RUSSIAN LITERATURE最新文献

Nadezhda Lukhmanova (1841-1907) was an important figure in the history of Russian farce theatre. She gained notoriety as a translator with the audience-winning comedy A Hero of the First Empire (1894, based on the play by Victorien Sardou and Émile Moreau Madame Sans-Gêne, 1893). Lukhmanova made a lot of changes to the play: it was not a translation but a retelling of the story, quite far from the original version. Her free translation and her creation of a sequel to the Madame Sans-Gêne story (the play Napoleon I, 1895) raised a wave of negative critical reviews. Critics regarded Lukhmanova as a “predatory translator” who spoiled original works and stole good ideas. Later she translated a large number of farces that were successful with audiences, and wrote several original plays. However, her work as a translator of farcical plays influenced public perceptions of her fiction and journalism. Readers and critics questioned why a writer and publicist, known for moralizing lectures and articles, should translate farces? The truth is that work in the farcical genre helped Lukhmanova to rethink the story of her personal life, demonstrating the absurdity of marriage conventions – and to play this out in front of an audience.

This thematic issue is focused on Russian theatre of the first third of the twentieth century. One of the main topics discussed is the correlation and mutual influence of theatre and literature in the broadest sense. Theatre’s new relationship with the literary foundation required the creation of acting techniques adapted for the “universal actor”. In the 1910s, theatre’s development attracted universal interest. It was not only theatrical figures who took part in critical discussions about theatre, but also writers and literary theorists, artists, composers and music connoisseurs, cinematographers, lawyers and politicians. Theatre directors found themselves in the very centre of all these problems – the era of “director’s theatre” was underway. In modern theatre studies, there is a common problem of an unequal degree of study of various theatres and of the creativity of directors, actors, theatre artists, and composers. This thematic issue offers some contribution to its resolution.

Petr Pertsov’s previously unknown article, ‘A Russian “Comedy of Masks”’ (1911), written for the 75^th anniversary of the premiere of Nikolai Gogol’s play The Government Inspector, is published here for the first time. Pertsov describes Gogol’s play as a Russian variation of commedia dell’arte.

In the period from autumn 1894 to spring 1896, while Vera Komissarzhevskaya was acting on the stage of the Vilna Theater (Nezlobin’s enterprise), her friendly relations with the high-ranking state dignitary, diplomat, and publicist Sergei Tatishchev began. Tatishchev offered to use his influence in theatrical circles to help Komissarzhevskaya sign a lucrative contract with the Alexandrinsky Imperial Theatre, where she aspired to act. Their correspondence, which lasted almost a year, reveals, on the one hand, Komissarzhevskaya’s determination to continue her theatrical career, and on the other, the complex personal history of her relationship with Tatishchev. Included in this article are letters to Tatishchev from Komissarzhevskaya’s mother Maria Shulgina, which give another point of view on the circumstances and fill in the gaps in the actress’s biography. Shulgina’s letters are published for the first time.

The discussion of Meyerhold’s “Revisor” (GosTIM, premiere – December 9, 1926) is an unprecedented case in European theatre of the first half of the twentieth century: no other theatrical event had such a breadth of public reaction. In the general controversy around the Meyerhold “Revisor”, the theatre-critical dialogue between the philologist and theatre critic of the Leningrad “Gvozdev school” Alexander Slonimsky and the director and theatre critic Iulia Sazonova-Slonimskaia (who were brother and sister) represents not only the views of Soviet Russia and Russia Abroad, but also those of the drama/theatre theorist and theatre practitioner. The dialogue considered in this article – at first glance, local and peripheral – turns out to be inscribed in the discussions of the 1920s about one of Meyerhold’s most controversial performances, and at the same time becomes the prehistory of the discussions of the 1930s about Meyerhold theatre’s formalism and “untimeness”, which brought a tragic denouement: the dissolution of the theatre and the death of its director.

This paper examines the dramatic text God May Be Around by Aleksandr Vvedenskii, which is viewed through the prism of the medieval mystery play. The structure of the text and the main motifs of the play are analyzed, and they reveal to us that this is a new type of the eschatological mystery play, created as a response to the apocalyptic changes in society after the Bolshevik Revolution. The categories of time and death are interpreted against the background of the Soviet reforms of the 1920s (calendar, religion), which brought about a feeling of instability and disintegration of the world.

K.S. Stanislavsky’s System remains the basis for actor training in conservatoires in the UK and more widely and Vs. E. Meyerhold’s Biomechanics is increasing in popularity as a training method in the twenty-first century. Both methods were rooted in scientific understandings from the modern epoch to the avant-garde, so it is important to question how this remains relevant to today’s practice. This essay explores responses to Diderot’s Le paradoxe sur le comédien (The Paradox of the Actor) in Russia from the nineteenth century to the 1930s, which, essentially, questioned whether “head” or “heart” should be primary in acting. A.N. Ostrovskii and P.D. Boborykin discussed this question from the 1860s in relation to the new science of I.M. Sechenov, which theorised generating emotion by reflex. Reflex theory impacted the debate between “experiencing” and “representation” in acting. The development of I.P. Pavlov’s reflex conditioning had further implications for “heart” or “head” and “experiencing” or “representation” debates for Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. In the 1930s, L. S. Vygotsky proposed a new response to Diderot’s Paradox and N.A. Bernstein’s neurophysiology pushed against the Soviet Pavlovian paradigm – a new context for reassessment of the great directors’ work.

The innovative choreographer Mikhail Fokin (Michel Fokine, 1880-1942) is often credited with reforming early-twentieth-century ballet theatre. In the first decade of the twentieth century he vehemently criticized traditional ballet for mechanistic virtuosity and lack of emotion. The reform he suggested was to introduce a new genre of one-act abstract ballet set to classical or romantic, non-dancing music, as well as a new emotional regime in ballet theatre. In his early statement of his purposes, he recognized that one of the strongest inspirations came from his contemporary, Isadora Duncan. Dance historians have also commented that the direction in which Fokin took ballet was suggested to him by the American dancer. Yet with the advance of modern dance in the 1930s, Fokin started distancing himself from Duncan. While admitting that his “Greek” ballets such as Eunice and Daphnis and Chloe (both 1907) stemmed from Duncan dance, he categorically denied any influence of hers on his main chefs-d’oeuvre, The Swan (The Dying Swan, 1907) and Chopiniana / Les Sylphides (1907-1909). Believing Fokin’s words, Russian dance historians have seriously belittled Duncan’s contribution to the reform of twentieth-century ballet. The article restates Duncan’s impact on Fokin by demonstrating that Chopiniana borrowed from Duncan’s Chopin-Abend (1904), and that the genre of the one-act “abstract” ballet is indebted to her dance.

This article reconsiders the vexed question of the authorship of the anonymous review (published in the journal Vremia, 1861) of the book Poems by A.S. Khomyakov. The review dealt not only with Khomyakov’s poems but also with his oeuvre as a whole, including his theological works. Inductive logic was applied to the task of resolving the text’s attribution, as a comparison of the respective likelihoods (conditional probabilities) of two alternative hypotheses: authorship by either Apollon Grigoriev or Fedor Dostoevsky. The author of the review speaks about Khomyakov’s theological brochures and tragedy Ermak with the same opinions and even almost the same wording as Grigoriev does in other texts of the same period. No similar opinions appear in texts belonging to Dostoevsky, even though Dostoevsky’s interest in Khomyakov’s journalism (but not his theology) is documented from the early 1860s. There are no grounds for speaking of any theological influence by Khomyakov on Dostoevsky in the 1860s (unlike in Dostoevsky’s last years). The conclusion by Boris F. Egorov that the author was Grigoriev is confirmed, whereas Vladimir N. Zakharov’s arguments for the authorship of Dostoevsky are disproved.

This article presents a study of the genesis and evolution of the Belarusian iambic tetrameter. A diachronic account of iambic patterns from the earliest samples to late-twentieth-century texts reveals a steady decomposition of the classical continental accentual-syllabic versification. The Belarusian iamb is studied alongside its apparent Russian sources in order to determine any possible comparative relations.