Russian Dramatist Mikhail Kuzmin and the Sexual Ambiguity of the Commedia Mask

Russian Dramatist Mikhail Kuzmin and the Sexual Ambiguity of the Commedia Mask LURAN A DONNELS O'MALLEY The impact of cOlllllledia dell arte on the aesthetic universe of Vsevolod Meierkhol'd has long been recognized; from The Puppet Show to Magnanimous Cuckold and beyond, the imagery and artistic principles associated with cOlllllledia became for Meierkhol'd a lodestone. In his productions, the balagall or fairground puppet show would replace the restrictive codes of realism - the clown, the mask, the pratfall were his weapons against the confines of the fourth wall. But Meierkhol'd was far from the only Russian artist fascinated with commedia's mystique. Among its devotees we find dramatist and poet Aleksandr Blok, dramatist and director Nikolai Evreinov, director Aleksandr Tairov, director Sergei Eisenstein, and the dance-drama creators of the Ballets Russes. In the realm of the visual arts, a path leads back to Mir iskusstva (The World of Art), in its devotion to non-idealogical art and the rococo finery of the eighteenth century. For indeed, the Silver Age version of commedia had little to do with the improvisational troupes touring sixteenthcentury Italy; rather the Russian artists created an amalgam of Carlo Gozzi's eighteenth-century Italy entwined with the nineteenth-century romanticism of Deburau's moony Pierrot and the grotesque and elegant stories of E.T.A. Hoffman. Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936). Poet. Novelist. Composer. Theorist. Translator . Companion and collaborator of the symbolists. Manifesto writer for the acmeists. Homosexual. Dramatist. Best known for poetry and fiction that frankly and eloquently explores the theme of male homosexual desire, Kuzmin's name weaves constantly in and out of the history of commedia dell'arte in Russia and three of his plays employ commedia motifs. For Kuzmin, the essence of the harlequinade is the ambiguity of the mask, which serves as a symbol of psychological and sexual duality. He integrates commedia into his work primarily through metatheatrical means, using the inner harlequinade as an echo of and comment on the outer play's themes and action. Model'll Drama, 37 (1994) 613 614 LURANA DaNNELSO'MALLEY In Velletiall Madcaps (Velletsiallskie bezumtsy, 1914), Mary's Tuesday (Vtornik Meri, 1921), and The Little Grove (Lesok, 1922), Kuzmin's focus is twofold: on character, particularly the exploration of homosexual desire, and on non-realistic structure - through his use of verse, metatheatre, cinematic technique, and commedia dell'arte. The associations of commedia, coupled with the theme of male/male love, co-create an alternative dramatic style. The intersection of homosexual imagery with the commedia dell'arte is an act of metaphoric appropriation not limited to Kuzmin's work. In nineteenthcentury France, one finds the Pierrot poetry of the noted gay Frenchman Paul Verlaine; in Russia, the flamboyant Sergei Diaghilev would nurture a long line of commedia-associated pieces by the Ballets Russes, from Carnival to Petrushka and Parade. And we even find homoerotic imagery in the first Russian commedia play, Aleks.ndr Blok's The Puppet Show. In that script (first produced by Meierkhol'd in 1906 with music by Kuzmin), although Pierro( and Harlequin act out their roles as rivals, their Doppelganger-like anachment to each other becomes suggestively sensual while the cardboard Columbine remains aloof. In these modernist revisions of traditional Italian comedy, the masked characters and their eternal triangle, seen through Hoffmannesque mirrors and reflected in the candlelight of an eighteenth-century ball, become the antitheses of what could be called heterosexist realism. Seventeen years after the tum of the century, Meierkhol'd crystallized the representation of this decadent world of charades and illusion in his extravagant production of Lermontov's Masquerade (1917).' Seventeen years after that, two years before Kuzmin's death, the doctrine of socialist realism would definitively close off all possibility for deviant rOle-playing or fantastic stylizations excepting of course the grotesque farce of Stalinist reality. Kuzmin's involvement with St. Petersburg artists and intellectuals shows his alignment with the primary avant-garde trends of his day. He was close to the World of Art group, a contributor to the symbolist journal Scales (Vesy), and a participant (along with Meierkhol'd) in the "Tower" salons of Viacheslav Ivanov in 1905. A major force in the...