Istoricheskaia Poetica (A Historical Poetics) Chapter 1, Section 8

Epos and lyric presented us with the consequences of the dissolution of the ancient ritual chorus. Drama, in its first artistic manifestations, preserved all of ritual chorus' syncretism, elements of action, archaic form of narration, and dialogue, but in forms cemented by cult, the mythic content of which unified a mass of animistic and demonistic notions that had become widespread. Cult tradition helped to stabilize choral tradition and required regular performers, as not all were privileged to know myths in their diversity. The rites of this caste, maintained as an inheritance by its elders, informed the conduct of a group of professionals, priests of a cult. They knew the prayers and the hymns. They narrated the myth or acted it out. The masks which had been used in imitative activities now served a new purpose: they appeared on the personages of religious legends, gods and heroes, in a succession of recitatives, dialogues, and choral refrains.

This is how, at a theoretical level, one can conceive of the development of drama. It will be born as art as it emerges from its origins in cult. Its artistry originates in the humanized and human content of myth, in those aspects of myth which engender spiritual interests, present questions of the moral order, inner struggles, fate, and responsibility.

Greek drama is of this sort. The dramatic action which originated in the ritual chorus has a different form: it is restricted to a mythological or epic theme laid out in dialogue with the accompaniment of a chorus and dance (India), or it presents, in close proximity to ritual, a number of everyday scenes which are poorly connected or unconnected by a central thread. The Atellan play and the mime of southern Italy are of this sort. Through all of its developmental stages we will encounter traces of the old choral structure, sometimes all the more clearly where we expect them least and in the most convoluted form where, it would seem, proximity to the ritual precursor should guarantee their remaining intact. Interference from extraneous legends sometimes obfuscates the true course of evolution, but one can cast light upon it at many points. I will at least indicate differences in the social position of actors. I will begin with the Siberian Bear Drama. It is closest of all to the beginning of this evolution, still vacillating between ritual and cult.

Festivals in honor of the bear are widespread amongst non-Russians of western and eastern Siberia, among the Giliaks, the Ainov, and others. They are connected with the respect, widespread among them, for the bear as a being endowed with godlike strength and wisdom, the son of heaven or the supreme creator (the Ostiaks, the Voguls). They are also connected with an ancient and at one time widespread pre-Hellenic cult, which held sway in the practice of the Attic Brauroneia, as well as in the remnants of European beliefs and superstitions, old and new, which formerly provoked the denunciations of the church. In the case of our non-Russian peoples, elements which in Europe were preserved as fragmented experiences and which entered in an episodic way into the makeup of Greek anthropomorphic myths, coalesced into an independent cycle of beliefs and rituals at various levels: from the festival of the hunt, with its game of imitation, to the activities of a cult with a divine bear-hero at its center.

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[Cult drama was born] in the ritual chorus aimed at influencing the success of the hunt. At its base lay the same sort of mimic activity that can be found in the Buffalo Dance of North American Indians, which was meant to attract buffaloes to the plains they had abandoned. I will also mention the Australian representations of a raid upon the herd, the hunt, the skinning of the carcass, and so on. One of the scenes of the Bear Drama presents us with analogous content. It is still easy to discern the ancient dramatic elements of the ritual under the layers that accumulated later. The chorus, with a soloist at its head...