Lermontov, who had been killed in a duel in 1841 at the age of twenty-six, never dreamed that his youthful drama, which he had never seen on the stage, would be presented with such sumptuousness. Masquerade was a typical romantic melodrama from the life of Petersburg high society, in which the hero, the jealous Arbenin, poisons his wife.
The impudent and independent Lermontov, an amateur artist, liked to depict Petersburg engulfed in a raging tide. “In those pictures,” recalled Count Sollogub, “Lermontov gave free rein to his imagination, which craved sorrow.” But even the fatalistic and pessimistic Lermontov could not have predicted that the production of Masquerade, which even the participating actors nicknamed “Sunset of the Empire,” would be the last act of the old Russia, drowning in the waves of the revolutionary flood. Lermontov would have found such a coincidence the height of romantic irony.
Lermontov’s unfinished novel, Princess Ligovskaya (1836), set in Petersburg, depicts the city’s topography exceptionally accurately. In that sense as in many others, Lermontov was an innovator, presaging the detailed descriptions of the capital in Dostoyevsky’s prose. As Leonid Dolgopolov noted, that topographical accuracy was due most probably to Lermontov and Dostoyevsky’s shared military education.109
But Lermontov would not have recognized the long, straight prospects of Petersburg in those days of February 1917, filled as they were with unhappy crowds of people. The protest demonstrations were spreading. One of them even interrupted a rehearsal of Masquerade, when the actors rushed to the windows and watched fearfully as an avalanche of workers moved silently along Nevsky Prospect. Banners imprinted with demands for bread swayed over the demonstrators’ heads. Yuri Yuriev, a popular actor playing Arbenin, recalled that “in that concentrated, silent mass was something threatening.”110
Events around Masquerade developed in a grotesque and symbolic way. Despite the existence of a revolutionary situation in the city, the minister of the imperial court insisted that the premiere take place. Yet again in Russian history, ritual and appearance for the sake of appearance was of paramount importance.
Meyerhold, fully sensing the tragic irony of the situation, was nevertheless excited. This was not the first time his artistic intuition had led him to mount a production whose political naïveté bordered on the outrageous. In 1913 during the pomp and ceremony commemorating three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty, he staged Richard Strauss’s opera Electra, with a scene of a royal beheading.
Meyerhold’s challenge in Masquerade was to create a unique “director’s score,” according to which literally every word the actor spoke had an exact equivalent in his gestures or movements. At all those innumerable rehearsals Meyerhold sought to find an exact scheme for moving each of the hundreds of extras across the huge Alexandrinsky stage. A critic called the delicate orchestration of the actors in the play “an opera without music.” Thus the basics were carefully laid down of Meyerhold’s as yet unformed avant-garde theatrical teaching, “biomechanics,” which would eventually become famous.
The premiere of Masquerade was set for February 25. The city was empty and eerie that night, but cars were parked in solid black rows in front of the Alexandrinsky Theater. Despite the high cost of tickets, the play sold out, and all the celebrities of the city were present. To his great astonishment, Yuriev saw grand dukes in the royal box.
Golovin had created a set that was a continuation of the audience. Intense black and red predominated. On stage, to Glinka’s languid “Valse-Fantaisie,” the imperial capital’s high society made merry, intrigued, and ultimately rushed to its doom, all the while watched by the truly doomed high society of the capital. What romantic author could have come up with a more symbolic or melodramatic scene?
The action of Masquerade shifted from the gambling house to a masquerade where myriad masks swirled before the audience, then to a ball. The outstanding actors, especially Yuriev, the lavish sets, splendid costumes, and beautiful music blended into an overpowering tapestry. Even the most jaded regulars oohed at the mounting theatrical effects. Still, one critic did write, though after the revolution, that he had been shocked watching the play, “So close, in the same city, next to those starving for bread—this artistically perverted, brazenly corrupting, meaninglessly frenzied luxury for the sake of prurience. What was it—the Rome of the Caesars? What were we going to do afterward, go to Lucullus to eat nightingales’ tongues, and let the hungry bastards howl, seeking bread and freedom?”111
