Performance as Power and Power as Performance in "Belshazzar's Feasts" by Fazil Iskander

Abstract

The story of “Belshazzar’s Feasts,” from the three-volume saga Sandro of Chegem , first saw light in the United States in 1979 -- not in Russia, where it was written in 1973 but could only be published in 1988. Iskander’s brilliant portrayal of Stalin puts the novella on the same level as The First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. The fictional plot revolves around Uncle Sandro’s participating in a dance concert in the presence of Stalin in 1935. He impresses Stalin with his act, sliding all the way up close to Stalin on his knees while blinded by his hood pulled over his eyes. But Stalin suspects he has seen the man before. The secret of their first encounter will ensure the suspense of the narrative, focused on the feast in an Abkhazian sanitarium honoring Stalin and featuring his inner circle: Beria, Voroshilov, Kalinin and others. Iskander’s plot construction is remarkable for its theatricality. His characters do not so much communicate verbally as perform before each other. Often they keep silent, but strike telling postures and assume marked facial expressions. When they do speak, rather than stating what they mean, they say something else, expecting the other to infer their message from the silent language of mime. Reading Iskander, one is immersed in intense semiotic interaction. His “theatrical scenes” are often power plays—“symbolic duels” at times, and at other times combat between an underdog and an authority figure bent on crushing the resistance or even the personality of the opponent. The essay does justice to the rich intertextual background of the novella, featuring, among others, motifs from Alexander Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter (and the broader Walter-Scottian topos of encounters of the everyman protagonist with a major historical figure), Friedrich Schiller’s drama William Tell , and the Bible’s Book of Daniel .