Modern Theatre in Russia

Tradition Building and Transmission Processes

Stefan Aquilina

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350246676
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350066090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Drama

What did modern theatre in Russia look like and how did it foreground tradition building and transmission processes?

The book challenges conventional historiographical approaches by weaving contemporary theories on cultural transmission into its historical narrative. It argues that processes of transmission – training spaces, acting manuals, photographic evidence, newspaper reports, international networking, informal encounters, cultural memories – contribute to the formation and consolidation of theatre traditions.

Through English translations of rare Russian sources, the book expounds on:
*side-lined material on Stanislavsky, including his relationship with German actor Ludwig Barnay, use of improvisation at the First Studio, and rehearsal practices for Artists and Admirers (1933);

*Valentin Smyshlaev's acting manual The Technique to Process Stage Performance and the creation of hybrid practices;

*proletarian theatre as an amateur-professional combination and force in the transformation of everyday life, as seen in the Proletkult's volume Art at the Workers' Clubs;

*Meyerhold's Borodin Studio as an early example of Practice as Research, his European tour of 1930, and international persona as depicted in newspapers published in the West; and

*Asja Lacis's work with children, which contributes to current efforts to address the gender imbalance that is often characteristic of modernism.

This historical-theoretical investigation is combined with practical exercises that provide a more experiential understanding of the modern performance realities involved. In this way, the book speaks not only to theatre scholars and historians, but also to students and practitioners engaged in practical work.

1

Introduction

Modern theatre and the problem of continuity

In a 1912 essay titled ‘Russian Dramatists’, theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold spoke about the central role which the repertoire plays in the creation of a theatre tradition. Using Spanish and French theatres as examples, he argued that a tradition of playwriting is formed when a large number of exponents, beyond, in these cases, the canonical names of Lope de Vega, Calderón and Molière, congregate together on shared aesthetical and ethical grounds:

We know the French theatre of the seventeenth century because it bequeathed us a splendid collection of texts by Molière.

This is not simply a matter of the talented abilities of the masters of drama I have cited [and reproduced above].

The repertory came into being as an individual entity, an aggregation of plays united by a common intellectual schema and common technical devices. (in Senelick 1981: 200; emphasis added)

Meyerhold opens further on what these intellectual schemas and technical devices are, invoking in turn the performance pillars of content and form. In the case of Spain, for example, the content or ‘ideological plane’ was informed by nationalism, while its ‘technical plane’ displayed ‘one task: to concentrate the rapidly unfolding action into intrigue’ (201; emphasis in original). French theatre exhibited its own form and content, but beyond such contextual specificities, it is the evidence of recurrent elements in practices authored by different practitioners that Meyerhold signals as the first condition for tradition building.

That in this essay Meyerhold focused on tradition building should come as no surprise, considering how Russian theatre at the turn of the twentieth century was questioning the relative merits of theatre traditions in general and of its Russian manifestation in particular. My aim is to unpick some of these questions and to use the modern critique of the Russian theatre tradition, of which Meyerhold was an integral part, to discuss how theatre traditions are established. Different to Meyerhold’s 1912 emphasis on the repertoire, however, my focus will be on transmission approaches, i.e. the processes (including training, rehearsal, performance, documentation, diaries and newspaper reports) through which theatre and performance practices get transformed when they move between individuals and communities of theatre makers. The point that I will return to with some consistency is that there is a tight connection between tradition building and transmission processes because it is also through the latter that theatre traditions are formed and consolidated.

My focus therefore will be on Russian theatre during the first decades of the twentieth century, a period which is often referred to as an example of ‘modern theatre’ or ‘modernism in the theatre’. This is a period when theatre practitioners were particularly aware of their position vis-à-vis past theatre traditions, in relation to which they articulated a position of either continuity or detachment and criticism. However, before I go any further, I would like to expand on what constitutes ‘modern theatre’ as this is a major through line that binds together the various case studies in the book. Issues of what ‘modern’ is and of ‘modernism’ remain, as Jane Milling and Graham Ley assert, ‘critically fraught topics’ (Milling and Ley 2001: vii), a result perhaps of an unfortunate whitewashing together of related but not analogous terms like ‘modernism’ itself, ‘modernist’ or even ‘modernity’. Consequently, though practitioners and theoreticians like Meyerhold, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Antonin Artaud, Adolphe Appia, Rudolph Laban, Jacques Copeau and Bertolt Brecht are readily associated with turn-of-the-twentieth-century modernism, what modernism is remains problematic. Symptomatic of this confusion is the way that ‘modern theatre’ has entered non-specialized discourse to refer to the contemporary theatre scene; see, for example, how Robert Leach uses it to refer to ‘the theatre of today’ (Leach 2004: 1). A similar straightforward use is also evident in Robert Russell and Andrew Barratt’s introduction to their edited volume on Russian Theatre in the Age of Modernism (1990), where ‘modern’ and ‘modernist’ are adopted as direct variations of ‘modernism’. The book’s use of ‘the Age of Modernism’ (emphasis added) in the title seems to give a temporal definition to modernism (the years between 1900 and 1940), and the term is then modified in the narrative to ‘modern Russian theatre’ and ‘Russian modernist theatre’ (Russell and Barratt 1990: vii and ix).

While nuanced definitions of modern and modernism are probably counterproductive to Russell and Barratt’s multi-authored perspective and, therefore, possibly unnecessary, the terms ‘modernity’, ‘modern’ and ‘modernism’ are here central to underscore the role of continuity in tradition building. Processes of continuity are startlingly present in modernity. Punctuated by the massive social, political, technological and philosophical upheavals associated with the end of feudalism, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, modernity indicates the protracted ‘process of transformation […] which refers to a long historical process of becoming “modern”’ (Wallace 2011: 16). The term goes beyond culture and the arts to embrace the widest spectrum of human activities possible. Modernism, on the other hand, is more restrictive in its remit and collates the contributions made by the arts towards this process of becoming modern. It is a section or part of modernity (Jeff Wallace refers to it as an ‘episode’), one which can be located with some surety between the Romantic period and the Second World War and its aftermath.

Rather than focusing on the identification of precise start and end points, an alternative way to define modernism is by identifying recurrent characteristics across a wide tapestry of practices at the turn of the twentieth century. Many writers underline experimentation and anti-conservatism as defining features of modern art, with Bert Cardullo describing modernism as ‘a period of dramatic innovation […] when the sense of a fundamental break with inherited means of representation and expression became acute’ (Cardullo 2013: 3).¹ Experimentation in both form and content of performance is certainly not unique to the early 1900s, but modernism indicates that the performing arts at the turn of the twentieth century were particularly experimental in nature. In underlining this experimental attitude modernism is invariably brought in conflict with an alternative but equally common way of articulating early twentieth-century theatre, that of the ‘avant-garde’. This is the appellation which Robert C. Williams (1977) uses to group together experimental Russian theatre of the 1905–1925 time frame. The material which Williams covers includes Meyerhold, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, artists which he frames around a definition of the avant-garde as a ‘conjunction of artistic innovation and revolutionary involvement’ (Williams 1977: 3). Notwithstanding his centrality to the scene, Stanislavsky’s name is absent from Williams’s study, hinting that his name is synonymous with modernism and modern theatre but not with the avant-garde.² In fact, while artistic innovation was clearly a driving force in Stanislavsky’s work (see Chapter 2), his revolutionary, read political, involvement remained, at best, peripheral. As will be made evident in the pages that follow, Stanislavsky’s role in the transmission of the Russian theatre tradition in the early twentieth century and beyond was a central one, and I therefore use the terms ‘modern theatre’ and ‘modernism’ over ‘avant-garde’ to weave Stanislavsky into this study.

The use of ‘modernism’ and ‘modern’ over ‘avant-garde’ also helps me to start untangling my central theme of continuity. While Cardullo’s words above speak of modernism as a fundamental break with the past, the fact remains that modern theatre in Russia developed on what I refer to as strong ‘lines of continuity’. These lines connect the late 1920s to the years between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 (also known as the Silver Age of Russian Theatre). They also hark back to the practices which started to develop, roughly speaking, during the mid-nineteenth century, an era in Russian theatre and the arts known as the Golden Age. This continuity contrasts with the supposed discontinuity postulated after the revolution by the most extreme voices of the avant-garde. Among those who proclaimed independence from past artistic practices were the Proletkult – a non-government organization formed on the eve of the October Revolution which tasked itself with the creation of proletarian culture (see Chapter 4) and the ‘leftists’, artists loyal to the revolution who placed faith in theatre’s potential to rebuild everyday life on scientific and technological principles. Both boldly ‘declared earlier art to be dead’ (Kleberg 1993: 4). These extreme statements were, however, carefully articulated as radical declarations to provoke and garner attention. Writing in a very direct tone, avant-garde artists employed the rhetoric of short manifestos or newspaper articles that barred the development of reasoned argumentation.³ Their extreme voices for rupture with the past were, however, countered by a set of equally strong calls demanding continuity, made by individuals who in the artistic practices of the previous generations found much that was useful. Instead of consigning practices to the past, these voices – who included strong political leaders like Alexander Bogdanov⁴ and Vladimir Lenin – arbitrated for a process of transmission, i.e. the displacement of past theatre techniques and their assimilation within modern milieus. Strongest among these voices was Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet People’s Commissar of Education who, in a direct criticism of the Proletkult, asserted the need for continuity with the past:

In the area of art, we must never, under any circumstance, let the proletariat be ignorant of all the wonderful products of human genius.

[But,] [t]here are people who believe that any distribution of ‘old’ science and ‘old’ art is an indulgence of bourgeois tastes, a cultural curse, and the contamination of the young socialist organism with the blood of rotting junk.

There are relatively few radical representatives of this delusion. However, the harm which they bring could be great. […] No, I repeat for the thousandth time that the proletariat must be armed with the entirety of human education. The proletariat is a historical class. It must go forward because of its past.

To discard the science and art of the past because of their bourgeois roots is as absurd as dropping machines in the factories or railways because of the same reason. (Lunacharsky 1919: 2; emphasis in original)

In other words, voices of discontinuity were part of the modern scene without, however, defining it. They would ultimately be crushed, but this tug of war between continuity and discontinuity does point towards a crucial characteristic of modern theatre in Russia, namely that it defined its position in relation to the Russian theatre tradition and that it did so through the lines of continuity which I will discuss below. This is one of a tripartite of characteristics – the other two being the time frame (from 1898 to about 1932–4) and experimentation – that qualify modern theatre in Russia as understood here.

Lines of continuity in the Russian theatre tradition

Strictly speaking, my story starts with the opening of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) and develops over the first three decades of the twentieth century. However, it is necessary to go beyond these time frames, at least in this Introduction, because modern theatre in Russia must be viewed against the backdrop of important trends that had been developing in Russia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Names such as Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Ostrovsky and Mikhail Shchepkin far from disappeared from theatre consciousness, and modern practitioners like Stanislavsky and, perhaps surprisingly, even Meyerhold, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Alexander Tairov, Fyodor (Theodore) Komissarzhevsky and others, appraised them in challenging and fresh ways. The lines of continuity, of perhaps different thicknesses and visibilities, which cut across the Russian theatre tradition, can be articulated as follows:

• dates and artists living across different historical eras;

• a moral dimension to theatre;

• a debate surrounding realism;

• the concept of authorship;

• modern staging of nineteenth-century texts.

On the simplest of levels, a degree of continuity emerges from a quick survey of the dates. A lot is sometimes made of the fact, for example, that Stanislavsky was born in the same year that Shchepkin died (1863).⁵ Stanislavsky’s connection to Shchepkin is easy to discern, and it is on this connection that one link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries rests. Stanislavsky himself articulated on several occasions his position vis-à-vis Shchepkin’s heritage, especially during various MAT anniversaries (e.g. see Whyman 2008: 30). Beyond the polite statements characteristic of such celebrations, Stanislavsky made Shchepkin’s tenet of living rather than representing the role the foundation of his System.⁶ In his correspondence with P. V. Annenkov, Shchepkin voraciously emphasized the need to back up one’s intuition and natural talent with study and hard work (in Schumacher 1998: 195–6). It is this balance that Stanislavsky strove to achieve through his ‘from the conscious to the unconscious’ dictum. Less known but equally compelling are the positive appraisals of modern practitioners who, though far removed from Shchepkin’s aesthetics, still felt the need to go back to his teachings and treat these as the basics. For example, Laurence Senelick says that Vakhtangov ‘prescribed Shchepkin’s habits of working on a role to his students’ (Senelick 1984: 251). Little acknowledged is Fyodor Komissarzhevsky’s debt to Shchepkin. This he himself articulated in a 1913 essay in which he asserted the similarity between his approaches and Stanislavsky’s, both of which ‘are to a greater or lesser extent derived from Mikhail Shchepkin’ (Komissarzhevsky quoted in Borovsky 2001: 277). Meyerhold, on his part, drew a line from his production of The Government Inspector (1926) back to Shchepkin’s work, adding that he consciously followed the path suggested by the great actor (Malcovati 1977: 263). Gogol proved another reference point, and The Government Inspector kept its position as a key performance text.⁷ Ultimately, the government made direct links with the past a matter of ideological importance, through its ‘Return to Ostrovsky’ policy (1923), which encouraged theatre artists to adopt the playwright’s critical disposition towards social realities (Rudnitsky 1988: 116–18).⁸ Against the background of such political appropriation, Meyerhold’s statement linking his work to Shchepkin and Gogol was laden with artistic significance but also transformed into a political defence mechanism.

A further level of continuity is provided by a number of practitioners who lived long enough to experience different historical eras and who remembered, for example, the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II (1896). They often juxtaposed that era to the war with Japan, the revolution of 1905, the First World War, the February and October Revolutions, the Civil War years, the NEP years, and the late 1920s and early 1930s. Stanislavsky described these decades as a transition from serfdom to Bolshevism and Communism (Stanislavski 2008a: 3). Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko similarly juxtaposed the two eras of pre- and post-revolutionary Russia and underwrites, by accident more than by design, how such transitional moments exhibit a tension between structure and repetition on one side and improvisation and change on the other. Taking Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths as an example, he argues that

[i]n the same theatre, between the same walls, the same play would be played; even the majority of the actors would be the same […] while the decorations and the mise en scène would also remain the same, untouched by the quarter-of-a century evolution of theatrical art; in a word, the performance would not show the slightest change. Only the audience would change – unrecognizably. It would become wholly new. (Nemirovich-Danchenko 1936: 244)

Other prominent practitioners who bridged the two eras included Meyerhold, who needed little persuasion to update his practices with a new, industrial terminology, and symbolists like Vyacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely, who also ‘sought to place their [pre-1917] theories at the service of the revolution’ (Worrall 2008: 8). A further example is that of Nikolai Evreinov, who did emigrate to the West in 1925 but not before building on his earlier experiments in retrospectivism and monodrama by staging in 1920 the mass spectacle The Storming of the Winter Palace.⁹ More than discarding their pre-revolutionary findings, these practitioners sought to adapt to a different context, a different audience and, in many cases, different collaborators coming from the young generation spawned by the revolution.

A recurrent concern for a moral dimension to theatre provided a strong line of continuity within the Russian theatre tradition. As Lars Kleberg says (1993: 4), the idea of art for art’s sake never had any real footing in Russia, as practitioners and theoreticians consistently underlined the enriching and developmental potential of theatre. Sure, what ‘enriching’ and ‘developmental’ meant changed from generation to generation and even from one individual to the next, but it is clear that theatre in Russia was consistently treated not only as a form of amusement and entertainment but also as an influential means of educa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Translation credits and a note on transliteration
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Stanislavsky: Renewing tradition through transmission
• 3 Misinterpretation of theatre practice: Stanislavsky-Smyshlaev
• 4 Amateur and proletarian theatre in post-revolutionary Russia
• 5 Meyerhold: Bias in transmission processes
• 6 Lesser-known names: Rediscovering female voices
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint