“The first experience of a civil memorial service”: the mourning morning at the Moscow art theatre 13 February 1910

Abstract

The article, which based on materials from pre-revolutionary periodicals, describes in detail and systematically analyzes the mourning meeting in honor of the memory of actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya. This meeting was organized and held on the morning of February 13, 1910 by the founders of the Moscow Art Theater - V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko and K.S. Stanislavsky. This memorial event, which took place in the foyer of the Moscow Art Theater, was named by V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko "the first experience of a civil memorial service," during his opening speech. The event received such a definition, since no clergyman took part in it, due to a ban from the Moscow church authorities to serve a church memorial service for Komissarzhevskaya in the theater building in Kamergersky Lane. The article hypothesizes that the term "civil memorial service" (“grazhdanskaia panikhida”) was used for the first time at that time.Funeral and memorial ceremonies without the participation of the clergy were sometimes held in Russia before that (during the revolutionary events of 1905). The meeting on February 13, 1910 at the Moscow Art Theater, being an important milestone in the evolution of the Russian civil funeral rite, stood apart in this row. The civil memorial ceremony for Komissarzhevskaya had no direct internal connection with the current political conflicts (within the framework of which the atheistic worldview was already openly opposed to the religious worldview). It rather reflected the discrepancy in the perception of the status of dramatic art and the personality of the dramatic actor-artist (as well as personal creativity in general) between the church consciousness typical of that time and the consciousness of the creative intelligentsia, within the limits of a single Christian paradigm. "The first experience of a civil memorial service" is considered in the article not as an attempt to redesign, but as an attempt to strengthen the existing memorial rite in the therapeutic aspect, adapting it to the mental characteristics of the artistic community.