'Laughter Through Tears': The Uncanny in Meyerhold's 'The Government Inspector'

• In Event: Gender, Subversion, and Artistic Innovation in the Soviet Avant-Garde

Abstract

At the apex of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s staging of The Government Inspector in 1926, the feckless Mayor turned not on his tormentor, the titular Government Inspector, but on the audience. Wheeling on his heels, he ignored the dramatis personae behind him and shouted frantically toward the spectators: “What are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves!” At this moment, Meyerhold sprung a trick — one drop curtain descended while another was raised, revealing an exact double of the gathered party, with one important difference: the actors had been replaced with marionettes.
This sleight-of-hand possessed all the hallmarks of the uncanny experience, addressed by Freud, Ernst Jentsch, and more recently Katherine Withy, of perceiving animated dolls. The figure and sounds of the doll, puppet, or automaton recurred in Russian avant-garde art as a manifestation of a larger philosophical discourse about, and anxiety around, the concept of the “God-man”, brought into the public consciousness by Cosmists like Nikolai Fedorov, Alexander Bogdanov, Vladimir Solovyev, and others.
My paper considers the nexus of the uncanny, Revolutionary theory, and avant-garde art in The Inspector General. Deploying an intertextual analysis of Gnesin’s score and Meyerhold’s dramaturgy, I argue that these two artists leveraged an estranged mimicry of the human form as a critique against the promised Socialist utopia. In context, the Mayor’s urgent injunction, juxtaposed with a party of unmoving and inhuman marionettes behind him, can be understood not only as a mere disruption of theatrical mimesis but as a warning against the false promises of Socialist utopia.

Author

• Piper Morrow Foulon, U of Michigan, Ann Arbor