly that the Comedie-Frangaise enjoyed on performances in French in the early years of the eighteenth century had the result of pushing the emphasis in the forain version of commedia onto mime, gesture, and the use of songs, comic gibberish, and placards, that is, onto theatricality as opposed to the realism of the official theatre. This enforced mutism was a decisive event in the international history of commedia dell'arte. It had the effect of associating commedia with mime, divorcing gesture from text, action from theatre. It also led to the association of this form of theatre with what Storey calls "a species of subversive participatory theatre,"38 that is, it established a hostility between commedia dell'arte and authority that was to prove decisive in its further evolution. FROM GOZZI TO TIECK

The process by which commedia ceased to be a simple theatrical style and entered literature can be traced in the work of Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806), who combined the style of commedia that he found in the Sacchi theatre in Venice with the structure of the folk-tale (fiaba). His most popular plays based on this combination were Love for Three Oranges (L'Amore delle ire melamnce, 1761), Turandot (1762), and The King Stag (II Re cervo, 1762). In the first of these Gozzi presented a traditional Italian children's tale in which parodies of his literary rivals, Carlo Goldoni and Pietro Chiari, who are represented by the magician Celio and the fairy Morgana, alternated with dazzling theatrical effects. The version of the play that we possess is in the form of a retrospective description or scenario with only a few passages in verse, in which the author is at pains to stress all the parodistic elements (apparently no more detailed text ever existed).39 The parodies of the two other writers gave Gozzi the opportunity to introduce a considerable element of metatheatrical commentary; for

27 Who Was That Masked Man? example, "[Truffaldino] sniffed the breath of the prince and noticed the smell that came from his stomach being overfull of undigested Martellian verse. The prince coughed and wanted to spit. Truffaldino gave him a cup to spit into and examined his spittle; in it he discovered rotten and reeking rhymes."40 The plot of the play concerns a prince, Tartaglia, who is stricken with melancholy. His father, Silvio, the king of clubs, consults doctors who tell him that if Tartaglia does not laugh soon he will die. This would suit the prince's cousin, Clarice, and the prime minister, Leandro, for she would marry him and place him on the throne. Truffaldino is sent by Celio to amuse the prince and make him laugh, but he is unsuccessful. Finally the prince is moved to laughter by the sight of an old woman who has come to a well to get some oil and is knocked over by Truffaldino's vituperations. Morgana, enemy of Silvio and protectress of Clarice and Leandro, enraged that the prince is now cured, makes him fall in love with three oranges. In the second act Tartaglia and Truffaldino, blown along by a devil with a set of bellows, set out to seek the oranges, which are two thousand miles away. When they get close to the castle of Creonta, possessor of the oranges, they manage, with the help of Celio, to pass the obstacles: the iron gates, a hungry dog, the half-rotten rope of a well, and a woman baker. Tartaglia and Truffaldino run away from the giantess Creonta with the three oranges. In the third act Truffaldino arrives by a lake with the oranges and stops to wait for Tartaglia. Thirsty, he cuts open an orange, only to find a girl inside dying of thirst. To assuage her thirst he cuts open a second orange, in which another girl is concealed. Both girls succumb, and Truffaldino runs away. When Tartaglia arrives, he cuts open the third orange and gets water from the lake in one of his iron boots for the beautiful princess Ninetta, whom he finds inside. They fall in love. The Moorish girl Smeraldina is then sent by Morgana to stick a pin in the hair of Ninetta. When she does so, the princess is transformed into a dove. In the final outcome, Celio reveals to Silvio the intrigues of Clarice, Leandro, and their helper Brighella. Truffaldino pulls the pin out of the dove's feathers, and the bird turns back into Ninetta. This account of the scenario of Love for Three Oranges does not even cover all the intricacies of the complex plot, which seems designed to combine as much spectacle and theatrical diversion - including the commedia insertions - as possible.41 A central feature of Gozzi's adaptation of commedia was the alternation of the prose speeches and improvisations by the traditional masks, such as Pantalone, Tartaglia, Brighella, and Truffaldino, with the verse speeches and exalted acting style of the "high" characters. In the case of Tumndot, the four

28 Pierrot in Petrograd commedia characters are in Chinese dress, but they still retain their typical traits. Thus Pantalone, who is, we learn from one of his speeches, an exile from Venice who has become the secretary of the Chinese emperor Altoum, still retains the learned characteristics typical of the character. Tartaglia, on the other hand, is more down-toearth. The commedia characters are important in Turandot for the way they enact in comic form a parallel to the "high" drama. Thus, in act IV Kalaf is in captivity awaiting the dawn when Turandot has to tell him his name; he is visited by a series of characters - Zelima, Skirina, and Adelma - who each try in different ways to wheedle the secret from him, while others - for example, Barak - pledge themselves to keep his secret. Their actions are mirrored by those of the commedia masks. The first is Brighella, who warns Kalaf of the possibility of nocturnal visitors. Unlike Barak, however, he is not noble enough to side openly with Kalaf, confessing, "Perhaps someone else would be able to refuse a purse of coin; as for me, I tried with all my strength but didn't succeed."42 Even more venal is Truffaldino, who enters while Kalaf is asleep and places a mandrake root under his pillow in the belief that Kalaf will talk in his sleep and give his name away. The resulting scene is a jewel of commedia improvisation. He creeps up to Kalaf, slips the root under his head, steps back, stands and listens, making various comic gestures. Instead of replying Kalaf makes some movements with his arms and legs. Truffaldino imagines that these movements mean something because of the effect of the mandrake root. It occurs to him that each movement signifies a particular letter of the alphabet. From Kalaf's movements he tries to guess the letters, combining them and composing what he fondly believes is a strange and comic name; he then goes out merrily, hoping that he has succeeded in attaining his goal.43 The four commedia figures in Turandot also have important metatheatrical functions, commenting as they do on the action of the play or on certain characters. They form in this way a link between the exotic subject of the play and the audience, for their characters are as familiar to the audience as is their Venetian dialect, and their sympathies are in the right place, although, because of their low status, they can indulge them only by subterfuge. Thus in act V Tartaglia, discussing Turandot, remarks, "She kept me for half an hour with her questions. Because of my cold and angry feelings towards her I guess I told her all sorts of dumb things. I would give her a thrashing with the greatest of pleasure!"44 A little later, when

29 Who Was That Masked Man? she enters with her troupe, he says, "Her suite has a pretty sad look to it. In general I think this marriage is starting to look like a funeral."45 We see here an essential element in the modern use of commedia in dramatic literature, namely its "intertextuality" or stylistic montage. The plays of Gozzi were, in a sense, the first harbingers of the romantic revival of commedia. Gozzi's espousal of this quintessentially Italian form of popular theatre was a rebuttal to the popularity of plays by Carlo Goldoni, such as The Servant of Two Masters (II Servitore di due padrone, 1743), which were sentimental dramas with a middle-class appeal and had little that was specifically Italian or theatrical about them. Moreover, Gozzi's use of original fables with commedia characters served to revitalize the tradition in a way that was to have a lasting influence. His plots skirt tragedy, and their view of humanity is far from benign, as, for example, in the unredeemable machinations of Tartaglia in The King Stag, over whose dead body the lovers - Leander and Clarissa (his daughter), Deramo and Angela - are united at the end. Also, in the latter play, the highly theatrical introduction of animal characters, and the transformation of characters into animals and back, heralds the grotesque as a new, and subsequently important, element in the commedia tradition.46 LUDWIG TIECK

The artistically subversive and ironic potential of commedia was perceived by several German romantics. In particular, Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) in his plays Puss-in-Boots (Der gestiefelte Kater, 1797) and The Topsy-Turvy World (Die verkehrte Welt, 1798) took a leaf out of Gozzi's book by combining some commedia types of character and situation (especially the metatheatrical features of commedia) with the folk-tale. In the first play he exploits the folk-tale of Puss-in-Boots as told by Charles Perrault. Here Tieck does not use the traditional zanni and other commedia masks, but he does have an actor masked as a cat, as well as the comic figure of popular German theatre, Hanswurst, whose relationship, though attenuated, to Italian comedy is generally noted.47 The innovations in Tieck's play mark an important and influential step forward. Thus, the traditional scenario has been replaced by a play-text (the "Puss-in-Boots" plot) that assumes the role of a play-within-the-play, since it is commented on by members of a fictive "audience," whose actions form an ironic metadramatic world that is inhabited also by a fictive "playwright," who tries to defend his play to the "audience," and even a "prompter." The

3O Pierrot in Petrograd

Illusionsbruch (disruption of illusion) that is created in this way is reinforced when some of the actors drop their roles and address the audience or each other with comments about the play. Tieck uses this "theatre/metatheatre" apparatus to satirize conservative literary tastes, specifically "realist" theatre (among others, Kotzebue is mentioned), and the Aristotelian principles of the Enlightenment, which the play offends at every turn. It is important to note here the link between artistic and political subversion. This connection is perceived first by Schlosser, one of the "audience." "To tell you my honest opinion, I regard the whole thing as a trick to spread opinions and drop hints to the people. You'll see if I'm not right. A revolutionary play, as far as I can see."48 This is certainly reinforced by the content of the play, which gives a comic portrait of the stupidity and gullibility of the king, and in which a poor upstart, Gottlieb, makes it to the top thanks to the wiles of his cat Hinze. This intrigue makes Hinze a typical commedia zanni, using his wit to turn the situation to the advantage of his master and to ensure the obligatory "happy ending." It is through cunning and guile, the play suggests, that the lower classes will outwit their masters and become rulers in turn. Thus, when Gottlieb, surprised that the cat can speak, asks Hinze, "Why do you behave so that nobody notices anything?" Hinze replies: "In order not to attract any responsibility, for as soon as language were inflicted on us so-called animals, there would be no more joy in the world. Think of all the things a dog has to do and learn! And the horse! They are foolish animals to permit men to notice their intelligence; they just have to indulge their vanity. We cats are still the freest race ever, because despite all our cleverness we know how to pose as creatures so inept that man quite gives up trying to educate us."49 From the theatrical point of view, the most important aspect of Tieck's play is the foregrounding of conventions. That is to say, the metatheatrical aspects of the play serve to "lay bare" the devices that make any play function and that constitute an unspoken contract between those presenting the play and the audience. The "laying bare" is achieved principally by the comments of the fictive audience and by the way the actors slip out of their roles. This process is illustrated in the following dialogue between Prince Nathanael and the King: NATHANAEL. Quiet!

KING. What's that! NATHANAEL. Quiet! Quiet! KING. I don't understand.

31 Who Was That Masked Man? NATHANAEL. Don't talk about it, or otherwise the public down there is finally going to notice that it really is unnatural. KING. That won't matter; they clapped earlier, and I can still handle them somehow. NATHAN AEL. You see, it's really only a concession to the drama my talking your language; because otherwise, of course, it would be incomprehensible ... LEUTNER. Only nature should ever be presented on the stage. The Prince ought to talk a totally foreign language and have an interpreter with him.50

The discussion here of the convention that makes all the characters in a drama speak a mutually comprehensible language (even when the play has them belonging to different nationalities) serves to satirize the notion that everything must be "natural." In fact, Tieck is suggesting, the most "natural" drama is still woven out of a set of highly unnatural conventions.51 These conventions were equally satirized in The Topsy-Turvy World, in which a number of commedia dell'arte characters are present: Skaramuz (Scaramuccio), Pierrot, Harlekin (Harlequin), and Pantalon (Pantalone). The topsy-turvy world of the title refers precisely to the inversion of conventions. Thus the play begins with an epilogue and ends with a prologue; in it Scaramuccio usurps the role of Apollo, becoming a real tyrant; and Pierrot becomes a member of the audience, while a "member of the audience," Grunhelm, becomes a character in the action onstage. Important metatheatrical additions include such characters as the poet, who is horrified at the effect of the changes on his "magnificent play"; the director Wagemann, who in the sea-battle emerges from the waves as Neptune; the technical assistant, who drenches Scaramuccio with an unexpected storm but impresses him with his thunder and lightning; and the prompter, to whom several of the characters refer. Tieck exploits brilliantly the metatheatrical device of "slipping out of character" (Aus-der-Rollefallen), for example, when the actors playing the innkeeper and his daughter discuss the dramatic rules, the innkeeper noting that he must avoid all poetic expressions that are not in keeping with his character.52 The device is foregrounded by the fact that, unlike the other characters, Scaramuccio does not slip out of his role, to the point of not recognizing the director.53 By letting a "low" comic mask play a sublime role, the director has created a monster. One further possibility of metatheatre is exploited to advantage by Tieck, namely the conceit of the play as a metaphor for the life of a man and the footlights as the dividing line between man and oblivion. "The

32 Pierrot in Petrograd

laughter is still, the events of the play come to an end, the curtain finally falls for the last time, the audience goes home. Then suddenly they have gone away, no one can say where; no one can ask them, no one has ever trod the terrible, fearful wilderness and returned. Oh you weak, fragile life of man! I will always look on you as a work of art."54 Tieck's work in these two plays was a hundred years ahead of its time. Many of the possibilities that he saw and exploited in metatheatre came to be understood and used by others only in the twentieth century.55

S C H I L L E R ' S TURANDOT Friedrich Schiller was another German writer of the romantic period who was inspired by Gozzi and translated Turandot into German. However, where Tieck moved in the direction of romantic irony, Schiller chose the bathos of high ideals. The verse speeches of the "high" protagonists are translated fairly accurately into German verse. The main change concerns the commedia characters, whose speeches are also put into verse and added in cases where the original has only scenarios for improvisations, for example, in act II, scenes i and 2. Lacking in humour, Schiller omits completely such asides as Tartaglia's remark, "They should have sacrificed this little pig of a princess. That would have been an end to all the misfortunes."56 Most important, he omits the "mandrake root" scene (IV. 8) completely. In line with the more rationalized treatment of the masks, it is Pantalone, the emperor's secretary, not Tartaglia, who reads the rules of the competition in act II, scene 2. The other major change that Schiller makes concerns the dramatic conflict between Kalaf and Turandot. Turandot's speech in act II, scene 4, is considerably longer than in the original and is passionately feminist. The image that emerges is of an uncompromising manhater. "Ich will nun einmal von dem Mann nichts wissen,/Ich hafi ihn, ich verachte seinen Stolz/Und Ubermut" ("I want nothing to do with men, I hate their pride and arrogance").57 Compare with Gozzi: "Why do you want me to be cruel against my will."58 Not surprisingly, the third riddle is changed in Schiller, since it is a direct address to the audience in which Kalaf describes the object of the riddle: the "Lion of the Adriatic" (that is to say, Venice). Apart from the the fact that such a piece of local colour would hardly be appropriate for a German audience, a direct address to the audience is clearly out of line with the intentions of Schiller, whose goal it is to intensify the passions in the play and make it into a romantic drama.

33 Who Was That Masked Man?

The play that results from Schiller's adaptation is not really cornmedia at all, despite the presence of a situation and characters derived from that tradition. That Schiller did not understand the principles of commedia is demonstrated by the fact that all the "scenarios" are turned into verse speeches or omitted. Instead of the montage of styles, metatheatrical play, and dialect insertions contrasting with and parodying the high speech, in Schiller's text we find the unity of the poetic text and language - passion and pathos rather than irony. Thus Schiller heightens the dramatic conflict by giving Turandot's rejection of men a quasi-revolutionary pathos, but this has the effect of making the finale, in which she capitulates to Kalaf, weak and unmotivated. It is not surprising that Schiller prefers to eliminate completely the last scene, with Turandot's speech in which she extolls the disinterestedness, friendship, loyalty, and love of the various characters. Schiller's Turandot ends with a silent scene in which Kalaf is joyfully reunited with Timur while Zelima and Skirina throw themselves at Turandot's feet and she "kindly raises them up." (The anodyne adverb clashes strangely with the image of a cruel, vengeful, and uncompromising princess that had been conjured up in the first acts.) Schiller's text is important in that it shows what is not commedia dell'arte - and how a commedia text can be rewritten in such a way that it loses the essential qualities of the tradition.59 However, because it was in German, it was better known, at least at the beginning of the Russian modernists' work on commedia dell'arte, than the Italian original. E . T . A . HOFFMANN AND CALLOT

A third seminal figure in the German romantic tradition is E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). Although he never completed a play, Hoffmann was a proponent of the grotesque and a propagator of the work of Gozzi and Tieck. His most important contribution, however, was his enthusiasm for the work of Jacques Callot. This seventeenthcentury French printmaker had travelled to Italy as an apprentice. There he had made many prints of commedia dell'arte figures that are a principal source of information on the Italian tradition, as well as masterpieces of grotesque deformation of the human body, an aspect of commedia that was to result later in Meyerhold's theory of biomechanics. The prints had served, in turn, as models for the porcelain sculptures of commedia figures turned out by eighteenthcentury German potteries. Hoffmann had the prints used as illustra-

34 Pierrot in Petrograd

tions to collections of his work,60 and he played an essential role in the shaping of Russian commedia dell'arte, especially through the association of commedia with the grotesque. COMMEDIA IN NINETEENTHCENTURY FRANCE

A decisive role in the modern interpretation of commedia was played by the French actor Jean-Gaspard Deburau, known as Baptiste (17961846), who developed the modern figure of Pierrot.61 Deburau was an actor at the Theatre des Funambules who became a celebrated figure in nineteenth-century Paris and enthralled the romantic sensibilities of such people as Charles Nodier and Theophile Gautier. He represented at once the continuation of the tradition of the theatre forain, and another important step in the stylization of commedia and its reduction to a formula. This stylization was accompanied by an equally clear reduction of the plot to a standard set of relationships, as described by Sand: "In Italian pantomimes, Pagliaccio fills the place occupied by Pierrot in France; he no longer wears a mask, his face being merely covered with flour. He is the rival of Harlequin, and the lackey of Pantaloon. He is in love with Columbine, but - like the French Pierrot - he is never successful in carrying her off from Florindo, the lover who is always dressed in the latest fashion of his time and place. In these pantomimes the roles of father fall to the lot of the Doctor or old Tabarino."62 It is this simple plot formula that was to form the basis of the various modulations of plot and situation developed by the modernists. In Deburau's conception, the commedia became a pantomime with a considerable amount of acrobatics, the pantomime sautante, as Jules Janin described it in his fanciful and ironic Deburau: histoire du theatre a Cjuatre sous (much of which was written in a mockingly panegyric tone). The first acrobatic pantomime [pantomime sautante] that I have been able to discover is the following: Harlequin comes onstage to lament his fate. When he has well and truly lamented it, he makes three capers. Then Cassandra comes on and replies to Harlequin; then Cassandra makes a deaf man's leap; then the very popular, witty, and cowardly Idiot Lover arrives, carrying a bouquet at his side as you have seen him in the Tableau parlant. The Lover makes a coward's leap and a perilous back-flip, whereupon Deburau arrives walking on his hands; Deburau makes a drunkard's leap. At the end of the piece each goes off as he came on, one on his legs, the other on his hands,

35 Who Was That Masked Man? and the play is over. This acrobatic pantomime, this mixture of drama and tours de force had a phenomenal success.63

The addition of acrobatics to the pantomime tradition of commedia dell'arte was an especially important element for certain Russian directors, especially Meyerhold and Radlov, who saw in acrobatics and circus techniques a powerful tool for theatrical renewal. In this sense, Deburau, whose contribution was well known in Russia, was a crucial figure. Another important aspect of the image of Pierrot as created by Deburau is his subversiveness, a notion that is suggested in Janin's book by the ironic tone that he adopts toward the established theatre of the Comedie-Franc.aise64 and by the stress that he places on the popular nature of Deburau's character, whom he calls Gilles in this passage: "Forward, then, my joyful Gilles. Gilles is not such and such a man with a specific proper name and social standing - Gilles is the people. Gilles, who is alternately joyful, sad, sick, healthy, beating others, beaten himself, musician, poet, silly, and always poor like the people."65 The link here between Pierrot, the poor downtrodden clown, who is always beaten and is always unlucky in love, and the downtrodden social classes is an important one, for it suggests the potential of this character for political as well as artistic subversion and underlines the links between protest against the established art forms and the political attack on established power structures. Deburau's dictum "Ignoble theatre is the only one possible today"66 could serve as a programme for Bertolt Brecht or Meyerhold.67 Hence, the notion of commedia dell'arte as a subversive - even revolutionary form seems to have crystallized in both France and Germany during the romantic period. Deburau formed the subject of a play, Deburau (1918), by Sacha Guitry. Guitry sought to recreate the atmosphere of the Theatre des Funambules in its heyday. "The scene shows the interior of the Theatre des Funambules. The auditorium is crammed, and the little stage is at the far end of the stage. In a box at the far end Victor Hugo is chatting with George Sand and Musset."68 Guitry's theatre-within-atheatre is a feature that becomes typical of the integration of commedia into a wider theatrical tradition, beginning with the romantics. The commedia scenario entitled "Marrchand d'habits" that Guitry incorporates into the first act of his play was quoted from an article by Theophile Gautier in the Revue de Paris of 4 September 1842 and contains a classic description of Pierrot: "Pierrot walks about with his hands plunged in his waist-coat pockets, hanging his head and dragging his feet. He is sad; a secret melancholy is devouring his soul.

36 Pierrot in Petrograd

His heart is empty and his purse resembles his heart; Cassandra, his master, replies to his requests for money with one of those peremptory kicks that happen so frequently in the dialogue of pantomimes."69 In the scenario, Pierrot murders a clothes merchant in order to have the finery necessary to pursue the object of his heart, a duchess. He is haunted by the ghost of the merchant and finds death when the latter strangles him in a death-hug so that "the victim and the murderer are skewered by the same steel like two may-bugs stuck with the same pin."70 The pantomime is embedded in a drama about Deburau's life, in particular his love affair with Marie Duplessis, who leaves him, triggering Deburau's departure from the stage. The last act of Guitry's play again takes place in the Theatre des Funambules, when Deburau's place is taken by his son.71 Guitry's play is of interest in that it illustrates the extent to which the life of Deburau - and Pierrot, the character whom he developed - had caught hold of the popular imagination and been transformed into a cultural myth. The ramifications of this myth are described in some detail by A.G. Lehmann72 and by Robert Storey, who traces the continuation of the Deburau tradition by his son Charles and such actors as Paul Legrand, Louis Rouffe, and Severin.73 Storey notes, "That the Romantics, suffering from a Byronic mal de siecle, could see themselves as much disinherited as Pierrot or le peuple is not at all surprising; and for Banville and Charles Baudelaire, the life of the saltimbanques - the Gilles and the Pierrots of the streets - soon became a symbol for that of the artist."74 In his discussion of the "Pierrotique" theme in French literature as manifested in the poetry of Verlaine and Laforgue, Storey shows the Pierrot myth, with its infusion of moonlit melancholy and sinister undertones, had as powerful an impact on the French romantics as Shakespeare's Hamlet.75 Indeed, Pierrot and Hamlet become conflated into a single persona, especially in such works as Laforgue's "Complaintes de Lord Pierrot," 'Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot," and "Complaintes des noces de Pierrot," in which the image of Pierrot as the perpetual loser in the struggle for Columbine's charms serves as a fulfilling metaphor for Laforgue's horror feminae. As the century wore on, the Pierrot theme became more and more divorced from the flea-pit theatre of its origins, and more and more the property of the aesthete and the poet, a convenient pose with overtones of dandysme and perversion, innocence and cruelty.76 Such contradictory tendencies were manifested in Laforgue's Pierrot fumiste (1882), as described by Lehmann: "Pierrot ('en habit noir, monocle incruste dans 1'arcade sourcilliere,' supreme dandy and impotent poet) misbehaves at his wedding, reads

37 Who Was That Masked Man? the Pornographe illustre during the cortege, flouts bourgeois platitude and feminine cunning, scandalously neglects his Columbine; when respectability, impatient with the never-consummated marriage, pronounces legal separation against the impossible bridegroom, he violates her and dances off to Cairo."77 In the 18905 Pierrot migrated across the Channel to become incarnated in the insipid quasi-Shakespearean verse of Ernest Dowson's The Pierrot of the Minute. This idyllic interlude, which takes place in the Pare du Petit Trianon, is inspired more by Watteau than Huysmans or Laforgue. In it Pierrot is visited by a moon maiden when he falls asleep by Cupid's temple. The playlet by Dowson is mainly of interest because of the series of drawings by Aubrey Beardsley that it inspired (although these are, at best, only tangentially related to Dowson's text, showing such scenes as Pierrot in his library, Pierrot on his deathbed, and so on). The drawings were in turn influential on Russian draughtsmen of the World of Art school and were later used to illustrate Vadim Shershenevich's translation of Laforgue's Pierrot fumiste.78 THE MODERNIST REVIVAL OF C O M M E D I A

Around 1900 commedia begins to assume a new role as an international phenomenon, especially in the theatre. Although the sources of this revival can be found in the role of Pierrot in French symbolist poetry, it took place particularly in the theatre, and acquired the form of a return to more vital forms of theatre, as a diversion from the dominant realistic mode. Probably the most important single impulse to the revival of commedia is to be found in Ruggero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. Performed for the first time in 1892 in Milan, this opera quickly swept Europe.79 In it we find the classic Harlequin-Columbine-Pagliaccio (a Pierrot-like figure) triangle presented first as a "real-life" situation, then as play-within-the-play, as the itinerant players enact a commedia which then ends tragically. Leoncavallo managed to compress into his short work the essence of the nineteenth-century romantic vision of Pagliaccio/Pierrot as a "laughter through tears" character, especially in Canio's famous aria "Vesti la giubba." The tragic outcome reflects Canio/Pagliaccio's inability to separate role from life, art from reality. The role breaks down and reality intrudes, fatally this time when he hears Nedda as Colombina repeat the same words - "A stanotte - IE per sempre io saro tua!" in the play as she has in "real life."

38 Pierrot in Petrograd KING

HARLEQUIN

Another early manifestation of the international interest in commedia was King Harlequin (Konig Harlekin, 1900), by the Viennese playwright Rudolph Lothar (1865-1943).80 This play was something of an international incident. In his introduction to the French edition of 1903, Jean Jullien notes that it "has been shown with success on almost all the main stages of Europe" and was translated into Italian, English, Spanish, Hungarian, Croatian, Polish, Swedish, and Danish.81 Moreover, it was suppressed by the Viennese censorship at its dress rehearsal and in Turin after seventy performances! Apparently, the play was suspect because of the anti-authoritarian and anti-monarchical tendencies that it displayed. Although the work is now forgotten, it was very important in the history of commedia dell'arte productions in Russia. King Harlequin, which takes place in a mythical place in Italy, tells a tale of court intrigue.82 The king of the realm is on his deathbed. His dissolute son, Bohemund, is betrothed to the courtier Tancred's daughter Gisa, but she loves Bohemund's simple-minded cousin Ezzo. When Bohemund brings a commedia dell'arte troupe to the castle, Harlequin kills him and takes his place, since he is a perfect mimic. The old king dies and Harlequin/Bohemund assumes the throne. Although the people complain of his despotism, he is torn between the need to be a cruel ruler and his sympathy for the common folk. Moreover, when Columbine flirts with him, he is torn with jealousy, for she does not realize his true identity, yet he triumphs when he manages to seduce her as king. At the end of the third act, to Pantalone, whom he has taken into his confidence, he threatens to become himself again. In the fourth act Columbine plans to kill "the king" for murdering Harlequin (a job that Gisa offers to do for her). When he upbraids her for her infidelity, she reveals her intent to him, and they are reconciled. Harlequin, now revealed, is threatened by the courtier Tancred, but Harlequin threatens to make him a laughing-stock, and Tancred lets him and Columbine go. In the last scene Bohemund is declared dead, and his simple-minded cousin Ezzo becomes king and Gisa queen. The audience is left with the ironic spectacle of a foolish and childish king being greeted by all. It is not hard to see why this play has not stood the test of time. To the modern sensibility it is sadly lacking in humour, and its ironies are heavy-handed and contrived. The point of the play lies in the rejection of the monarchy, which is presented as the unbridled pursuit of power and the debauched exploitation of the people. This

39 Who Was That Masked Man? machiavellian philosophy is espoused above all by Tancred. There are no admirable wielders of power (indeed, it can be argued that there are no admirable characters at all). Harlequin's rejection of the role of king suggests that the only position to adopt towards power is ironic rejection. The laughter that Harlequin returns to at the end is not a healthy phenomenon, but rather a complacent self-indulgence. In its decadent nihilism, Lothar's play is a product of the last days of the Hapsburg monarchy. In its determination to make its point, it succeeds mainly in showing that ideas, however ingeniously presented, are the death of theatre.83 In artistic terms, the play is of interest in that it shows the logical result of the reversal of roles: the despised underdog (Harlequin) becomes master, but he cannot stomach the hard decisions that the exercise of power requires. Paradoxically, the play tends to confirm the cruelty and power of monarchs, since it offers no alternatives. The plot is reminiscent of Love for Three Oranges in some particulars, for example, the Gisa/Ezzo intrigue, which parallels that of Clarice and Leandro, except that the intriguers triumph, an important reversal of the traditional "happy ending." In other respects we may see the play as a pastiche of Hamlet, since the same issues of power and action are addressed, and there is much in Harlequin's reflectiveness that bears comparison with Shakespeare; not to mention the role of the troupe of actors, which has an obvious parallel in Hamlet. Unfortunately, however, there is no play-within-the-play (which might have relieved the unrelenting seriousness of the action). We might classify Lothar's play along with Schiller's Turandot, in that it bears only the outward trappings of commedia dell'arte - that is, the names of the characters - but their presence is unmotivated, and the play has a unity of style that removes it from the tradition. Its popularity is symptomatic of a stage in the revival of the tradition when the nature of commedia was misunderstood as a set of images or theatrical characters, not as a structural rupture with the dominant, realistic theatre.84 THE BONDS

OF

INTEREST

Another work that played an important role in the modernist revival of commedia was The Bonds of Interest (Los Intereses creados, 1907), by the Spanish playwright Jacinto Benavente. The action "takes place in an imaginary country at the beginning of the seventeenth century." It begins in the tradition of commedia, with a prologue recited by Crispin in which he introduces and defends the genre of the play. The first act opens in a very traditional fashion in a city square. On

40 Pierrot in Petrograd

the right foreground is an inn. Two vagabonds, Leander and Crispin, enter. They fool the Innkeeper into giving them the best of everything. Crispin's somewhat subversive views come out early. "There are two [inns] in every city in the world; one for people who arrive with money and the other for persons who arrive like us."85 He tells Leander they must not pawn their fine clothes for food, but "make the most of our talents and our effrontery, for without effrontery talents are no use."86 Crispin manages to impress the Innkeeper with Leander's importance, and they are treated to the best. When the Captain and Harlequin enter - at their wits' end because their credit is exhausted - Crispin takes them under his wing and persuades the innkeeper to treat them lavishly as his master's guests. In the play Harlequin is an impecunious poet, while the Captain is the traditional braggart. He too has a rebellious streak (which was to acquire a resonance in Revolutionary Russia). "They abuse us and despise us, and seek to economize out of our martial misery, which is the little pay that they give us, and would dismiss us if they dared, if they were not afraid that some day all those whom they have oppressed by their tyranny and their greed would rise up and turn against them."87 The main intrigue concerns Donna Sirena, a widow, who is trying to marry off Sylvia, the daughter of Polichinelle, an unscrupulous and vulgar self-made man, advantageously and get a kickback from the successful suitor. Crispin intrigues to promote Leander's cause with Sylvia. Cunningly he warns Polichinelle against Leander (who is seen dancing with Sylvia in the background); in this way he provokes Polichinelle to oppose the union of Sylvia and Leander, and thus arouse the spirit of contradiction in Sylvia and make her fall in love more deeply. The second act opens in a room in Leander's house. To make Sylvia fall in love with Leander, Crispin has organized an attack on him, spreading the rumour that it was Polichinelle who was responsible. Leander disagrees with this tactic and confronts Crispin. In response, Crispin describes their situation: their credit is at an end and there is a lawsuit pending against them. However, "we have intertwined ourselves with the interests of many, and the bonds of interest will prove our salvation."88 Sylvia comes, and Leander reveals all the deceptions to her. Crispin enters, and they hide Sylvia, since a crowd is coming; Leander escapes through a window. Polichinelle enters with the Innkeeper, Pantaloon (Leander's landlord, who wants his rent), the Captain, Harlequin, the Doctor, the Secretary, constables, and so on. There is much play with the Doctor's (i.e., lawyer's) pedantry and Pantaloon's greed. Crispin explains that in order to get paid they must all make the marriage possible. They

41 Who Was That Masked Man?

all join forces to pursuade Polichinelle. Sylvia renounces her wealth to marry Leander, but Polichinelle finally assents to their marriage. Then Crispin tells Leander that he is going to leave him. Finally Silvia addresses the audience. "You have seen in it [the farce] how these puppets have been moved by plain and obvious strings, like men and women in the farces of our lives ... But into the hearts of all there descends sometimes from heaven an invisible thread ... of love which ... whispers to us still that this farce is not all a farce, that there is something noble, something divine in our lives which is true and which is eternal, and which shall not close when the farce of life shall close."89 Benavente's play is as graceful, witty, and charming as Lothar's is flat-footed. It is filled with a poetic lightness that still speaks to the present-day audience, for the play has been successfully turned into a modern opera.90 To be sure, it documents in a traditional way the rifts in the world between rich and poor, master and servant (rifts symbolized, incidentally, by the stylistic contrast of the commedia masks and the other characters). This thesis is illustrated when Crispin comments on the "mixture of ruin and nobility in one person" and continues, "It is better to divide among two persons that which is usually found confused clumsily and joined in one. My master and myself, as being one person, are each a part of the other."91 All this is part of the theme of quality and rabble, of the duality of humanity, that runs through the play: Crispin is base and scheming so that Leander can be noble and attractive. However, over all there is the "magic thread of love," of which Sylvia speaks at the end and which is symbolized by the warm and sensuous lyricism that infuses the play.92 The commedia elements are not as coherently integrated as one might expect: as in the Lothar play, there is no true playwithin-the-play, and the characters who have commedic names could just as easily not. In short, the commedia dell'arte elements are simply unmotivated theatrical colouring.

PIERRETTE'S

VEIL

One of the crucial figures in the evolution of the modernist version of the commedia was Arthur Schnitzler, whose pantomime Pierrette's Veil (Der Schleier der Pierrette, 1910) was a synthesis of his typical salon dramas, such as the Anatol cycle, with the stylistic resources of the commedia pantomime.93 The playlet tells a story of jealousy, love, and marriage that is somewhat reminiscent of the situation in Anatol's Wedding (Anatols Hochzeitsmorgen, 1888). It is the day of Pierrette's wedding, and she returns to her lover Pierrot for one final fling. He

42 Pierrot in Petrograd

persuades her to engage in a suicide pact by taking poison with him, but after he has drunk, she hesitates. He dashes the glass to the ground, and she leaves him dead. In the second "picture," we see the wedding ball. Pierrette is nowhere to be found, and Arlecchino, her groom, smashes the musical instruments in his rage. When Pierrette finally enters, they proceed to dance to the strain of the broken instruments, but Pierrot appears to her carrying the wedding veil that she has left in his apartment, and she leaves in horror. In the third picture, back in Pierrot's apartment, Pierrette enters, followed by Arlecchino. Arlecchino vents his rage on the dead Pierrot, then tries to seduce Pierrette. She is horrified, and he departs in a rage. Pierrette performs a dance that becomes more and more expressive of her madness, and then finally dies at Pierrot's feet. In the final scene, Pierrot's friends enter and dance, but then recoil in horror when they see the dead couple. Although Schnitzler's play is written in the form of a dialogue, he stresses that all this must be done in mime, a challenge to the expressiveness of the actors, who must find gestural equivalents for such dialogue as this: PIERROT

(leading her to the window). Look how beautiful the world is. All this is ours. Come, let's run away. PIERRETTE. Run away? No! Where to? What should we do? We have no money. There is no other way. We must die.94

Schnitzler, then, exploits the tendency of modernist commedia to become wordless pantomime, an effect that gives the acting a dancelike quality (when it is not actual dance) by stressing gesture, and foregrounds the music in the play, which is performed on the stage and is an integral part of the action. The smashing of the instruments at the wedding ball and the subsequent discordant music is both a striking theatrical effect and highly symbolic of the forced marriage of Pierrette. Symbolic, too, is the masterly balance in the play of the commedia elements with the Viennese environment (albeit, a hundred years remote in time) familiar to the audience from other plays. This counterpoint is signalled early in the description of Pierrot's room, which is that of a poor Viennese artist and looks out over the city, and yet is dominated by the painting of Pierrette on an easel. The description of costume - Pierrot's is a "mix of the traditional dress of Pierrot and that of Old Vienna," while Pierrette is dressed in an "old Viennese bridal gown with nuances of the costume of Pierrette" - similarly suggests this symbolic amalgam of two totally different traditions. As a result, the whole play acquires a more clearly

43 Who Was That Masked Man?

symbolic import than Schnitzler's erotic dramas. The audience is invited to contemplate the symbolic links between eroticism and death, and the ironic coexistence of the two theatrical traditions which is taken for granted by the actors in the play - suggests our sublime oblivion to such matters as the paradoxical coexistence of the merry carnival of life and the horrendous.95 SETTING THE STAGE

This survey of some of the important events and texts in the cornmedia tradition illustrates, among other things, the multi-faceted nature of that tradition as the Russian modernists inherited it. If the plays of Gozzi and Tieck were essentially joyful, light-hearted celebrations of theatricality, fairy-tales for the stage made colourful by the touches of commedia, other texts had different messages to bring. Thus Lothar's text, which was so important at the time, turns out to have been an ephemeral, heavy-handed piece of anti-monarchist propaganda that did not need the (contrived) use of commedia masks to convey its message, while Benavente's drama was a poetic essay that used the masks as a stylistic device to heighten the dream-like, romantic sentiments of the play. In Schnitzler's text a very different notion of commedia was present: the sinister, grotesque, Hoffmannian tradition derived from German romanticism. The international theatrical and literary traditions of commedia were firmly established by the early 19003, when we begin our review of their Russian manifestations. It was essentially to this international tradition that Russian directors, playwrights, and poets responded, finding their principal inspiration and sources in the work of Gozzi, Tieck, Deburau and his French followers, Laforgue, Schnitzler, Lothar, and Benavente, which we have examined.96 Out of this motley amalgam of texts and influences, they were able to produce a uniquely Russian version of commedia, one that was to play a crucial role during one of the most fertile and exciting periods in the history of Russian culture.

CHAPTER TWO

Improvisation and Dissonance: Commedia dell'Arte and the Crisis in Theatre Sein ... spielen ... kennen Sie den Unterschied so genau, Chevalier?1 O if only people could be more narrow-minded and understand that the honest craft of actors is a high rank, and that the attempts to plant all these Count Gozzis onto our poor, pensive, brainy, RUSSIAN northern soil are only so much extravagance. All this is painful because Meyerhold is so fine, and so is that unfortunate cripple Solov'ev as well.2

As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the interest in commedia dell'arte among Russian directors and playwrights was part of an international phenomenon that reached Russia quite late and corresponded to the needs of Russian theatre at that moment in time. Common throughout the wealth of Russian theoretical writing on the theatre that appeared in the first two decades of the twentieth century is the word "crisis."3 All writers seemed agreed that Russian theatre was indeed in a state of crisis, although they may have differed on the nature of the crisis and the reasons for it. For some it was a crisis of the realist tenets upon which the most successful practice of the time - that of the Moscow Art Theatre - was based. For some it was a crisis of repertory: the absence of appropriate plays to renew the theatrical experience. For yet others it was a crisis of the audience. Some even saw it as a crisis in society itself. As N.E. Efros wrote in 1918 of pre-Revolutionary Russian theatre, "It had long been in crisis, and it has been pointed out more than once that this theatrical crisis was to a considerable degree simply the reflection and consequence of a more general crisis of everything that can be described as prerevolutionary culture, which had tangled itself in tragic, irreconcilable contradictions."4 Out of all this talk of crisis there emerged the outlines of a renewal of theatre along different lines. Of course, this renewal was not a

45 Improvisation and Dissonance

uniquely Russian matter - far from it - although it took very specific forms in the Russian context. Rather, it was a part of an international renewal of the theatre that had begun with the ideas of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, and continued in the writings and practice of Georg Fuchs, Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt, and others. There are common threads running through the writings of all these theorists. In particular, there is a common detestation of the deadness and falseness of nineteenth-century bourgeois theatre, with its view of theatre as entertainment. Although they differed in details, the theorists were agreed on the need for a revolution in theatrical art to overcome such outworn conventions of that theatre as the primacy of the literary text, the proscenium arch separating performer from audience (contemptuously referred to as the "peep-hole"), the realistic illusion, the horseshoe-shaped auditorium inherited from opera, and so on. Renewal in the theatre was to be found, they thought, in a return to the vitality that had characterized the origins of drama among the Greeks and in medieval theatre, popular theatre, Japanese theatre, and so on. Stress was laid on the sources of drama in ritual and cult, and the need to create anew emotional communion between actor and spectator that would approximate a religious experience.5 With the advantage of hindsight we can see the crisis in theatre as part of a questioning of the conventional sign that runs through linguistics, poetry, the visual arts, and criticism, and it can ultimately be traced in the political events in Europe of the early twentieth century as well. As Saussure showed in his Course of General Linguistics, the linguistic sign (and, by extension, the sign in other "secondary modelling systems" - the arts, etc.) can be seen to be composed of a signifier and a signified that are locked in a deep, but arbitrary ("conventional") embrace. In theatre, which can be analyzed as a structure composed of signs, there are two types of sign: the conventional and the real.6 Thus (to borrow an example from Briusov),7 the sign "forest" may be denoted by a placard bearing the word "forest," or the director may choose to have a number of real trees onstage. In the evolution of Russian theatre in the late 18905, this opposition between conventional and real signs became the object of polemics and divisions. The problem began with Stanislavskii's productions, in which there was a tendency to privilege the "real" at the expense of the conventional. Chekhov was among the first to draw attention to the problem, in a well-known comment made at the rehearsal of his play The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre. Chekhov was distracted by the noise of frogs and chirping of crickets offstage.

46 Pierrot in Petrograd "What's that for?" Anton Pavlovich asked in dissatisfied tone of voice. "It's real," replied an actor. "Real," Anton Pavlovich repeated, laughing, and then after a brief pause continued: "Theatre is an art. Kramskoi has a genre painting in which the faces are depicted marvellously. What if one were to cut the nose out of one of the faces and insert a real live nose? The nose would be 'real,' but the picture would be ruined."8

For Chekhov, that is to say, art is composed of conventions, signs that stand in the place of real objects. To introduce a real object into a system of conventional signs is an offence against the "grammar" of the artwork. Valerii Briusov made a similar criticism of Stanislavskii's theatre in his article "Unnecessary Truth,"9 in which he again drew attention to the conflict between conventional and real signs. "To reproduce life onstage truthfully is impossible. Theatre is by its very nature conventional. One can replace some conventions by others, that is all."10 Thus, to develop Briusov's example cited above, both a placard with the inscription "forest" and some real trees onstage serve equally as signs for the abstract notion "forest." It should be said that both Chekhov and Briusov essentially misunderstood the intent of Stanislavskii's theatre and reacted only aesthetically to the grotesqueness of the result. In fact, theatre is different from the other arts (e.g., painting, which makes Chekhov's example unfair) in one crucial way, since there are always two types of sign present in theatre: the conventional (e.g., a painted backdrop) and the reality of the actor's body. Although the reality of the actor can be reduced through costumes, make-up, or the mask, the only way to achieve complete unity of signs is to dispose of the actor completely, for example, by using puppets, so that the theatre becomes entirely one of convention. Stanislavskii's theatre expresses an equal embarrassment at the problem of the incompatibility of the two sign systems in theatre. But rather than aiming at a theatre that privileges the conventional, it strives to achieve an equally unattainable result: the elimination of the conventional in a theatre that would be composed only of the real, a theatre of "experience" (perezhivanie). The theoretical base of Stanislavskii's theatre is to be sought in Tolstoi's critique of theatrical convention, a critique that is to be found in both his fiction and his theoretical writings "What Is Art?"11 and "On Shakespeare and Drama."12 Probably the best-known use of this device by Tolstoi is the description of the opera as seen by Natasha in War and Peace: The stage consisted of smooth planks in the centre, with some painted cardboard representing trees at the sides, and a canvas stretched over boards

47 Improvisation and Dissonance at the back. Girls in red bodices and white petticoats sat in the middle of the stage. One extremely fat girl in a white silk dress was sitting apart on a low bench, to the back of which was glued a piece of green cardboard. They were all singing. When they had finished their song the girl in white advanced to the prompter's box, and a man with stout legs encased in silk tights, with a plume and a dagger, began singing and waving his arms about ... After her life in the country, and in her present serious mood, all this seemed fantastic and amazing to Natasha. She could not even listen to the music: she saw only the painted cardboard and the oddly dressed men and women who moved, spoke, and sang so strangely in that brilliant light. She knew what it was all meant to represent, but it was so blatantly false and unnatural that she felt alternately ashamed for the actors and amused by them.13 The device selected here by Tolstoi to critique the role of convention in theatre is the denuding of the device, or "defamiliarization" (obnazhenie priema), which foregrounds the conventional, unreal nature of the theatrical sign by describing it from the point of view of a naive viewer, in this case the innocent Natasha Rostova.14 The conventional sign in the theatre is the result of a contract between spectator and director. Stanislavskii's tendency to privilege the real over the conventional signifies his desire to "break the contract." Like Tolstoi's theoretical attack on convention, Stanislavskii's theatrical practice suggests, ultimately, that the contract which creates theatrical convention is immoral, because convention is a lie. The crisis around the theatrical sign cannot simply be understood on semiotic terms, however. Underlying the two different sign systems - the real and the conventional - is a deeper, structural problem, namely that of point of view and the locus of the subject. In the totally conventional theatre, the events enacted are represented to the audience, whose needs and purpose dominate. It is noteworthy that the word "represent" is used twice in the above passage. For Tolstoi the notion of representation is philosophically unacceptable. Elsewhere in War and Peace he writes, "The innumerable categories into which it is possible to classify the phenomena of life may all be subdivided into those in which substance predominates or those in which form predominates."15 By "form" we should here, I suggest, read "representation"; that is, Tolstoi sees the presence of two different systems in society and takes a moral stance in favour of one over the other. In the opera that Natasha finds so artificial, the dominant system is representation, with no account taken of "substance" (thus, in order to deconstruct representation as a system, he marks the substance of the spectacle negatively: "fat," "glued," and so

48 Pierrot in Petrograd on, to reveal the invisible grotesqueness of the result); the locus of the point of view - the subject, the authority - lies in the spectator and is external to the events represented, so that Natasha gets the impression that the spectator is being pandered to. Thus, Tolstoi's radical critique of theatre implies a shift of subject: from the audience to the actor him or herself, who, rather than representing, should present.16 This is why Stanislavskii's theatre emphasizes "experience," that is, the substance of life: the actor should actually experience the emotions of the character. In other words, she/he should merge with the character seamlessly, so as to eliminate the border between signifier (actor) and signified (character). As Michel Aucouturier has shown, Stanislavskii's theatre, which seemed to aim at a total separation of life and theatre, contained within itself, so to speak, the seeds of its own antithesis, that is, total theatricality, the theatre for itself: "The possibility of such a paradoxical metamorphosis of the realistic theatre into its opposite seems to be implied by the ambiguity of Stanislavskii's fourth wall: devised as the imaginary recreation on the stage of the conditions of real life, if understood literally, it can only result in theatre for oneself, where author, actor and spectator merge into one person."17 That is to say, Stanislavskii's theatre strove, ultimately, to have theatre and life merge onstage, so that a new unity of the subject - actor, director, spectator - would result. The presence of an "intruding" audience beyond the fourth wall is an embarrassing recognition of the lack of unity. The audience is, as it were, a peeping Tom, spying on the "real" and legitimate subject, the actor himself. The problem with Stanislavskii's theatre was that it was impossible to banish convention from a "conventional" (in the traditional sense) theatre. More radical attempts to do so can be seen in Nikolai Evreinov's notion of monodrama and the "theatricalization of life." As Aucouturier shows,18 the desire to have theatre and life merge - to achieve total theatricality - can be seen in such enterprises as the mass re-enactment (staged, we should note, by Evreinov) of the October revolution on its first anniversary, a reminder that for the Russian avant-garde the Revolution was essentially an aesthetic event, an artwork that they strove to appropriate - history and art becoming indivisible. In this mass re-enactment the problem of the externality of the subject is solved, since all present were actors. The quest for theatricality of life finds its ultimate expression in the Utopian dreamings of the Russian avant-garde, for whom the workers were actors/ puppets to be manipulated (through Taylorism and other means) in vast Utopian projects that are best described in Zamiatin's We.19 The paradox in all this is that the ostensible subject - the actor in the

49 Improvisation and Dissonance

play or the worker in the Utopia - is in fact the puppet, the "human material," to borrow Olesha's chilling phrase, to be manipulated and shaped by an actual subject, a controlling force - the director in the theatre, the dictator in the state - "for his own good." Hence, a central problem for modernist theatre (not only in Russia - Craig reached the same conclusion) was to have the actor's will merge with that of the director, so that the director - the ultimate, controlling subject would be the subject of the entire theatrical experience.20 Stanislavskii's theatre failed because it did not go far enough in theatricalizing life and banishing convention. The result was, as Chekhov and Briusov pointed out, an embarrassingly na'ive juxtaposition of the real and the conventionally realistic, the grotesque contradiction between the two being conveniently ignored. Instead, Briusov, like other symbolists, suggested a return to theatre as a religious act, as ritual. "From the unnecessary truth of contemporary theatre I say we should return to the conscious conventionality of ancient theatre."21 He was not alone. The following passage from Fedor Sologub's article "The Theatre of a Single Will" is exemplary in conveying the ecstatic, pseudo-religious outpourings of the first generation of symbolists: A theatrical spectacle, which people attend in search of amusement or distraction, will shortly cease to be merely a spectacle in our eyes. Ere long the spectator, wearied by the alternation of spectacles alien to him, wants to become the participant in a mysterium, as he once was the participant in playacting. Expelled from Eden, he will ere long knock boldly at the door behind which the bridegroom feasts with the wise virgins. He participated in innocent playacting when he was still alive, when he still dwelt in paradise, in the beautiful garden of the ego between two great rivers. But now the sole means of his resurrection is to participate in a mysterium, a liturgical ritual in which he can join his hand to that of his brother and sister and press his lips, eternally parched with thirst, to the mysteriously filled chalice in which the ego "shall mingle water and blood." To consummate in a bright public temple what is now consummated only in the catacombs.22

This belief in the unity of the arts, in the primal dramatic experience, led in practical terms to the search for a new synaesthesia in which music, poetry, gesture, painting, and architecture would combine to form a Gesamtkunstwerk. The new theatre that they advocated would be one of theatricality, characterized by the organic unity and vitality of all the elements of the production, and the primacy of theatre over them. From this theory it was, however, a long way to a successful praxis.

5O Pierrot in Petrograd In their pronouncements, the symbolists were in line with foreign developments. In particular, Fuchs's Revolution in the Theatre (1908) served as a manifesto to the movement for a theatrical renewal. In the book Fuchs, following Wagner, attacks the deadness of bourgeois theatre and deplores what he calls the "dictatorship of literature over painting, architecture, and drama."23 In his effort to rethedtmliser le theatre, he redefines drama as "the rhythmic movement of the human body in space"24 and stresses the need for emotional contact and unity between actor and audience. Unlike the symbolists, however, Fuchs seeks to demystify drama, which he sees as a craft rather than the work of geniuses, and he looks to primitive forms of theatre the Bavarian passion-play and the vaudeville - as sources of vitality. Fuchs's remark on the sheer ability and potential of the variety artist reads as programmatic, given the role that such artists were to be encouraged to play in Russia after the revolution. The variety, or vaudeville, stage is the place where drama in its simpler outlines is cultivated today in the form of dancing, acrobatics, juggling, sleight-of-hand, boxing, and wrestling, exhibition of trained animals, musical dialogues (chanson), and what not. The dramatic effectiveness of such performances is indisputable, and the possibility of their artistic perfection is beyond question. We need only think of such dancers as Ruth St. Denis, of Saharet and Barison, of certain "eccentrics," various equestrian performers, and of Japanese acrobats to be convinced that when they have had training in the field of aesthetics these performers have every right to be called artists.25 Although Fuchs does not mention commedia dell'arte by name, it is clear that his remarks on vaudeville, together with the glorification of "primitive" forms of theatre, can be read to include it. Essentially, Fuchs is suggesting a return to theatre as presentation rather than representation, circus and acrobatics being frequently quoted as examples.26 Fuchs's book was to have important echoes in the work of a number of Russian theoreticians, especially in a book on the theatre of the future (Teatr, kniga o novom teatre ) that contained essays by, among others, Lunacharskii, Briusov, and Meyerhold. In his contribution, entitled "Socialism and Art," Lunacharskii acknowledged frankly his indebtedness to Wagner. His anthropocentric view of history looked forward to a Utopian vision of a revolutionary theatre that would be collective in nature, rejecting the individualism that he saw as a principal vice of contemporary art, and would achieve a religious intensity. Lunacharskii's stress on collectivism (which was analogous

5i Improvisation and Dissonance to, but not the same as, Wagner's and Fuchs's more racially oriented return to the popular or "folkish" forms of theatre) was to become one of the characteristic features of Russian thinking on theatrical reform. The collection also contains Briusov's article "Realism and Convention [uslovnost ] on the Stage."27 Here, as in his earlier article, he objects to the coexistence of realism and uslovnost' in a theatre production. Briusov sees art operating between the two poles of the real and the conventional. He distances himself from the new tendency in theatre towards uslovnost' over realism (and the implantation of the real), since it tends to reduce the actor (who is, after all, "real") to an automaton (hence the popularity of the marionette in early twentieth-century theatre, for example, with Maeterlinck and Craig). Indeed, the call for renewal in theatre implied a readjustment of the relationship between the four basic elements of the theatrical performance: the actors, the author, the director, and the audience. If, in the past, the star actors and the literary author had vied for supremacy, the new theatrical experiments that sprang up generally placed the director at the head. The source of this tendency was surely Stanislavskii, who had imposed a new discipline on his actors and by developing the notion that there are no star roles - that each role is equally important, that an actor must be prepared to play any role - had replaced the star system with a collective of actors. If Stanislavskii had done so in the name of an extreme fidelity to the author's text, which only a powerful director could enforce, the next step was to proclaim tine primacy of the director's vision of the text and his right to change the text of the play in any way necessary to create his vision. A corollary of this hegemony of the director was the concomitant reduction of the actor to a puppet, a doll carrying out the will of the director.

COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE/ USLOVNYI THEATRE Among the voices who were advocating theatrical reform were a number who turned to commedia (as well as such other historical styles as the Noh theatre of Japan and the medieval mystery play, but to a much lesser degree) as a means of creating a new theatre that would be free of the stultifying and (politically and aesthetically) conservative trammels of realism. Commedia was a form of theatre that corresponded to the prevalent notions of the vitality of popular or primitive art. The masks of commedia, their acrobatic skills, colourful costumes, and grotesque gestures, were the height of

52 Pierrot in Petrograd

theatricality and proclaimed that theatre did not need to be believable in order to be enjoyable. The myth of the collective of actorjourneymen travelling from place to place in the practice of their craft was a satisfying one to those who had seen in the troupe of actors of the Moscow Art Theatre a useful alternative to the star system of the nineteenth-century theatre. Most important, however, in cornmedia dell'arte the two types of theatrical sign - the real and the conventional, presentation and representation - could coexist in a uniquely theatrical space. That is to say, instead of naively combining real and conventional signs in a way that creates the unintentionally grotesque effects which Chekhov and Briusov objected to in Stanislavskii's theatre, commedia dell'arte foregrounded the border between the two types of sign to create an intentional grotesque. The montage of styles that we have traced in traditional commedia dell'arte was in fact an example of the coexistence of two systems of signs exploited for effect. Moreover, in its purest form commedia had used a scenario, not a literary text. Indeed, in later versions the commedia had become pantomime, in which words were totally absent and the actor was left completely to his gestural resources. It was therefore a powerful weapon in the struggle against the hegemony of the literary text on the stage (except that here too the battle proved to be between the author and the director - see, for example, Meyerhold's "rewrites" of the texts that he staged). Structurally, as well, commedia offered a set of masks with typical gestures and characteristics. That is to say, it went completely in the opposite direction to realist theatre, which sought not typicality but individuality. Commedia triumphantly affirmed such types as the young lover, the cuckolded old man, the pedantic doctor, rather than being embarrassed about such overtly theatrical conventions. It revelled in such devices as the misunderstanding, the disguise, the incredible coincidence. Finally, commedia allowed fantasy to return to the stage - in the appearance of such characters as the Skeleton, Death, the talking animal, the doll that comes to life, and so on, and in the unbelievable plot. In short, it promised to do for theatre what the cube was doing for painting or the twelve-tone scale for music. VSEVOLOD

MEYERHOLD

The key figure in the theatrical renewal in Russia at the beginning of the century, especially as it incorporated commedia dell'arte, was Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940).w It is difficult to exaggerate Meyerhold's importance, for the span of his career - from his early

53 Improvisation and Dissonance beginnings as an actor in Stanislavskii's troupe, through his pre-i9iy work as a theoretician and experimenter in studio theatres and at the same time director in the state-owned Aleksandrinskii Theatre, to his post-1917 career as the most formidable avant-garde director in Soviet Russia - covered much of what was new and innovative in Russian theatre in the twentieth century. The image that dominates Russian theatre up to 1917 is of Meyerhold as Pierrot, alternately applauded and hissed by admiring and hostile audiences. In his career, for brief moments, theatrical renewal and political revolution became synonymous, and the grim rule that makes revolutions consume their progenitors was confirmed in his grisly end. There is a tendency to think that Meyerhold's theories sprang from nowhere, that they were a product of his original "Russian" genius. Such opinions clearly result from the reluctance of Russian specialists to deal with the extent of German influences on him, and perhaps also from their - and western Meyerhold specialists' - ignorance of the international theatrical scene. In fact, many of Meyerhold's theatrical theories are derived from the work of Appia (especially as far as the opera is concerned) and Fuchs, and his early practice as a director shows remarkable parallels to that of Max Reinhardt as sketched by Styan. Thus Meyerhold "served his time" as an apprentice actor with Stanislavskii (1897-1903) as Reinhardt did with Otto Brahm (1894-1901). Thereupon, each broke with his "naturalist" master and moved towards more theatrical types of stage production. Reinhardt acted in a midnight cabaret "Schall und Rauch," "presenting satirical sketches, songs and dances, its attendants all dressed like pierrot,"29 while Meyerhold began his first experiments with cabaret-style, commedia-inspired productions towards the end of the decade in the House of Interludes. There is, likewise, considerable similarity in the repertoire that each choses: Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and a scandal-provoking production of Wedekind's Friihlings Erwachen (Reinhardt: 1906; Meyerhold: 1908). It is also worth noting that they both flirted with the possibilities of mass drama: Reinhardt at Salzburg and Meyerhold in his early post-1917 productions, such as Mystery-Bouffe and The Dawns (Lori). Meyerhold makes clear his indebtedness to such thinkers as Richard Wagner, Georg Fuchs, and Adolphe Appia in his theoretical writings that appeared before 1917.30 These writings show the breadth and depth of Meyerhold's readings on theatre at this time. In particular, Meyerhold shares the revulsion of Wagner and Fuchs at the stultification of nineteenth-century theatre. Like Fuchs, Meyerhold lays the blame at the feet of literature: "In the contemporary theatre the comedian has been replaced by the 'educated reader.' The

54 Pierrot in Petrograd

play will be read in costume and make-up' might as well be the announcement on playbills today. The new actor manages without the mask and the technique of the juggler. The mask has been replaced by make-up which facilitates the exact representation of every feature of the face as it is observed in real life. The actor has no need of the juggler's art, because he no longer 'plays' but simply 'lives' on the stage."31 Elsewhere in the same essay ("Balagan"), Meyerhold notes that "the restoration of the traditional theatre [i.e., a 'theatrical' theatre] is hampered by the alliance which the public itself has formed with those so-called dramatists who turn literature for reading into literature for the theatre - as though the public's attitude to the theatre were not confused enough already."32 Like Wagner and Fuchs, Meyerhold proposes a return to the ancient and hallowed well-springs of theatre as an antidote to the decline of theatricality. These are various, and they bring with them a new, positive vocabulary to oppose to "realism" and "literariness." Firstly, there is the balagan, which furnishes the title for one of Meyerhold's most seminal articles. Generally, this term is translated as "fairground booth," especially as the title of Blok's play of that name, which Meyerhold directed in 1906 (see below, chapter three). However, the title of Blok's play is in the diminutive, the -chik ending denoting endearment rather than size. In fact, the term refers not just to the booth itself (which Meyerhold represented concretely in his production as a miniature theatre-within-a-theatre) but also to the street farce that was enacted in the fairground booth (e.g., during maslennitsa, the Russian Shrove-tide). It is therefore closely related to the theatre forain in Paris. More importantly, the term is used figuratively in Russian, rather as the English "farce," but more pejoratively, to mean vulgar theatre or even a scandal of any kind in which conventional decorum is flouted. Meyerhold ironically places this pejorative meaning on its head to signify the notion of epater le bourgeois. A balagan, or scandal, was precisely what he tried to provoke (successfully, as it turns out) in his production of Blok's play. The ironical title, with its tinge of endearment, was an affront to the bourgeois theatre-goer and ironically anticipated his/her reaction to the spectacle. Thus, in the "transvaluation of values" that Meyerhold brings about in his writings, balagan becomes a positive term, and to it he assimilates other terms that had been at times used pejoratively, such as cabotin, bouffon and bouffonade, clown and "clownade," and, of course, commedia dell'arte. Additional sources of inspiration were the Japanese Noh theatre and Attellan comedy. All of these served as examples of a vital popular tradition - of theatre as theatre.33

55 Improvisation and Dissonance

The theatre of the future that Meyerhold proposed to create, and to which all his experimentation and theoretical research tended, could be summed up in the single term uslovnyi. It was Meyerhold, more than any other director, who realized uslovnyi theatre in concrete terms and made it his own, both in his writings (which included an article entitled precisely that - "Uslovnyi Theatre") and in his stage practice. This practice was ultimately inspired by the estranging techniques of Tolstoi's prose as discussed above. Tolstoi had drawn attention to, "foregrounded," the use of convention in his descriptions of theatre. Meyerhold's theatre similarly foregrounds conventions, but he does so not in order to discredit convention, which he understands is inevitable, but to renew theatre. His first steps towards uslovnyi theatre had been made with the production of Maeterlinckian symbolist plays, for example, The Death of Tintagiles (rehearsed at the Theatre-Studio founded by Stanislavskii, where Meyerhold worked during the summer of 1905, but never shown to the public). Solutions proposed to the problems of a non-naturalist production included the shallow stage, in which the actors appeared as if in a bas-relief, a plasticity of action that corresponded to the inner emotions portrayed, and a new type of theatre decoration that consisted of decorative panels.34 However, the possibilities represented by symbolist drama proved limited, and Meyerhold quickly moved on. In his writings on Wagner, a new and essential element enters, namely the pantomime. It is Meyerhold's thesis that the music, not the text, should determine the actions of the players in the Wagnerian opera. Richard Wagner reveals the inner dialogue through the orchestra; the sung musical phrase lacks the power to express the inner passions of his heroes. Wagner summons the orchestra to his assistance, believing that only the orchestra is capable of conveying what is ineffable, of revealing the mystery to the spectator ... the actor's word in the drama is an insufficiently powerful means of conveying the inner dialogue ... merely by declaiming words, even by declaiming them well, one does not necessarily say anything. We need some new means of expressing the ineffable, of revealing that which is concealed. Just as Wagner employs the orchestra to convey spiritual emotions, I employ plastic movement ... I am speaking of a plasticity which does not correspond to the words.35

The liberation of the stage play from the hegemony of words leads Meyerhold to the wordless play, that is, to pantomime, and to the theatre of improvisation. "In order to revive the theatre of the past contemporary directors are finding it necessary to begin with

56 Pierrot in Petrograd pantomime, because when these silent plays are staged they reveal to directors and actors the power of the primordial elements of the theatre: the power of the mask, gesture, movement and plot."36 He even proposes that the dramatist begin writing improvisations rather than complete texts. "He will quickly find that he is faced with the intricate task of composing scenarios and writing prologues containing a schematic exposition of what the actors are about to perform. Dramatists will not, I trust, feel degraded by this role."37 Pantomime was important not only in combatting literature in the theatre, but also because it implied a role for the audience in "cocreating" the theatrical work of art and solving the problem of what Meyerhold called the "segregation of actor and public"38 that had been brought about by the footlights, the proscenium arch, the orchestra pit, and the distance separating the actor from the audience in the realistic theatre; for him, as for Fuchs, this segregation was a principal obstacle to theatrical renewal and the attainment of emotional communion between actor and audience. As Meyerhold put it: "Ultimately the stylistic method [of uslovnyi theatre] presupposes the existence of a fourth creator in addition to the author, the director and the actor - namely, the spectator. The [uslovnyi ] theatre produces a play in such a way that the spectator is compelled to employ his imagination creatively in order to fill in those details suggested by the stage action".39 Pantomime brought with it the notion of improvisation, for essentially it consists of a series of improvisations by the actor based on a libretto. This did not necessarily imply greater freedom for the actor; on the contrary, discipline, technique, and a high degree of training were required, just as they had been in the golden age of commedia dell'arte, when, as we have seen, the actor had to master an arsenal of lazzi and set speeches and had to be a skilled acrobat, juggler, and even funambulist.40 The difference lay in the fact that the commedia troupes seem to have functioned as true collectives, whereas the apparent freedom of the modernist actor was subordinated to the expression of the director's will.41 A very important aspect of Meyerhold's writings on commedia dell'arte is to be found in his article "Balagan" (translated by Braun as "The Fairground Booth").42 This is his discussion of the grotesque, for it is precisely the grotesque that Meyerhold saw as the objective and raison d'etre of the theatre of the future that he was building.43 Meyerhold refers in particular to the manifesto of the Berlin Uberbrettl cabaret: "Depth and extract, brevity and contrast! No sooner has the pale, lanky Pierrot crept across the stage, no sooner has the spectator sensed in his movements the eternal tragedy of mutely

57 Improvisation and Dissonance suffering mankind, than the apparition is succeeded by the merry Harlequinade. The tragic gives way to the comic, harsh satire replaces the sentimental ballad."44 Although Meyerhold describes this as "an apologia for the favourite device of the fairground booth - the grotesque,"45 he insists that the grotesque is not simply a means of creating contrasts but "an end in itself." Like Gothic architecture, for example, in which the soaring bell-tower expresses the fervour of the worshipper whilst its projections decorated with fearsome distorted figures direct one's thoughts back towards hell. The lusts of the flesh, the sin of lasciviousness, the insurmountable bestiality of life: all these seem to be designed to prevent excessive idealism from turning into ascetism. Just as in Gothic architecture a miraculous balance is preserved between affirmation and denial, the celestial and the terrestrial, the beautiful and the ugly, so the grotesque parades ugliness in order to prevent beauty from lapsing into sentimentality. The grotesque has its own attitude towards the outward appearance of life. The grotesque deepens life's outward appearance to the point where it ceases to appear merely natural. Beneath what we see of life there are vast unfathomed depths. In its search for the supernatural, the grotesque synthesizes opposites, creates a picture of the incredible, and invites the spectator to solve the riddle of the inscrutable.46 What, one is inclined to ask, does this evocation of the grotesque (which reads like Bakhtin's apotheosis of the Rabelaisian and the carnivalesque) have to do with the humble Italian comedy of masks? Clearly, Meyerhold puts into words and holds up as an objective what had been present in the popular theatre of Italy and later France only by chance, unconsciously. Seeing commedia as a source of the grotesque had not occurred even to Ernst von Wolzogen, the author of the manifesto. It is Meyerhold's contribution to the tradition, a realization of something that had previously been latent. Moreover, in his notion of commedia there is a balance and a contrast between the intellectualized image of Pierrot created by the French romantics (and the concept of the "Pierrotic" that it projected) and that of Harlequin, who is seen as a down-to-earth, instinctive character. This is a scheme that is really only made explicit in the Russian variant of commedia and, one is tempted to believe, expresses the maelstrom of contradictions that was engulfing the Russian intelligentsia at the time. Meyerhold goes on to cite different examples of the grotesque, from Blok's Balaganchik, through a draft of a play by Pushkin, to Sapunov's designs for the Dapertutto production of Schnitzler's

58 Pierrot in Petrograd Columbine's Scarf. Meyerhold's parting shot is a response to the question he poses (from Blok's playlet The Unknown Woman ): "Cannot the body, with its lines and its harmonious movements, sing as clearly as the voice?" Meyerhold replies: When we can answer this question in the affirmative, when in the art of the grotesque form triumphs over content, then the soul of the grotesque and the soul of the theatre will be one. The fantastic will exist in its own right on the stage; joie de vivre will be discovered in the tragic as well as in the comic; the demonic will be manifested in deepest irony and the tragic-comic in the commonplace; we shall strive for "stylized impossibility," for mysterious allusions, deception and transformation; we shall eradicate the sweetly sentimental from the romantic; the dissonant will sound as perfect harmony, and the common-place of everyday life will be transcended.47 Meyerhold's statement is a coherent and inspiring defence of the grotesque as a desideratum in the theatre. It is of a piece with an age that was fighting bitterly against the false harmonies and saccharine banalities it had inherited from the nineteenth century. Essentially, by espousing the grotesque, Meyerhold realized that the only solution to the problem of the coexistence of the two sign systems (posed by Stanislavskii's theatre) was not to attempt to eliminate one of them but to exploit the effect that occurs when the two are montaged. His essay posits a new theatrical genre that we can call the balagan, in which the border between the real sign (e.g., the actor's body) and the conventional one (the character he or she is playing) is foregrounded. In this new genre, presentation (e.g., acrobatics) and representation (the use of conventional signs) are both heightened to their maximal effect. As a result, the unity of perspective that in traditional theatre was external - located in the audience - and in the circus, let us say, was internal - located in the the actor onstage - is shattered. A characteristic of the balagan as a theatrical genre is the shift of perspective from audience to actor as the action shifts from presentation to representation.48 This discovery flowed naturally out of Meyerhold's research on the commedia dell'arte, since one of the principal devices of commedia is the shift from the role to the acrobatic gesture or the "role" of actor - the 'Ausder-Rolle-fallen" that Tieck had so emphasized in his play-texts. The accounts that we have of at least two of his productions Columbine's Scarf and Balaganchik - lead us to believe that Meyerhold was largely successful in realizing his programme; moreover, it is not difficult to see the inspiration of his ideas in several post-i9iy productions by other directors. It is in the work of Meyerhold that a new

59 Improvisation and Dissonance

theatrical genre is born. We may call it Russian avant-garde commedia dell'arte, the theatre of convention (uslovnyi teatr), or quite simply, as Meyerhold did, balagan. HOFFMANN AND

THE GERMANS

The importance of the grotesque in Meyerhold's work reflects an interesting phenomenon of the 19108 and 19205 in Russia, namely, the resurgence of interest in E.T.A. Hoffmann (who had in the past exerted a considerable influence on such writers as Gogol' and Dostoevskii). The revival of the Hoffmannesque was in part attributable to the collapse of the realist poetic and the search by Russian writers for innovation through complexity and exaggeration in plot (e.g., the so-called "Serapion Brothers" of the 19205). The Hoffmannesque enters Meyerhold's work through the assumed name "Doctor Dapertutto." This is a diabolical character in the tale "The New Year's Eve Adventure" ("Die Abenteuer der Sylvesternacht"), who is instrumental in the hero Erasmus giving up his reflection in the mirror. The grotesque figure of Dapertutto, and the way he manipulates the fate of Erasmus, evidently offered an attractive persona to Meyerhold (one which was reinforced when in 1916 he played Dorian Gray in the film based on Wilde's novel, the Hoffmannesque elements of which are self-evident). Although Hoffmann did not write for the theatre, one Russian theatre-director, Tairov, directed a stage version of the story Princess Brambilla) (Die Prinzessin Brambilla) in 1919. This production made considerable use of commedia elements and was intended to reflect the Gozzi-Tieck tradition. The journal Love for Three Oranges served as an important outlet for Russian research and theoretical articles on commedia dell'arte, publishing material by Konstantin Miklashevskii and Vladimir Solov'ev, as well as translations of plays and scenarios (including Tieck's Puss-in-Boots, Gozzi's Love for Three Oranges, etc.).49 In addition, the journal included a regular feature entitled "Hoffmaniana" (sic) by Vladimir Kniazhnin and others, which contained research and notes on such questions as the reception of E.T.A. Hoffmann in Russia - testimony to the importance that Meyerhold's circle attached to Hoffmann in the context of commedia dell'arte. In this section there is an interesting note entitled "E.T.A. Hoffmann on the Stage" by Sergei Ignatov. It is a discussion of the unfinished dramatic work by that author entitled "Princess Blandina." Ignatov considers that in Hoffmann's work "Callot blended with Gozzi" and sees in the play "the possibility of a scenic creation 'in the manner of Callot,' in which the director would need the techniques of Gozzi,

6o Pierrot in Petrograd

for in this dramatic fragment Hoffmann is so close to the Italian fabulist."50 Specifically, Ignatov thinks that the grotesque poses of the figures on the forestage at the beginning of the fragment should remind one of such pieces by Callot as "The Fan," "The Tournament in Florence," or "Primo intermedio." He continues: "Meanwhile on the illuminated stage the action unfolds, the characteristic features of which are a very rapid tempo, convention foregrounding [uslovnost 1 in the style of commedia dell'arte, rhythmical movements and a sharply expressive mimicry. In the performance one should avoid the coarseness characteristic of commedia dell'arte, remembering that we have to do not with an exaggerated parody, but with a light irony which must be carefully conveyed. We should also not forget the character of that theatricality that Hoffmann had in mind."51 It is evident from the closeness with which he follows Meyerhold's "line" that Ignatov was one of his students. Apparently this production, for which the note reads like a preliminary director's sketch, never took place. Ignatov's note is followed by an unsigned review of a translation of Hoffmann's Princess Brambilla. The reviewer remarks approvingly, "This is not only one of Hoffmann's most resplendent and harmonious achievements, in which he attains a compete and graceful immersion in Callot and Gozzi, but it is a work that is particularly close to the Russian reader."52 The journal also published a seminal article by Viktor Zhirmunskii on the German sources for Russian commedia dell'arte entitled "The Comedy of Pure Joy."53 In it he discusses Ludwig Tieck's Der gestiefelte Kater and its links with Carlo Gozzi's comedies. Zhirmunskii begins his paper with a description of the discovery of Gozzi's comedies by the German romantics, especially Schlegel and Novalis, who found in them "a splendid joy" of pure play, free of any didacticism, and were carried away by them into a "world of another order, more exalted, joyful, and resplendent than the one that surrounds us."54 What fascinated the romantics, according to Zhirmunskii, was the irony that coexisted with this lyrical vision, and which had its source in the play of the masks. In their conscious comic play, their reflection of what is said by the heroes, they accompany all they do and say. They are onlookers, ideal comic mirrors of differing curvature that distort in varying ways the development of the poetic action. By their comments on the action, their remarks addressed to the audience, their mentions of the phenomena of everyday, non-theatrical reality, they disrupt the scenic illusion of the main, lyrically significant action, or rather, they reveal the illusoriness of everything that happens on stage ...

61 Improvisation and Dissonance what is depicted on the stage is not solid, material reality, but only a merry game, only a spectacle invented to amuse the spectators.55

Here, Zhirmunskii suggests, the romantics found the precursor of Tieck's use of metatheatrical characters as commentators on the action and exposers of its illusory nature. This was not to say that Tieck had the same objectives or that he achieved the same results as Gozzi. Thus the participation of the denizens of the parterre in the action permitted Tieck to develop the element of comic reflection that in Gozzi had been borne by the masks. This element is developed here into a separate plot - the "action in the parterre," the characters of which are the spectators. It could be called "the story of how a romantic comedy/fable was received by the enlightened public." In this connection the disruption of the scenic illusion also assumes completely new and exclusive forms. The presence of a public onstage, the participation of an author and a theatre technician who converse with the audience - all this gives the fairy-tale plot the character of something illusory, unreal, a merry game, a fair-ground spectacle, not serious reality.56

Zhirmunskii goes on to argue that the development of the metatheatrical aspect of the play gives Tieck's plays different qualities from those of Gozzi, qualities that are especially relevant for the contemporary Russian stage: "the poetic content of the children's fairy-tale is as it were totally absorbed by the comedy of the artistic form. The dramatis personae of 'Puss in Boots' are in a sort of contemporary and pointedly trivial travesty. In the fairy-tale plot everything reminds us of our time and our every-day life, so that it by the same token loses that fairy-tale perspective, that temporal and spatial distance from us that is necessary for the sympathetic reception of the fantastic and miraculous images and events."57 The unreality of the action reminds Zhirmunskii of Hoffmann's comment that the best theatre for Gozzi's plays would be the marionette theatre. Zhirmunskii's final observation is one of the most important, namely that Tieck's satirical portrayal of the audience and its expectations realism, everyday detail, and didacticism - corresponded closely to that found in recent Russian plays; in particular he mentions Blok's Balaganchik. His conclusion explains why such theatrical activists as Meyerhold found Gozzi and Tieck interesting: "Not only in the general feeling of life, but in many details of the development of artistic forms our contemporary Symbolism (or Neo-Romanticism) holds astonishing analogies with the Romanticism of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries."58

62 Pierrot in Petrograd NIKOLAI EVREINOV

An absolutely seminal figure as theorist of drama, playwright, and director in the period before and immediately after the Revolution was Nikolai Evreinov (1879-1953). He was active as an instigator of the Theatre of Antiquity (Starinnyi teatr) in St Petersburg, which was formed to recreate plays from great theatrical periods from the past (e.g., Greek and Roman theatre, the medieval mystery, the theatre of the Renaissance, and so on).59 The intention was to accelerate the renewal of theatre in Russia by giving audience and theatre specialists alike a clear grasp of the achievements of past eras. Included in the programme of reconstruction of the Theatre of Antiquity was the harlequinade.60 It was Evreinov's intention to devote an entire season, the third and last in the history of the Theatre of Antiquity, to the commedia dell'arte; however, the war intervened and Konstantin Miklashevskii, who was to play a key role in the season, was drafted.61 It was typical of this initial period of experimentation that actors and directors were driven to reconstruct the theatre of past periods.62 The interest in commedia was partly motivated by this desire to recreate a theatrical event from the past - what one might call an act of theatrical archeology. An important aspect of Evreinov's work at the Theatre of Antiquity was what he referred to as the "reconstruction of the spectator." This meant having actors onstage dressed in the clothing of the period of the play who would serve as an "audience." The real audience in the auditorium was thus in the same "voyeuristic" position as at the Moscow Art Theatre (even though Golub asserts that Evreinov did away with the "fourth wall"),63 since the play itself was directed at the audience onstage. The essential problem of metatheatre is that of the perspective of the audience and how it should related to the "audience" onstage.64 Evreinov's solution was to hope that the perspective of the surrogate audience would somehow be adopted by the audience. Meyerhold tried to do things differently: he planted actors among the spectators in the audience. Essentially this technique was no better, since the spectator is always aware of the distance (and hence difference of perspective) between him and the actor - be he onstage or sitting next to him. Where Evreinov's approach distanced the audience from the events onstage and imposed an intellectual response to a "museum piece," Meyerhold tried to involve the contemporary audience and evoke an emotional response to a living piece of theatre. Both techniques were attempts to solve a basic (unresolvable) problem, namely, to give meaning to the presentation of a play from a different era, a play divorced from the social and aesthetic environment that had created

63 Improvisation and Dissonance

it. Interestingly, the solution adopted by both directors involved an element of metatheatre, creating a surrogate "audience" of actors, and thus incorporated a basic device of commedia dell'arte. Apart from his work with the Theatre of Antiquity, Evreinov was associated principally with the Crooked Mirror cabaret theatre (Krivoe zerkalo), in which he served as artistic director from 191017. It was here, as well as in his short-lived Merry Theatre for GrownUp Children (Veselyi teatr dlia pozhilykh detei), that Evreinov was able to realize the unique theatrical genre that he invented: monodrama. In this genre he attempted to solve the problem of the fragmented subject - reflected in the multiple, conflicting perspective of theatre - in the most radical way. If, as Ivanov had pointed out, drama had originally had only one character, Apollo, whose unified perspective was shattered by the intervention of Dionysus, then the way back to a pristine unity was by refocusing the theatrical event back onto the perspective of a single individual.65 Fundamentally, all Evreinov's experiments in monodrama revolved around the problem of point of view in the theatre, as he showed in his article "Introduction to Monodrama" ("Vvedenie v monodramu," 1908). 57' 84, 133, 145; in Russian poetry, 142, 148; hostile attitude towards, 116 Pilniak, Boris, 202 Pilsudski, 186 Pirandelto, Luigi, 115, 135, 164-7, 168-9, 187, 188, 189; and actors' discipline, 323ni2; and problem of authority, 322n9; - plays: Each in His Own Way, 164; Six Characters in Search of an Author,

164-7; Tonight We Improvise, 164 Pirosmanishvili, 10 Plautus, 22; The Twins, 112 play-within-the-play, 6, 11, 24, 29, 39, 105, 115, 133, 135-6, 142, 159, 160, 161, 162-3, 168, 170, 176, 178, 197, 3o6n33 Players' Rest, 87, 91, 92, 3Oin46 Pobeda nod solntsem. See Kruchenykh, Aleksei Podviazka Kolombiny. See Eisenstein, Sergei Poema bez geroia. See Akhmatova, Anna Pogrebnichko, lurii: The Seagull (production of Chekhov's Chaika), 164 point of view in theatre. See perspective Pokryvalo P'eretty: (play), see Schnitzler, Arthur; (theatre production), see Tairov, Aleksandr Polichinelle, 40. See also Pulcinella Poloumnyi Zhurden. See Bulgakov, Mikhail Popular Comedy Theatre, 68, 70, 112-15, 215 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste. See Moliere Pornographe illustre, 37 Poslednii burzhui. See Miklashevskii, Konstantin Potemkin, P.: Petrushka, 3i9ri35 Pozharskaia, 99 Pravda, 203 presentation, 48, 50, 52, 58, 69-70, 161, 186, 3O5ni6, 3o6n26, 333ni4See also representation Presniakov, 88 primitivism in art, 5, 10 "Primo intermedio." See Callot, Jacques

364 Index "Princess Blandina." See Hoffmann, E.T.A. Princess Brambilla. See Tairov, Aleksandr Princess Turandot: (play), see Gozzi, Carlo; (theatre productions), see Komissarzhevskii, Fedor, and Vakhtangov, Evgenii Printsessa Turandot: (play), see Gozzi, Carlo; (theatre productions), see Komissarzhevskii, Fedor, and Vakhtangov, Evgenii Prinzessin Brambilla, Die: (tale), see Hoffmann, E.T.A.; (theatre production), see Tairov, Aleksandr Prival komediantov. See Players' Rest Prodelki Smeral'diny. See Solov'ev, Vladimir N. Proffer, Ellendea, 200, 201 Prokof'ev, Sergei, 7; Love for Three Oranges (Liubov' k trem apel'sinani), 3oon4i, 32on5o Proletcult, 209 "prompter": as character in play, 80 Pronin, Boris, 91 provincial theatre, 309^8 Przybyszewski, Stanislaw, 3ion4 Puccini, Turandot, 302^9, 3i/n6i Pugachev, 231 Pul 'chinelo. See Razumovskii, S.D. Pulcinella (Pulcenello, Punch), 22 Puppet Show. See Meyerhold, Vsevolod puppets, 14, 48. See also doll: the actor as Pushkin, Aleksandr, 5, 11, 57, 68, 82, 137; Bronze

Horseman, 137; "The Coffin-Maker" ("Grobovshchik"), 170; Ruslan and Liudmila, 82; Tales of Belkin, 13 Puss in Boots. See Tieck, Ludwig Putta onorata, La. See Goldoni, Carlo Pyman, Avril, 142-3 400 Farces du diable. See Melies Quo vadis. See Sienkiewicz, Henryk Rabelais, 57, 153, 155 Radix, 193 Radlov, Sergei, 35, 68, 112-3, 3001141; experiments with circus, 70-2, 112 - productions: The Dead Man's Bride, or The Wooing of a Surgeon (Nevesta mertvetsa, Hi Svatovstvo khirurga), 112; The First Distiller (Tolstoi's Pervyi vinokur), 112; The Twins (based on play by Plautus), 112 raeshnik, 191 Rameau, 95 Ratov, Sergei, 321^2 Razin, Stenka, 8 Razumovskii, S.D., 10910, 159, 3i5n24; ; lunaia buria (The Young Storm), 3i5n24; Pul'chinelo, 10910, 3i5n25 Re cervo. See Gozzi, Carlo "Realism and Convention on the Stage." See Briusov, Valerii realism in the theatre, 6, 51, 122, 134, 159-61, 167, 187, 206-7, 211/ 213 Red Army, 126, 183, 18990, 209; theatre, jijnzq.

Reed, John, 332^ Reinhardt, Max, 45, 53, 71, 108, 174, 186; production of Turandot, 923, 30in59, 312^3, 3123n6o religious experience in theatre, 45, 49, 183, 184, 227 Renaissance, 6, 168; theatre of, 62 Renaissance: (play), see Schonthan, Franz von; (theatre production), see Nezlobin, K. representation, 47, 50, 52, 58, 69-70, 161, 175, 186, 3O5ni6, 333ni4- See also presentation Revizor: Rezhisserskaia buffonada. See Evreinov, Nikolai Revolution, French, 116, 229-35, 3iin24 Revolution, Russian (Soviet), 6, 50, 68, 81, 91, 1O1-2, 111-12, 159,

162, 184, 229-35. See also October revolution Revolution, Russian (of 1905), 6 Revolution in the Theatre. See Fuchs, Georg Revue de Paris, 35 Riccoboni, Luigi, 17, 18, 20, 24, 25 Richards, Kenneth, 17 Richards, Laura, 17 "rigorism," 8, 305^0 Rilke, Rainer-Maria, 7 Rimskii-Korsakov, 101, 149; Le Coq A'or, 101 Ripellino, Angelo Maria, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188 Ristori, Tommaso, 128 Ritter, Naomi, 157 ritual: sources of drama in, 45 Rocker, Ned, 210

365 Index Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 184, 211 Rodina, T.M., 140 Roman theatre, 62 Romanov, E.G., 87, 96 romanticism, 25, 61, 207; French, 8-9, 25, 36; German, 29-34, 60-1, 217 Rosenberg, Hilding: Marionettar, 117, 303 ROSTA telegraph agency, 185 Rostand, Edmond: "Pierrot qui pleure et Pierrot qui rit" (translated as "P'ero plachushchii i P'ero smeiushchiisia"), 304^6 Rouault, Georges, 7 Rouffe, Louis, 36 Rubinshtein, 115 Rudnitskii, Konstantin, 80, 86, 102, 107, 111 Ruslan and Liudmila. See Pushkin, Aleksandr Russian avant-garde theatre, 6 Russian Dramatic Theatre (Moscow), 96 Russian folk-tale, 8 Russian theatre: cornmedia as the solution to, 51-2; crisis in, 43; perspective and nature of subject in, 47-9; problem of repertoire in, 67-8; problem of the sign in, 45-7, 213; renewal of, 43-4, 62, 66; symbolism in Meyerhold's productions, 3iori4; symbolist manifestos on, 49-51 Ruzzante. See Beolco, Angelo Sacchi, Antonio, 19, 21, 22, 26 Sage. See Eisenstein, Sergei

St Petersburg, 4, 10, 14, 62, 77, 81-6, 113, 125, 128-9 Sakhnovskii, Vasilii: critique of Benois's La Locandiera, 101; critique of Komissarzhevskii's Turandot, 93-4; on improvisation, 3067n4o; production of Goldoni's Pamela the Servant, 3i2n5& Salome, 8 Samoe glavnoe: (play), see Evreinov, Nikolai; (theatre production), see Petrov, N.V. Samoubiitsa. See Erdman, Nikolai Sand, George, 35 Sand, Maurice, 17-18, 20, 22, 23, 34, no Sapunov, Nikolai: designs for Balaganchik, 78, 81, 82; designs for Columbine's Scarf, 57, 84-5, 92, 99; designs for Turandot, 92-3, 96 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8 Satirikon, 80 Saussure de, Ferdinand: Course of General Linguistics, 45 Sayler, Oliver, 105-6 Sbornik komedii 1733-1735 gg> "3 Scala, Flaminio, 17, 20, 23 Scales. See Vesy Scaramuccia (Scaramouche, Scaramuccio), 23; in Razumovskii's Pul'chinelo, 109-10; in Tieck's Topsy-Turvy World, 31 "Schall und Rauch" (cabaret), 53 Scheherezade, 8 Schiller, Friedrich, 68; Turandot, 32-3, 39, 94-6, 118, 3Oin59 Schlegel, 60

Schleier der Pierrette, Der: (play), see Schnitzler, Arthur; (theatre productions), see Tairov, Aleksandr; and Meyerhold, Vsevolod Schnitzler, Arthur, 41-3, 57, 82, 83, 84, 85, 131, 304n96; Anatol, 41; Anatols Hochzeitsmorgen (Anatol's Wedding), 41; Der griine Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo, translated as Zelenyi popugai), 128, 233-4, 3iin24 - Der Schleier der Pierrette (Pierrette's Veil) (play), 41-3, 133, 3ioni5; as Pokryvalo P'eretty (Pierrette's Veil), 97-8; as Sharf Kolombiny (Columbine's Scarf), 57, 82-6; as Columbine's Garter Podviazka Kolombiny), 210 Schonberg, Arnold, 7 Schonthan, Franz von, 75, 92; Renaissance, 92; Zirkusleute, n, 75 School of Scenic Art, 90 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 12 Schorske, Carl, 219 Schumann, 118 Scythians, 8, 171 Seagull: (play), see Chekhov, Anton; (theatre production), see Pogrebnichko, lurii Segel, Harold B., 132, 154 semiotics, 3, 6, 45-6, 211, 220, 230; and Eisenstein's poetic, 33onz4 Serapion Brothers, 59, 189 Servitore di due padrone, II (Servant of Two Masters). See Goldoni, Carlo Serzh. See Aleksandrov, A.S. Severin, 36

hhh Shakespeare, 36, 39, 123; Hamlet, 39, 70, 133, 159, 168 Sharantsev, Evg. (translator of Lothar's Konig Harlekin), 3031184 Sharf Kolombiny: (play), see Schnitzler, Arthur; (theatre production), see Meyerhold, Vsevolod Sharmanka. See Guro, Elena Shershenevich, Vadim, 70; translation of Laforgue's Pierrot fumiste, 37, 133, 319^0 Shishmanov, V.N., 109 Shklovskii, Victor, 285; 'Art as Device" ("Iskusstvo kak priem"), 3O5ni4; "The Resurrection of the Word" ("Vbskreshenie slova"), 161 Shrove-tide. See maslennitsa Shut na trone: (play), see Lothar, Rudolf; (theatre production), see Zvantsev, N.N. Sienkiewicz, Henryk: Quo vadis (Kama griadeshi), 115, 178, 3161147 signs in the theatre: real and conventional, 45-7 Six Characters in Search of an Author. See Pirandello, Luigi Skaramuz. See Scaramuccia skaz, 192 Slepian, 115 Sluga dvukh gospod. See Goldoni, Carlo Smeraldina's Escapades. See Solov'ev, Vladimir N. Smert' Dantona. See Biichner, Georg Smolny, 225 Social-Democratic Party, 110

"Socialism and Art." See Lunacharskii, Anatolii Socialist realism, 13 Sologub, Fedor, 49; "The Theatre of a Single Will," 49 Solov'ev, Vladimir N., 44, 59, 88, 91, 307n4i; critique of Komissarzhevskii's Turandot, 94-6, 118; critique of Tairov's Los Intereses creados, 967; Harlequin the CardLover (Arlekin pristrastnyi k kartam), 237, 257-71; Harlequin the Marriage Broker (Arlekin khodatai svadeb), 89-91; theatre production: Prodelki Smeral 'diny (Smeraldina's Escapades), 113-14, 117, 3i5n39 Solov'ev, Vladimir S., 138 Somov, Konstantin, 156, 171 Souvenirs des funambules. See Champfleury Soviet cinema, 7, 208 Soviet critics, 13 Soviet Russia, 10, 116, 122-3, 159> *62/ 169, 195 Soviet school of structural poetics. See semiotics Soviet theatre: political background, 309^9 Sozdannye interesy: (play), see Benavente, Jacinto; (theatre production), see Tairov, Aleksandr Spain, 5, 19, 20, 104, no, 131 Spanish conquerors of Italy, 22-3 Spasskii, N.M. (translator of Pagliacci: Paiatsy), 303*79 Spavento, 22; in Razumovskii's Pul 'chinelo, 10910

Spengler, 9 Spezzafer. See Spavento Spiess-Eschenburg, 90 Spisok blagodeianii. See Olesha, lurii Spitzer, Rudolph. See Lothar, Rudolph sports event as theatre, 69 Stalin, Joseph, 10, 3O5n2o Stalinism, 108, 188 Stanislavskii, Konstantin: 65, 75, 161, 168, 200, 213, 225; Meyerhold as an apprentice of, 53, 55; naturalism of, 6, 12, 134, 207-8, 218; object of parody, 151-2, 174; problem of the sign in his theatre, 45-9, 52, 58, 206-7; production of Andreev's Life of a Man, 86; theory of "experience" (perezhivanie), 46, 48, 120-1, 163-4, 172, 175 Starinnyi teatr. See Theatre of Antiquity State Academy of Artistic Sciences, 3061140 Steadfast Prince: (play), see Calderon; (theatre production), see Meyerhold, Vsevolod Stenka Razin. See Kamenskii, Vasilii Stone Nakhimovsky, Alice, 193 Storey, Robert E, 26, 36 Strauss, Johann, 100 Strauss, Richard, 7 Stravinskii, Igor', 7, 75, 106; Petrushka, 106, 127, 130, 131, 136-8, 156, 191, 3o6n33 Stray Dog cabaret (Brodiachaia sobaka), 87, 115, 149, 156 Strindberg, 91 Struwelpeter, 10

367 Index Studiia E.B. Vakhtangova, (formerly Tret la studiia M.Kh.A.T.), 118 Studiia na Borodinskoi (Studio on Borodinskaia Street), 111, 112 Studiia na Liteinom (Studio on Liteinyi Street), 71, 112 Sturm und Drang, 94 Styan, J.L., 53 subject in the theatre. See perspective Such a Woman. See Evreinov, Nikolai Sudeikin, Sergei, 91, 3oin64; designs for Tairov's Los Intereses creados, 96 Sudeikina, Ol'ga, 322niO4 Suicide. See Erdman, Nikolai Summer Maly Opera Theatre, 118 suprematism, 105, 106 Swan, John, 5, 8, 11 Swan-Song. See Chekhov symbolism, 8, 11, 12, 61, 160; French, 9, 133; Russian, 49, neoromanticism, 61, 134, 137, 144, 154-5, 184 symbolist drama, 55, 162 Sypher, Wylie, 136, 167 Taganka theatre, 124 Tairov, Aleksandr, 96-101, 102, 161, 162, 200 - theatre productions: The Bonds of Interest (Iznanka zhizni; translation of Benavente's Los Intereses creados), 96-7, 156, 3i3n73, 3i3n74; The Fan (Veer, translation of Goldoni's // Ventaglio), 101; King Harlequin (Korol' Arlekin, translation of Lothar's Konig Harlekin), 104-6; Pierrette's Veil

(Pokryvalo P 'eretty; translation of Schnitzler's Der Schleier der Pierrette), 97-101, 210, 3O4n95; Princess Brambilla (stage version of Hoffmann's Die Prinzessin Brambilla), 59, 73, 106, 107-8, 129, 162, 3i4ni7; The Toybox, 106 Takaia zhenshchina. See Evreinov, Nikolai Takoshimo, 71 Tales of Belkin. See Pushkin, Aleksandr Tarasov, N.L., 92 Tarkovskii, Andrei, 217 Tartaglia, 22, 27-9, 32, 945, 109, 120 Tartuffe. See Moliere Taureg, I.V., 71, 113 Taviani, Ferdinando, 18 Taylorism, 48, 217, 30^19, 319^5 Tchaikovskii, Petr: Nutcracker, 106, 132, 136, 156 Teatr i iskusstvo, 93, 237 "Teatr kak takovoi." See Evreinov, Nikolai Teatr, kniga o novom teatre, 50 Teatr na Ofitserskoi, 76, 182 Teatr Nezlobina. See Nezlobin theatre Teatr Presnenskogo raiona M.S.R.K.D., 109 Teatr RSFSR-I, 68 Teatr v Tavricheskom sadu, 117, 118 Temptation of Damis. See Glazunov, Aleksandr TEO. See Theatre Department of the Commissariat Terioki, 88-91, 102, 307n4i, 3i7n68 "Theatre as Such." See Evreinov, Nikolai

"Theatre, Cinema, Futurism." See Maiakovskii, Vladimir Theatre de la Foire, 26. See also theatre forain Theatre Department of Petrograd, no Theatre Department of the Commissariat (TEO), 69 Theatre des Funambules, 18, 34, 35-6, 75, 129, 235. See also Deburau, Jean-Gaspard theatre forain, 10, 25, 26, 34, 65, 228, 234 Theatre in the Tauride Gardens, 117, 118 Theatre on Ofitserkii Street, 76, 182 "Theatre of a Single Will." See Sologub, Fedor Theatre of Antiquity, 623, 64, 85, 86, 183, 3o8n59, 3o8n62 Theatre of Revolutionary Satire. See Moscow Terevsat theatre Theatre of the Presnia region of the Moscow Soviet of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies, 109 Theatre-Studio (Meyerhold's), 91, 102 theatre-within-the-theatre, n, 35, 54, 77, 144, 160, 162, l88, 191, 2OO-1

Theatrical October, 69 theatricality; theatricalization of life. See Evreinov, Nikolai theatrum mundi, n, 14, 24, 81, 98, 144, 181 There may be God all over. See Vvedenskii, Aleksandr Theroigne de Mericourt. See Hervieu, Paul Third International, 183 Third Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre.

368 Index See Studiia E.B. Vakhtangova, 150 Thomas, Dylan, 197 "Three Left Hours," 193 Three Magi. See Evreinov, Nikolai Tieck, Ludwig, 5, 29-32, 33, 43, 58, 59, 60-1, 80, 92, 135, 142, 153, 178, igi, 201,

3011155

- Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss in Boots; in Russian, Kot v sapogakh), 29, 59, 601, 76, 80, 92, 21O-1,

218; as a source for Blok's Balaganchik, 32on56 - Die verkehrte Welt (The Topsy-Turvy World), 23, 29 Time of Troubles, 8 Timoshenko, 115 Today's Columbine. See Evreinov, Nikolai Tolstoi, A.K., 68, 232, 3iin24 Tolstoi, Lev, 6-7, 104, 154, 178, 179; critique of theatrical convention, 46-8, 55, 161, 213; The First Distiller (Pervyi vinokur), 112; "On Shakespeare and Drama," 46; War and Peace, 46-8, 213, 219; What is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?), 6, 46 Tonight We Improvise. See Pirandello, Luigi Topsy-Turvy World. See Tieck, Ludwig Torda, Thomas Joseph, 104 "Tot, kotoryi poluchaet poshchechiny." See Andreev, Leonid "Tournament in Florence." See Callot, Jacques Toybox: (composition), see Debussy; (theatre pro-

duction), see Tairov, Aleksandr Treplev (in Chekhov's Seagull), 76 Tret'ia studiia M.Kh.A.T. See Studiia E.B. Vakhtangova "Tri levykh chasa," 193 Tri volkhva. See Evreinov, Nikolai Troitskii Theatre, 104 Trotskii, Leon, 201; Literature and Revolution, 182 Truffaldino, 21, 22, 27, 28, 120 Tsereteli, 100, 105 "Tsirk." See Gibshman Turandot: (play), see Gozzi, Carlo, and Schiller, Friedrich; (theatre productions), see Komissarzhevskii, Fedor, and Vakhtangov, Evgenii; (opera) see Puccini Turgenev, 123 Tuscan language, 23, 135 Tverskoi, K.K., 87 Twelve. See Blok, Aleksandr Twins: (play), see Plautus; (theatre production), see Radlov, Sergei typage, 210 Uberbrettl cabaret (Berlin), 56, 92 UTianov, Vladimir ITich (Lenin), 231 Uncle Vania. See Chekhov, Anton Unfailing Infidelity. See Evreinov, Nikolai Union of Youth, 182 Unknown Woman. See Blok, Aleksandr Uprising. See Verhaeren, Emile Urgesamtkunstwerk, 227 uslovnyi, uslovnost', 51, 56, 79, 98, 115, 121, 182,

189-90, 198, 216; uslovnyi theatre as genre, 6, 7, 58-9, 74, 111, 120, 161, 200, 206, 297n4 "Uslovnyi teatr." See Meyerhold, Vsevolod Uspenskii, Boris, 3, 21920; on point of view and the play-withinthe-play, 168, 201, 3o8n64 Utopia, 48-9, 50, 64, 171, 182, 185, 229-31, 305ni9 V kulisakh dushi. See Evreinov, Nikolai "V lunnom svete," 92 Vakhtangov, Evgenii, 73, 106, 188; production of Turandot, 73, 106, 107, 118-22, 123, 161-2, 202, 3Oin59, 3i7n62 variety, 50 vaudeville, 50 vecchi, 21, 22, 23 "Vechnyi zov." See Belyi, Andrei Vedrinskaia, 90 Veer, (play), see Goldoni, Carlo; (theatre production), see Tairov, Aleksandr Velikie Luki, 209 Venetsianskie bezumtsy (Venetian Madcaps). See Kuzmin, Mikhail Venice, 5, 19, 26, 28, 32, 66, 130, 156-7, 3011146 Ventaglio, II: (play), see Goldoni, Carlo; (theatre production), see Tairov, Aleksandr Verhaeren, 104; "La Revolte" ("The Uprising," translated as "Vosstanie"), 233, 332mi Verigina, 77, 89-90

369 Index verkehrte Welt, Die. See Tieck, Ludwig Verlaine, 36, 142; "Pierrot Gamin," 16 vertep, 187 Veselaia smert'. See Evreinov, Nikolai Veselovskii, Aleksandr, 212, 227, 299119 Veselyi teatr dlia pozhilykh detei, 63, 87, 150 Vesy (The Scales), 9, 142 Victory over the Sun. See Kruchenykh, Aleksei Vienna, 10, 82, 92; as evoked by Schnitzler, 42, 100 Viennese censorship, 38 Vladimir Maiakovskii. See Maiakovskii, Vladimir Vliublennye. See Meyerhold, Vsevolod Vogak, K.A., 3oort4i Vollmoeller, Karl (translator of Turandot into German), 3i3n6o Vol'naia komediia, 115-16, 118 Vosstanie. See Verhaeren Vsevolozhskii, I.A., 131 Vulcani, Antonio, 128 "Vvedenie v monodramu." See Evreinov, Nikolai Vvedenskii, Aleksandr, 193, 197-200; Christmas at the Ivanovs' (Elka u Ivanovykh), 198-200, 327nioi, 327nio5; Kupriianov and Natasha (Kupriianov i Natasha), 198-9, 327nio3; Minin and Pozharskii (Minin i

Pozharskii), 197-8; There may be God all over (Krugom vozmozhno Bog), 198 Vygotskii, Lev, 228 Wagner, Richard, 8, 45, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 72 War and Peace. See Tolstoi, Lev War Communism, 10, 69, 104, 114, 122, 229 Watteau, 17, 26, 37 Waugh, Evelyn, 8 We. See Zamiatin, Evgenii Weber, Die. See Hauptmann, Gerhard Wedekind, Frank: Friihlings Erwachen, 53 What Is Art? See Tolstoi, Lev White Guard. See Bulgakov, Mikhail Wilde, Oscar, 9, 59, 104, 304^3 Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. See Goethe Windsor, Duke of, 8 Winter Palace, 112, 224, 225, 232, 234 Witkacy, 160 Woe from Wit. See Griboedov, Aleksandr Wolzogen, Ernst von, 57 Woman Snake. See Gozzi, Carlo World of Art, 5, 10, 37, 101, 107, 128, 131, 137, 156, 171, 3ign29 Worrall, Nick, 107 Young Storm. See Razumovskii, S.D.

Youth Theatre of Krasnaia Presnia, 164 Zamiatin, Evgenii, 48, 74, 188, 190-2, 202; ; The Flea (Blokha), 190-2, 326n79; We (My), 8, 48, 190, 3O5ni9 zanni, 18, 21-2, 23, 29, 30, 66, 72, 120 Zapiski perdvizhnogo teatra P.P. Gaideburova i N.F. Skarskoi. See Gaideburov, P.P. Zavadskii, lurii, 202 Zavist'. See Olesha, lurii Zelenogorsk, 88 Zelentsova, Nina, 128 Zelenyi popugai. See Schnitzler, Arthur Zhenshchina-Zmeia. See Gozzi, Carlo Zhirmunskii, Viktor, 60-1, 108; "The Comedy of Pure Joy," 60 Zhukov, 115 Zirkusleute. See Schonthan, Franz von Znosko-Borovskii, 83 Zoikina kvartira (Zoika's Apartment). See Bulgakov, Mikhail Zolotnitskii, David, 68, 71, 87, 112-13, 115 Zori. See Meyerhold, Vsevolod Zorzi, Ludovico, 18-19 Zvantsev, N.N., 104; production of The Fool on the Throne (Shut na trone; translation of Lothar's Ko'nig Harlekin), 104, 106