We look forward to reading it! What kind of feedback are you seeking?
I really love this time period (1917-1929) and am fascinated by Lunacharsky’s role within what was such a vibrant time of theatre-making.
Now that you have a draft of an article on Lunacharsky’s place within this period, it seems like going back and finding more sources will be really beneficial. You cite from Fitzpatrick, for example, but don’t yet draw from her definitions of “left”/futurist and “right”/”traditional” art. And even within traditional, there is a lot of variation: the former Imperial theatres I wouldn’t describe as realistic in the same way as the MAT; nor would I describe the Kamerny as realistic at all, despite the fact that it was thrown in by the futurists as one of the traditional theatres to be done away with.
There are a lot of specific questions that I am sure you are asking yourself and are in the process of answering: How and when did the structure of state control shift and why? When were theatres state funded? Who got more money? Why? What role did TEO Narkompros play? Who prompted the “Back to Ostrovsky” call and why? What was staged in the censorship-free period and what after? When did Glavrepartkom come into the picture? Who was Rolland? Who was Kerzhentsev? Why was Lunacharsky fired in 1929?
Regarding your production analyses, so far you are drawing primarily from secondary sources and not many of them- yet. I’d be cautious about using Rudnitsky to judge a production’s political content, though his descriptions are great. And I’m not clear which sources you are getting your production detail from. But, in general, I think there is plenty more out there on both Wiseman and Forest for you to draw from, including, in the case of the latter, the Meyerhold Theatre archive on microfilm that is available at several US libraries. Plus Braun and others.
Lastly, I think you are still searching for what your argument is, what ties it all together, and what you are saying that is an original contribution to the conversation. This will come. One possibility would be to make this about “Back to Ostrovsky” rather than about Lunacharsky quite so directly.
I look forward to continuing the conversation!
The paper looks at the early years of Soviet theatre from an original and illuminating point of view. The re-envisioning of pre-revolutionary texts by Eisenstein and Meyerhold clearly defines a dynamic, even “liminal,” time of burgeoning ideologies when clear positions on aesthetics and politics may never be fully recovered. I dare think that the selective evidence and intelligent argumentation in your paper actually advances a charming conjecture—a theoretical probability—that nicely flirts with new historicism!
I wonder if Soviet ideologists of theatreeither left or rightwere considering any particular criteria in their choice of suitable classical plays? For instance, did they categorize Gogol and Ostrovsky as “progressive” and “people’s” playwrights for their critique of the aristocratic/exploiting class? Although traditional in their dramatic form, Ostrovsky’s comedies might have been looked favorably on ideological level. I believe I am right to assume that Chekhov did not make Lunacharsky’s list….
Rolland’s statement of “theatre believers” and “people believers,” quoted in the conclusion, is superb and articulates a central topic of all our discussions! I am excited to hear more on the subject!
I too really love this time period (1917-1929), though my interest continues into the 1930s as well. What is most interesting to me is how we got from the experimentation of the 1920s to the socialist realism of the 1930s and later. I think you help to show how Lunacharsky was instrumental in enabling the experimentation. However, it seems that you could enrich your historical analysis by addressing the larger forces that seem to be at play. This struggle between the monumentalists and iconoclasts could be seen as a manifestation of these forces in the cultural realm, while the implementation of the New Economic Policy — a manifestation in the political realm. Given the way NEP affected society and formed a social background to the productions you discuss, and since these productions cite or refer to these social circumstances, the lack of discussion of NEP seems a significant omission.
Perhaps, the concept of "liminality" to which Vessela referred could provide a nice theoretical foundation for exploring this period. One way of reading the Rolland quotation you conclude with is as an allusion to the role of the State in bringing an end to liminality by restoring order. In this case, the Soviet state sought to restore order coming out of the Revolution and Civil War. Of course there was a tension between the need for order and the desire for ongoing international communist revolution. Interestingly, the move to socialist realism follows after Stalin's "socialism in one country" policy is instituted. Perhaps this tension between order and revolution contributed to or enabled the the debate over the appropriate theatrical aesthetic and organizational principles.
I'm guessing this paper may be part of a larger work in which you perhaps address some of the above, but hope this is useful. Thanks for sharing.
The paper is useful in helping decipher the official aesthetic politics of the Civil-War era’s dizzying political landscape.
I do, however, get confused with the use of right and left to describe both politics and aesthetics. How are you defining “artistic right and left”? Does this mean art that either opposes or aligns with Bukharin’s political “Left” of the Party? Perhaps some specific examples of companies or artists that Lunacharsky, Kerzhentsev
, or Lenin considered to be “right” and “left” would be helpful (assuming these terms have different meaning from merely “bourgeois”/“proletarian” or “revolutionary”/“counter-revolutionary”). Also, you introduce the terms “monumentalism” and “iconoclastism” much later on page 3, but perhaps this division could be useful earlier in the article and less confusing than the terms left/right. I would like to hear more about “monumenalism” and “iconoclastism.”
I realize that Lunacharsky is the focus of this paper, but I feel that Kerzhentsev gets lost in the discussion of Eisenstein’s and Meyerhold’s “Back to Ostrovsky” plays. Perhaps including the iconoclasts’ reading of these productions could help pick up Kerzhentzev’s thread at this later point in the paper. You do mention the anti-bourgeois and experimental elements in Eisenstein, but don’t explicitly mention the “theatrical left” until the very end of the Meyerhold section. Did these productions have any direct connections to Kerzhentsev?