One
The Precursors
Tsars, Socialists, and Poets
I am convinced that awful magistrate my Lord Mayor contracts a good deal of that reverence which attends him through the year by the several pageants which precede his pomp.
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
By the summer of 1918, Soviet power in Voronezh was six months old, and local Bolsheviks had already formed a municipal theater department. One evening the department invited four thousand spectators to a natural amphitheater on the sloping banks of the River Voronezh for a re-creation of the city's greatest moment in history: the taking of Azov from the Turks by Peter the Great's navy, built under his supervision at the town wharves. The actors were foot soldiers of the new Red Army, stunt men from the touring Cinizelli Circus, and local yachtsmen.
The presentation lasted two hours and consisted of five scenes. "The Turks in Azov," "The Battle of the Russian and Turkish Navies near Azov," "The Siege of Azov," and "The Taking of Azov by the Russians," topped off by a "Parade of the Victors." The scope of action necessitated a certain compression of dramatic time and space. An island in the middle of the river represented the Azov Fortress; prop fortifications and cannons were built over the ruins of Peter's wharves; the river was the Gulf of Taganrog. Because the gap between audience and stage precluded spoken dialogue, a brass band of ninety played throughout
the production, interspersed with commentary from onshore megaphones. The result was similar to a silent movie. Artillery battles were effected by illuminations and Bengal fire, hand-to-hand fighting by the circus stunt men, and naval engagements by the yacht club. The aquatic "Parade of Victors" gave the yachtsmen a chance to flaunt their skill, and it was accompanied by circus numbers performed on deck and by fireworks. At the show's conclusion, spectators were ferried to the island for a carnival that lasted until two in the morning.
For even the best of times there is a spoilsport, and here the Voronezhskii telegraf (Voronezh Telegraph ), a paper soon shut down for its "bourgeois tendencies," complained that "in conditions of starvation and the general uncertainty of human existence the Bolsheviks decided to organize a mass festival needed by nobody." But according to the organizer—not an unbiased observer—the spectators enjoyed themselves and the yachtsmen put on an unmatched show.[1] Whether the yacht club was bourgeois or proletarian is unknown.
Though this was the first mass spectacle in Bolshevik Russia, such things were not new in 1918. They were popular under the Romanovs, particularly during the patriotic years of the Great War. One of the most spectacular had been The Taking of Azov, performed in St. Petersburg's Petrovsky Park under the direction of Aleksei Alekseev-Iakovlev.[2] During the war, battle programs were a specialty of Petrograd circuses, and the Cinizelli group on tour from that city provided practical experience to the Voronezh production.[3]
The Autocratic Tradition
Mass dramas require a sponsor, a duty that has more often than not devolved on the state or the church. The Roman state held the masses' fickle loyalty with extravagant spectacles, and the medieval Catholic church gave birth to the mass liturgical drama (mystery play). In Romanov Russia, rituals and spectacles were an essential channel of communication between the autocracy and its subjects; for many years, the Lenten festival allowed tsars to mingle with common folk. Imperial sponsorship did not, of course, guarantee artistic success; nineteenth-century mass dramas attracted few talented actors or directors. The reign of Nicholas II was marked by many sumptuous celebra-
tions: two hundred years since the founding of St. Petersburg (1903); fifty years since the defense of Sebastopol (1906); one hundred years since the Battle of Borodino (1912); and, the greatest of all, the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913.[4] For the 1913 anniversary in Kostroma, home of the dynasty, a grand ceremony was followed by a carnival and fireworks;[5] and similar programs were sponsored in cities and provinces. But artistic participation was limited to some crude historical films, one them starring the young Mikhail Chekhov as Fedor Mikhailovich, founder of the dynasty.[6]
Artists had once willingly contributed to state celebrations. Eighteenth-century poets had considered it the highest honor to compose verses for an imperial procession or coronation, architects to construct allegorical floats. Peter the Great was himself an enthusiast of carnivals. On the occasion of the Treaty of Nystad (1723), the whole of St. Petersburg was treated to a three-day masquerade, followed by a carnival procession. The merriment halted only once, for a memorial service, which most of the celebrants attended in costume. Peter and his circle of friends, the Most Drunken Council of Fools and Jesters, headed the procession, dressed as anything from the Pope to a slave; ethnic costumes were also popular.[7] Catherine the Great laid claim to Peter's tradition in her coronation ceremony. Fedor Volkov, founder of the Russian theater, arranged an allegorical tribute, Minerva Triumphant, for the occasion, with verses by the poets Aleksandr Sumarokov and Mikhail Kheraskov celebrating reason's ascendancy over the elements (the elements were triumphant in the end, for Volkov soon died of pneumonia contracted during the march).[8]
The procession closed out an era, though later artists would occasionally decorate royal ceremonies. For the June 1883 coronation of Alexander III, Mikhail Lentovsky, renowned for his fairground theater (balagan ), arranged a carnival on Moscow's Khodynka Field. Four theaters, a circus, puppet shows, choirs, and orchestras all competed for the spectators' attention; and the day was capped by an allegorical procession, Spring Is Beautiful.[9] The coronation of the last Romanov, Nicholas II, in May 1896, saw an ominous end to the tradition. A sumptuous service in Moscow's Kremlin was followed by a carnival on the Khodynka. As the tsar distributed gifts to his people, the crowd surged toward the platform, crushing women and children; and when boards covering a ditch collapsed, thousands perished in a panicked stampede.
The February Revolution
The February Revolution, which swept away the hated autocracy, let artists consider cooperation with the state honorable. On March 4, 1917, the Arts Commission (Komissiia po delam iskusstva) was established; its leading members were the renowned author Maxim Gorky and Aleksandr Benois, Nikolai Roerich, and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, who were connected with the World of Art movement. Two days later the commission, which was a private organization, established contact with the Petrograd Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets, and, on March 13, the same group under the name Special Conference for Matters of Art (Osoboe soveshchanie po delam iskusstva) met in response to overtures from the Provisional Government. Although the group devoted some discussion to an arts program—including mass spectacles—it focused on the more pressing need to save art from the ravages of war and revolution.[10] Other artists in Petrograd banded together to form the All-Arts Union (Soiuz deiatelei vsekh iskusstv). The union, covering everything from futurism to traditional realism, proved an odd coalition. Artists were organized, if not entirely united; at least organized enough to help the government create two very different mass festivals: May Day and Liberty Bond Day (May 26).
Festivals and commemorations in autocratic Russia were a projection of power; only the tsarist state commanded the financial resources and legal authority to sponsor them. Demonstrations were illegal, and May Day observances were met by severe countermeasures. The only legal processions were funerals, which often served as pretexts for political manifestations. The prohibition was not exclusive to socialists; the radical right, even monarchists, often had their marches outlawed, despite their carrying religious and nationalistic banners and chanting antiworker slogans. Left and right shared the marching color red.[11]
Russia's first legal May Day was declared by the Provisional Government in 1917. Revolution had changed the nature of the day; it could no longer be a demonstration against the autocracy and begged a new celebratory style.[12] Planners felt May Day should celebrate the fresh revolution, and to mark its optimism and unity they suggested a great Social Mystery-Play .[13] In the end, though, a more traditional street demonstration was preferred. Social Mystery-Play, with its liturgical overtones of oneness, implied a camaraderie absent in Russian society. Workers had rid themselves of the tsars, but the factory owners and an unpopular war
Figure 1.
L. Petukhov, poster, May Day 1917 (V. P. Lapshin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn' Moskvy
i Petrograda v 1917 godu, Moscow, 1983).
remained. Most of the nation turned out for May Day, but it was not the hoped-for show of unity.[14] Professional artists helped with the posters and decorations (see Figure 1), but judging from the few pictures that remain, they used only simple color (red), slogans (of all variety), and allegorical figures (usually in classical dress and pose).[15] The center of the Petrograd celebration was the Field of Mars, whose most recent use had been for the imperial review of troops marching off to the front. A reviewing stand was raised and garlanded, and soldiers and workers—some armed—filed past members of the government. Who organized the event is not clear: some claim the Bolsheviks did much of the work,[16] but the municipal soviet (not Bolshevik at the time), the Provisional Government, and Gorky's commission also contributed.
The All-Arts Union likely did not take part in the celebration, even if some members did as individuals. On May 25, however, the union made its contribution to the national welfare by arranging Liberty Bond Day (Den' zaima svobody), the first mass festival in revolutionary Russia to make full use of artists' talents. The event, which included a parade, speeches, and theatrical performances, was organized by Fedor Sologub, the symbolist poet and head of the union's Curia of Verbal Art, and by two members of the Theater Curia: its director,
Figure 2.
E. Kruglikova, poster, Liberty Bond Campaign, May 1917 (V. P. Lapshin,
Khudozhestvennaia zhizn' Moskvy i Petrograda v 1917 godu, Moscow, 1983).
Pavel Gaideburov, and Aleksandr Mgebrov. State war coffers were seriously depleted, so the union organized a parade through town to sell bonds and collect money. Members ranging from imperial actors to futurist artists contributed to what was to be the union's sole concerted action. (Figure 2 shows a poster designed for the event.) Each group, school, or theater within the union was responsible for the adornment of a car. As cars traveled the parade route, speeches were improvised, and music, usually the Marseillaise, was played. The holiday was a rousing success, judging from accounts in the newspapers Rech' (Speech) and Russkaia volia (The Russian Will ). (The Bolsheviks had nothing to do with the war effort, and Pravda refused comment.) Copies of a one-day newspaper, Vo imia svobody (In the Name of Freedom ), featuring such unlikely comrades as Leonid Andreev, the poets Igor Severianin and Sergei Esenin, and the radical socialist Georgy Plekhanov, were snapped up in an instant.[17] The parade had a reception that bordered on hysteria:[18] spectators threw money and even jewelry to the Boy Scouts assigned to each car, who passed it on to bankers in booths set up along the route.[19]
Of greatest import for the future of revolutionary theater was a performance of Rachilde's Le vendeur de soleil by Gaideburov's Mobile-
Popular Theater, which set an example later followed by the Bolsheviks.[20] It was the first theater performed in the streets. The script hardly conformed to our modern notion of street theater, and the actors, who had no relevant experience, had to find new style almost spontaneously. They spoke of a temptation to improvise, to address the audience directly, to adapt a monumental style: broad, economic gestures, omission of details, and highlighting of essentials—all of which would have seemed artificial indoors. An anecdote that must have been striking at the time was prophetic for the future: "After the show, played directly on the pavement in the middle of a crowd of soldiers, one of them, deeply moved, approached an actor and asked: 'OK, but who should we vote for?'"
In Moscow, too, artists organized themselves into a union, the Soviet of Moscow Art Organizations, but the center of action was another group, which chose to cooperate with the government: the Arts-Educational Commission (Khudozhestvenno-prosvetitel'naia kommissiia) of the Moscow Soviet of Workers' Deputies. The commission, formed in April 1917, cut across aesthetic and political lines.[21] The other Moscow soviet, the Soviet of Soldiers' Deputies, established a parallel administration, the arts department of which included the artists Kasimir Malevich, Georgy Iakulov, and Pavel Kuznetsov. This group was not as well-funded as the commission, and, to raise money for a program of popular lectures and presentations,[22] it orchestrated a Holiday of the Revolution on July 12 at the racetrack. Sculptors and painters framed the track with posters and panels of revolutionary events; the restaurants and buffets were decorated; and artists of the theater, opera, ballet, and circus gave performances. The holiday raised the neccessary funds, but to do so tickets were sold at exorbitant prices, and it can be assumed that a proletarian or even broad public did not attend.[23] None of the celebrations arranged by artists between the two Revolutions of 1917 could or would claim to speak for a large part of the nation.
The October Revolution and the Arts
The October Revolution provoked a realignment of artists and government. Under the Provisional Government, the state and the Revolution had not been identified with any one party. Artists were
free to identify their work with the Revolution without subordinating themselves to a party or platform. This was a right that the Petrograd union defended, and a principle upheld by the Moscow commission. Not so after October. The state and the Revolution had become—despite their inherent antagonism—a single body and, furthermore, one under the aegis of a single party.
Bolshevik policy on the arts had not been clearly articulated when power was seized. Left socialist thinkers such as Plekhanov and Lunacharsky, head of the new Commissariat of Education (Narkompros), had speculated on the art of the socialist future, but their ideas did not constitute an official Bolshevik policy. The native tradition closest to materialist socialists was that of Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Dmitry Pisarev, utilitarian radicals who had subordinated art to "reality," which in practice meant negating art's autonomous value. But the newborn revolutionary state made little attempt to regulate artistic activity. Its foremost concern was to gather the instruments of power; art was of secondary importance for the moment. Lunacharsky's policy was twofold: to gain the cooperation, if not the sympathy, of leading artists and, at the same time, to assert administrative control.
For the moment little attempt was made to formulate the relationship between the state and art. No state had ever been socialist, so there was no precedent to rely on. Bolshevik leaders presented the state publicly as an intermediate stage on the way to a stateless society. Speculation was directed not toward the ephemeral present but toward the future. For this speculation there was a rich tradition; but, like so much of socialist thought, it concealed an antagonism latent until power was taken.
Tradition, a cosmopolitan mix of history and utopian philosophy, exerted a decisive influence on the Russians until they could mold their own experience. The most obvious model was the French Revolution. The parallel was welcomed by the Bolsheviks, who saw the glorious festivals of the French as a model for their own. One of the first theater books to come off Soviet presses was Julien Tiersot's Les fêtes et les chants de la révolution française,[24] and even in 1920 Lunacharsky regretted that Soviet fêtes had "turned out to have less creative genius in terms of organization and appeal to the masses than the late eighteenth-century French [fêtes] had."[25]
One could disagree with Lunacharsky, however commendable his modesty. French festivals had followed the inclination to allegory of their era. In November 1793, a Festival of Reason was celebrated at the
Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris; June 1794 saw a magnificent Festival of the Supreme Being. The latter festival, instigated by Robespierre, fired the imagination of future revolutionaries more than any other fête; it was both a sharp attack on the church and a display of civic virtues. Open skies and lush meadows embraced the common people as they filed onto the Champs-de-Mars; encomiums were sung to divine harmony; children were offered to the heavens, not in a pagan blood sacrifice but as a baptism into life. An altarlike mountain erected in the middle of the field inspired most (but not all) of society, which was united by a single emotion at a single place and time. That Robespierre would be purged within a month and the French Revolution would descend into fratricide made this moment all the more precious for future generations. Lunacharsky and other Bolsheviks knew the French festivals from respected peers: Rolland had described them in his Le théâtre du peuple, and the anarchist Prince Kropotkin dwelled on them at length in his History of the French Revolution .
The French Revolution was a beacon for the Russians, but in Marxist terms it was bourgeois, and Bolsheviks venerated it from a distance. The prerevolutionary writings of those Bolsheviks concerned with art, such as Lunacharsky and Friche, express enthusiasm for mass theater without mentioning the French.[26] Cultural politics made the French Revolution seem particularly less attractive, because its heritage was claimed after the February Revolution by the Provisional Government. That body had, for instance, used the Marseillaise as its anthem, and its fêtes were inspired by the French. There was a proposal to celebrate the burning of the Lithuanian Castle, a political prison, in a holiday like Bastille Day.[27] A more ambitious plan, announced in August 1917, proposed a "grandiose carnival-spectacle honoring the epoch of the French Revolution to be organized in the Summer Garden to aid Russian prisoners-of-war. . . . A prop city will be built depicting the Paris of that time. Actors will portray the artistic and theatrical bohemia of the late eighteenth century."[28] The projected director was Evreinov and the designer Iury Annenkov, who would create the grandest of the Bolshevik festivals in 1920.
Based on the French example, mass festivals were thought to be democratic, an assumption not unique to socialists. The theatrical world also saw open-air mass theater as a salvation. Theater had become exclusive; it had fled from the popular arena to intimate chambers accessible only to the wealthy and had succumbed to financial pressures to ignore questions disturbing their relaxation. The Berlin director and impresa-
Figure 3.
Circus arena-stage for a production of Macbeth in Petrograd, 1918 (Istoriia sovetskogo teatra,
Leningrad, 1933; image has been computer-enhanced).
rio Max Reinhardt tried to revive the open stage early in this century. He looked for inspiration to Greek tragedy and the medieval mystery play, where actors had addressed a broad audience and spoken directly to its heart. Reinhardt eschewed the subdued tones of bourgeois theater for a monumental theater of primitive but strong emotions. He was renowned for productions like Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Everyman (1911), a contemporary mystery play that he produced in a cathedral, and Oedipus Rex, which was performed in a circus arena. His Oedipus was brought to Petersburg's Cinizelli Circus in 1911, with the fabled Sandro Moissi in the starring role.
Reinhardt's revolution was aesthetic, not political. Still, Russians in 1918 found monumental theater apt for their own revolution. The poet Mikhail Kuzmin noted that "many types of drama have fallen to the wayside: psychological drama, the theater of half-moods [i.e., Chekhovian], plays written for a particular social stratum, or comedies of mores and the salon. . . . Our time clearly calls for the tragic theater."[29] The circus arena served better as the center of theatrical life: "More than anywhere else, the changes in the make-up of the audience are noticeable in the circus. . . . The corridors, buffet and auditorium of the circus are closest of all to the camp of revolution."[30]
In March 1918 Iury Iurev, lead actor of the Aleksandrinsky Theater, began negotiations with the Cinizellis to restage Reinhardt's Oedipus . The original sets remained intact in Petrograd; and Aleksei Granovsky, a Reinhardt disciple just back from Berlin and familiar with his master's production, was hired as director.[31] Negotiations were difficult: the arena was already let to Arthur Lurich, a popular wrestler, who wanted a part; but in the end the lease was surrendered without conditions. Iurev took the role of Oedipus; Mgebrov was hired to play Tiresias; Granovsky set the all-important choruses and mass scenes. Iurev was a tragic actor of the neoclassical school, and his delivery filled the arena expanses. The play was a huge success, selling out its week-long run to an audience of all social classes.
Gorky and Fedor Chaliapin, the great opera singer, enlisted in Iurev's next project: Shakespeare's Macbeth . Again Granovsky was to produce the tragedy in the Cinizelli Circus (a diagram of the stage is shown in Figure 3); Maria Andreeva was cast in the role of Lady Macbeth. Andreeva's assistance was essential: once a leading player in Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater, wife of Gorky, and now head of Petrograd theaters, she possessed the talent to play a difficult role and the political muscle (she was close to Lenin and Lunacharsky) to ensure the play
would run. Its success rivaled that of Oedipus, and Iurev, Andreeva, Gorky, and Chaliapin decided to found a "tragic theater," to be housed in a new building designed specially for monumental productions. It would feature the classic repertory so apt for revolutionary élan: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Schiller, and Byron. The collaborators (who had played Macbeth as a clash of good and evil) saw in these playwrights a clarity of moral vision lacking in the prerevolutionary theater. The Revolution was a time of great passion and striving, and only a monumental theater—a truly mass theater—could meet its needs. Although they did not build their theater (there were no funds during the Civil War), they did found the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater, which made the classic repertory one of the most popular of the time.
The Theater of the People
The mass-theater debate touched on ambiguities of great consequence after the Revolution. The belief that spectacles embodied the spirit of socialist revolution was common, but its roots were tangled. Some, following Wagner, felt that mass drama would, like the Greek drama, express the nation's unified will; others considered it an instrument of political struggle. When the October Revolution placed a party claiming to represent the working class in power, the leaders faced a dilemma: Should mass theater represent the workers in power or the people struggling for expression? Lunacharsky, representing the state, assumed optimistically that both interests could be served.[32] Rolland, whose Le théâtre du peuple had influenced his friend Lunacharsky, saw people's theater as an educator.[33] Its task in a bourgeois society was to agitate against the status quo; under socialism, it would introduce workers to progressive culture. Rolland considered people's theater inherently progressive: popular fêtes had furthered the French Revolution; the popular theaters of Maurice Pottecher and Louis Lumet were tools of democratic mobilization; the Swiss popular theater instilled democratic virtues. It would be equally progressive under socialism.
Though innocent sounding, such assumptions raised two issues central to Bolshevism: relations between activist intellectuals and the laboring classes they claimed to serve; and the primacy of politics over culture in party activity. Items of hot debate after the failed revolution of 1905, they had split the party and would always lurk behind the mass-
theater discussion. Lenin and his followers, who formed the core of the party, did not entirely trust the popular classes to act in their own interests. Lenin molded the party as a vanguard and considered its first task revolution. Socialist culture was a dream of the future, a task of secondary import during the initial phase of political struggle. Lenin's opponent in the debate was Bogdanov, a fellow exile whose faction felt that socialist society was unthinkable without socialist culture. Bogdanov stressed the vanguard's duty to nurture a socialist consciousness in the working class, which would allow it to realize its own power and form a new worker state. Bogdanov did not deny the utility of political organization, nor did he neglect the role of educated activists; his merit was in balancing this side of the revolutionary equation with popular initiative and cultural consciousness.
In early October 1917, the Provisional Government's dying days, Bogdanov and other culturalists (including Lunacharsky) founded Proletkult, an organization devoted to working-class culture. Born under a bourgeois government, Proletkult kept its autonomy from the state after the Bolshevik coup.[34] The Proletkult board pursued the dogma that socialist culture would be proletarian and collective. Theater, an inherently collective art, was at the cutting edge of its work, and Proletkult clubs throughout Russia searched for a mass theater to express the needs of the working class. Its most ardent adherent was Platon Kerzhentsev. A Bolshevik from 1904 and leader of the Proletkult Theater Section, he had studied mass theater in English-speaking countries and Europe in his years of exile.
Though collective proletarian spectacles were unknown, mass spectacles had been popular in the West before the First World War, and Kerzhentsev was familiar with them. There were two traditions in Europe and the United States. The first was a revival of Greek outdoor drama, part of a general neoclassicism.[35] In California, for instance, Isadora Duncan was reviving Hellenic dance; the Bohemian Club was founded in the woods near San Francisco; and Pasadena instituted the Rose Festival, which back then featured not football but chariot races. The movement placed faith in the tonic of the open air. Outdoor theater was healthier physically and socially; its audience could commune with art and nature, undivided by the architecture of aristocratic and bourgeois theater. Russians carried the faith in open air into their revolution and held to it despite a climate less benevolent than that of Athens or San Francisco.[36]
The eastern seaboard of the United States was the site of mass specta-
cles more directly presaging those of the Russians. The tradition exemplified by Percy MacKaye (author of The Civic Theatre ) was of a more rationalist bent than that of the West Coast, which satisfied the Russians' didactic urge. As the title of MacKaye's book suggests, it was a civic theater, based on the reintegration of art into the life of the democratic community.[37] Before the war, MacKaye and his associates organized a number of "civic masques," or historical re-creations: in 1914, for instance, the 150th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis was marked by a pageant in which much of the city participated. The participation of the people, who normally avoided theater and acting, was essential, for the goal of civic theater was "the conscious awakening of a people to self-government in the activities of its leisure."[38] Such participation was an expression of democracy, and though MacKaye's bourgeois democracy was alien to the Russians, both considered mass spectacles an antidote to capitalism.[39]
Kerzhentsev was an eclectic, borrowing from Wagner and Bogdanov, but he was close to MacKaye's practicality. In a series of works published in 1918, Kerzhentsev established the theoretical and practical foundations for much of Proletkult's theater work.[40] (Figure 4 shows the cover for his most famous book.) Like other Proletkult theoreticians, Kerzhentsev treated art from the viewpoint of performance and insisted that people's theater be not a theater for the people but a "'theater of the people,' i.e. based on the creative work of the lower classes."[41] It would "start from a desire to facilitate the full artistic expression of the proletariat's 'I' in harmonious collective theatrical creativity."[42] Naturally, creativity would not be matched by virtuosity, but, as Kerzhentsev pointed out, "the task of the proletarian theater is not to produce good professional actors who will successfully perform the plays of a socialist repertory, but to give an outlet to the creative artistic instinct of the broad masses"[43] The instinct grew from a broader creative urge called samodeiatel'nost' (MacKaye's self-government ).[44] Mass spectacles fit the twin demands for self-government and collectivity, and offered an aesthetic equivalent to the revolution in politics.
Many Bolsheviks, Lenin in particular, were distressed by Proletkult's flair for independence. Organizers of official celebrations did their utmost to keep Proletkult away. Yet in the early years of the Revolution, there was often no alternative. On May Day 1918 most theaters could not respond to the holiday appropriately. Private theaters were not yet under state control; public theaters—that is, the former imperial theaters—had only reluctantly acquiesced to new administrations. The
Figure 4.
Cover of Kerzhentsev's Creative Theater
(P. Kerzhentsev, Tvorcheskii teatr, Moscow, 1923).
only theater in Petrograd with both a stage and an enthusiasm for the Revolution belonged to Proletkult. In the spring of 1918, state expropriation had brought the columned Assembly of Nobles into Proletkult hands, and a ceremonial opening of the oxymoronic Proletkult Palace was scheduled for May Day.
The evening was graced by the work of the new theater studio, 200 students of both sexes led by Pavel Bessalko, Mgebrov, and Victoria Chekan. Bessalko was a "proletarian poet," a writer of verse on the proletariat and its revolution. He was a graduate of the Paris exile, where he had met the other future founders of Proletkult: Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky, and Fedor Kalinin. Mgebrov and Chekan came to Proletkult from different backgrounds. Mgebrov, a graduate of the tsarist Military Cadet School, was a talented and nomadic actor. Early in the century, he wandered from the Moscow Art Theater to the Theater of Vera Komissarzhevskaia and then, in 1911, to Evreinov's Ancient Theater, where he met Chekan. A cycle of seventeenth-century Spanish dramas was produced that year, and Chekan played Laurencia in Lope de Vega's Fuente ovejuna . She played the peasant girl with a remarkable vitality—her trademark—and years later Mgebrov would remember her "possessing a rare, completely Spanish temperament. . . . Some nights she tossed people about the stage like balls, so they fell into the orchestra pit and broke the musicians' instruments. And yet she was a frail woman."[45] Like Chekan, Mgebrov favored a romantic idealism that flourished during the Revolution. A beloved role was the hero of Pedro Calderón's The Purgatory of St. Patrick . His gaunt features and pathetic declamation lent themselves to the role of prophet (like Tiresias) or martyr; the die-hard typecasters Meyerhold and Eisenstein found him ideal for the roles of the Prophet in Emile Verhaeren's Les aubes (Meyerhold's 1920 reworking) and Archbishop Pimen in Eisenstein's Aleksandr Nevsky .
Mgebrov and Chekan left professional theater in the spring of 1917 to direct an after-hours theater in Petrograd's Baltic Factory. They were designated delegates by their club when Proletkult was organized in October, and when the Petrograd branch opened in March 1918, they became theater instructors at Lunacharsky's insistence.[46] Mgebrov's enthusiasm for the February Revolution—he had organized the Liberty Bond Festival—was not held against him, and he transferred his faith to the new revolution. Mgebrov, like Wagner, saw revolution less as a political than as a spiritual movement and felt the "rise of creative
powers hidden in man's collective consciousness from ancient times."[47] With many Proletkult leaders, he shared a style: cosmic and ecstatic.
Although most of the students shared his enthusiasm, none had stage experience; given a month to mount a program, Mgebrov wisely started with the basics. He rejected the standard repertory because few authors spoke sympathetically of workers' lives. As Kerzhentsev said: "The repertory situation is abominable. European literature has in essence no repertory for the proletarian theater. The number of authors and works that reflect the aspirations and spiritual needs of the proletariat is extraordinarily thin. Socialist plays can be counted not by the tens, but by the ones. And the majority of those are not on a high artistic level."[48]
Even they were beyond the range of Mgebrov's students, who were amateurs and more amateur than most. Rather than a script they used something called instsenirovka, a calque of the German inszenierung: an adaptation of nondramatic material, usually prose, to the stage. The trick was not new; the Moscow Art Theater had used it in the 1910s, when Chekhov was no longer around, and two of its adaptations, Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth and Dostoevsky's The Possessed, were great successes. When scripts are not available, adaptation becomes a useful approach. The technique would help later festival directors transform the Revolution itself into theater. Proletkult chose the verse of Aleksei Gastev, a leading proletarian poet, for dramatic material. Gastev's recently published Poetry of the Workers' Hammer was enjoying great popularity. Although the poetry in many respects was original, the influence of Walt Whitman was evident in the powerful rhythm, propelling lines across the page, and in the imagery of cosmic harmony. In fact, Mgebrov's next project was Whitman. Both poets profited from declamation.
None of the young students was trained to read verse, which prompted a decision that the reading be collective.[49] The motive was purely practical, but the result was lauded by Proletkult theorists. Collective declamation was just reaching the apex of popularity; a Professor Serezhnikov would soon found the Proletarian Studio of Declamation.[50] Collective declamation was simple; it allowed many students to participate and gave them a first taste of art, an experience that, judging by the proliferation of studios in the next five years, did not go to waste.
The May Day 1918 production of Gastev's We Grow Out of Iron provides an illustration of the Proletkult method. The mise en scène bore a striking resemblance to the new Proletkult emblem unveiled for that
morning's procession. As the curtain rose, "wheels, gears and flywheels began to spin, and from this primeval chaos rose the symbolic figure of a worker representing the full significance of the collective and the power based on overcoming the elements through the will to freedom. The bared muscles of arms, an intent pose, a sickle, a hammer and anvil, a hammer stroke frozen in mid-air . . . all this at the same time animated by a truly fiery inspiration and, most important, love and faith."[51]
Mgebrov sought harmony; he chose Gastev's poem to "confirm the full, absolutely harmonic mastery of life by the human collective, and see the possibility of such mastery in continuity of motion."[52] Rhythm provided the unifying impulse. Lines were broken up into phrases, words, and syllables, then distributed among the chorus. As the reading progressed, individual recitations were united into a single ecstatic chorus. In Mgebrov's words:
Suddenly the whistles began . . . At first separate figures of girls and workers rose to its summons as if against a background of dawn and the rising sun. They began with a joyous exchange of shouts that merged with the call of the factory whistles. Then voices, source unknown, responded to a singing and ringing summons drawing nearer and nearer. The summons swelled and hundreds of voices merged into it. With each addition they became more intoxicated. In the end, united, they were no longer distinct from each other and merged into a song created by a single impulse.[53]
The audience received the reading enthusiastically. Some reviewers and all of Proletkult's future critics measured it against the pretension of Proletkult's leaders (Bessalko among them) that they were creating a new culture. By that standard it was a failure. But there is no reason to burden the students with the pretensions of others; they were amateurs, and applying professional standards to them would be unfair. In professional theater only the show, the finished product presented to an audience of strangers, is important; for amateurs, who usually perform for an audience of like people, production is important as a process of participation and education. Something similar should be kept in mind with festivals, which are created for both the spectator and the participant, who are not wholly differentiated. The Proletkult performance belonged more to festivity than to the theater; it was a ritual celebration—stylized, measured, a canvas of ideas and not details. It was a proletarian show for a worker audience. Its peculiar stylistics were absorbed by future festival spectacles.
Festivals of a One-Minded People
The European progressive tradition inspired two approaches to mass drama that differed sharply in defining the "people" of people's theater. The trend followed by Kerzhentsev saw people as the oppressed masses struggling against the bourgeoisie. People's theater thrived in a divided society. The second viewpoint understood the people to be a homogeneous and essentially unchanging mass. Both traditions could be traced to the intoxicating summer of 1848, progenitor of Marx, but also of Wagner and his Art and Revolution and Art-Work of the Future .[54] The young Wagner shared his generation's infatuation with revolution; but Wagner's vision of revolution was uniquely aesthetic. Revolution was not an inspiration for art, it was an equivalent; both expressed the popular will, both harnessed its chaotic powers. Wagner's democratic art demanded a merging of the artist's will with the people; the historical necessity they embodied would become manifest through the artist's obedient hand. Wagner's ideas were an eternal temptation to Bolshevik materialists; Lunacharsky, for instance, saw mass drama as a "moment of orgiastic exultation,"[55] a recovery of humanity's primeval oneness.
Greek tragedy, the unity of unities, was the precedent for Wagner's drama, motivated by an odd analogy drawn first by the Reverend Johann von Herder: the Hellenes and the people (Volk ). Both represented the organic ideal, societies that Wagner, following Ludwig Feuerbach, claimed live in "necessity," where "life is a true mirror of nature."[56] Vital harmony was the alleged virtue of both, and "intellect with all its arrogant divorce from life,"[57] the culprit of decline. Wagner also blamed capitalism for the decay of modern society and theater. His aesthetic revolution aimed to reunite both society and the arts. The tragic theater would combine the arts of the poet, the musician, and the dancer, and the tragic poet would find "the noblest part of his own nature united with the noblest characteristics of the whole nation."[58]
The older Wagner's conservatism was evident even in the young radical. He believed that Greek art was concordant not only with society but with the state; it "was conservative, because it was a worthy and adequate expression of the public conscience." But in Wagner's time, which lacked Hellenic harmony, "true art is revolutionary, because its very existence is opposed to the ruling spirit of the community."[59] With
the coming of the new society it would be, in Wagner's paradoxical phrase, "conservative anew."[60]
Wagner opened a rich vein for socialism; he established a line of thought that grafted German ideas onto a predominantly French, English, and rationalistic tradition. Wagner's artwork of the future belonged to a complex of ideas that preached revolution but was strongly retrospective. His sense of history was cyclical; revolution culminated a process that shattered an original unity only to reinstate it in finer form.
The mixture of radicalism and conservatism, looking forward and looking backward, was not new; the French revolutionaries had claimed Rousseau as a forefather. Rousseau's ideal was rural and retrograde, but its sanction of democracy had great appeal in 1789. Rousseau was the first modern enthusiast of mass spectacles. His belief that they were vehicles of national unification was accepted by French revolutionaries and then socialists, and given egalitarian overtones. In the Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Spectacles (1758) and Consideration of the Government of Poland and Its Reform (1772), Rousseau saw spectacles as the people's welfare and as bringing about their unity. They were a model—a microcosm—of harmonious democracy: "Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of the square; gather the people together there, and you will have a festival. Do better yet; let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be united."[61] Rousseau inspired the French revolutionaries; Robespierre developed a particular enthusiasm for fêtes. But the revolutionaries translated Rousseau's ideas into their own terms. It is difficult to imagine him approving of the Festival of Reason.
There were differences between Wagner and Rousseau. Wagner provided a historical basis for the ideal; and his modern vocabulary was more digestible than Rousseau's for the socialists. But in one respect Rousseau exerted more influence. Although Wagner's artwork was "collective," it was also Apollonian. Translated into social terms, this meant that "art's life force" is provided by the people, but it is expressed by a single poet. Rousseau's fêtes were an art of and by the people. Both thinkers were influential in Russia, but there is more Rousseau than Wagner in Friche's article: "In socialist society the stage will once again merge with the audience, and theatrical spectacles with their division of spectator and actor will yield to collective fêtes, ceremonial processions, mass choruses."[62]
The ideology of socialism was systematic, but its broader cultural tradition was a muddle. The confusion was greatest where Wagner entered the picture. Wagner of the socialist tradition was not the historical Wagner, who preferred social integration to dialectical struggle. His Art-Work of the Future was an inspiring vision of socialist mass theater, but his conservatism was unpalatable to revolutionaries, so its aesthetic ideal was grafted onto another socialist tradition. The recipient of the graft was Friedrich Engels. In Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels argues that primeval society was based on the genes, a family-centered system he thought bore the seeds of communism: a lack of private property and class division, an equal distribution of labor and its fruits, and the communal ownership of the means of labor. Engels looked back for his vision of the future. "Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes ."[63]
Engels's work, a reiteration of principles in The German Ideology, his 1846 collaboration with Marx, legitimized the harmonic ideal for socialists. Ideals travel through a tradition in clusters; as the harmonic ideal passed from Engels to the Russians, the Wagnerian artwork of the future traveled with it and surfaced in unexpected places. Chernyshevsky speculated that the final stage of socialism would be close to primitive socialism, as did Bogdanov.[64] Bogdanov's vision of communism, as expressed in the utopian novel Red Star, foresaw that labor would no longer be split by specialization; people would not be divided by class; government would not separate the ruler from the ruled; and philosophy would not differentiate the material from the ideal. Art would be characterized by "extreme simplicity and thematic unity." The art of transitional epochs was discordant; but socialism's final stage would feature a monumental art inspired by the return to harmony.[65] Bogdanov never cited Wagner, but Lunacharsky, who shared his ideals, saw Wagner as gatekeeper for the theater of the future before the Revolution and throughout his stewardship of Narkompros.[66]
The Russians' admiration for Greek drama and their willful misconceptions about the society that engendered it placed them squarely in the tradition of Winckelmann, Herder, Hölderlin, Schiller, and Hegel—a tradition continued by Wagner and the young Marx. Each of these thinkers considered the Hellenes a model for the future, a society free of
modern life's great schisms: work and play, theater and church, government and governed, religion and philosophy. Nadezhda Krupskaia could in all seriousness call Soviet Russia "the new Athens" because probourgeois wholeness was a model for postbourgeois socialism.[67]
The latest and most compelling version of Hellenic culture available to turn-of-the-century intellectuals was Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy . Wagner's theater was a temple where art forms and social classes could be reunited; Nietzschean tragedy was a synthesis of two poles of existence, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, with no middle ground. Dionysus was the elemental, undifferentiated experience powering tragedy; Apollo, the artistic consciousness that rises above chaos and crystalizes it in a serene artistic dream. Associating Nietzsche with socialism was a feat of imaginative reading; nevertheless, grafted to the modified Wagnerian tradition, Nietzsche became more amenable to socialists. Wagnerian drama was the product of a society in repose; Nietzschean tragedy arose from chaotic popular emotions. Its home was not Pericles's marble city, as Wagner seems to have thought, but the muddied byways of lower Athens: a place that bred upheaval. A creative socialist armed with excerpts from the Birth of Tragedy could trace an analogy between the tragic artist and the revolutionary: both were imbued with the demotic spirit, yet possessed a clarity of vision beyond that of the common crowd. The artist and the revolutionary stood on the threshold of two worlds: the elite and the demos, the past and the future. They could also see, as many did in 1917–20, an analogy between festivals—tragic or otherwise—and revolution.
If Lunacharsky was profoundly (and selectively) moved by Nietzsche, the transmission of Wagner and Nietzsche to the Revolution was most clearly the work of the symbolist Viacheslav Ivanov.[68] Ecstatic rites of the demotic cult of Dionysus gave birth to tragedy; Ivanov saw theater's only hope in returning to this "democratism." He wanted to take tragedy directly back to its Dionysian roots—without the socialists' historicism. Dionysian rites were the answer to contemporary social problems, for they united the entire people in ecstatic worship, where frenzy obscured class distinctions. Ivanov found a kindred spirit in Aleksandr Scriabin, composer of Divine Poem (1903), The Poem of Ecstasy (1908), and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910). Scriabin saw art as a holiday, the antithesis of everyday life, in which art and life merge into one.[69] His final, uncompleted project was the ambitious Mystery, a fusion of sacrament and art. Mystery was to be a massive performance without spectators, only
participants. Music, dance, poetry, a light show, and even perfumes were incorporated into the score. Its opening chords were to be struck in the Tibetan Himalayas, continue way over to England, and culminate in a moment of mystic union on the banks of the Ganges.[70]Mystery would be an expression of a single, universal truth, a synthesis of music, poetry, dance, and light.
Ivanov's retrospective ideal could be given radical political implications; drama was, like revolution, a threshold state. It merged life and art, actor and audience, stage and theater, and overcame Marx's despised differentiation. Critically speaking, it also confused dramatic art and ritual, both covered by the catchall term deistvo . Ivanov's retrospective program led him to suggest "reforms" strikingly similar to The Theater of the Future (Die Schaubühne der Zukunft , 1906) of Munich director Georg Fuchs. In ancient rituals worshipped and worshipper, priest and sacrifice became one: "The spectator must become a do-er, a participant in the drama. The crowd of spectators must merge into a choral body, like the mystic commune of the ancient 'orgies' and 'mysteries.'"[71] If the actors and spectators were to merge, the theater would have to be rebuilt; the footlights and proscenium arch segregating participants of the rite would have to disappear.
Theater's social force was predicated on its communality. The main actor in Ivanov's deistvo , as in later Reinhardt and Proletkult productions, was the chorus. It played two roles: "the minor chorus, tied directly to the action . . . and a chorus symbolizing the entire community (obshchina ), which can be increased at will by new participants—a chorus, hence, that is manifold and inserts itself into the action only at moments of the highest ascent and full liberation of Dionysian energies."[72] Insertion into the action was a curious notion that later Soviet critics and directors would adopt. It implied a bond between stage and auditorium that could transform a theatrical event into a social event. This was Ivanov's "mystery," "drama transformed into a real event,"[73] which identified the choral chant (created by the dramatic poet) with the vox populi.
Communal drama was possible only in an "organic age," when art was pannational (vsenarodnyi ).[74] Here was the source of an unfortunate corollary: art flourishes best under unanimity. Organic art and society spring from a single source, a single body of myth. Embodied by the tragic chorus and expressed in its song, myth is "the perceptible signaling of communal [sobornyi —a religious term] one-mindedness and
unity of spirit, a manifest testament to the real tie binding differentiated consciousness into a living whole."[75] Myth speaks for the people; artists, engaged in Platonic mythopoeia (mifotvorchestvo ), embody the myth in their creations. Artists are assigned a tremendous role in social renaissance: apprehending the myths inherent in God's universe and communicating them to the people, they provide a medium for national unification. Poets are, in a phrase that would echo terribly in Stalin's mouth, responsible for "the organization of the national soul."[76]
Ivanov's ideas shared certain profound contradictions with those of socialists. He encouraged self-creativity in the demos, yet channeled it in prescribed ways. There was no provision for a divergence from the leader's guiding vision. If Ivanov's phrase was perverted by Stalin, it reached him through other socialists: Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Gorky. Ivanov spoke of mythopoeia in its Platonic sense, as recollection; socialists used the calque, an equivalent of the English "mythmaking," in another sense, as a dynamic and creative principle. They literally wanted to make myths to spur the working class to action.[77] Lunacharsky said (following Georges Sorel), "The leading class of an economically flourishing society is the carrier of the most vital, strong and bright ideal."[78] The "God-builders" (Gorky's phrase) saw consciousness as the molder of reality. Ideology was a motor of consciousness; and mythology, which translated ideology into art (art was presumably a transparent medium), became a tool of social change. Though symbolists and Bolsheviks would seem to have had little in common, they met every Wednesday evening at Ivanov's "Tower" apartment; Lunacharsky contributed an article to the symbolist anthology Teatr: Kniga o novom teatre (Theater: A Book about the New Theater ) (1908); and when the symbolists organized Torches (Fakely ) in 1905 to pursue dreams of a mythmaking theater, one of the group's enthusiasts was Gorky.[79]
The prerevolutionary Bolsheviks' experience with public manifestations was limited to street demonstrations, particularly May Day marches that were often suppressed. The October Revolution brought them power, and power in the Russian tradition was expressed through elaborate rituals and celebrations. The Bolsheviks had few models to fall back on, but there was available a tangled tradition of state pomp, theatrical art, and socialist philosophy that party leaders could selectively exploit for their own festivals. Bolsheviks concerned with the arts, particularly Lunacharsky, were subject to diverse and often contradictory influences. Each influence helped shape the festivals, but this often
indiscriminate assimilation led to deep tension. Mass drama was considered an expression of popular will; but many revolutionaries also believed that the popular will should be unanimous and correspond to the will of the Revolution (and its leaders). It was an ambiguity inherent to festivity itself, regardless of its social applications, and one that would play itself out over the next several years.