Nikolai Evreinov

• Born: February 26, 1879
• Birthplace: St. Petersburg, Russia
• Died: February 7, 1953
• Place of death: Paris, France

Other Literary Forms

Nikolai Evreinov’s theories on drama are presented in Vvedenie v monodramu (1909; an introduction to monodrama), Teatr kak takovoy (1913; the theater as such), and the three-volume Teatr dlya sebya (1915-1917; The Theater in Life, 1927). A summary of these theoretical writings is available in English in The Theater in Life, reissued in 1970. Evreinov also wrote articles and books on various dramatic topics, such as Spanish actors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serf actors, theatrical invention, the origin of drama, Semitic and German drama, and the Russian theater. His own and other plays staged by him at The Crooked Mirror were published under his editorship in the three-volume Dramaticheskiye sochineniya (1907-1923).

Achievements

Nikolai Evreinov belongs to those avant-garde playwright-directors who revitalized the Russian stage in the first decades of the twentieth century. After Anton Chekhov’s death in 1904, these writers, among them Vsevolod Meyerhold, experimented with new forms and ideas, all of which represented a reaction to the realism and naturalism that had dominated the stage throughout the nineteenth century. Evreinov’s contributions to this period of innovation in Russian theater are several. He strove to eliminate the barriers between audience and stage through a number of devices, including prologues that exposed the tricks of the trade by exhibiting props, explaining set arrangement and function, and changing scenery in view of the audience. His highly exotic settings incorporated grotesque placards, carnival paraphernalia, and dances and music. He brought back the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte and adopted its practice of giving the actors wide scope to improvise. Evreinov developed a type of “short play,” a sophisticated version of the humorous sketch found in cabaret, and staged this genre at The Crooked Mirror, the intimate St. Petersburg theater under his direction from 1910 to 1917. These skits subsequently became very popular in Russia and entered the general repertory as a standard feature. Evreinov’s desire to focus attention on the theatrical aspects of performance caused him to make prominent use of the play-within-a-play, which is present in all his major dramas. Evreinov’s assertions that “life is theater,” that life must be theatricalized, and that art influences life also occupy him in his theoretical writings. In these works, he expounds on his belief that the theatrical instinct is basic to human nature, causing the human personality to play parts, mask intents, and project images constantly. The drama, according to Evreinov, must give expression to this urge by stressing the theatrical side of its enterprise and by involving the audience.

Evreinov’s efforts to increase dramatic tension led him to expand on the monodrama. Whereas previously the term had designated a single actor, Evreinov split this individual into several parts, representing competing psychological tendencies. Luigi Pirandello valued Evreinov’s originality so highly that he produced The Main Thing in his own theater in 1924. The play’s Italian success prompted several American companies to mount productions, and in 1926, the Theater Guild engaged Evreinov to assist in a New York staging. Though American audiences found the intricate work strange, critics generally paid tribute to its uniqueness and recognized the potential of its new dramatic form. Evreinov’s plays are not frequently performed in the United States, nor is his name widely known in the West. He also finds very little recognition on the Soviet stage, given his émigré status: the Great Soviet Encyclopedia does not even list him. Many of his innovations, however, have become permanent features of modern performance the world over.

Biography

Nikolai Nikolayevich Evreinov was from birth immersed in the cultural graces of the aristocratic St. Petersburg family into which he was born on February 26, 1879. His love for the theater began in his childhood, which saw his first attempts at directing, staging, and writing. His versatility, too, was apparent early. In 1901, he was graduated from the Imperial Law Institute and embarked on a civil service career. At the same time, he developed his musical talents under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and took a degree at the conservatory. Socially, he impressed others by his interests in and knowledge of art and by his sophisticated humor and improvisations. He took his government service in St. Petersburg lightly, devoting his energies to working out new forms for the stage. During the 1907-1908 season, he started directing at the St. Petersburg Starinnyi Teatr (Theater of Antiquity), where he began to apply his theories. His overriding interest in the theater soon led him to give up his legal work altogether.

In 1908, Evreinov replaced Meyerhold at the Kommissarzhevskaya Theater. Evreinov’s insistence on “theatricalization,” however, clashed with the conventions of the Kommissarzhevskaya, and he searched for a more suitable niche. This he found in 1910, when he took over as regisseur of Krivoye Zerkalo (The Crooked Mirror), a theater of “small forms” that was not imperially subsidized and was open to experimentation and improvisation. The position as head regisseur combined the duties of director, business manager, stage manager, and general overseer, so that he had a completely free hand in determining the course of a production. He remained at The Crooked Mirror until the Revolution, in 1917, and his activity there included presentation of his own shorter pieces.

After the Revolution, Evreinov turned his full attention to writing plays. A stay in the Caucasus during the civil war saw the completion of his major work The Main Thing. On his return to Petrograd (the former St. Petersburg) in 1920, he found a changed artistic climate. The Bolshevik regime called for grandiose popular spectacles with political themes. In the beginning, this orientation caught Evreinov’s fancy because it coincided with his own emphasis on theatricality. In November, 1920, he staged Vzyatiye zimnego dvorsta (the taking of the Winter Palace), rejoicing in the large-scale participation of some eight thousand players, a five-hundred musician orchestra, and the warship Aurora. The event drew an estimated 150,000 spectators. The production of this revolutionary festival gave Evreinov a chance to develop the striking visual effects that he favored. His fee, in these times when money was worthless and goods scarce, consisted of a much-needed winter coat and food.

His participation in the festival also paved the way for approval of the nonpolitical The Main Thing at The Free Comedy Theater in February, 1921. Despite censorial grumbling that the play lacked the desired ideological dimension, The Main Thing had an enthusiastic reception and continued performance through several seasons. The play was also successful in the West, and the fame it brought the author led him to consider emigration. Soviet censorship in general restrained his experimental activity and endeavored to limit him to ostentatious festival pieces with revolutionary topics. After Evreinov’s mother died in 1923, he carried out his plan and settled with his talented actress-author wife, Anna Kashina, in Paris in 1925.

Before his departure, while his wife recuperated in the South of Russia, Evreinov wrote The Ship of the Righteous, which is dedicated to her. Although he inserted a superficial political dimension, the censors refused to allow production of the play, thereby strengthening Evreinov’s resolve to leave his homeland. The Warsaw Teatr Polski performed The Ship of the Righteous in 1925 to great acclaim, but the playwright himself was rejected as a Bolshevik sympathizer because of his part in revolutionary theater. His last major play, The Unmasked Ball, was first produced in Milan in 1929, and went on to become a European success.

In exile, Evreinov turned his attention to books and essays on the history of theater. He remained a dynamic personality, was famous for his unconventional productions of Russian operas, and was in great demand as an intelligent conversationalist. His dramatic triumphs, however, were closely linked to his staging experiments in prerevolutionary Russia, and these he was not able to repeat abroad. He died in Paris on February 7, 1953.

Analysis

Nikolai Evreinov’s contributions to twentieth century drama are several. He developed his own form of epic theater, independent of Bertolt Brecht and Pirandello. His multiple talents as director, writer, and musician (he composed his own music for A Merry Death and The Ship of the Righteous) combined to produce some of the most provocative staging and sets to be found anywhere. He pioneered approaches to actor-audience interaction and to making theater theatrical. Most important, he transformed his own theories on the function of illusion into highly unusual, sophisticated dramas.

The idea that life is theater, which is at the base of Evreinov’s theoretical writings, takes its cue from William Shakespeare’s “all the world is a stage.” Each of Evreinov’s dramas in one way or another, incorporates this notion. His innovations developed from a reaction against the dramatic realism that characterized nineteenth century Russian theater. He also believed that Chekhov, genius though he was, had dominated the Russian stage to the exclusion of all others. As staged by Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Chekhov drama tended toward stark naturalism, and this was in direct opposition to Evreinov’s view of the purpose of theater. For Evreinov, to strive for verisimilitude constituted only a cardboard faithfulness to reality, a vulgar pretension. Instead, he endeavored to appeal to the theatrical instincts of the public, to the role-playing in which everyone engaged in daily life. This necessitated the disclosure of dramatic devices, an emphasis on the theatrical properties of theater through striking visual effects and exotic nonrepresentational staging, and interaction, or at least identification, between public and players.

Toward this end, Evreinov devoted as much effort to staging as to writing. His first professional theater activity, the production of medieval mystery plays at the Theater of Antiquity immediately reflected his novel ideas. In 1907, for a Latin-language mystery play based on the Three Magi theme, he composed a prologue in Russian that revealed to the spectators the props to be used, the staging devices, and other behind-the-scenes information. He used his tenure at The Crooked Mirror to perfect his own version of the monodrama, or single-act play. In The Theatre of the Soul, his creative staging is designed to focus audience attention on the props. The character of the Professor, in a long prologue, uses blackboard drawings to explain the parts of the personality that the performers act out. Evreinov requires large, colorful displays for the parts of the body. Heart and lungs beat rhythmically in time to background music, speeding up or slowing down to reflect the mood of the central character, who never appears onstage. The suicide of the latter is signaled through a sudden gaping hole in the heart, which disgorges rolls of red ribbons.

Evreinov’s early piece A Merry Death gives full expression to his preference for commedia dell’arte characters. The practice of commedia dell’arte according to which the same persons portrayed Harlequin, Pierrot, Columbine, and the Doctor for long periods, resulting in identification of actor with role, appealed greatly to Evreinov’s dramatic ideas. He also liked the Harlequin actors’ freedom to improvise and their informal interaction with the audience. At the conclusion of A Merry Death, Pierrot discusses with the audience the extent of the actors’ obligation to the playwright. The use of harlequinade sequences also permitted Evreinov to forgo a traditional conclusion. Instead, a carnivalistic flourish, often including Harlequin and his group, emphasizes that human existence has no neat solutions, that nothing in life, as Pierrot says in A Merry Death, is worth taking seriously.

Another technique that Evreinov frequently employed was a play-within-a-play. This device allowed Evreinov to focus on the mechanics of the production, as the performers prepare for their parts, construct the set-within-the-set, and rehearse their roles. In all cases, however, the content of the inserted playlet is a comment on the theme of the entire piece. In The Main Thing, a rehearsal of Quo Vadis reveals the tensions attending a production, shows that the actors’ personal perceptions continuously affect their acting, and demonstrates that the stage is a most artificial and unsuitable place for actors. Their failure onstage is redeemed by successful performances in “living roles” offstage, enriching the lives of several unhappy people. In The Ship of the Righteous, the tragicomic play-within-a-play “Ham Versus Noah,” in which the actors don animal masks to portray the ark, foreshadows the abandonment of the two central characters in their search for a seafaring utopia. In The Unmasked Ball, the playlet takes the form of an “unmasked ball,” in which the performers are to express their opinions honestly. The resulting disillusionment proves that role playing is far superior to naked truth in human relationships.

Evreinov also made frequent use of direct address to the audience to ensure public involvement. In A Merry Death, Pierrot greets his listeners with a long monologue and keeps up a continuous chatter with them. In The Theatre of the Soul, the Professor gives a scientific explanation of the ego, id, and superego before the actors appear. The Main Thing brings the director and regisseur onstage in order to force Harlequin to finish the performance, so that the spectators will not miss the last streetcar. All of Evreinov’s plays, in the end, illustrate the author’s viewpoint that life and theater are closely interwoven.

Early Works

Even those of Evreinov’s humorous and grotesque satires written while he still pursued a civil service career contain the seeds of his later technique. Fundament schastya (the foundation of happiness) features a dream, humor directed at the audience, an undertaker who cheerfully tyrannizes his family, and a fantastic conclusion. Styopik i Manyurochka reveals the follies of the title characters to the audience bit by bit. The hero of The Beautiful Despot, vaguely resembling Luigi Pirandello’s Enrico IV (pr., pb. 1922; Henry IV, 1923), plays the role of an enigmatic landowner who charms a group of rurals into submitting to his tyranny. From these popular but artistically far-from-novel skits, Evreinov moved to the proper one-act play.

A Merry Death

Evreinov’s first experiment in this form, A Merry Death, turned into an international success as American, French, and Italian performances followed the Russian premiere in 1909. The four characters are the stock figures from the commedia dell’arte, who basically play their traditional parts embellished by Evreinov’s modern touches. The piece serves as a good illustration of how Evreinov used the harlequinade. Pierrot’s contact is primarily with the audience. He is delighted to have delayed the appointed midnight death of his friend Harlequin by two hours. Harlequin himself is determined to live his last evening to the fullest by spending it in intimate caresses with Pierrot’s willing wife, Columbine. Interludes with the Doctor show off Harlequin’s witty tongue and his carpe diem philosophy. As the kissing intensifies, Pierrot is torn between sympathy for his dying friend and jealousy. As these conflicting sentiments have no resolution in life, Evreinov resorts to the destruction of dramatic illusion that is so typical of his later work. Pierrot brings down the curtain and blames the “nonending” on the playwright. His own pitiful situation he ascribes to identification with the traditional Pierrot. He admonishes the spectators not to take the play seriously and assures them that Harlequin is not dead but a fellow actor waiting for his curtain call.

Predstavlenie lyubvi

Evreinov next completed another one-act piece, Predstavlenie lyubvi (the play of love), labeled a monodrama. He failed to find a producer, despite the fact that the play already displayed the staging methods of his major drama. A central character, “I,” interacts with his inner voice, with a female, and with a rival. Each change in mood is signaled by a change in setting, and the latter is brought about through creative lighting techniques.

The Theatre of the Soul

The author fared much better with a similar work, The Theatre of the Soul, which is still a universal favorite. Its continuing appeal is attributable both to imaginative staging and to Evreinov’s modern view of the complexity of human motives. Multicolored chalks trace a complicated network of veins and nerves, the latter represented by taut musical strings, whose sounds accompany the action. Heart and lungs loom garishly large; the head is absent, its function fulfilled by a yellow telephone. The primary confrontation is between the rational and emotional selves of an alcoholic clerk, who tries to regenerate his drab life by mentally transforming an aging songstress into a siren. The two selves conjure up correspondingly clashing images of the mistress, as well as diametrically opposed images of the wife, one a loving mother, the other a sharp-tongued hag. As the idealizations struggle with each other, the immense parts of the body, which dominate the stage, are in continuous motion and music. When the singer abandons the penniless clerk, the emotional self conquers its rational counterpart and signals, via the telephone, that it is time for the pistol. The suicide is depicted through images representing the disgorging of blood by the trembling mechanism. In conclusion, a third, inactive, subconscious self, vaguely alluding to a soul, is led off the stage (that is, out of the body) by a lantern-carrying conductor. This highly experimental piece was immediately popular and remained in the Soviet repertory even after Evreinov’s emigration. It fared equally well abroad.

The Main Thing

Evreinov’s success as a director kept him occupied in that capacity until the Revolution closed many theaters for ideological review. When he resumed writing, he found the full-length play a better format. The Main Thing is Evreinov’s first and most successful major play, fully illustrating his favorite ideas and techniques. The central character, Paraclete, plays many parts. His name, signifying the third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, suggests a religious dimension, which is sustained through several guises, until it is abandoned at the finale, as the monk changes into Harlequin, the trickster. Paraclete’s first role is that of Lady Fortune Teller, on the lookout for unhappy clients. She chooses two groups to demonstrate the benefits of role-playing on “the world’s stage”: boardinghouse tenants with problems, and dissatisfied actors. Paraclete, in his second guise as “theater of life” producer, witnesses the pitiful efforts of the troupe to rehearse Quo Vadis and engages the major performers to resolve the tenants’ difficulties by playing roles suited to the tenants’ needs. Paraclete himself oversees “The Boarding House Play” in the role of the “savior” Schmid. The living theater prospers as the romantic lead woos a lonely, unattractive typist and transforms her into a more self-assured woman. His wife, the dancer, now a maid, gains the confidence and love of a suicidal student, whom she helps to cope with his situation. The comic’s assignment is to provide a romantic interest for an embittered, unpleasant old woman.

As always in Evreinov’s plays, the actors’ own private tensions and other outside influences intrude, resulting in a blending of life and dramatization. When the tenants discover the masquerade, ambiguity enters. On the one hand, they have benefited from the encounter, the memory of which is to sustain them. On the other hand, they may backslide, bereft of their emotional support as the actors leave. Paraclete himself loses control. He has been in the habit of marrying unhappy women to provide them with a short span of joy, but when confronted by charges of polygamy, he takes refuge in more role-playing. First, he tries a monk’s disguise, emphasizing his religico-ethical motivation. When that fails, he abandons any attempt at resolution and concludes the play with a carousing carnival, himself a scheming Harlequin, while the romantic lead, the dancer, and the comic are transformed into Pierrot, Columbine, and the Doctor, respectively. The players rush to mingle with the spectators, while the directors try to find a suitable finish for the performance. The various references to the title suggest that “the main thing” in life is whatever people designate as such at any given moment. This unusual piece premiered the same year as Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (pr., pb. 1921; Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1922), with which it has much in common in theme and treatment. The Main Thing went on to be performed in twenty-five languages, including a screen version in 1942.

The Ship of the Righteous

Evreinov called The Ship of the Righteous a “dramatic epopee.” It deals with the efforts of two radical idealists, named Madman and Dream, to form a morally righteous commune aboard ship, which is to cruise eternally to avoid contamination with evil (represented by land). The basic plot elements are akin to those of The Main Thing. The recruited group hopes to leave its various personal problems behind, onshore, as it embarks on a new life with all good intentions. Initially, the escape seems successful. The passengers try to be “good.” All the difficulties and tensions of past life, however, surface during the course of the play. A stowaway former lover disrupts the newly established purity of relationships; jealousies masquerade under cover of ethical outrage; and a play-within-a-play gives evidence of revolt against the leaders of the “ark.” Intrigues are unmasked, villains revealed, and illusions destroyed as the passengers, one after another, return to normal life on land. The central dreamers appeal to the audience to support them in their lonely struggle against evil, but the final image is one of disbelief in such a venture. Once again, Evreinov used a setting in which people seek to be good, only to discover that the dynamics of life are not so one-sided. Soviet censors, sensing that Evreinov was attacking their socialist utopia, refused permission to stage the drama. The Ship of the Righteous has not been widely performed anywhere, though the Virginia Theater Wagon staged it in 1970 to a good reception.

The Unmasked Ball

Evreinov considered his three major dramas a trilogy, with each work a different manifestation of the theater of life. The Unmasked Ball, his last major play, which was initially successful though not widely performed, is more explicit in delineating the role of illusion. The setting is a school in which students learn to dramatize all human relationships. The play suggests that survival depends on successful presentation of the proper mask at the proper time. The true self must be hidden, masquerades of deceit are encouraged, and the general impression is that life is a battlefield, ready to devour the uncamouflaged self. Hypocrisy is so commonplace that truth-telling is staged as a special event, an “unmasked ball.” The result is deeply discouraging. Honest opinions and actions mercilessly undo the network of deceptive masking that permits people to cope. The final cry is for a return to blissful illusion, where betrayal and grief cannot employ their mutilating edge.

Bibliography

Carnicke, Sharon Marie. The Theatrical Instinct: Nikolai Evreinov and the Russian Theatre of the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Carnicke examines Evreinov’s drama within the larger context of early twentieth century Russian theater. Bibliography and index.

Golub, Spencer. Evreinov: The Theater of Paradox and Transformation. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984. An analysis of the theater art created by Evreinov. Bibliography and index.

Moody, C. “Nikolai Nikolaevich Evreinov, 1879-1953.” Russian Literature Triquarterly 13 (1975): 659-695. A concise overview of the life and works of Evreinov.

Proffer, Ellendea, ed. Evreinov: A Pictorial Biography. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1981. A photobiography of Evreinov that provides useful information on his life.