Boris Bugaev (1880-1934), who was to publish poetry, novels and criticism under the pen name of Andrei Bely, was born in Moscow, the only child of a professor of mathematics at Moscow University and a society beauty with artistic inclinations; the union was not a happy one, and Bely was to trace the tragic dualism of his nature to the divided loyalties of his childhood. Throughout his life, scientist and artist lived within him in an uneasy, though often fruitful partnership.
While still a student, Bely came under the influence of the philosopher Vladimir Soloviov, and was the center of a small group of callow mystics who called themselves “Argonauts” and lived in expectation of the Second Coming. Bely’s first collection of verse, Gold in Azure, appeared in 1904, and he was soon a leading contributor to Briusov’s Symbolist journal The Scales. From this period dates the exalted beginning of his tormented friendship with Blok, which was to continue—broken off and again renewed—until the latter’s death in 1921. In 1909 appeared Bely’s first novel, The Silver Dove, which, together with its two successors, Petersburg (1913-14) and the autobiographical Kotik Letaev (1918), represents his greatest claim on the attention of posterity.
The outbreak of the First World War found Bely living in the anthroposophical colony centered about Rudolf Steiner at Dornach in Switzerland; Bely’s devotion to Steiner ended, as his relationships and enthusiasms all too often did, in bitter disillusionment, although he never abandoned anthroposophy. Returning to Russia in 1916, Bely greeted the Revolution with the poem Christ is Risen and endured the trials of the civil war years. An unhappy interlude in Berlin (1921-23) ended with his permanent return to the Soviet Union.
Bely continued to be productive during his Soviet years, publishing novels (the two parts of Moscow), important critical and theoretical works (Rhythm as Dialectic and The Mastery of Gogol) and three brilliant books of memoirs in which, however, Bely’s eagerness to erect a barrier between his Soviet and his Symbolist self leads him into distortion and caricature (though it must at the same time be admitted that distortion and caricature are central to his artistic vision).
If there is a frenetic quality about Bely’s work that makes it wearying at times, one cannot deny its originality, range and influence. In his four early and experimental Symphonies (1903-1908) he attempted to organize large-scale prose works on musical principles. The “ornamental” prose of his novels, with its strong rhythmic and phonetic dominants (Bely claimed that the “content” of Petersburg was “derived” from a certain grouping of sounds) and its combination of the lyrically exalted and the grotesque, might be described as “neo-baroque.” Equally original is Bely’s work in the field of poetics, with its attempt to introduce strictly scientific methods; here he looks forward to the Formalists and even—for good or ill—to computer analysis techniques.
Bely’s genius, so intimately bound up with the texture of language, was not suited to the theatre, and his two published plays, The Newcomer (1903) and The Maw of Night (1906) are immature works. However, in the context of the early Symbolist drama, these brief, fragmentary eschatological mysteries are not without interest. The two plays are clearly connected—probably parts of a large-scale uncompleted drama. Both are permeated with mystical expectation: in The Newcomer signs and portents tell of the imminence of the Second Coming; in The Maw of Night the sun has been extinguished and the last Christians await the end. In this last play the mysterious, threatening atmosphere and the cast of children, women and old men call Maeterlinck to mind, in particular Les Aveugles and La Mort de Tintagiles; indeed, Bely’s plays might be described as an amalgam of Maeterlinck and Vladimir Soloviov. It is more than likely that the dialogue of the Mystics in Blok’s Puppet Show was meant to parody such exchanges as the following:
FIODOR. It is He … It is He …
ILIA. He comes, and in his hands he bears a torch.
FIODOR. His eyes are heavenly …
ILIA. Above him burns the mark of mystery.
FIODOR. He cometh. The Bridegroom cometh. The world
hearkens unto him … He is the Light of the World.
(The Newcomer)
Not only did Blok parody The Newcomer, but in his own drama of “last things,” The King in the Square, some of the atmospherics of Bely’s play—the ever-present tumult of the sea and the growing murmur of the mob—seem to have been borrowed.
In 1924 Bely made a stage adaptation of Petersburg under the title of The Death of a Senator (the bomb that explodes harmlessly in the novel kills Apollon Apollonovich in the play), and it was given its first performance the following year at the Moscow Art Theatre. A theatrical version of Moscow made in 1926 was never staged.
Under the influence of Viacheslav Ivanov, Bely experienced a brief “Dionysian” intoxication in 1904-1905, advocating a theatre of communal ecstasy and penning dithyrambs to the “whirling circle of separate experiences fused by music into a purple Dionysian flame, exalting those who take fire from it into the sapphirine grail of the heavens.” The enthusiasm did not last, however, and Ivanov makes an appearance in the fourth Symphony (1907) as a “golden-haired mystic” who “tried to leap up into heaven, but plunged downwards and uttered beautiful lies.” The excerpt from “The Theatre and Modern Drama” (1907) included here is, despite Bely’s transparently disingenuous disclaimer, a savage attack on Ivanov’s ideas.
ANDREI BELY
THE CHERRY ORCHARD19
In attempting to reproduce reality, the realistic artist first of all sets to work on its most general features; next he becomes a photographer of reality. His perception develops. He is no longer content with a superficial depiction of a phenomenon. Having concentrated his attention on the distinct and the enduring, he now turns to the indistinct and transitory elements of which the distinct and the enduring are composed. He then weaves a fabric of moments. The isolated moment becomes the goal of the process of reproduction. Thus represented, life is a delicate, almost transparent lacework. If one absorbs oneself in it, a given moment of life becomes in itself a door to eternity. Being a loop in the lacework of life, it is not sufficient to itself: it frames an outlet to what lies beyond it. The experience is of an infinite intensity. The lacework of life, which is composed of separate loops, becomes a series of doors to parallel corridors that lead to another world. The realistic artist, even though he remains himself, cannot but portray not only the surface of life’s fabric but also what is revealed in the depths of the parallel labyrinths of moments. In his portrayal, everything remains as it is, but permeated by the other. He himself does not suspect whence he is speaking. If you say to such an artist that he has penetrated into the beyond, he won’t believe you. He approached it, after all, from the outside. He was studying reality. He will not believe that the reality he portrays is, in a sense, no longer reality.
The mechanism of life channels our feelings in a direction we do not desire, delivering us into the power of machines. Our dependence begins in general causes unknown to us and ends in horse-cars, telephones, elevators and railroad timetables. A closed, mechanical cycle, from which it is increasingly difficult to break out, is taking ever more definite shape among us. A wears himself out for B, B for C, but C too, for whom A and B sacrifice themselves, remaining zeros, instead of attaining a life organically unified by his emotional experiences, sacrifices himself for A, thus also being reduced to a zero. A machine is being created for the pointless destruction of souls.
The power of the moment is a natural protest against the mechanization of life. Having freed himself, man deepens the fortuitous moment of freedom by concentrating upon it all the powers of his soul. Under such conditions, man learns to perceive more and more in little things. Little things are increasingly the conductors of Eternity. Thus realism is imperceptibly transformed into symbolism.
Moments are panes of painted glass. We gaze through them into Eternity. We have to concentrate our attention on a single pane, otherwise we shall never gain a clear vision of what lies beyond the fortuitous. Familiarity dulls all things and we tire of gazing, no matter at what. But once we have experienced a certain moment with sufficient intensity, we wish it to be repeated. By repeating an experience, we penetrate more deeply into it. In doing so, we pass through various stages. A given moment becomes for us an unexpected outlet into mysticism: our inner path becomes clear and the wholeness of our spiritual life is restored. The mechanism of life is overcome from within, the isolated moment no longer has power over us. The lacework of life, spun from isolated moments, disappears when we find an outlet to what had previously glimmered beyond life. In reporting what we see, we arrange the material of reality according to our will.
Such is mystical symbolism, as opposed to realistic symbolism, which conveys the beyond in terms of the reality that surrounds us.
Chekhov is a realist. From which it does not follow that his work is lacking in symbols. Since the conditions of the reality in which we live have changed for modern man, he cannot but be a symbolist. As a result of the nervous refinement of the best among us, reality has become more transparent. Without abandoning the world, we move toward what is beyond the world. That is the true path of realism.
It was not very long ago that we stood upon solid ground. Now the earth itself has become transparent. We move as upon slippery transparent glass, and through the glass the eternal abyss watches us. And suddenly it seems to us that we are walking on air. It is fearful, this airy path. Can one speak today of the limits of realism? Under such conditions, can one oppose realism to symbolism? Today those who have turned away from life find themselves in the midst of life because life itself has changed. Today realists, in depicting the real world, become symbolic: where there was once a boundary line everything has become transparent, penetrable.
Such is Chekhov. His heroes are touched in from the outside, but we comprehend them from within. They walk about, drink, talk trivialities, but we see abysses of spirit glimmering through them. They talk like people locked up in a prison, but we have recognized in them something they have failed to notice in themselves. In the trivialities by which they live a kind of secret code is revealed to us—and the trivialities cease to be trivial. There is something that neutralizes the banality of their lives. At every moment a grandeur is revealed. Is this not to look through banality? And to look through anything is to be a symbolist. By looking through I unite the object with what is beyond it. Symbolism is the inevitable result of such an approach.
The manifestations of the spirit of music are extremely varied. It can permeate all the characters of a given play in equal measure. In that event each character is a note in a single chord. Chekhov’s “plays of mood” are musical. Their symbolism guarantees that, for the symbol is always, in a general sense, musical. The symbolism of Chekhov differs substantially from the symbolism of Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck makes the heroes of his dramas the vessels of his own mysticism. Seeking to signal the approach of death, he makes his old man say: “Is there not someone else among us?” Too obvious a symbol. Is this not allegory? It is too general in its expression. Chekhov stumbles upon symbols in the process of refining reality. He is hardly aware of them. Nothing he puts into them is premeditated, for it is hardly likely that he has had any mystical experience. For this reason his symbols have an organic link with reality. The web-like fabric of phenomena is never torn. Thanks to this, he succeeds in disclosing in greater depth the symbols that reverberate at the back of trivial things.
A number of harassed people are sitting about, trying to forget the horrors of life, but a stranger passes by … A bucket crashes in a distant mineshaft. Clearly, this is horror. But perhaps it is all a dream? If we look at The Cherry Orchard from the viewpoint of unity of artistic effect, we will not find the perfection of The Three Sisters. In this respect, The Cherry Orchard is a less successful work. All the same, the psychological depth of certain moments is more perfectly conveyed here. If what we saw previously was a transparent lacework contemplated from a distance, the author has now, as it were, drawn closer to a few loops of that lace and seen more clearly what those loops frame. Other loops he has passed by. Because of this, the perspective has been disturbed and there is an unevenness about the play. Speaking relatively, Chekhov has taken a step backward. Absolutely, he has gone forward, refining his method still further. In places his realism is even more delicate, the symbols glimmer even more perceptibly.
How terrifying are the moments when fate creeps up soundlessly on its helpless victims. Everywhere is the disturbing leitmotif of the thunderstorm, everywhere a lowering cloud of horror. But, you might say, there’s nothing to be horrified about: an estate is being sold off, that’s all. But terrifying are the masks beneath which horror hides, peering through the eye-slits. How terrifying is the governess as she postures before the ruined family, or the footman Yasha, arguing about champagne, or the insolent post office clerk, or the passing stranger in the forest!
In the third act, Chekhov’s method is somehow crystallized: in the front room a family drama is being enacted, while in the candle-lit back room masks of horror are frenziedly dancing: look at that post office functionary dancing with a little girl—perhaps he’s really a scarecrow? Perhaps it’s a stick with a mask tied on, or a uniform dangling from a clothes hanger. And the stationmaster? Where is he from, what is he doing here? They are all embodiments of fatal chaos. And now they are dancing and posturing in the presence of a family misfortune.
Trivial things take on a coloring hitherto unknown. Reality is split in two: a thing is itself and not itself; it is a mask for something else, and the people are dummies, phonographs of the depths—and it is fearful, fearful …
Chekhov, while remaining a realist, here parts the folds of life and what from a distance had seemed to be shadowy folds are revealed as an outlet to eternity.
1904
ANDREI BELY
AGAINST REVIVING THE GREEK THEATRE
(FROM “THE THEATRE AND MODERN DRAMA”20
The drama represents the dynamic principle of creative energy in art. The drama enshrines the synthetic principle. In the drama we touch the massive trunk, as it were, from which the manifold forms of art spring in all directions to form a luxuriant crown. When, however, the drama is seen exclusively as the common source of the various art forms, its vital significance is undermined. We often hear these days that the mystery play represents a synthesis of the arts, and that modern drama is drawing closer to the mystery. To my mind, this is symptomatic of the danger threatening modern drama. The drama will be crushed beneath a pyramid of idols. The musical principle will once again give way to eclecticism. All these seductive appeals from the mystery must be regarded with suspicion. They lull our resolution—a resolution we need, no less than we need hosts of heroes, for the fierce struggle that lies before us. It is in the struggle, and not in dreamy supplication, that we shall be transfigured. It is the drama that will reveal to us the maneuvers of the coming struggle with destiny. Dramatic culture is culture. Such was the view of Nietzsche, that great theoretician of the new drama. And he had a more correct understanding of it than Wagner or, say, Schuré.21
Nietzsche perceived in Wagner’s music dramas a genuine struggle for the liberation of mankind. But even Nietzsche failed to reach a clear understanding of the fatal contradiction in modern drama. He sensed in it a summons to life, without distinguishing between the summons and the form in which it resounded. A return to life through what is new in the drama renders drama itself superfluous as an art form. Bowing before the drama’s summons to life, Nietzsche canonized the form in which the summons was cast—the theatre. A monstrosity resulted: the summons to life from the stage was transformed into a summons to life on the stage. The products of Wagner’s genius embody this unnatural summons. In the early period of his enthusiasm for Wagner, Nietzsche bowed before the drama as a form. The dramatic form became the slogan which he held up to art. He attributed the effect of the explosive charge to the outer casing of the bomb. He forgot that life itself and not the drama would provide the moment of explosion. Nietzsche bowed before music drama, the portent of an event, as before the event itself. He had created for himself an idol. And for that reason he tore Wagner’s inspired music from his heart, just as he tore from it his own Birth of Tragedy—a deed to which his own declaration bears witness. Zarathustra—there is a real dramatic actor, intoxicated with mythopoeia, and not that beef-witted oaf Siegfried,22 waving his cardboard sword about and tooting idiotically on his curved horn. Zarathustra was born on the stage and immediately set about playing to an audience. The stage represented the town of Bunte Kuh, and the virtuous Zarathustra walked about Bunte Kuh imparting wisdom. Then he gave it up as a bad job and left the stage for life. The third and fourth parts of Zarathustra are truly a drama of life. Here, in the innermost experiences of Zarathustra’s life, and not in fine theories about some operatic Siegfried, is the real starting point of the explosion.
But the charge will explode only when mankind stands under a single tragic banner. The true visage of destiny will be revealed only when man rises above the class struggle, that obstacle to all genuine affirmation or denial of life. The fetishism of productivity is not, of course, destiny but rather the mask of destiny. And the struggle for liberation does not lie in the rejection or acceptance of forms of economic equality. It begins in new forms of social equality. When the masks of destiny fall, mankind will fight the final battle for life and happiness. Then from the shattered forms of art, as from the shattered forms of personal life, the holy fire of vital creation will burst forth. Then the explosive shell of the drama, loaded with the dynamite of the spirit, will burst. That is what Nietzsche failed to take into account. The concept of social drama was alien to him. At first he amused himself with the casing of the shell—the renascence of modern dramatic forms; then, in extracting the dynamite of vital creation from drama as an art form, he inadvertently smashed the shell. The bomb exploded not where it should have—outside the walls of our prison—but in the hands of its inventor. And for fifteen years Nietzsche—the inventor of explosives—sat on the balcony of a peaceful villa with his brain blown to pieces. The spot on the balcony where the mad Nietzsche used to sit by the hour is still pointed out to tourists.
Such was the fate that overtook the greatest theoretician of the modern drama.
The latest theoreticians of the drama take particular pleasure in analyzing Nietzsche’s mistakes. They prescribe paths of their own for the drama, setting to rights the blunders of the mad genius. Instead of freeing the drama from the unhealthy growths of mystery mania that so infuriated Nietzsche, they are ready to affirm Nietzsche’s mistakes, rejecting his healthy protests against the Wagnerian epidemic. You will remember how “the vilest of men” made his appearance in Zarathustra’s cave and began singing hymns to dejection. Where the healthy song of the tragic actor Zarathustra once echoed, we now hear the vilest, the most cloyingly sweet songs.
The most recent theorists of the drama* establish, perhaps correctly, the link between the situation of today and the situation that gave rise to ancient drama (after Nietzsche, such a task is not hard to perform). They help us to resurrect the profound, sometimes forgotten significance of specific features of the drama; they point out that the drama developed from a sacrificial rite as a form of religious cult, and they attempt to revive ritual in modern drama. According to them, the theatre must become a temple. But why must the theatre become a temple when we already have temples as well as theatres? In these temples divine service is celebrated. Holy mysteries are wrought there. “Let holy mysteries be wrought in the theatre too”—that’s what the latest theoreticians of the drama say. But what are we to understand by “holy mystery?” And what are we to understand by “divine service?”
Religions past and present give a positive and not a figurative answer to these questions. Whether or not we take this answer into consideration, we understand the sense of it. We also understand the link between the ancient Greek drama and the cult of Dionysos. In Greece, drama moved away from religion as it developed. Eventually the drama was emancipated from religion. We received as our heritage this emancipated drama.
The European theatre developed and fixed the forms in which this emancipation resulted. When we hear these days that theatre is ritual, the actor a priest and that by contemplating drama we are participating in a holy mystery, we understand the words “ritual,” “priest,” “mystery” in a vague, ambiguous, almost meaningless way. What is “ritual?” Is it some kind of religious act? But of what kind? Before whom is this ritual to be enacted? And to what god are we supposed to pray? Whether or not we are being invited to return to those forms of religion out of which the drama developed remains veiled in mystery.
If we are to do so, then give us a goat for immolation! But what are we to do with a goat after Shakespeare? If some new ritual is implied, then let us know the name of the new god! Where is he? Who is he? Where, O expounders of the future theatre, did you find the new dramas dedicated to this new god? If you don’t know the name of this god, if the religion of such a god does not exist, then all the partisan declarations about the future of the modern drama and the new theatre remain mere metaphors, changing nothing in the modern theatre. The “temple” remains the Mariinsky Theatre and rhetoric remains rhetoric.
But the matter is not so simple.
The astute propositions that the stage is an obstacle between actor and audience, between the mythic action and the contemplation of it, and that the spectator should enter into the sphere of the action as a member of the chorus compel us to pay attention to what modern dramatic theorists have to tell us. To the objection that we already have temples without the theatre they reply, not unpersuasively, that a temple is part of a religious cult; that throughout history religious cults, while enshrining a profound and important truth, have inevitably been strangled by scholasticism and dogmatism; that dogmatism paralyzes the free development of religion, but the theatre is a sanctuary that, housing the creative minds of past religions, will itself kindle with the fire of free creativity.
All this would be acceptable if the argument had some basis in reality. In fact, however, the argument runs counter to the work of modern dramatists. The dramatists of today have no thought of uniting stage and auditorium.
Where is the orchestra in Ibsen? Where is the orchestra in Maeterlinck? How is the dramatic action in Ibsen to be transformed into ritual? According to the prescriptions of the latest theories, should not the famous scene in An Enemy of the People (where Stockman makes his speech) be staged in such a way that the auditorium represents a public meeting? But then the choric role assumed by the audience would make a farce of Ibsen’s drama. If anyone thought of reviving the ancient drama, it was surely Schiller and not Ibsen or Maeterlinck. However, in The Bride of Messina the choric principle is introduced in a formalized and therefore acceptable way.
Granted that the modern drama developed from the ancient, does that mean it will return to it? The rejoinder will be made that the ancient drama represents a thesis; modern drama developed the antithesis, and a synthesis is now being approached. Granted that the Greeks donned tragic masks and erected sacrificial altars, granted that elements of Greek culture have entered into our own—does that make Greeks of us? Does that mean we have to eat olives and prance round a goat? I’d like to see someone try to put that into practice. And so the latest interpreters of the drama remain without practical experience. They talk a great deal about what the drama ought to be. But where is it, this “ought-to-be” drama? It will come, they reply.
Better, though, if it never saw the light of day. And here is the reason why.
Let us suppose that we, the audience, have been transformed into a choric element. Further, that the choric element gives itself over to a dance of supplication. Only then will the remoteness of your supplicatory attitudes from a life unconverted into prayer be thrown into sharp relief. And the prayer will be crushed beneath the weight of life. We must not flee from life into the theatre to sing and dance about the dead goat of tragedy and then, finding ourselves back in the midst of life, feel astounded by our own odd behavior. What is this but a flight from destiny? And destiny will come bursting into the temple-theatre in pursuit, throwing our songs and dances into disarray. We must transform life itself into drama. Otherwise we shall enter the theatrical temple, array ourselves in white garments, crown ourselves with clusters of roses and act out the mystery (the theme of it is always the same—a godlike man locked in a struggle with fate); at the appropriate moment we shall clasp hands and begin to dance. Imagine yourself in such a role, reader, even for a moment. Are we really to whirl about the sacrificial altar, every one of us—the lady in the art nouveau dress, the stockbroker, the worker and the member of the State Council? I am certain that our prayers are unlikely to coincide. The lady in the art nouveau dress will pray to some poet or other in the image and likeness of Dionysos, the worker will pray for a shorter working day, and as for the state councilor—on what star will he fix his gaze? No, better to whirl in a waltz with a pretty young miss than to join hands in a ring dance with a privy councilor.
To this will come the reply that what we are concerned with is the democratic theatre of the future, that genuine community must be rooted in free communes where all is active creativity, that orchestras will be the generative focus of these communes. Then we shall be told that all our scepticism results from the fact that we represent a sheltered, secluded (in other words, bourgeois) way of life, that in the popular theatre unconstrained mythopoeia will be resurrected. But the popular theatre is the fairground sideshow where Churkin the bandit has long held sway, while the cinematograph is tending more and more to assume the role allotted to the future democratic theatre. Moreover, the cinematograph has its own mythopoeia: a man sneezes and bursts—an edifying victim of the fatal struggle … with the common cold. Further: if we are to speak of collective creation—it already exists. Why is the ringdance we can see in any village not an orchestra? Poor Russia, they are threatening to swamp her with orchestra’s when she has long been swamped with them. Go for an evening stroll in the countryside and you will encounter both the choric element and collective creativity … of unprintable words. Such are the results of drawing conclusions from a theory that fails to take account of the concrete forms of life. They are preparing to swamp Russian with orchestras when the time has long been ripe to rid her of them.
As long as the class struggle exists, these appeals to aesthetic democratism have an odd ring. And how absurd, how infinitely absurd, is this democratic theatre-temple of communal mythopoeia (as yet, thank God, completely non-existent!). In the absence of such a theatre, they turn to the past. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are revived in the theatre. Sometimes the devices of Aeschylus are successfully imitated (V. Ivanov). But what democratism is there in this? Is it not an aristocratic satiety that compels us to seek aesthetic pleasure in the religious dramas of a people alien to us? If the sacrificial altar of Dionysos were to be solemnly raised in the new theatre, would it not become a symbol of supreme blasphemy against the theatre, against ourselves, against art and against the sacred beliefs of a noble people?
The emblematic invocations to Dionysos remain, thank God, the personal lyricism (a lyricism how beautiful and profound!), far removed from life, of the theorists of the new drama. But these invocations create no disturbance. The temple remains the Mariinsky Theatre.
The fatal contradiction in which the theorists of the new drama have become entangled is that in inviting us into the theatre as into a temple they have forgotten that a temple presupposes a cult, and a cult—the name of a god, i.e. a religion. As long as they do not have this name, their attempts at a new kind of religious creation have no basis. The bringing to birth of a new religion on the boards of the stage is an impossibility, as are the theatre as temple and the drama as ritual. Ritual devoid of form and purpose is nothing but the posturing of actors introduced into the sacred region of the spirit where burns the hope for the creation of life. If in the modern theatre—theatre pure and simple—the actor is no more than an actor, perhaps this limiting of his function allows him greater freedom in the creation of a particular role. The priestly diadem would have crushed the actor, had he not contrived to transform it into a jester’s cap. At present the actor, by absorbing himself in his role, is able to make contact with those prototypes of vital creation which also obscurely agitated the dramatist. While to us he remains an actor, he is within himself the precursor of something different, something vital. But suppose we elevate him to be the tragic sacrifice; the very sacrificial element in his self-surrender to the prototypes of the life to come is made to ring false. The man is profaned in the actor.
The tragic dilemma of the theorists of the new drama lies in the fact that, while taking note of Nietzsche’s error (he confused the inner fire of the drama with its form), they promise, remaining within the bounds of the theatre, to set off an explosion which will shatter the dead forms of life and creation by the transfiguration of form. What results is a mock explosion of bengal lights on the stage: life remains life, theatre theatre.
1908
* I hasten to make a reservation: in analyzing the most recent views concerning the development of the drama, I do not have in mind the subtle and profound theory of V. I. Ivanov, with details of which I disagree while accepting its basic theses. I have no intention of analyzing this theory here, since space does not permit it. I do, however, strongly protest against vulgar interpretations of V. I. Ivanov’s theory and against conclusions drawn too easily from its basic premises. It is with these too easily drawn conclusions that one has to deal among philosophizing modernists. While giving a serious thinker his due, I cannot but take account of the danger presented by the over-hasty popularization of his views.