Russian Symbolist Theater

Michael Green

Description

Although by writers better known for their verse and narrative prose, the plays of the Symbolists were not intended, like the dramatic poems of the Romantics, for the study rather than the stage. Instead, they are highly theatrical creations in a new style that demanded a new style of production. Meyerhold played a decisive role in the new Symbolist theatre and it was his production of Blok's The Puppet Show in Komissarzhevskaya's Theatre that launched the new direction in Russian drama. Among the works collected here are the plays The Puppet Show and The Rose and the Cross (Blok), The Triumph of Death (Sologub), The Comedy of Alexis and The Venetian Madcaps (Kuzmin), Thamyris Kitharodos (Annensky), and The Tragedy of Judas (Remizov) and essays by Briusov, Blok, Ivanov, Bely, Sologub, and Andreyev. Rounding out this essential anthology are Michael Green's general introduction, as well as insightful prefaces for each writer, placing the plays and essays into their cultural and historical contexts.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 28 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468308129
• Langue: English

Extrait

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This edition first published in p aperback in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2013 by Ardis Publishers, an imprint of Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright © 1986 by Ardis Publishers
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Main entry under title: The Russian symbolist theatre
Includes bibliographical references.
Contents: Against naturalism in the theatre / Briusov—The dictatorship of the director; For a theatre of action; Vera Komissarzhevskaya; The puppet show; The rose and the cross / Blok— |etc.|
1. Russian drama—19th century—Translations into English. 2. Russian drama—20th century—Translations into English. 3. English drama—Translations from Russian. 4. Theater—Russian S.F.S.R.—History—20th century—Addresses, essays, lectures. 5. Symbolism in literature—Addresses, essays, lectures.
I. Green Michael.
PG3245.R84 1985 89l.72’08’015 85-20104
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN PRINT: 978-1-4683-0635-4
ISBN EPUB: 978-1-4683-0812-9
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
VALERY BRIUSOV
Introduction
Against Naturalism in the Theatre24
ALEKSANDR BLOK
Introduction
The Dictatorship of the Director
For a Theatre of Action
Vera Fiodorovna Komissarzhevskaya
The Puppet Show
The Rose and the Cross
VIACHESLAV IVANOV
Introduction
The Need for Dionysian Theatre
Annensky as Dramatist
ANDREI BELY
Introduction
The Cherry Orchard
Against Reviving the Greek Theatre
FYODOR SOLOGUB
Introduction
The Theatre of the Single Will
The Triumph of Death
MIKHAIL KUZMIN
Introduction
The Comedy of Alexis, Man of God
The Venetian Madcaps
INNOKENTY ANNENSKY
Introduction
Thamyris Kitharodos
ALEKSEI REMIZOV
Introduction
The Tragedy of Judas, Prince of Iscariot
LEONID ANDREYEV
Introduction
Theatre and the Inner Life
The Failure of the Symbolist Theatre
Chekhov as Panpsychologist
The Theatre of the Future
NOTES
To anthologize is to exclude, and sometimes to exclude reluctantly. In making the present selection of plays, I will confess to a bias in favor of poetry, ambiguity and surprise—qualities that characterize the Russian Symbolist theatre at its most original and interesting. The possession of these qualities rather than formal adherence to a literary faction has been my main criterion for inclusion or rejection.
I wish to thank Dr. Neil Granoien, who prepared the first drafts for the translations of two plays in the present volume: The Rose and the Cross and The Triumph of Death.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Vladimir Markov, of whose generosity with his time and knowledge I have taken full advantage. My thanks are also due to Professor Robert Cohen, the late Professor Peter Colaclides, Professor Simon Karlinsky and Professor Thérèse Lynn for their kind help and advice.
My translation of Kuzmin’s The Venetian Madcaps first appeared in Russian Literature Triquarterly , No. 7.
INTRODUCTION
The late nineteenth century was a period of rebellion and renewal in the European theatre. Discontent with the mediocrity of the commercial stage with its “well-made plays” and comfortable moral assumptions had given rise to the New Drama. Less a unified movement than a useful banner to which all those who wished for change in the theatre could rally, the New Drama looked toward both Symbolism and naturalism—a dualism embodied in the work of such dramatists of the period as Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann and Chekhov. Poets and philosophers too had their vision of the theatre of the future. Nietzsche dreamed of returning the theatre to its origins in Dionysian ritual and sweeping away the barrier between actor and spectator. Wagner had looked back to the Athenian theatre and seen in it a profound union of poetry, music, drama, dance and design, the spirit of which he hoped to recapture in the modern Gesamtkunstwerk . In France, Mallarmé too called for a theatre that would lay all the arts under tribute to create a drama of mystery on a stage reduced to its barest elements. Maeterlinck announced that external action was dead and pleaded for a theatre of stillness and inner drama; his plays began to be taken up by the avant-garde as a sacred cause.
This ferment did not leave Russia untouched. With the first translations of Ibsen and Strindberg in the 1880s, the New Drama began to filter into the consciousness of cultured Russians; Maeterlinck and Hauptmann followed in the 1890s, and in the 1900s appeared a whole galaxy of new names that included Przybyszewski, Hofmannsthal, Wedekind, Hamsun, Schnitzler, D’Annunzio, Wilde and Shaw.
To a striking extent, the development of the Russian theatre at the turn of the century ran a similar course to that of the French theatre ten years earlier. In France, the naturalistic excesses of Antoine’s Théâtre Libre (founded in 1887), which had specialized in painstakingly realistic productions of Ibsen and Hauptmann, had brought about a reaction in the shape of Paul Fort’s Théâtre d’Art (1890) and its successor, Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de L’Oeuvre (1892), which introduced the dramas of Maeterlinck and staged Ibsen in a stylized “Symbolist” manner, bringing in artists of the Nabi school (Vuillard, Sérusier, Maurice Denis) to paint decorative backdrops. In Russia, the naturalism of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre (founded in 1898), which found effective vehicles in the plays of Ibsen, Hauptmann and Chekhov, was succeeded by the stylized theatre of Meyerhold, who produced plays by Maeterlinck, Ibsen and a number of Symbolists, both native and foreign, turning for decor to brilliant young painters from the ambience of the World of Art. There is, however, a factor that disturbs the neatness of the parallel—the ambiguous genius of Chekhov, whose relationship to the Symbolist theatre deserves some examination.
Chekhov has always been closely associated with the Moscow Art Theatre, which achieved its first significant success with its revival of The Seagull in 1898 and gave the premieres of all his major plays thereafter. Although Chekhov himself had reservations, the Art Theatre’s naturalistic approach seemed ideally suited to Chekhov’s plays, with the result that Chekhov has often been identified with naturalism in the theatre. Yet if Chekhov was a realist, he was a realist of a special kind who refined realism to the point where it threatened to become something else. Both realists and Symbolists sensed this in Chekhov. “Do you know what you’re doing?” Gorky had expostulated, “You’re killing realism.” While in the opposite camp, Andrei Bely expressed the view that “while remaining a realist, Chekhov became the secret enemy of realism,” and wrote the brilliant Symbolist exegesis of The Cherry Orchard included in the present volume.
Chekhov’s later plays convey a mysterious sense of something pressing beyond words to find expression in the multitude of pauses that Chekhov, unlike most dramatists, is wisely content not to fill with stage directions. Dialogue seems to rise out of a profounder silence and to sink back into it. It is here that we sense a kinship between Chekhov and Maeterlinck, whose writings on the theatre are full of observations that, in a curious way, seem even more applicable to Chekhov’s dramas than to Maeterlinck’s own. “It is idle,” wrote Maeterlinck, “to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another.” He had argued that “psychological action” was “infinitely loftier in itself than mere material action,” maintaining that “side by side with the necessary dialogue” there was “another dialogue that seems superfluous,” but really determines “the quality and immeasurable range of the work.”
Chekhov was drawn toward Maeterlinck, just as he was repelled by Ibsen. A whole bouquet of uncomplimentary remarks about the great Norwegian may be gathered from Chekhov’s conversation and correspondence: “Listen, I tell you Ibsen is no dramatist,” h