From the Fairground

Urban carnival culture in Russia thrived from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century.^[3] Associated with Yuletide and Shrovetide, carnivals were bursts of color and celebration that bracketed the long Russian winter. Carnivals were confined to particular—but varying—spots within the city: in Moscow, Novinskoe Field, Maiden's (Devichee) Field, and Khodynka; in Petersburg, Admiralty Square (next to the Palace), later the Field of Mars. The Shrovetide and Yuletide holidays occupied a special time in the popular culture; as one saying had it:

Shrovetide comes only once a year;
I drinks a bit, don't spare the change
For holiday cheer.^[4]

Shrovetide was the only time of year that the Finnish sleighs came to Petersburg; dancing bears would sometimes even appear in the city.

Carnivals were the only time and place in Imperial Russia where all classes could meet and mix. Early in his reign Nicholas I was known to visit with the people on Admiralty Square; and a foreign visitor noted that during a fête, commoners and courtiers met as equals.^[5] Decades later, merchants and officers still found the holidays a fashionable time to promenade. Even the sheltered wards of the Smolny Institute for Noble Girls were known to circulate around the edges of the crowd in their carriages (or so they were represented in popular lithographs). By mid-century, however, the fashion had faded, and by the end of the century mixing was uncommon.^[6]

Up until the 1880s, when the socialist International claimed May Day as its own, that holiday was also celebrated with a carnival: for Petersburgers, it took place in Ekaterinhof, a park outside the city.

Although the Ekaterinhof carnival was revived for May Day 1919, it lacked the splendor of former years.^[7] Carnival thrives on excess; in 1919, Russia was starving and in the middle of the Civil War. Alcohol was forbidden as it had been during the war years; and the rich bliny , thin pancakes dripping with butter, were also a distant memory. Gone were the huge wooden swings of the traditional gulianie; gone were the ten-yard-high slides, coated with ice in the winter, on which a young boy could slide half the length of the Admiralty.

Bolshevik celebrations never provided the license of a true carnival; but this was due no more to a censorious Red soul than to the inroads of modernity. By the late nineteenth century traditional carnival amusements were being challenged by the products of the industrial age, the carousel and the roller coaster—which most of Europe called "Russian mountains," but which Russians called "American mountains." The vivid entertainments of the penny theaters were threatened, if not tamed, by the edifying shows sponsored by the People's Houses. Even when the old balagan master Lentovsky directed the 1903 May Day spectacles in the Nicholas II People's House, the show lacked the splash of yesteryear.

As holiday culture changed, the location it occupied within the city also shifted. From the early to mid-nineteenth century, the site of Petersburg gulianiia was Admiralty Square, next to the Palace. In the 1870s the fair was moved from city center to the Field of Mars, and the end of the century saw the Shrovetide carnival moving farther and farther toward the outskirts, coming to rest in the filthy Semenov Place. Carnivals of a sort were established in the once-elegant Mikhailovsky Manège near the center of town, where they resided until the First World War. The sponsor there was, at first, the Guardians of the People's Temperance; later, private enterprise was the organizer. The Guardians—representing a Victorianism alien to the carnival spirit—saw the fairs as an opportunity to attract the people away from the harmful influence of liquor.^[8]

By the twentieth century, carnival culture had been redefined by the industrial city. Industrial culture, with its standardized sense of time, was opposed to the erratic, intensified time of carnival. No time or space was allotted for carnival in industrial society. The essential change brought about by capitalism was the disassociation of carnivals from holidays; this link had made them central to earlier cultures. The time frame of carnival was rendered obsolete by the advent of entrepreneurial financing; profits were highest when the carnival ran every day.

Carnivals, which had once occupied a central position in an alternative, holiday, culture, were now consigned to a peripheral role in a single

culture—one without alternatives. Removed from the center of social life, the carnivals were removed from the center of the city. The Mikhailovsky affairs were designed strictly for simple folk; no self-respecting officer or merchant would be found there. The broad, open spaces of the central squares were replaced by an enclosure, a roofed indoor space. The program had also changed considerably since the advent of the gulianiia . Entertainment, confined to a variety stage, combined balagan -type skits, vaudeville, and circus. Indoors there could be no ice mountains, no fireworks; no longer did hawkers roam the crowd selling hot bliny. Drinking, obviously, was banned.

The Russian carnival should in no way be associated with a rebellious vein in the culture; as a matter of fact, the Baron N. N. Wrangel (brother of the future White general) had led the prewar fight to revive carnivals on the Field of Mars.^[9] In a great city, arranging and sponsoring a carnival is a complex process that can be accomplished by only the most powerful institutions, such as the autocracy. Yet the system that marked a carnival a holiday could be translated into an aesthetic of upheaval.

This transformation was what Mystery-Bouffe accomplished and what Meyerhold planned for November 7, 1918 (the first day of Mystery-Bouffe ), when he tried to revive the Manège carnival as a celebration of the Revolution. Meyerhold collected a remarkable organizing commission of artists who had used popular art forms in their work: Blok, Evreinov, Konstantin Miklashevsky (assistant to Meyerhold and Evreinov, expert on the commedia dell'arte), Lentulov, Sergei Prokofiev, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, and the choreographer Fedor Lopukhov. Also included were the finest performers of vaudeville and circus.^[10] The program did not differ radically from earlier Manège carnivals: vaudeville, dance numbers, musical and circus skits, puppet theaters. The Manège itself was different; the huge statue of Nicholas II standing before it had been taken down for the holiday, and its bronze was given for reuse in the Lenin monument plan.^[11] Yet the essential difference was Meyerhold's aim to return carnival to its former place at the center of the culture and restore the association with a holiday. The vitality, splash, and color dimmed by the Guardians and entrepreneurs would be restored. The commission planned for carousels, swings, and even extravaganza/melodramas—a balagan specialty. Alekseev-Iakovlev was hired to produce Song of the Merchant Kalashmikov (a repeat from the turn of the century), based on a Mikhail Lermontov poem; and when the commission discovered that the amphitheater where The Taking of Azov once played was still standing, it voted to organize a new spectacle

there. The planned revival was not entirely faithful: alcohol, an essential ingredient of the old carnival, was still banned, as were lotteries, a huge draw in prewar days. Strict censorship was to be enforced; but that too was part of the Russian carnival tradition.

Failure to realize the plan tells us more about the official side of Soviet culture in 1918 than about the popular side. The work of the commission, pursued over two months of meetings, fell victim to the bureaucratic skirmishes preceding the first anniversary. TEO, sponsor of the commission, moved its headquarters to Moscow in mid-summer; PTO, which took over operation of Petrograd theaters and spectacles, was run by Andreeva. She simply refused to recognize the commission and its plan; when funding disappeared, the commission dissolved.