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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde by Dassia N. Posner Jonathan Pitches The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde. By Dassia N. Posner. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016; pp. 344. While Russian theatre directors Meyerhold, Tairov, and Eisenstein have continued to stimulate interest in scholarship since the beginnings of their practice and have been the subject of individual studies and selected pairings right up to the present day—from Mel Gordon and Alma Law’s classic Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics (1996) to Amy Skinner’s forthcoming Russian Theatre in Practice (2019)—no one has yet taken on all three directorial titans in one volume. This is the challenge that Dassia Posner sets herself with The Director’s Prism, an elegantly organized and deeply scholarly book that manages to reveal (or to use her term, “refract”) new insights into the work of these much-discussed Russian creatives. The vehicle for this refraction and the common reference point for all three directors is the German romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), whose own deeply influential mantra for the theatre was for it “to ‘bear the spectator on invisible wings in to the imaginary world of poesy”’ (3). Hoffmann’s impact on Russian art, literature, and theatre is enormous, intensifying in two waves. The first occurred in the nineteenth century, Posner argues, embodied in Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev; the second wave followed in the early twentieth century as part of the Russian revolt against naturalism and its celebration of the “theatre theatrical,” as Oliver Sayler famously termed it. Posner reveals each of her chosen directors to be profoundly “under the sign” of Hoffmann, in their dedication to adapting his work for the stage and in their reimagination of his theatrical worldview—irony, the grotesque, the pursuit of artistic synthesis, the importance of commedia dell’arte and the power of the mask (4). As such, her focus on Hoffmann as an organizing principle is more than justified and helps to weave a rich narrative of both separate and interlaced strands of theatre history. The book’s structure reflects this organizational focus on Hoffmann. An introduction explains the conceit of the director’s prism and the concept of refraction—“the artist’s deep engagement with a source via the prism of untrammeled fantasy”—positioning Hoffmann both in his own time and in the revolutionary period in Russia (29). Separate chapters then follow treating Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein in turn, but welding each of them to another figure—resonating with Hoffmann’s obsession with alter egos. Thus we have the amalgams: Meyerhold-Dapertutto (chapter 1); Tairov-Celionati (chapter 2); and Eisenstein-Yutkevich, or “pipifax” as they termed themselves (chapter 3). These pairings (either actual in the case of Eisenstein and Yutkevich or metaphorical in the case of Meyerhold) serve productively to destabilize the identity and stability of the lone director. They wittily evoke Hoffmann’s own grotesque and dynamic characterizations, although, at least for this reader, they also run the risk of providing one layer of interpretation too many, blurring what is already a complex and kaleidoscopic narrative. The epilogue reflects on Hoffmann’s centenary in 1922 before moving to an assessment of the “significant afterlife [of ] theatricalist poetics” provoked by the German’s work within and beyond the Russian context (200–201). Posner does this not to construct a lineage or explicit line of influence from Hoffmann onwards, she says, but instead to consider the utility of Louise George Clubb’s term “theatregram,” coined to “describe the process of dissemination via oral, visual, and other largely non-traceable means” (202). There is more to be said on this and further expansion needed on the other suggested Hoffmannian afterlives manifest in Peter Brook, Kneehigh, and Dmitry Krymov. But an epilogue can only do so much, to be fair, and these contemporary figures are served up as “indirect refractions,” to be followed up independently. As a final gift, three useful appendices are also included: essays translated from Meyerhold’s famous Love of the Three Oranges journal, as well as commedia scenarios from Schnitzler and...