Vagabonding Masks: The Italian Commedia dell'Arte in the Russian Artistic Imagination by Partan Olga (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 567 Quilty’s status, concentrating on the details that suggest that he is possibly a hallucination, the crazed product of Humbert’s paranoia. Far from resolving the question, this serves to demonstrate Meyer’s theory that a one-solution reading counters the function of Nabokov’s novel, which is to call attention to the problematic nature of reality. Finally, Meyer uses the ambiguous structure of Sebastian Knight to read further into the incommensurable ambiguity of authorship in Pale Fire, to establish how far it reveals Nabokov’s preoccupation with the unknowable hereafter. Meyer’s study, full of specific analyses and relying on a clear theoretical and conceptual framework, demonstrates an impressive mastery of Nabokov’s bilingual career as well as a thorough knowledge of recent research in Nabokov studies. As she progresses through her exploration of the challenging notion of indeterminacy, Meyer also unearths many a fascinating link to other literary works. The arcane references illuminated by this study are anything but a new set of annotations, however. Rather, they serve a deeper impulse to relocate Nabokovian indeterminacy from the broad cultural context of postmodernism and show how Nabokov, marked by loss and tragedy, dramatized his very private sense of uncertainty through his art. Université de Cergy-Pontoise, Paris Seine Yannicke Chupin Partan, Olga. Vagabonding Masks: The Italian Commedia dell’Arte in the Russian Artistic Imagination. Liber Primus. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2017. 291 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $79.00. Olga Partan’s Vagabonding Masks explores the ‘rich yet insufficiently studied tradition of Russian harlequinized art’ (p. 14). Apart from Catriona Kelly’s history of the puppet Petrushka in Russian society and culture (Cambridge, 1990), scholarship has tended to focus either on the emergence of the commedia dell’arte in the eras of Peter the Great and Anna Iaonnovna, or on its influence and incarnations in Silver Age art, literature and theatre, exemplified (in the English language) by the work of Martin Green and John Swan, Douglas J. Clayton and Olga Soboleva. However, the ‘infatuation’ of modernist artists with the commedia dell’arte at the turn of the twentieth century was not ‘an isolated phenomenon of Western origin’, Partan contends, but ‘a powerful second wave in a centuries-long tradition of Italian masks and vagabonding’ (p. 163). Whilst examination of the work of Blok, Evreinov and Meierhol´d takes a central place in her study, the greater purpose of this book is to establish and trace the course of the tradition, and the ways in which it evolved, across three centuries of drama, literature and music, to become, to this day, inherently Russian. SEER, 98, 3, JULY 2020 568 As Partan explains, the first Russian harlequins ‘represented a peculiar hybrid of a Germanized version of the commedia dell’arte mask and medieval Russian wandering minstrels — the skomorokhi’ (p. 18). The skomorokhi, like the commedia, drew on oral folk traditions, their masks characterized by dance, song and subversive humour. Deemed pagan and anti-religious, the Orthodox Church prohibited them during the reign of Ivan IV and they were subsequently outlawed by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Unafraid of controversy, however, Ivan not only greatly enjoyed but also enthusiastically participated in their antics at court banquets, demonstrating how difficult it was to suppress their popularity, which seemed to infiltrate every strata of Russian society. Through the course of the eighteenth century the skoromokhi were gradually eclipsed by the commedia troupes, brought to Russia at the invitation of Empress Anna. During the nineteenth century, ‘Harlequin migrated from high culture (court stages) to low culture (the area of various circuses and balagan-entertainment booths)’ (p. 18), to be adopted by the innovators of preRevolutionary theatre — Benois, Evreinov, Meierhol´d — and transformed into ‘an irresistible lover and erotic icon’ (p. 19). Partan’s study is more than a cultural history. Structured chronologically, each chapter draws on close examination of contemporary texts — plays, commentary, poetry, fiction — to reveal new perspectives and demonstrate the extent of the commedia’s influence on dramatists, writers, artists and critics, as well as its gradual and deliberate incorporation into the Russian cultural enterprise. The first three chapters, covering a third of the book, considers Russian responses to the commedia dell...