Nikolay Evreinov’s “Inspector General”

NIKOLAY EVREINOV'S Inspector General Laurence Senelick "Don't blame the mirror if your mug is crooked," reads the epigraph to Gogol's comic masterpiece The Inspector General. Aptly enough, The Crooked Mirror (which in Russian also bears the meaning of "The Distorting Mirror") was the name given to a satirical "theatre of miniatures" that opened in St. Petersburg in December 1908. Originally, The Crooked Mirror was a midnight show to follow Meyerhold's The Strand, operating out of the Yusupov Palace Club, a gambling casino that had been taken over by the Union of Dramatic and Musical Authors. Meyerhold's enterprise proved to be too Hoffmannesque and sinister for the surroundings and soon folded. The Crooked Mirror, on the other hand, made such a hit with its parodies that by 1910 it could move to the 750-seat Catherine Theatre and compete with legitimate companies during standard performance hours. The Crooked Mirror had been founded, nominally, by Zinaida Kholmskaya, a heavy-weight comedienne of the Maly Theatre, who lent it much of its farcical exuberance. But the aesthetic policy-maker was her husband, Aleksandr R. Kugel, editor of Theatre and Art, the most influential critical journal in Russia. His editorials and reviews, under the pseudonym "Homo Novus," were unsparing in their attacks on what he considered artistic sham, hackwork, irresponsible experimentation or obscurantism. Like many thinkers of the time, Kugel believed that the theatre had reached an impasse. The evolutionary process demands a certain decadence, a disintegration, precisely in order that a social phenomenon weighed down by an overly regular development can go on evolving. The complication, mechanization and proliferation of the theatre have reached such a pitch that they impede its growth and condemn it to routine. 113 New forms had to be found to impel progress, "to fracture the theatre into its primary elements, to compress and condense it." (Quoted in Evreinov's Histoire du th6dtre russe, 1947, p. 396.) Kugel, inspired by the artistic cabarets of Europe, was more particularly taken with their concepts than their practice. As defined by the German litterateur Ernst von Wolzogen, Kleinkunstwas refined art made accessible to the general public in an Ueberbrettl or "Super-gaff," the intimate atmosphere taking the curse off the preciosity of the material. Kugel scrapped the notion of playing to a general public, as well as the standard cabaret device of the master-of-ceremonies; instead, he concentrated on parodies of art forms, exquisitely staged and performed for an audience of cognoscenti.The spectators at The Crooked Theatre were intellectuals and sophisticates, who kept apprised of the latest thing in the arts. This concentration was abetted by thirty-one-year old Nikolay Nikolaevich Evreinov, who joined The Crooked Mirror in 1910 as artistic director, and who had been responsible for its upward move to theatrical legitimacy. Characteristically, Evreinov's first play, written at the age of seven, had been a parody, Luncheon with a Minister of State. Although he pursued studies in music under Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, and in law, his attraction to the theatre had been too great to resist. He had begun as a playwright; in 1907, he co-founded the Theatre of Yore (Starinny Teatr), dedicated to reconstruction of medieval and Renaissance performance styles, and in 1908 became a director for the great actress Vera Kommissarzhevskaya . A year later he founded The Merry Theatre for Grownup Children with her half-brother Fyodor. Meanwhile, the mercurial and erudite Evreinov had won celebrity for his theatrical manifestos. His essay on monodrama was widely circulated: in it, he propounded the need for a theatre in which the audiences' sympathy and attention would be focussed on a single protagonist, whose moods, feelings and inner struggles would be uniquely reflected by changes in the lighting, sets, and other characters. He was even more insistent on the importance of "theatricality" as a pre-aesthetic human impulse, as fundamental as the sex instinct or the sense of self-preservation. The world was an arena for role-playing and game-playing. Consequently, the theatre itself was not to imitate "life," but had to have a distinct, autochthonous character of its own. What goes on on stage must create an anti...