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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
If so many poets have been attracted by the dramatic form, this is not because it gives them the somewhat crude (and generally dearly paid for) joy of realizing their conceptions in flesh and bone amid an atmosphere of painted cardboard, but precisely because it permits them to let the profound voices they hear in their hearts speak.
–Edouard DujardinOf all of Blok's works, The Puppet Show (Balaganchik) is perhaps the most recalcitrant in terms of interpretation. Despite the considerable scholarship that has grown up around the play, many basic questions perplex critics. For instance, the motivation and, to a significant degree, the effect of Blok's decision to incorporate elements of the commedia dell'arte into his little "fairy play" (feeriia) remain unresolved problems. Such lacunae in our knowledge of the play stem from either biographical or socio-economic assumptions behind two traditional approaches to the play.
1. Blok used the term “feeriia” in the foreword to the first collection of his socalled lyrical trilogy which was comprised of The Puppet Show, The King on the Square (KoroV na ploshchadi) and The Stranger (Neznakomka). See Blok, Aleksandr, Sobranie sochinenii, 8 vol. (Moskow : Gosudarstvennoe Izd-vo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1961), 4 : 434 Google Scholar. (Hereafter cited as SS, followed by the volume in roman and the page in arabicnumerals.)
2. Mochulsky, Konstantin, Aleksandr Blok, trans. V.Johnson, Doris (Detroit : Wayne State University Press, 1983), 123 Google Scholar. (The italics are Mochulsky's.) For less radical statements of what I will dub the biographical approach, see : Volkov, Nikolai, Aleksandr Blok i teatr (Moscow : Gosudarstvennaia akademiia khudozhestvennykh nauk, 1926 Google Scholar; Ershov, Petr, “Simvolicheskaia lirika na stsene,” Novyi zhurnal 67 (1962): 98–117 Google Scholar; Rodina, T. M., Aleksandr Blok i russkii teatr nachala XX veka (Moscow : Izd-vo Nauka, 1972)Google Scholar.
3. This approach was a mainstay in Soviet criticism of the play. For what amounts to the definitive Soviet approach, see : L.K. Dolgopolov, “Primechaniia,” in SS IV : 555–65. Other critics swayed by this approach include : Gromov, Pavel P., “Trilogiia liricheskikh dram 1906 g.,” in his Geroi i vremia (Leningrad : Sovetskii pisatel', 1961), 388–481 Google Scholar; Gromov, Pavel P., “Poeticheskii teatr Aleksandra Bloka,” in Aleksandr Blok, Teatr, ed. Gromov, Pavel P. (Leningrad : Sovetskii pisatel', 1981), 5–56 Google Scholar; Rubtsov, A. B., Dramaturgiia Aleksandra Bloka (Minsk : Izd-vo Vysheishaia shkola, 1968)Google Scholar; Fedorov, A. V., Teatr Bloka i dramaturgiia ego vremeni (Leningrad : Izd-vo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1972)Google Scholar; Fedorov, A. V., A. Blok—dramaturg (Leningrad : Izd-vo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1980)Google Scholar; ffl and Bonneau, Sophie, Le drame lyrique d'Alexandre Blok (Paris : Maurice Lavergne, 1946)Google Scholar. M Similar assumptions figure less prominently in Pavel Medvedev's invaluable work on m the drafts of Blok's plays and long poems, and in Virginia Bennett's work. See : Pavel 9 Medvedev, Dramy i poemy A. Bloka : Iz istorii ikh sozdaniia (Leningrad : Izd-vo pisatelei, M 1928); and Virginia Bennett, “Russian pagliacci : Symbols of Profaned Love in the The m Puppet Show,” in Drama and Symbolism : Themes in Drama (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1982), 4 : 141–71.
4. Elsewhere I have taken issue with the contention that The Puppet Show represents Blok's break from Solov'ev. See Timothy C. Westphalen, “The Ongoing Influence of V.S. Solov'ev on A.A. Blok : The Particular Case of Belaja lilija and Balagančik,” Slavic and East European Journal 36, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 435–51.
5. Roman Jakobson, “The Statue in Pushkin's Poetic Mythology,” in Pomorska, Krystyna and Rudy, Stephen, eds., Language in Literature (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1987), 320 Google Scholar. The tendency of critics has been to approach The Puppet Show from the standpoint of realist or naturalist drama which tries to make the spectator \ believe in the reality of what is happening on the stage. But since, whether or not the ; spectator believes it, the “reality” on stage is not life, the symbolists questioned “reality” as a legitimate goal. They argued that art is incapable of conveying life in its entirety and proposed schematization in the place of the realist aesthetic. In the words of Andrei Belyi, “In the impossibility of handling reality in all its fullness lies the basis of the schematization of reality (in part, for example, of stylization).” Quoted in V.E. Meierkhol'd, Stat'i, pis'ma, rechi, besedy (Moscow : Izd-vo Iskusstvo, 1968), 1 : 225. For the original, see Belyi, Andrei, “Formy iskusstva,” in his Simvolizm (Moscow : Musaget, 1910)Google Scholar; I reprint, Miinchen : Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), 147. The failure to perceive and acw count for this schematization lies at the center of the shortcomings of the scholarship J on The Puppet Show. S
6. Avril Pyman offers a different opinion. “Almost certainly, Blok did not think jj of himself as an innovator” (Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok. Vol. 1, The Distant If Thunder, 1880–1908 [Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1979], 1 : 235). Pyman, however, i contradicts herself as she goes on to argue that Blok sought to write “a purely lyrical 9 drama,” which would have been an innovation. Blok's reaction to the first performance m also suggests that he realized just how innovative The Puppet Show was : in his notebook, he remarked, “Yesterday, 30.XII, of December [sic], I went out on the stage four times. 3 One piercing whistle and applause. I bowed to the former and the latter” (Aleksandr \ Blok, Zapisnye knizhki [Moscow-Leningrad : Gosudarstvennoe Izd-vo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1965], 91). While this behavior might appear to reflect Blok's usual diffidence and composure, a remark in a letter to his friend, A.V. Gippius, suggests otherwise : The Puppet Show “… is playing at Kommissarzhevskaia's (right at this minute for the fifth time already) with, I would say, success because they called me out a lot and whistled and hissed abundantly at the first and second performance” (Letter, dated 21 January 1907, from Blok to A.V. Gippius; SS VIII : 176). Georgii Chulkov's comments to his wife after the first performance further enhance this impression : “Blok went out to bow with a silly little smile. He was terribly funny, and touchingly pressed to his heart a tiny bouquet thrown by a woman's hand” (Letter, dated 31 December, 1906, from Georgii Chulkov to his wife, N.G. Chulkova. See Aleksandr Blok. Novye materialy i issledovaniia. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 92 [Moscow : Izd-vo Nauka, 1980–87], 3 : 264). Taken together, these comments conjure up the picture of someone who had anticipated and, in all likelihood, had desired a mixed reaction.
7. In “Dramaticheskii teatr V.F. Kommissarzhevskoi,” written a month before the first performance of The Puppet Show, Blok contrasts Stanislavsky's iron-fisted rule with Meyerhold's methods. Meyerhold, according to Blok, gives his actors a general plan but then slackens the reins and “throws [their] individual gifts to the mercy of the stage, like a sheaf of sparks. They are free, they can burn down the ship of the play but they can also ignite the auditorium with sparks of true art” (SS V : 97).
8. As Avril Pyman has argued, Meyerhold and Blok were well matched for their work on The Puppet Show. She writes, “In their work on The Puppet Booth, however, Blok and Meyerhold understood one another perfectly within that ‘sphere of irony’ in which the action of the play takes place, and Meyerhold's own performance as Pierrot had a quality of eerie solemnity which safeguarded the delicate lyricism of the play” (The Life of Aleksandr Blok, 1 : 267).
9. Nor were his expectations frustrated. Blok was exceptionally pleased by Meyerhold's production. In his own words, “The production of The Puppet Show makes me happy” (Letter, dated 13 January 1907, from Blok to Briusov, SS VIII : 174). In fact he wrote to Meyerhold before the opening, “The general tone, as I have already said to you, was so pleasing to me that new perspectives on The Puppet Show have opened up for me : it seems to me that this is not only lyricism, but there is already in it the frame of a play” (Letter, dated 22 December 1906, from Blok to Meyerhold, SS VIII : 170). Blok went even further in the foreword to the first collection of the lyrical trilogy : “I am indebted to V.E. Meyerhold, his troupe, M.A. Kuzmin and N.N. Sapunov for an ideal production of [my] little fairy-play (feeriia) The Puppet Show” (SS IV : 434). (Kuzmin composed the music, and Sapunov created the scenery for Meyerhold's first production.) Far from a mere pleasantry, this comment reflects Blok's need to work with Meyerhold on The Puppet Show. As Blok explained it to Meyerhold before the first performance, “Believe [me] that it is necessary to me to be around your theater, it is necessary that The Puppet Show play under your direction; for me there is a cleansing moment in this, an exit from lyrical isolation” (Letter, dated 22 December 1906, from Blok to Meyerhold, SS VIII : 170 [italics Blok's]).
10. Meyerhold produced The Puppet Show again in 1908 and 1914.
11. Meierkhol'd, Stat'i, pis'ma, rechi, besedy, 1 : 208.
12. One commentator goes so far as to incorporate the term into the title of a book on Meyerhold. See : Symons, James M., Meyerhold's Theatre of the Grotesque (Coral Gables : University of Miami Press, 1971)Google Scholar.
13. In all of the literature on The Puppet Show only Seweryn Pollak, P.P. Gromov and A.V. Fedorov make any mention of the grotesque at all, and none of them develop this theme beyond a mere mention. Pollak attempts to set the play in the context of European literature, so often ignored by Soviet critics. It is especially significant in this regard that he employs the term “grotesque “ : “The constant interpenetration of grotesque-comic and lyric elements is distinctive.” Although he does not develop this idea, he does identify one of the play's most important elements. See Seweryn Pollak, “Blok dramaturg,” in Aleksander Blok, Utwory dramatyczne, trans. Seweryn Pollak and Jerzy Zagórski (Krakow : Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 217. Fedorov also uses the term “grotesque” but it is symptomatic that he uses it to convey an impression rather than to pinpoint a literary technique : for example, “The images of the mystics … appear in a grotesque form (grotesknyi vid)” (Teatr A. Bloka, 47).
14. In “Balagan,” Meyerhold suggests that Blok followed in the footsteps of Goya, Poe and Hoffmann; he argues that in Harlequin's final jump through a window into nothingness and the Fool's cry that he is bleeding cranberry juice, “Blok went along the path of the grotesque in the spirit of these masters” (Meierkhol'd, Stat'i , pis'ma, rechi, besedy, 1 : 227).
15. Ibid., 225.
16. Pinskii, L. E., Realizm epokhi Vozrozhdeniia (Moscow : Goslitizdat, 1961, 119–20Google Scholar. Quoted in Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge : MIT Press, 1968; reprint, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1984), 32. Throughout this paper, I have taken the liberty of reworking Helene Iswolsky's translation in order to bring it more closely in line with the original. I have relied on : Bakhtin, Mikhail, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul'tura Srednevekov'ia i Renessansa (Moscow : Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965 Google Scholar; reprint, Orange : Izd-vo Antikvariat, 1986), 39. Bakhtin's definition of the carnival-grotesque falls in line with these.
17. As a preamble to a discussion of the carnival-grotesque proper, it should be noted that The Puppet Show exhibits what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as the three characteristics shared by all carnivalized serio-comical genres. First, the play's relation to the reality that surrounds it is immediately apparent : The Puppet Show, in fact, is almost topical, and the apocalyptic overtones of the Mystics’ discussions and the Author's implicit criticism of symbolism are topics that were very much discussed at the time. Secondly, The Puppet Show emphasizes experience at the expense of all official, unitary languages as will become apparent later; the debunking of the Mystics, in fact, borders on what Bakhtin aptly calls “cynical exposé.” And finally, The Puppet Show demonstrates a rejection of stylistic unity, in the sense of the unity of a single unitary language : Blok's mixing of poetic and prosaic speech is typical of the stylistic diversity found in carnivalized works. Here I follow Bakhtin in his analysis of carnivalized serio-comical genres (see Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans, and ed. Emerson, Caryl [Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1984], 108 Google Scholar).
18. Two sources, one biographical and one literary, assume paramount importance in Blok's contact with the grotesque and carnivalized literature. The first is Blok's interest and participation in theater, and a comment by Bakhtin helps to clarify why a tie between the theater and carnival should arise : “It is characteristic that the subculture of the theater has even retained something of carnivalistic license, the carnivalistic sense of the world, the fascination of carnival” (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 131). In fact, Blok became so enthralled by the theater that at one point he actuallybegan to train as an actor (see his autobiography, SS VII : 13). Although he abandoned this course, he remained closely connected to and intimately involved in the theater, including in his romantic involvement with actresses. In addition, Z.G. Mints has argued that as a child Blok, more likely than not, saw puppet show presentations first hand in Petersburg (see Mints, Z. G., “V smyslovom prostranstve Balaganchika ,” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo universiteta, 720 : 44–53 Google Scholar, esp. 46). A more important source of carnival for Blok was carnivalized literature. As Bakhtin has argued, the sheer volume of such literature is striking because during the Renaissance “[t]here occurred a deep and almost total carnivalization of all artistic literature” (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 130). Historically, a writer participated in carnival less and less in life, but more and more in literature. “One basic source of carnivalization for literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the writers of the Renaissance—above all Boccaccio, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Grimmelshausen” (Ibid., 157 and 137). Writers who were influenced by these Renaissance writers in their turn influenced those who followed them. Amongst others, Bakhtin points to Diderot and Voltaire; Balzac, Sand and Hugo; Sterne and Dickens; and Poe, Tieck and Hoffmann. In the Russian tradition he draws special attention to Pushkin and Gogol'. Without a doubt, it is to these writers that Blok was most beholden for his acquaintance with the grotesque and with carnivalized literature.
19. Bakhtin particularly takes to task those who would reduce the grotesque to a merely negative principle : “Even in our day the purely satirical understanding of the grotesque … is far from having been overcome” (see his discussion of G. Schneegans's Geschichte der grotesken Satyre in Rabelais and His World, 45). (Again, I have attempted to bring Helene Iswolsky's translation more closely in line with the original.)
20. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 123.
21. SS VIII : 169–70.
22. Two of the first and most articulate statements about The Puppet Show take this tack. Andrei Belyi suggested that “Blok is a talented portrayer of emptiness” and that this is the key to the dramas. While granting that Blok is accomplished technically, Belyi holds that the “something” Blok's admirers had once seen underneath his technique proved illusory : “And there in the ‘dramas’ it turned out that this ‘something’ is … a big ‘Nothing.'” He concludes, “You are saying, it is impossible to understand Blok's dramas; indeed there is nothing to understand in them : … After all these are scraps of values” (see “Oblomki mirov,” Vesy, no. 5 [1908] : 65–8). This view, that The Puppet Show is about nothingness and contains nothing positive, became one of the basic tenets of criticism on the play. V. Bazarov, for instance, uses The Puppet Show to illustrate what he considers to be the psychological state of the “refined soul” (utonchennaia dusha) and points to much the same lack of positive meaning in the play. Basing his argument on William James's psychology, Bazarov argues, ” … but if outer expressive movements are noted generally, if they principally are recognized as ‘ridiculous, ’ then this does not testify at all to the depth and power of the experiences, but, quite the contrary, to their superficiality and weakness, to the inability of a given subject to experience an actual, integral emotion” (“Misteriia ili byt?” in Krizis teatra [Moscow : Problemy iskusstva, 1908], 72). Bazarov feels that Blok's “transcendental irony” is the artistic rendering of this psychological malaise.
23. For instance, N.S. Zelentsova, the only critic to have mentioned carnivalization as a force in the play, ignores the positive aspects of carnivalization : “The Puppet Show is rather a complex rethinking of the drama of Fate, the world of which is being torn apart from within by the power of the disintegration of the ‘monomyth’ (monomif). In fact the same disintegration, ‘carnivalization’ (not coincidentally Blok here uses the forms of puppet theater representation [balagannoe predstavlenie] and plays with its conventionality) seizes the world of the lyrical hero” ( “Nekotorye osobennosti evoliutsii Bloka-dramaturga,” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 735 [Blokovskii sbornik VII] : 32–47). Because of this purely negative understanding of carnivalization, Zelentsova attempts to subordinate the processes of carnivalization at work in the play to what D.E. Maksimov calls “Blok's fundamental myth—the ‘monomyth’ of the Soul of the world” (see Zelentsova, “Nekotorye osobennosti,” 35; and D.E. Maksimov, “O mifopoeticheskom nachale v lirike Bloka,” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 459 [Blokovskii sbornik III] : 24). This exaggerated emphasis on disintegration prevents an adequate discussion of what is being created in the play.
24. One of the first who did, however, was Georgii Chulkov. Reviewing Meyerhold's 1906 production of The Puppet Show, Chulkov argues that the play contains more than mere mockery of the Eternal Feminine, that it represents an underlying duality. He writes, “Medieval drama ('miracle’) and Aleksandr Blok's ‘wonder’ come into contact in a single moment of extraordinary importance : This is the religious love for Primordial Reality and at the same time the senseless and blasphemous mockery of It” (“The Puppet Show,” Pereval 4 [1907] : 53). Elsewhere he says, “It turns out that the poet's insanity is united with a new, still unheard of soberness. This is not ‘holy madness, ’ but ‘holy scepticism'” (“The Puppet Show,” 52).
25. As Blok wrote to Andrei Belyi, “In the face of present conditions, when everything is confused everywhere, my biggest wish is to be myself” (Letter dated 6 December 1906, SS VIII : 167).
26. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin : University of Texas Press, 1981), 36.
27. As Medvedev has shown, Pierrot and Columbine were originally Somebody (Nekto) and Bride (Nevesta) (see Dramy i poemy A. Bloka, 18–19). Clearly, Blok's decision to incorporate the commedia dell'arte figures into the play was carefully considered and not arbitrary and his use of masks in The Puppet Show, in fact, takes on a paradigmatic importance. As Bakhtin has suggested, “The mask is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself” (Rabelais and His World, 39–40).
28. This tendency is already apparent in the poem “The Puppet Show,” where the grotesque also makes itself felt. On the stage described in the poem, sharply opposed elements, such as ladies and kings and clowns and devils, mingle with one another. In the audience too, the grotesque prevails. “Happy and nice children,” who should be delighted by the antics of the puppets, end up in tears. The odd mixture of narrative and dialogue further contributes to the grotesque effect of the poem (SS II : 67–68).
29. Julia Kristeva's comments about the carnival word in the novel apply with special force here : “The carnival word lacks in this way its own intention. Unable to destroy the symbolic truth (the signified as transcendental signified), it destroys its univocality and substitutes for it the DOUBLE” (Le texte du roman [The Hague : Mouton, 1970], 165).
30. Meierkhol'd, Stat'i, pis'ma, rechi, besedy, 1 : 218.
31. Bonneau, Le drame lyrique, 91. Unfortunately, Bonneau does not develop this intriguing idea into a serviceable, critical term. The general polarity she sees between the inferior and superior in the double is essentially what other critics have identified more specifically as Pierrot's relative passivity and Harlequin's relative dynamism.
32. Although she does not identify Pierrot, Columbine and Harlequin as part of the commedia dell'arte specifically, Zarovnaia does refer to the masks as part of “the form of the comedy of masks” (“Liricheskaia drama A. Bloka Balaganchik” Voprosy russkoi sovetskoi i zarubezhnoi literatury [Khabarovsk], vyp. 1 (1972), 134).
33. Ibid., 135. Gromov, on the other hand, sees the two as the bifurcation of a single entity : “The unified character of Romeo became two characters—the characters of Pierrot and Harlequin” ( “Trilogiia,” 446).
34. Dostoevsky's influence is of paramount importance in this regard. Z. Mints has established Dostoevsky's influence on Blok in a general way in “Blok i Dostoevskii,” in Dostoevskii i ego vremia, eds. V.G. Bazanov and G.M. Fridlender (Leningrad : Izd-vo Nauka, 1971), 217–47. Several of her points are germane to The Puppet Show. Both immediately before and after writing The Puppet Show, Blok's prose, correspondence and articles alike are dotted with references to Dostoevsky. He wrote to both Belyi on 19 July 1905 and his friend E.P. Ivanov on 5 August 1905 enthusiastically about Dostoevsky. (See Aleksandr Blok i Andrei Belyi. Perepiska [Moscow : Izdanie Goslitmuzeia, 1940], 136 and SS VIII : 133. Both letters cited by Mints, “Blok i Dostoevskii,” 218). He told Ivanov, “The last few days I've become a lightheaded kid, who is terribly interested in Dostoevsky, my soul not lying close and passionately on his pages, but rather as if dancing on them.” Dostoevsky also figures heavily in one of Blok's signature prose pieces, “Bezvremen'e,” which was written several months after The Puppet Show. In it Blok treats Dostoevsky in an idiosyncratic manner that reveals far less about Dostoevsky than about Blok's debt to him : it is a schema in which the old world, represented by the hearth, is juxtaposed with the new world, where the hearth has grown cold. As Mints points out, Blok associates Dostoevsky with both worlds : “Dostoevsky's work, in Blok's opinion, has a transitional character. On the one hand, it is still linked with the world of comfort, which is on its way out…. On the other, Dostoevsky, according to Blok, already sharply feels the beginning of the inner rebirth of the world of hearths” (“Blok i Dostoevskii,” 227). She rightly insists on the importance of this duality (dvoistvennosf) in Blok's understanding of Dostoevsky. Blok's insistence on Dostoevsky's duality suggests what in Dostoevsky's work was important to him : the image of the double.
35. Blok himself spells this out in a note found among the plans and rough drafts of the play : “ 1 . In Pierrot's story—doubles (Pierrot and Harlequin)” (Dramy i poemy A. Bloka, 20).
36. The issue is further clouded by critics like Gromov who focus so narrowly on particular borrowings that they miss the forest for the trees. For example, he argues, ” … [T]he basic situation of The Puppet Show in many respects resembles the dramatic knot (uzel) of relations of the main heroes of The Idiot, the coupling of the fates of Rogozhin, Myshkin, and Natas'ia Filippovna” (“Trilogiia,” 459–60). Without a doubt the comparison is justified. Gromov, however, fails to complete the comparison : just as the theme of the love triangle is structurally subordinate to the theme of the double in Dostoevsky, so too is it subordinate in The Puppet Show.
37. Medvedev argues that this becomes apparent from the rough drafts. Blok reworked the original plan, broadening the play's thenratics in the process. Medvedev puts particular emphasis on the theme of the double, which, though implicit in the first sketch, is developed only in subsequent reworkings. The appearance of Harlequin and the elimination of the character of the host (who comes on stage in the first sketch when Harlequin comes on in the final version) are the most obvious and, according to Medvedev, the most important statements of this theme. Medvedev argues that not only is Harlequin Pierrot's double, he is also a double for the Mystics; his thirst for action contrasts with their passivity (Dramy i poemy A. Bloka, 21–22).
38. “Every character, as in Hoffmann, is accompanied by his shadow, his other ‘I’” (Dramy i poemy A. Bloka, 20). Medvedev cites Blok's own notes about doubles in first draft : “1. In Pierrot's story—doubles (Pierrot and Harlequin). 2. In the first couple— a double by the column. 3. In the second couple—a third pursuer—a double. 4. In the third couple—the double is she herself (echo)” (Dramy i poemy A. Bloka, 20).
39. SS IV : 16.
40. SS IV : 17.
41. According to Volkov, “The duality of the knight-clown is subtly underlined by Blok” (Aleksandr Blok i teatr, 32–33).
42. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 405.
43. Ibid., 400–10.
44. SS IV : 13.
45. This undermining of the Mystics’ language separates Blok from other symbolist dramatists, including Maeterlinck, for instance.
46. SS IV : 14.
47. Of course, we must exercise great caution in differentiating between the Author as character in the play, the playwright as creator of the play and Blok, the person whose identity is not exhausted by the play. A playwright, then, stands roughly in the same relation to a play as a narrator does to a novel or story.
48. SS IV : 19.
49. Volkov remarks, “Instead of developing relationships in struggle and dynamics, Blok prefers to give them in the guise of a story” (Aleksandr Blok i teatr, 30).
50. Rodina describes Pierrot's speech as a monologue, “which has been stripped of striking dramatic emotions” (Aleksandr Blok i russkii teatr, 140).
51. Volkov, Aleksandr Blok i teatr, 27.
52. Fedorov, Teatr A. Bloka, 50. Amongst Blok's predecessors in anti-theatricality and theatrical illusion, Fedorov cites Koz'ma Prutkov and Ludwig Tieck. To these we should add V.S. Solov'ev's The White Lily (Belaia liliia) which heavily influenced The Puppet Show. See Westphalen, “The Ongoing Influence. “
53. Gromov attempts to attribute to Blok's theatricality a psychological hue, arguing that the “stylistic device of theatricalization, the device of turning the real passions and experiences of the heroes into a conventional representation (uslovnoe predstavlenie), of taking them down with irony, turns out to be the fundamental, primary device in the play” (“Trilogiia,” 444). The great fault of this argument is that it deals with the psychology of characters that do not exist at the expense of the masks that do actually exist in the play.
54. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 34.
55. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 124.
56. At first glance, a female figure in the role of carnival king may be surprising, but it is not uncommon (see Bakhtin's comments about Mar'ia Aleksandrovna Moskaleva in Dostoevsky's “Uncle's Dream” in Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 162).
57. The fact that the first draft was literally divided into three acts lends further credence to this contention. See Medvedev, Dramy i poemy A. Bloka, 21. Volkov understood the play's structure in similar terms : “The Puppet Show … consists of two scenes and Pierrot's monologue, which links them” ﹛Aleksandr Blok i teatr, 27).
58. Zarovnaia suggests much the same thing : “Here there is no movement of a single plot, but there is a changing of scenes and states, which are coupled according to the principle of montage” ( “Liricheskaia drama,” 142). Gromov is even more explicit. He argues that the events, which Pierrot tells about in this monologue, “constitute an entire act” (“Trilogiia,” 437).
59. We should keep in mind that Blok lists Columbine, not Pierrot, first in the dramatis personae.
60. Zarovnaia, “Liricheskaia drama,” 142. Rodina makes a similar observation : “In the triangle of Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin, the image of Columbine is the apex” (Aleksandr Blok i russkii teatr, 138). Unfortunately, these critics are somewhat inconsistent in their conclusions. Zarovnaia maintains that Columbine, unlike the other figures from the commedia dell'arte, is essentially not an image; rather, the image of Columbine may be understood as the Eternal Feminine, but only ” … in the subjective refraction of it in each of the characters” (“Liricheskaia drama,” 143). She is, in Zarovnaia's view, what the other characters see her as. The methodological error in Zarovnaia's approach results from a skewed analysis of the play's structure. She holds that the action of the play occurs on two levels. The first includes all the characters, except the Author, and the second includes all the characters including the Author. The problem with such a schema is that the Author is not the only character who exposes theatrical convention : both Harlequin with his leap into nothingness and the Fool with his cranberry juice play roles similar to the Author's. It is as inconsistent to insist that Columbine is a structural element while the other masks are images.
61. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 124.
62. Ibid., 125.
63. SS IV : 15. In view of the carnival-grotesque nature of The Puppet Show, Pierrot's laughter takes on a paradigmatic significance.
64. It is from such considerations as this that the Polish critic Halina Chalacińska-Wiertelak argues, “Blok's theater is oriented futurologically toward the spectator of the future or toward that intellectual elite which, in the author's assumption, ought to understand not only the sense of what is going on on the stage in The Puppet Show, but also the meaning of theatrical art ….” (“Fenomen Teatru Bloka,” Zeszyty Naukowe Wydzialu Humanistycznego Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, Filologia rosyjska, no. 14 [1985] : 56).
65. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 17.