No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Baring the Frame: Meyerhold's Refraction of Gozzi's Love of Three Oranges
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2015
Extract
In 1761, Count Carlo Gozzi created a “reflective analysis” of an Italian fairy tale about three oranges, framing his commedia dell'arte–infused scenario with a series of polemical attacks on his theatrical rivals. In 1914, Vsevelod Meyerhold and two collaborators, Konstantin Vogak and Vladimir Soloviev, published a reflective analysis of Gozzi's reflective analysis. This new Love of Three Oranges (Liubov k trem apel'sinam, translated as Love for Three Oranges), served as the source material for Sergei Prokofiev's opera (1919; Chicago world premiere, 1921). It is also one of the most illuminating, yet strangely understudied sources of information on how Meyerhold redefined the theatrical event, the creative process of the director, and the role of the actor in the years preceding the October Revolution. In particular, this Russian Three Oranges explores how a conscious relationship between actor and character in concert with framing devices that delineate levels of fiction can emphasize an experience peculiar to the theatre: regardless of style, audiences inevitably maintain both belief and disbelief in what they see and perceive theatrical performance as simultaneously real and not real.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2015
References
Endnotes
1. Konstantin Vogak (1887–1938) was a writer, a translator, a director, and a collaborator at Meyerhold's studio (1913–15), after which he fought in the Great War and emigrated to Western Europe. Vladimir Soloviev [Solov'ev] (1888–1941) was a director, a teacher, a playwright, a critic, a Borodinskaia Street Studio leader, and a regular contributor to Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto (Liubov’ k trem apel'sinam: Zhurnal Doktora Dapertutto) (hereafter LTA). After 1922, he was a directing professor at the present-day St. Petersburg State Academy of Theatre Arts. L. S. Oves, ed., Nauchno-issledovatel'skii proekt po tvorcheskomu naslediiu V. E. Meierkhol'da “Liubov’ k trem apel'sinam,” 1914–1916. 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: RIII, 2014), 1:75, 46–7.
2. Hereafter Three Oranges.
3. Analysis of Three Oranges in other contexts includes Oves; Raissa Raskina, Mejerchol'd e il Dottor Dappertutto: Lo “Studio” e la rivista “L'Amore delle tre melarance” (Rome: Bulzoni, 2010); and Robinson, Harlow, “Love for Three Operas: The Collaboration of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Prokofiev,” Russian Review 45.3 (1986): 287–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4. Bert O. States has termed the theatre's inherent duality “binocular vision,” in which “one eye enables us to see the world phenomenally [and] the other … to see it significatively.” I use “plural vision” for more than two planes of perception. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 8.
5. Doctor Dapertutto [Vsevelod Meierkhol'd], “Sverchok na pechi, ili u zamochnoi skvazhiny,” LTA 1–3 (1915): 89–94, at 90–3Google Scholar.
6. Vsevelod Meierkhol'd, “Amplua aktera. Moscow: GVYRM, 1922,” in Meierkhol'd: K istorii tvorcheskogo metoda: Publikatsii. Stat'i, ed. and comp. N. V. Pesochinskii (St. Petersburg: Kul'tInformPress, 1998), 41–43, at 43.
7. Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (New York: Hill & Wang), 1963.
8. Robert Leach, Vsevolod Meyerhold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 51.
9. Vsevelod Meierkhol'd, “K istorii i tekhnike teatra (1907),” in Vsevelod Meierkhol'd, Stat'i, Pis'ma, Rechi, Besedy, ed. A. V. Fevral'skii, vol. 1, 1891–1917 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968), 105–42, at 132.
10. Vsevelod Meyerhold, “First Attempts at a Stylized Theatre,” in Vsevelod Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. Edward Braun (London: Methuen, 1998), 49–58, at 50.
11. Meierkhol'd, “K istorii i tekhnike teatra,” 109.
12. In Braun's translation: “[T]he art of the director is the art not of an executant, but of an author—so long as one has earned the right.” Edward Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1998), 221. Though this phrase has since been misinterpreted to argue that Meyerhold wished to usurp the place of the playwright, in its context Meyerhold argued simply that playwriting and directing were originally “a single profession” that was subsequently artificially split due to the specific, virtuosic skills required of each. He added: “But their nature is one and the same! Therefore the art of the director is not the art of an executant, but that of an author. But one must have the right.” Vsevelod Meierkhol'd, “Meierkhol'd govorit. Zapisi vyskazyvanii Vseveloda Emil'evicha na repetitsiiakh i v besedakh,” ed. A. K. Gladkov, in Tarusskie stranitsy, ed. V. Koblikov, N. Otten, N. Panchenko, K. Paustovskii, and A. Shteinburg (Kaluga: Kaluzhskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1961), 306.
13. Vsevelod Meierkhol'd, “Max Reinhardt (Berliner Kammerspiele) (1907),” in Meierkhol'd, Stat'i, Pis'ma, Rechi, Besedy, 162–66, at 164.
14. For two excellent transposition studies, see Caryl Emerson, Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); and Alexander Burry, Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky: Transposing Novels into Opera, Film, and Drama (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011).
15. Oves, 2:364. Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) was a German Romantic playwright, a dramaturg, and a translator who was especially known for his fascination with Shakespeare and for his metatheatrical comedies, including Puss in Boots and Topsy-Turvy World (1797).
16. Jeremy Adler, “Introduction,” in E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr: Together with a Fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 1999), vii–xxxi, at ix. E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) was a composer, civil servant, music critic, and fiction writer best known for fantastical tales such as “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” and “The Sandman.” He strongly influenced Russian literature of the nineteenth century and Russian theatre of the early twentieth century.
17. A. M. Konechnyi, V. Ia. Morderer, A. E. Parnis, and R. D. Timenchik, “Artisticheskoe kabare ‘Prival Komediantov,’” in Pamiatniki kul'tury: Novye otkrytiia: Pis'mennost’, iskusstvo, arkheologiia. Ezhegodnik 1988 (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1989), 96–154, at 102.
18. Jacques Callot (1592–1635) was a French etcher whose prolific oeuvre includes grotesque and whimsical depictions of commedia dell'arte masks, fêtes of the Medici court, and Les Misères et les malheurs de la guerre (1633), a series of etchings that responded to the Thirty Years' War.
19. J. Douglas Clayton, “From Gozzi to Hoffmann: German Sources for Commedia dell'Arte in Russian Avant-Garde Theatre,” in The Science of Buffoonery: Theory and History of the Commedia dell'Arte, ed. Domenico Pietropaolo (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989), 117–33.
20. Grimm, Reinhold, “From Callot to Butor: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Tradition of the Capriccio,” MLN 93.3 (1978): 399–415, at 401CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21. Michael Kennedy and Joyce Bourne Kennedy, “Capriccio,” in Oxford Dictionary of Music, ed. Tim Rutherford Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Oxford Reference Online, http://www.oxfordreference.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780199578108.001.0001/acref-9780199578108-e-1599, accessed 9 May 2014.
22. Grimm, 400.
23. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Princess Brambilla: A Capriccio after Jacques Callot,” in Hoffmann, “The Golden Pot” and Other Tales, ed. and trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 119–238, at 119. Hoffman is referring here to Callot's Balli di Sfessania series (1621–2).
24. See Sergei Ignatov, “Introduction,” in E. T. A. Hoffman, Printsessa Blandina, trans. Sergei Ignatov (prose) and A. Olenin (verse) (Moscow: Izd. vserossiskogo soiuza poetov, 1925), 4.
25. Chris Baldick, “Romantic Irony,” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Oxford Reference Online, http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-9780199208272-e-1002, accessed 7 May 2015.
26. Silvija Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 34.
27. For an example of Love of Three Oranges in dialogue, see John Louis DiGaetani, trans., Carlo Gozzi: Translations of “The Love of Three Oranges,” “Turandot,” and “The Snake Lady” (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). For a closer translation, see Carlo Gozzi, Reflective Analysis of His Fable Entitled “The Love of the Three Oranges,” trans. John Addington Symonds (Boston: Chrysalis, 1959). Martellian verse is a fourteen-syllable adaptation of Alexandrine verse developed by Pier Iacopo Martello (1665–1727).
28. Gozzi, Reflective Analysis, 10.
29. This doubled as a gibe at Chiari's “violations of the … unities of place and time.” Carlo Gozzi, Five Tales for the Theatre, ed. and trans. Albert Bermel and Ted Emery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 307 n. 17.
30. J. Douglas Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell'Arte/Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama (Montréal: McGill–Queen's University Press, 1993), 29.
31. Sergei Ignatov sent Gozzi's plays to Meyerhold in response to their conversations about Ignatov's E. T. A. Hoffmann: Man and Works (1914), a chapter of which links Gozzi's Strange Sorrows and theatrical reform to contemporary Russian theatre. Ignatov to Meyerhold, 2 December 1911, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow (hereafter RGALI), f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 1634. Meyerhold responded: “I am very grateful to you for having sent me this wonderful little volume. Oh, how much it has given me!” Meyerhold to Ignatov, 14 March 1912, in Vsevelod E. Meierkhol'd, Perepiska: 1896–1939, ed. V. P. Korshunova and M. M. Sitkovetskaia, and intro. Iu. A. Zavadskii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976), 143.
32. Antonio Sacchi [also Sacco] (1708–88) was an Italian commedia actor-manager, “probably the leading Italian player of the century.” His famous Truffaldino was featured (nearly twenty years apart) in both Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters and Gozzi's Love of Three Oranges. Martin Banham, The Cambridge Guide to Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 548.
33. In his introduction, Alexandrinsky Theatre actor M. V. Pisarev called for the tale to be used to reform the Russian stage. In E. T. A. Hoffmann, Neobychainyia mucheniia odnogo teatral'nogo direktora, ed. M. I. Pisarev, trans. M. V. Karneev (St. Petersburg: Lederle, 1894), 3–4.
34. A month after the first reading of the divertissement (at Meyerhold's apartment on 22 March 1913), Meyerhold wrote to Soloviev to discuss seeking a composer, expressing a preference for a French composer or for “one of the newest Russian ones.” Meierkhol'd to Solov'ev, 23 April (6 May, new style) 1913, in Meierkhol'd, Perepiska, 154. In 1918 Meyerhold gave a copy of their Three Oranges to Prokofiev, who developed his operatic refraction of it the following year.
35. For a list of early participants, see Oves, 1:94.
36. Ignatov to Meierkhol'd, [late February 1914], RGALI, f. 998, op. 1, ed. khr. 1634.
37. Called the Troitskaia Street Studio before it changed locations to Borodinskaia Street in 1914.
38. See Doctor Dapertutto, “Sverchok na pechi”; and n.a., “Khronika,” LTA 6–7 (1914): 117–18Google Scholar.
39. A. A. Mgebrov, Zhizn’ v teatre, 2 vols. (Moscow and Leningrad: Akademiia, 1932), 2:155.
40. Sergei Eisenstein wrote of this requirement as a student at Meyerhold's State Higher Theatre Workshops. See Sergei Eisenstein, “Iz pis'ma k Iu. I. Eizenshtein. Oktiabria 1921,” in Eizenshtein o Meierkhol'de: 1919–1948, ed. V. V. Zabrodin (Moscow: Novoe izdatel'stvo, 2005), 85–86, at 85.
41. Vs. Meyerhold, Vl. Soloviev, and Vogak, K. A., “Otkrytoe pis'mo avtorov divertismenta Liubov’ k trem apel'sinam A. A. Gvozdevu,” LTA 4–5 (1914): 86–8, at 87–8Google Scholar.
42. G. “Novye puti (Beseda s Vs. E. Meierkhol'dom),” Rampa i zhizn‘ 34 (1911): 2–3, at 2Google Scholar.
43. Mandel refers to “oscillations between levels of fiction” in Tieck's plays. Oscar Mandel, “Introduction,” in Ludwig Tieck, The Land of Upside Down, trans. Oscar Mandel in collaboration with Maria Kelsen Feder (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press [London: AUP], 1978), 7–26, at 21.
44. See Tieck, Land of Upside Down; and Ludwig Tieck's “Puss-in-Boots” and the Theater of the Absurd: A Commentated Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed. Gerald Ernest Paul Gillespie (Brussells and New York: Peter Lang, 2013).
45. Sometimes translated as The Puppet Show.
46. Blok, Alexander, The Puppet Show [Balaganchik], trans. Kriger, Mary and Struve, Gleb, Slavonic and East European Review 28.71 (1950): 309–22, at 309Google Scholar.
47. Braun, 67.
48. Ibid.
49. Many of the journal's employees and authors, including Zhirmunsky, “attended the Department of Romance and Germanic Studies at the University of St. Petersburg, where the formalists Eikhenbaum and V. Shklovsky were shaped.” Raskina, 21–2, my translation.
50. Zhirmunskii, Viktor M., “Komediia chistoi radosti. (Kot v sapogakh, Liudviga Tika. 1797 g.),” LTA 1 (1916): 85–91, at 86Google Scholar.
51. Ibid., 88.
52. Ibid.
53. Vsevelod Meyerhold, “The Fairground Booth,” in Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. Edward Braun (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998), 119–42, at 127, Meyerhold's italics.
54. Meierkhol'd, Vsevelod, Solov'ev, Vladimir, and Vogak, Konstantin, “Liubov’ k trem apel'sinam. Divertisment. Dvenadtsat' stsen, prolog, epilog i tri intermedii,” LTA 1 (1914): 18–47, at 19–20Google Scholar.
55. Oves, 1:76 n 2.
56. Meierkhol'd, Solov'ev, and Vogak, 23.
57. Ibid., 25.
58. Ibid., 18.
59. Ibid., 22.
60. “Forestage servants” is more commonly translated as “proscenium servants.” I translate prostsenium as “forestage” to capture Meyerhold's emphasis on the forestage as a liminal creative space, negotiated by the actor, between the real and fictional worlds.
61. Many of Masquerade's masqueraders were young Alexandrinsky actors who studied with Meyerhold at the Borodinskaia Street Studio. Oves, 1:94, 96.
62. Prokofiev's opera doubled the number of warring choruses, adding “Lyrics” and “Empty Heads.” The composer also gave the Eccentrics a more active role in shaping the action.
63. In the commedia sense of plot summary.
64. Meierkhol'd, Solov'ev, and Vogak, 32.
65. According to a footnote by Vogak, this scene is from “an anonymous pamphlet: Four Masks of the Italian Comedy.” Ibid., 34.
66. Ibid., 34.
67. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 7.
68. Meyerhold, “Fairground Booth,” 131.
69. Julia Vaingurt, Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 65.
70. Braun, 173. For a valuable framing discussion, see Vaingurt, 65.
71. Syssoyeva draws a useful connection between Meyerhold's understanding of actors as generators of their own material and today's collective creation. See Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva, “Revolution in the Theatre I: Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, and Collective Creation—Russia, 1905,” in A History of Collective Creation, ed. Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva and Scott Proufit (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 37–57.
72. See Hamill, Kyna, “Schiaminossi, Callot and Fencing,” Print Quarterly 26.4 (2009): 354–63, at 361Google Scholar; and Posner, Donald, “Jacques Callot and the Dances Called Sfessania,” Art Bulletin 59.2 (1977): 203–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
73. Studio participants studied Callot etchings in another required studio text: Konstantin Miklashevskii, La commedia dell'arte, ili teatr ital'ianskikh komediantov XVI, XVII, i XVIII stoletii (St. Petersburg: Sirius', 1914–17).
74. Sincere thanks to Kyna Hamill for bringing Callot's background planes to my attention.
75. Ignatov, Sergei, “Hoffmaniana I (E. T. A. Gofman na stsene),” LTA 4–7 (1915): 179–82, at 181Google Scholar.
76. Meierkhol'd, Solov'ev, and Vogak, 19.
77. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (London: Routledge, 2006), 100.
78. Zhirmunskii, 85–6.
79. Tatar, Maria M., “E. T. A. Hoffmann's ‘Der Sandmann’: Reflection and Romantic Irony,” MLN 95.3 (1980): 585–608CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 607, my italics.
80. Ibid., 608.
81. Andrew Wachtel, Plays of Expectations: Intertextual Relations in Russian Twentieth-Century Drama (Seattle: Herbert J. Ellison Center, University of Washington, 2006), 71.
82. Viktor Shklovsky, “The Making of Don Quixote,” in Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher, intro. Gerald L. Bruns (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), 72–100, at 94.
83. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, eds., Brecht on Theatre, 3d ed. (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2015), 72.
84. Meyerhold rehearsed Three Oranges for a proposed 1915 staging but replaced it with a journal-sponsored production of Blok's Balaganchik and The Incognita, during the intermission of which Chinese jugglers tossed real oranges to the audience. Oves, 1:74.
85. Of the three Oranges authors, Vogak (1887–1938) was the only Italian speaker. Oves, 1:75.
86. “Studiia. Programma,” LTA 6–7 (1914): 105–115, at 106Google Scholar.
87. Hoover, Marjorie L., “A Mejerxol'd Method?—Love for Three Oranges (1914–1916),” Slavic and East European Journal 13.1 (1969): 23–41, at 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
88. [Meierkhol'd, Vsevelod], “Studiia. Klass Meierkhol'da. Tekhnika stsenicheskikh dvizhenii,” LTA 4–5 (1914): 94–98, at 97Google Scholar.
89. Ibid., 96–7.
90. Ibid., 97.
91. Leach, Vsevolod Meyerhold, 30.
92. [Solov'ev, Vladimir], “Studiia. Klass Vl. N. Solov'eva. Osnovnye printsipy stsenicheskoi tekhniki improvizovannyi ital'ianskoi komedii,” LTA 4–5 (1914): 93–94, at 93Google Scholar.
93. Ibid.
94. [Solov'ev, Vladimir], “Studiia. Klass Vl. N. Solov'eva,” LTA 1 (1914): 60–61, at 60Google Scholar.
95. A short play signed by Soloviev's alter ego, Volmar Luscinius.
96. [Solov'ev], “Studiia. Klass Vl. N. Solov'eva,” 60–1.
97. Ibid., 61.
98. Hoover, 27.
99. “Studiia. Programma,” LTA 6–7 (1914): 105–15, at 113Google Scholar.
100. [Meierkhol'd, Vsevelod], “Studiia. Klass Vs. E. Meierkhol'da,” LTA 1 (1914): 61–62, at 62Google Scholar.
101. [Meierkhol'd], “Studiia. Klass Vs. E. Meierkhol'da. Tekhnika stsenicheskikh dvizheniia,” 95.
102. [Meierkhol'd, Vsevelod and Solov'ev, Vladimir], “Studio. Klass Vs. E. Meierkhol'd i Vl. N. Solov'eva,” LTA 4–5 (1914): 90–92, at 92Google Scholar. “The refusal” is an early reference to a term later used in the sequential trio of gestures in Meyerhold's biomechanics: the otkaz, an initial gesture in the opposite direction of the main movement, the movement itself, and the tochka, the movement's concluding punctuation.
103. Leach, Vsevolod Meyerhold, 30.
104. “Studiia. Programma,” 106.
105. Ibid., 113.
106. Ibid., 107.
107. Ibid., 112.
108. “‘Komedianty.’ Vecher studii V. E. Meierkhol'da,” Petrogradskaia gazeta (13 February 1915), reprinted in “Studiia,” LTA 1–3 (1915): 148Google Scholar.
109. “Studiia. Programma,” 109.
110. Sergei Iutkevich, “Doctor Dapertutto, ili sorok let spustia,” in Vstrechi s Meierkhol'dom: Sbornik vospominanii, ed. L. D. Vendrovskaia (Moscow: VTO, 1967), 207–18, at 214.
111. Originally called the State Higher Directing Workshop, it changed names several times to become the foundation of today's GITIS.
112. Leach, Vsevolod Meyerhold, 44.