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Andrei Bely: Russian Symbolist Author(s): Daniel C. Gerould Source: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Autumn, 1978), pp. 25-29Published by: Performing Arts Journal, IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3245198Accessed: 07-11-2015 09:46 UTC

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:. v11 AINDREI BELY:

Russian Symbolist

Daniel C. Gerould

Andrei Bely (1933)

This is the first part of a two-part essay on Russian Symbolist playwrights. The second section, on Valerii Briusov, will appear in the Winter issue of PAJ-Editors.

Andrei Bely (1880-1934, pseudonym for Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev) is best known as one of the leading Russian symbolist poets and prose writers. His experimental novels, The Silver Dove (1909), St.Petersburg(1913), and Kotik Letaev (1922), have been likened to those of James Joyce in their ground-breaking enlargement of the linguistic resources of fiction.

As a dramatist, however, Bely is virtually unknown. Yet like his fellow symbolists Alexander Blok, Valerii Briusov, and Fyodor Sologub, Bely was intensely interested in the theatre and wrote critical essays and reviews about plays and playwrights, theoretical works on the nature of theatre, and several fragmentary dramas; in his later career he adapted his novels, St. Petersburg and Moscow, for the stage. Along Meyerhold's, Bely's was one of the most important voices in pre-revolutionary Russia raised against the confines of restrictive realism and for the eternal theatre of the soul.

In his essay, "The Theatre and Contemporary Drama" (1907),1 Bely states his belief that the drama is the highest poetic art (symphonic music being the highest of all the arts, because as pure movement it is the furthest removed from reality and the closest to the secret of being). Thus the atmospheric quality of drama-in other words, its musicality-is its most precious attribute. Such a transcendent art of creation "bears us ... above the cosmic dust of space and time,"2 and the ultimate goal of the drama for Bely, as for his friend, the composer Alexander Scriabin, is the transfiguration of life.3 In the Russian writer's view, man must live by his creative imagination and re-fashion reality according to his inner vision.

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The stage, as Bely conceives it, is "the incarnation of the dream," and "the fictive world of the drama infects people as with a fever, through the creation of a life that is lofty and meaningful."4 Bely shared the interest of his contemporaries in the mystery play, asserting that

Drama came from the mystery play. It is destined to return to it. Once drama approaches the mystery, once it returns to it, it inevitably comes down from the boards of the stage and spreads into life.5

In 1898, the year in which he finished the gymnasium, Bely worked on the project for writing a mystery, The Anti-Christ, of which two fragments were completed and published, He Who Has Come (1903) and The Jaws of Night (1907). The theme of this drama, which was to be Bely's Faust, is the coming of the Anti-Christ under the mask of Christ, and it presents an eschatological vision of the death of the earth and the extinction of the sun. Unlike Scriabin, who with his Prefatory Action and Mysterium hoped to usher in the millenium, Bely did not believe it possible any longer to create a grandiose mystery that would bring freedom and happiness to mankind. Whereas the philosopher Vyecheslav Ivanov had proposed that the theatre become a temple in which mysteries could be communally celebrated as the spectators entered into the rites, the ironic author of St. Petersburg doubted whether the barrier between stage and auditorium could be erased in the name of an obsolete religious ritual. Rather than proposing a return to the primitivism of ancient mythologies, Bely suggests that perhaps cinema and puppet show are the true theatre of the twentieth century.

Having lived through the Russian Revolution of 1905, Bely was acutely aware of the unstable nature of the present age and in his poetry and fiction forecast the chaos and destruction to come in 1917; accordingly, he realized that old art forms must be destroyed. He begins his essay, "The Crisis of Consciousness and Henrik Ibsen" (1910), with the following words:

We are living through a crisis. Never before have the fundamental contradictions in human consciousness come into conflict with such sharpness; never before has the duality between consciousness and feeling, contemplation and will, individuality and society, science and religion, morality and beauty been so distinctly expressed.6

A revealing example of Bely's approach to the theatre is found in his writings about Chekhov and The Cherry Orchard. In accord with Meyerhold's reading of Chekhovian drama as musical and mystical, Bely interprets The Cherry Orchard as transcending realism; in the third act, during the ball, Bely argues that Chekhov's supra-realistic methods become apparent:

A family drama is taking place in the drawing room, while to the rear, lighted by candlelight, masks of horror are dancing a frenzied dance: take that post office official waltzing with a young girl, isn't he actually a scarecrow? Or perhaps he is a walking-stick to which a mask has been attached, or a clothesrack on which a uniform has been hung. And what about the station master? Where have they come from, and why? They are

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all incarnations of universal chaos. Here they are, dancing in a mincing fashion, when the family misfortune has just become a reality.7

Bely's own writings invariably portray the forces of chaos triumphing over order and rationality. In depicting the deepening cultural crisis confronting Europe at the turn of the century, Bely creates powerful images of an old tottering world, poised on the edge of an abyss into which it is about to collapse. "The gulf, over which we are hanging," he declares in "The Art of the Future" (1907), "is deeper and darker than we think."8

The short fragment, Jaws of Night, is a quintessential drama of the abyss and a thoroughly characteristic work, forecasting both the thematic obsessions and formal experimentation of the mature Bely. In many respects this mystery play about the end of the world anticipates Bely's first great apocalyptic novel, The Silver Dove, completed only two years later, in which a secret brotherhood of the faithful- called the Covenant of the Dove-await a false messiah and plan to do battle with the enemy of mankind; the imagery of spiritual illumination and darkness is strikingly similar in both works.

Psychic as well as world-historical in its orientation, The Jaws of Night can also be viewed as a drama of higher consciousness; Bely, ever in pursuit of occult knowledge, went to Switzerland in 1914 and joined a Rudolf Steiner anthroposophical society. The formal techniques by which Bely embodies in sensuous images the sudden epiphanies of spiritual life have their analogues in the music and painting of the period. A symphony of lights and sounds, The Jaws of Night plays off richly evocative shapes and colors against rhythmically repeated phrases, echoing and re-echoing through the mountains. As in Scriabin's Symphony No. 5, "Prometheus-the Poem of Fire" with its color-keyboard, Bely strives for a synthesis of sound and color.

In creating for his drama a cosmic arena expressive of the boundless expanses of the universe, Bely breaks sharply with the conventions of the late nineteenth-century theatre, even as enlarged and enriched by the French symbolists, and creates a new stage space that opens out onto infinity. In its cosmic locus, The Jaws of Night stands half-way between the allegorical wooded island of Maeterlinck's The Blind (1890) and the primeval chaos of Artaud's The Spurt of Blood (1927). Pulsating intensities of light and the refraction of radiance become the dramatic action, replacing psychology and plot. The play aboutnds in strange optical effects (akin to those of Op-Art). Sometimes the old prophet grows dimmer and dimmer until, like the Cheshire Cat, he fades out except for a faint afterglow; sometimes his image becomes re-duplicated in a whole series of little bubbles of light. The radiant Christian women recall the illumined angels of the Belgian symbolist painters Jean Delville and William Degouve de Nuncques, and the white-robed figures, cliffs, and cypresses are all dramatic renderings of Arnold Boecklin's famous Isle of the Dead.

After the October Revolution, Bely became actively involved in the new Soviet theatre in the mid-1920s. Upon his return to Moscow from Berlin in

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November, 1923, after two years abroad as an emigre, Bely received proposals to adapt his novel St. Petersburg for the stage from three of the outstanding artists of the time: Meyerhold, Tairov, and Mikhail Chekhov at the second studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. After first promising the play to Meyerhold, Bely finally agreed to give the adaptation to the Moscow Art Theatre, tempted by Chekhov's offer to play the central role of Senator Apollon Appollonovich Ableukhov, the Czarist bureaucrat whose anarchist son carries a time-bomb in a sardine can. Bely wrote to a friend:

I am quite fascinated by [Mikhail] Chekhov; he somehow was able to fire me with enthusiasm for the stage; and now, in the future, I am dreaming about writing plays. Have you seen Chekhov? What a wonderful artist! Now I understand that for a playwright the stage is a necessity, as a palette and brush for applying the colors; for me Mikhail Chekhov is such a brush.9

The first text which Bely prepared was called The Death of a Senator and differed so much from the novel that the author regarded it as a new and independent work. Mikhail Chekhov found this first stage version of St. Petersburg much too long and suggested that it be cut in half, marking those scenes that should be eliminated. Bely dutifully began making further revisions, a process that continued through eight different texts during all the rehearsals until the opening night on November 14, 1925.

Bely regarded the play, Petersburg, finally presented by the second studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, as less his own work than the collective creation of the actors, designers, directors, and musicians at the theatre. He humorously complained that he no longer recognized his own child and that in the course of working with the theatre the author became the director and the actors the playwright. The play and production received mixed reviews, but Mikhail Chekhov's performance was acclaimed and there was even a plan, never realized, of making St. Petersburg into a film. Subsequently Bely adapted his second city novel, Moscow (1925), for staging at Meyerhold's theatre in accordance with the great director's theatrical style, which had much impressed the writer in productions such as The Inspector General. Although a model for the set was designed, Moscow was never presented, and tightening Stalinist controls brought to an end Bely's career in the theatre.

Footnotes

In Arabeski, Moscow, 1911. First published in On Theatre (1908), an important collection of essays by Meyerhold, Sologub, Briusov, and others.

2 Simvolizm, Moscow, 1910, p. 71.

3 Ibid., p. 10. In his final years Scriabin planned to go to India where he hoped to present a vast mystery that would bring about the end of the world.

4 Arabeski, p. 17.

5 Sirnvolizm, p. 173.

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6 Arabeski, p. 161.

7 Ibid., p. 404.

8 Simvolizmn, p. 453.

9 Quoted by L.K. Dolgopolov, "A. Bely o Postanovke 'Istoricheskoi Dramy' 'Peterburg' na stsene MKhAT-2 (po materialam TsGALI)," Russkaya Literatura, No. 2, 1977, pp. 173-174. This production is also discussed in V. Gromov, Mikhail Chekhov, Moscow, 1970, and in Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, No. 27-28, Moscow, 1937, pp. 600-608, where there is information about the projected staging of Moscow as well.

A_! sAes>cXes

M.F.A./B.FA in Acting Directing Design/Technical Management Costuming

* Contact Robert Benedetti. Dean School of Theatre

California Institute of the Arts Valencia, California 91355

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