On December 28, 1972, speechless pantomime Enchanted Island debuted at deaf Theater of Mimicry and Gesture in Moscow. Directed by gay actor and author Evgenii Kharitonov ( 1 94 1-1981) and staged total of sixty-six times before its closing night on March 31, 1980, play has never been performed anywhere else or ever again. In loose terms of its plot, Enchanted Island floats philosophically (Nadezhda Ivankovskaia, personal interview, May 27, 2010) between Ovid's Metamorphosis and Shakespeare's Tempest (whose eighteenth-century adaptation shares title with Soviet play). It is broken up into three acts, in which jealous Prosperian sorcerer magically shape-shifts pair of shipwrecked lovers into all manners of being; all while lovers remain resolute in their insatiable search for one another's touch. Some of fantastic aspects assumed by actors include touching trio of palm trees; an invisible man and married couple; military commander, his cross-dressed maid, and lovelorn cavalryman; and cave- dwelling Cyclops, his companion monkey, and their marooned human captive.The spectacle was strange by late-Soviet standards and was met with mixed reviews, if theater guestbook and actors' recollections are good indication among scant archival traces. Many audience members punningly applauded play's ability to enchant, as in following typical if uninspired inscription by boarding school collective in March 1973: Thank you for enchanting play of actors, marvelous plasticity, bewitchment. Others bristled at brazenness of nearly naked bodies moving in such unexpected ways and to no apparent end. One actress recounted how a babushka comes in, looks around, says, 'Shameful! Naked people!' and walks out. 'What's use?' (Tat'iana Koval'skaia, personal interview, May 31, 2010). Another entry in same vein reads, Twelve of us came to watch your pantomime, eight left during intermission. What is it? What's it about? What's use? The actors exhibit movement with their bodies very well, but what's use, what's it about? To whom are you addressing such spectacle? Maybe this sort of thing is fashionable in Moscow but no one where I'm from would like it. I consider this show harmful and evening lost. With indignation, Orlov, Trainer [and] Severskii, Economist.In this essay, I take up gauntlet thrown down by scandalized babushka, physical trainer, and socialist economist to answer their common indignant query: What's use of Enchanted Island and, extrapolating, what's use of enchantment? I ask after inexplicable link between enchantment and that Orlov and Severskii sense but cannot name. This last query is provoked as much by play as it is by Max Weber's famous pronouncement in 1918 that the increasing intellectualization and rationalization of West, and growth of modern state, had induced of world with more intimate side-effect of disenchant [ing] and denud[ing man's bearing of its] mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity ([1918] 1954, 139, 155).Weber's words prove pertinent to present analysis not least of all as they anticipate operative terms of Soviet pantomime, but also, on metatextual level, because they continue to define terms of debate about modernity's disenchantment to this day, and, most important, because enchanted event I offer for consideration now transpired in culture so supremely 'scientifized,' it might be said to bring Weber's bleak forecast to its fullest fruition. I am referring to epoch of Soviet history retroactively known as stagnation, which corresponds to Leonid Brezhnev's conservative tenure as Communist Party secretary from 19651985. This was time of utter disillusionment with communism's Utopian dream, cold war historians concur, when arteries of Soviet state had gelled into an immoveable gerontocracy, making inward of personal and social orders unthinkable. …