The Shifting Symbol: Conditional Realism/Symbolism in Post-Chekhovian Russian Drama

• In Event: Reimagining Modern Russian Drama: New Interpretations and Productions

Abstract

This paper identifies and analyzes a dramaturgical genealogy for a concept which I term the shifting symbol. Beginning with Vsevolod Meyerhold’s concept of conditional realism and Nikolai Evreinov’s understanding of theatricality as a “mania for transformation,” I discuss manifestations of Symbolism and “condensations” of reality in the history of Russian drama which starkly oppose the classical (static) Symbolist understanding of the symbol as the “key” with which to unlock the truth of a text. Rather than acting as an organizing principle of the play, I observe instances of the symbol’s destructive and disorganizing tendencies in the works of such figures as Nikolai Erdman, Alexander Vampilov, and Vassilii Sigarev. Borrowing a concept from Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, I argue that the destabilized and destabilizing symbol enacts a type of dramaturgical “perspectivism,” complicating the ontological boundaries between human audience and non-human symbol and forcing the apparently detached and transcendental perspective of the interpreter into an immanent mode of relations with the symbol itself.

Author

• Ewan McPhee, Princeton U