The late nineteenth century was a period of rebellion and renewal in the European theatre. Discontent with the mediocrity of the commercial stage with its “well-made plays” and comfortable moral assumptions had given rise to the New Drama. Less a unified movement than a useful banner to which all those who wished for change in the theatre could rally, the New Drama looked toward both Symbolism and naturalism—a dualism embodied in the work of such dramatists of the period as Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann and Chekhov. Poets and philosophers too had their vision of the theatre of the future. Nietzsche dreamed of returning the theatre to its origins in Dionysian ritual and sweeping away the barrier between actor and spectator. Wagner had looked back to the Athenian theatre and seen in it a profound union of poetry, music, drama, dance and design, the spirit of which he hoped to recapture in the modern Gesamtkunstwerk. In France, Mallarmé too called for a theatre that would lay all the arts under tribute to create a drama of mystery on a stage reduced to its barest elements. Maeterlinck announced that external action was dead and pleaded for a theatre of stillness and inner drama; his plays began to be taken up by the avant-garde as a sacred cause.
This ferment did not leave Russia untouched. With the first translations of Ibsen and Strindberg in the 1880s, the New Drama began to filter into the consciousness of cultured Russians; Maeterlinck and Hauptmann followed in the 1890s, and in the 1900s appeared a whole galaxy of new names that included Przybyszewski, Hofmannsthal, Wedekind, Hamsun, Schnitzler, D’Annunzio, Wilde and Shaw.
To a striking extent, the development of the Russian theatre at the turn of the century ran a similar course to that of the French theatre ten years earlier. In France, the naturalistic excesses of Antoine’s Théâtre Libre (founded in 1887), which had specialized in painstakingly realistic productions of Ibsen and Hauptmann, had brought about a reaction in the shape of Paul Fort’s Théâtre d’Art (1890) and its successor, Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de L’Oeuvre (1892), which introduced the dramas of Maeterlinck and staged Ibsen in a stylized “Symbolist” manner, bringing in artists of the Nabi school (Vuillard, Sérusier, Maurice Denis) to paint decorative backdrops. In Russia, the naturalism of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre (founded in 1898), which found effective vehicles in the plays of Ibsen, Hauptmann and Chekhov, was succeeded by the stylized theatre of Meyerhold, who produced plays by Maeterlinck, Ibsen and a number of Symbolists, both native and foreign, turning for decor to brilliant young painters from the ambience of the World of Art. There is, however, a factor that disturbs the neatness of the parallel—the ambiguous genius of Chekhov, whose relationship to the Symbolist theatre deserves some examination.
Chekhov has always been closely associated with the Moscow Art Theatre, which achieved its first significant success with its revival of The Seagull in 1898 and gave the premieres of all his major plays thereafter. Although Chekhov himself had reservations, the Art Theatre’s naturalistic approach seemed ideally suited to Chekhov’s plays, with the result that Chekhov has often been identified with naturalism in the theatre. Yet if Chekhov was a realist, he was a realist of a special kind who refined realism to the point where it threatened to become something else. Both realists and Symbolists sensed this in Chekhov. “Do you know what you’re doing?” Gorky had expostulated, “You’re killing realism.” While in the opposite camp, Andrei Bely expressed the view that “while remaining a realist, Chekhov became the secret enemy of realism,” and wrote the brilliant Symbolist exegesis of The Cherry Orchard included in the present volume.
Chekhov’s later plays convey a mysterious sense of something pressing beyond words to find expression in the multitude of pauses that Chekhov, unlike most dramatists, is wisely content not to fill with stage directions. Dialogue seems to rise out of a profounder silence and to sink back into it. It is here that we sense a kinship between Chekhov and Maeterlinck, whose writings on the theatre are full of observations that, in a curious way, seem even more applicable to Chekhov’s dramas than to Maeterlinck’s own. “It is idle,” wrote Maeterlinck, “to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another.” He had argued that “psychological action” was “infinitely loftier in itself than mere material action,” maintaining that “side by side with the necessary dialogue” there was “another dialogue that seems superfluous,” but really determines “the quality and immeasurable range of the work.”
Chekhov was drawn toward Maeterlinck, just as he was repelled by Ibsen. A whole bouquet of uncomplimentary remarks about the great Norwegian may be gathered from Chekhov’s conversation and correspondence: “Listen, I tell you Ibsen is no dramatist,” he wrote to Stanislavsky; to Andreyev he was even more unceremoniously dismissive—“Ibsen is an idiot.” Ibsen, being, as Bernard Shaw admiringly observed in his Quintessence of Ibsenism, “a moralist and a debater as well as a dramatist,” had invented the play of discussion. Ibsen belongs to the old drama of communication, Chekhov to the new drama of non-communication, which is perhaps why he seems so “modern” to us today. No doubt it was just this polemical quality in Ibsen that Chekhov found unappealing. In Maeterlinck, however, he took a warm interest. In 1902 he attempted to persuade the Art Theatre to stage an evening of Maeterlinck’s short plays, and when at last in 1904 Stanislavsky did decide to produce Les Aveugles, Intérieur and L’Intruse, Chekhov, although mortally ill, took a keen interest in the project, demanding to be kept up to date on the progress of rehearsals. The plays were premiered on October 2, 1904—exactly three months after Chekhov’s death.
It is tempting to speculate on the direction Chekhov might have taken had he lived longer. The Cherry Orchard—“almost a farce,” as Chekhov insisted—anticipates the harlequinade of the pre-revolutionary years. Stanislavsky tells in his memoirs of a projected play that suggests that Chekhov was moving toward a decisive break with the manner he had brought to such perfection. The play was to deal with two friends in love with the same woman who journey together to the North Pole; the set for the last act was to represent an enormous ice-bound ship, and the play was to end with the two friends having a vision of the ghost of the woman (who had died in the meantime) flitting across the snow. The icy remoteness of the setting recalls that of Ibsen’s last and most “symbolic” play, When We Dead Awaken, while both action and decor curiously anticipate Apollinaire’s surrealist verse drama Couleur du temps. A jotting in Chekhov’s notebook gives another hint of new departures: a play about a group of people waiting for someone who never arrives.
Appropriately, it was Meyerhold, then a youthful member of the Art Theatre, who had created the role of Treplev, the advocate of “new forms,” in the Theatre’s production of The Seagull, and the director was later to speak with pride of Chekhov’s affection for him. Of the correspondence between the two, only one letter of Chekhov’s survives, as against seven written by Meyerhold between 1899 and 1904; it is clear enough, however, that Chekhov was sympathetic to Meyerhold’s increasingly critical attitude toward the Art Theatre, and that each tended to confide in the other his discontent with Stanislavskian naturalism. When Meyerhold, a founding member of the Art Theatre, was excluded from the list of shareholders when the Theatre became a joint stock company at the beginning of 1902, Chekhov was much concerned.
1902 was a year which saw the unmistakable emergence of new forces in the Russian theatre. In his article of that year, “Unnecessary Truth,” Valery Briusov, the leader of Russian Symbolism, for the first time called into question the achievement of the Moscow Art Theatre, then at the height of its success, and wondered whether naturalism was not opposed to the very nature of the stage. In 1902 Meyerhold resigned from the Art Theatre to form a company, eventually to take the name of “The Fellowship of the New Drama”; with the young Aleksei Remizov as literary adviser, the troupe toured the provinces, including in its repertoire such unfamiliar names as Maeterlinck, Przybyszewski, Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal. In the same year the most popular actress of her generation, Vera Komissarzhevskaya, left the Alexandrinsky Theatre (where, in 1896, she had created the role of Nina in the original prodiction of The Seagull), dissatisfied with the entrenched routine of the Imperial stage; by touring the provinces she raised enough money to open her own theatre in St. Petersburg in 1904. The later conjunction of these two searchers—Meyerhold and Komissarzhevskaya—was to bring about the brief flowering of the Symbolist theatre in Russia.
Stanislavsky’s 1904 productions of Maeterlinck, though generally agreed to be disappointingly unimaginative, had shown him to be not unaware of the need for a change of direction if the Art Theatre was to retain its leading position. Deciding that the time was ripe for experiment, and even for “novelty for novelty’s sake,” in 1905 he invited Meyerhold to take charge of an experimental “Theatre-Studio” attached to the Art Theatre. Briusov himself was to be in charge of the new theatre’s literary section, and two native Symbolist dramas, Briusov’s The Earth and Viacheslav Ivanov’s Tantalus, were planned for inclusion in the repertoire. For the Theatre-Studio’s opening production, however, Meyerhold chose Maeterlinck’s La Mort de Tintagiles. Under the influence of the Belgian dramatist’s own theory of “static theatre,” Meyerhold matched the play’s deathward drift and languid, hypnotic rhythms with a style of sparse, deliberate gesture that suggested the carefully composed groups of an antique bas-relief; formalized movement was complemented by formalized speech, each syllable falling, in Meyerhold’s own memorable phrase, like a pebble into a deep well.
The Revolution of 1905 and Stanislavsky’s dissatisfaction with the dress rehearsal of Tintagiles combined to bring about the premature demise of the Theatre-Studio, which never opened its doors to the public. Nevertheless, it had demonstrated during its brief, sequestered existence that a Symbolist theatre could exist outside the dreams of impractical poets. Moving now to St. Petersburg, Meyerhold became a frequenter of the famous Wednesday gatherings at the apartment of the erudite Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov, where all that was liveliest in the artistic and intellectual life of the capital was to be encountered; apart from the host and his wife, the writer Lidia Zinovieva-Annibal, there were Blok, Bely, Sologub, Briusov, Berdiaev, Chulkov, Gippius and Merezhkovsky. The theatre of the future was a favorite topic of conversation at the Wednesdays. Imbued with Nietzschean ideas, Ivanov preached a theatre of religious communion and Dionysian ecstasy. The mood was one of expectancy. “The idea of a symbolist theatre hung in the air,” wrote the poet, dramatist and critic Georgii Chulkov. “All that was lacking was a man of the theatre who would venture so risky an experiment. In those days only one director dreamed of a revolution in the theatre.” That man was, of course, Meyerhold; together with Chulkov, he attempted to organize a new theatre: to be called “Torches,” it would—so went the gossip in theatrical circles—“be something like a Petersburg version of the ill-fated Moscow Studio.” Although “Torches,” for want of financial backing, came to nothing, it did create conditions for an alliance between the new playwright and the new director, effectively bringing the poet into the theatre. It was for “Torches” that Blok, at Chulkov’s suggestion, developed one of his lyrics into a short play of the same name--The Puppet Show.
In 1906 Komissarzhevskaya moved her theatre to new premises on Ofitserskaya Street and invited Meyerhold to be her director. An actress of great spiritual intensity who communicated to her roles something of her own tragic personality, Komissarzhevskaya won the hearts of poets (as Blok’s touching obituary bears witness) no less than those of the theatregoing public; in the words of an admirer, “all the restless longing of a catastrophic epoch found its expression in her, all the vague reaching out, the satiety with the visible material world, the thirst to penetrate the undiscovered secrets of the universe and of life.” Her adherence to the cause of the Symbolist theatre helped to broaden its appeal and make it less of a coterie enterprise.
The very appearance of the theatre on Ofitserskaya Street made it clear that radical departures were to be expected. The keynote was a chaste and severe restraint: walls and columns were painted a stark white and the curtains were of a plain dark material. The only color was provided by Bakst’s drop-curtain, on which a Greek temple in the depths of a mysterious forest suggested the theatre’s aim of returning the theatre to its ancient ritual origins.
Meyerhold was director of Komissarzhevskaya’s theatre for little more than a year (his first production, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, opened on November 10, 1906, his last, Sologub’s The Triumph of Death, on November 6, 1907). The partnership was an uneasy one and the break, when it came, bitter. If Meyerhold and Komissarzhevskaya were both explorers, their explorations were conducted in different regions: “She did not need the external contrivances of new acting techniques, but the possibility of expressing her soul”—what drew her to Symbolism was the movement’s mystical and transcendental aspect; Meyerhold, on the other hand, was a scholar and a technician, fascinated by the stylization of past theatrical epochs and “theatre for theatre’s sake.” In a way, actress and director represented the division within Russian Symbolism itself.
The art of the Symbolist period was marked by a heightened awareness of developments in the west, a self-conscious return to the community of European culture. This internationalism of outlook was characteristic of the theatre on Ofitserskaya Street, which opened its doors with a defiantly anti-naturalistic production of a play by the Art Theatre’s beloved Ibsen—Hedda Gabler, in which the heroine, attired in a gown that suggested some scaly creature of the deep, moved against the deep blue and orange of Sapunov’s extravagant art nouveau set, a martyr to the aesthetic protest. Nevertheless, though foreign plays were preponderant in the repertoire, the year of the Meyerhold-Komissarzhevskaya collaboration saw the premieres of such plays as Blok’s Puppet Show, Andreyev’s Life of Man and Sologub’s Triumph of Death; the first of these was the occasion of a great theatrical battle of the order of the first night of Hernani or The Rite of Spring and marked a turning point in the history of the Russian theatre. After Meyerhold’s departure, Komissarzhevskaya, with the aid of such brilliant directors as her brother, Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, and Nikolai Evreinov, continued her policy of staging Symbolist plays until the banning of Wilde’s Salome in the autumn of 1908 forced her to close her theatre the following year. Russian dramas premiered during this period included Remizov’s Devil’s Comedy, Andreyev’s Black Maskers and Sologub’s Vanka the Steward and the Page Jehan. With the closing of Komissarzhevskaya’s theatre, the Symbolist drama was left without a theatre of its own. There was nothing to do but retreat to the little theatres and theatre-cabarets that were such a feature of the artistic life of St. Petersburg in the prerevolutionary years. This intimate atmosphere was well suited to such a master of chamber drama and divertissement as Kuzmin, and it also gave Meyerhold—since 1908 director of the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theatre—a chance to experiment with commedia dell’arte techniques in the guise of “Doctor Dapertutto.” By 1912, when Leonid Andreyev in the first of his two “Letters about the Theatre,” regretfully announced the demise of Symbolism in the theatre, Symbolism itself was fast on the wane as a movement. The only two native Symbolist dramas staged by Meyerhold at the Alexandrinsky—Sologub’s Hostages of Life (1912) and Zinaida Gippius’s The Green Ring (1915)—both represent a compromise with traditional realistic theatre. The most considerable late Symbolist drama, Blok’s The Rose and The Cross (the carefully researched historical setting of which also, in a sense, represented a compromise), was never given the staging it deserved.
Such is the “external” history of the Symbolist theatre in Russia. It has seemed worth summarizing here, since all the dramatists included in the present volume, with the exception of the lonely figure of Annensky, were closely connected with it. Which is is to say that the plays of the Symbolists were not, at their best, works intended, like the dramatic poems of the Romantics, for the study rather than the stage: they were highly theatrical creations in a new style that demanded a new style of production. Was it, then, a matter of a new theatre in search of a drama, or a new drama in search of a theatre? Meyerhold gave the primacy to literature: “The New Theatre,” he wrote in “Literary Intimations of the New Theatre” (1906), “has its roots in literature. Literature has always taken the initiative in breaking up dramatic forms. Chekhov wrote The Seagull before the Art Theatre came forward to stage it. Van Lerberghe and Maeterlinck existed before the theatre that staged them.” Meyerhold added that by literature he meant not only “playwrights who create a new form demanding a different kind of technique,” but also “critics who reject old forms.” In both these capacities the Russian Symbolists helped Meyerhold to formulate the principles of his theatrical revolution. Briusov’s rejection of stage naturalism in favor of stylization and Ivanov’s demand for the abolition of the barrier between actor and spectator remained central to Meyerhold’s thinking, while it would be difficult to overemphasize the key position that The Puppet Show occupied in his development. Meyerhold himself credited Blok’s play with providing “the first impetus in finding the paths of my art,” for it was here that he broke away from Maeterlinck’s “static theatre” to create his own “grotesque theatre” of movement and surprise.
“The basis of the grotesque,” wrote Meyerhold, “is the constant striving on the artist’s part to thrust the spectator from a plane he has only just succeeded in comprehending to another for which he is utterly unprepared.” Mystification, unease, ambiguity, a sense of the illusory and transient nature of things, a constant question of “reality,” are at the very heart of the Symbolist drama. They spring inevitably from the dualism of the Symbolist vision, with its unresolved tension between transcendental and everyday reality. It is characteristic of Symbolist drama that its action proceeds on two or more intersecting but mutually uncomprehending planes, and that the transitions between these planes are abrupt, creating just that sense of dislocation envisaged by grotesque (in Meyerhold’s sense) theatre. The method is most brilliantly deployed in Blok’s Puppet Show, where the action attains a complex ambiguity far beyond the simpler binary opposition underlying most Symbolist drama. In Annensky’s Thamyris Kitharodos, for example, the Apollonian world of high art represented by the ascetic protagonist co-exists with the Dionysian world of the Satyrs and Maenads. The lonely passion of Judas in Remizov’s tragedy is counterpointed with the bizarre antics of Zif, Orif and the Monkey King. In the plays of Sologub, such as The Triumph of Death and Vanka the Steward and the Page Jehan, dualism is so all-pervasive as to assume the function of a constructive principle. Kuzmin’s Count Stello in The Venetian Madcaps dwells in a world of pure aesthetic delight inaccessible to the play’s commedia dell’arte characters. Misty Brittany, with its songs and legends, remains infinitely remote from the feudal realities of Languedoc in Blok’s The Rose and the Cross.
These worlds co-exist rather than conflict, for there is no common ground between them on which conflict might take place. We might well say of these plays what Martin Esslin has said of the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd: that they reflect “one poet’s most intimate and personal intuition of the human situation, his own sense of being, his individual vision of the world”; that each play “is a complex poetic image made of a complicated pattern of subsidiary images and themes, which are interwoven, like the themes of a musical composition, not, as in most well-made plays, to present a line of development, but to make in the spectator’s mind a total, complex impression of a basic, and static, situation.” This lack of dramatic conflict in the conventional sense is reflected in such terms as “Lyrical Drama” (as Blok designated his three playlets of 1906) or Sologub’s “Theatre of the Single Will.” Yet while Sologub announced with unmixed satisfaction that all dramatis personae were but masks, transparent to a greater or lesser extent, behind which the face of their creator might be glimpsed, Blok (like Yeats and Hofmannsthal) came to distrust the lyrical, subjective element that was engulfing the stage, warning that “the subtle poisons of lyricism have eaten away the strong, simple chains that support the drama and hold it together.” Condemning Maeterlinck, and with him Chekhov, “who has taken away from the Russian drama what Maeterlinck has taken away from the European drama,” Blok proclaimed Ibsen to have been the last of the great European dramatists. Ironically, though, Blok’s earliest and most purely lyrical plays remain his most convincing work for the theatre; even The Rose and the Cross, with all its beauties, has a slightly labored air beside the freshness of The Puppet Show and The Stranger.
Russian Symbolism not only anticipated the constructive principles of Absurdist drama, it was also capable of astonishingly prophetic insights into the function of the theatre in man’s increasingly mechanized existence. “The Theatre of the Absurd,” writes Martin Esslin, “forms part of the unceasing endeavor of the true artists of our time to breach this dead wall of complacency and automatism and to re-establish an awareness of man’s situation when confronted with the ultimate reality of his condition”; it seeks “to instill in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder and primeval anguish, to shock him out of an existence that has become trite, mechanical, complacent.” In a letter to Meyerhold, written in 1906 under the immediate impression of a dress rehearsal of The Puppet Show, Blok used similar imagery to express virtually the same thought: “Every piece of buffoonery, including my own, seeks to become a battering ram to smash through all the deadness.” The poet-buffoon, said Blok, may pretend to embrace the “crass and torpid” world of matter, but only in order to fool it; “at this point the hour of mystery must strike: matter has been fooled, disarmed and subdued; in this sense, I ‘accept the world’—the whole world with its stupidity, inertia and dead, dry colors—only in order to trick this bony old witch and make her young again. In the embrace of the Fool and the Buffoon the old world puts on youth and beauty, and its eyes become translucent, unfathomable.”
The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk haunted the synesthetic imagination of the Symbolists, and it is natural that the theatre, the meeting place of the arts, should have occupied a central place in their thinking. Rarely in the history of the arts have music, painting, poetry and dance entered into so fruitful a partnership as they did in Russia in these prerevolutionary years. The dominant art of the period was undoubtedly music—the condition to which, in Pater’s well-known phrase, all art aspired. Andrei Bely, the leading theoretician of symbolism, had said that “music is the soul of all the arts,” and that “music is the ideal expression of the symbol.” If music could not occupy in the theatre of the word the supremacy it enjoyed in the ballet (which must be admitted the quintessential art form of these years), it is nevertheless a subtly pervasive element in the Symbolist drama, with its tendency toward the rhythmically organized language of verse and the dissolving of the action in song, mime and dance. Ivanov, Sologub and Annensky all envisaged a theatre in which there would be a place for the dance, while Meyerhold wished to “subordinate acting to the rhythm of speech and the rhythm of plastic movement” in anticipation of a “rebirth of the dance.”
In the Symbolist theatre the painter’s role assumed an importance it had not had since the days of the great baroque decorators, such as Viviani and Gonzago, who had worked in Russia. Jettisoning with relief the laboriously constructed three-dimensional stage models demanded by the Moscow Art Theatre, the artists of the Symbolist theatre once again made scene painting a “music for the eyes” that merged with the rhythm of the production. Though far less well known, the decorative achievement of the Symbolist theatre bears comparison with that of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which indeed, it anticipated. In an article entitled “The Artist in V. F. Komissarzhevskaya’s Theatre,” Evreinov wrote: “It seems a ridiculous thing to say, but it is the truth: in the field of painting, backward Russia suddenly overtook all other countries in theatre design.” The ambience of the World of Art, with its emphasis on technique, its cult of the theatre and its taste for the grand style in architecture, be it of St. Petersburg or Versailles, fostered a number of artists who were not only skilled decorators, but whose entire oeuvre is permeated by the spirit of the theatre. If Bakst and Benois devoted their talent mainly to the ballet at this period, there were others hardly less gifted—Dobuzhinsky, Roerich, Golovin, Sapunov, Sudeikin—to provide the atmospheric and brilliantly stylized settings demanded by the Symbolist theatre. This new kind of decorator, who united in himself the creative artist and the man of the theatre, assumed a position of power next only to that of the director himself, with whom he worked in the closest collaboration Meyerhold spoke with reverence of Sapunov and Golovin—“those together with whom I joyously set out on a journey of exploration (…), before whom a secret door into Wonderland opened, as it did to me.” Blok, as we shall see, was as suspicious of this new breed of decorator as he was of the dictator-director, seeing in him another pretender to the author’s rightful primacy of place.
The Symbolist theatre was close to the World of Art in another respect—its intense preoccupation with the styles and conventions of the past. The retrospectivism that marked Russian art at the turn of the century was not mere nostalgia or escapism; it was the result of a profound feeling that the way to the future lay through a recovery of the past. Diaghilev, the organizing force behind the World of Art, gave prophetic expression to this feeling in 1905, when, summing up what the movement had accomplished, he spoke of “a culture that has risen through us but will sweep us aside.” The scholar-artist and the scholar-poet, versed in a variety of cultures and with a protean ability to recreate them in their own work, were typical of the age. “Stylization”—a word that Briusov had put forward with some caution in 1902—soon became something of a catchword in cultivated drawing rooms.
In an attempt to break with the “untheatrical” realism of the immediate past, the theatre turned to what Meyerhold called “the truly theatrical epochs.” We read in Meyerhold’s theatre magazine The Love of Three Oranges of an attempt “to write a light comedy directly continuing the traditions of the eighteenth century and bypassing the line of development upon which Russian drama entered in the nineteenth century.” In 1907 the “Ancient Theatre,” founded by Evreinov and Baron Drizen with the aim of staging plays in the style of the period in which they were written, opened a season of medieval miracles and mysteries with Blok’s translation of Rutebeuf’s Le Miracle de Théophile; a second season in 1911 was devoted to the seventeenth century Spanish drama. What then were the “truly theatrical epochs” that the anti-realists sought to revive? Classical Greece, the Middle Ages, Elizabethan England, the France of Molière; but above all the lost golden age was located in late eighteenth century Venice, where Gozzi had brought about a miraculous rebirth of the commedia dell’arte with his fantastic, semi-improvisatory fairytale plays. Gozzi became the object of a cult: the title of his first great theatrical triumph was adopted by Meyerhold for a magazine largely devoted to making available in Russian the Italian dramatist’s plays and memoirs. Small wonder, then, if the masks of the commedia dell’arte haunt the drama of these years.
So powerful was the retrospective spirit in the years immediately preceding the Revolution that in his article “Russian Dramatists” of 1911, Meyerhold says nothing of the individual qualities of the representatives of the “New Drama,” but contents himself with an approving enumeration of their links with past theatrical traditions: Viacheslav Ivanov is reviving the ancient Greek orchestra; Blok is following the tradition of Italian popular comedy, while his outlook is close to that of such German Romantics as Novalis and Tieck; Remizov is laying the foundation for a modern mystery, modeled on the mystery plays of the Middle Ages; Kuzmin writes plays in the spirit of the medieval drama, and is also “reconstructing” the French comic theatre; Bely is trying to create an original modern mystery; Sologub is drawn to the classical Greek theatre (The Gift of the Wise Bees) or to the great age of Spanish drama (The Triumph of Death). This is, of course, a one-sided view. Just as the figures in eighteenth century or eighteen thirties costume who move with slightly self-conscious theatricality in the shallow, stage-like picture-space of such World of Art affiliated artists as Somov, Sapunov and Sudeikin are clearly the artists’ contemporaries playing at being aristocrats of the ancien régime, so the characters created by Symbolist playwrights reflect the sensibility of their own day. Count Stello in The Venetian Madcaps is really a St. Petersburg aesthete of the fin de siècle. Blok admitted that the men and women in his The Rose and the Cross were “modern people” and that “their tragedy is our tragedy.” Annensky too conceded that, although he had “treated an ancient theme in an ancient form,” his drama “very probably reflects the soul of modern man.”
While Meyerhold looked to Gozzi and Tieck as the precursors of an absolute, self-sufficing theatre (though it is true that he also found links between Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov and the great theatrical traditions of the past), it is possible to trace such an “anti-realistic” tradition—a minor one, to be sure—within the Russian theatre itself. Since Russian Symbolism was in many respects a return to the principles of Russian Romanticism, it is not surprising to find stirrings of discontent with the idea of verisimilitude as the basis of theatre in the writings of the Romantics. In a draft preface to Boris Godunov, Pushkin roundly declared that the very nature of drama excluded any such slavish copying of life: “ … what kind of verisimilitude is there, for heaven’s sake, in a room divided in two parts, one of which is occupied by two thousand people supposedly invisible to those on the stage?” Pushkin’s friend, the Decembrist poet Küchelbecker, wrote a choric tragedy, The Argives, in which he attempted to return to the Greek theatre without the intermediacy of the French classicists. More startlingly, he recommended a revival of the mystery play, not on the model of Goethe’s Faust, but in the style of “the artless allegorical popular spectacles of Hans Sachs, the Frères de la Passion, the English minstrels, the German mastersingers,” and the Sacramentales of Calderon. He was attracted by the division of the medieval stage into two or three levels and also by the deliberate disruption of the theatrical illusion by direct appeals to the audience. All these features he attempted to incorporate into his own “Mystery,” Izhorsky (1835).
Closer to the Theatre of the Absurd are the delightful nonsense plays of the comic team who wrote under the name of Kozma Prutkov. Not staged in their own day (with the exception of the first of them, Fantasia, which was banned after, or—as its “author” proudly pointed out—during its first performance in 1851, when an unamused Nicholas I stalked out in disgust), Prutkov’s plays were later to enjoy something of a vogue in the little theatres and cabarets of St. Petersburg, where they were staged by such directors as Evreinov and Komissarzhevsky. It would, however, be unwise to place too heavy an ideological weight on these jeux d’espirit; Aleksei Tolstoi, the most distinguished member of the Prutkov team, was, in propria persona, the author of worthy blank verse historical dramas and an advocate of the well-made play who objected to the “pointlessness” of Ostrovsky’s dialogue. Close in spirit to Prutkov’s plays, and like them an ancestor of Blok’s Puppet Show, is Vladimir Soloviov’s skit, The White Lily. Blok himself pointed to Sukhovo-Kobylin’s extraordinary black farce, Tarelkin’s Death (1869) as a play in which “the ancient lineaments of the symbolical drama may be discerned.”
If the Russian Symbolist drama was not entirely without ancestors on native soil, neither was it without progeny. The “trans-rational” drama of early Futurism, Mayakovsky’s expressionistic tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky (certainly the ultimate example of the “Drama of the Single Will”) and his later satirical grotesques, the Pirandello-like plays of Evreinov (whose earlier stage works, such as the harlequinade, A Merry Death, must be regarded as part of the Symbolist theatre), the tragi-comic farces of Bulgakov and Erdman, the allegorical fairytales of Evgenii Schwarz—not to mention verse dramas, such as those of Gumiliov and Tsvetaeva, that follow the lyrical rather than the grotesque line of Symbolist drama—are all in some measure indebted to the Symbolists’ short-lived theatrical revolution. It is hoped that, given the freedom to develop organically, the modern Soviet theatre will, like that of modern Poland, draw fruitfully upon the rich creative legacy of the Symbolist years.