Introduction [Amateur and proletarian theatre in post-revolutionary Russia : primary sources]

Abstract

Soon after the October Revolution, a young aspiring actor with some acting experience garnered from attending the studio of Fyodor Komissarzhevsky drifted towards Cherkizovo, a small village near Moscow. What took him there was the promise of work. The village’s drama circle had invited him to stage Gogol’s The Marriage with a group of local amateur actors. Surprisingly, he said, amateur theatre performances were becoming popular among local communities. The play was put on in the tiny and cramped village club, where the stage was lit by kerosene lamps. Fifty years later, the actor, now a seasoned professional, was astonished to hear that a record of the performance had been kept and that the programme was saved for posterity in the museum of the new city that grew on the same grounds. That young actor was Igor Ilinsky, one of the greatest performers of the Soviet stage. In some ways, Ilinsky’s story is atypical of the amateur theatre taking place after the Revolution. Few actors coasted from the amateur stage towards professional pastures, though some undoubtedly did. In other ways, however, Ilinsky’s recollections remain very representative of the broader amateur scene that developed after the Revolution. For instance, that he, a young actor with some training, acted next to amateur actors in a tiny rural village was quite a normal occurrence. Ilinsky also remembered the enormous craving that the workers and peasants had for the rough-and-ready productions that were hastily staged for their cultural entertainment. He did not forget other productions of Gogol and Chekhov in which he took part or his reading of Mayakovsky’s poems. He performed in railway stations, in canteens, factories, barracks, for Red Army units, and often in the workers’ clubs. He performed with little or no rehearsal time and in unheated rooms (Ilinskii 1984: 164–5). This volume gathers primary sources about the kind of post-revolutionary amateur theatre described by Ilinsky. The essays are sourced from the first decade after the Revolution. Taken together, they tell a story of unabashed optimism in the creativity of the working classes. They speak of the use of theatre to carve a public role and political voice in the construction of a new world. The sources, however, also exhibit the flipside of the scene, or the sombre difficulties faced by the amateur actors in their work, the incessant calls to raise standards through professional help, and ultimate infiltration from above that transformed what had begun as an autonomous and heterogonous activity into controlled state propaganda. Other anthologies do exist which collate together essays about culture in early Soviet Russia, but this is the first collection that specifically addresses the proletarian theatre produced by the workers.1 It captures both the theoretical articulations on the practice, produced by luminaries such as Platon Kerzhentsev, Valerian Pletnev, Alexander Mgebrov and Valentin Smyshlaev, as well as the more fleeting descriptions and firsthand accounts of the actual productions staged. As a result, the potential of collective practice, theatrical inventiveness and topical relevance will be highlighted. In this introduction I will expound on the range of the collection and draw links between the various essays, the vast majority of which have never been translated before.