5
Theater is not supposed to change the world. But it shows the world can change.
—Ali Fafii
In the 1790s, Russian actor and playwright Pëtr Plavilshchikov, who saw theater primarily in national and social terms, urged that Russian history be taken up in tragedy and the lives of merchants and peasants in comedy. Nikolai Gogol echoed the desire in an oft-quoted passage from 1836: “For heaven’s sake, give us Russian characters, give us ourselves, our own scoundrels and cranks!” Sociologist Wendy Griswold correctly equates the importance of the political, social, and cultural context in connecting the theater of any era with the other corners of her “cultural diamond”: author, text, and audience.1 Russian drama in this era progressed through numerous stages, shaped according to fashion, foreign import, audience demand, censorial constraint, and factors hard to determine. “History” entered theater with a roar in moments of national stress, particularly during and after the Napoleonic trauma and more subtly in the successive political dramas of Nicholas I. But since the social system throughout this period remained rooted in serfdom and the human edifices built upon it, Plavilshchikov’s “merchants and peasants” remained overshadowed on the stage for some time by long-dead kings, queens, and nobles. Slow shifts in their representation through plot, acting styles, sets, and costumes accompanied the multiplication of the common people in drama. “Schools and styles”—neoclassical, romantic, realist—became so elusive and intertwined that in time the lines became blurred.
Actors at Work
“The influence of the theater upon the social and spiritual life of [Russia] owed at least as much to the appearance of a constellation of brilliant actors as it did to the writings of any of the authors who are perhaps better known to history.” This perceptive observation by Anatoly Altschuller reminds us that performers brought texts to life. Where did the actors come from and how did they work? In all ages and all nations, acting talent of both sexes has always been found in every social stratum and, where permitted, has gone on to the stage. For a while in Russia, the rule against women acting (as opposed to dancing and singing) persisted in some quarters, and even after the appearance of women became customary, men often played comic crones. The class taboo was more permanent: the unwritten law, later folded into an edict, said that living nobles, people of high rank, were not to be seen on the public stage. The law could be broken by those with courage and motivation, but the vast majority of performers came from the merchantry and the lower classes and their progeny.2
By 1800 or so, the Imperial Theater system had adopted the standard range of dramatic roles or emplois from Europe: male lead, young lover, second lover, father, comics and servants; female lead, young mistress and first coquette, mother, and a variety of utility actors. For tragedy, certain actors were made to specialize as kings, queens, and so on. This roster persisted until 1882, though drastically modified for the new social types in the dramas from the 1850s onward. How did actors from the lowest classes manage to emulate great lords and ladies on stage? Bulgarin in 1825 advised actors to attend the French theater in order to observe the proper behavior of the upper classes—by which he meant not the French actors on stage but Russian society in the boxes. But observing and replicating social styles were two different matters. On arrival from their points of origin—Theater School, serf company, or a nondramatic background—actors had to learn or relearn the arts of acting. The playwright and actor Ivan Dmitrevsky (1733-1821) became a legendary teacher of the imperial stage who trained countless luminaries.3
Two of Dmitrevsky’s successors advanced contrasting pedagogical styles. The drillmaster Alexander Shakhovskoi required slavish copying of his gestures and readings. Like Tsar Peter the Great who tied hay and straw to the feet of his soldiers to teach them left from right in drill, Shakhovskoi told actors which foot to stand or lean on for which line. Some of the human material he worked with was still raw. Unschooled players thought “Albion” meant “albino” and would point to heaven when referring to the underworld’s River Styx. Shakhovskoi responded with a despotically applied coding system which some actors resented, preferring the methods of P. A. Katenin. Of partial Greek parentage, Katenin was a translator, teacher, and erudite classical scholar. After valorous service in the war of 1812, he saw the great tragedians Talma and Mlle. Mars in Paris. Revering Corneille and Racine, he tried to transfer to his pupils a feeling for classical learning in order to deepen their interpretations. From the classics, Katenin himself absorbed a sense of civic virtue and personal rebellion that led him to the margins of the Decembrist movement.4 Did the teaching work? Contemporaries and scholars—even sympathetic ones—agreed that among rank-and-file actors and even some stars, a narrow vision encompassed career, role, and the play—in that order. Most had no literary pretensions, broad cultural background, or refined esthetic sensibility. Scholars have tried to attribute this situation to the humble, often out-of-wedlock social origins of actors. But acting was (and still is) a job, and in bygone days little recognition was gained by an actor of any social class with an academic understanding of a role or of the historical background of a play. The relation of run-of-the-mill actors to playwrights was like that of artists’ models to artists. In each case, usually only the latter had some formal education in mythology and other literary and historical subjects indispensable to academic art.5
Social origin did not determine failure or success. Any number of superb performers of both sexes sprang from serf origins. Russian commoners who went on the stage certainly lacked an upbringing of listening to skilled homiletics, as absorbed by some of their European counterparts, for example.6 But they did grow up in a particularly expressive population. Russian styles of conversation and oral narrative in all classes were richly animated and conveyed with an abundance of gestural machinery. Proper training and endless practice could convert these properties for those with talent into theatrical skills of a high order. Quotidian “theatricality” did not of course transfer automatically into good acting. On the contrary, the vocal style that predominated through the early part of the century—declamation—required very special training as well as skill and a good memory. This system, in full force on the Russian and European stage in both high tragedy and sensational melodrama, died a very slow death everywhere as is clear even from early twentieth-century silent movies, whether made in Hollywood or in Yaroslavl. Declamation arose from the nature of the poetic scenario and from the size and acoustics of the theater itself. In 1830, Rafail Zotov spoke of the need for projection and precise enunciation, since the gallery was 140 to 150 yards from midstage.7 Central to the style was the tirade, a long, virtuoso recitation, usually in verse, designed to display the rhetorical gifts of the actor, the beauties of the text, and the pathos of its meanings.
Declamation employed a stringent code of gestures and body language, one of many visual elements that theater borrowed consciously from graphic art (fig. 31). Its poses and facial moves can be found in sculpture and in such pictures as fright prints, for example Cruikshank’s depiction of the response of horrified spectators to a duel. A serious dramatic actor, Alexander Bantyshev, would often stand with arms asunder like an entertainer at a Russian folk fair. The clenched fist pressed to the forehead was a sure sign of mental anguish. The section “On Fear” in a Polish acting manual Mimica (1812) by Wojtech Boguslawski mandated four or five stages of revulsion and terror as an actor sees a friend being beaten to death, with speech and gestures attending each phase. Stage exits were signaled twice: by moving feet and by an outstretched right hand. Mikhail Shchepkin, who later mocked the style, was fond of recounting the story of an actor who forgot the hand gesture when exiting, returned to center stage, and then properly followed his pointing hand into the wings. The extended hand mode was still being parodied in Ostrovsky’s late nineteenth-century play about provincial theater life, Talented People and Their Admirers (1882), in which the “tragedian” stalks around in high style bellowing irrelevant lines from King Lear and Hamlet.8
Russian actors developed their own modes of vibrato, volume, crescendo, modulation, and liquidity in order to convey pathos, terror, hatred, love, and any other emotion. Just as often, they copied from each other, from predecessors, stars, rivals, and foreigners. Codes could be dictated by directors, teachers, playwrights, powerful observers, and even the audience. The downside appeared when star performers subordinated plot and fellow actors to their own spectacular deliveries. Yet pedagogues and audiences both deemed declamation the only correct way to interpret dramatic material, certainly that of a high level. Greatness on stage mimicked “greatness” in social life. Stepan Zhikharëv observed that a magnate of Catherine’s time displayed grandiloquence in gesture and gait and weighed each word in prolonged and enunciated diction. Such people, seeing a drama about exalted figures of the past, would certainly expect to see noble character adorned with the proper speech and gestures just as they would in portraiture. “The tone of everyday speech is not suitable for tragedy,” said a critic in the 1810s. Audiences of the early part of the century apparently agreed and expected mountainous declamation and outward gravitas as signs of importance.9
Out of the vortex of competing genres that swirled after the Napoleonic wars came new actors whose versatility made them unclassifiable as mere tragedians or comic actors. They carried their individual styles into all genres, and what struck audiences and critics of this period was the contrasting stagecraft of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The cultural duel between the two capitals, often represented as an intellectual contest between Slavophilism and Westernism, was fought on many fronts, including the theater boards. The rivalry between adherents of Pavel Mochalov of Moscow and Vasily Karatygin of St. Petersburg stretched over decades. Mochalov (1800-1848) came from a Moscow family of serf actors, graduated from a pension, and debuted in 1817 in Ozerov’s Oedipus. Working in European and Russian tragedy and comedy, Mochalov reached his peak in the 1830s and 1840s, playing roles in Shakespeare and Schiller. He did well in historical plays and melodrama, especially in the role of Meinau in Kotzebue’s wildly popular Misanthropy and Repentance (fig. 32). Mikhail Buturlin reports that when the actor, burdened by a drinking problem, sometimes appeared shaky on stage and forgot his lines, the audience forgave him. A nervous playwright once begged him to leave the buffet and drink after the performance. Mochalov replied: “I'll drink now and after the play too.” It is not known if, as often happened, the alcoholism was rooted in some deeper ailment,10 but the defect was one reason why the Moscow theater director Verstovsky disliked him. Boris Varneke, in a Soviet edition of his book, implied that Mochalov was victimized by the nobility and the theater management, while in its 1914 edition, he had blamed Mochalov’s woes on personal failings.11
Some contemporaries thought Mochalov plebeian, in contrast to Karatygin’s “high” style. He was the darling of nongentry communities in the old capital. His success, like that of many performers, was conditioned by the intersection of his particular talent with the social environment: the growth of merchant audiences and the overheated intellectual-emotional atmosphere of student circles. The Moscow merchantry raved over his tragedies, financed his trip abroad, and closed their shops when he died.12 A student recalled later that he and his fellows found in theater an ennobling and enriching experience that afforded a refuge from the “cold apathy” of the time. Philosophical excitement there was aplenty in classroom and student gatherings; but rational and hard modes of thinking could not satisfy emotional needs. Those were answered by Mochalov’s volcanic force and deep creative powers. Students would buy two tickets on the same night: one to see a new production and one to see a few moments of Mochalov. They would weep and share the actor’s soaring joyful moral victories—especially in Shakespeare. For these young spectators, that actor seemed to possess what they understood as a Russian breadth of spirit.13 Mochalov also enjoyed success on the provincial circuit in no small way because he could speak from the stage in a diction accessible to those audiences.
In contrast, Vasily Karatygin (1802-53), the leading figure in a large dynasty of actors, allegedly personified the very essence of the Petersburg school of acting (fig. 33). The Moscow actor Shchepkin made the oft-quoted observation that “Karatygin is uniform-clad Petersburg, laced up, all buttons buttoned, stepping onto the stage as though on parade.” A giant of a man, Karatygin, after some urging, once did a comic impersonation of Tsar Nicholas in the imperial presence and received from the delighted tsar a case of champagne. As a political conservative, Karatygin moved in high aristocratic circles, but when the Chief of Gendarmes suggested that he insert patriotic and prodynastic touches in his performances, he refused. The tsar apparently liked Karatygin’s performances so much that he refused his request for early release from his contract with the Imperial Theater. According to Buturlin, Nicholas in jest told him that the only transfer he would allow would be into the ranks of the Preobrazhensky Regiment. Lofty patronage did not, however, shield Karatygin from the daily rigors of life backstage. He was imprisoned once by that keen jailer of actors, General Miloradovich; and, like many another, was insulted by his teacher Shakhovskoi. Through his common-law marriage to the temperamental A. M. Kolosova (1802-80), Karatygin got embroiled in feverish rivalries.14
Karatygin debuted in 1820. His brother’s diary entries reveal the extraordinary number of parts that actors had to master. In 1822, at age twenty, the actor handled twenty-nine different roles, most of them major, averaging three to four different characters per week—some of them done twice. The management assumed that once a part was learned, it was fixed forever in the actor’s mind. For Vasily Karatygin, roles in classical and historical national plays came to dominate. A favorite was Belisarius in Eduard Schenk’s historical melodrama of that name dealing with the Byzantine warrior who regained territory in Italy and Africa from the Goths and Vandals in the sixth century. Falsely denounced, the blind veteran was reduced in old age to obscurity and beggary. The moment when one of his former soldiers recognizes Belisarius became the focus of literary and artistic renderings. Referring to Jacques-Louis David’s painting on the subject, Belisarius Receiving Alms (1781), Hugh Honour called it “a poignant lament for the transience of human glory, the helplessness of age, combined with a meditation on moral heroism in adversity.” One can easily imagine what a great actor could do with such a role, particularly at a time when sentimentalism was being so neatly welded to historical motifs.15
The Petersburger’s fame grew out of his lofty roles and his monumental acting style: heroic poses, parade-like posturing, elevated rhetorical delivery. A meticulous craftsman and scholar-actor, Karatygin pored over textual and graphic sources for clues to authenticity. His stylized acting and studied movements found admirers in this age of ballet and opera frenzy. Literary critic Apollon Grigorev offered this colorful metaphor: “Karatygin is an exquisitely planned garden with clean allees, luxurious flowerbeds, and velvety lawns—nature bent to the needs of art, tidied up, neatly clipped, and well groomed. Mochalov is a dense forest: here you have an enormous pine tree, a weeping birch, and the giant oak growing alternately, with interlacing roots and twigs.” Grigorev’s figure is one of many claims that Moscow possessed a special personality that could be embodied in art. A minor culture war broke out among followers of the two actors. In 1833 and 1835, they appeared together on the Moscow stage. One suspiciously schematic review of their performance in Schiller’s Maria Stuart claimed that the upper classes in the audience favored Karatygin, the middle strata were divided, and the lower orders were for Mochalov. The critic Vissarion Belinsky saw Mochalov’s style as more democratic and realistic. Ever the “furious Vissarion,” Belinsky did not limit his views to print: at an 1839 banquet held to celebrate the launching of the journal Repertoire and Pantheon, Belinsky engaged in a shouting match with Bulgarin and Karatygin. But, Buturlin noted in his memoirs, there were no victors in this theatrical war.16
Given the essential differences in the two cities and the fact that Moscow theater life came under imperial auspices fifty years later than St. Petersburg, a special style was bound to develop there. Mikhail Shchepkin (1788-1863), though not a direct participant in the duel with Petersburg, attributed his own success to Moscow audiences. Among other things, he was the most famous serf actor in Russian history and spent seventeen years in servitude working in provincial theater. While still a serf, Shchepkin first revolted against thunderous declamation adorned with gestures and verbal ornamentation. It was actually a nobleman, Porfiry Meshchersky, who introduced Shchepkin to a different style. Upon seeing an 1810 performance of the amateur prince in a Sumarokov play, Shchepkin recalled saying to himself: “he speaks simply, why, just the way everybody speaks. Really, what kind of acting can you call this?” It occurred to him that Meshchersky “wasn't acting, he was living.” Meshchersky had abandoned shrieking tirades and other tools of the traditional kitbag. Though there remains some doubt about his sudden epiphany, Shchepkin came to abhor exaggerated gestures and lengthy recitations with no change in facial expression.17
Though Shchepkin got his freedom and a post at the Moscow Maly Theater in 1822, it took time before he could master the naturalness that he so admired. He advised the soon-to-be-famous Prov Sadovsky never to look into the audience, thus critiquing the whole tradition of bravura performance and the well-entrenched habit of playing to the house rather than to each other. Shchepkin must have realized that, however elevated the content of the performance, such acting could degenerate into a series of orations. He thus went beyond the individualist approaches of Karatygin, Mochalov—whatever their differences—and their predecessors by concerning himself with the whole cast, thus anticipating the ensemble practices that were borrowed from German visitors in the second half of the century and adopted by Stanislavsky at the end of it. Stressing the need to react to one’s fellow actors’ lines, Shchepkin affirmed that “on the stage there is no complete silence.” Though he denied it, his view of acting was “ethnographic” or “physiological” as those terms were used in the era. In 1848, he urged a pupil to “mingle with society as much as time permits; study man en masse.” To another colleague he said ''never learn a role without having read carefully the entire play. In real life, if you want to know some person inside out, you inquire about where he lives, his style of life, his habits, his friends and acquaintances—this is what we must do in our business as well."18
Shchepkin excelled in roles that unveiled the noble qualities and talents of the lower classes. He played the title role in Shakhovskoi’s Aesop the Slave in 1826, a work whose irony is implicit in the subject but which was doubled by the performing artist’s own life as a star risen from the swamp of serfdom. Nikolai Nekrasov celebrated the hard-won dignity of theatrical art in The Actor (1841), a vaudeville with a serious message in which an actor, modeled on Shchepkin, defends his humanity, his talent, and his profession to an ignorant landowner. This little-noted tribute to Shchepkin was an early indication of the intelligentsia’s growing respect for those who worked on the stage, and a challenge to the persisting view of actors as mere clowns and servants. One of Shchepkin’s most memorable creations was the title role in The Sailor (translated from the French). When a seaman returns home from an interminable voyage, he finds his wife married and a daughter grown up. Like Belisarius, he has lost his old identity and no one remembers him. By shedding tears on stage in this role, Shchepkin re-created the kind of pathos and suffering that the Russian audiences found irresistible.19
Shchepkin's work in Moscow turned him into a public figure. He frequented the English Club, Pechkin’s coffee shop, and Moscow University where one of his free relatives taught and where students gathered round him, attended his plays, and brought him to their own rehearsals. Immune to the affliction of alcohol that ruined so many of his colleagues, Shchepkin mingled regularly in intelligentsia circles whose members got drunk more on ideas than on vodka. His friends included Gogol; Sergei Aksakov and his Slavophile sons; and the Westernizers Pavel Annenkov, Timofei Granovsky, Vissarion Belinsky, and Alexander Herzen. The last held a special place in Shchepkin’s life as a confidant and conversationalist, though in the distant exile of London. Although he once actually told Herzen that the serfs did not wish freedom, Shchepkin loathed serfdom, recounted endless stories about its abuses, and rejoiced at its end and at the birth of a profession of free actors who could work with dignity. But he remained a devout monarchist who—despite his early life in bondage—refused to condemn the gentry as a class. In one of his numerous little lectures to fellow actors, he said: ''You must observe all ranks of society without prejudging any of them. Then you will see that there is good and bad everywhere."20
Admirers often attested to Shchepkin’s long-range influence on theater. He personally coached the grateful actress Glikeriya Fedotova (1846-1925)21 and many others. Stanislavsky, born the year Shchepkin died, reveled in the stories he heard about the actor and filled the pages of his memoirs with quotations from Shchepkin’s advice to thespians. Although many actors were noted for their realism before and in Shchepkin’s time, he became the emblem of a new style of acting. Stanislavsky named him as the one who replaced false with inner emotion and thus “the first to introduce simplicity and lifelikeness into the Russian theater.” Stanislavsky came to believe that Shchepkin’s tradition had declined in the late nineteenth century, and he built his own fame on a rejection of his generation’s theater.22 Much of the Soviet scholarship on Shchepkin—and there is very little else—reeks of hagiography that makes him the prophet of Russianness on stage, of realism, and of a democratic and even radical sensibility; a fearless foe of serfdom, aristocracy, and classicism.23 Stressing Shchepkin’s “serious” roles, the literature often ignores his achievements in the lesser forms of farce, vaudeville, and melodrama. Shchepkin’s engagements in the provinces won him many disciples there. He died in Yalta in 1863 while on tour.
The Terror and the Pathos
“In every landowner’s library,” wrote A. N. Grech in a moving obituary of the Russian estate, written in a Soviet prison in 1932, “could be found Racine, Corneille, Molière, Boileau, Fénelon,” along with the Encyclopedists and the Greek and Latin classics.24 The nostalgic exaggeration contained a kernel of truth. The classical tradition could be put to many uses. The “Greek” upbringing of Catherine II’s grandson, Grand Duke Konstantin, was designed to prepare him to ascend the Byzantine throne of Constantine in Istanbul (Tsargrad in Russian) which Catherine hoped to wrest from the Ottoman Turks. The momentary fashion allowed many Russians to blend with blissful eclecticism the eternal Hellenic verities, imperial ambitions in the Balkans, and liberal sympathies for national revolt. But classicism also served a much wider audience and constituted a crucial link to European high culture. Virtually all the arts delved into the ancient past for inspiration: odic poetry, Anacreontic ballets, operas with antique settings, and academic canvases depicting scenes from mythology.25 The classical theatrical repertoire, including Greek, French, and Russian tragedies and comedies, occupied a prominent position in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Drama, “literature that walks,” both reads and “walks” differently from one era to another. In 1800, tragedians still obeyed the codes of Aristotle and Racine: the unities of time, place, and circumstance. The teleological plot followed a long line of exposition, development, variations, crises, complications, and resolutions. As in a Renaissance painting or a classical symphony, the themes, plot, subplots, characters, action, and setting were canonically derived and formally constructed. Condensation, focus, tension, and the heightening and poeticizing of life’s moments prevailed over naturalistic imitation. In the Greek heroic model, “great men of the almost mythical past were ultimately descended from the Olympian gods themselves—are kings, princes, royal leaders in peace and war, proud aristocrats whose life and pleasures were founded on wealth, display, prowess at hunting and fighting, and feasting among their equals.” How marvelous, then, the tragic catharsis induced by the power of fate, the wrath of the gods, and the searing moral conflict between duty and love. Tragic heroes grow strong in defiance and opposition to adversity, however hopeless the struggle; and nobility flows from the muscular and moral exertions of that struggle. In early modern France, neoclassical drama had reached a level of unsurpassed perfection in the works of Racine and Corneille. The styles, rules, and even costumes of French drama captivated elite audiences all over Europe. At the end of the eighteenth century, Goethe and Schiller in Weimar actually struggled against emerging “realist” modes in order to promote stylized acting and high-art drama—especially tragedy. Goethe even used a baton and chalked squares on the rehearsal stage in order to choreograph actors. The plays of the two German authors were thus removed from everyday experience not only in time and place but in presentation.26
For decades, Russian audiences flocked to experience the tragedies of Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, and Metastasio, who at the time were considered virtually equal in artistic merit. Censors and state officials rarely had a problem with classical tragedy. From the very birth of Russian theater in the mid eighteenth century, Russian playwrights such as A. P. Sumarokov (1717-77), M. M. Kheraskov (1733-1807), and Ya. B. Knyazhnin (1740-91) began to practice the art of classical drama. Sumarokov rode the theme of conflict between duty (usually in politics) and emotion (usually in love). He made his plays “remote in time and place as if to emphasize the essential and eternal in human behavior rather than the mere local and picturesque.” In this regard, the aspirations of dramatists paralleled those of eighteenth-century landscape painters who sought through elevated perspective and panoramic scope to raise the viewer to exalted climes. The more daring Knyazhnin, Sumarokov’s son-in-law, though remembered mostly for social satire and the politically charged Vadim, also took on the Virgilian triangle and the epic of the Carthaginian wars in his tragedy Dido (1769), which inspired many later versions, including a lavish 1827 ballet mounted by Didelot.27
At the dawn of Tsar Alexander I’s reign, the sentimentalism that was threading itself into classical tragedy emerged full force in the works of Vladislav Ozerov (1769-1816). His poor Tver provincial gentry family entered him as a child in the Infantry Cadet Corps where he mastered French and acted in amateur productions of Racine. Like so many playwrights of his time, Ozerov served as an officer and then as a civil servant. He still held a general’s rank during his literary triumphs. His retirement years were clouded by waning success as well as personal and mental problems. Ozerov, whom the great twentieth-century poet Osip Mandelshtam lovingly called “the last ray of tragedy’s sunset,” earned the sobriquet “the Russian Racine” in some quarters, even though he shattered the unities and sometimes omitted the mandatory tension between public and private life.28 Ozerov read and rehearsed some of his most important works at the salon of Alexei Olenin, an exceptionally learned man who later headed the Imperial Library and the Academy of Arts. His home on the Moika and his estate at Priyutino hosted artistic celebrities as well as future Decembrists. One of the great incubators of Russian culture, Olenin’s salon brought together Katenin, Kapnist, Gnedich, the fabulist and playwright Ivan Krylov, future education minister Sergei Uvarov, and painter Orest Kiprensky, among others, in an environment where classicism and patriotism fed each other.29
Ozerov's eminence at the time rests almost wholly upon three thematically unrelated tragedies that appeared in the years 1804-7. The first, Oedipus in Athens, came well armed with star power: music by Osip Kozlovsky, decor by Olenin, sets by Gonzago, and the main roles played by Yakovlev, Shusherin, and Semënova whose career was launched in this play. The entire troupe moved to Olenin’s estate to rehearse. As a very free adaptation of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Ozerov’s version vented an emotional immediacy that contrasted with previous classical works. It also made a hopeful political statement. The character of Theseus, the wise and just king of Athens, was seen as embodying liberal ideas of a law-based state that arose with the accession of Tsar Alexander I and the emergence of the reform-minded “unofficial committee,” ideas that the tsar later frittered away. Theseus is made to be a servant of his people rather than a tyrant. Spectators memorized lines from Oedipus and recorded them in that great artifact of sensibility, the album. In the 1830s, regimental officers billeted in the little town of Ostrogozhsk in Voronezh Province were still reciting whole passages from it in high diction. Taras Shevchenko, an art student at the same time, was inspired to make drawings of its scenes. One of Mikhail Buturlin’s talented serf waiters could repeat tirades from Oedipus. On stage it ran until 1809 and in revival from 1816 into the 1850s, belying the notion that audiences only wanted “naturalistic” Russian speech, though Ozerov’s other classically inspired works had little success.30
Ozerov moved easily from neoclassical tragedy to the mists of medieval Scotland in Fingal (1805). The object of an all-European rage, James McPher-son's counterfeit Ossianic legends swept into Russia like a North Sea gale, though without displacing neoclassical drama. In fact the cults of Homer and Ossian reinforced each other, the latter seen as somehow the “northern equivalent of the Greek poet.” F. P. Tolstoy of the Academy of Arts designed two ballets: the Ossianic Golden Harp in 1838 and one on Grecian motifs in 1842.31 Ozerov’s loose adaptation retains the story of Fingal, the poet-soldier—portrayed at its debut by Yakovlev—caught in the cross-hairs of love and hate as he slays the brother of his beloved and then sees her killed by her own father. Jagged caves and raging seas on stage underlined the bleakness of the plot as the action unfolded with the aid of chorus, ballet, and song. Though the play is no longer performed, it resonated at the time, as a recent scholar has convincingly shown, “as a proud statement of Russia’s unique identity and superiority among the brotherhood of northern peoples.”32 One can get a feeling of what the music sounded like to listeners of the time from modern recordings. A monologue of Moine, Fingal’s love, begins with declamation around which the composer Kozlovsky wove dramatic modulations, and concludes with a stormy aria matching the drama. This work in particular underlines the onset of the intimate bond of words and music in nonoperatic drama of the era. And though Kozlovsky’s music is more restrained and lacks the lustrous quality of a later work inspired by Ossian—Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave Overture (1832)—it certainly provided both the blood-and-thunder and the tenderness required by the Ozerov play.33
The third in the Ozerov trilogy, Dmitry Donskoi (1807), brought the action closer to home and made transparent comment on contemporary political issues. Possibly inspired by Orest Kiprensky’s 1805 historical canvas, Dmitry Donskoi and the Battle of Kulikovo, Ozerov’s play, like all Russian historical dramas of this era, gave fanciful treatment to a past event, the exploit of the fourteenth century grand prince, Dmitry “of the Don,” so-called for his alleged victory over the Tatars near that river. Donskoi's “two-thousand-odd hexameters, ”writes a modern critic, ''roll down the page now as they must have rolled out into the audience then, in tedious waves of unoriginal grandiloquence."34 This is arguably true of the text, but not of the 1807 audience who still savored the rich music of declamation. The quasi-historical pomposity was balanced by the principals’ dilemma of love versus duty which, though conventional, was infused with sentiment. In fact, the opening night brought a smash success. This stemmed in no small part from its performance at the time when Russian armies had just suffered a chain of major defeats in the wars of 1805-7 against Napoleon. “More fit to die in battle than bear a shameful peace!,” Dmitry exclaims to his fellow princes. The tragedian Yakovlev’s patriotically inflected utterance of Donskoi’s language elicited a storm of emotion in the house as the audience, transforming the arrogant medieval Tatars into Frenchmen, was energized by the prospect of throwing off a new “Mongol yoke.” Additional patriotic stimulation was provided by Semënova's performance of a Russian folk dance in stylized peasant costume as an encore. Tsar Alexander, not an avid theatergoer, saw Donskoi at the Hermitage and a few nights later at the Bolshoi Stone. After the stunning success of this play, Ozerov became the most popular dramatist of his time. His fresh, warm approach to tragedy and the performance of superb actors brought drama closer to the heart than had Sumarokov and other eighteenth-century tragedy writers.35
The Ozerov triumph belongs in the long list of public expressions of Russian patriotism and dynastic loyalty that broke out on parade grounds and in churches, public squares, and railroad stations, right up to the early years of World War I. It also made a big moment in theater history. Since the theater in Russia was created from above, it took a long time to develop an organic relation between audience and repertoire. Ozerov’s tragedies responded to a national emergency and made what a prerevolutionary theater historian called “a temporary breach in the wall between stage and public,” a moment when the theater resembled an assembly rather than a presentation.36 That “temporary breach” also forged a temporary sense of community in the audience more powerful than that produced by the tears of melodrama, the laughter of comedy, or the shattering trauma and catharsis of classical tragedy.
The credit for Ozerov’s success must be shared by the actors who realized his dramas on stage. Alexei Yakovlev (1773-1817), son of a Kostroma merchant, came as an apprentice to St. Petersburg where he chanced to attend the theater and became obsessed with tragic declamation. Working as a shop clerk in Gostiny Dvor, he would ardently recite lines from current tragedies to his customers. He came to the attention of Dmitrevsky who took him on as a pupil. After debuting in the 1790s, Yakovlev soon broke with his mentor’s style in order to privilege emotion over reason. Though he first made a name in the sentimental role of Meinau in Kotzebue’s melodrama, Misanthropy and Repentance, he performed best in plays of Shakespeare, Ozerov, and the Greeks. Audiences adored Yakovlev’s rich voice, classical costumes, and majestic maneuvers alternating with feverish lurches. Convinced that reserve in the utterance of key lines did not work, he shouted certain passages which brought excitement to the hall and loud applause. This by no means unique habit led critics, Bulgarin among them, to lament Yakovlev’s catering to the majority in the audience at the expense of refinement. Some claimed that, since Russian audiences were dull-witted, Yakovlev got a false impression of his talents from their enthusiastic applause. This was a familiar case of damning an artist on the basis of popularity. Like many actors of his time, Yakovlev was defeated by liquor (and by unrequited love); he declined into melancholy, attempted suicide in 1813, and died a few years later at the age of forty-four.37
Ekaterina Semënova (fig. 34), the most charismatic actress of her time, studied with Dmitrevsky, Shakhovskoi, and N. I. Gnedich (1784-1833) who fell in love with her. She debuted at age seventeen and began doing tragedy in the grand manner. In majestic postures, she presented a classical face and a sculpted figure in Greek tunics and Roman togas and deployed her stately and severe contralto voice in a singsong style of declamation. Semënova's performances, though emotionally spirited, were also rigorously disciplined. Gnedich “scored” her scripts with markings for emotional gestures. When, in Voltaire’s Tancred, she threw herself on the corpse of Tancred as if to rouse him, she recoiled in horror and simply whispered audibly: “He is dead.” The effect on audiences was electrifying; in Moscow spectators involuntarily rose from their seats. One actor recalled her in Medea as she confronted Jason, with her dagger bloodied from the slaughter of her children: “See how your blood—and my blood billows.” Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, a Decembrist and later popular writer, wept over her rendition. Playwrights designed vehicles especially for her, and a close dramatic partnership with the playwright Ozerov brought Semënova to the zenith of success in his tragedies. People recalled the night of November 23, 1804, when Semënova played the role of Antigone in Ozerov’s Oedipus in Athens, transporting herself back to ancient Greece and captivating the audience with a voice, a beauty, an expressiveness, and an emotionalism they had never seen or heard in Russian classical tragedy.38
Semënova engaged in a bizarre challenge at Moscow’s Great Arbat Theater in 1811, an emotionally charged event that paralleled the fateful duel between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I. Semënova's opponent, Mlle. Georges (Marguerite-Josephine Weimer, 1787-1867), had achieved professional renown in Paris opposite Talma in neoclassical plays; and notoriety for her brief liaison with Napoleon, a fact that set society all agog (fig. 35). After her Petersburg debut in Phèdre, she enthralled the Moscow public with her physical attributes, a singsong drawl, and a trick of suddenly modulating the volume and speed of delivery. Since Georges and Semënova were each doing Tancred in their own languages but in different theaters, the idea of a duel came naturally. In Moscow, the two young actresses played identical roles on alternating nights in the works of Racine and Voltaire, including the former’s Phèdre and Andromache and the latter’s Semiramis and Tancred. Factions formed on either side— zhorzhisty versus semenovtsy—and the competition generated bulging box office receipts as well as minor scandals. On a night when the Russian actress was off, a drunk declared himself ready to throw a thousand rubles onto the stage for her presence. The police ejected him and made him sign a promise never to revisit the theater. Mlle. Georges’s adherents conceded no more than a tie, while Semënova's faction claimed victory. Win, lose, or draw, Semënova's star rose ever higher among the theater public. Patriotic Gallophobes supported Semënova in this cultural prelude to the 1812 war. Once back in St. Petersburg Mlle. Georges was booed as a traitor and a spy.39
While most professional observers raved over Semënova, Zhikharëv thought her acting “unnatural.” Sergei Aksakov responded wryly that all of theater was unnatural. Pushkin called Semënova “the sovereign queen of the tragic stage” and Kiprensky immortalized her in a magnificent portrait. The actress’s private persona was not so glittering. Like the Hellenic princesses and European monarchs she portrayed, Semënova offstage proudly donned luxurious raiment and displayed a massive arrogance. She snubbed mere critics such as Zhikharëv and esteemed herself well above titled people. Self-indulgent and capricious, she expected only deference, reveled in scandals, fought with male leads, and ruthlessly persecuted younger actresses. Her thirst for adulation led Semënova to crowd-pleasing tricks such as the folk dance following Ozerov’s Dmitry Donskoi. After her prime, when old and overweight, she often assumed inappropriate roles in comedies or vaudevilles. For this or other reasons, the actress was once called “a shabby old cat” by an audience member. In 1826, an angry Semënova retired under difficult circumstances from the theater but made several comebacks. In old age, she tried to relive her glory by performing at home, in what Buturlin called “archaeological dramatics,” excerpts from Ozerov’s Oedipus. To Buturlin, born of another generation, the declamation and gesticulation seemed affected. She died in 1849.40
Soviet critics long vacillated between admiration for the grand style of Russian classical theater and suspicion about its motivations. Since it was no great trick to learn from classical tragedy lessons about (among other things) the virtues of patriotism, enlightened monarchy, and class distinctions, one Soviet writer claimed that “the struggle against classical method was transformed into a struggle for the freedom of mankind.” Yet opponents of serfdom and absolutism also drank deeply from the well of classicism. During this era, Decembrists and those near them began writing their own “freedom plays”: Katenin’s Andromachus (1809-19, staged 1827); Fëdor Glinka’s Velzen, or Holland Liberated (1808), on tyranny (Napoleon's, not Tsar Alexander’s); and Wilhelm Küchelbecker's Argivyane (1820), on tyrannicide. Katenin translated Corneille’s antityrannical Cinna. Few of these plays were performed. Future Decembrists read, studied, translated, and discussed works on ancient Greeks and Romans, focusing on the themes of tyrannicide, national spirit, noble sacrifice, heroic deeds, and the evils of slavery. Kondraty Ryleev and Alexander Bestuzhev memorized the Brutus speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—Ryleev was later hanged and Bestuzhev and Küchelbecker exiled after the failed revolt in 1825. Yakushkin read the same speech to his friends. Cicero, Tacitus, and Polybius were scanned for suggestive ideas. It may well be that the very style of declamation in which these works were recited in the secrecy of political salons itself reinforced, by its pathos, the passions of opposition. There can be no doubt that the ideological polarities nourished by the Decembrists, made famous in the essay by Yury Lotman, were reinforced by their readings.41
Imported tragedy continued to grace the stages of Russia more or less regularly up to 1825 and then afterwards on a reduced scale. Russian hatred of Napoleon generated only a temporary hostility to French culture, and after 1815, it dissipated rapidly. It may seem odd to modern readers that the neoclassical idiom held on so long. As is well known, styles imported from Europe into Russia tended to become fetishized and often persisted long after they had disappeared in their place of origin. One must not underestimate the genuine admiration of audiences for the classical forms and their lofty ideals, the beauty of the versified language, the majestic delivery. Like the eighteenth-century French aristocracy, who prized characters of high station and birth and the style noble, 42 the Russian elite continued to prefer good tone and grandiloquent protagonists on stage rather than shopkeepers from Gostiny Dvor. The classical idiom, though almost wholly removed from the ordinary, in its own time entranced audiences, partly because the actors adhered to the canon and partly because they modified it. Even when the classics thinned out on the stage, reverence for them persisted in areas of everyday life. It was not only embryonic Decembrists who recited lines from the ancients or the French masters. The sheer elegance and majesty of Racine and Corneille were taken as the last word in refinement; aristocratic girls of the Smolny Institute and other finishing schools were still required to recite these masters in the 1850s.43
Nevertheless, a variety of forces eroded the power of classicism, Russian and foreign, in art and in theater, in form and in content. Neoclassical tragedy requires an accumulation of intensive emotional experience built up to a climax, involving an admirable and noble protagonist with a fatal flaw. The core of tragedy is what happens to the mind, not the body; in Aristotle’s view, it is this that arouses the deepest pity and terror. After a lengthy sojourn in these depths and heights, much of the Russian public seems to have lost interest. The art itself had become infused with “alien” elements long before it passed into secondary significance. And the rules that had once been laid down for good esthetic reasons, when applied to lesser works, acted like a boa constrictor, crushing the life out of theater; and the tighter they squeezed, the greater the suffering of the victim. The upsurge of interest in Schiller and Shakespeare and new dramatic styles contributed to the process. Sentimentalist, romantic, melodramatic, Gothic, Byronic, and historical plays (a la Walter Scott) rendered forms and styles of “tragedy” so diverse as to make taxonomy almost meaningless.44 A contemporary student witnessed in 1830 what he called the “death of classicism” at the dissertation defense of Nikolai Nadezhdin, one of whose opponents was an advocate of classicism, Professor Alexei Merzlyakov. The student reported that he and his fellows in attendance supported Nadezhdin and romanticism but admired his opponent and witnessed how classicism died a brave and noble death.45
Theater of War
In a censorial culture like that of Imperial Russia, historical fiction about the country on stage or page virtually had to have a patriotic subtext, particularly if it reflected recent history or current events. In the eighteenth century, Sumarokov, Knyazhnin, and others had wrestled with semimythical Kievan themes, but plays set a thousand years ago could not generate much euphoric patriotism. The full tide of historico-patriotic drama broke onto the Russian stage only at the dawn of the nineteenth century: a decade of using history to face Napoleon; the ephemeral typhoon of 1812 chauvinism; and the longer-lasting swell in the reign of Nicholas I. In the Napoleonic era, Ozerov’s successful use in Donskoi of the old trick of seeing today’s events through the eyes of yesterday’s was only one of many examples. Catchphrases about the Tatar or Polish menace sent audiences into raptures of bellicosity towards the current enemy, France, and loosed a paroxysm of applause whose real object was the Russian army and the tsar. Actors often had to wait out the clapping before resuming.46
From the battle of Austerlitz in 1805 to the victory celebrations of 1815, Russians cultivated a keen interest in the liberation of Moscow from the Poles in 1613 and other episodes of the Time of Troubles (1605-13). Ivan Martos’s monument in Red Square to the heroes of that struggle, Minin and Pozharsky, was begun in 1807. Earlier stage treatments paled in comparison to the flood that began with Pozharsky (1807) by Matvei Kryukovsky, an infantry officer who followed hot on the heels of Ozerov. Prince Pozharsky, acted by Yakovlev, dominates the play; Kuzma Minin, the Nizhny Novgorod butcher who raised money and troops to liberate Moscow and who actually chose Pozharsky as commander, has only six brief lines. The tumultuous reception of Pozharsky, which won a “bloodless victory” on the scenic front, set off a fad that continued with Sergei Glinka’s drama Minin (1811); Degtarëv's oratorio of the same year, Minin and Pozharsky, or the Liberation of Moscow; and the Shakhovskoi-Cavos opera Ivan Susanin (1815).47
The capstone of the public-spirited mood came in 1815 in Cavos’s 1815 opera, Ivan Susanin. In an age of raging patriotism, it was almost inevitable that someone would dredge up the semifictitious story of Ivan Susanin, the Russian peasant who allegedly saved the newly elected tsar, Mikhail Romanov, from the Polish invaders in 1613 during the Time of Troubles. According to legend, Susanin diverted the Poles deep into the forests of Kostroma, for which ruse they tortured him to death. Cavos and Shakhovskoi were inspired by a work of Sergei Glinka, a man of extreme anti-Napoleonic impulses. Cavos wove Russian folk melodies into the Cherubiniesque score and Shakhovskoi invented a happy ending. Just as the torture and execution by the Polish invaders of the Susanin family is to begin, Russian Cossacks arrive to save them. It was a colossal success.48 Two decades later Glinka would revisit this legend with much superior music and the original tragic ending, creating what is generally considered Russia’s first national opera.
As in Britain where the exploits of Nelson and Wellington were made into spectacles, Russian theater put news events on stage. In 1812, patriotism began to unroll in intermezzos, divertissements, ballets, and folk singing woven around military engagements, partisan raids, bivouacs, and triumphal celebrations. The best remembered of the war-related productions was Stepan Viskovatov’s (Viskovaty, 1786-1831) Universal Militia, performed together with a ballet, Love for the Fatherland (music of Cavos), on August 30, 1812, over a month after the French invasion. The peasants in this drama have graduated from comic buffoons and idyllic shepherds to serious Russian patriots. When a village feast is interrupted by news of war, all the lads enlist and the older peasants donate their savings. For additional poignancy, the long-retired icon, Ivan Dmitrevsky, made a cameo appearance. Playing an aged war hero now unfit for campaigning, he donates his medals to the war effort, a gesture that unlocked a frenzy of weeping and clapping. At one performance, a spectator tossed his purse on stage and shouted “here, take my last seventy-five rubles.” On the morning after the performance a large number of spectators enlisted.49 This dramaturgical recruiting device suggested that everyone would serve—one of the many mystifications of that war. In fact, the militia formed in 1807 as temporary units evoked suspicion and unrest not only among landowners, but among some peasants who feared it would turn into regular twenty-five-year military service and argued among themselves as to who would be drafted into it. Needless to say, those from the upper echelons of society made their own decisions as to whether or not to serve.
The city of Moscow was understandably even more exercised by the war since it was taken into its very heart. After the Battle of Borodino, the commander in chief of the Russian forces, General Mikhail Kutuzov, decided to sacrifice the ancient capital. “By preserving Moscow,” he said, “we do not preserve Russia.” The unplanned fires that consumed the city were probably the work of released convicts who turned to looting and arson; nobles who torched their homes; and government agents. The fire destroyed half to two-thirds of the city. Russians blamed the French; the French executed alleged patriotic arsonists. The governor of Moscow, Fëdor Rostopchin, actually bragged about his role in the fire when traveling abroad but denied it at home. The governor’s role in 1812 was far more significant that any alleged arson. In the view of a recent historian, the period 1807-12, so fraught with tension and confusion, allowed Rostopchin for a time to clarify and resolve the confusion by means of vulgar demotic patriotism—cultural acts, performances, and widespread writings expressing violent xenophobic emotions set in a popular idiom. He was backed by the tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna. Like many in the elite, she spoke Russian badly and, to compensate, made a mad dash to abandon everything French and to “Russianize” herself.50
All this jingoistic show paralleled and reinforced an unprecedented assault on French ways and their Russian emulators in everyday life; and a corresponding exaltation of things Russian. While the Russian army was defeating the monster military power of Europe, Russians at home jeered French actors, boycotted their theaters, and mocked Gallomanes on stage with raucous public laughter. The Napoleonic invasion set off identity crises among many nobles who “discovered” suddenly that their Russianness was paper thin. They hastened to polish up their spoken Russian, don traditional costumes, and learn folk dances. Gentry women in Penza ceased speaking French and wore peasant sarafans and conical hats. Elsewhere men shifted from French tobacco to Russian rough-cut majorca and from champagne to cabbage soup. Theater and other arts drew inspiration from the deep wells of native history and folkways. The rustic figures on stage who had once been laughed at for their bumptiousness seemed for a time to represent the true spirit and soul of the land. Patriotic shows made many Russians self-consciously happy to be Russian.51
The wartime Gallophobia created a temporary and superficial national moment, not the beginning of a community of national spirit of the sort engendered and fed by the wars, rituals, and festivals of the French Revolution. No mass popular nationalism erupted during the struggle. Peasants made war on the battlefield under noble officers. Behind the lines, they fought French looters in the name of survival and vengeance and punished them the way they did horse thieves in peacetime—live burial, roasting, dismemberment. Civilian peasants were armed only as a last resort, after Moscow was occupied. The Moscow population evinced no ideological motivation in their untrammeled looting which paralleled that of the invaders.52 The re-Russianization of the privileged and Europeanized classes in 1812, skin-deep at best, soon began to diminish and the outburst of wartime patriotism failed to reach the level of either Uvarov’s Official Nationalism or the Slavophiles’ demophilia. The deepest longings for a “national awakening” aroused by the war, those of the Decembrists, were at odds with official patriotism and thus never on public display. French cultural influence revived and continued long after the fighting stopped. Satirical swipes at imported ways and mores also continued but with no more venom than those of the eighteenth century.
In the decades after the victory over Napoleon, war drama traveled full circle back to the representation of Russia’s past wars as national inspiration. It reached fruition in the reign of Tsar Nicholas I in a series of mediocre historical pastiches, the dramatic rendering of the ideology of Official Nationalism; and in Russia’s first genuine national operas. Two principal forces behind the new nationalist wave were members of the Brotherhood: Kukolnik and Glinka. Nestor Kukolnik (1809-68), though born in Russia, was the son of one of many Carpathian Rus teachers recruited into Russian service in the early nineteenth century (fig. 36). The family became thoroughly Russianized and Orthodox. Nestor’s father, V. G. Kukolnik (b. 1765), an avid monarchist, served the state in several capacities: at the German theater in the 1810s; on the General Staff; as a civil servant; and as a professor of law and philosophy. One of his pupils in home study, the future Tsar Nicholas I, recalled him as one of “the most insupportable pedants imaginable.” In a family steeped in history, literature, and languages, Nestor as a child played Don Quixote in a family performance. He graduated from Gogol’s alma mater, the Nezhin Gymnasium, taught in Vilna, worked in state service and as a Polish translator. In St. Petersburg Kukolnik became associated with several thick journals and during the years of the Brotherhood wrote scenes for Glinka’s Ivan Susanin.53
In 1833, at age twenty-four, Kukolnik began his drama career with a big hit, Torquato Tasso. He was compared by some to Goethe and Byron, though modern critics call the play historical hash and cringe at its verbosity. His triumph was even greater with The Hand of the Almighty Has Saved the Fatherland, a play about the Time of Troubles which premiered in 1834 at the Alexandrinsky, with Karatygin in a major role. Benckendorff helped sponsor it and the tsar himself added a few touches at his desk in the Winter Palace. The title is a quotation from Ozerov’s Dmitry Donskoi, thus linking the liberation from the Tatar Yoke with liberation from the “Polish Yoke.” The main theme shining through the hazy historical spectacle is the relationship between leaders and people. In the opening scene, two citizens of Nizhny Novgorod discuss the news and set the story of the Polish army on the move. With the entry of Minin, who is gruff, manly, and therefore quintessentially “Russian,” loyalty to the Romanov dynasty takes center stage. Critics then and later read this as hardly more than an excretion of conservative monarchism and chauvinistic nationalism, both projecting and reflecting the love of “true Russian people” for Tsar Nicholas I and a reminder that the recently suppressed Poles were a long-time danger to Russia.54
Like many plays of this era, The Hand is a colossal bore to read, and yet made a vivid impression on audiences. A Stalin-era critic saw it as mere pandering to the feelings of the “Russian conservative bourgeoisie,” and sneeringly noted its great “success among the Apraxin and Gostiny Dvor [merchant] public”—a standard way for both nineteenth-century and Soviet literati to insult a work. Yet the merchants of those establishments showed enthusiasm for many different genres at the Alexandrinsky Theater—their “home stage.” The Hand was an immediate favorite of the tsar who ordered an upgrading of the production and a command performance on February 18, 1834 after which the author was received into the imperial presence. Royal favor was so palpable that when Nikolai Polevoi attacked the play in his Moscow Telegraph, that journal was promptly closed. Kukolnik’s work—and subsequent ones as well—really was the dramatic expression of Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov’s notorious but hardly original triune doctrine of Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Narodnost that was being circulated at just that moment. If, as Richard Wortman rightly says, Lvov’s “God Save the Tsar” was the nation’s new hymn and Glinka’s Ivan Susanin (later A Life for the Tsar) its national opera, then Kukolnik’s Hand was surely its national drama. Indeed, so closely was it associated with the dynasty that in 1866, in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt against Nicholas’s son, Alexander II, the play was revived by official order so as to arouse patriotic feeling.55
The extraordinarily prolific Kukolnik’s other patriotic plays took up similar themes. Prince Skopin-Shuisky (1835) brings us once again back to the turbulent years of the early seventeenth century. According to legend, one of the powerful wives at the Moscow court assassinated the popular hero Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky in 1611. In Kukolnik’s play, his avenger Prokopy Lyapunov forces her to drink from the same poisoned cup. This alone guaranteed public success and the thunderously delivered poisoner’s line, ''Drink under the knife of Prokop[y] Lyapunov! Drink under the anathema of the Holy Tsardom!" was especially savored by provincial actors.56 Kukolnik’s 1841 Prince Kholmsky dealt with a fifteenth-century Novgorod heresy known as the Judaizers. Kukolnik moved the action to Pskov and added a dubious love triangle involving a Russian prince, a Teutonic baroness, and a Jewish maiden. The incidental music to Kholmsky by Glinka includes a very busy declamatory overture with a graceful coda, a marche funèbre that rolls into maestoso, a pastorale alternating with the sound of menace, a triumphal piece dotted with timpani, and lots of Sturm und Drang—much of it resonating with the music of Weber, Schumann, and Beethoven (especially the Coriolanus Overture and the Egmont music), lightened by the funny rhythmic style of Rossini. This unfortunately neglected music is far more memorable than the vehicle it was written for, but it did not save Kholmsky, which was taken off the boards after three performances.57
Kukolnik has always had a bad press among the intelligentsia and fellow writers. His play on the life of Jacopo Sannazaro—poet of the arcadian movement of the 1490s and celebrant of pastures, shepherds, nymphs and satyrs—was considered the height of bad taste. Dostoevsky’s despicable violinist in “Netochka Nezvanova” admired this particular play; and Turgenev, in Zapiski okhotnika, equated its admirers to people lacking discernment in art. In 1847 Kukolnik abruptly departed the St. Petersburg literary scene and worked for ten years as a supply agent for the army in south Russia from Bessarabia to the Caucasus. After a brief return to Petersburg, he went south again—this time to Taganrog where he stayed mostly until his death in 1868. What little he wrote in these years concerned local patriotism and the promotion of railways. Like other dreamers—such as Fëdor Chizhov and the French Saint-Simonian Père Enfantin—Kukolnik apparently saw national salvation in the vistas of the iron road. Long gone were the heady days of the Brotherhood. Kukolnik outlived Glinka and Bryullov but unlike them was forgotten. The dramatist’s near complete desertion of his former career in letters may seem odd. Possibly he realized his talent had dried up or that his moment had passed. As one dedicated to the monarch, Kukolnik seems to have had no regrets serving in a capacity somewhat less exciting than that of a famous playwright.58
Inspired by his friend Kukolnik’s success in the early 1830s, Mikhail Glinka took up the theme of Ivan Susanin. The composer claimed to have heard the story as a child, and Soviet scholars held that he was inspired by the Decembrist Ryleev’s piece about Ivan Susanin. But it was the romantic poet Zhukovsky, tutor to the heir apparent and a powerful figure at court, who gave Glinka the theme and insisted on the tragic ending as “the apotheosis of love for the fatherland.” A minor poet, Baron Egor Rosen (Rozen), personal secretary to Tsarevich Alexander, wrote most of the libretto. In Susanin, Glinka illustrated musically the national and cultural polarity of the opposing forces. Russian solidarity and popular will resound in the chorus; and tender familial values are rendered in the folk-like arias sung in Susanin’s modest peasant cabin. In contrast, a gala ball held at the castle of King Sigismund II of Poland depicts the would-be conquerors of Russia, arrayed in baroque costumes, as arrogant and effete courtiers dancing the polonaise, mazurka, krakowiak, and an anachronistic waltz. The same music is transposed into the sound of evil menace as the Polish invaders approach Susanin’s village and shatter the tranquility of its life. In the finale, after Susanin is put to death, a triumphant chorus with words by Zhukovsky—the “Slavsya”—is sung to mark the ultimate victory over the Poles and the ascension to the Muscovite throne of Mikhail Romanov. It became Russia’s national anthem for a few years under Boris Yeltsin over a century and a half later.59
Cavos, conceding Glinka’s version to be superior to his own, conducted the premiere of Ivan Susanin on November 27, 1836, at the opening of the rebuilt Petersburg Bolshoi Theater. During the flamboyant scenes at Sigismund’s castle, the audience remained silent, perhaps reflecting hostility to the Poles after the recent uprising of 1830-31. Some sources say that aristocrats scorned Glinka’s use of folk tunes and called his work “coachman's music”—an epithet he allegedly accepted by saying that coachmen were more useful than lords.60 True or not, the incident has been oversold as proof of Glinka’s “democratic” character. Susanin's triumph is not in doubt: salons buzzed about it for days, ballroom orchestras played its dances, and its songs made their way into homes and even the streets. Odoevsky wrote a week or so after the performance that “this is the dawn of a new age in the history of the arts—the age of Russian music.” Intelligentsia and literary circles divided: Belinsky and Gogol admired the opera, Herzen and Stasov did not. The Slavophile Khomyakov applauded Glinka’s national spirit.61 The delighted tsar requested the opera be renamed A Life for the Tsar.62 Soviet scholars complained that this made it an apology for chauvinistic Official Nationalism against the composer’s intentions which were grounded in sincere popular patriotism. Glinka’s “patriotism” eludes simple categories. Whereas his friend Kukolnik personified Official Nationalism, Glinka blew hot and cold on his own country, depending on how it was receiving his works. But A Life for the Tsar clearly constituted the expressive peak of national and dynastic mythology in this era. Glinka added to Orthodoxy and Autocracy a strong element of Narodnost, with its overtones of popular monarchy, through the glorification of Susanin, the first large-as-life tragic peasant hero.63 This troubled Glinka’s liberal admirers and so disturbed the Soviet establishment that editors were ordered to rewrite the scenario and to change the title back to Ivan Susanin, under which name it remained a permanent part of the Soviet opera repertoire.
Rivaling both Glinka and Kukolnik in the esteem of the tsar, Nikolai Polevoi (1796-1846) became the king of dynastic flattery on stage. He grew up in a wealthy merchant family of Irkutsk. At fourteen, he was struck by a performance of Kotzebue’s plays at the Makarev Fair near Nizhny Novgorod. In 1825, Polevoi became editor of the Moscow Telegraph. Count Uvarov’s closure of the journal in 1834, allegedly for an attack on Kukolnik’s Hand, was an excuse to silence Polevoi, then deemed a dangerous revolutionary. After this episode, Polevoi turned rightward in politics and stageward in writing, and proved even more prolific than Kukolnik: some forty plays in the next dozen years. Like Kukolnik, Polevoi did better with the public than with the critics. If the claim by a modern scholar is correct that all of them were staged and garnered great popular response, Polevoi would have been the most popular dramatist of the time.64 He also gained the approval of the throne, once the Telegraph affair had blown over.
Nicholas I especially admired Polevoi’s Grandfather of the Russian Fleet (1838), the tale of a real-life Dutch gunner and shipbuilder of Peter I, Carsten Brandt (d. 1693). In the play, Brandt recalls in folkloric tones his clash with Stenka Razin’s bandits on the Caspian Sea, intrigues against him, and his arrest on false grounds and descent into poverty and obscurity. At the end, Brandt, a model of the work ethic, is “rediscovered,” honored, and rewarded by Tsar Peter, at which point the old shipbuilder predicts greatness for Russia under Peter and his successors. The premiere in 1838 won loud applause. Polevoi’s own favorite, Parasha the Siberian (1840), with music by Verstovsky, is another mawkish retelling of a tale based on a real event, this one about a poor girl who walks from Siberia to plead successfully with Tsar Alexander I for the release of her father who has been exiled for a minor offence. The prototype, Praskovya Lupalova, had won release for her father from the tsar and had inspired sentimental treatments by Marie de Cottin and by Xavier de Maistre (in La jeune sibérienne, 1825) who had known the real Parasha in St. Petersburg. The “action” of the play—mostly long-winded speeches—takes place in Moscow but its highlight is Parasha’s simple and naive farewell speech as she sets off on her mission. At the end, her dying father comes back to life as his daughter brings the news of his pardon. Both these plays, combining Biedermeier sentiment with historical pastiche, exalt a benevolent offstage Russian monarch concerned about characters who are both suffering in some way and totally loyal to him—thus reinforcing both the traditional “popular monarchy” of the peasantry and the doctrine of Official Nationalism. Herzen saw Parasha as an example of Polevoi’s decline from civic virtue. Soviet scholars usually argued that Polevoi colluded in the imposition of a repertoire that exalted dynastic values.65
These verdicts need some qualification. It is true that of the five most frequently performed Polevoi plays at the Imperial Theaters in 1837-55, three promonarchist works— Parasha with 65 performances, Grandfather with 51, and Igolkin, Merchant of Novgorod (1839) with 42—stood near the top. The others were Ugolino (1838) at 49, and Polevoi’s 1837 translation of Hamlet (which was more Polevoi than Shakespeare) at 79. Hamlet—played by Mochalov in Moscow and Karatygin in Petersburg—topped the list of favorites and could easily be read as a warning against tyrannical and treacherous monarchs. Ugolino (1838), Polevoi’s contribution to Gothic, was a thirteenth-century bloodbath drawn from a Dante theme with real historical characters.66 Polevoi, like Kukolnik, certainly glorified the regime and won huge acclaim from the public as well as from actors who found in his lines an opportunity to use classical declamation. The “good monarchs of the eighteenth-century Russian stage” had grown into omnipotent and benign interveners in Russian life throughout history and into the present. But Polevoi did not simply imitate Official Nationalism. A subtheme in his work was the merchantry’s support of the monarchy, as reflected in Igolkin. Although the author had given up his early radicalism, he continued a struggle against the aristocracy in the name of a Narodnost that was not that of the peasantry but of the class from which he had sprung, the authentic bearers of Russian culture. In his 1832 speech to commercial students predicting a glorious future for the merchant estate and in his merchant-based plays, Polevoi fashioned a key link between the Moscow merchantry and the Russian stage.67
Many of the historical dramas of this era centered around violent conflict—invasion, occupation, resistance, and a bloody dénouement. Much of this was fueled by the immense popularity of the historical novel—both the imported ones of Scott and the native ones of Mikhail Zagoskin, especially Yury Miloslavsky (1829), a blood-and-thunder tale of the Time of Troubles. An extreme example of theatrical chauvinism was The Death of Lyapunov by Stepan Gedeonov (1816 or 1818-1878), son of the director of the theater system. Staged at the Alexandrinsky and later in Moscow and in the provinces, it featured the historical figure Prokopy Lyapunov. The young radical Alexander Herzen at its 1845 premiere heard the bloodthirsty speech of the protagonist about the pleasure he would take in spilling Polish blood (this was only a decade and a half after the most recent spilling of that blood). Herzen claimed that the entire audience shared his revulsion.68 To a liberal like Herzen, identifying the Russian national spirit with warfare and the belligerent sentiment it nourished denied the humanitarian sensibility of the Russian people. But one must finally ask how effective any of these post-Napoleonic works were in generating patriotic feelings, national identity, or monarchical loyalty. Pathos on stage does not always produce the intended effect. A half-century after this period, lower-class audiences in People’s Theaters were heard snickering at emotional scenes on stage.69
The Time of Troubles as a historical event interested Slavophiles and Official Nationalists. For the former, the great heroic episode reinforced their reverence for the pre-Petrine past; for the latter, it ushered in their much-beloved Romanov dynasty. The period also provided a storehouse of rumors, legends, and stories that dramatists could work up. But why did the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 not catch on in theater and fiction as the great historical epos of national struggle and moral victory? One can easily imagine how much ideological capital patriotic writers could amass for the regime (and fame for themselves) by addressing this war, one that remained vividly in public memory. And yet, after the brief flurry of triumphalism in 1812-15, that theme virtually disappeared from the stage. And not only from the stage: Zagoskin’s monumentally popular 1613 novel was followed by a disappointing reception of Roslavev (1830), which dealt with 1812.70
If the Poles and the French were twinned as primordial enemies of Russia in a mythologized web of ideology, the Jews of the Russian Empire were constructed in drama as a people worthy of casual contempt in time of peace and of alarm in wartime. Censorship policy actually prohibited the representation of the Russian empire’s Jews as people with decent moral principles. This was balanced occasionally by the staging of sympathetic or at least complex figures in Merchant of Venice, Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Scott’s Ivanhoe, Richard Cumberland’s The Jew (a tract for toleration), Halévy's opera La juive, and a dramatic version of Scribe’s libretto for that opera. Shchepkin, who played a nasty Jewish character in the provinces for its comic richness, also chose for his Moscow benefit performances Shylock and Sheva. The latter is Cumberland’s good-hearted Jew, a “virtuous miser” who gives to the needy. The buffoon image of Russian Jews dominated, as in Pëtr Grigorev’s Postal Driver, which took the stage at the Alexandrinsky and the Maly in the 1840s and 1850s; and in Nikolai Khmelnitsky’s Quarantine (1820), a border intrigue in which Movsha, whose only strength is his “army of ducats,” gleefully confesses his essential nature as a money grubber.71 Kukolnik assigned a more insidious role to the Jews in Kholmsky where he tied Jewish greed to crime and treason, though even here the character of Rachel, a young Jewish woman smitten with a Russian prince, was drawn with sympathy. In the stage version of Gogol’s Taras Bulba (mounted in 1852-53), audiences saw Jews acting as spies who betray the Cossacks,72 —an eerie foreshadowing of the real thing acted out in Poland and the Pale in 1915 when the Jews, as “enemy aliens,” were subject to Cossack pogroms. It is worth noting that in 1860 the censors about-faced and began prohibiting Judeophobic works on stage, a position that quickly became a dead letter.
Innocence and Evil in Faraway Places
One evening at his home in the 1820s, theater director Fëdor Kokoshkin held a theatrical duel involving himself reciting from Corneille’s Cinna and Mochalov from Victor Ducange’s Thirty Years in order to illustrate the difference between classical drama and melodrama. The Ducange was more immediately effective; the Corneille left a deeper mark of power, majesty, and honesty. Melodrama, like historical drama, profited from the decline of classical tragedy and helped displace it. Although classicism long resisted the barbs aimed at it, those barbs were numerous. In France, Beaumarchais in the eighteenth century had asked: “What possible interest could I take in the death of a Peloponnesian tyrant? or in the sacrifice of a young princess in Aulis?” Not much later, the Russian playwright and actor Plavilshchikov echoed the sentiment: “Of what use is it to a Russian that some Tatar Chinggis Khan was the conqueror of China and performed many good deeds there? Why do we need to see some Dido languishing for love of Aeneas and Iarbas possessed by jealousy?”73 As if in response to these remarks, Russian historical plays brought the story to “here”; and the contemporary domestic melodrama brought it to “now.” Although melodramas of effect (or action) were popular in Russia, melodramas of affect (or emotion) had a greater impact upon theater tastes, especially for women, and on acting styles. The most popular were the imported works of Kotzebue, Ducange, and Caigniez.
The king of European melodrama, August Kotzebue (1761-1819) is remembered almost exclusively as the victim of a student assassination in 1819 which set off a wave of reactionary decrees in the Germanies. During a sojourn in Russia, Kotzebue had been exiled to Siberia on false charges by the Emperor Paul. Upon release, his anti-Napoleonic writings under Alexander I won him a high rank in Russian service and the role of an adviser to the tsar on German affairs—one reason for his murder by the inflamed Karl Sand. Pushkin’s 1823 poem The Dagger celebrated Sand’s deed as a blow for freedom and was widely circulated among younger officers. To the broad Russian public, Kotzebue had a wholly different resonance. The author of about 230 plays, Kotzebue became for a while a European cultural phenomenon. His plays were translated into a dozen languages, gained wide acceptance in Europe and America, and made up almost half the pieces performed in Petersburg and Moscow in the years 1800-1820. The appeal of Kotzebue’s works lay in their stageability, spectacle, immediacy of sentiment, and a sense of empowerment and agency that was almost absent in the neoclassical genre based on Greek models where the gods were in charge. Kotzebue’s success arose partly from the exotic settings in South America, the Near East, on the high seas. Audiences gaped at the animated impersonations of pirates, Gypsies, slaves, Peruvian Indians, uprooted Asians, rebels, impoverished nobles, and misused women—to say nothing of kings, sultans, and pseudohistorical figures attired in colorful costumes and backed by elaborate sets. Interwoven into the spectacle was the open expression of “naturalistic” feeling, with an occasional hint of sex, and a down-to-earth sentimentalism. The socially expanding Russian audiences could readily identify with his works.74
Kotzebue's Misanthropy and Repentance (1788) became his greatest success in Russia. This lachrymose piece, devoid of violence or villains, offered emotional turbulence when an errant wife repents to her husband and is forgiven. Baron Meinau, the male protagonist, has spent years of bitter hatred of self and of the human race due to her infidelity. Kotzebue presents an affecting dramatic treatment of the protagonists’ desolation. The icy Meinau is the hard man with a soft heart; his wife Eulalia, whose “heart bleeds and [whose] tears flow” at her fate, is endowed with kindness, charity, and chaste modesty. Their reunion is contrived and in the final moment of the play, after extended speechifying suspense, the afflicted couple are reconciled in the presence of their children.75 During Kotzebue’s Russian sojourn, Tsar Paul was deeply touched by a French production of Misanthropy and Repentance at the Hermitage Theater. Kotzebue’s popularity thereafter grew apace. By 1806, he was filling theaters in Petersburg, and being presented on Russian provincial stages and in serf theaters and amateur productions; dozens of his plays were translated into Russian. Misanthropy and Repentance led the pack. Audiences and theater entrepreneurs adored it and certain actors found in it a natural vehicle for their talents. At Kazan University, Sergei Aksakov played the role of Meinau in amateur student theater, and some of the most eminent professionals—Yakovlev, Alexandra Karatygina, and Mochalov—made their mark in this play.76
Not everyone shared audiences’ admiration. The Decembrist Wilhelm Küchelbecker (V. K. Kyukhelbekker), for example, not only detested the “sentimental-German” drama of Kotzebue, but scorned “the ladies of the Zamoskvorechie District [of merchant Moscow]” who raved about him. Quite a different verdict was offered on the playwright and his public by Rafail Zotov, the dramatist and spokesman for the seatless parterre. He wrote that “our audiences were raised on exclamations, shouts, and turgid phrases. But as soon as they were shown a domestic environment, the joys and sorrows of ordinary life, as soon as they saw verisimilitude and naturalness, as soon as they heard the voice of natural feelings—they joyfully jumped off the high horse of Sumarokov [the eighteenth-century classical dramatist] and with all their hearts attached themselves to the plays of Kotzebue.”77
The melodramas of Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844), the “father of French melodrama,” and his Parisian rivals, L.-C. Caigniez and Victor Ducange, flooded into Russia in the 1810s and 1820s. Petersburg and Moscow repertoires in the years 1813-25 featured ten melodramas of Pixérécourt, four of Caigniez, and several of Ducange, including Theresa, or the Orphan of Geneva, which by then had already played around the world. Its heroine, a young orphan adopted by a noble family in the Swiss Alps, is actually of noble birth, but has been fraudulently denied her birthright by the villain. In a contrived accident, the villain murders Theresa’s protector. When confronted in court by the live Theresa who he thinks is dead, the villain is frightened into confessing his crimes; the orphan is absolved, inherits her rightful fortune, and marries her young lover. This silly and suspenseful piece electrified audiences even in the exalted interior of the Imperial Theater. The sound effects and music marked in the margins of a Moscow copy of the script indicate that the dramatic tension could be further heightened by aural effects. Since actors on the imperial stage had to play roles assigned to them, the Petersburg audience could watch seasoned classical players acting out the shenanigans of melodrama. The classical star Ekaterina Semënova played the murdered woman, with her sister Nimfodora as Theresa and the noted tragedian Bryansky as the villain. The play ran for at least three decades in the capital and in provincial theaters from the Volga to the fairgrounds of Ukraine. Theresa possesses neither psychological depth nor social message. Yet audiences who could delight in the “pity and terror” of tragedy, also wanted agency, action, spectacle, and thrill. A murder plot twisted around the fate of a victimized young woman answered the desire to perfection.78
The legend of the “thieving magpie,” of obscure origin, was fashioned into a French melodrama in 1815 as La pie voleuse. The plot involves a young maidservant accused of having stolen her mistress’s silver plate which has actually been pilfered by a magpie attracted by its glitter. By chance the maid has quite recently sold one of her own plates in order to help her elderly father, an army deserter. A nefarious magistrate falsely accuses the maid because she has rebuffed his advances; she is convicted and sentenced to death. As in many melodramas, the innocent party cannot reveal the truth out of fear for another’s fate. But when the magpie reappears and steals a bright coin, the stolen plate is discovered. The young woman is cleared and her father pardoned.79
The Russian version of La pie voleuse, Soroka-Vorovka, premiered in Moscow in December 1816, had three more performances that month, and in 1817 played nine times—a record run for that era. The most enduring treatment of the magpie was the delightful opera of Gioacchino Rossini, La gazza ladra, which premiered at La Scala in Milan in 1817. It opened in St. Petersburg in February 1821 in Russian also as Soroka-Vorovka, with Nimfodora Semënova singing the lead role. Like its model, Gazza had a long stage life in Russia. Pushkin saw it in Odessa during the 1823-24 season and borrowed for Boris Godunov the cleverly wrought scene in which the heroine deliberately misreads to the mayor the police description of the deserter. Thus for about three decades, and perhaps longer, the thieving magpie flew around Russia as La pie voleuse in the French theater; as Sorokavorovka in Russian theaters; and as an Italian opera. Alexander Herzen’s story “Thieving Magpie,” inspired by a real-life episode in the provinces, illustrated the links between the magpie legend and the injustice of serf theater (see chapter 6 of the present work).80
One needs caution in assessing the emotional impact of melodrama, not least because of the tremendous variation among audiences in terms of wealth, position, estate, geography, gender, and age. Traditional Soviet readings of melodrama complained that its alleged concern for the poor and the weak was offset by an affirmation of the “bourgeois” order and a preachy message of class peace. The genre thus masked real, systemic social evils behind a war of abstract good and evil.81 This familiar mode of Marxist explanation proclaims that “bourgeois” art is never innocent. If so, melodrama may have been guilty of a quite opposite “sin”: Russian viewers who regularly saw legally permitted productions about the struggle of the poor and the weak against the rich and the strong in a secular setting may have become as attuned to social evils as did the far fewer readers of antiserfdom novels and essays. The intention of melodramatists, by all accounts, was precisely to wrench tears of sympathy for victims of injustice; and Russian audiences responded accordingly. The sentimentalism of the earlier “Poor Liza effect” from Karamzin’s famous story was amplified by a “reality effect” which made the accumulation in fiction and theater of details about previously unobserved members of society part of what a historian has called the “humanitarian narrative.”82
Melodrama also helped change acting styles. Acting did not become “realistic” overnight. Each generation, it seems, smiles at the “realism” of previous ones and experiences verisimilitude in its own terms. But melodrama clearly diverged from the high-style method of neoclassical verse drama. Melodrama sought illusion rather than stylized quasi-balletic performance, in order to drive the story and heighten suspense and sensation. In spite of all the flamboyance, the asides and soliloquies, it allowed a more “naturalistic” interaction of the players. The methods required to perform imported melodramas successfully were also those that made the plays accessible to audiences from increasingly broad social origins. Even actors on the capital stages found—or reinvented—themselves by acting melodrama. Melodrama and vaudeville—the least cerebral and seemingly the most lacking in messages—became, to the chagrin of critics, the most popular forms on the Russian stage by midcentury. And one of the many ironies in this story is that Vasily Karatygin, generally seen as affected and unnatural, was credited or blamed for deserting the refined diction of classicism and introducing a looser and more realistic style when playing imported melodramas; and he applied that style even while garbed in the robes and tunics of Oedipus, Nero, Fingal, and Donskoi.83
The Human Comedy
Russian comedy, though originally drawing shamelessly from Molière, Marivaux, Beaumarchais, and a dozen others, had much more to say about Russian society than did tragedy with its universals, history with its past, or melodrama with its exotic sites—all to various degrees remote from the viewers’ quotidian experience. These genres captured moods, emotions, ideals, even some political attitudes, but in the voices of dead heroes or live ones in distant climes. As Laurence Senelick has noted, comedy was more congenial to Russian audiences than tragedy because it dealt with familiar conflicts and resolutions within a community setting.84 Instead of archetypicality, timelessness, and eternal verities, Russian comedy offered topicality: local color, recognizable places and figures, recent news and gossip. Instead of a menaced or victorious “Russia” embodied in stylized heroes and foreign enemies, it offered something resembling live Russians facing domestic dilemmas. Instead of abstract victims and villains of melodrama, if offered slyly crafted versions of real people.
Comedy's people are in love, in debt, on the rise or on the downswing, enmeshed in sexual intrigue, or blindly infatuated with things foreign. Most of all, they are engaged in problems that resonate with audiences. The burst of laughter creates the flash of recognition. Playwrights’ awareness of shared preoccupations and their keen sense of tension between order and change in the general consciousness enabled them to mount these matters on stage with little danger from the censors. Comedy compressed larger concerns and displayed them sparely—subtly in high comedy, broadly in vaudeville. Successful comic playwrights read a cognitive map of their audience and offered an invisible sense of common experience, however limited by class distinctions. Satirical exposure on stage of society’s foibles could arouse a whole range of audience responses: animosity, embarrassment, shame, malicious glee, release, and pure delight—sometimes mingled in an uneasy blend. Generating laughter can also serve a variety of “political” functions: moral uplift, social criticism, and conformity. Russians inherited the well-established traditions of comic representation from classical and neoclassical comedy, puppet show, commedia dell’arte, school drama, and even masked balls. City slickers and country rubes, servants and masters, coquettes and cuckolds and nagging wives, ingenues, femmes fatales, boastful cowards, prodigal sons, strict parents, and pompous asses collided on stage in fictionalized microdramas of society.
How much did the representation of social types on stage change over time from the French Revolution to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861? The servant-master relationship in drama entered Russia from France where, in the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, aristocratic values and tastes predominated. Servants appeared as bumbling fools, physically ugly, sometimes corrupters of their betters—all in contrast to refined noble masters. Servants functioned as the chorus or as go-betweens, offering comic relief, brazenness, wisdom, and occasionally social inversion. In contrast to the pomp, dignity, and aloofness of their betters, they tended to be base in speech and manners, loquacious, sensual in matters of food and lust, complaining, often pretentious—yet sometimes cleverer than their masters. Because of such complex representation, liveried servants were excluded from the audience in French theaters.85 Russian servants were also presented as fundamentally silly and uncouth, though occasionally cunning as saucy soubrettes or impudent valets. Yet house serfs on stage, like their counterparts in life, often showed a superior attitude to field serfs. Around the turn of the century, when imperial stages were alive with actors playing servant roles, real-life servants of gentry spectators could actually see themselves thus portrayed. There is no cause to think their reaction was monolithic. Well-dressed and well-treated serf valets may have thought themselves lucky if they saw shabby ones on stage acting the fool, or been astonished to see clever ones advising the master. Badly abused ones might have hankered to change roles with those on the boards. And there were surely those who simply enjoyed the show without engaging in the slightest sociological rumination.
In eighteenth-century theater, peasants often walked the stage as no more than stick figures or as clownish types who spoke in elevated diction. Since real peasants often simulated stupidity in self-defense, they were so represented in theater. Peasants on stage, as in fiction, were the unwitting victims of city swindlers, as in the mid-eighteenth-century comic interlude, The Hatter and the Peasant.86 Even when treated sympathetically, peasants were stereotyped as parts of a collective. They spoke in poeticized and un-individualized voices in settings of utopian villages where no real labor occurred. The reassuring image of Russian peasant contentment persisted until the mid-nineteenth century when it died a hard death; it revived as a national industry and state enterprise all over twentieth-century Eastern Europe. The theme of peasant patriotism in 1812 incorporated the rural population into the body politic, but only as long as the emergency lasted. Almost to the end of serfdom, the clichés prevailed. Since a taboo for a long time hung over acting in folk idiom and certain forms of everyday speech, lower-class representation was bound to be artificial. Thus while one could learn much about “the peasant’s shifting visibility and invisibility (as well as his audibility and inaudibility)”87 in pastoral literature and landscape, little of real village life was visible or audible in theater.
A few playwrights sought greater novelty. Vladimir Lukin and Plavilshchikov pioneered the scripting of Russian ways and manners and peasant speech. For them peasants became protagonists with Russian names in a Russian setting, though still subject to the vagaries of a safe plot, usually a collision between peasant boy, peasant girl, steward, and lord, benevolently resolved by a deus ex machina. In Lukin’s Wastrel Reformed by Love (1765), one of the earliest depictions of a serf in a “naturalistic” setting, the hero actually declines the freedom offered to him by his owner. Plavilshchikov made a village romance the focus of his play Bobyl (1790). It contains a peasant drama played out on its own terms, contrasting a poor landless peasant (bobyl) with the wealthy but rude and cruel village strongmen. Matvei, the bobyl, is remarkably self-confident, almost a modern man. When his owner scoffs at the idea that a peasant in a gray kaftan could love, his paramour replies: “The muzhik has a heart just like the master’s.”88
Sentimentalism eroded the austerities of classicism even before the latter went into decline. Drawn from sources as varied as Ossian, Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise, and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, it filtered into Russia through translations and imitations. Elegiac, travel, and epistolary genres celebrated chaste love, nature’s glories, and easily triggered tears, offering what Sterne called “the joy of grief.” The related theme, sympathetic treatment of the poor and the weak, appeared in many Russian genres of literature and theater, as Simon Karlinsky has shown, long before the canonical “realists” of the 1840s. Catherine II’s O, Time! on the Moscow plague, the plays of Knyazhnin and Kapnist, the operas of N. P. Nikolev, and the prose of Nikolai Novikov and Radishchev dealt with the theme, though in stylized form. The romance between upper-class male and lower-class female offered a perfect vehicle for sentimentalist plotting. Nikolai Karamzin (1766-1826), who made chuvsvitelnost (sensibility) and sentimentalnost (sentimentality) immensely fashionable in Russian life and art, had the story “Poor Liza” (1792) turn on the dalliance of a young nobleman with a poor peasant girl, ending in her suicide and revealing, amidst an abundance of tears, that “peasant women, too, know how to love!” The heart-melting pathos of “Poor Liza” magnified and popularized the sentimentalized peasant for early nineteenth-century Russian readers.89
But a real and tragic Liza never reached the stage. Karamzin’s numerous imitators preferred happy endings. Nikolai Ilin’s Liza, or the Triumph of Gratitude (1802) featured a sentimental cross-class romance that gets resolved by having his “poor Liza” revealed as the daughter of a nobleman, an ending that drew applause from audiences. In Vasily Fëdorov's Liza, or the Consequences of Pride and Seduction (1803), Liza is pulled out of the pond and saved. Ilin’s sentimental play about recruiting, Magnanimity, or the Selection of Recruits (1803), was among the first play to have a wholly peasant (as opposed to merely rustic) setting. Its characters speak in lofty cadences, love their work, and revere the tsar. These and other frequently staged plays drew conflicting reactions to putting peasants on stage as more than cunning house serfs or buffoons. Ilin’s critics charged that his peasants were unreal. Others objected that even the lame attempts to reproduce village speech and folkways offended the ears and had no educational value. The most revealing denunciation came from I. I. Dmitriev, aristocratic poet, courtier, and justice minister under Alexander I. He drew a cultural line between the nobility and all others when he wrote in Messenger of Europe that peasant life has no place on the stage since “the noble part of the public” had no interest in ''taverns, in village markets and in the huts of odnodvortsy [smallholders]. . . . They have their own customs, their own prejudices, and their own weaknesses."90 This antipopulist argument inscribed class lines in indelible ink. Behind the affirmation that it was useless to know the lower orders perhaps lay the fear that it might be dangerous as well.
If both field and household serfs abounded on the Russian stage, serfdom itself had to be approached with caution. Dramatists like Kheraskov in the eighteenth century idealized serfdom, while a few daring playwrights and librettists made a leap from social satire into social criticism that willy-nilly struck at one of the foundations of Russian life. In the plot of the first opera written by a Russian, Anyuta (1772), the peasant heroine’s love for a nobleman induces her peasant suitor to defy the landowner with veiled threats.91 It seems clear that this opera would not have reached the boards a year later when the bloody Pugachev peasant revolt began. In Nikolev’s opera Roseanne and Lyubim (1778) the master attempts to abduct a serf girl who is in love with a freed peasant lad. She is saved by the repentance of the noble kidnapper. On the general lot of serfs, the lord’s huntsmen sing these astonishingly provocative words:
The masters’ joy is our bad luck,
When they have sunshine, we have storm.
When they sneeze, we catch cold,
They have fun at our expense.
Too good are they for bread and water,
Yet bread and water make our fare.
Amusement and well-being are the masters’ lot,
Our good life lies in precious freedom.
The first line is often cited as a deep critical comment on serfdom and inequality. In fact all the lines are set up as false assumptions and are followed by a rejection of their judgments (“Net, Net, Net”) and an announced satisfaction with their lives. Even so, the initial litany itself must have been disturbing. In spite of his sly dance around the issue, Nikolev, by generalizing in class terms, broke the taboo on fundamental social criticism.92
The most famous treatment of serfdom was Knyazhnin’s comic opera, Misfortune from a Carriage (1779). Yakov Knyazhnin (1740-91), a Pskov nobleman, led a stormy life which embraced gambling, a criminal conviction, and a death sentence reduced to service as a soldier in the ranks. After a miraculous exit from these woes, he spent over a decade in educational work. In Misfortune, the Russia-hating nobleman Firyulin, mindlessly enamored of all things French, displays absurdity and callousness with every word he utters. He yearns for a new and expensive Parisian carriage. Through a ruse, his steward Klimenty (whom the owner calls Clément [Kleman]) arranges to raise the money by selling as a recruit a serf boy who is the steward’s love rival. To avert this disaster, a kindly nobleman teaches the serf a few French words, and the boy persuades the benighted master that he is fluent. In the lord’s eyes, linguistic talent has made his human property suddenly precious, and all ends well.93
Prior to Misfortune, plays about recruiting abuses had illustrated the magnanimity of landowners or officials who intervened to correct the misdeeds of lesser beings—stewards or malevolent peasants. Knyazhnin blamed the serf owner himself and combined the accepted indictment of Francomania with a denunciation of the mistreatment of serfs. While some Europeans and Russians were identifying the evils of serfdom with an essentialist and barbarous Russia, Knyazhnin linked them to the European cultural impact: the need for the carriage stemmed from the Francophile nobleman’s aping of foreign ways; and the salvation device stemmed from superficial knowledge of that culture. Conversely, the highborn character who shows kindness to the serfs is made to seem authentically “Russian.” Yet we can wonder with Simon Karlinsky whether audiences did not see beyond the “abuse” to the injustice of the system itself. As all viewers would know, although this particular victim was saved from a lifetime of military service, someone else would have to go in his place in order to fill the quota. Misfortune was shown at court with Catherine II and Paul in attendance, performed eight times in St. Petersburg in the years 1779-91, forty-four times in Moscow, 1780-1800, and twice again there in 1810. It retained its popularity into the 1820s.94 The authorities clearly saw only the main message: inane noble foiled by wise and kind noble. Knyazhnin exposed serfdom’s capacity for ruining lives, but only its capacity, since on stage tragedy was always averted. In real life, the sale of recruits, the rupture of serf romances, and other cruelties were actually going on without the intervention of a fairy godfather. Misfortune's appeal for fair and just treatment of serfs within the system can also be seen as an apology for the system. Knyazhnin and other writers were working within the constraints of political censorship. Only the individual misuse of serfs by lord, steward, official, or each other could be publicly aired, and thus no “serf tragedy” was ever performed until after the emancipation. Even in fiction, which had a freer scope than theater, serious canvassing of the peasants’ lot did not surface until the 1840s.95
The peasant genre declined after the Napoleonic wars until the 1850s when something like real peasants appeared in staged villages with their own diction, stories, psychological profiles, problems, and—often unhappy—resolutions (see chapter 9). Literary interest in the subject that flourished in poetry and prose in the 1840s had no parallel on the stage, which was dominated by melodrama, vaudeville, and historical plays. In one of the most popular comedies of the reign of Nicholas I, Pëtr Grigorev’s Filatka and Miroshka the Rivals (1833), a minor village official blackmails his desired bride and her lover by threatening to send the rival’s brother into the army. Although the brother, a stout Russian patriot, is willing to serve, base villainy is thwarted by a benevolent noble who rights all wrongs. Filatka, as a rural courtship vaudeville and rescue comedy, said nothing new. Its success grew out of the use of peasant dialect and the acting by Grigorev and Prov Sadovsky. Filatka ran at the Alexandrinsky Theater for over fifteen years to audiences ranging from the imperial family to clerks and lower townspeople. It delighted the provincial public as well, including those in Dostoevsky’s Siberian prison camp. The total unoriginality and lack of authenticity of this delightful piece indicated how far the theatrical stage had strayed from the peasant theme since the early nineteenth century.96
Needless to say, most comic drama and opera with domestic plots revolved around the life of the gentry. Of social classes on the Russian stage in this era, only nobles spoke in language which, even when versified, faintly resembled their own speech. But what could they say and do without offending the censors? Some comedies employed more or less politically neutral themes of European inspiration: cross-gendering, adultery, cuckoldry, coquetry, and mistaken identity. Some playwrights simply wrote panegyrics to their own social order, as Vasily Maikov seemed to do in the musical pastorale Village Feast (1777) which praises the landlord and unmasks a corrupt steward who oppresses the peasants.97 Since such stewards were indeed a common type, this device neatly deflected blame from the master. Drama without conflict and flawed human beings ceases to be drama, and a wholly virtuous and noble-hearted collection of characters is no fun. Comedy requires human frailty, even repugnant behavior that can be corrected or punished. But criticizing gentry required caution. The trick was to treat a noble’s sin as an aberration condemned by the majority of the class. Most social comedies were morality tales with a minivillain who was neither a wrathful god of tragedy nor a melodrama monster—too bad to be true. Each age offered explanations for deviant and boorish gullible provincial Russian gentry women who worshiped all things French. Overpriced goods, smuggling, blackmail, and the fumbling of drunken lackeys are woven around a standard love farce. Towering above all the characters in brains and earthy common sense, Masha, the enserfed Russian shop clerk, juggles all the characters in the air in a hilarious plot that ends with her gaining freedom.100 Most scholars agree that theatrical satires on the Francophile gentry offered no deep social or political critique of the social order. Even those linking foreignism and foppery to domestic inequities had a safety clause. There is not much evidence that the reception of social satire was characterized by a mixture of laughter and tears. Even so, the continual dramaturgical parade of privilege gone awry, asinine serf owners, vulnerable servants and peasants, and the blatant moral messages encoded in the plays must surely have had an effect on some gentry audience members, not to mention the middle and some of the lower classes in those audiences.
Krylov and Shakhovskoi broadened the indictment of gentry vices in the early nineteenth century to an assault on provincial estate theaters, agricultural experimentation, and the slavish adoption of European sentimentalism. Alexander Shakhovskoi—archenemy of political reform, modernism in language, and Westernism in general—vented his negative views for decades in the Imperial Theater (fig. 37). A man of great wit and self-irony, Shakhovskoi set as his goal “to refine taste, to soften manners, to eradicate vices, to rouse the spirit and a sense of patriotism.”101 Semi-Lordly Amusements, or Domestic Theater (1808) roasted the rustic indulgence in serf theater. Roughly modeled on Molière's Bourgeois gentilhomme, the hero, Avdei Tranzhirin (spendthrift), is a tax collector of indeterminate class origin and a man on the rise. On becoming a landowner, he establishes a manorial serf theater which stages a performance of (presumably Knyazhnin’s) Dido to honor the landowner’s relatives. All the elements are in place for a successful production: serf girls as Minerva and Juno, a ballet, a double chorus, and even a horn band. When liquor flows backstage, trouble begins: missing props spell disaster to the scenic gods, a real dog bites into a stage bear, and the roof of the theater collapses.102 This spoof was not wholly exaggerated. In provincial serf theater, far advanced as of 1808, one could find many examples of bizarre productions—including some of Dido. Semi-Lordly Amusements remained in the repertoire until 1837, with Shchepkin often playing Tranzhirin; and it inspired several sequels and imitations. Griboedov, in Act II of Woe from Wit, took a passing shot at a “ballet troupe of serfs,” made up of children ripped from their families.
Shakhovskoi and Krylov aimed their shafts at another species of the provincial gentry, the improving landowner who sought fiscal salvation in books, journals, and foreign experts on agronomy. Most fell victim to a naive reverence for European science and technology unmatched by an understanding of them or of the peasant mentality. Peasants, though skilled in making their own adaptations, nourished, in the words of Michael Confino, ''a deep scorn for any initiative coming from the landowner."103 An offstage character in Krylov’s Fashion Shop purchased Dutch cows, English rams, and Spanish lambs which perished in the unsuitable Russian climate and brought him ruin. In 1819, just when the Moscow branch of the Free Economic Society was founded to promote agricultural innovation, Shakhovskoi staged his Prodigal Landowners, one of the funniest plays of the era, which mercilessly mocked the innovators. The hapless landowner, Prince Rainbow, builds factories on his “plantation,” imports merino sheep, introduces sugar beets, and deploys machinery and irrigation technology—all of which fail miserably. The peasants resist newfangled ways, managers cheat him, his wife overspends, and his “expert” relies on the philosopher Kant for guidance.104
Shakhovskoi's A Modern Sterne (1805) broke new ground in social comedy by showing the fatuousness of the sentimentalism that was sweeping over Russian literature and life. He fashioned a wicked caricature of the “modern Sterne” in the nobleman Pronsky, who romances a sturdy peasant girl already enamored of a village lad. Comic disaster results on several fronts. In the manner of Don Quixote, the master miscommunicates with his servant and other lower-class people whom he has totally idealized. He speaks in the sentimentalized conventions that are as inappropriate as the feudal imagery of the lord of La Mancha. Pronsky refuses to serve in the army and makes grandiose verbal love to a poor peasant girl whose simplicity he adores. But he blanches at the thought of being the brother-in-law of his lackey who is courting the maid’s sister. Shakhovskoi insisted that “sentimentalism” and rigid social snobbery went hand in hand. The obtuseness of the hero is heightened by the fact that he is a Russian noble-playing-the-European-playing-the-peasant.105
A Modern Sterne was put on the boards two years after the publication of Admiral Shishkov’s antimodern treatise on the old and new styles of Russian literature and language. Shakhovskoi became close to Shishkov’s circle of “archaists” which eventually included Derzhavin, Krylov, Katenin, and Griboedov, among others. They were ranged against the “moderns”: Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Vyazemsky, and Zhikharëv. Lesser Karamzinists, Pëtr Shalikov and Vladimir Izmailov, were the prime targets of Sterne which derided the sentimentalist trope of a love between nobleman and peasant girl and the saccharine travel traditions launched by Laurence Sterne. Beneath the transparent assault on Shalikov and other sentimentalists lay an attack on emotionalism’s corrosive effect on the social order. In Simon Karlinsky’s view, Shakhovskoi’s antisentimentalism was rooted in a conservative, quasi-racist belief in the inability to communicate between classes. The play underscored the abnormality of class transgression by having “patriarchal” figures from opposing classes (a general and a serf) converge in their hostility to it. Shakhovskoi’s farcical expression of antisentimentalism was all but inevitable; whenever a Sterne appears, a Richard Brinsley Sheridan is bound to be not far behind.106
Shakhovskoi unleashed another offensive against gentry sentimentalism in A Lesson for Coquettes, or the Lipetsk Spa (1813). Its huge success issued partly from the scandal inspired by its heavy-handed satirizing of some prominent literary figures. A minor character in the play, the gentry poet Fialkin, mischievously caricatured Zhukovsky. While the character strums a guitar and solemnly improvises verses on Homer, the peasant girl he is serenading cries “what nonsense” as an aside and a maid says “Great! The blind leading the blind,” in reference to the Greek bard. The all too recognizable Zhukovsky sat in the audience, side by side with Vigel and Zhikharëv. For a performance of Lesson for Coquettes at court, the role of Fialkin was cut in order to protect the feelings of Zhukovsky who had a secure place with the imperial family. The waters of the spa resort overflowed into a torrent of abuse and factional polemics that Zhukovsky called “the Lipetsk flood.” The wrath of several writers descended upon Shakhovskoi, and the famed Arzamas Literary Circle (1815-18)—Zhukovsky, Uvarov, Batyushkov, Karamzin—was founded in reaction to Lipetsk.107 Although the pastorale still lurked as background to many a noble adventure, Shakhovskoi here used a different chronotope or space-time setting—the spa—which, like its European prototype, served as a potential curative site for romantic, matrimonial, or sexual needs as well as medical ones. Imported coquetry, one of the playwright’s satirical objects, found a natural habitat in a foreign-inspired place which, like any holiday resort, offered relative freedom from the constraints of home. The elite segment of the play’s audience could well connect Shakhovskoi’s chauvinistic lesson to the setting they knew so well. The Lipetsk spa itself declined soon after the play appeared in favor of German spas and Caucasian mineral water centers.108 But Shakhovskoi, followed by Griboedov and a few others, had opened up one more social venue for stage action, setting the scene for the use of the ballroom and salon in the prose society tale of the 1820s and 1830s.109
Shakhovskoi and Krylov represented more than a harmless brand of satire aimed at gentry foibles. Their barbed wit seemed to be aimed at all “useless” gentry who retired from service, got bored with nothing to do, and indulged in extravagant hobbies such as estate theater and experimental agronomy; or in Gallomania and mawkish deference to foreign literature. The acerbic Shakhovskoi especially seemed to be transcribing the old device of shaming the cuckolded husband into a scorching indictment of Russian rural life where naive gentry allowed themselves to be duped by false foreign ideas and dishonest employees. Indeed the linking of sexual and foreign intellectual seduction was suggested in Russian comedy long before its darker version, the antinihilist novel of the 1860s.110 Nicholas I and his censors became more stringent about offending the social estate upon which the throne rested. The dramatist Alexei Potekhin was warned during the 1850s that it “was not permitted to represent a nobleman on stage in comic form.” Though Potekhin exaggerates the effect of the warning, the episode shows how much things had changed since the time of Shakhovskoi and Krylov.111 In 1845, an interesting “class-neutral” sideshow carped at signs of an emerging women’s independence current, known in the 1840s as “zhorzhzandizm” after the French novelist. The Emancipated Woman, an unsigned “caricature in two acts,” featured a gentry wife who rode horseback, hunted, smoked, played billiards, bossed her hubby around, and addressed men with demeaning diminutives. For her “assertive tone” she was dubbed “a Russian George Sand.”112 With literary opponents like this, the gentry could relax, at least until the 1850s when harsher themes in the landlord-peasant nexus were mounted on stage (chapter 9).
Like their real-life counterparts in the audience, merchant and other urban characters made their way gradually onto the stage. Mikhail Matinsky’s St. Petersburg Gostiny Dvor (1779), the eighteenth century’s most original and popular comic opera, led off by situating merchants in their own workplace—Gostiny Dvor, the famous arcade of shops on the Nevsky Prospect that still bears the name and fulfills its functions. Actor, composer, and writer Matinsky (c. 1750-c. 1820) was a former serf who had been freed and sent to Italy to study music. In an interesting social juxtaposition, this satirical opera by an ex-serf writing about merchants for the delight of an audience including the aristocracy was done up in a Russian national style and inhabited by city people—merchants and clerks in a shop setting where “sacred truth” wins out over cheating. Although the plot device and resolution were adapted from contemporary comedies of gentry life, the novelty of the milieu and characters gave Gostiny Dvor an immense success that lasted well into the nineteenth century.113 Matinsky’s As You Live, So Are You Judged (1792) contains more somber tones. Virtue wins again, but the mercantile villain, a “heartless creditor,” surpasses the petty cheats of Gostiny Dvor by preying on rich and poor and by reveling in his squalid methods. An honorable nephew appears to establish a moral balance and to allow proper space for honest business practices in the social order.114
An equally common vice attributed to merchants, social climbing, evoked frequent sermonizing on the stage from the eighteenth century right up to Alexander Ostrovsky. Wirtschafter discusses two works that underline the lesson. Osip Chernyavskoi’s In the Company of Merchants (1780) warned merchant daughters to beware of ensnarement by noble suitors who turn out to be swindlers. V. A. Lëvshin's Mr. Voldyrov’s Wedding (1793) reverses gender roles in a tale about a foolish merchant who meets disaster when he falls for the charms of a corrupt gentry widow. The focus on merchant gullibility and gentry rascality of course is presented as exceptional, a moral failing rather than a fault in the social order.115 Plavilshchikov, who lamented the general neglect in drama of merchants, clerks, workers, peasants, servants, and seminarians, tried to devise comedy plots which depicted their inner life. Anticipating Ostrovsky’s vaunted “kingdom of darkness” by half a century, his Shop Clerk (1804) unfolds in a murky world where a merchant attempts to frame the poor and virtuous clerk whom his daughter loves, and to marry her off to a rich man—a theme addressed many times in the coming century.116 Playwrights taking up the merchant genre told their audiences mainly two things: cheating, a natural side effect of the business profession, can be overcome by moral fiber; attempts to marry out of one’s class invariably result in failure or worse.
Scholars seem to agree about the long hiatus in the merchant theme on the Russian stage in the first decades of the nineteenth century, but have no plausible explanations for it. Undeniable, however, was its resurrection in the 1830s. A Soviet writer, dealing with performances at the Alexandrinsky Theater, with references to Moscow, offered unconvincing theories about the rise of the Russian bourgeoisie, the advent of the “bourgeois monarchy” in France, and the efforts of Official Nationalists to rope in all classes for the monarchy. A more likely answer is the turn of playwrights, as with graphic artists, to a broader panorama of society, and the continuous growth of merchant theater audiences. In any case the output, not great in either quantity or quality, floated two subthemes that drew on older plays: the historical merchants, Minin among others, who help save or are saved by a tsar; the stubborn daughter who aspires to marry upward out of her class or who wants to marry downward for love. In the historical genre, one new note was sounded—the serf who becomes a rich merchant (Polevoi's Igolkin, the Novgorod Merchant, 1835). Plays about marital squabbles provided a bridge between those of the eighteenth century and the upcoming work of Ostrovsky. Indeed one of them strikingly anticipates Ostrovsky when the father, opposing his wife’s search for a gentry son-in-law, asks: “Why get into another’s sleigh?” In these ephemeral works of the Nicholas period, the critic Nikolai Dobrolyubov would have found ample material for his withering commentaries on merchant life that were triggered by Ostrovsky in the next reign.117
P. G. Grigorev (1807-54), born three years after the appearance of Shop Clerk, took up the theme in the 1830s. From 1831 he acted at the Alex-andrinsky Theater, a veritable hangout for merchants. Grigorev excelled in merchant roles and wrote over thirty comedies and vaudevilles, including the popular Merchant Polka and Once Again the Merchantry. The merchant milieu of Nikolai Gogol’s The Marriage (1842) was suggested to him by Shchepkin in order to draw a contrast to gentry courting habits. The female protagonist, daughter of a deceased tyrannical merchant, seeks a gentleman groom but finally chooses a midlevel official. Her initial fussiness was a motif echoed in Pavel Fedotov’s 1849 painting, A Choosy Bride. Simon Karlinsky argues that the play showed a new “social and erotic interaction” between merchants and gentry and that it reflected Gogol’s own revulsion at marriage itself, largely because of his homoerotic disposition. But The Marriage was seen by many contemporaries as a negative comment on social pretension. The perception was in the long run more relevant to the history of cultural attitudes than was the real motivation. More important is Karlinsky’s observation that Gogol’s play “contributed to the emergence of a more realistic mode of staging and acting.”118
Vaudeville, one of the genres that flourished from the 1820s onward, occupied a blurred space beside comedy. The term has been traced to the fourteenth-century French poet Olivier Basselin’s Chansons de Val de Vire, though the first modern vaudeville theater appeared in 1792 in Paris where it served as a cruder successor to French comic opera. Unlike American vaudeville—essentially a suite of show numbers without a connecting narrative—original vaudeville involved a brief situation comedy devoid of ideas or dramaturgical harmony. The plot was subordinated to wit, dialog, songs of banter and charm, couplets (actually quatrains), dances, funny business, horseplay, schtick, sight gags, virtuosity of performance, and often direct interaction with audience. The brevity of the form allowed vaudeville to be presented as an added attraction before or after a main performance. Vaudeville enlivened the stage and introduced or sharpened new themes, particularly satirical broadsides at the current butt of ridicule. Many critics, notably Belinsky, hated vaudeville as a pure exemplar of trivial commercial culture, without recognizing or caring about its social effect as a vehicle for presenting novel situations and new places of human interaction.
Hundreds of vaudeville adaptations or originals appeared on the St. Petersburg stage alongside full-length comedies. In the 1830s and 1840s, vaudeville flooded the boards of the two capitals to the sound of clapping hands and clinking coins at the box office. Actors took up the pen and added their own sense of a visibly changing public to their pieces. In terms of content, the “wider social purview of Russian vaudeville from the late 1830s on” took in city folk, clerks, the lower middle classes, country bumpkins in the city, and provincial actors, with a pronounced shift in setting from gentry estates and metropolitan drawing rooms to clerks’ lodgings and merchant shops. Though most vaudevilles were adapted from foreign works, the social content suggested a new way of looking at Russia and at the notion of who was Russian. Under the influence of Eugène Scribe, vaudevilles presented scenes of everyday life, paralleling the physiological sketch, feuilleton, genre picture, and urban song. In the 1840s, as the term “natural school” was emerging, vaudeville kept pace.119
Critical interest in social verisimilitude on stage was sparked in 1817 by a comedy that mocked the rustic who comes to town: Mikhail Zagoskin’s Mister Bogatonov, or a Provincial in the Capital, another adaptation of Molière's Bourgeois gentilhomme. Molière's hero was hardly needed as a model for the wide-eyed provincial. In 1812, Konstantin Batyushkov had described a rustic on his first visit to the capital: “a lucky fellow who, having just galloped in on a post coach from the shores of the Sekvana River in light-blue pantaloons and an unsightly wide frock coat, is devouring the sights.” Zagoskin’s Bogatonov travels through three different identities: from bourgeois to noble landowner, from Russian to Gallomane, from rustic to urbanite. He fails the final rite of passage and is swindled outrageously by city folk and foreigners. Bogatonov ran in Moscow and St. Petersburg for a dozen years or more and had become a hit in the provinces by the 1820s. Critics at the time argued that Zagoskin lacked social realism. One claimed that a provincial as ignorant as Bogatonov could not have been found in St. Petersburg even twenty years earlier, a doubtful proposition. A Russian biographer of the playwright found the character of Anyuta to be not at all Russian, citing her boldness: “In our country, maids do not converse so openly with the master.” Bogatonov offered little of interest about urban life, but the brief flurry over it indicated a growing interest in the issue of accurate social reflection and how it was distorted by obsolete characterization and excessively slavish imitation of foreign models.120
In the late 1830s and 1840s, as painters and journalists were exploring the obscure corners of urban life, the comic stage began to present a more or less believable cross-section of the capital’s population to the public gaze in the form of landlord-tenant relations, apartment hunting, dachas, and contrasting neighborhoods. Pëtr Karatygin’s House in the Petersburg District (1838), a vaudeville with an undercurrent of urban blight and heartlessness, appeared in Repertoire and Pantheon at the moment when Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris was being serialized there. Karatygin offered a stock villain, female victim, and hero. The villain is a greedy urban landlord in the northern part of the city, Mr. Pennypinch (Kopeikin), who engages in rent gouging, eviction, confiscation of furniture, and insulting language. The hero poses as a criminal, punishes the landlord, and saves the tenant. In a mock-Gothic touch, he torments Penny-pinch by having his accomplices sing the satanic chorus from Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable which was at that moment frightening and thrilling Petersburg theater audiences. The landlord must recompense his victim but remains as deaf to moral principles as the street in the Petersburg District known as Deaf Alley. When the hero asks Pennypinch if he understands that “a noble person must be lenient to the less fortunate,” the latter replies that he does not. This piece of dramatic migration from the familiar climes of manor house and gentry town home to big city neighborhoods marked a major turn in stage representation that put ordinary denizens of the capital into the limelight for all to see.121
Comedy writer Fëdor Koni (1809-79), father of the famous Russian jurist, moved in liberal gentry intelligentsia circles in the 1840s. Yury Arnold was impressed by the enormous social range of his characters and his grasp of their customs and speech in plays that captured the lives of the poorly defined but dominant sector of urban society: merchants, townspeople, impoverished landowners, and various lower-class people. St. Petersburg Apartments (1840) featured a newly promoted official out to display his success in a lavish apartment. His quest takes him from his home in the respectable Kolomna District near the Bolshoi Stone Theater to Gorokhovaya Street (later notorious for Rasputin’s flat at one end and the Cheka at the other), to Mudflats and Goat Marsh. Along the way he meets an aging French actress, an opera regisseur, some journalists, and assorted shady characters. Theater people and mercenary journalists (including Zadarin: read Bulgarin) are mercilessly caricatured. At one level, Petersburg Apartments works as a bedroom farce, at another it denounces petty bourgeois values. Money infects everything and, like some of the tiny flats visited, it constricts life, relationships, and horizons. Neither Karatygin nor Koni delved into the lower depths in the manner of Dostoevsky or Vsevolod Krestovsky. But their plays and others like them offered new X-ray pictures to be added to the growing image of the body social, new crannies and corners of the urban landscape that theater writers and audiences were willing to explore.122
Other sites of Russian life came into the theatrical purview to join the estate, the town, the spa, and the quarantine station. Among these, the backstage of provincial theater inspired a work that, though rarely mentioned in literary histories, became one of the most enduringly popular comic vehicles in the annals of Russian theater and one of the few works of this period—along with Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, Gogol’s Inspector General, and some Ostrovsky plays—never to have left the stage: the 1839 vaudeville Lev Gurych Sinichkin by Dmitry Lensky (1805-60). Lensky (fig. 38), one of those theater folk who frequented Pechkin’s coffee shop and the Moscow Merchant Club, lamented his lack of success as actor, his life’s dream, and denigrated his fame as vaudevillist.123 The French prototype of Sinichkin, Le père de la débutante (1837) by M. E. G. M. Thealon and J. F. A. Bayard, and an early Russian adaptation were both performed with no great success in St. Petersburg in spring 1839. The following autumn the premiere of Lensky’s version, with music by Verstovsky, met a resounding response in Moscow, repeated in St. Petersburg in 1840, and it was performed in seven different provincial theaters in the first two years alone. The provincial actor, Sinichkin—like Noël Coward’s “Mrs. Worthington”—wants his daughter on the stage and will stop at nothing. Among the obstacles are an aging female star and a womanizing gentry “patron” of the theater. The action revolves around a rehearsal of “Borzikov”'s Pizarro in Peru with the Spaniards, a droll conflation of two popular European melodramas: Kotzebue’s The Spaniards in Peru and Pixérécourt's Pizarro, or the Conquistador of Peru, both well known to Russian theater audiences.124
As in the take-offs of serf theater, the rehearsal-in-the-play explodes in chaos. The timpani player is at the tavern, the unprepared actors are fined, and the orchestra plays too loud. When an actress “faints,” a cast member calls out the immortal line—first used by Alexandre Dumas père in another backstage drama, Kean (1836), and still being repeated in Anglo-American radio and film comedy into the 1940s—“is there a doctor in the house?” Riotous action predominates and the couplets offer slashing commentary on actors, owners, critics, writers, and theatrical Lotharios. When the vaudeville opened at the Moscow Maly in 1839, the entrance of the famous comic actor Zhivokini as Sinichkin brought prolonged laughter even before he opened his mouth. Verstovsky’s wife, Nadezhda Repina (1809-67), who had been purchased as a serf by the Imperial Theaters, premiered the role as Liza, the hopeful theater debutante. Several characters made playful reference on stage to themselves and other real actors, including Lyubov Mlotkovskaya, from one of the best known provincial theaters in Kharkov. Lensky, with his “half-Kalmyk” features, refined manners, and fluent French,125 took the role of the slimy seducer.
Lensky, playing to an “in” audience, shrewdly offered familiar situations and “talking names.” Moscow and Petersburg audiences who had attended theater in the provinces could recognize his version and perhaps feel the superiority of being a “capital public.” They were reminded that provincial audiences’ “wits are blunt,” and all the worst that they had seen or heard about provincial theater was on full display: a blaring orchestra, inappropriate quotations, mispronounced foreign words, and awful acting made worse by wild gestures and ponderous archaic declamation which Lensky took pains to parody in action and words: “Hands are stretched now up, now down / As would act a foolish clown.” What the spectators might have heard about backstage life—jealous rivalry, drunkenness, fines, police actions, directorial tyranny, authors’ claques, and sexual politics—was gleefully embellished. Though pure farce was the main concern, bits of social reality shone through as well: the landowner Prince Vetrinsky (Windbag) took actresses to his estate, Revelry Hall; uncooperative ones he could ruin by working hand in hand with the manager, Pustoslavtsev (Vainglory), who was modeled on a real manager, Vysheslavtsev.
Lensky let out all the stops. In a fashion later to be called “zany” and “screwball,” he shattered all logic of plot through slapstick, and never gave the audience a chance to think about absurdities—or much about the unjust practices unveiled. Serious critics, appalled at the success of vaudeville, attributed it as usual to the twin demons of an unversed public and entrepreneurial greed. Gogol denounced vaudeville, along with melodrama, ballet, and opera. The literary historian and Official Nationalist Stepan Shevyrëv, writing in 1851, distinguished between ephemeral farce and enduring comedy. Leaping to the defense of the genre, Koni, writing in Northern Bee in 1840, insisted that vaudeville’s purpose was not to enlighten or “to embody an idea,” but to entertain an undemanding audience. A modern scholar has rightly stressed the “nonlinguistic codes,” the acoustical and visual aspects of the genre in Len-sky's work: choreography, decor, music, and the actors’ bodily and vocal mimicry.126 Sinichkin was widely imitated and has persisted up to our time. Ostrovsky’s Talented People and their Admirers (1882) is not only a slightly grim picture of stage life and morality, but a homage to Lensky’s brilliant expose of some of the silliness of theatrical conventions. Tsarist censorship, however, did not allow Sinichkin in popular theaters in 1905—a time when grand dukes and other worthies had their theater mistresses—because of its “ludicrous” insinuation that privileged people sexually exploited actresses! The Soviets put on Sinichkin in the 1920s in modern dress and setting at the Vakhtangov Theater, and a 1956 film, starring the eminent Nona Mordukhova, tried with only modest success to recapture its original buffoonery.127
In the eighteenth century, theater had offered, in the words of Elise Wirtschafter, “a conversation about Russian society.” Resolutions in drama sought not a change in society but reconciliation and individual moral reform via a conservative Enlightenment which preached preservation of the natural order—including autocracy and serfdom. Theater as a whole represented a civic society of association and mutual moral instruction—in fact preaching—not a civil society devoted to structural change. In other words, theater acted as one organ of the larger educated society devoted to bettering Russia by bettering Russians (and not institutions) for the general good. In the early nineteenth century, the didactic element weakened.128 But what changed most was the social content and audience composition. Drama can do no more than offer modern readers a blurred glimpse of those worlds. But in its own time, the unfolding drama of society gradually produced for the consumption of a wide public a panorama of sites and personalities, both familiar and new. Some have seen literature, others theater, as the surrogate parliament and bearer of Russia’s political and social conscience in the preparliamentary age. This may be an exaggeration, but it seems clear that the social exploration and representation of Russians on stage awakened curiosity about “the other country” that lay within the borders of the Russian state, particularly those of the semi- or nonprivileged estates. Widening the lens to various parts of the human terrain uncovered novel situations. The “gentry nests” did not disappear from audience view in this era or indeed until after the Revolution. Yet while audience attraction to social comedy and vaudeville was spurred by sheer boldness and humor, there can be no doubt that that genre’s commentary on everyday life and social relations in the Russia of Nicholas I had reached a level of candor that was equivalent to revelation.