St Petersburg полностью

This play was shown at the same House of the Press, in which Filonov’s Masters of Analytical Art had done paintings on the walls of the theater and lobby. Now Filonov’s “analytical” method triumphed on the stage: the costume of the postmaster was made up of envelopes sealed with red wax and huge postal cancellations; the policeman’s uniform featured leg irons, chains, locks, and keys; the tavern waiter had a wine bottle and hams on his head and a large sausage dangling from a strategic place. They were called “speaking costumes” and elicited a stormy reaction. The sophisticated audience was as delighted as the critics were outraged by Terentyev’s handling of the text of Gogol’s comedy, which was known to everyone in the country. The characters suddenly switched to French, Polish, or German or burst into Gypsy song and even arias from Rimsky-Korsakov operas in the middle of their monologues.

The play based on The Inspector General was filled with music and staged for the most part as parody; for instance, the hero proceeded solemnly to the toilet to the sounds of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. In general, the toilet played an important part in Terentyev’s production: the actors were constantly heading off for it and interpolating grunts and moans into Gogol’s original text. This was highly unusual for Soviet audiences, as was the blatantly erotic interpretation, which embarrassed even the avant-garde critics.

The premiere of the Gogol-Terentyev Inspector General, which received a hostile reception from the Leningrad establishment, took place in the spring of 1927 and had an undoubted influence on Shostakovich’s Nose, which he began soon afterward. Another striking theatrical phenomenon in Leningrad that entranced Shostakovich was the Theater of Worker Youth (TRAM), which arose in 1922 as an amateur studio at the House of Communist Upbringing. Shostakovich lived nearby and saw many performances by that ensemble, which was headed by one of the most popular theater figures of the city, Mikhail Sokolovsky, the idol of “proletarian” youth. TRAM quickly won a wide audience and realized the secret dreams of the most radical “left” theoreticians of the theater. Sokolovsky, whose energy and enthusiasm could overwhelm any doubters, rejected the most important elements of the old theater. Instead of presenting plays traditionally, the basis of their performance became the “dramatization,” which Adrian Piotrovsky, a TRAM theoretician, later described thus: “The dramatization of a remembered event or asserted slogan was the linchpin onto which were threaded actions, movements, dialogues, and songs.”96 According to Piotrovsky, for the avant-garde an important distinction between a “dramatization” and the old psychological drama was the fact that this new theater form “strove not ‘to show,’ but ‘to prove,’ ‘to persuade,’ to change lives.”

In that sense TRAM was the embodiment of all the utopian manifestos of Russian theater symbolism and the later futurism. What had seemed an unrealizable ideal before the revolution suddenly became possible in Communist Petrograd. In the early years after the revolution the authorities allowed and encouraged all sorts of dramatic performances in which thousands of people took part. The avant-gardists were granted an artistic license that had not existed before; they could use “word, song, athletic march, military parade, smoke screen, cannon fire from a fortress, fireworks, projectors from battleships.”97 For Soviet avant-gardists these were exercises in preparation for the total theater of the future, which according to their plans would have to blend into life and which they visualized as a never-ending carnival.

But gradually those mass theatrical productions dwindled to nothing. The “obsolete” traditional theater withstood the attacks of the innovators and clearly had no intention of vanishing. Now all the hopes of the left theater people were tied to TRAM, where the indefatigable Sokolovsky banished professional actors as well as the traditional play and replaced them with young laborers. This allowed TRAM to claim to be the bastion of “proletarian” art. More or less protected by his orthodox label, Sokolovsky could undertake any experiment he wished.

Sokolovsky was primarily interested in theater’s unmediated effect on audiences. His actors lived and worked like a creative commune, which Sokolovsky dubbed the Monastery.98 TRAM’s performances, which usually consisted of a chain of brief episodes with a generous use of lights, music, and songs, were dedicated to such themes as alcoholism, anti-Semitism, juvenile delinquency, and the questions of free love versus traditional marriage.