Russian Symbolist Theater
Russian Symbolist Theater

Author: Michael Green

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2013-05-28

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1468308122

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Although by writers better known for their verse and narrative prose, the plays of the Symbolists were not intended, like the dramatic poems of the Romantics, for the study rather than the stage. Instead, they are highly theatrical creations in a new style that demanded a new style of production. Meyerhold played a decisive role in the new Symbolist theatre and it was his production of Blok’s The Puppet Show in Komissarzhevskaya’s Theatre that launched the new direction in Russian drama. Among the works collected here are the plays The Puppet Show and The Rose and the Cross (Blok), The Triumph of Death (Sologub), The Comedy of Alexis and The Venetian Madcaps (Kuzmin), Thamyris Kitharodos (Annensky), and The Tragedy of Judas (Remizov) and essays by Briusov, Blok, Ivanov, Bely, Sologub, and Andreyev. Rounding out this essential anthology are Michael Green’s general introduction, as well as insightful prefaces for each writer, placing the plays and essays into their cultural and historical contexts.

Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement
Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement

Author: Simon Morrison

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2002-08-05

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9780520927261

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An aesthetic, historical, and theoretical study of four scores, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement is a groundbreaking and imaginative treatment of the important yet neglected topic of Russian opera in the Silver Age. Spanning the gap between the supernatural Russian music of the nineteenth century and the compositions of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, this exceptionally insightful and well-researched book explores how Russian symbolist poets interpreted opera and prompted operatic innovation. Simon Morrison shows how these works, though stylistically and technically different, reveal the extent to which the operatic representation of the miraculous can be translated into its enactment. Morrison treats these largely unstudied pieces by canonical composers: Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, Rimsky-Korsakov's Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, Scriabin's unfinished Mysterium, and Prokofiev's Fiery Angel. The chapters, revisionist studies of these composers and scores, address separate aspects of Symbolist poetics, discussing such topics as literary and musical decadence, pagan-Christian syncretism, theurgy, and life creation, or the portrayal of art in life. The appendix offers the first complete English-language translation of Scriabin's libretto for the Preparatory Act. Providing valuable insight into both the Symbolist enterprise and Russian musicology, this book casts new light on opera's evolving, ambiguous place in fin de siècle culture.

Symbolist Theater
Symbolist Theater

Author: Frantisek Deak

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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"Frantisek Deak's Symbolist Theater is a welcome and fundamental contribution to the re-evaluation of European avant-garde theatre. Deak's analysis of symbolist theatre rebuts earlier approaches which concluded, as Haskell Block did in the 1969 Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama, that attempts to stage symbolist plays were "doomed to failure," because of "an inherent opposition between symbolist premises and the demands of sustained theatrical elaboration." These earlier critiques analyzed symbolist theatre from the viewpoint of literary criticism, but Deak's book employs different methods by taking "as a premise that theater exists in performance" (7). Symbolist Theater leans conceptually on Czech structuralists and Russian formalists as it makes "theater criticism based on the reconstruction of the semantic gesture of the production;" criticism which "takes the text into consideration as one aspect of the structure" (10), and sees the symbolist theatre project as an effort to re-define the "signifying process" in general (132). Despite its title, however, Symbolist Theater is not an analysis of the whole symbolist theatre movement, but instead a focus on French symbolist theatre alone".

A History of Russian Symbolism
A History of Russian Symbolism

Author: Avril Pyman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-03-09

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 9780521024303

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This book is the first detailed history of the Russian Symbolist movement, from its initial hostile reception as a symptom of European decadence to its absorption into the mainstream of Russian literature, and eventual disintegration. It focuses on the two generations of writers whose work served as the seedbed of Existentialism in thought and of Modernism in prose and the performing arts, and reassesses their achievements in the light of modern research. At the centre of the study are the texts themselves, with prose quoted in English translation and poetry given in the original Russian with prose translations. There is a valuable bibliography of primary sources and an extensive chronological appendix. This book will fill a long-felt gap, and will be invaluable to students and teachers of Russian and comparative literature, Symbolism, modernism, and pre-revolutionary Russian culture.

A History of Russian Theatre
A History of Russian Theatre

Author: Robert Leach

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999-11-29

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9780521432207

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A comprehensive history of Russian theatre, written by an international team of experts.

Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890-1950
Theater of the Avant-Garde, 1890-1950

Author: Robert Knopf

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-04-28

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 030021054X

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An essential volume for theater artists and students alike, this anthology includes the full texts of sixteen important examples of avant-garde drama from the most daring and influential artistic movements of the first half of the twentieth century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism. Each play is accompanied by a bio-critical introduction by the editor, and a critical essay, frequently written by the playwright, which elaborates on the play’s dramatic and aesthetic concerns. A new introduction by Robert Knopf and Julia Listengarten contextualizes the plays in light of recent critical developments in avant-garde studies. By examining the groundbreaking theatrical experiments of Jarry, Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Artaud, and others, the book foregrounds the avant-garde’s enduring influence on the development of modern theater.

Theories of the Avant-garde Theatre
Theories of the Avant-garde Theatre

Author: Bert Cardullo

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0810887045

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In this collection of essays by avant-garde theatre's most creative practitioners--directors, playwrights, performers, and designers--these writings provide direct access to the thinking behind much of the most stimulating playwriting and performance of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A History of Russian Symbolism
A History of Russian Symbolism

Author: Ronald E. Peterson

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 9027215340

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The era of Russian Symbolism (1892-1917) has been called the Silver Age of Russian culture, and even the Second Golden Age. Symbolist authors are among the greatest Russian authors of this century, and their activities helped to foster one of the most significant advances in cultural life (in poetry, prose, music, theater, and painting) that has ever been seen there. This book is designed to serve as an introduction to Symbolism in Russia, as a movement, an artistic method, and a world view. The primary emphasis is on the history of the movement itself. Attention is devoted to what the Symbolists wrote, said, and thought, and on how they interacted. In this context, the main actors are the authors of poetry, prose, drama, and criticism, but space is also devoted to the important connections between literary figures and artists, philosophers, and the intelligentsia in general. This broad, detailed and balanced account of this period will serve as a standard reference work an encourage further research among scholars and students of literature.

Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle
Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle

Author: Barbara Walker

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2004-12-14

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0253110432

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Barbara Walker examines the Russian literary circle, a feature of Russian intellectual and cultural life from tsarist times into the early Soviet period, through the life story of one of its liveliest and most adored figures, the poet Maximilian Voloshin (1877--1932). From 1911 until his death, Voloshin led a circle in the Crimean village of Koktebel' that was a haven for such literary luminaries as Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Gumilev, and Osip Mandelstam. Drawing upon the anthropological theories of Victor Turner, Walker depicts the literary circle of late Imperial Russia as a contradictory mix of idealism and "communitas," on the one hand, and traditional Russian patterns of patronage and networking, on the other. While detailing the colorful history of Voloshinov's circle in the pre- and postrevolutionary decades, the book demonstrates that the literary circle and its leaders played a key role in integrating the intelligentsia into the emerging ethos of the Soviet state.