Valery Briusov (1873-1924), poet, novelist, dramatist, critic and translator, was born in Moscow and came of a solid merchant family. Calculating and ambitious, he early saw “Decadence” as the literary movement of the future and resolved to become its leader. Between 1893 and 1895 he published several “anthologies” (actually written almost exclusively by himself under a variety of pseudonyms) entitled Russian Symbolists; though largely an exercise in youthful épatage, they did introduce the notion of Symbolism to a wide Russian public for the first time. Within a decade Briusov established himself as a formidable figure on the literary scene—the acknowledged “master” of the younger Symbolist poets and the editor of the influential Symbolist journal The Scales. With the decay of Symbolism as a movement after 1910 his influence began to wane. He was one of the few leading Symbolists to accept the October Revolution wholeheartedly and to attempt, not very successfully, to adapt his art to revolutionary themes. Because of this, his work has continued to be published, in highly selective editions, under the Soviets.
Briusov was essentially an aesthete and an eclectic. A tireless experimenter in poetic form, he also broadened the thematic range of Russian poetry with his urbanism and bold (if cold) eroticism. It may be, however, that his prose (which has yet to receive its due) has worn better than his verse. In contrast to most Symbolist prose, it exhibits a sobriety and restraint that can be traced back to Pushkin (of all the Symbolists, Briusov was the most devoted Pushkinian).
Briusov’s interest in the theatre goes back to the beginning of his career. At the age of twenty, he wrote a comedy, Country Passions, which was banned by the censor because of its “sordid amorous intrigues”; the hero of this play (which has remained unpublished) was a “decadent” poet called Findesièclov. Briusov’s best known dramatic work, the “Scenes from Future Times,” The Earth, was published in 1905. Like his remarkable story “The Republic of the Southern Cross,” it is a nightmarish vision of man living in a completely closed and controlled environment, shut off from nature and eventually destroyed by his own technological prowess. If the vision owes something to Wells, it also looks forward to Zamiatin’s We. The Earth was never produced, and Briusov later included it in a collection of stories, maintaining that the play was written “more to be read than for performance.” The poet returned to this “science fiction” theme in an unpublished play written in 1920, The Dictator; when read to an audience of writers, it aroused heated discussion by its temerity in suggesting that a socialist society, even in the distant future, might become a dictatorship.
Briusov’s other published plays include The Wayfarer (1910), a “psychodrama” in one act, written perhaps under the influence of Evreinov’s ideas about monodrama, in which there are only two characters and only one speaking role. His verse tragedy Protesilaus Dead (1912) is the third Russian Symbolist drama to treat the myth of Laodamia (the other two being Annensky’s Laodamia and Sologub’s Gift of the Wise Bees); Briusov’s is certainly the most pedestrian of the three. Several more plays and film scenarios remain in the Briusov archives.
Active as a translator throughout his career, Briusov made Russian versions of a number of plays, including Racine’s Phaèdre, Molière’s Amphitrion (1913), Maeterlinck’s Pélleas et Mélisande (1907) D’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini (1908, in collaboration with Viacheslav Ivanov; these last two translations were intended for Komissarzhevskaya’s theatre), Verhaeren’s Hélène de Sparte (1909) and Oscar Wilde’s Duchess of Padua (1911).
Briusov played a decisive role in encouraging the revolt against the naturalism of Stanislavsky’s early Moscow Art Theatre productions. In Meyerhold’s words, “Briusov was the first in Russia to speak of the futility of that ‘truth’ which our theatres have sought so strenuously to capture in recent years; he was also the first to point to other paths of dramatic presentation.”
VALERY BRIUSOV
AGAINST NATURALISM IN THE THEATRE1
(FROM “UNNECESSARY TRUTH”)
It is three years now that the Art Theatre has been with us in Moscow. Somehow it was an immediate success with everyone—the public, the press, the partisans of the new art and the defenders of the old. Not long ago, it was the custom to cite the Maly Theatre as the model of the Russian stage; these days people only laugh at its routine. And this same Maly Theatre and another Moscow theatre—Korsh’s—have begun to adopt the new methods. For Muscovites the Art Theatre has become a kind of idol; they are proud of it, and it is the first thing they hasten to show off to the visitor. When the Art Theatre visited Petersburg, it performed here to packed houses, arousing universal interest. The Art Theatre ventured to stage plays that had failed in other theatres—Chekhov’s Seagull, for example—and was successful. Most surprising of all, it was the Art Theatre’s experimental spirit, its innovations in decor and acting, its daring choice of plays, that won the sympathy of the crowd.
What is the Art Theatre, then? Is it really the theatre of the future, as some have called it? Has it made a step toward the spiritualization of art, toward the overcoming of the fatal contradictions between the essence and the surface of art? Simple probability says no. If the Art Theatre had set itself such tasks, it would hardly have won universal acclaim so quickly. Success attests that what the Art Theatre offers its audience is not the genuinely new, but the old refurbished, that it offers no threat to the deep-rooted habits of the theatregoer. It has only achieved with greater perfection what other theatres, including its rival the Maly, have aimed at. Together with the entire European theatre, with insignificant exceptions, it is on a false path.
Modern theatres aim at the utmost verisimilitude in their depiction of life. They think that if everything on the stage is as it is in reality, then they have worthily fulfilled their function. Actors endeavor to speak as they would in a drawing room, scene-painters copy views from nature, costume designers work in accordance with archaeological data. In spite of all this, however, there remains much that the theatre has not succeeded in counterfeiting. The Art Theatre has set itself the aim of reducing this “much.” The actors there have begun to sit with their backs to the audience without constraint; they have begun to talk to each other instead of “out” to the audience. In place of the usual box set has appeared the room placed at an oblique angle: other rooms are visible through the open doors, so that an entire apartment is presented to the viewer’s gaze. The furniture is arranged as it usually is in people’s homes. If a forest or a garden is to be represented, several trees are placed on the forestage. If the play requires rain to fall, the audience is made to listen to the sound of water. If the play is set in winter, snow can be seen falling outside the windows. If it is windy, curtains flutter, and so on.
First of all, one has to say that these innovations are very timid. They are concerned with secondary matters and leave the essential traditions of the theatre undisturbed. And until these traditions, which comprise the essence of any stage production, are changed, no alteration of detail will bring the theatre closer to reality. All theatres, including the Art Theatre, try to make everything on stage visible and audible. Stages are lit by footlights and strip lights, but in real life light either falls from the sky, or pours in through windows, or is cast by a lamp or a candle. If there is a night scene, the Art Theatre has ventured to leave the stage in greater darkness than is customary, although it has not dared to extinguish all the lights in the theatre; however, if it were really night on stage, the audience would obviously be unable to see anything. Similarly, the Art Theatre is at pains to ensure that all stage conversation is audible to the auditorium. Even if a large gathering is represented, only one actor speaks at a time. When a new group begins to speak, the previous one “moves upstage” and begins gesticulating energetically—and this a quarter of a century after Villiers de l’Isle Adam in his drama Le nouveau monde bracketed two pages of dialogue with the direction “Everybody speaks at once!”
But even if the Art Theatre were more daring, it would still fall short of its purpose. To reproduce life faithfully on the stage is impossible. The stage is conventional by its very nature. One set of conventions may be replaced by another, that is all. In Shakespeare’s day a board would be set up with the inscription “forest.” Not so long ago we used to be content with a backdrop of a forest with side wings depicting trees with branches incomprehensibly intertwined against the sky. In time to come, forests will be constructed from artificial three-dimensional trees with foliage and rounded trunks, or even from living trees with roots hidden in tubs under the stage … And all this, the last word in stage technique, will, like the Shakespearean inscription, be for the audience no more than a reminder, no more than a symbol of a forest. The modern theatregoer is not in the least taken in by a painted tree—he knows that a particular piece of lathe and canvas is intended to stand for a tree. In much the same way, a signboard meant “forest” to an Elizabethan audience and a stage sapling will mean a tree growing naturally to the audience of the future. The set is no more than a pointer to the imagination. In the Greek theatre, an actor playing someone who had just returned from foreign parts would enter from the left. At the Art Theatre, the actor is admitted to a small vestibule where he divests himself of sheepskin and galoshes as a sign that he has come from afar. But who among the audience is likely to forget that he arrived from the wings? In what way is the convention by which an actor removes his sheepskin more subtle than the one by which it is understood that if he enters from the left he is coming from foreign parts?
Not only the art of the theatre, but art of any kind cannot avoid formal convention, cannot be transformed into a re-creation of reality. Never, in looking at a picture by one of the great realist painters, will we be deceived like the birds of Zeuxis into thinking that before us are fruits or an open window through which we may glimpse a distant horizon. By infinitesimal gradations of light and shade, by the most elusive signals, the eye is able to distinguish reality from representation. Never will we bow to the marble bust of an acquaintance. It is unheard of that someone, on reading a story in which the author recounts in the first person how he came to commit suicide, should order a mass to be sung for the repose of his soul. And if there do exist reproductions of people and things that deceive the eye, such, for example, as bridges in a painted panorama or wax figures so convincing that they frighten children, we have difficulty in recognizing these creations as works of art. Not a single one of the spectators sitting in the orchestra and paying three or four roubles for his seat is going to believe that he is really looking at Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and that in the final scene the Prince lies dead.
Each new technical device in art, be it that of the theatre or another, only arouses curiosity and suspicion in the spectator. A certain contemporary artist has, it is said, painted a new series of pictures in which the effect of moonlight is strikingly conveyed. When we see them, our first thought will be: how did he manage to do that? And then we will captiously seek out every discrepancy with reality. Only when we have satisfied our curiosity will we start looking at the picture as a work of art. When an avalanche of wadding descends on the stage, the members of the audience ask each other: how was that done? If Rubek and Irene2 simply walked off into the wings, the audience would believe more readily in their destruction than it does now, when before their eyes two straw-stuffed dummies and armfuls of wadding go rolling over the boards. “It faded on the crowing of the cock,” someone says of the Ghost in Hamlet, and this is enough for the audience to imagine the crowing of the cock. But in Uncle Vanya the Art Theatre has a cricket chirping. No one in the audience will imagine that the cricket is real, and the more lifelike the sound, the less convincing the illusion. In time, audiences will become used to the devices they now find so novel and will cease to notice them. But this will not come about because the audience will take wadding for snow in real earnest, or the rope that tugs at the curtains for wind, but because these devices will simply be numbered among the usual theatrical conventions. Would it not then be better to abandon the fruitless battle against the invincible conventions of the theatre, which only spring up with renewed strength, and rather than seeking to eradicate them, attempt to subjugate, to tame, to harness, to saddle them?
There are two kinds of convention. One kind arises from the inability to create successfully. A bad poet says of a beautiful woman: “She is as fresh as a rose.” It may be that the poet really understood the vernal freshness of the woman’s soul, but he was unable to express his feelings, substituting cliché for genuine expression. In the same way, people want to speak on the stage as they do in life but are unable to, stressing words unnaturally, pronouncing endings too emphatically and so on. But there is another kind of convention—that which is deliberately applied. It is a convention that statues of marble and bronze are left unpainted. They could be painted—at one time they even were—but it is unnecessary, since sculpture is concerned with form, not color. An engraving in which leaves are black and the sky striped observes certain conventions, but it nevertheless affords pure aesthetic enjoyment. Wherever there is art, there is convention. To oppose this is as absurd as to demand that science would dispense with logic and explain phenomena other than by their causal relationship.
It is time that the theatre stopped counterfeiting reality. A cloud depicted in a painting is flat, it does not move or change its form or luminescence—but there is something about it that gives us the same feeling as a real cloud. The stage must provide everything that can most effectively help the spectator to recreate the setting demanded by the play in his imagination. If a battle is to be represented, it is absurd to send on stage a couple of dozen—or even a thousand—extras waving wooden swords: perhaps the audience will be better served by a musical picture from the orchestra. If a wind is called for, there is no need to blow a whistle and tug at the curtain with a rope: the actors themselves must convey the storm by behaving as people do in a strong wind. There is no need to do away with the setting, but it must be deliberately conventionalized. The setting must be, as it were, stylized. Types of setting must be devised that will be comprehensible to everyone, as a received language is comprehensible, as white statues, flat paintings and black engravings are comprehensible. Simplicity of setting will not be equivalent to banality and monotony. The principle will be changed, and there will be ample scope in particulars for the imagination of Messrs. set designers and technicians.
Dramatists too must in some degree perfect their artistic method. They are sovereign artists only when their work is read; on the stage their plays are only forms into which the actors pour their own content. Dramatists must renounce all superfluous, unnecessary and ultimately futile copying of life. Everything external in their work must be reduced to a minimum because it has little to do with the conduct of the drama. The drama can convey the external only through an intermediary—through the souls of the dramatis personae. The sculptor cannot take soul and emotion in his hands; he has to give the spirit bodily incarnation. The dramatist, on the contrary, should make it possible for the actor to express the physical in the spiritual. Something has already been achieved in the creation of a new drama. The most interesting attempts of this kind are the plays of Maeterlinck and the latest dramas of Ibsen. It is noteworthy that it is in the staging of these plays that the modern theatre has shown itself to be particularly ineffectual.
The ancient theatre had a single permanent set—the palace. With slight alterations it was made to represent the interior of a house, a square, the seashore. Actors wore masks and buckskins, which forced them to put aside any thought of imitating everyday life. The chorus sang sacred hymns around the altar and also intervened in the action. Everything was at once thoroughly conventionalized and utterly alive; the audience devoted its attention to the action and not to the setting, “for tragedy,” says Aristotle, “is the imitation not of men, but of action.” In our day, such simplicity of setting has been preserved in the folk theatre. I chanced to see a performance of Tsar Maximilian3 given by factory workers. The scenery and props consisted of two chairs, the tsar’s paper crown and the paper chains of his rebellious son Adolph. Watching this performance, I understood what powerful resources the theatre has at its disposal and how misguided it is in seeking the aid of painters and technicians.
The creative urge is the only reality that exists on earth. Everything external is, in the poet’s words, “only a dream, a fleeting dream.” Grant that in the theatre we may be partakers of the highest truth, the profoundest reality. Grant the actor his rightful place, set him upon the pedestal of the stage that he may rule it as an artist. By his art he will give content to the dramatic performance. Let your setting aim not at truth, but at the suggestion of truth. I summon you away from the unnecessary truth of the modern stage to the deliberate conventionalization of the ancient theatre.
1902