The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde by Dassia N. Posner (review)

After Tsar Alexander III abolished the state’s monopoly on staging theatrical productions in 1882, private Russian theatres and “laboratory” environments quickly embraced the spirit of experimentation that was sweeping across Europe. In the decades preceding the emergence of Russia’s theatrical avant-garde during the 1910s and ’20s, the innovations of Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Fuchs, Adolph Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, and Max Reinhardt influenced Russia’s theoreticians and practitioners of theatre. Into this well-worn narrative of Russian theatre history, Dassia Posner’s trenchant study introduces another, unexpected progenitor of the Russian theatrical avant-garde: German romantic prose writer and playwright E. T. A. Hoffmann. In The Director’s Prism, Posner argues that Hoffmannian plots, themes, and form helped shape the theatrical experiments undertaken by Russian directors Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein. She devotes a chapter to each of the three directors, invoking their pseudonyms borrowed from Hoffmannian characters as chapter titles: Meyerhold-Dapertutto (Hoffmann’s “Tale of the Lost Reflection”); Tairov-Celionati (Hoffmann’s Princess Brambilla); and Peregrinus Tyss Meets Pipifax (Peregrinus Tyss being Eisenstein’s pseudonym taken from Hoffmann’s Master Flea). The chapters are organized according to a consistent formula: a short “Prologue/Polemic,” an “Interlude,” and “Epilogue.” The prologues/polemics present each director’s work within the context of surrounding debates, and the interludes help “the reader locate the book’s central case studies and . . . link the book’s structure with its thematic content” (30).

Posner uses the metaphor of the prism to articulate her understanding of an artist’s engagement with extant material and ideas. This approach derives from the fact that the three directors used either “prism” or “refraction” in reference to their creative processes (26), which allows Posner to use a hermeneutic that has an organic link to the objects of her analysis. Fastidiously avoiding the word influence, she instead proposes that we think of the three avant-garde theatre directors as prisms that refract (that is, creatively transform) Hoffmann’s body of work, as well as their own perceptions of life. Her optical metaphor aptly focuses our attention on the visual, which might otherwise be under-appreciated if she instead used the vague language of influence to characterize the directorial innovations in creating theatre as spectacle. Posner carefully scrutinizes the directors’ stagecraft from the viewer’s perspective, in particular such practices as framing characters and playing with multiple points of view.

She also highlights the legacy of the capriccio, an Italian term born in the seventeenth century for a work that capriciously ignores or reworks existing rules of art. As a kind of idiosyncratic methodology used by playwrights and visual artists, the capriccio (which Hoffmann inherited from playwright Carlo Gozzi and illustrator Jacques Callot) represents a zigzagging of creative thought. For Posner, each directorial prismatic refraction is a manifestation of the capriccio’s idiosyncratic spirit as it comprises a deviation in form or content from the original source. Just as a prism bends light, so the artist (or director) reshapes a preceding work of art according to his caprice. Thus Hoffmann’s Princess Brambilla: A Capriccio after Jacques Callot refracts Callot’s drawings comprising the series Balli di Sfessania, which includes grotesque renderings of the commedia dell’arte figures. Hoffmann’s capriccio later gets refracted by Tairov in his production Princess Brambilla: A Kamerny Theatre Capriccio after Hoffmann. Further, the avant-garde’s reworkings of the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition offer another series of prismatic refractions: Meyerhold’s Columbine’s Veil gets refracted in Tairov’s Pierrette’s Veil and in Eisenstein’s collaboration with Sergei Yutkevich, Columbine’s Garter. Posner thus foregrounds the formal device of the capriccio as a model for creative appropriation and distortion: Hoffmann refracted the capriccio of Gozzi and Callot, and her trio of avant-garde directors refracted the capriccio of Hoffmann.

In addition to their creative appropriations of Hoffmannian plots and themes...