REVOLUTION

February to November 1917 constituted ten months which shook Russia. Heavy military setbacks in the war, and hunger, poverty and freezing cold in the cities led to increasingly angry demonstrations on the streets. On 27 February, the tsarist Guards, who had struggled to ‘keep order’ until now, refused to fire on demonstrators, a Soviet was formed in Petrograd and on 2 March the tsar abdicated. A Provisional Government was formed. But the revolution was only just beginning.

On 3 April Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia from exile abroad, and less than three weeks later, in the ‘April Days’, there were mass demonstrations against the Provisional Government's plan to continue the war. Two governments were vying for power, the Soviet and the Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov. Whose policies and laws should prevail? Massive demonstrations in the ‘July Days’ demanded ‘all power to the Soviets’. Lvov was forced to step down and Alexander Kerensky took over. In August came the ‘Kornilov Mutiny’ when General Kornilov led his troops towards Petrograd, aiming to seize power. He was defeated, and on the night of 25–26 October Lenin's Bolsheviks seized the initiative. They occupied most of Petrograd's strategic buildings, and the Congress of Soviets was summoned to approve the formation of a Bolshevik government. Kerensky fled. Lenin took charge.

But those who opposed Bolshevism were not done, and a brutal and bloody civil war consumed Russia for four more years. This was not simply a struggle between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. All sorts of independence movements and breakaway regimes in far-flung parts of the Empire rose against Russian dominance, opportunistic bandits took their chances, and things were further complicated by various groups of monarchists, democrats and foreign interventionists. In January 1918 the Bolsheviks disbanded the Constituent Assembly and obligated the Cheka, the secret police, to enforce their rule, by means of terror if necessary. In March they moved the capital to Moscow and also signed the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with Germany. In July the tsar and his family were shot. By 1919 the centre of resistance was Omsk, where Admiral Kolchak established an alternative Government. General Pyotr Vrangel in the south wanted to move his White forces to join Kolchak but his fellow general, Anton Denikin, wanted to march on Moscow.

THE UNION OF YOUTH

Russian Futurism was inherently theatrical, and the Futurists themselves worked hard to realise this. Most obviously this was seen in ‘The First Futurist Theatre Productions in the World’ which were staged at the Luna Park Theatre, St Petersburg, in early December 1913, but before this there was much which showed the theatricality of Futurism.

‘The First Futurist Theatre Productions in the World’ were presented under the auspices of the Union of Youth, which had existed informally since the early summer of 1909, and was regularised in January 1910, when it was officially founded. It was, it stated, intended to be

It organised an impressive variety of activities for its members. Besides twiceannual exhibitions, there were well-attended lectures, discussions and public debates – even at their most abstruse, the Futurists were always entertaining. It acquired premises in St Petersburg where members could meet on a nonsectarian basis and enjoy drawing sessions together, and in 1912 started its own journal, The Union of Youth. It also presented concerts and theatre productions. Much of this was due to its energetic moneyed patron, Levky Ivanovich Zheverzheyev, who became its President, with a committee which included Mikhail Matyushin, Olga Rozanova, Iosif Shkolnik and others.

In 1913 the Union of Youth entered into a more or less formal alliance with the Hylaea group of Futurist poets and writers, welcoming readings by Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh and Burlyuk as well as less-known figures like Mikhail Le-Dantyu, Ilya Zdanevich and Igor Severyanin. With literature becoming more important in its programme, and with painters such as Malevich, Rozanova, Shkolnik and Pavel Filonov in its ranks, its members also moved towards book production, many of the Hylaea poets publishing chapbooks designed and illustrated by these artists.

These illustrations were often influenced by the lubok, popular prints of ‘old’ Russia. The influence can also be seen in Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova's neo-primitivist art of this period, and it was significantly to affect the ‘look’ of Futurist theatre.

NEP

The first issue of LEF (Left Front of the Arts), published in March 1923, contained a theoretical article entitled ‘From Where to Where?’ by Sergei Tretyakov. After the high jinks and exuberance of Mystery Bouffe, Radlov's popular comedy, Foregger's machine dances, Eisenstein's Wise Man and even Meyerhold's Death of Tarelkin, the Russian Futurist theatre was ready to make something more substantial and more profound.

LEF was essentially a journal of the period of Lenin's New Economic Policy, which was introduced at the Tenth Party Congress of March 1921. The policy aimed to bring the peasants into the new Bolshevik state and to stabilise the country after the hoped-for revolutions in western Europe had failed to materialise. ‘The goal is set’, wrote Trotsky, ‘to accommodate ourselves to the new, more prolonged period which may be necessary for the maturing of the revolution in the west.’ Food requisitioning was brought to an end, and there were significant concessions to agriculture and to free trade. Zinoviev described it in December 1921 as ‘a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat’ when, in Trotsky's words, ‘a radical reconsideration of the methods of soviet power became necessary’.

Remarkably rapidly, shops, small-scale businesses and factories sprang into being, along with restaurants, cafés, nightclubs and brothels. The NEP cafés and clubs were to some extent a resurgence of the pre-revolutionary phenomenon: little theatres like Crooked Jimmy, the Hermitage and the Grotesque mounted revue-style productions which often used material from the 1910s, though new ‘small form’ dramas, parodies and satirical sketches by writers like Nikolai Erdman were also forthcoming. The most commented-on feature of the period, however, may have been the rise of the ‘NEPmen’, spivs on the make, racketeers turning a quick rouble by dubious means, dressed up, with ostentatious cars and flash jewellery, and satirised in many Futurist works, like Tretyakov and Eisenstein's A Wise Man.

Many people, especially the young and those supporting the regime, saw NEP as a betrayal of the revolution, and their resentment helps to explain the acceptance by the end of the decade of Stalin's second-wave revolution.

MEYERHOLD AND ACTING THEORY

The new plays – epic or miniature, abstract or satirical – demanded new attention to acting practices. By employing circus professionals, Radlov and Meyerhold had made a start, but in reality this only postponed the problem. The question was how to modify the circus artist's performance to fit the somewhat different demands of the theatre, how to theatricalise the circus, or circusise the theatre.

Meyerhold knew better than anyone that a dynamic performance which could stimulate an urgent and emotional response in the spectator was one which relied on technique. In 1913 he opened his Doctor Dapertutto's Studio in St Petersburg in order to explore and develop what was to become known in the Soviet era as ‘Biomechanics’, though it was then called by the perhaps more appropriate name of ‘Scenic Movement’. At base, this was rooted in one side of the ongoing debate about acting which can be traced to Denis Diderot and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It was Diderot who first asked: ‘If the actor were full, really full, of feeling, how could he play the same part twice running with the same spirit and success? Full of fire at the first performance, he would be worn out and cold as marble at the third.’ He pointed out that ‘at the very moment when he [the actor] touches your heart he is listening to his own voice; his talent depends not, as you think, upon feeling, but upon rendering so exactly the outward signs of feeling, that you fall into the trap’, and he concluded: ‘Actors impress the public not when they are furious, but when they play fury well.’ And the English actor David Garrick, whom Diderot greatly admired, remarked that he could speak to a post with the same feelings as to the loveliest Juliet under heaven.

Yet the Romantic theatre rejected this cool rationality and insisted on the actor infusing his performance with genuine feeling. This approach reached its apogee in the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Meyerhold's teacher. In Stanislavsky's fictionalised account of learning the process of acting, An Actor's Work, the first compliment the gauche young actor receives is for a moment in his performance of Othello when ‘like us the audience, [he] surrendered totally to what was happening.

CHANGED TIMES

On 14 April 1930, less than a month after the premiere of The Bathhouse, Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself. He wrote in the note he left when he died, ‘As they say, the case is closed.’ Symbolically, Mayakovsky's death marked the end of Russian Futurist theatre. As he added, his ‘love-boat’ had crashed on ‘byt’, the everyday, the humdrum.

Mayakovsky and his fellow Futurists had been swept up in the force of the revolutionary flood. They had believed in the revolution's power to construct the new human being, a task which allied them firmly with the revolutionaries. But as the day-to-day compromises, unpleasant initiatives and inevitable realpolitik of the post-1917 world began to bite, they were cut adrift. The disillusion was utterly catastrophic.

The signs of changed times had been visible at least since 1927. In January of that year Trotsky had been exiled to Alma-Ata. In the following months Eisenstein wrote that ‘the enormous breath of 1917 … is blowing itself out’, and the LEF group urged a united federation of writers, including all groups. The year 1928 saw the end of NEP and the inauguration of the first Five Year Plan. It was also the year of the first show trials when fifty-three engineers from Shakhty in the north Caucasus region were accused of sabotage and collaboration with Russians in exile: five were sentenced to death and forty-four were sent to prison. In 1929 Trotsky was deported into exile, there were purges of cultural institutions, and a vicious campaign was launched against the writers Boris Pilnyak and Evgeny Zamyatin. Anatoly Lunacharsky was forced to resign as Minister for Education and the Arts.

By 1930 Mayakovsky, who the year before had tried to transmute LEF and Novyi LEF into REF (the Revolutionary Front of the Arts), had even applied to join RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), the group most vociferously opposed to LEF. And a week after his suicide, his last dramatic work, Moscow Is Burning, was staged at the First Moscow State Circus. The old love of the theatricalised circus had not quite died with him.

SERGEI EISENSTEIN

Russian Futurist theatre reached one of its climaxes in the work of Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Tretyakov at the First Workers Theatre of the Proletkult, which was established in early 1923 and housed in the former mansion of Savva Morozov in Moscow.

Eisenstein was born in Riga in Latvia in 1898. His father was a civil engineer and architect, something of a ‘tyrant’ at home, and the family being well off, Eisenstein's was a privileged if somewhat isolated childhood. In 1909 his mother left the home, and Eisenstein lived with his father. It was while visiting his mother, however, that he first went to the circus, a form with which he immediately fell in love, especially adoring the clowns. In 1915 he enrolled as a student at the Institute for Civil Engineering in Petrograd, where he lived with his mother. In 1917 he joined in revolutionary demonstrations, including in the Bolshevik demonstrations in the ‘July Days’, but he also began designing stage sets and costumes. Immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power, he volunteered for the Red Army. While still a soldier here, he became involved practically in drama with amateur groups, as well as decorating agit-trains, and in September 1920 he entered the General Staff Academy to study Japanese. This, like his earlier studies, was interrupted, however, when he joined the Proletkult as chief stage designer, and it was in this capacity that he first came to general attention with the production on 10 March 1921 of The Mexican.

THE MEXICAN

This show, to be directed by Valentin Smyshlayev with designs by Leonid Nikitin and Eisenstein, was based on a story by Jack London with a scenario by Boris Arvatov. Set in the Mexican Revolution, which was sparked when the eighty-year-old dictator, Porfiro Diaz, ‘won’ the 1910 election by fraud, the plot, as told by Eisenstein, concerned ‘a Mexican revolutionary group [which] needs money for its activities. A boy, a Mexican, offers to find the money. He trains for boxing, and contracts to let the champion beat him for a fraction of the prize. Instead he beats up the champion, winning the entire prize.’ The scenario was read at the first rehearsal and the show was created through improvisation and discussion. This resulted in a degree of chaos, but it in no way dampened the young company's enthusiasm.

KANDINSKY AND STAGE COMPOSITION

While some Russian Futurists were creating a physicalised, political epic theatre focused on the future, others were more interested in seeking a transrational, or abstract, dramatic form.

A forerunner to these, who was perhaps no more than on the fringes of Futurism, was Vasily Kandinsky. He was a member of the Jack of Diamonds group and exhibited with Larionov, Goncharova and the Burlyuk brothers. But he was born in 1866, and was therefore a good generation older than the Futurists. He studied law and became an academic before throwing this career over in 1896 in order to be an artist. He went to Munich to study, and for the next eighteen years he split his time between Germany and Russia. In Munich in 1909 he and Franz Marc founded the Blue Rider group which promulgated the idea that great art was rooted in spirituality. In 1914 he returned to Russia and, though positively apolitical, after the Revolution he joined the Fine Art Department of Lunacharsky's Narkompros, becoming director of INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in 1920. Two years later he left Russia to join the Bauhaus, and he never returned to his native country. But from 1918 to 1922 in Russia Kandinsky wrote and lectured on his ideas, especially the relationship he found between form and colour. It should be added, however, that most of the Russian Futurists rejected his theories, not least because he seemed out of step with contemporary social and political developments.

Nevertheless, many of Kandinsky's ideas chimed with those of the Futurists, and his plays form an intriguing prelude to Futurist transrational drama. As Peter Jelavich has pointed out, as early as 1904 Kandinsky was arguing that painting (‘malerai’ in German) should properly be called copying (‘abmalerai’), since most earlier painting imitated nature, just as most earlier, and indeed contemporary, theatre tried to ‘imitate’ real life. Painting – and theatre – needed to move beyond mere imitation, he argued, towards a new kind of Gesamtkunstwerk in which sound, colour and movement could each exist in their own right. In a further pre-echo of Futurism, he looked forward to the replacement of contemporary materialism by an ‘epoch of great spirituality’, though unlike the Futurists’ idea of the coming Utopia, Kandinsky believed this would be a time when the artist would uncover the spiritual essence of humanity.

Russian Futurist theatre blazed brilliantly but very briefly. It lasted little more than twenty years, flourishing on either side of the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was the creation of a mere handful of practitioners, who included playwrights like Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Sergei Tretyakov, Vasily Kamensky, Ilya Zdanevich, Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky; stage designers such as Kasimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky; and directors like Sergei Radlov, Nikolai Foregger, Sergei Eisenstein, Igor Terentiev and of course, above all the others, Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Starting with small-scale, but noisy and disruptive, performances both inside and outside theatre buildings, continuing with wild experiments in circusisation, transense language and Constructivist extravagance, the Russian Futurist theatre by 1930 could be seen to be responsible for some of the most challenging and profound plays and productions of the twentieth century. Appallingly, it was cut off in its prime by political fiat and merciless tyranny, its practitioners silenced (more or less brutally) and its achievements buried in unmarked graves. For long it was forgotten, and only towards the end of the twentieth and in the early twenty-first centuries was it (to some extent) resurrected, and its genius acknowledged.

This book is perhaps the first to attempt an overview of this extraordinary phenomenon. It tries to tell the history of the Russian Futurist theatre and to understand its driving motivations. There have by now been scholarly studies of virtually all the subjects which this book addresses, and many brave productions of its works, but a similarly comprehensive survey and assessment has not, so far as I am aware, been essayed. I am conscious, however, of treading in the footsteps of finer scholars and practitioners than myself.

I became interested in the Russian Futurist theatre when I was investigating the seeds of Bertolt Brecht's theatre. Brecht's contact with some of those who had visited Russia in the 1920s, such as Bernhard Reich, Asja Lacis and Walter Benjamin, his friendship with Sergei Tretyakov, and so on, had opened to him a dazzling world of ambitious and trailblazing theatre work. It seemed worth inquiring into this source of inspiration.

A SLAP IN THE FACE OF PUBLIC TASTE

In 1912, a slim volume of poetry by several authors entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste was published in Moscow. In the pamphlet, the poems were preceded by a brief introduction, which acted as a kind of manifesto, and which was also called A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. It was the opening gambit of Russian Futurism, and its provocative title hinted at what was to become a constant stance.

The authors represented in this little book went by the collective name of ‘Hylaea’ which they borrowed from Chernyanka, or, in Greek, Hylaea, the home town by the Black Sea of their leader, David Burlyuk. Their message in the introduction to their poetic collection was simple: ‘Through us the horn of time blows in the art of the word’; ‘Throw Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, etc, etc, overboard from the Ship of Modernity’. It also attacked popular mainstream authors of the day – Gorky, Blok, Sologub, Bunin and others. Since it only stated one rather modest aim, to ‘enlarge the scope of the poet's vocabulary’, it was less a manifesto than a defiant statement of an extreme modernist position. It implied a Futurist attitude not just to art, but to life: a welcoming of whatever was new, and a disgusted rejection of the humdrum, the accepted and the everyday – what the Russians call ‘byt’. It voiced social protest as much as aesthetic aspiration, and implied what was only later articulated: that the Futurists wanted to remake the world, through art, through language, through overturning convention and, significantly, through theatre. Their rejection of the ‘old’ theatre meant interrogating every convention – standard dramatic language, play construction, stage settings, lighting, costume and of course acting – and inaugurating something new, a new world, which would be performative.

A Slap in the Face of Public Taste was signed by David Burlyuk, Alexander Kruchenykh (whose real name was Alexei), Vladimir Mayakovsky and Victor Khlebnikov (who later changed his first name to Velimir). They were the most prominent of the Hylaeans, who also included David Burlyuk's two brothers, Nikolai and Vladimir, and Benedikt Livshits.