Russian Futurist Theatre: Theory and Practice [Illustrated] 1474402445, 9781474402446

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance

Russian Futurist Theatre Theory and Practice Robert Leach

RUSSIAN FUTURIST THEATRE

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance Series Editor: Olga Taxidou Editorial Board: Penny Farfan (University of Calgary); Robert Leach (formerly of Edinburgh and Birmingham Universities); Ben Levitas (Goldsmiths, University of London); John London (Goldsmiths, University of London); Laura Marcus (University of Oxford); Marjorie Perloff (University of Stanford); Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (University of Oxford); Alexandra Smith (University of Edinburgh) Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance addresses the somewhat neglected areas of drama and performance within Modernist Studies, and is in many ways conceived of in response to a number of intellectual and institutional shifts that have taken place over the past 10 to 15 years. On the one hand, Modernist Studies has moved considerably from the strictly literary approaches, to encompass engagements with the everyday, the body, the political, while also extending its geopolitical reach. On the other hand, Performance Studies itself could be seen as acquiring a distinct epistemology and methodology within Modernism. Indeed, the autonomy of Performance as a distinct aesthetic trope is sometimes located at the exciting intersections between genres and media; intersections that this series sets out to explore within the more general modernist concerns about the relationships between textuality, visuality and embodiment. This series locates the theoretical, methodological and pedagogical contours of Performance Studies within the formal, aesthetic and political concerns of Modernism. It claims that the ‘linguistic turn’ within Modernism is always shadowed and accompanied by an equally formative ‘performance / performative turn’. It aims to highlight the significance of performance for the general study of modernism by bringing together two fields of scholarly research which have traditionally remained quite distinct – performance / theatre studies and Modernism. In turn this emphasis will inflect and help to re-conceptualise our understanding of both performance studies and modernist studies. And in doing so, the series will initiate new conversations between scholars, theatre and performance artists and students. Published The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema Anthony Paraskeva Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Irish Playwrights, Sexual Politics, and the International Left, 1892–1964 Susan Cannon Harris Modernism and the Theatre of the Baroque Kate Armond Beckett’s Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts Sozita Goudouna Russian Futurist Theatre: Theory and Practice Robert Leach Forthcoming Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance Olga Taxidou Pina Bausch’s Dance Theatre: Tracing the Evolution of Tanztheatre Lucy Weir www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecsmdp

RUSSIAN FUTURIST THEATRE Theory and Practice

Robert Leach

To Joy sine qua nihil sum

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Robert Leach, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Sabon and Gill Sans by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0244 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0245 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3670 0 (epub) The right of Robert Leach to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Poem on p. 8 copyright © 1975 by Ardis. First published in RLT No. 12. Published in 1976 in Snake Train: Poetry and Prose by Velimir Khlebnikov, reprinted by arrangement with The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., . All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vi Author’s Note ix Preface x 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Manifestoes and Meanings Theatricalising Futurism Futurism and Revolution Transrational Drama Futurist Acting The Montage of Attractions From Where to Where? The Case Is Closed

1 18 47 77 96 128 161 195

Chronology 224 Bibliography 232 Index 240

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Numbers in square brackets indicate colour plates. 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 [1]

2.5 2.6 2.7 [2] 2.8 [3] 2.9 3.1 3.2 3.3 [4]

3.4 [5] 3.5 [6] 3.6 3.7 3.8 [7]

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Illustrations by Natalia Goncharova for Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh’s book A Game in Hell 19 David Burlyuk with painted face 21 Larionov with Maximovich’s corpse in Drama in the Futurist Cabaret Number 13 26 Iosif Shkolnik, backcloth design for Act 2, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 29 Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1913 30 Kasimir Malevich, backcloth design for Act 2, ‘The Tenth Land’, Victory Over the Sun 35 Kasimir Malevich: the Fat Man from Victory Over the Sun (St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music) 38 Kasimir Malevich: Chorus Member from Victory Over the Sun (St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music) 39 Poster for Futurist appearance in Kazan, February 1914 43 Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik in Fettered by Film 54 Vasily Kamensky, ‘Cabaret’, ferro-concrete poem 56 Konstantin Vyalov, stage design for Stenka Razin, Theatre of Revolution, 1924 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 57 Konstantin Vyalov, costume design for Stepan Razin, 1924 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 59 Vladimir Mayakovsky, costume design for the Priest in Mystery Bouffe, which was not used 61 Clown Serge, cartoon by Sergei Yutkevich 67 Clown Taurek, cartoon by Sergei Yutkevich 67 Anton Lavinsky, costume design for Angel, Mystery Bouffe, 1921 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 74

list of illustrations

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 [8] 5.3 [9] 5.4 [10]

5.5 5.6 5.7 6.1 [11] 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 [12]

7.5 7.6

Vladimir Tatlin, stage design for Zangezi, 1923 (State Russian Museum, St Petersburg) 83 Vladimir Tatlin, costume design for Laughter, Zangezi (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 85 Ilya Zdanevich and Mikhail Le-Dantyu, 1915 91 A page from the printed edition of LeDantyu as a Beacon, designed by Ilya Zdanevich 93 Nikolai Erdman, The Mandate, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1925 104 Sergei Yutkevich, costume design for Sabina, The Mystery of the Canary Islands, directed by Nikolai Foregger 109 Kindness to Horses: the stable of the crimson filly, by Sergei Yutkevich 111 Kindness to Horses: Gipsy-Pipsy, costume design by Sergei Eisenstein (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 112 Nikolai Foregger, The Walk 114 Boris Ferdinandov 118 Nikolai Erdman, The Piggy Bank, directed by Boris Ferdinandov, Experimental-Heroic Theatre, 1922 121 Sergei Eisenstein, stage design for The Mexican, 1921 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 130 Sergei Eisenstein 134 Sergei Tretyakov 137 Ivan Yazykanov as Glumov, the White Clown, in A Wise Man, 1923 138 Glumov’s ‘Ascension’, A Wise Man 140 ‘Religion is the opium of the people’: A Wise Man 147 Glumov as Mamayev’s donkey in the film Glumov’s Diary 148 Cover of the first edition of Are You Listening, Moscow?! by Sergei Tretyakov (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 155 Sergei Tretyakov in 1923 164 Alexander Rodchenko, Hanging Construction 165 Roar China!: the gunboat 169 Nikolai Evgrafov, costume design for the Postman, The Government Inspector, directed by Igor Terentiev, 1927 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 177 Poster for The Bedbug at the Meyerhold State Theatre, 1929 183 Igor Ilinsky as Prisypkin in The Bedbug, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold 185 vii

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7.7 7.8

Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold 188 Zinaida Raikh as the Phosphorescent Woman, The Bathhouse, 1930 191 7.9 A scene from The Bathhouse at the Meyerhold State Theatre, 1930 192 8.1 [13] El Lissitzky, costume design for Milda, I Want a Baby (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 199 8.2 [14] Tatiana Bruni, stage design for the ballet The Bolt, 1931 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 208 8.3 [15] Tatiana Bruni, costume design for the Bureaucrat, The Bolt (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow) 208 8.4 Arches Theatre, Minsk, Belorus, production of More Than Rain, 2014 221 Unless otherwise stated, all illustrations are from the author’s collection.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

Transliteration Various transliteration systems exist for rendering Russian words and names into English. On the whole I have tried to use a modified Library of Congress system. Even this is probably inconsistent, and names in particular are a problem, because certain usages which have become established over time actually derive from different systems. I have in this book tended to go with the most commonly used variants – e.g. Meyerhold, not Meierkhol’d (or any variations in between). Translation Translation can also be a problem, and I have occasionally pointed this out in the following pages. The difficulty is particularly acute with the titles of plays – e.g. Tretyakov’s Zemlya Dybom, which seems to be virtually untranslatable. It has been rendered Earth Rampant, The World in Turmoil, Earth Prancing, The World Upside Down and more. In such cases, I have adopted what seemed the most appropriate title in English, and I trust the reader will bear with this. Dates On 13 February 1918 the Gregorian calendar was adopted for the first time in Russia. Before that the Julian calendar was in use. This meant that before 1900 Russian dates were twelve days behind western dates, and in 1900 this grew to thirteen days. Consequently, precise dating is often a problem and inevitable inconsistencies may confound the most diligent researcher. I hope any such inconsistencies here will not detract from the interest of the material presented. Places Russian places have often changed their names. The most obvious example of this is St Petersburg, which in 1914 was renamed Petrograd and then in 1924 became Leningrad, before reverting to St Petersburg in 1992. Again the reader’s indulgence is requested in this matter. ix

PREFACE

Russian Futurist theatre blazed brilliantly but very briefly. It lasted little more than twenty years, flourishing on either side of the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was the creation of a mere handful of practitioners, who included playwrights like Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Sergei Tretyakov, Vasily Kamensky, Ilya Zdanevich, Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky; stage designers such as Kasimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky; and directors like Sergei Radlov, Nikolai Foregger, Sergei Eisenstein, Igor Terentiev and of course, above all the others, Vsevolod Meyerhold. Starting with small-scale, but noisy and disruptive, performances both inside and outside theatre buildings, continuing with wild experiments in circusisation, transense language and Constructivist extravagance, the Russian Futurist theatre by 1930 could be seen to be responsible for some of the most challenging and profound plays and productions of the twentieth century. Appallingly, it was cut off in its prime by political fiat and merciless tyranny, its practitioners silenced (more or less brutally) and its achievements buried in unmarked graves. For long it was forgotten, and only towards the end of the twentieth and in the early twenty-first centuries was it (to some extent) ­resurrected, and its genius acknowledged. This book is perhaps the first to attempt an overview of this extraordinary phenomenon. It tries to tell the history of the Russian Futurist theatre and to understand its driving motivations. There have by now been scholarly studies of virtually all the subjects which this book addresses, and many brave productions of its works, but a similarly comprehensive survey and assessment has not, so far as I am aware, been essayed. I am conscious, however, of treading in the footsteps of finer scholars and practitioners than myself. I became interested in the Russian Futurist theatre when I was investigating the seeds of Bertolt Brecht’s theatre. Brecht’s contact with some of those who had visited Russia in the 1920s, such as Bernhard Reich, Asja Lacis and Walter Benjamin, his friendship with Sergei Tretyakov, and so on, had opened to him a dazzling world of ambitious and trailblazing theatre work. It seemed worth inquiring into this source of inspiration. x

preface

With my own students and others I began to explore practically some of the modernist Russian theatre ideas which I uncovered. This meant, most particularly, probing the Biomechanics of Vsevolod Meyerhold, and trying to stage some of the Russian plays of the period. Our early work on Biomechanics soon took us far beyond what is still often regarded as its boundaries – a few études (Throwing the Stone, Shooting the Bow, the Slap in the Face, the Stab with the Dagger, and others) and some elementary stick work (tossing it, catching it, balancing it, and so on) – to much more adventurous and acrobatic work, such as the Walking Somersault, the Leap onto the Chest, leaping onto or standing on the partner’s shoulders, and more. This was extended through Biomechanically oriented work on other physical skills including mime, clowning, mask work and dance, all of which comprise elements of Biomechanics. The actors themselves began to take possession of the work, as we investigated variations in tempo, mood and movement. We invented our own études, and we devised our own pantomimes in the style of Meyerhold’s infinitely variable ‘The Hunt’, which depicts a hunter stalking an animal (Meyerhold took his students to the zoo to observe animal movements; we used David Attenborough films) and which involves stalking the prey, sensing danger, shooting an arrow, a dance of death, a triumphal procession, and so on. And we tried to apply what we learned to full-scale productions. But we also experimented with ideas from Ferdinandov, Foregger and Eisenstein, and tried to apply these, too, to plays which they had produced. Over the decades I have directed workshop or full-scale productions, mostly with students, of many of the plays discussed in this book, including almost all of Mayakovsky’s plays, many of Tretyakov’s, Kruchenykh’s Victory Over the Sun, and Erdman’s The Suicide. I am particularly grateful to Mark Rozovsky for inviting me to direct the Russian premiere of Tretyakov’s I Want a Baby at his Teatr u Nikitskikh Vorot, which even in 1990 came under the disapproving scrutiny of the theatre’s Soviet. We spent a whole weekend arguing that the Soviet public really was ‘ready’ for this play. Interestingly, in view of the play’s subject matter, the member of the Soviet who most wholeheartedly supported me during those long two days was the actress representative on the Soviet. When the production toured Russia, the Communist Party in at least one town which it visited still attempted to ban it. I came to see that Futurist performance (if such it could be called) demanded that the actor hold his ‘superobjective’, his ‘set role’ or ‘mask’, at the forefront of his creative brain, while the director concentrated on each individual ‘attraction’, or ‘bit’, or ‘plane’. Of course, this is not to suggest that the actor should not pay attention to detail or that the director should not be interested in the montage, the overall composition, its rhythms and spatial configurations. But the contradiction between the actor’s overarching set role and the director’s focus on the separate attractions fired a paradoxical spark which ignited xi

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theatre, which allowed it to happen ‘as such’ (as the Futurists might say) and to create something which was neither realism nor fantasy, but was the quintessence of theatre. A brief explanation such as this of course oversimplifies. It must be said that my journey through this provocative, difficult, inspiring terrain was at all times inspired by scholars, practitioners, students and audiences to whom I owe almost any understanding which I may have managed. To begin to try to enumerate them all is frankly impossible, but among the many to whom I am deeply grateful must be mentioned the scholars whose work has illuminated so much: Edward Braun, David Zolotnitsky, Konstantin Rudnitsky, Lars Kleberg, Nick Worrall, Viktor Borovsky, Dassia Posner, Fadil Jaf, Richard Taylor, Jonathan Pitches and Edouard Ditschek. In Russia I owe most to Tatyana Gomolitskaya-Tretyakova, Mark Rozovsky, Svetlana Sergienko, Angela Ermarkova, Tamara Garamova, Andrei Molotkov, Viktoria Zaslavskaya, Olga Lebedeva, Margarita Rasskazova and Irene Chernykh. Among the British people to whom I am indebted are Geoffrey Buckley, Jocelyn Powell, Diana Duncan, Joel Kaplan, Stephen Holland, James Merifield, John Topping, Mark Barden, Rick Harwood, Marcus Fernando, Mandy Stevens, Robin Tebbutt, Paul Farrell, Alison Nott, Sarah Rose, Caroline Hadley, Nick Cannon, Alex Sumner and Rikki Chamberlain. To those not named here, I apologise. For help with the illustrations in this book, I would like to thank Vera Kessenich of the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Alexandra Shtarkman of the St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music, and Elena Gripich of the Bakhrushin State Theatre Museum. Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reproduce material previously published elsewhere. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. This book owes its existence to the persuasiveness of my editor, Olga Taxidou, whose patience, support, criticism, suggestions and friendship are beyond compare; and to the long-suffering Joy Parker for advice, ­understanding and much more. R. L.

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Plate 1  [2.4]  Iosif Shkolnik, backcloth design for Act 2, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow).

Plate 2  [2.7]  Kasimir Malevich: the Fat Man from Victory Over the Sun (St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music).

Plate 3  [2.8]  Kasimir Malevich: Chorus Member from Victory Over the Sun (St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music).

Plate 4  [3.3]  Konstantin Vyalov, stage design for Stenka Razin, Theatre of Revolution, 1924 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). Plate 5  [3.4]  Konstantin Vyalov, costume design for Stepan Razin, 1924 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow).

Plate 6  [3.5]  Vladimir Mayakovsky, costume design for the Priest in Mystery Bouffe, which was not used.

Plate 7  [3.8]  Anton Lavinsky, costume design for Angel, Mystery Bouffe, 1921 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow).

Plate 8  [5.2]  Sergei Yutkevich, costume design for Sabina, The Mystery of the Canary Islands, directed by Nikolai Foregger.

Plate 9  [5.3]  Kindness to Horses: the stable of the crimson filly, by Sergei Yutkevich.

Plate 10  [5.4]  Kindness to Horses: Gipsy-Pipsy, costume design by Sergei Eisenstein (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow).

Plate 11  [6.1]  Sergei Eisenstein, stage design for The Mexican, 1921 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow).

Plate 12  [7.4]  Nikolai Evgrafov, costume design for the Postman, The Government Inspector, directed by Igor Terentiev, 1927 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow).

Plate 13  [8.1]  El Lissitzky, costume design for Milda, I Want a Baby (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow).

Plate 14  [8.2]  Tatiana Bruni, stage design for the ballet The Bolt, 1931 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow).

Plate 15  [8.3]  Tatiana Bruni, costume design for the Bureaucrat, The Bolt (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow).

1

MANIFESTOES AND MEANINGS

A Slap in the Face of Public Taste In 1912, a slim volume of poetry by several authors entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste was published in Moscow. In the pamphlet, the poems were preceded by a brief introduction, which acted as a kind of manifesto, and which was also called A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. It was the opening gambit of Russian Futurism, and its provocative title hinted at what was to become a constant stance. The authors represented in this little book went by the collective name of ‘Hylaea’ which they borrowed from Chernyanka, or, in Greek, Hylaea, the home town by the Black Sea of their leader, David Burlyuk. Their message in the introduction to their poetic collection was simple: ‘Through us the horn of time blows in the art of the word’; ‘Throw Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, etc, etc, overboard from the Ship of Modernity’.1 It also attacked popular mainstream authors of the day – Gorky, Blok, Sologub, Bunin and others. Since it only stated one rather modest aim, to ‘enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary’,2 it was less a manifesto than a defiant statement of an extreme modernist position. It implied a Futurist attitude not just to art, but to life: a welcoming of whatever was new, and a disgusted rejection of the humdrum, the accepted and the everyday – what the Russians call ‘byt’. It voiced social protest as much as aesthetic aspiration, and implied what was only later articulated: that the Futurists wanted to remake the world, through art, through language, 1

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through overturning convention and, significantly, through theatre. Their rejection of the ‘old’ theatre meant interrogating every c­ onvention – standard dramatic language, play construction, stage settings, lighting, costume and of course acting – and inaugurating something new, a new world, which would be performative. A Slap in the Face of Public Taste was signed by David Burlyuk, Alexander Kruchenykh (whose real name was Alexei), Vladimir Mayakovsky and Victor Khlebnikov (who later changed his first name to Velimir). They were the most prominent of the Hylaeans, who also included David Burlyuk’s two brothers, Nikolai and Vladimir, and Benedikt Livshits. David Burlyuk, a natural entrepreneur, also had a hand in organising groups of painters like the ‘Jack of Diamonds’ group, which included Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Alexandra Exter, Vasily Kandinsky, Aristarkh Lentulov and Vladimir Tatlin, all of whom were to become more or less closely associated with Futurism. Burlyuk was a compulsive organiser, though he was to emigrate to New York after the Bolshevik Revolution. His approach to the youthful student artist Mayakovsky indicates something of his style: Burlyuk, introducing me to someone, trumpeted: ‘Don’t you know him? My genius friend. Famous poet Mayakovsky.’ I tried to stop him. Burlyuk was adamant. Leaving me, he bellowed: ‘Now write or you will make me look a regular fool.’ The incident kickstarted the career of the man who would be Russian Futurism’s most dynamic and controversial poet and playwright. Mayakovsky added: ‘I think of David with unchanging love. Wonderful friend. My real teacher.’3 According to Vladimir Markov, without Burlyuk ‘there probably would have been no Russian Futurism’.4 It should be added that for Burlyuk not everything always went smoothly. His Jack of Diamonds group was split when Larionov publicly dissociated himself from Burlyuk’s apparent ‘Europeanism’ (despite the fact that he and his wife, Natalia Goncharova, introduced French Impressionism to Russia). Larionov set up his own rival Donkey’s Tail group which turned towards Russian primitivism and included Goncharova, Kasimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, though Tatlin and Malevich kept a foot in both camps. The group’s name derived from the prank played in Paris in 1905 by the French artists Roland Dorgelès and Frédéric Gérard, who tied a paintbrush to a donkey’s tail and stood the donkey with its rear end close to a canvas. The random swishes produced a ‘painting’ which they entitled ‘Sunset over the Adriatic’ and exhibited, provoking serious discussion among art critics and intellectuals who were not privy to the joke. The donkey’s tail became something of a private joke among Futurists. 2

manifestoes and meanings

Russian and Italian Futurism By the time of Burlyuk’s initiatives in Russia, there was already in existence a version of Futurism in Italy, led by the energetic Filippo Marinetti. He proclaimed ‘the progress of industry, skyscrapers and cinema, radio, X-Rays, aeroplanes and electricity’.5 Thoroughly nationalistic, Marinetti’s Futurism aimed to be a disruptive force aimed at changing the future, employing the energy of technology and the speed of the machine as the means to revive a moribund Italy. Marinetti’s first manifesto of 1909 announced ‘We intend to exalt aggressive action’ and asserted that no beauty existed ‘except in struggle’.6 Indeed, a later manifesto stated baldly that war was ‘Futurism intensified’.7 It is hard to disagree with Walter Benjamin’s judgement that Italian Futurism was the worst sort of ‘art for art’s sake’, especially in its aestheticisation of politics and war.8 Marinetti came to Russia in January 1914 perhaps to unite the Russian Futurists behind him. Two months before he arrived, however, Mayakovsky had rejected Italian Futurism, and Larionov suggested that rotten eggs might be thrown at him, though some Futurists, such as Vadim Shershenevich, were interested in what he might have to say, and the St Petersburg Union of Youth published Russian translations of some of his writings. Marinetti’s visit to Russia, however, was not a success. He attended balls, gave lectures, enjoyed banquets and took in theatre performances, but with a few exceptions – Olga Rozanova, Kasimir Malevich, Ilya Zdanevich – the Russian avant-garde were not impressed. Italian and Russian Futurists were largely against the same things – ­passéism, lifelessness and elitism – and both groups felt themselves on the verge of a new age. The Italians, like the Russians, were interested in linguistic experiment and the sound of words. But the Italians’ approach was simplistic compared with the philosophical and ramified studies and experiments of, say, Khlebnikov. There was nothing in the Italians’ practice which compared with the Russian Futurists’ attempts to ‘complicate’ art – ‘poetry is not porridge,’ proclaimed the Oberiu manifesto of 19289 – while the simultaneity in the Italian Futurists’ paintings of bodies in motion seemed primitive beside the Cubist variety of viewpoints and ‘multiple seeing’ of the Russian Futurist painters. As much as anything, the Italian Futurists’ limitations stemmed from their having one leader, Filippo Marinetti, where the Russian Futurists were plural, disputatious and divergent. Whereas Italian Futurism made barely a scratch on the surface of world theatre, Russian Futurism revolutionised it. The Russians brought new techniques of staging in extraordinary Constructivist settings; they found a new kind of expressive acting; they developed wholly original approaches to directing and constructing a performance; and they considerably extended the 3

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scope of dramatic form – their epic drama was uniquely focused on the future, their bitter comedies found new and profoundly disturbing means of speaking truth to power, and their absurdist dramas enabled the imagination to explore hitherto undreamed-of possible futures. In less than twenty years, the Russian Futurist theatre remade the world and the human being, and permanently affected every area of dramatic production. Markov suggests that Marinetti’s visit to Moscow and St Petersburg triggered the end of Russian Futurism.10 It is true that Marinetti caused some shifts in positions and group realignments, but this demonstrated rather the resilience of Russian Futurism. It was not perhaps surprising that while Marinetti and the Italian Futurists drifted into Fascism and irrelevance, the Russians remained steadfastly revolutionary, both artistically and politically. While Mussolini was to accept the Italians, Stalin destroyed the Russians. Russian Futurism and Modernism The Russian Futurists therefore are easily distinguished from their Italian counterparts. They also need to be distinguished from other Russian modernists, such as the Symbolists associated with Vyacheslav Ivanov’s ivory tower and ‘mystical anarchism’. They fiercely set themselves against Symbolist poets like Konstantin Balmont, Dmitry Merezhkovsky and even Alexander Blok, as well as other poetic groupings such as the ‘Acmeism’ propounded by Nikolai Gumilev, Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, and the later ‘Imagism’ of Sergei Esenin and Anatoly Mariengof. Theatrically they were equally opposed to the aesthetic trend in Russian modernism best evidenced in the work of playwrights such as the decadent Mikhail Kuzmin, the pseudo-Symbolist Leonid Andreyev and the sometimes self-indulgent aesthete Nikolai Evreinov, and practitioners and directors like Alexander Tairov, Fyodor Kommissarzhevsky and Konstantin Mardzhanov. Vsevolod Meyerhold was a more problematic case. He was often seen as close to the Futurists, and he produced some of their best plays by Mayakovsky, Tretyakov and Erdman. But his scope was wider, and some of his most formidable productions were of Russian classics like Gogol’s The Government Inspector and Ostrovsky’s The Storm, international masterpieces like Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and seminal Symbolist plays like Blok’s The Fairground Booth. His ideas pervaded much Futurist theatre practice, but since these are discussed widely in studies of Meyerhold,11 his work is only glancingly referred to in this book. This in no way implies, however, that his profound influence should be underestimated. Shklovsky’s Exegesis The earliest Russian Futurist publication is generally held to be A Trap for Judges, an anthology published in 1910 and containing mostly poetry. It was, 4

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however, as one commentator put it, only ‘vaguely’ Futurist.12 Only gradually did the enduring value of Russian Futurism become clear, largely through the efforts of Opoyaz (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language), founded in St Petersburg in 1916, whose members included Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jacobson, Boris Eichenbaum and Yuri Tynyanov. Shklovsky formulated the Futurist impulse most cogently in Art as a Device: The thing rushes past us, prepacked as it were; we know that it is there by the space it takes up, but we see only its surface. This kind of perception shrivels a thing up, first of all in the way we perceive it, but later this affects the way we handle it, too . . . Life goes to waste as it is turned into nothingness. Automization corrodes things, clothing, furniture, one’s wife and one’s fear of war. Shklovsky continued: ‘so that a sense of life may be restored, that things may be felt, so that stones may be made stony, there exists what we call art.’13 One of Futurism’s abiding aims was to renew ‘the sense of life’. The method, Shklovsky argued, was to ‘complicate’ a work of art through the use of what he called ‘devices’: The purpose of art is to transmit the sense of a thing as seeing, not as recognizing; the device of art is that of ‘making things strange’ and of making form difficult, increasing the difficulty and time taken to perceive since the process of perception in art is an aim in itself and must be prolonged: art is the way of experiencing the making of a thing and what has already been made is of no importance.14 The key concepts here are ‘making things strange’, complicating form, and art as active and constructive. It is through the ‘devices’ themselves that perception is renewed. The devices used to complicate the work of art included digression, a-logicality, repetition, retardation, and so on. Stephan notes that in the 1920s the LEF group ‘sought to rediscover the immediate world by breaking the relationships in which the perception of objects, words or sounds had become automatized’, noting that ‘when one object was substituted for another, the uniqueness of each becomes clearer’.15 Juxtaposing one image with another quite different image was perhaps the key device, applicable equally to poetry, painting and theatre. Russian Futurist Groupings These principles unite all the various and shifting Russian Futurist groups, which was why Benedikt Livshits was able to assert in 1933 that the term ‘Futurism’ covered ‘all the innovative artistic initiatives’ of the period 1910 to 1930.16 These initiatives mostly sprang from the multifarious, different, self-defining groups, and, as Markov warns, ‘Russian futurism was flexible, 5

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varied and contradictory, and any effort to reduce it to the aspirations or achievements of only one group or of a single person are bound to end in the worst possible simplifications and distortions.’17 Thus the Hylaeans metamorphosed into Cubo-Futurists when they embraced a number of Futurist painters. In St Petersburg, the Union of Youth, a club founded in 1910, was financed by Levky Ivanovich Zheverzheyev, and included as more or less active members the painters Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Mikhail Matyushin, Iosif Shkolnik and Pavel Filonov. In October 1911 a group of mostly writers, calling themselves Ego-Futurists, was formed, including Igor Severyanin, Vadim Shershenevich, Ivan Ignatiev and Vasilisk Gnedov, which aimed at ‘self-affirmation in the future’. Organised largely by Ignatiev, they were the group closest to Marinetti, and were sometimes seen as effete and decadent. When Ignatiev committed suicide in January 1914, the Ego-Futurists faded away as a group. By then there were other groupings of Futurists, including Centrifuge, formed at the end of 1913, with Nikolai Aseyev, Boris Pasternak and Ivan Aksenov as members, and the Mezzanine of Poetry, which included Shershenevich and Sergei Tretyakov and was seen as allied to the Ego-Futurists in rejecting zaum, the transrational poetry with which the Hylaeans Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh were experimenting. Khlebnikov himself formed the Society of 317 in 1916, and there were also the Everythingists of Mikhail Le-Dantyu and, contrarywise, Boris Zamenkov’s Nothingists, under Zamenkov’s injunction: ‘Write nothing! Read nothing! Say nothing! Print nothing!’18 Strands of Futurist fine arts included Larionov and Goncharova’s Rayism, Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematism, and, in the 1920s, the Constructivists, many of whom, however, rejected the Futurist label. The post-revolution civil war found several Futurists in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), Georgia, including Kruchenykh, Ilya Zdanevich, Vasily Kamensky and Igor Terentiev, who formed the nucleus of Company 41°; and others, including Tretyakov, David Burlyuk, Aseyev and Nikolai Chuzhak, in the Far East, where they formed Tvorchestvo (‘Creation’), first in Vladivostok, then moving to Chita. When the Civil War was over, several of these returned to Moscow and, with Mayakovsky, Osip Brik, Boris Kushner and others, formed LEF, the Left Front of the Arts, the most important Futurist grouping of the 1920s. LEF aimed to unite progressive and ‘leftist’ artists, to fight against the old enemies of complacency and bureaucracy, and to undertake ‘big projects’. LEF was essentially a magazine, the first issue of which appeared in March 1923, and Tretyakov deliberately traced its genealogy back to the Hylaeans of the early 1910s. The 1920s also saw the birth of Eccentrism and finally, in 1928, the last Futurist grouping, Oberiu (the Association for Real Art), who also declined to call themselves ‘Futurists’. All were united, however, in believing that habitual usage led to the death of art, and responded to Shklovsky’s call for 6

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the ‘resurrection’ of art through various forms of distortion and consciously manipulated ‘devices’. And almost all, though not perhaps the Oberiuty, felt themselves on the brink of a new age and determined to shape the ‘new human being’. Transrational Futurism There were two main identifiable strands to Russian Futurism. The first distorted reality largely through transrational means. A Slap in the Face of Public Taste had sensed ‘the new coming beauty of the self-sufficient (self-centred) word’,19 and the following year in Explodity Kruchenykh suggested that ‘emotional experience cannot be put into (conventional) words’.20 For him, earlier poets had spent too much time agonising over the human soul, thereby neglecting ‘the word as such’. He and Khlebnikov developed what they called zaum, sometimes neatly translated as ‘beyonsense’, that is, transrational writing which used chopped words, half-words, unpredictable sound combinations, slips of the tongue, rude words, baby talk, archaisms often derived from old Slavic words or roots, simple neologisms and more. A not untypical example is Kruchenykh’s ‘Goosey Spring’ from the 1913 pamphlet Piglets: te ge ne    ryu ri    le lyu       be    tlk    tlko    ho mo ro re k ryukpl    krd kryud       ntpr       irkil       bi pu21 Deliberately provocative, in The Word as Such Kruchenykh stated that common language imprisoned, whereas zaum liberated.22 Clarity, pleasant sounds or set rhythms should not be the writer’s aim; rather, new words were needed to create new poetic resonance. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov argued that words themselves as free-standing phonetic entities without referents could interact dynamically, and unexplored areas of sensibility and experience would be unlocked. ‘Zaum’ was perhaps literature’s equivalent of abstract painting, and it is surely no coincidence that it was developed at the same time and in the same place as Kandinsky’s ‘compositions’ and ‘improvisations’ and Malevich’s Suprematism. In 1921 Kruchenykh distinguished three basic forms of zaum: 7

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‘the magic of songs, incantations and curses’, ‘revelation’ (the depiction of things unseen), and ‘musical-phonetic word-creation’.23 A poem could consist of a single word, Khlebnikov’s ‘Incantation by Laughter’ being a well-known example. One possible translation of this work reads:     O laugh it out, you laughsters!     O laugh it up, you laughsters! So they laugh with laughters, so they laugherize delaughly,     O laugh it up belaughably! O the laughingstock of the laughed-upon – the laugh of belaughed  laughsters! O laugh it out roundlaughingly, the laugh of laughed-at laughians!    Laugherino, laugherino,    Laughify, laughicate,laugholets, laugholets,       Laughikins, laughikins,     O laugh it out, you laughsters!     O laugh it up, you laughsters!24 The manifesto of Company 41° affirmed ‘transreason as the mandatory form for the embodiment of art’,25 and one member of the Company, Igor Terentiev, in his 1919 appreciation of Kruchenykh’s achievement, asserted: In transrational language one can howl, squeak, ask for what nobody asks for, touch upon inaccessible themes coming right up to them; one can create for oneself, because the birth of the transrational word is as deep a mystery for the author’s consciousness as it is for a stranger.26 Following logically from this, Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh argued for The Letter as Such. Since a person’s handwriting may alter according to the writer’s mood, and this is picked up by the reader, they argued for printed verse to employ different fonts, different sized letters, different spacing, and so on. Thus the look of the poem on the page became newly significant. Vasily Kamensky’s experiments with ‘ferro-concrete poetry’ was the logical outcome of this. All this was more than mere chaos, though chaos itself might be useful since it released energy in ways unimaginable for Symbolists or decadents. For Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, as well as for later Futurists like Alexander Vvedensky, such Futurist experiments were often rooted in Russian or Slavic folk culture, songs, proverbs, children’s rhymes, playful nonsense and riddles. Kruchenykh objected to critics who tried to ‘stifle the primeval feeling for one’s own tongue’27 and part of his and Khlebnikov’s word coinage depended on archaisms and primitive themes drawn from a time when words and motifs lacked the connotative baggage of later times. A principal source of 8

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Eccentrism, according to Leonid Trauberg, was the traditional folk play The History of Tsar Maximilian and His Disobedient Son Adolf.28 The fact that in some versions of the play this son is female, Adolfa, sets us on the journey to ‘beyonsense’. Social and Political Rebellion Insistence on the word as such, the letter as such, beyonsense itself, contained implicitly a dimension of social and even political rebellion. ‘We, stern carpenters, hurl ourselves and our names into the bubbling cauldron of beautiful tasks,’ proclaimed Khlebnikov and several of his associates.29 The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution seemed to some at least that moment of victorious rebellion, the chaos depicted by Kruchenykh in Victory Over the Sun when the sun is overthrown and the destruction of what is bygone and passé is achieved. In 1917, the anticipated new age seemed to many to have arrived. The second major strand of Futurism was concerned with this future, which these artists proclaimed and dreamed of. Several had already aligned themselves more or less with Russia’s political revolutionaries. Mayakovsky was arrested three times in his teens for Bolshevist agitation, David Burlyuk was deeply concerned with the social effects of Futurist activities, and the First Manifesto of Suprematists and Non-Objective Painters trumpeted: ‘We glorify the revolution as the only engine of life . . . Young and strong, we march with the flaming torches of the revolution.’30 The Ego-Futurists were only less specific, Ivan Ignatiev declaring perhaps more cautiously: ‘Even in the graveyard of the past and in the swamp of the present, the Future flares up with a bright, perhaps unhealthy and dangerous, fire.’31 This commonly held quasi-political stance was naturally allied to an emphasis on speed, technology and the city. In 1900, Mayakovsky recalled, he was walking with his father through the foggy night when suddenly a light appeared before them, ‘brighter than the sky. That was electricity. Prince Nakashidze’s River Works. After seeing electricity, [I] lost all interest in nature. Not up to date enough.’32 In 1916, Shershenevich hymned ‘urbanism with its dynamism, its beauty of speed, its intrinsic Americanism’.33 Five years later Grigory Kozintsev contrasted ‘yesterday – the culture of Europe’ with ‘today – the technology of America’,34 which his partner at the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, Leonid Trauberg, explained: ‘Russia was a backward country with no technology, no structures, no urbanism. For us, American civilization was the symbol of the constructivist era.’35 Many of the Futurists in ‘the constructivist era’ collaborated in LEF, a journal subsidised by the Communist state but promulgating strongly Futurist ideas. LEF in fact attempted to reconcile Futurism and nascent Communism. Their aim was ‘an active art’ which would ‘fight for the construction of life’ and thus help to produce through art the ‘new human being’ which the 9

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Revolution needed.36 The journal Object declared in 1921 that the ‘mission’ of ‘constructive art’ was ‘not after all to embellish life, but to organise it’.37 Such attempts at aligning Futurism with the Bolshevik Revolution, however, had obvious dangers. Was the ‘new human being’ envisaged or even produced by Futurism going to be the same as the new Communist person desired by Lenin, and then more stringently by Stalin and his bureaucrats? It was a conundrum which the 1920s would pitilessly unravel. Futurist Theatre Futurism’s positioning in literature and the fine arts came together in the theatre. Once again Russian Futurism’s theatre practice started somewhat under the shadow of Filippo Marinetti, whose dabbling in theatre rested perhaps on his belief that ‘the only way to inspire Italy with the warlike spirit is through the theatre’.38 Actually the Italian Futurist theatre sometimes seemed an uneasy hybrid, part schoolboy naughtiness, part Nietzschean overreaching. Marinetti’s 1913 manifesto, The Variety Theatre, held up the contemporary variety theatre as the acme of Futurist performance, because it might use film, employ up-to-date technology, provoke laughter and danger simultaneously, and collaborate with its audience. It called for ‘amazement, record-setting and body-madness’ by such means as sprinkling the seats in the auditorium ‘with dust to make people itch and sneeze’. Its calls for ‘the type of the eccentric American’ and ‘exciting grotesquerie’, however, remained sadly unspecific, though the Italians did present ‘Futurist Evenings’ from 1910, and Marinetti condensed the second act of his drama Electric Dolls (1909) for presentation without decor in Palermo in September 1913. Later manifestoes, such as Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli and Bruno Corra’s The Futurist Synthetic Theatre 1915 and Enrico Pampolini’s The Futurist Stage (Manifesto) 1915, further speak to the times, and are energised by their iconoclasm, but they betray a fatal lack of theatrical experience in the writers. Often the Russian Futurist theatre manifestoes suffered from something of the same problem. The writers of these, too, were often inexperienced, but always they show artists seriously grappling with the practical problems of the theatre. Thus when the First All-Russian Congress of Futurian Bards, or at least their ‘President’, Mikhail Matyushin, and the ‘secretaries’, Alexei Kruchenykh and Kasimir Malevich, called Futurists to ‘swoop down on the ramparts of artistic weakness – the Russian theatre – and to resolutely reform it’,39 they were in the process of practically planning for the groundbreaking production of the opera Victory Over the Sun. This opera confronts the spectator with what might be called ‘theatre as such’, or ‘action as such’, with minimal reference to the ‘real’ world. Later Futurist drama, while retaining some of this purity, would engage more energetically with what might ­contribute to the making of ‘the new man’. 10

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Theatrical Manifestoes Probably the first Futurist theatre manifesto was Mikhail Le-Dantyu’s ‘Active Performance’. Composed under the influence of the St Petersburg Union of Youth’s productions of The Performance House and Tsar Maximilian and His Son Adolfa, it was published in 1912. Sharing some ideas with Nikolai Evreinov, Le-Dantyu proposes a ‘synthetic’ theatre centred on the movement of the actors. All the other facets of the production – stage design, music and indeed the script itself – should be made to synchronise or harmonise with the actor. This would, Le-Dantyu argued, influence the spectator actively, rather than merely by chance, or passively. The centrality of the actor’s movement, the downgrading of the playscript and the urge to activate the spectator would recur in much Futurist theatre theorising. Vladimir Mayakovsky published ‘Cinema, Theatre, Futurism’ in Kino Journal in July 1913. Proclaiming Futurism’s ‘grand destruction of all areas of beauty’, he saw no reason why this should ‘stop at the theatre door’. He denounced yesterday’s drama as ‘neurasthenia cultivated by paint, verse and footlights’, a result, he suggested, of the ‘naive realism and artistry of Chekhov and Gorky’, which Mayakovsky contrasted with Shakespeare’s theatre and the Oberammergau Passion Play. Like Le-Dantyu, he argued that the special art of the actor was what held the key to the theatre’s ability to ‘express the greatest inner feelings’. The art of the actor was in essence dynamic, exemplified in the intonations of the voice, even when the words spoken had no specific meaning, or in ‘the movements of the body which are invented but free in their rhythms’. In the contemporary theatre, however, the actor’s art was ‘enslaved’ by ‘the dead background of decoration’, that is, the detailed naturalism of the setting, and thus stifled. However, Mayakovsky suggested that if this trend was transferred to the cinema, with its photographic realism, this would ‘open the way to the theatre of the future and the unfettered art of the actor’.40 In April 1914, a year after Mayakovsky’s essay, Vadim Shershenevich, Marinetti’s most committed Russian advocate and translator, published A Declaration About Futurist Theatre. Though clearly influenced by Marinetti, this ‘declaration’ was also close to Le-Dantyu’s and Mayakovsky’s in much of what it said. In some respects Shershenevich went further, for instance in rejecting not only the naturalism and psychologism associated with Stanislavsky’s productions of Chekhov and Gorky, but also the experimental avant-gardism of Vsevolod Meyerhold. Shershenevich’s theatre would replace the dominance of words with the actor’s movement, and substitute the actor’s improvisation for the written text. Like Mayakovsky, he decried the static stage set and painted backdrop, and, perhaps in light of Malevich’s experiments in the December 1913 production of Victory Over the Sun, described in the next chapter of this book, he suggested that scenery might be replaced 11

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by lighting effects. Shershenevich reprinted this piece in 1916 in his theoretical work Green Street, where he expounded his view of literary works as ‘an uninterrupted series of images’ so that ‘a high degree of tension and concentration of the images themselves is achieved’.41 He was also to employ this form of juxtapositioning as a ‘device’, in Shklovsky’s terms, in his later theatre work. More extreme, but still to an extent influenced by Marinetti, were the Eccentrists. On 5 December 1921, at the ‘Dispute on the Eccentric Theatre’ held at Sergei Radlov’s Free Comedy Theatre in Petrograd, Grigory Kozintsev read his ‘Salvation in the Trousers of the Eccentric’, the manifesto of the Eccentric theatre, later explored by the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS). A crude but wildly exhilarating document, it called for the actor to move ‘from emotion to the machine, from anguish to the trick’, using circus techniques and ‘head over heels’ psychology. Kozintsev advocated ‘the synthesis of movements: acrobatic, gymnastic, balletic, constructive-mechanical’, and urged that the director should employ ‘a maximum of devices’, and ‘a turbine of rhythms’. Kozintsev specified that the presentation should be a ‘rhythmic wracking of the nerves’, and the play itself ‘an accumulation of tricks . . . chase, persecution, flight’, whose form would be that of a ‘divertissement’. ‘We prefer Charlie [Chaplin]’s arse to Eleanora Duse’s hands,’ he exclaimed. He also proposed a ‘look’ for Futurist theatre which would be modernist yet also popular and traditional – ‘humped backs, distended stomachs, wigs of stiff red hair’ – and the kinds of sounds expected – ‘horns, shots, typewriters, whistles, sirens – Eccentric music . . . [the] start of a new rhythm’. This would result in ‘the Americanisation of the theatre [which] in Russian means ECCentriSM’.42 In 1928, by which time Kozintsev and his partners, Leonid Trauberg, Sergei Yutkevich and Georgy Kryzhitsky, had turned to film-making, Vladimir Nedobrovo explicated their practical method from observation of their ­theatrical creations in terms reminiscent of Shklovsky’s: It must be said that the essence of the Eccentric concept of the FEKS lies in the extraction of objects and concepts from the automatic state. The FEKS try to convey the sense of an object ‘through vision and not through consciousness’. Their Eccentric concept is one of ‘impeded form’. ‘Impeded form’ extends the period of time taken by the audience to perceive an object and complicates the whole process of perception. This process Nedobrovo describes as ‘alienation’, a word more familiar to later theatre theoreticians from its use by Bertolt Brecht. ‘The FEKS concept of alienation’, Nedobrovo explains: consists in presenting an object in isolation from the things that surround it. The object is removed from its normal context and placed in another milieu . . . But the realistic form of the object remains untouched. Only 12

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the interrelationships between the object and other objects have been altered. ‘We can see’, Nedobrovo concludes, ‘that this is the moment for montage.’43 The Montage of Attractions Montage, a form of parataxis, consists of the unexpected juxtaposing of dissimilar elements to produce new meanings. The concept, if not the word itself, was at the heart of the theatre section of the Oberiu manifesto of 1928, largely written by Daniil Kharms. He made the case initially for a theatrical reality which was distinct from lived reality: ‘If an actor who represents a minister begins to move around on the stage on all fours and howls like a wolf, or an actor who represents a Russian peasant suddenly delivers a long speech in Latin – that will be theatre, that will interest the spectator, even if it takes place without any relation to a dramatic plot.’ He pointed out that ‘such an action will be a separate item’, going on to say that ‘a series of such items organised by the director will make up a theatrical performance’.44 Kharms described how, in the theatre of Oberiu, a dramatic plot which seemed to develop slowly was suddenly interrupted by something extraneous and perhaps ridiculous. The logic of life had been overthrown, interrupted: this was now a theatrical sequence of happenings. The conventional plot, he suggested, ‘glimmers’ behind the action while the scenic plot, the sequence of theatrical events, proceeds. This was, perhaps, ‘theatre as such’, or ‘action as such’. Kharms asserted: ‘The scenery, the movement of an actor, a bottle thrown down, the train of a costume – they are actors, just like those who shake their heads and speak various words and phrases.’45 Five years before this manifesto, Sergei Eisenstein published in LEF his seminal article ‘The Montage of Attractions’, the single most convincing exposition of Futurist theatre, and one of the key documents of European modernist theatre as a whole. In it he contrasted the ‘agitational theatre of attractions’ with the traditional ‘figurative-narrative theatre’. An attraction for Eisenstein was similar to what Kharms suggested, ‘any aggressive moment in theatre’, a classical actor’s speech as much as the colour of the prima donna’s tights, a roll on the drums as much as Romeo’s soliloquy. An attraction provoked an emotional shock which led the spectator onwards. It was also ‘an independent and primary element in structuring the show’ and therefore relative, operating in conjunction with other attractions. This kind of structuring gave rise to ‘a free montage of arbitrarily chosen independent . . . effects (attractions) . . . with the precise aim of a specific thematic effect – a montage of attractions’.46 The following year Eisenstein expanded his idea, specifically with reference to film, in ‘The Montage of Film Attractions’, in which he defined an attraction as ‘an action, a phenomenon, a conscious combination’, selected tendentiously 13

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rather than being ‘plot-related’. It was ‘the juxtaposition and accumulation’ of effects, ‘chains of associations’ linked to a particular phenomenon, which, ‘when taken as a whole’, produced a response in the spectator.47 It was perhaps significant that Eisenstein, unlike Mayakovsky, Shershenevich or Kharms, was a theatre practitioner, a director, so that he was able to crystallise the stage action, rather than, say, the text, as the centre of Futurist theatre theory. Characteristics of Russian Futurist Theatre From the foregoing, it is possible to explore what Russian Futurists wanted their theatre to look like. First, it was a theatre of individual moments (attractions), then of small forms in the tradition of the mystery play, commedia dell’arte performance or balagan (fairground) show, latterly most clearly seen in the circus, the cabaret and the agit-sketch. Sometimes these elements might merge into longer, epic plays which still consisted of more or less self-­contained fragments, which interrupted one another and never worked towards a conventional dénouement or formed into the unrolling of a traditional plot. Discarding conventional genre categorisation as well as believable plots, Russian Futurist theatre combined different performance elements unexpectedly, using paradox and contradiction, irony and satire, parody and intertextuality, and all sorts of metatheatrical devices to break the illusion. It consistently employed the grotesque, distorting its material and juxtaposing discordant elements. One minute it was realistic, the next fantastic; a comic scene was likely to be cut short by a tragic one. Time and space no longer cohered. This produced unsettling content: it mixed high and low elements, and heroics and false heroics. Crudities and erotica might bump into high-flown sentiment; seething crowds were set against solo mime or song or stillness. All this fatally undermined the dominance of the linear narrative. The traditional ‘plot’ suddenly looked dog-eared and played out, replaced by jagged interruptions, montage and transitions marked by what in Russian is known as ‘sdvigy’, displacements, or violent shifts. Kruchenykh, asserting that zaum is ‘a shift language’, argued that ‘the shift [sdvig] conveys movement and space [and] multiplicity of meanings and images’.48 The shift and the interruption were the decisive factors in the structuring of the performance. The ‘look’ of Futurist theatre was gaudy, extravagant and deformed. Decor, costume and make-up comprised a spectacle – an ‘attraction’ – in themselves, and the relationship of the action to the setting came to imply Constructivism however the Constructivists may have tried to deny the relationship. The mechanics of the theatre were deliberately exposed, disturbing the expected effect of stage settings. The ‘sound’ of Futurist theatre, too, was distinctive. Text and speech became newly elliptical and challenging, music often disrupted acceptable harmonies, and sound effects were frequently violent elements in the overall sound design. 14

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The production as a montage of attractions gave Futurist theatre a particular dynamic, in which the tempo and rhythm of movement, ‘action as such’, was crucial, creating rhythms which were jerky, dislocating and abrasive. Encounter and slapstick, too, added apparent spontaneity to what was above all a sensuous experience. Character depended not on psychology but on action, and what Eisenstein called ‘typage’. Thus, Futurist theatre-makers favoured clowns, acrobats, masks, holy fools (yurodivye) and stock types. Finally, the contribution of the audience was vital. No longer was a passive audience to undergo a rejuvenating catharsis. This theatre acquired a new kind of function, which was to effect change in its spectators. If the nineteenthcentury realists had argued that content determined form, Kruchenykh turned this formulation upside down, asserting that form created content. Sergei Tretyakov refined this by arguing in LEF in 1923 that the material (rather than ‘content’) of the play was subjected to ‘devices’ (instead of ‘form’), these devices being determined by the production’s function. ‘The separation and opposition of the concepts of “form” and “content” must be reduced to a study of the methods for working up the material into a useful object, of the function of this object, and of the means of its employment.’ In Novyi LEF in 1928, he elaborated: ‘Ideology does not lie in the material which art makes use of. Ideology lies in the devices through which that material is worked up; ideology lies in form. Only expediently formed material can become a thing with a direct social function.’49 The material, the devices and the function, in other words, worked dialectically. Thereby they operated to defamiliarise the action for the audience. The defamiliarising devices, the constant ‘alienation’ of the action, the breaking open of the ‘fourth wall’, conjoined to compel the audience to complete what was fragmentary, to fill in the gaps, as it were, in the presentation, and thereby to complete the work. What Tretyakov called the ‘function’ of the work thus related precisely to the audience. His colleague, Sergei Eisenstein, argued that ‘theatre’s basic material derives from the audience’.50 He looked, he said, to ‘process’ the spectators. And Khlebnikov ended the Prologue to Victory Over the Sun with an exhortation to the audience: Take your seats in the clouds and in the trees and on the backs of whales before the bell. Sounds emanating from the orchestra will fly to you. The cashier will greet you. The music of a composer will fill the theatre. The orchestra will obey the conductor. The spores of the ‘Budeslavl’ [Futurist] Theatre will fly into life. The stage is a mouth! 15

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Be a spectator by listening (with a large ear)! And be an observer.51 The Futurist theatre, in other words, demanded an audience who would not merely hear and see, but would listen and observe. For it was they who had to make meaning from the sequence of attractions set before them. This was a genuine extension of the process of theatre, and explains why it was in the theatre that Russian Futurism made its deepest and longest-lasting impact. Notes   1. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, p. 51.  2. Ibid.   3. Marshall (ed.), Mayakovsky, p. 84.  4. Markov, Russian Futurism, p. 9.  5. Milner, A Slap in the Face!, p. 29.  6. Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909, in Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos, p. 21.   7. Marinetti, Settimelli and Corra, The Futurist Synthetic Theatre 1915, in Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos, p. 183.   8. See Ottinger (ed.), Futurism, p. 58.   9. Gibian (ed.), Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd, p. 197. 10. Markov, Russian Futurism, p. 157. 11. See, for instance, Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre; Gladkov, Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses; Leach, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. 12. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, p. 12. 13. Pike (ed.), The Futurists, the Formalists and the Marxist Critique, p. 13. 14. Ibid. pp. 13–14. 15. Stephan, ‘LEF’ and the Left Front of the Arts, p. 58. 16. See Railing (ed.), Victory Over the Sun, vol. 2, p. 11. 17. Markov, Russian Futurism, pp. 269–70. 18. Bowlt, Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia’s Silver Age, p. 317. 19. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, p. 52. 20. Ibid. p. 65. 21. Kruchenykh, Suicide Circus, p. 49. 22. Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, The Word as Such, in Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, pp. 57–62. 23. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, p. 183. 24. Khlebnikov, Snake Train, p. 62. 25. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, p. 177. 26. Ibid. p. 180. 27. Markov, Russian Futurism, p. 126. 28. Christie and Gillett (eds), Futurism/Formalism/FEKS, p. 28. 29. Khlebnikov, Snake Train, p. 207. 30. Lavrentiev, Aleksandr Rodchenko, p. 85. 31. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, p. 119. 32. Marshall (ed.), Mayakovsky, p. 77. 33. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, p. 149. 34. Christie and Gillett (eds), Futurism/Formalism/FEKS, p. 11. 35. Ibid. p. 28. 36. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, pp. 194, 195, 208.

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37. Lodder, Russian Constructivism, p. 228. It should be noted, however, that Lodder maintains that ‘it would be completely mistaken to regard Object as a Constructivist journal’. 38. Marinetti, Settimelli and Corra, The Futurist Synthetic Theatre 1915, in Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos, p. 183. 39. Railing (ed.), Victory Over the Sun, vol. 1, p. 15. 40. Mayakovsky, ‘Cinema, Theatre, Futurism’, in Elliott (ed.), Mayakovsky: Twenty Years of Work, p. 22. 41. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, pp. 150, 152. 42. Christie and Gillett (eds), Futurism/Formalism/FEKS, p. 13. 43. Ibid. p. 19. 44. Gibian (ed.), Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd, p. 201. 45. Ibid. p. 202. 46. Taylor (ed.), Eisenstein: Writings 1922–1934, pp. 33–8. 47. Ibid. p. 41. 48. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, pp. 185–6. 49. Ibid. pp. 211, 265. 50. Taylor (ed.), Eisenstein: Writings 1922–1934, p. 34. 51. Bartlett and Dadswell (eds), Victory Over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera, pp. 23–4.

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2

THEATRICALISING FUTURISM

The Union of Youth Russian Futurism was inherently theatrical, and the Futurists themselves worked hard to realise this. Most obviously this was seen in ‘The First Futurist Theatre Productions in the World’ which were staged at the Luna Park Theatre, St Petersburg, in early December 1913, but before this there was much which showed the theatricality of Futurism. ‘The First Futurist Theatre Productions in the World’ were presented under the auspices of the Union of Youth, which had existed informally since the early summer of 1909, and was regularised in January 1910, when it was officially founded. It was, it stated, intended to be something like a museum-club, where links can be established, artists can become acquainted, and where most importantly they can get to know each other’s work, can listen attentively and freely to arguments and thus new talents can be revealed . . . The main aim . . . is to allow the possibility of self-examination, free searching, and the elucidation of new paths.1 It organised an impressive variety of activities for its members. Besides twiceannual exhibitions, there were well-attended lectures, discussions and public debates – even at their most abstruse, the Futurists were always entertaining. It acquired premises in St Petersburg where members could meet on a nonsectarian basis and enjoy drawing sessions together, and in 1912 started its 18

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2.1  Illustrations by Natalia Goncharova for Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh’s book A Game in Hell. own journal, The Union of Youth. It also presented concerts and theatre productions. Much of this was due to its energetic moneyed patron, Levky Ivanovich Zheverzheyev, who became its President, with a committee which included Mikhail Matyushin, Olga Rozanova, Iosif Shkolnik and others. In 1913 the Union of Youth entered into a more or less formal alliance with the Hylaea group of Futurist poets and writers, welcoming readings by Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh and Burlyuk as well as less-known figures like Mikhail Le-Dantyu, Ilya Zdanevich and Igor Severyanin. With literature becoming more important in its programme, and with painters such as Malevich, Rozanova, Shkolnik and Pavel Filonov in its ranks, its members also moved towards book production, many of the Hylaea poets publishing chapbooks designed and illustrated by these artists. These illustrations were often influenced by the lubok, popular prints of ‘old’ Russia. The influence can also be seen in Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova’s neo-primitivist art of this period, and it was significantly to affect the ‘look’ of Futurist theatre. Larionov, a ‘forceful personality’ noted for his ‘fabled obstinacy’,2 and his wife, Goncharova, were very much leaders of the Futurists at this date, his ‘rude’ paintings being ‘characteristic’ of Futurism at this time.3 It was Goncharova who led the attack on the French-influenced 19

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Cubism of the Jack of Diamonds exhibition at the Union of Youth in February 1913, arguing that the principles of Cubism could equally be found in old Russian artefacts such as ikon and fresco paintings, and the dolls sold at traditional fairs. With Larionov’s vocal support, she announced the formation of the Donkey’s Tail. The evening, according to Markov, ‘ended in an uproar’.4 Larionov believed the Union of Youth was stagnating, though the Union’s support for the Hylaea writers and for Malevich’s ‘zaum realist’ Cubo-Futurist experiments in painting hardly bears out his fears. Futurism on the Streets By late 1913 Larionov and Goncharova’s Futurism finally arrived at the centre of the cultural and artistic life of Russia, partly through its implicit performativity and the deliberate theatricalisation of individual members’ works and lives. Their notoriety was gained through a series of ‘public appearances’ on the streets as well as in lecture halls and cabarets, when their controversial behaviour aroused volumes of comment, derision, criticism and interest. Publicity of any kind was welcome, and the notorious behaviour of the Futurists in the eighteen months before the outbreak of the First World War was a significant factor in shaping Futurism’s image for the rest of its existence. The aim of everything they did was to arouse the public and to publicise their cause. But it should be added that many of the Futurists were also nearly penniless and appearances and performances helped to generate income for them. Their most accessible performances, which raised little money but usually engendered publicity, took place in the streets, where they attracted attention simply by walking about. Firstly this was because of their appearance. Mayakovsky and Burlyuk wore top hats and capes, with flowing cravats at their necks. Kruchenykh wore a carrot in his lapel, and others sported radishes or, in the case of Mayakovsky, Burlyuk and Kamensky, wooden spoons in deliberate mockery of the lilies and carnations of the decadents. At other times, Mayakovsky sported a yellow, or yellow and black striped, Russian blouse, and yellow ties, each larger than the last. Their faces were painted in various styles. Kamensky wore blue eyeshadow; Mayakovsky and Burlyuk had little drawings on their cheeks or foreheads – a dog, a bird in a tree, or just a pattern of lines and zigzags. Larionov, Goncharova and Zdanevich also appeared in public in make-up, but they preferred lettering, musical notes or cross-hatching. Larionov and Zdanevich explained that ‘the painting of our faces is neither an absurd piece of fiction, nor a relapse – it is indissolubly linked to the character of our life and of our trade’. They added: ‘We have joined art to life. After the long isolation of artists, we have loudly summoned life and life has invaded art . . . The painting of our faces is the beginning of the invasion.’5 The painting was thus performative: it subverted orderly life and seemed to imply different social possibilities. The Mezzanine of Poetry group 20

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2.2  David Burlyuk with painted face. included one member, his name not given, who ‘fancied himself a Pierrot with an unpowdered face, and so he stuck a beauty spot in the shape of a heart to his right cheek and tried to convince everyone that all misfortune comes from the fact that people do not tell enough lies’.6 Thus decorated, Larionov and Konstantin Bolshakov walked up and down Kuznetsky Most with their faces painted, then retired to a café where they sat in the window drinking coffee, a spectacle for passers-by. Goncharova, meanwhile, became what one commentator called ‘an Amazon of the avantgarde’7 and painted provocative motifs on her own body as well as her face. At the same time, and as a publicity stunt, Burlyuk organised a group to walk through central Moscow not just painted and in costume, but reciting poems loudly as well, which caused more of a stir. ‘Even the introverted and shy [Benedikt] Livshits paraded with an outlandish necktie and handkerchief,’ Markov recorded.8 ‘We walked with serious, stern expressions, without even smiling,’ Kamensky recalled,9 and when a young girl offered Mayakovsky an orange, he ate it then and there, to the amazement of the lookers-on. Futurist Lectures But the Futurists’ greatest scandals occurred indoors, at the lectures they purported to give at their ‘Futurist Evenings’, which comprised variously poetry readings, ‘lectures’, debates, and verbal and even physical exchanges 21

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with the audience. The actual lectures frequently bore no resemblance to the advertised title, and could consist of improvised gibberish deliberately created to shock or arouse their listeners. Even when the lectures seemed to conform to expectations, as with Kamensky’s lecture on aviation and Futurism, there were surprises. Kamensky, a well-known pilot who had walked away virtually unscathed from a dramatic crash in 1911, lectured dressed in a chocolate-­coloured suit with gold trimmings and with an aeroplane painted on his forehead. Shklovsky declared that the debates were not always noisy, but he remembered one such when ‘the audience decided to beat us up . . . Mayakovsky made his way through the crowd like a red-hot iron through snow [but] Kruchenykh walked out screeching and beating off attackers with his galoshes’.10 Lili Brik, on the other hand, recalled that the Futurists ‘could not get through a single performance without the police being called and chairs being broken’.11 Some performers were better than others. Severyanin sang his poems. Kruchenykh, at the Union of Youth, spoke of chopping off words, then looked at the clock, appeared to notice the time and hastily ran offstage, thereby chopping off his own act. Mayakovsky was described by Filippo Marinetti, no friend of his, as ‘a clown with the red cloak, gold cheekbones and blue forehead . . . an imbecile in red arguing with four idiots in black’.12 On 23 March 1913 at the Polytechnic Museum of St Petersburg, a significant debate about art and the theatre was held, in which Ilya Zdanevich demonstrated the antics of the Italian Futurists in a speech notorious for his claim that an old boot was more beautiful than the Venus de Milo. Then, after Mikhail Bonch-Tomashevsky bitterly disparaged the theatre in Europe, Larionov suggested founding an avant-garde theatre in Russia. It was to be an idea he would return to. Now, however, he refused to allow a critic in the audience to speak, to the dismay of other audience members, some of whom stood up threateningly. Larionov threw a light bulb, then a decanter, at them, they replied by hurling chairs at the stage, and only when the police were called did the hubbub subside. This was not untypical of Futurist events. At the Hall of the Society of Art Lovers in Moscow in October 1913, a debate advertised on posters made of toilet paper was held despite police attempts to halt it. The hall was packed, and the Futurists soon aroused them, Mayakovsky shouting that the Futurists were destroying their (i.e. the audience’s) old world and pointing out how fat various spectators were. Army officers began banging the floor with their swords, Kruchenykh spilled tea over the front row – perhaps deliberately – and again the event ended in chaos. Cabaret Performances The Futurists also performed in cabarets like the famous Stray Dog in St Petersburg. This was opened under the auspices of the Artistic Society of the 22

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Intimate Theatre and soon became what one commentator has described as ‘the centre of Petersburg literary life and the Russian literary avant-garde in general’.13 Tamara Karsavina, who danced there, described the clientele as ‘actors hectically making a precarious living, musicians of prospective fame, poets and their muses, and a few aesthetes’,14 and Benedikt Livshits called it the place ‘where the literary and artistic youth, without a cent to their name as a general rule, felt at home’.15 The evening began after midnight, and the entertainments and arguments were all the more impassioned because of the lateness of the hour. Besides poetry readings, music (‘noise’ concerts) and dance, there were more lectures, including, for instance, Shklovsky’s famous ‘Resurrection of Word’. This began at one o’clock in the morning, after which the questions and discussion did not begin until half-past two. Olga Rozanova, Kruchenykh’s wife, recorded how she stayed all through one Saturday night until seven thirty in the morning. It was here, too, in November 1913, that Larionov, Goncharova, Zdanevich and Le-Dantyu presented ‘The First Evening of Everythingism’, seeking freedom in art from time and space. All this was Futurism theatricalised. It was uncontainable and scandalous, and the press soon came to use the word ‘Futurism’ as a stick with which to beat anything outrageous. The Futurists themselves they treated as unreformed hooligans. But the well-heeled St Petersburg audiences were fascinated, pleasurably horrified and greatly excited by them. They kept coming back for more, and some even painted their own faces. How were they to react to Larionov and Zdanevich’s ‘holiday interview’ of January 1913? • Are you Futurists? • Yes, we’re Futurists. • You deny Futurism? • Yes, we deny Futurism, till it vanishes into the face of the earth. • But you’re contradicting yourselves. • Yes, our mission is to contradict ourselves. • Are you charlatans? • Yes, we’re charlatans. • Are you without talent, then? • Yes, we’re without talent. • Is it impossible to talk to you? • Yes, of course . . . • So what do you want for the New Year? • To be true to ourselves.16 This was alternative comedy, or perhaps performance art, the theatricalising of life and art. It was Futurism, performative, challenging and with social implications which were disturbing and even destabilising. 23

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The Performance House and Tsar Maximilian The Union of Youth’s entry into theatre came in 1911, first with a cabaret-like medley called The Performance House, and then with a production of the old Russian folk play Tsar Maximilian and His Son Adolf. The Performance House opened on 27 January at the Suvorin Theatre School in a production by Mikhail Bonch-Tomashevsky. It was an entertainment with similar neo-­ primitive roots in a Russian or Slavic past which Goncharova and Khlebnikov were beginning to excavate. Its various unconnected scenes, comprising traditional songs and dances as well as comic interludes, took place simultaneously in several rooms with names like the Champagne Hall and the Folk Dance Arena. These different performing spaces were decorated with bold, lubok-style paintings, and the audience sat on barrels, not chairs, around acting areas which were informally marked out and not specially lit. The performers were dressed in bright, pseudo-traditional costumes designed by Mikhail Le-Dantyu, and their style was ‘popular’: they talked to the audience, joked with them and at no time pretended their characters were real. Audience members could themselves change into appropriate costume and make-up in a room reserved for this, and join in. The show began with a rousing horn and drum voluntary, interrupted by a cock crowing, followed by the performers processing through the ‘house’. Cannons showered the audience with confetti; there were rowdy interludes with masked devils and goblins, monks, swordsmen and soldiers, dragons and cupids. Popular dancers, singers and acrobats performed, and traditional music was interspersed with specially composed works by Adrian Shaposhnikov which accompanied improvised ballet sequences. One room was designated the ‘Beer Cellar of Mr Gambrinus’ and was based on a bohemian Paris café whose proprietor, one Mr Gambrinus, was reputed to have invented lager. Here French, Italian and Spanish songs were sung and the entertainment was decidedly bawdy. The whole event was a kind of carnival, noisy, energetic and celebratory.17 The Union’s second production in May 1911 was of Alexei Remizov’s version of Tsar Maximilian and His Son Adolf, again directed by Mikhail Bonch-Tomashevsky and with designs by Vladimir Tatlin. This was presented at the intimate theatre known as the House of Interludes. The production contained a number of motifs which would reappear in the Futurist theatre. For example, the image of the cock, which crowed to signal the end of the play’s dark night, sunrise and the return to normality and was repeated on the Easter cake Maximilian was given, as well as on the end of his sceptre, was the opposite of its use in Kruchenykh’s Victory Over the Sun, where the sun is the symbol of everything out-of-date and useless, and must be brought down out of the sky. The throne of Maximilian, despot and lover, was set at the top 24

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of a flight of stairs, under a bright arch, an effect Zdanevich would recreate in his Yanko king of Albania. And the fact that Tsar Maximilian had been presented as a vertep entertainment – that is, a popular puppet show – was also echoed by Zdanevich, who deliberately employed vertep conventions in his ‘dras’. The Union of Youth presentations were successful enough to be toured to Moscow under the auspices of the Moscow Literary Circle. When they returned to St Petersburg, they added a third play, Cervantes’s The Jealous Old Man, to their repertoire. Mikhail Larionov’s ‘Teatr Futu’ There seem to have been no specific Futurist theatre productions in Moscow before the autumn of 1913. Natalia Goncharova held a major retrospective exhibition at this time, on the closing night of which Ilya Zdanevich again lectured on ‘Everythingism’. But it was in conjunction with this exhibition that Konstantin Bolshakov’s The Street Dance, with decor by Mikhail Larionov and music by Alexei Arkhangelsky, was performed. An impressionistic exploration of urban night life, the play had only one character, played in the three scenes by three different actors. How far the presentation was more than a staged reading is unclear, but Larionov’s idea for a stage set, in which the three settings – a restaurant, a flat and the street – were to be built, as it were, inside each other, and the three scenes then played simultaneously, was striking. Suddenly, Larionov became possessed by a flame of theatricalising energy. In September 1913 he announced plans for a new Futurist Theatre – ‘Teatr Futu’ – in Moscow, which would involve some of the most prominent Futurists, including Goncharova, Zdanevich, Mayakovsky, Bolshakov and others. The dramas performed would be ‘beyond the limits of the language of ideas, being a free and invented onomatopoeia’.18 Plays by Bolshakov, Anton Lotov and others were in preparation, music by Vyacheslav Levkievsky was being written and a patron had been acquired. Larionov’s vision was Artaud-like when Artaud was still a mere teenager. His various ideas for the stage of the new theatre, for instance, proposed that either it would be constantly in motion, allowing dancers to perform on a moving floor, or it would be placed in the centre of the auditorium, with the audience watching from above, lying or sitting on a strong mesh suspended from the ceiling. Alternatively the audience could be accommodated on a dais in the centre of the hall, with the action performed around them. The actors were to appear in Futurist guise, perhaps with extra ears or eyes painted on their faces, and their hair encased in several different wigs, one on top of another. They were to ‘perform’ the parts of costumes and scenery, too – ­actor-hats, actor-trousers, actor-tables, actor-windows, and so on – though exactly how this was to be accomplished was not vouchsafed. 25

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Larionov’s theatre opened at the Pink Lantern cabaret on 19 October 1913. Spectators’ faces were painted as they entered. But the programme soon degenerated into controversy, with Larionov himself, face painted, abusing the audience, and Mayakovsky also being offensive. When Goncharova, perhaps provoked, hit an army officer, the audience’s growls became louder. Larionov tried to silence them, they yelled insults back at him, and the whole evening deteriorated into a brawl. The police were called. Larionov’s Pink Lantern was extinguished.

Drama in the Futurist Cabaret Number 13 That the closure passed with minimal protest was due to the fact that Larionov had now acquired a contract from N. Toporkov and Alphonse Winkler, who borrowed money to make a film, Drama in the Futurist Cabaret Number 13. Directed by Vladimir Kasyanov, this venture included all the prominent Futurists, including, besides Larionov and Goncharova, Mayakovsky, the Burlyuk brothers, Ilya Zdanevich, Vadim Shershenevich, Anton Lotov and others. A comic-grotesque parody of filmic melodrama, Drama in the Futurist Cabaret Number 13’s action has been described in detail by Anthony Parton.19 The Futurists paint their faces and then perform several turns, including reading their poetry (for the silent cinema!) and Goncharova doing a Futurist tap-dance, the various sequences being punctuated by apparently meaningless

2.3  Larionov with Maximovich’s corpse in Drama in the Futurist Cabaret Number 13. 26

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letters flashing up on the screen. The story itself begins with a ‘Futurist Dance of Death’. Larionov and a woman (Maximovich) dance on a table, they lunge at one another with knives, and Maximovich is killed. Then comes the ‘Futurist burial’: Larionov carries Maximovich’s body out, kisses her and leaves her in the snow. Larionov is expelled from Futurism. He takes poison and dies. The other Futurists depart, stepping over his body, on which a note is pinned: ‘Expelled from Futurism’. Maximovich’s corpse is seen, also with a note pinned to it: ‘A victim of Futurism’. This work received little kudos, and the Futurists’ ambitions moved on, though Mayakovsky held a lifelong enthusiasm for cinema. Indeed, at the end of 1913 he was approached by Robert Persky for a script. He wrote a scenario, called Pursuit of Glory, but it was turned down. ‘Ashamed, I tore up the scenario,’ he wrote, but continued: ‘Later, on a tour of the Volga region, I saw a film made from this very scenario.’ Persky’s editor had obviously felt Mayakovsky’s work was not so bad after all.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy In the meantime, in St Petersburg, Matyushin, Kruchenykh and Malevich’s ‘All-Russian Congress of Futurian Bards’ announced their plans for theatre productions, fearful that Larionov would pre-empt their claims to primacy. They advertised plays by Mayakovsky and Kruchenykh, which were produced in December 1913, as well as others by Elena Guro, Khlebnikov and Nikolai Burlyuk, which did not materialise. When Mayakovsky’s contribution proved too short, he hurriedly wrote a second act for it, but it still ran for barely an hour. When it was sent to the censors, it had not yet been titled: it was simply ‘Vladimir Mayakovsky, a tragedy’. It was passed as such, and on 2 December 1913 Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy became the first Futurist play to be performed, with a second performance two days later. Mayakovsky had advertised for performers, adding, ‘Actors, do not bother to come, please.’20 Those who did appear were therefore mostly students. They gathered to hear the author read his play, which he did to ‘staggering effect’, according to Aristarkh Lentulov.21 But as the few rehearsals proceeded, at least one student dropped out. He wrote to the St Petersburg paper that ‘such senseless rubbish as Mayakovsky’s poetry’ was ‘incompatible with the dignity of an honest intellectual’.22 The letter was published on 1 December, causing a rush for tickets. Though perhaps not all seats were sold, the theatre was almost full for the first Futurist theatre performance the next evening. Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy was the quintessence of non-­illusionist theatre. It was supposedly directed by Vladimir Rappaport, though Mayakovsky, who played the main part of ‘Vladimir Mayakovsky’, was unable to resist interfering with every element of the production. The play began with a prologue set in front of a square panel on which Pavel Filonov, one of two 27

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designers who worked on the production, had painted colourful children’s toys. There was also, Shklovsky recalled, ‘a large, very handsome cock which Filonov painted over several times’.23 The sets for the two main acts of the play were designed by Iosif Shkolnik, at this time a neo-primitivist artist who would become resident designer at St Petersburg’s Troitsky Theatre in 1914 and at the Maly after the 1917 revolution. His original idea for a three-dimensional setting with ladders, bridges and walkways proved impractical for reasons of both finance and time, so he substituted two painted backcloths representing a city – streets, carriages, trams and people for the first act, a city set in a slightly disturbing landscape for the second. In one corner of the stage, covered in a sheet, was concealed the Enormous Woman. She was perhaps twenty feet tall. At a crucial point in the action, the sheet was removed to reveal a huge papier mâché doll, with red cheeks and dressed in rags. She was, perhaps, a side swipe at the Symbolist poets, especially Blok, whose idealisation of a ‘beautiful woman’ had captivated St Petersburg’s more decadent poetry readers, and who was in the first-night audience. At the front of the stage was a small set of steps. Mayakovsky entered through the audience and slowly ascended these steps to speak his opening lines. He was not made up, was dressed in his yellow blouse, hat and cape, and he carried his own walking-stick. On one level this was almost an everyday garb, but there was also something of the clown about it, a Futurist version of the traditional Russian ‘holy fool’, perhaps. He made a vivid visual contrast to the other ‘characters’ who carried six-foot boards in front of them upon which Filonov had depicted ikon-like pictures in a style inspired by monastery frescoes. Some of the actors, behind their shield-like boards, carried crude objects – an iron herring, a painted bagel – and their tears in Act 2 were made of tinsel and looked like ‘giant fish bubbles’.24 Behind their ‘shields’, the actors wore white coats, and they put their heads round the sides to speak. They moved with slow deliberation and in straight lines so as always to show the face of the shield to the audience. Alexander Mgebrov commented: ‘Of course, they acted badly, mispronounced words as well as not understanding what they were saying, but they had, it seemed to me, something that came from the very depths.’25 Unlike these, Mayakovsky himself strolled, danced and moved around the stage, paying little attention to them, smoking, and declaiming. According to Kruchenykh, he spoke ‘stunningly well’,26 and Livshits concurred: ‘In playing himself, in hanging up his cloak of buffoonery, in adjusting his striped jacket, in lighting up his cigarette and in reading out his verses, Mayakovsky threw an invisible bridge across the two art forms’ of lyrical poetry and drama.27 The critic P. Yartsev believed that Mayakovsky brought back ‘the actor in his pure form – the fairground buffoon who frankly introduces himself and, while performing, is engaged in obvious interaction with the audience’.28 28

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2.4  [Plate 1] Iosif Shkolnik, backcloth design for Act 2, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). Though he remembered being ‘booed to shreds’,29 the performance was actually something of a triumph for Mayakovsky, who was able to shift from the oratorical to the conversational unexpectedly and disarmingly. Some members of the audience laughed at him, some heckled, and there were negative press reviews, as expected, from newspapers which did all they could to denigrate Futurism, but the policeman, placed strategically backstage, had nothing to 29

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report, and Mgebrov wrote later of the performance that ‘the strange fact of the matter was – it made an impression; it had substance in it; movement’. He explained: The public tried laughing, but the laughter died. Why? Because this wasn’t at all funny . . . For example, if I had come demanding a spectacle which had to be amusing; say I had come to laugh at a clown, and all of a sudden that clown began to talk seriously about myself – the laughter would freeze on my lips. And when in that first moment the laughter died . . . immediately one sensed the audience was strangely alert.30 The audience sensed the tragedy behind the strange goings-on on stage. Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy is not an Evreinov-style monodrama, as has been argued, though Susan Compton’s suggestion that Mayakovsky interpreted the form ‘in a new and alarming way’ has some substance. He gave ‘a fearsome twist to Evreinov’s theory of monodrama,’ she argued: ‘suddenly the attributes of the hero’s character have taken on their own life, frightening the character.’31 The key to Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy lies in something Mayakovsky wrote ten years later, in 1923, when wrestling with his love for Lili Brik: ‘Love is life, love is the main thing . . . Love is the heart of everything.’32 This does not simply refer to a personal emotional commitment to one person; as Shklovsky noted, Mayakovsky ‘linked the destiny of the world to the destiny

2.5  Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1913. 30

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of his love’.33 The play merges these two, personal love on the one hand and the love of the revolutionary for the people on the other. The second of these is clear from the opening scene which becomes ‘a beggars’ holiday’: ‘hundreds of feet strike the taut belly of the city square’ and ‘the excitement is uncontrollable’.34 But to make this energy productive, the beggars need someone who understands, and this is Mayakovsky’s role. It is he who unveils the Enormous Woman, the ‘meat’ which, when it is eaten by the poor (that is, when they take it to themselves), gives them the drive for revolution and a new kind of life. They kill the Conventional Young Man, who urges caution, and raise the Enormous Woman. The Man with One Eye and One Leg announces the complete overthrow of the old world: on the foreheads of cities anger swelled up into rivers of thousand-mile-long veins. Slowly, in terror, arrows of hair rose up on the bald pate of Time.35 On the level of personal emotional life, this images the seething, ungovernable feelings of passionate love. The unveiling of the woman changes the ‘jolly holiday’ into ‘joyous madness’. It expresses overwhelming physical love, and the climax, which ‘breaks all bonds’, is the orgasmic climax. The Old Man with Scrawny Black Cats attempts to prevent the unveiling, telling the people they are shaking ‘babies’ rattles’. He advocates the old romantic flummery – pinning ‘the sun on the gowns of our sweethearts’ and adorning ‘them with glittering brooches of stars’ – rather than having sex with them. His is the voice of the past, of convention and byt. He is like the tsar offering a Duma in place of a Soviet, who, when electricity is demanded, suggests the people stroke cats to make electricity: The entire catch of those flashes we’ll pour into wires.36 The amount of electricity generated from stroking a cat is clearly inadequate to the people’s needs, and stroking is a soothing, virtually mindless occupation, the opposite of passionate love. But he almost convinces the beggars. He is heeded, for example, by the Man with One Ear: presumably he lacks the ear which should be tuned to Mayakovsky’s revolutionary message. It is only when Mayakovsky ‘teaches’ his ‘children’ about ‘her’ who puts her ‘healing flowers into the wounds of my lips’ and unveils the Enormous Woman that they accept his revolutionary, love-dependent standpoint. As he expressed it in his later poem, ‘Homewards!’: 31

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Proletarians    come to Communism              from the depths beneath – the depths of mines,        sickles,           and factories. I   plunge into Communism           from the heights of poetry above, because for me,        without it,           there is no love.37 It is this fusion of private and public which gives the play its resonance. It is love which makes him a poet – he is not God, as the Old Man with Scrawny Black Cats cunningly tries to insist; he is a poet, and can only urge people what to do. He can set the Enormous Woman, the red meat, before them but they must eat it. And they do, symbolically: they carry the image shoulder high, but in their intoxication they mistake the giver for the gift. ‘We’ll raise a monument to red meat,’ they announce. They drop the Enormous Woman. In gratitude they turn to Mayakovsky and drape him in a toga as if to turn him into the monument. They thus undermine the very basis of their liberation. Mayakovsky is now as the Enormous Woman was, but of even less use, for he is not red meat, he is the one who served it. On the personal level, the draping of Mayakovsky in a toga represents the institutionalisation of his love, the cloaking of passionate spontaneity with a garment of respectability. Mayakovsky has become an inanimate statue. Herein lies the play’s tragedy. Mayakovsky’s heroic attempts to make his great love productive have failed. The frenzy of the carnival changed into the raising of a monument, free love-making into conventionalism. In Act 2, significantly labelled ‘Depressing’, the poet has become an obelisk, an idol, a lover dressed in a ridiculous, outdated toga and crowned with laurels. The revolution – or the grand passion – has evaporated. Instead of being brought iron herrings and huge golden twisted loaves of bread, material things, things of the street, as he was in Act 1, he is now offered tears, first from women, then from silly, giggling, puppet-like children. Mayakovsky becomes ‘frightened’, then ‘awkward’, and sinks down, exhausted and in despair. But he stands again, resolutely: But no! . . . I’ll go out through the city, leaving 32

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shred after shred of my tattered soul on the spears of houses.38 Institutionalised love – revolutionary or sexual – is a ‘bestial faith’ and Mayakovsky decisively rejects it.

Victory Over the Sun On 3 December 1913, the night after the premiere of Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy, the second Futurist drama was performed. It was Victory Over the Sun, an opera with libretto by Alexei Kruchenykh and music by Mikhail Matyushin. It shared Vladimir Mayakovsky’s ‘deep antipathy to bourgeois mediocrity and the regimented mechanisation of civilization’.39 The sun was, for Kruchenykh, the ultimate symbol of the humdrum and the everyday: after all, it rose every morning without fail and behaved absolutely predictably, travelling from east to west and then setting, only to rise again the following day and repeat the cycle. And it represented the old poetry, too, the poetry Kruchenykh was dedicated to throwing overboard. Pushkin had been described as ‘the sun of Russian poetry’ from the time he had been shot in a duel in 1837. Moreover, the despised Symbolist poets had continually ‘bandied about’ the idea of ‘let us be like the sun’,40 as Kruchenykh himself had complained. As for the theatre, he saw the ‘tinselled-up Art Theatre’ as ‘a venerable shelter of vulgarity’, and wished to replace it with a ‘new theatre’ which ‘beats on the nerves of habit and spreads new revelations on all the arts’.41 Opera was hugely popular in St Petersburg, which had no fewer than four permanent opera companies, and no doubt Kruchenykh and his colleagues were also hoping to unnerve the haute bourgeois and prosperous opera-goers. But more than this: as Irina Duksina has pointed out, Victory Over the Sun advances ‘a new people, a new civilization, a new cosmology and a new mythology’.42 Kruchenykh, Matyushin and Kasimir Malevich, who designed the sets and costumes, worked under the pressure of time, worried among other things that they would be pre-empted by Larionov’s Moscow Teatr Futu. Vladimir Rappaport again directed, but most of the performers seem to have been those rejected by Mayakovsky. In the end only two full rehearsals took place, and these in less than propitious circumstances. The rehearsal room became ‘a sort of Futurist salon’ with, among others, Kulbin, Burlyuk and Khlebnikov present. Khlebnikov sat gnomically through proceedings, occasionally dropping a remark which, ‘if it concerned the performance . . . was acted on immediately’.43 He was surrounded by a bevy of young admirers. In addition, instead of an orchestra, there was only a tinny piano to provide music, a situation which pertained in the performances, too, and only three of the chorus of seven could be described as ‘singers’, though their number was augmented by two professionals, including Nikolai Rikhter in the role of the Aviator. At 33

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one point in rehearsals, Rikhter was actually shot when the stage gun used in the action was discovered to have been loaded, but luckily his heavy costume prevented any serious injury. Alexander Mgebrov remembered the performance years later: The curtain rose and confronting the audience was a second, of white calico, on which was depicted the author himself, the composer and the artist, in three different hieroglyphics. The first chord of the music sounded and the second curtain parted. He [Kruchenykh] began reading the prologue: ‘Enough!’ shouted the audience. ‘Boring – get off!’ The prologue ended. Strange bellicose shouts rang out and the next curtain split in two. The audience began to guffaw. But a beautiful challenge began to sound from the stage. Cardboard came down from on high, entirely covered with war-like colours: on it were painted two life-like aggressive figures: two knights. All this in blood-red. The challenge had been thrown down. Now the action began. The most varied assortment of masks came and went. Backdrops changed and so did moods: horns resounded, shots rang out. Amid the cardboard and calico figures I made out a cockerel in a symbolic cockerel’s costume.44 The prologue, read by Kruchenykh, was actually written by Khlebnikov. The language of both Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh presents the first puzzle the spectator has to solve in Victory Over the Sun. There is certainly some use of zaum, beyonsense Cubist language, which may sound when spoken like actors’ voice exercises, but even the apparently normal words and sentences can resist interpretation. This is demonstrated by the difficulties translators have found with this work: thus, the two most recent translations render the last line of the first scene: if you are an infidel run to strike your lord’s head and he will run after it in a flower sale . . . (Eugeny Steiner)45 If you run off disloyally, you will have to strike your leader’s head and he will run after it in a flower shop . . . (Rosamund Bartlett)46 Neither is ‘wrong’, but the difference demonstrates the problem. This is, in other words, a difficult text, one which draws attention to itself and thus frees the audience to construct meanings. It is possible, however, that it can unlock the imagination, and prompt the sensitive spectator to see new relationships and possibilities, in ways more conventional linguistic constructions cannot. The words were complemented in performance by the designs of Kasimir 34

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Malevich, then a Cubo-Futurist painter on the verge of his breakthrough to Suprematism. Hampered as he was by lack of time and money (though he created twenty pieces of decor in four days), his sketches remain brilliant examples of what stage costumes and design can be. Yet though the backcloths and costumes clearly contributed their own dimension of meaning to the performance, in a sense these sketches are deceptive, because on the page, as designs, they are so stark and clear, whereas in performance, Malevich’s ­lighting effects created something much more ambivalent. Kruchenykh’s suggestions for backcloths mark the progress of the action: in the first act, white with black in Scene 1 when the action is divisive, then green when ‘the sun is slain’ and ‘darkness has begun’, then black to indicate the eclipse of the sun. The suggestions for the second act, set in ‘the Tenth Land’, are more complicated. Kruchenykh now demands houses with their windows ‘strangely’ looking inside and ‘arranged in irregular rows’ so that ‘it seems they are moving suspiciously’.47 But Malevich was able to find a concrete solution for these ideas in his Cubist, anti-perspectival, non-illusionist backcloth designs which destroy the expected coherence of conventional stage pictures. Thus, the houses he draws are like dream houses which could never be. They destabilise audience assumptions and question whether the conventional house imprisons or liberates. The ladder, for instance, echoed – or contradicted – in

2.6  Kasimir Malevich, backcloth design for Act 2, ‘The Tenth Land’, Victory Over the Sun. 35

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the nearby spiral staircase, leads, not to heaven as in a traditional ikon, but to nowhere, while the fragment of clock makes its own ironic comment on time in the timeless Tenth Land. If the backcloths were fully realised in production – and this is not certain – the costume designs were probably not completely implemented. The actors wore bulbous masks, not obvious in the design sketches, though the three-dimensional, volumetric effect against the two-dimensional background remained. The Sportsman’s dress, for example, was an asymmetrical assemblage of circular and rectilinear elements in violent colours, which stood out against the black and white backdrop vividly. Such costuming inevitably forced the performers into unearthly, almost robotic movement, and seemed to partially deform the human body. The lighting, however, considerably modified any effects made by the costumes or the backcloths. Malevich employed moving spears of light which restlessly sought out whatever was on stage and sometimes were turned on the spectators, dazzling them momentarily. The coloured light struck the black and white backdrops, changing their hues and violently modifying their impact. The audience obtained partial views, and perspectives skewed or broken down. Unexpected glimpses of parts of bodies or pieces of distorted costume were picked out, and long, strange shadows were thrown, complementing and contradicting the bizarre shapes painted on the cloths, creating alienated, intriguing outlines and forms. And besides all this, Matyushin’s music added a further dimension of the unexpected. Matyushin was by profession a violinist rather than a composer, but now he sought a ‘new’ sound, and an atonal open form. He wanted half-notes and quarter-notes, and a ‘free music’ which reflected natural sound rather than traditional classical models. He said banging with a stick on a fence was an example of ‘free’ music, and he was interested in capturing the sounds of laughter and of birdsong. Whether he had the skill to harness these ideas may be questioned. Throughout Victory Over the Sun the music hovers almost unknowably behind much of the action. Sadly, more than half the score is missing, and what remains seems to contain many mistakes. Whether the music could have been effective on an out-of-tune piano rather than with a full orchestra must also be doubted, and some witnesses recorded that the singers were sometimes deliberately flat. It seems impossible therefore to judge the musical contribution to the performance of the ‘opera’, though it should have been crucial. This is a loss because the ‘sound’ of Futurism was important: it is a material part of zaum’s effect, for instance. For Kruchenykh, each letter, each sound, held significance, and he insisted in the performance that the actors break the words of the text into their component syllables, and insert a tiny pause between each, thereby producing a kind of mechanical quality to the 36

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speaking of the verse which ‘alienated’ the audience. At the same time, in their Malevich-designed costumes, the actors had a semi-robotic, grotesque, clown-like physicality. ‘The performers moved as if tied together’ according to Kruchenykh himself,48 perhaps as they performed the demanding stage directions: ‘The Enemy drags himself away by the hair and crawls off on his knees’, the Certain Person with Bad Intentions ‘starts a fight with himself’,49 and so on. These actions may be seen, however, as only one step further than the brilliant opening of the opera, when ‘two Futurian strongmen rend the curtain’ like circus ringmasters – or strong men. Yet the opera was received poorly. The theatre was nearly full for both performances on 2 and 4 December, with students and intelligentsia in numbers, but still they were boisterous and, as one account had it, ‘witty’: Almost every cue was followed by some witty word or other and soon the theatre was hosting not one, but two, performances: one on stage, and the other in the auditorium. Whistling and booing replaced the ‘music’ which, by the way, harmonized very well with the crazy decors and the delirium that resounded from the stage.50 When at the end the spectators called for the author, the theatre’s chief administrator shouted that the author had been taken off to the asylum. The newspapers, who constantly found the Futurists deliciously scandalous and helped in advance to create the atmosphere of mockery, were almost unanimously negative – ‘a show by the mentally ill’, ‘pseudo-artists put on a pseudo-show’, ‘wild, boring, indecent, senseless’ were fairly representative comments. It is, however, surprising to find one of Russian Futurism’s most sympathetic critics, Vladimir Markov, calling Victory Over the Sun ‘boring nonsense’.51 Victory Over the Sun may be provocative, it may be difficult, partly because of its use of ‘beyonsense’, but it is neither boring nor nonsense. It depicts in theatrical-metaphorical form the process of overthrowing the old social and artistic world and the opening of the new. Its method is through a series of opposing images which mesh rather like the teeth of two cogwheels. The teeth of one wheel represent the force of the future, those of the other conservatism, the old ways. As the cogs revolve, the implications become clearer. Thus, few characters appear in more than one scene because they usually stand for only one aspect of the force they represent. The old culture has its patrons (Neroand-Caligula), its self obsessions (the sun itself, the Certain Person with Bad Intentions) and its dead weight (graves, Fat Men). The new culture is strong (Strongmen) and agile (Sportsmen), and flies to new regions (the Traveller Through All Centuries and the Aviator). These oppositions grind against one another, menacingly, relentlessly, but not meaninglessly. 37

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2.7  [Plate 2] Kasimir Malevich: the Fat Man from Victory Over the Sun (St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music). The first scene begins with a statement of the opera’s intention – the Strongmen tear the curtain down. This is not only a deliberate defiance of the old decorous raising of the curtain, it is a physical destruction of the most cherished symbol of the traditional theatre. They declare their intention to put an end to the old culture: 38

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2.8  [Plate 3] Kasimir Malevich: Chorus Member from Victory Over the Sun (St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music). We have locked up The fat beauties in the house Let all those drunkards wander Around there stark naked

39

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And disclaim any stake in conventional culture: We have no songs Nor sighs nor rewards Which used to please the mildew of Rotten naiads! . . .52 The sun was responsible for the old ideas, and Nero-and-Caligula is its first representative, the rich amateur artist and patron. He drives out the Strongmen, adopts a ‘noble pose’, and boasts of his destructive, consumerist approach to the arts. But when the Traveller Through All Centuries arrives, he panics: ‘It shouldn’t be allowed to treat old people like that!’ he shouts, takes his boots off and leaves. The Traveller is seeking somewhere where ‘there is power without abuse and the rebels battle with the sun’. Overheard by the Certain Person with Bad Intentions, he argues that the bourgeois lifestyle and obsession with money has deadened the potential of art: ‘peddler women occupied the space on the spiral staircases.’ His resolve to fly unnerves and provokes the Person with Bad Intentions, who fires at him but misses. A ‘futurian machine-gun’ appears to mock his incompetence and Bullies and Enemies appear like doubts and fears to tease and rile him. At one moment he fights them, the next he attempts to befriend them, till finally he ‘shows a footballer’s technique’, dodging, feinting and running. In the ‘green’ second scene, the army of the past is marching – some are lame, some ‘very fat’. The Person with Bad Intentions rejects the flower they offer him, but is confused and fights with himself. Meanwhile the Sportsmen and Strongmen sing joyfully of the sun’s demise. The moment is arriving. They wait, and soon ‘Funerarians’ (gravediggers) arrive to bury the old, and a man on the telephone excitedly hears news of the sun’s captivity. The earth is no longer revolving, and a holiday is established as victory is gained. We are loose The crushed sun . . . Hail darkness! And black gods They dance, ‘growing healthy as pigs’. Act 2 takes place in the immediate aftermath of the victory. This is the Tenth Land, outside time and space. The Fat Man (the bourgeois) in terror is unable to find out how to wind up the clock and wants to get rid of his now-useless watch, while the windows of the houses are turned inwards and he can no longer climb the stairs or open the door. The houses obtain light from within themselves, it is ‘easier to breathe for everybody’, and the Reader, the newly empowered explorer of arts and culture, reflects: 40

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how extraordinary life is without the past With risk but without remorse and memories . . . Mistakes and failures that were tediously droning in one’s ears like a pest are forgotten and you are now similar to a spotless mirror or rich reservoir where in a spotless grotto carefree goldfish flex their tails. The noise of an aeroplane propeller draws nearer. It is the future world arriving, scaring a ‘petty bourgeois young man’ into an ugly ‘beyonsense’ lament:    yu yu yuk    yu yu yuk    gr gr gr       pm       pm     dr dr rd rd       u u u     k n k n lk m       ba ba ba ba the motherland is dying But something new is beginning. The aeroplane crashes, and the Aviator strides in from the wreck, ‘laughing’. ‘I am alive,’ he says and bursts into his own jubilant zaum song. The Strongmen join him in what is perhaps an ironic parody of Shakespeare: all is well that begins well     and has no end the world will perish but to us there is no           end!53 The opera thus works through dialectical oppositions. The old is faced with the new. Music bursts in, and falls silent. Speech and song interrupt one another. The static design is contradicted by the restive spotlight ranging across the whole theatre, and on the stage bumbling figures appear and disappear. The Fat Man is set against the Sportsmen. The ‘plot’ develops through leaps and breaks, structured by a series of unexpected shifts. Victory Over the Sun is impossible to categorise: it is not opera, nor is it a ‘straight’ play; it is neither comedy nor tragedy. It breaks all the rules, and operates unpredictably, and since there is no narrative in the conventional sense, each sensation promotes its own perception. The visual effect, for instance, is simply itself: what is seen is less than how it is seen. This is ‘theatre as such’, and stimulating enough to have been produced again in Vitebsk on 6 February 41

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1920, by Malevich’s group, UNOVIS (Affirmers – or Affirmation – of the New Art). Malevich oversaw the production, which was collectively produced and had new designs by Vera Ermolayeva, with Cubist backcloths and cylindrical and cubic forms for costumes. El Lissitzky, who emerged from the UNOVIS group, planned his own puppet version of the opera, and published his designs, but this production never took place. The Futurists failed to capitalise on the scandal and success of Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy and Victory Over the Sun. Part of the reason for this was of course the outbreak of war in 1914, in which some, like Mikhail Le-Dantyu, were killed, and others, including Larionov and Goncharova, emigrated. But part of the problem was that Zheverzheyev, the Union of Youth’s wealthy patron and chair, disliked the two plays presented, and was unhappy to be subsidising them. He quarrelled over paying Kruchenykh the agreed fee, and he bluntly refused Matyushin’s request to return Malevich’s design drawings. Members of the Union were shocked by this behaviour, and protested, whereupon Zheverzheyev walked away. The Union collapsed: planned exhibitions were cancelled and the next issue of The Union of Youth journal did not appear. Consequently, such ‘Futurist’ plays as were written over the next few years were largely unmemorable, and rarely found a producer. They included an opera, Song of Universal Growth by Pavel Filonov, Mayakovsky’s designer, which was a poor copy of Kruchenykh’s work, and Yuri Degen’s play Death and the Bourgeoisie, which followed equally palely in the shadow of Mayakovsky’s tragedy. Vadim Shershenevich’s Swifthood, despite the promise of his manifesto, A Declaration About Futurist Theatre, was a very slight piece. The Futurists Tour So the Futurists failed to capture the theatre, but they continued to ‘theatricalise’. Between December 1913 and March 1914, David Burlyuk organised a tour of seventeen Russian cities for himself, Mayakovsky and Vasily Kamensky, with Igor Severyanin making a few appearances until he quarrelled with Burlyuk and Mayakovsky. The tour, besides propagandising Futurism and the works of the Futurists, aimed to make some money for these badly off poets. In each city they visited they painted their faces, put radishes in their lapels and walked the streets to publicise their performances. In the evenings, they read their works, and lectured – Mayakovsky on the modern city, how it extended human emotions and provided a new rhythm to life, Kamensky on why Futurist poetry was uplifting, and Burlyuk on Futurism and Cubism. Burlyuk chaired the evenings, sitting under a grand piano suspended upside down above his head. Sometimes they read their poems simultaneously, as the Dadaists were to do later. 42

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2.9  Poster for Futurist appearance in Kazan, February 1914. Sometimes their audiences were numerous, but sometimes few people turned up. Sometimes these audiences were supportive, sometimes they booed and whistled. Always they were engaged. Alexander Rodchenko has left a good description of one performance: Shouts . . . Whistling . . . Laughter . . . Indignation . . . Burlyuk, all powdered, with an earring in one ear, was triumphant and unruffled . . . Pursing his lips with disdain, he carefully and meticulously examined the frenzied crowd through his lorgnette . . . Vasily Kamensky, wearing a light-coloured suit with a gigantic chrysanthemum in his lapel, raising his head high, sort of sparkling all over, read in a singsong . . . Vladimir Mayakovsky wore a yellow top, and [read] in a low, pleasant voice, which nonetheless drowned out all the noise of the hall. Mayakovsky also read Pushkin, but the audience still hissed, booed, banged . . . It was the first time I had seen such a frenzied, furious audience.54 The police watched in every city they visited, and sometimes intervened or even cancelled performances. They had many fine adventures, as when a goat ate their publicity material in Kishinev in the Ukraine. Finally, at the end of the 43

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tour, their finances were not much improved, but Futurism had become known and talked about across the huge tsarist Empire. Futurism during the First World War During the war the Futurists continued to appear in public in Moscow and St Petersburg, now Petrograd, but their audiences were reduced in both lecture halls and cabarets, though on one notorious occasion Mayakovsky offended the audience in the Stray Dog cabaret by announcing that he would rather ‘serve soda’ to prostitutes than recite his poetry to the bourgeoisie of the capital. Mayakovsky continued to perform more than other Futurists. According to Elsa Triolet, he ‘used to give readings, wearing his yellow blouse, and I remember these being something like boxing matches with people shouting, heckling and whistling . . . but he’d keep his head, showing off, thundering, yelling at the crowd’. She added: ‘I’ve only ever seen one man – Mayakovsky – who could totally “possess” a room. He played with the audience, teased it, taunted it like a mad bull and could always make it go in the direction he wanted.’55 At Christmas 1915, Lili Brik, Triolet’s sister, and her husband, Osip Brik, gave a ‘Futurist party’. The Christmas tree hung upside down and was decorated with verses from Mayakovsky’s poem ‘A Cloud in Trousers’ as well as a paper replica of his yellow blouse. In the candlelight, the guests wore outlandish costumes and make-up, with radishes or similar vegetables in their buttonholes. The hostess wore a short tartan skirt, red knee socks, a scarf instead of a blouse and a tall white wig. Kamensky had one eyebrow painted higher than the other and a bird painted on his cheek. Mayakovsky appeared as a hooligan with a rough red scarf and a knobkerrie. The last pre-revolutionary Futurist theatricalisation took place in February 1917, just a few days before the revolution which was to overthrow the tsar. It was a kind of coronation of Velimir Khlebnikov, who had been named ‘King of Russian Poetry’ at another party held by Osip and Lili Brik in 1915. In 1916 Khlebnikov had been drafted into the army, much to this unworldly poet’s anguish. The experience had already led to his writing the poetic sequence War in a Mousetrap, one of the great anti-war poems, in which he rejects the death of youth in war and proposes the only acceptable kind of war – against death itself. In February 1917 the Futurists mounted a ‘Carnival of the Arts’ in which a procession of flower-bedecked cars drove slowly down Petrograd’s Nevsky Prospect. Inside them were the Futurists – poets, painters, musicians, actors, who acknowledged the puzzled pavement crowds as they passed. The last vehicle in the line was a large lorry, on which sat the ‘Chairman of the Terrestrial Globe’, Velimir Khlebnikov. The Futurists performed Futurism in private and on the streets, a performativity which made it original and gave it the theatrical impetus which was its engine for years to come. 44

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Notes  1. Howard, The Union of Youth, p. 42.  2. Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, pp. 97, 102.   3. Ibid. pp. 106–7.  4. Markov, Russian Futurism, p. 39.  5. Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant Garde, pp. 80, 81.   6. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, pp. 133–4.  7. Yablonskaya, Women Artists of Russia’s New Age, p. 57.  8. Markov, Russian Futurism, p. 133.  9. Milner, A Slap in the Face!, p. 22. 10. Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and His Circle, pp. 68–9. 11. Jangfeldt (ed.), Love Is the Heart of Everything, p. 5. 12. Milner, A Slap in the Face!, p. 30. 13. Segel, Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret, p. 303. 14. Karsavina, Theatre Street, p. 197. 15. Segel, Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret, p. 308. 16. Sarab’yanov (ed.), Neizvestnyi Russkii Avangard, p. 132. 17. Howard, The Union of Youth, pp. 73–84. 18. Parton, Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde, p. 66. 19. Ibid. p. 71. 20. Tomashevsky, ‘Vladimir Mayakovsky’, p. 94. 21. Compton, The World Backwards, p. 57. 22. Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, p. 160. 23. Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and His Circle, p. 55. 24. Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, p. 164. 25. Worrall, Vladimir Mayakovsky, p. 15. 26. Railing (ed.), Victory Over the Sun, vol. 1, p. 133. 27. Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, p. 161. 28. Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre, p. 13. 29. Marshall (ed.), Mayakovsky, p. 86. 30. Worrall, Vladimir Mayakovsky, pp. 14, 15. 31. Compton, The World Backwards, pp. 49–50. 32. Jangfeldt (ed.), Love Is the Heart of Everything, p. 33. 33. Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and His Circle, p. 84. 34. Daniels (trans.), The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky, p. 29. 35. Ibid. p. 30. 36. Ibid. p. 24. 37. Marshall (ed.), Mayakovsky, p. 342. 38. Daniels (trans.), The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky, p. 36. 39. Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre, p. 11. 40. Bartlett and Dadswell (eds), Victory Over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera, p. 99. 41. Kruchenykh, Suicide Circus, p. 99. 42. Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant Garde, p. 38. 43. Tomashevsky, ‘Vladimir Mayakovsky’, p. 96. 44. Railing (ed.), Victory Over the Sun, vol. 1, pp. 141–2. 45. Ibid. p. 63 46. Bartlett and Dadswell (eds), Victory Over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera, p. 31. 47. Railing (ed.), Victory Over the Sun, vol. 1, p. 85. 48. Ibid. p. 140.

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49. Ibid. pp. 63, 67. 50. Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant Garde, p. 24. 51. Markov, Russian Futurism, p. 144. 52. Railing (ed.), Victory Over the Sun, vol. 1, p. 51. 53. All quotations from the play are taken from the translation by Evgeny Steiner in Railing (ed.), Victory Over the Sun, vol. 1, pp. 45–99. 54. Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future, pp. 217–18. 55. Triolet, Mayakovsky: Russian Poet, pp. 27, 29.

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3

FUTURISM AND REVOLUTION

Revolution February to November 1917 constituted ten months which shook Russia. Heavy military setbacks in the war, and hunger, poverty and freezing cold in the cities led to increasingly angry demonstrations on the streets. On 27 February, the tsarist Guards, who had struggled to ‘keep order’ until now, refused to fire on demonstrators, a Soviet was formed in Petrograd and on 2 March the tsar abdicated. A Provisional Government was formed. But the revolution was only just beginning. On 3 April Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia from exile abroad, and less than three weeks later, in the ‘April Days’, there were mass demonstrations against the Provisional Government’s plan to continue the war. Two governments were vying for power, the Soviet and the Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov. Whose policies and laws should prevail? Massive demonstrations in the ‘July Days’ demanded ‘all power to the Soviets’. Lvov was forced to step down and Alexander Kerensky took over. In August came the ‘Kornilov Mutiny’ when General Kornilov led his troops towards Petrograd, aiming to seize power. He was defeated, and on the night of 25–26 October Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized the initiative. They occupied most of Petrograd’s strategic buildings, and the Congress of Soviets was summoned to approve the formation of a Bolshevik government. Kerensky fled. Lenin took charge. But those who opposed Bolshevism were not done, and a brutal and 47

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bloody civil war consumed Russia for four more years. This was not simply a struggle between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. All sorts of independence movements and breakaway regimes in far-flung parts of the Empire rose against Russian dominance, opportunistic bandits took their chances, and things were further complicated by various groups of monarchists, democrats and foreign interventionists. In January 1918 the Bolsheviks disbanded the Constituent Assembly and obligated the Cheka, the secret police, to enforce their rule, by means of terror if necessary. In March they moved the capital to Moscow and also signed the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with Germany. In July the tsar and his family were shot. By 1919 the centre of resistance was Omsk, where Admiral Kolchak established an alternative Government. General Pyotr Vrangel in the south wanted to move his White forces to join Kolchak but his fellow general, Anton Denikin, wanted to march on Moscow. They squabbled while Kolchak lost ground. Vrangel was eventually removed from his post, Denikin taking over, but meanwhile Kolchak was defeated, captured and executed in February 1920. Denikin resigned in March, and Vrangel returned, but it was too late. The Polish invading army was also defeated in April and by the end of the year, though sporadic fierce fighting continued to erupt, it was clear that the Bolsheviks had gained control of Russia. Once in power, the Bolsheviks instituted ‘War Communism’, because of the ongoing civil wars and wars of intervention by the western powers, but also as a first step towards the Communist Utopia. It entailed the outlawing of private trading and the nationalisation of all industries. Strikes were banned, labour was subject to coercion and money was virtually abolished. Despite the requisitioning of agricultural ‘surpluses’ (which could mean any peasant’s complete harvest) and stringent rationing, food shortages, especially in the cities, were acute, diseases like tuberculosis were rampant, and the freezing winters were almost unendurable without fuel. Lili Brik, perhaps more privileged than most, remembered: To keep warm we all huddled together in the smallest room. We covered the walls and floor with carpets to make sure there were no draughts. In the corner there were a stove and a fireplace. We lit the stove rarely, but we lit the fire morning, noon and night, using old newspapers, broken boxes, anything we could get hold of.1 The actor Igor Ilinsky remembered working at Nikolai Foregger’s Theatre of Four Masks in 1918: We were cold and hungry, and I remember very well how after rehearsals we all took little sledges and brought armfuls of old fences and sheds into the backyard of Foregger’s house. Even though the janitors whistled and carped, we’d light the half-rotten boards to make ‘a little stove’.2 48

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Between 1917 and 1920 the population of Petrograd halved as people left the city to seek food and shelter. In the same period, the population of Moscow fell by forty per cent. Even in 1922 a quarter of Boris Ferdinandov’s theatre company of forty people had entered a tuberculosis sanatorium. Yet for those yearning for a future utterly different from the past, like the Futurists, War Communism held a pearl of promise within its shell of adversity. And all was not destroyed. The theatres continued and even found a new popularity. The Mariinsky Theatre in Petrograd may have been stripped of its tsarist decor and its better-off clientele may have exchanged sparkling evening dress for plain jackets, but they now had to share the dramatic entertainments with soldiers and workers, dirty, smoking but appreciative. They flocked to hear Chalyapin sing. And in Moscow, Arthur Ransome recorded, while ‘there can be no question about the hunger of the people . . . the theatres are crowded, and there is such a demand for seats that speculators acquire tickets in the legitimate way and sell them illicitly near the doors of the theatre . . . charging, of course, double the price, or even more’. He added: ‘Interest in the theatre, always keen in Moscow, seems to me to have rather increased than decreased.’3 The Futurists’ Revolution It was an interest the Futurists were well fitted to exploit, especially as most other writers and intellectuals vehemently rejected the Bolshevik Revolution. For the Futurists it seemed like a victory over the sun. Burlyuk saluted ‘the joyous light of freedom’,4 while Mayakovsky wrote: ‘To accept or not to accept? For me (as for the other Moscow Futurists) this question never arose. It is my Revolution.’5 The Bolsheviks, like the Futurists, wanted to remake human beings. An alliance was obvious. But it turned out to be only temporary, for while a different ethical system would be at the root of the Futurists’ ‘new human being’, for the Bolsheviks’ that root would be in economics. The difference was crucial. For now, however, it was overlooked. Herbert Marshall wrote that before 1917 Mayakovsky’s Futurism was ‘a revolutionary spirit, an ardent desire to be himself at all costs in a society which offered him no future and whose brutality and incompetence he condemned with all his humanity’.6 At the age of twelve in 1905 he had participated in a protest demonstration against the murder of a Bolshevik, and he joined the Party a year later. He was gaoled for his political activities more than once before he entered Art College in 1911, where he stated that he wanted to ‘create a Socialist art’.7 Though his artistic work then superseded his political commitment, ‘the dominant sensation in the spring of 1917 was one of liberation, of euphoria’, as his biographer records.8 It was the feeling Trotsky noticed at the burial of the victims of the February revolution: ‘When the coffins were lowered into the grave there sounded 49

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from Peter and Paul fortress, the first funeral salute, startling the innumerable masses of the people. That cannon had a new sound: our cannon, our salute.’9 Sergei Eisenstein saw the revolution as a victory of the young over the old. The Futurists called for a revolution of the spirit to accompany the political revolution. The shock and destruction of 1917 seemed to have left cultural and artistic life frozen in a kind of limbo, and the new government had as yet had no time to formulate any sort of policy in this area. Mayakovsky and the Futurists were ready to jump into the vacuum. Kamensky had already organised the First Republican Evening of the Arts in Moscow in March 1917, when he appeared with Mayakovsky, Burlyuk, Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich. ‘“Futurist poet” is equivalent to “Communist”,’ Mayakovsky proclaimed,10 and artists like Malevich, Olga Rozanova and Vasily Kandinsky were soon putting their skills at the service of the new regime through IZO, the Department of Fine Arts. Meanwhile Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik Commissar for Education and Culture and a playwright himself, accepted every offer of support or help, and seemed intrigued by Futurism. For their part, the Futurists called themselves ‘Agents of the Social Order’ though few Bolsheviks showed any enthusiasm for them. Lenin said, rather feebly, that ‘he didn’t understand these modern poets’,11 while Trotsky, suggesting their work was more ‘Bohemian nihilism’ than ‘proletarian revolutionism’, argued that Futurism had ‘originated in an eddy of bourgeois art’, and had not had ‘time to free itself from its childish habits, from its yellow blouses, and from its excessive excitement’.12 Nevertheless, their call to decorate the streets, especially on public holidays, with banners, posters, giant paintings and the like, was welcomed by the Bolsheviks. Even before the October Revolution, on May Day 1917, buildings had been decorated, and there was a gigantic march, sombre, theatrical and strong. ‘I do not think I ever saw a more impressive spectacle,’ a visiting British MP said.13 There were numerous quasi-theatrical parades, too, and meetinki in the streets. All this was magnified after the October Revolution. The first and only issue of The Futurist Gazette in March 1918 called for the streets and buildings to be adorned with art, and for poems to be posted on fences, walls and buses. Nine months later, in the first issue of Art of the Commune, they (probably Mayakovsky) poeticised the call: The Boulevards are our brushes, The plazas our palettes.14 Others joined in, too. In 1919 it was the ‘Imagists’ who stuck poems and pictures on the walls of Strastnoi Monastery in Moscow, as well as – more mischievously – giving new names to Moscow streets, so that, for example, Tverskaya Street became Esenin Street after the peasant poet. Arthur Ransome described a row of wooden houses in Okhotnia Row on May Day 1919: 50

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These had been painted by the futurists or kindred artists, and made a really delightful effect, their bright colours and naïf patterns seemingly so natural to Moscow . . . in clear primary colours, blue, red, yellow, with rough flower designs, on white and chequered backgrounds, with masses of snow in the road before them, and bright-kerchiefed women and peasants in ruddy sheepskin coats passing by, they seemed less like futurist paintings than like some traditional survival, linking new Moscow with the Middle Ages.15 Futurist Practice after 1917 A few new cabarets and nightclubs also sprang up, like the Pittoresque, which flourished between autumn 1917 and spring 1919, and the Poets’ Café, both in Moscow, where Futurists performed. The appeal of these places to the writers, for whom performance was in any case part of living their Futurism, was obvious in a time of stringent paper shortages and a dearth of independent publishers. The Poets’ Café was established in an old laundry in late November 1917, with money from the wealthy radical Nikolai Filippov, as a kind of descendant of the pre-revolutionary cabarets like the Stray Dog. With sawdust on the floor and the walls decorated with paintings and verses from Mayakovsky, Kamensky and Burlyuk, it operated late in the evenings into the small hours and featured not only poets’ appearances but also acts like Vladimir Goldschmidt, a ‘Futurist of life’ and something of a ‘strongman’, breaking wooden boards over his head. He wore ‘some sort of blue shirt with an open collar, with a gold ring on his head, like something in the spirit of the ancient Greeks’. The audience consisted of ‘bohemians, journalists, speculators and bourgeois who hadn’t yet run off. It was noisy, colourful, smoky.’16 Its anarchistic atmosphere, however, did not appeal to the severer Bolsheviks, and the Poets’ Café was closed down in April 1918. The Futurists’ attempts to publish their work, and so establish their hegemony in the world of literature, were only partially successful. They published a Futurist Gazette in March 1918 – there were no further issues – containing mostly poetry by Mayakovsky, Kamensky and Burlyuk, which tried to reorientate Futurism towards the proletariat. Without either more issues of the Gazette or the Poets’ Café, Mayakovsky and Osip Brik joined IZO, the Fine Art Department of Lunacharsky’s Narkompros (the Commissariat for Education), and through this they managed to establish a new journal, Art of the Commune, first published in December 1918, largely under Mayakovsky’s editorship. According to Shklovsky, ‘Art of the Commune propagated the idea of new art; Futurism wanted to conquer the country. Lunacharsky objected on the grounds that the workers did not like Futurism, although they appreciated Mayakovsky.’17 But Art of the Commune did more than this: it defined art as ‘action’ and ‘the direct material creation of things’.18 To further their aims, 51

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the Futurists lobbied for a separate Literary Department – with themselves in charge, of course – but they were unsuccessful, and when publishing was taken over by Gosizdat, the state publishing house founded in May 1919, no further editions of Art of the Commune were published. A further initiative also foundered now. In late 1918 Brik and Mayakovsky had organised a number of talks and poetry readings in working-class districts, and this led, in January 1919, to the foundation of the Kom-Fut (CommunistFuturist) collective in Vyborg. Organised by Brik and Boris Kushner, a poet and contributor to Art of the Commune, it aimed to develop the concept of revolutionary proletarian art: ‘all forms of everyday life, morals, philosophy and art must be recreated on communist principles,’ they urged.19 Any Party member could join (which excluded Mayakovsky, who refused to join the Party), lectures, readings and discussions were organised, and in their enthusiasm they even sent Lenin a complimentary copy of Mayakovsky’s most recent revolutionary poem, ‘150,000,000’. But the Vyborg party, probably on the instructions of the Bolshevik government, refused to register Kom-Fut as a Party affiliate, on the grounds that this would create an unwanted precedent, and the Kom-Fut enterprise also collapsed. The Futurists Dispersed One reason for the Futurists’ inability to assert dominance over the cultural life of post-revolutionary Moscow and Petrograd was the fact that many of them had been displaced and dispersed across the country by the shocks of revolution and civil war. Sergei Tretyakov and Nikolai Aseyev, and in 1918 David Burlyuk, found themselves in Vladivostok. Here, along with an old Bolshevik poet, Nikolai Chuzhak, and others, they formed a Futurist group who performed at the Bi-ba-bo cabaret and published a magazine, Tvorchestvo (‘Creation’). Burlyuk walked round the city in trousers with legs of different colours. When in 1920 the administrative centre of the Soviet Far East moved to Chita, most of the group moved there too, though Burlyuk himself sailed to Japan, and two years later emigrated to the USA. Tvorchestvo continued to appear, and in December 1921 Tretyakov staged Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy, himself playing the part of Mayakovsky. A few months later most of the group returned to Moscow. Alexei Kruchenykh, Ilya Zdanevich, Igor Terentiev and others arrived in Tiflis (Tbilisi) in Georgia in 1918, and established one of the most fascinating Futurist groups, 41°, which also performed in cafés, published chapbooks of verse and even briefly set up a Futurist University. Their dramatic output is discussed in Chapter 4 below. Yet another group formed in Odessa, where there were at least three cafés – Trash, the Fourth Paean and the Furnished Isle – where Futurist poets like Alexei Chicherin and the youthful Semyon Kisanov performed. The Odessa Association of Futurists was not officially 52

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set up until 1922, but they decorated the streets, published poetry and even formed a Futurist Theatre. Other Futurist poets failed to find a home. Velimir Khlebnikov spent the years after the revolution wandering, usually across the steppe, though he also went to Persia in the wake of the Red Army. His body failing, hungry and unable to cope, he fell ill in summer 1922 and died in a village near Novgorod on 28 June 1922. Mayakovsky and Film During the immediate post-revolution period, Mayakovsky also explored the medium of film. Though the results disappointed him, all three films which he made for Neptune Studios were popular with audiences. He not only wrote but acted in each of them. Creation Can’t Be Bought, from a scenario by Mayakovsky and Burlyuk based on Jack London’s novel Martin Eden, directed by Nikander Turkin, was released in April 1918. Mayakovsky and Burlyuk headed the cast which also included Lev Grinkrug, Vasily Kamensky and Margarita Kibalchich. Turkin was no Futurist, and not an admirer of Mayakovsky, but the film was workmanlike. With some scenes set in the Poets’ Café, it tells of a poet (Mayakovsky) discovered by a rich patron (Burlyuk), who acquires fame and becomes entangled in a love affair, which remains unresolved. He contemplates suicide, plays with his revolver, but finally makes off, alone and free. The Young Lady and the Hooligan, based on a story by Edmondo De Amicis and released in May 1918, was directed by Yevgeny Slavinsky. A hooligan (Mayakovsky) falls for the village schoolmistress (Alexandra Robikova). When a student disrupts her class, the hooligan attacks him, but with his gang the disruptive student gets his revenge. The gang attack and fatally wound the hooligan. As he lies dying, the schoolmistress kisses him on the lips. This film was popular across Russia, and even received open-air screenings. Mayakovsky’s final film was the complex Fettered by Film. Again directed by Nikander Turkin, who ‘mutilated’ it, according to Mayakovsky, it was released in June 1918, and the heroine was now played by Mayakovsky’s beloved Lili Brik, though the more experienced Margarita Kibalchich and Alexandra Robikova were in the cast. It concerns a painter (Mayakovsky) who falls in love with a ballerina screen idol. She steps out of the film, or emerges from the poster, but he cannot control her and she dissolves back into celluloid. This was a sophisticated attempt to make a film about film, reality and imagination, and it had the potential to be something more than the popular success which it was, an early attempt at what Eisenstein was to achieve with the film Glumov’s Diary, in his production of A Wise Man in 1923. The film industry was too powerful for the poet, who turned back to the theatre.

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3.1  Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik in Fettered by Film. 54

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The Need for New Forms All these works in various media – film, performance, poetry, printing – ­indicate a striving by the Futurists both for cultural leadership across the arts, and also for significant new forms. They ask: what is the function of art? Should the artist simplify, or, as the Futurists contended, complicate? In the new, socialist state, how could the proletarian masses appreciate avant-garde art, when they were not educated to it? Arthur Ransome noticed in 1919: ‘There is much excited controversy both in magazine and pamphlet form as to the distinguishing marks of the new proletarian art which is expected to come out of the revolution and no doubt will come, though not in the form expected.’20 To many, even when the Revolution had barely had time to establish the new regime, cultural life seemed not to be moving in step with political and economic developments. The Revolution had destroyed ways of perceiving, but where were the new perceptions? Accordingly, the state, somewhat incoherently, set up organisations of its own under the aegis of Lunacharsky’s Commissariat of Education. In 1920, for instance, they established an Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) under Vasily Kandinsky, which provided lectures and discussions centred on these problems: is it necessary to have cognisance of ‘old’ art for future work? How to weigh ideology against practical experience, or agitational work against investigatory? This left the Futurists with a dilemma, not helped by their innate anarchism. Arthur Ransome in 1920 quoted one Bolshevik bureaucrat: ‘At first we were in the artists’ hands, and now the artists are in our hands.’21 The Futurists vehemently rejected not just private patronage but also state interference. Yet many of them supported the Revolution: they wanted to serve the state, but to retain their individuality. They could publish their journals and print their books only by joining Narkompros, which agreed to subsidise twelve books per year. But this in itself caused problems – to the state bureaucrat, the Futurists were unintelligible and libertarian. Gosizdat unwarrantably delayed the printing of Mayakovsky’s poem ‘150,000,000’, and voices within Narkompros, as well as some students, opposed the staging of his play, Mystery Bouffe, on May Day 1919, and the production was banned. The text was finally published, after several stumbling blocks were surmounted, by the theatre magazine Vestnik Teatr, nominally under Gosizdat’s control, but payment was not forthcoming, and Mayakovsky was forced finally to sue Gosizdat in order to receive what he was owed. After Meyerhold’s 1921 staging of this play, Lunacharsky announced the death of Futurism – ‘it already stinks,’ he averred.22 It should be added, however, that Lunacharsky’s attitude was at least ambivalent, and sometimes timidly expressed: he was fascinated by the Futurists, had welcomed the first production of Mystery Bouffe in 1918, and had approved the printing 55

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of ‘150,000,000’. But the Futurists wanted hegemony, while Lunacharsky wanted pluralism. Vasily Kamensky: Stenka Razin It was in the theatre that the Futurists demonstrated their would-be leadership most strongly. Mystery Bouffe was premiered in Petrograd on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, 7 November 1918, while in Moscow on the same day the first version of Vasily Kamensky’s Stenka Razin was presented at the Vvedensky People’s House. These two plays became something like the Revolution’s Iliad and Odyssey. Kamensky was a colourful personality who had been an actor in a travelling theatre company and an active revolutionary in 1905. By 1908 he was writing and painting in St Petersburg, where he also edited the literary journal Vesna (‘Spring’). In this capacity he claimed to have discovered Nikolai Aseyev, Viktor Shklovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. In 1910 he became a stunt pilot, and he crashed his plane in Poland in 1911, an incident recreated in Victory Over the Sun. Once he joined the Futurists he became a versatile, if sometimes shallow, poet, often employing a folk song-like style combined with neologisms, onomatopoeia and children’s language. He virtually invented ‘ferro-concrete’ poetry which ignored the line as the basic unit and required of its readers a different reading strategy, which allowed the eye to roam across the page almost as if it were a painting. He also wrote a very supportive book about the theatre of the arch-aesthete and anti-Futurist playwright and director Nikolai Evreinov, who later repaid the compliment with a book about Kamensky.

3.2  Vasily Kamensky, ‘Cabaret’, ferro-concrete poem. 56

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Between the two revolutions of 1917, Kamensky ‘blossomed’, according to Vladimir Markov. Though inclined towards anarchism, he welcomed the revolutions, adding his own exhortatory verses to his fellow artists: Poets! Take your brushes, now, And posters – sheets of poetry, Paste the truth of life Along the streets with a ladder –23 Stenka Razin had been Kamensky’s boyhood hero. He was best known as a figure of song and story, rather like a Russian Robin Hood, and his name as an anti-aristocrat rebel had been invoked during the 1905 Revolution. Historically, he was a Don Cossack who led a rebellion against landowners and tsarist officialdom in 1670, though the uprising was crushed and Razin executed in 1671. But for Kamensky – and many others – the 1917 revolutions were a sort of continuation of Stenka Razin’s insurrection, an elemental struggle against aristocratic tyranny by the peasantry and the poor in the name of Mother Russia, often personified in the River Volga. Kamensky recycled Razin’s story in different genres. He worked on it first as a novel, which, when it was published in 1915, proved surprisingly popular. His hero, a leader, a rebel and a poet, epitomised the Russian soul. Kamensky created animated crowd scenes which contrasted effectively with the picture of the strong individual, and the novel had a Futuristic structure, veering between songs and lyric poems on the one hand, and fictional narrative and sober historical prose on the other. In 1918 Kamensky published a long poem sequence called Stenka Razin, the Heart of the People. Many of the short poems were

3.3  [Plate 4] Konstantin Vyalov, stage design for Stenka Razin, Theatre of Revolution, 1924 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). 57

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taken from the novel, but without the surrounding prose, and perhaps partly because of the inclusion of some zaum poetry, the poems on their own came over as ‘barbaric and forceful miniatures’.24 Finally, Kamensky turned the material into a play which dramatises the hero leading his piratical band against the forces of tsarism. The people flock to his banner, and he and his supporters sail through the Caspian Sea as far as Persia, where he captures the Persian Princess Medran. They fall in love, but when her presence provokes rumbling dismay among his men, Razin throws her into the Volga as a kind of sacrifice to Mother Russia. The band sails on to Astrakhan, where they cause mayhem, killing the aristocrats, overturning officialdom, and looting churches and shops, until finally the Ataman of the Cossacks captures Stenka Razin, and he is despatched to Moscow to be executed. Legend and fact are thus blended into a neo-primitivist drama which is both folkloric and Futurist. While Kamensky himself suggested the lubok, or folk picture, as a model, it is actually the future this play focuses on. The climax comes when the rebels sing that ‘the day will come’ which will bring freedom and brotherly love: The day will come, and everyone Will open the gates for free guests So that in life every care Be equal for equal undertakings. The day will come – and friends will begin To whirl in dances for ever The poor, and the merchants and the princes. The day will come – all will gather as a family Under a united cherished window And then these songs will pour forth Into the hearts of each like heady wine. The day will come.25 Kamensky’s Stenka Razin was first staged in 1918 by Vasily Sakhnovsky and Arkady Zonov, with choreography by Kasyan Goleizovsky and design by Pavel Kuznetsov. The production found a rumbustious style, episodic and punctuated with songs and clowning, and was popular enough for several later productions to be mounted, often in revised or rewritten versions, including in Kiev in 1919, directed by Konstantin Mardzhanov, in Moscow in 1923 in a version which ended with the singing of the ‘Internationale’, and, in what was probably the most convincing production, at the Theatre of Revolution in February 1924, with music by Nikolai Popov, directed by Valery Bebutov and designed by Konstantin Vyalov. Vyalov ‘conceived the play as 58

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3.4  [Plate 5] Konstantin Vyalov, costume design for Stepan Razin, 1924 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). a “buffoonery”, using “Cubist constructions, bright light effects, music and dynamic elements”’.26 Vladimir Mayakovsky: Mystery Bouffe The first version of Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe was staged in Petrograd on the same day as the first version of Stenka Razin. Together these two epic dramas exemplify the Futurists’ most radical theatre innovations. Like other Futurist drama, a pervading form underlying Mystery Bouffe is the circus, something which had always attracted Futurists: Kamensky had recited sections of the poetic version of Stenka Razin, in the costume of the Cossack hero, while riding in the Efimov circus, and Dmitry Petrovsky performed a similar circus turn, ‘The Horse and the Book’, in which he rode bareback four times round the ring, reading poetry by Khlebnikov, Aseyev and himself. Khlebnikov fell in love with a young lady elephant rider in the circus, and wrote a poem about her: Butterfly of death, Butterfly of snow whirls in the red hot fire. There is languor in the elephant’s trunk, too.27 59

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Kamensky also published a poem in LEF, ‘The Juggler’, which compares the poet to the circus performer. Importantly, the fledgling Soviet state approved of the circus, and circus artists were exempted from military call-up. In February 1919, Lunacharsky, who maintained that circus was valuable to a revolutionary society because it encouraged heroic attitudes and vital social forces, set up a special circus section in his Theatre Department, whose purpose was stated to be: To care for the artistry of the circus, to help the labourers of the circus . . . to cleanse their art of impurity . . . to determine [its] strength, agility and courage, to incite laughter and to delight in a brilliant, vivid and exaggerated spectacle.28 Meyerhold stated: ‘If I were asked what entertainment our people need now when Russia has thrown off the shackles, I would reply without hesitation: “such entertainment as only circus showmen can provide”. The Russian people need an art which could inspire them with great courage.’29 The Futurist theatre practitioners embraced circus as a potential new direction for the theatre: ‘circusisation’. Circus is an alternative to the morally and politically dubious cabaret. It displays amazing feats of human (not divine) skill and strength. It is spectacular, colourful and noisy, and not clogged up with intellectual theorising. Moreover, it is performed within a ring, a communal, democratic and informal space. If what it presents is not quite drama, nor yet is it quite reality. Circus requires highly trained and skilful performers, and is dangerous, exuberant and breathtaking. It demonstrates human beauty and human potential in undiluted forms. It is also fun, though the fun, as with most forms of clowning, may be ambivalent, just as performers may be seen as (non-communist) hero figures. Circus is thus both ideologically healthy and unofficially subversive. Huntly Carter recounts the scene between the traditional clowns, Bim and Bom: They entered the ring carrying a great sack. To Bim’s question, ‘Have you been getting wood?’ Bom replied, ‘No, here is the wood,’ and he held up a match. ‘Then what is in the sack?’ inquired Bim. ‘The necessary permits,’ replied Bom. Carter adds: ‘The sharp censure on the bureaucracy is clear.’30 Mayakovsky turned wholeheartedly to the circus in Mystery Bouffe, which dramatises the Revolution as a flood sweeping away the old, cleansing the earth to make space for the future. A few (carefully representative) people have reached the last dry place in the world, the North Pole, where they decide to build an ark to effect their escape. While the ‘Clean’ (the bourgeoisie) encourage them, the ‘Unclean’ (the workers) build the vessel. Once afloat, the Negus of Abyssinia is made tsar, and eats the food the Unclean make. The 60

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Clean, believing they deserve some, too, overthrow the Negus and institute a ‘bourgeois democracy’ in which the food is still made by the Unclean, but is now eaten by all the Clean. Seeing this, the Unclean want their share, and now they overthrow the democracy. The workers take charge. But where should they steer the ship? A Most Ordinary Human Being arrives, walking across the water to them. He advises them to trust their own strength. They go on. Hell is harrowed by them, and heaven deflated. Finally they reach the Promised Land – their own homes. But now they exist in a workers’ state where tools, things and food are all freely available to them. If their journey partly resembles Odysseus’s journey from the Trojan war, the play is also a parody of the medieval mysteries – Noah’s Flood, the harrowing of hell, and so on – but it gains force because it is also a ‘buffoonade’. The Symbolists wanted a theatre of mystery – Mayakovsky laughs that out of court with his ‘Bouffe’. And his first tool in doing this comes from the circus, also a dazzling spectacle within a traditional structure which ignores psychology, preferring maximum expressiveness. The circus ‘bares the device’, as

3.5  [Plate 6] Vladimir Mayakovsky, costume design for the Priest in Mystery Bouffe, which was not used. 61

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Shklovsky put it, and assures us there are no secrets. The Unclean are strongmen and acrobats, the Clean are clowns, being tumbled and slapped down by the merry andrew of history. But who would stage this blasphemous extravaganza made in celebration of a revolution which had barely begun, and was certainly not in 1918 assured of success? The actors of the Alexandrinsky Theatre rejected it scornfully when the leading director of the former Imperial Theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold, presented it to them. Mayakovsky was compelled to advertise again, as he had in 1913: Comrade Actors! You are under obligation to celebrate the great anniversary of the Revolution with a revolutionary production. You must present the play Mystery Bouffe, a heroic, epic and satiric portrait of our era, written by Vladimir Mayakovsky . . . To work, everyone! Time is precious.31 Enough performers answered this call for the production to go ahead. With no professional theatres making themselves available, the theatre of the Music and Drama Conservatory was acquired for three performances, though without that institution’s support. They tried to deny the scratch company rehearsal space, they refused to sell the printed playtext, and they even refused to distribute posters, which Mayakovsky was still colouring in by hand on the day of the premiere. As with Victory Over the Sun, Kasimir Malevich was appointed to design the show. His work has not survived, but descriptions suggest its significance. In the first act the stage was dominated by a great half-globe, the Arctic Circle; in the second, the ark itself seemed to be sailing towards the audience; Hell in Act 3 was a dingy red and green cave, while Heaven was all pink and pale blue with Angels and Saints sitting on white woolly clouds. The Promised Land was bright, and filled with gleaming machines. Malevich explained: I saw the box-stage as the frame of a picture and the actors as contrasting elements . . . Planning the action on three or four levels, I tried to deploy the actors in space in predominantly vertical compositions in the manner of the latest style of painting. The actors’ movements were meant to accord rhythmically with the elements of the setting. I depicted a number of planes on a single canvas; I treated space not as illusory but as cubist. I saw my task not as the creation of associations with a reality existing beyond the limits of the stage, but as the creation of a new reality. The final comment is important. It suggests what the Futurists tried to achieve especially on the stage – ‘a new reality’. For art to construct like this was what Art of the Commune demanded, and it was at the core of the new ‘Constructivist’ movement which was beginning to stir in the arts in 62

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Russia. It appears, however, that Mayakovsky and Malevich quarrelled over the ­production – the design of uniformly grey costumes for the Unclean, for instance, seems to have lacked theatrical force – and Malevich, for a long time fine art’s most ardent Futurist, began to drift away from the Futurists. Mayakovsky’s scratch cast seems to have gone some way to realising the originality of this piece, perhaps largely because of the brilliance of Meyerhold’s direction. It opened with an echo of Victory Over the Sun: two actors tore down the curtain, symbol of the old theatre, and the Futurists’ deadliest theatrical bugbear. Meyerhold broke the action into jagged pieces, the equivalent of circus turns, and served up a medley of brash buffoonery, noisy stunts and self-contained turns. Thus, the Unclean were caught in a rope as they emerged from below decks; they spoke or sang in unison like a Red Army choir before such a thing existed; the Negus was spectacularly thrown overboard; the American roared onstage on a motorbike, while the Merchant fell offstage as a clown. The script itself prompts such an approach: CARPENTER: It’s a knife in our backs! VOICE: And a fork, too! A stage direction asks for: ‘Night. The moon skims across the sky, then goes down. Daybreak’, while the Promised Land is an updated traditional folk dream: In my heaven furniture fills sumptuous halls, Electricity serves you in stylish rooms. Sweet work there will never callous your hand, But bloom in your palm like roses luscious.32 Mayakovsky himself played the part of the Ordinary Human: He climbed unseen by the audience up an iron fire-escape to the left of the stage onto a gantry four or five metres high, and there he fixed round himself a broad leather safety belt, and at the right moment he somehow fell off the gantry, soaring above the crowd of the Unclean, crowded on the deck of the ark . . . In this position, he minted the rattling verse of his monologue.33 Spectacular, farcical and fast-moving as the production was, it also offered a first view of a new theatrical form, or, rather, a new development of an existing form – the dramatic epic. Medieval and Shakespearean dramatic epics dragged a community through social or political troubles, but ended with them settled – Richard III, for instance, ends with the Wars of the Roses over and the Tudor settlement in place. The Romantic epic was picaresque, focused on a single figure searching for meaning in an alien world – Goethe’s Faust, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt – and it usually ended with the hero’s death. In Mystery Bouffe, 63

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Mayakovsky created a post-Romantic epic, still picaresque, but dealing with a community. A protagonist who dies no longer features, but nor are the community’s struggles over. The protagonist – or protagonists – have a new perspective, the future, into which they will march. The Blacksmith at the end of the first version of Mystery Bouffe proclaims: We go, We go through village and town, Like flags.34 It was a form which the Futurist dramatists would further develop in the 1920s, and it was taken over by later dramatic epic makers. At the end of Brecht’s The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, for instance, the cauliflower trade has not found a settlement and Ui himself is looking madly to the future: There are other cities: Washington and Milwaukee! Detroit! Toledo! Pittsburgh! Cincinnati! And other towns where vegetables are traded! Philadelphia! Columbus! Charleston! And New York! They all demand protection! And no ‘Phooey!’ No ‘that’s not nice!’ will stop Arturo Ui!35 Similarly in Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden’s The Non-Stop Connolly Show of 1975, the very title indicates the idea of events propelled into the future, and the last lines of the epic confirm this; Connolly says: ‘This was not history. It has not passed.’36 Circusisation: The Merry Sanatorium Mystery Bouffe was therefore a breakthrough on two fronts: first was the ‘circusisation’ of theatre, or the construction of the play as a series of ‘turns’; and second was a new form of dramatic epic, focusing on the future. It was the element of circusisation which was most immediately taken up by theatre practitioners, for instance by the State Exemplary Theatre at the Hermitage, Petrograd, between July and September 1919. The most notable production here was by the Futurist artist and stage designer Yuri Annenkov of his own adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s The First Distiller. The First Distiller was Tolstoy’s first attempt at playwriting. It tells of a peasant who refuses to curse a thieving devil and is punished by the forces of hell by the invention of alcohol, which reduces the peasant, his family and his whole community to drunken uselessness. Annenkov followed Tolstoy’s division of the story into six short acts, but created a scenario which utterly undermined Tolstoy’s pseudo-naturalism. Thus, where Tolstoy set Act 3 in ‘a barn’ where ‘carts [are being] loaded with grain’, and his Hell was a place where the devil’s orderly hierarchy may flourish: ‘The Chief of the Devils sits in the highest place. The Devil’s Secretary sits 64

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lower down, at a table with writing materials. Sentinels stand at each side’,37 Annenkov turned the stage into a grotesque, Futuristic circus: The decor of Hell was composed, according to strictly established rhythms and cadences, of flying trapezes, mobile suspended platforms, giant ropes and poles that spanned the stage, crossing each other in different directions. The stage was an assemblage of different constructions built to facilitate the movement of actors in many directions. This construction was composed without any figurative meaning. On these purely linear and abstract elements that composed the three dimensions of the scenic space in synchronised displacement, the internal life (vertical devils, zig-zagging devils, twisting damned) evolved from the top down using unreal movements under flamboyant lighting whose form, colour and intensity was constantly changing.38 František Déak sees Marinetti’s influence here, but equally important, surely, was the influence of Malevich and Victory Over the Sun, though by the final scene of the peasants’ ultimate debauch, Annenkov had outstripped either of these, presenting not Tolstoy’s ‘village street’ with ‘some old women sitting on logs of wood’,39 but a frantic Walpurgisnacht with chorus, dancers, tumbling acrobats and clowns, accompanied not just by traditional accordion-playing but by a Futurist ‘noise’ orchestra. The cast included the variety performer Konstantin Gibshman as the peasant who forgave the devil, the ‘Four Devils’ acrobatic troupe as devils, Alexander Karloni, ‘the India rubber man’, and the clown, Georgy Delvari. For Annenkov, circus rather than theatre provided the tired city worker with a ‘merry sanatorium’ in which to recoup flagging spirits. ‘You proceed past the gaily-coloured circus posters with an ironic smile,’ he teased, ‘for from childhood you were taught to frequent only “serious” theatres. Most profound delusion! The art of the circus is one of the most subtle and magnificent arts.’ It was the circus, he argued, which broke down the sterile barrier between audience and performer: Because everything in it is unusual and abrupt; because impetuous action wells up simultaneously before you, behind you, over you and under you, so that you hardly have time to turn your head; . . . and from flaming firebrands, the brilliant spheres and cymbals, from consciousness of dangers and surprises, because the light is too dazzling and the smell of the menagerie tickles your nostrils, and because the chain barriers are clanking, but in the bravura orchestra the trombone and drum prevail – in you wakes an extinguished temperament, nerves get stronger, circulation speeds up, and you leave the circus as if after a good mud-bath or a morning walk along the shore, with a reserve of gaiety and cheerfulness.40 65

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This was Annenkov’s ‘merry sanatorium’. Later, in a lecture at the Petrograd House of Arts in April 1921, he asked whether theatre was a ‘pure’ art in its own right, or merely the meeting-place of all the other – ‘pure’ – arts. To achieve its ineluctable self, theatre should no longer accommodate ‘dead’ scenery, for until the stage decor ‘stirs from its place and starts to run around the stage, we will not see a single, organically fused theatrical performance’. ‘Theatre is dynamic,’ he asserted, adding that ‘rhythmically organised ­movement is theatrical form’.41 Sergei Radlov and the Theatre of Popular Comedy Also in Petrograd pursuing this aim, and following somewhat in Annenkov’s footsteps, was the former Meyerhold student Sergei Radlov. Radlov had worked on the ‘mass spectacles’ of the Revolution and had set up his own Experimental Theatre in 1918. In the wake of Annenkov’s circusisation of theatre, in the autumn of 1919 he founded the Theatre of Popular Comedy. He took over the ‘Iron Room’ in the Petrograd House of the People, situated in a working-class district, and by means of a shallow stage, backed by a permanent setting designed by Valentina Khodasevich, he transformed it into a theatre. Khodasevich’s design consisted of three ‘rooms’ at the back of the stage, each with two further rooms above them, to provide nine small acting areas besides the forestage, which jutted out a few feet into the auditorium. Here Sergei Yutkevich remembered the ‘cigarette-merchants’ who attended the shows, ‘youngsters who sold cigarettes singly or as tab-ends – the “gamins” of revolutionary Leningrad’, though he added: ‘Naturally the theatre was equally patronised by the intellectuals, writers, artists . . . but there were also workers and soldiers. It really was a popular audience.’42 And the company was one in which circus performers outnumbered ‘straight’ actors, and included Konstantin Gibshman, Georgy Delvari, Karloni, the ‘India rubber man’, the clowns Serge (Alexander Sergeyevich Alexandrov), an accomplished Pierrot, and Ivan Taurek, besides the musical eccentric Bob (Boris Kozyukov), the Japanese juggler Takoshimo, the conjuror Ernani and others. The style Radlov aimed for incorporated acting directed ‘out’ at the audience, a good deal of improvisation and pantomime and circus playfulness. The Theatre of Popular Comedy opened on 8 January 1920 with The Corpse’s Bride from a scenario by Radlov. The commedia dell’arte-like scenario involves a feisty young woman whose rich father (the banker J. P. Morgan) wants her to marry a loathsome miser when she is in love with a poor sailor. The miser is a surgeon who practises on corpses. The sailor pretends to be a corpse. He is brought to the surgeon’s house in the dead of night by four men, actually four jugglers, and when he arises like a ghost and terrifies the surgeon, mayhem is unleashed. ‘Burning torches are flying about, surgical knives are whining as they cut through the air, surgical instruments are 66

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3.6  Clown Serge, cartoon by Sergei Yutkevich.

3.7  Clown Taurek, cartoon by Sergei Yutkevich. whirling over the doctor’s head.’43 Meanwhile the girl’s grandmother, played by clown Serge, hunts the sailor in an astonishing sequence of acrobatic leaps and tumbles. The following week the company added The Monkey Who Was an Informer to their repertoire, with Serge this time playing the monkey, climbing to the ceiling and swinging from beam to beam over the heads of the audience. In 67

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the centre of the hall, he hung on with one hand while scratching himself with the other, to the audience’s amazement, laughter and appreciative applause. In The Banker’s Second Daughter, supposedly a sequel to the first show, Serge resuscitated his monkey, while in The Sultan and the Devil he appeared with Taurek, both as devils. Their make-up was identical. They appeared on different parts of the stage in delusive lighting which flashed on and off, so that it appeared that only one devil was present, but he was in more than one place at once. The circusisation was clever and sometimes stunning, but now Radlov decided to direct a contemporary satire, Maxim Gorky’s The Hardworking Mr Slovotekov, which existed as a scenario for improvisation. The play concerns an inexhaustibly verbose bureaucrat, who faces every tiny problem with a cascade of clichés but unbudgeable inaction. Finally the roof actually falls in on him, but even that cannot staunch his endless flow of Soviet-style banalities. Georgy Delvari’s Mr Slovotekov (‘word deluge’) was perhaps only what the inhabitants of Half-Asleep Street, Lazy Street and Mucky Street deserved, but the satire was sharp enough for the play to be banned, curiously by Gorky’s own wife, Maria Andreyeva, who was Commissar for Theatre in the Petrograd Region. This production marked a gradual turning away by Radlov from unadulterated ‘circusisation’ towards something more traditional, and more literary. The Theatre of Popular Comedy’s last nine plays, presented between November 1920 and its closure in December 1921, included two by Molière and one each by Shakespeare, Calderon and Labiche. But they also saw one of Radlov’s most brilliant circus-theatre presentations, The Adopted Child, when once again Clown Serge amazed and delighted the spectators. He had to transport some documents to the Soviet Union but was being chased by two comic policemen, played by Karloni and Taurek. At every turn in the breathtaking chase, the policemen fell over each other, landed in a barrel filled with water, or tumbled off their feet. But the feats of Serge outshone even this: he scaled walls, ducked behind doors, and squeezed between gantries. He walked the tightrope over the heads of the audience and finally escaped up a rope ladder to an aeroplane which flew him to Moscow. The audience seemed almost to participate in this zany, express pursuit: Every onstage movement is mirrored in the auditorium, which, in turn, reaching the stage, gives rise to a new momentum of action. The actors play, pushing off from the spectators, as it were, as jumpers push off from a springboard; and again the spectators help the performers by their ‘intolerable’ behaviour.44 All this would feed into later Futurist theatre. Though some thought Radlov’s attempt to stage Shakespeare’s Merry Wives 68

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of Windsor in the Iron Hall was misguided, it seems that some of the circustheatre elements were widely appreciated. The open stage obviously suited Shakespeare, and Radlov’s use of circus acrobats as servants in the play was a welcome contrast with the sadly staid interpretations of the ‘academic’ theatres of Moscow and Petrograd. But the change of direction in the repertoire led several of his circus performers to return to the circus proper, which probably precipitated the end. Vitaly Lazarenko and the Theatricalisation of the Circus Creative ideas, approaches and practices shuttle between artists unpredictably. Circusisation of the theatre led next to theatricalisation of the circus, and the chief instigator here was again Vladimir Mayakovsky. His motivation probably sprang from his friendship, which long pre-dated the Revolution, with Vitaly Lazarenko, clown, Futurist and political activist, who had already devised a turn ‘dramatising’ Mayakovsky’s political epigrams, The Soviet Alphabet. Together they developed an agitational circus presentation, The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle, written by Mayakovsky, for the Second Moscow State Circus, and premiered on the anniversary of the Revolution, 7 November 1920, just five days before Radlov presented The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Petrograd Popular Comedy. The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle takes its title from a line in Mayakovsky’s poem ‘150,000,000’. It is a clown show which parodies a popular wrestling match. The referee, ‘Uncle Vanya’, played by Lazarenko, introduces the combatants in a speech which almost caricatures Futurist poetry, and which Lazarenko spoke in a style somewhere between that of Mayakovsky at the Poets’ Café and a circus ringmaster: Hear ye, Hear ye. Come in, people. Listen, people. Look, everyone who’s eager: Lazarenko, in the role of Uncle Vanya, can pin any wrestler – of course, only if he’s lying on the sofa. How many have been defeated by me! Almost unbelievable: Sidarenko, Karpenko, Enko. 4, 5, 16, 28, fortyteen. 69

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Who, who hasn’t been beaten yet? But I’m not a wrestler Today. I’m a referee. Now there’ll be a championship: not an ordinary fight – but a class struggle. Now before your very eyes – the noblest nobles – athletes will strut by in well-matched pairs: they’re here to eliminate each other. Parade allez! The combatants are Russian Communism’s political persecutors – Woodrow Wilson, the American champ, Lloyd George for the Entente, France’s Alexandre Millerand, Poland’s Józef Pilsudsky, Siderov, a Russian speculator, and Pyotr Vrangel, the White General. There is also Aprelev, a Menshevik compromiser, ‘almost a champion’, whom Uncle Vanya says he wanted to reject because he would try to calm the fighters and make them make concessions to each other. The champions are introduced, each fatter and more disgusting than the last, and each no doubt booed roundly by the Soviet audience; the prizes – a crown, a huge gold coin and a bag labelled ‘Profits from an imperialist war’ – are thrown into the ring. Lloyd George and Millerand fight for the bag, Wilson and Siderov for the gold coin, and Vrangel and Pilsudski for the crown, while ‘the red-haired Menshevik is getting under everyone’s feet’. They scrap, cheat, pratfall and bite each other till Uncle Vanya blows his whistle. Enter Revolution. ‘Suddenly everything becomes quiet.’ The former wrestlers try to slink away, though Lloyd George faces Revolution, who catches him in a ‘head circle tie-up’. Lloyd George is pushed out on a wheelbarrow. The referee appeals to the spectators to join the Red Army, adding: I am ready to go there today. A large circus hoop is rolled in. To get there faster I’ll even take a carriage. He sits inside the hoop, rolls around the ring in it, and leaves the arena.45 Nikolai Erdman, who called himself an ‘Imagist’, not a ‘Futurist’, also 70

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wrote sketches for Vitaly Lazarenko, usually parodies of court cases in which Lazarenko appeared as a loquacious accused. In The Comradely Court Case at Housing Co-operative 1519, he appears before the Judge ‘with a yoke around his shoulders. On one end of the yoke hangs a bucket full of water.’ He approaches the Judge, bows and of course water pours out of the bucket over the Judge. Further slapstick follows as Lazarenko tells a rambling tale and the Judge is thoroughly saturated and beaten about. Lazarenko is similarly garrulous in The People versus Vitaly Lazarenko, in which there is less slapstick, while in The Divorce he confronts the Judge: ‘am I allowed to tell the truth?’ When the Judge tells him he must, he calls his wife ‘a low-down bitch’ and worse. JUDGE: How dare you, citizen? Who allowed you to use such language? LAZARENKO: You. JUDGE: What do you mean, me? LAZARENKO: Just that. You. I asked you, can I speak the truth and you said I could. JUDGE: You can tell the truth but you can’t say ‘bitch’. Later, he confuses the judge further: JUDGE: What is her relation to you? LAZARENKO: She used to be my wife but now she is my daughter. JUDGE: Your wife became your daughter? How could that have happened? What daughter? LAZARENKO: She’s a daughter-of-a-bitch, citizen judge.46 Small Forms Circus sketches like these were related to ‘small’ forms of drama, interludes and skits favoured by cabarets and late-night theatres, but they also derived from popular folk and fairground plays, known as ‘balagani’. They therefore mixed the popular with the intellectually pointed, and in the revolutionary period were soon transformed into ‘agitprop’ (agitational propaganda). Several Futurist writers engaged with the short form at this time and helped to move it towards a sort of Futurist, politicised folk playlet in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. Kamensky’s 1920 agitational playlet The Impoverished Engine Shed was one example of this, and Kruchenykh also tried his hand at the genre, while Mayakovsky prepared three such little dramas for the Theatre of Satire for May Day 1920, when the traditional workers’ holiday happened to coincide with Easter, and when the Party had also decreed a ‘subbotnik’, or Communist Saturday, when people were asked to do socially useful work without pay. Sadly, Mayakovsky’s plays were banned, despite Lunacharsky’s support, and it is unlikely they have ever been performed together. 71

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The first play, And What If? May Day Dreams in a Bourgeois Armchair, centres on Ivan Ivanovich who, having drunk more than he should at lunch, naps, and dreams the old times have returned. He joins the pack of reactionaries hunting the proletariat like hounds, yelping and on all fours, when there is a knock on the door. A sober worker enters and asks Ivan Ivanovich to contribute to the Communist Saturday. Small Play About Priests Who Do Not Understand What a Public Holiday Is shows Father Pighead unable to make a living now all his congregation has deserted him for the Revolution. He learns he must now work for his living, like everyone else. The third play, How Some People Spend Time Celebrating Holidays, contrasts the aimless debauchery characteristic of the old religious festivals with the new May Day holiday of the workers. What is attractive about these little dramas is their theatrical exuberance – the pack of bourgeois hounds on all fours, yapping and baying; Father Pighead tumbling in a somersault through his open window; and the children in How Some People Spend Time Celebrating Holidays buried alive under droppings from the Christmas tree while their faffing parents ignore them.

Mystery Bouffe: The Second Version In the earthquake that was the Revolution and the Civil War, Futurist theatre was finding new forms, both epic and miniature, new practices based in the popular theatres of the fairground, the circus ring and the music hall, and new spectator-performer relationships. Nothing illustrated this better than the second version of Mystery Bouffe, which Mayakovsky wrote in 1920 and Meyerhold staged on May Day 1921. The production, like that of the first version, was almost forestalled. In December 1920, Alexander Serafimovich, head of the Literary Department of Narkompros, suggested banning it on the grounds of its ‘anarchism’ and ‘incomprehensibility’. Other influential figures backed him, and while Mayakovsky gave readings to try to gather support in Moscow’s working-class districts, Valery Bebutov, Meyerhold’s assistant, organised a public debate, ‘Should Mystery Bouffe be staged?’. At this event, it soon became clear that Mayakovsky’s opponents were attacking the first version of the play, not the new revised version, and their arguments, though not their opposition, evaporated. This new version of the play adds some characters, such as Clemenceau and Lloyd George, and a Menshevik compromiser, perhaps derived from these characters in The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle. New episodes, like the Land of Chaos, and the electrification of the Soviet Union, were also added, and Mayakovsky wrote a new Prologue, which could act as a kind of manifesto for his idea of a new theatre, based not on the illusion of real life, but on theatrical spectacle:

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For other theatrical companies the spectacle doesn’t matter: for them the stage is a keyhole without a key. ‘Just sit there quietly,’ they say to you, ‘either straight or sideways, and look at a slice of other folks’ lives.’ You look – and what do you see? Uncle Vanya and Aunty Manya parked on a sofa as they chatter. Mayakovsky wanted a different kind of showing: We, too, will show you life that’s real – very! But life transformed by the theatre into a spectacle most extraordinary! And, like Khlebnikov’s Prologue to Victory Over the Sun, he warns the spectators, ‘Look as hard as you can!’47 The production was directed by Meyerhold and Bebutov, with new music by Alexander Orlov, stage design by the sculptor Anton Lavinsky and the painter Vladimir Khrakovsky, and costumes also by Lavinsky. Now there was no front curtain to tear down, and the set itself spilled into the auditorium, which one commentator explained as follows: [The proscenium] consists of what seems to be fanciful reliefs, counterreliefs, force-lines, all interweaving but which are actually extremely simple. But each relief, each line, each step starts to play and acquire meaning and movement as soon as the actor’s foot treads thereon.48 The design presented the kind of expressive space which led some commentators to call this production a ‘bridge’ to stage Constructivism. The costumes of the Unclean capitalised on earlier Futurist costume designs, though they were perhaps more cartoon-like, while the Menshevik was a redhaired clown figure, the fall guy in every joke, who was beaten about as much as any circus Auguste. Less successful, once again, were the costumes of the Clean; this time they were in blue, but they were still undifferentiated, which somewhat distorted the impact of the play. Nevertheless, this new version of the play was marked by verve, energy and theatrical drive, aided by performers such as Vitaly Lazarenko as one of the devils, who entered down a wire and cavorted acrobatically during the scene in hell. In the rewritten version of the play, the Ordinary Human was replaced 73

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3.8  [Plate 7] Anton Lavinsky, costume design for Angel, Mystery Bouffe, 1921 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). by a Person of the Future, who spoke from high in the ceiling, which was not particularly successful considering the pivotal role the character plays. Mostly, however, the play fizzed and crackled with fantastic and grotesque ideas, not least in the caricatured Clean, who included a German businessman prone to ‘Scheidemannizing’ in pavement cafés – that is, doing nothing, like the German Chancellor, Philipp Scheidemann. Lloyd George and Clemenceau were a kind of music hall double act, and there was a dithering Methuselah, and a monstrous Queen of Chaos. Furthermore, the production bubbled with topical and satirical references, which Mayakovsky continued to add to the script right up to the final rehearsals. Indeed, the published version of the play states: ‘In 74

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the future, all persons performing, presenting, reading or publishing Mystery Bouffe should change the content, making it contemporary, immediate, up-to-the-minute.’ This of course is impossible, but it indicates the author’s urgency. The play was enthusiastically received by the largely lower-class audiences, who were excited by the play’s dynamism and topicality, and at the end of each performance they were invited onto the stage to mingle with the actors. The critics were considerably less enamoured of it: it violated so many of their cherished prejudices, and threatened the theatre they understood. But Meyerhold was clear: ‘Mayakovsky was a true playwright’, he observed some years later, ‘who could not as yet be accepted because he had jumped several years ahead.’49 Mystery Bouffe was presented, often in adapted versions, all round Russia. In 1921 it was seen in Tambov, Omsk, Saratov, Kharkov and even in the Salomonsky Circus, and there were further productions in Irkutsk in 1922, Kazan in 1923 and Tiflis in 1924. It was very successfully revived in Moscow in 1957 on the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution and has made its mark in productions across the world, including a notable one at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, in 1982. The year 1921 was a high point in Russian Futurist theatre. Securely theorised by its practitioners, it created innovative forms of which the political epic was to be the most influential. As developed by Mayakovsky, Radlov, Kamensky and others (not least, of course, the radical and Promethean director Vsevolod Meyerhold), it had three elements which later theatre practitioners would employ: first, what came to be called ‘physical theatre’; second, a circus-like structuring which replaced a smoothly unfolding narrative with short, vivid, circus-like scenes set paratactically beside one another; and third, a drama not focused on the settlement of problems, but open-ended, focused on the struggles ahead. Notes   1. Jangfeldt (ed.), Love Is the Heart of Everything, pp. 16–17.  2. Ilinsky, Sam o sebe, p. 143.  3. Ransome, Six Weeks in Russia 1919, p. 103.  4. Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism 1917–1921, p. 19.   5. Marshall (ed.), Mayakovsky, p. 88.   6. Ibid. p. 13.   7. Ibid. p. 83.  8. Jangfeldt, Mayakovsky, a Biography, p. 96.  9. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, p. 345. 10. Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism 1917–1921, p. 37. 11. Marshall (ed.), Mayakovsky, p. 29. 12. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, pp. 161, 158, 160. 13. Rappaport, Caught in the Revolution, p. 172. 14. Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future, p. 230.

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15. Ransome, Six Weeks in Russia 1919, p. 76. 16. Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future, p. 224. 17. Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and His Circle, p. 107. 18. Roberts, The Last Soviet Avant-Garde, p. 122. 19. Lodder, Russian Constructivism, p. 247. 20. Ransome, Six Weeks in Russia 1919, p. 152. 21. Ransome, The Crisis in Russia 1920, p. 69. 22. Leach, Revolutionary Theatre, p. 66. 23. Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910–1930, p. 106. 24. Markov, Russian Futurism, p. 331. 25. Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910–1930, p. 105. 26. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Avant-Garde Theatre, p. 399. 27. Khlebnikov, Snake Train, p. 294. 28. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Avant-Garde Theatre, p. 174. 29. Kleberg and Lövgren (eds), Eisenstein Revisited, p. 14. 30. Carter, The New Spirit in the Russian Theatre, p. 180. 31. Leach, Revolutionary Theatre, p. 33. 32. Mikhailova (ed.), Classic Soviet Plays, pp. 134, 127, 142. 33. Leach, Revolutionary Theatre, p. 34. 34. Mikhailova (ed.), Classic Soviet Plays, p. 172. 35. Brecht, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, p. 98. 36. D’Arcy and Arden, The Non-Stop Connolly Show, p. 448. 37. Tolstoy, Plays, p. 4. 38. Déak, ‘Two Manifestos’, p. 90. 39. Tolstoy, Plays, p. 20. 40. Annenkov, ‘Merry Sanatorium’, pp. 111, 112. 41. Baer, Theatre in Revolution, p. 72. 42. Schnitzer, Schnitzer and Martin (eds), Cinema in Revolution, p. 15. 43. Zolotnitsky, Sergei Radlov, p. 11. 44. Ibid. p. 16. 45. Mayakovsky, The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle, pp. 55–63. 46. Freedman (ed.), A Meeting About Laughter, p. 74. 47. Mayakovsky, The Complete Plays, pp. 45–6, 47. 48. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Avant-Garde Theatre, pp. 111–12. 49. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 275.

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4

TRANSRATIONAL DRAMA

Kandinsky and Stage Composition While some Russian Futurists were creating a physicalised, political epic theatre focused on the future, others were more interested in seeking a transrational, or abstract, dramatic form. A forerunner to these, who was perhaps no more than on the fringes of Futurism, was Vasily Kandinsky. He was a member of the Jack of Diamonds group and exhibited with Larionov, Goncharova and the Burlyuk brothers. But he was born in 1866, and was therefore a good generation older than the Futurists. He studied law and became an academic before throwing this career over in 1896 in order to be an artist. He went to Munich to study, and for the next eighteen years he split his time between Germany and Russia. In Munich in 1909 he and Franz Marc founded the Blue Rider group which promulgated the idea that great art was rooted in spirituality. In 1914 he returned to Russia and, though positively apolitical, after the Revolution he joined the Fine Art Department of Lunacharsky’s Narkompros, becoming director of INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in 1920. Two years later he left Russia to join the Bauhaus, and he never returned to his native country. But from 1918 to 1922 in Russia Kandinsky wrote and lectured on his ideas, especially the relationship he found between form and colour. It should be added, however, that most of the Russian Futurists rejected his theories, not least because he seemed out of step with contemporary social and political developments. 77

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Nevertheless, many of Kandinsky’s ideas chimed with those of the Futurists, and his plays form an intriguing prelude to Futurist transrational drama. As Peter Jelavich has pointed out, as early as 1904 Kandinsky was arguing that painting (‘malerai’ in German) should properly be called copying (‘abmalerai’), since most earlier painting imitated nature, just as most earlier, and indeed contemporary, theatre tried to ‘imitate’ real life.1 Painting – and theatre – needed to move beyond mere imitation, he argued, towards a new kind of Gesamtkunstwerk in which sound, colour and movement could each exist in their own right. In a further pre-echo of Futurism, he looked forward to the replacement of contemporary materialism by an ‘epoch of great spirituality’,2 though unlike the Futurists’ idea of the coming Utopia, Kandinsky believed this would be a time when the artist would uncover the spiritual essence of humanity. Much of this was at the heart of his lecture ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, delivered at the Second All-Russia Congress of Artists in St Petersburg at the end of 1911, when he suggested that the task of the artist was to make the spiritual visible. It led inexorably towards abstract art but encompassed the theatre, too, as he made clear in ‘On Stage Composition’, his introduction to The Yellow Sound, published in 1912. Though he did not wish to throw ‘old’ drama ‘overboard from the Ship of Modernity’, as the Futurists did, he dismissed not only past drama, as concerned only with the externals of life, but also opera, in which either the music simply illustrated the action or the dramatic action was used to explain the music, and ballet, which suffered from the same problems but was more naïve. Kandinsky contended that the goal of a work of art was ‘a certain complex of vibrations’ which would be transmitted from the artist to the ‘receiving soul’, and though the receiving souls’ responses would be complex and inexhaustibly different, they would lead to inner liberation. The conception was surprisingly close to Eisenstein’s later materialist formulation that ‘the moulding of the audience’ was the theatre’s chief task.3 It is also worth noting that when he was the leader of INKhUK in the early 1920s, his programme concerning monumental art urged that painters, architects, sculptors, music composers, dramatists, theatrical directors, ballet dancers and circus figures unite to create a new theatre by applying principles peculiar to their respective art. He enumerated the ‘means of expression’ for the Institute’s investigation. He devoted particular attention to the role of movements and gestures on the stage, which he considered ‘language without words’. These movements and gestures would involve the spectator’s participation in the theatre.4 Kandinsky saw a prime link between easel painting and the stage, and wrote a number of plays – ‘stage compositions’, as he called them – though it appears none were actually staged. They include The Yellow Sound, Daphnis and Chloe, The Green Sound, Black and White and Violet, the last including 78

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a scene in which a bourgeois woman in a very low-cut dress and a top-hatted toff fight a violet curtain, a cow is assailed by violet light and, in a rare attempt to create easily comprehensible speech, the woman soon finds words inadequate: You know well in the heart of every being . . . Oh! You’ll understand me! I don’t know how to express my thoughts properly. But you could say it like that, can’t you? It’s a current expression, isn’t it? Can’t you express yourself like that? Truly, I wouldn’t know how to say it otherwise! Besides, there’s a lot of truth in that expression! Truly! And how else could I express it? In the heart of every being . . . (After a few moments of hesitation) It’s true that that’s a bit funny, almost comical. (Timidly) I express myself like an old lady. But I don’t know – how to say . . . Yes! No! I can’t express myself any other way!5 Violet and The Yellow Sound, with music by Thomas von Hartmann, came close to performance in Munich in 1914, but the productions were pre-empted by the outbreak of war. The Yellow Sound was performed in New York in 1982.

The Yellow Sound It has a weird, other-worldly atmosphere, governed by a highly active lighting plot in which yellow, the colour of physical abandon, seems to be pitted against blue, the colour of restraint. The Prologue, or Introduction, gives some feeling of the work’s strangeness: Some indeterminate chords from the orchestra. Curtain. Over the stage, dark-blue twilight, which at first has a pale tinge and later becomes a more intense dark blue. After a time, a small light becomes visible in the centre, increasing in brightness as the colour becomes deeper. After a time, music from the orchestra. Pause. Behind the stage, a Chorus is heard, which must be so arranged that the source of the singing is unrecognizable. The bass voices predominate. The singing is even, without expression, with pauses indicated by dots. At first, deep voices:     Stone-hard dreams . . . And speaking rocks . . .     Clods of earth pregnant with puzzling questions . . .     The heaven turns . . . The stones . . . melt . . .     Growing up more invisible . . . rampant . . . High voices:     Tears and laughter . . . Praying and cursing . . .     Joy of reconciliation and blackest slaughter. 79

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All:     Murky light on the . . . sunniest . . . day (Quickly, and suddenly cut off)     Brilliant shadows in darkest night!! The light disappears. It grows suddenly dark. Long pause. Then orchestral introduction.6 The five brief scenes which follow seem to centre on five giants dressed in yellow and with yellow faces who hover, whisper together and make feeble gestures, while anonymous groups of other people huddle together, move apart, at one moment (Scene 2) dressed in garish colours, speaking and crying out, and finally (Scene 5), now in tights of different colours, moving at first like marionettes, but becoming gradually more animated, until there is a kind of Dionysian frenzied dance. There is confusion in the orchestra, ‘whole groups run from the stage’, while those remaining begin to dance, ‘running, jumping, running to and fro, falling down’. Some move only their limbs, others move in unison, some move differently. There is a wildly confused climax in the orchestra; the stage goes black. Only the giants remain, till they too ‘go out like a lamp’ and ‘total darkness ensues’.7 Readers of this play are in danger of losing some of its essential elements which would be stark in performance, such as the constantly changing music and the shifting, variegated lighting effects. The most startling scene features a small child pulling at a bellrope watched by a ‘very fat’ man with a white moon face. Suddenly he commands, ‘Silence!’ and the child drops the rope. Silence and darkness. The play’s meaning is opaque, and critics have offered differing interpretations, but it does seem to be a fragile embodiment of the inner spirit, and perhaps its liberation. Perhaps more fruitful for an audience, given the contradictions which provide little to hold onto, would be simply to allow the action to wash over them, without attempting literal interpretation. On the one hand there is pure sound, light and movement, each element operating independently and often in disharmony with the others – disharmony perhaps being more evocative than its opposite, harmony, which can be construed as simplistic. On this level, it seems to be a kind of profane ritual, with anonymous bodies, voices crying out and lost in space, and the performance area itself provisional and indeterminate. This is theatre reduced to its barest: sometimes the play of light is all the action. It is ‘theatre as such’, abstract and complex. On the other hand, this ‘purity’ is subverted by comic and popular elements – puppetry, actors on stilts, painted faces and idiotic, folk-like dances. On this view, the colour, movement and sound may remind us of the circus or the cabaret, and its performers of clowns. Kandinsky himself noted that clowns ‘build their composition in a very definite alogicality. Their action has no definite development, their movements are incongruous, their efforts lead 80

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nowhere and, indeed, they’re not meant to. But at the same time, the spectator experiences impressions with total intensity.’8 Elena Guro Three plays by Elena Guro also date from the years before the First World War. She was the wife of Mikhail Matyushin, Victory Over the Sun’s composer, and a gifted poet in a rather subdued style. Her brief early poems and stories were complemented by three plays, two – Harlequin Pauper and In a Closed Chalice – published in 1909, and a third, An Autumn Dream, three years later. The plays are Symbolist and impressionistic before they are Futurist: An Autumn Dream concerns an idealistic young man, Wilhelm Kranz, who is a kind of Don Quixote making his way through the rough world, but one day he will reap the happier rewards his naïveté deserves. No iconoclast, Guro did not associate much with the noisy Futurists, but her urbanism seems not unlike Mayakovsky’s, and her unwillingness to allow the logical to overpower something less obvious allies her work with that of Khlebnikov. So too does her use of language, which is often fragmentary and even zaum-like. She is a strangely haunting presence in the background of the Futurist theatre, partly because she is one of the very few women Futurists, but also because she died young, aged only thirty-six, in 1913, with her promise barely fulfilled. Khlebnikov’s First Plays More clearly ‘Futurist’ than Guro’s or Kandinsky’s plays, partly because of their playful treatment of language, are the dramas of Velimir Khlebnikov, one of the signatories of the original Slap in the Face of Public Taste. His pre-revolutionary plays include The Little Devil, Mrs Lenin, Worldbackwards and Death’s Mistake which, like Kandinsky’s, attempt to find a dramatic form which can deal with a world beyond the visible and the materialistic. The earliest of these is probably The Little Devil. This apparently chaotic drama features all sorts of St Petersburg citizens from beggars to high officials, old people to policemen, but also sphinxes, caryatids, pagan gods and witches, a crow, a mammoth and even a large glass of beer. The script is full of jokes, satire and unexpected actions. Perhaps intended as part of a larger work, The Little Devil seems to decry the death of fantasy in city dwellers and appeal for a rebirth of free imagination. Mrs Lenin is more like a radio play as, first, various voices describe a nebulous happening in a garden, then the setting moves to a hospital where a patient is dying. More achieved than these are Worldbackwards and Death’s Mistake. Worldbackwards is a short, sharp depiction of the relationship between a man and his wife (Polya and Olya) in five brief scenes. It begins with Polya’s funeral, which he describes to Olya. In the next scene the two are middle-aged, dealing with their rebellious son. In Scene 3 they are lovers in a boat on the river: 81

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We’re just sweet friends and seekers after the closeness to each other and we fish for pearls in the sea of our own gaze we are sweet and tender and the boat floats along throwing its shadow on the stream and we leaning over the side to see our faces in gay river clouds caught by the water-net fallen from the far skies and noon whispers to us O children we are the freshness of midnight.9 In the next scene they are glimpsed at school and in the last scene they are babies in their prams, holding toy balloons. This text is also notable for its experimental use of a sort of unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness which occasionally breaks into rhyming couplets: ‘Ivan Semyonovich is here isn’t it true that in the monkey’s paw a certain bone reveals a flaw? We’re not scholars but at our age we love and honour the erudite sage.’10 Equally vivid is Death’s Mistake, set in ‘a tavern of merry dead corpses with reed pipes set in their teeth’. They celebrate a ‘ball of death’, led by the Damsel of Death and danced by her twelve guests. When she is tired, the scene shifts to a banquet. The Damsel, ‘all in white roams among her guests with a whip. A trainer among her beasts.’ But an Intruder bursts into the scene: he wants to drink ‘the beer of death’. The corpses seem to fall into a trance, while Damsel Death denies the Intruder because there is no glass for him. He demands she unscrew her skull and use that for a glass, which, after some hesitation, she does, accepting his handkerchief in its place. She defers to him, the corpses stir, and the damsel realises with growing panic that she is dying. As she dies, the corpses are gradually re-animated. She dies, and joins the guests at the banquet. ‘I have played out my part and may join you. How do you do, ladies and gentlemen!’11 In 1917 Vladimir Tatlin, the artist, and Khlebnikov were planning to stage Death’s Mistake and Mrs Lenin, but the projected production was interrupted by the revolutionary events. In 1920, Death’s Mistake was staged in Rostovon-Don. Independently of this, Vladimir Dmitriev designed a Futurist set for the play of large painted boards with brightly coloured triangles, circles and stars which moved in accord with the action, recalling Mikhail Larionov’s pre-war ideas for staging at ‘Teatr Futu’.

Zangezi These plays by Khlebnikov approach a drama which subverts conventional understandings of death, time and indeed understanding itself, and moves towards a more comprehensive theatricalisation of thought, ‘pure’ theatre, or theatre as such. They are, however, outshone by Khlebnikov’s last drama, Zangezi, which contains twenty scenes, or ‘planes’, as Khlebnikov calls them, most with titles like ‘The Birds’, ‘The Gods’, ‘The Falling Sickness’ and ‘Sorrow and Laughter’, indicating the planes of experience, understanding and language itself. Khlebnikov called Zangezi a ‘supersaga’, 82

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made up out of independent sections, each with its own special god, its special faith, and its special rule . . . The supersaga resembles a statue made from blocks of different kinds of stone of varying colours – white for the body, blue for the cloak and garments, black for the eyes. It is carved from the varicoloured blocks of the Word, each with its own different structure. The play’s setting immediately takes the spectator to some strange place where a new way of viewing the world may be forthcoming: The mountains. At the edge of a clearing rises a steep craggy rock; it resembles an iron needle seen through a magnifying glass. Like a pilgrim’s staff left standing against a wall, it stands against perpendicular slopes of layers of rock overgrown by the pine forest. A bridge-platform connects it to the bedrock, the result of a landslide that has fallen across the top of the crag like a straw hat. This platform is Zangezi’s favourite place. He comes here every morning to recite his poems. Zangezi is an ethereal being, a cross between Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Wagner’s Siegfried, who can understand the language of the birds and who

4.1  Vladimir Tatlin, stage design for Zangezi, 1923 (State Russian Museum, St Petersburg). 83

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wrestles with language, time and the significance of numbers. Ordinary people climb the rocks seeking his words, and when he does appear in Plane Five, he tells them: I have come like a butterfly Into the hall of human life, And must spatter my dusty coat As signature across its bleak windows. When he addresses the people, it is about ‘the alphabet war-makers’; he sings in ‘star-language’ and asserts, ‘Words do not exist; there are only movements in space and their parts – points and areas.’ He discourses on the alphabet as the echo of space, letters as the ‘mogogospel’, and offers them compounds of the word ‘oom’, Russian for ‘the mind’: PRO-OOM PRA-OOM PREE-OOM EXCL-OOM DEV-OOM and so on. Later he speaks of the ‘Table of Destiny’ and his life bound to the wheel of history. All is not as pompous as this may sound, and the people mock him (‘What language are you trying to talk?’), complain (‘What a mad muddle!’) and become increasingly restless, wandering defiantly away: We’ll drink to our Odessa mama And the moon of Alabama, and We gotta dance! And drink some more! Finally, they bring him a horse, and he mounts, chanting: Nickery, flickery, Little stewball! Coachery catchery, Tortury mortuary, Matchery catchery, witchery watchery – Evens in heavens As evening descends. And he rides away, leaving a final battle between Laughter and Sorrow. Laughter ‘loosens the pinching shoes of reason’, but ‘even a clown has his work cut out for him’. But Sorrow seems too strong for him: ‘The movement of time undoes us all! Oh, what a fall!’ and Laughter dies. There is an Epilogue in ‘a cheerful location’: two people are reading a newspaper. ‘What’s this?’ one of them asks. ‘Zangezi is dead!’ ‘Not only that’, replies the other, ‘but he did 84

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4.2  Vladimir Tatlin, costume design for Laughter, Zangezi (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). it himself, with a razor!’ At which moment Zangezi reappears. ‘Zangezi lives!’ he cries. ‘It was all just a stupid joke!’12 This ending is perhaps a warning to critics to beware when addressing Zangezi. It is a joke, and is drama ‘beyonsense’. But the year after Khlebnikov’s death, it was staged at the Museum of Artistic Culture in Petrograd by Vladimir Tatlin, who directed, played the leading part of Zangezi and designed the production. On stage he placed a tall pyramidical structure in unpainted, unvarnished natural wood, focused by an independent narrow vertical cone, shaped like a huge knitting needle. The different textures and materials he employed were intended to reflect or chime with the different textures of the words in a manner not unlike Kandinsky’s conception. In the auditorium Tatlin erected coloured panels, oddly painted with daubs of colour and odd words, and a ‘staircase of the thinkers’. The stage was lit mostly by spotlight beams which moved between Zangezi, who spent most of the play at the top of the stage construction, and the various members of the crowd ranged up and down and across the set below him. The actors, dwarfed by the structure, caught and lost in the roving beams of light, lost their individuality, despite some colourful interventions, so that the presentation had a sculptural quality only gradually revealed. The significance of this production as a 85

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demonstration of transrational Futurist theatre can hardly be overemphasised. Unfortunately, the performers, students recruited late in the process, were not wholly convincing. The performance was not well understood, and was poorly attended, despite the fact that lectures on Khlebnikov’s work accompanied the production. Kruchenykh’s Drama Khlebnikov collaborated with his fellow Futurist, Alexei Kruchenykh, on much more than just Victory Over the Sun, including a second opera, The Military Opera, which however remained unfinished. Both authors were primarily poets who also wrote for the stage. Kruchenykh’s book Let’s Grumble contained among other things a short drama which begins almost conventionally but soon becomes thoroughly bizarre, with words losing their obvious meanings and the dramatic flow broken and interrupted by the intrusion of strange words, broken phrases and incomprehensible grammatical constructions. The Woman, perhaps the central character, begins a soliloquy, but as she speaks her bed rises without warning into the air. Soon other objects are flying about. ‘The Reader’, who may perhaps represent the spectator, interrupts her with a typically beyonsense speech, talking extremely fast and in a high-pitched voice, which at moments drops into a sort of sliding glissando. The Woman loses her train of thought, her speech becomes broken, a jumble of half-words, nonsense, letters and numbers. Finally, the actors leave the stage, and ‘Someone at Ease’ reads excerpts from Kruchenykh’s earlier zaum poetry. Also very short is Kruchenykh’s play The Bridge, in which the central character, Krivliaka, ‘The Poseur’, perhaps a self-parody of the author, destroys the bridge probably to his past, so that he is in effect ‘burning his bridges’. Another piece, Gli-Gli, apparently about Futurism itself, was playing in a Moscow cafécabaret in October 1917 at exactly the time of the Bolshevik seizure of power. One commentator described this drama as ‘a mixture of noises, bright colours, lighting effects, “trans-sense” language, dancing, mime, acting and clowning’, which provoked ‘fights between the actors and the totally b ­ ewildered audience’.13 This account indicates Kruchenykh’s fascination with the stage as a phenomenon in its own right. He was a fine performer, ‘a brilliant reader of his own verse’, according to Sergei Tretyakov, and one who ‘shouted out words full of juicy dullness’ and could bring ‘listeners to the verge of fainting’.14 He was a natural actor who, in Victory Over the Sun, not only read Khlebnikov’s Prologue but also played the parts of the Certain Person with Bad Intentions and the Reader. He took a keen interest in Meyerhold’s experiments at Doctor Dapertutto’s Studio in St Petersburg and developed his own theory of the stage, which he published as The Phonetics of the Stage in 1923. In this he claimed that zaum would become the language of drama in the future, and he 86

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gave examples – though not very helpful examples – of how to speak zaum poetry. He stressed the flexibility of zaum, which could be mere verbal fun, or an articulation of fierce emotion, or a way of elucidating the verbal texture, or a pathway into the mysteries of poetry and life. For Kruchenykh, language was to be seen by the dramatist not as a mere vehicle for communication or dialogue, nor as an aid to dramatic characterisation; rather, language existed for itself: the text was, as it were, a musical score, which indicated the sound, rhythm, tempo and so on of the piece. His stage aesthetic was figured round zaum, or beyonsense, ‘sdvig’, shifts, and ‘faktura’, the texture of the words, which embraced not only the sound but also the rhythm, syntax, semantics and more. When in The Bridge, for example, he interrupted conventional speech with zaum and then interrupted that with more conventional speech, he was creating a series of shifts designed to unsettle the audience. The shifts could also encompass the collision of words to form new words – easier in Russian than most languages, because of Russian’s reliance on prefixes and suffixes: the suffix of one word could elide with the prefix of the next to create a new word which the listener would become aware of. Kruchenykh’s theatre has been called ‘alogistic’ and ‘absurdist’ because of the way it juxtaposes words, actions and random items for no logical reason and with no discernible context. Clowning is a supreme example of alogism, since it consists of haphazard and arbitrary sequences. Parody, too, may be alogical, revealing the banality of old forms and inserting something unexpected and surprising. Kruchenykh thus approached ‘acting as such’, the idea that the actor acts for the sake of acting, and what he does has no necessary meaning beyond itself. It is the process of the action, not its consequences, which is key. And as in English, the Russian words ‘acting’ and ‘playing’ are cognate. Playing can explore what cannot be known: there is never a reason to play, and playing is purely irrational. Futurists in Tiflis 1917–1921 In 1916 Kruchenykh went to the Caucasus, and the following year, as the tornado of revolution swept over Russia, he returned, staying till the end of 1919. The region, and especially Tiflis, was during these years full of poets and artists, including the Futurist Blue Horn group. Vladimir Goldschmidt and Vasily Kamensky were there briefly in 1918, the poet Rurik Ivnev made his home there for some years, as did Yuri Degen, art critic, poet and playwright. Degen, later shot by the Bolsheviks, published his magazine, Phoenix, in Tiflis at this time and also ran the Fantastic Tavern where many of these artists performed. Ilya and Kirill Zdanevich and Igor Terentiev were also in Tiflis, and with them Kruchenykh founded Company 41°; 41° was the geographical latitude of Tiflis, and also the highest possible body temperature of human beings. Kruchenykh was undoubtedly the leader of this group, which put 87

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zaum at the centre of its poetic credo, and his time in Tiflis was extremely productive for him, though he seems not to have written more plays here. Even so, he published an astonishing number of poetry chapbooks, and he and his colleagues lectured and gave readings at noisy meetings in the Fantastic Tavern or the Peacock’s Tail. One habituée of the latter described it: The barman was Ilya Zdanevich and the barmaid was the wife of the singer Seliger. My husband and I and Rafalovich went to sit down at a table. Suddenly there was shooting. In panic everyone rushed to the doors . . . There was a little stage and in the evenings, when it was crowded with public, someone read verse in Russian and in Georgian. Or we would play some amusing sketch. Everyone knew everyone else – it was very cheerful.15 Ilya Zdanevich’s Aspects of a Donkey In Tiflis, the chief dramatic writer employing zaum became Ilya Zdanevich. A poet and artist, Zdanevich had come to Futurism through his association with Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova before the First World War. He had been prominent in extending Futurism’s reach, having proselytised ‘Everythingism’, proclaimed that an old boot was worth more than the Venus de Milo, and advocated face-painting. By 1917 he was back in his native Tiflis, joining with other Futurists in performing and lecturing, including at the embryonic Futurist University, on subjects such as Italian Futurism, the theatre and more. He had already begun writing what became a pentalogy of short, vivid dras, as he termed his individual plays. The pentalogy was called, provocatively, Aslaabliche, which may be rendered dUnkeeness or Aspects of a Donkey, perhaps as a nod in the direction of the old Donkey’s Tail group, of which Zdanevich had been an active member. The donkey is certainly a central image in these five plays, which should not be regarded as five acts of a single drama, but rather as five separate works linked by theme and treatment. They take some of their style from the folk puppet shows of the Ukraine, the vertep, which presented little plays of biblical stories, interlaced with contemporary parody and satire, and plenty of knockabout. They were introduced by a Master, or Interpreter, who sometimes interjected comments or intervened in the proceedings on stage to give a sort of commentary. Zdanevich imported this figure into his dras, as well as the parody, blasphemy and buffoonery. Equally fascinating, however, was his employment of zaum, slightly different in each play, but providing perhaps the most determined and relentless employment of zaum in all of Futurism. The texts are not without some spoken Russian, but the zaum is pervasive, cleverly devised and delicately done. The first play in the sequence is Yanko king of Albania, which was performed on 3 December 1916 at the house of B. N. Essen in Petrograd before 88

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Zdanevich returned to Tiflis. He himself played both the Master and Yanko, whose name recalls Yanko, king of the smugglers, in Mikhail Lermontov’s seminal A Hero of Our Time. The play may be best seen as a parody of the traditional history play, including, perhaps, Kamensky’s Stenka Razin. Yanko, a dithering weakling, fails to respond to the young girl Lilia’s overtures. A gang of Albanian bandits, perhaps the personifications of anti-life sexlessness, capture him and force him to be their king. He tries to resist, but they glue him to the throne. He cannot escape, until a German doctor named Prentel helps to free him. They are parched, they groan as if defecating and call for water, but the bandits seize Yanko again and murder him. The second play, Donkey for Rent (Dunkee for Rent), was presented in Tiflis, perhaps in no more than a reading, on 3 May 1918, and contains only four characters – the beautiful Zokhnar, her two suitors, called simply A and B, and a donkey, and the story is perhaps derived from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A is transformed into a donkey. Zokhnar falls for him and promises to marry him. But A and B together deflect her ardour towards the real donkey. Finally, A reveals himself, and he and B, with the donkey, serenade her. Then the two men stab themselves, leaving Zokhnar to lament. The poet and theatre director Igor Terentiev wrote of this work, perhaps half humorously, that it was ‘a compress made of women, which is reverently applied indiscriminately now to bridegroom A and now to bridegroom B and sometimes, by mistake, to the ass. All the indecent love words in this ecstasy without causality whoop, go “yu” and squawk and produce . . . saliva.’16 Easter Island (Eester ailand), or perhaps Easter Eyeland, first presented on 19 July 1918, reminds us that Christ rode into Jerusalem before his passion and crucifixion on a donkey. The dra concerns a somewhat boorish sculptor who visits a shop which trades in stone, the material he works in, but here there are only stone coffins. Unaccountably, more deaths occur to add to those of the corpses in the coffins, but when all are sprinkled with blood they rise again. The dra’s uncompromising action deliberately evokes reflections about the unmentionable subject of menstruation, as well as about the meaning of the Christian myths of resurrection and Christ’s blood. Yet it is mostly playful knockabout. Its finale is presented as versified stage directions: Two-and-a-half stone women they get into their coffins they die the boss, the merchant Pryk, slams down the lids of the coffins a sculptor enters boss, ask the sculptor the sculptor smashes the first coffin 89

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smashes the second smashes the third the merchant runs in the sculptor grabs the merchant he stabs the merchant the merchant falls the sculptor stabs him the merchant dies the sculptor sprinkles the blood on the women the women are resurrected the women in a chorus, ‘Blockhead’ they beat the sculptor they sprinkle the merchant with the sculptor’s blood the merchant comes to life Easter the women depart leaving pools of blood the boss Easter is a negative indication of the death of menstruation Easter gives the stone women their activity and the sculptor too it sprinkles the blood of the women over the sculptor comes to life, runs the boss17 Alexei Kruchenykh paid his own tribute to this dra in a poem addressed ‘To Ilya Zdanevich’: How easily       EASTER    ISLOUNT reads! A durge! Midnight mass eases up like a bike being shoaled over to Erik! The final two dras are more explicitly concerned with the relations of life, love and art. As Though Zga (azthO zgA) was the last of the dras to be presented in Tiflis, on 22 November 1918. The word ‘zga’ barely exists in Russian except in opposition to ‘vidno’, ‘what is obvious or visible’, though it also refers to the bell fixed to the curved yoke above the horses pulling a troika. Drucker quotes the Russian saying ‘it’s so dark you can’t see the zga’,18 hence ‘as though zga’ implies something perhaps glimpsed. In the dra, Zga wakes 90

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4.3  Ilya Zdanevich and Mikhail Le-Dantyu, 1915. up, and speaks to the Mirror. The Mirror comes to life and dances with Zga, but the reflected image takes on a life of its own as the character As Though Zga. The tension is broken only when the Mirror is smashed. Zga goes back to sleep. The final dra, LeDantyu as a Beacon (lidantYU azabEEkan), is Zdanevich’s homage to his friend and fellow advocate of ‘Everythingism’, Mikhail Le-Dantyu, who was killed in the world war. It was only presented in 1923 after Zdanevich had settled in Paris. The dra opens with the Spirit (Zaperedukhlya) speaking a meditation over the body of a dead woman, who is guarded by five foul and foetid female corpses. A Realist Painter paints a ‘lifelike’ portrait of the dead woman, which the stinking women hugely admire. But then LeDantyu appears. He paints an ‘unlike’ portrait which brings the woman back to life. She and the ‘unlike’ portrait desire one another, but the ‘lifelike’ portrait intervenes. The resurrected woman attacks the ‘lifelike’ portrait, but is restrained by the ‘unlike’ portrait, who however turns on the ‘lifelike’ portrait and murders it. The five ugly cadavers attack her, but the Spirit defends her, until the Realist Painter kills the Spirit. LeDantyu then kills the Realist Painter, and leads the woman and the ‘unlike’ portrait like a beacon out of hell. This dra is probably the height of Zdanevich’s considerable dramatic achievement: according to Vladimir Markov, ‘the zaum in this play is unbelievably inventive, expressive and funny’, with each person in the dra employing their own form of the language – the Spirit, for example, only uses consonants, except for the vowel ‘i’, and LeDantyu’s zaum carries an unmistakeable Russian flavour. But Zdanevich’s use of zaum is consistently creative throughout the five dras. In Yanko king of Albania, for instance, while Dr Prentel speaks a kind of pidgin German, the bandits speak (and sing) nothing but letters of the Russian alphabet, and Yanko himself speaks almost always in vowels, a zaum supposedly based on Albanian. Beyond this, the sounds and compounds Zdanevich devises in these five dras are sometimes startling, perhaps especially in the areas of bawdry and obscenity, and it is worth noting that Tiflis was 91

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outside the jurisdiction of any censor at the time he was writing. This zaum is a language, or anti-language, which liberates drama from the tyranny of words and the necessity of comprehensive, informative dialogue. It subverts the structures of power by sidestepping what the purpose of language is taken to be, and offers unexpected connections between language on the one hand and identity, sexuality and the subconscious on the other. The dras also contain a series of consonances which reflect on the animal in the human, on love sacred and love profane, on the artist in society and on religion, death, resurrection and time. Thus, through the five plays the woman grows from the innocence and childish sexuality of Yanko king of Albania through the young woman unclear of her sexuality in Donkey for Rent, the shock of menstruation in Easter Island, the mature relationship figured in the dance in As Though Zga until in LeDantyu as a Beacon she attains her ‘unreal’ self and is led towards the light. She is matched by the image of the donkey, which seems to indicate the male sex drive, but sometimes seems to be compounded with the female. The sexless dithering Yanko of the first play is replaced by the animal passion of the second. In the third dra the donkey traipses towards some kind of Jerusalem; in the fourth there is an awakening, though perhaps it is still in harness, pulling the troika. Only in the fifth dra is there release. The profane love suggested by these propositions is also refracted through a contemplation of divine love, for the play hints at the passion, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. The first dra echoes the moment when Jesus is hailed as the ‘King of the Jews’, an attribution he is quick to deny. Donkey for Rent dramatises the struggle for truth in the Garden of Gethsemane. In Easter Island Christ rides into Jerusalem, in As Though Zga the smashing of the mirror parallels the veil of the Temple being rent at the moment of the crucifixion, and LeDantyu as a Beacon may present the harrowing of hell and the final resurrection. Other progresses may also be depicted in the pentalogy. For instance, the dras consistently glance at the struggles of the artist. The aridity in Yanko king of Albania implicitly criticises the idea of modelling a king out of the unsuitable material of a coward; Donkey for Rent asks what is real and what is unreal; Easter Island presents a sculptor who works in stone, the material of coffins, and, at another level, as Easter Eyeland, questions again how material objects are seen; the ‘realism’ of the picture presented by a mirror is smashed in As Though Zga; and in LeDantyu as a Beacon the realistic portrait is murdered by anti-realism. The influence on Zdanevich’s dras of the puppet stage, with its brief, episodic stories, its primitivism, knockabout, blasphemy and scatology, has been noticed, but there is also a strong element of musicality here, not only in the sound of the zaum, nor indeed simply in the musical portions of the 92

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texts, but in the actual organisation of the dras. They often seem structured musically. Yanko king of Albania, for example, works almost like a sonata: the arid opening love scene is the exposition, the enthroning of Yanko by the loveless bandits elaborates the theme, and the aridity of Yanko’s rescue by the Doctor, symbolised in their desperate thirst, recapitulates the opening. The final murder may then be seen as a coda. In As Though Zga there is a similar structure – the awakening forming the exposition, the dance with the mirror being the development, and the smashing of the mirror, another sort of awakening, being the recapitulation, with Zga’s return to sleep as the coda. In addition, Zdanevich sometimes employs choral speech, that is, when two or more actors speak or sing in unison; but sometimes they speak ‘in orchestra’, that is, two or more actors speak or sing different lines simultaneously; and sometimes, the text swerves between the two forms. The effect is polyphonic, and indeed the printed texts, over which Zdanevich, a trained typesetter, took much care, sometimes look like music scores. Part of the aim of the printed texts is to help the actor or reader not only to produce the correct pronunciation of the zaum sequences, but also to respond to the author’s rhythms, emphases, and so on. Consequently, the publications are ‘a visual feast with a graphic value all its own’,19 almost works of art in themselves, if perhaps less helpful in practice to the actor. Zdanevich himself, however, was a superb reader of his own work, his strong tenor voice resonating through the hall when he gave readings at the Fantastic Tavern, and at least one hearer recorded that ‘the dra made a strong emotional impression when recited on the stage’.20

4.4  A page from the printed edition of LeDantyu as a Beacon, designed by Ilya Zdanevich. 93

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These dras mix sdvig, buffoonery, anal eroticism, fun, mockery and a good deal of music in the search for dramatic forms which reconfigure and renew lived experience with an authenticity which resonates at a deep level. They offer insights into the problems of living and dying, and if there is no single meaning in them, they at least offer space to make meanings. In 1921 Zdanevich went to Paris to oversee an exhibition of Russian art. When the exhibition was cancelled, Zdanevich stayed on, to become a leading figure in the Parisian Dada group under the name Ilyazd, a contraction of his Russian name. But Futurism in Tiflis had reached its end anyway. One participant remembered 1920: Life was getting very difficult. Rooms were requisitioned. It was unprecedentedly cold in Tiflis, but the Guild still went on meeting. Wrapped up in their coats, people huddled around the miserable stoves, reading poetry. The electricity went out every minute, but even if it was on, you could not read by it. Paraffin lamps, which smoked, appeared. Cold and hunger stopped this activity.21 Abstract Theatre The transrational branch of Futurist theatre is not always easy to come to terms with. Teasing, deceptive and fantastical, it finds forms as close to ‘abstract’ drama as any in the long history of world theatre. It is perhaps not surprising that the trailblazers of abstract painting, Kandinsky and Malevich, were so closely involved in its making. It is also possible, however, to see how this transrational theatre shares crucial elements with the other, more accessible forms of Futurist theatre. They all share a predilection for short, sharp scenes, sometimes barely a line or two, and they all feature sdvig, sharp shifts within scenes, interruptions, pauses and swift changes from speech to song and from horror to slapstick. There is, for instance, the unexpected appearance of the child pulling the bellrope in The Yellow Sound, the absurd materialisation of Laughter in Zangezi (‘a sudden great leap, and Laughter appears on the platform, leading Sorrow by the hand’22), the bed which flies up into the air in Let’s Grumble and the woman flirting with the donkey in Donkey for Rent. Yet much of the action is indeterminate, if fascinating, and always there is an uneasy awareness of something beyond. This is also conveyed in the strange settings these plays tend to inhabit, usually best conveyed by abstract constructions like those Tatlin devised for Zangezi, and the strange restless lighting, often violently coloured, which these plays all demand and which discloses and conceals in almost equal proportions. In Kandinsky’s Violet a violet beam of light attacks a cow; in The Yellow Sound ‘in quick succession bright coloured rays fall from all sides (blue, red, 94

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violet and green alternate several times). Then all these rays meet in the centre, becoming intermingled’;23 and in As Though Zga the light from the mirror is extinguished when the mirror is smashed. Language, too, is always slippery, fluctuating, implying rather than stating, as with Kandinsky’s décolleté Woman in Violet, or Olya’s attempts to describe her love in Khlebnikov’s Worldbackwards, or in Zdanevich’s endlessly ­reconceived zaum. Finally, there is never any pretence to ‘naturalism’ but there is an awareness of the audience at all points, a felt need for their response never to be literal, but to be imaginative and even unpredictable. This is a theatre which, if not ‘spiritual’ in Kandinsky’s sense, is certainly never figurative or narrative-driven, and it is perhaps regrettable that these plays have been so rarely performed. Notes  1. Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism, p. 221.   2. Ibid. p. 222.   3. Taylor (ed.), Eisenstein: Writings 1922–1934, p. 34.  4. Barooshian, Brik and Mayakovsky, p. 53.  5. Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism, pp. 226–7.   6. Cardullo and Knopf (eds), Theater of the Avant-Garde, pp. 173–4.   7. Ibid. p. 179.  8. Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism, p. 224.  9. Khlebnikov, Snake Train, p. 130. 10. Ibid. p. 129. 11. Ibid. pp. 137, 139, 141, 144. 12. Khlebnikov, The King of Time, pp. 187–235, passim. 13. Fitzlion and Browning, Before the Revolution, p. 58. 14. Markov, Russian Futurism, pp. 338–9. 15. Proffer and Proffer (eds), The Ardis Anthology of Russian Futurism, p. 322. 16. Ibid. p. 306. 17. Ibid. p. 304. 18. Drucker, The Visible Word, p. 184. 19. Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature, p. 176. 20. Proffer and Proffer (eds), The Ardis Anthology of Russian Futurism, p. 303. 21. Ibid. p. 320. 22. Khlebnikov, The King of Time, p. 229. 23. Cardullo and Knopf (eds), Theater of the Avant-Garde, p. 176.

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5

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Meyerhold and Acting Theory The new plays – epic or miniature, abstract or satirical – demanded new attention to acting practices. By employing circus professionals, Radlov and Meyerhold had made a start, but in reality this only postponed the problem. The question was how to modify the circus artist’s performance to fit the somewhat different demands of the theatre, how to theatricalise the circus, or circusise the theatre. Meyerhold knew better than anyone that a dynamic performance which could stimulate an urgent and emotional response in the spectator was one which relied on technique. In 1913 he opened his Doctor Dapertutto’s Studio in St Petersburg in order to explore and develop what was to become known in the Soviet era as ‘Biomechanics’, though it was then called by the perhaps more appropriate name of ‘Scenic Movement’. At base, this was rooted in one side of the ongoing debate about acting which can be traced to Denis Diderot and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It was Diderot who first asked: ‘If the actor were full, really full, of feeling, how could he play the same part twice running with the same spirit and success? Full of fire at the first performance, he would be worn out and cold as marble at the third.’ He pointed out that ‘at the very moment when he [the actor] touches your heart he is listening to his own voice; his talent depends not, as you think, upon feeling, but upon rendering so exactly the outward signs of feeling, that you fall into the trap’, and he 96

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concluded: ‘Actors impress the public not when they are furious, but when they play fury well.’1 And the English actor David Garrick, whom Diderot greatly admired, remarked that he could speak to a post with the same feelings as to the loveliest Juliet under heaven. Yet the Romantic theatre rejected this cool rationality and insisted on the actor infusing his performance with genuine feeling. This approach reached its apogee in the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Meyerhold’s teacher. In Stanislavsky’s fictionalised account of learning the process of acting, An Actor’s Work, the first compliment the gauche young actor receives is for a moment in his performance of Othello when ‘like us the audience, [he] surrendered totally to what was happening. We were stunned and fired by the same common emotion.’ Tortsov, the teacher, explains: ‘These moments of success, which we can abstract from the whole, can be termed the art of experiencing which we cultivate here in our theatre and study in our school.’ ‘What is the art of experiencing?’ I asked, curious. ‘You know what it is because it happened to you.’2 Meyerhold’s search for a cooler, more technical approach led him to the popular performance traditions of the past which did not rely on ‘the art of experiencing’. Like many artists of the early twentieth century, from Schönberg to Picasso, Meyerhold was particularly fascinated by the old masked commedia dell’arte. Meyerhold wanted actors as versatile as those Italian comedians. He also wanted what he deemed a necessary corollary, a stage like theirs – a platform, with the audience clustered around it. The danger of returning to past forms like this was that it could become mere antiquarianism, but with Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe he discovered something absolutely immediate, and more visceral, more contemporary, than commedia dell’arte. His actors played, as it were, contemporary fury so well that the audiences’ emotions were roused to revolution while the actors remained in control of their performances. Meyerhold’s work on this epic play marked the beginning of a new phase both for him and for the concept of Futurist acting. ‘The masks were freed of the burden of symbolism, romanticism, retrospection and aestheticism’ in Mystery Bouffe,3 according to Konstantin Rudnitsky, but they stirred, amused and infuriated the spectators. These emotions were not aroused by the actor ‘identifying’ with the part, or the detailed ‘truth’ of the stage setting. The play began with the curtain, symbol of the ‘private’ play, being torn down; spectators were promised, not a private conjuring of tears or even laughter, but ‘a spectacle most extraordinary’. Another critic compared the interrelation of stage and actors in this production with Stanislavsky’s famous approach to Chekhov. Meyerhold’s production did not, he reported, 97

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copy life with its fluttering curtains and idyllic crickets. It is all composed of reliefs, counter-relief and force lines, striking to the eye but extremely simple, fantastically interwoven. But every relief, every line, every step will play, will obtain meaning and movement when the actor’s foot steps on it and the sound of his voice strikes it.4 Another commentator, less favourable to Mayakovsky’s play, nevertheless recognised Meyerhold’s breakthrough: ‘This is the conception of a whole new area in theatre. The new theatre presses out into the audience with soul and body . . . The staging is marvellous, gives the impression of something vast, significant, powerful.’5 The innovative director Evgeny Vakhtangov noted: ‘Meyerhold provided the roots for the theatre of the future.’6 Meyerhold’s Biomechanics Meyerhold’s Biomechanics was never fixed. As a training method, it was constantly changing with changing times and demands. Nevertheless, in the early 1920s its basic structure was clear. Its aim, as suggested, was to find the technical means to provoke a response in the spectator, as a pianist provokes a response in the listener when a piece of music is played correctly. (Correctness, of course, includes emotional colouring.) Biomechanics has three fundamental elements: first, the silhouette, poised, ready, aware, like a shooting dog waiting for the rifle’s crack to signal the fall of the prey; second, the ‘acting cycle’, a three-part sequence which any action partakes of – the intention, the realisation and the reaction; and third, what might be called the ‘body-think’, the ability to create actions from physical rather than intellectual stimuli. To achieve these, Meyerhold’s students undertook all manner of physical exercises, from running and jumping to dance of various sorts, acrobatics and stick work (throwing a metre-long stick and catching it, balancing it, and so on), individually, in pairs and in small groups. The fundamental rhythm Meyerhold taught for any action, no matter how simple, was tripartite: in Russian, ‘ee-raz-dva’ (‘and-one-two’), which can be varied from a regular three beats to ‘ee-raz, dva’ or ‘ee, raz-dva’, and so on. Thus, throwing and catching the stick is done in three sections: the actor stands poised, a silhouette. Then, ‘ee’, the knees are bent, the stick lowered; ‘raz’, the legs straighten and the stick is tossed into the air; ‘dva’, the stick is caught and held. This is the acting cycle of intention-realisation-reaction, which is just as applicable to, say, a Hamlet soliloquy: Enter Hamlet (intention), ‘To be or not to be’ (realisation), pause (reaction). The exercises give technical control, both physically and intellectually, and the actor learns precision, balance and co-ordination through purely physical stimuli. He learns, not to be furious, but to play fury. Meyerhold also devised a series of ‘études’ such as Shooting the Bow, the Stab with the Dagger, and Throwing the Stone, little mimed pantomimes 98

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which not only tested the physical ability of the student, but also taught the theatricalisation of the techniques learned. Thus, an arrow may be released from the bow viciously, or dreamily, or proudly. Varying rhythms provoke varying responses, and emotional colour is added, not through ‘experiencing’, but by physical means prompted by the ‘body-think’. As for ‘characterisation’, Meyerhold understood perhaps instinctively the concept of the performative, that we ‘perform’ our lives. He rejected a psychological approach to character, preferring to work from the theatrical ‘emploi’, a notion descended from the masks of the commedia dell’arte and the set roles or stock types of later theatres. The actor began work on the character by recognising the stock dramatic type from which the role stems – Macbeth as ‘the heavy villain’, Cleopatra as ‘the courtesan’, and so on, attributes derived at least in part from the character’s function in the plot. Then, a character might find different ‘emplois’ in different scenes of the same play, just as in life we play different roles when we are with different people – even in adulthood, we tend to ‘play’ the child with our parents; we play ‘the suppliant’ with our bank manager, ‘the good companion’ with our friends, and ‘the lover’ with someone we desire. Each emploi can then be refined, individualised and co-ordinated by a performable peculiarity, such as in gait, in gestures or in ways of looking at others. What was important about Biomechanics was that it was a technique for the actor to create something that would resonate with the spectator. Eisenstein noted that Meyerhold ‘could “show” anything you’d like, but could “explain” nothing’, yet ‘there were never as many tears shed anywhere as within the walls of Meyerhold’s theatre’.7 The Biomechanical actor was above all technically proficient, but could be intensely moving. Meyerhold’s productions of the 1920s demonstrated this with exceptional force. He worked on too few specifically Futurist plays for this to have become mainstream Futurist practice, but where he did come into contact with them the results were noteworthy. An early example was the series of scenes created for Biomechanics students in 1922 by Nikolai Aseyev, Sergei Tretyakov and others under the title Spinball (The Versailles Tourists Who Bumped Into a Landmine), though this was never shown to the public. Tretyakov: The World Upside Down The following year Tretyakov contributed a major epic to Meyerhold’s repertoire, Zemlya Dybom, which title has been translated as The World Upside Down, Earth Rampant, Earth Prancing and other variants. It was more than an adaptation, it was a rewriting of the French anarchist-communist Marcel Martinet’s Le Nuit, which Leon Trotsky greatly admired and which had been presented at the Theatre of the Revolution the previous year. Meyerhold disliked this somewhat verbose and sentimental drama which depicts the 99

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agony and sadness of an old woman whose son is caught up in the war. The action takes place mostly offstage, as the son is killed, the soldiers revolt led by one of their number, Ledrux, but the revolt is quashed, and the old woman is left to mourn. Tretyakov identified this work’s main defects as: ‘(1) The preponderance of soliloquies in the pathetic French manner . . . (2) a monotonous rhythm, always gravitating towards iambic pentameters; and (3) [in the Russian version] far too many petty subsidiary words and particles, only necessary for filling in rhythmic lacunae and gaps’.8 Tretyakov cut over a third of the text, introduced a vernacular style which replaced rhetorical flourishes with concrete phrases, and virtually abandoned the long monologues. He focused on the conflict between the ‘Black International’ and the peasantry, thereby implicitly confirming Marxist theory that such uprisings fail because they lack the support of the industrial working class. Tretyakov further strengthened the parallel between the two seventy-year-old characters, Mariette, the old mother, and Generalissimo Bourbouze, the leader of the forces of reaction, and made Ledrux himself old Mariette’s son. He also ‘de-psychologised’ the characters, instead employing ‘poster-slogans’ projected onto a screen to pinpoint key perspectives. He developed what he called ‘semaphore speech’ to eradicate all vocal melody, concentrating instead on ‘verbal gestures’, a method which he argued led to the principle of the ‘verbal mask’. Huntly Carter described this as ‘a form of speech which flashes out phrases like poster phrases, giving them a finished rhythmic appearance of their own’.9 The play thus received something of a Futurist metamorphosis, being now constructed on phonetics and the word as such. The World Upside Down was premiered at the Meyerhold Theatre on 4 March 1923. The former five acts were now eight vigorous episodes, mixing satire, buffoonery and tragedy in a unique combination which Meyerhold’s production capitalised on. One spectator described the opening: On a perfectly bare stage nothing was to be seen at first but a few constructions of wood and iron, several guns, a field-kitchen, and an aeroplane. After a bugle had sounded for the play to begin some automobiles drove right through the auditorium over a bridge connecting it with the stage, and were followed by a number of cyclists in uniform.10 The buffoonery was best seen when the Emperor learned of the uprising. His panic grossly disturbed his bowels. While the orchestra blared out ‘God Save the Tsar’, an orderly brought on the royal chamber pot, emblazoned with the royal arms. When his Majesty had finished his business, the orderly carried the pot through the audience, holding his nose, to the screams and guffaws of the spectators. Later the Emperor fell asleep and was wheeled into the wings in a wheelbarrow. One famous scene involved the Emperor’s cook (played by Erast Garin) carrying in a live cockerel with which to prepare the 100

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Emperor’s dinner. It flapped and squawked, the cook stumbled and the cockerel flew off. Blinded by the lights, it soon alighted and was caught again, but not before the audience had enjoyed the chase. Inevitably, at one performance, the cockerel flew into the auditorium, and now was not blinded. As it flapped around, Meyerhold himself jumped out of his seat and snatched its legs as it flew past. He returned it to the relieved Garin on stage amid a surely deserved round of applause. Beside these high jinks, there were moments of great and moving solemnity, as when Ledrux was brought home in death: Slowly, to the steady sound of a motor, a lorry drives onto the stage. A pause. The close friends bid farewell to the body of the deceased; the coffin is loaded onto the lorry. The motor runs softly during the pause, as if to replace the funeral march with its humble sound. The final farewell. The lorry slowly begins to move, the motor’s rhythm changes, and the lorry disappears from the stage with a roar of the motor that continues to be heard in the distance off-stage. Those attending the coffin freeze in their place . . . The hypnotic sound of the motor lingers in the ears of the spectators gripped by the scene’s dramatic effect.11 The World Upside Down thus attained a tragic dimension Futurism rarely aspired to. It was more in the mould of Stenka Razin than Mystery Bouffe or even Victory Over the Sun. The action took place within a Constructivist design by Lyubov Popova in the form of a huge gantry crane, and – significantly – all the stage props and utensils were ‘real’: the typewriters, the field telephones, the bicycles, and so on. In this The World Upside Down prefigured the Futurist turn to ‘factography’ towards the end of the 1920s. The way the stage was joined to the auditorium by a giant ramp was an attempt to mix an aggressive modernity with the concept behind the commedia dell’arte’s trestle stage. The conventional aisle in the theatre had been widened to resemble a road and up it, as Fülöp-Miller and Gregor’s account, quoted above, records, came bicycles, motorbikes and even motor cars. Futurism was destroying the old theatre in a completely unexpected way! Moreover, hanging from the gantry was a large screen, upon which were projected slogans and captions: when Generalissimo Bourbouze commandeers Mariette’s house for his headquarters, he condescends to her brusquely: Well, granny, you’re not complaining, are you? It’s no trouble for you to grant us This place for the briefest time? Is it? And the slogan is flashed up: ‘How to look after your betters.’ When the Priest counsels prayer as the means of protecting the peasants from the marauding 101

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army, a projection comments: ‘Religion is the opium of the people.’12 The effects were furthered, too, by the stark searchlights used to illumine the stage, and by the placing of the orchestra, not in an orchestra pit, but fully visible on the stage, so that ‘their music provided an ironic commentary on the action’.13 The production of The World Upside Down fulfilled that Futurist imperative voiced by Shklovsky when he wrote of making stones ‘stony’. The Revolution was in the past, it was accepted and recognised. This Futurist play made it strange, enabling its spectators to experience again its making. One worker commented after attending a performance, ‘I lived through what I lived through in 1917. And this coincidence of living through it tells me of the absolute truth of The World Upside Down.’14 The comment by a non-specialist is telling, in that the production used anything but ‘naturalistic’ means to achieve this end. Erdman: The Mandate Another Meyerhold production which might be called ‘Futurist’ was The Mandate by Nikolai Erdman, which opened on 20 April 1925. Erdman was a major playwright on the fringes of Futurism, and this play is a farce in the spirit of Nikolai Gogol. It focuses on Pavel Gulyachkin, a former bourgeois, now displaced and adrift in the new Soviet Union. He realises that with a Party card as his mandate, he can regain respect and even influence, and his sister will be able to marry advantageously. However, his rather dull cook is somehow mistaken for a member of the tsarist royal family, and the best-laid plans come crashing down amid as many pratfalls, visual jokes and comicalities as would fill any circus. Into this hilarious mix, Erdman is able to insert a number of Futuristic motifs. These include linguistic conundrums: PAVEL: They could shoot me for using words like that. VARVARA: Shoot you? NADEZHDA: . . . They can’t shoot you just for using words. PAVEL: There are words and there are words. There are also what appear to be zany discussions of art: ‘What do you think a picture is for?’ Pavel asks his mother as he hangs a two-sided reproduction on the living-room wall – on one side is ‘Copenhagen Twilight’ and on the other a portrait of Karl Marx, so the picture can be turned over according to who might call on them. ‘A painting is no less than the soul’s deep moan when pleasured by the organ of sight.’ Later Nadezhda suggests that the purpose of a statue is ‘the Edification of Posterity’. The knockabout comedy includes a postman who enters with a cooking pot on his head. ‘You’ve drowned me in noodles,’ he exclaims, having been taken by surprise when Pavel hammered a nail into the wall. Later Pavel sits on a portrait of the tsar which sticks to the seat of his trousers; ‘You think you can turn my bottom into a kind of 102

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picture gallery and get away with it, do you?’ There is a mad, carnivalesque party led by an organ-grinder, a man with a drum, and a woman with a parrot and a tambourine, and there are even implied intertextual references to Tsar Maximilian and Yanko king of Albania when Nastya, the cook, is seated on the throne, on which there is a gun which effectively glues her to it.15 Meyerhold was able to take this material and apply his Biomechanics to it with brilliant results. It was one of the most popular productions he ever created. Boris Alpers described the acting convincingly: The behaviour of each character in The Mandate on the stage is constructed on an abrupt sequence of still and mute poses and mime sections followed by movement and the utterance of individual lines. There seems to take place a permanent mechanical resurrection of the character and then his return to ‘nonexistence’, to immobility’.16 There were examples of the ‘silhouette’, described by Rudnitsky: [Erast] Garin’s performance [as Gulyachkin] was astonishing for the moments when a psychological condition was suddenly fixed, for moments of immobility, when movement suddenly stopped, when Gulyachkin’s empty eyes stopped and stared at the auditorium in a lengthy pause of incomprehension, when his entire figure froze ‘in a frame’, as though illuminated by a magnesium flash.17 The moment when he declared ‘I am a member of the Party’, everyone froze, Ivan Ivanovich, the next-door neighbour, cringing on the ground, Gulyachkin’s mother and sister standing aghast with their mouths open, and Gulyachkin himself, ‘crazed with his own heroism, stood petrified in an unnatural, simultaneously proud and frightened pose’.18 There were several moments of what might be called ‘Biomechanical pantomimes’, when groups of people moved almost as in a dance, but grotesquely, and sometimes in slow motion, depicting ‘the strange actions, the fantastic logic of behaviour, the amusing accidents and the examination of an evident alogism of life knocked out of its rut’.19 And there was also clowning which, Rudnitsky records, ‘led to a most intensive enrichment of the actor’s means of expression, (and) opened the doors to the freshest truth of modern times’.20 The highest achievement here was probably Sergei Martinson’s performance with his back to the audience as he played the piano: With unbelievable flair, he hits the keys with chords of a heart-pinching Gypsy romance. His entire body plays. It is as though he is all hinged, first throwing himself back from the keyboard, then quickly throwing himself at it. His long apelike hands jump high into the air.21 Clearly this was a performance worthy of Chico Marx. Martinson, however, was not only clowning, he was performing something like a Biomechanical étude. 103

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5.1  Nikolai Erdman, The Mandate, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1925. Finally, the actors also appealed from time to time directly to the audience, especially Erast Garin as Gulyachkin, and indeed the action sometimes spilled out into the auditorium. All this was played on a stage whose floor held concentric revolves which could (and did) move, sometimes in different directions, sometimes together, bringing actors onto the stage and moving them about amid large flat walls which also moved. This was perhaps the ultimate ­realisation of Mikhail Larionov’s pre-war dream of a Teatr Futu. Meyerhold showed the way with his Biomechanics, but Biomechanics was intended to be applicable to many sorts of drama. Though it was employed with great success to the plays of Mayakovsky and Erdman at this early period of the flowering of Futurist drama, it was never applied to some of the more outré or abstract forms, and it was left to other directors and theatre practitioners to seek acting techniques and staging practices which could match the wilder visions of Futurism. Nevertheless, Meyerhold’s practice was a sort of template: his actors performed with technical brilliance, and the spectator responded emotionally. Radlov and The Pure Elements of the Actor’s Art Sergei Radlov, who had experimented with popular forms at the Theatre of Popular Comedy, now stated that it was ‘time to consider what constitutes the sphere of powers, rights and responsibilities of the actor’, and asked: ‘What is his art? What does it express, how does it express, and for whom?’22 In February 1922 he established his Experimental Workshop in Petrograd, and in the summer of that year he presented a triple bill, The Shipwreck, The Fatal Ring and The Courting of Negro Quimba (A Negro in Love), followed less 104

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than two weeks later by A Glass of Malaga, later appearing in Moscow at Nikolai Foregger’s Workshop with these ‘pantomimes’. They were intended to demonstrate the actor’s art which he was to define as pure sound combined with pure movement to induce pure emotion, a kind of theatrical Suprematism. In 1923 he published On the Pure Elements of the Actor’s Art, in which he said: Movement of the body evokes in the spectator first of all spatial sensations. On his mastery depends the creation in the viewer of the most concrete feeling of the three-dimensionality of this space. A cube of air surrounding a human body begins to live, being cut by the lines of his movements. These lines, temporarily extended, are perceived by our memory as existing in the present. Imagine that you are watching a man who at dusk took a torch in his hands and is rapidly moving it through the air. You see circles, ellipses, but are not able to determine where, at any given moment, the hand is holding the light. So, too, the actor carves in space the various, simplest forms, living in the air. Using this, and training his body in a given direction, he will create before us a performance of circles, undulating lines, diamonds and every possible sort of angular form. Constructivist movements and the visual richness of them amplify the demands we make on the new actor’s body. And through movement, we evoke even temporal sensations. To replace a spatial problem with a temporal, and to let not the ear but the eye of the spectator feel the flow of time, to plunge him into temporal emotions, is an undertaking of fantastic difficulty. Decelerations, accelerations, repetitions of movement, violent changes in speed achieve this.23 Though the waving of the torch in the dark, for instance, reminds us of the antics of Clown Serge and Clown Taurek in The Sultan and the Devil at Radlov’s Theatre of Popular Comedy, the general sentiment expressed is more particularly the product of Radlov’s new explorations and teaching in his Experimental Workshop. One of Radlov’s students, Nikolai Golubentsev, remembered that Radlov’s ‘pure movement’ exercises were ‘aimed at the maximal sculpturesque expressiveness of the human body’ which was pursued by Radlov through practising ‘various shifts of “axes” which pass through the head, the shoulders, the thighs and the shins’, and Radlov’s chief assistant, Elizaveta Golovinskaya, recorded how students checked ‘the correlation of their figures vertically’, ‘the equality of distances from a certain imagined centre of scenic action and the breaking of this equality’. They worked on the ‘three axes of the human body; the axis of the head, the axis of the shoulders and the axis of the thighs’, moving them to discover ‘maximum expressiveness’.24 Radlov also worked on the voice and sound on stage, asserting that it is ‘not only by the sound of the voice, but also by the tread of feet, by the clatter of objects in the actor’s hands, he [the actor] lets us listen to the passing of time. 105

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A thing is not just seen, but also sounds under the magic touch of his hand.’ In what sounds like a specific reference to Futurist drama, Radlov continued: As for the voice, it is the bearer of pure forms of sound. Freed of words – for the actor is not obliged to utter one semantic word! – the actor will give us richly articulated, now high, now low, now slowed, now accelerated pure sound. In this wordless speech of his the actor sounds freely, like a bird.25 That Radlov was exploring the use of zaum on stage is further suggested by Golubentsev’s recollection of ‘training for a combination of senseless speech, abstruse language and “pure emotion”’.26 Radlov’s interest in Futurist drama was further developed in his next productions with his Experimental Workshop. In January 1923 he mounted a double bill of The Murder of Archie Braiton and Opus Number One. The first of these improvised plays consisted of ten short scenes, in which, as in Khlebnikov’s Worldbackwards, the first scene took place chronologically at the end of the story: Archibald Braiton lay murdered, but then was seen alive before the murder had happened; his murderers discussed the results of the murder before they committed it, and so on. Opus Number One was more overtly an attempt to create abstract theatre. Golubentsev described the production: Ten or twelve students executed this group piece, writhing on the floor in improbable twists and inclinations of the body, tying themselves together with a rope stretched across the platform . . . Each actor himself had to construct a mise-en-scène in accordance with the position or movements of one or several partners. This system stipulated certain mise-en-scènes such as circular, square, linear, diagonal one, etc. We moved about the platform, representing nothing, formed groups, lay down, knelt, carried one another in our arms, expressing some abstract states and emotions and uttering senseless speeches.27 In these works Radlov had effectively left behind the popular techniques, especially those of the circus, which had characterised his earlier productions, and his next production, an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s 100%, presented in June 1923, ‘signified a turn towards realism’.28 His more abstract exercises, such as the movement work based on the axes of the body, were quietly dropped from the Workshop’s curriculum, in early 1924 the Experimental Workshop in Petrograd closed, and Radlov moved to the State Drama Theatre, the former Alexandrinsky Imperial Theatre. Futurist Movement and Dance The Workshop of Nikolai Foregger (MASTFOR) focused on the Futurist actor, emphasising physicality and technique and rejecting the ‘old’ theatre 106

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with its indulgence in emotions. In 1918 he had organised his Theatre of the Four Masks in his own flat, which was ‘filled with rare books, engravings and old furniture’. While Foregger and his family moved into one little room, the small company set about making the rest of the flat into a theatre. They decorated what became the auditorium, the ‘cloakroom’ and the foyer, installed a maximum of forty seats and ‘pinned to the sliding curtain little bells which emitted melodious and provocative tinkles as the curtains were opened and closed’.29 The theatre lasted for a few months, presenting An Evening of French Farces and other ‘old’ plays which Foregger used to explore clowning, movement and the interplay of the characters of the commedia dell’arte, but the raging Civil War did not make such work easy. Foregger found himself drafted to Voronezh, then to work on an agit-train. At the end of the Civil War, Foregger joined the Theatre of Revolutionary Satire (TEREVSAT), where he met Vladimir Mass, who joined him in establishing MASTFOR. One of the motives behind MASTFOR was the seeming fact that classical dance was unable to express the experience of revolution, yet that experience was above all physical. The Revolution was movement, dynamism, concrete and corporeal. Many dance and movement specialists tried, and indeed the proliferation of dance studios in the new Russia was extraordinary. Most notable among them was probably Kasyan Goleizovsky’s, which became the Moscow Chamber Ballet, and his Eccentric Dances of 1923 was one typical example of his work. With a range of music in different styles, including jazz, by Matvei Blanter, Yuri Milyutin, Dmitri Pokrass and Isaak Dunayevsky, and designs by Anatoly Petritsky, Eccentric Dances still seemed to many to be too anchored in classical ballet to qualify as genuinely avant-garde. It was sensual, acrobatic and inventive, but it barely attempted to renew the world in the Futurists’ sense. Goleizovsky’s progress is well summarised by Elizabeth Souritz: Goleizovsky’s art was born in protest. The choreographer rebelled against the old morality, against the stagnant forms and the stagnant content of the old ballet. But in his protest Goleizovsky directly continued the investigations of those who fought for the renewal of choreography even before the revolution.30 Apparently more in tune with modernity was Valentin Parnakh, whose idiosyncratic jazz dances were jerky, mechanical and energetic. Parnakh had been an acting student of Meyerhold, but had lived abroad for some years, returning in 1922 to introduce Moscow to New Orleans-style jazz as well as to the ideas of French Dada. He also promoted the films of Charlie Chaplin. But his inability to focus for long on a single object diluted his impact, and he was soon off again to Europe, though he spent the last twenty years of his life in the Soviet Union. 107

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Among the post-revolution dance studios attempting to find forms to fit the times were Ludmilla Alexeyeva’s Studio of the Art of Movement, teaching ‘harmonious gymnastics’, Nikolai Poznyakov’s Studio of Plastic Rhythm, also focused on gymnastics, Evgeny Prosvetov’s Tonal-Plastic Studio, which attempted to unite rhythmic movement and choral speech, and Inna Chernetskaya’s Studio of Synthetic Dance, which attempted to apply Stanislavsky’s acting system to dance. Nikolai Foregger himself wrote of this movement: The work of the present-day dance producer bears more of a negative than positive character. He destroys past traditions, beats against obsolete tastes and sense of beauty, strives to capture new perceptions and new themes, and, only seldom erring and falling, outlines new forms for his art.31 On the other hand, Nikolai Cherkasov, later a leading film actor, recorded an eccentric dance called Pat, Pataschon and Charlie Chaplin, as it were, from the inside: As Pat I tried to copy his mannerisms, and movements, and gestures, twisted my body, shook hands with myself behind my back, embraced myself and made believe I was dancing with a lady, and stepped absentmindedly over my partners. I would pretend to envy their successful steps and stunts and try to outdo them by a fast eccentric dance packed with acrobatics.32 Charlie Chaplin was a ubiquitous figure for many avant-garde theatre artists of the time, and Foregger was certainly one of them. Chaplin’s ‘illogical realism’ was a style of acting which was never, in Diderot’s words, ‘full of feeling’, it deliberately only rendered the ‘outward signs of feeling’. Chaplin was always precise, never using decorative gesture for the sake of gesture, and in his work his intentions and his actions are always clear. His playing is concrete, he reacts precisely to things. The whole experience is inconceivably stark, and one doesn’t remember ‘his eyes’ or ‘his profile’ because his whole body is at work, as a complete mechanism.33 Nikolai Foregger’s Physical Theatre MASTFOR opened in 1921, though it was only in autumn 1922 that it found a permanent home on the Arbat, in a hall seating fewer than two hundred spectators. Foregger had already made his reputation with parodies, satires and miniature dramas, as well as dance numbers, in a sort of cabaret or revue style of programme. He explained: 108

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When the dominant waves of art reflect an already defined reality, then the ‘little forms’, like foam on the crests of the waves, carry in their spray the smell and tang of new waters which will come to wash the world. In the domain of theatre, it is the music hall (cabaret) which must play this role.34 His major collaborators included Vladimir Mass as writer, Matvei Blanter as composer, and Sergei Yutkevich and Sergei Eisenstein, both later distinguished film directors, as designers. In fact, for a brief spell, Yutkevich and Eisenstein performed a double act as ‘Pipifax’ – ‘Pip’, the white clown, being Yutkevich, and ‘Fax’, the red clown, Eisenstein. ‘I’ is Russian for ‘and’, and ‘Pipifax’ is a German word connoting tomfoolery.35 Foregger created a string of clever and comic parodies, including the Eisenstein-designed Fetra, from the Kamerny Theatre’s Phaedra by Racine, Don’t Drink Unboiled Water, which mocked the Bolshevik agitprop works, The Tsar’s Mother-in-Law, which parodied Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride, The Dying Swan, which became The Black Swan, Are You Deaf, Moscow?, which ridiculed Eisenstein’s production of Tretyakov’s Are You Listening, Moscow?!, and Meyerhold’s The Magnanimous Cuckold as The Rhinocerus, written by Nikolai Erdman, whose title punned on ‘ragonosets’, a cuckold and ‘nosorog’, a rhinoceros.

5.2  [Plate 8] Sergei Yutkevich, costume design for Sabina, The Mystery of the Canary Islands, directed by Nikolai Foregger. 109

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The miniature dramas Foregger presented ranged from pantomimes like The Mannequin to pseudo-thrillers like The Mystery of the Canary Islands, but the company’s greatest triumph, which was kept in the repertoire until MASTFOR closed, was Vladimir Mass’s Kindness to Horses, which seemed to crystallise many of the strengths, and some of the weaknesses, of Futurist theatre. It was based on a poem by Mayakovsky in which a horse falls on the main street in Moscow. A crowd gathers and jeers the horse, but the poet sympathises and comforts the animal, which so heartens the horse that it gets up and trots away: life is worth living after all!36 Vladimir Mass, who dramatised this poem, may have kept the final happiness of the poem, but he changed its content radically. The crowd which mocks the fallen horse is then diverted by a spivvish NEPman to a new restaurant, or ‘poets’ café’, in which he happens to have an interest. Here, an American visitor calls on the proprietor to provide some entertainment, and the long finale is a kind of Futurist cabaret, with songs. The performance featured the glamorous and scantily clad Gipsy-Pipsy, and an ‘Imagist’ poet, half Shershenevich-like Moscow dandy in smoking jacket and top hat, half Esenin-like peasant-poet in a smock and a peasant’s cap. Later reworkings of the piece – called More Kindness to Horses and Even More Kindness to Horses – set the poets’ café on ‘Tverboul’, the voguish name for Tverskoi Boulevard, and included a female Bolshevik commissar in leather jacket and boots and a short skirt, and a self-proclaimed hero of the Civil War, an updated version of the Braggart Soldier. Sergei Yutkevich designed a ‘mobile’ stage set, almost like Larionov’s earlier unrealised conception, with a moving stairway, revolving scenery, trampolines and dynamic lighting, while Eisenstein’s costumes were astonishing and risqué. Among the notorious parodies which the cabaret offered were exaggerated imitations of the French chanteuse Mistinguett and the American dancer Isadora Duncan, then living in Moscow, who was played by a male actor in see-through red veils. ‘She’ danced to a jazzed-up version of the Chopin Nocturne which Duncan had used when she danced before Lenin. Directed and choreographed by Nikolai Foregger, the piece was a kind of modern commedia dell’arte performance, with ‘masks’, acrobatics, satire and exuberance. The intellectual content was perhaps superficial, certainly in comparison with Mayakovsky’s original poem, yet while the performers never ‘lived’ their parts, the audience felt strongly the joyous high-spirited emotion with which the piece was imbued. Foregger’s most famous contribution, however, was in the area of dance, especially the ‘machine dance’. When his miniature dramas were criticised for hiding bourgeois attitudes under a veneer of satire, Mayakovsky defended Kindness to Horses, but Foregger pressed on to the classically Soviet, thoroughly modern and ‘industrialised’ machine dances like Taylor-Gestures, named after Frederick Winslow Taylor, the time-and-motion expert whose 110

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5.3  [Plate 9] Kindness to Horses: the stable of the crimson filly, by Sergei Yutkevich. methods were then being assiduously applied to Soviet industrial production, Electric Dances, and more. These works combined the bravado of the circus, the precision of dance and the brassiness of popular cinema. The auditorium lights dimmed. A shrill whistle sounded, the stage was lit up and the performers, dressed in smart black-and-white costumes modelled on sports outfits, 111

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5.4  [Plate 10] Kindness to Horses: Gipsy-Pipsy, costume design by Sergei Eisenstein (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). entered running. They lined up, and moved quickly and efficiently into a pyramid several people high. The ‘noise’ orchestra began playing – drums, Jew’s harps, the shaking of bags of broken glass, the clanging of metal objects, as well as the whispers and shrieks of the performers themselves. The machine 112

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swept into action: for instance, they were a transmission belt formed by a chain of female dancers running between two men revolving on the spot with their arms out as sprockets. René Fülöp-Miller reported: Their bodies became correctly constructed appliances, they no longer moved, they ‘functioned’. What Foregger accomplishes is a cinematics of the living organism, an analysis in dance of the human mechanism, worked out in exhaustive physiological, mechanical and psychotechnical studies. The new dancing, in Foregger’s sense, tries to express the most general movements of the human organism, rhythm no longer individual but universal. All gestures are, therefore, as far as possible transformed into partial functions of a total movement, and strictly geometrised. The spectator is intended to recognize in the activity of each single group of muscles a motor reflex within the frame of the whole great stage machine. Dancing is intended to be nothing but a vivid demonstration of the adequate organisation of the human machine.37 Pistons, cylinders, fly-wheels, pumps, the performers swaying, stamping feet, clapping, swinging burning cigarettes through the air to simulate the sparks flying from the furnace, they created The Blacksmith’s Forge with fists for hammers and The Saw with two men holding the feet and shoulders of a rigid woman, and ‘sawing’ with her. Two ‘machines in love’ suddenly appeared on stage, portrayed by actors whose makeup, costumes, and eurhythmic gestures were enhanced by angular geometric forms, emphasizing what Sergei Yutkevich saw as the ‘enormous physiological influence of the mechanism as actor’. Foregger selected a piano piece by Boris Ber as accompaniment – a simple pastoral melody ‘cooled down’ by modern harmonies, with an interesting ­interchange of time signatures – from 2/4 to 5/4.38 Huntly Carter referred to these performers as ‘Futurist marionettes’, and called Foregger ‘an inventor of genius who took the mechanical age into the theatre and sought to interpret some of its wonders by means of satirical dances’, presenting the machine itself as ‘a mechanical aid to liberation’. This was Futurist urbanism taken to the extreme. In Foregger’s productions, all was presented energetically, and often rapidly, with total precision and usually blank faces. Sometimes the audience was asked to guess what the industrial process being imitated was. A more legitimate question might have been: what is its content? Where does the imitation of the machine lead? And if the answer is that it leads to greater physical and athletic precision, to a group of people, dynamic, muscular, all in step, symmetrical, it may be that the anarchism of the mob has been transformed into the strict unison of the marching battalion, the aesthetics of 113

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5.5  Nikolai Foregger, The Walk. mass physical culture later beloved by Stalin and Hitler. As it was, Foregger’s erotic Dance of the Hooligans and his strict-tempo Dance of the Red Army Soldier embodied another paradox or dilemma: his experimental work pleased the avant-garde but bored the paying spectators, while his more entertaining and perhaps risqué dances were frowned on by the intelligentsia but adored by the bourgeois patrons. Foregger designed his own syllabus, ‘Physical Theatre Training’, shortened to ‘TePhyTrenage’. Laid out in cartoon-style drawings, it suggested more than three hundred different physical movements and gestures his performers were to master. He taught that gesture was theatrical melody and the pose its harmony, and that ‘theatrical action is revealed in the sequence of gestures and poses’.39 The exercises he devised, he argued in a somewhat dense piece, developed the following skills, with some indication of how to achieve them: 1. Control of one’s movements. Work on co-ordinating exercises for the separate parts of the body. Further tasks in the construction of the exercises are the same. 2. Speed of the plastic memory; attention to oneself and to one’s partner (coupling). The trainer demonstrates the exercise several times and outlines it once. Exercises in pairs or larger groups. 114

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3. Emotional colouring of the exercises. 4. Precision and speed of reaction. Boldness. Interrupted movement. Arbitrary alteration of the chain of exercises. 5. Inventiveness and ingenuity. Development of plastic thought. Completion of the assigned exercise basics. A reciprocal movement in the sequence of construction. The shaping of the musical phrase, etc.40 Among the conclusions Foregger drew from this were: Today, the precision and accuracy of machines, the distinctive lines of the streets, represent the tempo of movement. Simplicity and economy of resources are requirements for the contemporary dance. Complete absence of ornamentation and fancifulness. The ballerina twirling twenty fuetve and the poodle riding a bicycle are of equal worth. The worker at a lathe, the soccer player in a game, already harbour within themselves the outlines of the dance. We must learn to recognize these features. Two opposite but complementary exercises indicate the scope of TePhyTrenage. The first, ‘The Wandering Leg’, is outward and dynamic: 1. Stand at ease, feet apart, hands loose at the side. 2. Tremble the right leg violently, while bringing it very slowly forward, foot just off the ground. 3. With the right leg still trembling, lift both hands straight out in front of the chest, arms straight; then lower both hands onto the right thigh. 4. Stop trembling, shoot the right leg backwards, taking the left leg with it. 5. The body falls forward, the hands break the fall, the performer lies on his stomach, face down. 6. Jerk the face up, look forward, angry and puzzled. This may be contrasted with ‘The Beggar’, which is slow and shrinking: 1. Stand at ease. 2. Bend both knees as far as possible to crouch; simultaneously, hook the right hand behind the left knee, bend the back, look piteously upwards, raise the left arm straight up. Such exercises show how TePhyTrenage was, like Biomechanics, designed to ‘render the outward sign’ of human individual and social life, but certainly not to engage the performer’s feelings. However, by the end of 1923, Foregger’s main collaborators, Vladimir Mass, Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevich, had all moved on, and in 1924 his tiny theatre on the Arbat burned down. Criticism 115

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of his ‘bourgeois’ work had also increased, and he was not permitted to reopen MASTFOR. He became a freelance choreographer, creating Constructivist Hopak, based on Ukrainian dances, Historical Dances and An American on Ligorsky Boulevard, and later in the 1920s moved out of Moscow to Kharkov. Small Forms Foregger’s presentations were examples of ‘small forms’ which enjoyed something of a renaissance at the time. Emerging out of the cabarets and cafés chantants of the pre-revolutionary years, they developed in two directions in the years after the Revolution: first, towards the agitprop style of politically motivated troupes like the Proletkult and the Blue Blouses, where the circusised and Futurist elements were increasingly diluted; and second, in short plays aiming towards satirical laughter. Nikolai Erdman was probably the master of this genre, contributing sketches to multi-authored reviews, as well as creating whole reviews himself. He developed his own variants on the Futurist concerns with linguistic unpredictability and illogical action, and is often seen as a bridge leading towards the Theatre of the Absurd. Thus he contributed to Moscow from a Point of View, which also contained sketches by Viktor Tipot, David Gutman and Vladimir Mass, ‘The Room in Which They Rented an Apartment’. This is a fantastical satire on the Communist policy of increasing the number of tenants in rented buildings. A family seeking accommodation applied to ‘The Rental Bureau for the Allocation of BreastFed Passes Guaranteeing the Right of Front Door Entry’. The family is shown an apartment where the overcrowding is such that space is offered to them on a trapeze strung from the ceiling, a student lives in the piano (‘Personally I live on the bass chords, so the trebles are absolutely free’), one person lives on a chair – ‘Careful, that’s a live person you’re sitting on’ – and the children are hung up by the collar like so much washing on a line. A husband and wife live ‘a bourgeois idyll’ in a wardrobe, and their son inhabits the drawer below.41 Erdman’s Destruction of Europe is spun from a young man, urging his girlfriend to come home with him. Meeting the response that she might come tomorrow, he argues: ‘For love there is no tomorrow. Tomorrow there may be a flood or an earthquake.’ The rumour flies round – Moscow will be destroyed in a flood or an earthquake, panic sets in, and people make desperate preparations: Misha plugs his ears so the water will not seep into them, a woman rushes to the bathhouse in order to get used to water, while coffee is served with straws because they will give the drowning something to clutch at.42 The sketch climaxes in a frantic foxtrot. The Experimental-Heroic Theatre Running alongside MASTFOR, physically in the same building as well as ideologically in searching for non-naturalistic acting and producing techniques, 116

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was the Experimental-Heroic Theatre of Boris Ferdinandov and Vadim Shershenevich. By the time their theatre established itself in 1921, Ferdinandov had had ten years of experience, mostly as an actor and designer, with, among other theatres, the Moscow Art Theatre and Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre. His design work, influenced by Alexandra Exter and Vladimir Tatlin, rejected tradition, eschewed all illusionistic detail, and was marked by geometric conceptions and primary colours. He was therefore in tune with Futurist approaches, and his partner was Shershenevich, former leader of the Mezzanine of Poetry group. Shershenevich, sophisticated but perhaps a little sick of self-love, was a leading ‘urbanist’ poet, with lines like this extract from one of his ‘poesas’: The crowd was buzzing like a tram wire And the sky was arched like an abat-jour . . . The moonlight showed through a cloud, Like a woman’s leg through a stylish ajour.43 For some years he had hovered on the edge of the theatre, having appeared in the film Drama in the Futurist Cabaret Number 13, having theorised about theatre – he was against both Stanislavsky and Meyerhold’s practices, and wanted movement and improvisation to replace the conventional text – and having turned his hand to writing a few plays – Swifthood, about the isolation of a Futurist poet, a monologue, Rapids, The Eternal Jew and an adaptation of Wagner’s Rienzi. In 1921 several members of Alexander Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre, desiring more artistic freedom for themselves, broke from that theatre to establish their own. They included Ferdinandov and Shershenevich, who worked in the Literary Department, the actor Konstantin Eggert, and the designer Boris Erdman, who had worked with Meyerhold, Foregger and Goleizovsky, and developed a style in which asymmetry was allied, often incongruously, with geometrical precision. His costumes, especially for women, were notoriously minimal. This group took up residence in the Safonov Theatre on Taganka Square, the community theatre for the Rogozhsky-Simonovsky district. Though Eggert left after the first production, other collaborators were drawn in, including the musicians Yuri Milyutin and Boris Pavlov, and Boris Glubokovsky as dramaturg. It was soon clear that the group were unwilling to share the Safonov Theatre with other local groups, and they walked out to find a home in GITIS, the State Institute of Theatrical Art, where Meyerhold was the director and a number of independent companies, including for a while Foregger’s MASTFOR, found their home. Shershenevich and Ferdinandov, in true Futurist style, sought to complicate their art: ‘We are not struggling to be direct,’ Shershenevich wrote, ‘often we follow the path of most resistance.’ This implied ‘scientific verification of the laws of the basic theatrical alphabet’ leading to a ‘precise science of theatre’ 117

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5.6  Boris Ferdinandov. as a whole.44 They further sought to fight ‘theatrical mysticism’ by consulting the Opoyaz group of Formalist literary critics, and attempted to incorporate their notions, such as of ostranennie, ‘estrangement’, in their work. Placing the actor firmly at the centre of the theatrical creation, they were led towards a montage, in which music, which underscored the actors’ movements, and architectural-pictorial stage settings and appropriate lighting were major structuring devices. Shershenevich wanted to use stage lighting, rather as Malevich and Tatlin had, not to create an illusion or to reinforce some kind of ‘stage magic’, but rather to destroy the conventional stage space. He believed it was necessary to ‘study the density of this or that colour of electricity and how it affects the actor’s facial expressions, just as sound does the actor’s voice’.45 Shershenevich and Ferdinandov were thus to some extent seeking to modernise what were in effect Diderot’s ideas. They went further, however. Ferdinandov spoke passionately against the concepts of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’, and maintained that ‘laboratorial experiments on the movements of the human body in space should lead [us] beyond the bounds of art. The future path is unclear . . . but it is beyond art.’46 Shershenevich’s devotion to the scientific was meanwhile becoming suspiciously close to the mysticism he thought to reject: If we were to use a special apparatus, we could increase the light density to such a point that the scenic atmosphere would lift the actor’s body to a certain height and tear him away from the floor, not illusorily, but 118

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completely materially. I am convinced that, with the help of special condensers, we will be able to make the scenic atmosphere so dense that the human body will be able to lean against it, just as the screw or wheel of a ship pushes the water away. I see . . . costumes made of light which will clothe or reveal the body of an actor . . . I am convinced that electric light composers will exist and will be just as essential to the theatre as constructors or poets are today.47 Meanwhile Ferdinandov, with Shershenevich, was proceeding with actor training in their ‘metro-rhythmics’ system aimed at enabling them to render ‘the outward signs’ which would stimulate their audiences, or, as Shershenevich put it, the ‘mechanical calling forth of emotion’.48 He called the ‘two pillars’ of acting rhythm and metre: ‘rhythm is a centrifugal, mysterious and religious force, while metre is a centripetal earthly force. Rhythm rips the spectacle out of everyday life and metre gives it new artificial life.’49 Another way of viewing this would be to suggest that the actor’s creativity is harnessed through metre but expressed through rhythm. The approach was supposedly thoroughly rational and scientific, deriving its efficiency from the time-and-motion theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and its responses from the ideas of Ivan Pavlov. For Ferdinandov and Shershenevich, the key to the spoken text lay less in the words than in the pauses, the caesuras, which responded to the beat of the sentences and the natural rhythms of language. This led to a mode of speaking which was part singing, part recitative and part heavily and regularly accented speech. It also implied units of combined text, movement and action, and that each unit was more or less discrete. According to Sergei Yutkevich, Ferdinandov’s ‘actors behaved on the stage like so many marionettes, playing according to an exact scheme of movements laid down by the director’.50 The actors were trained in ‘synthetic-theatrical gymnastics’ but also used rehearsal exercises, such as the following supplied by Nikolai Erdman: Jack and Billy Both loved Katy. And so They suffered more Than they could bear. They decided To go To Katy’s house And beg her To give them An answer. Both, burning from passion, Said ‘Hi ya, Katy. 119

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We’re in your power; Pass judgment on us Now. Our lives are as bitter as pepper! We ask you for hand and heart! Oh, Kate! Give us an answer!’51 Such a piece implies not only voice work but a complete improvisation exercise or étude. Erdman, author of The Mandate, cut his theatrical teeth at this theatre. His first major project was a piece clearly ‘after Mayakovsky’ called The Mystery, or The Revolutionary Mystery, in which he attempted to dramatise the evolution of man from ape to revolutionary in a work which combined zaum language with the kind of physical attack Boris Ferdinandov’s teaching implied. The theory and training in metro-rhythmics was put into practice in the productions mounted by the Experimental-Heroic Theatre between 1921 and 1923. Metro-rhythmics gave Ferdinandov and Shershenevich their method of working out the ‘score’ of a production, but they kept a very tight rein on their actors despite seeing performances as ‘experiments’: Least of all do we intend to establish through our experiments an overblown idea of ‘the performance’. On the contrary, we stress all the time that we are not firstly concerned with the performance. What we produce may be more or less shocking from the point of view of conventional acceptability, but they are always scientifically-constructed experiments, built on a foundation of theatrical literacy.52 Ferdinandov maintained he had left Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre because of its lack of intellectual rigour. Now he had the chance to prove his case. The first production was of Shershenevich’s adaptation of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King which opened on 3 October 1921, with Ferdinandov himself directing and playing the leading role. The set was a somewhat crude construction and the masked actors coped as well as they could with Ferdinandov’s insistence on metre and rhythm, but the results seemed rough, and the broken-up text was in the end monotonous. The next production, of Alexei Diky’s adaptation of Ostrovsky’s The Storm, suffered from not dissimilar problems, though it was more widely appreciated. However, the charm Russians find in Ostrovsky was largely absent as the text was split into beats, pauses and what one critic compared to fermata, the pauses, or long-drawn-out notes, which precede an aria in opera. The actor Mikhail Zharov remembered: ‘The manner of scenic declamation – whether singing, recitation or rhyming – was . . . attractive, but 120

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it was . . . quite irrelevant to Ostrovsky’s dramatic text, which was built on conversational folk melodies.’ Anna Arsenyeva, however, as Ekaterina, ‘stayed within the precise framework of the rhythm’, using her ‘special technique and magnificent scenic temperament’.53 Her performance in the final scenes of the tragedy was especially powerful. Gogol’s Marriage and Shershenevich’s ‘harlequinade’, All Utter Nonsense, followed before the company’s first real success, Labiche’s The Piggy Bank (also known as The Money Box), adapted by Nikolai Erdman, which opened on 10 February 1922. Part of the success was due to Boris Erdman’s setting. He stripped out the backcloth and the wings, leaving the theatre walls unadorned. On stage a sort of mock Eiffel Tower made of light, transparent material gave the production unexpected spatial dimensions, and permitted a sort of circusisation on the stage. One observer commented that ‘the range of movement was broad, from sliding ballet glissandi to circus somersaults and leaps, performed with the precision and courage of an aerial gymnast’.54 The text was still subject to metro-rhythmic divisions, musically structured and not always successful, but the tempo of the production was upbeat and largely enjoyed. The lighting, too, also by Boris Erdman, contributed to the production’s popularity. This was followed by adaptations of Gogol’s violent supernatural story A Terrible Vengeance and Prosper Mérimée’s La Jacquerie, itself a short play divided into thirty-six extremely brief scenes. The Experimental-Heroic

5.7  Nikolai Erdman, The Piggy Bank, directed by Boris Ferdinandov, Experimental-Heroic Theatre, 1922. 121

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Theatre’s final production was of Shershenevich’s The Lady with the Black Glove, a fast-moving parody of the kind of detective melodrama usually seen in the cinema. Again the theatre walls were bared, but this time the stage construction was an abstract cube with ladders, horizontal bars and trapezes for the actors. Their costumes were in black and white, and their movements were accompanied not by music such as Ferdinandov had employed previously, but by a Futuristic ‘noise’ orchestra – car horns, sirens, the crackle of telegraph wires and percussion. The lighting now was by single spotlight beams, like car headlights, which roamed the stage like the lighting for Victory Over the Sun, as the performers ran, tumbled, raced and chased, and were sometimes too breathless to adhere to the metro-rhythmical speech patterns they had been given. But the play was contemporary, up-to-the-minute, and gave promise of riches to come. This was not to be. Ferdinandov and Shershenevich quarrelled, and intrigues at GITIS ensured that the Experimental-Heroic Theatre’s time there was terminated. Ferdinandov returned briefly to Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre but spent most of his later career in the Russian provinces, and Shershenevich turned to films. The Factory of the Eccentric Actor Meyerhold, Foregger and Ferdinandov were all based in Moscow, but in Petrograd, too, even as Radlov’s Theatre of Popular Comedy was winding down, other things were stirring. Petrograd, situated in time between tsarist St Petersburg and Communist Leningrad, was caught in an almost symbolically liminal time, a time surely for throwing over the traces. It was here where the Revolution had started, and now, on 21 December 1921, at Radlov’s Free Comedy Theatre, was held a ‘Dispute on the Eccentric Theatre’. Three young would-be theatre artists – Grigory Kozintsev, aged just seventeen, Leonid Trauberg, twenty years old, and the slightly older Georgy Kryzhitsky – each read a short, outrageous statement. In his contribution, Kozintsev set yesterday’s ‘comfortable offices’ and ‘bald foreheads’, when ‘people pondered, made decisions, thought things over’, against today’s emphasis on the machine – ‘driving bolts, chains, wheels, hands, legs, electricity, the rhythm of production’. ‘The rhythm of the machine’, he asserted, was ‘concentrated by America [and] realized on the street’. He called for ‘art without a capital letter, a pedestal or a fig-leaf’ and vowed to perform ‘a cancan on the tightrope of logic and common sense – through the “unthinkable” and the “impossible” to the Eccentric’.55 The audience was scandalised. Later the statements, with the addition of a contribution from Kozintsev’s friend, the eighteen-year-old Sergei Yutkevich, were published as a manifesto, more shocking even than A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. An excerpt from Kryzhitsky’s excited piece gives the flavour: 122

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       As in the circus:           under the same dome – precisely within a hair’s breadth – the equilibrist balances, and the whole audience freezes, holds its breath . . .        here .  .  . here .  .  . now!               – Ahh! –        – Relief! – Relief!! – Relief!!! – This is the theatre of excitement; it is action, flying, bingo, lotteries, racing, roulette. Theatre is the totaliser, the furious excitement of the game, the steeplechase in which the prizes go to the performers. Like racehorses. They have to perform.56 The group established the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS). Their Eccentrism was influenced by Marinetti, but there were other influences on these young iconoclasts too. Yutkevich enumerated the pantomime of Deburau, Charlie Chaplin and German Expressionist films, such as Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse, and Kozintsev remembered later that the group were ‘captivated by the art of the circus and the Rosta [propaganda comic strips, displayed in revolutionary] windows . . . street decorations, the fairground spectacle of Tsar Maximilian, clowning, [and] the multicoloured coach of a propaganda train’.57 This list omits the powerful American influence – jazz and detective films. Clearly, Eccentrism combined the classic Futurist enthusiasms for urbanism and the rhythms of industry and the machine with ‘low’ performance forms like the circus and cabaret, but it added to this a delight in any novelty, however irrational, which caused surprise. According to Viktor Shklovsky, Eccentrism is based on the selection of memorable moments and on a new, non-automatic connection between them. Eccentrism is a struggle with the monotony of life, a rejection of its traditional conception and presentation.58 Shklovsky also wrote that ‘Eccentrism meant defamiliarisation’.59 The fullest definition of Eccentrism is given by Daniel Gerould, quoting from the Soviet Encyclopaedia of Circus. It is, says this source, An artistic device for pointedly comic portrayal of reality, consisting of intentional violation of logic, sequentiality, and interdependence among the events portrayed and of the alogical (from the point of view of generally accepted norms) behaviour of the characters, with the result that the occurrences appear as though displaced from their usual positions and receive unexpected shifted meanings . . . The eccentric performer by the seeming illogicality and absurdity of his actions, presents happenings in an unexpected light, exposing their hidden truth (for example, the comic 123

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portrays a man who publicly repents the mistakes that he has made and beats himself on the breast; then leaving the platform, the ‘orator’ pulls out from his chest a metal tray with a pillow attached to it, which has protected his breast from the blows). After a series of logical actions, there can follow a final displacement, which shows the senselessness of all that has gone before (for example, the performer carefully cleans his jacket, blows the dust off it, and then suddenly spreading it out on the ground, wipes his feet on it).60 It should be added that Eccentrism’s manifestations spread wider than the Factory of the Eccentric Actor. For example, Nikolai Cherkasov, as a young member of the Petrograd Young Ballet Studio, ‘did a somewhat grotesque Negro dance’ in Coppelia, and in The Misadventures of Mr Hughes he ‘did an eccentric acrobatic solo dance’.61 On 25 September 1922, a full nine months after the ‘Dispute’, a new poster announced an Eccentric performance of Gogol’s Marriage complete with ‘operetta, melodrama, farce, cinema, circus, variety and Grand Guignol in one performance’.62 The company was only allowed to enter the theatre for the first time on the day of the performance, and actually only two hours before the curtain was due to rise. There was a frantic dress rehearsal which continued for over an hour after the advertised performance time. The crowd in the theatre foyer was becoming so frustrated that the police had to be called, while inside, as the performers went as fast as they could through their routines, the sardonic voice of an interloper, none other than Sergei Eisenstein, was heard: ‘Too slow! Much too slow! Speed the action up!’63 When the drama was presented, there was not a single word of Gogol’s in the script. Instead there was ‘a piling up of tricks at a tempo of 1000 horse power’,64 a performance given at a hair-raising pace which was accentuated by frequent abrupt changes of style, with circus tricks, chases, a ‘cascade of gags’, and even a rudimentary cancan. The first sequence was performed in front of a projection on the backcloth of excerpts from a Chaplin film, and the characters included Podkolyosin, now renamed Musichall Kinematografovich Pinkerton, and Miss Agafya, who danced in a revealing dress with a myriad of green sequins, and who was courted by three suitors, the Steam Bridegroom, the Electric Bridegroom and the Radioactive Bridegroom, all on roller skates. Clown Taurek and Clown Serge appeared as Albert and Einstein, and Gogol himself even made an appearance, speaking with a rough Ukrainian accent (Gogol was from the Ukraine). The part was played as a ‘beanpole with a moustache’65 by Sergei Martinson, who was to make such an impact in Meyerhold’s production of The Mandate. The play opened with his appearance in front of the animated Chaplin film. A chamber pot was brought on, and, as Serge was later to describe it, ‘they electrified Gogol by putting a 124

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plug and electric wire into his posterior. They played every possible trick on him and generally abused him.’66 There were madly flashing lights, a ‘noise’ orchestra comprising hooters, rattles, bells and whistles, as well as a piano, and the audience, entering into the spirit of the thing, cheered, whistled and threw objects at the stage. Soon after this production, Yutkevich and Kryzhitsky left the group and Kozintsev and Trauberg set up the FEKS Workshop at 2 Proletkult Street in Petrograd. Asserting that the art of acting was ‘mechanised movement’, they attempted to formulate a curriculum which focused on and synthesised movement, whether acrobatic, athletic, dance or ‘constructivist-mechanical’, and coupled this physical approach with improvisation and more traditional physical pursuits like boxing and fencing. Trauberg seems to have been largely responsible for the theoretical work, with Kozintsev in charge of the physical work, which included pantomime, clowning and ‘melodramatics’. The group also visited mainstream theatres in order to barrack what was being presented there. Their second (and final) production was Foreign Trade on the Eiffel Tower, staged on 4 June 1923. It was supposedly a reworking of Hamlet in which Hamlet’s father would be murdered not by having poison poured into his ear, but by being given a massive electric shock in the ear. The production did not include this, nor any other reference to Hamlet. It did, however, owe something to Cocteau’s scandalous contemporary ballet Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, which Eisenstein thought, mistakenly, had been designed by Picasso. Foreign Trade on the Eiffel Tower concerned a dire shortage of energy in Europe which a crafty American planned to fill with a special kind of coal made from air. When the World Fuel Corporation tried to prevent this, there was an eye-popping, breathless chase, which took up most of the playing time, through the sewers, and up and down the Eiffel Tower, with tumbles, mishaps, somersaults and acrobatics. In the end the situation was saved by a little girl, played by Clown Serge, and Europe was rescued by the Soviet Union from the grasp of greedy capitalists. Besides Serge, the cast was headed by the glamorous Faina Glinskaya, and there was much more – and more sophisticated – use of film. This caused problems with the near-circular, commedia-like stage, but still, when the Sevzapkino organisation saw the production, they invited Kozintsev and Trauberg to make a film. The Factory of the Eccentric Actor’s theatre life was over, and Kozintsev and Trauberg went on to become two of Russia’s most respected film-makers. The Factory of the Eccentric Actor’s productions were marked by maximum physical involvement, which left no time for, even if there had been any inclination towards, psychologism in the acting. ‘Character’ was presented as being based in and expressed through movement and actions which were exaggerated and ‘eccentricised’. The actor’s body was the pivot and hinge of the 125

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audience’s observation and understanding. ‘Was it, frankly, worth the trouble of becoming an artist in this time of worldwide revolutionary upheaval simply to content oneself with reflecting everyday existence and mooning on about the pettiness of life?’ asked Grigory Kozintsev. ‘Anything but naturalism, anything but everyday life!’67 FEKS’s eccentric acting may have owed more to their antipathy to the everyday, and to what the Russians call byt, than to any wish to put Diderot’s theories into practice. But it, like Radlov’s ‘pure’ elements of acting, Foregger’s machine dances and Ferdinandov’s metro-rhythmics, did acknowledge the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, and to that extent all this work ploughed the same furrows, if not always as deep or straight, as Biomechanics. Notes   1. Cole and Chinoy (eds), Actors on Acting, pp. 162, 164, 170.   2. Stanislavski, Konstantin, An Actor’s Work, p. 16.  3. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 256.   4. Ibid. p. 279.  5. Ibid.   6. Ibid. p. 246.   7. Kleberg and Lövgren (eds), Eisenstein Revisited, pp. 74, 73.  8. Trabskii, Russkii Sovetskii Teatr 1921–1926, p. 203.  9. Carter, The New Theatre and Cinema of Soviet Russia, p. 78. 10. Fülöp-Miller and Gregor, The Russian Theatre, pp. 67–8. 11. Leach, Revolutionary Theatre, pp. 139–40. 12. Tretyakov, The World Upside Down, trans. Robert Leach, typescript, pp. 7, 2. 13. Eaton, The Theater of Meyerhold and Brecht, p. 71. 14. Leach, Revolutionary Theatre, pp. 140–1. 15. Erdman, The Mandate, pp. 11, 4, 43, 9, 94. 16. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 380. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. p. 381. 19. Ibid. p. 379. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. p. 381. 22. Drain (ed.), Twentieth-Century Theatre, p. 42. 23. Ibid. p. 43. 24. Zolotnitsky, Sergei Radlov, pp. 29, 35. 25. Drain (ed.), Twentieth-Century Theatre, pp. 43–4. 26. Zolotnitsky, Sergei Radlov, p. 29. 27. Ibid. p. 30. 28. Ibid. p. 33. 29. Ilinsky, Sam o sebe, p. 142. 30. Souritz, Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s, p. 169. 31. Foregger, ‘Experiments in the Art of Dance’, p. 77. 32. Cherkasov, Notes of a Soviet Actor, p. 39. 33. Foregger, ‘Charlie Chaplin’, pp. 2, 3. 34. Foregger, ‘Iskusstvo Avangarda i Muzykholl’, p. 6. 35. Posner, The Director’s Prism, p. 163. 36. Marshall (ed.), Mayakovsky, pp. 127–8. 37. Baer, Theatre in Revolution, p. 52.

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38. Chepalov, ‘Nikolai Foregger and the Dance of Revolution’, p. 363. 39. Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre, p. 97. 40. Foregger, ‘Experiments in the Art of Dance’, p. 76. 41. Erdman, Mass et al., A Meeting About Laughter, pp. 41–52. 42. Ibid. pp. 9–11. 43. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, p. 124. 44. Shershenevich, ‘The Path of the Experimental-Heroic Theatre’, p. 44. 45. Ivanov, ‘The Rhythmometric Theater of Boris Ferdinandov’, p. 496. 46. Ibid. p. 498. 47. Ibid. p. 496. 48. Shershenevich, ‘The Path of the Experimental-Heroic Theatre’, pp. 44–5. 49. Ivanov, ‘The Rhythmometric Theater of Boris Ferdinandov’, p. 493. 50. Schnitzer, Schnitzer and Martin (eds), Cinema in Revolution, p. 20. 51. Freedman, Silence’s Roar, p. 32. 52. Shershenevich, ‘The Path of the Experimental-Heroic Theatre’, pp. 45–6. 53. Ivanov, ‘The Rhythmometric Theater of Boris Ferdinandov’, p. 494. 54. Zolotnitsky, Budni i Prazdniki Teatral’nogo Oktyabrya, p. 34. 55. Christie and Gillett (eds), Futurism/Formalism/FEKS, pp. 11, 12, 13. 56. Ekctsentrizm, Petrograd: Ekctsentropolis, 1922, p. 6. 57. Schnitzer, Schnitzer and Martin (eds), Cinema in Revolution, p. 99. 58. Christie and Gillett (eds), Futurism/Formalism/FEKS, p. 16. 59. Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and His Circle, p. 170. 60. Christie and Elliott (eds), Eisenstein at Ninety, p. 90. 61. Cherkasov, Notes of a Soviet Actor, p. 29. 62. Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre, p. 124. 63. Schnitzer, Schnitzer and Martin (eds), Cinema in Revolution, p. 101. 64. Posner, The Director’s Prism, p. 167. 65. Senelick and Ostrovsky (eds), The Soviet Theater, p. 189. 66. Déak, ‘Two Manifestos’, p. 92. 67. Christie and Gillett (eds), Futurism/Formalism/FEKS, p. 24.

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6

THE MONTAGE OF ATTRACTIONS

Sergei Eisenstein Russian Futurist theatre reached one of its climaxes in the work of Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Tretyakov at the First Workers Theatre of the Proletkult, which was established in early 1923 and housed in the former mansion of Savva Morozov in Moscow. Eisenstein was born in Riga in Latvia in 1898. His father was a civil engineer and architect, something of a ‘tyrant’ at home, and the family being well off, Eisenstein’s was a privileged if somewhat isolated childhood. In 1909 his mother left the home, and Eisenstein lived with his father. It was while visiting his mother, however, that he first went to the circus, a form with which he immediately fell in love, especially adoring the clowns. In 1915 he enrolled as a student at the Institute for Civil Engineering in Petrograd, where he lived with his mother. In 1917 he joined in revolutionary demonstrations, including in the Bolshevik demonstrations in the ‘July Days’, but he also began designing stage sets and costumes. Immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power, he volunteered for the Red Army. While still a soldier here, he became involved practically in drama with amateur groups, as well as decorating agit-trains, and in September 1920 he entered the General Staff Academy to study Japanese. This, like his earlier studies, was interrupted, however, when he joined the Proletkult as chief stage designer, and it was in this capacity that he first came to general attention with the production on 10 March 1921 of The Mexican. 128

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The Mexican This show, to be directed by Valentin Smyshlayev with designs by Leonid Nikitin and Eisenstein, was based on a story by Jack London with a scenario by Boris Arvatov. Set in the Mexican Revolution, which was sparked when the eighty-year-old dictator, Porfiro Diaz, ‘won’ the 1910 election by fraud, the plot, as told by Eisenstein, concerned ‘a Mexican revolutionary group [which] needs money for its activities. A boy, a Mexican, offers to find the money. He trains for boxing, and contracts to let the champion beat him for a fraction of the prize. Instead he beats up the champion, winning the entire prize.’1 The scenario was read at the first rehearsal and the show was created through improvisation and discussion. This resulted in a degree of chaos, but it in no way dampened the young company’s enthusiasm. However, during the process, Eisenstein – unable to keep his hands off the developing production – began to suggest how the drama should proceed, insisting, for example, that the climactic boxing match take place not in the wings with the onstage audience conveying what was happening by their reactions, but rather that the ring be placed on stage, front and centre, and that the actors really box. Eisenstein also took over work on the ‘acrobatics’ he wanted to include, as well as voice production. Smyshlayev exerted less and less influence, so that commentators have suggested, correctly, that the production of The Mexican should really be attributed to Eisenstein. Beyond this, his Cubo-Futurist designs were highly provocative. The stage setting for the first act was composed of rigid triangles and triangles reshaped into cones, suggesting perhaps that rigidity may be changed. In Act 2, as the lights came up slowly, slanting vibrating beams gradually formed a tangle of triangles. In Act 3, the triangles were fractured, collapsing. These triangular configurations were echoed in the staging and lighting. Thus, in Act 1 the revolutionary leaders on one side of the stage faced the revolting workers on the other. They were divided by a sharp beam of light, which then struck the black-cloaked figure of Rivera, the hero who was to fight the champion, at the apex of a triangle. This carefully contrived stage world, however, was subverted by ‘interludes’, invented by Eisenstein, and performed between the acts. Immediately at the end of the first act, revolutionaries went among the audience, talking to them about Rivera, the need for money, and asking them to support ‘suffering Mexico’. One began to harangue a section of the audience about the struggle against worldwide oppression. A policeman rapidly appeared, and tried to arrest him, but two ne’er-do-wells came up behind him and distracted him, allowing the revolutionary to flee through the auditorium. The fat policeman swore and followed him, while the two good-for-nothings turned into a crosstalk double act: 129

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6.1  [Plate 11] Sergei Eisenstein, stage design for The Mexican, 1921 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). FIRST: What are we doing here? SECOND: Here? Oh, for a very important reason, for an especially important reason, for a so very specially important reason that I need a proper speaker’s platform in order to explain it to you. (Pompously) Er, bring me Rivera’s stool from the second act! (FIRST brings the stool from behind the curtain. SECOND makes meal of climbing on it, falling, trying again. Eventually) Well, now, we – that is, me and you – FIRST: Me and you – SECOND: No, me and you. FIRST: That’s what I said, me and you – SECOND: Calm down! Now – me and you, that is, we, us – we must build up our artistic connections. FIRST (energetically, in Spanish): Who with? SECOND: Our artistic connections between the first and second acts of The Mexican, because that’s the only way we can unite things that are disconnected – black and white, white and red, red and yellow, the elevated and the vile, the Proletkult and the academic theatres, card A and card B, sunset and sunrise, arrival and departure, debit and credit, individual and collective, dog and cart, elephant and mouse, Ruslan and Ludmilla, Eugene and Onegin, musical drama, Jacques and Dalcroze, Romeo and Juliet . . . Mystery Bouff-f-fRIVERA (enters from behind the curtain): How d’you get to Kelly’s boxing control office? (FIRST and SECOND indicate the auditorium with trembling fingers. Rivera goes through the audience.) 130

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SECOND (remembering): Devil take it, that’s the little Mexican who’s always at Roberts’s. FIRST: Yes yes, he’s been training him to box, he’s a client of the old drunkard.2 After further crosstalk, and some clown antics, other characters appear, some seeking cheap tickets for the boxing match. The policeman returns, chases some through the auditorium, and suddenly the Stage Manager appears from behind the curtain: ‘Hey! We’re starting! Lights down!’ Everyone shouts: ‘Second act!’ and the show starts again. A second interlude between Acts 2 and 3 is not unlike the first: characters come into the auditorium, try to persuade individual spectators to support a particular fighter, and there are further scuffles and chases. These interludes are crucial to the Futurist theatre project. They disrupt expectations, and indeed they perhaps disrupt the very form which the dramatic narrative is taking. Are they part of the ‘plot’? Are they an act in themselves? Are the characters who appear real or merely figures of theatrical convention? How does their crosstalk fit with the dramatic events of the story? As often with comedians – and Futurists – there is an also implicit subversion of language itself as an efficacious tool for communication. Commentary on the play by characters in the play is another favourite Futurist device. These threats to the stability of language and the conventional enclosure of the world of the play on the stage seem almost to hold the fate of the play in the balance, just as the fate of the fighters, and the fate of the Mexican Revolution itself, seem to be in the balance. In Act 3, the boxing match, these interludes invaded the stage itself. The triangular motif was disarmed and broken up, replaced by squares and circles. On one side of the boxing ring were grotesque figures with square heads, square-checked clothes, square hats, bags, scarves, shoes, umbrellas. Facing them on the other side of the ring, the spectators were circular and spherical. Grotesque masks and make-up featured throughout – the clerk, for instance, wore the head of a parrot – but the boxers themselves were without make-up of any kind. And as the fight proceeded, the stage crowd which faced the ‘real’ audience on the other side of the ring added a growing dynamic frenzy to the action. They cheered, booed, squabbled and flirted, while two clownlike reporters with red noses and loud checked coats partially interpreted the events. A coquettish black woman cast envious looks at her even more coquettish friend, whom a foppish young negro was hanging around. A nanny rocked a baby in her arms, giggling next to the carter she’d invited along, a fat and bored individual who had come here in search of thrills. A bespectacled member of the Salvation Army, book in hand, darkly 131

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glowered at the public, across the ring, vainly concealing his secret passion for boxing. A stylish cowboy arrived with a prostitute, and both animatedly devoted themselves to one another. Hotly a young pickpocket appeared, panting and running to his place, having a weakness for this type of show. A clerk in scruffy clothes flirted with a waitress from the nearby café. A shabbily-dressed ponce with dyed hair and rouged cheeks made advances to a Russian corps-de-ballet dancer . . .3 Meanwhile, the lanky referee in striped costume waited for the action. Rivera entered through the audience quietly, to some indifference and some mild mockery. The people had laid their bets on Denny Ward, the champion. At last Ward entered, relaxed and grinning, to cheers, stamping and whistles. The arena went quiet. Tremolo music in the orchestra. The first round commenced, a tense affair, with both combatants warily testing the situation. The round ended, and the activities in the audience resumed: the neighbours of the dancer turned out to be a parson and his wife, and the dancer began to make eyes at him. Their story continued through the remaining pauses between rounds: scandal erupted, the parson’s wife beat the dancer over the head with her umbrella, whereupon her dog-collared husband dragged her away, to the whistles and guffaws of the crowd. A myriad such incidents occurred in the intervals. In the match, the second round saw Ward beginning to press. In the third round Rivera seemed to be hanging on. But in the fourth round Rivera unleashed a tremendous blow, Ward fell prostrate to the ground and his second rushed on with a towel. Ward was dead to the world. Almost unbelievably, Rivera was the victor. The spectators who had laid all their money on Ward reacted with fury, screaming and howling. ‘And in the corner, leaning against the ropes, lonely and tired, was the little Mexican, looking distrustfully out from under his eyebrows.’4 The idea of the puny worker overcoming his Herculean opponent predictably pleased the critics in early Bolshevik Russia, and even the Commissar for Education and the Arts, Anatoly Lunacharsky, found its Futurism ‘appropriate’, if only ‘because it serves to create easily-recognized caricatures of the bourgeoisie’.5 S. Margolin wrote that ‘in the fierce theatricality of The Mexican is transmitted the impetuous joie de vivre of the Workers Theatre collective’.6 Eisenstein revived The Mexican in March 1923, when he emphasised the Eccentrism of the performance, though this seems to have been less successful than the first production. He now cast Ivan Pyriev, later a film director, as Rivera, and Grigory Alexandrov as Denny Ward. Alexandrov, too, became a film director, though not until the 1930s; before that he was one of Eisenstein’s favourite actors. At the time of The Mexican he was one of the Rudenko Brothers, a circus trapeze and acrobatic act also known as ‘The Eagles of the Ural Mountains’. 132

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Meyerhold’s The Death of Tarelkin In the summer when the first production of The Mexican was running, Lenin introduced his New Economic Policy, which returned a limited form of capitalism to Russia. Among other things, this opened up new possibilities in the arts, not least in the theatre. For Eisenstein, the most important event of that autumn was his enrolling with his friend, Sergei Yutkevich, in Meyerhold’s Directors’ Workshop, for Meyerhold was to cast an immensely important shadow over the rest of Eisenstein’s creative life. He watched Meyerhold’s rehearsals for his adaptation of Ibsen and later wrote how nothing in his exciting later life would ‘ever erase from my memory the impressions left on me by those three days of rehearsals for The Doll’s House in the gymnasium on Novinsky Boulevard. I remember shivering continuously. It was not cold, it was excitement, it was nerves stretched to their limit.’7 He was to be assistant director on Meyerhold’s 1922 production of Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin’s The Death of Tarelkin, a production which married Futurism, circus and commedia dell’arte in a unique fusion, which Eisenstein described as ‘a strong and colourful grotesque, moving in places into pure clowning’.8 Rudnitsky explained how this worked: A carnival atmosphere invaded the auditorium. Coloured balls flew through the hall. During the intermissions enormous prop apples were lowered from the balcony and the spectators eagerly tried to grab them. Posters were tossed out: ‘Death to the Tarelkins – Make way for the Meyerholds!’9 Meyerhold taught Eisenstein how to structure a production, how to combine the actors’ improvisations with tightly controlled blocking, and though the younger man, hating all father figures, constantly rebelled against ‘the Master’, it was he who saved Meyerhold’s archive when Meyerhold was arrested and judicially murdered in 1940, and he who called him ‘the divine! The incomparable! Mey-er-hold! . . . I was to worship him all my life.’10 Eisenstein in the Early 1920s From October 1921 Eisenstein also worked with Foregger at MASTFOR and in the spring of 1922 he joined the Factory of the Eccentric Actor briefly. Mostly this was as a stage designer, and it included significant work on Puss in Boots (1921) and Heartbreak House (1922) as exercises in Meyerhold’s Workshop, Fetra (1922) and Kindness to Horses (1922) for Foregger, and Macbeth, staged at the Central Educational Theatre in April 1922. In the summer of 1922 he also worked with Yutkevich on something of a capriccio, Columbine’s Garter. This unfinished work was a parody of Cocteau and the French Cubists, but also an answer to Meyerhold’s 1916 production of Schnitzler’s Columbine’s Veil. In Eisenstein and Yutkevich’s version, Pierrot was to be played by a woman 133

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6.2  Sergei Eisenstein. in drag. He was to be strangled by his beloved Columbine with her garter. Harlequin was to be a trapeze artist who berated his bride from a swing in the roof of the theatre, while the ghost of Pierrot, a marionette, haunted her. But Harlequin was to metamorphose into an American detective who would resurrect the dead Pierrot with an electric shock, and Pierrot and Columbine were to be left dancing to a jazz band. The project was important because it seems that here Eisenstein first articulated the concept of the ‘attraction’. According to Posner, Eisenstein conceived of the attraction as being ‘immediate, affective, audience-centred, viscerally jolting, drawing from popular forms and using juxtapositions that prompt active mental synthesis. The word also implies a shift away from theatrical meaning that is denotative (psychologically and/or 134

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visually representational) to meaning that is connotative (self-contained units and literalised metaphors).’11 In that summer of 1922 Eisenstein also took over the Proletkult’s mobile touring troupe (Peretru) as it amalgamated with the Proletkult Directors’ Workshop (Rezhmas). How much time he was able to devote to any of these projects is uncertain, though he was always a glutton for work, but by the autumn of that year, with the Proletkult group, he was beginning experiments with Ostrovsky’s classic play Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man (also known as Too Clever By Half and Even a Wise Man Stumbles). Sergei Tretyakov The adaptation of the script was by Sergei Tretyakov, the Futurist poet whose success at the Meyerhold Theatre, The World Upside Down, has already been noted. Tretyakov, like Eisenstein, was born in Latvia, though he was born in Kuldiga, not Riga, in 1892. However, he went to school in Riga, where he graduated from the Gymnasium in 1913 with a gold medal. He studied law at Moscow University from 1913 to 1916, during which time his first poems appeared in print. He was associated with both the Ego-Futurists and the Mezzanine of Poetry, becoming especially close to Vadim Shershenevich. His verse was, according to Markov, essentially urbanist and impressionistic, though his range was wide, including free verse, more regular poetry and even imitations of children’s rhymes and riddles. He was also an excellent pianist, with perfect pitch, whom Scriabin praised, and his cartoons were published in newspapers. In 1916 he joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but after the upheavals of 1917 he found himself in Vladivostok, where he married Olga Viktorovna Gomolitskaya and adopted her young daughter, Tatyana. He also helped to found the Futurist group Tvorchestvo. When Chita became the Bolshevik capital of the Eastern Region of Russia, most of the Tvorchestvo group, including Tretyakov, moved there. But in 1922 Tretyakov returned to Moscow, where he became a member of the Central Committee of the Proletkult, and taught in their Writers’ Workshop. He was also invited by Meyerhold to join his theatre, where he energetically entered into the turbulent life of the theatre and the workshop and helped in much of the organising and planning. Tretyakov quickly became a valuable person for the Meyerholdites and won solid prestige by his firm adherence to principle, his broad knowledge, his frank confidence in his own powers, his inexhaustible energy, his ability to organise work and a mode of life, and his genuinely comradely ­attitude to the students and actors.12 Meyerhold invited him to teach, and they shared a course on ‘TextMovement’. His seminal article, ‘Text and Speech Montage’, published on 135

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the day of the premiere of The World Upside Down, arose from this course, as well as from his experience working on the play. In this essay, he discusses the need to shift towards a ‘montage of speech’, which entails moving the focus from the rhythmical, associated with vowels, to the articulatory-­ onomatopoeic, which he associated with consonants. He wished the actor to abjure ‘vocal melody’ as well as the conversational, and seek a kind of ‘semaphore speech’, which could accommodate ‘verbal gestures’ and ‘verbal masks’. He distinguished this approach from the ‘mimicry’ of the Maly Theatre, the ‘conversational’ tones of the Moscow Art Theatre, and the ‘declamatory’ style of the Kamerny Theatre. Rather than these, his aim was to get actors to ‘speak’. Tretyakov also paid attention to appropriate rhythms – staccato, legato – and tempo, and to the colouration of the words, as tempered by the stress. Rhythm, melodics and pronunciation could all lend intimations of the grotesque to a character, and work towards what he called ‘sound gestures’.13 Fevralsky noted that, in The World Upside Down, ‘Tretyakov and the actors created stage speech which was expressive, which sounded crisp and hardhitting, and which acquired in some places a poster-like brilliance, and in others a tragic strength.’14

A Wise Man Two weeks after the celebrations to mark the centenary of Alexander Ostrovsky, on 26 April 1923, the Tretyakov-Eisenstein version of his comedy Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man was presented at the former Morozov mansion, now the First Workers Theatre of the Moscow Proletkult. It was called simply A Wise Man. Updated to be contemporary with the performance, the play was now largely set in Paris among the Russian émigré community, which allowed for topical and political jokes about current affairs, and for a satirical portrayal of ‘White Russia’, where the anti-hero, Glumov, arriving from the Bolshevik Soviet Union, can seek ways to ‘feather his nest’.15 But the story was much the same as Ostrovsky’s. To rise in this society, Glumov tries to please everyone, no matter the hypocrisy involved. His diary, to which he has confided his ‘true’ opinions, is stolen, its contents causing scandal, but the corrupt decadents of the émigré society realise they will not gain from its publication, and Glumov agrees to return to Moscow with his chief tormenter, Golutvin, a ‘NEPman’, to take advantage of the relaxation of economic controls and swindle his way to a fortune there. Besides the change of time and place, the script bristles with jokes: Gorodulin, on the make, bids Turusina ‘Arriva-dividend-erchi!’; Golutvin says that ‘Mum is writing her memoirs [and] Dad is writing his dadoirs’; Mamayeva complains histrionically to her beloved Glumov: ‘I’m so unhappy.’

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6.3  Sergei Tretyakov. GLUMOV: What beast, what serpent has made you unhappy? MAMAYEVA: It wasn’t a beast, it was the dentist. It’s got nothing to do with serpents, it’s just that the crown came off my tooth. GLUMOV: I’m not a dentist or a Bolshevik, I don’t knock crowns off tsars’ coconuts – it’s not my fault. However, complicating Ostrovsky in a notably sophisticated extension of the nineteenth-century playwright’s satire, Tretyakov’s play worked simultaneously on three distinct levels. Thus, the characters are first individuals in the 137

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story; then they are circus performers – clowns, aerialists, tumblers; and finally they personify contemporary figures, political or social. Thus, Ivan Yazykanov played the character Glumov, who was the White Clown, but also a subversive NEPman (a spiv on the make); Gorodulin in the story was also a circus juggler, as well as the recently empowered Mussolini, apt to exclaim ‘Mamma mia!’ when surprised; Mamayeva was a circus equilibrist, but also a vamp; Mashenka was an ingénue, but also Mary Mac-Lac, a dealer in stocks and shares; Kurchayev, a lion tamer in fleshings and leopard skins, was also and simultaneously three ‘extra-polished hussars’; Mamayev was an acrobat but also Milyukov, Kerensky’s Foreign Minister, who had emigrated to Paris (though Eisenstein also compounded Mamayev with Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Minister); and Golutvin, the ‘mysterious’ person, was Harry Piel, the film detective, and also a double-dealing NEPman. With Krutitsky becoming General Joffre and Manefa the matchmaker as Rasputin, an unremitting kaleidoscope of popular entertainment and popular perceptions of politics and society bubbled and sparkled. The production did more than cock a snook at one of Russia’s most revered playwrights, Alexander Ostrovsky, just at the time when Anatoly Lunacharsky was urging theatres to drop their excesses by adopting the slogan ‘Back to Ostrovsky!’: his campaign was ridiculed in this version of one of Ostrovsky’s greatest comedies when Mamayev dragged another character out onto the stage by his coat tails, shouting, ‘Back, back to Ostrovsky!’ A Wise Man was in fact a comprehensive deconstruction of Ostrovsky, just as FEKS’s Marriage and later Igor Terentiev’s Government Inspector deconstructed Gogol. A Wise Man fizzed with parody and satire. Its targets included Dziga

6.4  Ivan Yazykanov as Glumov, the White Clown, in A Wise Man, 1923. 138

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Vertov’s newsreel films, religion, bourgeois morality, the academic subsidised theatres, the vogue for ‘spy’ novels and films, and White Russian emigration. Partly this was achieved through the music, which not only provided the ‘rhythmic base for the rehearsals and the performance’16 but was not specially composed. Rather, Zinovy Kitayev, the accompanist, watched the rehearsals and improvised round well-known melodies, adding a further dimension of intertextuality to the mix. Examples of Kitayev’s ingenuity are numerous. Thus, when Glumov, with a pair of wings, was being raised towards the roof, Kitayev played a parody of a well-known hymn tune; when, as the White Clown, he left the stage, Kitayev counterpointed his exit with music from Bizet’s overture to Carmen; and when Alexandrov was walking the tightrope, he intensified the suspense with Harlequin’s Cloak. ‘Music was an indispensable, active element of A Wise Man,’ one of the actors commented. ‘The actors would not have been able to play without it.’17 The stage was a ring with steeply raked seats around about three-quarters of it. From the high tent-like ceiling, ropes, trapezes, nets and rings dangled. The walls were hung with canvases. This pseudo-circus ring was covered with a circular green carpet with red edgings, and at the back there was a balcony with yellow ramps leading up to it. On the balcony were two ladder-like constructions hidden behind a dark, cherry-red curtain, and under it a further curtained ‘stage’, somewhat like the arrangement in the London Elizabethan theatre. There was a screen for the projection of the film, and also on stage a black trick chest, two yellow cylindrical columns and a grand piano. These objects were not decorative, they were ‘real’, placed to be used. Meanwhile the performers often entered and exited through gaps in the audience. The whole was therefore focused, but decentred, with echoes of Constructivism, displaying ‘architectonics (volume), velocity (instantaneity) and caprice (arbitrariness)’.18 Tretyakov’s script further sharpened the piece. A single example will suffice. In Ostrovsky’s original, over two scenes, Mamayev, Glumov’s uncle, ­encourages Glumov to flirt with his bored wife: MAMAYEV: . . . There’s another thing, rather a delicate matter. What exactly are your relations with your aunt, my boy? GLUMOV: I’ve been well brought up, sir. You needn’t teach me how to behave to a lady. MAMAYEV: No, no, no, my boy, don’t be so stupid! Your aunt is still quite young and beautiful. A lot she cares for your good manners! You don’t want to make an enemy of her, do you? GLUMOV: I don’t understand what you’re driving at, uncle. MAMAYEV: If you don’t understand, then listen to me and learn. Thank God you have someone to teach you. Women never forgive a man who does not notice their beauty. 139

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6.5  Glumov’s ‘Ascension’, A Wise Man. GLUMOV: Quite so, quite so, sir. Gosh, what a fool I am! MAMAYEV: There, there, you see now, don’t you? They say blood is thicker than water, but I’m afraid, my boy, that our blood, yours and mine, I mean, has been rather diluted. Still you are a relation of mine, albeit a very distant one. You can therefore allow yourself more latitude with my wife than a mere acquaintance. Sometimes, you may pretend it is out of sheer forgetfulness, it may be a good thing if you kissed her hand 140

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twice and, well . . . er . . . with the eyes, you know, something. You know what I mean, don’t you? GLUMOV: I think I do, but I don’t know how to do it, sir. MAMAYEV: What an innocent you are, to be sure, my boy. Look, this is what I mean. (He turns up his eyes in a glad-eye.) GLUMOV: Really, sir, how can you even suggest such a thing to me? MAMAYEV: Why not, my boy, why not? There, be a good boy and practice it before a mirror and get it right. Then again, occasionally, you may just sigh, you know, with a languorous expression on your face. All this flatters their vanity, you know. GLUMOV: I’m sorry, sir, but I refuse to do it. No, thank you, sir. MAMAYEV: But do try to understand, my boy. I’m doing it for my own peace of mind. GLUMOV: I’m afraid, sir, I can’t follow you at all. MAMAYEV: Your aunt, my boy, is a woman of a sanguine temperament, she’s hot-headed, she can be easily carried away by some fop or other, or even, the devil take her, by some labourer, or again even by some jailbird. In these affairs there is no fear of God, you must understand. So that’s how things stand, and that’s where you come in, my boy. ‘If you must flirt, madam, here’s the man for you, a reliable man and your own flesh and blood.’ You see it now, don’t you? The lady can have her fling and the husband needn’t worry. GLUMOV: What a mind you have, uncle, what a mind! MAMAYEV: I should say so. GLUMOV: There’s something else, sir. To make sure that there shouldn’t be any gossip, you know what people are, sir, I think that it would, perhaps, be a good thing if you introduced me to Mrs Turussina. At her house I can openly pay court to her niece and even, to make things quite easy for you, get engaged to her. Then, indeed, the lady could have her fling and her husband need not worry. MAMAYEV: Quite right, quite right. That’ll make everything perfect! GLUMOV: Of course, sir, we shan’t mention a word about Turussina to your wife. Not that she will be jealous, but you know how women look at things with different eyes. MAMAYEV: I know, I know. Mum’s the word! GLUMOV: When shall we pay our visit to Turussina, sir? MAMAYEV: Tomorrow evening. Well, now you know what to do, don’t you? GLUMOV: What to do? Why, sir, admire your great intellect! (Enter MAMAYEVA and GORODULIN.) GORODULIN (whispers to MAMAYEVA): In two weeks he’ll have the job. 141

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MAMAYEV: Ah, Gorodulin, I called on you today. I wanted to give you my advice about that business at the club. GORODULIN: I’m afraid I’m in a hurry. (Shakes hands with GLUMOV.) Au revoir. MAMAYEV: Let me share your carriage. I’m going the same way. I have some business at the Senate. (MAMAYEV and GORODULIN go out.) MAMAYEVA (sitting down in an arm-chair): Kiss my hand, your business is settled. GLUMOV: I didn’t ask you for anything. MAMAYEVA: Never mind, I did it off my own bat. GLUMOV (kissing her hand): Thank you. (Picks up his hat.) MAMAYEVA: Where are you off to? GLUMOV: Home! I am so happy. I want to run off and share my happiness with my mother. MAMAYEVA: You are happy? I don’t believe it. GLUMOV: I am as happy as I possibly can be. MAMAYEVA: Which means that you’re not quite happy, that you still desire something, isn’t that so? GLUMOV: I’ve got everything that I dare hope for. MAMAYEVA: No, no. Tell me straight: have you got all you desire? GLUMOV: What else can I want? I shall get a job. MAMAYEVA: I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. Being so young you want to make people believe that you’re a materialist, that all you care for is a job and money. GLUMOV: Please, please . . . MAMAYEVA: . . . that you have no heart, that you never dream of happiness, that you don’t cry, that you’re not in love with anyone . . . GLUMOV: I never said that. MAMAYEVA: You said that you’d got all you wanted. GLUMOV: I said that I’d got all that I could possibly get, all that I could dare hope for. MAMAYEVA: Which means that you dare not hope that your feelings are reciprocated. Why, therefore, waste them, these pure pearls of your heart? Tell me, who is the cruel one? GLUMOV: But this is an inquisition! MAMAYEVA: Tell me, you bad man, tell me at once. I know, I can see it in your eyes: you’re in love! My poor darling, is it really as bad as that? GLUMOV: You have no right to question me like this. You know I do not conceal anything from you. MAMAYEVA: Who are you in love with? 142

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GLUMOV: Have pity on me! MAMAYEVA: Is she worthy of you? GLUMOV: Don’t torture me, please. MAMAYEVA: Is she able to do full justice to your passion, your devoted heart? GLUMOV: I shan’t tell you. Kill me if you will, but I shan’t say a word. MAMAYEVA (whispers): Courage, my friend, courage! GLUMOV: You want to know who I am in love with? MAMAYEVA: Yes, yes . . . GLUMOV: You! MAMAYEVA (with a soft cry): Ah-h-h! GLUMOV: I am your slave for ever. Punish me for my boldness, but I love you. Force me to keep silence, forbid me to look at you, to stop admiring you, or, what is worse, make me keep at a polite distance from you, but do not be angry with me! You are yourself to blame. Were you not so beautiful, so gracious to me, I might have kept my passion within the bounds of propriety, however big a price I’d have had to pay for it. But you, an angel so good and beautiful, robbed me, a decent man, of my reason. Yes, I am mad. I thought that heavenly bliss was awaiting me and I did not see the chasm opening up before my feet and ruin staring me in the face. Forgive me, forgive me! (He falls on his knees before her and bows his head disconsolately.) MAMAYEVA (kissing his bent head): I forgive you. (GLUMOV gets up and, bowing low, goes out. MAMAYEVA follows him with a gaze full of speechless adoration.)19 Tretyakov not only tightens up this episode, virtually halving its length, he also slices it into sharp segments which lie beside each other in a powerful example of collision montage which, through its juxtapositions, brings out not only the hypocrisy of the characters, but also their fundamental absurdity: MAMAYEV: And, er, one more, rather delicate question: what sort of relationship do you have with your aunt? (MAMEYEVA becomes visible above on the platform.) GLUMOV: I’m a bit of a haberdasher.20 I can dance the One-Step. I don’t need to be taught manners. MAMAYEVA: Kiss my hand, your problem is solved. (GLUMOV runs to her.) GLUMOV: But I haven’t asked you anything. MAMAYEVA: I guessed it. GLUMOV: Then thank you. (He turns back to MAMAYEV.) MAMAYEVA: Where are you going? GLUMOV: I’m going home. I’m so happy. (He returns to MAMAYEV.) 143

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MAMAYEV: Well, what I’ve got to say is stupid, perhaps. (MAMAYEVA mimes appropriately behind.) She’s still young and beautiful, she doesn’t need your ‘manners’. You don’t want to make some sort of enemy, do you? GLUMOV: I don’t understand you, uncle. MAMAYEV: Well, if you don’t understand, listen carefully, and you’ll learn something. A woman never forgives a man who fails to notice her beauty. GLUMOV: Yes yes yes, of course, I’m going bonkers. But I’m still not convinced. (He runs back to her.) MAMAYEVA: Are you happy? GLUMOV: I’m as happy as I could be. MAMAYEVA: So you’re not completely happy? GLUMOV: What else could I want? A position for me has been found. MAMAYEVA: I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you. It’s because you’re so young that you want to show yourself to be a historical materialist, and you want me to think you’re only interested in your new position and money. GLUMOV: Cleopatra Lvovna – MAMAYEVA: That you don’t love anybody. But I know, I can see it in your eyes – you’re in love. Poor you, are you suffering a lot? GLUMOV: You have no right to use such means. (He runs back to MAMAYEV.) MAMAYEV: You understand, old chap. You’re a very distant relative, it’s true, but still you are a relative, so you have a certain freedom which a mere acquaintance wouldn’t have. Sometimes you might seem to forget yourself (he whistles) and kiss her hand. Maybe you could make eyes at her – I dare say you know how to. GLUMOV: No, I don’t. MAMAYEV: You what, old fellow? Look, like this. (He demonstrates. GLUMOV goes to MAMAYEVA and copies him.) Like Sashenka Kerensky. GLUMOV: I wouldn’t dare! MAMAYEV: Well, you could practice in front of a mirror. MAMAYEVA: Who are you in love with? GLUMOV: Please – have mercy. MAMAYEVA: Is she worthy of you? GLUMOV: Oh God, what are you doing to me? MAMAYEVA: Can she appreciate your passionate nature, your fervent heart? GLUMOV (getting up, returning to MAMAYEV): Even if you were to kill me, I wouldn’t make so bold. 144

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MAMAYEV and MAMAYEVA (together): Go on, my friend, be bold! MAMAYEV: But it’s for my sake, don’t you see, don’t you get it? GLUMOV: I still don’t understand. MAMAYEV: Your aunt is a naturally optimistic woman, you see. She is hot-headed. She’s quite capable of falling for any dandy. The devil take it, she might go for an artisan. Maybe even a convict. God does not bless such affairs. Who knows where they lead to? Well, now you can see where you come in. You’re a member of the family, you’re tried and trusted. The mouse can play, and the cat can stay away. GLUMOV: Ha ha ha. You’re clever, uncle, really clever. MAMAYEV: I hope so. GLUMOV (runs back to MAMAYEVA): Who’m I in love with? MAMAYEVA: Yes. GLUMOV: You! MAMAYEVA: Ahh! (She appears to faint. He runs back to MAMAYEV.) MAMAYEV: That’s it, that’s it! GLUMOV: To prevent any title-tattling by outsiders, perhaps you’d care to introduce me to Salon-Turusina, so I can court her niece quite openly, and perhaps even propose to her, if you’d like me to. That way, both the mice can play, while the cats stay away. But better not mention that to Cleopatra Lvovna, she’d be . . . not jealous, but . . . you know. MAMAYEV: Absolutely, I won’t, no, no, no. GLUMOV: When shall we go to Turusina’s? MAMAYEV: Tomorrow. GLUMOV (makes for MAMAYEVA, but is caught halfway between the two): I’m your slave for life. Punish me for my presumptuousness, but I love you. (To MAMAYEV) Forgive me! MAMAYEVA: You are forgiven. (Tableau.) This adaptation provides especially exciting opportunities for actors, and Eisenstein invented more. In other scenes, Kurchayev, an utterly commonplace being, was presented by three actors, all dressed alike and moving in unison, with no trace, therefore, of individuality. Towards the end, Glumov ascended to the ceiling, candle in hand, on the end of a rope, in a parody of the Ascension. Glumov’s mother’s first appearance was inside a parcel which the other characters assume is food aid from the American Relief Aid. Glumov is smuggled out of Russia in a coffin which is pierced with a sword at the German border in a well-known circus trick: ‘If there was anything alive in there, it’s dead now!’ When he arrives in France it is at high speed on roller-skates. Mamayev is so scandalised by Kurchayev’s portrait of him stretched over a 145

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circus hoop that he somersaults right through it. Turusina’s flimsy skirt is complemented by two lamp shades over her breasts: these light up and flash on and off when she is aroused. And in what Eisenstein was to call an ‘AristotelianRabelaisian’ moment, Mamayeva is faced with the lecherous soldier Joffre. She exclaims: ‘Help! He’s going to occupy me! Now I’m up a gumtree!’ whereupon stage hands bring on a balancing pole, fix it in Joffre’s pouch, and she climbs dextrously to the top, where she performs stunts. ‘Now I’m right up the pole,’ she exclaims, to which Joffre replies, ‘Now you’re like Moscow, it’s impossible to reach you.’ ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘now I’m as unattainable, and as dauntless, as Russia.’ Margolin commented that in this production, ‘the actor was like an enriched instrument, who possessed all the secrets of tomfoolery and physical strength.’21 A Wise Man drove the ideas and practices of Annenkov, Radlov, Foregger and the FEKS group to what was probably their highest possible point. The action consisted of aerial numbers, floor gymnastics, flying somersaults, tumbling, balancing, satirical songs and clowning, and it was broken into turns like a circus. The wedding, for instance, was like a clown interlude. Kurchayev, the bridegroom, was played by three actors, so a mullah was called to conduct the ceremony because his religion allowed polygamy. He – or rather she, since the mullah is actually Manefa, the fortune teller – is brought in seated on a plank, intoning a mock hymn, ‘Allah Verdi’, with a sign saying: ‘Religion is the opium of the people.’ She/he leaps off the plank and performs a Cossack dance. The three bridegrooms are packed into a large box and pots are smashed against it while the guests sing a comic song, all in parody of ancient wedding rituals. The Epilogue even included two short, sensational films. The first showed Golutvin escaping with Glumov’s stolen diary. He jumps from a car, rushes into a building, climbs out of a second-floor window and scrambles onto a parapet. From there he ascends to the highest point of a tower, hangs his top hat on a pinnacle and beckons urgently. Glumov is seen peering out of the window, seeking him. An aeroplane flies past: it has apparently rescued Golutvin, who jumps out of it into a waiting car and makes off. When he finally arrives, a live actor now on stage, it is to disclose the contents of the diary. The sequence recalls Mayakovsky’s Fettered by Film, though it is more mature and more successful. It is the contents of the stolen diary which provide the subject of the second film. It is filled with trick effects which reveal the ‘truth’ behind Glumov’s consistently obliging behaviour, his true contempt for each of the other characters. The first shot is of a film being unwound – this is the diary. Then we see how, in each encounter, Glumov becomes what the other character would most like him to be. Thus, to Turusina he appears as a card house; he turns into a cannon for General Joffre, a swastika for the Fascist Gorodulin, and a baby 146

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6.6  ‘Religion is the opium of the people’: A Wise Man. for Mamayeva. For her husband, his uncle Mamayev, he turns into a donkey. At the end, the film is unwound, the director (Eisenstein) takes a bow, and Golutvin, the thief who stole the diary, smiles, enigmatically smug. After everyone has disappeared, Golutvin and Glumov, betrayer and betrayed, face each other. Glumov knocks Golutvin down and tears a large label off his trousers. On it is written ‘NEP’. Suddenly realising they are brothers-in-exploitation, Glumov melodramatically throws open his arms and acknowledges him: ‘So you’re a NEPman!’ They dance together. Finally, they decide to return to Russia. While Golutvin crosses over the heads of the audience on a tightrope, Glumov, not so daring, decides to return ‘by the back way’. The Red Clown (Glumov’s mother) enters. She is alone, and bursts into noisy tears. In a parody of Firs at the end of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, she bemoans her fate: ‘Everybody’s gone. But they’ve forgotten somebody.’ Her crying sounds like a donkey’s ‘ee-ore’. Gregory, the servant, enters down the tightrope, hanging on by his teeth. ‘Time’s – ’ ‘What?’ asks Gregory. ‘Up!’ says the Red Clown. She throws a bucket of water over Gregory, who falls over in surprise. The Red Clown turns to the 147

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6.7  Glumov as Mamayev’s donkey in the film Glumov’s Diary. audience. ‘The end!’ She bows, and at this moment fireworks explode under the seats of the audience. Even such a lengthy description hardly does justice to this extraordinary show. To make the films, Eisenstein and his team were asked to work with Dziga Vertov, who was to oversee their work. But after two or three sequences had been shot, Vertov left, realising he could not help. In fact the filming was completed in a single day, yet has remained highly watchable to this day. The Harry Piel parody is amusing, and there are references to the Futurists’ favourite image of the donkey (as there are in the acted stage sections of the show, too). The fact that the first film was shot outside the Morozov mansion also provokes a series of responses: was Morozov hand in glove with the White Russians and the NEPmen? Since Morozov was the Moscow Art Theatre’s main financial backer, what is being said about that now august institution? Was this the first show to take place outside the theatre building as well as inside? A Wise Man is proudly, self-consciously multi-layered. It has generated commentary and criticism for a century, and its final teasing question arises from those final shots in the film, when Eisenstein himself removes his cap and bows ironically. A Wise Man juxtaposes film, a kind of arranged reality, with the actual reality of the circus performer. This was exemplified in Alexandrov’s walking the tightrope at the end of every night’s performance. Eisenstein himself hardly dared watch. Once he fell off, though luckily with no damage to himself or any audience member. Another time, when he seemed to be toppling, a helpful spectator held up his walking-stick, which Alexandrov grabbed to 148

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steady himself. Golutvin would reach Russia. Thus, between film and circus, Eisenstein found a new kind of theatre. ‘The Montage of Attractions’ It led directly to Eisenstein’s essay ‘The Montage of Attractions’, published in LEF in the summer of 1923.22 Contrasting the ‘figurative-narrative’ theatre, which he characterised as ‘static’ and ‘domestic’, with his own ‘agitational theatre of attractions’, which was ‘dynamic’ and ‘eccentric’, he asserted that A Wise Man was ‘the first work of agitation based on a new method of structuring a show’. For Eisenstein, the theatre’s basic material derived from the audience, and the theatre-maker’s task was the moulding of the audience in a desired direction through the deployment of attractions. ‘An attraction’, he argued, was ‘any aggressive moment in theatre’, one that ‘subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence’. This, he said, could be ‘verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator in their proper order within the whole’. In other words, it operated to stimulate somewhat in the manner of a Pavlovian conditioned reflex. The shocks led to ‘the final ideological conclusion’. The attraction, for Eisenstein, was an independent and primary element in the structuring of a show, but it was not a thing complete in itself. The attraction was relative to other attractions and to the responses of the audience. An effective structure of a show as a whole, therefore, was ‘a free montage of . . . independent . . . effects (attractions) . . . with the precise aim of a specific thematic effect’. The attraction was thus a ‘realistic artificiality’: Grigory Alexandrov on the tightrope in A Wise Man was engaged in a real action, but the context – the stage, the audience – was entirely artificial. Every theatre through history has employed attractions – an effective entrance, a clever bit of ‘business’ – but now these were to be planned in such a way as to generate a cumulative response, as the music hall or circus planner structures the sequence of ‘turns’ in a show, and Eisenstein concluded by exemplifying this with a list of the attractions, in order, in the Epilogue of A Wise Man. The attraction was, for Eisenstein, the basic building block in the construction of the drama. Its function as a structuring device was of more importance than any overt meaning the attraction might seem to embody. Attractions were units of stage-audience interaction which together comprised the montage, and A Wise Man was Eisenstein’s (and Tretyakov’s) attempt to force the audience to watch and listen, to interact rather than merely to see and hear, thus echoing Khlebnikov’s insistence in the Prologue to Victory Over the Sun: Be a spectator by listening (with a large ear)! And be an observer.

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A New Acting System The new way of playmaking required a new way of acting, going beyond the partially limited schemes of Sergei Radlov, Boris Ferdinandov, Nikolai Foregger and even perhaps beyond Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Biomechanics. Futurist acting needed to advance beyond circusisation, learning from circus but incorporating what might be called theatricalisation. Eisenstein and Tretyakov employed teachers – Valentin Parnakh for contemporary dance, Viktor Khenkin for storytelling, the Three Georges, also known as the Rudenko Brothers, Armand, Tserep and Peter, for acrobatics – and they caused a pseudo-circus arena to be built in the Morozov stables. From nine in the morning till one o’clock (lunchtime) their amateur students pursued physical activities – horse riding, including acrobatics on horseback, swimming, rowing, boxing and fencing, acrobatics and trapeze work; after lunch they usually worked on acting – voice training, Biomechanics – or team games like volleyball or football; and the evenings tended to be occupied with either rehearsing or performing. It was a punishing schedule. There were a number of influences on the work. Benoît-Constant Coquelin’s insistence on the dual personality of the actor – the expressive body and the controlling brain – was central, and actors were not expected to ‘identify’ with the role. The ideas of Prince Sergei Volkonsky, proponent of François Delsarte and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, patron of Serge Diaghilev, and head of the Moscow Rhythmic Institute from 1919 till he emigrated in 1921, were also of interest. Volkonsky saw the human body as machine-like, and investigated the interactions between rhythmic movement and emotional responses. Probably more influential were the ideas of Rudolf Bode, even though his emphasis on organic movement was somewhat at odds with Biomechanics’ exploration of the dissociation of muscles, limbs, and so on. Nevertheless Bode’s exercises to free the potential of the body and to consciously control movement were highly significant. Lastly the Japanese theatrical form of kabuki should be added to the list. Eisenstein loved all things Japanese, and the kabuki actors’ tendency to ‘freeze’ in a tableau at moments of high tension, the bravura acting style, high energy and demanding vocal technique, as well as the exaggerated costumes, make-up and props, and the highly stylised dance forms, were a rich source for exercises and ideas. The Russian child psychologist Alexander Luria saw A Wise Man and shortly afterwards met Eisenstein. Luria had noted how observation of movement tended to elicit contractions of the same muscles in the observer, and for Eisenstein this was confirmation of his fundamental tenet. The basis of Eisenstein’s theory was similar to Diderot’s, that the spectator, not the actor, experienced emotions, but he went further than Luria because he was also clear that ‘Expressive Movement’ was distinct from everyday movement, 150

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in that movement in the ordinary world did not aim to arouse emotion. Expressive Movement must involve the entire body, and the entire body must take part in every movement. Eisenstein used the image of someone balancing a billiard cue on the end of his nose to show how the slightest movement of the most peripheral digit may affect the whole action. In this sense, Eisenstein, like Rudolf Bode, was at odds with Prince Volkonsky’s anatomist and physiological view of the human body because it failed to account for instincts and reflexes. Bode’s ‘organic’ movement, or ‘natural’ movement, inevitably implicated the whole body. Nevertheless, Eisenstein identified what he called, with some irony, ‘bimechanics’ – that is, the dichotomy between conscious and reflex movement. To lift one’s hand involves a conscious decision; to let it drop is a reflex action. The relationship between the two is therefore dialectical, with Expressive Movement constantly seeking a kind of synthesis between them. There was a need both to train the will and also to harness the reflexes. Meyerhold’s insistence on the ‘recoil’ before the main movement – the bow must be drawn back before the arrow can be fired – was a classic expression of this, but so, too, was the kabuki actor on the hana-michi way through the audience towards the stage, when each forward movement of a few steps was interrupted by a pause, a leaning backward as if recoiling from the objective. In more practical terms this implied that movement should be characteristic of the circumstances in which it took place, which distinguished it from mime and from identification with the role, rather as Tretyakov taught that speech should be neither rhetorical nor conversational, but that the actor should ‘speak’. This enabled a range of movements to be available, depending on the circumstances. On the one hand, movement might be eccentric and grotesque: A gesture turns into gymnastics, rage is expressed through a somersault, exultation through a salto-mortale, lyricism by a run along a tightrope. The grotesque of this style permitted leaps from one type of expression to another, as well as unexpected intertwinings of the two expressions.23 On the other hand, it might be performed with machine-like efficiency: imagine strangling someone with the unemotional efficiency of a boa constrictor. Eisenstein suggested that there were three types of gesture which the actor must understand. Gesture might be rhetorical, as the orator’s banging his fist on the lectern is, or representative, as when pointing something out, or symbolic, as when making the sign of the cross. Beyond this the expressive actor recalls that any gesture must involve the entire body, so that such a line as ‘It’s over there’ might incorporate a recoil on the first word as the arm is drawn back, followed by the whole body leaning forward as the arm is extended and the finger pointed, on ‘there’. Thus, Expressive Movement is allied with ‘kinesics’, the way we communicate through movement, gesture and facial expression. 151

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Kinesics blends into dance, acrobatics, tumbling and other movement forms. Eisenstein himself noted: During my fox trot lessons I learned one basic thing: in contradistinction to the dances of my youth, with their strictly prescribed patterns and rotation of movement, the fox trot was a ‘free dance’, held together only by a strict rhythm, on the framework of which one could embroider any freely improvised movement.24 Even in dance, in other words, there is a dichotomy, or dialectic, between the reflex response to the rhythm and the will to improvise freely. The final element in Expressive Movement is the deformation of movement. Eisenstein opines that walking perfectly balanced and smoothly is not expressive, but walking with a limp is. He suggests that to ‘go’ is almost meaningless, but to go ‘rollingly’, or ‘stumblingly’, or quickly, or limping, is – or can be – expressive: but even then, only if it is deliberately pointed. Eisenstein and Tretyakov conclude their most persuasive essay on Expressive Movement: Maximally expressive (affective) stage movement can occur only in those instances where the actor, instead of copying exactly the result of motor processes (leg movement, grimaces, gesture), performs the motor process itself with organic correctness . . . Besides a complete exactness of the mechanical scheme, any stage movement, in order to be an attraction, must carry a certain accent. It is not enough to do a somersault correctly, to sit on a chair, to walk a wire, to make a threatening gesture. The movement must also be ‘sold’, as circus performers express it. The actor must perform an action ‘for real’, but must also ‘sell’ it to the audience, as the tightrope walker must concentrate on the ‘real’ action or else he will fall, but at the same time must acknowledge those who are watching, and either holding their breath or applauding. Eisenstein and Tretyakov make two supplementary observations: 1. Expression is always a motor element and never a static one (it is a process); and 2. In every expression, from the very mechanics of this process, one can single out the moment of ‘fixation’ – the moment when the forces are balanced, after which the expression passes over either into a real act, symbolised by the expression (victory of the reflexive thrust), or into a state of repose (victory of the voluntary stimulus). The teeth bared in fury either will bite, or the lips will close over them; the hand, with fingers crooked symbolising grasping will either grasp, or the fingers will relax and return to normal . . . Thus arises the aim not for the ‘sincerity’ of an actor’s movement, but for its imitative, mimical infectiousness.25 152

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Eisenstein and Tretyakov also considered characterisation, and here again they sought not sincerity but imitative and accurate ‘infectiousness’. Coquelin probably provided the spark when he wrote of ‘the exterior of an actor, certain details of his physical conformation, of his “architecture”’ which made him particularly suited to certain parts.26 Alexander Levshin, who played General Joffre in A Wise Man, noted that the actors in this production ‘started from an image of a character’.27 Eisenstein was concerned to match the actor’s physical ‘architecture’ to his ‘image’ of the part. It was a system which came to be known as ‘typage’. Thus, in A Wise Man, the handsome, youthful Ivan Pyriev played Gorodulin, whom Ostrovsky describes as ‘young’ and ‘a gentleman of importance’,28 but whom Tretyakov makes into a Fascist. The actor’s physical attributes were merged into an ‘image’, or a type. This enabled the actor to develop a character without resort to psychology, and the audience to recognise each character as being primarily connected with social function. Thus, Tretyakov’s Glumov was still a social climber as in Ostrovsky (though it should be noted that ‘social climber’ is itself a type), but he was also the white clown, one who considers himself superior to the gormless red clown, but who is actually riding for a fall. The dramatis personae in a production using a montage of attractions therefore fall somewhere between conventional characters and abstract ideas. ‘Typage’ derives perhaps from commedia dell’arte, which both Meyerhold and Foregger experimented with, but it also acknowledges the German Expressionist playwrights, who often preferred to give their characters descriptive epithets rather than names. The characters in Walter Hasenclever’s The Son are ‘The Son’, ‘The Tutor’, ‘The Friend’, ‘The Fraulein’, and so on, while Georg Kaiser’s hero in From Morning Till Midnight is simply ‘The Cashier’. In Tretyakov’s next play, Are You Listening, Moscow?!, the characters are ‘The Bishop’, ‘The Count’ and, where they have names, these tend also to indicate function, as with ‘Pound’, the American capitalist.

Are You Listening, Moscow?! The new season at the First Workers Theatre of the Proletkult opened in September 1923 with A Wise Man and a revival of The Mexican, now made more grotesque and eccentric. On 7 November, the repertoire was joined by Are You Listening, Moscow?!, in which the climax of the action occurs on 7 November 1923. The play thus problematises the relationship between ‘real’ life and the stage fiction. It engages with the contemporary uprising in Hamburg against the extraordinary inflation then ripping Germany apart, an uprising led by the Communist Party and in Moscow supported by Trotsky, as well as Radek, Zinoviev and others, but disapproved of by the more cautious Stalin. Tretyakov and Eisenstein inclined to the more radical view, especially after Trotsky’s endorsement of Tretyakov’s earlier play at the Meyerhold Theatre, The World Upside Down. Are You Listening, Moscow?! is set on 153

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the estate of a hereditary Count, who intends to emasculate the potential of revolutionary Communism in his fiefdom by mounting a celebratory pageant in honour of his ancestor, the first Count. The climax of the pageant will be the unveiling of a bas-relief portrait of the ‘Iron Count’. The workers who prepare this event, however, replace the bas-relief of the Count with one of Lenin, so that when the portrait is uncovered the uprising begins. ‘Are you listening, Moscow?’ they shout from the stage. ‘We’re listening,’ the audience is supposed to reply. The published version of Are You Listening, Moscow?! shows it to be almost more like a scenario than a fully written play, and it includes variations on traditional lazzi, like the artist Grubbe and the poet Grabbe squabbling over the courtesan Marga, and the tournament-like celebration, with Grabbe as a troubadour. These lazzi form quintessential Eisensteinian attractions. The script clearly juxtaposes the grotesque-satiric with the pathetic-heroic, theatricalisation with realism, through the sdvigy which continually jerk the spectator’s responses into new modes. Despite the camel upon which Marga entered in Eisenstein’s production for no very good reason, Are You Listening, Moscow?! indicates that circusisation as such had had its day: its lessons having been learned, the Futurist theatre turned to less overtly eccentric models. It, and Futurist plays which followed, however, still relied on popular forms for their fundamental theatricality. In the case of Are You Listening, Moscow?!, the underlying form was Grand Guignol, Tretyakov adapting the form into what he designated ‘agit-guignol’. It was epitomised in the murder of Shtumm, the stool pigeon. In the play, he has betrayed one of the workers to death, but apparently the dead comrade managed to write the name of his betrayer on a piece of paper. Shtumm is handed the paper on which, as he knows, only his own name can be written, and is asked to say whom the deceased has named. (Shtumm pulls the folded paper out of the envelope but he cannot unfold it.) SHTUMM: It . . . I ca . . . I can’t. I cccc . . . ALL: Shtumm! SHTUMM: Bbbut . . . HUGO: Well? ALL: Death! HUGO (signs Dick, who moves behind Shtumm): Dick! SHTUMM: It’s not . . . (Dick stabs him with a knife.)29 The action is carried out with the boa-constrictor-like efficiency demanded by Expressive Movement. While both Eisenstein and Tretyakov were interested in theatricalisation as such, Eisenstein was more inclined towards the grotesque and the eccentric, 154

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6.8  Cover of the first edition of Are You Listening, Moscow?! by Sergei Tretyakov (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). 155

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while Tretyakov was drawn to something more fact-based and agitational. He urged that ‘the theatre show . . . be replaced by the theatre blow’.30 Nevertheless, both worked in this production to maximise the dialectical clashes between the realism of the workers’ scenes and the stylisation of the scenes with the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. Even so, the play still seems more conventional than A Wise Man, firstly because Tretyakov’s script is written in a spare, compressed but accessible style, and secondly because of the tension generated by the gradual progress through the four acts of the play towards the completion of the construction upon which the bas-relief will be displayed. The climax, however, fuses theatricality and realism in a highly innovative and powerful manner, in which the triple coincidence of the date of the fictional events with the date of performance of the play itself and the climactic play-within-the play ultimately draws the audience into the action. This impression is enhanced by the way Tretyakov has conceived of the characters in terms of ‘typage’. They are less caricatures than embodiments of social functions. Thus, Shtumm, the stool pigeon, is shifty, his teeth chatter, and he twitches, but he listens ‘carefully’ and speaks ‘secretively’, and his cautious counselling is anything but that of an agent provocateur. The Count’s muscles have been developed through fencing, hunting – and embracing. And his artist and his poet in residence are designated by him as his Michelangelo and his Shakespeare in a comment which reveals more about him, the Count, than it does about Grubbe and Grabbe. Meanwhile, Kurt plays the courageous hero, even to the point of allowing himself to be shot. The production still used circus numbers – aerial stunts, tightrope walking, juggling – and, as one observer noted, ‘the principles of biomechanics were applied in the playing’.31 And other Futurist features were also present – parody, for instance, even in the treatment of the plotting and clandestine meetings of the sympathetic Communists, and satire, most obviously of the bourgeois characters. The play was structured, however, round the sometimes extended attractions. There is, for instance, the business around Marga’s legs, when she bids the men to tie her shoelaces. They crowd round her, crouching to do her bidding, grunting and admiring the shapeliness of the legs. She, meanwhile, giggles and squirms, protests that someone’s moustache is tickling her calves, and then, in Eisenstein’s direction, she places her other boot on the Count’s head in the pose of a triumphant big game hunter. A little later, when she tries to get the Communist, Kurt, to kiss her leg, he refuses. She is outraged, but he spits on her leg. She grabs a whip and strikes Kurt. The finale is an attraction which contains its own smaller attractions, such as the poet in armour and on stilts who, at a critical moment, comes clattering to the ground; the procession of dignitaries; the ‘plastic ballet’, an ironic glance at ‘official’ culture, perhaps, undermined when the dancers form a hammer and a sickle 156

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‘apparently accidentally’; the ridiculous doggerel of the celebratory ballad; and the final dénouement. The audience, the ‘material’ of the production, was clearly energised. Eisenstein reported: Tretyakov has neatly formulated something that I was planning to write in Izvestiya concerning this year’s repertory – ‘the subject of the play’ is not in the play but in the audience – the play only ‘includes’ moments necessary to the objective of the production and which are put before the spectator ‘to achieve the condensation of the necessary emotional effect’ . . . Of course he said it better.32 Later Eisenstein described the concrete results of this approach: In the audience spectators leaped from their seats. There were shouts: ‘Over there, over there! The Count is escaping! Grab him!’ A colossal student from a workers’ university, leaping to his feet, shouted at the cocotte: ‘What are you fussing about? Grab her,’ accompanying these words with a salty curse. When the cocotte was killed on the stage and shoved downstairs, he swore with satisfaction, adding, ‘She had it coming.’ This was said so forcefully that a lady in furs sitting next to him could stand it no longer. She jumped up and blurted in fright: ‘Good heavens! What is going on? They’ll be at it here, too,’ and ran for the exit. Every killing of a Fascist was drowned in applause and shouts. It was reported that a military man, sitting at the back, pulled out his revolver and aimed it at the cocotte, but his neighbours made him see sense. This fervour affected even the stage. Extras in the stage crowd, students . . . placed there for decoration, unable to hold back, joined in the assault on the installation. They had to be dragged back by their legs.33 There is no doubt that this production was tighter and more satisfying than A Wise Man. Alexei Gvozdev asserted that Are You Listening, Moscow?! ‘was, and in the history of revolutionary theatre will always remain, a magnificent model’, adding that In this production, Eisenstein sharply and decisively dissociated himself from the old theatre and its methods, be they the hallowed traditions of the Alexandrinsky, of Stanislavsky or of the fairy tales of opera and ballet. He borrowed the methods of the circus and the music hall and structured them in accordance with Meyerhold’s ideas, driving them to a convincing artistic and agitational limit, beyond which beckoned the destruction of the old theatre and the formation of the new.34 Eisenstein himself seemed to agree: ‘In Are You Listening, Moscow?! I used fundamentally technical means in trying to realize theatrical illusions with 157

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mathematical calculations. This was the first success of the new theatrical effects.’35 An objectively conceived and rehearsed performance had provoked a powerfully emotional response.

Gas Masks The final production of the First Workers Theatre of the Proletkult was Tretyakov’s Gas Masks, first staged on 24 February 1924 at the Kursky Voksal gasworks, and later published in the LEF journal. This strange choice of venue was the result of Tretyakov and Eisenstein’s desire to bring a new kind of direct realism into their work, furthering the ‘realism’ amid the Cubism and grotesquerie of The Mexican. In fact, the initially sympathetic director of the gasworks became increasingly worried by the venture and in the end only allowed three performances there. The production was only performed seven times in all. Gas Masks, which was based on an actual incident, told the story of a corrupt factory manager who has spent money earmarked for the purchase of gas masks on strong drink for himself. When a gas pipe springs a leak, there are no gas masks for those who can repair the damage and consequently they have to work in poisonous conditions. By working three-minute shifts without protection, the workers save the plant, and with it their own livelihoods. This simple narrative is complicated by the personal story of the Director and his sickly son, who defies him and insists on helping the workers. He dies as a result and the father, recognising his own guilt, begs to be arrested. By performing this story in a real gasworks, both theatricality and ‘reality’ were brought urgently into question. Does not a play’s ‘reality’ lie in its theatricality? As the Komsomols (young Communists) leapt athletically over the factory benches, at what level was the audience expected to respond? The play was a melodrama, an essentially non-real form which works best as fantasy, but here the action was surrounded by genuine turbines, an enormous black gas tank, spidery catwalks and glistening, revolving machinery. As the play proceeded, actual workers went about their business around the stage and the audience, who were seated on wooden benches. For most, it seems that the undeniable realism of the setting, the weird, artificial lighting and the actors’ lack of make-up all contributed to the ‘reality’ overwhelming the theatricality. Tretyakov was happy that, inevitably in this setting, there were fewer circus turns: for him, the production approached ‘industrial art’, even though he still wondered whether it was not ‘too aesthetic’. But Gas Masks was still structured round a montage of attractions, as when, with the Director, precariously perched on the top of a ladder, watching, Vaska entered, intent on destroying the ikons. But he was pursued by Valkyrie-like ikon-wielding women, who set about him with their holy placards, smashing them to bits in the process. ‘But 158

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who did the lightning actually strike,’ Vaska wonders, ‘me or God?’36 Other attractions include the attack on the Director by one of the workers who is choking from the gas fumes, Grigory Alexandrov as an old woman, the singing of the Komsomol choir, and of course the setting itself, the hissing gas and factory hooters. Moreover, most of the characters were still rooted in their function, not just those without names, like the Director of the Factory and the Engineer, but even the named ones, like Dudin, the worker correspondent. This was an attempt to create a show which would not only allow for an emotional response but also provide an opportunity for rational criticism. It was probably not successful, not least because of the disruption of the gasworks itself and the pervasive smell of gas, and Eisenstein himself regarded it as something of a fiasco. The questions it raised about ‘factuality’ and illusion were never fully resolved, partly because this play was given so few performances, and partly because neither author nor director really followed it up. For Tretyakov, it led towards a literature of fact, or at least towards seeking a way for literature or art to intervene in real life. For Eisenstein it led directly to film. Nevertheless, this play contains more than is implied by this. Pravda printed a letter from one audience member who suspected its possible significance: ‘I see this as the first play of its kind,’ this spectator wrote. ‘The play gives one a great shot of energy. It’s not a rest, and it’s good that it’s not . . . When you left, you stood stronger on your feet.’37 And the American poet Babette Deutsch, then visiting Moscow for its theatres, wrote: The play was extremely crude, and the acting untutored and rhetorical. But when the men, facing certain agony and possibly death, went down the shaft to save the factory, ‘their’ factory now, the minutes were tense with an actuality that no stage performance, with trained actors and modern lighting, could touch the fringe of.38 Notes  1. Eisenstein, Film Form, p. 6.  2. Zolotnitsky, The Dawns of October in the Theatre, p. 353.   3. Ibid. p. 347.   4. Ibid. p. 349.   5. Ibid. p. 352.  6. Margolin, Pervyi Rabochii Teatr Proletkulta, p. 32.  7. Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, p. 79.  8. Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein: Zamysly-Filmy-Metod, vol. 1, p. 52.  9. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 312. 10. Ibid. p. 130. 11. Posner, The Director’s Prism, p. 168. 12. Tret’yakov, Slyshish, Moskva?!, p. 187. 13. Tretyakov, ‘Text and Speech Montage’. 14. Tret’yakov, Slyshish, Moskva?!, p. 192.

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15. All quotations from A Wise Man are from an unpublished translation by Robert Leach, Angela Ermarkova and Tatyana Tretyakova. 16. Kleberg and Lövgren (eds), Eisenstein Revisited, p. 16. 17. Ibid. 18. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Avant-Garde Theatre, p. 19. 19. Ostrovsky, Easy Money and Two Other Plays, pp. 43–7. 20. This is typical of Glumov’s attempts to impress with long words. 21. Margolin, Pervyi Rabochii Teatr Proletkulta, p. 36. 22. All quotations from Eisenstein’s ‘The Montage of Attractions’ are from Taylor (ed.), Eisenstein: Writings 1922–1934, pp. 33–5. 23. Gerould, ‘Eisenstein’s Wiseman’, p. 75. 24. Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, p. 46. 25. Eisenstein and Tretyakov, ‘Expressive Movement’, in Law and Gordon, Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics, pp. 184–7. 26. Cole and Chinoy (eds), Actors on Acting, p. 197. 27. Kleberg and Lövgren (eds), Eisenstein Revisited, p. 20. 28. Ostrovsky, Easy Money and Two Other Plays, p. 14. 29. Tretyakov, Slyshish, Moskva?!, p. 17. 30. Tretyakov, ‘Teatr attraktsionov’, p. 54. 31. Margolin, Pervyi Rabochii Teatr Proletkulta, p. 42. 32. Senelick and Ostrovsky (eds), The Soviet Theater, pp. 192–3. 33. Ibid. p. 193. 34. Christie and Elliott (eds), Eisenstein at Ninety, p. 68. 35. Drain (ed.), Twentieth-Century Theatre, p. 87. 36. Tretyakov, Gas Masks, unpublished translation by Robert Leach, p. 5. 37. Pravda, 28 February 1924. 38. Leyda, Kino, p. 180.

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7

FROM WHERE TO WHERE?

NEP The first issue of LEF (Left Front of the Arts), published in March 1923, contained a theoretical article entitled ‘From Where to Where?’ by Sergei Tretyakov. After the high jinks and exuberance of Mystery Bouffe, Radlov’s popular comedy, Foregger’s machine dances, Eisenstein’s Wise Man and even Meyerhold’s Death of Tarelkin, the Russian Futurist theatre was ready to make something more substantial and more profound. LEF was essentially a journal of the period of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which was introduced at the Tenth Party Congress of March 1921. The policy aimed to bring the peasants into the new Bolshevik state and to stabilise the country after the hoped-for revolutions in western Europe had failed to materialise. ‘The goal is set’, wrote Trotsky, ‘to accommodate ourselves to the new, more prolonged period which may be necessary for the maturing of the revolution in the west.’1 Food requisitioning was brought to an end, and there were significant concessions to agriculture and to free trade. Zinoviev described it in December 1921 as ‘a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat’2 when, in Trotsky’s words, ‘a radical reconsideration of the methods of soviet power became necessary’.3 Remarkably rapidly, shops, small-scale businesses and factories sprang into being, along with restaurants, cafés, nightclubs and brothels. The NEP cafés and clubs were to some extent a resurgence of the pre-revolutionary 161

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phenomenon: little theatres like Crooked Jimmy, the Hermitage and the Grotesque mounted revue-style productions which often used material from the 1910s, though new ‘small form’ dramas, parodies and satirical sketches by writers like Nikolai Erdman were also forthcoming. The most commented-on feature of the period, however, may have been the rise of the ‘NEPmen’, spivs on the make, racketeers turning a quick rouble by dubious means, dressed up, with ostentatious cars and flash jewellery, and satirised in many Futurist works, like Tretyakov and Eisenstein’s A Wise Man. Many people, especially the young and those supporting the regime, saw NEP as a betrayal of the revolution, and their resentment helps to explain the acceptance by the end of the decade of Stalin’s second-wave revolution. For now, the state still controlled the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy – banking, heavy industry, transport and foreign trade – but the promised Utopia seemed to be postponed as social problems like crime and other issues like human sexuality edged towards the centre of public discourse. Criminals were ‘hooligans’, enemies of socialism, and the term was applied not only to rebellious young men, but also to ‘hooligan poets’, especially Esenin and Mayakovsky. The concerns were crystallised in the notorious incident in Chubarov Alley in September 1926 when a gang of youths brutally raped a young woman in Leningrad. The case ignited a furore in the press and led to the execution of five of the ‘hooligans’ in January 1927. ‘Chubarovets’ has remained a term of abuse ever since.

LEF But NEP also saw the end of the war against what some militant Bolsheviks called ‘bourgeois’ art, at least temporarily. Indeed, with NEP, Futurism had a new burst of life, symbolised in the inauguration of LEF. The journal’s progenitor was MAF (Moscow Association of Futurists, or International (Mezhdunarodnaya) Association of Futurists), a publishing enterprise established by Alexei Kruchenykh and others in 1922. Under NEP new private and co-operative publishing ventures were permitted. However, it soon became apparent that most of what was being published was either worthless trivia or anti-Soviet propaganda, or both, and Gosizdat, the state publishing company, found itself forced to counter by subsidising serious left-wing writing. This included, however reluctantly, supporting the hooligan journal LEF, even after Trotsky dismissed the Futurists in Literature and Revolution in 1924. Most of the active Futurists collaborated in the new venture, which was led by Mayakovsky, Aseyev, Tretyakov, Osip Brik, Boris Kushner, Boris Arvatov and Nikolai Chuzhak. Committed to the journal, but less involved, were figures including Eisenstein, Rodchenko, Kruchenykh, Igor Terentiev, Boris Pasternak, Yuri Tynyanov, Viktor Shklovsky and Dziga Vertov. Mayakovsky, as the most prominent Futurist, was named as editor, though Brik and Kushner 162

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seem to have been the most energetic on the editorial side. Nevertheless, Mayakovsky, in his brief autobiography, records for 1923: ‘We organise LEF. LEF equals coverage of great social themes through all of Futurism’s resources.’4 He also wrote in a poem at this time: We are Communists, in that, rooted in today, we peer beyond the rim of tomorrow,       and drag it our way.5 The history of LEF is the history of the struggle of the avant-garde to drag the future their way. This enterprise involved the need to accommodate, and indeed to promulgate, Communism. The alliance, however, was uneasy. The LEF Futurists’ vision was primarily ethical and thus not the same as the Communists’ primarily economic ideal, though their hopes overlapped in important areas. Perhaps the relaxation associated with NEP enabled co-­existence to continue as both avant-garde and political victors stretched their wings and tried to fly. Differences were less clear at this early stage, even though the Futurists were constantly attacked by more conventional artistic and cultural groups, with and for whom the Communists felt more sympathy. Trotsky’s view may have been disdainful, but it was more sympathetic than most Communists’: ‘The problems raised by the theorists of the “Lef” group about art and a machine industry, about art which does not embellish life, but forms it . . . are all problems which are extremely significant and interesting from the point of view of building a Socialist culture.’ But he added: ‘Unfortunately, the “Lef” colours these problems by a Utopian sectarianism.’6 It was a reservation not without foundation, perhaps, since the Futurists’ focus on form contrasted with the self-styled proletarian writers’ emphasis, shared by most Communists, on the content of any artistic production. ‘From Where to Where?’ Tretyakov’s essay ‘From Where to Where?’ tracks the history of Russian Futurism and projects it forward to possible futures. Accepting that in 1913 it may have been justifiable to regard the Futurists as ‘charlatan-acrobats’, he suggests that with the production of Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe Futurism had grown up. By now (1923), he argues, the work of Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh and others demonstrates that Futurism is not a settled dogma, but rather ‘a revolutionary ferment that without respite impels us towards creativity, towards the search for ever newer forms’. Futurism’s implacable hatred of ‘yesterday’, which explained for example the face-painting of a decade earlier, remained. According to Tretyakov, Futurism had never preached absolute aesthetic values, but had created artistic flexibility because it aimed to forge 163

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7.1  Sergei Tretyakov in 1923. the ‘new human being’. It was the Revolution which had crystallised Futurism, driving its members towards agitational productions, march songs, and so on, thus bringing art into everyday life. In other words, Futurism had found a purpose. Cubism gave way to Constructivism. Constructivism emerged in 1921 when Rodchenko, Popova, Stepanova and other fine artists decided to stop making ‘fine art’ and to use their expertise to create utilitarian objects for use in the real world. Their productions graduated from works like Rodchenko’s hanging constructions, made from a single piece of plywood cut and built into a relief-like sculpture which hovered between two and three dimensions but which were essentially decorative, to something more practical. They turned to the theatre because it provided them with a testing ground for their ideas. Thus, Popova designed a moving, windmill-like structure for Meyerhold’s production of The Magnanimous Cuckold with the actors clad in prototypes of working clothes. She moved on to the use of real objects in The World Upside Down. Meanwhile Stepanova created a series 164

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of smaller constructions, almost like items of circus apparatus, distributed about the stage, for Meyerhold’s The Death of Tarelkin. These stage creations, partially abstract but clearly made to conform to Meyerhold’s demand for ‘machines for acting’, were above all functional and efficient. But they were more than this. Constructivist stage design freed the stage from naturalist illusionism, from the pictorial Romantic backcloth and from the Renaissance’s fixation with perspective. Now the stage could be itself, the space which enabled Aeschylus and Shakespeare, not to mention the players of the commedia dell’arte and the fairground booth. It sanctioned a theatre which is neither wholly real nor wholly of the imagination, but is rather where the real and the imagined co-exist and interact to produce something which is completely unreal, completely of the imagination, yet is completely rooted in and concerned with the real world. It freed the impossible paradox which is theatre: with Constructivism, the stage is allowed simply to be a stage, and then the play can be simply a play. In ‘From Where to Where?’ Tretyakov implicitly acknowledged this. He

7.2  Alexander Rodchenko, Hanging Construction. 165

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argued that agit-art was only a temporary ‘semi-solution’ because it still required the suspension of disbelief. The new Futurism was to be functional, its aim to organise emotion. Analysis of form and content was replaced by an examination of how the material of the work was treated by devices in order to fulfil this function, how art could become a social force which would expose the ‘everyday-life quagmire’ dialectically. Art was process. Futurists, aiming to create the new ‘person-worker’, no longer ‘owned’ their artworks, for art was to be integrated into life. Tretyakov suggested that in this way Futurism ran parallel to Communism, and indeed that finally it would be replaced by Communism.7 Boris Arvatov divided the Constructivists’ approach into three: ‘the pure material, the method of working, and the purpose of the product’,8 and it was this dialectical triad which was to inform Futurist theatre. The work’s material would be treated through the artist’s devices which would be governed by the function. Each one of these could be regarded as thesis, or antithesis, or synthesis, and each synthesis became a new thesis: the material of the artwork is contradicted by the devices employed by the artist which produce the function; or, the function may be controlled by the material through the creation of certain devices; or, the devices may challenge the function to modify the material. This formula – material, devices, function – is at the heart of Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’, and is found in other, later progressive modernist approaches to the theatre, for example in Bertolt Brecht’s theory of ‘alienation’. It was this theatre which Arvatov called on to become ‘a factory turning out people qualified for life’.9 Futurist Performance in the Mid-1920s Meanwhile, the LEF journal did not sell well, Gosizdat became impatient with it, and its editors found themselves at odds with one another – Mayakovsky and Brik wanted a more pluralistic policy, while Kushner, Chuzhak and others demanded a close focus on a defined programme. The seventh and last issue of LEF appeared in January 1925, and though it was resurrected in 1927 as Novyi LEF, its days were numbered. Tretyakov’s 1923 stocktaking of Futurism in ‘From Where to Where?’ marked a decisive point in the history of Russian Futurist theatre. In the following winter Foregger’s theatre burned down, Ferdinandov’s theatre virtually closed, Lyubov Popova died, Boris Arvatov became ill and was confined to a sanatorium, and Tretyakov himself took up a nine-month appointment in China. In January, Lenin died. It was at this time, too, that several Futurist theatre practitioners moved into film, including Sergei Eisenstein and the leaders of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. The cinema held obvious attractions, apart from the fact of its place in popular culture. It offered both the possibility of formal exploration 166

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through the ‘camera eye’, associated with Dziga Vertov, and the employment of highly managed montage techniques. Their films deliberately rejected the cinema’s conventional romantic storytelling, replacing it with sequences of ‘attractions’, some of which parodied romantic films, but most of which used a kind of documentary form, with images shot in provocative ways and arranged to create a ‘different’ reality. This is not the place to discuss early Soviet Futurist films, but even a brief list of titles shows the impressive range of cinematic creations: The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924, directed by Lev Kuleshov), Kino-Eye (1924, Dziga Vertov), The Adventures of Oktyabrina (1924, Kozintsev and Trauberg), Strike (1925, Eisenstein) and Battleship Potemkin (1925, also Eisenstein). It is worth noting, too, that Mayakovsky and Tretyakov were both attracted to film, though with varying degrees of success. Mayakovsky’s 1927 filmscript How Do You Do? was accepted by Kuleshov, who cast him alongside the brilliant Alexandra Khokhlova in the main parts but was then denied funding. His next script, Forget the Hearthside, was also accepted, this time by Kozintsev and Trauberg, but it too was shelved, though Mayakovsky was to transform it into the stage comedy The Bedbug. Meanwhile Tretyakov returned from China with a filmscript which Eisenstein was to direct, but this too was refused funding. In 1927 Tretyakov became drama consultant to the Georgian State Film Studio in Tbilisi, and his successful films, often pseudo-documentaries, included Eliso (1928, directed by Nikolai Shengelaya), Salt for Svenetia (1930, Mikhail Kalatozov), Khabardia (1931, Mikhail Chiaureli) and A Song About Heroes (1932, Yoris Ivens). The years immediately after LEF foundered and the theatre lost many of its most prominent practitioners actually saw the final, most dazzling flowering of Russian Futurist theatre. In four years it realised this still rarely surpassed achievement in almost every form of dramatic presentation it attempted, including epic theatre, classical revival, absurdist drama and satirical comedy.

Roar China! and Epic Theatre On 23 January 1926, Sergei Tretyakov’s Roar China! was presented at the Meyerhold Theatre in a production by Vasily Federov. An extension of earlier Futurist epic drama – Mystery Bouffe, Stenka Razin, The World Upside Down – Roar China! was the most widely performed of all Futurist plays. After the Moscow production, it was seen across the Soviet Union, including performances in the Ukrainian, Georgian, Tartar, Uzbek and Armenian languages. It was first performed in Germany in 1929, in Austria in 1930, and in China and New York in the same year. It was produced in England (Manchester) in 1931, Australia and Poland in 1932, Japan in 1933, Argentina in 1935, Norway in 1936, Canada in 1937 and India in 1942. In 1944 a group of Jews in Czestochowa concentration camp put on Roar China! in Yiddish, 167

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and when Shanghai was liberated in 1949, it was revived in the theatre there. The New York Guild Theater production of 1930 made a particular impact, with striking sets designed by Lee Simonson and with Chinese actors specially imported from New York’s Chinatown. Herbert Biberman, who directed the production, remarked, ‘I do not exaggerate when I say that the experience of work on this play made me a politically conscious and progressive person.’10 Tretyakov insisted on the factual accuracy of the play, which tells how an American business representative drowned after an argument with a local ferry boatman near where a British gunboat, Cockchafer, was anchored. The Cockchafer’s captain was so outraged he insisted on the ferryman being executed. When he could not be found, the captain demanded that two other Chinese be executed, or else he would bombard the whole town. Two innocent Chinese were put to death. Tretyakov stuck to these facts, though of course his sophisticated montage gave the work a tendentious edge. But Tretyakov’s picture was not so biased as some commentators suggested. Chinese life is not presented as the picturesque fantasy of the orientalist. This is the eating-house on the wharf: Several boatmen are sitting on benches at long rough tables, eating broth out of wooden bowls. They pick out the solid bits with chopsticks, and then noisily drink off the juice. At the hearth stands the cook, naked to the waist and wearing a coarse apron, attending to the rice which is being steamed over pans of boiling water.11 The Chinese in the play are shown as often venal, superstitious and easily overawed, and there is no blinking at matters like the sale of child prostitutes. The western characters’ haughty imperialism and racism may also be a not unfair depiction in the age of events like the Amritsar massacre. Vasily Federov’s production mixed elements of realism with guignol exaggeration and Biomechanical dynamism. Maria Babanova’s pathetic Chinese boy was especially remembered, and despatches purportedly from the front of China’s struggle for liberation were read during some performances. The design by Sergei Efimenko blended Constructivism with realism: ‘above all, the stage must not be decorated with pretentious curved roofs, screens, dragons or lanterns,’ Tretyakov warned.12 Accordingly, Efimenko gave the Chinese scenes a warmth which sharply contrasted with the pristine gunboat, where even the gramophone was bright white. The stage was divided into levels – the deck and the bridge on the ship, the wharf and the water itself, a large tank, for the Chinese scenes. Basil Dean was an unlikely British spectator at one performance: At the back of the stage is a vast girder mast, and what purports to be the quarterdeck of the British gunboat, Cockchafer. At certain moments this 168

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7.3  Roar China!: the gunboat. contrivance is made to advance and to swing the muzzles of two large guns over the audience with menacing effect.13 Dean also describes with amused paternalism how the captain ‘strides about his quarter-deck smoking an enormous briar pipe’, not noticing that he, like the other characters, is presented as a type designed to deflect the viewer away from psychologism and towards Tretyakov’s more significant social truth. It is worth noticing, too, that the Chinese are also presented as types – the Old Boatman, the Student, the Procuress, the Nationalist Monk, and so on. The Stoker, the voice of the revolution, becomes a sort of Scarlet Pimpernel, appearing only occasionally, unexpectedly and briefly. Yet though both groups 169

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are conceived as ‘types’, it is clear that the western imperialists and the Chinese have nothing in common. The focus seesaws between them. Robert Russell asserts that ‘the constant shifting becomes disorienting’,14 but this destabilisation is what Tretyakov was surely aiming for. The play is built through a series of attractions, from the foxtrot danced by Ashlay and Cordelia (‘You foxtrot divinely, Mr Ashlay. It’s just like swimming’) through the clownish comedy with the soda water siphon, and the Captain’s sudden appearance ‘transformed into complete parade uniform’, the epaulettes of which ‘give him the appearance of a gilt idol’,15 to the awful and poignant hanging of the Boy and the projection of revolutionary slogans in the final scene. These are montaged to create a cumulative effect, typified in scenes such as the death of Ashlay when the focus shifts repeatedly from the boat to the wharf. Equally effective is the montage in the scene on the gunboat in the evening, when first searchlights revolve ominously, then the laughing, dressed-up and ‘much bejewelled’ westerners appear: each addresses the audience directly, they drink and flirt, but their brittle revels are interrupted when the Boy drops the bowl of fruit, and the sombre Chinese delegation arrives. The ‘realism’ is further undermined by Tretyakov’s emphasis on ‘showing’ throughout the action, typified in the several interventions by the Journalist with his camera. When the boatmen clamour for his custom, he stops to photograph them, and later he thinks ‘it’ll be quite a scoop’ if he photographs the hanged bodies. He approaches the place of execution, ‘focussing the camera, and moving people out of the way with his foot’.16 The death of Ashlay is seen from two perspectives: first the Captain and his Lieutenant watch it through binoculars from the gunboat, then it is enacted in front of the Chinese on the wharf. These epic features are reinforced by the play’s concentration first on groups of people rather than on individuals, and then on the future, notably in the interventions by the Stoker, whose final words carry hope: ‘I may fall, but ten will rise in my place.’17 The function of this epic theatre is not to evoke a coolly rational audience such as Bertolt Brecht sought, but rather to arouse the emotions of the audience. In 1923 Tretyakov had looked for an audience which would be a ‘firmly established collective which interacts with the play’. This would demand ‘the transfer of attention from the purely narrative aspects of the play to the methods of construction’, and ‘the invention of the best methods for the organisation of a group into a cooperating collective’.18 To this end, Roar China! is split into nine ‘links’, each with several episodes, which build into a dynamic whole with the intention of provoking a response. That response is likely to be emotional, even if the emotion is anger in a bourgeois spectator. In 1933 Tretyakov described the response he sought from more sympathetic viewers: ‘The problem of the playwright is to lift the playgoer out of his equilibrium so that he will not leave serene, but ready for action.’19 Walter and Ruth Meserve, 170

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after noting a production of this play in Zurich in 1975, wondered ‘why Roar China!, of the thousands of propaganda plays, has lasted so long, heedless of time, space, nationality and race’. They gave their own answer: What began as a simple documentary drama became an expression of human feeling and abused human dignity throughout the world, strong enough to demand the attention of people who at various times and in many places felt themselves bound by sympathetic emotions.20 Igor Terentiev’s Theatre Roar China! was presented at the Meyerhold Theatre in Moscow, but it was not directed by Meyerhold himself. He was occupied with preparing his production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector which, when it was seen later in 1926, became one of his greatest achievements, and aroused more comment, criticism and adulation perhaps than any other single production in the twentieth century. But many Futurists, while admiring Meyerhold’s work, nevertheless felt that Gogol’s nineteenth-century text had been reconstituted for the Soviet age, when for them it should have been deconstructed. The job of deconstructing this classic fell to Futurism’s wildest and most daring director, Igor Terentiev. Terentiev had been an active member of Company 41° in Tiflis after the Revolution, along with Kruchenykh and the Zdanevich brothers, whose aim, announced with typical Futurist understatement, was nothing less than ‘to put the world on a new axis’.21 They upheld zaum, which Terentiev proclaimed ‘a grandiose abomination’ which, he said, was ‘anal’, a concept deliberately antithetical to western intellectual tradition, and therefore quintessentially Russian. Scatology was identified as an ineradicable national characteristic, and would feature in Terentiev’s later work. Kruchenykh recorded how he and Terentiev had worked together at this time on a ‘kaka-anal dictionary’.22 Terentiev wrote a brief biography, Kruchenykh the Grand, in which he argued that Kruchenykh was the first Futurist poet, ahead of the usually more highly regarded Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, as well as a similar biography of Ilya Zdanevich called A Record of Tenderness. Terentiev admired Zdanevich’s dras, pointing to their likeness to puppet drama, and applauding the anal eroticism by which their harshness is sometimes softened. Nevertheless, at this time Terentiev appeared to be little more than another Futurist poet, who published four slim volumes of poetry in Tiflis, employing comparatively obscure forms of zaum. Terentiev also cared for the look of the poem on the page, positioning letters, or whole words, at right angles to the rest of the poem, eliding words which used the same letters, and often enlarging those that were used in two successive words. He was also fond of mixing different fonts. He explained his use of zaum in a way which seems to foreshadow Antonin Artaud’s Theatre 171

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of Cruelty: ‘In zaum one can howl, squeak, ask for the unaskable, and touch unapproachable subjects.’23 Taking a familiar Futurist position, he argued that the laws of poetic language were different from the laws of language as a tool for everyday communication, that art was distinct from everyday life. But there was a relationship, he believed. This was perhaps to be found in what he called ‘fact’, which seems to have resembled somewhat Shklovsky’s stone: a poem about a stone succeeds when the reader appreciates anew the stoniness of the stone. For Terentiev, the ‘naked fact’ was to be appreciated above ‘the vomit of thought’ or ‘the haemorrhoids of theory’. ‘Devoid of all sense, useless, vicious, nondescript, uncomfortable, simple, tale-telling, BARE FACT,’ he wrote; ‘The impact of a fact on your thoughts gives birth to a convulsive squeeze of the FACT in the vice of the soft brain matter!’24 He suggested, half playfully perhaps, that the Futurists’ work showed that history was reaching the point of madness, and that when the priests, the capitalists, the generals and even the proletarians had been and gone, the world would belong to atheists, idiots, beggars and layabouts. Then would be the time of ‘byzpyzy’, a zaum word coined by Zdanevich which seems to suggest something like a grotesque comedy, a kind of ridiculous theatrical show. For Terentiev was already in 1919 deeply interested in theatre. He admired Victory Over the Sun, he wrote reviews of plays and dance works, and he was involved with Zdanevich’s dras. He noted, for instance, how the third dra escapes ‘Ibsen-like unresolvedness’. But he had no intention even then of taking all this intellectual flagellation too seriously. On the cover of his poetry collection, 17 Nonsensical Instruments, he noted: ‘There are no misprints in this book.’ Inside, the first page contained an apology for the misprints in the book. This teasing of the reader also hints at that gap which has been noticed by some postmodernist critics between what one sees and what one comprehends, and suggests postmodernism was not wholly postmodern. At the end of the book Terentiev declares: ‘Never miss a chance to say something stupid.’ By late 1920 the economic situation in Tiflis had become so bad that the outsiders were leaving. Terentiev went via Baku back to St Petersburg, now Petrograd. Here he drifted towards the Museum of Artistic Culture, which opened officially in 1921 but by 1924 had transmogrified into the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK). At its head, as director, was Kasimir Malevich, who was also directly responsible for the Department of Formal and Theoretical Painting. The staff at the Institute also included Mikhail Matyushin as head of the Organic Culture Department and Vladimir Tatlin as head of the Material Culture Department. Terentiev took up a post as director of the Phonology Section, studying systems of sound in relation to language.

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Deconstructing the Classics But he was soon engaged with theatre as well. In 1924 he presented his radically reworked version of Ostrovsky’s much-loved children’s classic The Snow Maiden at the Agit Studio of Viktor Shimanovsky. As perhaps only a revolutionary Futurist artist could, Terentiev made The Snow Maiden into an ‘anti-religious agit-passion play’ for which Ostrovsky’s original seems to have been barely even a pretext. Performed by students, who intoned their lines rather than spoke them, and danced nimbly to the jangling accompaniment of a percussion band, the production proved popular with audiences and critics alike. Zhizn iskusstvo’s reviewer, for example, wrote on 20 May 1924: This is a striking, colourful lubok [folk woodcut], with energetic folk dances and songs, which alternate with foxtrot-like motifs. It rouses the enthusiasm of the spectators and is clearly a brilliant show.25 The foxtrot motif would reappear in Terentiev’s work. For now he was rewarded with a production of the acclaimed account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days Which Shook the World. Terentiev made his own adaptation, which he called John Reed after the name of the American author of the book, and he staged it as a series of sharp, more or less self-contained scenes, montaged together, at the Red Theatre in what was now Leningrad. This production, too, was well received, and one reviewer spoke of ‘the joie de vivre of the young performers’.26 Terentiev was now offered a production of Konstantin Trenev’s play The Pugachev Rebellion at the Leningrad Academic Theatre. Trenev was a wellestablished novelist who had written little for the stage. But he had embraced the revolution, and this play was an attempt to widen his popularity. It was accepted for production in Moscow by no less a company than Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre, whose first ‘Soviet’ play it was to be. The Leningrad production therefore needed to be impressive, positive and at least the equal of the Art Theatre’s. In the event it was none of these things. ‘A disaster’ would be a more accurate term to describe what happened. Part of the problem was that Terentiev had again attempted to break the play into units which he then tried to montage into something sharply dialectical, after the manner of Eisenstein. But the play’s realistic literary qualities simply refused to permit such a reworking. Pugachev was an eighteenth-century Cossack who led a famous but unsuccessful insurrection against Catherine the Great. Russia’s greatest writer, Alexander Pushkin, had written a prose history of the revolt and this literary history weighed heavily on the way the tale was regarded. Trenev’s version fully respected this, but Terentiev wanted a play about rebellion and ‘pugachevishness’ rather than the bourgeois conception he felt Trenev’s play indulged. He was interested in creating ‘the poetry of the 173

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masses’, crowds of rebels spilling out joyously onto the stage, claiming their rights. He made Pugachev into a comic figure, almost a clown, a garrulous if charming rogue who was, however, also a pawn whirled about by the contending forces of history. This simply failed to fit Trenev’s sternly socialist realist character creation. There were other problems, too. For instance, the actor Igor Ilinsky, who was cast as Pugachev, remembered how he was asked to leap from a high church spire down onto a snowy square, represented by the white stage cloth – ‘à la Douglas Fairbanks’, as Ilinsky put it in his memoirs. At the same time, big black crows were to fly overhead – stuffed birds on wires. As Ilinsky prepared to jump, one of the crows turned belly up and flew across the sky apparently on its back, waggling its legs ridiculously at the heavens. Those in the auditorium dissolved into near-hysterics. In the end, actors and stage crew alike rebelled, and the production collapsed in May 1925 before the public had had a chance to see it. At this point, Terentiev moved to the House of the Press in Leningrad, where there was a small theatre seating only two hundred spectators. He invited students of Pavel Filonov, who had designed scenes for the 1913 production of Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy, and who had also been working at the Institute of Artistic Culture, to decorate the interior of the building, and their weird, Suprematist and Futurist paintings adorned the walls of the foyer and the corridors. According to one witness, ‘On the canvases, in delicate, transparent colours were portrayed lilac- and rose-coloured cows, and people from whom the layers of skin had seemingly been removed by a wonderful surgeon. Veins, arteries and internal organs were distinctly visible. Bright green shoots of trees and grasses sprouted through the figures.’27 Terentiev opened this theatre with a thoroughly controversial production of Vasily Andreyev’s ironically named Foxtrot about the NEP spivs, swindlers, pimps and their prostitutes to be found in the underworld of the city. Using a kind of vivid realism, or brutal naturalism, in which everything was a little larger than life, the production was constructed as a sequence of rapid scenes which exposed the seediest elements of contemporary Russian society. One scene, for example, recalled in harsh close-up the recent Chubarov Alley gang rape, and one newspaper reported spectators shouting at this brutal scene: ‘That’s enough! It’s a disgrace! Why do you show this sort of thing?’ Such a reaction was provoked by Terentiev’s use of montage, which carried with it, implicitly and inevitably, a strong dose of social criticism. People crowded to see Foxtrot, though they often seem to have watched it with a sort of horrid fascination as much as with enthusiasm. Undeterred, a few weeks later Terentiev presented his own play, A Tangled Web, which also addressed contemporary criminality. It depicted the NEP society as a sort of social quagmire in which former Civil War heroes seemed 174

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lost and broken, while the newly rich appeared ever happier to drink, party and forget the horrors. The plot of Terentiev’s play involved a gang of embezzlers purloining state funds and squandering them on food, drink and sex; if they were brought to court it was for anything but their embezzlement. It was staged deftly and included some unexpected directorial coups, such as the use of looming shadow puppets and an effective sound montage in which the voices of the actors on stage were counterpointed with harsh recorded sounds of the city. The production was sharp, funny and shocking. Terentiev’s Government Inspector A Tangled Web was followed by Terentiev’s riposte to Meyerhold, his production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector, which opened on 11 April 1927, only a few months after Meyerhold’s premiere. The contrast was telling. Where Meyerhold’s Government Inspector was elegant and stylised, Terentiev’s was clownish and nonsensical; where Meyerhold’s was sinister and full of foreboding, Terentiev’s was fast-paced and irreverent; where Meyerhold focused on Khlestakov, Terentiev focused on the Mayor; and where Meyerhold’s production was set in the opulent capital of the Empire, Terentiev’s was set in a shabby anonymous small town, miles away from anywhere. Meyerhold’s setting famously used a semi-circle of doors to hem in the acting space. Terentiev used five moveable cubicles, whose purpose was soon evident: the Mayor, on hearing the news of the imminent arrival of the Government Inspector, rushed into one, holding his stomach and undoing his trousers. Once he had locked the door he shouted his instructions from within the cubicle: Take in hand . . . (making an effort) . . . a street . . . What am I saying? Take . . . (straining) in hand a broom . . . (straining) and sweep (with relief) ooh . . . the street . . .28 Soon the other town worthies were all in cubicles too, straining away as they discussed what to do. Rudnitsky described the way the cubicles functioned: The entire set of The Government Inspector consisted of five tall parallelepipeds which were moved about within the stage area. These ‘cupboards’ or ‘crates’ were enclosed on three sides, open on one, and by manipulating them in various ways, moving them from place to place, now turning the solid black surface towards the audience, now the open side, Terentiev was able to impart flexibility and fluidity to the production’s spatial form. The unexpected application of Craig’s ‘tragic geometry’ to comic ends proved to have great potential: the action at times shrank into the narrow stage area compressed by the ‘crates’ that had been moved together, at others took over the entire stage floor, moved 175

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obliquely along the diagonal or spread out frontally. Furthermore, every one of the ‘crates’ could itself serve as a place of action – a WC, for example.29 The cubicles, which actually were closer to Constructivism than to Edward Gordon Craig’s Symbolism, also served for Khlestakov as he took first Anna, and then Maria, into one. Each knowingly discarded most of her clothes before she entered the cubicle, and the expressive moans and squeaks which emanated from behind the cubicle’s closed door indicated without ambiguity what was happening within. The costumes by a group of Filonov’s students, including Nikolai Evgrafov, Rebekka Leviton and Artur Liandsberg, were designed to further the ‘typage’, by indicating the wearer’s occupation, chief interests and obsessions. Their ‘irreverence’ towards Gogol shocked some spectators: The red, green and blue costumes for the performance . . . confuse the viewer. Apparently, Filonov’s scenic exercises, these multi-coloured costumes are meant to take The Government Inspector out of its historical framework . . . but these costumes are simply a caprice, altogether ­dilettantish, spurious, provincial and crappy.30 In fact, audiences spent so much time looking at and trying to figure out the costumes’ ‘meaning’ that they proved a distraction and were finally dropped. However, Terentiev also introduced songs (a gypsy ballad, a parody of an opera aria, as well as original music by Vladimir Kashnitsky), had stage directions read out by the characters, and included passages in foreign languages – German, French, Ukrainian, Polish and of course zaum. And when the Mayor complained of the rats, a troupe of white mice were released onto the stage. Terentiev’s ending parodied, but outshone, Meyerhold’s. Where Meyerhold had had all the characters freeze into a sculpted group when the Government Inspector finally arrived, Terentiev did the same but his Government Inspector turned out to be none other than Khlestakov himself, thereby completely turning Gogol’s play on its head. And then before the final curtain Khlestakov read out the author’s description of each character, pointing to each of them as he did so. Terentiev’s dominant idea, that of the little man’s bewilderment in facing tomorrow, was perhaps vindicated by some of the press attacks on the production: In these multi-coloured, painted, Chinese-cum-Parisian costumes which reduce decadent aestheticism in the theatre to self-sufficient snobbism, the actor performs a series of very indecent numbers . . . [Terentiev] makes the Mayor sit in a W.C., the Mayor’s wife go around in her pantaloons and another guy go about with a night potty . . . To the strains of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata Khlestakov takes his candle 176

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7.4  [Plate 12] Nikolai Evgrafov, costume design for the Postman, The Government Inspector, directed by Igor Terentiev, 1927 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). 177

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and goes into the toilet in the form of a tall, black box looking like a telephone booth. And that’s where Khlestakov perches himself with Maria Antonovna.31 Re-Act Theatre Terentiev’s final production at the Leningrad House of the Press was adapted from Sergei Semenov’s novel Natalia Torpova. This, too, was characterised by its fast pace, irony and comic fun. Everything again was slightly exaggerated for comic effect, and once again Terentiev had his actors read their stage directions. And this time he went further, stopping the action while actors read, in the third person, sections of the novel in which their character’s innermost thoughts and feelings were revealed, as it were turning up the buried subtexts. Another major innovative device which Terentiev introduced here was a huge mirror like a cinema screen which showed the audience what was not on stage. Thus, in a scene on a train, while the central character’s wife was seen in the corridor of the train, the mirror showed the husband himself in one of the compartments, chatting to another passenger, a scene which was acted offstage. The simultaneity was unexpected, dialectical and unsettling. These devices had the effect of ‘making things strange’, as Shklovsky advocated, by complicating the action and forcing the spectator to take stock. As in all Terentiev’s theatre work, a sort of alternative reality was created. The significant features of Terentiev’s theatre may be enumerated: illogicality and fragmentation; basic bodily functions; speed, collision montage and alienation. By now, Terentiev was planning a production of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a montage sequence, but this project remained unrealised. Meanwhile he wrote a kind of manifesto for his ‘Re-Act Theatre’, so called because it was a reaction against the academic theatres which dominated Russian dramatic culture, and the clear opposite of Soviet Russia’s single most prestigious company, the Moscow Art Theatre of Konstantin Stanislavsky. Indeed, Terentiev proposed to found his own company, to be called the Leningrad Anti-Art Theatre. The kernel of Terentiev’s Re-Act Theatre, however, was his detestation of what he saw as Stanislavsky’s apparent reverence for the playwright’s text. ‘Only by neglecting the text of the play can we create a great performance,’ he proclaimed, and he stated as his motto, perhaps with a nod towards Wagner’s Total Theatre: ‘Not the play, but the leitmontage.’ He also contrasted his own ‘natism’, as he called it, with the dominant mode of ‘naturalism’. Theatrical reality, he asserted, lay primarily in zaum language and illogicality. All this, of course, prefigures Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty in remarkable ways. But always with Terentiev, there was a certain frivolity, a buoyancy, a sense of fun. His was a supremely Futurist theatre.

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Oberiu Terentiev forms the link between Futurism and the Oberiuty, sometimes called the last Soviet avant-garde grouping. Alexander Vvedensky, one of Oberiu’s leading members, worked with him in the Phonological Section of Malevich’s GINKhUK in Leningrad, during which time he wrote his first play, Minim and Pozharsky, which is set after the characters have died. Like so many Futurist dramas, it plays teasingly with time. According to Graham Roberts, it ‘looks back to the heady experimentalism of early left art, and beyond that to Kruchenykh’s Futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun’.32 In fact, the Oberiuty were the direct successors to the transrational beyonsense dramas of Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov and Zdanevich. In 1925 Vvedensky met Daniil Kharms, a budding zaum poet, and the two worked with the largely student group Radix Theatre. Against ‘impressionism’ and ‘naturalism’, Radix referred to the roots of theatre, and was based in the Institute in Leningrad between 1925 and 1926. When Radix collapsed, Kharms and Vvedensky formed, first, the Left Flank Theatre, but, realising that ‘Leftism’ was aligned in Soviet minds with Trotsky, they soon became Oberiu (Association for Real Art). As such, together with Igor Bakhterev, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Evgeny Vigilansky, Boris Levin, Sergei Tsimbal and others, they presented performances in and around Leningrad over nearly two years. To distinguish themselves from the Futurists, they called members of the group chinari (‘plane trees’ – the plane tree being a symbol of regeneration, and its wood having been used for the construction of the wooden horse in Troy), though their mentors were mostly the Futurists, especially Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh. The chinari saw existence as real only insofar as it related to other existences, even if that ‘other’ was the word. Words brought things into existence in an extension, which perhaps they did not recognise, of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the sign. For them, the word made the world. As far as drama was concerned, it too only existed in relation to its performers and its audiences. In this sense, their drama made new worlds. Typically in their plays, words became performative and the action consisted of alogical collisions which defied reason, naturalism and conventional ‘meaning’. Into the new world created by such actions the spectator sometimes intruded, as in Kharms’s 1927 Comedy of the City of St Petersburg when a character on stage asks a member of the audience for his opinion. The spectator equivocates, is harangued and eventually leaves the theatre. Characterisation in this theatre depends not on the Stanislavskian ‘superobjective’ and ‘given circumstances’, but on performance itself – sound, tempo, rhythm. Character, in other words, was what was performed. Outside the theatre, Kharms often ‘performed’ himself as an English country gentleman in a tweed suit and smoking a briar pipe, a late manifestation perhaps of the impulse which drove Burlyuk and Larionov to 179

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paint their faces. Rejecting Meyerhold’s theatricality – for Meyerhold was part of the theatrical ‘establishment’, he had ‘done nothing’33 – the Oberiuty sought a theatre which presented rather than represented, an Artaudian merging of life and theatre in which reality as we know it fades, or rather flows. This was the final and clearest example, perhaps, of ‘drama as such’. In 1927 and 1928 the Oberiuty appeared in different venues before students, soldiers and others presenting their unpredictable show, which included readings, dance, circus tricks and a conjuror. Their most notorious performance was Three Hours Left which took place on 24 January 1928 at the Leningrad House of the Press amid the remnants of Terentiev’s set for The Government Inspector. The first part consisted of poetry readings: Konstantin Vaginov read while the ballet dancer Militsa Popova performed, Vvedensky read while riding a bicycle about the stage, Kharms sat on the top of one of Terentiev’s cubicles smoking his pipe, and Zabolotsky appeared as a military veteran with a large trunk. Kharms’s play Elizaveta Bam was performed in the second part, and the third part consisted of a showing of Film Number One: The Meat-Grinder, which was constructed from discarded film clips and was accompanied by a three-piece band consisting of piano, drums and double bass. The evening concluded with Vvedensky chairing a noisy debate.

Elizaveta Bam The most significant of these elements was probably Elizaveta Bam. This elusive work is divided into nineteen jagged, disparate, discrete ‘bits’, each with its own title – ‘Pastoral bit’, ‘Chinarish bit’, ‘realistic melodrama’, ‘physiological inspiration’, ‘operatic ending’, and so on – which suggests an often-parodic performance style. The plot ‘glimmers, so to speak, behind the back of the action. The dramatic plot is replaced by a scenic plot which arises spontaneously from all the elements of our spectacle.’34 It is a compilation – or montage – of discrepant scenes and sequences which function like Eisenstein’s ‘attractions’. The first ‘bit’ is ‘realistic melodrama’: it is both comic and terrifying, reminding the modern spectator of Kafka or Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. Elizaveta Bam enters: ‘Now, I’m afraid, the door will open and they’ll come in . . . They’ll definitely come in, to catch me and wipe me from the face of the earth. (Quietly) What have I done! What have I done! If only I knew . . .’ There is a banging on the door. Two sinister, clown-like Secret Police-type intruders, Pyotr Nikolayevich and Ivan Ivanovich, demand to enter, threatening to break the door down if Elizaveta resists.35 Contrast this with the ‘Chinarish bit’, when Elizaveta enters, running round the stage absurdly and chanting: I’ve broken away from everywhere! Broken away and started to run! 180

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Broken away and, so, run! MUMMY (running after Eliz Bam): Sup some soup? DADDY: Sup some meat? (Running) MUMMY: Sup some flour?    (Entracte-cataract) IVAN IVANOVICH: Sup some swede? ELIZAVETA BAM: Sup some mutton? DADDY: Sup some rissoles? MUMMY: Oh, my legs are getting tired! IVAN IVANOVICH: Oh, my arms are getting tired! ELIZAVETA BAM: Oh, my scissors are getting tired! DADDY: Oh, my springs are getting tired!    (Behind stage a choir sings to the tune of the overture.) The climax of the play comes in the fifteenth bit, ‘balladic inspiration’, in which ‘the battle of the heroes’ between Daddy and Pyotr Nikolayevich takes place. The challenges are made in zaum: Kurybeer daramour din-dee-ree slakteer paka-radagou    hey-ell Daddy strikes down Pyotr Nikolayevich with his rapier, Pyotr Nikolayevich is carried out, only to reappear later and accuse Elizaveta Bam of murdering him. His murder, it transpires, is the crime for which he came to arrest her in the first place. Even defeat and death in this world are meaningless, at least for those with power, for the murdered man can return, more real than Banquo’s ghost, to demand his due. This reappearance illustrates Kharms’s contention that the ‘separate elements of the spectacle are equally valuable and important’; each exists for itself and there is no necessary correlation between scenes, events or persons as they appear in one scene or another. Certainties melt into new situations, language becomes impotent, power illusory and identity elusive. The theatricality is all, whether that be in its physical manifestations, as when Elizaveta Bam ‘stands, hands on thighs and neck craned towards the door’, or when the two representatives of power ‘start running on the spot [and] a log is brought on frontstage and while Pyotr Nik. and Ivan Iv. are running, the log is being sawn’,36 or in the metatheatrical moments, as when Pyotr Nikolayevich and Ivan Ivanovich give an absurd juggling and conjuring performance in the bit entitled ‘absurdly comic-naive’. The production was directed by Igor Bakhterev in a flexible pseudoConstructivist set. In the centre was an impressive double door, flanked by 181

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strange-shaped side pieces which swivelled and moved. The props were largely real – a log and a saw for the sawing sequence, fencing swords for the Battle of the Heroes, a lantern, a samovar, a crutch, and so on. There was also an offstage choir of nearly twenty singers whose voices lent an ethereal atmosphere to the play. At the end, the lights slowly dimmed to blackout, and the final lines were spoken in the dark. ELIZAVETA BAM: And in the little house on the hill a light is already burning. The mice are twitching their whiskers, twitching them. And on the stove sits Cockroach Cockroachovich, in his shirt with the reddish collar and an axe in his hands. PYOTR NIKOLAYEVICH: Yelizaveta Bam. Having stretched your arms and extinguished your fixed stare, start walking after me, preserving the equilibrium of your joints and the celebration of your sinews. Follow me.37 The most disturbing element of the play is Kharms’s use of language, which veers unpredictably between beyonsense and the abuse of language commonly perpetrated by those with power. Elizaveta Bam is arrested for an unexplained crime, and her oppressors make clear that she has consequently lost the right to speak. Who is she? In a single speech, Ivan Ivanovich calls her ‘Elizabeth Cockroach’, ‘Elizaveta Eduardovna’ and ‘Elizaveta Mikhailovna’, and when she later asks him to ‘go down to the bar-room and bring us a bottle of beer and some peas’, he replies: Aha! Peas and a half-bottle of beer, go down to the bar, and from there, back here. ELIZAVETA BAM: Not half a bottle, a bottle of beer, and don’t go to the bar, go for the peas! IVAN IVANOVICH: Right away, I’ll hide my fur coat in the bar-room and I’ll put a half pea-pod on my head.38 Language seems to have broken down, but sometimes the deliberate confusions and obfuscations are the means of control, used especially by those in power against those without power, and by men against women. For all its fantasy and playfulness, Elizaveta Bam dramatises wrongful arrest, the wielding of arbitrary power and the impossibility of escape once the coils of authority have been unleashed. Pyotr Nikolayevich may be slain, but he soon reappears, relentless as before. It is the Stoker of Roar China!’s ‘I may fall, but ten will rise in my place’ turned on its head. Stalinism was flexing its muscles.

The Bedbug Nascent Stalinism was also behind the last two genuinely Futurist plays to be produced in Russia for many decades, the late satirical comedies of 182

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7.5  Poster for The Bedbug at the Meyerhold State Theatre, 1929. Vladimir Mayakovsky. They were presented by the Meyerhold Theatre in 1929 and 1930, following an agreement the poet signed with Vsevolod Meyerhold in 1926 to supply him with a ‘Comedy with Murder’. Throughout the 1920s Mayakovsky had performed his poetry, lectured in public and confronted audiences, and some of the rough-and-tumble of these rowdy 183

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popular performances informed his stagecraft and subject matter now. On 30 December 1928, he read The Bedbug to Meyerhold’s company, though whether this was the ‘Comedy with Murder’ may be doubted. It received its premiere on 13 February 1929, and had designs for the first part by the Kukrinitsy collective and, for the second part, by Alexander Rodchenko, and music by Dmitri Shostakovich. The Bedbug exemplifies Futurism’s dreams and anxieties about the time to come. It tells the story of Ivan Prisypkin, a former worker and Party member now made good, who shakes off his old life to marry a nouveau riche NEPman’s daughter. At the wedding, however, a fire breaks out, and though the firefighters dowse the flames they are too late to save anyone. At least so it appears till fifty years into the future, when the site is excavated and Prisypkin is discovered frozen in the water used to put out the blaze. He is unfrozen, and with him a bedbug which clung to him, but the sanitised society of the future is unable to decide what to do with him. Eventually, they put him, along with the bedbug, in a zoo, from where he appeals to the audience to come and join him. This problematic comedy is full of dramatic moments, such as the unfreezing of Prisypkin, and clownish comedy, like the wedding itself, which degenerates into a brawl during which the bride’s dress catches fire. It is the import of the satire which problematises the play. Daringly, it ridicules contemporary Soviet pretension, as in the way Prisypkin, a worker and former Bolshevik, has shed his faintly absurd proletarian name and now calls himself Pierre Skripkin, derived from skripka, a violin, which sounds much more elegant. Is he, then, a parasite on Soviet society as the bedbug is a parasite on him? But in the second part, seeing the antiseptic new society which Communism has built, he asks to be refrozen. The implications are at least ambiguous. Perhaps the second part presents Prisypkin’s nightmare of the future, as Shostakovich suggested, but it seems that the self-confident, scientifically oriented future people have little idea of what to do with a scruffy individual like Prisypkin. They too are found wanting. As with Gogol’s The Government Inspector, there are no positive characters in this play, even in the perfect future, and as with Gogol’s play, the audience comes face to face with the dilemma at the end, when Prisypkin appeals directly to them. The fact that he recognises them and that at this moment they sympathise with him carries the implicit suggestion that they, too, are unfit for the Communist future. Dramaturgically, the play breaks through the stage’s conventional ‘fourth wall’, with the unspoken assumption that whatever conventions govern contemporary society may also be upset. The play thus not only undermines present certainties, it subverts the hopedfor future. Meyerhold worked closely with Mayakovsky on the production. In his opinion, 184

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Mayakovsky knew what theatre is . . . he was not only a brilliant playwright but also a brilliant director. I have been staging plays for many years but I never allowed myself the luxury of letting a dramatist work with me directing a play. But not only did I permit Mayakovsky to work with me, but I found I could not work without him.39 The settings continued the inbuilt ambiguity of the piece. For the first half, designed by the Kukrinitsy collective, all the costumes and props were deliberately tawdry, banal, even ugly. Bought in local shops and stalls, they represented the tastelessness of the NEP bourgeoisie, and contrasted sharply with Rodchenko’s sci-fi creations for the second part, which demonstrated the imagined technology of 1979. There were screens, flashing lights,

7.6  Igor Ilinsky as Prisypkin in The Bedbug, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold. 185

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intercontinental communications, automatic glass doors and artificial trees, which were inspired or lifeless according to interpretation – that is, they matched Mayakovsky’s paradoxical irony. The production was full of ‘attractions’, like Prisypkin playing the guitar or learning to perform the part of the bridegroom. Oleg Bard counsels him: ‘And now, comrade Skripkin, you discreetly locate the lady’s brassiere, hook your thumb into it, and rest your hand – it’s pleasant for the lady and makes it easier for you.’40 The first scene was noisy, busy, full of life, with all sorts of street traders shouting their wares, policemen, newsboys, shoppers, all dressed in gaudy clothes with books, balloons, and so on, haggling and boasting, before Prisypkin, Rozalia and Bayan entered. Prisypkin himself was gormless, awkward and self-satisfied: ‘His lower lip is thick and hangs down, his eyes are like slits, narrow and arrogant, a fat little belly, fat rear, highly unpleasant voice that squeaks and grunts.’41 The staging of the wedding scene resembled an improvised jazz number, with innumerable characters, more than Mayakovsky’s script contains, each having a solo turn – waiters, guests, servants, and so on. Later the firefighters came on, marching and singing: Comrades and citizens!        vodka is toxic! Drunks can easily       burn up the Republic!42 Meyerhold emphasised the contrast between the first and second parts, even though the second included a chorus line, a foxtrot and newsboys shouting their wares. A particular highlight was Prisypkin emerging from his crate, which Rudnitsky describes: In the centre of a silver stage on a sterile-white bed, surrounded by six doctors in white coats, the sleeping Prisypkin under the glass bell appeared as a lonely black smudge. Devices, dials, buttons, switches, glimmered behind him. The proceeding was being directed by an impassive professor, also dressed in white. Upon his command, switches were thrown, bells rung, lights flashed. Prisypkin was dragged out, placed facing the audience, massaged and rubbed down. He was immobile. Finally, the first movement took place. Prisypkin suddenly raised his arm holding the guitar, stretched luxuriously, squinted, then opened his eyes and asked in a sleepy, normal voice, ‘Which precinct is this?’43 When the bedbug itself was similarly awakened, Igor Ilinsky as Prisypkin performed the traditional commedia dell’arte lazzo of Harlequin and the fly, which was always highly applauded by the spectators. Shostakovich’s music was an integral part of the production, even though, in the composer’s words, ‘Mayakovsky and I disagreed about it.’44 According 186

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to Gerard McBurney, the musical items contained ‘waspish and colourful parodies of popular dance idioms, somewhat à la Kurt Weill, [which] evoke the Westernizing commercialism and self-indulgence of the NEP era’.45 Much of it was dissonant and atonal, involving plenty of wailing and pounding, and the wedding scene became almost operatic with passages for singing and instrumental numbers, while the fire was conjured by a stormy and explosive orchestral sequence. It came in for a good deal of criticism, however, as did Rodchenko’s designs for the second part of the play. The play itself and the production as a whole won plaudits, however, even though there were some strong dissenters, like the critic of Rabochaya Moskva who found it ‘incomprehensible . . . No good for anything. Except taking children to.’46 But with audiences, The Bedbug was extremely popular.

The Bathhouse Its success spurred Mayakovsky to write a second satirical comedy, The Bathhouse, ‘a drama in six acts with circus and fireworks’, which was even more bitter than The Bedbug. When he read it to the Meyerhold Theatre’s Artistic Soviet on 23 September 1929, the severity of the satire obviously made many of his listeners nervous. In the tense atmosphere, while the author sat at the desk on stage, ‘smoking constantly, shifting the cigarette in his mouth, and occasionally making notes’, various speakers criticised the play. Two or three times Mayakovsky tossed off witty, but not very sharp replies. But then a thin, puny little fellow got up on stage and with his first words announced that Mayakovsky’s new play was a ‘banality’. He had a high voice and he lisped. Mayakovsky was sitting with his back half-turned toward him, but on the word ‘banality’, he sharply turned, throwing back his shoulders. His motion was so powerful that the speaker involuntarily moved away to the edge of the stage in fright. The audience broke into laughter . . . After he pulled himself together, the speaker began to shout out something even more impudent, but the audience continued laughing. And at this point, Mayakovsky himself laughed. He laughed together with the whole audience. And at once it became clear that the overwhelming majority of the audience was on his side.47 Mikhail Zoschenko recorded that the reading was ‘a triumph. The actors and writers laughed uproariously and applauded the poet. They grasped the point of every single phrase. I have seldom seen such a positive reaction.’48 Meyerhold himself, calling Mayakovsky ‘a playwright of true popular comedy’, argued that Mayakovsky provides jests that make the average spectator, any worker, smile. These jests of his will really be exciting and hit home . . . In the history of the 187

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theatre only one playwright – Molière – has access to the lightness with which this play is written.49 The Bathhouse received its first performance in Leningrad on 30 January 1930, with Meyerhold’s production in Moscow following on 16 March. The Bathhouse, which washes everyone clean, concerns an inventor who creates a time machine. He finds it impossible to reach the appropriate authorities to report this before a ‘Phosphorescent Woman’ from a hundred years hence arrives, promising to take into the future ‘those persons whose names will be remembered one hundred years from now’.50 It transpires that these are the workers and imaginative scientists who are struggling to create a better

7.7  Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold. 188

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society, while the bureaucrats will be left behind. Time, and Mayakovsky’s deep concern with the future, is a central theme. Clocks – ‘those tick-tocking things’ – become useless as this play reverses the schema of The Bedbug, and the future visits the present, though again one presents a perspective on the other. Characters’ names reveal Mayakovsky’s social ‘typage’, and the play’s driving anger and purpose. Chudakov, the ‘eccentric inventor’, and the energetic Velosipedkin, for instance, are set against the bureaucrats Pobedonosikov (‘Victory for nosiness’, with a sly reference to Pobedonostsev, the hugely unpopular procurator of the Holy Synod before 1917) and the vapid Optimistenko. If Pobedonosikov is also a grotesque version of the alreadygrotesque Mayor in Gogol’s The Government Inspector, the structure of The Bathhouse also recalls the structure of Gogol’s play: a visitor from outside exposes the obscurantism and complacency of those in positions of power. This is a satire on those who fear satire, the more stinging because Pobedonosikov, even more than Prisypkin, is a product of contemporary Soviet society, one who has been installed by the revolutionary government in his position of authority and responsibility, a hideous reincarnation of Gorky’s loathsome Mr Slovotekov, whom Radlov had presented a decade earlier. He describes his revolutionary activity: You’ll see directives being carried out, circulars being circulated, efficiency measures being implemented, and papers that have been lying there for years in perfect order. There’s a conveyor belt for applications, complaints and memoranda. It’s a regular little nook of socialism.51 For citizens with a problem, actually seeing Pobedonosikov is virtually impossible, since his ‘gatekeeper’ Optimistenko never allows petitioners to proceed: Damn it all! Now you just listen to me. I don’t want to see you around here again pestering a big government agency with your petty problems. We can’t be bothered with trifles. The government is interested in big things: various kinds of Fordism, other speedup systems, and so on.52 Then the person whom the time machine has called from the future arrives. The Aviator who crashed his plane and strode in, laughing and alive, in Victory Over the Sun has now transformed into the ineluctable Phosphorescent Woman. Pobedonosikov makes a show of welcoming her while privately getting Optimistenko to check her out. When the two confront one another, Pobedonosikov boasts: I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t give tips, I don’t lean towards the Left, I don’t show up late for appointments, I don’t (bending down towards her ear) indulge in excesses, I don’t spare myself on the job, I don’t – 189

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PHOSPHORESCENT WOMAN: No matter what you talk about, it’s always ‘I don’t’, ‘I don’t’, ‘I don’t’. Isn’t there anything you ‘do, do, do’? POBEDONOSIKOV: ‘Do, do, do’? Yes, there is. I implement directives, I fix resolutions, I pay my Party dues, I receive my Party maximum salary, I sign papers, I stamp them with the official seal . . . Yes, it’s a regular little nook of socialism.53 If this is the present, what is the future? This play, like other Futurist works, is built up through a montage of attractions, like the arrival, in an explosion of blue light and smoke, of the letter from the future, the pseudo-machine dance of the line of petitioners outside Pobedonosikov’s office who ‘imitate one another’s movements like so many cards being shuffled’,54 and the office routine which turns into a juggling act: Just pick up three or four objects – let’s say, a pen, your signature, a sheet of paper, and your maximum salary – and go through a few juggling tricks. Toss up the pen, catch the paper, sign it, and take the maximum salary. Catch the pen, take the paper, sign it, and grab the maximum salary. One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four!55 In the Meyerhold Theatre, Sergei Vakhtangov’s setting used a light scaffolding construction with steps and platforms which soared into the flies and was bedecked with slogans, and contrasted this with Pobedonosikov’s office with its voluminous plush armchair and the plethora of telephones on his huge heavy desk. Alexander Deineka’s costumes dressed the inventors and workers in overall-like work clothes and the bureaucrats in stuffy business suits, while the Phosphorescent Woman wore a tight-fitting leotard-like space suit complete with sleek aviator’s helmet. All this was visually spectacular, even though the mechanics of the set worked less smoothly than they should have. Meyerhold used this Constructivist space to stage action on various levels simultaneously, for dances and other attractions, and he elicited notably strong performances from Zinaida Raikh as the Phosphorescent Woman and Maxim Shtraukh, Eisenstein’s friend who had replaced Mayakovsky’s choice, Igor Ilinsky, as Pobedonosikov. The most telling passage in the play is Act 3, which throws the whole Futurist theatre project into the sharpest relief, for in this act all the conventions of acceptable theatre are broken. Mayakovsky may have asserted that Theatre     is not a reflecting mirror, but –    a magnifying glass56 but in this act he both reflects and magnifies. The opening stage direction reveals the author’s strategy: 190

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7.8  Zinaida Raikh as the Phosphorescent Woman, The Bathhouse, 1930. The stage represents an extension of the orchestra seats. There are several empty seats in the first row. A signal: ‘We are beginning.’ The audience looks at the stage through opera glasses, and the [actors on] stage look back at the audience through opera glasses. People begin to whistle and stamp their feet as they shout, ‘Time to start!’57 The empty seats are filled by Pobedonosikov and his cohorts, and they discuss the play with the Director. Pobedonosikov objects that life is not as it is presented here, and that a top government official cannot be presented as a ‘character’ on the stage. Should a play rouse or soothe its audience? Someone 191

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asks for art which reflects the ‘beautiful lives of beautiful, live people’ and another commends the Bolshoi Theatre’s ballet: ‘Everywhere you looked, they were dancing, and singing, and flitting about – all those different elves and . . . syphilids.’58 If the theatre must examine politics, agit-sketches from the period of the Revolution seem all that is required, according to Pobedonosikov, and so the Director improvises such a piece with his actors: ‘You there, you’ll play the role of Capital. Over here, Comrade Capital! Now dance over all the others with an expression of class domination. Embrace an imaginary woman with an invisible arm, and drink imaginary champagne.’ Later they build a human pyramid, ‘personifying in plastic form a symbol of communism’.59 All forms of past theatre, even revolutionary agitprop, were being thrown overboard from the ship of modernity. Agit-art, as Tretyakov had argued, had been no more than a ‘semi-solution’. The discussion and demonstration is interrupted by Velosipedkin trying to enter the theatre through the auditorium on urgent business for Pobedonosikov. But he is prevented by an Usher. The levels of reality, the confusion between life and performance, are again multiplied and confounded. Velosipedkin in the play is a force for change, who must be kept out. Pobedonosikov, crying that ‘We want to be inactive – what do you call ’em – spectators’, flees. The conventions are broken, the stage and the audience have infiltrated one another, and later the arch bureaucrat threatens to quit – ‘but for you, comrades (to the audience) things will be even worse!’ But when he is finally

7.9  A scene from The Bathhouse at the Meyerhold State Theatre, 1930. 192

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ejected from the time machine he turns again to the audience in despair: ‘She, and you, and the author – all of you! What have you been trying to say here? That people like me aren’t of any use to communism?’60 It was another slap in the face of public taste. Mayakovsky has taken the material of contemporary Soviet life, put it under the magnifying glass, or created from it a montage of attractions, and thereby fulfilled the function of firing up the spectators, making them clench their fists, suggesting to them different possibilities. The performance itself has reformatted the world. The production demonstrated the potency of Futurism, the threat it posed even to the new Soviet establishment. The Leningrad production was greeted with icy reserve, and was soon taken off, though the author’s first response to Meyerhold’s production, in a letter to Lili Brik, was generally positive: I liked it with the exception of one or two details. In my opinion it’s my first proper production. It was funny how much the audience was divided – some said, ‘We’ve never been so bored’; others said, ‘We’ve never had such fun’.61 Meyerhold himself felt this was the most successful of his productions of Mayakovsky plays, but the press, subservient to the new mood in Stalin’s Russia, was poisonous. ‘The performance is so uninteresting that it is hard to write about it,’ according to one paper. ‘The onlooker remains emotionally uninvolved and follows the action, which is often difficult to follow, with cold indifference.’62 Another called it ‘a tedious confused show, which can be of interest only to a small group of literary gourmets’.63 Igor Ilinsky remembered Mayakovsky after the vicious attacks on the play in a poignant image: ‘he stood alone on the porch of the lobby [of the theatre], letting the departing audience pass him by, looking straight into their eyes.’64 Notes  1. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, p. 1,242.  2. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 769.  3. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, p. 1,242.   4. Marshall (ed.), Mayakovsky, p. 90.  5. Soviet Literature, no. 6 (423) (1983), p. 79.  6. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 165.   7. Tretyakov, ‘From Where to Where?’, in Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, pp. 204–16.  8. Lodder, Russian Constructivism, p. 108.  9. Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre, p. 90. 10. Segel, Twentieth-Century Russian Drama, p. 152. 11. Tretiakov, Roar China, p. 58. 12. Ibid. p. 8. 13. Dean, Seven Ages, p. 294.

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14. Russell, Russian Drama of the Revolutionary Period, p. 54. 15. Tretiakov, Roar China, pp. 24, 48. 16. Ibid. p. 83. 17. Ibid. p. 87. 18. Eaton, The Theater of Meyerhold and Brecht, p. 24. 19. Nizmanov, ‘The Soviet Theatre Today’, p. 140. 20. Meserve and Meserve, ‘The Stage History of Roar China!’, pp. 10, 11. 21. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, p. 177. 22. Kruchenykh, Suicide Circus, p. 273. 23. Markov, Russian Futurism, p. 344. 24. Proffer and Proffer (eds), The Ardis Anthology of Russian Futurism, p. 309. 25. Zolotnitsky, Akademicheskie Teatry na Pytyakh Oktyabrya, p. 176. 26. Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre, p. 201. 27. Ibid. 28. Senelick and Ostrovsky (eds), The Soviet Theater, p. 283. 29. Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre, p. 202. 30. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Avant-Garde Theatre, p. 151. 31. Ibid. 32. Roberts, The Last Soviet Avant-Garde, p. 57. 33. Ioffe and White (eds), The Russian Avant-Garde and Radical Modernism, p. 385. 34. Gibian (ed.), Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd, p. 202. 35. Kharms, Incidences, p. 155. 36. Ibid. pp. 158, 163. 37. Ibid. p. 184. 38. Ibid. p. 181. 39. Glenny (ed.), Three Soviet Plays, pp. 30–1. 40. Ibid. p. 45. 41. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 443. 42. Glenny (ed.), Three Soviet Plays, p. 52. 43. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 445. 44. Volkov (ed.), Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, p. 247. 45. Fairclough and Fanning (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich, p. 154. 46. Senelick and Ostrovsky (eds), The Soviet Theater, p. 329. 47. Gladkov, Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses, pp. 65–6. 48. Vladimir Mayakovsky: Three Views, p. 15. 49. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, pp. 448–9. 50. Daniels (trans.), The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky, p. 199. 51. Ibid. p. 227. 52. Ibid. p. 213. 53. Ibid. p. 253. 54. Ibid. p. 212. 55. Ibid. p. 229. 56. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 461. 57. Daniels (trans.), The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky, p. 225. 58. Ibid. p. 229. 59. Ibid. pp. 230–1. 60. Ibid. pp. 251, 264. 61. Jangfeldt, Mayakovsky, a Biography, p. 503. 62. Ibid. p. 487. 63. Gladkov, Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses, p. 51. 64. Senelick and Ostrovsky (eds), The Soviet Theater, p. 332.

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THE CASE IS CLOSED

Changed Times On 14 April 1930, less than a month after the premiere of The Bathhouse, Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself. He wrote in the note he left when he died, ‘As they say, the case is closed.’1 Symbolically, Mayakovsky’s death marked the end of Russian Futurist theatre. As he added, his ‘love-boat’ had crashed on ‘byt’, the everyday, the humdrum. Mayakovsky and his fellow Futurists had been swept up in the force of the revolutionary flood. They had believed in the revolution’s power to construct the new human being, a task which allied them firmly with the revolutionaries. But as the day-to-day compromises, unpleasant initiatives and inevitable realpolitik of the post-1917 world began to bite, they were cut adrift. The disillusion was utterly catastrophic. The signs of changed times had been visible at least since 1927. In January of that year Trotsky had been exiled to Alma-Ata. In the following months Eisenstein wrote that ‘the enormous breath of 1917 . . . is blowing itself out’,2 and the LEF group urged a united federation of writers, including all groups. The year 1928 saw the end of NEP and the inauguration of the first Five Year Plan. It was also the year of the first show trials when fifty-three engineers from Shakhty in the north Caucasus region were accused of sabotage and collaboration with Russians in exile: five were sentenced to death and forty-four were sent to prison. In 1929 Trotsky was deported into exile, there were purges of 195

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cultural institutions, and a vicious campaign was launched against the writers Boris Pilnyak and Evgeny Zamyatin. Anatoly Lunacharsky was forced to resign as Minister for Education and the Arts. By 1930 Mayakovsky, who the year before had tried to transmute LEF and Novyi LEF into REF (the Revolutionary Front of the Arts), had even applied to join RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), the group most vociferously opposed to LEF. And a week after his suicide, his last dramatic work, Moscow Is Burning, was staged at the First Moscow State Circus. The old love of the theatricalised circus had not quite died with him.

Moscow Is Burning Moscow Is Burning was a montage of scenes created to chronicle and celebrate twenty-five years since the 1905 Revolution. Combining poetry, film, pantomime and circus acts, it was designed by Valentina Khodasevich and directed by Sergei Radlov, who had directed October in the Ring, a celebration of ten years since the Bolshevik Revolution, at the Leningrad Circus in 1927. The arena’s acoustics were poor and the circus performers found Mayakovsky’s verse difficult, but Mayakovsky himself coached them, stressing the consonants as Tretyakov had done with Meyerhold’s actors in The World Upside Down, and in the circus context the verse proved unexpectedly powerful. When Radlov fell ill towards the end of the rehearsal period, Andrei Petrovsky took over. Mayakovsky also drafted a second version of Moscow Is Burning for outdoor mass performance, adding topical characters like the Pope, Ramsay MacDonald and Józef Pilsudski, dictator of Poland, which was presented with five hundred performers, including circus artists, drama students and mounted soldiers. It was the first version which was presented at the Moscow State Circus on 21 April 1930, in the specially adapted arena, with a ramp leading up to a small stage, larger-than-life props and a cinema screen. It was a montage of attractions, with constant shifts of focus and subject matter interrupting any consistent flow – as happens in the circus. It opened with a pyramid embodying the class system under tsarism (though this might have reminded some spectators uncomfortably of the satirised class pyramid in Act 3 of The Bathhouse). Here, no fewer than eighty performers formed the pyramid which was ten metres tall, with workers in chains at the bottom, a second level of usurers and state officials, police and the military on a third level, priests, mullahs and rabbis one level higher, capitalists and landowners above them, and at the top a dwarf clown representing the tsar with a huge crown on his head. Other sequences included a comic chase, with acrobats and strongmen as workers and clowns as policemen: The workers scatter. A policeman runs after one of them. Meanwhile the 1st Worker sticks a pamphlet on another policeman’s back. Laughter. 196

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The policeman runs after this worker. He adroitly and nimbly climbs up a rope to a trapeze. The policemen pursue him and clumsily get their sabres and holsters entangled in the ropes. The worker swings from one trapeze to another, hurling down pamphlets, until he reaches a sanctuary in the cupola.3 Almost as impressive was the House of Cards sequence, demonstrating the fragility of the tsar’s post-1905 settlement. There is a party at the Winter Palace at which each guest is given an oversized playing card. ‘Corks pop, and foaming champagne gushes out like geysers. The guests lift their glasses, drink and wave the playing cards – the Constitution. They rush to each other and kiss, put down their glasses and begin to stack the pages of the Constitution into a huge House of Cards.’ When the tsar and his party blow with all their might, the Constitution collapses and they applaud joyfully. Later, a Cossack rider is shot by a sniper hiding in a factory, and falls, rolling down the ramp while the factory suddenly blazes with light. And after the tsar has been overthrown, clown Kerensky jumps through a hoop into the tsarina’s bedroom. The show was popular with the popular audiences, but the newspaper critics were wary. It could be argued that Moscow Is Burning was a new kind of history play, a development from Mystery Bouffe, even if sometimes it looked like a throwback to the agit-pieces and mass spectacles of the immediate post-revolutionary years. As Helen Stoddart commented, ‘The circus’s physical machinery, as well as its dramatic figures and structures, constitute for Mayakovsky . . . a radical theatrical language within which a critique of capitalism may be articulated, and is therefore not merely a set of metaphors put to satirical use.’4 Avant-Garde Theatres Struggle This show was something of a ray of light in darkening times. NEP was fading into a memory. The new bracing reality was of the Five Year Plans and the struggle of class against class, and increasingly theatres turned to fare which fitted this world – even if what they presented was the make-believe of ‘happy childhoods’ and glorious production lines staffed by willing workers. Not to conform with this idyll was to court danger. Nikolai Foregger attempted to revive his early pseudo-commedia dell’arte revues at the Revue Theatre in Moscow in 1929 with a light and breezy production of Vladimir Mass’s adaptation of Molière’s The Jealousy of le Barbouillé. The production modernised the characters and included topical references and comic songs, but it was not repeated. Mostly Foregger now worked in the provinces on dance theatre pieces like The Footballer, staged at the Kharkov State Opera on 7 February 1930. In this piece, by Vsevolod Kurdyumov, with music by Viktor Oransky and designs by Anatoly Petritsky, a footballer and his worker-fiancée are each 197

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besieged by would-be seducers, but are finally married in a happy-ever-after Soviet wedding. Meyerhold himself, after his work on Mayakovsky’s plays, found matters becoming ever more difficult. He revived some of his more acceptable productions, like Masquerade and Woe to Wit, and presented a few of the better contemporary Soviet plays, but his most noteworthy productions were of classic texts, like Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias and Thirty-Three Fainting Fits, created out of Chekhov’s vaudevilles. His most ambitious plans, for two of the most impressive late Futurist dramas, I Want a Baby by Sergei Tretyakov and Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide, came to naught.

I Want a Baby I Want a Baby focuses on Milda Grignau, a Party cadre, who wants to contribute to the future by bearing a child with a proper proletarian heredity, though she does not want a husband. She lives in an overcrowded Moscow tenement beset by petty intrigue, squalor and drug addiction, but her revolutionary zeal attempts to combat this corruption. She asks Yakov, a down-to-earth building worker with good proletarian credentials, to be the father. Amazed, he at first resists her approaches – he is engaged to Lympa – but he finally agrees to help her, and after a while she becomes pregnant. He turns sentimental at the thought of fatherhood but Milda sends him back to Lympa. Milda’s dream of winning First Prize at an ‘Exhibition of Children’ is vitiated, however, as happens in dreams, when Lympa shares First Prize, and Third Prize is awarded to the child of a drug addict whose girlfriend Milda had urged to have an abortion. As all the children are raised aloft, Yakov appears on a podium to proclaim, in an uncanny prefiguring of Stalin, ‘Uncle Joe’, architect of Soviet children’s ‘happy childhoods’: ‘Hurrah for the heroes of our age!’ and the parents march past in procession.5 Very obviously, the play concerns the Futurist aim of creating the new person, but Tretyakov well understood the ambiguity of this ending: I will not bow any more to plays which end with some kind of approved maxim, which emasculates any struggle towards understanding. The intrigue has been worked out, the conclusion has been presented, and the spectators can go and put on their galoshes in peace. I think plays which stimulate in the spectator something that lasts beyond the theatre are more valuable.6 Public readings of the play in 1926 and 1927 provoked considerable discussion among audiences. Milda, whose name is that of a Lithuanian love goddess, is a sort of Holy Fool, a ‘yurodivya’ for the new religion of Communism, or, in Terentiev’s words, ‘a sort of female Hamlet in a major key’.7 Her body is her own. There is such a thing as female sexuality, but its expression belongs to 198

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the woman. ‘The play isolates and examines dispassionately the expenditure of sexual energy which has as its aim the birth of a baby,’ Tretyakov remarked, adding that it ‘aims to discredit the so-called love intrigue, that commonplace of our theatrical art and our literature’.8 Sexual pleasure is shown as a bourgeois concept when Milda, who has failed to arouse Yakov in herself, goes behind a screen and when she emerges, ‘she has waved her hair, she is made up, and powdered, and she has a low-necked dress’.9 ‘Up to now on stage, love has been a spicy stimulant,’ Tretyakov further asserted. ‘The tension of it gripped the spectator, turning him into an “illusory lover”. In the play I Want a Baby, love is put on the operating table and traced to its socially significant result.’10 For Mayakovsky, I Want a Baby was ‘a work of first class importance’, and he compared it with the Soviet cinema’s finest work, Battleship Potemkin. Like that cinema masterpiece, I Want a Baby is constructed through a montage of attractions. The tenement’s destruction and rebuilding forms a dynamic central stage image within which vivid scenes of the tenants’ lives are glimpsed. Each overlooks the others, as the audience overlooks them all, and this constant seeing, watching, noticing is a prime creator of montage and effectively ‘alienates’ the material. Thus, in the first scene the fallen dummy and the drugged poet, Filirinov, are stared at by the frightened residents; Saxoulsky’s ballet, the ‘plastic symphony of the emancipation of woman’,

8.1  [Plate 13] El Lissitzky, costume design for Milda, I Want a Baby (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). 199

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is watched by the Club Secretary; the NEP revellers’ shimmy is gazed at by Yakov and Grinko; even Milda’s seduction of Yakov is spied on by a grotesque gallery of eavesdroppers. In one room: MAN (in braces, with his ear to the wall): Bah, you’d think butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. It’s a scandal for this corridor. She’s locked in with a stranger. Hell, I can hardly hear anything. (A baby starts to cry) Shh, you rascal . . . In another room: (A horrible woman and a little girl. The horrible woman pulls the little girl by the ear.) HORRIBLE WOMAN: How dare you not keep an eye on the milk? It’s disappeared. How dare you? GIRL (squirming): Let go! HORRIBLE WOMAN: Don’t you dare shout! You mustn’t make a noise after ten o’clock. I’m telling you! I’m telling you! GIRL: Can you hear? HORRIBLE WOMAN: What? GIRL: The bed creaking. HORRIBLE WOMAN: Where? GIRL: At our neighbours. (She runs to the wall.) HORRIBLE WOMAN: Look through the crack. GIRL: It’s dark. HORRIBLE WOMAN: The light’s out. It’s revolting. GIRL: They’re whispering. There’s two of them. HORRIBLE WOMAN: Two? Give us a look. Where? In another room: OLD WOMAN: If it’s the last thing I do, I’m not going to kick the bucket till I’ve seen how these filthy slobs fornicate. Number 32. Along the corridor, they said. She’s wheedling all the cooks into taking the Party card, and the club – she’ll turn it into a maternity unit at this rate. And what goes on in her own room . . . If it’s the last thing I do, if I have to drag myself there, I shan’t peg it till I’ve seen how these Bolsheviks fornicate.11 Milda sees Saxoulsky seducing Kitty, and the scene between the dying old general and his son is played in two variants before the club members and the secretary. The finale is ‘The Exhibition of Children’, and the intention was for the audience to come on stage and view the children almost like a cattle show. Different kinds of ‘love’ are also montaged to force the spectator to consider this ‘spicy stimulant’. There is, for instance, Saxoulsky’s insouciant seduction of Kitty; the tenement supervisor’s awkward attempts to seduce Milda; 200

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Barbara’s infatuation with the poet and drug addict Filirinov; Andryusha’s gauche attempts to inveigle Ksenichka to have sex; and Dr Vopitkis’s narcissistic attempts to impress. Lympa, the ‘girl next door’, wants to settle down and have a family, Angelica will make up to anyone in trousers, and there are hooligans ready to take advantage of Ksenichka’s defencelessness in the sickening gang rape scene (another recreation of the Chubarov Alley affair). All these are set beside Milda’s planned and antiseptic approach to ‘love’, especially when reflected in the range of attitudes to Milda herself. The doctor seeks the ‘feminine’ side of this Party activist, Stoneturner does not even conceive of her as a woman, the Superintendent confuses her lack of prejudice with sexual availability, and Lympa believes she is a sort of vamp. She herself is naïve, a Latvian and therefore an outsider, the product perhaps of scientism and productionism. Within this configuration, Tretyakov also deploys what his translator, Stephen Holland, calls ‘the full formidable spectrum of Russian, from the scatological to the plain-spoken, and on to the proverbial, the genuinely intellectual and passionate, and beyond that, with roguish good humour, into the infinite gradations of bureaucratese and obfuscation’.12 The power of language is pinpointed when Milda visits Barbara to learn the language of love. When Barbara suggests ‘Sweetie-weetie’, ‘umpsy-wumpsy’ and ‘itsy-bitsy’, the selfpossessed Milda responds: ‘So you can just take an adjective and add –umpsy or –itsy?’ If this suggests the richness of this epic drama, the plans for production matched its potential. El Lissitzky designed the ultimate Constructivist set for it. He had already made unrealised designs for Victory Over the Sun, and his first designs for I Want a Baby were made in 1926, as he attended Meyerhold’s early rehearsals. For the play itself a new area in the theatre is created, a ring that rises from the orchestra pit. The actors emerge from below from the depth of the orchestra pit, from above out of one of the balconies, and from the sides across bridges: they no longer have anything to do with the stage. Props roll down ropes from above and disappear into the depths after every scene. Light sources move together with the actors who perform on a transparent floor. The new arrangement of the acting surface brings the actor closer to the spectator in the balconies, thus devaluing what used to be the frontstalls.13 The setting thus derived ideas from Larionov’s Teatr Futu, from the circus ring and from Constructivist practice to make a ‘Milda-machine’, a complete construction for acting and spectating. Stage action was to take place on gangways, in galleries and on stairs. The set was flexible and multi-storeyed but at the same time could be seen through from all seats. The audience, 201

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seated around the interior, were able to actively participate. According to Christina Lodder, ‘Lissitzky’s model fused architectural and theatrical elements together to create a new concept of the theatrical stage and the theatrical interior.’14 At the same time, Tretyakov insisted on the Futurist perspective. ‘What is needed’, he said in 1933, ‘is that the play should be able to roll under the morrow, lift it and roll it a step further. The trouble with our drama is that it is a drama of today. There is no prognosis.’15 I Want a Baby was about making the new human being through Milda’s victory over that Futurist anathema, bourgeois romanticism. It ensured that the play itself was a new and challenging kind of victory over the sun. The struggle to produce I Want a Baby, however, was long and tortuous. On 26 September 1926 Tretyakov and Meyerhold signed a contract for its production. On 29 November Meyerhold applied for permission to present it, and on 16 February 1927 the play went into rehearsal and was announced as part of the Meyerhold Theatre’s upcoming programme. But then Glavrepertkom insisted on major changes to the text. Tretyakov rewrote the play, transferring it from the seething Moscow tenement to a collective farm, and excising many of the more daring words and expressions. On 4 December 1928 the ArtisticPolitical Soviet of Glavrepertkom met again to hear Tretyakov read his new version. In the debate which followed, Petrov, representative worker from the Hammer and Sickle factory, still objected to some of the language, others found the play vulgar and characters ‘generalised’, while the representative of the Guardians of Motherhood and Babyhood was resolutely opposed to it. It was strongly defended by the film director Abram Room and the critic Vladimir Blyum, who argued that ‘Fears connected with this play are analogous to fears around Darwinism. If workers can’t go to this play with their families, then their families are philistines.’16 Meyerhold, maintaining the discussion was a ‘blind alley’, proposed that any ban should be based on consideration of the director’s plan, not on the play’s text, and, this being agreed, the meeting adjourned until 15 December, when Meyerhold and Igor Terentiev presented their plans for staging the play. Both agreed I Want a Baby should be presented as a ‘discussion play’, with, in Meyerhold’s version, the action stopped at various moments to consider provocative questions and unresolved problems raised by the action, with a final debate held at the end of the performance. Meyerhold invited Glavrepertkom to send representatives to participate in these debates ‘from time to time’, and Tretyakov himself could ‘come out sometimes from the stalls and speak to the actors: “You don’t say it like that”, and he himself says it, or a different line’.17 Terentiev, hoping to stage it in Leningrad, proposed a not dissimilar ‘discussion production’, which would allow spectators to intervene with questions to be considered by specialists including a typist, announcer and others situated 202

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in a glass pod suspended above the audience. The main discussion was to take place at the end of the show, however, and in any case only predetermined questions were to be addressed. Having heard these plans, Comrade Pikel of Glavrepertkom, still terrified of what he called the play’s ‘biological content’, but also anxious not to seem too dictatorial, allowed only Meyerhold’s version to go ahead because it ensured that the audience’s genuine but ‘stray’ questions could be more effectively countered. He concluded: The play remains banned. Comrade Meyerhold is permitted to produce this play on a trial basis. But the possibility is not closed to Comrade Terentiev to mount a production in another city. If Comrade Terentiev rehearses with another theatre, we will consider the question again.18 In fact, Meyerhold’s Moscow theatre was on the verge of a complete renovation and refurbishment and was unable to accommodate Lissitzky’s revolutionary design. Meyerhold decided to postpone the production. His company moved out of the theatre, ostensibly temporarily, in fact for ever, and he never staged I Want a Baby. It has been suggested that somehow the solution propounded by Meyerhold and Terentiev of making this into a ‘discussion play’ with a preordained outcome indicates the avant-garde’s connection to – indeed, encouragement of – dictatorship, but this seems a misunderstanding. Their attempt to energise the audience, to empower the spectator, was profoundly at odds with what Stalin was attempting. In the ‘discussion play’, life and theatre would at last coalesce, and the drama would effectively intervene in life. Whether this would have proved the case is not, however, certain, and Mayakovsky’s blistering satire of the idea in The Bathhouse suggests that he at least was not convinced. Tretyakov made a further attempt to realise this work, rewriting it yet again, this time as a film scenario, but no film was ever made, and his last two projects for stage works – one about the restructuring of the patriarchal society in Svanetia, and a second play entitled We Fill the Earth – remained unrealised, though he did publish translations of three plays by Bertolt Brecht in 1934.

Novyi LEF Partly under the influence of Constructivism, and in theatre terms the use by Lyubov Popova of ‘real’ objects in The World Upside Down, by the late 1920s Tretyakov and other Futurists were turning towards ‘literature of fact’, the driving raison d’être behind the foundation of Novyi LEF in January 1927. The aim was to apply literary or other devices to factual material in order to integrate life and literature. In the pages of Novyi LEF poetry largely gave way to reportage, travel sketches, diaries and memoirs which attempted to match Dziga Vertov’s documentary films. Tretyakov wrote of: 203

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The problem of the fixation of fact; raising the interest of the activists in reality; the assertion of the primacy of realness over fiction, the publicist over the belletrist – this is what in LEF is now most burning and immediate.19 But the narrowness of this focus led to the departure from the group of Mayakovsky and others, leaving only Tretyakov and Nikolai Chuzhak to edit Novyi LEF until it collapsed at the end of 1928.

The Suicide The Suicide by Nikolai Erdman met with a fate not dissimilar to I Want a Baby. Towards the end of the 1920s Erdman, working with Vladimir Mass, developed a popular, pseudo-subversive dramatic style, first with the short burlesque The Odyssey, presented at the Leningrad Music Hall, and then in a series of revues, sketches and songs. The Suicide, however, was on another plane. A full-length grotesque comedy, full of farcical satire and acid barbs, it centres on the unemployed worker Semyon Semyonovich Podsekalnikov, whose desperate plight forces him to contemplate suicide. His wife and motherin-law try desperately to prevent this. As he takes up playing the tuba as a way of making a living through concert work, news of his suicide threat leaks out and first one, then another aggrieved member of Soviet society pleads with him to commit suicide in a way which will cast light on their troubles. Each new complainant tries to outdo the last and Podsekalnikov, at the end of his tether, even tries to phone the Kremlin. He is given a farewell party by those urging him to die, from which he staggers off drunk but still without the courage to kill himself. He flops into the coffin they have provided for him, and is carried to the cemetery, where however he sits up and then climbs out. He has decided not to commit suicide, at which point news arrives that Fedya Petunin has. Podsekalnikov is, like Mayakovsky’s Prisypkin, a little man out of his depth in contemporary society, though the list of characters is more like the cross section of contemporary Soviet society presented in I Want a Baby – members of the intelligentsia rub shoulders with a priest, a butcher, a postman and others, and, like many Futurist satirical comedies, it combines farce, slapstick, parody and circus antics. Perhaps farce’s typical bathos predominates, as when Podsekalnikov’s neighbour Alexander Kalabushkin tells him ‘life is a struggle’. PODSEKALNIKOV: Haven’t I struggled, comrade? Here, look at this . . . (He takes a booklet from under a pillow.) KALABUSHKIN: What is it? PODSEKALNIKOV: Instructions on how to teach yourself to play the tuba. KALABUSHKIN: The what? PODSEKALNIKOV: The tuba!20 204

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Later he achieves ‘a shattering noise’ from the tuba. He explains to his wife and mother-in-law how he can make money from concerts if he can learn to play it properly: ‘(He reads) In order to learn the scale, I, Hugo Schultz, world renowned master of music, recommend the following cheap method: buy yourself a . . . (He turns the page) piano.’ – ‘A piano?’ screech wife and motherin-law in unison. And the comparison with the circus is sometimes overt. Maria, Podsekalnikov’s wife, tells him: ‘We can’t go on like this, Semyon. It’ll do for a circus act, but it’s no way to live,’ and later the writer Viktor Viktorovich pleads with him: ‘I want to be Tolstoy, not a circus performer.’21 Such self-consciousness in performance is typical of the Futurist theatre, and compounded by the slapstick, as when Semyon’s gun turns out to be a liver sausage, or when water is poured over him by his wife who thinks he is dead. And the final scene both parodies Chekhov’s The Seagull and challenges the audience: VIKTOR VIKTOROVICH enters. VIKTOR: Fedya Petunin has shot himself. (Pause) He left a letter . . . ARISTARCH: What does he say? VIKTOR (reads): ‘Podsekalnikov is right. Why live?’22 To stage this play at this time in this place was no easy matter. Despite the objections of Osaf Litovsky, head of Glavrepertkom, that it was ‘politically off-key and highly reactionary’,23 Erdman negotiated with several theatres for the right to present it, including the Realistic Theatre, the Vakhtangov and the Maly. In April 1930 he read it at the Moscow Art Theatre, where Stanislavsky laughed inordinately, and after which Gorky wrote to Stalin recording his admiration. In September he read it at the Vakhtangov Theatre, but at a meeting of the theatre’s Artistic-Political Council, held on 17 September 1930, grave reservations about it were expressed, beginning with Kazachenko, presumably chairman of the meeting, who opened his remarks by saying he was ‘not going to focus on several errors of a purely ideological order, a whole series of expressions – clearly unnecessary and alien to our ideology – which are put forward in this play’. When he asked ‘what does this play consist of? What is its goal, its purpose? What does it give the spectator?’ he answered himself: ‘It’s nothing but a bouquet for the bourgeoisie.’24 Other members of Council chimed in. ‘Every single character in the play speaks in a language which cannot be called anything other than reactionary,’ said one; another asked: ‘Can it [the play] be corrected and staged with artistic and theatrical means in the spirit of a true Soviet comedy?’ and answered: ‘I think not’; and a third, echoing the fatuous Pobedonosikov in Mayakovsky’s The Bathhouse, complained that it was ‘not realistic’, adding that he considered it ‘an absolutely seditious play’.25 On 25 September, Glavrepertkom moved to ban The Suicide. 205

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But Meyerhold, Erdman’s preferred director, still held readings at his theatre shortly after this, and accepted it for production. Hearing that the Moscow Art Theatre was still keen to stage it, he issued a challenge: Comrades, they’ve bitten off more than they can chew (laughter, applause) . . . I challenge the Moscow Art Theatre to a Socialist competition (applause) with respect to Erdman’s play, The Suicide. This competition will be formulated not on an artistic but on a political level. And I will not be afraid if . . . the managers of the MKhAT [the Art Theatre] try to put The Suicide together before us. I will not hurry, but will be thorough, and sooner or later will pin this theatre to the floor. (Applause, laughter)26 Stanislavsky himself wrote to Stalin about staging the play, and received an ambivalent reply, dated 9 November 1931: Dear Konstantin Sergeyevich, I do not have a very high opinion of the play The Suicide. My closest comrades consider it empty and even harmful. You can see the opinion (and reasons) of the Repertory Committee in the enclosed document. It seems to me that the Repertory Committee’s opinion is not far from the truth. Nevertheless, I am not against the theatre experimenting and showing its skill. Provided that the theatre achieves its aims. The Cultural Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of our party (Comrade Stetsky) will help you in this matter. Comrades will judge who know about artistic matters. I am a dilettante in this. Regards, J. Stalin27 Stanislavsky was obviously encouraged by this answer, and in December rehearsals began. But for some unrecorded reason, in May 1932 they were discontinued, and Meyerhold’s ‘Socialist competition’ never happened. Meyerhold himself had only just begun to rehearse the play, and pursued it energetically through that summer. By early autumn it was ready, and Stalin himself was expected to attend the dress rehearsal which would determine the production’s fate. The theatre was tense that night, and not encouraged when instead of Stalin his lieutenant, the sardonic Lazar Kaganovich, appeared. Still, the performance seemed to be successful, though Igor Ilinsky, playing Podsekalnikov, recorded how, when he pointed his pistol into the auditorium, he noticed the grim sidelong glances of the official party. He understood at that moment not only that the production would be disallowed but also that the Meyerhold Theatre itself was in danger. And so it proved. Kaganovich left the theatre without a word, and very quickly the play and the production were forbidden. 206

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Shostakovich: Ballet and Opera Among the very few works which could be characterised as Futurist which did squeak past the censorship were the early ballets and operas of Dmitri Shostakovich. These combined elements of the transrational with political satire in new and fruitful – and dangerous – ways. Dance had followed its own avant-garde, perhaps Futurist, path in the 1920s, notably in the work of choreographers like Lev Lukin, Kasyan Goleizovsky and Fyodor Lopukhov. Shostakovich’s first ballet was The Golden Age which opened in Leningrad on 26 October 1930. It tells the story of Rita, a dancer from the Golden Age cabaret, whose love for a handsome local fisherman, Boris, arouses the jealousy of Jacques, her thuggish dancing partner. This was followed by the more substantial The Bolt, which premiered, also in Leningrad, on 8 April 1931. This ballet, about a disaffected worker who sabotages his factory by inserting a bolt into a lathe, with a final act, like so many Futurist final acts, set in a dream of the future, is a scornful satire of the many ‘happy Soviet factory’ plays of the Five Year Plan. Its characters are types in the Eisensteinian sense, and bear names like Manka Fart, Ivan Corkscrew and Fyodor Beer. With a mixture of serious and popular music, calisthenics, circus tricks, marching troupes and clown comedy, the choreography alternated between the abstract and the popular in unexpected ways, using motifs from sport and the circus. The design, by Tatiana Bruni and Georgy Korshikov, was one of the last genuinely Constructivist sets of the Soviet period. This was clearly a major work, which was greeted with extraordinary enthusiasm both at its open dress rehearsals and at its first performance. Tatiana Bruni remembered the dress rehearsal when The theatre seemed overcrowded. As soon as the curtain opened, applause rang out; when the factory started to move, the applause transformed into an ovation that did not let up until the end of the spectacle. The dancing chapel and the individual costumes delighted the public. I swear by all that is sacred that this took place. The catcalling of those in opposition (manifest philistines!) was drowned out by the applause.28 But the ballet was removed from the repertoire after a single performance. Bruni recalled: ‘We somehow became responsible for a “failure”. They rebuked us in the press; I’ve remembered the title of one article: “Bolt and chattering formalists”.’29 Shostakovich’s early operas were even more disturbing to the authorities. The Nose, from Gogol’s story of the same name, for instance, has been called ‘an assault on tradition’30 and is both shattering and daring. With a libretto by Georgy Yonin, Alexander Preis, Evgeny Zamyatin and Shostakovich himself, it remains fairly faithful to Gogol’s original grotesque fantasy. Kovalyov, an 207

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8.2  [Plate 14] Tatiana Bruni, stage design for the ballet The Bolt, 1931 (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow).

8.3  [Plate 15] Tatiana Bruni, costume design for the Bureaucrat, The Bolt (A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow). 208

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inoffensive college assessor, is shaved by the barber, Ivan Yakovlevich, who next day wakes up to find a nose in his breakfast roll. While he tries to dispose of it unobtrusively, Kovalyov finds he has lost his nose, which is later seen in the uniform of a State Councillor walking abroad in the city. Kovalyov tries to report his loss to the police, and to advertise for it in the newspapers. Meanwhile, the Nose is corralled, crowds come to stare – and suddenly it returns to Kovalyov’s face. The music, which gives the piece its flavour, is by turns shrill, abrasive, ominous and jolly, and is sometimes interrupted by spoken dialogue. Words are fractured, strange, and over-emphatic rhythms intervene, and Shostakovich mixes high and low genres to form a musical montage – gallop, polka, waltz, juxtaposed to graceful fugati, laments and even parodies of church music, while contrabassoons imitate farts, burps and lascivious groaning. The red nose is the trademark of the Auguste clown, and all the characters are what Sheinberg calls ‘musical masks’.31 The policeman, for instance, who questions Ivan Yakovlevich when he tries to drop the nose into the river, in a scene which parodies Berg’s Wozzeck, strains to reach his high notes. And the crowd in pursuit of the Nose turns into a mob in a scene which now recalls the crowd which chases Podsekalnikov in The Suicide. The overall effect, despite the exuberance of the composition, is grim. ‘The Nose is a horror story,’ Shostakovich himself said. ‘How can police oppression be funny?’ – adding, ironically, ‘Without a nose, you’re not a man.’32 More fully realised than The Nose, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, with a libretto by Alexander Preis and Shostakovich, was premiered on 22 January 1934 in Leningrad, and performed two days later in Moscow. It was immediately hailed as a masterwork and taken up all across Europe. The central figure in the opera is Katerina Ismailova, trapped in a loveless marriage and bullied by her weak husband and domineering father-in-law. She takes a lover, Sergei, and this passion releases all her intense ardour and stifled emotions. She murders her father-in-law and then her husband, but is arrested with Sergei and sent into exile in Siberia. On the long, exhausting tramp east, Sergei betrays her with another woman convict, and in her despair she pushes her rival into the icy river and leaps in after her, to drown her nemesis and kill herself. The convicts march on. The work becomes a cry for help or a shriek of despair on behalf of women suffering under tyrannical male control. It was only late in the chronicle of Futurist theatre that the exploitation of women was addressed. In the earlier Soviet period, the question of women’s rights in the Soviet Union was energetically pursued by women like Alexandra Kollontai, first commissar for women under Lenin, through education, the law and equality in marriage. Indeed, Kollontai herself abhorred traditional family life and advocated ‘free love’, but her radical leftism led to her being sidelined by Lenin. Perhaps more charismatic was another prominent Bolshevik woman, 209

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Larisa Reisner, journalist, revolutionary fighter and determined left-wing activist, who has been suggested as a model for Milda in Tretyakov’s I Want a Baby. Trotsky wrote that Reisner ‘flashed across the revolutionary sky like a burning meteor’,33 but she died in 1926 just as the struggle for the future of the revolution was reaching its climax. By 1930, Stalin, now in total command, was hiding his covert refusal to ameliorate the exploitation and oppression of women by claiming that the ‘woman question’ was solved. Perhaps this explains why it was only then that Futurist dramatists began to focus on the issue. Perhaps also it was because it was only at about this time that a number of women theatre activists – including Meyerhold’s wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh – began to argue for its importance. Besides I Want a Baby, Kharms’s Elizaveta Bam is a passionate investigation of the oppression of women, and now Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk adopted a similar stance. These works shared the premise that a woman has a right to control her own life and her own sexuality, and it is perhaps not by accident that the finest representative of the dreamed-of future in these dramas is Mayakovsky’s Phosphorescent Woman in The Bathhouse. The music in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, unconventional, challenging, exuberant and grotesque, conjures some of this, but the opera’s closeness to Futurist drama has rarely been recognised. The work is conceived as guignol, recalling Are You Listening, Moscow?!, but is structured through a series of shifts, or sdvigy. Moreover, Katerina’s lack of a child, and her husband’s incapability, contrasted with the proletarian Sergei’s potency, present a sort of mirror image of Milda’s desire in I Want a Baby, though the violent image of childbirth in the evocation of the dam bursting indicates the dangers of childbearing in this society. The chaotic wedding scene similarly recalls the wedding scenes in A Wise Man and The Bedbug, though again the ending, with the police arriving and Katerina ‘distraught and rushing about the stage trying to escape’, is more terrifying than anything in those dramas. The second scene, with the tormenting of Aksinya, calls to mind the Chubarov affair and the gang rape in I Want a Baby, while the police are menacing yet still have a clownish edge. In January 1936 Stalin attended a performance of this opera and was clearly affronted. A few days later there appeared in Pravda an article which, it has been suggested, was penned by Stalin himself. Headlined ‘Muddle not music’, it stated: The listener can from the very first moment in the opera sense a deliberately dissonant muddled stream of sounds. Snatches of melody, fragments of musical phrases, re-emerge, and then vanish once more amid the grinding and screeching racket . . . So it goes throughout the whole opera. Onstage the singing is completely replaced by shrieking. 210

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The article continued, not without justification: Leftist art in general rejects simplicity in theatre along with realism, the concept of character, and the natural sound of words. This is transforming the extremely negative features of ‘Meyerholdianism’ in a magnified form into opera and music. This is a leftist muddle instead of natural human music . . . all this is crude, primitive and vulgar.34 Extremely dangerous, if not terminal, though this was for Futurist theatre, Solomon Volkov notes that as far as Shostakovich was concerned, the relationship between him and Stalin was ‘profoundly traditional: the ambivalent “dialogue” between tsar and yurodivy, and between tsar and poet playing the role of yurodivy in order to survive, takes on a tragic incandescence’.35 In these operas, Shostakovich deconstructed Russian classics, creating an intense contemporaneity and provoking greater outrage even than Terentiev’s Government Inspector. No more such operas were forthcoming. Should we regret the fact that Stalinism tamed Shostakovich’s early avant-garde enthusiasm? Perhaps not, since he was able to go on to use his own experience of oppression and exploitation to explore so profoundly the condition of the Russian people in music. Socialist Realism Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk premiered in the year of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, held in Moscow in August and September 1934. The published proceedings of the Congress, which was chaired by Maxim Gorky, were edited by Sergei Tretyakov, ironically enough. They record the speech of Andrei Zhdanov, Leningrad Party boss after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, which defined ‘socialist realism’: Truth and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction must be combined with the task of the ideological transformation and education of working people in the spirit of Socialism. This method of artistic literature and literary criticism is what we call socialist realism. The transformation of the human being was not so far from Futurism’s ideal, but Zhdanov implied that Futurism ‘depicted a nonexistent life with nonexistent heroes’, and lacked what he called ‘revolutionary romanticism’. He called instead for typicality, detailed ‘realism’, and optimism, qualities which would lead to ‘the transformation of the human consciousness in the spirit of Socialism’.36 From this time, Socialist Realism was to be the only permissible artistic form in the Soviet Union.

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Daniil Kharms: Late Plays It was hardly a surprise that the Oberiuty were unable to conform. In 1929 Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky were expelled from the Union of Poets. Then, a week before Mayakovsky shot himself, on 8 April 1930, they were viciously attacked in the press for ‘nonsensical poetry’ and ‘zaum trickery’,37 and the group disbanded. The chinari, however, continued to meet informally well into the 1930s, and several members continued to write plays which, of course, remained unproduced. Daniil Kharms, for instance, created many small – even tiny – dramas which often depend on the active cooperation of an audience to achieve their effect. They include the nonsensical The Measure of Things (1929) in which Professor Gettincretin insists: Feet measure fields the sabre measures the human body, but objects are measured by the fork.38 In the 1930s Kharms wrote, among other dramas, The Mathematician and Andrei Semyonovich (1933), the playful Koka Briansky (1933), the terrifying Makerov and Petersen (1934) and the metatheatrical Fenerov in America (1934) with its sly references to Kuleshov’s film The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks: a Russian visitor to the USA tries to make sense of a queue waiting to enter a music hall, there is a sudden ‘circus number’ and, once inside the theatre, the Master of Ceremonies tries to make the audience laugh by pulling a face. The final stage direction reads: ‘The curtain rises.’39 Kharms’s late play Comprehensive Research (1937) is mordantly ironic, but perhaps his most memorable is Pushkin and Gogol (1934) which, in the spirit of A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, turns these two literary giants into a clown double act: PUSHKIN stumbles over GOGOL and falls. PUSHKIN: What the devil! Seems I’ve tripped over Gogol! GOGOL (getting up): What a vile abomination! You can’t even have a rest. (Walks off, stumbles over PUSHKIN and falls) Seems I’ve stumbled over Pushkin! PUSHKIN (getting up): Not a minute’s peace! (Walks off, stumbles over GOGOL and falls) What the devil! Seems I’ve tripped over Gogol again! And so on. These dramatic squibs were complemented by a few not dissimilar plays by other Oberiuty, including Nikolai Zabolotsky, whose strange The Test of the Will (1934) is written in a sort of stultified archaic verse.

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Vvedensky’s Plays Alexander Vvedensky’s achievement is more substantial than either of these. The single scene in Kuprianov and Natasha (1931) depicts the unsatisfactory love-making of a couple. Slowly they undress, but he is reduced to masturbation, she to feeling that her breasts are vanishing: ‘they retreat, they float off’. They dress again. Finally, ‘he gets smaller and smaller and disappears. Nature indulges in solitary pleasure.’40 A Certain Quantity of Conversations (1937) centres on three wanderers, perhaps lunatics or prisoners or army deserters, or perhaps lost souls wandering in Purgatory. They discuss ‘the absence of poetry’, and ‘remember events’ while they play cards or take a bath. They stroke their cats, like the character in Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy, sit on the roof and stare out. ‘Maybe this is hell,’ says Zoya.41 The Oberiu manifesto notes how Vvedensky ‘breaks action down into fragments, but the action does not lose its creative order’, and this explains the juxtapositions which evoke more than whatever is said or done. The scenes are not necessarily sequential, as Vvedensky plays endlessly with time and its consequences, but some sort of journey seems indicated, during which memory, identity, being itself merges, submerges but never re-emerges. Language and action are irreparably fractured. Vvedensky’s strongest play, perhaps, is Christmas at the Ivanovs (1938), which contains no character called Ivanov. Its story, melancholy in tone, parodies the ‘great’ Russian novels, but rather than flowing inexorably as they do, this play repeatedly interrupts itself, presenting jagged rhythms and unexpected occurrences. It begins the day before Christmas when the children are being bathed by their Nurse. Sonia exposes her private parts. The Nurse chops her head off. The police arrive, the parents are grief-stricken. Meanwhile, in the woods, Fyodor, the Nurse’s fiancé, works with other woodcutters to prepare a Christmas tree. While Sonia is in her coffin, her parents copulate beside it, and Fyodor and the woodcutters deliver a tree. The Nurse is brought first to the police station, where she claims she is Sonia, and then to the mental asylum, where the Doctor discharges her. Fyodor has sex with the maid, while at home even the dog is upset by Sonia in her coffin. In court, two judges die during the trial, but the Nurse is sentenced to death. At last it is Christmas Day. The parents and children gather round the tree. They remember Sonia, then one by one they die. The strangeness embedded in the ‘plot’ is echoed in the details. Dunya Shustrova is an eighty-two-year-old child, there is moss growing on Varya’s back, in the forest live ‘a giraffe; a wolf, a beaver-like animal; a lion, the king; and a porky sucking pig’,42 the judge at the trial chants:    I judge    I cut    I sit 213

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   I rage     No, I don’t sin. One more time.    I judge    I cut    I sit     No, I don’t sin. One more time    I judge    I cut    I sit     No, I don’t sin.43 and the mother mourns her daughter in zaum: A o u e i ya V G R T44 Moreover, there is always a clock on stage which tells different impossible times for each scene. Christmas at the Ivanovs constantly struggles towards realism, which it then subverts or ridicules, defamiliarising simple events and forcing the spectator to co-create a different reality. It is the antithesis of socialist realism, destabilising all attempts at naturalism and defying every dramatic convention aimed at representing a recognisable world. Futurist Theatre Strangled Moscow Is Burning, I Want a Baby, The Suicide, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Christmas at the Ivanovs indicate the extraordinary richness which Russian Futurist theatre achieved. They also indicate the tragedy of its brutal strangulation. After his production of The Government Inspector had closed, Igor Terentiev wrote to Alexei Kruchenykh: The critics are trying to get me imprisoned and close the theatre. The present moment is very dangerous for everyone in the whole House of the Press because there are some disappointing directives from above. We are beginning a savage fight.45 Terentiev was correct. He was arrested in 1929, but released not long after. He was rearrested in 1931, released again, and arrested a third time in 1936. He died in the gulag the following year. Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms were arrested on 10 December 1931 and released soon after but were 214

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forbidden to live in Moscow or Leningrad. However, in 1933 this order was rescinded and both moved to Leningrad, where they were able to publish children’s stories. In 1936 Vvedensky moved to Kharkov. Both, however, were rearrested in 1941. Vvedensky died of dysentery on a prison train in December 1941, and Kharms died in a prison asylum on 2 February 1942. Nikolai Erdman was perhaps luckier. On 10 October 1933 he was arrested along with Vladimir Mass: ‘At the height of an October seaside day, they arrested the fragile, utterly charming Erdman and carried him away like they carry away furniture.’46 He was exiled first to Yeniseisk in Siberia, and then to Tomsk. He was released in 1936 but not allowed to live in Moscow. He did, however, escape further arrest and death. Adrian Piotrovsky, librettist for Shostakovich’s ballet The Bright Stream, was attacked in Pravda for ‘balletic falsehood’, arrested in November 1937 and shot, probably the following year. Sergei Tretyakov was arrested on 16 July 1937 and accused of working for the German and Japanese secret services. He admitted the charge, saying he had needed the money to pay his gambling debts: Tretyakov was well known as a fervent opponent of gambling, and this was his way of ridiculing the charge. He was tortured, and he died in Butyrka prison in September 1937 when he flung himself over the banisters of the prison from several storeys up, killing himself on the paved floor below. The authorities’ response was to put nets across the stairwell to prevent future detainees from following his example. His friend Bertolt Brecht responded with one of his most poignant poems: My teacher, Tretyakov, Tall and kindly, Has been shot, condemned by a people’s court As a spy. His name is damned. His books are destroyed. Talk about him Is suspect and suppressed. Suppose he is innocent?47 The name ‘Tretyakov’ was expunged from all editions of this poem during the Communist period. The story of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Zinaida Raikh is well known. An article by Platon Kerzhentsev in Pravda on 17 December 1937 stated: In a series of plays staged by the [Meyerhold] Theatre, Soviet reality has been presented in a crudely distorted, mockingly hostile manner . . . Over a number of years, Meyerhold stubbornly tried to stage the play I Want a Baby by the enemy of the people, S. Tretyakov, which was a hostile slander on the Soviet family, and the play The Suicide by Erdman, which defended the right of the middle class to exist and lodged a protest against the dictatorship of the proletariat.48 215

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In January 1938 the Meyerhold Theatre was liquidated, and for a time Meyerhold worked with his old mentor, Konstantin Stanislavsky, on opera. After Stanislavsky’s death, however, his position became more precarious and on 20 June 1939 he was arrested in Leningrad. A few weeks later, on the night of 14/15 July 1939, Zinaida Raikh, his wife, was surprised in their Moscow flat by intruders and brutally stabbed to death. Meyerhold was tortured, summarily tried and shot on 2 February 1940. Among those artists who were not arrested but whose art was dulled, deflected or fractured were Sergei Eisenstein, Dmitri Shostakovich, Alexei Kruchenykh, Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, as well as the critic-writers Viktor Shklovsky and Osip Brik. ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority.’49 All the works of the Russian Futurist theatre were ‘disappeared’ or at least muffled during the Soviet period, and because they were Russian and often had left-wing or even Communist sympathies, few in the west were interested in discovering them. After the death of Stalin, most were rehabilitated, though this usually meant little in terms of publication or production. Later Productions of Russian Futurist Drama There were some exceptions. Mayakovsky had been praised with absurd irony by Stalin in a letter to Nikolai Yezhov, written after a meeting with Lili Brik. Mayakovsky was, wrote Stalin, ‘the best, the most talented poet of the Soviet epoch’, with the added assertion that ‘indifference to his memory and his work is a crime’.50 The praise was repeated in an editorial in Pravda on 5 December 1935. Still, his plays were not revived until the 1950s, when Valentin Pluchek, a former member of the Meyerhold Theatre, now director of the Moscow Theatre of Satire, presented The Bathhouse in 1953, The Bedbug in 1955 and Mystery Bouffe in 1957. The Bedbug especially has been quite frequently revived since, but even Mystery Bouffe, for example, when it was directed by Michael Boyd at the Sheffield Crucible Theatre in May 1982, amazed. One critic wrote of ‘the delight and the joy of this production . . . against the odds it works . . . to make it totally gripping theatre’.51 A version of The Bathhouse was even successfully adapted for the Royal Commonwealth Pool in Edinburgh in 2009, with performers from Edinburgh Diving Club. Between 1964 and his death in 1970, Nikolai Erdman worked somewhat mutedly with Yuri Lyubimov at the Taganka Theatre, where the influence not only of Meyerhold but also of Terentiev was acknowledged. And while The Mandate has been revived several times, including at the National Theatre in October 2004, The Suicide has entered the standard theatrical repertoire all over the world. Few of Tretyakov’s plays have been revived, but I Want a Baby was produced by the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe in 1980, at the Berliner Ensemble in 1989 and finally in Moscow at the Teatr u Nikitskikh 216

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Vorot in 1990. Daniil Kharms’s Elizaveta Bam was revived in a widely acclaimed production in Moscow in 2006 which was seen in London in 2008. Alexander Vvedensky’s Christmas at the Ivanovs was given a notable production by Agnes Bourgeois in 2008 for the Terrain de jeu in a co-production with the Comédie de Saint-Étienne when the title was rendered Un sapin chez les Ivanov, punning on the word ‘sapin’ meaning either a Christmas tree or a coffin, and the highlight of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2016 was the Croatian Daska Theatre’s haunting yet terrifying production of Vvedensky’s A Certain Quantity of Conversations, under the title Murdered Artists Society. Shostakovich’s ballets and operas have emerged through innumerable productions since The Bolt was resurrected in 1979, when Tatiana Bruni reconstructed her original designs for the 1931 production. And Victory Over the Sun has not only been revived several times, first perhaps in the Los Angeles County Museum in September 1980, then later in Toulouse, Munich, Leningrad and Moscow, and at the Barbican Centre, London, in June 1999; it has also been the subject of at least two recent full-length scholarly volumes, one compiled by Patricia Railing for Artists Bookworks in 2009, the other edited by Rosamund Bartlett and Sarah Dadswell for Exeter University Press in 2012. The Legacy The wider legacy of Russian Futurist theatre is harder to pin down because of the black hole it fell into in Stalin’s Russia, compounded by the west’s suspicion of all things Russian. One strand may be found in the later twentiethcentury epic theatre which derives in part at least from Mystery Bouffe and the plays of Sergei Tretyakov. Tretyakov was a friend of Bertolt Brecht, and there are many echoes in the German’s work of the older Russian playwright. In I Want a Baby, when Yakov discovers that Milda is pregnant, he fantasises the child in its pram: Please, comrade baby, get your toes out of your mouth. Look, comrade baby, a jackdaw on the telephone wire. Let’s go. Keep to the pavement. Er, excuse me, citizen, move aside. Careful now, we’re crossing a new little citizen here. Old woman, mind out now, quick as you can. A citizen is on the move. Stand aside! Cars, give way! Don’t cry, comrade son, we’ll get across the road. Policeman, clear a way through. Hold up your truncheon! Bus, stop! Motorbike, stop! We’re coming, citizen.52 In The Good Person of Szechuan, when Shen Te finds herself pregnant, she fantasises similarly: Oh joy! A new human being is coming to life in my body . . . Come, my son, inspect your world. Here, that is a tree. Bow politely, greet him. 217

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(She performs a bow) There, now you know one another . . . Ah, the policeman! I think we will avoid him . . . Here’s the road. Now gently, walk slowly so we don’t attract attention, as if nothing whatever had happened. (She sings as she walks along with the (imaginery) child).53 Brecht’s peasants in The Caucasian Chalk Circle clearly descend from the Chinese peasants in Roar China! and the same play is behind the scene of drawing lots in Mother Courage and Her Children. The open epic form developed by Tretyakov, with its emphasis on the future, is taken up by Brecht. The Good Person of Szechuan ends with Shen Te’s couplet: Ladies and gentlemen, in you we trust: There must be happy endings, must, must, must!54 while Andrea’s final line in Life of Galileo is: ‘There are a lot of things we don’t know yet, Giuseppe. We’re really just at the beginning.’55 Brecht was more cerebral than Tretyakov, but Brecht’s way, summarised here by Tretyakov, has a similar function: The essence of a play is not to send away the spectator after bathing him in catharsis, according to Aristotle’s rules; the spectator should be changed, or rather the seeds of change should have been planted in him, seeds which must come to flower outside the limits of the performance.56 And despite Brecht’s preference for a cool-headed reaction to his work, Tretyakov notes the emotional response to a performance he witnessed of Man Equals Man: The intelligent middle-class Berliner does not go to the theatre to be made uneasy . . . As a result, women stamped their heels, lawyers foaming with anger hurried from the theatre, hurling their crumpled programmes at the actors as they left. In the cloakroom a sobbing woman tore her coat from her husband’s grip and went to a far corner to put it on alone. Her husband was unbearable, for he had watched the play without being nauseated.57 In 1934 Die Linkskurve published an article by Georg Lukacs attacking the open epic form, triggering a controversy in which both Brecht and Tretyakov responded, and even Ezra Pound assailed them. The influence of Brecht was pervasive in the second half of the twentieth century. It can be discerned, for example, in the work of Dario Fo, who is, however, better thought of as Mayakovsky’s heir, not least because his most notorious one-person show was Mistero Buffo. Deriving both its approach and its attitudes from Mayakovsky’s epic, Mistero Buffo combined popular and ludicrous devices in a montage of blasphemy, satire and buffoonery, with the 218

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aim of forging a political weapon to fight international capitalism. There are also elements here of Erdman’s farcical illogicalities. Untangling the influences, borrowings and possible cross-currents in the transrational tradition of Russian Futurist drama requires another volume. Only a few possible suggestions are offered here to indicate the peculiar Russian contribution to twentieth-century absurdist drama. The key element in this was the use of transrational or zaum language, and it is not irrelevant that Ilya Zdanevich, one of Futurism’s most sophisticated practitioners of zaum, should have emigrated to France, where he became a prominent figure in Dada. Beyond this, Nina Gourianova noticed how Zdanevich’s ‘principles dominate the theatre of Antonin Artaud, which undermines the utilitarianism of language and attempts to use speech like a magic spell to restore its ability to shock physically’.58 Artaud’s The Spurt of Blood was published in 1925, when the Russian Futurist theatre had been in existence for over a decade, and its opening, for instance, could have come from a contemporary Russian play: YOUNG MAN: I love you and everything is fine. GIRL (in a quickened throbbing voice): You love me and everything is fine. YOUNG MAN: I love you and everything is fine. GIRL (lower still): You love me and everything is fine.59 Artaud’s concept of the theatre and its double, life, also has resonance with Russian Futurism. Surrealism, from which Artaud emerged, wanted, like the Russian Futurists, to upturn traditional culture and literature. Most Surrealists, like most Futurists, wanted to make a new human being or a different world, but their way was through dreams, hallucinations and hypnosis, means which few Futurists accepted. But the Oberiuty, who were contemporaries of the Surrealists, did share some of their conceptions. For instance, Oberiu accepted the vital significance of intuition, which they believed could lead to knowledge of the thing-itself, and they happily admitted intuition’s alogicality. Its expression therefore inevitably destabilised not only language (zaum) but observed reality as well. Their theatre works proceeded unexpectedly, with odd juxtapositions and by leaps and stumbles. Theatrically, this is closest to the Theatre of the Absurd, and indeed perhaps the major theatre absurdist in Russia in the 1950s and 1960s, the dissident Andrei Amalrik, who spent years in Siberian exile, admitted Khlebnikov as a major influence. His play The Nose! The Nose? The No-se! (1964), based on Gogol’s story, surely also owed something to Shostakovich. The similarities between Kharms and Ionesco have been often pointed out. Kharms’s mini-dramas also foreshadow Samuel Beckett’s ‘dramaticules’, like 219

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Come and Go. Some of Vvedensky’s scenes are also strangely close to Samuel Beckett. In A Certain Quantity of Conversations, ‘The evening passes. Nothing changes.’ The First Companion, trying to recall the previous day, says: Come on, you were sitting there, at place A, while I stood there at place B. Then you said: No, come on, you were not sitting there at place A, and I was not standing there at place B. To buttress my proof, to make it very very powerful, I immediately experienced sadness, joy, and lament, and then I said: But the two of us were here yesterday, at the same time, at two neighbouring points, A and B – don’t you understand that.60 The pre-echoes of Waiting for Godot, not to mention Quad and other dramaticules, are uncanny. Three Twenty-First-Century Plays Happenings, situationist events, punk and even postmodernism all carry a whiff of Russian Futurist theatre. Russian theatre today is infused with Futurist practice, but it is rarely aware of it, partly because Futurism elides with so much else to produce the contemporary and the original. A snapshot of 2014, for instance, offered notable examples which indicate the breadth and subtlety of its impact, and the way it has been able to integrate with other progressive theatre models and methods. SounDrama, based in the Meyerhold Centre in Moscow, premiered The War, directed by Vladimir Pankov at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2014, about the First World War. Conceived as a sequence of images, or attractions, like Moscow Is Burning, and structured musically almost as Zdanevich structured his dras, the show used parody and physicality to reconstitute familiar tales and histories. Some London critics found it hard to accept because it lacked a conventional text or storyline. ‘This is art theatre with a vengeance,’ one scornfully reported,61 but though grander in presentation, its thematic approach and execution were still reminiscent of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh. Opus No 7, presented by the Dmitry Krylov Lab of Moscow, focused on the oppression of the Jews and of the artist, particularly Shostakovich, under Stalin. But by various means which would have appealed to Igor Terentiev or the young Sergei Eisenstein, it was a montage of attractions – knives cutting through the cardboard backdrop, paint flung at the walls, a whirlwind of paper blown over the audience, pianos skidding around like dodgem cars, and a huge ten-foot-high puppet of Mother Russia toting a revolver and wearing Stalin’s peaked cap. The gun was aimed at Shostakovich, but it misfired. ‘Stunning and surreal,’ one newspaper aptly headlined its review.62 Finally, the Arches Theatre of Minsk, Belorus, presented More Than Rain, directed by Pavel Adamchykan. This extraordinary adaptation of Anton 220

the case is closed

8.4  Arches Theatre, Minsk, Belorus, production of More Than Rain, 2014. Chekhov’s The Seagull became a chain of images, partially danced in a style distinctly reminiscent of Foregger’s machine dances. It was part parody, part action blocks, like Radlov’s Popular Comedy. These elements structured the piece, not as Chekhov had done, but almost like a series of Meyerholdian études, opening up this hilarious tragedy of misconceived love in unique ways. The Russian Futurist techniques and devices were shown in such performances to be infinitely resonant and useable. Their structuring through the use of dramatic montage led to new insights and unexplored pathways. The question remained: could this be harnessed to make the new human being or even the new world? That case was not closed. Notes   1. Carrick (ed.), Volodya: Selected Poems, pp. 18–19.  2. Bergan, Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict, p. 142.  3. The Drama Review, vol. 17, no. 1 (1973), p. 76.   4. Tait and Lavers (eds), The Routledge Circus Studies Reader, p. 19.  5. Tretyakov, I Want a Baby, p. 118.  6. Fevralsky, ‘S. M. Tret’yakov v Teatre Meierkholda’, in Tret’yakov, Slyshish, Moskva?!, p. 198.  7. Sovremennaya Dramaturgiya, no. 2 (1988), p. 238.  8. Ibid.  9. Tretyakov, I Want a Baby, p. 77. 10. Fevralsky, ‘S. M. Tretyalov v Teatre Meierkholda’, in Tretyakov, Slyshish, Moskva?!, p. 204. 11. Tretyakov, I Want a Baby, pp. 78–80.

221

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12. Ibid. pp. xvi–xvii. 13. Lissitzky, Das Neue Frankfurt (1930), quoted in Christina Lodder, ‘El Lissitzky’s set for Sergei Tretyakov’s “I Want a Child”, and Constructivist Stage Design’, unpublished paper given at conference ‘Tretyakov, Brecht’s Teacher’, University of Birmingham, January 1989. 14. Lodder, ‘El Lissitzky’s set for Sergei Tretyakov’s “I Want a Child”, and Constructivist Stage Design’. 15. International Literature 3, Moscow (July 1933), p. 139. 16. Sovremennaya Dramaturgiya, no. 2 (1988), p. 239. 17. Ibid. p. 240. 18. Ibid. p. 243. 19. Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, p. 270. 20. Erdman, The Suicide, p. 9. 21. Ibid. pp. 2, 25. 22. Ibid. p. 52. 23. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 466. 24. Freedman (ed.), A Meeting About Laughter, p. 191. 25. Ibid. pp. 193, 201. 26. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p. 466. 27. Erdman, The Suicide, pp. vi–vii. 28. Bolt, Bel Air Media, booklet issued with DVD, Bolt by Bolshoi Ballet. 29. Ibid. 30. Fairclough and Fanning (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich, p. 185. 31. Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque, p. 163. 32. Shostakovich, Testimony, p. 208. 33. Trotsky, My Life, p. 384. 34. Senelick and Ostrovsky (eds), The Soviet Theater, p. 284. 35. Shostakovich, Testimony, p. xxix. 36. Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant Garde, pp. 293, 294. 37. Roberts, The Last Soviet Avant-Garde, pp. 12–13. 38. Ostashevsky, Oberiu, p. 81. 39. Ibid. p. 112. 40. Ibid. pp. 11, 12. 41. Ibid. p. 46. 42. Ibid. p. 168. 43. Gibian (ed.), Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd, pp. 163, 184. 44. Ibid. p. 187. 45. Senelick and Ostrovsky (eds), The Soviet Theater, p. 284. 46. Erdman, The Mandate, p. ix. 47. Willett and Manheim (eds), Bertolt Brecht Poems, Part 3, p. 331. 48. Senelick and Ostrovsky (eds), The Soviet Theater, p. 401. 49. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 66. 50. Jangfeldt, Mayakovsky, a Biography, p. 574. 51. The Guardian, 31 May 1982. 52. Tretyakov, I Want a Baby, p. 103. 53. Brecht, The Good Person of Szechuan, pp. 73–4. 54. Ibid. p. 109. 55. Brecht, Life of Galileo, p. 113. 56. Witt (ed.), Brecht As They Knew Him, p. 78. 57. Ibid. p. 73. 58. Railing (ed.), Victory Over the Sun, vol. 2, pp. 32–3.

222

the case is closed

59. Artaud, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 62. 60. Ostashevsky, Oberiu, p. 32. 61. The Guardian, 11 August 2014. 62. The Guardian, 6 May 2014.

223

CHRONOLOGY

January January During this year:

27 January May 18 September October 3 December During this year:

December During this year:

224

1910 Union of Youth, St Petersburg, established First issue, A Trap for Judges V. Khlebnikov, ‘Incantation by Laughter’ published 1911 The Performance House, Suvorin Theatre School, St Petersburg Tsar Maximilian and His Son, des. V. Tatlin, Moscow Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minister of Russian Empire, assassinated, Kiev Ego-Futurist group formed Stray Dog cabaret opens, St Petersburg V. Kamensky’s plane crashes in Poland V. Kandinsky, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ 1912 V. Meyerhold, On Theatre, published A Slap in the Face of Public Taste published V. Kandinsky, Yellow Sound and ‘Concerning Theatrical Composition’

chronology



M. Le-Dantyu, ‘Active Performance’ First number of journal The Union of Youth

1913 Public debate on art and theatre, Polytechnic Museum, St Petersburg 18 July ‘First All-Russian Congress of Futurian Bards’, Usikirkko, Finland 27 July V. Mayakovsky, Theatre, Cinema, Futurism published 9 September Plans announced for Futurist Theatre at Pink Lantern cabaret September V. Meyerhold opens ‘Doctor Dapertutto’s Studio’, St Petersburg 19 October Pink Lantern cabaret opens and closes after ‘scandalous’ evening November ‘First Evening of Everythingism’, Stray Dog, St Petersburg November/December Centrifuge group formed 2 and 4 December V. Mayakovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy, Luna Park Theatre, St Petersburg 3 and 5 December A. Kruchenykh, Victory Over the Sun, Luna Park Theatre, St Petersburg December Futurist poets embark on tour of Russia 23 March

20 January 26 January 28 January March 26 April 28 June August 29 August

March December During this year:

1914 Suicide of Ego-Futurist poet Ivan Ignatiev F. T. Marinetti arrives in Russia Film Drama in the Futurist Cabaret Number 13 released First Journal of Russian Futurists published (only one issue produced) V. Shershenevich, A Declaration About Futurist Theatre Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo World War begins Russia defeated at Battle of Tannenberg 1915 ‘Tramway V’: first Futurist exhibition, Petrograd ‘Futurist Christmas Party’ given by Lili and Osip Brik M. Larionov and N. Goncharova leave Russia 225

russian futurist theatre

February April 3 December 30 December During this year:

February February 2 March March 3 April 1 May

1916 Formation of Society 317 by V. Khlebnikov Comedians’ Rest cabaret opens, Petrograd I. Zdanevich, Yanko king of Albania, Petrograd Assassination of Rasputin Opoyaz (Society for the Study of Poetic Language) established, Petrograd 1917 General strike ‘Carnival of the Arts’, Petrograd Tsar Nikolai II abdicates; formation of Provisional Government ‘First Republican Evening of the Arts’, Moscow Vladimir Lenin returns to Russia City buildings decorated with artworks and posters First Congress of Soviets A. Kerensky forms new Provisional Government M. Le-Dantyu killed Café Pittoresque, Moscow, opened Bolshevik Revolution

16 June July 25 August October 25 October/   7 November November Poets’ Café, Moscow, opened November/December Formation of Company 41°, Tiflis, Georgia

1918 January Constituent Assembly dissolved January Formation of Tvorchestvo group, Vladivostok January N. Foregger opens Theatre of the Four Masks 3 March Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed 11 March Soviet capital moved to Moscow March Only edition of Futurist Gazette published April Film Creation Can’t Be Bought released April Poets’ Café, Moscow, closed 3 May I. Zdanevich, Donkey for Rent, Tiflis May Film The Young Lady and the Hooligan released June Film Fettered by Film released July Machiavelli, Mandragora, dir. N. Foregger, Theatre of the Four Masks, Moscow 19 July I. Zdanevich, Easter Island, Tiflis 28 July All industry in Russia nationalised 226

chronology

7 November 7 November 11 November 22 November 7 December

January 24 September 7 November

8 January 6 February 17 February 20 March 20 May 16 June 7 November 12 November 14 November 16 November 31 December During this year:

30 January

V. Mayakovsky, Mystery Bouffe, dir. V. Meyerhold, Petrograd Music and Drama Conservatory V. Kamensky, Stenka Razin, dir. A. Zonov and V. Sakhnovsky, Moscow World War armistice I. Zdanevich, As Though Zga, Tiflis Art of the Commune, first issue 1919 Kom-Fut established in Vyborg L. Tolstoy, The First Distiller, dir. Y. Annenkov, Hermitage, Petrograd V. Kamensky, Stenka Razin, dir. S. Radlov, Baltic Navy Theatre 1920 The Corpse’s Bride, dir. S. Radlov, Popular Comedy, Petrograd Victory Over the Sun, UNOVIS, Vitebsk The Monkey Who Was an Informer, dir. S. Radlov, Popular Comedy, Petrograd The Sultan and the Devil, dir. S. Radlov, Popular Comedy, Petrograd The Banker’s Second Daughter, dir. S. Radlov, Popular Comedy, Petrograd M. Gorky, The Hardworking Mr Slovotekov, dir. S. Radlov, Popular Comedy, Petrograd V. Mayakovsky, The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle, Second State Circus, Moscow W. Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, dir. S. Radlov, Popular Comedy, Petrograd V. Mayakovsky, And What If . . . ?, TEREVSAT Studio, Moscow Civil War in Russia ends with Bolshevik victory at Perekop V. Mayakovsky, Small Play About Priests, TEREVSAT Studio, Moscow Famine in Russia; continues until 1922 1921 Public meeting: ‘Should Mystery Bouffe be staged?’ 227

russian futurist theatre

March 10 March 17 March 23 March 28 March April 1 May 3 October December 21 December 31 December During this year

22 January February 10 February 3 April 25 April 13 May 28 June 9 July 25 September September 24 November

9 January

228

New Economic Policy (NEP) announced at Tenth Communist Party Congress The Mexican (1st version), dir. V. Smyshlayev, des. S. Eisenstein and L. A. Nikitin Kronstadt mutiny suppressed V. Kamensky, Stenka Razin, Petrograd Theatrical Parodies, dir. N. Foregger, MASTFOR, House of the Press, Moscow Kom-Fut organisation dissolved V. Mayakovsky, Mystery Bouffe (2nd version), dir. V. Meyerhold, 1st Theatre of RSFSR Oedipus the King, dir. B. Ferdinandov, ExperimentalHeroic Theatre, Moscow Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy, Tvorchestvo, Chita ‘Dispute on the Eccentric Theatre’, Free Comedy Theatre, Petrograd V. Mass, Kindness to Horses, dir. N. Foregger, MASTFOR, Moscow I. Zdanevich and V. Kandinsky emigrate 1922 Theatre of Popular Comedy, Petrograd, closes S. Radlov opens Experimental Workshop, Petrograd E. Labiche, The Piggy Bank, adap. N. Erdman, dir. B. Ferdinandov, Experimental-Heroic Theatre, Moscow J. Stalin appointed General Secretary of Communist Party F. Crommelynck, The Magnanimous Cuckold, dir. V. Meyerhold, GITIS, Moscow Crooked Jimmy cabaret opens, Moscow Death of V. Khlebnikov Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS) opens, Petrograd N. Gogol, Marriage, FEKS, Proletkult Theatre, Petrograd MASTFOR opens on Arbat, Moscow A. Sukhovo-Kobylin, The Death of Tarelkin, dir. V. Meyerhold and S. Eisenstein, GITIS, Moscow 1923 The Murder of Archie Braiton and Opus Number One, dir. S. Radlov, Experimental Workshop, Petrograd

chronology

February 13 February March 4 March 26 April 9 May 4 June June 7 November

21 January 29 February 27 April

18 May 25 May 1 October 24 October 31 October 10 November 9 December 16 December

20 April

Experimental-Heroic Theatre disbanded Machine Dances, dir. N. Foregger, MASTFOR, Moscow 1st number, LEF S. Tretyakov, The World Upside Down, dir. V. Meyerhold, des. L. Popova, TIM, Moscow S. Tretyakov, A Wise Man, dir. S. Eisenstein, Proletkult Theatre, Moscow V. Khlebnikov, Zangezi, dir. and des. V. Tatlin, Museum of Artistic Culture, Petrograd Foreign Trade on the Eiffel Tower, FEKS, Hall of Musical Comedy, Petrograd S. Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Attractions’ published in LEF S. Tretyakov, Are You Listening, Moscow?!, dir. S. Eisenstein, Proletkult Theatre, Moscow 1924 Death of V. I. Lenin S. Treyakov, Gas Masks, dir. S. Eisenstein, Proletkult Theatre, Moscow Film The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, dir. L. Kuleshov, released A. Ostrovsky, The Snow Maiden, dir. I. Terentiev, Shimanovsky Studio, Petrograd Death of L. Popova Moscow from a Point of View, Theatre of Satire, Moscow John Reed, dir. I. Terentiev, Shimanovsky Studio, Leningrad Film Kino-Eye, dir. D. Vertov, released Lecture-demonstration of Metro-Rhythmics by B. Ferdinandov, Moscow Film The Adventures of Oktyabrina, dir. G. Kozintsev and L. Trauberg, released N. Erdman, Lev Gurych Sinichkin, Vakhtangov Theatre, Moscow 1925 N. Erdman, The Mandate, dir. V. Meyerhold, GOSTIM, Moscow 229

russian futurist theatre

28 April 21 December

23 January May 11 June September 9 December

January January 11 April 7 November

24 January 7 March April 23 October

February 13 February

18 January 16 March 8 April 14 April 230

Film Strike, dir. S. Eisenstein, released Film Battleship Potemkin, dir. S. Eisenstein, released 1926 S. Tretyakov, Roar China!, dir. V. Federov, GOSTIM, Moscow V. Andreyev, Foxtrot, dir. I. Terentiev, House of the Press, Leningrad I. Terentiev, A Tangled Web, dir. I. Terentiev, House of the Press, Leningrad Chubarov Alley, Leningrad, incident N. Gogol, The Government Inspector, dir. V. Meyerhold, GOSTIM, Moscow 1927 1st number, Novyi LEF Trotsky exiled to Alma-Ata N. Gogol, The Government Inspector, dir. I. Terentiev, House of the Press, Leningrad October in the Ring, dir. S. Radlov, Leningrad Circus 1928 Three Hours Left, Oberiu, House of the Press, Leningrad Arrest of engineers at Shakhty, Donbas, accused of sabotage NEP abolished. First Five Year Plan inaugurated Film Eliso, scen. S. Tretyakov, dir. N. Shengelaya, released 1929 Trotsky sent into exile V. Mayakovsky, The Bedbug, dir. V. Meyerhold, GOSTIM, Moscow 1930 N. Gogol, The Nose, music by D. Shostakovich, Maly Opera Theatre, Leningrad V. Mayakovsky, The Bathhouse, dir. V. Meyerhold, GOSTIM, Moscow Last Oberiu performance, Leningrad; Oberiu disbands Suicide of Vladimir Mayakovsky

chronology

21 April 25 September 26 October

V. Mayakovsky, Moscow Is Burning, dir. S. Radlov, First Moscow State Circus Glavrepertkom bans The Suicide by N. Erdman D. Shostakovich, The Golden Age, Soviet Ballet, Leningrad

10 December

1931 D. Shostakovich, The Bolt, State Theatre of Opera and Ballet, Leningrad D. Kharms and A. Vvedensky arrested

10 October

1933 N. Erdman and V. Mass arrested

8 April

22 January August/September 1 December

1934 D. Shostakovich, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Maly Opera Theatre, Leningrad First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers Assassination of Sergei Kirov

5 December

1935 Stalin declares indifference to Mayakovsky’s memory ‘is a crime’

July

1936 First Moscow show trial of Zinoviev, Kamenev and others

16 July September 17 December

1937 S. Tretyakov arrested Death of S. Tretyakov Pravda attacks V. Meyerhold

20 June 15 July

1939 V. Meyerhold arrested Z. Raikh murdered

2 February

1940 V. Meyerhold executed

231

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Annenkov, Yuri, ‘Merry Sanatorium’, The Drama Review, vol. 19, no. 4 (December 1975). Apollonio, Umbro (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). Artaud, Antonin, Collected Works, vol. 1 (London: John Calder, 1978). Aumont, Jacques, Montage Eisenstein (London: BFI, 1987). Baer, Nancy Van Norman, Theatre in Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991). Barooshian, Vahan D., Brik and Mayakovsky (The Hague: Mouton, 1978). Barooshian, Vahan, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910–1930: A Study in AvantGardism (The Hague: Mouton, 1974). Bartlett, Rosamund and Sarah Dadswell (eds), Victory Over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2012). Bellido, Ramon Tio, Kandinsky (London: Studio Editions, 1988). Bergan, Ronald, Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict (London: Warner Books, 1999). Beumers, Birgit, Yuri Lyubimov at the Taganka Theatre, 1964–1994 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1997). Bowlt, John E., Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia’s Silver Age (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008). Bowlt, John E., Russian Art of the Avant Garde (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988). 232

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Dean, Basil, Seven Ages (London: Hutchinson, 1970). Drain, Richard (ed.), Twentieth-Century Theatre: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1995). Drucker, Johanna, The Visible Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Düchting, Hajo, Wassily Kandinsky (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1996). Eaton, Katherine Bliss, The Theater of Meyerhold and Brecht (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985). Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form (London: Harcourt Brace, 1949). Eisenstein, Sergei, Immoral Memories (London: Peter Owen, 1985). Ekctsentrizm (Petrograd: Ekctsentropolis, 1922). Elliott, David (ed.), Alexander Rodchenko (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1982). Elliott, David (ed.), Mayakovsky: Twenty Years of Work (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1982). Erdman, Nikolai, The Mandate, trans. Declan Donnellan (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004). Erdman, Nikolai, The Suicide, trans. Peter Tegel (London: Pluto Press, 1981). Erdman, Nikolai, Vladimir Mass et al., A Meeting About Laughter, ed. and trans. John Freedman (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic, 1995). Fairclough, Pauline and David Fanning (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Figes, Orlando, A People’s Tragedy (London: Pimlico, 1997). Fitzlion, Kyril and Tatiana Browning, Before the Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). Foregger, Nikolai, ‘Charlie Chaplin’, Kino-Fot, no. 3 (1922). Foregger, Nikolai, ‘Experiments in the Art of Dance’, The Drama Review, vol. 19, no. 1. Foregger, Nikolai, ‘Iskusstvo Avangarda i Muzykholl’, Ermitazh, no. 6 (1922). Freedman, John (ed.), A Meeting About Laughter (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic, 1995). Freedman, John, Silence’s Roar (London: Mosaic Press, 1992). Fülöp-Miller, René and Joseph Gregor, The Russian Theatre (London: Harrap, 1930). Gerould, Daniel, ‘Eisenstein’s Wiseman’, The Drama Review, vol. 19, no. 2. Gibian, George (ed.), Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd (New York: Norton, 1974). Gladkov, Aleksandr, Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1997). Glenny, Michael (ed.), Three Soviet Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). 234

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239

INDEX

Adamchykan, Pavel, 220 Aeschylus, 165 Akhmatova, Anna, 4 Aksenov, Ivan, 6 Alexandrov, Alexander see Serge Alexandrov, Grigory, 132, 139, 148, 149, 159 Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, 108 Alpers, Boris, 103 Amalrik, Andrei, 219 Andreyev, Leonid, 4 Andreyev, Vasily, 174 Andreyeva, Maria, 68 Annenkov, Yuri, 64–6, 146 Arden, John, 64 Arkhangelsky, Alexei, 25 Arsenyeva, Anna, 121 Artaud, Antonin, 25, 171, 178, 179, 219 Arvatov, Boris, 129, 162, 166 Aseyev, Nikolai, 6, 52, 56, 59, 99, 162 Babanova, Maria, 168 Bakhterev, Igor, 179, 181 Balmont, Konstantin, 4 Bebutov, Valery, 58, 72, 73 Beckett, Samuel, 219–20 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 176 Benjamin, Walter, 3 Ber, Boris, 113 Berg, Alban, 209 Biberman, Herbert, 168 Biomechanics, 96, 98–9, 103, 104, 115, 126, 150, 168 Bizet, Georges, 139 Blanter, Matvei, 107, 109 Blok, Alexander, 1, 4 Blyum, Vladimir, 202 Bode, Rudolf, 150, 151 Bolshakov, Konstantin, 21, 25 Bonch-Tomashevsky, Mikhail, 22, 24 Bourgeois, Agnes, 217 Boyd, Michael, 216

240

Brecht, Bertolt, 12, 64, 166, 170, 203, 215, 217–18 Brik, Lili, 22, 30, 44, 48, 53, 193, 216 Brik, Osip, 6, 44, 51, 52, 162, 166, 216 Bruni, Tatiana, 207, 217 Burlyuk, David, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 19, 20, 21, 26, 33, 42, 43, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 77, 179 Burlyuk, Nikolai, 2, 26, 27, 77 Burlyuk, Vladimir, 2, 26, 77 Calderon de la Barca, 68 Carter, Huntly, 60, 100, 113 Chalyapin, Fyodor, 49 Chaplin, Charlie, 12, 107, 108, 123, 124 Chekhov, Anton, 11, 97, 147, 198, 205, 221 Cherkasov, Nikolai, 108, 124 Chernetskaya, Inna, 108 Chiaureli, Mikhail, 167 Chicherin, Alexei, 52 Chuzhak, Nikolai, 6, 52, 162, 166, 204 Clemenceau, Georges, 72, 74 Cocteau, Jean, 125, 133 Constructivism, 3, 6, 14, 73, 101, 139, 164–6, 168, 176, 181, 201, 203, 207 Coquelin, Benoît-Constant, 150, 153 Craig, Edward Gordon, 175, 176 Curzon, Lord George, 138 D’Arcy, Margaretta, 64 De Amicis, Edmondo, 53 Déak, František, 65 Dean, Basil, 168, 169 Deburau, Jean-Gaspard, 123 Degen, Yuri, 42, 87 Deineka, Alexander, 190 Delsarte, François, 150 Delvari, Georgy, 65, 66, 68 Denikin, Anton, 48 Deutsch, Babette, 159 Diaghilev, Serge, 150 Diaz, Porfiro, 129

index

Diderot, Denis, 96–7, 108, 118, 126, 150 Diky, Alexei, 120 Dmitriev, Vladimir, 82 Dorgelès, Roland, 2 Drama in the Futurist Cabaret Number 13, 26–7, 117 Dumas, Alexandre, 198 Dunayavsky, Isaak, 107 Duncan. Isadora, 110 Duse, Eleanora, 12 Eccentrism, 6, 9, 12, 122–4 Efimenko, Sergei, 168 Eggert, Konstantin, 117 Eichenbaum, Boris, 5 Eisenstein, Sergei, 13–14, 15, 50, 53, 78, 99, 109, 110, 115, 124, 125, 128–35, 136, 138, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150–9, 161, 162, 166, 167, 173, 180, 195, 207, 216, 219, 220 Mexican, The, 128, 129–32, 153, 158 Erdman, Boris, 117, 121 Erdman, Nikolai, 4, 70–1, 102–4, 109, 116, 119–20, 121, 162, 198, 204–6, 215, 216 Mandate, The, 102–4, 120, 124, 216 Suicide, The, 198, 204–6, 209, 214, 215, 216 Ermolayeva, Vera, 42 Ernani, 66 Esenin, Sergei, 4, 50, 110, 162 Essen, B. N., 88 Evgrafov, Nikolai, 176 Evreinov, Nikolai, 4, 11, 30, 56 Exter, Alexandra, 2, 117 Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), 9, 12, 122–6, 133, 138, 146, 166 Federov, Vasily, 167, 168 Ferdinandov, Boris, 49, 117–22, 126, 150, 166 Fevralsky, Alexander, 136 Filippov, Nikolai, 51 Filonov, Pavel, 6, 19, 27–8, 42, 174, 176 Fo, Dario, 218–19 Foregger, Nikolai, 48, 105, 106–16, 117, 122, 126, 133, 146, 150, 153, 161, 166, 197, 221 Fülöp-Miller, René, 101, 113 Garin, Erast, 100–1, 103, 104 Garrick, David, 97 Gérard, Frédéric, 2 Gerould, Daniel, 123 Gibshman, Konstantin, 65, 66

Glinskaya, Faina, 125 Glubokovsky, Boris, 117 Gnedov, Visilisk, 6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 63 Gogol, Nikolai, 4, 102, 121, 124, 138, 171, 175, 176, 184, 189, 207, 212, 219 Government Inspector, The, 4, 138, 171, 175–8, 180, 184, 189, 211, 214 Marriage, 121, 124–5, 138 Goldschmidt, Vladimir, 51, 87 Goleizovsky, Kasyan, 58, 107, 117, 207 Golovinskaya, Elizaveta, 105 Golubentsev, Nikolai, 105, 106 Gomolitskaya, Olga, 135 Goncharova, Natalia, 2, 6, 19–20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 42, 77, 88 Gorky, Maxim, 1, 11, 68, 189, 205, 211 The Hardworking Mr Slovotekov, 68, 189 Gregor, Joseph, 101 Grinkrug, Lev, 53 Gumilev, Nikolai, 4 Guro, Elena, 27, 81 Gutman, David, 116 Gvozdev, Alexei, 157 Hasenclever, Walter, 153 Hitler, Adolf, 114 Ibsen, Henrik, 4, 63, 133 Ignatiev, Ivan, 6, 9 Ilinsky, Igor, 48, 174, 186, 190, 193, 206 Ionesco, Eugene, 219 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 4 Ivens, Yoris, 167 Ivnev, Rurik, 87 Jacobson, Roman, 5 Jacques-Dalcroze, Émile, 150 Joffre, Joseph, 138, 146, 153 Kafka, Franz, 180 Kaganovich, Lazar, 206 Kaiser, Georg, 153 Kalatozov, Mikhail, 167 Kamensky, Vasily, 6, 8, 20, 21, 22, 42, 43, 44, 50, 51, 53, 56–8, 59, 60, 71, 75, 87, 89 Stenka Razin, 56–9, 89, 101, 167 Kandinsky, Vasily, 2, 7, 50, 55, 77–81, 94, 95 Yellow Sound, The, 78, 79–81, 94 Karloni, Alexander, 65, 66, 68 Karsavina, Tamara, 23 Kashnitsky, Vladimir, 176 Kasyanov, Vladimir, 26 Kerensky, Alexander, 47, 138, 144, 197

241

russian futurist theatre

Kerzhentsev, Platon, 215 Kharms, Daniil, 13, 14, 179, 180–2, 210, 212, 214–15, 217, 219 Elizaveta Bam, 180–2, 210, 217 Khenkin, Viktor, 150 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 24, 27, 33, 34, 44, 53, 56, 59, 73, 81–6, 95, 106, 149, 171, 179, 219, 220 Worldbackwards, 81–2, 95, 106 Zangezi, 82–6, 94 Khodasevich, Valentina, 66, 196 Khokhlova, Alexandra, 167 Khrakovsky, Vladimir, 73 Kibalchich, Margarita, 53 Kirov, Sergei, 211 Kisanov, Semyon, 52 Kitayev, Zinovy, 139 Kolchak, Alexander, 48 Kollontai, Alexandra, 209 Kommissarzhevsky, Fyodor, 4 Kornilov, Lavr, 47 Korshikov, Georgy, 207 Kozintsev, Grigory, 9, 12, 122–3, 125, 126, 166, 167 Kozyukov, Boris, 66 Kruchenykh, Alexei, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22, 24, 27, 28, 33–7, 42, 52, 71, 86–8, 90, 162, 163, 171, 179, 214, 216, 220 Victory Over the Sun, 9, 10, 11, 15, 24, 33–42, 56, 62, 63, 65, 73, 81, 86, 101, 122, 149, 172, 179, 189, 201, 217 Krylov, Dmitry, 220 Kryzhitsky, Georgy, 12, 122, 125 Kukrinitsy, 184, 185 Kuleshov, Lev, 167, 212 Kurdyumov, Vsevolod, 197 Kushner, Boris, 6, 52, 162, 166 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 4 Kuznetsov, Pavel, 58 Labiche, Eugène, 68, 121 Lang, Fritz, 123 Larionov, Mikhail, 2, 3, 6, 19–20, 21, 22, 23, 25–7, 33, 42, 77, 82, 88, 104, 110, 179, 201 Lavinsky, Anton, 73 Lazarenko, Vitaly, 69–71, 73 Le-Dantyu, Mikhail, 6, 11, 19, 23, 24, 42, 91 LEF, 6, 9, 13, 149, 158, 161, 162–3, 166, 167, 195, 196 Novyi LEF, 15, 166, 196, 203–4 Lenin, Vladimir, 10, 47, 50, 52, 110, 133, 159, 161, 166, 209

242

Lentulov, Aristarkh, 2, 27 Lermontov, Mikhail, 89 Levin, Boris, 179 Leviton, Rebekka, 176 Levkievsky, Vyacheslav, 25 Levshin, Alexander, 153 Liandsberg, Artur, 176 Lissitzky, El, 42, 201–2, 203 Litovsky, Osaf, 205 Livshits, Benedikt, 2, 5, 21, 23, 28 Lloyd George, David, 70, 72, 74 London, Jack, 53, 129 Lopukhov, Fyodor, 207 Lotov, Anton, 25, 26 Lukacs, Georg, 218 Lukin, Lev, 207 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 50, 51, 55, 56, 60, 71, 77, 132, 138, 196 Luria, Alexander, 150 Lvov, Prince Georgy, 47 Lyubimov, Yuri, 216 MacDonald, Ramsay, 196 Malevich, Kasimir, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 19, 27, 33–7, 42, 50, 62–3, 65, 94, 118, 172, 179, 216 Mandelstam, Osip, 4 Marc, Franz, 77 Mardzhanov, Konstantin, 4, 58 Margolin, S., 132, 146 Mariengof, Anatoly, 4 Marinetti, Filippo, 3–4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 22, 65, 123 Markov, Vladimir, 2, 5, 20, 21, 37, 57, 91, 135 Marshall, Herbert, 49 Martinet, Marcel, 99 Martinson. Sergei, 103, 124 Marx, Chico, 103 Marx, Karl, 102 Mass, Vladimir, 107, 109, 110, 115, 116, 197, 204, 215 Matyushin, Mikhail, 6, 10, 19, 27, 33, 36, 42, 81, 172 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27–33, 42, 43, 44, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 59–64, 69, 71–5, 81, 97, 98, 104, 110, 120, 146, 162, 163, 166, 167, 171, 183–93, 195, 196, 198, 199, 204, 205, 210, 212, 216, 218 Bathhouse, The, 187–93, 195, 196, 203, 205, 210, 216 Bedbug, The, 182–7, 189, 210, 216

index

Championship of the Universal Class Struggle, The, 69–70, 72 Kindness to Horses, 110, 133 Moscow Is Burning, 196–7, 214, 220 Mystery Bouffe, 55, 56, 59–64, 72–5, 97, 101, 161, 163, 167, 197, 216, 217, 218 Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy, 27–33, 52, 174, 213 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 4 Merimée, Prosper, 121 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 4, 11, 55, 60, 62, 63, 66, 72, 73, 75, 86, 96–101, 102–4, 107, 109, 117, 122, 124, 126, 133, 135, 150, 151, 153, 157, 161, 164, 165, 171, 175, 176, 180, 183–5, 186, 187–8, 193, 198, 201, 202–3, 206, 210, 211, 215–16, 221 Mgebrov, Alexander, 28, 30, 34 Michelangelo, 156 Millerand, Alexandre, 70 Milyukov, Pavel, 138 Milyutin, Yuri, 107, 117 Mistinguett, 110 Molière, Jean-Baptiste, 68, 188, 197 Morgan, J. P., 66 Morozov, Savva, 128, 148, 150 Mussolini, Benito, 4, 138 Nedobrovo, Vladimir, 12–13 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 83 Nikitin, Leonid, 129 Novyi LEF see LEF Oberiu, 3, 6, 13, 179–80, 212, 213, 219 Opoyaz, 5, 118 Oransky, Viktor, 197 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 4, 120, 121, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 153, 173 Pankov, Vladimir, 220 Parnakh, Valentin, 107, 150 Pasternak, Boris, 6, 162 Pavlov, Boris, 117 Pavlov, Ivan, 119 Persky, Robert, 27 Petritsky, Anatoly, 107, 197 Petrov, -., 202 Petrovsky, Andrei, 196 Petrovsky, Dmitry, 59 Picasso, Pablo, 97, 125 Pikel, Comrade, 203 Pilnyak, Boris, 196 Pilsudsky, Jósef, 70, 196 Pinter, Harold, 180

Piotrovsky, Adrian, 215 Pluchek, Valentin, 216 Pokrass, Dmitri, 107 Popov, Nikolai, 58 Popova, Lyubov, 101, 164, 166, 203 Popova, Militsa, 180 Pound, Ezra, 218 Poznyakov, Nikolai, 108 Preis, Alexander, 207, 209 Prosvetov, Evgeny, 108 Pugachev, Emelyan, 173–4 Pushkin, Alexander, 173, 212 Pyriev, Ivan, 132, 153 Racine, Jean, 109 Radek, Karl, 153 Radlov, Sergei, 12, 66–9, 75, 96, 104–6, 122, 126, 146, 150, 161, 189, 196, 221 Raikh, Zinaida, 190, 210, 215–16 Ransome, Arthur, 49, 50, 55 Rappaport, Vladimir, 27, 33 Rasputin, 138 Reisner, Larisa, 210 Remizov, Alexei, 24 Rikhter, Nikolai, 33–4 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 109 Robikova, Alexandra, 53 Rodchenko, Alexander, 43, 162, 164, 184, 185, 187, 216 Room, Abram, 202 Rozanova, Olga, 3, 19, 23, 50 Rudnitsky, Konstantin, 97, 103, 133, 175, 186 Sakhnovsky, Vasily, 58 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 179 Scheidermann, Philipp, 74 Schnitzler, Arthur, 133 Schönberg, Arnold, 97 Scriabin, Alexander, 135 Semenov, Sergei, 178 Serafimovich, Alexander, 72 Serge, 66, 67–8, 105, 124, 125 Severyanin, Igor, 6, 19, 22, 42 Shakespeare, William, 63, 68–9, 156, 165 Shaposhnikov, Adrian, 24 Shengelaya, Nikolai, 167 Shershenevich, Vadim, 3, 6, 9, 11–12, 14, 26, 42, 110, 117–22, 135 Shimanovsky, Viktor, 173 Shklovsky, Viktor, 5, 6, 12, 22, 23, 28, 30, 51, 56, 62, 102, 123, 162, 172, 178, 216 Shkolnik, Iosif, 6, 19, 28

243

russian futurist theatre

Shostakovich, Dmitri, 184, 186–7, 207–11, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220 Bolt, The, 207, 217 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, 209–11, 214 Nose, The, 207–9 Shtraukh, Maaxim, 190 Simonson, Lee, 168 Sinclair, Upton, 106 Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A, 1–2, 7, 81, 122 Slavinsky, Yevgeny, 53 Smyshlayev, Valentin, 129 Sophocles, 120 Stalin, Joseph, 4, 10, 114, 153, 162, 193, 198, 205, 206, 210, 211, 216, 220 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 11, 97, 117, 157, 173, 178, 179, 205, 206, 216 Stepanova, Varvara, 164 Sukhovo-Kobylin, Alexander, 133 Symbolism, 4, 61, 81 Tairov, Alexander, 4, 117, 120, 122 Takoshimo, 66 Tatlin, Vladimir, 2, 24, 50, 82, 85, 94, 117, 118, 172, 216 Taurek, Ivan, 66, 68, 105, 124 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 110, 119 Terentiev, Igor, 6, 8, 52, 87, 89, 138, 162, 171–8, 179, 180, 198, 202–3, 211, 214, 216, 220 Tipot, Viktor, 116 Tolstoy, Leo, 1, 64, 65, 178, 205 Toporkov, N., 26 Trauberg, Leonid, 9, 12, 122, 125, 166, 167 Trenev, Konstantin, 173, 174 Tretyakov, Sergei, 4, 6, 15, 52, 86, 99–102, 109, 128, 135–7, 139, 143, 149, 150–9, 161, 162, 163–6, 167–71, 192, 196, 198–203, 210, 211, 215, 216, 217–18 Are You Listening, Moscow?!, 109, 153–8 Gas Masks, 158–9 I Want a Baby, 198–203, 204, 210, 215, 216, 217 Roar China!, 167–71, 182 Wise Man, A, 53, 136–49, 150, 153, 156, 157, 161, 162, 210 World Upside Down, The, 99–102, 135, 136, 153, 164, 167, 196, 203 Triolet, Elsa, 44 Trotsky, Leon, 49, 50, 99, 158, 161, 162, 163, 179, 195, 210

244

Tsar Maximilian and His Son Adolf, 9, 11, 24–5, 103, 123 Tsimbal, Sergei, 179 Turkin, Nikander, 53 Tynyanov, Yuri, 5, 162 Union of Youth, 2, 6, 11, 18–20, 22, 42 Vaginov, Konstantin, 180 Vakhtangov, Evgeny, 98 Vakhtangov, Sergei, 190 Vertov, Dziga, 139, 148, 162, 167, 203 Vigilansky, Evgeny, 179 Volkonsky, Prince Sergei, 150, 151 Volkov, Solomon, 211 Vrangel, Pyotr, 48, 70 Vvedensky, Alexander, 8, 179, 180, 212, 213–15, 217, 220 Certain Quantity of Conversations, A, 213, 217, 220 Christmas at the Ivanovs, 213–14, 217 Vyalov, Konstantin, 58 Wagner, Richard, 4, 83, 178 Weill, Kurt, 187 Wilson, Woodrow, 70 Winkler, Alphonse, 26 Yazykanov, Ivan, 138 Yezhov, Nikolai, 216 Yonin, Georgy, 207 Yutkevich, Sergei, 12, 66, 109, 110, 113, 115, 119, 122, 125, 133 Zabolotsky, Nikolai, 179, 180, 212 Zamenkov, Boris, 6 Zamyatin, Evgeny, 196, 207 Zdanevich, Ilya, 3, 6, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 52, 87, 88–95, 171, 172, 179, 219, 220 As Though Zga, 90–1, 92, 93, 94 Donkey for Rent, 89, 92, 94 Easter Island, 89–90, 92 Le-Dantyu as a Beacon, 91, 92 Yanko, king of Albania, 25, 88–9, 92, 93, 103 Zdanevich, Kirill, 87, 171 Zharov, Mikhail, 120 Zhdanov, Andrei, 211 Zheverzheyev, Levky, 6, 19, 42 Zinoviev, Grigory, 153, 161 Zonov, Arkady, 58 Zoschenko, Mikhail, 187