Vera Kommissarzhevskaya: The Actress as Symbolist Eidolon

Abstract

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the leading lady of the legitimate stage was often regarded as a diva. Just as such romantic feminine archetypes as la belle dame sans merci and the ethereal muse were enjoying a revival in decadent poetry and painting, so the great actresses of the time embodied them in flesh-and-blood. Sarah Bernhardt's gaunt features and flamboyant personality, when portrayed in the posters of Mucha and the poetry of Rostand, created a type of exotic sensuality. In contrast, instinctive femininity stared from the limpid gaze of Eleonora Duse, her soulfulness glorified by Gabriele D'Annunzio. For their contemporaries, these women were more than actresses, more even than spectacular celebrities: they were at once the incarnation and the epitome of a refined sensibility that dwelt in transcendent spheres. They were less of this world than of Byzantium or the inner realm of the feminine psyche. Artists and poets projected on to them fantasies and obsessions which, refiltered through their performances on stage, inspired new aesthetic creativity. Bernhardt the divine, Duse the earth-mother: add to these another panel, to make a triptych: the panel of the prescient mystic. As Bernhardt and Duse associated with fashionable poets, so Vera Fyodorovna Kommissarzhevskaya (1864-1910)' hobnobbed with the literary avant-garde of Russia. She could reckon in her orbit the pleiad of Aleksandr Blok, Andrey Bely, Valery Bryusov, Mikhail Kuzmin, Fyodor Sologub, Georgy Chulkov, almost the entire cohort of Russian symbolism. If she sought to nourish her art on their ideas, they in turn looked to her to realize their concepts in the theatre. This essay does not pretend to be a full biography of Kommissarzhevskaya or to evaluate her place on the Russian stage. It intends to explore