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The Theater as Will and Representation: Artist and Audience in Russian Modernist Theater, 1904-1909

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Betsy F. Moeller-Sally
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Extract

There is for us an inexplicable rapture when we feel ourselves a crowd, a unified crowd, moved by a single feeling. Let us leave it to the researches of scholars to ascertain from what elements of our distant prehistoric past this phenomenon is composed. Let us leave it to them to determine whether it sprang from half-bestial orgies or from half-divine cults. One thing is indubitable: a shock runs through us when we feel ourselves fused in a single passion with others, with a multitude of other people, when we feel ourselves one grandiose whole, a unified mass.

—Georg Fuchs, The Revolution of the Theater

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , Summer 1998 , pp. 350 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1998

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References

I would like to thank John Malmstad, William Mills Todd III, and Stephen Moeller- Sally for reading earlier versions of this article and helping me smooth out some of the rough spots.

1. Ivanov, Viacheslav, “Ekskurs: O krizise teatra,” Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Ivanov, D. V. and Deshart, O. (Brussels, 1974), 2: 215–18Google Scholar. All translations are my own.

2. Ibid., 2: 217–18.

3. InThe Total Art of Stalinism: Avant Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton, 1992), Boris Groys has argued that the postrevolutionary avant garde was totalitarian in nature and impulse, and that it first propagated and then passed on to Stalinist culture the “domination of the conscious by the unconscious” via art. The efforts to “enslave the souls” of the audience to which Ivanov referred predate the texts discussed by Groys by more than a decade.

4. For an excellent discussion of the ideal of unity in the context of European thought, see Walicki, Andrzej, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth Century Russian Thought (Notre Dame, 1989).Google Scholar

5. Hosking, Geoffrey, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), xxvi.Google Scholar

6. Andrzej Walicki deals with this subject extensively in The Slavophile Controversy, mentioned above, and also in his studies Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Oxford, 1967), in which he examines those Russian thinkers who challenged this mistrust, and Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom (Stanford, 1995), which deals with the populists as well as the Marxists. It is important to remember that the distrust of modern law and democracy, like the longing for unity and community, was not peculiar to Russia alone—as all of Walicki's studies demonstrate.

7. See especially: Fanger, Donald, “Conflicting Imperatives in the Model of the Russian Writer: The Case of Tertz/Sinyavsky,” in Morson, Gary Saul, ed., Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies (Stanford, 1986), 111–24Google Scholar; Freidin, Gregory, “By the Walls of Church and State: Literature's Authority in Russia's Modern Tradition,” Russian Review 52, no. 2 (April 1993): 149–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paperno, Irina, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford, 1988)Google Scholar. Two studies that trace the transmission of high-culture models of authorship to less literate readers are: Brooks, Jeffrey, “Popular Philistinism and the Course of Russian Modernism,” in Morson, , ed., Literature and History, 90–110 Google Scholar; Sally, Stephen Moeller, “Parallel Lives: Gogol''s Biography and Mass Readership in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 62–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Freidin, “By the Walls of Church and State.” Of course, not all writers followed this “kenotic” model of authorship; and those who did in some cases, did not do so in all, as the work of Aleksandr Pushkin shows.

9. Mandel'shtam, O., Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Struve, G. P. and Filippov, B. A., 2d ed. (Moscow, 1971), 60 Google Scholar (emphasis added).

10. Gogol', N. V., “Peterburgskie zapiski 1836 goda,” Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, ed. Mashinskii, S. I. and Khrapchenko, V. B., vol. 6, Stat'i (Moscow, 1978), 180.Google Scholar

11. Tolstoi, L. N., “Chto takoe iskusstvo?” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 30, Proizvedeniia 1882–1898 (Moscow, 1951), 65.Google Scholar

12. Kandinskii, Vasilii, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. Lindsay, Kenneth C. and Vergo, Peter (1982; reprint, New York, 1994), 258, 257.Google Scholar

13. On Nietzsche in Russia, see especially Clowes, Edith W., The Revolution of Moral Consciousness: Nietzsche in Russian Literature, 1890–1914 (DeKalb, 1988)Google Scholar; Kom'iati, Kristina Galotsi, “'Rytsar’ teatral'nosti': Vliianie Nitsshe na esteticheskoe kredo N. N. Evreinova,” Studia Slavica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 35, no. 3–4 (1989): 393–402 Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, ed., Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (Cambridge, Eng., 1994)Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, ed., Nietzsche in Russia (Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar. On Schopenhauer in Russia, see Baer, Joachim T., Arthur Schopenhauer und die russische Literatur des spaten 19.und fruhen 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1980)Google Scholar; Clowes, Edith W., “Sologub, Schopenhauer, and the Anxiety of Individuation,” American Contributions to the Tenth International Congress of Slavists, Sofia, September 1988: Literature (Columbus, 1988), 111–21Google Scholar; Laursen, Eric, “Transformation as Revelation: Sologub, Schopenhauer, and the Little Man,” Slavic and East European Journal 39, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 552–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Bartlett, Rosamund, Wagner and Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 1995)Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, “Wagner and Wagnerian Ideas in Russia,” in Large, David C. and Weber, William, eds., Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca, 1984), 198–245.Google Scholar

15. The arguments put forth in this article do not pretend to summarize the whole of the oeuvre and thought of each of these artists. I have selected these particular texts, not because they epitomize the author's work as a whole, but because they broach problems of the function of art in relation to the audience. Finally, this article does not claim to exhaust the topic of the audience and the artist: on the contrary, it is intended as a prolegomenon and a stimulus to further discussion.

16. “The Poet and the Mob” may be found in volume 1 of Ivanov, Viacheslav, Sobranie sochinenii (Brussels, 1971)Google Scholar. “New Masks,” “Wagner and the Dionysian Rite,” and “Presentiments and Portents” are included in volume 2. On Ivanov's theories of the theater, see especially Bartlett, Wagner and Russia; Kleberg, Lars, “Vyacheslav Ivanov and the Idea of Theater,” in Kleberg, Lars and Nilsson, Nils Ake, eds., Theater and Literature in Russia 1900–1930 (Stockholm, 1984), 57–70 Google Scholar; Malcovati, Fausto, “The Myth of the Suffering God and the Birth of Greek Tragedy in Ivanov's Dramatic Theory,” in Jackson, and Lowry, , eds., Vyacheslav Ivanov: Poet, Critic, Philosopher, 290–96Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, “Theatre as Church: The Vision of the Mystical Anarchists,” Russian History/Histoire russe 4, no. 2 (1977): 122–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stakhorskii, S. V., Viacheslav Ivanov i russkaia teatral'naia kul'tura nachala XX veka: Lektsii (Moscow, 1991).Google Scholar

17. Evreinov, Nikolai, Krasivyi despot: Poslednii akt dramy (St. Petersburg, 1907)Google Scholar. For brief discussions of the play in the major studies of Evreinov, see Babenko, V. G., Arlekin i P'ero: Nikolai Evreinov. Aleksandr Vertinskii. Materialy k biografiiam. Razmyshleniia (Ekaterinburg, 1992), 21–24 Google Scholar; Carnicke, Sharon Marie, The Theatrical Instinct: Nikolai Evreinov and the Russian Theatre of the Early Twentieth Century (New York, 1989), 87–88 Google Scholar; Golub, Spencer, Evreinov: The Theatre of Paradox and Transformation (Ann Arbor, 1984), 22–23.Google Scholar

18. Sologub, Fedor, “Teatr odnoi voli,” Teatr: Kniga o novom teatre (Moscow, 1908), 177–98Google Scholar. “Theater of One Will” is discussed briefly in Daniel Gerould's article, “Sologub and the Theatre,” Drama Review 21, no. 4 (1977): 79–84. “la—bog tainstvennogo mira … “ may be found in Sologub, Fedor, Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1979), 176 Google Scholar. Tiazhelye sny(Leningrad, 1990) and Melkii bes (Ann Arbor, 1979).

19. Publication began in the journal Novyi put' under the title “Ellinskaia religiia stradaiushchego boga” (1904, nos. 1–4, 8, 9) and was completed in Voprosy zhizni under the title “Religiia Dionisa: Ee proiskhozhdeniia i vliianiia” (1905, nos. 6, 7).

20. Letter from Merezhkovskii to Ivanov, 20 March 1903. In “Perepiska s Viacheslavom Ivanovym,” Valerii Briusov, Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow, 1976), 85: 435M3 (emphasis added).

21. Timothy Ware (The Orthodox Church [London, 1991], 23) provides a valuable explanation of sobornost’ as used in reference to the Orthodox Church and its councils: In the Church there is neither dictatorship nor individualism, but harmony and unanimity; men remain free but not isolated, for they are unity in love, in faith, and in sacramental communion. In a council, this idea of harmony and free unanimity can be seen worked out in practice. In a true council no single member arbitrarily imposes his will upon the rest, but each consultswith the others, and in this way they all freely achieve a “common mind.” A council is a living embodiment of the essential nature of the Church. Ivanov's writings abound with terms signifying unanimity of thought and feeling, most frequentlyedinomyslie and edinochuvstvie.

22. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 1: 709–10, 714.

23. Ibid., 2: 76.

24. Ibid., 2: 77–79.

25. Ibid., 2: 83–84.

26. Ibid., 84. Bartlett suggested that Ivanov insisted on speech for the hero because he was a poet and not a musician (Wagner and Russia, 133). While this may well be true, Ivanov was also trying to raise the overall “consciousness level” of the musical drama so that, like the theaters of Aeschylus and Aristophanes, it might better perform social and at least protopolitical functions.

27. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 2: 85 (emphasis in the original).

28. Wagner developed the notion of artistic fellowships at some length in The Art-Work of the Future, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, Neb., 1993). Besides Ivanov, other Russians who took up the notion and adapted it to their own purposes were Georgii Chulkov, a sometime ally of Ivanov's, and Anatolii Lunacharskii, a playwright and revolutionary who later became the first commissar of enlightenment after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Lunacharskii broached the idea in the long essay “Sotsializm i iskusstvo” (Socialism and art) published in Theater: A Book about the New Theater, the same collection in which Fedor Sologub's essay “The Theater of One Will” appeared.

29. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 2: 103 (emphasis added).

30. For a good introduction to this topic, see Walicki, “The Tradition of the Censure of the Law,” in Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism.

31. “Perepiska s Viacheslavom Ivanovym,” 487.

32. According to classical literature, Praxiteles’ statue of Aphrodite was so beautiful that men would fall in love with it and desire to spend the night in its embraces. Evreinov's choice of statue thus reinforces both the theme of the compelling power of art and the dissolution of the boundary between art and life.

33. Evreinov, Krasivyi despot, 10.

34. Ibid., 5.

35. Ibid., 3.

36. Velimir Khlebnikov, a sometime friend of Evreinov's, also used “A solitary sower of freedom …” as a subtext for a narrative of disillusionment in his poem “Odinokii litsedei” (Solitary player, written in late 1921 or early 1922). See Moeller-Sally, Betsy F., “Masks of the Prophet in the Work of Velimir Khlebnikov: Pushkin and Nietzsche,” Russian Review 55, no. 2 (April 1996): 213–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37. Pushkin, Alexander, Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, trans. Arndt, Walter (Ann Arbor, 1984), 52.Google Scholar

38. Evreinov, Krasivyi despot, 12.

39. Ibid., 11. Babenko errs with regard to this point when he writes that the barin “quickly became disenchanted with the ideas of social democracy and unexpectedly … wrote an article, ‘Slavery and Its Positive Sides'” (Arlekin i P'ero, 22).

40. Evreinov, Krasivyi despot, 13, 16–17.

41. Ibid., 8–9.

42. Ibid., 18 (emphasis added).

43. On the shift of the role of “prophet” and “legislator” from poet to critic, see Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 11.

44. Sologub, “Teatr odnoi voli,” 181. Sologub's emphasis on the humiliating and dispiriting comic nature of everyday life is one of the many echoes of Arthur Schopenhauer in the essay. Consider, for instance, Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F.J. Payne (1958; reprint, New York, 1969), 1: 322: The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. For the doings and worries of the day, the restless mockeries of the moment, the desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of every hour, are all brought about by chance that is always bent on some mischievous trick; they are nothing but scenes from a comedy…. Thus, as if fate wished to add mockery to the misery of our existence, our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but, in the broad detail of life, are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy.

45. Sologub, “Teatr odnoi voli,” 180.

46. Ivanov, for instance, recalled in his diary for 11 August 1909 a conversation he had had with Georgii Chulkov in which Chulkov confessed that he felt he had “died with the revolution” and that he had for three years experienced utter spiritual desolation and exhaustion. Ivanov agreed that the revolution had been a crisis that many would not survive (i.e., spiritually and psychologically). But: “One needs to be younger than the generation of 1905, one must have the strength to live further and, what is most important, to live differently.” Ivanov himself anticipated a national revival and began increasingly to write about sobornost’ as “the Russian idea.” Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 2: 788.

47. Sologub, “Teatr odnoi voli,” 182–83.

48. Ibid., 187–88.

49. Aleksandr Blok's play Balaganchik (The puppet show) had done something similar in 1906, but with a seemingly more nihilistic (as opposed to Schopenhauerian) effect.

50. Compare, for instance, the following passage from Schopenhauer with two passages from Sologub. First Schopenhauer, from The World as Will and Representation, 1: 153: “Just as a magic lantern shows many different pictures, but it is only one and the same flame that makes them all visible, so in all the many different phenomena which together fill the world or supplant one another as successive events, it is only theone will that appears and everything is its visibility, its objectivity.” Now Sologub from “Teatr odnoi voli,” 179 and 185: “Behind the decaying masks, and behind the rouged mug of the fairground buffoon, and behind the pale mask of the tragic actor— shines a single Visage,” and “There are not different people, there is only one person, only one I in all the universe, willing, acting, suffering, burning on an unquenchable fire. “

51. Sologub, “Teatr odnoi voli,” 185.

52. Ibid., 192–93 (emphasis added).

53. Ibid., 183–84 (emphasis added).

54. Ibid., 193, 194.

55. Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 2: 216–17.

56. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, A Defence of Poetry and A Letter to Lord Ellenborough (London, 1948), 13, 35–37.Google Scholar

57. For apt contemporary criticism of the Russian intelligentsia by its own members, including criticism of the rigidity and dogmatism of the radical intelligentsia's concept of service to the people, see the collection of essays entitled Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii, ed. N. A. Berdiaev (Moscow, 1909), which provoked furious debate in 1909.

58. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 19, 46; see also 51.