'All of Russia is Acting!': The Role of Symbolist and Avant-Garde Theater in Early Soviet Myth-Making

• In Event: Writing and Reimagining the Silver Age

Abstract

This presentation investigates how key principles of Symbolist and avant-garde theater—Ivanov’s emphasis on collective sobornost’, Evreinov’s belief in all life’s inclination toward teatral’nost’, and the frame-breaking interactivity of Futurist theater, for example—coincided with pre- and post-Revolutionary theater. Under the direction of officials like Lunacharsky and Kerzhentsev and, in some cases, Symbolist and avant-garde artists themselves, elements of modernist Russian theater took on an explicitly political dimension in the form of agit-dramas, mass reenactments, and people’s festivals. Evreinov’s 1920 staging of The Storming of the Winter Palace provides a particularly salient example of Symbolist theater’s contributions to Soviet myth-making. Hallmarks of Evreinov’s earlier dramatic and theoretical works—interrogation of the relationship between actors and audience and distortion of narrative time—reach their apex in The Storming, a performance that spontaneously roused spectators to action and indelibly distorted historical narrative and collective memory. The theatrical instinct that Evreinov celebrated was, in a way, realized by the Soviets, with Lunacharsky proclaiming in 1920 that “All of Russia is acting!” As the new state solidified, however, the experimental theater and dramatists that had enabled its rise were repressed, and roles both on and off stage grew ever more rigid and pervasive.

Author

• Rebecca Cravens, Indiana U Bloomington