Revolution as Art: Soviet Mass Spectacles and the Paris Commune

The illegitimate son of Tadeusz Zelinski, celebrated professor of Greek at St. Petersburg University, Adrian Piotrovsky (1898–1938) became his father’s student and disciple and himself a professor of Greek. But Piotrovsky was also one of the most dynamic and versatile creative forces and activists in the Soviet arts in the 1920s and 1930s until he was brutally liquidated by Stalin at the age of forty. As a classical scholar who wished to adapt the cultural ideals of the Greek polis for the new Soviet audiences, Piotrovsky translated works by Aristophanes and Euripides and arranged for their productions, and he worked as a critic, theorist, and practitioner of theatre, opera, and film. He was a director and creator of mass spectacles and festivities celebrating the revolutionary holidays and anniversaries, and he created a science of festive performance that he called eortalogy, from eorta (banquet in ancient Greek). Piotrovsky theorized about the use of the chorus, the relations of spectators to performance, and new conceptions of space and time in the agitational, participatory festival performances.

Piotrovsky taught at Meyerhold’s Classes for the Mastery of Stage Productions and worked with his older friend Sergei Radlov (1892–1958) at the People’s Comedy Theatre in Petrograd from 1918 to 1919. In 1919 Piotrovsky and Radlov staged The Battle at Salamis, based on the Greek defeat of the Persian navy as presented by Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aeschylus; then Radlov staged Piotrovsky’s verse drama, The Sword of Peace at the Theatre Drama Shop of the Red Army in the Cinizelli Circus in 1920. Piotrovsky directed the third part of the famous mass spectacle Toward a World Commune, given on the steps of the Stock Exchange on July 19, 1920. He completed his classical studies at Petrograd University in 1923. Radlov staged Piotrovsky’s version of Lysistrata in 1924. In 1933 Piotrovsky published two volumes of his translations of Aristophanes. He also translated Catullus and wrote about ancient comedy.

Piotrovsky was committed to creating a new Soviet theatre and saw the mass spectacle as offering the best means of reaching a large audience. The Soviet mass spectacles often related the Bolshevik Revolution to the earlier history of world revolution, and the Paris Commune of 1871 was recognized as the most important precursor to 1917 — a true working class revolution, unlike the French Revolution of 1789, which was directed by bourgeois lawyers and favored the middle class. Thus the Paris Commune of 1871 was a subject perfectly suited to the new type of revolutionary theatrical performance that Piotrovsky and his colleagues envisaged. The Paris Commune, the first genuine proletarian revolution, was a group activity with collective — not individual — heroes, demanding a collective form of drama that rejected old notions of time and space, hierarchies of character, and concepts of plot. In the Commune ordinary workers were in the forefront, and for the first time there was a massive participation of women in revolutionary action. Politically the Paris Commune was officially endorsed as a perfect subject for the new genre of performance.

The Paris Commune as a historical subject contributed directly to the development of the idea of a popular theatre and participatory drama in the form of a festivity or celebration, first in the Soviet Union, then in France after 1968 when it first ceased to be a tabooed subject. The Commune has proved to be a great stimulus for popular people’s theatre and left-wing street theatre, attracting Marxists, Communists, and radically engaged playwrights.

In the Soviet Union, more than fifty plays and mass spectacles devoted to the Commune were performed in the 1920s. Adrian Piotrovsky was repeatedly drawn to the subject: the third part of Towards a World Commune dealt with the Paris Commune; in 1921 he wrote Memories of the Paris Commune; and in 1924 he wrote and staged his major intsenirovka, The Paris Commune. An intsenirovka (staging) was a genre of mass spectacle that presented a broad fresco of an important historical event in the revolutionary history of the working classes, making use of historical figures, their speeches, and other documents of...