We all know how the story will end, with Red Square parades and Stalinist show trials ultimately prevailing, yet getting there is what makes Thomas Seifrid’s account of early twentieth-century Russian and Soviet spectacle, as told in Staging the Absolute: Ritual in Russia’s Modern Era, so engaging and illuminating. Probing the “interventions” produced by public rituals and performances intended to disrupt the historical present through a staging of “the installation of a different order” (7), Seifrid offers impressive analysis of the Russian and early Soviet modernist impulse to transform the present via quasi-religious, theatrical means. What emerges is a wide-ranging, theoretically rigorous exploration of the drama, novels, poetry, and painting underscoring that artistic zeitgeist of ritual and historical disruption that would, alas, become such a conspicuous, sanctioned facet of Soviet culture under Stalin.
The story Seifrid confidently tells does not proceed in typical chronological fashion, for his syuzhet (plot)—underscored by a rhizome-like approach highlighting “dispersed and heterogenous linkages” (6)—takes an initial leap forward to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1928–40). Along with other works by Bulgakov, in particular newspaper feuilletons he produced in the early 1920s and his first novel, The White Guard (1925), The Master and Margarita sets the stage for Seifrid’s subsequent analysis and allows him to scaffold, quite successfully, the rich, expansive scope of his study. Bulgakov’s novel, through its retelling of Christ’s trial before Pontius Pilate and account of Woland and his demonic gang descending upon Moscow, fruitfully facilitates Seifrid’s bridging of prerevolutionary ritual with Stalinist Moscow.
The theatricalization of public urban space, especially that of Moscow, constitutes a core facet of Bulgakov’s novel and, accordingly, Staging the Absolute. A heterogenous spatial “voluntarism” (33) permeates so many of the initial works Seifrid discusses, and in The Master and Margarita, panoramic views of Moscow, memorable scenes at Patriarch Ponds and the Moscow River, and the back and forth with Jerusalem allow the Soviet capital to become the site of early Soviet-era interventions that counter prevailing Stalinist values. Everything eventually returns to a dull, repetitive normality, yet history has been temporarily disrupted while presentiment of a new era lingers.
An important basis for The Master and Margarita and other work of the era would be the medieval genre of the mystery play, with its “totalizing spectacles that place human affairs before God” (57), and the Faust tale, as Seifrid draws important parallels between the model of intervention found in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust and Russian modernism. Likewise informing the ritualized theatricalization of prerevolutionary Russian creativity was Richard Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art that vis-à-vis Greek tragedy bolstered modern artistry. The Russian symbolists, Viacheslav Ivanov for one, looked to the Gesamtkunstwerk and the fecund model of the ancient Greek chorus as he and others aimed to bring Wagner’s ideas to fruition in prerevolutionary Russia.
A carnivalesque critique of Ivanov’s mysticism, however, came from fellow symbolist Aleksandr Blok, whose work occupies a central place in Staging the Absolute. Blok’s play The Fairground Booth (1906), anticipating the Igor Stravinsky ballet Petrushka (1911), fashioned commedia dell’arte and puppetry (à la vertep) to offer a provocative retort to conventional “bourgeois” theater of the era, while highlighting the sharp contrast between theater and reality, whereby at the end of this short play the scenery rolls up, leaving the character of the author alone on an empty, seemingly post-apocalyptic stage. And in Blok’s long poem The Twelve (1918), a postrevolutionary “irruption of otherworldly forces” (113) ensues as Christ appears before Red Army soldiers in Petrograd, suggesting a Second Coming. Meanwhile, Vladimir Maiakovskii’s Mystery-Bouffe (1918), a retort of sorts to Blok’s poem, had its focus on revolutionary pathos as it both promoted and parodied the era’s theatrical interventions.
Towards the end of his study, Seifrid evokes Vladimir Papernyi’s contrast of an experimental Culture One of the 1920s with an authoritarian Culture Two of the 1930s, as the “spatial aggression” (124) of early Bolshevik festivals soon gave way to solemn Stalinist rituals, the never-built Palace of the Soviets, the well-planed Gorʹkii Park and Moscow subway, and a series of well-publicized show trials. Seifrid gives credence to Boris Groys’s oft-cited reading of Stalinism as a continuation of avant-garde trends, but the roots of Stalinist spectacle, it is noted, harkened back to cultural proclivities predating the rise of Russian “Left” art. Perhaps more could have been said here regarding cinema’s impact on theatricalized ritual (film makes only a sporadic cameo or two), but the story told is a compelling one that extends, as Seifrid provocatively suggests in his somber epilogue, to present-day Russia.
