St Petersburg полностью

Balanchine did not spare Volynsky’s school: “It lacks the basic rules of classicism…. It all creates a depressing impression.” And as a final observation of the school’s effort, “It is left with nothing but a broken trough,” another literary reference, this time to Pushkin’s popular fairy tale.108

Teatr, the magazine in which Balanchine’s lampoon appeared, featured the attack and printed the artist’s photograph on the cover: Balanchine, in heavy makeup like some decadent Pierrot, stared piercingly as if playing the role of a libertine, cynic, and skeptic.

The same magazine later published a playful satire on Volynsky entitled “The Demise of Theaters. Horrible Events in Ballet.” It described the fantastic “nightmarish tragedy” of the Maryinsky Theater, when Volynsky was allegedly confirmed as its director (the ballet world in Petrograd knew that this was his dream). Volynsky the director decided on a ballet performance and then asked Volynsky the writer to lecture the audience before the start of the show and invited Volynsky the critic to read his review at the end of the performance right from the stage. This led to a tragic end, according to the satire: listening to Volynsky’s endless presentation, “one of the audience died … and dying, whispered, ‘Too much water!’” (In Russian, “water” in a speech or lecture is like water in a ham—unnecessary filler.) Soon afterward, the rest of the audience followed suit and died, the magazine reported in mock horror.109

The satire on Volynsky was not signed, but ballet connoisseurs knew that it was written by Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, the already notorious leaders of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS). It was an avant-garde theater studio, but the word “studio” seemed hopelessly old-fashioned to its creators, who replaced it with “factory.” In the anthology Ekstsentrizm (Eccentricity), published as the cover announced in the city of “Eccentropolis (formerly Petrograd),” Kozintsev proclaimed the “Americanization of the theater”:

Life demands art that is hyperbolically crude overwhelming, grating on the nerves, openly utilitarian, mechanically precise, instantaneous, fast, otherwise they will not hear, see, or stop.

Further, Kozintsev defiantly listed the “parents” of FEKS:

In a word—the chansonette, Pinkerton, an auctioneer’s cry, street brawls.

In painting—the circus poster, the cover of a trashy novel.

In music—the jazz band (a Negro makeshift orchestra), the circus march.

In ballet—American dance music.

In theater—the music hall, the movies, circus, dance cafe, and boxing.

On September 25, 1922, FEKS performed The Marriage (“Not after Gogol”) to a stunned Petrograd audience; the poster had promised operetta, melodrama, farce, film, circus, variety, and grand guignol all in one. The whole thing was called “A Trick in Three Acts,” and Kozintsev and Trauberg were its “engineers,” rejecting the antediluvian term “director.” The characters in this amazing Marriage were Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, and three suitors who came on stage on roller skates: robots running on steam, electricity, and radioactivity. The latter explained, “Marriage today is ridiculous. The husband goes away, the wife suffers. Radium, a new force, works at a distance. A radioactive marriage is truly modern.”

The outraged public, suspecting it was being mocked, went wild. Kozintsev came out on stage and thanked the shouting patrons “for a scandalous reception of our scandalous work.” The action of The Marriage was a cascade of acrobatic tricks, satirical couplets, tap dancing, fox trot music, and sound-and-light effects. The performers had to be specially trained, because no one in Russia knew how to do all these things. The Factory of the Eccentric Actor prepared them in a marvelous old town house whose owner had fled to the West. Here seventeen-year-old Kozintsev and twenty-year-old Trauberg and their acolytes lived according to the motto borrowed from Mark Twain, “It’s better to be a young pup than an old bird of paradise.” Leading Petrograd avant-gardists were announced as teachers: Punin, Annenkov, Evreinov, and Lourié. But in fact they did not take part in the studio’s work.

One of the reasons could have been the excessive cockiness of the inventors of eccentricity. This is a description by Sergei Yutkevich, a leader of the early FEKS, of a visit to Annenkov, who was already a famous avant-garde artist and director, in a letter to Eisenstein from Petrograd: