here
have been only a handful of periods in world
cultural history when the theater was the leading
form-Athens of the 5th century BC, Elizabethan
England, and Russia/the Soviet Union from the
1890s to the 1930s. This web site is dedicated
to the Russian theater of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold,
Chekhov, Mayakovsky and Bulgakov, Malevich and
Tatlin, Stravinsky and Shostakovich.
From the list of names above, it should be
clear that it is precisely theater that is of
issue here, not merely drama. Of course, there
were great dramas written and produced in this
period, including the major plays of Chekhov,
of Mayakovsky, and of Bulgakov. Much more important,
however, was the powerful theatrical milieu
out of which these plays grew. Russian modernist
culture was nothing if not synthetic. In the
first decades of the 20th century, Russian writers,
painters, composers all strove to erase the
bounds separating what had traditionally been
seen as discrete artistic areas. Frequently,
a union of the arts was accomplished in the
oeuvre of a single person. Thus, the novelist
and poet Mikhail Kuzmin was an accomplished
and recognized composer. The Futurists Vladimir
Mayakovsky and David Burliuk started out as
visual artists, and their cubo-futurist poetry
marks an obvious attempt to apply the principles
of painting to poetry. Mikhail Matiushin was
a leading futurist composeras well as an exhibitor
of paintings... (Read
the rest of the introduction)
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