RUSSIAN LITERATURE最新文献

The Russian Literature editorial team has decided that the time is ripe, first, for a modest change of journal policies and, second, for the less modest step of changing the journal name. In this editorial, editor-in-chief Ellen Rutten explains and contextualizes the two policy choices.

This article analyzes the impressions of Russian poet Andrey Bely, who visited the dress rehearsal of the play The Case (Delo), written by Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin and staged by Boris Sushkevich, at the Moscow Art Theater II. Bely shared his impressions in a letter to Razumnik Ivanov-Razumnik, writer, philosopher and literary critic, and a friend and interlocutor of Andrey Bely. In the mini-review in his letter Bely also mentions Leonid Grossman, a specialist in the field of the heritage of Sukhovo-Kobylin. Both Bely and Grossman focus on the play’s protagonist Muromsky. They note the “memory of the character” and they discuss the performance of the actor Mikhail Chekhov.

Archival sources demonstrate the specifics of theatrical memory. Drafts, director’s copies, typewritten inserts, pasted from other publications preserved in the foundation at the Museum of Theatrical and Musical Art in St. Petersburg and in the Russian State Archive of Literature, were brought for the reconstruction of the performance. Analysis of the director’s copy of the script prepared by Boris Sushkevich made it possible to identify the original source with which he worked when adapting it for the stage. It was the publication of the play The Case (Delo) from 1887. A comparison of the transformation of the text reveals common elements in two productions: the plays The Case (Delo) by Sukhovo-Kobylin and Petersburg by Andrei Bely.

In this article I examine Meyerhold's occasional castings of actresses for male parts in a small, but significant, number of instances from his long career as a stage director. Meyerhold cast a woman for a male part six times, five of them in tragedies. However, he did so intermittently and for different purposes, to suit highly heterogenous contexts. Three cases have particularly interesting perspectives: his 1915 production at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg of Calderon de la Barca's Spanish Baroque tragedy The Constant Prince; his 1926 co-production at the Meyerhold Theatre in Moscow of Tretyakov's activist melodrama Roar, China!; and his 1931 production at the Meyerhold Theatre of Yury Olesha's contemporary tragedy A List of Benefits. The three cases are not connected but are – each in its own way – artistic reactions to the three consecutive, dissimilar systems of government, under which Meyerhold lived and worked: the Tsarist regime, the formative first decade of the Soviet Union, and finally Stalinism. On a more basic personal level, they reflect Meyerhold's habitual preference for tragedy as a means of expression to reveal the social mechanisms exploited by oppression or released against it. In each case, casting an actress in a male part poses a maximum contrast to the oppressive system inquired into by way of metonymy.

Khlebnikov’s dramaturgical texts – little-known, little-studied, and even less staged – are in a variety of genres and forms (poetry, prose, or a mix of both), and have a variety of themes and settings. They are united by Khlebnikov’s sustained interest in theatricality: the theatricalization of gestures, of one’s life and everyday behaviour, a sort of self-theatre. An overall interpretative key may be offered by the two meanings of ‘vision’: spectacle – Khlebnikov’s creation of vivid, expressive scenes to impress the eyes; and perception – Khlebnikov’s expression of his “science” of the universe. The article explores the composition, purpose, and functions of the predominantly supernatural characters, particularly the semi-parodic role of deus ex machina. The general term “theatre of the impossible” (Grigor’ev) covers both the especial difficulty of staging Khlebnikov’s works, and their extreme density of semantic and visual hues. This idiosyncratic substitute for the superficially mimicked genre of tragedy ultimately resolves in collapse, implosion of the whole textual structure, when self-oriented and self-sufficient verbal layers collide.

In this article one of the forgotten reviews of Velimir Khlebnikov’s production of Zangezi performed by Vladimir Tatlin in 1923 is considered. The review belongs to the philologist Boris Kazansky, who was attached to OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language). The text of this review is republished for the first time and accompanied by a detailed commentary. Some occultist parallels to Khlebnikov’s prognostic publications are indicated.

This article analyzes the intertextuality and motifs of the tragedies Laodamia by Innokenty Annensky and Judith by Nikolai Nedobrovo. These works reflect the main trends of Russian modernism: the interpretation of the world and European cultural heritage through Greek mythology and the Bible. Laodamia and Judith illustrate two different ways a classical text was received in the culture of the Silver Age: Nedobrovo’s reception is determined by the classicist tradition, Annensky’s reception – by romanticism. The analyzed tragedies are united by a system of motifs and images. The siege of the biblical Bethulia recalls the siege of Troy, and the image of a widow meeting not her husband, but “someone else”, is central to both plots – while Judith meets the shadow of her husband (statue) or enemy, she, like Laodamia, spends the night “not with him”. Annensky and Nedobrovo did not formally belong to the acmeist movement, but they both influenced the acmeists’ intertextual poetics.

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth many thought that ballet was in crisis. An opposition could be observed between the “old” classical ballet and the “new” ballet, represented in the first place by Michel Fokine and Alexander Gorskii. In books and magazines critics discussed what should happen to Russian ballet in the future. Many of these predictions were later fulfilled. The critics managed to “foresee” the advent of abstract ballet (pioneered by George Balanchine), the epoch of so-called “dramballet”, and the gradual independence of character dance in 1930–1940.

The article provides commentary and background information on the audio recording of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Inspector General” directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold (1926). This performance was appreciated by contemporaries as one of the most significant works by the director and a striking achievement of 1920s Soviet theatre. The wax cylinder captured a dialogue between Khlestakov (Erast Garin) and Anna Andreevna (Zinaida Reich, the only voice recording of the actress) from Act III, Scene 6, where Khlestakov is boasting about the life he leads in St Petersburg. It provides us with rare examples of Meyerhold’s approach to Gogol characters’ speech, which was influenced by the experiments of modern music like jazz, and conformed with the general principles of Meyerhold’s biomechanics. The article contributes to knowledge about approaches to documenting twentieth-century theatre and Meyerhold performances in particular. It focuses on the research projects of the Institute for Artistic Speech Research (Leningrad), which initiated the sound recordings of this and other Meyerhold productions in 1927.

A wide range of dramatic forms can be found in Khlebnikov’s dramatic œuvre, which should be viewed against the background of Russian classical literature and culture, Symbolism, as well as the Futurist theatre of the time. In this paper I focus on Khlebnikov’s early dramatic work Snezhimochka (Snowflake, 1908) retracing its connections with the folk character of Snegurochka (the Snow Maiden) as she is represented in Afanas’ev’s famous collections of folktales, on which Ostrovsky based his play Snegurochka (1873), on which in turn Rimsky-Korsakov based his opera Snegurochka (1882). I highlight how the motif of the Snow Maiden played an important role in the revival of interest in folklore and Slavic mythology in St Petersburg Symbolist circles, which the young Khlebnikov frequented. Finally, Snezhimochka and Kruchenykh’s “opera” Victory over the Sun – which were intended to be performed together – are compared with reference to the theme of the sun, their characters, and, above all, their treatment of language and neologization.