Theories of the Avant-Garde Theatre

A Casebook from Kleist to Camus

Edited by Bert Cardullo

THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
2013
Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2013 by Bert Cardullo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Theories of the avant-garde theatre : a casebook from Kleist to Camus / edited by Bert Cardullo.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-8704-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8705-3 (ebook) 1. Experimental
theater. 2. Avant-garde (Aesthetics) I. Cardullo, Bert.
PN2193.E86T56 2013
792.02'9—dc23
2012028479

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
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Printed in the United States of America

 Contents

Preface v
Chronology of the European Avant-Garde, 1890–1950 vii
Introduction: Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical,
Intellectual, and Cultural Context 1
Bert Cardullo
1 On the Marionette Theatre (1810) 41
Heinrich von Kleist
2 The Tragic in Daily Life (1894) 49
Maurice Maeterlinck
3 On the Futility of the “Theatrical” in the Theatre (1896) 57
Alfred Jarry
4 Prefatory Note to A Dream Play (1901) 63
August Strindberg
5 The Stylized Theatre (excerpt, 1907) 65
Vsevolod Meyerhold
6 Realism and Convention on the Stage (1908) 69
Valery Briusov
7 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909) 81
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti
8 Epilogue to the Actor (1913) 87
Paul Kornfeld
9 A Few Words about the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure
Form (1919) 91
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

iii
iv Contents

10 On Humor (1920) 97
Luigi Pirandello
11 Lecture on Dada (1922) 105
Tristan Tzara
12 Surrealism (1922) 111
André Breton
13 The Dehumanization of Art (1925) 129
José Ortega y Gasset
14 Postwar German Drama (1928) 135
Ernst Toller
15 New Stage Forms (1928) 139
Oskar Schlemmer
16 The Oberiu Theatre (1928) 143
Daniil Kharms
17 The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto (1932) 147
Antonin Artaud
18 The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) 155
Albert Camus
Epilogue: There Is No Avant-Garde Theatre (1962) 159
Eugène Ionesco

Select Bibliography 165

Index 177
About the Editor 185
 Preface

Theories of the Avant-Garde Theatre: A Casebook from Kleist to Camus is

an inspired handbook of ideas and arguments about twentieth-century Euro-
pean drama. It gathers together a uniquely wide-ranging selection of nineteen
original writings on Western theatre by its most creative practitioners—di-
rectors, playwrights, performers, and designers. These key texts span most of
the twentieth century and reach back into the nineteenth, providing direct
access to the thinking behind much of the most stimulating playwriting and
performance the modernists had to offer, as well as guidelines to the contem-
porary theatre’s current, most adventurous developments. Included in this
anthology are such seminal figures as Strindberg, Meyerhold, Marinetti, Jar-
ry, Pirandello, Breton, and Artaud—from a number of Western countries and
diverse theatrical movements—whose writings illuminate their astonishing
daring in wrenching dramatic art out of all of its old habits and creating a
new, distinctive, and freestanding theatrical vocabulary. The book includes
important selections that are frequently omitted from other anthologies, like
“The Dehumanization of Art” (1925) by José Ortega y Gasset and “The
Myth of Sisyphus” (1942) by Albert Camus.
Setting theory beside practice, these writings bring alive a number of vital
and continuing concerns, in addition to providing illuminating perspectives
on the theatrical history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This
casebook is not only an essential and versatile collection for students at all
levels, but it also offers a feast of ideas for anyone interested or engaged in
theatre. Theories of the Avant-Garde Theatre: A Casebook from Kleist to
Camus offers clear and useful notes on the contributors and their works, a
select bibliography, and a theatrical-cum-historical timeline, as well as a
provocative introduction that traces the history of the avant-garde tradition
and argues for a revisionist history of modern drama that would acknowledge

v
vi Preface

the innovative contributions of such movements as symbolism, futurism,

expressionism, surrealism, Dadaism, and absurdism. In sum, this compilation
of theoretical writings, which signaled and accompanied the twentieth centu-
ry’s radical shift in the aesthetics of theatre and drama, is a valuable contribu-
tion to the literature of the avant-garde and should be of great use to scholars
and theatre lovers alike.
 Chronology of the European Avant-
Garde, 1890–1950

Adapted from Chronology of the European Avant-Garde, 1900–1937, com-

piled by Chris Michaelides with contributions from curators of the European
and American Collections, British Library, December 2007. Available at
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/breakingtherules/images/AvantGar-
deChronology.pdf.

1890–1894

1890 Ellis Island opens, New York Harbor; William James Principles of
Psychology; Frazer The Golden Bough; van Gogh A Woman from
Arles; suicide of van Gogh; Hamsun Hunger; Wilde The Picture of
Dorian Gray; Freie Volksbühne established in Berlin; Maeterlinck
The Blind and The Intruder; Claudel Tête d’Or; Villiers de l’Isle
Adam Axel; Ibsen Hedda Gabler.
1891 First international copyright law; the Independent Theatre estab-
lished in London; Shaw The Quintessence of Ibsenism; Rimbaud dies;
Mahler Symphony No. 1; Pissarro Two Young Peasant Women; Monet
Grainstacks; Hardy Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Huysmans Là-Bas;
Wedekind Spring’s Awakening; London-Paris telephone service avail-
able.

vii
viii Chronology

1892 The word “homosexual” first appears in print; voting machines first
used in the United States; Tennyson dies; Cézanne Card Players;
Dvorak New World Symphony; Maeterlinck Pelléas and Mélisande;
Ibsen The Master Builder, Claudel The Tidings Brought to Mary;
Yeats The Countess Cathleen.
1893 Henry Ford builds the first automobile; Lugné-Poë’s Théâtre de
l’Oeuvre is founded; Turgenev, Tchaikovsky, Maupassant, and Taine
die; Cézanne Still Life with Curtain, Pitcher, and Bowl of Fruit; Pis-
sarro Place du Havre, Paris; Munch The Scream; Wilde Salomé;
Hauptmann The Assumption of Hannele; Hofmannsthal Death and the
Fool; Sternheim The Iron Cross; Wedekind Earth Spirit.
1894 Coca-Cola sold in bottles for the first time; Marconi builds the first
radio equipment; US Congress establishes the Bureau of Immigration;
Korea declares independence from China; Pater dies; Maeterlinck
Interior; Ibsen Little Eyolf; Shaw Arms and the Man; Yeats The Land
of Heart’s Desire; Debussy Afternoon of a Faun; Gauguin Breton
Village in the Snow; Henri Rousseau War, or the Ride of Discord.

1895–1900

1895 First showing of a motion picture in New York City using Thomas
Edison’s Kinetoscope and Joseph Armat’s Vitascope, and in Paris by
Louis and Auguste Lumière; Roentgen discovers X-rays; Engels dies;
Shaw Candida; Wells The Time Machine; Hardy Jude the Obscure;
Freud Studies in Hysteria; Degas Jockeys; Cuban War of Indepen-
dence begins.
1896 Millennial celebrations in Hungary of the Magyars’ settling in Cen-
tral Europe inspire an unparallelled cultural boom; Jarry Ubu Roi;
Chekhov The Seagull; Ibsen John Gabriel Borkman; Hauptmann The
Sunken Bell; Puccini La Bohème; Verlaine dies; first modern Olym-
pics, Athens; Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity; periodical Die
Jugend founded in Germany.
1897 Vienna Secession group, led by Gustav Klimt, founded by Viennese
artists critical of “Das Künstlerhaus”—the official artists’ association;
creation of their own exhibition space, the Secession Building, archi-
tect Josef Maria Olbrich, and promotion of their design aesthetic with
exhibition posters and their own journal Ver Sacrum; J. J. Thompson
discovers the electron; gold fields discovered in the Klondike; Chek-
hov Uncle Vanya; Strindberg Inferno; Schnitzler La Ronde; Shaw The
Devil’s Disciple; Hofmannsthal The Little Theatre of the World; Mo-
net The Cliffs of Dieppe; Brahms dies.
 Chronology ix

1898 Berlin Secession movement founded by artists including Max Lie-

bermann, Lovis Corinth, and Käthe Kollwitz, as a protest against the
establishment’s traditionalist view of art; first exhibition of the Vienna
Secession; in Romania, the Society of Independent Artists publishes
the review ILEANA, a call for a vigorous (Secessionist) aesthetic; the
Curies discover radium; founding of the Moscow Art Theatre; Span-
ish-American War; Bismarck dies; Rodin Balzac; Mallarmé dies;
Strindberg To Damascus; Cézanne Woodland Scene.
1899 In Vienna, Karl Kraus founds the literary periodical Die Fackel (The
Torch); second trial and pardon of Dreyfus; first radio transmission,
England to France, achieved by Marconi; first refrigerator produced;
beginning of Boer War (–1902); Ibsen When We Dead Awaken; Sy-
mons The Symbolist Movement in Literature; Monet Lily Pond and
Rouen Cathedral; Vuillard The Salon with Three Lamps.

1900

Boxer rebellion in China.

Austria

Sigmund Freud Zur Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams].

France

Paris, Exposition Universelle attracts 51 million visitors.

Paris Metro opens.
Ardengo Soffici in Paris (–1907).
Gauguin Noa-Noa.

Germany

First zeppelin flies.

Wedekind The Marquis of Keith.
Planck proposes quantum theory.
Nietzsche dies.

Great Britain

British Labour Party founded.

Conrad Lord Jim.
Shaw Three Plays for Puritans.
x Chronology

Scandinavia

Strindberg Easter.

Spain

Construction of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia begins in Barcelona.

1901

Death of Queen Victoria.

Marconi sends wireless message from Poldhu, Cornwall, to Newfound-
land, Canada.
First Nobel Prizes awarded.
Planck’s law of radiation.

France

Picasso’s first exhibition in Paris, at the Galerie Ambroise Vollard; his

“blue period” begins: The Absinthe Drinker, Woman with a Cap, Ca-
sagemas in His Coffin.
Van Gogh Sunflowers.

Germany

Founding of the Überbrettl, Germany’s first cabaret, in Berlin by Ernst

von Wolzogen, with Arnold Schoenberg as musical director.
Kandinsky founds the artists’ group Phalanx in Munich.

Great Britain

Wells The First Men in the Moon.

Russia

Chekhov Three Sisters.

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto no. 2.

Latvia

Exhibition celebrating the 700th anniversary of Riga’s founding.

Italy

Verdi dies.
 Chronology xi

1902

South African (“Boer”) War ends, with Boer acceptance of British sove-
reignty.
Coronation of King Edward VII.
Lenin and Trotsky meet for the first time, in London.
Alfonso XIII of Spain comes of age.

Austria

Fourth exhibition of the Vienna Secession, with Gustav Klimt’s Beetho-

ven Frieze mounted in the Secession building.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal Ein Brief, an important critique of literary lan-
guage.

France

Méliès Voyage dans la lune.

Marinetti La Conquête des étoiles.
Debussy Pelléas et Mélisande.
Zola dies.
Picasso Two Women at a Bar.

Germany

Posthumous publication of Nietzsche’s Der Wille zur Macht [The Will to

Power].
Berlin, Edvard Munch exhibits for the first time the entire Frieze of Life,
a series of paintings including The Scream.
Stadler and Schickele found the periodical Der Stürmer.

Great Britain

Conrad Heart of Darkness.

Irish National Theatre Movement founded in Dublin.
Yeats Cathleen Ni Houlihan.

Scandinavia

Strindberg Ett drömspel [A Dream Play].

Russia

Gorky The Lower Depths.

xii Chronology

1903

Edward VII’s state visit to Paris improves relations between France and
Britain; visit of French president Loubet to London follows.
Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst founds Women’s Social and Political Union, in
Manchester.

Austria

Wiener Werkstätte [Vienna Workshops], a design collective that empha-

sizes the interdependence of all forms of art, founded by Josef Hoff-
mann and Koloman Moser and includes among its members Carl Otto
Czeschka, Bertold Löffler, and Dagobert Peche; the Workshops will
continue until 1932.

Russia

Socialist movement splits into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

France

Leo and Gertrude Stein settle in Paris.

First Salon d’Automne.
Gauguin dies.
Picasso Seated Woman.

Germany

Deutscher Künstlerbund founded as a forum for new German art in Wei-

mar by Harry Graf Kessler, Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, and
other Secessionists.
Munich, première of scenes from Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen (La Ronde).

Great Britain

Erskine Childers’s thriller The Riddle of the Sands raises fears about
German invasion.
Synge In the Shadow of the Glen.

Scandinavia

Norwegian dramatist Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson awarded Nobel Prize for lit-

erature.
Roald Amundsen first navigates the Northwest Passage.
 Chronology xiii

1904

Russo-Japanese War (–1905).

Entente Cordiale between Great Britain and France.
Rolls-Royce chosen as name to market Henry Royce’s first car.

France

Paris and Rome, exhibition of Tony Garnier’s theoretical project for Cité
industrielle.
Matisse Luxe, calme et volupté.

Germany

Members of all parties in the German Reichstag protest the art chosen to
represent Germany at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, which represents
Emperor William II’s conservative tastes and rejection of the Seces-
sionists (whose work he considers to be “gutter art”).
Wedekind Die Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s Box].
Freud The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Great Britain

Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Scotland Street School’s groundbreaking

use of glass.
Yeats The Hour Glass.
Peter Pan, non-realist fable, performed at Duke of York’s theatre, Lon-
don.
Abbey Theatre, Dublin, opens.

Spain

Gabriel Alomar lectures on Futurism in Barcelona.

Lithuania

Revival of cultural life after the lifting of the prohibition on the Lithua-
nian press in 1904 and under the influence of the Russian revolution of
1905 as well as the Vilnius Seimas (parliament).
M. K. Čiurlionis, Lithuanian painter and composer, explores the analogies
between music and the visual arts; Čiurlionis draws on Lithuanian
folklore and Oriental mysticism and uses more abstract forms than
many of his Russian contemporaries.
xiv Chronology

Russia

Blaise Cendrars moves to Russia (–1906).

Chekhov The Cherry Orchard.
Chekhov dies.

1905

Abortive revolution (–1907) in Russian empire.

Norway gains independence from Sweden.
Modern labor movement begins with the founding of the International
Workers of the World.
General strike in Finland.
Albert Einstein publishes his special theory of relativity in the journal
Annalen der Physik.
January Bloody Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg, Russia.
March Embryonic Sinn Fein started, as Dungannon Club, in Belfast.
May First suffragette demonstration, Westminster, organized by E. Pank-
hurst.
June Battleship Potemkin Uprising in Odessa.
October Manifesto grants full civil rights to the subjects of the Russian
empire and promises the establishment of a parliament or duma. The
ban on Ukrainian-language publications is lifted till another strict ban
in 1914. HMS Dreadnought—faster and with greater range than any
other warships—begins construction, is launched February 1906.

Belgium

A group of Flemish Expressionists led by Albert Servaes and including

Constant Permeke, Gustave De Smet, and Frits Van den Berghe settle
in Laethem-Saint-Martin, a small village near Ghent previously colo-
nized by a group of Symbolist artists led by George Minne.

France

The Fauves exhibit at the Salon d’Automne in Paris.

Marinetti Le Roi Bombance published in Paris.
Claudel The Break of Noon.
 Chronology xv

Germany

Die Brücke [The Bridge], a loose collective of artists, founded in Dresden

by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and
Fritz Bleyl.
Dresden, première of Richard Strauss Salomé.
In Berlin, Max Reinhardt takes over the management of the Deutsches
Theater.
Morgenstern Galgenlieder.

Great Britain

Work on early garden city at Letchworth begins.

Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession performed privately (first public per-
formance in 1925); Man and Superman, with Act 3 omitted (dream
sequence set in hell), and Major Barbara performed at Royal Court.
Wells Kipps.
Synge Riders to the Sea and The Well of the Saints.

Italy

Marinetti’s review Poesia (–1909).

Morasso La nuova arma: La macchina.

1906

Election of the first duma (parliament) in Russia.

Trans-Siberian railway completed.
Women get the vote in Finland (the first in the world to be granted full
political rights).

Austria

Musil Die Verwirrungen des Jünglings Törless [The Confusions of

Young Törless].

France

Paris, Matisse exhibition in the Salon d’Automne includes Le Bonheur de

vivre.
Paris, exhibition of Russian art at the Grand Palais organized by Diaghil-
ev; Larionov, Jawlewsky, and Kandinsky come to Paris.
Derain in London paints a series of nineteen views of the city commis-
sioned by Ambroise Vollard.
xvi Chronology

Death of Cézanne.

Germany

Dresden, first exhibition by Die Brücke (largely ignored by critics and

public).
Berlin, Kandinsky exhibition in the Galerie Wertheim.
Hamburg, opening of the Hauptbahn, largest railway station built to date.
Hauptmann And Pippa Dances.

Italy

Boccioni travels to Paris and Russia.

Modigliani and Severini in Paris.

Scandinavia

Death of Ibsen.

Ukraine

Kiev, exhibition by Archipenko and Bohomazov.

1907

Brooklands, world’s first motor-racing track opens.

France

Picasso Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Cézanne exhibition at the Salon d’Automne.

Germany

Death of early German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker.

Scandinavia

Strindberg The Ghost Sonata.

Great Britain

R. Orage becomes editor of The New Age, exponent of continental and

avant-garde ideas.
Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World causes a riot when it opens at
the Abbey Theatre.
 Chronology xvii

Yeats Deidre.

Spain

Barcelona journal Futurisme published.

Hungary

Works by Cézanne, Gauguin, and Matisse exhibited for the first time in
Budapest.
MIÉNK [Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists] founded.

Latvia

Riga, Jahrbuch für bildende Kunst in den Ostseeprovinzen (–1913).

Lithuania

First Lithuanian Art Exhibition organized in Vilnius. Participants include

the painters M. K. Čiurlionis, Antanas Žmuidzinavičius, and Petras
Kalpokas, the sculptors Petras Rimša, Juozas Zikaras, and Jonas Da-
nauskas, and the architects Kazimieras Gabrėnas and Ipolitas Januška,
besides folk artists. Artists who returned from Western Europe
brought with them Post-Impressionist influences, while those who had
lived in Russia had been influenced by Russian Realism.
Dailės draugija [the Art Society], founded in Vilnius, organizes eight
exhibitions before World War I; members include Lithuanians, Poles,
Jews, and Russians who act as a conduit of information about Futur-
ism, Cubism, and Expressionism to local artists in Vilnius.

Russia

Gorky Mother.

1908

Women’s Sunday: 200,000 suffragettes take part in a London demonstra-

tion.
Olympics at White City.
First airplane flight from English soil at Farnborough.

Austria

Oskar Kokoschka Die träumenden Knaben, a book commissioned by the

Wiener Werkstätte.
xviii Chronology

Vienna, première of Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, op. 10.

Salzburg, First Congress of Freudian Psychology.

France

Birth of Cubism: the term was first applied by Louis Vauxcelles to paint-
ings exhibited in Paris by Braque in 1908.

Great Britain

Franco-British exhibition at White City.

Jacob Epstein’s figures for BMA façade.
Ezra Pound moves to London.

Hungary

Nyugat (West) founded as a journal for modern Hungarian literature.

First exhibition of MIÉNK at the National Salon.

Italy

Florence, La voce.
Venice, A lume spento, Ezra Pound’s first collection of poems, published.

Spain

Journal Futurisme published.

Ukraine

Kiev, exhibition of the group Zveno [Link] with members Nicolai and
Vladimir Burliuk, Exter, Bohomazov, and Baranoff-Rossine.

1909

Louis Blériot flies across the English Channel from Sangatte to Dover.
Commercial manufacture of plastic begins.

Belgium

Maeterlinck The Bluebird.

 Chronology xix

Austria

Vienna, première of Oskar Kokoschka’s play Mörder, Hoffnung der

Frauen [Murderer, Hope of Women] (in 1919 Paul Hindemith will
compose a one-act opera based on the play).
Schoenberg Erwartung and 3 Pieces for Piano, op. 11, the first wholly
atonal piece of music.
Webern 5 Movements for String Quartet, op. 5.

France

Paris, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes performs Prince Igor at the Châtelet.

Apollinaire L’Enchanteur pourrissant (with woodcuts by André Derain)
published by Kahnweiler.
André Gide establishes La Nouvelle Revue Française.
Ukrainian artist Mykhailo Boichuk founds his own studio-school in Paris.
Picasso’s landscapes at Horta de Ebro, regarded by Gertrude Stein as the
first Cubist paintings.

Germany

Berlin, Kurt Hiller and Jakob van Hoddis found Der Neue Club as a focus
for new writing and organize performances under the name Neopathe-
tisches Cabaret.
Kubin Die andere Seite.
Dresden, première of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s
Elektra.
Munich, Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter, Marianne von Weref-
kin, and others found the Neue Künstlervereinigung, a group for
avant-garde artists, musicians, and dancers.

Great Britain

Wells’s feminist text Ann Veronica.

Glasgow Repertory stages the first Chekhov play seen in the UK, The
Seagull.

Italy

Balla Lampada ad arco.

Marinetti’s Le Futurisme published in Le Figaro; also published, in Ital-
ian, in Poesia V, no. 1–2, February–March; later called Fondazione e
manifesto del Futurismo.
Marinetti Le roi Bombance staged in Paris at Le Théâtre de l’Oeuvre.
Marinetti Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna! (published in Poesia V, no. 7–9).
xx Chronology

Scandinavia

General strike in Sweden.

Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf awarded Nobel Prize for literature.
Strindberg The Great Highway.

Spain

Ramón Gómez de la Serna publishes Marinetti in issue 6 of the journal

Prometeo.
“Tragic Week” in Barcelona: general strike leads to incendiarism.

Hungary

Lajos Kassák walks from Budapest to Paris, begins to write free verse.
MIÉNK breaks up after its second exhibition; the group Keresők [Seek-
ers] is formed with members Lajos Tihanyi, Róbert Berény, Béla
Czóbel, Dezső Czigány, Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Dezső
Orbán, and Bertalan Pór; their first exhibition denotes the first appear-
ance of a truly avant-garde movement in Hungary.

Poland

Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto published in the Krakow journal Swiat in

October 1909.

Romania

Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto published in Romanian in Craiova in a

local newspaper and in the Parisian Le Figaro.

Ukraine

Odessa First Salon, organized by sculptor Vladimir Izdebsky and former

student of Odessa Art School Wassily Kandinsky, is the first major
display of avant-garde art in the territory of the Russian empire; it
includes 900 works by 150 artists, such as Henri Matisse, André De-
rain, Natalia Goncharova, Aleksandra Exter, Mikhail Larionov, and
many others.

1910

Daily Mail sponsors a London-Manchester air race.

Foundation of the International Psychoanalytical Association, located in
Zürich; C. J. Jung is president.
 Chronology xxi

Edward VII dies; succeeded by George V (crowned in 1911).

China abolishes slavery.
Mexican Revolution (–1911).

Austria

Exhibition of forty paintings by Schoenberg, organized by the bookseller

Hugo Heller.

France

Paris, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes performs Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheher-

azade and Stravinsky’s Firebird, with costumes and sets designed by
Bakst.
East European artists are strongly represented in the Salon des Indépen-
dants: Archipenko, Exter, Malevich, Meller, Shterenberg, and Sonia
Delaunay are all featured.
Ivan Morozov commissions monumental decorative panels for his house
in Moscow from Bonnard. The triptych La Méditerranée is installed in
1911 after being shown at that year’s Salon d’Automne. A second
commission will follow in 1912. Morozov had previously commis-
sioned decorative works from Maurice Denis (L’Histoire de Psyché,
1908).

Germany

Literary periodicals Der Sturm (ed. Herwarth Walden) and Die Aktion
(ed. Franz Pfemfert) founded in Berlin.
Neopathetisches Cabaret begins in Berlin.

Great Britain

Russell and Whitehead Principia Mathematica.

Roger Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition in London.
Marinetti delivers several lectures to the Lyceum Club for Women, at 128
Piccadilly.

Italy

Marinetti Mafarka il futurista.

Futurist evenings take place in Trieste, Milan, Turin, and Venice.
Boccioni La città che sale (Museum of Modern Art) and Rissa in Galleria
(Pinacoteca di Brera).
De Chirico paints L’enigma dell’Oracolo.
La Pittura futurista, manifesto tecnico, signed by Carrà, Boccioni, Russo-
lo, Balla, and Severini.
xxii Chronology

Marinetti Discours futuriste aux Vénitiens.

Balilla Pradella Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi.

Spain

Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid (–1936), a residential college on the

Oxbridge model; among the students are Dalí, Buñuel, Lorca, and
Alberti.
The Gran Vía, “Madrid’s Broadway,” is built. Its sky-scraping buildings
include Telefónica (1929, by Lewis S. Weeks and Ignacio de
Cárdenas; at the time, the tallest building in Spain) and Edificio Capi-
tol (1930–1933, by Martínez Feduchi and Vicente Eced).
Madrid Prometeo publishes a Futurist proclamation.

Russia

St. Petersburg, first exhibition of the Union of Youth, one of the most
long-lived avant-garde societies; concurrent exhibition of the Triangle
group, organized by Nikolay Kulbin, contains sections of drawings by
Russian writers and a painting section.
Publication of Studiya impressionistov [The Studio of Impressionists],
edited by Kulbin.
Moscow, the first Jack of Diamonds exhibition is organized by Larionov.
Nathan Altman and Chagall travel to Paris, El Lissitzky to Darmstadt,
Italy, and France, Gabo to Munich.
Publication of A Trap for Judges, a collection of Futurist poetry, marks
the first collaboration of David and Nikolai Burliuk, Elena Guro, Ka-
menskii, and Khlebnikov, eventually known as the Gileia group.
Excerpts from the “Manifesto of Italian Futurist Painters” appear in Rus-
sia in Apollon.
Odessa, second Izdebsky Salon, including work by Kandinsky and the
Burliuks, and works of artists of the Russian and Western avant-garde;
the catalogue contains essays by Kandinsky and Schoenberg.

Hungary

First important contributions to Post-Impressionist theory: lectures by

Károly Kernstok Art as Exploration (becomes the artistic program for
the group Keresők) and by György Lukács The Ways Have Parted.
Sándor Bortnyik moves to Budapest from Transylvania.
 Chronology xxiii

Latvia

Modernist tendencies (combining Neo-Primitivism and Expressionism

with Symbolism and Post-Impressionism) following the exhibitions in
Riga of the new Latvian Society for the Encouragement of the Arts,
the Izdebsky International Salon, the St. Petersburg group the Union
of Youth, and Voldemārs Zeltin (1879–1909). Vladimir Markov, the
principal spokesman for the Union of Youth (1910–1914), publishes
articles defending the group’s artistic experiments, organizes its early
exhibitions, and travels to Western Europe to establish links with the
German and French avant-garde. His articles on the principles of the
new art and his advocacy of a subjective approach through altered
states of consciousness influence Kazimir Malevich, Filonov, Rozano-
va, and Larionov.

Ukraine

Odessa, Second Izdebsky Salon, showing works by Kandinsky, the Bur-

liuks, and many Western avant-garde artists (439 works in total, 25 by
David Burliuk, 53 by Kandinsky). First abstract work by Kandinsky
appears on the cover of the catalogue Salon Izdebskago 2. The catalog
contains essays by Kandinsky and Schoenberg.
Kiev, Second Izdebsky Salon moves from Odessa to Kiev.
Kharkiv, the artists’ studio Golubaia Liliia [Blue Lily] opened by Evgeny
Agafonov.
Kherson, Futurist group Gileia [Hylaea] is created (Burliuk brothers, Vel-
imir Khlebnikov, and Aleksei Kruchenykh).

1911

First Portuguese republic.

Revolution establishes the Chinese Republic after 267 years of Manchu
rule.
In January, troops use force against Russian “anarchists” at Stepney.
Petr Stolypin, prime minister of Russia from 1906, is shot at a theatre in
Kiev in September.

France

First group showing of the Cubists at the Salon des Indépendants in “Salle
41.” It includes works by Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le
Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger, and Albert Gleizes, but Picasso and
Braque are not represented.
xxiv Chronology

Apollinaire Bestiaire ou cortège d’Orphée (Paris, 1911), with woodcuts

by Raoul Dufy. The poet coins the word “Orphism” to indicate the
work of a group of artists who had their roots in Cubism, with abstract
tendencies.
Apollinaire implicated in the theft of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa from the
Louvre.
Several Futurist painters visit Paris in the autumn in order to see the new
Cubist works.

Austria

Hofmannsthal Everyman.

Germany

First use of the term “Expressionism” in Der Sturm.

Jakob van Hoddis “Weltende” published in Der Sturm.
Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider] founded in Munich by Wassily Kan-
dinsky and Franz Marc; others associated with the group included
Alfred Kubin and Paul Klee. The group’s first exhibition opens in
December.
Kandinsky Über das Geistige in der Kunst [Concerning the Spiritual in
Art].
The Berlin Secession turns down a number of works by Expressionist
artists including Max Pechstein, leading them to found a “Neue Seces-
sion.”
Karl Vinnen publishes the conservative-nationalistic Protest deutscher
Künstler [Protest of German Artists], attacking modern artists. Kan-
dinsky and associates respond with Im Kampf um die Kunst [The
Struggle for Art].

Great Britain

Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso at the Grafton Galleries.

Camden Town Group founded by Sickert.
Synge Deidre of the Sorrows.
Ballets Russes at Covent Garden: Le Pavillon d’Armide; Carnaval;
Prince Igor.
Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition by Roger Fry.

Italy

Rome, Esposizione internazionale.

Marinetti Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna! (first edition in volume form).
Russolo La musica (Estorick Collection).
 Chronology xxv

Andrea Savinio (Andrea de Chirico) and Giorgio de Chirico move to

Paris.
Marinetti Manifesto dei drammaturghi futuristi.
Pratella Manifeste des Musiciens Futuristes.

Hungary

Bartók Allegro barbaro, marking the beginning of modern Hungarian

music; Bartok finishes Bluebeard’s Castle.
Sculptor József Csáky adopts Cubism (in Paris).
Keresők group renamed “Nyolcak” [The Eight]. Second exhibition, at the
National Salon.

Lithuania

Posthumous Čiurlionis exhibition, also shown in St. Petersburg and Mos-

cow.

Poland

First manifestations of avant-garde tendencies at Krakow’s Exhibitions of

the Independents, which include works by Tytus Czyżewski, Euge-
niusz Zak, Andrzej, and Zbigniew Pronaszko.

Romania

Publication of the monthly review FRONDA.

Ukraine

Glière Symphony no. 3 Ilya Murometz, which brings him worldwide

renown.
Opening of the first film studio in Ukraine.

1912

Titanic sinks, producing hesitancy regarding the claims of modernity.

Royal Flying Corps (later RAF) founded.
First Balkan War begins.

Austria

Schoenberg Pierrot lunaire.

xxvi Chronology

Belgium

Brussels, exhibition of works by Rik Wouters, Louis Thévenet, Ferdinand

Schirren, Auguste Oleffe, and Willem Paerels held at the Galerie Gi-
roux marks the emergence of Brabant Fauvism.
Nyst La peinture futuriste en Belgique (published in La Belgique artis-
tique et littéraire, no. 82 and also, separately, in Milan).
Brussels, Les peintres futuristes italiens at Galerie Giroux.

France

Paris, Les peintres futuristes italiens at Galerie Berheim-Jeune includes

works by Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, and Severini.
De Chirico exhibits Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon at the Salon
d’Automne, the first of his metaphysical paintings.
Apollinaire Soirées de Paris (–1914).
Les Ballets Russes performs Debussy's L’après-midi d’un faune (with
designs by Bakst).
Picasso, Braque, and Gris begin to make collages, papiers collés, and
assemblages.
Duchamp exhibits his Futurist-influenced Nude Descending a Staircase at
the Salon de la Section d’Or exhibition.
Gleizes and Metzinger Du Cubisme.
Archipenko’s sculpture atelier opens in Paris; he also exhibits in the
Salon des Indépendants.
Chagall exhibits at the Salon des Indépendants (–1914).

Germany

Sturm-Galerie group (an offshoot of the periodical) founded in Berlin.

Ludwig Meidner paints the first of his “Apokalyptische Landschaften”
and founds the artists’ group Die Pathetiker.
Early death of the poet Georg Heym; his collection Umbra vitae pub-
lished posthumously.
Kirchner writes Chronik der Brücke, after which the group is formally
dissolved.
Munich, Kandinsky and Franz Marc publish the almanac Der Blaue Reit-
er.
Gerhart Hauptmann wins the Nobel Prize for literature.
Gottfried Benn’s poetry collection Morgue.
Sorge The Beggar.
Barlach The Dead Day.
 Chronology xxvii

Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm publishes Manifesto del futurismo and

Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista. Der Sturm also organizes in
Berlin the exhibition Die futuristen Umberto Boccioni, Carlo D.
Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini. Later in the year Walden also
organizes Futurist exhibitions in Hamburg, The Hague, Amsterdam,
and Munich (Galerie Tannhäuser).

Great Britain

London, Exhibition of Works by the Futurist Painters at Sackville Gal-

lery. Marinetti delivers three lectures, at Bechstein Hall (on 19 March)
and elsewhere, achieving instant notoriety.
Les Ballets Russes performs Stravinsky’s The Firebird at Covent Garden
(the first public performance of a work by Stravinsky in the UK).
Second Post-Impressionist exhibition in London.
Ezra Pound introduces Imagism.

Italy

Marinetti (ed.) I Poeti futuristi.

Boccioni Manifeste technique de la sculpture futuriste.
Marinetti Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista.
Joly Le Futurisme et la Philosophie—Il Futurismo e la Filosofia.

Netherlands

The Hague, Archipenko’s first personal exhibition includes Medrano I,

the first modern sculpture to use wood, metal, wire, and glass.

Scandinavia

Death of August Strindberg.

Spain

Barcelona, Exposició d’art cubista at Galeries Dalmau.

Junoy Arte & artistas (includes articles on Picasso and Cubism).

Russia

January Moscow, the second Jack of Diamonds exhibition opens, orga-

nized by the Burliuks without Larionov. Includes Western avant-garde
artists: Delaunay, Matisse, Picasso, and Léger.
March Exhibition of Larionov’s new group Donkey’s Tail.
April First issue of The Union of Youth.
xxviii Chronology

June Second issue of The Union of Youth, containing a Russian transla-

tion of the Italian Futurist manifesto to the public and V. Markov’s
principles of creativity.
August Publication of the first Russian Futurist poetry book, Old-Time
Love, by Aleksei Kruchenykh, with “ornament” by Larionov. Goncha-
rova decorates A Game in Hell by Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov.
November Publication of Benois’s article “Cubism or Ridiculism” in
response to David Burliuk’s talk on Cubism at the previous week’s
Union of Youth debate.
December The opening in St. Petersburg of the fourth exhibition of the
Union of Youth including Larionov, the Burliuks, and examples of
Rayonist painting. Publication of Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s
World Backwards, illustrated by Larionov, Goncharova, and Tatlin
and A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, the futurist manifesto of the
Hylaea group.
Popova (studies at La Palette) and Puni travel to Paris, Filonov to France
and Italy, Burliuk to Germany.

Georgia

Niko Pirosmani’s art discovered by the local artists Ilia and Kirill Zdane-
vich and the Russian painter Mikhail Le-Dantiu.

Hungary

Budapest, Lajos Kassák begins to publish free verse, novels, and short
stories. Third (and final) exhibition of Nyolcak group.

Romania

Publication of the review Simbolul. Its editors include S. Samyro, who

later changed his name to Tristan Tzara, Ion Iovanaki, later known as
Ion Vinea, and Marcel Janco (Iancu), painter and illustrator.

1913

Women get the vote in Norway.

Bohr discovers the structure of the atom.
Russian pilot Petr Nesterov becomes the first pilot to fly a loop, in a
Nieport IV monoplane with a 70 horsepower Gnome engine over Sy-
retzk Aerodrome near Kiev.
Second Balkan War, June–August.
 Chronology xxix

Austria

Sigmund Freud Totem und Tabu.

France

Completion of the Théâtre des Champs Élysées; Ballets Russes performs

The Rite of Spring, music by Stravinsky and choreography by Nijin-
sky.
Blaise Cendrars/Sonia Delaunay La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Pe-
tite Jehanne de France, a folding sheet of twelve panels two millime-
ters long, with Cendrars’s “simultaneist” poem and an abstract design
by Sonia Delaunay providing a fragmentary experience of movement
through the modern world.
Apollinaire Alcools and Les peintres cubistes.
Proust Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of A la Recherche du
Temps Perdu.
Alain-Fournier Le Grand Meaulnes.
De Chirico exhibits in the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne,
and in his studio; first appearance of mannequins in his work. Apolli-
naire first applies the term “metaphysical” to his work.
Duchamp’s first ready-made, Roue de bicyclette. He begins studies for
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor and Even (The Large
Glass).
Paris, exhibition of sculptures by Boccioni at Galerie La Boëtie.

Germany

Première of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck at the Residenztheater in

Munich; although written almost eighty years earlier, its fragmentary
form, tortured hero, and hallucinatory images make it a major influ-
ence on contemporary dramatists. Berg’s opera Wozzeck will be first
performed in 1925.

Great Britain

Lawrence Sons and Lovers.

Wyndham Lewis begins Vorticism; an important influence was Bergson’s
lectures when Lewis was in Paris.
Shaw Pygmalion.
Gino Severini’s exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery.
Roger Fry opens Omega Workshops in Bloomsbury, with an emphasis on
interior decoration and design.
Post-Impressionist and Futurist exhibition at the Doré Galleries.
xxx Chronology

Marinetti’s lectures and readings in London attract considerable media

attention.

Italy

Programma politico futurista (Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, and Russolo).

Lacerba (–1915), founded in Florence by Giovanni Papini and Ardengo
Soffici. Influenced by Futurism, it claims to be the organ of all princi-
ples of irrationalism.
Exhibition of Futurist art organized by Lacerba.
Rome, Teatro Costanzi Prima esposizione di pittura futurista; Pratella’s
Musica futurista per orchestra performed at the Teatro Costanzi.
Rome, the first Serata futurista at the Teatro Costanzi; Russolo L’arte dei
rumori in March, followed in June by the first concerts of intonarumo-
ri at the Teatro Stocchi in Modena.
Paris, Boccioni’s Futurist sculptures exhibited in June–July in Paris, at
the Galerie La Boétie. Apollinaire L’Antitradizione Futurista. Mani-
festo=Sintesi, Milano, Direzione del Movimento Futurista. Also pub-
lished in French. The Italian version appears in Lacerba in September.

Russia

February Publication of A Trap for Judges II and Kruchenykh’s poems

Hermits, illustrated by Goncharova; Half-Alive; and Pomade, illustrat-
ed by Larionov. Jack of Diamonds also published.
March Amalgamation of Union of Youth group and Hylaea group of
Russian Futurists headed by Burliuk. Moscow, The Target exhibition,
including Rayonist paintings and works by Malevich, who joins Union
of Youth.
Spring Russian translation of Du Cubisme by Gleizes and Metzinger
published.
April Moscow, Larionov organizes a show of icons and popular prints.
The publication of Larionov’s theory of Rayonism and the poetry
collection Service-Book of the Three.
Mid-year foundation of a new journal of art and literature, Sofiia, edited
by Muratov and Tugendkhold.
The Russian Futurists parade in Moscow with painted faces (Larionov’s
article in Argus explains why).
June Publication of Aleksandr Shevchenko’s Principles of Cubism and
Other Contemporary Trends in Painting of All Ages and Nations.
Publication of Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov’s poem A Forestly Rapid,
illustrated by Rozanova, Kulbin, and Kruchenykh; Kruchenykh’s
 Chronology xxxi

Let’s Grumble, illustrated by Malevich and Rozanova; Kruchenykh’s

Explodity, illustrated by Malevich, Rozanova, Kulbin, and Goncharo-
va.
July First All-Russian Congress of Singers of the Future (Poet-Futurists)
is held at Matiushin’s dacha in Finland; present are Matiushkin, Male-
vich, and Kruchenykh, who make plans for the Futurist opera Victory
over the Sun. Publication of Donkey’s Tail and Target, and the first
monograph on Goncharova and Larionov, by Eli Eganbiuri (pseudo-
nym of Ilia Zdanevich).
August Exhibition of Goncharova’s works, 1900–1913 (768 items).
Smaller show in St. Petersburg in 1914.
September St. Petersburg publication of The Three (includes some music
from Victory over the Sun, by Matiushin); Kruchenykh’s essay here
uses the word zaum, “transrational,” “trans-sense” language, or “trans-
logical,” for the first time.
October Publication of Futurist manifesto The Word as Such by Kruche-
nykh and Khlebnikov, with illustrations by Malevich and Rozanova.
November Publication of Shevchenko’s Neo-primitivism.
December Futurist tour, in which D. Burliuk, V. Mayakovsky, and V.
Kamensky give evenings of poetry and lectures on the new art
throughout Russia. In St. Petersburg the production of Kruchenykh’s
opera Victory over the Sun, and Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy.
Publication of Andrei Belyi’s novel Petersburg. La Prose du Trans-
sibérien (Cendrars-Sonia Delaunay) exhibited at the Stray Dog Café.
Publication of Kruchennykh’s Duck’s Nest . . . of Bad Words (illustr.
Rozanova); Bobrov’s Gardeners over the Vines (illustr. Goncharova).
Travels: Tatlin to Germany and France (sees Picasso’s studio).

Hungary

Budapest, traveling exhibition of Futurists and Expressionists at National

Salon.
Budapest, International Post-Impressionist Exhibition includes works by
Nyolcak group (April–May).
László Moholy-Nagy moves from Szeged to Budapest and starts his law
studies.

Poland

Lwów, exhibition of Futurists, Cubists, and Expressionists organized

jointly with the Berlin Galerie Der Sturm (Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Ko-
koschka, Kubišta, and others).
xxxii Chronology

Ukraine

Kiev, Oleksandr Murashko founds his own studio and infuses a Western
European and Modernist character into Ukrainian painting.
Futurist group Kvero [Quaero] is formed (Mykhail Semenko, Vasyl Se-
menko, and Pavlo Kovzhun).
Kharkiv, Budiak [Weed] group is formed by Bohomazov and Syniakova.

1914

French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès assassinated.

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28.
Austria declares war on Serbia in July, sparking a general mobilization in
Russia. Lenin and Trotsky immigrate to Switzerland. General mobil-
ization throughout the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
Britain declares war on Germany in August. Germany declares war on
Russia. St. Petersburg is renamed Petrograd. Russians abroad return at
the outbreak of war. Paris saved from German advance at the begin-
ning of the First World War.
The Mancomunitat, the first autonomous Catalan government (–1923).
German zeppelins bomb Antwerp.
Supreme National Committee formed in Austrian Galicia; formation of
Piłsudski’s Polish Legions.
Sweden, Denmark, and Norway all remain neutral with respect to World
War I.

Austria

Vienna, Hungarians Róbert Berény, Bertalan Pór, Lajos Tihanyi, and Vil-
mos Fémes Beck exhibit at the Galerie Brüko.

France

Ballets Russes production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or, staged in

Paris with designs by Goncharova, who comes to Paris with Larionov.
The two artists exhibit at the Galerie Paul Guillaume and befriend
Apollinaire, who publicizes their work.
Large display of Russian art at the Salon des Indépendants.
De Chirico Portrait of Apollinaire.
Hungarians Imre Szobotka and Alfréd Réth interned as enemy aliens.
József Csáky loses pre-1914 production of sculpture and volunteers
for French Army to avoid internment. Nemes Lampérth and the Ga-
limbertis return to Hungary.
 Chronology xxxiii

Germany

Berlin, Herwarth Walden organizes a Chagall retrospective in his Der

Sturm gallery.
Cologne, major exhibition by the Deutscher Werkbund, featuring works
by Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut.
Ernst Barlach’s sculpture Der Rächer [The Avenger] exemplifies the in-
itial enthusiasm of artists for the war as an opportunity to destroy a
corrupt world and create radical change.

Great Britain

Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (–1915), edited by Wyndham

Lewis, London.
The Egoist: An Individualist Review (–1919), edited by Dora Marsden,
then Harriet Shaw Weaver.
Des Imagistes, edited by Ezra Pound, London, the first Imagist anthology.
Last anthology, 1930.
New Numbers (–1914), publishing Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, and
other Georgian poets, in Dymock.
Joyce Dubliners.
Gaudier-Brzeska Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound.
Exhibition of the works of the Italian Futurist painters and sculptors at the
Doré Galleries.
Marinetti performs at the Doré Gallery in London.
Russolo directs concerts of his Intonarumori (“noise intoners”) at the
London Coliseum; the performances also include recitations by Mari-
netti.
Marinetti and Nevinson Contre l’art anglais. Manifeste futuriste.

Italy

Marinetti Zang Tumb Tuuum, Abbasso il Tango e Parsifal, Lo splendore

geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilità numerica. Manifesto futurista.
Marinetti visits Russia.
Rome, international Futurist exhibition at the Galleria Sprovieri. Foreign
artists include Archipenko, Rozanova, and Exter.
Mario Sironi joins the Futurists.
Boccioni Pittura e scultura futuriste.
Numerous interventionist demonstrations by the Futurists.
Sant’Elia Manifesto dell’architettura futurista (pamphlet; also published
in Lacerba, 10 August).
Sintesi futurista della Guerra (collective manifesto).
xxxiv Chronology

Scandinavia

Baltic exhibition at Malmö.

Russia

January Visit of Marinetti to Russia. He sees Te li le by Kruchennykh/

Khlebnikov and compares it to Italian Futurist books. Both Russian
and Italian Futurists experiment with language and look for irrational
art, but Russian Futurists’ books are handwritten and illustrated, and
many of the avant-garde artists dislike Marinetti. Publication of the
Burliuks’ Croaked Moon.
February Publication of Futurists: Roaring Parnassus and of the second
edition of Kruchenykh’s A Game in Hell, with illustrations by Roza-
nova and Malevich.
March Publication of Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy and the First
Journal of Russian Futurists; Larionov’s exhibition No. 4 (which in-
cludes Kamensky’s ferro-concrete poetry).
November Kandinsky and other artists and writers living abroad return to
Russia. Publication of Goncharova’s album of lithographs, Mystical
Images of War.
Publication of Kamensky’s Tango with Cows and Naked One among the
Clad (both include his ferro-concrete poetry). Founding of the Mos-
cow Kamerny Theatre with its emphasis on mime, stage lighting re-
form, and settings by Futurist artists (Exter and others).
Moscow, exhibition of Symbolist Ukrainian artist Vsevolod Maxymo-
vych.

Hungary

Budapest, exhibition of Paris-based Sándor Galimberti and his wife Va-

léria Dénes’s cubist works.
German Expressionist and Activist influences and that of Der Sturm be-
come dominant.

Ukraine

Mykhail Semenko publishes first poetry collection Derzannia [Audacity].

It includes the provocative introduction Sam [Alone], which is consid-
ered the first manifesto of Ukrainian Futurism: “I burn my Kobzar.”
Semenko publishes his second book of poetry, Kvero-Futuryzm [Kvero-
Futurism].
“The Ring Exhibition”: an exhibition of the group Kol’tso [Ring] led by
Alexander Bohomazov, one of the founders of Ukrainian Cubo-Futur-
ism (Exter, Isaak Rabinovich).
 Chronology xxxv

Bohomazov Tram (Kiev, Lvivska Street).

Bohomazov writes his treatise Painting and Elements.
Vladimir Tatlin creates his relief Bandura in yellow and blue (the nation-
al colors of Ukraine).

1915

Russian occupation of Poland ends with German victory on the Eastern

Front; Poland is occupied by German and Austrian armies.
Women get the vote in Denmark and Iceland.
First intercontinental telephone transmission.
The British launch the first planned air raid of the war in March.
Sinking of the Lusitania in May; Italy declares war on Austria.

France

Duchamp La Mariée mise à nu.

Germany

Kafka The Metamorphosis.

Great Britain

The Signature, edited by D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and John

Middleton Murry, in London.
Lewis The Crowd.
Vorticist exhibition at the Doré Gallery.
Death of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

Italy

Marinetti Guerra, sola igiene del mondo.

Severini Suburban train arriving in Paris.
De Chirico and Savinio return to Italy. They are posted in Ferrara, where
they meet De Pisis and Carrà.
Carrà paints L’Antigrazioso, which marks the end of his Futurist period.
Palazzeschi, Papini, and Soffici break with Marinetti and his followers
and publish “Futurismo e Marinettismo” in Lacerba.
Teatro futurista sintetico (manifesto signed by Marinetti, Corra, and Setti-
melli).
Balla-Depero Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo.
xxxvi Chronology

Spain

Junoy’s calligram Oda a Guynemer published in the journal Iberia.

La Revista (Barcelona 1915–1936), edited by Joaquim Folguera, pub-
lishes articles on Futurism.

Russia

Petrograd, Gabo makes his first constructions. Exhibition of Leftist

Trends. Publication of Aliagov and Kruchenykh’s Transrational Book
(illustr. by Rozanova). Tramway V exhibition, at which Malevich
shows “alogical” paintings and Tatlin shows his “painterly reliefs.”
Publication of Filonov’s Sermon-Chant about Universal Sprouting and of
the miscellany The Archer, which includes writings by Blok, Kuzmin,
and the Hylaea group.
Moscow, The Exhibition of Painting, 1915 includes Rayonism, Tatlin’s
reliefs and “counter reliefs,” and his “construction of materials.” May-
akovsky, the Burliuks, and Kamensky also contribute.
Possible creation of Suprematist work in a drawing of the curtain, the
black square for the second unrealized publication of Futurist Kruche-
nykh’s opera Victory over the Sun.
Publication of Took: A Futurist Drum, influenced by the English Vorticist
publication Blast.
Publication of Malevich’s From Cubism to Suprematism: The New Paint-
erly Realism. In Petrograd The Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures
includes Tatlin, Malevich, and Puni. First public showing of Suprem-
atist works such as Malevich’s famous black square.

Hungary

Kassák publishes his first volume of poetry, Eposz Wagner maszkjában.

Béla Uitz is awarded the gold medal of the International Exhibition of
Graphic Art at the San Francisco World’s Fair.
János Máttis Teutsch turns to the Expressionist style of painting.
Valéria Dénes dies of pneumonia; her husband Sándor Galimberti com-
mits suicide.
Lajos Kassák publishes his first avant-garde journal A Tett [The Deed].

Romania

Publication of the review Chemarea [The Call], a prefiguration of the

Dada aesthetic.
 Chronology xxxvii

Ukraine

Skoptsy (near Kiev) and Verbivka (near Cherkasy), peasant craft cooper-
atives. Embroideries and kilims designed by the Suprematist artists
Kazimir Malevich, Alexandra Exter, Nina Henke-Meller, Liubov Po-
pova, Ivan Puni, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, and Yevgeniia
Prybylska.

1916

Restoration of Kingdom of Poland by Germany.

Battle of Verdun, June–July.
Battle of the Somme, July–November.
In September, the first use of tanks in battle.

France

Ribemont-Dessaignes L’Empereur de Chine, considered to be the first

Dada play.

Germany

Georg Kaiser Von morgens bis mitternachts.

Death of Franz Marc at Verdun. In September the Munich Secession
organizes a commemorative exhibition of his work.

Great Britain

Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Pound Gaudier Brzeska: A Memoir.

Italy

Italia futurista (–1918), directed by Corra and Settimelli.

Futurist painters meet Larionov and Goncharova.
Marinetti La nuova religione-morale della velocità. Manifesto futurista.
Death of Boccioni.
Milan, exhibition Boccioni pittore e scultore futurista at the Galleria Cen-
trale d’Arte a Palazzo Cova.

Scandinavia

Swedish poet and novelist Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam awarded
Nobel Prize for literature.
Södergran Dikter [Poems].
xxxviii Chronology

Switzerland

Cabaret Voltaire founded in Zürich by Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, Tristan

Tzara, and others. Beginning of Dadaism.

Russia

Kruchenykh moves to Tbilisi in Georgia.

The Store exhibition, featuring Rodchenko’s geometric drawings.
Exter designs the production of Annensky’s Famira Kifared. Malevich
moves to Vitebsk. The Exhibition of Contemporary Painting includes
Kandinsky, Malevich, and Popova and her “painterly architectonics.”

Hungary

Inaugural exhibition of the group A Fiatalok [The Young]: artists Péter

Dobrovics, Lajos Gulácsy, János Kmetty, József Nemes Lampérth,
and Béla Uitz.
Kassák produces international issue of A Tett and includes works by
authors from enemy countries. Journal banned for its anti-war stand.
Soon he starts his new journal Ma [Today], with cover art by Czech
Vincenc Beneš and Kassák’s article “The Poster and New Painting.”

Latvia

Teodors Zalkalns’s granite figures (1916–1918) combine an indigenous

Latvian aesthetic with African art forms.
Jēkabs Kazaks introduces African-influenced geometric and stereometric
forms.

Ukraine

Odessa, the group Tovarystvo nezalezhnykh khudozhnykiv [Society of

Independent Painters] is formed by Hershenfeld and others.
Kiev, the highly experimental Molodyi teatr [Young Theater] is founded
by Les Kurbas. Kurbas directs and acts in Gogol’s Revizor and Sopho-
cles’ Oedipus Rex.
Association of Kiev Artists is formed by Oleksandr Murashko.
Neoprimitivist artist Maria Syniakova paints Viina [War] and Bomba
[Bomb].

Yugoslavia

Proljetni (Spring) Salon, the first avant-garde activity in Zagreb.

 Chronology xxxix

1917

Beginning of assault on Flanders. From July to November, the British

Expeditionary Force (BEF) loses 300,000 men, the Germans 200,000.
Total gain: four miles and occupation of Passchendaele.
In Poland the Legions are dissolved; establishment of Polish National
Committee in Lausanne (it later transfers to Paris); establishment of a
Regency Council.
Occupation of Riga by the German army; Karlis Ulmanis declares Latvia
a democratic anti-Bolshevik state.
Finland declares its independence from Russia.
February Petrograd, the Revolution begins. The duma meets and forms a
provisional government.
March The Republic is established; the provisional government is de-
clared, with Kerensky soon at its head. Proletkult (proletarian cultural
organization) is established as a formal entity.
March Ukrainian Central Council set up in Kiev. The historian Mykhailo
Hrushevsky is elected president of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
April The United States enters the war.
April–May Return of Lenin, Lunacharsky, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik
leaders.
October The storming of the Winter Palace, Petrograd. Bolshevik Revo-
lution places Lenin at the head of government.
November Bolshevik regime offers the Germans an armistice, concluded
in December.
December Revolt of the Don Cossacks marks the start of Civil War.

France

Picabia launches 391 (–1924).

Pierre Reverdy launches Nord-Sud (–1918), a review of Cubist art and
poetry.
Apollinaire lectures on L’Esprit nouveau et le poètes (published in 1918).
Satie and Cocteau’s Parade staged by Diaghilev at the Théâtre du
Châtelet, with sets and costumes by Picasso and choreography by
Massine. The Ballets Russes also performs Les contes russes (with
designs by Larionov).
Apollinaire Les Mamelles de Tirésias, at the Théâtre Renée-Maubel in
Montmartre.
xl Chronology

Germany

Wieland Herzfeld founds Malik-Verlag, a publishing house devoted to

the political, literary, and artistic avant-garde.
Publication of the Erste George Grosz-Mappe (nine lithographs) and the
Kleine Groszmappe.
Paul Westheim launches Das Kunstblatt (–1933).

Great Britain

Leonard and Virginia Woolf found the Hogarth Press.

Eliot Prufrock and Other Observations.
Yeats At the Hawk’s Well.

Italy

Ferrara, de Chirico, and Carrà establish the principles of Metaphysical

painting and produce some of their key works.
Pirandello Right You Are, If You Think You Are!
Noi Futuristi (founded by Enrico Prampolini and Bino Sanminiatelli)
published in Rome (–1925).
Florence, Teatro Niccolini. First showing of the film Vita futurista.
Picasso and Cocteau meet Balla and Depero in Rome. Les Ballets Russes
performs Stravinsky’s Feux d’artifice (with Futurist designs and light-
ing effects by Balla) at the Teatro Costanzi.
Severini publishes “La peinture d’avant-garde” in the Mercure de France.

Netherlands

De Stijl (–1932) founded in Leiden by Theo van Doesburg and Mondrian.

Other contributors include Vilmos Huszár (1884–1960), Georges
Vantongerloo, Bart Van Der Leck, and the architect Gerrit Rietveld.

Scandinavia

Journal Klingen published in Copenhagen.

Danish novelist and dramatist Karl Gjellerup and Danish novelist and
short story writer Henrik Pontoppidan share the Nobel Prize for litera-
ture.

Spain

Gómez de la Serna Greguerías.

Switzerland

Galerie Dada opens in Zürich.

 Chronology xli

First issue of Dada journal appears, edited by Tzara.

Russia

Publication of Ivan Aksenov’s monograph on Picasso, with cover by

Exter. In Moscow Rodchenko, Tatlin, and Yakulov decorate the Café
Pittoresque.
At the end of year in Petrograd, Punin is made commissar of the Russian
Museum and formulates his radical ideas about the destruction of old,
bourgeois art.
In Moscow private art collections are requisitioned by the government.
Publication of Aksenov’s Picasso and Environs in Moscow.
Publication of 1918 by Kamensky and Kruchenykh.

Georgia

Flowering of literary modernism. In the years following the October Rev-

olution there is an influx of Russian writers, poets, and artists to the
Georgian capital Tbilisi.
Establishment of the Fantastic Tavern (Fantasticheskii kabachok), where
Russian and Georgian avant-garde poets and artists recite, perform,
and lecture together.
Cabaret Chimaera [Khimerioni] opens in Tbilisi. Designed by Sergei Su-
deikin, Lado Gudiashvili, and Davit Kakabadze, it becomes a meeting
place for members of the Russian and Georgian artistic community
and brings together both Georgian and Russian art.
The Futurist Syndicate group, the first manifestation of the Tbilisi avant-
garde. It is dominated by the organizing presence of the Muscovite
Aleksei Kruchenykh and attracts local artists such as Lado Gudiashvi-
li, the resident Armenian futurist Kara-Dervish, and the Zdanevich
brothers Ilia and Kirill.

Hungary

László Moholy-Nagy wounded at the front.

Second exhibition of the A Fiatalok group: Géza Csorba, Rudolf Diener-
Dénes, Péter Dobrovics, Andor Erős, János Kmetty, József Nemes
Lampérth, and Armand Schönberger.
János Mácza starts innovative theatre workshop; László Péri joins.
Inaugural exhibition of new Ma Gallery: János Máttis Teutsch’s first
exhibition (Expressionist paintings, sculptures, and linocuts).
Critic Iván Hevesy starts the journal Jelenkor [The Present Age] with
László Moholy-Nagy’s contribution.
xlii Chronology

Bartók’s The Wooden Prince (1914–1916, libretto by Béla Balázs) per-

formed in the State Opera.
First literary matinée of the Ma Group.

Poland

Publication of the first issue of the avant-garde art journal Zdrój (Source),
founded by Jerzy Hulewicz (1917–1922), in Poznán.
Tytus Czyżewski, Leon Chwistek, and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz form
Poland’s first avant-garde group Formiści [Formists] (called Polish
Expressionists until 1919) in Krakow; first exhibition of Polish Ex-
pressionists.

Ukraine

Hryhory Narbut, the creator of modern Ukrainian book-design, returns to

Kiev.
Galician-born Myhailo Boichuk and other Boichukists move to Kiev.
Ukrainian Art Academy opens.
Group Soiuz Semi [Union of Seven] is created. The group exhibit their
works in The Union of Youth together with Russian Neo-Primitives
Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov.

1918

Royal Air Force established.

The general election in the United Kingdom is the first in which women
over thirty are allowed to vote.
Death in battle of the legendary airman Manfred von Richthofen, the
“Red Baron.”
A revolt in the Navy sparks revolutionary uprisings in Germany; as the
war ends Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates and Germany becomes a repub-
lic. The Dutch refuse demands to hand the Kaiser over to the Allies.
Austro-Hungarian monarchy dissolved. “Chrysanthemum” revolution and
social democratic government in Hungary.
Lithuania gains independence.
Establishment of Polish Communist Workers’ Party.
Finnish Civil War.
Global influenza epidemic kills millions (–1920).
 Chronology xliii

March Russian Government moved to Moscow. The Treaty of Brest-

Litovsk between the Russian SFSR and the Central Powers is signed.
It contributed to or affirmed the independence of Finland, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Poland.
June Allied governments recognize the principle of Polish Independence.
July First Soviet constitution, adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress
of Soviets. Murder of the tsar and his family.
October Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR) is established by
the Ukrainian National Rada [Council] in Lviv. Establishment of
Czechoslovakia as an independent republic under the presidency of
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk.
11 November Armistice ends First World War.
November Abdication of German Emperor William II. Friedrich Ebert is
declared head of state in his place. Jozef Pilsudski becomes head of
independent Polish state. Emperor Charles I of Austria renounces any
role in the country’s government; two days later he makes a similar
proclamation as king of Hungary, effectively abdicating although he
does not use the term.
Anti-German uprising in Wielkopolska (–1919).

France

Death of Guillaume Apollinaire. His Calligrammes published by the Mer-

cure de France.
First soirées of group Les Six.
Ozenfant and Le Corbusier Après le Cubisme, the manifesto of Purism.
Exhibition of Purist art.

Germany

Die Novembergruppe, a group of German artists named after the revolu-

tion of November 1918, is formed. It will remain active until 1932.
Première of Georg Kaiser’s play Gas I (the second part in 1920).
Richard Huelsenbeck writes the Dadaistsiches Manifest, signed by both
Berlin and Zürich Dadaists.
Walden Expressionismus: Die Kunstwende.
First volume (second in 1922) of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des
Abendlandes [The Decline of the West].
Barlach The Poor Cousin.

Great Britain

The poet Wilfred Owen is killed on the Western Front.

xliv Chronology

Italy

Marco Broglio founds the monthly journal Valori plastici (–1922). De

Chirico publishes important theoretical articles in this review. Other
contributors include Carrà, de Pisis, and Savinio.
Morandi’s “metaphysical” period.
Savinio Hermaphrodito, with a preface by Papini.
Viareggio’s La pittura d'avanguardia includes works by Carrà, de Chiri-
co, Primo Conti, Prampolini, and Depero.

Spain

Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro comes to Madrid, publishes Ecuatorial

and Poemas árticos.
Manifesto of the Spanish Ultraísmo (1918–1922). The movement’s most
prominent members are Gerardo Diego, Juan Larrea, Guillermo de
Torre, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Switzerland

Tzara writes the Dada manifesto, published in Dada, no. 3.

Russia

Publication of Aleksandr Blok’s poem The Twelve, with illustrations by

Annenkov, in Petrograd.
Kandinsky publishes his Autobiography.
Tatlin heads the Visual Arts Section of the Commissariat of Enlighten-
ment.
Publication of the scores of Lourié’s Our March (cover by Miturich) and
Daily Pattern (Yakulov’s cover is a Futurist illustration of the sound
of music).
Prokofiev, though inspired by the Futurists and their manifestos, decides
to immigrate to the U.S.
Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe performed with sets by Malevich and di-
rected by Meyerhold.
Resolution by art students at a conference in Petrograd in April maintain-
ing the autonomy of artistic creation. Lenin promulgates his Decree on
Monumental Propoganda.
In September the first All-Russian Proletarian Cultural and Education
Organizations, in Moscow.
Altman in charge of decorations for the first anniversary celebration of
the Revolution.
In Petrograd, first numbers of Iskusstvo kommuny; it is a platform for the
anarchical statements of artists in Komfut (Communist-Futurists).
 Chronology xlv

Belarus

Marc Chagall (1887–1985, native of Vitebsk) is appointed commissar of

arts for the Vitebsk region.

Czechoslovakia

Publication of the first edition of Červen (–June), a biweekly magazine

edited by the poet S. K. Neumann, with contributions by future mem-
bers of the avant-garde Devĕtsil group. It also acts as the mouthpiece
of the Tvrdošíjní [Stubborn Ones] group of artists, including Josef
Čapek, Václav Špíla, Rudolf Kremlička, Jan Zrzavý, Vlastislav Hoff-
mann, and Otakar Mravánek, who open their first exhibition at the
Weinert Gallery, Prague, on 30 March. They remain active until 1924,
exhibiting in Dresden, Geneva, Berlin, Hannover, and Vienna as well
as Czechoslovakia.

Georgia

Exhibition of the Georgian Artists’ Society. It includes works by Davit

Kakabadze (1889–1952).
Kruchenykh, Ilia Zdanevich, and N. Cherniavskii are joined by the Trans-
rational poet Igor Terentev to create Group 41š, a name generally
assumed to refer to Tbilisi’s location on the 41st parallel.

Hungary

MA’s third exhibition: Sándor Bortnyik, Rudolf Diener-Dénes, Sándor

Gergyel, Lajos Gulácsy, János Kmetty, János Máttis Teutsch, József
Nemes Lampérth, Pál Pátzay, György Ruttkay, János Schadl, Ferenc
Spangher, and Béla Uitz.
Lajos Tihanyi’s first solo exhibition at MA.
László Moholy-Nagy exhibits at the National Salon.
Bartók’s Prince Bluebeard’s Castle (1911, libretto by Béla Balázs, publ.
1922) performed.

Latvia

Marta Liepiņa-Skulme portrays My Family (1918) in related primitive

wood sculpture, with a debt to Picasso and Modigliani.

Poland

Group of writers and artists affiliated with Zdrój found the group Bunt
[Revolt].
xlvi Chronology

Lwów, “Exhibition of Expressionists” organized jointly by Formiści and

Bunt.
Poznań, the first Bunt exhibition Wystawa Ekspresjonistow; the exhibi-
tion and accompanying special issues of Zdrój are a radical declara-
tion of Expressionism.
Kraków, second exhibition of Polish Expressionists, with contributions of
the Poznań group Bunt.
Berlin, Bunt’s exhibition in the gallery of the periodical Die Aktion.
Poznań, the manifesto My [Us], by Jerzy Hulewicz, and his first abstract
paintings inspired by the works of Kandinsky.

Ukraine

Kiev, the art review Hermes published with a cover design by Exter.
Kiev, Neoprimitive artist Hanna Sobachko-Shostak exhibits her work.
Kharkiv, exhibition of the group League of Seven (Yermilov, Syniakova).

1919

Founding of the Weimar Republic in Germany, based on a new democrat-

ic constitution. Friedrich Ebert is elected president of the newly
founded National Assembly.
Short-lived Soviet-style “Räterepublik” proclaimed in Munich with play-
wright Ernst Toller as president of the Central Committee.
League of Nations formed.
First Atlantic flight.
Mussolini establishes the Fascist party.
15 January Murder of the German revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxem-
burg and Karl Liebknecht.
22 January Union of Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) and Western
Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR) is proclaimed. During an eight-
month period in 1919–1920 Kiev is captured and recaptured by no
fewer than five different groups.
21 March Commune proclaimed in Hungary. György Lukács becomes
deputy commissar for culture and education.
28 June Peace Treaty of Versailles.
August Hungarian Commune defeated by military force after 133 days.
Communist politicians flee the country. Some avant-garde figures per-
secuted; many leave Hungary for Vienna or Berlin.
Polish-Soviet war (–1920).
 Chronology xlvii

Austria

Vienna, Bécsi Magyar Újság [Hungarian Journal of Vienna] begins publi-

cation as a forum for Hungarian émigrés.
Break-up of the Austrian empire.

France

Littérature (1919–1924), edited by Breton, Aragon, and Soupault. It con-

tributes to the success of Duchamp, Picabia, Max Ernst, Arp, and Man
Ray. Breton and Soupault’s Les Champs magnétiques, an exploration
of automatic writing and the importance of the subconscious.
Georgian artist David Kakabadze settles in Paris.

Germany

Kurt Schwitters devises the concept of “Merz” to describe his collages.

Dada group in Cologne founded by Max Ernst, Jean Arp, and Johannes
Baargeld.
Alexander Archipenko’s studio opens in Berlin (–1922).
Hungarian-German art critic and theorist Ernő Kállai comes to Germany
on a scholarship and remains until 1934.
Walter Gropius founds the Bauhaus school of art and design in Weimar.

Great Britain

Performance of Balilla Pratella's La Guerra at the Queen's Hall in Lon-

don.

Italy

Milan, Che cos’è il Futurismo. Nozioni elementari (F. T. Marinetti, Setti-

melli, Mario Carli).
Rome, Casa d’arte Bragalia organizes exhibitions of the work of Depero
(January), the first retrospective of de Chirico (February), and Sironi
(July).
Azari Le theatre aérien futuriste.
Marinetti Il Futurismo, prima, dopo e durante la guerra.
Marinetti Les mots en liberté futuristes.
Folgore Città veloce.

Scandinavia

The Railway Station in Helsinki, designed by architect Eliel Saarinen, is

completed.
xlviii Chronology

Spain

Salvat-Papasseit Poemes en ondes hertzianes; illustrated by Torres-

García.

Russia

Tatlin begins work on the Monument to the Third International (Tatlin’s

Tower).
The Tenth State Exhibition: Non-Objective Creation and Suprematism,
one of the last major collective avant-garde exhibitions; inspired El
Lissitzky to create his “Proun” works.
Exhibition of Society of Young Artists equipped with industrial machin-
ery. Medunetsky and Stenberg brothers advance Constructivism as the
only guideline for a socialist art.
Petrograd, Punin reads his First Cycle of Lectures for student teachers of
drawing (published with covers by Malevich in 1920).

Belarus

Vitebsk Academy of Fine Arts established; Marc Chagall becomes its

director.
Kazimir Malevich comes to Vitebsk to teach in the Academy of Fine Arts
and has a profound influence on the system of teaching and the artistic
life in the town. He develops the theories about Suprematism and
forms the Suprematist group UNOVIS—the acronym for the Russian
translation of “Affirmers of the New Art”—an organization of art
students and professors dedicated to the exploration of new theories
and concepts in art, aiming to shape the new Soviet society through
art.
Vitebsk, Malevich publishes On New Systems in Art (republished in Mos-
cow as From Cézanne to Suprematism, in 1920).

Czechoslovakia

Publication in Červen of Apollinaire’s poem Zone in a translation (Pas-

mo) by Karel Čapek, with linocuts by his brother Josef. This, together
with Čapek’s anthology of contemporary French poetry, Francouzská
poesie nové doby (1920), is widely influential among the new genera-
tion of poets.

Georgia

Kruchenykh joins forces with the Zdanevich brothers to form the Futurist
group Forty-One Degrees.
 Chronology xlix

F/NAGT (illustr. Rodchenko and Zdanevich); Kruchenykh Obesity of

Roses and Lacquered Tights; Terentev’s Fakt and To Sofiia Grigoriev-
na Melnikova (both with covers by Zdanevich). Lado Gudiashvili ex-
hibits eighty paintings showing Futurist influence.

Hungary

Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin (libretto by Menyhért Lengyel, publ.

1925).
Commune, with hightened avant-garde activity: propaganda posters by
Béla Uitz, Róbert Berény, Sándor Bortnyik, and Bertalan Pór; revolu-
tionary theatre by János Mácza, Ödön Palasovszky, and Erzsi Újvári;
radical art schools, performances. Activists issue a manifesto welcom-
ing the communist republic, and take a leading role in the reorganiza-
tion of cultural life. Attack by communist leader Béla Kun, labeling
MA decadent and bourgeois. MA practically proscribed. Last Budapest
issue 1 July. After defeat, protagonists go into exile to Austria and
Germany.

Latvia

Country declared a Soviet Republic; armed struggles.

Ekspresionisti [Expressionist Group], later Rīgas Mākslinieku Grupa
[Riga Artists’ Group] initiated in 1919 by Grosvalds.
Romans Suta designs theatrical decorations on Soviet model for Riga
May Day celebrations.

Lithuania

Vilnius University reopens as the Stefan Batory University. Its depart-

ment of fine arts is directed by Ferdynand Ruszczyc and includes
leading figures from Poland’s avant-garde (Zbigniew Pronaszko,
Benedykt Kubicki).

Poland

Warsaw, the first Futurist evening organized by Anatol Stern and Alek-
sander Wat.
Łódź, Group of Jewish artists Jankiel Adler, Marek Szwarc, Henryk Bar-
cinski, and others form the group Jung Idysz [Young Yiddish]
(–1923).
Łódź, publication of the first issue of the short-lived periodical Jung
Idysz, including the group’s manifesto.
Kraków, third exhibition of Formists (formerly Expressionists).
l Chronology

Kraków, publication of the journal Formisci, editors Tytus Czyżewski,

Leon Chwistek, and Konrad Winkler (–1921, six issues only).
Kraków, Tytus Czyżewski, Bruno Jasieński, and Stanisław Młodożeniec
found the Futurist Club Katarynka [Hurdy-Gurdy].

Ukraine

Exter’s Kiev Studio of Decorative Arts opens (Meller, Petrytsky, Redko,

Khvostenko-Khvostov, and Tyshler).
Bronislawa Nijinska’s Ballet Studio (Meller and Exter as collaborators)
opens.
Jewish Kultur-lige [Culture League] society forms a Yiddish Publishing
House. The Culture League promotes a post-Cubist expressionism
(Epstein, Lissitzky, Nikritin, and Tyshler).
Formation of the group Flamingo, led by Mykhail Semenko. It publishes
three books of poetry by Semenko (with cover designs by Petrytsky
and Lisovsky).
First issue of the review Mystetstvo [Art] edited by H. Mykhailychenko
and Mykhail Semenko. Cover design by Heorhii Narbut.
Narbut illustrates Aeneida [Eneid], by Ivan Kotlarevsky; he creates cov-
ers for the journal Solntse truda [Sun of Work] and the poetry collec-
tion Alliluia, by his brother Vladimir.
Odessa Film Studio opens.

1920

First republic of Austria (1918–1938).

“Kapp Putsch” takes place in Berlin, a right-wing failed attempt at over-
throwing the new government.
The Russian economy collapses and a severe famine lasts the winter.
Miklós Horthy elected regent of Hungary by national assembly.
Treaty of Versailles signed on June 4; Hungary loses 60 percent of its
population and two-thirds of its territory.
“Numerus clausus” law enacted in Hungary, restricting the numbers of
Jewish and ethnic minority students to be admitted to higher education
institutions.
Battle of Warsaw in August.
Peace treaty signed with Soviet state by independent Latvian state in
August.
Soviet regime installed in Ukraine.
 Chronology li

Austria

Vienna, first issue of MA in exile. In his To the Artists of All Countries!

Kassák calls for the independence of art from political ideologies.
Bortnyik’s new album of six abstract linocuts.

Russia

An Evening organized by MA, one of the first public presentations of

Soviet avant-garde art in Europe.
Divisions within MA group between Dada and Constructivism.
Activists’ First Viennese Matinée with poetry readings and Sándor Bar-
ta’s Dada manifesto “The Green-Headed Man.”
Béla Uitz’s first exhibition in Vienna.

Belgium

Antwerp, first issue of the review Ça ira.

Brussels, the Galerie Sélection (1920–1921) exhibits the work of the Bel-
gian Expressionists, whose work is also promoted by Paul-Gustave
Van Hecke and André De Ridder in the review Sélection (1920–1927).

France

Milhaud and Cocteau’s Le Boeuf sur le toit staged at the Théâtre des
Champs Élysées, with sets by Raoul Dufy.
Death of Modigliani.
Tzara in Paris.
Ozenfant and Le Corbusier’s L’Esprit nouveau (–1925), a platform for
Purism.
Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella at the Opéra, with costumes by Picasso.
Georgian artist Lado Gudiashvili settles in Paris. He meets Picasso, Mod-
igliani, and Aragon.
Ezra Pound moves to Paris.

Germany

Erwin Piscator founds the Proletarisches Theater in Berlin, with a compa-

ny made up of Berlin Dadaists.
“Erste Internationale Dada-Messe” in Berlin; first Dadaist events in Co-
logne.
Wiene The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Wegener The Golem.
Richard Huelsenbeck publishes Dada siegt, En avant Dada, and the
Dada-Almanach.
lii Chronology

Kurt Pinthus publishes Menschheitsdämmerung, the defining anthology

of Expressionist poetry.
Jünger Im Stahlgewitter [The Storm of Steel].
Kaiser Gas II.
Première of Ernst Toller’s Masse Mensch.

Italy

Marinetti Le Futurisme avant, pendant, après la guerre.

Venice Biennale: one-man show by Archipenko.
Contro tutti i ritorni in pittura by Dudreville, Funi, Russolo, and Sironi.
Guglielmo Sansoni stages his funeral in the streets of Bologna. He is
“reborn” as Tato Futurista.

Scandinavia

Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Russia

Publication of Mayakovsky’s poem 150,000,000 and Punin’s pamphlet

on Tatlin’s Tower.
Burliuk immigrates to the United States.
Moscow, second exhibition of Obmokhu (the foundation of the first
working group of Constructivists).
Publication of Roslavets’s score of the march Fiz! Kul’t! Ura! (Roslavets
was associated with the Futurists and invented his own serial harmon-
ic system independent of Schoenberg).
Publication of the score of Lourié’s Piano in the Nursery (illustr. by
Miturich).
Formation of Inkhuk (Institute of Artistic Culture), based in Moscow
under Kandinsky (with affiliates in Petrograd under Tatlin and Punin
and in Vitebsk under Malevich).
Publication of Gabo and Pevsner’s “Realist Manifesto” with an exhibi-
tion.
Moscow, nineteenth exhibition of the All-Russian Central Exhibition Bu-
reau, IZO. Narkompros (includes Rodchenko, Stepanova, and Shev-
chenko).
Kandinsky leaves Inkhuk. Reorganized by Rodchenko, Stepanova, and
the musician Briusova.
 Chronology liii

Belarus

Publication in Vitebsk of Malevich’s Suprematism, 34 Drawings (with

lithographs by El Lissitzky) to accompany a Malevich retrospective in
Moscow.
Vitebsk, POSNOVIS produces numerous projects and publications that
influence avant-garde movements in Russia and elsewhere. Its mem-
bers include El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Nikolai Suetin, Ilia
Chashnik, Vera Ermolaeva, Anna Kagan, Lev Yudin, and others.

Czechoslovakia

Raoul Haussmann and Richard Huelsenbeck organize two Dadaist soirées

in Prague.
Musaion, an arts journal edited by Karel Čapek, begins publication and
becomes the magazine of the Tvrdošíjní group. A Dadaist unit is
founded in June by Jaromír Berák, Artus Černík, and Zdeněk Kalista
in Prague.
The magazine Orfeus, representing younger artists, appears from 1920 to
1921.
The Artistic Union of Devětsil (Umělecký svaz Devětsil) is founded at the
Union coffee house in Prague under the leadership of the writer Vla-
dislav Vančura, with Karel Teige as its theorist and the painter Adolf
Hoffmeister as its secretary. Primitivism and magical realism are
prominent in its ideals of proletarian art.
Čapek R.U.R.

Georgia

Formation and development of Georgian Modernist Theatre, directed by

Kote Marjanishvili and Sandro Akhmeteli. It stages plays designed by
Irakli Gamrekeli and Petre Otskheli.

Hungary

Some avant-garde artists who have remained in Hungary retreat from

Budapest to smaller towns.
Pécs, avant-garde flyer 1920; journal Krónika. Farkas Molnár leads the
Pécs Artists’ Circle.

Latvia

Foundation of the Riga Artists Group, which has close links with Group
of Estonian Artists. The work of this group was promoted by Suta in
articles published in L’Esprit nouveau (numbers 10 and 25).
liv Chronology

Latvia

Latvian art enters its avant-garde maturity, drawing equally on the West
and Russia. Kazak’s Jūlijs Sproģis (1920) and Bathers (1920) show
Cubist-Futurist influences.

Lithuania

Revival of the Lithuanian Art Society, in Kaunas (Vilnius is occupied by

the Poles).

Poland

Warsaw, publication of the futurist almanac Gga, by Anatol Stern and

Aleksander Wat, is immediately confiscated on the grounds of obscen-
ity.

Ukraine

Al’manakh tr’okh [Almanac of the Three] (O. Slisarenko, M. Liubchenko,

and M. Semenko) published.
First Jewish Art Exhibition of Sculpture, Graphics, and Drawings is held
(Mark Epstein, Sucker Ber Rybak, and El Lissitzky).
Kharkiv, Constructivist Vasyl Yermilov heads Industrial Teacher Work-
shop.

Yugoslavia

First wave of Slovenian avant-garde artists (the poet Anton Podbevšek

develops his program along anarchist “proletcult” lines for the journal
Rdeči pilot).

1921

The mutiny of the officers and uprising of the sailors at Kronstadt naval
base, Russia, in March forces the Bolshevik government to institute
the New Economic Policy (NEP), which restores a free market sys-
tem.
Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the National Sozialistishe Deutsche Ar-
beiter-Partei (NSDAP) in Germany.
Irish independence.
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) founded.
In March, Riga Peace Treaty between Poland and Soviet Russia. Consti-
tution of Poland.
 Chronology lv

Nestor Makhno abandons the armed struggle in Ukraine and flees to Paris
in August.

Austria

Wittgenstein Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung [Tractatus Logico-

Philosophicus].
Sándor Barta’s Dadaist-absurd play Igen (Yes) appears in MA, with Bort-
nyik’s linocut.
Hofmannsthal The Difficult Man.
Kassák’s first Dadaist visual poem on a cover of MA. His book of Dada
poetry Új versek (New Poems), with his own Dada-constructivist
woodcuts.
MA features Kassák’s manifesto Képarchitektúra (Picture Architecture)
and “mechano-Dada” art by Moholy-Nagy.

Belarus

Vitebsk, El Lissitzky begins to paint abstract pictures, which he calls

Prouns. He also designs books and periodicals with radical innova-
tions in typography and photomontage.

Belgium

Special themed issue on Dada (edited by Clement Pansaers) of the Ant-

werp-based periodical Ça ira, no. 16, Nov. 1921: Dada, sa naissance,
sa vie, sa mort. Collaborations de . . . Pierre-Albert Birot, Paul Élu-
ard, Clement Pansaers, Benjamin Peret, Francis Picabia, Ezra
Pound, G. Ribemont-Dessaignes.

France

Breton abandons Dada after disagreements with Tzara.

Picabia L' oeil cacodylate (1921; Paris, Pompidou), a canvas consisting of
greetings and signatures from friends.
Severini Du Cubisme au Classicisme.
Man Ray exhibition of paintings and provocative objects in the Librairie
Six.
Ballets Russes production of Prokofiev’s Chout (designed by Larionov).
Josef Šíma arrives in Paris, where he remains permanently, though retain-
ing strong links with Prague.

Germany

Dadaists George Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde, and Johannes Baader are

fined for libeling the army in the portfolio Gott mit uns.
lvi Chronology

Weimar, Farkas Molnár, Alfréd Forbát, and Andor Weininger enroll at

Bauhaus.
Berlin, László Moholy-Nagy becomes German correspondent for the
Vienna-based MA. Lajos Tihanyi has an exhibition. László Péri and
János Máttis Teutsch exhibit at Der Sturm gallery.
Richter Rhythmus 21.
Ruttmanm Lichtspiel Opus 1.

Italy

Marinetti Il Tattilismo. Manifesto futurista letto al Théatre de l’Oeuvre

(Parigi), all’Esposizione mondiale d’Arte Moderna (Ginevra), e pub-
blicato da “Comoedia” in Gennaio 1921.
Bidou Les Bruiteurs Futuristes Italiens de Luigi Russolo;
Gl’Intonarumori Futuristi di Luigi Russolo.
Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an Author.
Mario Bartoccini, Aldo Mantia L’improvvisazione musicale. Manifesto
futurista.

Netherlands

van Ostaijen Bezette Stad, an attempt at “rhythmic typography.”

Amsterdam, El Lissitzky’s design is used for the cover of Wendigen
(fourth issue).

Scandinavia

Diktonius Min dikt (My Poem).

Journal Mot Dag (–1929) published in Oslo.

Russia

Restoration of the Academy of Fine Arts in Petrograd. Advocacy, within

Inkhuk, of industrial and applied arts associated with the Productivist
movement. Easel painting condemned as outmoded in favor of indus-
trial art and construction.
Isadora Duncan performs at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow.
In Baku publication of Kruchenykh’s Tsotsa, which includes his Declara-
tion of Zaum Language.
Moscow, the exhibition 5x5 = 25 includes Rodchenko’s red, yellow, and
blue canvases. Stepanova, Exter, Vesnin, and Popova also exhibit.
Moscow: Béla Uitz visits exhibition organized for Third Comintern,
where he encounters the work of Constructivists.
 Chronology lvii

Czechoslovakia

A small exhibition of the work of Devĕtsil members is held at the U

zlatého klasu bookshop in Prague, followed by a poetry matinée at the
Revoluční scéna theatre in February.
Enrico Prampolini organizes in Prague an exhibition of Italian Futurist
art, including works by young Futurist painters and twenty-one items
by Umberto Boccioni.
F. T. Marinetti visits Prague, makes friends with the Devětsil group, and
directs a production of Futurist Syntheses at Švanda’s Theatre.

Hungary

Budapest, actor-playwright-poet Ödön Palasovszky revives Modernist

life, presenting experimental stage performances in workers’ centers.
Journal Magyar Írás (Hungarian Writing), edited by Tivadar Raith, de-
voted to new art and literature.
Iván Hevesy writes in Nyugat (West) on Imre Szobotka’s cubism.
Pécs, exhibition of Pécs Artists’ Circle: Farkas Molnár, Andor Weininger,
Henrik Stefán, Hugó Johann, et al.
Čapek The Insect Play.

Latvia

Founding of Latvian Academy of Arts with Vilhelms Purvītis as its first

rector. He becomes the mentor of the great wave of 1920s avant-
gardists.

Lithuania

Establishment of the Lithuanian School of Art. In addition to teaching, it

awards grants to more talented students to train in Western European
art centers.

Poland

Kraków, publication of the first issue of Jednodniuwka futurystuw [The

Futurists’ Day], containing futurist manifestos written against the ele-
mentary rules of grammar and spelling by Bruno Jasieński.
Kraków-Warsaw, publication of the second issue of The Futurists’ Day:
Nuż w bżuhu (A Knife in the Stomach); it is confiscated three weeks
later.
lviii Chronology

Ukraine

Kiev, manifesto by the group Komkosmos [The Communist Cosmos]

(Oleksa Slisarenko, Geo Shkurupii, Mykola Tereshchenko, and the
painter Oleh Shymkov).
Kharkiv, Mystery Bouffe by Mayakovsky is staged at Kharkiv’s Heroic
Theatre [Geroicheskii Teatr] with designs by Oleksandr Khvostenko-
Khvostov.
Group “Electro-organism” (the painters Solomon Nikritin, Alexandr
Tyshler, and Klyment Red’ko).
Yermilov decorates the agitprop movement Red Ukraine and the Club of
the Red Army (together with sign painter Chuk).
Founding of the publishing house Rukh [Movement].

Yugoslavia

The review Svetokret—List za ekspediciju na severni pol čovekovog duha

[Turning World—a Magazine for an Expedition to the North Pole of
the Human Spirit] is published in Ljubljana by Virgil Poljanski (Bran-
ko Micić, Branko Ve Poljanski).
Avant-garde activities in Slovenia (–1928) are linked to the reviews Sve-
tokret (1921), Rdeči pilot [Red Pilot, 1922], Ljubljanski zvon [Ljublja-
na Bell], Novi oder [New Stage] (1924), and Tank (1927–1928), pub-
lished by Ferdo Delak in Ljubljana and edited by Avgust Černigoj and
Ferdo Delak; two issues were published, a third banned.
Černigoj and Delak introduce Constructivist art to Ljubljana.
Zagreb, Zenit [Zenith], launched by the poet Ljubomir Micić; forty-three
issues of Zenit and thirty-four volumes of varying format and size
were published in the Zenit collection. The magazine brought together
a number of collaborators: Marijan Mikac, Jo Klek, Vilko Gecan,
Mihailo Petrov, Boško Tokin, Stanislav Vinaver, and others. Foreign
collaborators included the French poet Ivan Goll as well as Alexander
Archipenko, Ilya Ehrenburg, Wassily Kandinsky, El Lissitzky, and
Louis Lozowick.
Zenitist Manifesto by Ljubomir Micić, originally published as Manifest
Zenitizma in Zenit no. 1 (Zagreb, 1921).

Great Britain

Yeats Four Plays for Dancers.

 Chronology lix

1922

Walther Rathenau, German foreign minister, assassinated in Berlin.

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is officially established as
the union of the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Transcaucasian
Soviet republics ruled by Bolshevik parties.
Assassination of Gabriel Narutowicz, president of Poland.
Mussolini’s Fascist regime comes to power.
Turkey becomes a republic.
Irish Free State established.
Discovery of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb.

Austria

Karl Kraus’s “World War tragedy” Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit.
Journal Egység (Unity) appears in Vienna: Béla Uitz, Aladár Komját.
First issue of Sándor Barta’s left-wing Dada journal Akasztott ember
[Hanged Man]; he satirizes Kassák and MA for glorifying machines.
Uitz publishes album Analízis [Analysis] with twenty-three abstract
linocuts.
Béla Uitz breaks with the Activists.
Double issue of MA includes works by international Constructivists and
Dadaists.
Remaining original Activist members break with Kassák; Uitz’s journal
Egység is politically left of MA.

France

Joyce’s Ulysses, published by Shakespeare & Co.

Paul Guillaume organizes a de Chirico exhibition; it includes fifty-five
works of his Paris and Ferrara years together with more recent materi-
al. Breton writes the introduction in the catalogue and provides a
Surrealist reading of de Chirico.
Kandinsky returns to France.
Gance La Roue (with Cendrars as assistant director).

Germany

Murnau Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens.

Lang Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.
Moholy-Nagy and László Péri exhibit new Constructivist works (concrete
and metal reliefs) at Der Sturm gallery, Berlin.
lx Chronology

Moholy-Nagy prepares screenplay The Dynamics of the Metropolis. It is

later published in Ma (1924) and in his book Malerei, Photographie,
Film (1925).
Bortnyik takes a studio in Weimar, as does Moholy-Nagy; both attend
Dada-Constructivist Congress.
Der Sturm’s special issue on Hungarians (Alfréd Kemény, László Péri,
László Moholy-Nagy, Lajos Kassák, and Sándor Bortnyik).
In Düsseldorf, the Congress of International Progressive Artists; Polish
Expressionists represent the Polish art community: Stanislaw Kubicki,
Margarete Kubicka, Władysław Skotarek, and Jankiel Adler.
International Exhibition of Revolutionary Artists in Berlin organized by
Bunt in collaboration with the group Die Kommune.
Brecht’s first plays Trommeln in der Nacht [Drums in the Night] and
Baal.
Barlach The Foundling.
Rilke Sonnets to Orpheus.

Great Britain

Eliot The Waste Land published in The Criterion.

First private performance of Walton’s Façade; the first public perfor-
mance will take place in 1923. Edith Sitwell is the reciter on both
occasions.

Italy

Novecento exhibition at the Galleria Pesaro, Milan.

Pirandello Enrico IV.

Netherlands

De Stijl publishes special issue on Ma, and vice versa (July).

Russia

Publication of El Lissitzky’s Story of Two Squares, Erenburg’s Material-

ization of the Fantastic, and Mayakovsky’s Conversations with a Tax
Inspector about Poetry (with covers by Rodchenko).
Naum Gabo leaves Russia for Germany. Pevsner begins his constructions.
Exhibition of the resurrected World of Art group (includes Lentulov,
Udaltsova, and Konchalovsky).
Spring, Popova designs sets and costumes for Meyerhold’s production of
Crommelynck’s The Magnanimous Cuckold.
Malevich moves from Vitebsk to Petrograd.
 Chronology lxi

Exhibition of Pictures of Realistic Trends: first exhibition of the Associa-

tion of Artists studying revolutionary life (AKhRR) and the beginning
of Socialist Realism.
First exhibition in Moscow of Makovets group. In Paris Ballets Russes’
production of Stravinsky’s Renard (designs by Larionov).
Exhibition Union of New Trends in Art in Petrograd (includes works of
Malevich and Tatlin).
Stepanova designs sets for Meyerhold’s production of Sukhovo-Koby-
lin’s Tarelkin’s Death.
Publication of A. Gan’s Constructivism: Kongress der Konstruktivisten
includes El Lissitzky. In Berlin he edits Veshch/Gegendstad/Objet.
Mayakovsky in Berlin in contact with Grosz.
First exhibition of New Society of Painters (NOZh) reverses trend away
from easel art.

Scandinavia

Journal Ultra published in Helsinki.

Czechoslovakia

The Tvrdošíjní exhibition includes works by Otto Dix and Paul Klee, as
well as representatives of Dresden Art Nouveau; it subsequently visits
Košice and Brno.
Karel Teige and Jaroslav Seifert (who in 1984 will become the first Czech
to win the Nobel Prize for literature) make contacts with the French
avant-garde, including Amédée Ozenfant, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara,
and Le Corbusier.
The Yugoslav review Zenit features the work of Devětsil authors, and an
exhibition of Picasso’s work is arranged by Vincenc Kramář at the
Mánes Gallery in Prague.
Publication of the Revoluční sbornik Devětsil emphasizing the importance
of international avant-garde movements such as Constructivism, Pur-
ism, and Dadaism. Several members of the group, including Alois
Wachsman, Adolf Hoffmeister, František Muzika, and Bedřich Piskač
split off to form the new group Nová skupina and continue the tradi-
tion of magic realism.

Hungary

Új művészek könyve [Book of New Artists], by Kassák and Moholy-

Nagy, in Hungarian and German (Leipzig) editions.
Ödön Palasovszky publishes manifesto Új Stáció [New Station], calling
for a collective art for the masses.
lxii Chronology

Latvia

Karlis Zalite-Zale exhibits at the First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin.

He is also the editor of the influential journal Laikmets Saturs [Con-
temporary Times].

Poland

In Kraków, publication of the monthly Zwrotnica [Railway Switch]

(1922–1923, 1926–1927; twelve issues published) by Tadeusz Peiper;
the periodical becomes the forum for the Polish avant-garde.
Witkiewicz The Water Hen.

Romania

Marcel Janco’s exhibition at the Bucharest Artists’ Union.

Ukraine

The modern Ukrainian Theatre Berezil’ is established in Kiev under the

direction of Les Kurbas (with Meller as chief scenographer). It fea-
tures an Expressionist repertoire (Gas by Georg Kaiser and Jimmy
Higgins by Upton Sinclair) and works by contemporary Ukrainian
playwrights (e.g., Mykola Kulish).
Bohomazov joins Palmov, Meller, and Tatlin at Kiev Art Institute.
Founding of the literary group ASPANFUT (Asotsiatsiia panfuturystiv)
[Association of Panfuturists].
Futurist journal Semafor u Maibutnie. Aparat Panfuturystiv [A Go-Ahead
Signal for the Future] is published. It includes manifestos in French,
German, and English [What Do We Want] and translations of various
Dada texts.
First issue of Katafalk iskusstva [Catafalque of Art].
First collection of poetry by Geo Shkurupii Psykhetozy [Psychetosis].

Yugoslavia

Dada Tank and Dada Jazz are published by Dragan Aleksić (only one
issue of each published) in Zagreb.
Poljanski publishes the anti-Dadaist magazine Dada-Jok. The term Yugo-
Dada is coined by Aleksić.
In Belgrade, avant-garde magazines: Putevi [Paths] (1922–24), Hipnos
(1922–1923), Crno na belo [Black on White] (1924), Svedočanstva
[Testimonies] (1924–1925), 50 u Evropi [50 in Europe] (1928), Tra-
 Chronology lxiii

govi [Traces] (1928–1929), Nova literatura [The New Literature]

(1928–1930), Nemoguće [Impossible] (1930), Nadrealizam danas i
ovde [Surrealism Here and Now] (1931–1932).

1923

Hyperinflation in Germany reaches its peak with the Reichsbank issuing a

banknote for 100 billion Marks.
Hitler’s National Socialists attempt to seize power in the abortive “Beer
Hall” putsch in Munich.
Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in Spain (1923–1930).
The government of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic is dissolved.
Eastern Galicia (capital Lviv) becomes part of Poland.
Campaign of Ukrainization starts in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Re-
public.

Austria

MA becomes key international constructivist forum after the demise of

Veshch’.
Journal Ék [Wedge], edited by Béla Uitz and Sándor Barta. Barta leaves
Dada, and Uitz takes the proletkult line.
Ernő Kállai’s essay “Constructivism.”

France

Tzara Le coeur à gaz (Théâtre Michel), with music by Satie and readings
by Iliazd, René Crevel, and Pierre de Massot, costumes designed by
Sonia Delaunay; Breton, Aragon, Éluard, and Péret storm the stage,
thus provoking a final break with Dada.
Ballets Russes production of Stravinsky’s Les Noces (designed by Gon-
charova).
Lajos Tihanyi settles in Paris.
Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne organizes a De Stijl
exhibition.
Milhaud La Création du Monde (text by Cendrars, designs by Léger)
premièred at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
L’Herbier L’Inhumaine (collaborators include Léger, Milhaud, and Mal-
let-Stevens).
Clair Paris qui dort.
Man Ray The Return to Reason.
lxiv Chronology

Germany

In Weimar, first Bauhaus exhibition opens in August, featuring work by

staff and students of the school. The exhibition features the “Haus am
Horn,” a model building designed by Georg Muche and the studio of
Walter Gropius and furnished with items from the Bauhaus work-
shops. Moholy-Nagy becomes a lecturer at the Bauhaus.
Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, and Jawlensky form Die Blaue Vier group
and exhibit together under this name for a decade.
Alfréd Forbát sets up with Max Buchartz the firm Neue Reklame—Ges-
taltung.
Ma-Buch, Kassák’s poetry in German translation, is published.
Georg Grosz publishes the series of drawings Ecce Homo, which is con-
fiscated and becomes the subject of an obscenity trial.
Schwitters publishes Merz (–1932) in Hannover.
Archipenko moves from Berlin to the U.S. and becomes an American
citizen.

Great Britain

The Klaxon, edited by Lawrence K. Emery [A. J. Leventhal], Dublin.

Controversial magazine publishes its only issue: Futurism, Cubism,
and literary Modernism with an Irish inflection.
W. B. Yeats awarded Nobel Prize for literature.
Shaw St. Joan.
O’Casey The Shadow of a Gunman.

Italy

In Milan, first showing of Novecento artists at the Galleria Pesaro.

Svevo La Coscienza di Zeno.
Cangiullo Poesia pentagrammata.

Netherlands

Vilmos Huszár breaks with De Stijl.

Spain

Federico García Lorca stages his puppet play Títeres de cachiporra with
music by Falla.

Russia

Publication of Mayakovsky’s poems About This with photomontages by

Rodchenko.
 Chronology lxv

Brik and Mayakovsky found Lef (–1925): it will be succeeded by Novyi

Lef (1927–1928).
Le-Dantiu as beacon, by Iliazd (I. Zdanevich), is published in Paris.
Popova designs sets and costumes for Tretiakov’s Earth on End, pro-
duced by Meyerhold. Khlebnikov’s Zangezi is staged in Petrograd,
with sets by Tatlin.
Vakhtangov produces Gozzi’s Princess Turandot for the Moscow Arts
Theatre (with designs by Nivinsky).
Vesnin brothers design the Palace of Labor building.
Suetin and Chasnik apply suprematist motifs to porcelain.
Publication of Forsch’s Ravvi (Moscow), Tairov’s Theatre Unbound
(Potsdam), and Broom, vol. 4, no. 3 (Berlin), all with covers by El
Lissitzky, and of Kuzmin’s Swimming Voyagers (Berlin) with cover
by Altman.
Immigrations: Chagall, Korovin, and Pevsner to Paris.

Belarus

Kazimir Malevich together with UNOVIS moves to Petrograd and be-

comes the head of the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINHUK).

Czechoslovakia

Devětsil organizes the Prague stage of a traveling Archipenko exhibition,

with an essay published to accompany it, and in November launches
the review Disk, edited by Seifert, Teige, and the architect Jaromír
Krejcar; it includes Jindřich Štyrský’s manifesto “Obraz” [Picture]
and Teige’s “Malířství a poesie” [Painting and Poetry], the manifesto
of the picture poem. A Brno branch of the organization is founded,
and Teige joins the editorial board of Stavba [Construction], the maga-
zine of the architects’ association Klub architektů, an important
mouthpiece for international Constructivism until 1931.
The Ukrainian Studio of Plastic Arts, directed by D. Antonovych, opens
in Prague.
Tvrdošíjní exhibition at the Rudolfinum, featuring Dufy, Ozenfant, and
other guest artists.
Czech artists are represented at the International Architectural Exhibition
of the Bauhaus in Weimar, with which Devětsil remains in close con-
tact.
Devětsil organizes the Bazar moderního umění [Bazaar of Modern Art] at
the Rudolfinum, featuring many new members including the female
artist Toyen and Man Ray as a guest. It travels to Brno the following
month as Výstava nového umění [Exhibition of New Art].
lxvi Chronology

Hungary

Farkas Molnár writes on architecture in Magyar Írás.

In the Mentor bookshop (Budapest), exhibition Modern Graphic Art:
Béla Kádár, J. Máttis Teutsch, Béla Uitz, S. Bortnyik, et al., probably
the first display of avant-garde art after 1919.
Bartók’s Dance Suite for Orchestra, Kodály’s Psalmus hungaricus per-
formed.

Lithuania

New Art Exhibition opens in Vilnius, organized by Władysław

Strzemiński and Vytautas Kairiūkštis (1890–1961), one of the first
manifestations of Constructivist art outside Russia. Its catalogue in-
cludes Kairiūkštis’s Constructivist manifesto. The participants of the
exhibition later become the members of the Blok group (Grupa
Kubistów, Konstruktywistów i Suprematystów Blok), which holds ex-
hibitions in Riga, Bucharest, Brussels, and Warsaw.

Latvia

Romans Suta writes the introduction to the first published catalogue on

modern Latvian art: 60 Jahre lettischer kunst (Leipzig, 1923).

Poland

First photograms by Kazimierz Podsadecki.

In Vilnius, The New Art Exhibition marks the first appearance of Polish
Constructivism; participants include Mieczyslaw Szczuka (first mon-
tage photographs), Henryk Stażewski, Władysław Strzemiński, and
Teresa Zarnower.
In Warsaw, International Exhibition of Young Art, organized by Polish-
Jewish communities, mainly from Berlin, presents works by Kandin-
sky, Klee, Kokoschka, and others.

Ukraine

Kiev, Panfuturist miscellany Zhovtnevyi zbirnyk panfuturystiv [The Pan-

futurists’ October Collection], edited by Geo Shkurupii and Nik Ba-
zhan, is published. Cover designed by Nina Henke-Meller.
First issue of the journal Barykady teatru [Barricades of Theatre].
Boris Lyatoshinsky Symphony no. 1.
Kiev-born Constructivist composer Alexander Mosolov creates his First
Piano Sonata Op. 3.
 Chronology lxvii

Yugoslavia

Hiljadu druga noć [The Thousand and Second Night] is performed in

Belgrade.
Ljubomir Micić publishes the manifesto Zenithism as the Balkan Totaliz-
er of New Life in Zenit and organizes the first Zenithist soirées in
Belgrade and Zagreb.

1924

Death of Lenin in January marks the beginning of the power struggle

between Trotsky and Stalin (the latter will be victorious in
1927–1928).
Petrograd renamed Leningrad.
First winter Olympics.
The UK recognizes the USSR in February.
Insecticides used for the first time.

Austria

Kassák begins to design commercial advertisements.

Máttis Teutsch exhibition in Vienna.
MA special issue on music and theatre in German, Italian, and French.
Béla Balázs has his Der sichtbare Mensch, oder, Die Kultur des Films
published, one of the first systematic works on the aesthetics of film.
Friedrich Kiesler organizes the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theater-
technik in Vienna, bringing together avant-garde theatre design from
all over Europe.
Hofmannsthal The Tower.

France

Breton Manifeste du surréalisme.

Breton launches (with Soupault, Desnos, and Éluard) La Révolution sur-
realiste (–1929).
Breton Soluble Fish.
Tzara Sept manifestes Dada.
Léger develops the machine aesthetic and releases his film Le ballet
mécanique (with Dudley Murphy; music by Antheil).
Première of Milhaud’s ballet Le train bleu by the Ballets Russes at the
Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. The book is by Jean Cocteau, sets by
Henri Laurens, and costumes by Coco Chanel. The work is also per-
formed at the London Coliseum in 1924.
lxviii Chronology

Clair (with Picabia and Satie) Entr’acte.

Satie’s ballet Mercure (sets by Picasso, choreography by Massine).

Germany

Béla Kádár, Hugó Scheiber, Moholy-Nagy, Kassák, Aurél Bernáth, Béni

Ferenczy, and László Péri have exhibitions at Der Sturm gallery dur-
ing the year.
Mann Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain].
Death of Kafka.
In Dresden, the première of Ernst Toller’s pacifist play Hinkemann is
disrupted by National Socialist activists. Later performances in Berlin
and Vienna take place under police protection.
The Rote Gruppe, an association of communist artists led by Grosz and
John Heartfield, is founded in Berlin.
Eggeling Symphonie diagonale.
Following campaigns by the right-wing press and government in Thurin-
gia, funding is withdrawn from the Bauhaus in Weimar. The school’s
activities are suspended in December.
Brecht In the Jungle of Cities.
Barlach The Flood.

Italy

Marinetti Futurismo e Fascismo.

Netherlands

Dezső Korniss meets Vilmos Huszár and is exposed to the art of the De
Stijl group.

Spain

Joan Miró has his first exhibition at the gallery of Josep Dalmau.

Russia

Immigrations: Exter, Serebriakova, Annenkov, and Puni to Paris.

Publication of State Plan for Literature (key document for Constructi-
vism).
Publication of Mess Mend (cover by Rodchenko). Vesnin designs Con-
structivist set for production of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was
Thursday.
First Discussional Exhibition of Associations of Acting Revolutionary Art
(Vkhutemas). Publication of A. Lunacharsky’s Theatre and Revolu-
tion.
 Chronology lxix

Exter designs sets and costumes for the science-fiction film Aelita.

Czechoslovakia

Miroslav Ponc joins Der Sturm as a painter and composer.

Exhibition of modern Czech art at the John Levy Gallery, Paris, including
works by Emil Filla, Josef Čapek, Václav Špala, and Jan Zrzavý.
Publication of the first issue of Pásmo [Zone] by the Brno Devětsil group;
in its third issue it publishes its manifesto “Naše základna a naše cesta:
Konstruktivismus a poetismus.”
Publication of Vítěslav Nezval’s poems Pantomima, with illustrations
and jacket by Štyrský.

Georgia

The Georgian Futurists publish three journals, all short-lived: H2SO4 (the
formula for sulphuric acid), Lit’erat’ura da skhva [Literature and the
Rest], and Memartskheneoba [Leftness].

Hungary

Budapest, first Propaganda Evening of the Free Union of New Artists,

with Ödön Palasovszky, Iván Hevesy, composer Pál Kadosa, et al.
Sándor Bortnyik returns to Budapest.
Bartók publishes The Hungarian Folk Song.

Latvia

Marta Liepiņa-Skulme works on a project for the Latvian Freedom Mon-

ument (1924–1925).
Baltars porcelain factory (–1929) founded by Suta. Its ceramics combine
Cubo-Constructivist motifs with Latvian folk subjects.

Poland

In Warsaw, the birth of the Polish Constructivist avant-garde group Blok

is marked by the publication of the first issue of Blok magazine (elev-
en issues were published in total), and the inaugural exhibition in the
showroom of the automobile firm Lauren-Clement is preceded by a
one-man show organized by Henryk Berlewi from his own work Me-
chanofaktura in the Austro-Daimler Automobile Salon. Blok pub-
lishes the group’s manifesto “Co to jest konstruktywizm” (“What is
Constructivism”), codifying its main programmatic principles.
lxx Chronology

Romania

Publication of the radical review Contimporanul, the most widely re-

garded of the modernist periodicals, published by Janco and Vinea.
Publication of the iconoclastic 75HP [Horsepower], the creation of the
poet Ilarie Voronca (1903–1946) and the painter Victor Brauner.
Brauner and Voronca created their picto-poetry, non-figurative oil
paintings, with words culled from Dada-Futurist vocabulary manipu-
lated into geometric forms.
Contimporanul’s international exhibition at Bucharest’s hall of the Art-
ists’ Union in which almost the entire Romanian avant-garde exhibit
together for the first time (M. H. Maxy, Marcel Janco, Mattis Teutsch,
Victor Brauner, Constantin Brancusi, Miliţa Petraşcu, and Dida Solo-
mon).
Punct [Full Stop], an imaginative integration of Constructivist art, archi-
tecture, and literature.

Ukraine

Mykhail Semenko publishes his own Kobzar (collected works from 1910
to 1922).
Literary almanac Honh komunkul’ta [Gong of the Komunkul’t].

Yugoslavia

Constructivist art experiments of Avgust Černigoj.

Micić organizes the “First Zenit International Exhibition of New Art” in
the Stanković music school. Peeters, Lozowick, Balsamdžieva,
Bojadžiev, Delaunay, Archipenko, Kandinsky, Lissitzky, Foretić-Vis,
Gecan, Klek, and Petrov participate.
Marij Kogoj’s opera Črne Maske [Black Masks].

1925

The Communist Party Central Committee’s resolution “On the Party’s

Policy in the Field of Artistic Literature” calls for a style “comprehen-
sible to the millions” while advocating continued open competition
among different artistic tendencies.

Austria

As MA is banned in Czechoslovakia and Romania, Hungarian audiences

shrink.
 Chronology lxxi

Special German language issue to accompany First German Propaganda

Evening organized by MA, their last event in Vienna, in March.
Last issue of MA publishes in June.

Belgium

Oesophage; only one issue published. Collaborators include Hans Arp,

Max Ernst, Paul Joostens, René Magritte, E. L. T. Mesens, Georges
Ribemont-Dessaignes, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan
Tzara.

France

Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes,

giving rise to the term Art Deco.
Josephine Baker appears in the Revue nègre.
Breton organizes the first Surrealist group exhibition, which includes
works by Picasso, de Chirico, Ernst, Man Ray, Masson, Miró, Tanguy,
and Arp.
André Kertész moves from Budapest to Paris.
Léger and Ozenfant found the Académie de l’Art Moderne, a center for
the machine aesthetic.

Germany

The Bauhaus moves from Weimar to Dessau following campaigns against

it by the right-wing press and government in Thuringia.
Moholy-Nagy and Hugó Scheiber exhibit at Der Sturm gallery. Moholy-
Nagy starts the series Bauhausbücher.
Première of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck.
Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] exhibition held in the Mannheim
Kunsthalle.
Posthumous publication of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess [The Trial], pub-
lished by Max Brod in defiance of Kafka’s request to destroy his
unpublished works.
Publication of the first part of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Great Britain

Woolf Mrs. Dalloway.

George Bernard Shaw awarded Nobel Prize for literature.

Italy

Constructivist art experiments of Avgust Černigoj in Trieste (–1929).

lxxii Chronology

Depero, Prampolini, and Balla contribute to the Italian Pavilion in the

Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Spain

Salvador Dalí has first one-man show at Dalmau’s gallery in Barcelona.

Exposición de Artistas Ibéricos in Madrid includes Dalí’s portrait of
Buñuel.

Switzerland

Publication of Kunstismen by El Lissitzky and Arp in Zürich.

Russia

Viktor Shklovsky publishes his main work On the Theory of Prose.

Filonov establishes the Collective of Masters of Analytical Art in Lenin-
grad.
The party takes over control of literature by the creation of the All-Union
Association of Proletarian Writers.
El Lissitzky returns to Russia.
Publication of Left Front of the Arts, key document for the Constructi-
vists.
Kruchenykh’s Alive (cover by Klucis).
First performances of Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 2 and Pas d’acier; the
glorification of machines and their movement in the ballet are in the
tradition of Futurism and Soviet Constructivism.
Sándor Barta immigrates to the Soviet Union.
Eisenstein The Battleship Potemkin.
Melnikov designs the Soviet pavilion for the Paris Exposition Internation-
ale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Rodchenko designs
the furnishings for a workers’ club shown there.
The poet Esenin commits suicide.

Czechoslovakia

The Brno branch of Devětsil invites Moholy-Nagy to lecture on painting,

photography, and film.
Fromek founds the Prague publishing house Odeon, which acts as a plat-
form for Devětsil over the next nine years. Štyrský and Toyen travel to
Paris for three years, where they exhibit.
The kinetic artist Zdeněk Pešánek completes the first version of his color
piano.
 Chronology lxxiii

Teige, Seifert, and Honzl join a delegation of the Society for Economic
and Cultural Rapport with the New Russia to visit Moscow and Lenin-
grad.

Georgia

Lado Gudiashvili returns to Georgia.

Hungary

Ernő Kállai’s book Új magyar piktúra 1900–1925 [New Hungarian Paint-

ing] published with Moholy-Nagy’s cover design; a German edition is
also published in Leipzig.
Farkas Molnár returns to Budapest from Weimar.
S. Bortnyik and Farkas Molnár exhibit at Mentor bookshop in Budapest.
First two performances of the Dada “Green Donkey Theatre” with Ödön
Palasovszky, Iván Hevesy, Gyula Lazicziusz, S. Bortnyik, Farkas
Molnár, et al.
First issue of journal 365, an attempt to establish a Budapest edition of
MA.
Three students of the Academy of Fine Arts (Dezső Korniss, György
Kepes, and Sándor Trauner) set up an informal group concerned with
new art (later they become the New Progressives).

Poland

Ziemia na lewo [Earth to the Left], a book of poems by Bruno Jasieński

and Anatol Stern, with a cover design by Mieczysław Szczuka, is the
first Polish photomontage.

Romania

Integral, published through 1928 by Maxy, Voronca, and Brauner, in-

cludes non-representational linocuts, reproductions of Constructivist
collages, stage designs, and non-figurative sculpture. Both Contimpor-
anul and Integral promote Constructivism, a synthesis of literary gen-
res represented by Ion Vinea, B. Fundoianu, Ion Calugaru, Ilarie Vo-
ronca, and Marcel Janco.
New Hungarian avant-garde journal Periszkóp, edited by György Szántó.
Bortnyik’s pantomime The Green Donkey appears in Periszkóp 4.

Ukraine

Formation of ARMU [The Association of Revolutionary Masters of

Ukraine] in Kiev.
lxxiv Chronology

Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin is the head of the Theatre, Cinema, and

Photography Faculty at the Kiev Art Institute; he executes stage de-
signs for Taras Shevchenko’s Haidamaky [Haidamaks].
Viktor Palmov, the Russian-born Neo-Primitive painter, friend of David
Burliuk and Vladimir Mayakovsky, is appointed professor of painting
at the Kiev Art Institute and joins various avant-garde groups.
Futurist literary almanac Hol’fshtrom [Gulf Stream]. It includes contribu-
tions by O. Kapler, O. Slisarenko, Geo Shkurupii, and Mykhailo
Shcherbak.

1926

General strike in Great Britain.

Piłsudski’s May coup d’etat; Sanacja Regime begins in Poland.
Hirohito becomes emperor of Japan.
Goddard launches first rocket.

Austria

Kassák’s last poetry performance in Vienna before his return to Hungary.

France

Zervos launches the review Cahiers d’art (–1960).

Duchamp Anémic cinema.
Aragon Le paysan de Paris.
Le Corbusier Almanach d’architecture moderne.
Max Ernst and Miró design sets for Diaghilev’s production of Prokofiev’s
Romeo and Juliet in Paris.
Kassák travels to Paris and meets Éluard, Aragon, Le Corbusier, Tzara,
Goll, Chagall, and others.

Germany

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe becomes director of the Berlin Werkbund.
Founding of the architects’ association Der Ring in Berlin; members in-
clude Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Klaus Mann’s Der fromme Tanz, one of the first German novels dealing
with the theme of homosexuality.
Major retrospective of the work of Lovis Corinth following his death the
previous year.
Kafka The Castle.
Barlach Boozer Boll.
 Chronology lxxv

Italy

L’Art Mécanique. Manifeste futuriste.

“The Modern Stage,” by Ferdo Delak published in Edinost.
Prampolini L’Architettura futurista (manifesto).

Spain

Revista de Occidente publishes Lorca’s Oda a Salvador Dalí.

Russia

Benois immigrates to Paris.

Pudovkin releases his film version of Gorky’s Mother.
The journal Contemporary Architecture is founded (–1930).
Publication of Asnova News, edited by El Lissitzky.
In Moscow, exhibition of Western Revolutionary Art includes works by
Uitz, Bortnyik, Kassák, Kudlák, and Máttis Teutsch, mainly from the
collection of János Mácza. Zenitists Micić, Mikac, and Poljanski rep-
resent the Yugoslav avant-garde.
Béla Uitz immigrates to Soviet Union.

Czechoslovakia

Nezval’s alphabet poems Abeceda are published with designs by Teige

featuring photographs of the choreography of Milca Mayerová.
Founding of Devětsil’s theatre section, the Osvobozené divadlo (Liberat-
ed Theatre), under the directorship of Jiří Frejka and J. Honza.
Kurt Schwitters performs to great acclaim in two “grotesque evenings”
and a reading of his poetry in Prague, followed by an exhibition of
fifty of his collages at the Rudolfinum in December.
Foundation of the Prague Linguistic Circle by Bogatyrev, Mukařovský,
Mathesius, Jakobson, and Trubetskoy.

Hungary

Új Föld (New Ground) group formed, mainly from participants of the

Green Donkey Theatre. Three performances during the year; publica-
tions include Palasovszky’s Punalua, with cover and graphics by
Sándor Bortnyik.
Róbert Berény returns to Hungary, where he carries on with painting and
engages in graphic design work.
lxxvi Chronology

Kassák returns to Budapest permanently. His new journal Dokumentum

presents Constructivist ideology and gives voice to emerging Hungar-
ian surrealists in literature like Andor Németh, Tibor Déry, and Gyula
Illyés.

Poland

Blok splits up; the last issue of the magazine is devoted to the Internation-
al Exhibition of Architecture held in Warsaw.
Szymon Syrkus initiates a new association of architects and painters
called Praesens (1926–1939). The authors of program statements em-
phasize the links between new architecture and social demands.
Construction begins on a new building for the National Museum in War-
saw. The building, designed by Tadeusz Tołwiński, is modern and
functional.

Ukraine

The literary group Avanhard [Avant-Garde], organized by Valerian Po-

lishchuk (includes painters Vasyl Yermilov and H. Tsapok and poet
H. Koliada), proclaims the ideas of Constructivism, Dynamism, Ma-
chinism, and Spiralism.
VAPLITE [Free Academy of Proletarian Literature] is founded by Myko-
la Khvylovy.

Yugoslavia

The group Oblik (Form) is founded in Belgrade.

1927

Trotsky expelled from the party in November. Bad harvest. Terror re-
sumes its full strength. NEP comes to an end.
Lindbergh makes first solo transatlantic flight.

France

Breton joins the Communist Party.

Ballets Russes production of Prokofiev’s Pas d’acier (designed by Yaku-
lov).
First exhibition of André Kertész.
Eugène Iolas founds transition (–1950), promoting French, American,
and Irish Modernism.
 Chronology lxxvii

Abel Gance’s film Napoléon shown at the Paris Opéra, with the use of
revolutionary projection techniques.

Germany

Two exhibitions of Hugó Scheiber at Der Sturm gallery.

Lang Metropolis (original version no longer exists; earliest surviving ver-
sion is usually called the 1928 German version).
Ruttmann Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt.
August Sander’s “People in the 20th Century” photographs shown at the
Kunstverein exhibition in Cologne.
Kafka Amerika.
Hesse Der Steppenwolf.
Première of Ernst Krenek’s “jazz opera” Jonny spielt auf in Leipzig.
Architectural exhibition Die Wohnung in Stuttgart, organized by the
Deutscher Werkbund.
The Bauhaus opens its long-planned architectural department.
Brecht A Man’s a Man.

Great Britain

Ray (–1927), edited by Sidney Hunt. Two issues of Russian and European
sound and visual poetry, graphic design, and experiment.
Woolf To the Lighthouse.
Riding and Graves Survey of Modernist Poetry.

Italy

Depero Futurista, a collection of Fortunato Depero’s typographic designs

published as a “bolted” book.
Depero designs the Book Pavilion (for the Bestetti, Tuminelli, Treves
publishing houses) at the International Biennale Exhibition of Decora-
tive Arts in Monza.
Marinetti Scatole d’amore in conserva.

Spain

Foix Gertrudis, illustrated by Miró.

Lorca Mariana Pineda, performed with décor by Dalí.
Alberti Sobre los ángeles.

Russia

Shub The Great Road.

Shterenberg has an exhibition at the Museum of Painterly Culture and
Tatlin at the Russian Museum.
lxxviii Chronology

Publication of German edition of Malevich’s Die Gegendstandlose Welt.

Architecture of Vhutemas and All-Union Printing Trades Exhibition Cat-
alogue (covers by El Lissitzky).
Publication of the score of Deshevov’s Rails (a mechanistic piece in the
style of Honegger or Prokofiev).
Tatlin takes his exhibition to Warsaw and Berlin. Most paintings will
never return to Russia.
Filonov’s group exhibits.
Leningrad première of Berg’s Wozzeck.
Exhibition of Newest Trends in Art. Publication of Punin’s New Tenden-
cies in Russian Art.

Czechoslovakia

The Prague virtuoso Erwin Schulhoff plays works by Ponc in London,

including quartertone and atonal pieces.
Some members of the Osvobozené divadlo leave to found Divadlo Dada
under Frejka.
Ilya Ehrenburg and Vladimir Mayakovsky perform in Prague.
April publication of Fronta in Brno, an anthology edited by František
Halas, Vladimír Prusa, Zdeněk Rossmann, and Bedřich Václavek.
Publication continues despite the dissolution of the Brno branch of
Devětsil.
First issue of Revue Devětsilů (ReD, –1931), edited by Teige, in which
Toyen and Štyrský publish their manifesto “Artificialismus.”
J. Šíma becomes a founding member of the Parisian group Le Grand Jeu.

Hungary

For lack of funds, the journal Új Föld (edited by Aladár Tamás) soon
ceases publication along with Dokumentum and Magyar Írás.
100%, legally published cultural journal of illegal communist party, edit-
ed by Aladár Tamás, with a Constructivist cover by Farkas Molnár.

Poland

Kazimir Malevich shows a selection of his works and lectures on new

trends in art.
Publication of the avant-garde journal Dźwignia [Lever], affiliated with
the Communist Party of Poland, edited by Mieczysław Szczuka until
his death in August 1927 and continued by Teresa Zarnower until
1928.
Strzemiński is a representative of Praesens, co-organized The Machine
Age Exhibition in New York.
 Chronology lxxix

First photomontage films by the Themersons (Franciszka and Stefan).

Ukraine

First All-Ukrainian Art Exhibition Ten Years October is held in Kiev,

Kharkiv, and Odessa (Epstein, Khvostenko-Khvostov, Meller, Pal-
mov, Petrytsky, and Tatlin participate).
OSMU [Contemporary Ukrainian Artists Union] is formed (Altman,
Khvostenko-Khvostov, Epstein, Petrytsky, and Palmov).
Review Bumeranh [Boomerang] started.
Nova Generatsiia [New Generation] starts under the editorship of Myk-
hail Semenko. Collaborators include Eisenstein, Vertov, Mayakovsky,
Tatlin, Malevich, Georgian Futurists, and numerous European artists.
In Kiev, literary almanac Zustrich na perekresnii stantsii. Rozmova tr’okh
[Meeting at the Crossing Station] (M. Semenko, Geo Shkurupii, M.
Bazhan).

1928

Opening of the Olympic Games in Amsterdam.

The first Five-Year Plan is adopted in the USSR.
Penicillin discovered.

France

Ravel Bolero.
Breton Nadja.
Breton Le Surréalisme et la peinture.
Dulac La Coquille et le Clergyman (screenplay by Antonin Artaud).

Germany

Première of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Dreigroschenoper [The

Threepenny Opera].
In Berlin, first exhibition outside Yugoslavia of the Slovenian Constructi-
vist avant-garde.
The Berlin Vossische Zeitung begins serialization of Erich Maria Re-
marque’s Im Westen nichts Neues [All Quiet on the Western Front],
published in book form the following year.
Walter Gropius resigns as head of the Bauhaus and is succeeded by
Hannes Meyer.
lxxx Chronology

Great Britain

Auden Poems, published by Stephen Spender.

Woolf Orlando.
In London’s Tooth & Sons Gallery, the first exhibition in Great Britain of
the work of de Chirico.
O’Casey The Silver Tassie.

Scandinavia

Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset awarded Nobel Prize for literature.

Journal Quosego (–1929) published in Helsinki.

Spain

Manifest groc (manifest antiartístic català): Dalí, Gasch, Montanyà.

Russia

Venice Biennale includes a large section on Soviet art.

In Cologne, El Lissitzky supervises the USSR pavilion at the Internation-
al Pressa exhibition.
In Brussels, an exhibition of new Russian art opens.
Publication of Workers Art in Leningrad.
AKhRR, which has flourished economically under the New Economic
Policy, meets with difficulties in the first Five-Year Plan. It adopts a
new declaration of artistic aims, replacing passive documentation with
more active revolutionary goals.

Czechoslovakia

Josef Šíma exhibits at the Aventinum Garret, an exhibition space in

Prague opened by Otakar Storch-Marien, the owner of the Aventinum
publishing house.
The KFU (amateur photographers’ club) organizes an exhibition of
photography oriented towards Constructivism and the Neue Sachlich-
keit; Josef Slánský and Josef Dašek both publish manifestoes of the
new photography.
Teige publishes the second Poetist manifesto in ReD.
The anthology Devět básníku Devětsil appears.
Schulhoff gives a concert in Prague on Pešánek’s visual piano.

Hungary

Róbert Berény and Sándor Bortnyik work on commercial poster designs.

 Chronology lxxxi

Modiano cigarette paper franchise commissions a major advertising cam-

paign lasting into the 1930s, with contributions by Róbert Berény,
Sándor Bortnyik, and Lajos Kassák.
Four Cikk-Cakk [Zigzag] evenings of avant-garde theatrical performance:
Ödön Palasovszky, Iván Hevesy, Aladár Tamás, et al. (Új Föld group).
Performances by Független Új Művészek [Independent New Artists]:
Kassák, Jolán Simon, Tibor Déry, Gyula Illyés, et al. (Dokumentum
group).
Tér és Forma [Space and Form] published by Virgil Birbauer in Buda-
pest, devoted to modern architecture.
Kassák starts journal Munka [Work], concentrating more on society and
politics than the arts. Eventually banned in 1939 for political reasons.
Bortnyik opens “Műhely” [Workshop], a school of design with Iván He-
vesy (art history, film), Kálmán Kovács (stage design), Farkas Molnár
(architecture), Pál Ligeti (“construction,” cultural history), and Sándor
Bortnyik (painting, graphic design, advertising design).
Kassák’s exhibition of his Képarchitektúra works.

Romania

Unu [One], a monthly magazine of the literary avant-garde, publishes

through 1932; contributors include Sasa Pana, the poet and apologist
of Romanian Surrealism, Tristan Tzara, F. T. Marinetti, and André
Breton. It also published work by Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Osip Zad-
kine, Marc Chagall, and a host of Romanian figures.

Ukraine

Malevich joins Tatlin, Palmov, and Meller as professor at the Kiev Art
Institute.
Malevich starts his Second Peasant cycle.
Fresco cycles by the Boichukist School in Odessa.
Dovzhenko’s epic film Zvenyhora [Zvenigora].
The unaffiliated journal Literaturnyi iarmarok [Literary Fair] is estab-
lished in Kharkiv under the editorship of Mykola Khvylovy; design by
Anatol Petrytsky.

1929

Stock market crash heralds start of world economic depression (–1937).

World economic crisis brings about mass unemployment in Germany.
Collectivization starts in the USSR.
lxxxii Chronology

Belgium

Le sens propre (Paris, 1929); five issues (includes contributions by Goe-

mans and Magritte).

France

Breton Le Second Manifeste du surréalisme.

Bataille (with Leiris, Desnos, Limbour) launches the art review Docu-
ments (–1930).
Ribemont-Desseignes Bifur.
Buñuel and Dalí Un Chien Andalou.
Ernst La femme 100 têtes.
Cocteau Les enfants terribles.
Claudel The Satin Slipper.
Man Ray Les mystères du château de Dé.

Austria

Death of Hofmannsthal.

Germany

Döblin Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Brecht’s first two “Lehrstücke” [Didactic Plays], Das Badener Lehrstück
vom Einverständnis [The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent] and Der
Lindbergflug (later renamed Ozeanflug [Ocean Flight]), with music by
Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill. At around this time Brecht first for-
mulates the concept of “epic theatre.”
Publication of Kurt Tucholsky’s “political Baedeker” Deutschland
Deutschland über alles, illustrated with photo-collages by John Heart-
field.
Pabst Die Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s Box].
Thomas Mann awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Great Britain

Woolf A Room of One’s Own.

Italy

Marinetti becomes an academician (he is first made a member of the

Reale Accademia d’Italia and then asked to direct the Secretariat of
the Accademia’s Classe Arti e Lettere).
Manifesto dell’aeropittura futurista.
 Chronology lxxxiii

Spain

International Exhibition in Barcelona: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designs

the German pavilion and also the aluminum and leather Barcelona
chair.
Exposición de arte moderno nacional y extranjero in Barcelona; Neo-
Plasticist works are shown for the first time in Spain.
Lorca starts writing Poeta en Nueva York (not published until 1940, in
New York and Mexico City).

Russia

AkhR begins publication of the journal Art to the Masses.

Lunacharsky is replaced as commissar of instruction.
Malevich exhibits at the Tretiakov gallery.
Tatlin begins work on his flying machine, the Letatlin.
Dziga Vertov completes his film Man with a Movie Camera.
Architectural journal Building of Moscow (–1931).
In Moscow, publication of the score of Mosolov’s Constructivist machine
music piece The Foundry; the work, which is influenced by Honegger,
uses a metal sheet to create the sound of clashing iron and steel.
In Moscow, first performance of Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug (produced
by Meyerhold, with designs by Rodchenko and music by Shostako-
vich).
Establishment of the Union of Proletarian Architects.

Czechoslovakia

Teige takes part in the Neue Typographie exhibition in Berlin and interna-
tional exhibition of books and magazines in Dessau. He also publishes
the Mezinárodní soudobá architektura compendium to accompany the
Neues Bauen exhibition, complemented by a display of Czech archi-
tecture, held in Prague in May; and he attacks Le Corbusier in Stavba.
Jindřich Honzl leaves the Osvobozené divadlo, which becomes a revue
theatre presenting the duo Voskovec and Werich.
Teige is elected chairman of the newly formed Levá fronta [Left Front], a
group of artists and intellectuals that assumes some of Devětsil’s func-
tions.

Hungary

Bortnyik’s lecture Art of the Machine Age at Mentor bookshop.

Avant-garde performances continue. Pantomime The Green Donkey per-
formed, along with plays by Tristan Tzara and Herwarth Walden.
lxxxiv Chronology

Police officers raid classes at the Academy of Fine Arts and expel stu-
dents of the New Progressive Group for “subversive” material (includ-
ing socio-photomontages).
New Progressives break with Kassák and Munka, but he continues to
publish their works.
Hungarian group of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Mod-
erne) formed, headed by Farkas Molnár.

Poland

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Poland’s independence, the

Universal Exhibition of Art opens in Poznań (the largest show of
Polish visual art in the interwar period; it includes works by avant-
garde artists). The Praesens group breaks up after the exhibition.
Strzemiński, Stażewski, and Kobro leave the group, and the next peri-
od of activity, lasting until 1939, is marked by a preoccupation with
technological problems.
Katarzyna Kobro, Henryk Stażewski, Władysław Strzemiński, and Julian
Przyboś establish the group a.r. (revolutionary artists or real avant-
garde).
Publication of the journal Europa (–1930; thirteen issues).
Anatol Stern’s poem “Europa” published, illustrated with typocollage
pages by Szczuka and with the book’s cover designed by Zarnower.

Ukraine

At the Odessa Film Studio, Dovzhenko creates his film Arsenal, which
shows the Bolshevik uprising in Kiev in January 1918.

Yugoslavia

The group Zemlja [Earth] is formed in Zagreb. Members: Augustinčić,

Hegedušić, Ibler, Junek, Kršinić, Mujadžić, Postružnik, Ružička, and
Tabaković.
Manifesto by Drago Ibler.

1930

Pluto discovered.

Austria

Publication of El Lissitzky’s Architecture for World Reconstruction.

 Chronology lxxxv

France

Buñuel L’Âge d’Or.

Breton Second Surrealist Manifesto.
Cocteau The Blood of a Poet.
Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution (six issues).
L’Art Contemporain, published in Polish and French, includes articles by
the Polish avant-garde artists Peiper, Kurek, and Czechowicz. It is a
forum for a wide spectrum of European avant-garde ranging from
Cubism and Suprematism to Surrealism and Dadaism.
Győző Vásárhelyi (Victor Vasarely) moves to Paris.

Germany

Josef von Sternberg Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel].

Robert Musil Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man without Qual-
ities].
Première of Schoenberg’s opera Von Heute auf Morgen [From Today to
Tomorrow] in Frankfurt am Main.
Hannes Meyer is forced to resign as head of the Bauhaus; he is replaced
by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Freud Civilization and Its Discontents.
In Leipzig, El Lissitzky supervises the USSR contribution to the Interna-
tional Fur Trade Fair and designs covers for Neutra’s Amerika and
Ginsburger’s Frankreich.
Brecht The Measures Taken.

Russia

Publication of Lobanov’s Artistic Groups for the Last 25 Years (Moscow)

and Kirsanov Is Called Upon to Speak (cover by Telingater).
Mayakovsky’s last play, The Bathhouse, is performed.
First performance of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose at the Maly Theatre,
Leningrad, shows the influence of the expressionist style of Berg.
Audiences are responsive but reviews are hostile; Shostakovich is ac-
cused of “formalism.”
Mayakovsky commits suicide.
Malevich’s works are shown in Moscow and he participates in the Exhibi-
tion of Soviet Art in Berlin.
lxxxvi Chronology

Czechoslovakia

Pešánek installs his lumino-dynamic sculpture at the building of the Edi-

son Power Station on Jeruzalemská Street, Prague, and delivers the
lecture “From Impressionism to Kineticism” in Hamburg at a congress
on psychological aesthetics.
Teige publishes Moderni architektura v Československu and Svět, který
voní, the first historical appraisal of Dadaism.
Nezval founds the periodical Zvěrokruh [Zodiac], anticipating the merg-
ing of Poetism with Surrealism, and in its second (and final) issue
publishes André Breton’s Surrealist manifesto.
Jan Tschichold organizes a traveling exhibition of posters, Nový plakat.

Hungary

Kassák stops painting his Képarchitektúra works.

Bortnyik’s one-man exhibition of paintings, photographs, and photomont-
ages at the Tamás Gallery.
Journal 100% banned.
First and only exhibition of New Progressives at Tamás Gallery. Subse-
quently most of them leave Hungary for Berlin, Paris, or the Nether-
lands.
Bartók’s Cantata profana.

Latvia

Mūksala and Radigars (Spirit) groups active throughout the 1930s.

Though dependent on recent European developments, they combine
decorative Cubist, Purist, and Constructivist geometricized forms with
an Expressionist tendency.

Lithuania

Formation of the the Society of Independent Artists.

Poland

The Institute of Art Propaganda is founded to promote modern art in

Warsaw.

Ukraine

In Kiev, last monographic exhibition by Kazimir Malevich (forty-five

works from 1928 to 1930 are shown). Malevich is arrested and jailed
for three months.
 Chronology lxxxvii

Dovzhenko’s film Zemlia [Earth], depicting collectivization in Ukraine

(scenario Dovzhenko, cinematography Danylo Demutsky). It is called
“counter-revolutionary.”
Almanac Avanhard [Avant-Garde], edited by Geo Shkurupii.
The first Polish State Theatre opens (Fedir Nirod) in Kharkiv.
Forced liquidation of “Literaturnyi iarmarok”; demise of Nova Generat-
siia [New Generation].
Mykhail Semenko Evropa i my. Pamflety i virshi [Europe and U.S.].
Formation of ANUM [Association of Independent Ukrainian Artists] in
Lviv, headed by Mykhailo Osinchuk and Yaroslava Muzyka. It orga-
nizes thirteen group and personal exhibitions.

Yugoslavia

Slavko Osterc’s Expressionist Maska rdeče smrti [Mask of the Red

Death].

1931

World economic crisis continues.

France

Clair A nous la liberté.

Dali The Persistence of Memory.
Seuphor, Abstraction-Création group.
Cocteau Le Sang d’un poète.
Exposition Coloniale in Paris.

Germany

Lang M: Mörder unter uns.

Première of Carl Zuckmayer’s satire on Prussian militarism and conform-
ism Der Hauptmann von Köpenick.

Great Britain

The Island, edited by Josef Bard (–1939): voice of “The Islanders” op-
posed to commercialized art; contributors include Henry Moore, Ger-
trude Hermes, C. R. W. Nevinson, Naomi Mitchison, and Mahatma
Gandhi.
The Four Gospels published with typeface and engravings by Eric Gill.
Woolf The Waves.
lxxxviii Chronology

Scandinavia

Swedish poet Erik Karlfeldt awarded Nobel Prize for literature.

Journal Spektrum (–1933) published in Stockholm.

Spain

Second Spanish Republic begins (–1939). The new constitution gives

equal rights to women and legalizes divorce.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Ismos, identifies twenty-five “isms.”
Lorca The Love of Don Perlimplin and Belisa in the Garden.

Czechoslovakia

Teige devotes himself chiefly to the sociology of architecture.

Štyrský starts to publish the series of books Edice 69, opening with his
illustrated edition of Nezval’s Sexualní nocturno; he completes the
series in 1933 with his series of ten photomontages Emilie přichazi ke
mně ve snu [Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream], with an epilogue by the
psychoanalyst Bohuslav Brouk.
Founding of Linie, the magazine of the eponymous group of artists and
authors including Karel Valter, Ada Novák, and Josef Bartuška.
Štyrský and Toyen exhibition marks the transition from Artificialism to
Surrealism.

Hungary

Construction of a Modernist estate of twenty-two cube-shaped family

houses in Budapest, designed by Farkas Molnár, Pál Ligeti, József
Fischer, and others.

Poland

Kobro and Strzemiński The Composition of Space—The Calculation of

Space-Time Rhythm.
In Łódź, the International Collection of Modern Art assembled by the a.r.
group based in the Municipal Museum of History and Art (now Mu-
seum of Art) opens to the public (the second permanent gallery of
abstract art in a European museum, after the Hannover collection).
Thanks to Strzemiński’s efforts many of the works come from groups
such as Abstraction-Création and Cercle et Carré, active in Paris. Art-
ists represented include Ernst, Arp, Leger, Picasso, Marcoussis, and
all the Polish avant-garde.
In Kraków, the first issue of the literary avant-garde journal Linja, pub-
lished and edited by Jalu Kurek.
 Chronology lxxxix

Ukraine

In Lviv, ANUM organizes an exhibition in which Ukrainian artists from

Paris (Mykhailo Andrienko-Nechytailo, Oleksa Hryshchenko, Mykola
Hlushchenko, and Vasyl Perebyinis) take part.

1932

Assassination of French president Paul Doumer by a mentally unstable

Russian émigré.
Engelbert Dollfuss of the Christian Social/Fatherland Front Party be-
comes chancellor of Austria.
Decree issued “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations”
disbanding all cultural groups in the USSR.
Non-aggression pact between Poland and the USSR.
British Union of Fascists founded by Oswald Mosley.

Austria

Closing of the Wiener Werkstätte.

France

Breton Les Vases communicants.

Céline Voyage au bout de la nuit.
Picasso’s first retrospective exhibition, at the Galerie Georges Petit and
later at the Zürich Kunsthalle.

Germany

The communist film Kuhle Wampe, with a script by Brecht, is released

but widely banned.
Hans Fallada Kleiner Mann, was nun? [Little Man, What Now?].
Roth Radetzkymarsch.

Great Britain

Huxley Brave New World.

Italy

Marinetti and Fillia La Cucina futurista.

xc Chronology

Czechoslovakia

Linie organizes an exhibition of new photography in České Budějovice,

featuring photographs, photomontages, and photograms by twenty art-
ists including Josef Sudek, Adolf Schneeberger, and Josef Šroubek.
Opening of Poesie 1932, an international survey of Surrealism and related
movements in Prague, including works by Arp, Dalí, Giacometti, de
Chirico, Klee, and Miró, alongside Czechoslovakian artists including
Toyen, Štyrský, Wachsman, Hoffmeister, and Hana Wichterlová.

Poland

In Warsaw, the Themersons, inspired by Anatol Stern’s poem “Europa”

(published in 1929), make the photomontage film Europa.

Ukraine

Dovzhenko’s first Ukrainian sound film Ivan, about the building of the
Dnieper Dam.
Petrytsky paints Holod u Nimechchyni [Starvation in Germany].
The review Mystetstvo [Art] is published under the editorship of Pavlo
Kovzhun.

1933

Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP comes to power in Germany. Avant-garde art,

music, and literature are condemned as “cultural Bolshevism”; books
by avant-garde writers are among those burned in public, and pictures
by avant-garde artists are removed from galleries. Many writers and
artists leave Germany and are stripped of their citizenship by the new
regime.
The Great Famine in Ukraine (Holodomor): the estimates of the number
of victims vary from 2.6 to 10 million.
Stalin sends Pavel Postyshev to Ukraine in order to centralize the power
of Moscow.
Mykola Khvylovy, the most prominent Ukrainian Bolshevik leader and
head of the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education, commits suicide in
Kharkiv.
President Franklin Roosevelt ends almost sixteen years of American non-
recognition of the Soviet Union.
 Chronology xci

France

Minotaure (–1939), a lavish, beautifully illustrated literary and artistic

review published by Skira and edited by Tériade. Its adventurous and
eclectic coverage includes contributions by all the major artists of the
avant-garde, especially the Surrealists. The cover of each of its thir-
teen issues is designed by a different artist as a variation on the Mino-
taur theme.
Queneau Le Chiendent.

Great Britain

Seed (–1933), edited by Herbert Jones and Oswell Blakeston, London:

visual poetry, prose poems, and other experiments.
Orwell Down and Out in Paris and London.

Italy

Sironi Il Manifesto della pittura murale (published in La Colonna).

Spain

José Antonio Primo de Rivera founds Falange.

Lorca Bodas de sangre, La casa de Bernarda Alba, Yerma (–1936).

Russia

Chernikov Architectural Fantasies (Leningrad).

Czechoslovakia

Fotolinie, a branch of Linie, is founded, and continues to organize photo-

graphic exhibitions until the late 1930s.
Nezval and Jindřich Honzl establish personal contact with Breton and
other Paris Surrealists, leading to the publication of a letter of 10 May
from Nezval to Breton emphasizing the ideological similarities be-
tween Devětsil and Parisian Surrealism.
The Levá fronta presents Social Photography, an exhibition in Prague and
Brno including the work of French and Russian photographers, as well
as Czechs such as the newly formed Brno Photogroup of Five (f5),
which makes its début there.
The Czechoslovak ballet presents Miroslav Ponc’s Three Movements for
Ballet during the World’s Fair in Chicago, initiating a successful
American tour.
xcii Chronology

Ukraine

The publishing house Rukh closes.

1934

The Austrian government crushes socialist uprising. All political parties

abolished except for the Fatherland Front.
Austrian chancellor Dollfuss assassinated and succeeded by Kurt von
Schuschnigg.
Hitler viciously purges the Nazi party in the “Night of the Long Knives.”
Revolt in the Asturias: Spanish workers set up socialist republic.
Socialist realism ratified as official Soviet style at first All-Union Con-
gress of Soviet Writers.
Sergei Kirov shot to death on 1 December in Leningrad. Andrei Zhdanov
is made secretary of the Leningrad Communist party.
State of Emergency declared in Latvia by Prime Minister Ulmanis, who
suspends the constitution. This effectively ends an era of artistic ex-
perimentation in Latvia.
Non-aggression pact between Poland and Germany.
British Committee for Relations with Other Countries (now the British
Council) founded.
Nestor Makhno dies in Paris.
The capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is moved back
from Kharkiv to Kiev.

Belgium

Exposition Minotaure, an international Surrealist exhibition organized by

Editions Albert Skira at the Palais des Beaux-Arts under the aegis of
the review Minotaure.
Intervention surréaliste: Special issue (no. 34), June 1934 of Documents.

France

An exhibition of Czechoslovak art is held in Paris at the Jeu de Paume.

Ernst Une Semaine de bonté.

Great Britain

Ariel: ballet by Roberto Gerhard, libretto by Foix, décor by Miró.

 Chronology xciii

Italy

Galleria Il Milione (Milan): first exhibition in Italy of the work of Kan-

dinsky and Albers.
Manifesto dell’arte astratta (Fontana, Rho, Soldati, Melotti, Licini Reg-
giani, and Veronesi).

Spain

Issue 179 of D’ací i d’allà, published in Barcelona and devoted to twenti-

eth-century art; cover by Miró.

Russia

Stalin begins purges of the Communist Party.

Shostakovich produces First Jazz Suite when the party allows relative
permissiveness (the official party line was that jazz was a bourgeois
delinquent genre).
Kamerny Theatre and Its Artists, 1914–1934.
Première of Shostakovich Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; popular and critical
success but negative reaction from composers’ union (condemned lat-
er in Pravda, 1936, in an article titled “Muddle instead of Music”).

Czechoslovakia

Founding of the Surrealistická skupina in Prague, with the issuing of a

manifesto, Surrealismus v ČSR, signed by Nezval, the poet Konstantin
Biebl, Bohuslav Brouk, and a number of other poets, composers, and
artists. Teige withdraws because of a rift with Štyrský, but later joins
the group.

Ukraine

Ivan Kavaleridze’s expressionist film Koliivshchyna [The Kolii Rebel-

lion].

1935

Launch of Front Populaire uniting left-wing groups against Fascism.

Anti-Jewish Nuremberg race laws introduced in Germany.
In Poland, April Constitution enacted; death of Józef Klemens Piłsudski.
xciv Chronology

Belgium

Bulletin International du Surrealisme, no. 1 (Brussels). Other issues will

be published, in 1935 and 1936, by local Surrealist groups in Prague,
Tenerife, and London.

France

Jeu de Paume exhibition L’art italien des XIXe et XX siècles includes

works by Boccioni, de Chirico, Casorati, Modigliani, and Sironi.

Germany

Leni Riefenstahl Triumph des Willens [Triumph of the Will]: a documen-

tary film about the Sixth Reich Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1934.
Berlin cabarets “Katakombe” and “Tingeltangel” closed by the Gestapo.
Karl Hubbuch’s painting Aufmarsch II.

Great Britain

Eliot Murder in the Cathedral.

Isherwood Mr. Norris Changes Trains.
London, Reid & Lefevre Gallery: Bonnard exhibition.

Italy

Galleria Il Milione (Milan): Lucio Fontana exhibition.

Scandinavia

Completion of the Viipuri library, designed by Alvar Aalto.

Switzerland

Publication of Wolfgang Langhoff, Die Moorsoldaten, an exposé of life

in Germany’s concentration camps.

Czechoslovakia

The Surrealists hold their first exhibition in Prague, including works by

Štyrský, Toyen, and the sculptor Vincenc Makovský, with an intro-
duction by Nezval and Teige.
Honzl founds the Nové divadlo, where he and Štyrský present Surrealist
productions, including premières of plays by Breton and Louis Ara-
gon.
Breton and Paul Éluard in Prague to meet the Czech Surrealists; Breton’s
Nadia is subsequently published in Nezval’s translation.
 Chronology xcv

Joan Miró in Prague for the International Exhibition I at which twenty-

one of his works are displayed.

Hungary

Constructivist villa designs by Lajos Kozma.

Yugoslavia

Miloje Milojević’s piano composition Ritmičke grimase [Rhythmic Gri-

maces].

1936

Spanish Civil War (–1939).

Berlin Olympics (the winter games also take place in Germany, in the
Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen).
Death of George V; accession of Edward VIII; Edward VIII abdicates and
George VI becomes king.
German troops occupy the Rhineland.

Italy

Pirandello dies.

France

Charles Ratton Gallery’s Exposition surréaliste d’objets.

Bataille Acéphale (–1939).
First performance of Enescu’s opera Oedipe, at the Paris Opéra.

Germany

Cannetti Die Blendung [Auto da Fé].

Klaus Mann Mephisto (published by Querido-Verlag in Amsterdam).

Great Britain

London International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galler-

ies.
Joyce Ulysses, finally published openly in Britain.
Pevsner The Pioneers of the Modern Movement.
Surrealist Group in England Declaration on Spain.
International Surrealist Bulletin, no. 4, published in London.
xcvi Chronology

Spain

Gaceta de arte: special number on Picasso.

First Picasso retrospective in Spain (ADLAN, Barcelona).
Assassination of Lorca in August.

Czechoslovakia

The first and only issue of Surrealismus is published under the editorship
of Nezval.
Štyrský and Toyen take part in an international Surrealist exhibition in
London at the Burlington Arcade.
Jan Mukařovský contributes to the Surrealists’ volume Ani labut ani luna
[Neither Swan Nor Moon] commemorating the centenary of the death
of the Romantic poet and forerunner of Surrealism Karel Hynek
Mácha.

1937

Japan invades China.

National Unity Camp formed in Poland.
German dirigible Hindenburg burns.
Destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by the German Condor Le-
gion.
The Great Terror in the Soviet Union.

France

Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie Mod-

erne: Picasso's Guernica exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion.
Les maîtres de l’art indépendant, 1895–1937 at the Petit Palais.
Breton L'amour fou.
Jean-Louis Barrault produces Cervantes’ Numances (designs by André
Masson).

Germany

Entartete Kunst [Degenerate Art] exhibition held in Munich, showcasing

avant-garde art considered degenerate by the Nazis.
Première of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in Frankfurt am Main; the work
is strongly condemned by the leading Nazi critic Herbert Gerigk.
 Chronology xcvii

Great Britain

Axis, a quarterly review of contemporary abstract painting and sculpture,

edited by Myfanwy Evans, London.

Switzerland

Berg’s unfinished opera Lulu premièred in Zürich (acts 1 and 2).

Czechoslovakia

Opening of E. F. Burian’s exhibition of the Czechoslovak avant-garde in

Prague, combining works by the Devětsil generation with those of
young artists who had exhibited at Burian’s D37 theatre and later
formed the basis of Skupina 42.
Zdeněk Pešánek’s kinetic and light sculptures are shown in the Czecho-
slovak pavilion of the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
Nezval publishes his poem Absolutní hrobař [The Absolute Gravedig-
ger].
Štyrský and Toyen participate in the Tokyo Surrealist exhibition.

Hungary

Kassák has jubilee concert for his fiftieth birthday at the Music Academy.

Ukraine

Mykhail Semenko reads his satirical poem “Nimechchyna” [Germany]

months before his arrest and execution by the NKVD.
The theatrical avant-gardist Les Kurbas is executed in the Solovki con-
centration camp.
The artist Mykhailo Boichuk and his wife Sofia Nalepinska-Boichuk are
executed.

1938–1950

1938 Germany annexes Austria and occupies the Sudetenland; House Un-
American Activities Committee formed.
1939 World War II begins as Germany invades Poland; New York
World’s Fair; Brecht Galileo; Eliot The Family Reunion; Joyce Finne-
gans Wake.
1940 Germany conquers most of Western Europe.
1941 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and the United States enters the war;
Brecht The Good Woman of Sezuan and Mother Courage.
xcviii Chronology

1942 Fermi splits the atom; Camus The Stranger.

1943 Allied invasion of Italy; Sartre The Flies.
1944 D-Day and the Allied invasion of Europe; Camus Caligula.
1945 Roosevelt dies and Truman becomes president of the United States;
Germany capitulates; the U.S. drops atomic bombs on Japan; World
War II ends; Sartre No Exit.
1946 United Nations founded; Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech marks
the start of the Cold War.
1947 India granted independence; India and Pakistan partitoned into sep-
arate states; Dead Sea Scrolls discovered; transistor invented; CIA
formed; Genêt The Maids; Camus The Plague.
1948 Gandhi assassinated; Israel founded; Berlin airlift; Brecht The Cau-
casian Chalk Circle; Pound Pisan Cantos.
1949 Apartheid instituted in South Africa; Communist revolution in Chi-
na; NATO Treaty signed; Berliner Ensemble founded by Brecht; Ge-
nêt Deathwatch; Beckett Waiting for Godot; Orwell 1984.
1950 Korean War begins (–1953); George Bernard Shaw dies; Ionesco
The Bald Soprano; Eliot The Cocktail Party.
 Introduction
Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical,
Intellectual, and Cultural Context

Bert Cardullo

Surprisingly, no one has ever written a history of genuinely avant-garde

drama, chronologically surveyed and isolated from twentieth-century devel-
opments in conventional, veristic forms. For this reason, Modern(ist) drama
is still persistently viewed as moving from the Realistic (yet formally Neo-
classical) Ibsen and the Naturalistic Strindberg to the socially, politically, and
psychologically oriented “problem plays” of the twentieth and twenty-first
century, fed occasionally by assorted “techniques” from aberrant avant-garde
movements. (See, for example, Tennessee Williams’s homage to Expression-
ism in his production notes to the otherwise Romantically Realistic, even
Impressionistic Glass Menagerie [1944].)
It is time, in fact late, to bring the major innovative tradition of twentieth-
century theatre into central focus, which I shall attempt to do here. The
problem in doing so, however, has been that the plays and documents of the
tradition are hard to find. The writings of some of its major figures are
scattered in out-of-print translations or have not been translated at all, and
there are few comprehensive collections in English—or any other language,
for that matter—that give adequate recognition to the place as well as the
importance of the avant-garde in the development of a distinctive, freestand-
ing theatrical sensibility and vocabulary. Such an anthology would illuminate
not only a single national tradition or movement (such as Michael Benedikt
and George Wellwarth’s fine anthologies of French, German, and Spanish
avant-garde plays or Walter Sokel’s important collection of Expressionist
drama), nor even one style or posture that cuts across national boundaries

1
2 Introduction

(such as “Absurd” or “Protest”), but instead the astonishing variety and dar-
ing of the writers in all Western countries and theatrical movements who
since before the turn of the century have wrenched dramatic art out of every
one of its habits, including its more fundamental ones. Represented should be
such movements as French and Russian Symbolism, Italian Futurism, Ger-
man Expressionism, and Dada-Surrealism, as well as seminal figures like
Jarry, Strindberg, and Artaud along with such a Gesamtkünstler as Kandin-
sky.
Beyond accounting historically for this new drama, the lumping together
of such disparate yet fundamentally similar pioneers could suggest, I think,
intellectual and aesthetic contexts for theatre and drama even broader than
those that have already been proposed by critics and historians in explaining
the avant-garde revolution. What would become apparent in the assemblage
of these writers in a single volume is, for example, that the new movements
were fed as much by the other arts as they were provoked by conventional
drama itself. Poets, painters, musical composers, circus performers, archi-
tects, choreographers, photographers, cartoonists, sculptors—any but profes-
sional or commercial filmmakers—were the models and sources for the radi-
cal shift in the aesthetics of theatre and drama.
To speak only of the movies, their presence was continually felt through-
out the vigorous theatrical experimentation of the 1920s. On the one hand,
the theatre was seeking a new area of activity that the cinema—potentially,
the most literally representational or documentally “real” of the arts—could
not usurp; on the other hand, the theatre frequently tried to explore ways of
imitating and incorporating the fantastic or visionary capability of film form.
Throughout Europe, the dramatic avant-garde repeatedly expressed admira-
tion for film’s dreamlike fluidity, its power to convey interior states of mind,
as well as for its possibilities as a truly proletarian and anti-bourgeois art.
Particularly in France, the Surrealist theatrical experiments of such writers as
André Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, and Antonin Artaud
were perhaps better suited to the screen than to the stage, assaulting as they
did the theatre’s traditional objectivity or exteriority and its bondage to con-
tinuous time and space. And a number of Surrealists did indeed move from
the theatre to the cinema, most notably Jean Cocteau.
In Germany, film was one element among many of the influences that led
to the development of dramatic Expressionism (or vice versa), as German
cinema and theatre freely borrowed from each other during the twenties. The
debt to the stage, as well as to painting, of such pictures as The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari (1920) has often been noted, and, to cite only one example, the
characteristic roving spotlight of the Expressionist stage was an obvious
attempt to control audience attention in the manner of a movie director. The
attempts of the Bauhaus group to create a non-representational, manifestly
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 3

manufactured “total theatre” themselves involved the incorporation of film

into the ultimate theatrical experience, as did the production experiments of
Marinetti’s “Futurist Variety Theatre” in Italy.
The drama’s shift to so simultaneously mechanical, democratic, and po-
tentially subjective a model as the cinema is intimately connected, of course,
to the concepts of modernity and Modernism. “Modernity” refers to the
network of large-scale social, economic, technological, and philosophical
changes wrought by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. “Mod-
ernism,” for its part, is usually used to denote that period of dramatic innova-
tion in all the arts, from around the end of the nineteenth century (with
Symbolism and Aestheticism but going as far back as the Romantic move-
ment) up to the Second World War and its immediate aftermath (with Ab-
surdism), when the sense of a fundamental break with inherited modes of
representation and expression became acute. Modernism employs a distinc-
tive kind of imagination, one that insists on having its general frame of
reference reside only within itself; the Modernist mind accordingly believes
that we create the world in the act of perceiving it. Such a view is basically
anti-intellectual, celebrating passion and will over deliberative and systemat-
ic morality.
Most important, Modernism implies an historical discontinuity, a social
disruption, a moral chaos, a sense of fragmentation and alienation, of loss
and despair—hence of retreat inside one’s inner being or private conscious-
ness. This movement rejects not only history, however, but also the society
of whose fabrication history is a record. Modernism repudiates traditional
values and assumptions, then, in addition to dismissing equally the rhetoric
by which they were once communicated; and in the process it elevates the
individual over the group, the interior life of a human being over his commu-
nal existence. In many respects a reaction against Realism and Naturalism
and the scientific postulates on which they rest, Modernism has appositely
been marked by persistent, multidimensional experiments in subject matter,
form, and language. Literary excursions of a Modernist kind revel in a dense,
often free-form actuality as opposed to a practical, regimented one, and they
have been conducted by poets and novelists as vital yet varied as T. S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia
Woolf, William Faulkner, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, James Joyce, Marcel
Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Thomas Mann.
Modernist or avant-garde, as opposed to modern, drama is similarly asso-
ciated, above all, with a pervasive, formal self-consciousness and inventive-
ness. The avant-garde thus becomes that element in the exercise of the imagi-
nation we call art which finds itself unwilling (unable really) to reiterate or
refine what has already been created. Many, though, would also identify in
the avant-garde not merely a tendency to retreat from the maddening disorder
of the world for the purpose of creating, through art, an alternative, visionary,
4 Introduction

eternal order but also a tendency to absorb the world’s chaos into the work of
art itself. (The first tendency holds true for most writers of Modernist fiction
and verse, as it does for Yeats the Symbolist playwright. The majority of
avant-garde dramatists, however, belong either in the second category—like
Luigi Pirandello, the Humorist of the Grotesque—or in both categories si-
multaneously, like the Pataphysician Alfred Jarry.)
Many would additionally identify in the avant-garde a thematic preoccu-
pation with the modern city and its technologies—with the exhilaration of
speed, energy, and rapid development, as in the case of the Italian Futurists—
as well as with the urban potential for physical, social, and emotional dislo-
cation. Renato Poggioli (1968) has described this avant-garde as a culture of
negation and its commitment to ceaseless, radical critique—not only of the
(bourgeois) art that went before it, but also, in many instances, of the socio-
political institutions and instruments of industrial-technological practice or
power—may indeed be seen as a prime instance of the Modernist emphasis
on the creation of the new.
In a rhetorical gesture utterly typical of the avant-garde, however, the
Surrealist poet-cum-playwright Robert Desnos lambasted the very notion of
the “avant-garde,” associated as it was for him with the Impressionists and
the Aestheticism of Cocteau. The dynamic of “negation,” then, is not re-
stricted to a criticism of mass culture by everything outside it but operates
within the field of avant-garde practice as well. Nothing is more characteris-
tic of the avant-garde than disputes within its ranks about which subgroup is
most deserving of the epithet. On the surface, the avant-garde as a whole may
seem united in terms of what it is against: accepted social institutions and
established artistic conventions, or the tastes and values of the “general pub-
lic” as that represents the existing order. Yet any positive program tends to be
claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic
groupings. So Modernist art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as
much by manifestos as by creative work, and representing the amorphous
complexity of post-industrial society in a multiplicity of dynamic but un-
stable movements focused on philosophical abstractions. Hence the use of
“isms” to describe them: Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism,
Surrealism, and the like.
All these modernist “isms” nevertheless react against the same common
enemy: the modern drama of Realism and Naturalism, that is, the social-
problem play as fathered by Henrik Ibsen, if not pioneered earlier by Frie-
drich Hebbel. Such Realistic and Naturalistic drama was based on the con-
ventional, long-lived triad of psychology or motivation, causality or connec-
tion, and morality or providential design, but these problem plays banished
theology as well as autocracy from their triadic paradigm of human action, in
this way deepening the dramatic role played by psychology, sociology, and
linearity or linkage. That is, in modern drama, the patriarchal relationship
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 5

between God and the individual soul has been replaced by the adversarial
relationship between man and his own psychology, his will to comprehend
himself, even as the patriarchal relationship between ruler and subject has
been replaced by the adversarial relationship between man and society, in the
form of society’s drive to marginalize all those that it cannot or will not
homogenize. Thus the fundamental subject of almost all serious plays of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in other words, of almost all of modern
as well as Modernist drama—becomes the attempt to resurrect fundamental
ethical or philosophical certainties without resurrecting the fundamental spir-
itual certainty of a judgmental God or the fundamental political certainty of a
mindful monarch.
Modernist or avant-garde drama, however, took modern drama a step
farther, by demonstrating that a play’s movement could be governed by
something completely outside the triad that links motive to act, act to logical
sequence of events, and logical outcome to divine or regal judgment. In
Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play Pelléas and Mélisande (1892), for
instance, the characters are led to the slaughter like sheep but for reasons that
are never clear, either to them or to the audience. There is sequence but no
causality—that is, one event follows another but is not caused by it. Even an
otherwise representational work like Chekhov’s Ivanov (1887) can intimate
the avant-garde by breaking down the connection between the psychology of
its central character and the causal pattern of his drama. There is a causal
sequence leading to Ivanov’s marital infidelity and suicide, but there is no
sustained motive on his part—which is to say, one event is caused by an-
other, but irrespective of this otherwise intelligent man’s clear intent or wish.
For the avant-garde, beginning in the late nineteenth century with Jarry, if
not earlier with such German visionaries as Ludwig Tieck, Georg Büchner,
Christian Dietrich Grabbe, and Heinrich von Kleist, the nature of reality
itself becomes the prime subject of plays because of a loss of confidence in
the assumed model for dramatizing human behavior and thinking about hu-
man existence: in other words, the representation of the illusion of reality on
stage becomes the demonstration of the reality of the illusion-making capac-
ity, illusion-projecting essence, or illusion-dwelling tendency of the human
mind. Through the introduction of total subjectivity into drama—that mirror
of a supposedly external reality—the Symbolists in particular imagined a
new theatrical model, polyphonic in form and irreducible to rational analysis
or univocal interpretation, thereby opening the way for the subsequent avant-
garde movements that dominated the stage in the twentieth century.
The world, which the Realists and (to a lesser extent) the Naturalists had
claimed could be fully known and accurately depicted, was revealed by the
Symbolists to be pure illusion—a veil of fleeting appearances behind which
were hidden deeper truths. It was what lay buried within the psyche and
concealed behind the mirror that this radical new poetics of the drama pro-
6 Introduction

posed to explore. Problems or issues of perception and epistemology thus

subverted prior certainties, as the arena of artistic representation moved from
outside the human consciousness to within it. And the drama that emerged
from such an aesthetic was paradoxically more sacred—or sacrilegious—
than secular, thus returning theatre to its ritualistic origins. For its themes and
techniques, Symbolist performance happened to be drawn, as was Nietzs-
che’s own Birth of Tragedy (1872), to church ritual, pagan rites, folklore,
fairy tales, popular superstition, and communal practices—in other words, to
“primitive” times before the advent of Realism. The locus of this visionary
art was not the here-and-now of daily life (as it was for the Realists), not
what can be seen and experienced during normal waking hours; rather, that
locus was man’s eternal bond to the unknown, to the mystery in man himself
and in the universe, as he journeys over the primordial abyss toward ultimate
extinction.
In striving to put onstage what common sense declared to be non-dramat-
ic and undramatizable, the Symbolists liberated playwriting from mechanis-
tic notions of chronological time and Euclidian space; they enlarged the
frame of drama to include worlds and beings other than those inhabiting the
bourgeois theatre—which, to more than one of its foremost practitioners
(among them Augustin Scribe, Émile Augier, and Alexandre Dumas fils),
need be no more than the echo of society’s whispers. Moreover, despite
much adverse criticism, the Symbolists held firm in their conception of the
acting appropriate to the production of their plays, for they felt it necessary to
divert attention from external Realism or representationalism to the mysteri-
ous inner as well as outer forces that control human destiny. A natural exten-
sion of this interest led the Symbolists to explore the possibilities of puppet
theatre, which until then had been associated primarily with crude, popular
entertainment. Edward Gordon Craig’s vision of the ideal actor as an
Übermarionette (itself influenced by Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the
Marionette Theatre” [1808]) was paralleled by Maeterlinck’s belief that pup-
pets would be the most suitable performers for his early plays, and by Auréli-
en Lugné-Poë’s original intention of founding his Théâtre de l’Oeuvre as a
puppet stage.
Indeed, marionette theatre presents a natural Symbolist aspect. Because
marionettes are abstractions of the human form, individual experience does
not obtrude on our perception of them, as it inevitably does with a human
performer when the actor’s personality comes into play; and our perception
or apprehension reaches full expression only subjectively, in our minds as
spectators, not objectively, on the stage. Symbolist designers took their own
cue from the puppet theatre, and as a result of their subtly atmospheric or
evocative efforts, theatre artists became aware of the illogicality of too much
literalism in the procedure of a medium that is essentially make-believe. The
future, ideal stage of the Symbolists would thus be multiple, fluid, and poly-
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 7

valent: a point of departure for imaginary voyages into uncharted regions.

For such drama there were no fixed forms, prescribed rules, or conventional
models to follow. Disdainfully rejecting the theatre of commerce with all its
practicalities, Symbolist poets wrote their plays for no existing audience or
playhouse, their works sometimes remaining unperformed for many years.
Nonetheless, Symbolism in the theatre—as well as in poetry and paint-
ing—was a truly international movement and spread not only throughout
Europe but also to North and South America and parts of Asia. Only when
the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre closed its door in 1899 did Symbolism begin in
Poland and particularly in Russia, where, in addition to Valery Briusov, the
movement included Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Bely, and Leonid Andreyev
among its dramatists. Likewise, in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Roma-
nia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and India, Symbolist theatre enjoyed a sec-
ond life after having been declared dead in Paris. Furthermore, rather than
deriving from a reactionary, escapist tendency (as has often been depicted),
Symbolist drama in Eastern Europe, Ireland, and India was a progressive or
liberating force, awakening a consciousness of national and cultural identity,
opposing all forms of repression, and protesting against the drabness of regi-
mented modern life.
Symbolism, then, battled against all restrictions and limitations, including
those that isolated theatre from the allied arts of painting, poetry, and music.
Taking its cues from Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, on the one hand, and Mal-
larmé’s “theatre of the mind,” on the other, Symbolism aspired to be a total
spectacle encompassing all of life. From our remove of more than one hun-
dred years, such an assault on the objectivity of the dramatic form seems an
essential first step—perhaps none has been as important—in the series of
Modernist (and Postmodernist) revolutions that have transformed the art of
theatre from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day.
Each of the revolutionary movements and coalitions had its distinctive
character. They were shaped by forces as varied as F. T. Marinetti’s artistic
expansionism, which sought to colonize all Modernist manifestations and
individual creators for the Futurist empire (which, hardly by accident, labeled
war the supreme, health-bestowing activity), the libertarian individualism of
Tristan Tzara’s Dada, or André Breton’s zealous defense of Surrealist purity.
Both within and outside these movements, however, the specific genius of
individual avant-garde writers and artists flourished, the distinctive trace left
by such individuals serving to remind us that historical categories and group-
ings are often suspect, reductive, or artificial. As we shall see, between
Marinetti’s machine-age bombastics and Kandinsky’s abstract spirituality,
there is a world of difference.
Wassily Kandinsky, for his part, attempted to disrupt the concept of tradi-
tional theatre as a reproductive or representational mechanism by advocating
a synthetic, spiritualized art that would redirect man inside himself and re-
8 Introduction

veal the depths and heights of the human soul. Kandinsky believed he could
synthesize music, dance, poetry, and painting into one monumental, self-
contained, and self-defined art form, or rather art-temple. Futurist synthetic
theatre, by contrast, rejected such an inward-looking art. For the Futurists,
literature, painting, sculpture, theatre, music, dance, morals, and politics
should all be inspired by the scientific and technological discoveries that had
changed man’s physical environment, and that should correspondingly
change human perceptions. Man should, in fact, become like a machine,
abandoning the weaknesses and sentimentalities of the past. Influenced as
they were by the superman of Nietzsche and of D’Annunzio, the Futurists
wrote of their own god-like being, who was aggressive, tireless, courageous,
inhuman, and mechanical. Early heroes of theirs, accordingly, were those
who had direct contact with machines: racecar drivers, pilots, journalists,
telegraph operators, and the like. Later heroes represented a fusion of man
and machine, assured of immortality because his, or its, parts were inter-
changeable.
The Futurists’ theories naturally centered on the industrial age, with its
machines and electricity, its urbanizations, and the revolution in the means of
transport and communication. Futurists welcomed the products of industrial
society with an all-embracing optimism, for they saw them as the means by
which man would dominate his environment and be able to extend his
knowledge infinitely. The speed and change of the industrial age were also
fundamental to the Futurists’ love of the modern and their rejection of the
static, lethargic past. The effects of the speed of transport and communication
on modern sensibility were such that man was now aware not just of his
immediate surroundings, but of the whole world as well. He was able to
overcome the limits of time and space, and to live through events both near
and far—in fact, to be everywhere at the same time. Simultaneità (simultan-
eity) was the word used by the Futurists to describe these extensions of
perception. In their works, different times, places, and sounds, both real and
imagined, are juxtaposed in an attempt to convey this new concept to the
public.
The Futurist embrace of simultaneity was accompanied by a desire for
synthesis. The Futurists held that the speed of modern life called for a corre-
sponding speed of communication in contemporary art, which was there-
fore—unlike the conventional or antiquated theatre—to convey the essence
of an emotion or a situation without resorting to lengthy explanation or
description. The sintesi teatrali (theatrical syntheses), then, were works of
extreme brevity and concentration, in which the traditional three-act play was
replaced by attimi (moments) intended to capture the essence and atmosphere
of an event or a feeling as it occurred. Movement, gesture, sound, and light
became as important as the written word, and in some cases came to replace
words altogether. This reduction to what the Futurists regarded as the essen-
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 9

tial part of the action was intended to create an immediate and dynamic
contact with the public, so that the audience would respond intuitively to a
theatre that was now synthetic, hyper-technological, dynamic, simultaneous,
alogical, discontinuous, autonomous, anti-literary, and unreal.
F. T. Marinetti was determined from the outset to bring his movement to
the attention of the greatest possible number of people. In common with
many other innovators in the arts of the time, he believed that art and litera-
ture could have a determining influence on society, and he described Futur-
ism as the new formula of artistic action. The artist therefore became the
leader and promoter of new ideas, and the forger of links between art and
action, art and society. The desire for ceaseless activity, the advocacy of
bravery and heroism, and the insistence on aggression, accordingly, led the
Futurists to go beyond mere theorizing. They involved themselves in a great
deal of direct action, including their serate, or evenings, which usually con-
sisted of readings from Futurist works of literature and which often ended in
brawls. The serate doubtless gave the Futurists some general experience of
the theatre, whose importance for his movement Marinetti recognized, as he
did that of the spettacolo (performance) in particular.
Futurist performances became an ideal means of direct communication
with the public, the expectation being that audience members would react
directly and physically to what they saw and heard. Deliberate provocation of
the audience, partly for the sake of being aggressive, partly in order to break
down the barriers between audience and actors, became one of the most
important techniques of Futurist theatre and strongly influenced the staging
of its plays. The Futurists thus realized the polemical importance of certain
theatrical techniques early on, and in this sense Italian Futurist theatre repre-
sents nothing less than the birth of the twentieth-century avant-garde. In its
violent rhetoric and actions, in its blatant self-promotion and willful disre-
spect for the sacred cows of the (written) intellectual tradition, as well as in
its all-embracing (if prototypically Fascist) ideology, Futurism was the mod-
el or stereotype for all the “isms” to come.
Itself influenced by the Futurist synthetic theatre, Dada had been founded
in 1916 by a group of expatriate artists in Zürich, but as practitioners adopted
the banner in Berlin, Cologne, and New York, the movement became an
international one. Tristan Tzara, the Romanian poet who became the leader
of the movement, moved to Paris, the major center for Dada, as it was later
for Surrealism. “Dada” itself is a nonsense word, and as such is a clue to the
nature of the movement, which was anarchic, violently anti-traditional, and
vociferously anti-bourgeois—at least in its rhetoric. Many of the Dada artists
had been involved in the First World War, and the Dada movement has been
understood as a reaction of disgust toward a society that could sustain such a
10 Introduction

barbaric conflict. If the war was the end-product of a society supposedly built
on the principles of rationality espoused by Enlightenment philosophers, then
the means of protest against this society would have to be irrational.
As conscientious objectors in neutral Switzerland (the fount of the move-
ment), moreover, Dadaists were expected to desist from overt political
protest; Switzerland prohibited citizens or visitors from taking a strong vocal
stance on political occurrences beyond its borders, for fear that the country’s
neutrality might be compromised. The impulses of frustration and counterag-
gression felt by the Dadaists had to manifest themselves in some way, yet if
life had so little meaning for a world that was organizing and sanctioning its
own destruction, how could art matter? Hence the anti-sensical anarchy of
Dada art, whose pacifist authors wanted, not to escape from current events
through fantasy, but rather to reflect the chaos of their present so as to make
the public cry with laughter. Dada, in fact, struck out against all “isms”—
previous artistic movements that had, in effect, exhaustively and systemati-
cally emphasized the timeless and universal aspects of art without ever truly
living in their own particular moment.
This is the context in which Marcel Duchamp began to exhibit his “ready-
mades”—ordinary objects like bicycle wheels and the urinal he named
“Fountain,” signed “R. Mutt,” and presented as a sculpture. In doing so,
Duchamp offended against not only the assumption that art involves creative
effort but also the assumption that only certain things are appropriate subject
matter for art, which by definition would not include utterly utilitarian ob-
jects. Indeed, the Dadaists maintained that the artistic act, rather than the
product, was first and foremost Dada; the tangible yield developing from the
imaginative act (the painting, poem, sculpture, or dramatic text) was merely a
by-product of the real art. But best of all for the anti-materialist Dada artists,
the Dadaist use of language was not easily merchandized. In the performance
of a poem or a play, the Dadaists kept custody of their work, letting only the
experience of the language and its effects on the listener stand as proof of its
existence. Dadaists thereby succeeded not only in creating a presence in
society for the artist-as-performer (as opposed to the actor-as-character) but
also in keeping art out of the commodifying hands of bourgeois marketers,
principally because the art itself was a matter of hearsay to those not fortu-
nate enough to be present for the poetry reading or theatrical event. Dada
thus sought to radically short-circuit the means by which artistic objects
acquire financial, social, and spiritual value; in this manner, the movement
fulfilled one definition of the avant-garde, which is an attack on the founda-
tions of artistic institutions themselves.
And attack the avant-garde did, for the term “avant-garde” is, after all,
military in origin—however synonymous with “esoteric” or “incomprehen-
sible” it may now be—referring to the “advance party” that scouts the terrain
up ahead of the principal army. The expression was first used militarily
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 11

around 1794, to designate the elite shock troops of the French army, whose
mission was to engage the enemy first so as to prepare the way for the main
body of soldiers to follow. The expression was first used metaphorically
beginning around 1830, by members of French revolutionary political move-
ments who spoke of themselves as being in the “vanguard.” Used as early as
1825, in fact, by the utopian socialist writer Olinde Rodrigues and later by
Charles Fourier’s disciple Gabriel Laverdant, the term “avant-garde” was
applied to the “men of vision” of the coming society—statesmen, philoso-
phers, scientists, and businessmen—whose actions would direct the future
development of humanity. It was only during the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century, however, that the metaphor was transferred wholesale from
politics to literary and artistic activities. Mainly attached to them ever since,
the aesthetic metaphor has been used to identify successive movements of
writers and artists who, within the larger cultural framework of Modernism,
generated a vital tradition of formal innovation or experimentation and socio-
political radicalism.
Mikhail Bakunin, for example, titled the short-lived anarchist journal he
published in Switzerland in 1878 L’Avant-Garde, and his aim in revolution-
izing aesthetics was to pave the way for social revolution. More than fifty
years earlier, however, Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon had proclaimed in
L’Artiste, le savant et l’industriel that

it is we artists who will serve as your avant-garde; the power of the arts is
indeed the most immediate and the most rapid. We have weapons of all
kinds. . . . We address ourselves to the imagination and to the feelings of man;
and we must always take the swiftest and the most decisive action. . . . There is
no more beautiful destiny for artists than to exert a powerful influence on
society—this is our true calling—and to thrust ourselves into the fray with all
our intellectual faculties, at the peak of their development. (210–211, 216; my
translation)

To Saint-Simon, the avant-garde artist was a soldier-priest in the service of

progress, and Saint-Simon’s multivolume Oeuvres, published between 1868
and 1878, promulgated this belief with a vengeance. Hence, toward the end
of the nineteenth century, certainly, the use of the term “avant-garde” had
been extended to encompass the idea of social renewal through cultural chal-
lenge rather than by means of overtly political activity.
The avant-garde mentality, in its most rabid form, thus belongs to the past
hundred years or so. But if we look at the matter in the context of French
literary history, it is possible to suggest that we are not dealing with an
absolutely new and separate phenomenon; it is, rather, the latest effect of a
long and extremely complicated process, which is, of course, the general
changeover from the static or cyclical view of human existence to the evolu-
tionary view. And evolutionism is, fundamentally, a scientific concept.
12 Introduction

Therefore, if my suggestion is correct, the term “avant-garde” is not simply a

military metaphor, used first in politics and then transferred to literature and
art; it is basically connected with science and with what is sometimes called
the scientific revolution: the replacement of the medieval belief in a finished
universe by the modern, scientific view of a universe evolving in time. The
scientific view affected political and social thinking long before it penetrated
into literature proper and the fine arts, and that is the real reason the metaphor
was political first and literary or artistic afterward.
In France, the first real signs of the modern evolutionary view occur in the
seventeenth century, at the time of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns.
(This quarrel was fought from either an essentially conservative position—
the championing of the ancient Greeks and Romans, codification of aesthetic
rules, insistence on decorum and the purity of traditional literary genres,
subordination of art to moral or social concerns—or a liberal one—the cham-
pioning of the moderns, pragmatic and flexible treatment of all classical
precepts, the perception of art as an end in itself.) But the beginnings of the
development can naturally be traced back to the Renaissance—to Coperni-
cus, Machiavelli, and Montaigne—and, beyond the Renaissance, to ancient
Greece, where most ideas existed at least in embryo.
In seventeenth-century France, the first pale dawn of the scientific view
seems to have had little or no effect on the aesthetic attitudes of creative
artists, or in any case on those attitudes that were part of these artists’ con-
scious makeup. The extraordinary flowering of French Neoclassical litera-
ture that was contemporaneous with the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns
owed almost nothing to it. Even those famous French thinkers of the earlier
part of the grand siècle, Descartes and Pascal (like their contemporary Gali-
leo), were not looking toward the future in the modern manner. It is true that,
as they made their mathematical and scientific discoveries and tried to put
their conflicting ideas in order, they made a number of explosive statements.
But we have no reason to believe that they themselves knew just how radical-
ly new their thinking was.
In the eighteenth century, however, a dramatic change took place that has
often been commented upon. Although scientific evolutionism was not yet
fully established, the major thinkers of the French Enlightenment foresaw, or
at least sensed, its implications. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rous-
seau, all of whom had some knowledge of science, were in a sense sociolo-
gists, trying to understand human life both as a dynamic process in time and
as a secular process that cannot be accounted for in religious terms, more
especially not in the light of Christian revelation. These philosophes were
thus brought into conflict with orthodox Christian theology, which is based
on the belief in a static relationship between human beings inside time and
God outside time. The great controversy, then, between science and relig-
ion—which was not to occur in England until the middle of the nineteenth
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 13

century, with Darwin’s formulation of evolutionary theory—had, for all in-

tents and purposes, run its course in France by the end of the eighteenth
century.
This historical situation is the fundamental reason why the conditions
favoring the development of the avant-garde mentality were present earlier in
France than anywhere else. In France, by the end of the eighteenth century,
the modern evolutionary and secular view of the world had pervaded the
consciousness of at least the intellectual elite. The situation that Nietzsche
would express so dramatically in the nineteenth century with the phrase
“God is dead” already existed before 1789. In fact, most of the great nine-
teenth-century themes are already present in the French Enlightenment: we
can find intimations of Hegel and Marx in Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rous-
seau; of Darwin and Freud in Diderot; of Freud and Sacher-Masoch in Rous-
seau; and of Freud, Sacher-Masoch, and Nietzsche in the Marquis de Sade.
We might even say that the Marquis de Sade (himself an anti-sentimental,
even irrationalist dramatist in such works as Oxtiern, ou Les Malheurs du
libertinage [1791]) was the first great modern figure to go mad over the
death of God, and that this is why he has been revived with such fervor over
the past 180 years or so as the darling of successive avant-gardes.
In other words, the intellectual watershed, as I see it, is the Enlighten-
ment. In the two to three centuries since, many sincere, ingenious, and elab-
orate attempts have been made to effect a compromise between the modern
scientific view of the universe and the old Christian view, and the French
themselves, from August Comte and Hippolyte Taine to Henri Bergson and
Simone Weil, have been particularly active in this effort. But it seems obvi-
ous that no reconciliation has been brought about. The two different ways of
looking at matters exist side by side, and the extremely tangled aesthetic
history—not to speak of the social and political history—of the last 250 years
can be seen in terms of the tensions between these attitudes and the growing
predominance of the scientific worldview, which is often apprehended more
emotionally by non-scientists than by scientists.
A crucial contribution of the Enlightenment was the concept of history as
the continuously unfolding tale of human life on earth, seen, of course,
against the backdrop of a much greater time scale—the evolutionary devel-
opment of the universe. This view presents human life as a process in time,
which we can illuminate to some extent as we look back, or speculate about
as we look forward, but which bears no definable relation to anything that
might exist outside time—that is, to eternity or God. This is what is meant by
“the death of God,” and the implication is not simply that there is no personal
entity behind the universe to provide us with a moral law but also that human
life can be given a meaning, if it has any at all, only within the flux of
14 Introduction

history. And, if I may be allowed my largest generalization yet, the increas-

ing prevalence of avant-garde attitudes reflects the growing effect of this
perception that we live solely in time and have to find our values in time.
Avant-garde artists and thinkers sense the problem of finding values in
flux, and they are trying—often perhaps neurotically—to adapt to what they
see as the movement of history by anticipating the crest of the next wave (la
nouvelle vague); alternately, they may be trying to escape from the dilemma
of perceptual movement by finding some substitute for eternity—that is,
some God-substitute. Quite often they are trying to achieve both ends at
once, and that is why so many avant-gardes have both a progressive and a
non-progressive aspect. Insofar as they are non-progressive, the expression
“avant-garde” is a misnomer, because the movement is not forward but to the
side, or even backward in time to pre-Enlightenment attitudes. It occasionally
happens, for instance, that an avant-garde artist (like the Expressionist Rein-
hard Sorge or the Symbolist Paul Claudel) is consciously reconverted to or
reconfirmed in Christianity, and usually to old-fashioned Catholicism, be-
cause it offers the best escape from the cycle of change. Indeed, the greatest
rhetorical coup of the twentieth century, after Lenin’s use of the term
“Bolsheviks” (Majority) for a minority with the Russian Social Democratic
Party, was the adoption of the term “Modernists” or “Avant-gardists” for
such reactionary artists, who despised practically every aspect of modern
society, from urbane life and universal suffrage to the decline of revealed
religion.
I might add here, incidentally, that the avant-garde syndrome is much less
noticeable in scientists than it is in artists and intellectuals. Although it is
ultimately a result of science, it does not seem to affect the scientist qua
scientist. I suppose this is because, as I posited earlier, he is in the happy
position of not being concerned in his work with human emotional values at
all and can therefore take an optimistic view of time. He carries the past
within him in the form of an agreed-upon, accumulated knowledge, and he
can look forward to the future as a continuously deeper or more extensive
reading of the book of nature on the level of verifiable fact. Scientific truth is,
in itself, an escape from time because it is cumulative and because the effec-
tiveness of any part of it can be demonstrated at any moment.
The artist and the thinker, by contrast, are concerned respectively with
works of art and intellectual theories, about which there is by no means the
same degree of cumulative agreement, and they cannot collaborate with one
another in the production of an impersonal truth in the way that scientists
can. When George Bernard Shaw famously said that he stood on the shoul-
ders of Shakespeare, he was deluding himself with a false analogy between
science and art. Antoine Lavoisier stood on the shoulders of Joseph Priestly
and Einstein on those of Newton, but artists and intellectuals cannot build a
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 15

progressive monument in this way. They are almost totally involved, or

caught up, in flux, and their situation has become steadily more critical in
this respect since the eighteenth century.
Nonetheless, during the first phase of the Enlightenment (which contin-
ued well into the nineteenth century), considerable optimism prevailed about
the possibility of arriving at the permanent truth concerning human nature; it
was thought that, in the search for such truth, art might be used as an instru-
ment. The French philosophes had looked back over history, had seen it as a
record of success or failure (but mostly failure), and had assumed that, over
time, they and other thinkers would evoke a concept of man that would allow
them to correct the course of history. If history was such a record of crime
and injustice, this was because it had not played out in accordance with the
true nature of human beings. Once humans had been defined as a natural
phenomenon like other phenomena, without all the mythical accretions of the
past, society would right itself, and the generations of the future would find
themselves in a social context that would allow the full, harmonious expres-
sion of their inherent possibilities.
We come now to what I believe is the crux of the matter: in recent times
the Enlightenment hope of ameliorating the definition of human nature has
come to seem more and more illusory, at least to a great many important
thinkers and artists. When the philosophes assumed that it would be possible
to define the nature of humans and create the perfect society, they imagined
they were looking toward the future, but in fact they were falling back onto a
static conception. The accumulation of knowledge has shown not only that
humans are part of the evolutionary process but that, as the only animal with
culture, they are an exceptionally mobile or changeable part. It is possible to
talk about the nature of the non-cultural animals, such as the lion or the tiger,
because that nature has not altered appreciably in the course of recorded
history. But the more we learn about human beings, the more we realize that
their so-called nature has included such a bewildering variety of customs,
attitudes, beliefs, and artistic products that it is impossible for any one person
to comprehend more than a very small part of the range. Moreover, we are
more aware than ever before of the complex and mysterious forces at work
within ourselves, forces that we do not understand and therefore cannot
wholly control.
In other words, as some modern thinkers—in particular, French thinkers
such as André Malraux—are fond of putting it, the death of God is now being
followed by the death of Man (Temptation, 97). However much some people
may wish to reject the past, precisely because they find it so difficult to
contemplate, the knowledge of it weighs on them as an immense repository
of largely unassimilable data, while the future stretches ahead, a vista of
endless and ultimately meaningless change. The sheer fact of living in time
thus becomes a form of existential anguish, because history is no more than a
16 Introduction

succession of moments, all in a way equally valid or invalid. Human nature,

having ceased to be a unifying concept, henceforth signifies no more than the
name we give to the successive manifestations of human life.
And of course this anguish of living in time is accompanied by the twin
anguish of contingency, the sensation that scientific law holds sway over
animate and inanimate nature, entirely without intelligible reference to hu-
man consciousness and emotions. The result is a metaphysical dizziness or
nihilistic despair over the very concept of human nature, which combines in
all sorts of complicated ways with both the pastoral myth of original human
nature and the millennial myth of future or ultimate human potential. Let me
now try to indicate some of the consequences of all this for avant-garde art in
general and avant-garde drama in particular.
It is because people have been trying, since the Enlightenment, to under-
stand matters rationally and scientifically that they have arrived at these
dilemmas. Hence the widespread, often fascinated, disgust with the idea of
science, which is taken as a further justification for the flight from reason.
Hence also the search for methods of producing a sensation of mystic
depth—in other words, an apparently meaningful, although ultimately in-
comprehensible, relationship with the transcendent, with something beyond
ordinary or everyday existence. If nothing can be given a meaning in the
general transitoriness of history, everything can be given a sort of mystic
weight through existential awareness, which may range from hysterical eu-
phoria to resigned nausea. In its extreme form, this awareness even elimi-
nates the need to create a work of art. Anyone can be an artist, simply by
picking up a stone or a found object, or by drawing a line around some
fragment of the given world and seeing it as an embodiment of mystery. This
helps to explain collages, cut-outs, and the cult of the object among Surreal-
ists and other avant-garde littérateurs.
Such randomness is also connected with the dream, on the one hand, and,
in its more frantic manifestations, with madness, on the other. Both are forms
of unreason that have been much cultivated by different avant-gardes. It is
interesting that while medicine and psychiatry, which are scientific in inten-
tion, try to interpret dreams and madness in rational terms, some avant-
gardes have reverted to the medieval attitude and accept the dream or the
madman’s perception as a truth higher than that perceptible by the sane or the
waking mind. This inclination is particularly noticeable among the Surreal-
ists and their descendants, who have taken Rimbaud’s prescription about le
dérèglement de tous les sens (the disordering of the senses) very seriously
and who find in Freud’s work their justification for an enlightened form of
irrationalism.
Furthermore, since language is normally the vehicle of articulate mean-
ing, it is in connection with language that the problem of meaning versus
meaninglessness occurs most acutely among avant-garde writers. For some,
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 17

all the ordinary uses of language are too comprehensible, so these avant-
garde writers adopt various methods designed to break through language to a
mystery that is supposed to lie beyond it; or, in the interests of escaping from
mutability, they adopt imaginative ways of putting words together; yet, un-
like classical authors, avant-gardists ignore the purportedly changeless aspect
of human nature in their writing.
At one end of the scale are dramatists as different as Antonin Artaud and
Gertrude Stein, who dispense with their existing languages almost altogether
and replace them with collocations of more or less onomatopoeic sounds. (In
rejecting cogency of plot and idea in favor of the sensuality or pure form of
gesture and space as well as language, Stein was probably the first thorough-
going American avant-garde dramatist.) These sounds could be intended as a
return to the voice of man’s original pastoral or primitive nature, like the
barking of dogs and the mooing of cows, or perhaps they are supposed to
make us feel that all language is futile, since no language provides the key to
the meaning of the evolving universe. Then come those playwrights, like the
Dadaist Tzara, who treat words as objects, like the objects of the avant-garde
painter or sculptor, and try to dissociate them from the articulate meanings
they might have in a sentence.
As a performance phenomenon and as dramatic art, Dada disposed of
organic contexts by removing from language its readily recognizable charac-
ter of communication. The Dadaist poet hacked up words and rearranged
their syllables, exalting the outcome as new language whose meaning
camped sometimes in inflection, sometimes in the resemblance to other,
fixed or contextualized, words. Indeed, Dada poetry actively inconven-
ienced—or indeed eradicated—immediate comprehension by aggrandizing
language into art and then depriving that art of a clear and consistent aesthet-
ic. Like Dada poetry, the Dada stage was an experiment in language, med-
dling with the word in order to reduce viewers’ comprehension of theme,
setting, and metaphoric meaning. For the Dadaists believed that language art,
like other representational art forms, required revivification if it was to es-
cape from lifeless intellectualism. Language, for them, had lost its artistic
probity; in the form not only of overtly political propaganda but also of
truistic everyday speech, it was used merely as a tool to sustain ideological
power structures. When Tzara demanded a poetry intentionally divorced
from standard syntax and punctuation, he was not just exercising anarchism
against the tyranny of Realism and Naturalism in the arts; he was, in addi-
tion, rebelling against both communication and the possibility of communi-
cating Dada creativity (as well as desperation) to the rest of the world.
Of course, writers have always been aware of words as objects with a
shape, a rhythm, and a feel in the mouth, but traditional artists combined this
sense of words as tangible entities with the elaboration of more or less
coherent statements. Coherence had become such a despised characteristic
18 Introduction

by the early twentieth century, however, that many dramatists tried to elimi-
nate it, just as the so-called literary or narrative element had been removed
from much painting and sculpture. The play was meant to be a sheer juxtapo-
sition of words that did not allow the mind to pass through it in the usual way
and so slip back into the cycle of time. The normal comprehension of any
sentence is necessarily an act in time, so that if you could halt comprehen-
sion, the words would become or might appear to become ultimate fragments
of the universe, thus producing a semblance of eternity.
André Breton took a militant stand against all procedures that tended to
destroy just such an approximation of eternity—and with it the enigma of
existence—by submitting the unknown aspects of human words and actions
(paradoxically) to rational analysis. Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto
(1924 [Breton 1972]) therefore attacked the psychological novel directly and,
by implication, similar approaches to the drama. But Breton conceded that
dialogue as verbal communication was the most suitable channel for what he
called automatic writing. “It is to the dialogue that the forms of Surrealist
language are best adapted” (34), he declared. And in an effort “to restore
dialogue to its absolute truth” (35), Breton rejected the use of dialogue for
polite or superficial conversation. Rather, it was to be a confrontation of two
streams of spoken thought, neither particularly relevant to the other nor hav-
ing any inherent sequential order, but each provoking a spontaneous response
from its opposite number. As a psychic release in which the speakers dis-
pensed with decorum, such dialogue, when written down, was “automatic”
according to Breton in the sense that it was as free as possible from the
mental mechanism of criticism or self-censorship on the part of the author.
One of the first pieces of writing acknowledged as “Surrealist,” the play The
Magnetic Fields (1919), on which André Breton and Philippe Soupault col-
laborated, was just such a form of dialogue: a juxtaposition of two soliloquies
verbally bouncing off each other.
Finally, language might be used to create a puzzle, a conundrum, or a
game, as in the case of Jarry’s Caesar-Antichrist (1895). This is not quite the
same thing as a sheer object, for it allows a kind of circular movement of
comprehension within the terms of reference of the game itself. Here the
writer produces a construct according to his own arbitrary rules, or to rules
founded on the unexplained vagaries of his particular temperament, and we
are intended to enjoy it as a sort of metaphysical trompe-l’oeil. The game
presents the appearance of meaning, for the language of which it is composed
conveys sense up to a point, but it is really a self-sufficient linguistic laby-
rinth from which the mind is not intended to escape. Such a work offers no
exit to any reality other than its own and hence can be seen as something of
an anti-Realistic, quasi-Absurdist statement unto itself. Its over-deliberate
arrangement is, in the last resort, equivalent to the randomness of some other
avant-garde works.
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 19

A common denominator among most avant-garde movements, in particu-

lar those which sprang up between 1910 and 1930, was a deep-seated skepti-
cism about earlier modes of perception—skepticism, that is, about the articu-
lation of meaning through the logic of language or the language of logic.
Realism together with its more complex descendant, Naturalism, had been
based on the assumption that material or positivistic reality can be discovered
and articulated through the systematic application of the scientific method to
objective or observable phenomena. The resultant tendency to ignore subjec-
tive elements and the inner life led, in the view of avant-garde artists, to an
oversimplified view of the world. By contrast, as we have seen, the Symbol-
ists, Aesthetes, and Neoromantics had sought truth in such abstractions as
mystery, destiny, beauty, and the ideal, which is to say that they placed
ultimate reality outside our human ken. The dramatic movements to come
were as deeply concerned about truth and reality as their predecessors but,
finding the old definitions and formulations inadequate, they sought new
ones. In this pursuit they were not anti-scientific; rather, they attempted to
incorporate scientific discoveries (by Einstein and Freud and later Heisen-
berg) into a more comprehensive vision of the world. And that revised vision
was prompted as much by World War I, as I have already suggested, as by
anything else.
The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz-Ferdinand at Sarajevo
on June 28, 1914, started a four-year period of slaughter and mutilation
among whose victims was precisely the Realistic play of the well-made
school. Although the nineteenth-century theatre was not killed outright in the
first of the great world wars, it did receive a series of blows from which it
would never fully recover. The stable world of the pre-war era, reflected in a
theatre that had catered to a bourgeois audience and had held the mirror up to
their lives, manners, and morals, began to disintegrate. With a million killed
at the Battle of Verdun and another million during the Russian offensive of
1916, with countries appearing, disappearing, and reappearing on the map of
Europe, what did it matter if Madame Duclos committed adultery with her
husband’s best friend or if Monsieur Dupont succeeded in marrying off his
daughters? After the horrors of mechanized war, the theatre’s depiction of
the material and financial problems of the bourgeoisie became irrelevant,
even obscene. The Realistic tradition and the well-made play were of course
not killed in battle, but only maimed and shell-shocked; they continue to drag
out a senile existence in the rest homes of our commercial theatre.
The Surrealist writer and painter André Masson described the origin of
the artistic revolt of the 1920s as disgust with “the colossal slaughter” of
World War I, the “obscene ‘brain-washing’ that had been inflicted on civil-
ians,” with the “militant stupidity” and “sick society of the years ‘between
the wars’” (1974; 81, 96, and passim; my translation). Angrily rejecting the
past, and—to repeat—beginning their quest as early as the late nineteenth
20 Introduction

century with Jarry (if not earlier with the Germans Tieck, Büchner, Grabbe,
and Kleist), avant-garde dramatists also rejected traditional ways of regard-
ing and portraying reality; or, to put the matter another way, they lost confi-
dence in the customary (representational) model for dramatizing human be-
havior and thinking about human existence. These playwrights created a
daringly experimental drama that reflected their new ways of seeing people
and the world. And if the Great War exploded old conventions and precon-
ceptions for these artists, then the Russian Revolution of 1917 (preceded by
the dress rehearsal of 1905) showed them that the most sacred structures
were subject to violent change.
Indeed, the October Revolution and World War I go hand in hand, for the
former appeared to rescue the universal values of the French Revolution of
1789 from the ashes of Verdun in 1916. October 1917 restored faith in the
power of human agency (a power that would not be without its significance
for the drama) at a moment when the carnage on the Western Front seemed
to prove that human beings were the helpless playthings of historical forces.
For the entire European Left, the Russian Revolution symbolized the re-
sumption of history’s forward march—and so it was seen, through thick and
mostly thin, by many if not all leftists, until the Velvet Counterrevolution of
1989. Certainly neither international communism (with its rhetoric of the
enemy class) nor nationalist fascism (with its rhetoric of the enemy race)
would ever have become ruling creeds in the twentieth century had bourgeois
society not thrown itself into the abyss of 1914. It was World War I that
transformed both political “isms” into beliefs that spoke to the resentment,
exhaustion, and horror of the men who returned from the trenches.
Communism’s own accomplishment, and the source of its appeal, was to
formalize the terms of the bourgeoisie’s guilty conscience, its remorse at its
failure to practice what it preached: the idea of universality or action in the
public interest, as well as the equality of all citizens, ideals the bourgeoisie
claimed as its primary innovation and the foundation of democracy, but each
of which it constantly negated through the unequal distribution of property
and wealth perpetuated by the competition of its members. And communism
gave expression also to the aesthetic self-loathing of the bourgeoisie, their
secret belief that money twisted the soul and that they knew the price of
everything, yet the value of nothing. In this sense, the rise of communism
was inseparable from the rise of Romanticism, the artistic rejection of all that
was narrow, miserly, and vulgar about bourgeois capitalism.
In Russia, such rejection, and the revolution that went with it, became the
starting point for the new, theatrically and cinematically as well as politically
and economically, and it made the Soviet stage pre-eminent for experimenta-
tion during the dozen years after the fall of St. Petersburg and Lenin’s arrival
at Finland Station. Pilgrimages to Moscow to see the productions of Evgeny
Vakhtangov, Aleksandr Tairov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Nikolai, Akimov,
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 21

Schlomo Mikhoels, and Sergei Eisenstein became mandatory for anyone

interested in the future of the theatre or in the work of a Russian Futurist
dramatist such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose Mystery-Bouffe (1918) en-
joys the odd reputation of being both the greatest Bolshevik and the greatest
Futurist drama and who once wrote that the violence of World War I made a
Futurist of everyone. As a result of the war, all stability and all expectation of
what is normal or can be taken for granted were destroyed.
The Russians Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky, for their part,
belonged to the Oberiuty, the last wave of post-revolutionary Modernist writ-
ers who were able to express the new sense of uncertainty and repudiation as
well as eagerness for novelty before being suffocated (like Mayakovsky
before them) by Stalinist Socialist Realism—which would permit no confu-
sion or commingling of revolutionary politics with revolutionary artistic
methods. While stressing their rejection of representationalism, the Oberiuty
also wanted it understood that, unlike some of the earlier twentieth-century
avant-garde groups, such as the more extreme Futurists and the Dada-Sur-
realists, their goal was not to divorce art from life but only to reflect the
illogicality, fragmentation, and chaos of the life around them in a different,
non-representational way: by jarring the perceptions with unusual, unex-
pected, and disjointed configurations of reality mixed with unreality, then by
exploiting what such a collision of elements could yield in the way of shock,
upset, and humor.
If Westerners were unaware of the Russian Oberiuty at least until the
early 1970s, they were equally unaware during the twenties and thirties of a
lonely and misunderstood figure, the Polish painter-playwright-novelist-phi-
losopher Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. “Witkacy,” who had recently re-
turned from the Czarist army and direct observation of the Revolution, was
creating in the third decade of the twentieth century a proto-Absurdist theatre
and a theory of abstract drama based on an analogy with modern painting. In
this theatre, meaning would be defined solely through internal scenic con-
struction, the only logic being that of pure form, and the only psychology that
of bizarre fantasy. In the West, German Expressionists such as Ernst Toller
and Georg Kaiser themselves radically transformed dramatic structure and
staging but, unlike Witkiewcz, Kharms, and Vvedensky, with an impact soon
felt across the Atlantic in the United States. As a result—and partly on
account of the United States’ increasing globalization after its successful
participation in World War I—American theatre joined the international
mainstream of experimentation for the first time as it produced the avant-
garde drama of the early Eugene O’Neill, e. e. cummings, and Gertrude
Stein.
After the First World War as well, France, which had enjoyed commer-
cial rather than artistic leadership in the drama as the nineteenth century
marched in lockstep from Pixérécourt and Scribe to Sardou and Labiche,
22 Introduction

immediately regained its traditional importance in the avant-garde, and not

only through the theatrical innovations of Jacques Copeau and his students
(Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, Gaston Baty, and Georges Pitoëff). The
French also reasserted their prominence in drama through the avant-garde
experiments of such Surrealists as Philippe Soupault, Benjamin Péret, Louis
Aragon, and Roger Vitrac, who—in the wake of a world war both imperialist
and mechanized—portrayed the ambiguity and irrationality of existence with
incongruous juxtapositions, with nonsense and non sequitur, and with humor
and irony. (Guillaume Apollinaire was the first to use the term “Surrealism,”
in the preface to his play The Breasts of Tiresias [1917; republished 1964]:
“When man wanted to imitate walking he created the Wheel, which does not
resemble a leg—and in the same way he has created Surrealism unconscious-
ly” [56].)
Artaud, whose radical insights bore fruit a generation later, himself began
his work as playwright, actor, director, theorist—and prophet—during this
period of renaissance in the French theatre. And, though in Italy Pirandello
shattered traditional concepts of representational theatrical illusion and uni-
fied dramatic character, it was the French productions of Dullin and Pitoëff
that brought the Sicilian’s new dramatic vision to the rest of Europe and
America—so much so that in the United States Six Characters in Search of
an Author (1921) has surely become the most frequently anthologized, and
deservedly the most influential, of avant-garde plays.
Whether it was French or Italian, German or Russian, the theatrical avant-
garde of the post–World War I era was revolutionary not only in an artistic
sense, however; as I have noted, it was also revolutionary in a sociopolitical
sense, which was itself complemented by a psychological revolutionism. The
patron saints of the theatrical revolutionists of this period happened to be an
unlikely pair, Sigmund Freud and V. I. Lenin (the latter of whom, coinciden-
tally, in the year before the Russian Revolution, lived directly across the
street from the Cabaret Voltaire, the famous café in Zürich that was the
birthplace of Dada). Implosions and explosions, dreams and revolutions, the
conquest of the irrational and the triumph of the proletariat—these psycho-
logical and sociopolitical extremes lent form and substance to the avant-
garde theatre of the teens and twenties.
Expressionism and Surrealism, the two major movements in painting and
drama of the period, unite the subjective and the societal, dream and revolu-
tion, with the aim of transcending and transforming reality by releasing the
subconscious and leveling all social barriers. In their rejection of the old
society, the Surrealist heirs of Dada looked eastward, toward Moscow, for
fraternity as well as inspiration and maintained a prolonged, if stormy and
vacillating, attachment to the French Communist Party and the Third Interna-
tional—an attachment that thus privileged social or political revolution over
the spiritual revolt of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Unlike the war-mongering
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 23

Italian Futurists, the German Expressionists, almost to a man, were pacifists.

Social change, for them, grows out of the dream of spiritual rebirth, and the
grimly realistic therefore moves with shocking rapidity in their work into the
fantastic and the visionary.
The extremism and distortion of Expressionist drama derive precisely
from its closeness to the dream. Indeed, in its crude aspects, Expressionism is
nothing more than dramatized daydream or fantasy. In it subtler and more
interesting examples, however, Expressionism parallels the concealing sym-
bolism and subliminal suggestiveness of night dreams if not nightmares.
Innovatively, Strindberg called the experimental plays he wrote when he
passed beyond Naturalism “dream plays”: namely, To Damascus
(1888–1904), A Dream Play (1902), and The Ghost Sonata (1907). In them
the projection and embodiment of psychic forces take the place of the imita-
tion of external fact, and the association of ideas supplants the construction
of plot based on the logical connection of cause and effect. The old structural
principle of causal interrelations linking character, incident, and action thus
gives way to a new structural pattern, closer to music than to drama—the
presentation of a theme and variations.
Instead of being mimetic, the acting in Strindberg’s dream plays, like that
in German Expressionist drama, would be “musical” as well. Rather than
seeking to reproduce everyday behavior on the stage, the Expressionistic
actor, according to Paul Kornfeld (in an epilogue appended to his play The
Seduction [1913; repr. 1963]), should combine passionate rhetoric with
trance-like ecstasy and “not be ashamed of the fact that he is acting. . . . The
melody of a great gesture says more than the highest consummation of what
is called naturalness. Let him think of the opera, in which the dying singer
still gives forth a high C and with the sweetness of his melody tells more
about death than if he were to crawl and writhe” (7–8).
Strindberg’s dream plays in turn became the inspiration for German Ex-
pressionists such as Kaiser, Toller, Reinhard Sorge, and Walter Hasenclever.
Unlike the French Surrealists of the twenties and thirties, though, the Expres-
sionists rarely reproduced actual dreams, with their shifting planes of reality
and gross distortion of the laws of time, space, and causality. Instead, the
structure of many of their plays resembled the formal pattern or movement of
the human mind in dream and reverie. Not by accident, the influence of
Strindberg coincided with that of psychoanalysis (Freud’s Interpretation of
Dreams having appeared two years before A Dream Play), and, in its Freu-
dian form (as well as later in its Jungian one), psychoanalysis had decisive
significance for Expressionism. But even before Freud, German philosophy
from Schelling to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, together with the intellectual
atmosphere in Germany in the wake of Romanticism, had offered intimations
24 Introduction

of the subconscious. Even those Expressionists who were not conversant

with the actual works of Freud, then, could not help but be familiar with the
climate of thought that had given rise to psychoanalysis in the first place.
In adopting an episodic dream structure, the German Expressionists not
only rejected the tradition of the well-made play and openly defied the ideal
of an objective recording of everyday life, on which “realistic” theatre had
been based. In league, paradoxically, with the Realists and Naturalists, they
also turned against the disdainful aloofness from contemporary urban reality
that characterized those writers who sought to revive the Romanticism or
even the Neoclassicism of the past. Along with the dominant art of bourgeois
society, the Expressionists rejected, unmasked, and caricatured the mores,
precepts, and institutions that denatured its urban reality, whose prevailing,
authoritarian temper—whether in Wilhelminian Germany or Hapsburg Aus-
tria—they opposed. Thus, like the other avant-gardes of its time, Expression-
ism constituted not merely an aesthetic revolt but also an ethical and some-
times even a political one, closely allied with humanitarian principles and
socialist reform. However, since this revolt was in many cases neither specif-
ic nor rational, but instead vague and emotional, the otherwise pacifistic
movement numbered among its members some who were afterward, in an
apparent about-face, to contribute their support to militant communism.
The Bolshevik Revolution and Freudian psychoanalysis, then, tore down
both the external conventions of society and the internal walls of the self. No
wonder the walls and conventions of the realistic theatre were also demol-
ished—walls between stage and auditorium, actor and audience, author and
play, together with the conventions of illusion, character, and plot. Freud and
Lenin had demonstrated that reality, the basis for “realism,” was neither
objective nor unchanging, neither absolute not unified, but instead relative
and fragmented. And with the loss of belief in objective, immutable truth
understandably came the eclipse of illusionistic, representational playwriting
and staging. The human psyche, the psychoanalysts showed, was a heap of
fragments, not an integrated whole; an entire society, the Bolsheviks proved,
could be blown up and with it every value that it had cherished, every belief
that it had promulgated.
The avant-garde writers of the twenties and beyond investigated dramatic
form precisely for the purpose of expressing this shattered reality; instead of
holding a mirror up to nature, creating an illusion of reality, or reflecting the
surface of the world, they smashed that mirror, imagined illusions within
illusions, and generated apocalyptic visions. It was in order to depict human
society and human nature in constant, often violent, upheaval and disintegra-
tion, to uncover subterranean faultlines in politics as well as people, that the
new playwrights adopted the fluidity of dreams and the chaos of revolutions
as dramatic devices. Avant-garde drama between the world wars thus reflects
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 25

not the private domestic life of that period but rather its gross communal
instability: its shifting planes of reality, changing perspectives on society,
drastic transpositions of time and space, and multiple takes on personality.
Many of the new movements placed considerable emphasis upon multiple
images of personality, for example, through their exploration of the subcon-
scious—probably because Freud’s theories provided a semi-scientific expla-
nation for forces that the Symbolists had relegated to the realm of fate,
mysticism, or the supernatural. Through the subconscious, the subjective and
the objective worlds could be brought into a logical relationship onstage that
synthesized the views of both the Realist-Naturalists and the Symbolists.
And through the psychological probing of the Surrealists, the vast realms of
the mind offered material for new explorations in performance, apart from
any concern for objective representation. Freud’s theories were given new
dimensions, moreover, by the work of Carl Jung. Beginning with Psychology
of the Unconscious (1912; repr. 1971), he argued that Freud’s description of
the mind’s structure is incomplete; to its three divisions of id, ego, and
superego should be added a fourth, the “collective unconscious”—a division
outside the reach of psychoanalysis, for “by no analytical technique can it be
brought to conscious recollection, being neither repressed nor forgotten”
(319).
The collective unconscious, according to Jung, is “nothing more than a
potentiality . . . which from primordial times has been handed down to us in
the specific form of mnemonic images, or expressed in anatomical forma-
tions in the very structure of the brain” (319), incorporating “the psychic
residua of innumerable experiences of the same type” (320). In this manner,
Jung pushed the conception of the unconscious one step further and sug-
gested an explanation for psychological responses not accounted for by
Freud. He went on to declare that there are essentially two kinds of art: the
kind based on the personal unconscious and that based on the collective
unconscious. The first is limited by the author’s personal vision, but the
second is more significant because it captures (through archetype, myth, and
symbol) experiences embedded in the collective unconscious, which are the
ones best suited to compensate for what is missing from our lives in the
present. From the point of view of avant-garde dramatists, Jung, in so extend-
ing Freud’s conception of the unconscious, was implicitly arguing for a
reality that is far more complex than surface appearance would suggest.
New developments in physics were to prove as far-reaching as those in
psychology. Beginning in 1905, Albert Einstein began formulating his theory
of relativity, which constitutes the most revolutionary, precise statement of
those perceptions of time and space that greatly influenced not only twenti-
eth-century science but art and literature as well. This theory is revolutionary
precisely because, in formulating it, Einstein sought to incorporate both spa-
tial and temporal dimensions. Newtonian physics had depicted space as static
26 Introduction

and absolute by treating both time and point of view as fixed; starting with
Einstein space came to be seen, by contrast, as relative to a moving point of
reference. To the three spatial dimensions, he added the fourth dimension of
time, in the form of movement; and the faster the movement, the greater are
the changes in perceived dimensions of both time and space.
Even though Einstein saw mass, length, time, and simultaneity as relative,
he never doubted the orderliness of the universe, and he sought to harmonize
the variables through mathematical formulas. Less scientifically oriented
minds, however, were more attracted to the idea of relativity itself and ele-
vated it to a principle by which they could not only question the linear
progression of time or the related principle of inexorable, deterministic cau-
sality but also postulate the purely subjective nature of human perception.
For many, consequently, the possibility of firm or absolute truth had van-
ished forever, in the same way that it had disappeared around a century
before for the German Romantics in consequence of Kant’s notion that “pure
reason” cannot penetrate the essence of things, that the intellect cannot deter-
mine what is truth and what merely appears to be truth, that all perception is
finally subjective. (This idea was expressed in his Critique of Pure Reason
[1781] but later qualified—like Einstein’s theory of relativity—and recon-
ciled with a belief in God’s moral law in both his Critique of Practical
Reason [1788] and his Critique of Judgment [1790].)
Kant’s notion—which for Kleist shattered his Enlightenment belief in the
power of reason to comprehend the universe and to perfect life on earth—lay
at the heart of German Romanticism. Henceforth, the outer world was aban-
doned in favor of the inner, reality was created by the imagination, higher
consciousness was gained through the unconscious, and the generally valid
was reached by the way of the most individual. But whereas Romantics like
Tieck and Grabbe escaped from objective reality into a world of fairy-tale
fantasy, literary satire, or nationalistic folklore, Kleist incorporated the recal-
citrance of that reality into such dramas as Penthesilea (1808) and Prince
Friedrich of Homburg (1811) and in this sense showed some affinity for the
classicism of Goethe and Schiller (themselves erstwhile Stürmer-und-
Dränger), which attempted to reconcile spirit and matter by harmonizing the
inner and outer worlds.
As a result of Einstein’s work, however, the changed conceptions of time
and space were soon visibly evident on the surface of artistic forms (in
addition to being spiritually manifest at their core)—particularly in their
organizational patterns. Space in painting, for example, had since the Renais-
sance been conceived as fixed, and objects had been shown from a single
point of view at a specific instant in time. In fact, the entire logic of perspec-
tive painting was based on this convention, which was grounded in Newton-
ian physics. The first major break with tradition came in the late nineteenth
century when Paul Cézanne began to include in one painting objects that
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 27

could be seen only from different “eye-points.” But it was Cubism (usually
said to have begun in 1907 and to have reached its height just prior to World
War I) that first systematically introduced into a single painting several
points of view, no one of which had more authority than the others. The
Cubist painters, among whom Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were the
leading figures, sought not only to break down objects semi-geometrically
into cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones, but also to provide several views of
the same object simultaneously. Cubism thus represented an attempt to deal
analytically with space and to incorporate the dimension of time into paint-
ing.
Similar attempts were made in drama, where time had traditionally been
treated as linear (and events occur in proper succession from beginning to
middle to end) rather than as simultaneous or relative. Just as fixed space had
governed most painting, the orderly or sequential passing of time had gov-
erned drama, with most plays being unified through a cause-and-effect ar-
rangement of incidents that mimicked Newton’s own theory of causality
(according to which every thing or occurrence in the universe has its cause or
origin). Less often, overriding thought, theme, or thesis had been used to
unify otherwise seemingly random, disjointed incidents (as in Aristophanes’
comedies and the medieval mystery plays). And it is a variation on the latter
method that nearly all non-realistic dramatists have adopted, for most have
organized their works around some central idea or motif, although the specif-
ic form of organization—musical, say, as in the cases of Strindberg’s afore-
mentioned Ghost Sonata, Mayakovsky’s “bouffe” (comic opera) of a mys-
tery play, or, even later, Sam Shepard’s Suicide in B-Flat (1976)—depends
in large part upon the assumptions the playwright has made about reality.
Before the modern period most dramatists had assumed, of course, that
ours is a logical universe presided over by a just God; behind any apparent
chaos, therefore, lay ultimate harmony and justice. But as I have tried to
make clear, avant-garde drama was directly affected by the new god of
science—by new scientific discoveries and the advanced technologies of the
machine age, in their constructive as well as destructive capacities. For this
reason, the plays of the Expressionists, Futurists, and Surrealists have an
essentially new tempo or rhythm that mirrors the fast pace of industrial life,
the thrilling speed of the airplane, the automobile, and the motorcycle, and
the quick cuts of edited film. Such drama overwhelms the spectator with its
abrupt images and movement more in keeping with the sports arena and the
movie screen than with the predictable pace and sanctimonious solemnity of
the bourgeois, boulevard, or Broadway theatre or even the Symbolist temple
of art (where earthly discontinuity, illogicality, and obscurity could still be
absorbed, reconciled, or overruled in a transcendent, ideal realm). Further-
more, avant-garde drama playfully calls attention to itself as drama, to its
own artifice and spectacle (as Realist or Naturalist plays never would), and
28 Introduction

exuberantly combines esoteric art with popular culture—with the circus, the
cabaret, even the jazz of the twentieth century—in a way not seen since the
two apogees of Western theatre: those of ancient Greece and Elizabethan
England.
All the playfulness and exuberance ended, however, with the rise of fas-
cism and the arrival of World War II, as an entire generation of artists was
geographically displaced, politically silenced, morally co-opted, or simply
executed (like the sometime Surrealist Federico García Lorca). State repres-
sion of the avant-garde was most obvious, of course, under the totalitarian
regimes of the Soviet Union and Germany, where avant-garde practice was
denigrated, respectively, as “formalist” and “degenerate.” In both cases,
avant-gardism was stamped out because it conflicted with, or merely failed to
serve, official government policy. The dramatic decline of the European
avant-garde in the 1930s is thus connected with a paradoxical feature of the
avant-garde ethos: avant-garde artistic practice can flourish only under liber-
al political regimes, which are willing to tolerate vigorous expressions of
dissent against the state and society. In this respect the avant-garde bites the
hand that feeds it, or conversely, in Poggioli’s words, it pays “involuntary
homage” to the bourgeois liberal democracies it attacks (106).
World War II was thus a turning point not only in the individual lives of
so many artists and intellectuals but also in the history of the avant-garde as a
whole. Avant-garde drama written after World War II, like the drama pro-
duced between the two world wars, was to be affected by new scientific
discoveries and the advanced technologies of the machine age, but in this
case they were those that made possible the splitting of the atom and the
demented, conveyor-belt efficiency of gas chambers—which is to say, tech-
nologies whose immediate effect was overwhelmingly negative, indeed, in-
comprehensibly catastrophic. The horrors of World War II, especially the
systematic displacement and extermination of vast numbers of people, creat-
ed a crisis of conscience among many of the world’s artists and intellectuals.
Traditional values and morals seemed incapable of coping with such dilem-
mas as America’s dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan or such monstros-
ities as the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis against European Jewry (not
to mention the Soviet Union’s GULAG stretching from the Urals to the
Pacific). Conventional values and morals, as a result, no longer seemed to
rest on any solid foundation.
As the full implications of a Godless universe (one promulgated, if not
introduced, by late-nineteenth-century thinkers) at last became fully evident,
the search for absolute values or essential truths gave way to a fundamental
questioning about man’s existence and place in the universe. As Martin
Esslin put it, “The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the
Second World War by the substitute religions of faith in progress, national-
ism, and various totalitarian fallacies. All this was shattered by the war. By
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 29

1942, Albert Camus was calmly putting the question why, since life had lost
all meaning, man should not seek escape in suicide” (1961; rept. 1969, 5).
Camus, of course, was an exponent of existentialism, perhaps the most com-
pelling force in postwar thought. (Although it can be found as far back as the
ancient Greeks, existentialism remained a relatively minor strain in philoso-
phy until the mid-nineteenth century, beginning with Kierkegaard.)
While an essentialist philosopher might inquire into what it means to be
human—what the essential human traits are—the existentialist begins by
asking, “What does it mean ‘to be’ or ‘to exist’?” Existentialists like Camus
argued that human beings are, individually, responsible for making them-
selves what they are and that, without making a free and conscious choice
before taking action, one cannot truly be said “to exist” as a human being.
This philosophical movement thus sought to free the individual from external
authority as well as from the authority or weight of the past and to force him
to discover within himself the grounds for choosing and doing. (Hence the
difference between traditional, expository characters who are victims of the
past and unconventional, existentialist characters who live in—and act out
of—the eternal present.) Understandably, existentialism struck a responsive
chord during and after World War II, for the world had seemingly gone mad
as personal choice was abdicated in favor of blind adherence to national
leaders and policies, even when such obedience entailed condoning almost
unbelievable cruelties or crimes against humanity.
Existentialism also struck a responsive chord in the theatre. Albert Camus
and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote such plays as Caligula (1945) and The Flies
(1943) to dramatize the tenets of their philosophy. These plays, along with
others by Giraudoux, Anouilh, and Salacrou, create what could be called a
form of aesthetic dissonance, however, for they posit, in Esslin’s words, the
ultimate “senselessness of life [and] the inevitable devaluation of ideals,
purity, and purpose” (6). Yet the plays themselves are logical constructs that
depend for their effect on ratiocinative devices, discursive thought, and con-
sistent or coherent character. In this sense, existentialist playwrights have
something in common with dramatists who went before them—Goethe,
Schiller, and especially Kleist, a harbinger of the avant-garde. These Ger-
mans had attempted to harmonize Romanticism—and its focus on the turbu-
lent, internal life—with Neoclassicism, which emphasized the controlled,
external world. Camus, Sartre, and company tried to express irrational con-
tent—that is, the theme of the irrationality of the human condition—in ra-
tional form. (Sartre and Camus were followed, in the late 1990s, by Tom
Stoppard and Michael Frayn, whose Arcadia and Copenhagen, paradoxical-
ly, explore in conventional dramatic form the way in which Werner Heisen-
berg’s uncertainty principle exploded the traditional concept of causality,
thus opening the door to “chaos theory.”)
30 Introduction

The dramatists of the Theatre of the Absurd, by contrast, strive to express

their sense of metaphysical anguish at the senselessness of the human condi-
tion in a form which mirrors that meaningless or ultimate lack of purpose.
Therefore, Absurdists like Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genêt, and
Arthur Adamov abandon the cause-and-effect relationship that traditionally
governs the incidents in a play—the progression of exposition, complication,
turning point, climax, and dénouement—or reduce reliance on that pattern to
an absolute minimum. Rather than chronicling the connective quality of
events in a linear narrative, the action in plays like Waiting for Godot (1949),
The Bald Soprano (1950), The Maids (1947), and The Invasion (1949) tends
to be circular or ritualistic, as it concentrates on exploring the texture of a
static situation or condition. In such drama, problems or dilemmas are sel-
dom resolved, and characters tend toward the typical or archetypal rather
than the specific or the individual. Often they even exchange roles or meta-
morphose into other characters, and some are given only generic or numeri-
cal designations.
Moreover, time for these characters is flexible, as it is in dreams, just as
place is generalized: the dramatis personae of Absurdist plays most often
find themselves in a symbolic location or in a void cut off from the concrete
world as we (think we) know it. And in this dramatic limbo, language itself is
downgraded. Although the characters frequently talk as volubly as do the
figures of conventional theatre, they usually recognize that they are indulging
in a word-game that ridicules the very use of language by distorting it or
making it as mechanical as possible. To compensate for this downgrading of
language as a means of communication, Absurdist plays emphasize the meta-
phorical aspect through their scenery. Their poetry tends to emerge, accord-
ing to Esslin, “from the concrete and objectified images of the stage it-
self. . . . What happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the
words spoken by the characters” (7).
What happens, moreover, never takes place in the context of traditional
dramatic genres: instead, the somber often becomes the grotesque (as in the
precursory esperpentos of Ramon María del Valle-Inclán from the twenties)
and the comic frequency takes on tragic overtones (as in the anarchic farces
of Joe Orton). The world is “neutralized,” even turned on its head, by these
writers’ deriding of everything that in the past had been taken seriously, or by
their transforming of what most people have considered to be ludicrous into
something ominous, powerful, and affecting. Despite such rejection of for-
mal purity, structural logic, integrated character, and linguistic cohesiveness,
Absurdist drama is ultimately conceptual, for in the end it too seeks to project
an intellectualized perception—however oblique or abstruse—about the hu-
man condition.
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 31

The difference between such drama and earlier non-realistic plays, from
Symbolism onward, is precisely that perception or vision, rather than its
techniques. Although the Absurdists were especially attuned to as well as
inclined to imitate the work of Jarry, Artaud, Pirandello, the Futurists, the
Dadaists, and perhaps above all the Surrealists, their subject becomes hu-
mans’ entrapment in an irrational, hostile, impersonal, and indifferent uni-
verse, an existence in which the search for truth is an exercise in futility.
(This attitude, incidentally, does not seep into American drama, with Jack
Gelber’s The Connection [1959] and Edward Albee’s The American Dream
[1961], until our post-war euphoria wears off, the Korean War erupts in the
midst of the Cold War, and the Vietnam debacle looms on the horizon. The
American avant-garde, however, is rooted more in performance than in text,
in a radical performance technique that dismantles and then either discards or
refashions the overwhelmingly “well-made” drama of the American stage, as
the work of the Wooster Group, the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, the
Bread-and-Puppet Theatre, Mabou Mines, and Ping Chong will attest.)
The Theatre of the Absurd, that is, gives up the search for a dramatic
model through which to discover fundamental ethical or philosophical cer-
tainties about life and the world—something even the Surrealists attempted
in their probing of the unconscious. To paraphrase Malraux (1960), if the
mission of the nineteenth century was to get rid of the gods, the mission of
the twentieth century was to replace them with something—until we get to
the Absurdists, who replace “something” with nothing or nothingness. The
only certainty about human reality, in Ionesco’s words, is that, “devoid of
purpose . . . cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental
roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless” (quoted
in Esslin, 5). And this “certainty,” as I have already indicated, is reflected by
the viciously cyclical nature of Absurdist dramatic form.
Since the inception of the Absurd, avant-garde drama certainly has not
ceased to be written. One need only witness from the 1970s, for example, the
Austrian Peter Handke’s Ride Across Lake Constance (1971), which demol-
ishes even the remnants of mimesis through a relentless scrutiny of the semi-
otics of language and experience that allows for no progression of events, no
resolution, no characterization, and hence no correspondence between behav-
ior and language; the Frenchman Michel Vinaver’s Overboard (1973),
whose many discontinuous and seemingly unrelated scenes ultimately sug-
gest that everything from the corporate world to the world of myth intercon-
nects; the American Robert Wilson’s three-hour speechless epic Deafman
Glance (1971), which created a combination Theatre of Silence-and-Images
not unlike that of silent experimental film; and the work of another
American, Charles Ludlam, whose savagely nihilistic Ridiculous Theatre
parodied familiar genres and the absurdities of life as well as art, in plays like
Bluebeard (1970) and Camille (1971). What has happened, however, is that
32 Introduction

since the late 1960s or so, we have entered the era of Postmodernism (a term
first used in architecture), in which two events occurred to stop the “ad-
vance” of the avant-garde.
The first was the embrace by Postmodern dramatists of a stylistic plural-
ism, an eclectic and often self-reflexive mixing of different styles from dif-
ferent time periods. Under Modernism, the argument goes, a variety of styles
had flourished, but within any one (such as Expressionism or Surrealism) the
artist sought unity by adhering consistently to the set of conventions associat-
ed with that mode. The problem with this definition of Modernism, at least as
it is extended to the history of drama, is that the mixing of radically different
styles—and the playwrights’ propensity to call attention to the process of
artistic creation—was already evident in the work of avant-gardists from the
1920s, not to mention earlier, in the experimental plays of Strindberg. A
more sophisticated version of the Postmodern argument claims that it is not
the mere presence of eclecticism and self-referentiality that distinguishes
Postmodernism, but rather their different cultural positioning and use within
a Postmodern context. Within an avant-garde ethos the self-conscious mixing
of styles constituted a typical attempt to occupy the position of “most ad-
vanced and subversive trend,” whereas self-reflexive pluralism in Postmod-
ern culture marks an exhaustion of the subversive energies and ambitions
once associated with the avant-garde.
Over the past century, artists, chastened by what they saw happening in
the world, have ceased believing in the efficacy of revolutionary art to
change the world; yet they still mouth slogans about transforming the order
of society and go through the motions of producing art designed to do just
that. And the ideologies and techniques of earlier avant-gardes are still con-
veniently lying around, ready to be picked through, recycled, and called to
reserve duty, though the heirs no longer see themselves as belonging to a
single movement at all. (The quintessential example, in form as well as
content, of the resulting drama is Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millen-
nium Approaches [1992].)
What began before World War I, then, as a burgeoning involvement by
artists in the future of their societies—if only as outcasts who believed (like
Artaud) that some day they would be regarded as prophets—had subsided by
the decade of the 1970s into an acknowledgment that progressive artistic
programs would never be adopted and experienced by the vast majority of
any country’s citizens. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson (1991), all that is left
is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of
the styles in the imaginary museum of the past. Or, as Ihab Hassan (1971;
repr. 1982) put it, only indeterminacies—“discontinuity, heterodoxy, plural-
ism, randomness, pervasion”—and deformations—“disintegration, decon-
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 33

struction, displacement, discontinuity, disjunction, decomposition, demystifi-

cation, delegitimization”—can be identified as central to Postmodernism
(269).
The avant-garde remains with us today as a sanctioned aesthetic predilec-
tion. Struggling within the confines of a self-reflexive formal orientation and
against an ill-defined social context of liberal and diffuse pluralism, that
avant-garde bears curious witness to an ambiguous state of mind. It attempts
to display a creative and critical vitality yet raises only minimal expectations.
It countenances an active and often aggressive assertion of individual will yet
betrays an uneasy acquiescence and resignation. Its most significant efforts
do continue to involve the self-conscious exploration of the nature, limits,
and possibilities of drama and theatre (the most naturally reflexive of art
forms) in contemporary society; but the vision of the future—of the avant-
garde’s future as well as that of society and culture in general—provided by
such work is tentative and unclear, as if the avant-garde could not move
beyond doubt and distrust toward an inspired vision.
Reworking the military metaphor underpinning the notion of avant-gard-
ism, one could argue that we have entered a period in which the culture of
negation has been replaced by a demilitarized zone, flanked by avant-garde
ghosts on the one side and a changing mass culture on the other. The once
subversive styles of the avant-garde have been assimilated by mass culture,
so that the gap between nominally avant-garde products and popular, mass
cultural ones, such as Julie Taymor’s Lion King on Broadway or television’s
MTV and The Larry Sanders Show, is greatly reduced. If the historical avant-
garde once consisted of wave after wave of anti-bourgeois, mostly left-lean-
ing, angry yet visionary artists pouring themselves out onto a hostile shore (a
beachhead, to continue the military metaphor), then each successive wave
has been soaked up by the society it apparently hated and opposed—has been
co-opted and made fashionable, turned into a style in competition with other
styles, by the once and future enemy (the official culture’s dogmatically
imposed system of values and beliefs).
The avant-garde, as a result, can today do little more than impotently
express disenchantment with its own ideals, while popular culture is en-
chanted to assume the once radical posture of inventiveness, daring, and
“difference.” Indeed, in what could be the ultimate indignity, the very phrase
“avant-garde” has itself become a marketing device, and now even the name
of a new line of deodorant in Great Britain. Moreover, the objects of the
avant-garde have become useful investment commodities for the “Establish-
ment,” in the form of paintings, sculptures, and even theatrical posters that
adorn the walls of major corporations—purportedly in the name of culture,
education, and refinement.
34 Introduction

The second development to stop the “advance” of the avant-garde was,

and remains, the deification of Postmodern performance, through the merg-
ing of author and director in a single “superstar” like Peter Brook or Jerzy
Grotowski, Andrei Serban or Peter Sellars, Tadeusz Kantor or Robert Lep-
age, as well as through the breaking down of boundaries between dramatic
forms and performance styles, between styles and periods, and between the
arts themselves. Again, however, we see the presence particularly of the
latter breakdown within Modernism: in the synesthesia of the Symbolists, for
instance, or in the writing of plays by artists from different media or accord-
ing to the dictates of a different artistic medium. (Among these works can be
counted Henri Rousseau’s A Visit to the Paris Exposition of 1889 [1889],
Arnold Schoenberg’s The Lucky Hand [1913], Jean Cocteau’s Parade
[1917], Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Color of Time [1918], Ernst Barlach’s
The Poor Cousin [1919], Oskar Schlemmer’s The Figural Cabinet I and II
[1922–1923], and Pablo Picasso’s Desire Caught by the Tail [1941]). When
we see something like this breakdown after World War II, in the “happen-
ings” of the painter Allan Kaprow from the late fifties (the original “perfor-
mance art,” in the sense that visual art was “performed” by objectified human
bodies), we also begin to see the cultivation of performance as art unto itself,
apart from or superior to any a priori text.
First, attempts were made by artists other than Kaprow to move drama
outside the confines of traditional, or text-based, theatres and into more ac-
cessible, less formal surroundings. Second, emphasis was shifted, in the
“happenings,” from passive observation to active participation—from the
artistic product to the viewing process. Each spectator, in becoming the par-
tial creator of a piece, derived any meaning that might be desired from the
experience, thus downplaying the artist’s intention or even existence. (So
much for the work of such Postmodern authors as Caryl Churchill and Heiner
Müller.) Third, simultaneity and multiple focus tended to replace the orderly
sequence of conventionally, or even unconventionally, scripted drama; no
pretense was maintained that everyone at such a multimedia event could see
and hear the same things at the same time or in the same order. Many of these
ideas were carried over into “environmental theatre,” a term popularized by
Richard Schechner for something in between happenings and traditional pro-
ductions.
In this kind of theatre, among other things, all production elements speak
their own language rather than being mere supports for words, and a text
need be neither the starting point nor the goal of a production—indeed, a text
is not even necessary, and therefore there may be none. In other words,
fidelity to the text, that sacred tenet which had so long governed perfor-
mance, has become irrelevant: Postmodernism, both as critical inquiry and as
theatre, continues to challenge whether any text is authoritative, whether a
dramatic text can be anything more than a performance script—whether, in
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 35

fact, the play exists at all before it is staged. In Blooded Thought, Herbert
Blau (1982) conceded that “so far as performance goes, the Text remains our
best evidence after the fact, like the quartos and folios of the Elizabethan
stage.” But what, he asks, is “the nature of the Text before the fact?” “The
idea of performance,” he suggests, “has become the mediating, often subver-
sive third term in the on-again off-again marriage of drama and theatre” (37).
And performance groups such as Mabou Mines and Grand Union, for their
part, have become concerned less with what they are saying—with content—
than with form and formal experiment: with the means of communicating,
the places where theatrical events take place, the persons employed as per-
formers, and the relationship of performers, and performance, to the audi-
ence.
Something similar can be said about the formalists who practice “experi-
mental” or “alternative” playwriting in America and who trace their lineage
back to Gertrude Stein. Even in those plays of theirs that seem, on the
surface, to obey established or conventional dramatic norms (those of farce,
say, in Charles Ludlam’s Reverse Psychology [1980]), these writers encour-
age us to step back and linger over the elements of performance longer than
we’re used to doing, seeing how those elements contain clues to the largest
meanings of the drama. The design of space, the passage of time, the rhythms
of speech and movement: these “invisibles” of theatre, once meant to disap-
pear when stories or characters are compelling enough, instead emerge from
the background to tell their own stories.
The very setting of the “other” American drama seems to take on a life of
its own. Landscape becomes an extension of its inhabitants, reflecting anxie-
ties or ambitions only partly expressed in words. “The rooms besiege me,”
says Jean Peters in Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black
and White (1976), and as she struggles against them, she reveals a hypersen-
sitivity shared by many other characters in these plays. Jeep fears the walls
closing in on him in Shepard’s Action (1975). Marion’s spirit suffocates in
her husband’s townhouse in Maria Irene Fornés’s Abingdon Square (1987).
The different kinds of compartments in Jeffery M. Jones’s Night Coil (two
adjacent chambers), Len Jenkin’s 1988 work American Notes (a motel room
and lobby, a forest hideaway), and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Imperceptible Mut-
abilities in the Third Kingdom (the hull of a slave ship, measured obsessively
throughout the play) all serve as psychological pressure-cookers for their
occupants. The more they know about space, the less they feel able to control
it.
Outside, the landscape is just as restless, forcing characters to acknowl-
edge emotions they would prefer to avoid. In Lee Breuer’s B. Beaver Anima-
tion (1974), a flood reduces the stage to a pile of planks, all that remains of
B. Beaver’s dam. Nature won’t stay outdoors in Tina Howe’s One Shoe Off
(1993), where roots break through the floorboards, branches wind themselves
36 Introduction

around the beams, and ivy crawls up the furniture. And consider how many
writers—Ronald Tavel (Boy on a Straight-Back Chair, 1969), Murray Med-
nick (Switchback, 1994), David Greenspan (Son of an Engineer, 1994), John
Steppling (Standard of the Breed, 1988)—come immediately to set their
plays in vast wastelands. A catastrophe seems imminent or perhaps has just
occurred. Either way, one senses that the space has won only a temporary
reprieve from change—whether it comes in the form of urban warfare in Eric
Overmyer’s Native Speech (1985), nuclear holocaust in Constance Cong-
don’s No Mercy (1986), or the death of a moon in Mac Wellman’s The
Hyacinth Macaw (1994). In each of these plays, an enormous sky stretches
above measureless darkness. Characters use up all their emotional resources
just keeping their small pools of light from dwindling away. All of them
could be asking the question Rhoda asks in Richard Foreman’s Rhoda in
Potatoland (1975): “How can I relate to this place?”
As we map this new theatrical territory, we will also have to acknowledge
the effect of time, another element of performance we can no longer take for
granted. When narrative is observed, its passage can be excruciating: in
Action, one intensely felt minute gives way to another, just as unremitting, as
if the present tense dilated to ensure that the subtlest gradations of experience
are dramatized. Equally disorienting are those plays where the past won’t
remain in the background and the future won’t wait its turn. The former
aren’t mere memory plays: Oyamo (in 1981’s The Resurrection of Lady
Lester), Congdon, and Kennedy each create a remembered world that is
capable of sucking characters irretrievably into its vortex. And the latter
aren’t standard-issue fantasias: For John Guare (Muzeeka, 1968), Arnold
Weinstein (Red Eye of Love, 1961), Naomi Iizuka (Tattoo Girl, 1994), and
Richard Caliban (Rodents and Radios, 1990), the speculative selves available
in dream or fantasy slip the leash for the characters who summoned them,
wreaking havoc on the best-laid plans for narrative. In fact, it is the rare
character in these plays who doesn’t exist in all three tenses at once. Time
becomes an almost tangible element of the environment—groped through,
wallowed in, pushed back—capable, like a tornado, of dispersing a character
among numerous contexts; ready, like a flood, to overwhelm him all at once
with worlds ordinarily visited one at a time. This ordeal is rarely as moving
as in Suzan-Lori Parks’s theatre, where time is space for different versions of
the same character (African, and later American) on opposite sides of a
single ocean.
Self-division is epidemic in all this theatre: it is as if stage-time acts as an
acid on its inhabitants, breaking apart images valid only for the moment they
are perceived, revealing the composition of personalities beneath the surface
of ordinary behavior, and sometimes allowing us to see a self and its ramifi-
cations (the kind of person a character denies, fears, or hopes to become) at
the same time. The spectacle is unsettling: the person on stage, fickle about
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 37

his form, can’t be trusted, nor can he trust himself. Shepard’s Shooter, in
Action, identifies a condition known to many characters when he describes
seeing a collection of limbs that, despite his best efforts, he can’t claim:
“When I look at my hand, I get terrified. The sight of my feet in the bathtub.
The skin covering me. That’s all that’s covering me.” He is “afraid to sleep
for fear his body might do something without him knowing.”
Standard psychological language is useless when it comes to describing
such characters. They’re not just “alienated,” for instance, when the floor
barely supports them, the walls close in, and their entire world sheds a skin
just when it starts to seem familiar. (“I got no references for this,” says Jeep.
“Suddenly it’s shifted.”) “Ambivalence” doesn’t begin to suggest their radi-
cal fracturing of will. (Kennedy’s Clara sits in the margins watching movie
stars “star in her life” and speak her thoughts.) “Nostalgic” or “idealistic”
temperaments aren’t to be found here; only characters so unmoored to a
context that, like Fornés’s Marion, they feel as if they’re “drowning in
vagueness” and “have no character.” Nor are they simply “insecure” or “con-
fused,” but rather suffer such an extreme form of self-consciousness that the
self dissolves under the laser-like scrutiny of consciousness. (Foreman’s
Rhoda can’t reconcile her body with her “body of knowledge.”) Indeed,
when we look at that place onstage where a character is supposed to be—a
figure bearing the burden of biography on the road to realized choices—
instead we see phantoms and mannequins and the debris of their struggle to
become complete. There are figures like Dinah in One Shoe Off—donning
and doffing costumes from famous plays, unable to find one that suits her
self-image—and the heroine of Craig Lucas’s Reckless (1983), frequently
changing her name and so, she hopes, her destiny. There are the malcontents
in Muzeeka, Red Eye of Love, Jack Richardson’s Gallows Humor (1961), and
Rodents and Radios, casting aside jobs and family roles in their quest for
their essential identities. There are the characters in Ed Bullins’s theatre—
say, The Man Who Dug Fish (1967)—refusing to accept racial roles without
irony. And finally there are the collages and force fields that stand in for
character in the works of Kennedy, Breuer, and Foreman—what could be
called ephemeral constellations of thought, vision, and action.
One senses that these playwrights are never sure of their characters, who
seem in the shifting landscape of a play to be more than merely the sum of
their actions and utterances. Yet for all their determination to penetrate their
mysterious surroundings and redeem the promise of the promised land, these
characters never feel they arrive. Up to the last moment, their skepticism
battles their faith: Individuals who began by scorning received definitions of
their lives are careful not to settle for their own. They think there is always
another corner of the setting to discover, another variation of their identity to
try. Potential lives and future destinations remain more seductive than cur-
rent experiences. Are such characters destined for days of self-contradic-
38 Introduction

tion—needing clarity and self-integration on the one hand, drawn to a life of

continuous reinvention on the other? Which state will make them feel more
alive, not merely present? Which offers the most security, the most freedom?
The questions are left hanging, and the statements of these characters
point to something—a place, a quality, an image of oneself—that has yet to
be experienced, something that remains invulnerable to cheapening and mis-
understanding. Entire plays are summarized in these abbreviated lines: “I just
wanted to be . . . ,” says Philip in Gallows Humor, and as his voice trails off,
the play opens up to reveal a picture of the need and sadness (and also the
hope) behind the workings of the imagination. “I want to become—touch
some part of—,” says Jack Argue in Muzeeka, and here again speech arches
forward, trying to reach the perfect expression and the perfect attitude, to
present the most convincing incarnation of the self. By the time we get to
Action, the state of expectation is familiar, but there are still no words for
what’s expected: “I’m looking forward to my life. I’m looking forward to—
me. . . . My true position . . . up for grabs.” Another failed declaration? Or
rather, a deliberate evasion of identity, for fear of its being interpreted too
narrowly? So many characters are poised on similar precipices—wondering
if the next sensation will be the one to illuminate the meaning of their lives
but also dreading its consequences. Revelation rarely comes, and perhaps
that’s why they sound ecstatic: The thrill is in the search, and in speaking of
the search: “I roam,” says one character. “I keep looking for the action!” says
a second. From still another: “Let’s keep pushing!”
The texture of much of this writing suggests that a passionate encounter is
going on just beneath its surface, in which a playwright pursues rather than
merely dramatizes lives and events. Each scene is another stab at knowledge,
written less to prove a point or demonstrate a theme than to gather evidence.
Some pages even read as if the playwrights are quarreling with their own
styles, trying to elude habitual turns of phrase and signature rhythms. At such
moments, one imagines the writers urging themselves to stick with difficult
subjects or characters until they bend, past the point when they seem merely
understood. Perhaps then something unexpected—and truly revelatory—will
emerge. For a writer of such an analytic temperament, characters are proposi-
tions, meant to be tests against the writer’s sense of the full force of thought
and action. Staging becomes a form of inquiry; language and movement, the
instruments of that inquiry. And writing, for the most anxious of these writ-
ers, thus becomes writing-toward in which dramatic form is always in ques-
tion.
Enter “performance art,” privileging the indeterminacy and unpredictabil-
ity of the event over the finish and fatedness of the text. And it is perfor-
mance art of a kind so loosely defined in the United States that all the
following qualify as, or have called themselves, “performance artists”: Ma-
donna, Karen Finley, Anna Deavere Smith, Amy Taubin, Eric Bogosian,
 Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 39

Ann Magnuson, Martha Clarke, Stuart Sherman, Chris Burden, Linda Mon-
tano, Laurie Anderson, Jack Smith, Holly Hughes, Vito Acconci, Winston
Tong, Meredith Monk, Spalding Gray, Rachel Rosenthal, Tim Miller, John
Fleck, John Leguizamo, John Kelly, Joan Jonas, Gilbert and George, Debo-
rah Hay, Bill Irwin, Bob Berky, David Shiner, the Kipper Kids, Michael
Moschen, Avner (“the Eccentric”) Eisenberg, and the Flying Karamazov
Brothers. Anything can be called “art,” in other words, as long as it is conse-
crated in performance—often of the narcissistic self.
Yet even “performance art,” especially in its original incarnation as Ka-
prow’s “happening,” harks back to ideas first introduced by the Futurists,
Dadaists, and Surrealists. Impatient with established art forms, they turned
first to the permissive, open-ended, hard-to-define medium of performance,
with its endless variables and unabashed borrowings from literature, poetry,
music, dance, drama, architecture, cinema, sculpture, and painting. Alfred
Jarry’s investiture of a new personality, or performative self, for himself;
Oskar Kokoschka’s manufacture of and formal marriage to a life-sized doll;
the proto-Expressionist Frank Wedekind’s enthusiastic participation in circus
life, together with his practice of nudism, eurythmics, “free love,” even on-
stage masturbation and urination; the Bateau-Lavoir’s celebrated banquet in
honor of le douanier Rousseau; the Dadaists’ first program, which ended in
riot at the Cabaret Voltaire in February 1916; Eisenstein’s production of
Tretyakov’s Gas Masks (1923–1924) in the Moscow Gas Factory—all these
by turns playful and impassioned, casual and programmed, serious and child-
like events could be called, by today’s definition, “performance art.”
But avant-gardists tellingly termed them fumisteries (figuratively, practi-
cal jokes or mystifications), and the aesthetic motif that they embodied fu-
misme. Which is to say that these events were simultaneously the smoke-
screens and cannon shots through which the avant-garde initiated its frontal
assault on the art of previous centuries. Fumisteries were never intended to
be, as is “performance art,” the thing in itself. They were the products of
artists who, when their creative rhythms were most accelerated, when their
most pugnacious breakthroughs in aesthetic method and concept were occur-
ring, equated their roles as much with carnival barker, circus clown, music-
hall magician, or religious charlatan as with those of sage and prophet. To
put it another way, they had some perspective on what they were doing, or
enough self-doubt not to take themselves too seriously, which is one of the
reasons we can take them so seriously today. In word as well as deed, avant-
gardists embodied the relativity, subjectivism, or tumult of their age—not the
fragmentation, flattening, and solipsism of the one to follow.
40 Introduction

WORKS CITED

Apollinaire, Guillaume. Preface to The Breasts of Tiresias: A Surrealist Drama. Trans. Louis
Simpson. In Modern French Theatre: The Avant-Garde, Dada, and Surrealism; An Antholo-
gy of Plays, ed. Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth, 56–62. New York: Dutton,
1964.
Blau, Herbert. Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal
Publications, 1982.
Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. 1961. Rev. ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Double-
day, 1969.
Hassan, Ihab. “Postface 1982: Toward a Conception of Postmodernism.” In Ihab Hassan, The
Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, 259–271. Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991.
Jung, C. G. “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” (1922). In The Portable
Jung, ed. Joseph Campbell; trans. R. F. C. Hull, 301–322. New York: Viking, 1971.
Kornfeld, Paul. “Epilogue to the Actor.” Trans. Joseph Bernstein. In Anthology of German
Expressionist Drama: A Prelude to the Absurd, ed. Walter H. Sokel, 6–8. Garden City, NY:
Anchor/Doubleday, 1963.
Malraux, André. The Metamorphosis of the Gods. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Doubleday,
1960.
———. The Temptation of the West. Trans. Robert Hollander. 1961. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991.
Masson, André. La mémoire du monde. Geneva: Albert Skira, 1974.
Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1968.
Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de. Oeuvres (facsimile reprint of the 1868–1878 Paris edition). Vol.
5. Geneva: Slatkine, 1977.
Schechner, Richard. Environmental Theatre. New York: Hawthorn, 1973.
 Chapter One

On the Marionette Theatre (1810)

Heinrich von Kleist

Translated by Jean Wilson.

Original publication: The essay “Über das Marionetten Theater” was first
published in four installments in the daily Berliner Abendblätter from De-
cember 12 to 15, 1810.

Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) was a German dramatist, all of whose

plays dramatized, in one form or another, the notion that pure reason cannot
penetrate the essence of things, that the intellect cannot determine what is
truth and what merely appears to be truth, that all perception is finally subjec-
tive. This notion—which for Kleist shattered the Enlightenment belief in the
power of reason to comprehend the universe and to perfect life on earth—
was at the heart of German romanticism, which abandoned the outer world in
favor of the inner in the belief that reality was created by the imagination,
that higher consciousness was gained through the unconscious, and that the
generally valid was reached by way of the most individual.
Kleist’s first drama was the tragedy The Schroffenstein Family (Die Fam-
ilie Schroffenstein, 1803). His second, Penthesilea (1808), presents a picture
of the wild passion of the queen of the Amazons. More successful than these
two was his romantic play Käthchen of Heilbronn (Das Käthchen von Heil-
bronn, 1808), a poetic drama full of mystery, witchcraft, and dream-imagery.
Kleist also wrote comedies: The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochne Krug, 1808)
and Amphitryon (1808), an adaptation of Molière’s play. His other dramas of
note are the anti-Napoleonic Die Hermannsschlacht (The Battle of the Teuto-
burg Forest, 1809) and the enigmatic Prince of Homburg (1811), in which a
young officer struggles to reconcile the conflicting impulses of romantic self-
actualization and obedience to military discipline.

41
42 On the Marionette Theatre

Viewed as a precursor to Ibsen and modern drama because of his atten-

tion to the psychological causes of characters’ emotional crises, Kleist is also
known for his essays on the subjects of aesthetics and psychology, such as
“On the Marionette Theatre”—essays that also reveal a keen insight into the
philosophical questions discussed by contemporaries of his such as the Kant,
Fichte, and Schelling. Taking as its central topic the problem of self-con-
sciousness in relation to art, “On the Marionette Theatre” focuses on the role
of the creative imagination in man’s arduous attempt to achieve an ultimate
and infinitely higher reality. According to Marvin Carlson in Theories of the
Theatre (1984), this essay “anticipates the fascination the puppet exerted on
dramatic theorists a century later” (189). For the notion of the ideal actor as a
kind of puppet, who simply reflects the essential mood or soul of the drama,
would later be taken up by the symbolists—Maeterlinck, Appia, Lugné-Poë,
Jarry, Yeats—and above all by Edward Gordon Craig in his famous essay
“The Actor and the Über-Marionette” (1908). The mysterious Mr. C— him-
self, with his desire to exploit the skill of other artists for his own purposes,
already strongly suggests the controlling impulse behind a “director’s thea-
tre.”
Kleist is also known for his essays on the subjects of aesthetics and
psychology, such as “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speak-
ing” and “On the Marionette Theatre.” On closer examination, these pieces
show a keen insight into the metaphysical questions discussed by philoso-
phers of Kleist’s time, such as Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. Taking as its
central topic the problem of self-consciousness and its relation to art, “On the
Marionette Theatre” itself focuses on the role of the creative imagination in
the “circuitous” journey of mankind toward an ultimate, infinitely higher
unity. This essay anticipates the fascination the puppet exerted on dramatic
theorists a century later, for the notion of the ideal actor as a kind of puppet,
who simply reflects the essential mood or soul of the drama, would be taken
up by the Symbolists—Maeterlinck, Appia, Lugné-Poë, Jarry, Yeats—and
above all by Edward Gordon Craig in his famous essay “The Actor and the
Über-Marionette” (1908). The mysterious Mr. C— himself, with his desire to
exploit the skill of other artists for his own purposes, already strongly sug-
gests the controlling impulse behind a “director’s theatre.”

***

During the winter of 1801, which I spent in M—, I happened one evening, in
the public gardens, to meet Mr. C—, who had recently been engaged as the
principal dancer at the opera in that town and was enjoying extraordinary
popular success.
 Heinrich von Kleist 43

I told him that I had been astonished to see him several times at a marion-
ette theatre, which had been hammered together in the marketplace and was
providing entertainment for the crowds by means of little dramatic bur-
lesques interspersed with song and dance.
He assured me that the pantomime of these puppets afforded him much
pleasure, and let it be known in no uncertain terms that a dancer who wanted
to perfect his art could learn a few things from them.
Since this remark, from the way he expressed it, seemed to me to be more
than a mere sudden whim, I sat down with him in order to question him more
closely about the grounds he might have for such a strange claim.
He asked me if I had not, in fact, found some of the dance movements of
the puppets, particularly of the smaller ones, very graceful.
I could not deny this fact. A group of four peasants, dancing a roundel in
rapid tempo, could not have been painted more prettily by David Teniers the
Younger [1610–1690].
I inquired about the mechanism of these figures and how it was possible,
without having a myriad of strings on one’s fingers, to control their individu-
al limbs and extremities as the rhythm of their movements in the dance
required.
He answered that I should not think of each individual limb as being
placed and pulled by the manipulator during the various moments of the
dance.
Each movement, he said, had its center of gravity. It suffices to control
this in the innermost part of the figure; the limbs, which are nothing but
pendulums, follow mechanically on their own, without any help whatsoever.
He added that this movement is very simple: whenever the center of
gravity is moved in a straight line, the limbs describe curves; and often,
when shaken in a merely random way, the whole figure comes to a kind of
rhythmical movement which is similar to dance.
This observation seemed to me at first to shed some light on the pleasure
he had claimed to find in the marionette theatre. I was still a long way from
suspecting the conclusions that he would later draw.
I asked him if he believed that the manipulator who controlled these
puppets must himself be a dancer or at least have some conception of the
beautiful in relation to dance.
He replied that even if a task is easy from a mechanical point of view, it
does not necessarily follow that it can be performed entirely without sensitiv-
ity.
The line that the center of gravity has to describe is indeed very simple
and, so he believed, in most cases straight. In situations where it is curved,
the law of its curvature seems to be of the first or at most of the second order,
44 On the Marionette Theatre

and even in the latter case only elliptical, a form of movement most natural
for the extremities of the human body (because of the joints), which would
demand no great artistic skill on the part of the manipulator.
From another perspective, however, this line is something very mysteri-
ous. For it is nothing less than the path of the dancer’s soul, and he doubted
that it could be found unless the manipulator were to transpose himself into
the marionette’s center of gravity—in other words, were to dance.
I replied that the business of a puppeteer had been presented to me as
something fairly uninspired, rather like the turning of a crank on a barrel
organ.
“Not at all,” he answered. “In fact the relation of the movements of his
fingers to the movement of the attached puppets is something quite artful,
rather like the relation of numbers to their logarithms or the asymptote to the
hyperbola.”
Meanwhile, he believed that even the last bit of vitality or spirit could be
removed from the marionettes, their dance could be transferred wholly into
the realm of mechanical forces, and that it could be produced, just as I had
imagined, by means of a crank.
I expressed my amazement at seeing him dignify with such attention this
variety of fine art intended for the masses. Not only did he consider it capable
of a higher development, he himself seemed to be preoccupied with such a
thing.
He smiled and said he was confident in claiming that if a craftsman were
to construct a marionette according to his specifications, he could use it to
present a dance that neither he nor any other skillful dancer of his time,
Gaetan Vestris [1729–1808] himself included, would be capable of match-
ing.
“Have you,” he asked, when I silently cast my eyes at the ground, “have
you heard of those mechanical legs that English craftsmen manufacture for
unfortunate souls who have lost their limbs?”
I said no, I had never come across such things.
“I am sorry to hear that,” he replied, “for when I tell you that these
unfortunate individuals dance with them, I am almost afraid that you will not
believe me. What do I mean, ‘dance’? The range of their movements is
indeed limited, but those they do have at their command are executed with a
serenity, ease, and grace that must astonish every thinking soul.”
Jokingly, I responded that he had now found his man. For the craftsman
who was capable of constructing such a remarkable limb would doubtless be
able to put together an entire marionette according to his specifications.
“What,” I asked, as he in his turn, slightly embarrassed, looked down at
the ground, “what, then, are the specifications that you would expect his skill
to meet?”
 Heinrich von Kleist 45

“Nothing,” he answered, “that is not already to be found here—balance,

agility, ease—but a higher degree of everything, and in particular a natural
arrangement of the centers of gravity.”
“And the advantage that this puppet would have over living dancers?”
“The advantage? First of all a negative one, my excellent friend, namely
this, that it would never act affectedly. For affectation, as you know, appears
when the soul (vis motrix [animating force]) is situated somewhere other
than in a movement’s center of gravity. Since the manipulator, using a wire
or string, has absolutely no other point in his power, all the remaining limbs
are what they should be—dead, pure pendulums—and they follow the basic
law of gravity—an excellent quality, which one looks for in vain in most of
our dancers.
“Just observe P—,” he continued, “when she plays Daphne, and, pursued
by Apollo, looks back at him: her soul is located in the small of her back; she
bends as though she were about to break, like a naiad out of the school of
Gian Lorenzo Bernini [1598–1680]. Or look at young F—, when, as Paris, he
stands among the three goddesses and extends the apple to Venus: his soul is
lodged (it is a fright to behold) in his elbow.
“Such mistakes,” he added, breaking off, “are unavoidable, since we have
eaten of the tree of knowledge. Paradise is locked and the cherubim behind
us; we must journey around the world and see if it is perhaps open again
somewhere at the back.”
I laughed. Certainly, I thought, the human spirit cannot err where none
exists. But I could see that he had more on his mind and asked him to
continue.
“In addition,” he said, “these puppets have the advantage of antigravity.
They know nothing of the inertia of matter, that property most inimical to the
dance, for the force that lifts them into the air is greater than that which holds
them to the ground. What would our dear G— give to be sixty pounds lighter
or to be aided in her entrechats and pirouettes by such a force? Puppets, like
elves, need the ground only so that they can touch on it and renew the vigor
of their limbs through this momentary check; we need it in order to rest and
recover from the exertions of the dance—a moment which is clearly not part
of the dance, and with which we can do nothing except make it as inconspic-
uous as possible.”
I said that no matter how skillfully he might present his paradoxes, he
would never make me believe that a mechanical puppet could be more grace-
ful than the human body.
He retorted that it was absolutely impossible for a human being to match
the grace of a puppet. Only a god could compete with matter in this respect,
and here was the point where both ends of the ring-like world came together.
I became more and more astonished, and did not know what I should say
to such strange claims.
46 On the Marionette Theatre

It would seem, he retorted, as he took a pinch of snuff, that I had not read
the third chapter of the Book of Genesis very carefully; and if a person is
unfamiliar with this first stage of all human development, one can hardly
speak with him about the later stages, let alone the final one.
I said that I knew very well what disorders consciousness produces in the
natural grace of human beings. A young man of my acquaintance had lost his
innocence right before my eyes, as it were, through a mere observation, and
afterward he was unable ever to find paradise again, in spite of every con-
ceivable effort. But what conclusions, I added, can you draw from this?
He asked me what incident I had in mind.
“About three years ago,” I related, “I was bathing with a young man
whose development at the time was suffused with a wonderful grace. He
would have been just approaching the age of sixteen, and only the first traces
of vanity were beginning to appear—a result of the favor he enjoyed with
women. It happened that shortly before this, in Paris, we had seen the statue
of the youth removing a thorn from his foot; copies of the statue are well
known and can be found in most German collections. Just as my friend was
putting his foot on a stool in order to dry it, a momentary glance in a large
mirror reminded him of the statue; he smiled and told me the discovery he
had made. In actual fact I had seen the same thing in exactly the same instant,
but, whether it was to test the sureness of the grace he possessed or to counter
his vanity in a salutary way, I laughed and replied that he must be seeing
things! He reddened and raised his foot a second time in order to show me;
however, as one might easily have guessed, the attempt failed. Flustered, he
raised his foot a third and fourth time; he must have raised it about ten times:
in vain! He was incapable of producing the same movement again—what am
I saying? The movements he did make had such a comical aspect that I had
trouble holding back my laughter.
“From that day—from that moment, as it were—an inconceivable change
came over the young man. He began to spend entire days in front of the
mirror; and bit by bit his charm deserted him. An invisible and incomprehen-
sible power, like an iron net, seemed to spread over the free play of his
gestures, and, after a year had gone by, there was no longer any trace of the
loveliness which had once delighted those who surrounded him. There is
someone still living today who was witness to this strange and unfortunate
occurrence and can confirm it, word for word, just as I have related it.”
“At this point,” said Mr. C— amicably, “I must tell you another story;
you will easily see how it fits in here.
“On a journey to Russia, I was visiting the estate of Mr. von G—, a
Livonian nobleman, whose sons were at that time very involved in fencing.
The eldest in particular, just home from the university, was playing the
virtuoso, and he offered me a rapier one morning when I was in his room. We
fenced, but it happened that I was better than he was. He became flustered,
 Heinrich von Kleist 47

partly because of his own passion, and almost every thrust I made found its
mark, until finally his rapier went flying into the corner. Picking it up, he
said, half jokingly, half irritably, that he had met his match, but sooner or
later we all encounter our master, and now he wished to lead me to mine. The
brothers burst out laughing and shouted, ‘Let’s go! Down to the stall!’ Tak-
ing me by the hand, they led me to a bear that their father, Mr. von G—, was
having raised on the estate.
“Astonished, I went up to the bear who was standing on his hind legs,
with his back against a post to which he was chained and his right paw poised
to strike. He looked me straight in the eye: this was his fencing posture. I
thought I must be dreaming to find myself facing such an opponent, but Mr.
von G— said, ‘Go ahead, attack! See if you can hit him!’ When I had
recovered somewhat from my astonishment, I lunged at him with my rapier;
the bear made a very quick movement with his paw and parried my thrust. I
tried misleading him with feints; the bear did not move. I lunged at him again
with concentrated skill, and I definitely would not have failed to hit a human
breast, but the bear made a very quick movement with his paw and parried
the thrust. I was now almost in the situation of the young Mr. von G—. The
bear’s soberness robbed me of my composure, thrusts alternated with feints, I
was dripping with sweat: in vain! It was not only that the bear, like the
premier fencer in the world, parried all my thrusts, but he did not react at all
to feints (no fencer in the world copies him in this). His paw poised to strike,
he stood with his eyes fixed on mine as though he could read my soul therein;
and when my thrusts were not in earnest, he did not move.
“Do you believe this story?”
“Absolutely!” I cried, applauding enthusiastically. “I’d believe it of any
stranger, it is so plausible; how much more, then, of you!”
“Now, my excellent friend,” said Mr. C—, “you have everything you
need to understand me. We see that in the organic world, as reflection grows
darker and weaker, grace emerges more radiant and powerful. But just as two
lines intersecting on one side of a point, after their passage through infinity,
suddenly reappear on the other side, or just as the image in a concave mirror,
after moving out into the infinite, suddenly becomes visible again, so too
grace returns, when knowledge has, as it were, gone through an infinity; thus,
grace appears most purely in that human form which has either no conscious-
ness at all or an infinite one—that is, in a puppet or in a god.”
“Therefore,” I said, somewhat abstracted, “we would have to eat once
more of the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of inno-
cence?”
“Yes, indeed,” he answered. “That is the final chapter in the history of the
world.”
 Chapter Two

The Tragic in Daily Life (1894)

Maurice Maeterlinck

Translated by George Brandt.

Original publication: From Le Trésor des humbles (Paris: Société du Mercure
de France, 1898), 179–201.

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) was a Belgian dramatist and essayist

who exerted an influence upon contemporaneous European dramatists—par-
ticularly Chekhov, Strindberg, and Yeats—wholly disproportionate to his
own modest posthumous reputation. His Symbolist dramas of the fin de
siècle—beginning with La Princesse Maleine (1889) and including The In-
truder (L’intruse, 1890), The Blind (Les aveugles, 1890), Pelléas et Méli-
sande (1892), and Interior (L’intérieur, 1894)—contributed significantly to
the establishment of a new dramatic mode in Europe as a result of their
brooding lyricism, their sense of fatalism, and their exploitation (sometimes
deft and moving, sometimes heavily portentous) of the techniques of oblique
communication.
Many of Maeterlinck’s ideas found more direct expression in his essays,
as collected in Le trésor des humbles (The Treasure of the Humble, 1896)
and La vie des abeilles (The Life of the Bee, 1901). “The Tragic in Daily
Life,” first published in Le Figaro in 1894, called for a new type of drama, a
drama of stasis. The theory came on the heels of the success of Maeterlinck’s
The Blind and The Intruder, which had death at the center of the action, or
rather inaction. With their emphasis on stillness and inwardness, these plot-
less dramas were like motionless tableaux rather than dramatic events in the
conventional sense; they set out to capture a timeless moment that would
invite the spectators to contemplate ineffable mysteries in a meditative state
of mind. The principles of non-action and “second-degree dialogue” cham-
pioned in “The Tragic in Daily Life” were echoed, in the early years of the
49
50 The Tragic in Daily Life

twentieth century, in the work of several notable Symbolist playwrights such

as Yeats and late Strindberg. Comparable if not identical principles can be
traced in the second half of the twentieth century to writers like Beckett and
Pinter in plays such as Krapp’s Last Tape in the case of the former or
Landscape and Silence in the case of the latter.

***

There is a tragic element in daily life that is far more real, far deeper, and far
more consistent with our true self than the tragedy of great adventures. This
is easy to feel but hard to show because the essential tragic element is not
merely material or psychological. It is not a matter of the unflinching strug-
gle of one person against another, the struggle of one desire against another,
nor the eternal conflict of passion and duty. It is more a matter of revealing
what is so astonishing about the mere act of living. It is more a matter of
revealing the existence of the soul itself, in the midst of an immensity that is
never at rest. It is more a matter of allowing to be heard, above the ordinary
dialogue of reason and the feelings, the more solemn and uninterrupted di-
alogue of man and his destiny. It is more a matter of making us follow the
uncertain and painful steps of someone approaching or retreating from his
own truth, his beauty, or his God. And it is a matter of showing us and
making us hear a thousand similar things which the tragic poets have given
us brief glimpses of in passing. But here is the essential point: could not that
which they have given us brief glimpses of in passing be shown before
anything else? That which we hear underlying King Lear, Macbeth, and
Hamlet for instance, the mysterious chant of the infinite, the ominous silence
of souls or of the gods, the rumble of eternity on the horizon, the destiny or
fatality one senses inwardly without being able to say by what signs one
perceives it—could one not by I know not what interchange of roles bring
them closer to us while putting the actors at a greater distance? Is it then too
bold to maintain that the authentic tragic element of life, normal, deep-rooted
and universal tragedy, only begins at the moment when so-called adventures,
sorrows, and dangers are over? Is not the arm of happiness longer than that of
sorrow, and do not some of its forces come closer to the soul? Must we really
shriek like the Atrides before an eternal god will reveal himself in our life,
and will he never sit down with us in the calm light of our lamp? Is not
tranquillity, watched over by the stars, a terrible thing when you consider it;
and does our sense of life grow in tumult or in silence? Is it not when we are
told at the end of a story, “They were happy,” that a great unease should
come upon us? What is going on while they are happy? Does not happiness
or a simple moment of rest reveal more of what is serious and changeless
than does the whirlwind of passion? Is it not then that the progression of time
and other more secret progressions at last become visible and the hours go
 Maurice Maeterlinck 51

rushing forward? Does not all this touch deeper chords than the dagger-thrust
of ordinary drama? Is it not just when a man thinks he is secure from death
threatening from without that the strange and silent tragedy of being and of
the immensities does indeed throw open the doors of his drama? While I am
fleeing before a naked sword, does my existence reach its most interesting
point? Is it always at its most sublime in a kiss? Are there not other moments
when one hears more lasting and purer voices? Does your soul only burst
into flower during stormy nights? This seems to have been the general opin-
ion until now. Almost all our tragic authors only see the life of violence, the
life of the past; and one may say that all our theatre is out of date and that the
art of drama is as many years behind the times as is sculpture. It is a different
story with, for instance, good painting and good music, which have managed
to tease out and reproduce the most hidden but none the less serious and
astonishing features of the life of today. They have noted that what life has
lost by way of surface decoration it has gained in depth, in intimate meaning
and spiritual weight. . . .
But our tragic authors, just like the mediocre artists who have not gone
beyond history painting, make the violence of the story they are telling carry
all the interest of their plays. And they set about entertaining us with the
same kind of deeds that delighted barbarians who were used to crimes, mur-
ders, and treasons. But we spend most of our lives far away from blood,
shouting, and swords, and the tears of mankind have become silent, invisible,
and almost spiritual . . .
When I go to the theatre I feel as if I were back for a few hours among my
ancestors whose idea of life as something simple, arid, and brutal I have all
but forgotten and which I can no longer share. There I see a betrayed husband
kill his wife; a woman poison her lover, a son avenge his father, a father
butcher his children, children cause the death of their father, murdered kings,
ravished virgins, citizens in jail, and all the traditional sublime, but alas! so
superficial and so crude—blood, unfelt tears, and death. What do these crea-
tures, who have but one fixed idea and no time to live because they must put
to death a rival or a mistress, mean to me?
I had come in the hope of seeing something of life connected to its
sources and its mysteries by links which my daily routine gives me neither
the opportunity nor the power to observe. I had come in the hope of glimps-
ing for a moment the beauty, the grandeur, and the gravity of my humble
everyday existence. I was hoping that I should be shown I know not what
presence, what power or what god living with me in my room. I was expect-
ing I know not what meaningful moments which I experience unperceived
amid my most wretched hours; and all too often I was to discover a man who
told me at length why he was feeling jealous, why he was administering
poison, or why he was committing suicide.
52 The Tragic in Daily Life

I admire Othello, but he does not seem to me to be living the sublime

daily life of a Hamlet who has time to live because he does not act. Othello is
admirably jealous. But is it not perhaps a long-standing error to think that it
is at moments when such a passion or other equally violent ones possess us
that we are truly alive? I have come to think that an old man, seated in his
armchair, simply waiting underneath his lamp, listening unawares to all the
eternal laws that reign about his house, interpreting uncomprehendingly what
there is in the silence of the doors and the windows and the quiet voice of the
light, submitting to the presence of his soul and his destiny with his head
slightly inclined, never suspecting that all the powers of this world are acting
and watching in the room like so many attentive servants, not realizing that
the very sun is supporting above the abyss the little table on which his elbows
are resting, and that there is not a star in the heavens nor a power of the soul
that are indifferent to the movement of a drooping eyelid or of a rising
thought—I have come to think that this motionless old man was actually
living a deeper, more human, and more universal life than the lover who
strangles his mistress, the captain who wins a victory, or “the husband who
avenges his honor.”
I shall perhaps be told that a motionless life would scarcely be visible,
that it has to be animated with some movements and that these varied move-
ments, in order to be acceptable, can only be found in the small number of
passions employed hitherto. I do not know whether it is true that a static
theatre is impossible. But it actually seems to me to exist already. Most of the
tragedies of Aeschylus are motionless tragedies. I do not mean Prometheus
and The Suppliants, in which there is no action; but the entire tragedy of The
Libation Bearers, which is surely the most terrible drama of antiquity, errs
like a nightmare around Agamemnon’s tomb until murder springs forth like
lightning from the accumulation of prayers which keep gathering there. Con-
sider a few more of the finest ancient tragedies from this point of view: The
Eumenides, Antigone, Electra, Oedipus at Colonus. “People have admired,”
Racine says in his preface to Bérénice, “people have admired Sophocles’
Ajax, which is about nothing else but Ajax killing himself out of regret for
the fury into which he had fallen after being denied the arms of Achilles.
People have admired Philoctetes, whose sole subject is Ulysses coming to
seize the arrows of Hercules. Even Oedipus, though full of recognitions,
contains less subject matter than the simplest tragedy of our days.”
Is this anything other than a life almost without motion? Usually there is
not even any psychological action, which is a thousand times better than
physical action and which seems indispensable but which has nevertheless
been suppressed or wonderfully reduced in such a way as to leave as the only
interest that which arises out of the situation of man in the universe. Here we
are no longer among barbarians, and man is no longer driven by those crude
passions which are not the only interesting things about him. We have time to
 Maurice Maeterlinck 53

observe him at rest. We are dealing not with an exceptional violent moment
in life but with life itself. There are thousands and thousands of laws mightier
and more venerable than the laws of passion; but these slow-moving, dis-
creet, and silent laws, like all things endowed with irresistible strength, are
not seen and heard except in the twilight and the serenity of the quiet mo-
ments of life.
When Ulysses and Neoptolemus come to Philoctetes to ask him for the
arms of Hercules, their action in itself is as simple and as ordinary as that of a
man of our time who enters a house to visit an invalid, of a traveller who
knocks at the door of an inn, or of a mother by the fireside who waits for her
child to come home. Sophocles swiftly sketches in the character of his hero.
But can we not say that the main interest of the tragedy does not lie in the
struggle we see there between cunning and loyalty, between love of one’s
homeland, rancor, and stubborn pride? There is something else; it is man’s
higher existence that is shown to us. The poet adds to ordinary life something
that is the secret of poets, and all of a sudden it is revealed in its astonishing
grandeur, its subordination to unknown powers, its unending affinities, and
its awesome misery. A chemist lets fall but a few mysterious drops into a
vessel that seems to contain nothing but clear water: and all at once a whole
world of crystals will rise up to the rim and reveal to us what was latent in the
vessel where our flawed vision had not perceived anything. Similarly in
Philoctetes, the sketchy characterization of the three main actors would seem
to be merely the sides of the vessel containing the clear water which is
ordinary life, into which the poet lets fall the revealing drops of his genius . . .
So it is not in the actions but in the words that the beauty and the great-
ness of beautiful and great tragedies lie. Are they found only in the words
which accompany and explain the actions? No, something is needed other
than the outwardly necessary dialogue. It is the words which at first seem
redundant that matter in a play. It is in them that its soul lies. Side by side
with the necessary dialogue there is almost always a dialogue that seems
superfluous. Examine it carefully and you will see that this is the only one to
which the soul will listen profoundly because it is only here that it is being
addressed. You will also become aware that the quality and the scope of this
dialogue determine the quality and the ineffable range of the play. It is a fact
that in the ordinary drama the indispensable dialogue does not reflect reality
at all; and what constitutes the mysterious beauty of the most beautiful trage-
dies are those very words which are spoken beside what seems to be the strict
truth. It is found in the words that conform to a truth deeper and incompar-
ably closer to the invisible soul which breathes through the poem. One may
even affirm that the poem comes closer to beauty and a higher truth to the
extent that it does away with the words which explain the action and substi-
tutes for them words which explain, not what is called a “state of the soul”
but I know not what intangible and unceasing striving of souls towards their
54 The Tragic in Daily Life

beauty and towards their truth. To that extent also it comes closer to the true
life. It is a common experience in daily life that one has to resolve a very
serious situation by means of words. Just think about it. At these moments, or
indeed ordinarily, is what you say or what is said to you always that which
matters most? Are not other powers, other words that one cannot hear
brought into play that determine the event? What I say often counts for little;
but my presence, the attitude of my soul, my future and my past, that which
will be born in me, that which has died in me, a secret thought, the friendly
stars, my destiny, the thousands and thousands of mysteries that surround me
and envelop you, that is what speaks to you at that tragic moment and that is
what responds to me. All this underlies each of my words and each of yours,
and it is chiefly this we see, and it is chiefly this we hear in spite of ourselves.
If you have come, you “the outraged husband,” the “deceived lover,” the
“abandoned wife” intending to kill me, your arm will not be stayed by my
most eloquent pleas. But it may be that you will then encounter one of those
unexpected forces and that my soul, knowing that they are watching over me,
may speak a secret word which will disarm you. These are the spheres where
adventures are resolved, this is the dialogue the echo of which should be
heard. And it is this echo that one hears—exceedingly attenuated and vari-
able, it is true—in some of the great plays I have just spoken of. But could we
not try to draw closer to these spheres where everything happens “in reality”?
It seems to me that the attempt is being made. Some time ago, dealing
with Ibsen’s play where this “second-degree” dialogue is heard at its most
tragic, dealing with The Master Builder I endeavored, unskillfully enough, to
prise open its secrets. These are still gropings very much like the same blind
man’s hand on the same wall striving towards the same light. “What is it,” I
said, “that in The Master Builder the author has added to life in order to make
it appear so strange, so profound, and so disquieting beneath its trivial sur-
face? It is not easy to make out, and the old master has kept more than one
secret from us. It would even seem that what he wanted to say was but little
compared to what he had to say. He has set free certain powers of the soul
which had never been free before, and he may have been possessed by them.
“‘Do you see, Hilde,’ exclaims Solness, ‘do you see! There is sorcery in you
just as there is in me. It is this sorcery that causes the outside powers to act.
And we have to yield to it. Whether we like it or not, we have to.’”
There is sorcery in them as there is in all of us. Hilde and Solness are, I
believe, the first dramatic characters who feel for an instant that they are
living in the atmosphere of the soul, and this essential life they have discov-
ered within themselves, beyond their everyday life, terrifies them. Hilde and
Solness are two souls who have caught a glimpse of their situation in the true
life. There is more than one way of getting to know a person. Let me take, for
instance, two or three people whom I see almost every day. Probably for a
long time I shall distinguish them only by their gestures, their outer or inner
 Maurice Maeterlinck 55

habits, their manner of feeling, acting, and thinking. But there comes a mys-
terious moment in any friendship of some duration in which we become
aware, so to speak, of our friend’s exact relationship to the unknown that
surrounds him and the attitude destiny has assumed towards him. It is from
this moment onwards that he truly belongs to us. . . .
I believe that Hilde and Solness are in this state and perceive each other in
this fashion. Their conversation is unlike anything we have ever heard before
because the poet has endeavored to blend inner and outer dialogue in one
expression. There reign in this somnabulistic drama I know not what novel
powers. All that is said in it at once conceals and uncovers the sources of an
unknown life. And if we are bewildered at times, we must not lose sight of
the fact that our soul often appears to our poor eyes a most demented force,
and that there are in mankind many more fruitful, more profound, and more
interesting regions than those of reason or intelligence. . . .
 Chapter Three

On the Futility of the “Theatrical” in

the Theatre (1896)
Alfred Jarry

Translated by Barbara Wright.

Original publication: From “De l’inutilité du théâtre au théâtre,” Mercure de
France, September 1896.

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) was a French dramatist and novelist who

achieved, with his bitterly farcical Ubu Roi (Ubu the King) in 1896, what his
contemporaries grudgingly admitted to be a succès de scandale and which
since has been acknowledged as the start of a line that led via the Surrealists
all the way up to the Theatre of the Absurd. Written according to Jarry as a
“Guignol,” this play called for drastically untraditional scenery and acting
and otherwise broke with all other accepted theatrical norms of the time.
Jarry followed it in 1900 with Ubu enchaîné (Ubu Unchained).
“On the Futility of the ‘Theatrical’ in the Theatre” was published in the
September 1896 issue of the Mercure de France, shortly before the opening
night of Ubu Roi, which was about to be staged at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre by
the avant-garde director Aurélien Lugné-Poë. Jarry’s technical notes here,
which referred specifically to the forthcoming production, must be read as a
practical expression of his dramaturgical innovations. His anti-bourgeois
stance, formulated in the essay as an all-out attack on the theatre-going
public, was embodied in the text in scabrous dialogue, primitive and blatant-
ly two-dimensional characterization, a farcical approach to tragic material,
and an overall defiance of decorum. This violently anti-classical play clearly
implied a new form of staging, in provocative opposition to any Romantic or
Naturalistic illusionism. It also meant a totally new, as it were dehumanized,
approach to performance; Jarry’s call for masked acting was not realized in

57
58 On the Futility of the “Theatrical” in the Theatre

the actual production, but its potential for depersonalization is one of several
sources of the twentieth-century theatre’s return to the mask. Both the play
and its theatrical realization were to have a long-term influence on many
non-rationalist forms of theatre, especially in France (but elsewhere too)—an
influence clearly traceable in the work of Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Ionesco.

***

I think the question of whether the theatre should adapt itself to the masses,
or the masses to the theatre, has been settled once and for all. The masses
only understood, or pretended to understand, the tragedies and comedies of
ancient Greece because their stories were known to everybody and were
explained over and over again in every play anyway and, as often as not, set
out by a character in the prologue. Just as nowadays they go to see the plays
of Molière and Racine at the Comédie-Française because they are always
being played. Besides, it’s a fact that most of them are over their heads. The
theatre not yet having gained the freedom forcibly to chuck out anyone who
doesn’t understand, or to clear the auditorium at each interval before the
shouting and smashing begin, we can be satisfied with the established truth
that if people do fight in the theatre it will be over a work of popularization,
one that is not in the least original and is therefore more readily accessible
than the original; an original work will, at least on the first night, be greeted
by a public that remains bemused and consequently dumb.
And the first-night public consists of the people who want to understand.
If we want to lower ourselves to the level of the public, there are two
things we can do for them and which are being done for them: the first is to
give them characters who think as they do (a Siamese or Chinese ambassa-
dor, seeing Molière’s The Miser, bet that the miser would be outwitted and
his money-box stolen), and whom they understand perfectly, thinking: “I
must be witty to laugh at all this wit”—which never fails to happen to the
audiences of Mr. Maurice Donnay [1859–1945]—and thinking that they are
doing their bit in creating the play, which cuts out the effort of anticipating
what is going to happen; and in the second place, to give them a common-
place sort of plot—everyday events that happen anytime to just anybody,
because the fact is that Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci
are rather outsized figures whose diameter is somewhat hard to measure up
to, because genius, intelligence, and even talent are larger than life, and so
beyond most people.
If in the whole universe there are five hundred people who, compared
with infinite mediocrity, have a touch of Shakespeare and Leonardo in them,
is it not right and proper to grant these five hundred healthy minds the same
 Alfred Jarry 59

thing that is lavished on Mr. Donnay’s audiences—the relief of not seeing on

the stage what they don’t understand; the active pleasure of participating in
creation, and of anticipation?
What follows is a list of a few things which are outstandingly horrifying
and incomprehensible to these five hundred minds, and which clutter up the
stage to no purpose: first and foremost, the décor and the actors.
A décor is a hybrid, neither natural nor artificial. If it were exactly like
nature it would be a superfluous duplication . . . It isn’t artificial, in the sense
that it doesn’t give the artist a chance to realize the outside world as he has
seen it or rather as he has created it.
Now it would be very dangerous for the poet to impose on a public of
artists the décor as he himself might paint it. In a written work anyone who
knows how to read sees the hidden meaning in it that makes sense to him. . . .
But there is hardly anyone for whom a painted backcloth has two meanings,
as it is far harder to extract the quality from a quality than the quality from a
quantity. And every spectator has a right to see a play in a setting which suits
his own view of it. For the general public, on the other hand, any “artistic”
décor will do, as the masses don’t understand anything by themselves but
wait to be told.
There are two sorts of décor: indoor and outdoor. Each is supposed to
represent either rooms or the countryside. We shall not once more go over
the question, which has been settled once and for all, of the stupidity of
trompe l’oeil. Let us state that the said trompe l’oeil fools people who only
see things crudely, that is to say, who don’t see at all, and it shocks those who
see nature intelligently and selectively, since it presents them with a carica-
ture of it by someone who lacks all understanding. They say the Greek
painter Zeuxis [ca. 420–390 B.C.] deceived the brute beasts [by painting
grapes so realistically as to attract birds to the picture], and the Italian painter
Titian [ca. 1490–1576] deceived an innkeeper.
A décor by someone who can’t paint is nearer to an abstract décor, as it
only gives the essentials, just as a simplified décor would pick out only the
relevant aspects.
We tried heraldic décors, where a single shade is used to represent a
whole scene or act, with the characters “passant” harmonically against the
blazon. That is rather stupid, as the said color can only establish itself . . .
against a colorless background. This can be achieved simply and in a way
which is symbolically accurate by an unpainted backcloth or the reverse side
of a set. Each spectator can then conjure up for himself the background he
requires or, better still, if the author knew his business, the real scene, by a
process of exosmosis. The placard brought on to mark the changes in place
cuts out the intermittent appeal to mindlessness of a material change of
scenery, which one becomes aware of especially at the moment of change.
60 On the Futility of the “Theatrical” in the Theatre

In these conditions, any specially needed piece of scenery—a window to

be opened or a door to be broken down—becomes a prop and can be brought
on like a table or a torch.
The actor makes up his face according to his character, and should do as
much to his body. The play of his features, his expressions, etc., is caused by
various contractions and extensions of the muscles of his face. No one has
realized that the muscles remain the same under the make-believe, made-up
face, and that Jean Mounet-Sully [1841–1916] and Hamlet do not have the
same configuration of the skull, even though in anatomical terms we think
they are the same man. Or else people say that the difference is negligible.
The actor should use a mask to envelop his head, thus replacing it by the
effigy of his CHARACTER. His mask should not . . . simply betoken tears or
laughter, but should indicate the nature of the character: the Miser, the Wa-
verer, the Covetous Man piling up crimes . . .
And if the eternal nature of the character is embodied in the mask, we can
learn from the kaleidoscope, and particularly the gyroscope, a simple means
of highlighting the critical moments, singly or several at a time.
With the old-style actor, masked only in thinly applied make-up, each
facial expression is raised to a power by color and particularly by relief, and
then to cubes and higher powers by LIGHTING.
What we are about to describe was impossible in the Greek theatre as the
light, vertical or at least never sufficiently horizontal, produced a shadow
under every protuberance in the mask—but not sharply enough because the
light was diffused.
Contrary to the deductions of rudimentary and imperfect logic, there is no
clear shadow in those sunny countries, and in Egypt, under the Tropic of
Cancer, there is hardly a trace of shadow left on the face; the light was
reflected vertically as if by the face of the moon, and diffused both by the
sand on the ground and the sand suspended in the air.
The footlights illumine the actor along the hypotenuse of a right-angled
triangle, the actor’s body forming one of the sides of the right angle. And as
the footlights are a series of luminous points, that is to say a line which, in
relation to the narrowness of the front view of the actor, extends indefinitely
to the right and left of its intersection with the actor’s plane, they should be
considered as a single point of light situated at an indefinite distance, as it
were behind the audience.
It is true that the footlights are less than an infinite distance away, so that
one cannot really regard all the rays reflected by the actor (or facial expres-
sions) as traveling along parallel lines. In practice each spectator sees the
character’s mask equally, with differences which are certainly negligible
compared to the idiosyncrasies and different perceptive attitudes of the indi-
vidual spectator, which cannot be attenuated—and which in any case cancel
each other out in the audience qua herd, which is what an audience is.
 Alfred Jarry 61

By slowly nodding up and down and lateral movements of his head the
actor displaces the shadows over the whole surface of his mask. And experi-
ence has shown that the six main positions (and the same number in profile,
though these are less clear) suffice for every expression. We shall not cite
any examples, as they vary according to the nature of the mask and because
everyone who has managed to watch a puppet show will have been able to
observe this for himself.
They are simple expressions and therefore universal. Present-day mime
has made the great mistake of ending up with a conventional, tiresome, and
incomprehensible mimed language. An example of this convention is the
hand describing a vertical ellipse round the face and a kiss being implanted
on this hand to suggest a beautiful woman and love. An example of a univer-
sal gesture is the marionette displaying its bewilderment by starting back
violently and banging its head against a flat.
Behind all these accidentals there remains the essential expression, and
the finest thing in many scenes is the impassibility of the mask, whether it
utters words grave or merry. This can only be compared with the solid
structure of the skeleton, deep down under its surrounding animal flesh, the
tragicomical qualities of which have always been acknowledged.
It goes without saying that the actor must have a special voice, which is
the voice appropriate to the part, as if the cavity forming the mouth of the
mask were incapable of uttering anything other than what the mask would
say, if the muscles of its lips could move. And it is better for them not to
move, and that the whole play should be spoken in a monotone.
And we have also said that the actor must take on the body appropriate to
the part . . .
 Chapter Four

Prefatory Note to A Dream Play (1901)

August Strindberg

Translated by Evert Sprinchorn.

Original publication, in English: From August Strindberg: Selected Plays
and Prose, ed. Robert Brustein (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
1964).

August Strindberg (1849–1912) was a Swedish playwright and dramatic

theorist. Strindberg’s plays are traditionally divided into two major stages:
his naturalist period of the late 1880s and early 1990s, and his predominantly
expressionist period from 1898 on. Of the naturalist plays, The Father (1887)
and Miss Julie (1888) are the ones most frequently produced. The fragmenta-
tion of personality so characteristic of Strindberg’s expressionism first ap-
pears in To Damascus (Part I, 1898). The full-blown expressionism that
followed is chiefly represented by A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost
Sonata (1907), the former of which did so much to free the stage from the
time- and space-bound assumptions of naturalism. Strindberg’s formal ex-
perimentation, particularly his marking of a protagonist’s journey through
life via a series of “stations,” was a crucial influence on the German expres-
sionists and even Artaud, one of whose few realized productions was of A
Dream Play in 1928.

***

Following the example of my previous dream play To Damascus, I have in

this present dream play sought to imitate the incoherent but ostensibly logical
form of our dreams. Anything can happen; everything is possible and prob-
able. Time and space do not exist. Working with some insignificant real

63
64 Prefatory Note to A Dream Play

events as a background, the imagination spins out its threads of thoughts and
weaves them into new patterns—a mixture of memories, experiences, spon-
taneous ideas, impossibilities, and improbabilities.
The characters split, double, multiply, dissolve, condense, float apart,
coalesce. But one mind stands over and above them all, the mind of the
dreamer; and for him there are no secrets, no inconsistencies, no scruples, no
laws. He does not condemn, does not acquit; he only narrates the story. And
since the dream is more often painful than cheerful, a tone of melancholy and
of sympathy with all living creatures runs through the pitching and swaying
narrative. Sleep, which should free the dreamer, often plagues and tortures
him instead. But when the pain is most excruciating, the moment of waking
comes and reconciles the dreamer with reality, which, however agonizing it
may be, is a joy and a pleasure at that moment compared to the painful
dream.
 Chapter Five

The Stylized Theatre (excerpt, 1907)

Vsevolod Meyerhold

Translated by Edward Braun.

Original publication, in English: From Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. Edward
Braun (1969; London: Methuen, 1991).

Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) was a Russian actor, director, and (brief-

ly) filmmaker of German parentage. Though his work was not explicitly
political before the Revolution—when he worked with Stanislavsky at the
Moscow Art Theatre and Vera Komissarzhevskaya at her theatre in St. Pe-
tersburg—Meyerhold was one of the first in theatre to side with the Bolshe-
viks. His part in transforming Soviet theatre into a revolutionary cultural
force open to avant-garde movements of the time is large.
In On the Theatre, a collection of his critical writings that appeared in
1913, Meyerhold defends theatricality and stylization, the puppet and the
mask, and the elevation of form over content. He believes that the impos-
sibility of embracing the totality of reality onstage justifies the schematiza-
tion of the real (in particular by means of stylization). For Meyerhold this
means that the theatre should seek its most profound effects through its own
means: the mime, the mask, the juggler, the puppet, and the improvisation of
action. Through these, the drama can suggest the vast, unfathomed depths
beneath visible reality. The job of the spectator, in the sort of stylized theatre
that Meyerhold wished to substitute for the “Apollonian fantasy” of Natural-
ism, would be to employ his imagination creatively in order to fill in those
details only suggested by the stage action.
In 1921 Meyerhold became director of the Moscow State Higher Theatre
Workshop, where he developed “biomechanics,” a system of exercise and
actor-training subsequently employed in his productions. In 1937 he was

65
66 The Stylized Theatre

attacked in Pravda, and a year later the Meyerhold Theatre was shut down.
In 1939 he was arrested and his wife, Zinaida Raikh, murdered; Meyerhold
himself was shot a year or so later.

***

The stage has become estranged from its communal-religious origins; it has
alienated the spectator by its objectivity. The stage is no longer infectious, it
no longer has the power of transfiguration.
But thanks to such dramatists as Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, and Wag-
ner, the theatre is moving back towards its dynamic origins. We are rediscov-
ering the precepts of antiquity. Just as the sacred ritual of Greek tragedy was
a form of Dionysian catharsis , so today we demand of the artist that he heal
and purify us.
In the New Drama external action, the revelation of character, is becom-
ing incidental. We are striving to penetrate behind the mask, beyond the
action into the character as perceived by the mind; we want to penetrate to
the inner mask.
The New Drama rejects the external in favor of the internal, not in order
to penetrate man’s soul and thus renounce this earth and ascend to the heav-
ens (théâtre ésotérique), but to intoxicate the spectator with the Dionysian
cup of eternal sacrifice.
If the New Theatre is once again dynamic, then let it be totally dynamic.
If the theatre is finally to rediscover its dynamic essence, it must cease to be
“theatre” in the sense of mere “spectacle.” We intend the audience not mere-
ly to observe, but to participate in a corporate creative act. . . .
The stylized theatre liberates the actor from all scenery, creating a three-
dimensional area in which he can employ natural, sculptural plasticity. . . .
By freeing the actor from the haphazard conglomeration of irrelevant stage
properties, and by reducing technical devices to the minimum, the stylized
theatre restores prominence to the creative powers of the actor. Concentrat-
ing on the restoration of tragedy and comedy (as manifestations of Fate and
Satire), the stylized theatre avoids the “mood” of Chekhovian theatre, which
transforms acting into the passive experiencing of emotions and reduces the
actor’s creative intensity.
Having removed the footlights, the stylized theatre aims to place the stage
on a level with the auditorium. By giving diction and movement a rhythmical
basis, it hopes to bring about the revival of the dance. In such a theatre,
dialogue can easily merge into melodic declamation and melodic silence.
The task of the director in the stylized theatre is to direct the actor rather
than control him (unlike the Meiningen director). He serves purely as a
bridge, linking the soul of the author with the soul of the actor. Having
 Vsevolod Meyerhold 67

assimilated the author’s creation, the actor is left alone, face to face with the
spectator, and from the friction between these two unadulterated elements,
the actor’s creativity and the spectator’s imagination, a clear flame is kindled.
 Chapter Six

Realism and Convention

on the Stage (1908)
Valery Briusov

Translated by Laurence Senelick.

Original publication: Essay first published in Teatr: Kniga o novom teatre
(St. Petersburg, 1908).

Valery Briusov (1873–1924) was a Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, trans-

lator, and critic. Briusov began his literary career in the early 1890s while
still a student at Moscow State University with his translations of the poetry
of the French symbolists (Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Maurice Maeter-
linck, and Stéphane Mallarmé), as well as that of Edgar Allan Poe. Briusov
also began to publish his own poems, which were very much influenced by
the symbolism of continental Europe. By the early 1900s, he had become a
central figure and mentor to a new generation of Russian symbolists.
Briusov began writing plays around 1893, among them The Earth (1905)
and The Wayfarer (1910), an example of monodrama, in which there is only
one speaking character—a genre favored by the Russian symbolists (among
them Nikolai Evreinov) for its mystical or “inner” possibilities. In his theo-
retical writings on drama, Briusov argued against the naturalism of the Mos-
cow Art Theatre, which, he believed, failed to challenge the ingrained and
complacent viewing habits of Russian audiences. In his opinion, the author’s
task is to evoke moods and reveal essences through intimation or suggestion,
rather than to offer up a total representational picture of reality through the
precise recording of surface appearances. In “Realism and Convention on the
Stage,” Briusov seeks a middle ground between Stanislavsky’s realism and
Meyerhold’s symbolism, between a theatre that merges itself with life and

69
70 Realism and Convention on the Stage

another one that merges itself with thought. The key to resolving this contra-
diction is the living actor, around whom should be objects that are actual but
not obtrusive, illusionistic, or unharmonious.
Many of his fellow symbolists fled Russia after the Russian Revolution of
1917, but Briusov remained until his death in 1924. His attempt to write
plays that embraced the Bolshevik Revolution failed, however, and he never
recaptured the success and influence of his symbolist period.

***

The production style at modern theatres can be divided into two kinds: realis-
tic and conventionalized.
Historically, stage convention preceded stage realism. The ancient theatre
knew only conventionalized staging, being reconciled to kothurnoi, masks,
megaphones, and scenery that almost never changed. Conventionalized were
the stage productions of the medieval theatre and the theatre of the ages of
Shakespeare and Corneille. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, when real-
ism triumphed even in literature and the graphic arts, theatre directors re-
mained faithful to convention, which had degenerated into a pernicious tradi-
tion: in depicting a room or a forest, in turns of speech, in gestures, in
makeup. Only in the last twenty-five years have attempts been made to turn
the stage into a kind of mirror which would reflect reality. The Meiningen
theatre in Germany, Antoine’s theatre in France, the Moscow Art Theatre
here in Russia, all attempted to free the stage from all these conventions.
Their productions might be considered the last word in theatrical realism;
their failures ought to be acknowledged as fatal for all theories. (This is no
place to revive the old argument about “realism” in art, in general. The
question may claim to have been resolved, until the defenders of realism find
new arguments. Only those who refuse to hear and understand can still aver
that art should “reproduce” or “reflect” reality. It has long been proven that
art, in the first place, has never performed that function; in the second, cannot
perform it; in the third, were it to perform such a function, it would create
something wholly unsuitable.)
The ideal of the realistic theatre is to make everything on stage as it is “in
life.” The realistic theatre contrived to put an entire apartment on stage, in
lieu of the traditional three-walled “box-set” with white draperies: the specta-
tor faced a room with a ceiling, a hanging lamp, furniture arranged just as it
ordinarily is in private homes: through the window a town or garden was
visible, other rooms could be seen through the open door. In place of trees
painted on the wing-and-border pieces, quaintly intertwining their branches
up to the sky, the realistic theatre plants a sort of real garden or forest on
stage, with paths, grass, asymmetrically staggered tree-trunks. If rain is to fall
during the play, the spectators in such theatres hear the sound of water; if the
 Valery Briusov 71

play takes place in winter, bits of white paper are sprinkled behind the win-
dows or between the trees; if there is wind, the window curtains billow; if
there is supposed to be a street on stage, the noise of a crowd and carriages or
even the whirring and bells of an electric trolley reach our ears. The actors in
such theatres wear costumes that correspond exactly to the epoch or social
stratum depicted; their vocal intonations, accents, and gestures copy exactly
what they have seen and heard in life; in delivering dialogue, crossing the
stage, positioning themselves in groups, they pay no attention to the audi-
ence, but pretend that they are living, not acting, etc., etc.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that, despite all these innovations, even
in the realistic theatre a great deal fails to appear to be “life as it is.” While it
pays heed to details, it leaves untouched the basic scenic conventions. The
stages of realistic theatres are lit, as before, by footlights and spotlights from
below, above, and the side, whereas, in reality, light either falls from the
sky—from the sun or moon—or filters in through a window or issues from a
lamp or candle. Not one theatre has yet dared to portray night by plunging the
stage into total, real darkness. In just the same way, all theatres continue to
make sure that everything spoken on stage can be heard in the auditorium,
even though it be spoken in a whisper. Even when a large number of people
is on stage, invariably only one actor does the talking, and when a new group
of performers starts to speak, the preceding group never fails to fall silent and
only pretends, by frantic gesticulation, to be carrying on its conversation.
Thus, at every step individual realistic details in the production are revealed
to be out of keeping with others: when, for instance, rain is depicted, they
forget to devise runnels of rainwater and leave the actors in dry clothing; in
portraying a sunset, they let the shadows of things and persons fall to the side
opposite the footlights, right in the path of the sun, etc.
Of course, an ingenious and highly intelligent director may perhaps suc-
ceed in avoiding all these pitfalls and eliminating all these imperfections (for
instance, by taking advantage of the phonograph and the cinematograph,
which are, as yet, barely used in the theatre). But, even so, no director will be
able to “deceive” the spectator or make him believe that what he sees is life
and not a “show.” By all sorts of trifling signs, by the brightness of colors or
the movement of shadows, our eyes almost always and unmistakably distin-
guish the make-believe from the real. Unlike the stupid birds of Zeuxis [ca.
420–390 B.C.], we never take painted fruit to be the real thing; we never
walk up to a landscape painted on a wall with the idea that it is an open
window where we can inhale fresh air; we never nod to a marble bust of an
acquaintance. When an avalanche composed of cotton wool buries two luna-
tics at the end of a performance, we see perfectly well that they are not the
actors who just now were playing their roles for us, but dummies stuffed with
straw. And none of the spectators sitting in the pit and the balconies, having
72 Realism and Convention on the Stage

paid from two to six rubles for his seat, believes that Hamlet, prince of
Denmark, is actually standing before him and later lies dead as the curtain
falls.
The most realistic productions remain in essence conventionalized. In
Shakespeare’s day they would put up a sign with the inscription “A Wood.”
Not so long ago we were content with a painted backdrop of a wood and
wing-and-border pieces representing implausible trees. Nowadays they begin
by constructing a forest out of artful plastic trees with three-dimensional
trunks, hinged branches, and fake foliage. Possibly the next step will be to
confront the spectators with living trees, whose roots are concealed beneath
the stage floor. However, even this will remain only a conventional symbol
for a forest to the spectator; he will never believe that, behind the curtain
during the intermission, pines, oak, and birches actually sprang up—and he
will merely assume a forest in the shape of what he sees, as the Elizabethan
spectator assumed it when he read the inscription “A Wood.” In the ancient
theatre, when the actor portrayed a man come from foreign parts, he entered
from the left. On the modern stage the actor is left in a little vestibule, where,
in sight of the spectator, he removes his overcoat and puts down his umbrel-
la, to show that he has entered from the street. But who among the spectators
forgets that the actor has entered from the wings? How is the convention of
removing an overcoat, donned in the dressing room a minute before going on
stage, subtler than the convention that an actor, entering at left, has come
from foreign parts?
Moreover, all the technical improvements of the realistic theatre not only
fail to enhance stage illusion, but vitiate it. A beautiful stage-set rivets the
attention as an independent work of art, and distracts it from the course of
action. Period and true-to-life objects, flaunted by the directors, arouse inter-
est as museum curios and fill the mind with notions irrelevant to the drama.
By giving free play to machinery, such as the sound of rain, the chirp of
crickets, or curtains billowing in the wind, one arouses curiosity and compels
the whole audience to wonder and ponder: where is the gramophone or the
wind machine located, behind which curtain are they jerking wires? Little by
little the spectators grow accustomed to these improvements in stage realism,
which have now ceased to be novelties, but this is not the result of spectators
starting to accept cotton wool as snow and a length of cord as wind, but of all
these contrivances having passed into the roster of ordinary stage conven-
tions. In the world, emotion and nature are the active elements; in the theatre
they are replaced by the artistic creativity of the performers and the craft of
the machinist. The more we conceal this distinction between life and stage,
the more palpable it will come to be.
 Valery Briusov 73

II

The shortcomings of the realistic theatre of late, when realism was put in
effect on the stage in a logical fashion, were so striking and pronounced that
they prompted a reaction. The blatantly antirealistic movement, which, at the
end of the last century, regenerated all forms of art, finally invaded the
theatre. Attempts were made to transmute the very principles of stage pro-
duction and, to replace realistic theatres, theatres arose that called themselves
“conventionalized.” The Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris, Max Reinhardt’s thea-
tre in Berlin, V. F. Komissarzhevskaya’s theatre in Petersburg with produc-
tions by V. E. Meyerhold, the Moscow Art Theatre in its latest productions,
one after another made conscious efforts to return to conventionality on
stage. Their productions are only the first steps on the path of exploration,
but they mark out the road on which stage art is stumbling.
Conventionalized theatres, starting from the accurate premise that total
illusion on stage is unattainable, eschewed the hope of deceiving the specta-
tor and mimicking life and nature. These theatres exchanged the realistic
depiction of place of action for pictorial allusion. Instead of a box-set of a
room, for instance, they put only a window; instead of a forest, a few trees;
instead of a tower, a piece of cardboard with a crudely marked pattern of
stones. The stage is furnished with only those objects absolutely necessary
during the course of action: a bench, a bed, the bank of a stream, with the
walls of the room or the outskirts of a park or the back of a street left entirely
empty. In the new theatre, the acting corresponds to the décor. Instead of
reproducing those vocal intonations and gestures observed in life, they “por-
tray” only various psychic upheavals and various behavioral actions: for
instance, weeping is an inclination of the head, running is a slow floating
movement, a kiss is a bringing together of lips that do not touch one another.
The directors of these theatres take special care to see that everything con-
summated on stage be beautiful, regardless of the subject of the drama per-
formed. All of the actors’ rhythmical movements and their groupings are
subordinated to the general concept, the general tempo chosen, to harmonize
with the style of the décor, etc.
However, it must be noted that these would-be conventionalized produc-
tions in fact seem, for the most part, semirealistic. The directors of conven-
tionalized theatres, thinking to free themselves from unnecessarily realistic
detail, present, rather than all of the ambience, only a few of its components,
but often those few are presented with complete realism. The former theatre
depicted a whole room, the new one depicts one wall; the former theatre
depicted a forest, with sunlight streaming between the tree-trunks and bird-
song, the new one, in its stead, puts three saplings on the forestage. This
semirealism rivets the spectator’s attention with heavier shackles than the old
74 Realism and Convention on the Stage

stage realism did. Seeing only part of a room in front of him, one wall
without a ceiling, one window beside a bed, the spectator sees only that wall,
only that window beside a bed, and it is much harder for him to imagine the
room than if it were either depicted in entirety or not depicted at all. The
Elizabethan spectator, reading “A Wood,” could conjure up a dense, impene-
trable grove, wherein the action takes place; the spectator at a “conventional-
ized” theatre, with three trees set before him on stage, sees only these three
trees and nothing more.
In just the same way the actors’ conventionalized acting in fact seems, for
the most part, inconsistently performed. The actors at “conventionalized”
theatres perform ordinary dialogue wholly naturalistically and switch to con-
ventionalized acting only in the most dramatic passages. In dialogue during
the scenes their voices correspond accurately to what we hear in life; con-
versely, in screams and exclamations, they do not imitate an actual scream
but “depict” it. Walking across the stage, sitting on a bench, closing their
eyes, raising an arm, the actors of the “conventionalized” theatre move like
living people; at a moment of emphasis or intense dramatic action, they
suddenly lose this ability—of being living creatures—and turn into manne-
quins. In conventionalized productions these shifts from realism to styliza-
tion in the acting checker all the actions, shatter all the effects, transform the
show into an excruciating alternation of clashing colors and dissonances.
Of course, one can combat semirealism and inconsistent acting style;
conventionality might be more logically injected into all set-pieces and all
details of the acting. Aware that the depiction of objects cannot, in any case,
give an illusion of the originals, some “conventionalized” theatres have al-
ready begun deliberately to distance the scenery and set-pieces from the
forms of reality. Not walls or trees or clouds are portrayed on stage, but a
suggestion of walls, trees, clouds—stylized reality; the furniture put on stage,
the props put into the actors’ hands are intentionally unlike the originals,
obviously only depictions, only symbols, and not the things themselves. The
actors at such theatres, in all the scenes, significant and insignificant, strive to
deport themselves like mannequins. Recollecting that, in the emotional pas-
sages, they nonetheless will fail to deceive the spectators or compel them to
believe that they [the actors] are suffering, enjoying bliss, or dying in actual
fact, for the sake of a total effect, they pretend that they are not walking, not
looking, and not talking, but depicting walking, looking, talking. . . . In these
theatres everything must be conventionalized from start to finish, and as in
the old theatres they constantly strove to convince the spectators that they
were watching reality, so here they constantly strive to remind them that this
is only representational. . . . Nevertheless, not one theatre has yet succeeded
in implementing such a plan in full measure. At every point, realism kept
breaking through the conventionality all the same: the sky, for instance, was
conventionalized, with its stripes, but the crags were realistic; the walls were
 Valery Briusov 75

conventionalized, but the staircase real; the portières conventionalized, but

the actors’ costumes real. Finally, at every moment the actors themselves
mistook the tone and suddenly, after sweeping the floor with “conventional-
ized” gestures, they started moving like living persons, etc.
We grant, however, in theory, that a brilliant director and an ideal compa-
ny may succeed in surmounting all the difficulties and create an entirely
“conventionalized,” “stylized” theatre; they may succeed in avoiding the
most minor realistic details in scenery and set-pieces, in dressing the per-
formers in costumes that will also be nonrealistic and will not contradict
those things they depict, in training the performers in movement that will
harmonize with the stationary clouds on the painted sky and the leaves on the
constructed trees, and so forth: will the harmony necessary to all-round con-
ventionality result? No. Even after this, one entirely insurmountable contra-
diction is left. The actors’ living, actual bodies will never jibe with the
conventionality of the scenery, set-pieces, and acting. Against a background
of daubed canvas which merely delineates a house, a bush, or a sky, there
always stands the alien and inapposite figure of the actor, which does not
delineate a man but is, in actual fact, a man. One may do away with realistic
gestures and intonations, but how can one do away with the living quality of
the voice itself, with the living color of the face, with the living radiance of
the eyes? The only way left for the “conventionalized” theatre to triumph
ultimately is to replace actors with puppets on strings, with gramophones
inside them. This would be logical and a possible solution to the problem—
and there is no doubt that the modern “conventionalized” theatre is leading
by the most direct route to a theatre of marionettes.
But the more logical the conventionalized production and the more it
tallies with a mechanical theatre, the less necessary it will be. By gradually
depriving the actor of the possibility of acting and of artistic creation, theatri-
cal conventionality will finally eliminate the stage and art as well. In reading
a dramatic work, of course, we conjure up the action taking place through the
power of our imagination. “Conventionalized” theatre will aid imagination
only somewhat: in its performance, as in the mere reading of a book, the
action itself will only be implied. If the conventionalized theatre gains a
foothold, the only persons to visit it will be those with feeble imaginations,
persons for whom books are not enough; for those persons imbued with
fancy, the theatre will seem superfluous.
76 Realism and Convention on the Stage

III

Both methods of staging now practiced in theatres—the realistic and the

conventionalized—lead to insoluble contradictions. To elucidate the ques-
tion, one must translate it from the realm of pragmatism to the realm of
theory, to define more precisely what the art of the stage is and how it differs
from other arts.
It is erroneous to think that the arts are differentiated by the materials they
use. A work of sculpture can be created from various materials, marble,
bronze, oak, plaster—but it remains sculpture nonetheless. Conversely,
sculpture and architecture are quite distinct arts, although they often use the
same materials: stone, metal, wood. Arts are differentiated by those aspects
of the visible world and reality to which each of them directs its primary
attention. Sculpture is concerned exclusively with shapes; painting and draw-
ing with colors and lines; music knows only sounds; epic poetry, human life
and events; lyric poetry, fluctuations in emotion; and so on. True, the ancient
carvers painted their statues (as some moderns do), but this decoration played
an ancillary role. A statue painted does not turn into a painting any more than
poetry spoken aloud turns into music.
The ultimate aim of art is to apprehend the universe by a special artistic
intuition. To this end it strives, singling out one aspect of reality, isolating it,
making it possible to fix all our attention on it. Out of the infinitely multitudi-
nous world of colors, sounds, actions, and emotions surrounding us, each art
selects but a single element, as if inviting us to bestow contemplation on it
alone, to seek in it a reflection of the whole. A statue which represents
Sophocles gives us, first of all, a depiction of the shapes of his body, without
telling us what color his hair was or what timbre his voice. Admiring a
landscape by Isaac Levitan [1860–1900], we do not know exactly who lived
in the manor house he has drawn or how the rooms in it were arranged.
Shakespeare portrays the development of Othello’s jealousy, but says noth-
ing about the views Othello held as a military commander.
Art always “abbreviates reality,” showing us only one of its aspects. This
method must be admitted as fundamental to art, its constant “modus operan-
di.” At first sight, it may be thought that stage art contradicts the general law.
In the theatre everything is as it is in life: shapes and colors and sounds and
movements and events and emotions. It is sculpture, but brightly painted in
natural colors; it is painting, but moving and speaking; it is music and lyric
poetry, but personified in outward images. It may be asked, does not the
theatre transgress against the fundamental requirement of art, by becoming a
kind of color photograph of reality, transplanting it to the stage, so to speak,
with the roots and soil intact? Is not the theatre like a panorama, presenting
an illusion of truth, or waxwork figures in a museum, touched up with rouge
 Valery Briusov 77

and dressed in real costumes—like all those artifacts to which we deny the
name of art? Is it not misconceived on our part to ascribe stage performances
to the realm of art?
These charges would be valid if the theatre did, in fact, lay claim to
concentrating on several different aspects of outward appearance at the same
time. Then it would only be a blend of the various genres of art and would
lose the right to an individual place in their ranks. But, not being a synthesis
of the arts as some theoreticians claim, the theatre is nevertheless a true art,
because the essential token of artistic creativity is characteristic of its very
authenticity. The essence of theatre, as of any art, was beautifully defined,
once and for all, by Aristotle two thousand years ago, in his treatise on
poetics. “Tragedy,” said Aristotle, “is the imitation of a single, important,
self-contained action”—and these words, with striking precision, distinguish
the art of the theatre from other types of art. As shapes are to sculpture and
line and color to painting, so action, direct action appertains to drama and the
stage. The dramatist wants the actor, by his playing, to incarnate the action as
it develops before the spectator’s eyes, much as the sculptor wants to show
the spectator the inert shapes of a body in marble or bronze.
The dramatic works of all ages and countries confirm Aristotle’s defini-
tion. Leaving aside the Greek tragic poets, whose works served him as points
of departure for his theory, all later masters of drama incarnated in their
works primarily action: Kalidasa, Shakespeare, Calderón, Corneille, Ibsen,
Wedekind. (The theory of drama as “action” [“in the process of being accom-
plished” and not “having been accomplished”], propounded by Aristotle, is
worked out in greater detail by the German critics, beginning with Lessing.)
What is Othello, for example? He is not a statuesque image, immediately
taken in by the sight, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix [1872]; he
is no outpouring of emotion like Shelley’s poetry, he is the image of a man in
action. We learn of Othello not from his outward guise, not even from his
speeches, but precisely from his behavior on stage. Even those dramas which
could seem to contradict Aristotle’s definition essentially affirm it. Such are
the early plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote a great deal against the
theatre of action, and in defense of static theatre. The immobility and inactiv-
ity of those dramas are notorious. Although all the characters, throughout the
course of all the plays, remain in almost one and the same posture, the
possibility of action keeps growing in their souls, to burst forth in the last
scene as the catastrophe.
In order to show the spectators action protracted over time, an “actor” is
indispensable. Therefore, the incarnation of drama on stage can appertain
only to a performer, a living creature capable of action, or else to an ingeni-
ous mechanism which depicts action. In the latter case the theatre, as an
individual art form, disappears and becomes only a second-rate auxiliary for
the dramatist, just as typography is for the poet. In the former case, the sole
78 Realism and Convention on the Stage

legitimate monarch of the stage remains the artist-performer. There is no

third option. Once the performers have been retained, one cannot force them
to act like machines; a living creature is incapable of it, to any great degree.
Once machines have been utilized, one cannot elevate their workings to the
level of creativity: we do not have the power to inspire the dead with life. If
in the past the theatre ever revealed its mighty influence as an artistic activ-
ity, this was always due to the creativity of the performers. Stage art and the
actor’s art are synonymous; the director and machinists have no more mean-
ing in the theatre than editor and copy-reader have on a newspaper. Scenery
and set-pieces for the acting are the same as a frame for a painting, and woe
betide if the frame dominates the foreground.
Each art has its own degree of realism and its own conventionality. That
aspect of the visible world on which the attention of a given art is primarily
concentrated must be incarnated with all the realism available to it. So,
sculpture tries to be realistic in reproducing form, letting the body be the
color now of marble, now of bronze, now of cast iron. In just the same way,
in a black-and-white engraving, the drawing may be realistic but the coloring
is conventionalized. A performer’s acting may be realistic, too, when it em-
bodies the stage action, but this realism must not turn into naturalism. The
actors’ vocal intonations, gestures, and mime must correspond to the truth of
life only insofar as the form of a statue corresponds to the form of the human
body. We do not consider a sculptor’s creations to be unlike life because they
are more or less than life-size in proportion—be it the gigantic Zeus of
Phidias or a tiny golden statuette by Cellini. We do not consider the carica-
tures of Leonardo da Vinci to be untruthful, although he portrayed deformity
seldom met with in real life. But we withhold the name of art from creations
which contradict our notions of the possible: statues which break the laws of
anatomy, paintings which break the laws of perspective. Acting ought to be
realistic in the sense that it must show us possible actions, even if exaggerat-
ed in one direction or another: in comedy, toward vulgarity; in tragedy,
toward grandeur.
But the very act of choosing performers to act out the drama predeter-
mines the nature of the stage décor. Side by side with living persons, both
counterfeits of reality (“realistic” productions) and its stylization (“conven-
tionalized” productions) are inappropriate and impossible. The natural hu-
man figure can harmonize only with actual objects and not their representa-
tions. Theatrical realism, dimly aware of this, was mistaken, however, in
thinking to achieve its goal by perfecting its counterfeits of reality. A more
decisive step had to be taken and representation replaced directly by reality
itself. But the objects surrounding the actor must in no way be those very
ones which, given the play’s subject, might surround its characters in life.
The conventionalized theatre understood perfectly that the spectators’ imagi-
nation can create the necessary picture better and more accurately than can
 Valery Briusov 79

all the contrivances of scene designers; it was mistaken only in thinking that
the imagination had to be assisted by all sorts of inappropriate hints.
Portières, parti-colored rugs covering the stage floor, benches covered by
cloth or fur, rows of columns, massive pediments, steps ascending aloft, and
so on—these are the possible accessories of dramatic performance. None of
these objects can have a direct relation to the drama performed; they can be
associated with it only by a unified style, and their selection must depend on
the discretion and taste of the director.
The ancient Greeks, possessed of a subtle dramatic flair, had their actors
play against the background of an actual building. In Shakespeare’s time
actors played against a background of tapestries and draperies which did not
pretend to the spectators to be anything else. Neither the spectators of the
ancient theatre nor those of Shakespeare’s theatre found it difficult to use
their faculty of imagination in picturing Scythia, the brink of earth, where
Prometheus was fettered to his rock, and the clouds where the action of
Aristophanes’ Birds takes place, and all those courts, hovels, seacoasts,
woods, and mountains that alternate with such cinematic rapidity in Shake-
speare’s tragedies. The attempts made by some German and Russian theatres
to play Shakespeare and the ancient drama on dual-level stages and similar
experiments of the French open-air theatres with unit sets have shown that
even for the modern spectator such exertion of the imagination is not at all
difficult. After the manifest failures of all the “realistic” and “quasi-conven-
tionalized” productions, it is definitely time to turn to the techniques of the
ancient and Shakespearean theatres. Only then shall we be returning the art
of the stage to its rightful owner—the artistic creativity of the performers.
 Chapter Seven

The Founding and Manifesto of

Futurism (1909)
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti

Translated by R. W. Flint.
Original publication, in English: From Documents of Twentieth-Century Art:
Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (New York: Viking, 1973),
19–24.

Filippo Tomasso Marinetti (1876–1944) was an Italian playwright, poet,

and literary activist who, through the manifestos he produced from 1909 to
1921, made his mark as the founder of Futurism in Italy—a movement that
repudiated the past, venerated the machine, liberated the word from gram-
matical and syntactical order, welcomed the coming of Fascism, and hailed
war as the world’s one salvation.
Futurism was launched in Paris by the following manifesto, which ap-
peared on the front page of the Figaro of February 20, 1909. In this violent,
rhapsodic statement Marinetti called for a new art suited to the new century,
dedicated to speed and to struggle, to the mob, the factory, and the machine.
The racing automobile therefore became the symbol of beauty. War was to
be idealized not only because it represented action and struggle but also
because it contributed to the destruction of the traditions of the numbing past.
Marinetti called upon the new artists themselves to destroy museums, librar-
ies, and academies and to fight against moralism and cowardice of every
kind.
Marinetti’s first play, Il re Baldoria (King Baldoria), was written in 1905
and staged in France in 1909 as Le roi Bombance; a collection of his plays,
Elettricità sessuale (Sexual Electricity), was published in 1920. Although
starting in 1914 Marinetti became a friend of Mussolini and Fascist enthu-

81
82 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

siast, it is hard to argue any inherent connection between Futurism and Fas-
cism, since the Russian Futurists embraced the Russian Revolution with
equal fervor.

***

We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps
with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like
them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled
our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of
logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.
An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at
that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward
sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celes-
tial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships,
alone with the black specters who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives
launched down their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like
wounded birds along the city walls.
Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker
trams that rumbled by outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on
holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po River and dragged
over falls and through gorges to the sea.
Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering
its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp
green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of
automobiles.
“Let’s go!” I said. “Friends, away! Let’s go! Mythology and the Mystic
Ideal are defeated at last. We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and, soon
after, the first flight of Angels! . . . We must shake the gates of life, test the
bolts and hinges. Let’s go! Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn!
There’s nothing to match the splendor of the sun’s red sword, slashing for the
first time through our millennial gloom!”
We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their
torrid breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived
at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stom-
ach.
The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us
through streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents. Here and there, sick
lamplight through window glass taught us to distrust the deceitful mathemat-
ics of our perishing eyes.
I cried, “The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts.”
And like young lions we ran after Death, its dark pelt blotched with pale
crosses as it escaped down the vast violet living and throbbing sky.
 Filippo Tomasso Marinetti 83

But we had no ideal Mistress raising her divine form to the clouds, nor
any cruel Queen to whom to offer our bodies, twisted like Byzantine rings!
There was nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at
last from the weight of our courage!
And on we raced, hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them
under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron. Death, domesticated, met
me at every turn, gracefully holding out a paw, or once in a while hunkering
down, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle.
“Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like
pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give
ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the
deep wells of the Absurd!!”
The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around
with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two
cyclists coming toward me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally
convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma
was blocking my way—damn! Ouch! . . . I stopped short and to my disgust
rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air. . . .
Oh! Maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I
gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black
breast of my Sudanese nurse. . . . When I came up—torn, filthy, and stink-
ing—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously
pass through my heart!
A crowd of fishermen with handlines and gouty naturalists were already
swarming around the prodigy. With patient, loving care those people rigged a
tall derrick and iron grapnels to fish out my car, like a big beached shark. Up
it came from the ditch, slowly, leaving in the bottom like scales its heavy
framework of good sense and its soft upholstery of comfort.
They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was
enough to revive it; and there it was, alive again, running on its powerful
fins!
And so, faces smeared with good factory muck—plastered with metallic
waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot—we, bruised, our arms in
slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth:

MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearless-
ness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
84 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and

sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the
racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
4. We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new
beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with
great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems
to ride on grapeshot—is more beautiful than the sculpted Victory of
Samothrace.
5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his
spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to
swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an
aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived
as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them
before man.
8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! . . . Why should we
look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors
of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in
the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriot-
ism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth
dying for, and scorn for woman.
10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will
fight moralism, feminism, and every opportunistic or utilitarian cow-
ardice.
11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by
riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in
the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of
arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; of greedy
railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on
clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the
rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives;
of adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomo-
tives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel
horses bridled by tubing; and of the sleek flight of planes whose pro-
pellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an
enthusiastic crowd.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting,
incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism because
we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeolo-
 Filippo Tomasso Marinetti 85

gists, ciceroni, and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in
secondhand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that
cover her like so many graveyards.
Museums: cemeteries! . . . Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of
so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories
where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd
abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously macerating each other with
color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!
That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the
graveyard on All Souls’ Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave
a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda portrait, I grant you that. . . . But I don’t
admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should
be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison our-
selves? Why rot?
And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions
of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to
express his dream completely?
. . . Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a
funerary urn instead of hurling it far off, in violent spasms of action and
creation.
Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile
worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken,
beaten down?
In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies
(cemeteries of empty exertion, calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of
aborted beginnings!) is, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision
by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious
wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace
for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner. . . . But we want no part
of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!
So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they
are! Here they are! . . . Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the
canals to flood the museums! . . . Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old
canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded! . . . Take
up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers, and wreck, wreck the venerable
cities, pitilessly!
The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our
work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably
throw us into the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to hap-
pen!
86 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

They will come against us our successors; they will come from far away,
from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flex-
ing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the
strong odor of our decaying minds, which already will have been promised to
the literary catacombs.
But we won’t be there. . . . At last they’ll find us—one winter’s night—in
open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see
us crouched beside our trembling airplanes in the act of warming our hands
at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take
fire from the flight of our images.
They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them,
exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by hatred: the
more implacable it is, the more their hearts will be drunk with love and
admiration for us.
Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.
Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.
The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a
thousand treasures of force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw willpower;
have thrown them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly,
breathless and unresting. . . . Look at us! We are still untired! Our hearts
know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed! . . .
Does that amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having
lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance at
the stars!
You have objections?—Enough! Enough! We know them . . . we’ve
understood! . . . Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival
and extension of our ancestors—perhaps! . . . If only it were so!—But who
cares? We don’t want to understand!
. . . Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again!
Lift up your heads!
Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the
stars!
 Chapter Eight

Epilogue to the Actor (1913)

Paul Kornfeld

Translated by Joseph Bernstein.

Original publication, in English: From An Anthology of German Expression-
ist Drama, ed. Walter Sokel (1963; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1984).

Paul Kornfeld (1889–1942) was a Czech-born Jewish writer who wrote

expressionist plays in German, as well as theoretical essays on the theory of
drama. In 1913, at the age of twenty-three, he wrote the first draft of his
most-renowned play, Die Verführung (The Seduction).
In 1916, Kornfeld moved to Berlin, where, during the Weimar period, he
experienced his most intense period of creativity. In 1918, during the final
months of the war, he oversaw the first production of Die Verführung. An
expressionist work, it attempted to encapsulate the universality of human
aspiration. Die Verführung was accompanied by the following essay on ex-
pressionistic acting, in which Kornfeld condemns actors who attempt to
create the illusion of spontaneity on the stage or who visit bars to see how
people act when they are drunk. On stage, according to the author, one
should speak and act as no one has ever done in real life; free of the crosscur-
rents of conflicting passions and interests in real life, the actor can portray
emotions with crystal clarity. Once emotional memory and naturalistic obser-
vation are thus banished, the actor will find that the expression of a feeling
artificially stimulated is “purer, clearer, and stronger” than any feeling
aroused by real stimuli. And only the actor is free to externalize himself so
completely.
Kornfeld wrote a subsequent expressionist drama titled Himmel und Holle
(Heaven and Hell, 1919). He also wrote satirical comedies such as Der ewige
Traum (The Eternal Dream, 1922), Palme, oder Der Gekränkte (Palme, or
87
88 Epilogue to the Actor

The Offended One 1924), and Kilian, oder Die gelbe Rose (Kilian, or The
Yellow Rose, 1926). One of his last plays, ud Süß (Suss, the Jew), was staged
in 1930 and portrayed the controversial eighteenth-century Jewish financier
Joseph Süß Oppenheimer.
Hitler’s seizing of power in 1933 forced Kornfeld back to Prague. In
1941, he was taken into custody there by the Nazis and sent to Ghetto
Litzmannstadt in Łódź, Poland, where he died at the age of fifty-two.

***

I do not know whether this play [Die Verführung] will ever be presented on a
stage. It has been written for the theatre. If it is never produced, I am pre-
pared to accept any reason except one: namely, that its style is not good
theatre. If someone were to say that it was not worthwhile offering it to the
theatre-going public, I would neither agree nor disagree. But I would vigor-
ously protest if someone asserted that it was indeed worthwhile—but not
suited to the theatre.
This assumes that the director and actors will not stage it in a way that
runs counter to its spirit. But as the art of acting has developed over the past
few decades, this danger does lie in a definite direction. And judging from
the form and spirit of most of the “modern” plays presented in these last
decades, the contemporary playwright (who is also “modern”) faces a double
danger. Therefore I feel it necessary to address the following words to the
actor. Perhaps there are here and there actors who, as they read this tragedy,
will retrospectively correct the images inspired in them, or even form images
out of what had previously remained mere words.
Let not the actor in this play behave as though the thoughts and words he
has to express have only arisen in him at the very moment in which he recites
them. If he has to die on the stage, let him not pay a visit to the hospital
beforehand in order to learn how to die; or go into a bar to see how people act
when they are drunk. Let him dare to stretch his arms out wide and with a
sense of soaring speak as he has never spoken in life; let him not be an
imitator or seek his models in a world alien to the actor. In short, let him not
be ashamed of the fact that he is acting. Let him not deny the theatre or try to
feign reality. On the one hand, he can never fully succeed in the attempt; on
the other hand, such a counterfeit presentation of reality can only be given in
the theatre if the dramatic art has fallen to such a low estate as to be a more or
less successful imitation of physical reality and everyday life—whether
steeped in emotions, moral precepts, or aphorisms.
If the actor builds his characters from his experience of the emotion or
fate he has to portray and with gestures adequate to this experience, and not
from his recollections of the human beings he has seen filled with these
emotions or victimized by such-and-such a fate; in fact, if he completely
 Paul Kornfeld 89

banishes these recollections from his memory, he will see that his expression
of a feeling which is not genuine and which has really been artificially
stimulated is purer, clearer, and stronger than that of any person whose
feeling is prompted by a genuine stimulus. For the expression of a human
being is never crystal-clear because he himself is never crystal-clear. He is
never only one feeling—and if he were only one, this one would always
appear in a different light. If he thinks he has immersed himself in but a
single experience, there are nevertheless innumerable psychic facts existing
within him that falsify many aspects of his behavior. The shadow of his
present environment as well as the shadow of his past falls across him. Many
people are comedians to themselves; yet the actor, who merely performs, is
truer in his expression than many of those who are victims of an actual fate.
Concern for many things prevents the real-life person from externalizing
himself completely: the memory of many things is rooted in him and the rays
of a thousand events crisscross within him. So at any given moment he can
only be a changing complex of behavior. But the actor is free of all that: he is
no complex, he is always only one. He is not falsified by anything—hence
only he can be crystal-clear and rectilinear. And since he is only this one
embodiment, he can embody it completely and magnificently. By shaping the
character he portrays, the actor will find his way unerringly to its essence.
Let him therefore pick out the essential attributes of reality and be nothing
but a representative of thought, feeling, or fate!
The melody of a great gesture says more than the highest consummation
of what is called naturalness.
Let him think of the opera, in which the dying singer still gives forth a
high C and with the sweetness of his melody tells more about death than if he
were to crawl and writhe. For it is more important to know that death is
anguish than that it is horrible.
 Chapter Nine

A Few Words about the Role of the

Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form
(1919)
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

Translated by Daniel Gerould.

Original publication: From Nowe Formy w Malarstwie, Szkice Estetyczne,
Teatr (Warsaw: P.W.N., 1974).

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939) was a Polish playwright, novel-

ist, painter, art critic, and essayist. The author of over thirty plays, Witkie-
wicz put forward in 1918 the Theory of Pure Form in the Theatre, which was
inspired as much by formalist innovations in painting and by post-Newtonian
scientific concepts as by purely literary ideas. His radical attack on realism
and psychological verisimilitude ran parallel to but was independent of, and
somewhat different from, the theatrical avant-garde doctrines being formu-
lated around that time in France as well as elsewhere in Western Europe.
The following essay on the “Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure
Form” was stimulated by the appearance of Fyodor Kommissarzhevsky’s
1916 book on the theories of Stanislavsky. Witkiewicz agrees readily enough
here with Stanislavsky’s emphasis on the acting ensemble in preference to
the star system, but he firmly rejects the idea of an actor’s “experiencing” the
inner life of the role. He should instead seek to grasp “the formal conception
of the work (as distinct from its real-life mood) and its character apart from
all real-life probabilities.” The actor must subordinate himself not merely to
the acting ensemble but to the entire work, and choose tones and gestures not
on the basis of imitation or of psychological truth but for their contribution to
the whole. A line may therefore be given in a psychologically realistic way, it
may be given only as a pattern of sound, or it may be delivered in response to
91
92 A Few Words about the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form

the stimulus of an image. The overall form of the work is the responsibility of
the director, but the duty of the actor is “to keep himself firmly under con-
trol,” to “forget completely about life,” and to devote himself entirely to
building up the total theatrical experience.
Largely ignored during his lifetime, Witkiewicz achieved his real influ-
ence only posthumously, after the political changes in 1956 in Poland, when
his plays—among them The Water Hen (1921), The Cuttlefish (1922), and
The Madman and the Nun (1923)—came to loom large in the national reper-
toire and to attract attention abroad.

***

In Warsaw recently there has been a revival of the art of the actor, initiated
by Mieczyslaw Limanowski [1876–1948], a geologist well known through-
out the whole of Europe. We are obliged to debate the matter with him—we
being (in the pluralis doppelgängerus) a painter virtually unknown even in
Poland. This seems farcical, but that’s the way it is—there’s no help for it.
The theatre really must be in bad shape if people from such diverse special-
ties have something to say on this subject.
The theories according to which this “renaissance” is taking place are
closely related to the principles set forth in Fyodor Kommissarzhevsky’s
book The Art of the Actor and the Theatre of Stanislavsky. Following these
views, the actor is supposed to “experience” totally the inner life of his role;
his words and gestures are supposed to result naturally from his feelings, just
as would happen in real life to people under the influence of strong emotions.
All this they call pieriezhivaniya (experiences), plus voploshcheniya (em-
bodiment).
A second principle of the Stanislavsky school (in our view a correct one,
as opposed to the first, which we must categorize as totally false) has as its
aim the creation of an absolutely unified company in which no star tenor can
hog the front of the stage and push the other actors into the role of accompa-
nists, turning the play into a solo display piece for a particular actor or actress
and destroying it as a work of art. It goes without saying that in the staging of
the sort of Pure Form play which we have previously attempted to describe,
this second principle is altogether indispensable. Despite the dominance or
subordination of certain moments and individuals on the stage, it is impos-
sible to think of any purely formal whole where unity in plurality in and of
itself is not the most important goal. But, in our opinion, all kinds of “experi-
ences” are totally irrelevant.
In the genre which we are proposing (and even for performances of the
old masters of dramatic literature), the actor should be, in all he says and
does, a part of the whole, without feeling any necessity to “create” the role in
a realistic sense; that is to say, he need not enter into the real-life feelings of
 Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz 93

the hero and imitate onstage such a person’s supposed gestures and tone of
voice at various important moments in his life. Instead, the actor should truly
create the role, which, in our interpretation, entails the following. First, the
actor must understand the whole of the play, with particular reference to all
the lines spoken by all the characters who appear in the work, as well as their
gestures and also the different settings as they unfold during the course of the
action; or, in other words, he must first understand the formal conception of
the work (as distinct from its real-life mood) and its character, apart from all
real-life probabilities. Next, he should build his role in such a way that—
quite independently of his own frame of mind, his own inner experiences and
state of nerves—he can execute with mathematical precision whatever is
required by the purely formal conception of the particular work in question.
This may mean that he is to say a given speech with special stress on certain
words, at one moment emphasizing their logical content, at another their
sound value, or to offer the spectator a new image which contrasts with the
real, fluctuating picture of the given situation. His work will be genuinely
creative only when he considers himself an element in the given whole.
Once he is onstage, the actor does nothing but give a performance, which
of course may be increasingly perfected throughout the rehearsals and the
actual production itself, but he will continue to do nothing but give a perfor-
mance, comparable to other performances, such as the actual painting of a
picture which has already been composed, or the writing down of a sympho-
ny and its performance by an orchestra. However, the relationship between
conception and execution is different for each of the arts; their moments of
invention and technical realization are differently coordinated. In painting
and poetry, the most—relatively speaking—happens while the work is actu-
ally in progress; less takes place during the physical writing of music, al-
though even here various changes and improvements of initially foggy con-
ceptions are also possible. In the theatre there should be a minimum of this,
unless of course the theatre is to be nothing more than a servile copy of
reality. If that is the case, then “experiences” can be immensely useful, al-
though if we imagine a successful play in which a certain character commits
two murders and is condemned to death, we may well ask what kind of a
superman or superwoman would be able to experience all that, say three
hundred times, without becoming seriously disturbed or, quite simply, going
insane.
In our opinion, for the actor who does not have to imitate a character, but
who can create his role according to his own creative intuition, the psycholo-
gy of the hero as well as the lines which he has to speak should be only
subsidiary means. Once he appears onstage, the actor must be like a painter
who has so thoroughly thought out all the details of his painting and has such
a sure hand that the execution of the picture requires nothing from him but
the mechanical application of several coats of paint. It goes without saying
94 A Few Words about the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form

that such a procedure is almost impossible in painting; in the art of the actor,
however, the creative process should ideally proceed in that fashion, and it is
in fact quite within the realm of possibility. Naturally, unavoidable small
variations are of no concern.
The actor should keep himself firmly under control the way a musical
virtuoso does. The only difference is that the actor has much greater scope
for his creativity, but always within the limits of the given work’s remaining
true to itself—which is the director’s responsibility. Every play, like every
poem, contains only a certain limited number of interpretations, beyond
which it stops being the work created by the author. However, we have no
objective measure for this limit. In our opinion, Shakespeare staged with
Stanislavsky’s realism stops being Shakespeare, Beethoven played sentimen-
tally stops being Beethoven, but unfortunately we have no objective criterion
for any of this. There will always be the possibility of more or less emphasis
on real-life content, and every work of art, even the purest, faces inevitable
defilement—in the performance and the hearing or viewing in music and
theatre, and in the very visibility of the world of objects in painting.
Of course, it all depends on whether the author has stressed the formal
content or the real-life content. Any play in Pure Form can be staged realisti-
cally, but a purely formal whole cannot be made out of every realistic work,
even if the director were to stand on his head. But whereas in painting and
sculpture there are only the works and those who view them, music and
theatre are further handicapped in that they must depend on the performance,
and in the case of theatre the complications arising from this reach quite
colossal proportions.
Setting the formal tone depends, of course, on the director. Grasping the
purely formal content of the work and creating a unified structural whole are
incredibly difficult tasks. But as a general guideline we could formulate the
following purely negative principle: Forget completely about life and pay no
attention to any real-life consequences of what is happening onstage at any
given moment as it relates to what is about to happen at the next moment. It
goes without saying—at the next moment onstage. Naturally we’re not talk-
ing about real-life consequences beyond the stage, such as the possibility of
an empty cash drawer, or the director, actors, and author being beaten up by
the crowd, or other similar happenings which, in our opinion, the manage-
ment of an experimental theatre should, at the present time, accept as the
facts of life.
We should point out that in this kind of play the manner of speaking the
lines, or the delivery, ought not to be uniformly a matter of the emotions.
From time to time this sort of emotional emphasis might serve as a purely
formal effect (for example, saying something sad in a joyful fashion or the
reverse, which incidentally happens even in life when one gets upset over
something totally insignificant or treats indifferently a real atrocity); howev-
 Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz 95

er, compared to the roar of animal passions heard on the stage nowadays,
compared to this hyperintensification of life, the delivery of the lines in the
theatre of Pure Form must be very restrained, and all the same principles
formulated when discussing the declamation of poetry must be applied to this
question. Each play should have its own “tone,” its upper and lower limits to
be respected in accordance with the author’s intentions, which must be felt or
understood by the director. We do not maintain that volleys of shots, roars,
and groans are inadmissible on the stage, but only that everything must be
interpreted and incorporated within the limits set by the tone of the whole,
rather than be the expression of purely real-life associations. Whereas au-
thors can afford to let themselves be carried away, the challenge of creative
work on the stage depends on its rigorous limits.
If actors could only give up their ingrained bad habit of displaying emo-
tions, the whole creative process of acting would consist solely in maintain-
ing the agreed-upon tonality. On the one hand, this seems to be something so
trifling that it is not worth talking about; on the other hand, it is infernally
difficult—so much so as to be virtually impossible. However, we maintain
that as soon as the tone is properly understood as a part of the formal concep-
tion, the details of the execution should fall into place of their own accord. Of
course, actors would have to give up their long-standing practice of trying to
send audiences into convulsive emotional twitchings, spasms, and fits—and
that is one of the principal difficulties in the proper staging of a play in this
new mode. The actor’s need to direct the audience’s attention to himself and
to feel the satisfaction of being able to hit them in their innermost recesses
and guts would have to become transformed into a genuine desire actually to
create a whole in dimensions totally different from real-life ones, even
though each actor’s contribution would be only partial. To accomplish this,
the actor would have to forgo his desire to impersonate, to pretend to be
somebody real about whom someone else was tactless enough to write—
which is what “experiencing” à la Mieczslaw Limanowski (1876–1948) ulti-
mately amounts to. Despite all the lack of expertise in theatre of which we
can be accused, we hold that the gist of what we have said is correct—from
the formal point of view of course—and that the whole thing which we have
outlined is completely feasible.
Let’s assume that people at the first performance actually roar with laugh-
ter because they expect the play to make the kind of sense which they have
always been accustomed to look for in the theatre and which au fond already
bores them to death. Quite possibly, sophisticated connoisseurs and profes-
sional theatregoers will make faces in disgust and use abusive language. But
we are of the opinion that after a certain purely superficial getting used to the
outer trappings of the thing, it should be possible to take far greater pleasure
in performances of this kind than in French farces which already make peo-
96 A Few Words about the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form

ple sick to their stomachs, or than in dramas with so much “truth” in them
that they outdo life itself in truthfulness, sublimities hobbling on crutches, or
various other tidbits under the rubric “renaissance.”
Now we have absolutely no desire to depreciate the great masterpieces of
past ages. But isn’t it time to stop repeating what was created a long time ago
in its most perfect form? What we propose is twofold: to cultivate the clas-
sics with a proper feeling for their essence—but only those works of out-
standing value which have stood the test of time—and to launch out on the
(at least seemingly) boundless sea of experiment. In painting nothing more
remained to be created in the realm of subject matter, from the point of view
of life undeformed, except for inane naturalism, which amounted to beating
one’s head against a brick wall—in other words, against the unachievable
perfection of nature. Likewise in poetry, sense—worked over for the mil-
lionth time—became an obstacle to new formal combinations. In theatre the
situation is exactly the same now. Don’t anyone tell me that this will produce
private gibberish unintelligible to others, an individual language which only
its creator will understand, or actions characteristic of people suffering from
schizophrenia. All these accusations may be true if we look at art from the
point of view of life. In our understanding of the term, form is something
higher than subject matter and real-life sense, which are only means in the
purely personal process of creation.
There is need to unbind hands and feet, ungag mouths, and shake all the
old bad habits out of our heads. Let’s assume that nothing comes of it and
that it all sinks down again into the same boredom and grayness typical of the
creative work going on around us now and reverts to that endless rehashing
of the same old thing to the point of nausea. Let’s assume that it’s the
figment of the imagination of a sick brain—the brain of an individual who
does not understand that the theatre can never be anything but what it has
always been up to now. Still, isn’t it worth trying?
The force with which we resist the temptation to try anything new and
unknown is truly diabolical. Or has the temptation really grown too weak?
That would prove that the mechanization of life has really gone so far that the
theatre as a social institution par excellence can no longer resist the petrifica-
tion of everything into a uniform, gray, undifferentiated pulp that is only
superficially heterogeneous.
 Chapter Ten

On Humor (1920)
Luigi Pirandello

Translated by Teresa Novel.

Original publication, in English: From Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 3
(Spring 1966).

Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) was an Italian playwright, novelist, and short

story writer. His early plays, written in Sicilian dialect, reflected his interest
in the Sicilian folk tradition, but they are rarely produced today. His last
plays, written in the 1930s, represent his greatest experimentation with dra-
matic form; in these works, most notably The Mountain Giants (1937), Pi-
randello comes closest to Symbolism and Surrealism. But it is for his philo-
sophical dramas, mostly written from 1917 to 1924, that he is justifiably best
known. This period of his work shared much in common with the teatro del
grottesco, a school of Italian playwrights that investigated the gap or disjunc-
ture between appearance and reality.
Unlike other “grotesque” playwrights, however, Pirandello questioned
whether a more reliable truth is to be found when the mask is stripped away
and preferred instead to call himself a “humorist.” Pirandello’s most ex-
tended and best-known critical essay, “On Humor,” was itself primarily a
refutation of Benedetto Croce’s assertion that humor, like the comic and the
tragic, is essentially undefinable, that there is no such thing as humor in the
abstract but only individual humorous works. Pirandello’s response, analyz-
ing humor as a juxtaposition of contraries, deals with a number of aesthetic
concerns but not with the theatre as such. The most important of his critical
essays that did concern the theatre are “Theatre and Literature” (1918) and
“The New Theatre and the Old” (1922).

97
98 On Humor

Pirandello’s most respected plays from this time, Right You Are (If You
Think You Are!) (1917), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), and
Enrico IV (1922), thus all investigate the relativity of identity, truth, and
madness. Six Characters, part of his “theatre-in-the-theatre” (or metatheatri-
cal) trilogy, which includes Each in His Own Way (1924) and Tonight We
Improvise (1930), used the theatrical process to explore both the difference
and the similarity between fiction and reality, as well as to investigate the
nature of character. Pirandello’s idea that the masks we wear in life cover an
essential void influenced the Absurdists—in particular Samuel Beckett.

***

Comedy and its opposite lie in the same disposition of feeling, and they are
inside the process which results from it. In its abnormality, this disposition is
bitterly comical, the condition of a man who is always out of tune; of a man
who is at the same time violin and bass; of a man for whom no thought can
come to mind unless suddenly another one, its opposite and contrary, inter-
venes; of a man for whom any one reason for saying yes is at once joined by
two or three others compelling him to say no, so that yes and no keep him
suspended and perplexed for all his life; of a man who cannot let himself go
in a feeling without suddenly realizing something inside which disturbs him,
disarranges him, makes him angry. . . .
It is a special psychic phenomenon, and it is absolutely arbitrary to attrib-
ute to it any determining cause. It may be the result of a bitter experience
with life and man—an experience that doesn’t allow one the naïve feeling of
putting on wings and flying like a lark chirping in the sunshine: it pulls at the
tail when one is ready to fly. On the other hand, it leads to the thought that
man’s sadness is often caused by life’s sadness, by evils so numerous that not
everyone knows how to take them. It leads to the reflection that life, though it
has not ordained a clear end for human reason, does not require me to wander
in the dark, a reflection that is peculiar and illusive for each man, large or
small. It is not important, though, since it is not, nor may it be, the real end
that all eagerly try to find and which nobody finds—maybe because it does
not exist. The important thing is to give importance to something, vain as it
might be. It will be valued as much as something serious, and in the end
neither will give satisfaction, because it is true that the ardent thirst for
knowledge will always last, the faculty of wishing will never be extin-
guished—though it cannot be said that man’s happiness consists in his
progress.
All the soul’s fictions and the creations of feeling are subjects for humor;
we will see reflection becoming a little devil which disassembles the ma-
chine of each image, of each fantasy created by feeling; it will take it apart to
see how it is made; it will unwind its spring, and the whole machine will
 Luigi Pirandello 99

break convulsively. Perhaps humor will do this with the sympathetic indul-
gence about which those who see only a kind of good humor speak. But it
ought not to be trusted. . . .
Every feeling, thought, and idea which arises in the humorist splits itself
into contraries. Each yes splits itself into a no, which assumes at the end the
same value as the yes. Sometimes the humorist may pretend to take only one
side; meanwhile, inside, the other feeling speaks out to him, and appears
although he doesn’t have the courage to reveal it. It speaks to him and starts
by advancing now a faint excuse, an alternative, which cools off the warmth
of the first feeling, and then a wise reflection which takes away seriousness
and leads to laughter. . . .
Let us start, then, from the construction that illusion offers each of us: the
image that everyone has of himself through the work of our illusions. Do we
see ourselves in our true reality, as we really are, and not as what we would
like to be? Through a spontaneous interior artifice, the result of hidden ten-
dencies or unconscious imitations, don’t we believe ourselves to be, in good
faith, different from what in substance we are? And we think, work, live
according to this factitious but at the same time sincere interpretation of
ourselves.
Now, yes, reflection can reveal to the comic and the satirical as well as
the humorous writer this concept of illusions. The comedian only laughs at it,
being pleased to blow away this metaphor of himself created by a spontane-
ous illusion. The satirical writer will be upset by it. But not the humorist:
through the ridiculous side of this perception he will see the serious and
grievous side of it. He will analyze the illusion, but not with the intention of
laughing at it. Instead of feeling disdain he will, rather, in his laughter, feel
commiseration.
The comic and satirical writers know, through reflection, how much nour-
ishment the spider of experience takes from social life to form the web of
morality in any person. And they know how often what is called the moral
sense remains trapped in this web. In the long run, what are arrangements of
so-called social convenience? Calculated considerations, in which morality is
almost always sacrificed. The humorist goes deeper, and he laughs without
disdain on finding out how, with naïveté, with the best good faith, through
the spontaneous work of fiction, we are led to interpret as real feeling, as real
moral sense in itself, what is nothing but a feeling of convenience, that is, of
mental calculation. He goes even further, and discovers that even the need to
appear worse than what one really is may become conventional, if one is
associated with a social group whose characteristic ideas and feelings are
inferior to what one might desire for oneself. . . .
Simplicity of soul contradicts the historical concept of the human soul. Its
life is a changing equilibrium, a continuous awakening and slumbering of
feelings, tendencies, and ideas. It is an incessant fluctuation between contra-
100 On Humor

dictory terms, an oscillation between opposite poles: hope and fear, truth and
falsehood, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong, and so on. If suddenly in the
dark image of the future a brilliant plan of action is drawn, or vaguely a
flower of pleasure shines, soon there also appears, as a result of experience,
the thought of the past, often dark and sad; or the feeling of the agitated
present intervenes to bridle the happy fancy. This conflict of memories,
hopes, prophecies, presentiments, perceptions, and ideals can be represented
as a conflict of souls among themselves; all are fighting for the definite and
full power of personality.
Let’s look at an executive, who believes in himself and is a gentleman.
The moral is predominant in him. But one day the instinctive soul, which is
like a wild beast hidden deep in everybody, gives a kick to his moral soul and
the gentleman steals. Now that poor man is the first one who after a while is
shocked, cries, and desperately asks himself, “How, how could I have done
this?”
But—yes, sir—he has stolen. What about another man? A well-to-do
man, indeed a rich man, he has killed. The moral ideal constituted in his
personality a soul which was in conflict with his instinctive soul; it consti-
tuted an acquired soul that fought with his hereditary soul, which, left free to
itself for awhile, succeeded in committing a crime.
Life is a continuous flow which we continually try to stop, to fix in
established and determinate forms outside and inside of ourselves because
we are already fixed forms, forms that move among other immovable ones,
which follow the flow of life until the point when they become rigid and their
movement, slowed, stops. The forms in which we try to stop and fix this
continuous flow are the concepts, the ideals, within which we want to keep
coherent all the fictions we create, the condition and the status in which we
try to establish ourselves. But inside ourselves, in what we call our soul,
which is the life in us, the flow continues indistinctly, under the wire, past the
limits that we set when we formed consciousness and built a personality.
During certain stormy moments, inundated by the flow, all our fictitious
forms collapse ignominiously. Even what doesn’t flow under the wire and
beyond the limits—what is revealed distinctly in us carefully channeled by
our feelings, in the duties which we have imposed upon ourselves, in the
habits that we have formed—in certain moments of flood overflows and
topples everything.
There are some restless spirits, almost in a continuous state of confusion,
who do not freeze into this or that personality. But even for the quiet ones,
those who find rest in one form or other, fusion is always possible. The flow
of life is in everybody.
Therefore, it can be, sometimes, a torture for everyone that, in contrast to
the soul that moves and changes, our body should be fixed forever in un-
changing features. Why are we made exactly so? We sometimes ask the
 Luigi Pirandello 101

mirror, “Why this face, this body?” We lift a hand; in the unconscious, the
act remains suspended. It seems strange that we have done it. We see our-
selves alive. In that suspended gesture we look like a statue—like that statue
of an ancient orator, for example, whom we see in a niche, climbing the stairs
of the Quirinal in Rome. He has a scroll in one hand and the other hand lifted
in a severe gesture. How sad and surprised that ancient orator seems to be
that he has remained there, through so many centuries, suspended in that
gesture, while so many persons have climbed, are climbing, and will climb
those stairs!
During certain moments of interior silence, during which our soul sheds
all habitual functions, and our eyes become sharper and more penetrating, we
see ourselves in life and we see life as an arid barrenness. Disconcerted, we
feel as if taken by a strange impression, as if, in a flash, a different reality
from the one we usually perceive were revealed to us, a living reality beyond
human vision, beyond the forms of human vision. Very clearly, then, the
facts of daily existence, almost suspended in the vacuum of our interior
silence, appear to us meaningless and without scope. That different reality
appears horrible to us in its stern and mysterious crudeness because all our
fictitious relationships, both of feelings and images, have split and disinte-
grated in it. The interior vacuum expands, surpasses the limits of our body,
becomes a vacuum around ourselves, a strange vacuum like a stop of time
and life, as our interior silence plunges itself into the abyss of mystery. With
a supreme effort we try, then, to recapture the normal sense of things, to tie
ourselves again to the usual relationships, to reassemble ideas, to feel alive in
the usual way. But we cannot trust this normal consciousness, these rear-
ranged ideas, anymore because we know now that they are deceptions which
man needs to save himself from death or insanity. It was an instant, but its
impressions will last for a long time, with a dizziness in contrast to the
stability, quite specious, of things, ambitions, and miserable appearances.
Life, which goes on as usual among these appearances, seems as if it isn’t
real anymore. It seems a mechanical phantasmagoria. How can one give
importance to it? How can one respect it?
Today we exist, tomorrow we will not. Which face have they given us to
represent part of a living person? An ugly nose? How painful to walk around
with an ugly nose for the rest of our life! It is good for us that after a while
we don’t pay any more attention to it. Then we don’t know why other people
laugh when they look at us. They are so silly! Let us console ourselves by
looking at somebody else’s lips, one who doesn’t even realize it and doesn’t
have the courage to laugh at us. Masks, masks. They disappear in a breath,
giving way to others. A poor lame man, who is he? Running toward death on
crutches. Here life steps on somebody’s foot, there it blinds somebody’s
eye—wooden leg, glass eye, and it goes on. Each one fixes his mask up as he
can, the exterior mask.
102 On Humor

Because inside there is another one, often contradicting the one outside.
Nothing is true! True is: the sea, the mountain, a rock, a blade of grass. But
man: always wearing a mask, unwillingly, without knowing it, without want-
ing it, always masked with that thing which he, in good faith, believes to be
handsome, good, gracious, generous, unhappy, and so on.
This is funny, if we stop to think of it. Yes, because a dog, after the first
ardor of life is gone, eats and sleeps; he lives as he can, as he ought to. He
shuts his eyes, with patience, and lets time go by, cold if it is cold, warm if it
is warm.
If they kick him he takes it because it means that he deserved it. But what
about man? Even when he is old he always has that fever; he is delirious and
doesn’t realize it. He cannot help posing, even in front of himself, in any
way, and he imagines so many things which he needs to believe are true,
which he needs to take seriously. . . .
The discovery of the telescope gave the finishing stroke. This is another
infernal machine, comparable to the one which nature wanted to give us. But
we invented this one. Instead of being less than nature, with the eye looking
from the bottom, out of the smaller lens, and seeing what nature mercifully
wanted us to see small, what does our soul do? It jumps to look from the top,
so that the telescope becomes a terrible instrument, which destroys earth,
man, and all our glory and greatness.
Luckily, we have humorous reflection, from which stems the feeling of
incongruity, which in this case says, “But is man really as small as an in-
verted telescope wants us to see him?” If he can understand and realize his
infinite smallness, it means that he also understands and realizes the infinite
greatness of the universe. How can we say, then, that man is small? But it is
also true that if he feels himself big and a humorist happens to know it, he
can have happen to him what happened to Gulliver, the giant in Lilliput who
became a toy in the hands of the Giants of Brobdingnag. . . .
From what we have said up to this point about the special activity of
reflection in the humorist, the intimate process of humorous art clearly and
necessarily develops.
Art, like all ideal or illusory constructions, has the tendency to fix life. It
stops it at one moment or in various moments—a statue in a gesture, a
landscape in a momentary unchangeable aspect. But what about the perpetual
mobility of our successive aspects? What about the continuous fusion in
which souls find themselves?
Art in general abstracts and concentrates; that is, it catches and represents
only the essential and characteristic ideality of men and things. Now, it
appears to the humorist that all this oversimplifies nature, attempting to make
life too reasonable, or at least too coherent. It seems to him that art in general
does not take into consideration what it ought to, art doesn’t consider causes,
the real causes which often move this poor human life to strange, absolutely
 Luigi Pirandello 103

unpredictable actions. For a humorist, causes in real life are never as logical
and ordered as in our common works of art, in which all is, in effect, com-
bined and organized to exist within the scope that the writer has in mind.
Order? Coherence? What if we have within ourselves four souls fighting
among themselves: the instinctive soul, the moral soul, the affective soul, and
the social soul? Our consciousness adapts itself according to whichever dom-
inates, and we hold as valid and sincere a false interpretation of our real
interior being, which we ignore because it never makes itself manifest as a
whole, but now in one way, now in another, according to the circumstances
of life.
Yes, an epic or dramatic poet may represent a hero in whom opposite and
unacceptable elements are shown fighting; but he will create a character out
of these elements and make him coherent in his actions. Well, the humorist
will do exactly the reverse: he will take the character apart. While the poet is
careful to make him coherent in each action, the humorist is amused by
representing him in his incongruities.
A humorist does recognize heroes; even better, he lets others represent
them. He, for his own sake, knows what legend is and how it is formed; he
knows what history is and how it is formed. They are all compositions more
or less ideal; perhaps they are the more ideal if they show a greater pretense
of reality. He amuses himself by taking them apart, and one cannot say that
this is a pleasant amusement.
He sees the world, if not entirely naked, let’s say in only its shirtsleeves.
He sees a king in his shirtsleeves, a king who makes a beautiful impression in
the majesty of his throne, with his royal staff and crown, his purple robe and
ermine. Don’t lay people with too much pomp on their deathbeds, in their
funeral chambers, because he is capable of profaning even this composition,
this scene. He is capable of catching, amid the sadness of the spectators, in
that cold and rigid corpse, with his decorations and good suit on, a certain
lugubrious grumble of the stomach, an exclamation (since these things are
best expressed in Latin), “Digestio post mortem. . . .”
And what about the unseen part of life? The abyss which exists in our
soul? Don’t we often feel a spark inside ourselves, strange thoughts like
flashes of folly, illogical thoughts we dare not confide even to ourselves,
arising from a soul different from the one we recognize in ourselves? For
these, we have in humor research into the most intimate and minute particu-
lars—which might look vulgar or trivial if compared with the ideal syntheses
of most art—and work based on contrasts and contradictions in opposition to
the coherence sought by the others. We have that disorganized, untied, and
capricious element, all the digressions which are seen in a humorous work in
opposition to the orderly plan, the composition, of most works of art.
104 On Humor

They are the result of reflection, which dissects—“If Cleopatra’s nose had
been longer, who knows what course the world would have had?” This if,
this little element that can be pinned down, inserted like a wedge in all facts,
can produce many different disaggregations; it can cause many disarrange-
ments at the hand of a humorist who, like Laurence Sterne for example, sees
the whole world regulated by infinite smallnesses.
Let’s conclude: humor is the feeling of polarity aroused by that special
activity of reflection which doesn’t hide itself, which doesn’t become, as
ordinarily in art, a form of feeling, but its contrary, following the feelings
step by step, however, as the shadow follows the body. A common artist pays
attention only to the body. A humorist pays attention to the body and its
shadow, sometimes more to the shadow than the body. He sees all the tricks
of the shadow; it now assumes length or width, as if to mimic the body,
which, meanwhile, doesn’t pay any attention to it.
 Chapter Eleven

Lecture on Dada (1922)

Tristan Tzara

Translated by Robert Motherwell.

Original publication, in English: From The Dada Painters and Poets, ed.
Robert Motherwell (1981; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1989).

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), a playwright, editor, and theorist, was born in

Romania but moved to Zürich, Switzerland, at the start of World War I; in
1920, he relocated to Paris. Tzara was one of the founders and the chief
theorist of Dada, which originated in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich
and spread to several major European cities. From 1917 to 1920, he wrote
seven manifestos expressing the central tenets of Dada in his typically angry,
mischievous, and nonsensical writing style. Dadaism began as a reaction to
the madness of World War I: in the face of such insane destruction, the logic
of mainstream art forms was futile. For this reason Tzara hailed the passing
of realism and of the illusionist theatre; freed of the burden of imitating life,
the theatre could preserve its artistic autonomy and live by its own scenic
means. Actors themselves could be freed from the cage of the proscenium
theatre, and scenic as well as lighting effects could be arranged in full view
of the audience, making them a part of the theatre world. Tzara’s best known
plays in the Dadaist vein are The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine
(1920) and The Gas Heart (1923).

***

Ladies and Gentlemen:

105
106 Lecture on Dada

I don’t have to tell you that for the general public and for you, the refined
public, a Dadaist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only a manner of
speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat us with that
remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit of belief in progress. At
ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you ask me why, I won’t be able to
tell you.
Another characteristic of Dada is the continuous breaking off of our
friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender his
resignation from the Dada movement was myself. Everybody knows that
Dada is nothing. I broke away from Dada and from myself as soon as I
understood the implications of nothing.
If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather be-
cause I have a need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I can.
Basically, the true Dadas have always been separate from Dada. Those who
acted as if Dada were important enough to resign from with a big noise have
been motivated by a desire for personal publicity, proving that counterfeiters
have always wriggled like unclean worms in and out of the purest and most
radiant religions.
I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don’t
expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you
exist. You haven’t the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my children
happy. But in your hearts you know that isn’t so. You will say: I exist to
guard my country against barbarian invasions. That’s a fine reason. You will
say: I exist because God wills. That’s a fairy tale for children. You will never
be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a
serious attitude about life. You will never understand that life is a pun, for
you will never be alone enough to reject hatred, judgments, all these things
that require such an effort, in favor of a calm and level state of mind that
makes everything equal and without importance.
Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost
Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada covers things with an artificial gen-
tleness, a snow of butterflies released from the head of a prestidigitator. Dada
is immobility and does not comprehend the passions. You will call this a
paradox, since Dada is manifested only in violent acts. Yes, the reactions of
individuals contaminated by destruction are rather violent, but when these
reactions are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic insistence of a continuous
and progressive “What for?” what remains, what dominates is indifference.
But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.
I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the Nothing
can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it will
be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only for the individual
 Tristan Tzara 107

who is expressing himself.—I am speaking of myself. Even that is too much

for me. How can I be expected to speak of all men at once, and satisfy them
too?
Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one
doesn’t like. What’s the use of giving them explanations that are merely food
for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their
little possessions, their income, their dog. This state of affairs derives from a
false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and
indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that cannot be shak-
en. Try to be empty and fill your brain cells with a petty happiness. Always
destroy what you have in you. On random walks. Then you will be able to
understand many things. You are not more intelligent than we, and we are
not more intelligent than you.
Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of society,
the organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a society tea. It
serves to create order and clarity where there are none. It serves to create a
state hierarchy. To set up classifications for rational work. To separate ques-
tions of a material order from those of a cerebral order, but to take the former
very seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of sound education and pragma-
tism. Fortunately life is something else and its pleasures are innumerable.
They are not paid for in the coin of liquid intelligence.
These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a realization
which constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from the sympathy
which binds us and which is inexplicable. It would not have been possible for
us to found our agreement on principles. For everything is relative. What are
the Beautiful, the Good, Art, Freedom? Words that have a different meaning
for every individual. Words with the pretension of creating agreement among
all, and that is why they are written with capital letters. Words which have
not the moral value and objective force that people have grown accustomed
to finding in them. Their meaning changes from one individual, one epoch,
one country to the next. Men are different. It is diversity that makes life
interesting. There is no common basis in men’s minds. The unconscious is
inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as mysterious as
the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we could not reconstruct
it.
What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us to
take a single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is backward?
Did they alter our forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we dispute, we
get excited. The rest is sauce. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes mixed with a
limitless boredom, a swamp dotted with tufts of dying shrubs.
We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched
beyond measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now
is spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything else.
108 Lecture on Dada

But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the inter-
vention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this quantity of
life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not the most precious
manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people
like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct
measure that should be given to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada
introduces it into daily life. And vice versa. In art, Dada reduces everything
to an initial simplicity, growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices
with the chaotic wind of creation and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It
wants logic reduced to a personal minimum, while literature in its view
should be primarily intended for the individual who makes it. Words have a
weight of their own and lend themselves to abstract construction. The absurd
has no terrors for me, for from a more exalted point of view everything in life
seems absurd to me. Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond
between disparate acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what
interests me is the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into
the work: the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the
elements and in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion,
into a lacework of words and sentiments.
Dada tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point
of view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass
through the same filter. It is not the new technique that interests us, but the
spirit. Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a pictorial, moral, poetic,
literary, political, or social renewal? We are well aware that these renewals
of means are merely the successive cloaks of the various epochs of history,
uninteresting questions of fashion and façade. We are well aware that people
in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as the people
of today, and that [the ancient Chinese philosopher] Chouang-Dsi was just as
Dada as we are. You are mistaken if you take Dada for a modern school, or
even for a reaction against the schools of today. Several of my statements
have struck you as old and natural: what better proof that you were Dadaists
without knowing it, perhaps even before the birth of Dada.
You will often hear that Dada is a state of mind. You may be gay, sad,
afflicted, joyous, melancholy, or Dada. Without being literary, you can be
romantic, you can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny, trans-
figured, vain, amiable, or Dada. This will happen later on in the course of
history when Dada has become a precise, habitual word, when popular repe-
tition has given it the character of a word organic with its necessary content.
Today no one thinks of the literature of the Romantic school in representing a
lake, a landscape, a character. Slowly but surely, a Dada character is forming.
Dada is here, there, and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its faults,
with its personal differences and distinctions which it accepts and views with
indifference.
 Tristan Tzara 109

We are often told that we are incoherent, but into this word people try to
put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent.
The gentleman who decides to take a bath but goes to the movies instead.
The one who wants to be quiet but says things that haven’t even entered his
head. Another who has a precise idea on some subject but succeeds only in
expressing the opposite in words which for him are a poor translation. There
is no logic. Only relative necessities discovered a posteriori, valid not in any
exact sense but only as explanations.
The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens in a com-
pletely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called
Dada.
Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic
strikes me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language
is ample and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games and
our literature we no longer need it.
The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but of a
disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3000 years
have been explaining everything to us (what for?); disgust with the preten-
sions of these artists-God’s-representatives-on-earth; disgust with passion
and with real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the bother;
disgust with a false form of domination and restriction en masse, which
accentuates rather than appeases man’s instinct of domination; disgust with
all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are nothing but a
front for the interests of money, pride, disease; disgust with the lieutenants of
a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile laws; disgust with
the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly (for why is it more
estimable to be red rather than green, to the left rather than the right, to be
large or small?). Disgust finally with the Jesuitical dialectic that can explain
everything and fill people’s minds with oblique and obtuse ideas without any
physiological basis or ethnic roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and
ignoble charlatan’s promises.
As Dada marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself.
From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no
benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that it’s no
use, that all this doesn’t matter. What interests a Dadaist is his own mode of
life. But here we approach the great secret.
Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races
and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing; it is the
point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the
castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs
and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Dada is useless.
Dada is without pretension, as life should be.
110 Lecture on Dada

Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a
virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces
that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
 Chapter Twelve

Surrealism (1922)
André Breton

Translated by David Gascoigne.

Original publication, in English: From What Is Surrealism?, trans. David
Gascoigne (1934; London: Faber & Faber, 1936).

André Breton (1896–1966)was a French poet, playwright, theorist, and edi-

tor. Although he never practiced medicine, Breton attended medical school,
and his study of mental illness together with his exposure to the writings of
Sigmund Freud fueled his interest in dreams. By 1916 he had joined the Dada
movement, and although he was a follower of Tzara, Breton contributed to
the demise of Dada when in 1924 he became one of the founders of surreal-
ism as a movement. The play The Magnetic Fields (1919), on which Breton
collaborated with Philippe Soupault, is generally regarded as the first genu-
ine surrealist work, and their subsequent play, If You Please (1920), remains
one of the earliest and best examples of “automatic writing,” a technique the
surrealists developed to help them bypass their brains’ logical functions. As
editor of the magazine Littérature, Breton became official leader of the sur-
realist movement and published several theoretical documents central to the
development of surrealism as an art form.
According to Anna Balakian,

Surrealism aimed to destroy the notion of literary categories and genres; it

realigned writing on the broad bases of logical and analogical expression, the
former to be considered journalistic and commercial, the latter poetic and
liberating. The attack on formalism in the arts was part of a wider declaration
of what Breton called his “non-slavery to life,” and a militant stand was taken
against all procedures that tended to destroy the enigma of existence by sub-

111
112 Surrealism

mitting the unknown elements in man’s words and actions to a rational under-
standing of them. (from The Reader’s Encyclopedia of World Drama, ed. John
Gassner & Edward Quinn [New York: Crowell, 1969], 821.)

The most essential characteristics of surrealism itself, in any form of the arts,
are the cult of the dream, the representation of the absurd, the erotic, and the
element of chance, and the expression of the psychic experience of man
through a form of writing that is “automatic” in the sense that it is uninhibit-
ed, freely associative, and as free as possible from the mental mechanism of
criticism and censure.
Breton later became committed to a political role for surrealism, expelling
Antonin Artaud from the movement, for example, for his apostate view of
revolution as no more than a change in the internal conditions of the soul. In
response, Artaud in 1927 characterized Breton’s revolution, preoccupied as it
now was with the necessity of production and the conditions of the workers,
as a “revolution for castrates.” The roots of man’s problems lay far deeper
than in social organization, Artaud argued, and the only revolution worthy of
support would have to free the internal man—as surrealism, in the way it was
originally conceived by Breton, had intended to do.

***

In an article, “Enter the Mediums,” published in Littérature, 1922, reprinted

in Les Pas Perdus, 1924, and subsequently in the Surrealist Manifesto, I
explained the circumstance that had originally put us, my friends and myself,
on the track of the surrealist activity we still follow and for which we are
hopeful of gaining ever more numerous new adherents in order to extend it
further than we have so far succeeded in doing. It reads:
“It was in 1919, in complete solitude and at the approach of sleep, that my
attention was arrested by sentences more or less complete, which became
perceptible to my mind without my being able to discover (even by very
meticulous analysis) any possible previous volitional effort. One evening in
particular, as I was about to fall asleep, I became aware of a sentence articu-
lated clearly to a point excluding all possibility of alteration and stripped of
all quality of vocal sound, a curious sort of sentence which came to me
bearing—in sober truth—not a trace of any relation whatever to any incidents
I may at that time have been involved in; an insistent sentence, it seemed to
me, a sentence, I might say, that knocked at the window. I was prepared to
pay no further attention to it when the organic character of the sentence
detained me. I was really bewildered. Unfortunately, I am unable to remem-
ber the exact sentence at this distance, but it ran approximately like this: “A
man is cut in half by the window.” What made it plainer was the fact that it
was accompanied by a feeble visual representation of a man in the process of
 André Breton 113

walking, but cloven, at half his height, by a window perpendicular to the axis
of his body. Definitely, there was the form, re-erected against space, of a man
leaning out of a window. By the window following the man’s locomotion, I
understood that I was dealing with an image of great rarity. Instantly the idea
came to me to use it as material for poetic construction. I had no sooner
invested it with that quality, than it had given place to a succession of all but
intermittent sentences which left me no less astonished, but in a state, I
would say, of extreme detachment.
“Preoccupied as I still was at that time with Freud, and familiar with his
methods of investigation, which I had practiced occasionally upon the sick
during the War, I resolved to obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain
from patients, namely a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over
which the subject’s critical faculty has no control—the subject himself
throwing reticence to the winds—and which as much as possible represents
spoken thought. It seemed and still seems to me that the speed of thought is
no greater than that of words, and hence does not exceed the flow of either
tongue or pen. It was in such circumstances that, together with Philippe
Soupault, whom I had told about my first ideas on the subject, I began to
cover sheets of paper with writing, feeling a praiseworthy contempt for what-
ever the literary result might be. Ease of achievement brought about the rest.
By the end of the first day of the experiment we were able to read to one
another about fifty pages obtained in this manner and to compare the results
we had achieved. The likeness was on the whole striking. There were similar
faults of construction, the same hesitant manner, and also, in both cases, an
illusion of extraordinary verve, much emotion, a considerable assortment of
images of a quality such as we should never have been able to obtain in the
normal way of writing, a very special sense of the picturesque, and, here and
there, a few pieces of out and out buffoonery. The only differences which our
two texts presented appeared to me to be due essentially to our respective
temperaments, Soupault’s being less static than mine, and, if he will allow
me to make this slight criticism, to his having scattered about at the top of
certain pages—doubtlessly in a spirit of mystification—various words under
the guise of titles. I must give him credit, on the other hand, for having
always forcibly opposed the least correction of any passage that did not seem
to me to be quite the thing. In that he was most certainly right.
“It is of course difficult in these cases to appreciate at their just value the
various elements in the result obtained; one may even say that it is entirely
impossible to appreciate them at a first reading. To you who may be writing
them, these elements are, in appearance, as strange as to anyone else, and you
are yourself naturally distrustful of them. Poetically speaking, they are distin-
guished chiefly by a very high degree of immediate absurdity, the peculiar
quality of that absurdity being, on close examination, their yielding to what-
114 Surrealism

ever is most admissible and legitimate in the world: divulgation of a given

number of facts and properties on the whole not less objectionable than the
others.”
The word “surrealism” having thereupon become descriptive of the ge-
neralizable undertaking to which we had devoted ourselves, I thought it
indispensable, in 1924, to define this word once and for all:
“SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to
express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought.
Thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and
outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
“ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of
certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of the
dream and in the disinterested play of thought. It tends definitely to do away
with all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the
solution of the principal problems of life. Have professed absolute surreal-
ism: Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, De-
snos, Éluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon,
Soupault, Vitrac.
“These till now appear to be the only ones, and there would not have been
any doubt on that score were it not for the strange case of Isidore Ducasse, of
whose extra-literary career I lack all data. Were one to consider their output
only superficially, a goodly number of poets might well have passed for
surrealists, beginning with Dante and Shakespeare at his best. In the course
of many attempts I have made towards an analysis of what, under false
pretenses, is called genius, I have found nothing that could in the end be
attributed to any other process than this.”
There followed an enumeration that will gain, I think, by being clearly set
out thus:
“Edward Young’s Night Thoughts are surrealist from cover to cover. It
was unfortunately a priest who spoke: a bad priest, to be sure, yet a priest.
“Heraclitus is surrealist in dialectic.
“Lulle is surrealist in definition.
“Flamel is surrealist in the night of gold.
“Swift is surrealist in malice.
“Sade is surrealist in sadism.
“Carrière is surrealist in drowning.
“Monk Lewis is surrealist in the beauty of evil.
“Achim d’Arnim is surrealist absolutely, in space and time.
“Rabbe is surrealist in death.
“Baudelaire is surrealist in morals.
“Rimbaud is surrealist in life and elsewhere.
“Hervey Saint-Denys is surrealist in the directed dream.
“Carroll is surrealist in nonsense.
 André Breton 115

“Huysmans is surrealist in pessimism.

“Seurat is surrealist in design.
“Picasso is surrealist in cubism.
“Vaché is surrealist in myself.
“Roussel is surrealist in anecdote. Etc.
“They were not always surrealists—on this I insist—in the sense that one
can disentangle in each of them a number of preconceived notions to
which—very naïvely!—they clung. And they clung to them so because they
had not heard the surrealist voice, the voice that exhorts on the eve of death
and in the roaring storm, and because they were unwilling to dedicate them-
selves to the task of no more than orchestrating the score replete with marve-
lous things. They were proud instruments; hence the sounds they produced
were not always harmonious sounds.
“We, on the contrary, who have not given ourselves to processes of filter-
ing, who through the medium of our work have been content to be silent
receptacles of so many echoes, modest registering machines that are not
hypnotized by the pattern that they trace, we are perhaps serving a yet much
nobler cause. So we honestly give back the talent lent to us. You may talk of
the ‘talent’ of this yard of platinum, of this mirror, of this door, and of this
sky, if you wish.
“We have no talent. . . .”
The Manifesto also contained a certain number of practical recipes, titled:
“Secrets of the Magic Surrealist Art,” such as the following:
“Written Surrealist Composition or First and Last Draft.
“Having settled down in some spot most conducive to the mind’s concen-
tration upon itself, order writing material to be brought to you. Let your state
of mind be as passive and receptive as possible. Forget your genius, talents,
as well as the genius and talents of others. Repeat to yourself that literature is
pretty well the sorriest road that leads to everywhere. Write quickly without
any previously chosen subject, quickly enough not to dwell on, and not to be
tempted to read over, what you have written. The first sentence will come of
itself; and this is self-evidently true, because there is never a moment but
some sentence alien to our conscious thought clamors for outward expres-
sion. It is rather difficult to speak of the sentence to follow, since it doubtless
comes in for a share of our conscious activity and so do the other sentences,
if it is conceded that the writing of the first sentence must have involved even
a minimum of consciousness. But that should in the long run matter little,
because therein precisely lies the greatest interest in the surrealist exercise.
Punctuation of course necessarily hinders the stream of absolute continuity
which preoccupies us. But you should particularly distrust the prompting
whisper. If through a fault ever so trifling there is a forewarning of silence to
come, a fault, let us say, of inattention, break off unhesitatingly the line that
116 Surrealism

has become too lucid. After the word whose origin seems suspect you should
place a letter, any letter, ‘l’ for example, always the letter ‘l,’ and restore the
arbitrary flux by making that letter the initial of the word to follow.”
I shall pass over the more or less correlated considerations which the
Manifesto discussed in their bearing on the possibilities of plastic expression
in surrealism. These considerations did not assume with me a relatively
dogmatic turn until later (Surrealism and Painting, 1928).
I believe that the real interest of that book—there was no lack of people
who were good enough to concede interest, for which no particular credit is
due to me because I have no more than given expression to sentiments shared
with friends, present and former—rests only subordinately on the formula
given above. It is rather confirmatory of a turn of thought which, for good or
ill, is peculiarly distinctive of our time. The defense originally attempted of
that turn of thought still seems valid to me in what follows:
“We still live under the reign of logic, but the methods of logic are
applied nowadays only to the resolution of problems of secondary interest.
The absolute rationalism which is still the fashion does not permit considera-
tion of any facts but those strictly relevant to our experience. Logical ends,
on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say that even experience has had
limits assigned to it. It revolves in a cage from which it becomes more and
more difficult to release it. Even experience is dependent on immediate util-
ity, and common sense is its keeper. Under color of civilization, under pre-
text of progress, all that rightly or wrongly may be regarded as fantasy or
superstition has been banished from the mind, all uncustomary searching
after truth has been proscribed. It is only by what must seem sheer luck that
there has recently been brought to light an aspect of mental life—to my belief
by far the most important—with which it was supposed that we no longer
had any concern. All credit for these discoveries must go to Freud. Based on
these discoveries a current of opinion is forming that will enable the explorer
of the human mind to continue his investigations, justified as he will be in
taking into account more than mere summary realities. The imagination is
perhaps on the point of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our minds
harbor strange forces capable of increasing those on the surface, or of suc-
cessfully contending with them, then it is all in our interest to canalize them,
to canalize them first in order to submit them later, if necessary, to the
control of the reason. The analysts themselves have nothing to lose by such a
proceeding. But it should be observed that there are no means designed a
priori for the bringing about of such an enterprise, that until the coining of
the new order it might just as well be considered the affair of poets and
scientists, and that its success will not depend on the more or less capricious
means that will be employed. . . .
 André Breton 117

“I am resolved to render powerless that hatred of the marvelous which is

so rampant among certain people, that ridicule to which they are so eager to
expose it. Briefly: The marvelous is always beautiful, anything that is marve-
lous is beautiful; indeed, nothing but the marvelous is beautiful. . . .
“The admirable thing about the fantastic is that it is no longer fantastic:
there is only the real. . . .
“Interesting in a different way from the future of surrealist technics
(theatrical, philosophical, scientific, critical) appears to me the application of
surrealism to action. Whatever reservations I might be inclined to make with
regard to responsibility in general, I should quite particularly like to know
how the first misdemeanors whose surrealist character is indubitable will be
judged. When surrealist methods extend from writing to action, there will
certainly arise the need of a new morality to take the place of the current one,
the cause of all our woes.”
The Manifesto of Surrealism has improved on the Rimbaud principle that
the poet must turn seer. Man in general is going to be summoned to manifest
through life those new sentiments which the gift of vision will so suddenly
have placed within his reach:
“Surrealism, as I envisage it, displays our complete nonconformity so
clearly that there can be no question of claiming it as witness when the real
world comes up for trial. On the contrary, it can but testify to the complete
state of distraction to which we hope to attain here below. Kant distracted by
women, Pasteur distracted by ‘grapes,’ Curie distracted by traffic, are pro-
foundly symptomatic in this respect. The world is only very relatively pro-
portionate to thought, and incidents of this kind are only the most striking
episodes of a war of independence in which I glory in taking part. Surrealism
is the ‘invisible ray’ that shall enable us one day to triumph over our enemies.
‘You tremble no more, carcase.’ This summer the roses are blue; the wood is
made of glass. The earth wrapped in its foliage makes as little effect on me as
a ghost. Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions. Existence is
elsewhere.”
Surrealism then was securing expression in all its purity and force. The
freedom it possesses is a perfect freedom in the sense that it recognizes no
limitations exterior to itself. As it was said on the cover of the first issue of
La Révolution Surréaliste, “it will be necessary to draw up a new declaration
of the Rights of Man.” The concept of surreality, concerning which quarrels
have been sought with us repeatedly and which some have attempted to turn
into a metaphysical or mystic rope to be placed afterwards round our necks,
lends itself no longer to misconstruction; nowhere does it declare itself op-
posed to the need of transforming the world, which henceforth will more and
more definitely yield to it.
As I said in the Manifesto:
118 Surrealism

“I believe in the future transmutation of those two seemingly contradicto-

ry states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, so to
speak. I am looking forward to its consummation, certain that I shall never
share in it, but death would matter little to me could I but taste the joy it will
yield ultimately.”
Aragon expressed himself in very much the same way in Une Vague de
Rêves (1924):
“It should be understood that the real is a relation like any other; the
essence of things is by no means linked to their reality—there are other
relations beside reality, which the mind is capable of grasping, and which
also are primary like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream. These various
groups are united and brought into harmony in one single order, surreal-
ity. . . . This surreality—a relation in which all notions are merged together—
is the common horizon of religions, magic, poetry, intoxications, and of all
life that is lowly—that trembling honeysuckle you deem sufficient to popu-
late the sky with for us.”
And René Crevel, in L’Esprit contre la Raison:
“The poet does not put the wild animals to sleep in order to play the
tamer, but, the cages wide open, the keys thrown to the winds, he journeys
forth, a traveler who thinks not of himself, but of the voyage, of dream-
beaches, forests of hands, soul-endowed animals, all undeniable surreality.”
I was to sum up the idea in these terms in Surrealism and Painting
(1928):
“All that I love, all that I think and feel inclines me towards a particular
philosophy of immanence according to which surreality will reside in reality
itself, will be neither superior nor exterior to it. And conversely, because the
container shall be also the contained. One might almost say that it will be a
communicating vessel placed between the container and the contained. That
is to say, I resist with all my strength temptations which, in painting and
literature, might have the immediate tendency to withdraw thought from life
as well as place life under the aegis of thought.”
After years of endeavor and perplexities, when a variety of opinions had
disputed amongst themselves the direction of the craft in which a number of
persons of unequal ability and varying powers of resistance had originally
embarked together, the surrealist idea recovered in the Second Manifesto all
the brilliance of which events had vainly conspired to despoil it. It should be
emphasized that the First Manifesto of 1924 did no more than sum up the
conclusions we had drawn during what one may call the heroic epoch of
surrealism, which stretches from 1919 to 1923. The concerted elaboration of
the first automatic texts and our excited reading of them, the first results
obtained by Max Ernst in the domain of “collage” and of painting, the prac-
tice of surrealist “speaking” during the hypnotic experiments introduced
among us by René Crevel and repeated every evening for over a year, uncon-
 André Breton 119

trovertibly mark the decisive stages of surrealist exploration during this first
phase. After that, up till the taking into account of the social aspect of the
problem round about 1925 (though not formally sanctioned until 1930), sur-
realism began to find itself a prey to characteristic wranglings. These wran-
glings account very clearly for the expulsion-orders and tickets-of-leave
which, as we went along, we had to deal out to certain of our companions of
the first and second hour. Some people have quite gratuitously concluded
from this that we are apt to overestimate personal questions. During the last
ten years, surrealism has almost unceasingly been obliged to defend itself
against deviations to the right and to the left. On the one hand we have had to
struggle against the will of those who would maintain surrealism on a purely
speculative level and treasonably transfer it on to an artistic and literary plane
(Artaud, Desnos, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vitrac) at the cost of all the hope for
subversion we have placed in it; on the other, against the will of those who
would place it on a purely practical basis, available at any moment to be
sacrificed to an ill-conceived political militancy (Naville, Aragon)—at the
cost, this time, of what constitutes the originality and reality of its research, at
the cost of the autonomous risk that it has to run. Agitated though it was, the
epoch that separates the two Manifestos was nonetheless a rich one, since it
saw the publication of so many works in which the vital principles of surreal-
ism were amply accounted for. It suffices to recall particularly Le Paysan de
Paris and Traité du Style by Aragon, L’Esprit contre la Raison and Etes-vous
Fous by René Crevel, Deuil pour Deuil by Desnos, Capitale de la Douleur
and L’Amour la Poésie by Éluard, La Femme 100 Têtes by Ernst, La Révolu-
tion et les Intellectuels by Naville, Le Grand Jeu by Péret, and my own
Nadja. The poetic activity of Tzara, although claiming until 1930 no connec-
tion with surrealism, is in perfect accord with ours.
We were forced to agree with Pierre Naville when he wrote:
“Surrealism is at the crossroads of several thought-movements. We as-
sume that it affirms the possibility of a certain steady downward readjust-
ment of the mind’s rational (and not simply conscious) activity towards more
absolutely coherent thought, irrespective of whatever direction that thought
may take; that is to say, that it proposes or would at least like to propose a
new solution of all problems, but chiefly moral. It is, indeed, in that sense
that it is epoch-making. That is why one may express the essential character-
istic of surrealism by saying that it seeks to calculate the quotient of the
unconscious by the conscious.”
It should be pointed out that in a number of declarations in La Révolution
et les Intellectuels. Que peuvent faire les surréalistes? (1926), this same
author demonstrated the utter vanity of intellectual bickerings in the face of
the human exploitation which results from the wage-earning system. These
declarations gave rise amongst us to considerable anxiety and, attempting for
the first time to justify surrealism’s social implications, I desired to put an
120 Surrealism

end to it in Légitime Defense. This pamphlet set out to demonstrate that there
is no fundamental antinomy in the basis of surrealist thought. In reality, we
are faced with two problems, one of which is the problem raised, at the
beginning of the twentieth century, by the discovery of the relations between
the conscious and the unconscious. That was how the problem chose to
present itself to us. We were the first to apply to its resolution a particular
method, which we have not ceased to consider both the most suitable and the
most likely to be brought to perfection; there is no reason why we should
renounce it. The other problem we are faced with is that of the social action
we should pursue. We consider that this action has its own method in dialec-
tical materialism, and we can all the less afford to ignore this action since, I
repeat, we hold the liberation of man to be the sine qua non condition of the
liberation of the mind, and we can expect this liberation of man to result only
from the proletarian revolution. These two problems are essentially distinct
and we deplore their becoming confused by not remaining so. There is good
reason, then, to take up a stand against all attempts to weld them together
and, more especially, against the urge to abandon all such research as ours in
order to devote ourselves to the poetry and art of propaganda. Surrealism,
which has been the object of brutal and repeated summonses in this respect,
now feels the need of making some kind of counter-attack. Let me recall the
fact that its very definition holds that it must escape, in its written manifesta-
tions, or any others, from all control exercised by the reason. Apart from the
puerility of wishing to bring a supposedly Marxist control to bear on the
immediate aspect of such manifestations, this control cannot be envisaged in
principle . And how ill-boding does this distrust seem, coming as it does
from men who declare themselves Marxists, that is to say possessed not only
of a strict line in revolutionary matters, but also of a marvelously open mind
and an insatiable curiosity!
This brings us to the eve of the Second Manifesto. These objections had to
be put to an end, and for that purpose it was indispensable that we should
proceed to liquidate certain individualist elements amongst us, more or less
openly hostile to one another, whose intentions did not, in the final analysis,
appear as irreproachable, nor their motives as disinterested, as might have
been desired. An important part of the work was devoted to a statement of the
reasons which moved surrealism to dispense for the future with certain col-
laborators. It was attempted, on the same occasion, to complete the specific
method of creation proposed six years earlier, and thoroughly to tidy up
surrealist ideas.
“Whatever may have been the controversial issues raised by former or
present followers of surrealism, all will admit that the drift of surrealism has
always and chiefly been towards a general and emphatic crisis in conscious-
ness and that it is only when this is in being or is shown to be impossible that
the success or historic eclipse of the movement will be decided.
 André Breton 121

“Intellectually it was and still is a question of exposing by every available

means, and to learn at all costs to identify, the factitious character of the
conflicts hypocritically calculated to hinder the setting in motion of any
unusual agitation to give mankind were it only a faint understanding of its
latent possibilities, and to inspire it to free itself from its fetters by all the
means available. The horror of death, the pantomime of the beyond, the total
breakdown of the most beautiful intellect in dream, the towers of Babel, the
mirror of inconstancies, the insuperable silver-splashed wall of the brain—all
these startling images of human catastrophes are perhaps nothing but images
after all. There is a hint in all this of a belief that there exists a certain
spiritual plane on which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past
and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the
low, are not conceived of as opposites. It would therefore be vain to attribute
to surrealism any other motive than the hope to determine that plane, as it
would be absurd to ascribe to it a purely destructive or constructive charac-
ter: the point at issue being precisely this, that construction and destruction
should no longer be flaunted against one another. It becomes clear also that
surrealism is not at all interested in taking into account what passes alongside
it under the guise of art and is in fact anti-art, philosophy or anti-philosophy,
all, in a word, that has not for its ultimate end the conversion of the being into
a jewel, internal and unseeing, with a soul that is neither of ice nor of fire.
What, indeed, do they expect of surrealism, those who are still anxious about
the position they may occupy in the world ? On that mental plane from which
one may for oneself alone embark on the perilous but, we think, supreme
exploit, on that plane the footfalls of those who come or go are no longer of
any importance, because their echo will be repeated in a land in which, by
delimitation, surrealism possesses no listening ear. It is not desirable that
surrealism should be dependent on the whim of this or that person. If it
declares itself capable of ransoming thought from a serfdom more and more
task-driven, to bring it back to the path of complete understanding, to restore
to it its pristine purity, it is indeed no more than right that it should be judged
only by what it has done and by what it has still to accomplish in the
fulfillment of its promise. . . .
“While surrealism undertakes particularly the critical investigation of the
notions of reality and unreality, of reason and unreason, of reflection and
impulse, of knowing and ‘fatal’ ignorance, of utility and uselessness, there is
nevertheless between it and historical materialism this similarity in tendency,
that it sets out from the ‘colossal abortion’ of the Hegelian system. I do not
see how limits, those for instance of the economic framework, can be as-
signed to the exercise of a thought which is definitely adapted to negation
and the negation of negation. How allow that the dialectical method is only to
be applied validly to solving social problems? It is the whole of surrealism’s
ambition to supply it with no wise conflicting possibilities of application in
122 Surrealism

the most immediate conscious domain. I really cannot see, pace a few mud-
dle-headed revolutionaries, why we should abstain from taking up the prob-
lems of love, of dreaming, of madness, of art and of religion, so long as we
consider these problems from the same angle as they, and we too, consider
Revolution. And I have no hesitation in saying that nothing systematic had
been done in this direction before surrealism, and for us also at the point
where we found it, ‘the dialectical method in its Hegelian form could not be
put into application.’ For us also it was imperative to have done with ideal-
ism proper, and our coining of the word ‘surrealism’ is enough to show that
this was so, as it is to show the need for us—to use Engels’ example—of
going beyond the childish development: ‘The rose is a rose. The rose is not a
rose. And yet the rose is a rose.’ Nevertheless—if I may say so parenthetical-
ly—we had to set ‘the rose’ in a profitable movement of less innocuous
contradictions, a movement in which the rose is successively the rose out of
the garden, the rose which holds a singular place in a dream, the rose which it
is impossible to extract from ‘the optical bouquet,’ the rose which may
change its properties completely by passing into automatic writing, the rose
which retains only what the painter has allowed it to retain of a rose in a
surrealist painting, and finally the rose, quite different from itself, which goes
back into the garden. That is a long way from any idealist standpoint, and we
should not disclaim an idealist view if we were not continuing to suffer the
attacks of an elementary materialism. These attacks emanate from those who,
out of low conservatism, oppose the investigation of the relation of thought
to matter, and those who, through ill-digested revolutionary sectarianism,
and while ignoring the whole of what is being asked of them, confuse this
materialism with the materialism which Engels distinguished as essentially
different from it and defined as being primarily an intuition of the world
which had to put itself to the test and be realized. ‘In the course of the
development of philosophy, idealism became untenable and was contradicted
by modern materialism. The latter is the negation of negation and is not
simply the old materialism restored: to the enduring foundations of this old
materialism it adds the whole of what has been thought in philosophy and
natural science throughout an evolution of two thousand years, and adds too
the product of this long history itself.’ It is also essential to the proper appre-
ciation of our starting-point to understand that we regard philosophy as out-
classed. In this we are, I believe, at one with all those for whom reality has
more than a theoretical importance, for whom it is a question of life and
death to appeal passionately, as Ludwig Feuerbach insisted, to this reality:
we so appeal by committing ourselves entirely, without reservation, to the
principle of historical materialism; he so appealed by casting in the face of
the astounded intellectual world the idea that ‘man is what he eats’ and that
 André Breton 123

there would be better prospects of success for a future revolution if the

people were better fed, specifically if they were given peas instead of pota-
toes. . . .
“It was to be expected that surrealism should make its appearance in the
midst of, and perhaps thanks to, an uninterrupted succession of falterings,
zigzags, and defections, which constantly exact the rediscussion of its origi-
nal data, i.e., it is called back to the initial principle of its activity and at the
same time is subject to the interrogation of the chancy morrow when the
heart’s feelings may have waxed or waned. I have to admit that everything
has not been done to bring this undertaking off, if only that we have not taken
full advantage of the means which have been defined for our group nor fully
tested the ways of investigation recommended when the movement was born.
The problem of social action is—as I have already said and as I insist—only
one form of a more general problem which surrealism finds it its duty to
raise, and this problem is the problem of human expression in all its forms.
Whoever says ‘expression’ says, to begin with, ‘language.’ It is not therefore
surprising that in the beginning surrealism should have confined itself almost
entirely to the plane of language, nor that it should, after some incursion or
other, return to that plane as if for the pleasure of behaving there in a con-
quered land. Nothing, indeed, can prevent the land from being to a great
extent conquered. The hordes of words which were literally unleashed and to
which Dada and surrealism deliberately opened their doors, are not, whatever
anyone thinks, words which withdraw vainly. They will penetrate, at leisure,
but certainly, the idiotic little towns of that literature which is still taught and,
easily failing to distinguish between low and lofty quarterings, they will
capture a fine number of turrets. In the belief that poetry alone so far is all
that has been seriously shaken by us, the inhabitants are not really on their
guard: they are building here and there a few unimportant ramparts. There is
a pretense that it has not been noticed how much the logical mechanism of
the sentence is proving more and more impotent by itself to give man the
emotive shock which really gives some value to his life. On the other hand,
the productions of that spontaneous or more spontaneous, direct or more
direct, activity, such as surrealism is providing in ever greater numbers, in
the form of books, pictures, and films—these which man first looked upon
with amazement, he is now placing about the home, and it is to them that,
more or less timorously, he is committing the task of revolutionizing his
ways of feeling. No doubt when I say ‘man,’ that man is not Everyman, and
he must be allowed ‘time’ to become Everyman. But note how admirably and
perversely insinuating a small number of quite modern works have already
proved, those precisely about which the least that can be said is that they are
pervaded by an especially unhealthy atmosphere: Baudelaire, Rimbaud (de-
spite the reservations I have made), Huysmans, and Lautréamont—to men-
tion only poetry. Do not let us be afraid of making a law unto ourselves of
124 Surrealism

this unhealthiness. We want it to be impossible to say that we have not done

everything to annihilate that foolish illusion of happiness and good under-
standing which it will be the glory of the nineteenth century to have exposed.
Truly we have not ceased to be fanatically attracted by these rays of sunshine
full of miasma. But at this moment, when the public authorities in France are
preparing a grotesque celebration of the centenary of Romanticism, we for
our part say that this Romanticism—of which we are quite ready to appear
historically today as the tail, though in that case an excessively prehensile
tail—this Romanticism is, we say, in its very essence in 1930 the negation of
these authorities and this celebration; we say that for Romanticism to be a
hundred years old is for it to be young, and that what has wrongly been called
its heroic period can no longer pass for anything but the pulings of a being
who is now only beginning to make known its wants through us; and finally
we say that if it should be held that all that was thought before this infant—
all that was thought ‘classically’—was good, then incontestably he is out for
the whole of evil.”
These considerations preface the critical examination of the changes and
alterations which the most typical forms of surrealist expression have under-
gone in the course of time. This has been, as it happens, nothing less than a
rallying back to principles:
“It is, as I was beginning to say above, regrettable that more systematic
and sustained efforts, such as surrealism has constantly called for, have not
been supplied in the way of automatic writing and of accounts of dreams. In
spite of the way in which we have insistently included material of this sort in
surrealist publications, and the remarkable place they occupy in certain
works, it has to be admitted that sometimes their interest in such a context
has been slight, or that they rather give the effect of being ‘bravura pieces.’
The presence in these items of an evident pattern has also greatly hampered
the species of conversion we had hoped to bring about through them. The
excessive negligence of which most of their authors were guilty is to blame:
generally these authors were content to let their pens run over paper without
observing in the least what was at the time going on inside themselves—this
duplication being nevertheless easier to seize and more interesting to consid-
er than that of reflective writing—or else they put together more or less
arbitrary dream-elements intended to set forth their picturesqueness rather
than to make visible usefully how they had come about. Such distortion of
course nullifies any benefit that might be obtained from this sort of operation.
Indeed, the great value of these operations for surrealism lies in the possibil-
ity they have of yielding to the reader particular logical planes, precisely
those in which the logical faculty which is exercised in everything and for
everything, in consciousness, does not act. What am I saying! Not only do
these logical planes remain unexplored, but further, we remain as little in-
formed as ever regarding the origin of the voice which it is open to each one
 André Breton 125

of us to hear, and which in the most singular fashion talks to us of something

different from what we believe we are thinking, sometimes becoming solemn
when we are most lighthearted, or talking nonsense when we are wretched.
“Nobody expressing himself does more than take advantage of a very
obscure possibility of conciliation between what he knew he had to say and
what on the same subject he didn’t know he had to say and yet has said. The
most rigorous line of thought is unable to forgo this assistance, undesirable
though it yet is from the point of view of rigor. Truly, the idea gets torpedoed
in the heart of the sentence enunciating it, even when this sentence escapes
having any charming liberty taken with its meaning. Dadaism aimed espe-
cially at calling attention to the torpedoing. By appealing to automatism, as is
well known, surrealism sets out to prevent the torpedoing of some vessel or
other: something like a phantom-ship (some people have tried to make use of
this image against me, but hard-worn as it may be, I find it good, and I use it
again).
“There is no need to indulge in subtleties: inspiration is familiar enough.
And there can be no mistake: it is inspiration which has supplied the supreme
need of expression in all times and in all places. A common remark is that
inspiration either is or is not, and when it is not, nothing summoned to
replace it by the human skill which interest obliterates, by the discursive
intelligence, or by the talent acquired with labor, can make up in us for the
lack of it. We recognize it easily by the way it completely takes possession of
the mind, so that for long periods when any problem is set we are momentari-
ly prevented from being the playthings of one rational solution rather than
another; and by that kind of short-circuit which it sets up between a given
idea and what answers to it (in writing, for example). Just as in the physical
world, the short-circuit occurs when the two ‘poles’ of the machine are
linked by a conductor having little or no resistance. In poetry and in painting,
surrealism has done everything it could to increase the number of short-
circuits. Its dearest aim now and in the future must be the artificial reproduc-
tion of that ideal moment in which a man who is a prey to a particular
emotion, is suddenly caught up by ‘the stronger than himself,’ and thrust,
despite his bodily inertia, into immortality. If he were then lucid and awake,
he would issue from that predicament in terror. The great thing is that he
should not be free to come out, that he should go on talking all the time the
mysterious ringing is going on: indeed, it is thanks to that whereby he ceases
to belong to himself that he belongs to us. Provided the products of psychic
activity which dreaming and automatic writing are, are as much as possible
distracted from the will to express, as much as possible lightened of ideas of
responsibility ever ready to act as brakes, and as much as possible kept
independent of all that is not the passive life of the intelligence, these prod-
ucts have the following advantages: that they alone furnish the material for
appreciating the grand style to the body of critics who in the artistic domain
126 Surrealism

are strangely disabled; that they allow of a general reclassification of lyrical

values; and that they offer a key to go on opening indefinitely that box of
never-ending drawers which is called man, and so dissuade him from making
an about-turn for reasons of self-preservation on those occasions in the dark
when he runs into the externally closed doors of the ‘beyond,’ of reality, of
reason, of genius, and of love. The day will come when these palpable
evidences of an existence other than the one we believe ourselves to be
leading will no longer be treated as cavalierly as now. It will then seem
surprising that, having been so close to truth as we are, we in general should
have taken care to provide ourselves with some literary alibi or other instead
of plunging into the water though ignorant of swimming, and going into the
fire though not believing in the phoenix, in order to attain this truth.”
Some of you may be perhaps astonished, by the way, to find me dealing
thus with automatic texts and accounts of dreams:
“If I feel I must insist so much on the value of the two operations, it is not
because they seem to me to constitute in themselves alone the intellectual
panacea, but because for the trained observer they lend themselves less than
any others to confusion or trickery, and that further they are the best that have
been found to invest man with a valid sense of his resources. It goes without
saying that the conditions imposed on us by life make it impossible for such
an apparently unmotivated exercise of thought to go on uninterruptedly.
Those who have yielded themselves up to it unreservedly, however low some
of them may later have fallen, will one day turn out not to have been quite
vainly projected into such a complete internal faerie. In comparison with this
faerie, a return to any premeditated activity of mind, however it may appeal
to the majority of their contemporaries, will in their eyes provide but a poor
spectacle.
“These very direct means, means which are, let us say it again, open to
all, means which we persist in putting forward as soon as the question is no
longer essentially to produce works of art, but to light up the unrevealed and
yet revealable part of our being in which all the beauty, all the love, and all
the virtue with which we scarcely credit ourselves are shining intensely—
these immediate means are not the only ones. Notably, it seems that now
there is much to be expected of certain methods of pure deception, the appli-
cation of which to art and life would have the effect of fixing attention
neither on the real nor on the imaginary, but on the, so to speak, hither side of
the real. It is easy to imagine novels which cannot end as there are problems
which remain unsolved. When, however, shall we have the novel in which
the characters, having been abundantly defined with a minimum of particu-
larities, will act in an altogether foreseeable way in view of an unforeseen
result; and, inversely, the novel in which psychology will not scamp its great
but futile duties at the expense of the characters and events, but will really
hold up (as a microscopic slide is held up) between two blades a fraction of a
 André Breton 127

second, and in this will be surprised, the germs of incidents? When shall we
have this other novel, in which the verisimilitude of the scenery will for the
first time fail to hide from us the strange symbolical life which even the most
definite and most common objects lead in dreams; again, the novel in which
the construction will be quite simple, but in which, however, an elopement
will be described with the words for fatigue, a storm described with precision
but gaily, etc.? Whoever believes with us that it is time to have done with the
provoking insanities of ‘realism’ will have no difficulty in adding to these
proposals for himself.”
 Chapter Thirteen

The Dehumanization of Art (1925)

José Ortega y Gasset

Translated by Helene Weyl.

Original publication, in English: From The Dehumanization of Art and Other
Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature , trans. Helene Weyl (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1968), 4, 8–10, 11–14, 54.

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was a prolific Spanish writer of essays

on philosophy, literature, and politics. In The Revolt of the Masses (1932) he
blended diverse intellectual influences, including Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant,
and Einstein, in the creation of a perspectivist, existential philosophical sys-
tem premised on the need for a ruling class of liberal intellectual elites—a
view that antagonized the left. Somewhat complementary to The Revolt of
the Masses, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture,
and Literature, published in 1925, discusses the nature of Modernism—of
the modern artist in search of a fresh vision—and the hostility it inspires in
the masses “who do not understand it.” During the Spanish Civil War, Ortega
y Gasset’s resistance to Franco’s offers to appoint him as Spain’s national
philosopher resulted in his voluntary exile to South America; he returned to
his native country only in 1949.

***

All modern art is unpopular, and it is so not accidentally and by chance, but
essentially and by fate.
It might be said that every newcomer among styles passes through a stage
of quarantine. The battle of Hernani comes to mind, and all the other skir-
mishes connected with the advent of Romanticism. However, the unpopular-
ity of present-day art is of a different kind. A distinction must be made
129
130 The Dehumanization of Art

between what is not popular and what is unpopular. A new style takes some
time in winning popularity: it is not popular, but it is not unpopular either.
The break-through of Romanticism, although a frequently cited example, is,
as a sociological phenomenon, exactly the opposite of the present situation of
art. Romanticism was very quick in winning “the people” to whom the old
classical art had never appealed. The enemy with whom Romanticism had to
fight it out was precisely a select minority irretrievably sold to the classical
forms of the “ancien régime” in poetry. The works of the romanticists were
the first, after the invention of printing, to enjoy large editions. Romanticism
was the prototype of a popular style. First born of democracy, it was coddled
by the masses.
Modern art, on the other hand, will always have the masses against it. It is
essentially unpopular; moreover, it is antipopular. Any of its works automati-
cally produces a curious effect on the general public. It divides the public
into two groups: one very small, formed by those who are favorably inclined
towards it; another very large—the hostile majority. (Let us ignore that am-
biguous fauna—the snobs.) Thus the work of art acts like a social agent
which segregates from the shapeless mass of the many two different castes of
men.
Which is the differentiating principle that creates these two antagonistic
groups? Every work of art arouses differences of opinion. Some like it, some
don’t; some like it more, some like it less. Such disagreements have no
organic character; they are not a matter of principles. A person’s chance
disposition determines on which side he will fall. But in the case of the new
art the split occurs in a deeper layer than that on which differences of person-
al taste reside. It is not that the majority does not like the art of the young and
the minority likes it, but that the majority, the masses, do not understand it.
The old bigwigs who were present at the performance of Hernani understood
Victor Hugo’s play very well; precisely because they understood it they
disliked it. Faithfully adhering to definite aesthetic norms, they were dis-
gusted at the new artistic values which this piece of art proposed to them.
“From a sociological point of view” the characteristic feature of the new
art is, in my judgment, that it divides the public into the two classes of those
who understand it and those who do not. This implies that one group possess-
es an organ of comprehension denied to the other—that they are two differ-
ent varieties of the human species. The new art obviously addresses itself not
to everybody, as did Romanticism, but to a specially gifted minority. Hence
the indignation it arouses in the masses. When a man dislikes a work of art,
but understands it, he feels superior to it; and there is no reason for indigna-
tion. But when his dislike is due to his failure to understand, he feels vaguely
humiliated and this rankling sense of inferiority must be counterbalanced by
indignant self-assertion. Through its mere presence, the art of the young
compels the average citizen to realize that he is just this—the average citizen,
 José Ortega y Gasset 131

a creature incapable of receiving the sacrament of art, blind and deaf to pure
beauty. But such a thing cannot be done after a hundred years of adulation of
the masses and apotheosis of the people. Accustomed to ruling supreme, the
masses feel that the new art, which is the art of a privileged aristocracy of
finer senses, endangers their rights as men. Whenever the new Muses present
themselves, the masses bristle.
For a century and a half the masses have claimed to be the whole of
society. Stravinsky’s music or Pirandello’s drama has the sociological effect
of compelling the people to recognize itself for what it is: a component
among others of the social structure, inert matter of the historical process, a
secondary factor in the cosmos of spiritual life. On the other hand, the new
art also helps the elite to recognize themselves and one another in the drab
mass of society and to learn their mission, which consists in being few and
holding their own against the many.
A time must come in which society, from politics to art, reorganizes itself
into two orders or ranks: the illustrious and the vulgar. That chaotic, shape-
less, and undifferentiated state without discipline and social structure in
which Europe has lived these hundred and fifty years cannot go on. Behind
all contemporary life lurks the provoking and profound injustice of the as-
sumption that men are actually equal. Each move among men so obviously
reveals the opposite that each move results in a painful clash.
If this subject were broached in politics the passions aroused would run
too high to make oneself understood. Fortunately the aforementioned unity
of spirit within a historical epoch allows us to point out serenely and with
perfect clarity in the germinating art of our time the same symptoms and
signals of a moral revision that in politics present themselves obscured by
low passions. . . .
One point must be clarified before we go on. What is it the majority of
people call aesthetic pleasure? What happens in their minds when they “like”
a work of art; for instance, a theatrical performance? The answer is easy. A
man likes a play when he has become interested in the human destinies
presented to him, when the love and hatred, the joys and sorrows of the
personages so move his heart that he participates in it all as though it were
happening in real life. And he calls a work “good” if it succeeds in creating
the illusion necessary to make the imaginary personages appear like living
persons. In poetry he seeks the passion and pain of the man behind the poet.
Paintings attract him if he finds on them figures of men or women whom it
would be interesting to meet. A landscape is pronounced “pretty” if the
country it represents deserves for its loveliness or its grandeur to be visited
on a trip.
It thus appears that to the majority of people aesthetic pleasure means a
state of mind which is essentially undistinguishable from their ordinary be-
havior. It differs merely in accidental qualities, being perhaps less utilitarian,
132 The Dehumanization of Art

more intense, and free from painful consequences. But the object towards
which their attention and, consequently, all their other mental activities are
directed is the same as in daily life: people and passions. By art they under-
stand a means through which they are brought into contact with interesting
human affairs. Artistic forms proper—figments, fantasy—are tolerated only
if they do not interfere with the perception of human forms and fates. As
soon as purely aesthetic elements predominate and the story of John and
Mary grows elusive, most people feel out of their depth and are at a loss what
to make of the scene, the book, or the painting. As they have never practiced
any other attitude but the practical one in which a man’s feelings are aroused
and he is emotionally involved, a work that does not invite sentimental
intervention leaves them without a cue.
Now, this is a point which has to be made perfectly clear. Not only is
grieving and rejoicing at such human destinies as a work of art presents or
narrates a very different thing from true artistic pleasure, but preoccupation
with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with aesthet-
ic enjoyment proper. . . .
During the nineteenth century, artists proceeded in all too impure a fash-
ion. They reduced the strictly aesthetic elements to a minimum and let the
work consist almost entirely in a fiction of human realities. In this sense all
normal art of the last century must be called realistic. Beethoven and Wagner
were realistic, and so was Chateaubriand as well as Zola. Seen from the
vantage point of our day Romanticism and Naturalism draw closer together
and reveal their common realistic root.
Works of this kind are only partially works of art, or artistic objects. Their
enjoyment does not depend upon our power to focus on transparencies and
images, a power characteristic of the artistic sensibility; all they require is
human sensibility and willingness to sympathize with our neighbor’s joys
and worries. No wonder that nineteenth-century art has been so popular; it is
made for the masses inasmuch as it is not art but an extract from life. Let us
remember that in epochs with two different types of art, one for minorities
and one for the majority, the latter has always been realistic. (For instance, in
the Middle Ages. In accordance with the division of society into the two
strata of noblemen and commoners, there existed an aristocratic art which
was “conventional” and “idealistic,” and a popular art which was realistic
and satirical.)
I will not now discuss whether pure art is possible. Perhaps it is not; but
as the reasons that make me inclined to think so are somewhat long and
difficult the subject had better be dropped. Besides, it is not of major impor-
tance for the matter at hand. Even though pure art may be impossible there
doubtless can prevail a tendency toward a purification of art. Such a tendency
would effect a progressive elimination of the human, all too human, elements
predominant in romantic and naturalistic production. And in this process a
 José Ortega y Gasset 133

point can be reached in which the human content has grown so thin that it is
negligible. We then have an art which can be comprehended only by people
possessed of the peculiar gift of artistic sensibility—an art for artists and not
for the masses, for “quality” and not for hoi polloi.
That is why modern art divides the public into two classes, those who
understand it and those who do not understand it—that is to say, those who
are artists and those who are not. The new art is an artistic art.
I do not propose to extol the new way in art or to condemn the old. My
purpose is to characterize them as the zoologist characterizes two contrasting
species. The new art is a world-wide fact. For about twenty years now the
most alert young people of two successive generations—in Berlin, Paris,
London, New York, Rome, Madrid—have found themselves faced with the
undeniable fact that they have no use for traditional art; moreover, that they
detest it. With these young people one can do one of two things: shoot them,
or try to understand them. As soon as one decides in favor of the latter it
appears that they are endowed with a perfectly clear, coherent, and rational
sense of art. Far from being a whim, their way of feeling represents the
inevitable and fruitful result of all previous artistic achievement. Whimsical.
arbitrary, and consequently unprofitable it would be to set oneself against the
new style and obstinately remain shut off in old forms that are exhausted and
the worse for wear. In art, as in morals, what ought to be done does not
depend on our personal judgment; we have to accept the imperative imposed
by the time. Obedience to the order of the day is the most hopeful choice
open to the individual. Even so he may achieve nothing; but he is much more
likely to fail if he insists on composing another Wagnerian opera, another
naturalistic novel.
In art repetition is nothing. Each historical style can engender a certain
number of different forms within a generic type. But there always comes a
day when the magnificent mine has been exhausted. Such, for instance, has
been the fate of the romantico-naturalistic novel and theatre. It is a naïve
error to believe that the present infecundity of these two genres is due to lack
of talent. What happens is that the possible combinations within these literary
forms are exhausted. It must be deemed fortunate that this situation coincides
with the emergence of a new artistic sensibility capable of detecting other
untouched veins.
When we analyze the new style we find that it contains certain closely
connected tendencies. It tends (1) to dehumanize art, (2) to avoid living
forms, (3) to see to it that the work of art is nothing but a work of art, (4) to
consider art as play and nothing else, (5) to be essentially ironical, (6) to
beware of sham and hence to aspire to scrupulous realization, (7) to regard
art as a thing of no transcending consequence. . . .
134 The Dehumanization of Art

But whatever their shortcomings, the young artists have to be granted one
point: there is no turning back. All the doubts cast upon the inspiration of
these pioneers may be justified, and yet they provide no sufficient reason for
condemning them. The objections would have to be supplemented by some-
thing positive: a suggestion of another way for art different from dehuman-
ization and yet not coincident with the beaten and worn-out paths.
It is easy to protest that it is always possible to produce art within the
bounds of a given tradition. But this comforting phrase is of no use to the
artist who, pen or chisel in hand, sits waiting for a concrete inspiration.
 Chapter Fourteen

Postwar German Drama (1928)

Ernst Toller

Originally published in English.

Original publication: From The Nation, no. 127, 7 November 1928.

Ernst Toller (1893–1939) was a German Expressionist playwright of Jewish

parentage. He saw front-line action in the First World War, as a result of
which he became a left-wing pacifist, took part in the 1919 communist take-
over in Munich, and was appointed Commissar for Education in the short-
lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. In consequence Toller was sent to prison for
a five-year sentence, where he wrote his first play, Die Wandlung (Transfig-
uration, 1919). Subsequent plays include Masse Mensch (Man and the
Masses, 1921), Die Maschinenstürmer (The Machine Wreckers, 1922),
Hinkemann (1923), and Hoppla, wir leben! (Hoppla, We’re Alive!, 1927).
After the Nazis took power in 1933, Toller escaped from Germany to live
first in England and subsequently in the United States, where he committed
suicide in New York on May 22, 1939.
If Toller sought to realize his political beliefs in his activities as a revolu-
tionary, he tried in his dramatic activity to present the genesis of his thinking
on the nature of man’s political condition. But the designation “political”
requires clear definition in this instance. Certainly, where Toller is con-
cerned, the scope of the political cannot be limited to notions of ideology,
propaganda, and manipulation. However, if the definition of “political” were
extended to what Paul Kornfeld termed “metapolitical” to signify the total
condition of man in his idealistic struggle for realization of the brotherhood
of men, the designation “political” would be consistent with Toller’s life and
works.

***
135
136 Postwar German Drama

I have been asked by the editor of The Nation to write a few words on
postwar German drama. We are in the habit of using the term “postwar
drama” without stopping to ask ourselves if there really is such a type,
distinct in presentation, treatment, kind, and form from that of the pre-war
period.
Did the war really cause this decisive change in German drama? Not at
all. It is strikingly confirmed today, after ten years, that the present tenden-
cies in the drama began their development years before the war, and that
since then they have simply been in more rapid eruption.
The younger dramatists felt that an unbridgeable gulf divided them from
the older generation. The struggle between the generations, the father-and-
son problem, the fight between compromise and directness, between bour-
geois and anti-bourgeois, had stirred young intellects before the war and
made a reality of what they had prophetically seen coming. To be sure, the
war destroyed many moral and social, many spiritual and artistic values. But
the foundations of these values had become rotten. In place of the idea, there
had come to the fore a realpolitik which was leading to the abrogation of all
reality. Freedom had become hypocrisy—freedom for the few, spiritual and
economic bondage for the many. In the first dramas of Sorge, Hasenclever,
and Werfel this hatred toward our elders was already smoldering. And these
were the same elders who did nothing to prevent the war but, tricking it out
in romanticism, pitilessly and unfeelingly sent battalion after battalion of
young German manhood out to die.
During the war very little got to the public through the strict censorship.
But after the collapse, every day brought new works from the newly liberated
minds. The form which this art took was called expressionism. It was just as
much reaction as it was synthetic and creative action. It turned against that
tendency in art which was satisfied merely to set down impressions, one after
the other, without troubling to question their essential nature, justification, or
the idea involved. The expressionists were not satisfied simply to photo-
graph. They knew that environment permeates the artist and is reflected in
his psychic mirror in such a way as utterly to transfigure this environment.
Expressionism wanted to influence environment, to change it in giving it a
brighter, more righteous appearance—to make it impossible, for example, for
a catastrophe like the war ever to threaten mankind again. Reality was to be
comprehended anew in the light of the ideal, was to be born again.
All activity resolves itself into outer and inner activity, both of equal
importance and strength as motivating forces. In style expressionism was
pregnant, almost telegraphic, always shunning the peripheral, and always
probing to the center of things. In expressionistic drama man is no accidental
private person. He is a type posited for many, and ignoring the limits of
superficial characterization. Man was skinned in the expectation that some-
 Ernst Toller 137

where under his skin was his soul. The dramatic exponents of expressionism
were Sorge, Göring, Barlach, and Toller. Of their works may be mentioned
Sorge’s The Beggar, Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight, Hasenclever’s The
Son, Unruh’s A Family, The Poor Cousin by Barlach, and Toller’s Transfig-
uration and Masses and Man.
During the epoch of expressionism a significant development took place.
A new character appeared on the stage—proletarian man. Of course, there
had already been plays whose action took place in a proletarian milieu. But
something fundamental divided expressionistic proletarian drama from such
a play as Hauptman’s The Weavers or Büchner’s Woyzeck. In the old dramas
the proletarian was a dull creature who rebelled against his fate with strong
but rash impulse. The artist who pictured him wanted to awaken sympathy.
In the new drama, the proletarian is active, conscious, rebelling against his
fate, and struggling for a new reality. He is driven on by feeling, by knowl-
edge, and by the idea of a brighter future.
It is useless to talk of the fiasco of expressionism, or to ask whether
expressionism produced works which will still be remembered in fifty years.
Expressionism wanted to be a product of the time and to react to it. And that
much it certainly succeeded in doing. Never since Schiller’s The Robbers
[1782], since [his] Intrigue and Love [1784], has the theatre been so much a
rostrum for current happenings or so much upset by the strife and counter-
strife of public opinion: passionate partisanship on one side, and violent one-
sided reproaches on the other.
Let us examine for a moment the reproach of “tendency” leveled against
expressionism. When a piece of writing portrays spiritual behavior, feelings,
reactions to the phenomena of life and knowledge, it does not seem tenden-
tial to the bourgeois, because these things have become traditional and be-
cause they express his conception of the world, his philosophy, his naked
economic interest. He overlooks the fact that such writing also has a tenden-
cy, namely his own.
But when new observations are made in a drama, in opposition to those
ideas to which the bourgeois has been accustomed, he calls such a work
tendential. The atmosphere in any work of art, in so far as it transects a given
social milieu, always has a definite impress that one is safe in calling parti-
san. There is, however, one type of partisanship that the artist must avoid,
namely that partisanship of the black-and-white kind which depicts all per-
sons on one side as devils of the blackest sort, and all those on the other as
angels.
But since the spirit, the idea, did not succeed in changing the character of
the times; since the old reality with the old abominations, with the old greed,
the old rapacious striving, the old danger zones, simply reappeared; since the
peace which all were yearning for turned out to be a grin behind which the
next war is looming; since the spiritual had again become a veneer and a
138 Postwar German Drama

mockery, younger dramatists appeared who thought that as the ideal was
lacking there was no reason for it, especially in art. They set out to portray
life and nothing but life. But the decisive thing in life for them was the
uninhibited accord or antagonism of the sexual impulse. The chaotic, the
sexual, became the focus of the new drama which tended to the epic in form.
Side by side with this the struggle between the generations played a definite
role. Speech became naturalistic again, but it was distinguished from the old
naturalism by a dynamic impetus that gave it a distinctive rhythm. As drama-
tists of this type one may mention Brecht, Bronnen, and Zuckmayer.
The later German dramatists were unquestionably influenced by America,
but the German brand of Americanism did not represent the great minds of
America. What was taken over was the tempo, the banal optimism, the super-
ficiality, in short that new matter-of-factness which has very little meaning
and no connection whatever with the major arts.
German drama exists, as does all German art, between two worlds. The
bourgeois world is spiritually and ethically convulsed, and the world of the
workers is visible as yet only among small or petty groups.
 Chapter Fifteen

New Stage Forms (1928)

Oskar Schlemmer

Translated by Anna Millan.

Original publication: From “Neue Formen der Bühne,” Schünemanns Monat-
shefte (Bremen), October 1928.

Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943) was a German painter, sculptor, designer,

and creator-cum-choreographer of performance pieces who first engaged in
theatre work in 1912. His Triadic Ballet is his most famous work and was
performed in full in 1922 after having been conceived in 1916; in it the actors
transform themselves from normal to geometrical shapes. In Schlemmer’s
Slat Dance and Treppenwitz, both from 1927, the performers’ costumes
make them into living sculpture, as if they were part of the scenery.
Schlemmer started teaching at the Bauhaus in 1920, and in 1925 he creat-
ed n experimental theatre there. Schlemmer’s theater work for the Bauhaus is
important in any consideration of his oeuvre, which rejects pure abstraction
and treats instead the architectural problem of the figure in space (as in
Egocentric Space Lines, from 1924). Indeed, according to Marvin Carlson in
Theories of the Theatre (1984), Schlemmer

saw the tension between man the living organism and the nonliving environ-
ment on the stage as the critical opposition of the art. But man himself,
Schlemmer noted, is both spiritual and mechanical. . . . [In this he] recalls the
interest of Craig, Kleist, and Briusov in the marionette. . . . [Hence Schlem-
mer’s ] ideal stage figure would be both formal and spiritual, both man and
marionette (actually something rather close to Craig’s Über-Marionette).
(353)

139
140 New Stage Forms

In 1929, following political criticism of his work, Schlemmer left the Bau-
haus to work at the Breslau Academy. In 1930, the Nazis destroyed a series
of mural paintings he had done at Weimar; they shut down the Breslau
Academy two years later, and then did the same to an exhibition of Schlem-
mer’s work in Stuttgart. In 1937, Schlemmer figured in the Nazi exhibition
of “Degenerate Art” in Munich. The last ten years of his life were spent in
Germany, albeit in a state of “inner emigration.”

***

A: Can you tell me what the lines on the stage mean? [Photos show four
strings rising from the stage corners and crossing diagonally at a single point,
center stage, and apparently some eight feet in the air.]

B: They are the axes of the stage, then the diagonals, and inside the resulting
square, a circle is drawn. Apart from the center-point marked by the lines on
the floor, the central point of the space has also been fixed by stretching
light-colored strings from the corners of the stage—a surprising effect that
somehow brings the space to life.

A: But what for? Are the actors so stupid they need such aids to orient
themselves?

B: No. But because the geometry and stereometry of the stage space are in
this way “revealed,” and the notion of the dimensions awakened, the space
acquires a specific character it did not have before. Its accordance with laws
becomes perceptible, the actor, performer, or dancer is “bewitched” by this
spatial system that otherwise he would be unaware of, and he moves within it
differently than he would in the indeterminate fluidity of space.

A: But doesn’t such an exaggerated principle kill off what is best in a dancer:
the unconscious, the self-surrender, the exaltation? Doesn’t it rob him of his
soul? After all, the dancer isn’t a gym teacher or a traffic warden. It is just
this quality of soul and ecstasy we demand of the artist.

B: Certainly, and I would be the last to want to see that stifled. Let me remind
you of Goethe’s phrase “freedom within law,” and remind you further that in
all art, and particularly in the highest art, there reigns an operation of laws
that we experience as form and style. Let me remind you of the music of J. S.
Bach, which is a wondrous work of adherence to contrapuntal laws, and
equally of course a wonder of sensibility. Or to take an example from the
pictorial arts: the book of proportions of Albrecht Dürer, that exceptional
work on measure, of the human form in particular, where the secrets of
 Oskar Schlemmer 141

number are sought with a fanatical zeal. Law and number have hindered
neither of these two great artists from revealing a spiritual content; indeed,
they attained this only through consummated form. To return to our stage:
why should measure and law be banned here, where they advance upon us in
the proportions of the space, the proportions of man, and in every form, just
as they do in color, in light, and in the passage of time, etc.?
 Chapter Sixteen

The Oberiu Theatre (1928)

Daniil Kharms

Translated by George Gibian.

Original publication, in English: From The Man in the Black Coat: Russia’s
Lost Literature of the Absurd, ed. George Gibian (1971; Evanston, IL: North-
western University Press, 1987).

Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) was a Russian playwright and theorist. A self-

styled eccentric who, like Alfred Jarry, attempted to draw public attention to
his work through his odd personal behavior, Kharms was a member of sever-
al avant-garde groups during the 1920s. In 1925, he met Alexander Vveden-
sky (1904–1941), and together they became the center of a group of writers
who in 1928 officially founded Oberiu, or the Association for Real Art.
Efforts to make art resemble life have falsified both, according to Oberiu,
since art has a logic of its own and, to depict an object from life, must adjust
it to fit art’s own laws. In the theatre, the customary logical sequence should
be replaced by a “theatrical sequence” (like the filmmaker Sergei Eisen-
stein’s “montage”). The dramatic plot should give way to the “scenic plot,”
which arises spontaneously from all elements of the spectacle. There should
also be no attempt to subordinate individual elements; they best advance the
scenic plot if they remain autonomous and of equal value. Their conflicts and
interrelationships form the basis of theatre. (This concept of the isolation of
elements would occur later in Brecht’s epic theatre.)
As early as 1926, Kharms and Vvedensky had produced work along the
lines of their 1928 manifesto. Kharms’s writing itself, most notably in his
play Elizabeth Bam (1928), rejects realism and conventional plot structure in
favor of the dissemination of a Materlinckian-Kafkaesque aura of doom that
gives way to a Gogolian atmosphere of absurdity; a dark, even tragic-gro-
tesque humor; and an extreme, nonsensical violence of the kind favored by
143
144 The Oberiu Theatre

Artaud in his Theatre of Cruelty. The production of Elizabeth Bam in 1928,

together with the publication of the Oberiu manifesto, incurred the disap-
proval of Soviet authorities and the Oberiu group’s program of performances
therefore did not survive past 1930. As Marvin Carlson wrote in Theories of
the Theatre (1984),

Ever since the Revolution, Russia’s avant-garde artists had attempted to de-
fend the possibility of a formalist, nonrealistic art that would nevertheless
remain concerned with life in general and the new social order in particular.
Against this, the proletarian writers and critics insisted upon a realistic ap-
proach and a message clear even to the most uneducated audiences. By 1930,
when the Oberiu disbanded, the battle was essentially over and the triumph of
the latter view of theatre complete. (361)

Daniil Kharms himself was arrested in 1931 and exiled, then jailed again in
1941; he is believed to have died of starvation in a Ukrainian prison on
February 2, 1942.

***

Suppose two people walk out on the stage, say nothing, but tell each other
something by signs. While they are doing that, they are solemnly puffing out
their cheeks. The spectators laugh. Is this theatre? Yes, it is. You may say it
is balagan [knock-about puppet show; booth show at a fair]. But balagan is
theatre.
Or suppose a canvas is let down on the stage. On the canvas is a picture of
a village. The stage is dark. Then it begins to get lighter. A man dressed as a
shepherd walks onstage and plays on a pipe. Is that theatre? Yes.
A chair appears on the stage; on the chair is a samovar. The samovar
boils. Instead of steam, naked arms rise up from under the lid.
All these—the man and his movements on the stage, the boiling samovar,
the village painted on the canvas, the light getting dimmer and getting bright-
er—all these are separate elements of theatre.
Until now, all these elements have been subordinated to the dramatic
plot—to the play. A play has been a story, told through characters, about
some kind of event. On the stage, all have worked to explain the meaning and
course of that event more clearly, more intelligibly, and to relate it more
closely to life.
That is not at all what the theatre is. If an actor who represents a minister
begins to move around on the stage on all fours and howls like a wolf, or an
actor who represents a Russian peasant suddenly delivers a long speech in
Latin—that will be theatre, that will interest the spectator, even if it takes
 Daniil Kharms 145

place without any relation to a dramatic plot. Such an action will be a separ-
ate item; a series of such items organized by the director will make up a
theatrical performance, which will have its plot line and its scenic meaning.
This will be a plot that only the theatre can give. The plots of theatrical
performances are theatrical, just as the plots of musical works are musical.
All represent one thing—a world of appearances—but depending on the
material, they render it differently, after their own fashion.
When you come to us, forget everything that you have been accustomed
to seeing in all theatres. Maybe a great deal will seem ridiculous. We take a
dramatic plot. We develop it slowly at first; then suddenly it is interrupted by
seemingly extraneous and clearly ridiculous elements. You are surprised.
You want to find that customary logical sequence of connections which, it
seems to you, you see in life. But it is not there. Why not? Because an object
and a phenomenon transported from life to the stage lose their lifelike se-
quence of connections and acquire another—a theatrical one. We are not
going to explain it. In order to understand the sequence of connections of any
theatrical performance one must see it. We can only say that our task is to
render the world of concrete objects on the stage in their interrelationships
and collisions. We worked to solve this task in our production of Elizabeth
Bam.
Elizabeth Bam was written on commission for the theatrical section of
Oberiu by one of the members, Daniil Kharms. The dramatic plot of the play
is shattered by many seemingly extraneous subjects that detach the object as
a separate whole, existing outside its connection with others. Therefore the
dramatic plot does not arise before the spectator as a clear plot image; it
glimmers, so to speak, behind the back of the action. The dramatic plot is
replaced by a scenic plot that arises spontaneously from all the elements of
our spectacle. The center of our attention is on it. But at the same time,
separate elements of the spectacle are equally valuable and important to us.
They live their separate lives without subordinating themselves to the ticking
of the theatrical metronome. Here a corner of a gold frame sticks out—it
lives as an object of art; there a fragment of a poem is recited—it is autono-
mous in its significance, and at the same time, independent of its will, it
advances the scenic plot of the play. The scenery, the movement of an actor,
a bottle thrown down, the train of a costume—they are actors, just like those
who shake their heads and speak various words and phrases.
 Chapter Seventeen

The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto

(1932)
Antonin Artaud

Translated by Helen Weaver.

Original publication, in English: From Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings,
trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), 242–251.

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was a French actor, director, playwright, de-

signer, and theorist. From 1921 to 1924, he worked as an actor for some of
the most respected and influential avant-garde theatre directors in Paris, in-
cluding Lugné-Poë, Dullin, and Pitoëff. In 1924, Artaud joined the Surrealist
movement; but because of his devotion to theatre—which, in general, André
Breton found to be too oriented toward commercial production—and also
because of his “unorthodox” interest in occultism, mysticism, and Oriental
religion, Artaud split with the Surrealists. He co-founded, in 1926, the
Théâtre Alfred-Jarry in Paris, for which he directed the premières of two
plays by the Surrealist Roger Vitrac; and he started the Theatre of Cruelty in
1935, for which he directed his own adaptation of The Cenci.
Like Bertolt Brecht, Artaud viewed the drama as an instrument of revolu-
tion, a tool for the reordering of human existence. Also like Brecht, he sought
to dissociate theatre as it ought to be from what it was—a facile and false
purveyor of transitory pleasure. Artaud’s vision, however, was of a theatre
that would change people not socially but psychologically, by setting free the
dark, latent forces festering in the individual soul. Brecht and Artaud, then,
came to represent positions almost diametrically opposed, the one associated
with a theatre stimulating the spectator to reason and analysis, the other with

147
148 The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto

one regarding discursive thought as a barrier to the awakening of the body’s

inner spirit. Indeed, in Artaud we see the metaphysical concerns of the Sym-
bolist and Surrealist theorists taken to their most radical extension.
Ultimately, Artaud influenced the avant-garde more through his theoreti-
cal writings than through his plays and productions. In The Theatre and Its
Double (1938), he articulated his concept of a theoretical language dependent
on the body rather than the word as its primary unit of expression. He coined
the term “theatre of cruelty” to capture his vision of theatre, in which a
visceral attack on the senses would be used to confront what he saw as a
diseased society. The plays he wrote during the 1920s—The Spurt of Blood
(1925), The Philosopher’s Stone (1926), and The Burnt Belly, or The Crazy
Mother (1927)—are all characterized by violent images in disconnected se-
quences that defy ordinary logic. Artaud’s writings and dramatic vision ex-
erted a powerful influence on avant-garde theatre, including the work of
Adamov, Genêt, Arrabal, Ionesco, Beckett, Grotowski, the Living Theatre,
and Peter Brook, for the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-
first.

***

We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theatre, whose only value lies in
its excruciating, magical connection with reality and danger.
Stated this way, the question of the theatre must arouse general attention,
since theatre, because of its physical aspect and because it requires expres-
sion in space (the only real expression, in fact), allows the magical means of
art and speech to be practiced organically and as a whole, like renewed
exorcisms. From all this it follows that we shall not restore to the theatre its
specific powers of action until we have restored its language.
That is to say: instead of relying on texts that are regarded as definitive
and as sacred, we must first of all put an end to the subjugation of the theatre
to the text and rediscover the notion of a kind of unique language halfway
between gesture and thought. . . .
The question for the theatre, then, is to create a metaphysics of speech,
gesture, and expression in order to rescue it from its psychological and hu-
man stagnation. But all this can be of use only if there is behind such an
effort a real metaphysical temptation, an appeal to certain unusual ideas
which by their very nature cannot be limited or even formally defined. These
ideas, which have to do with Creation, with Becoming, with Chaos, and are
all of a cosmic order, provide an elementary notion of a realm from which the
theatre has become totally estranged. These ideas can create a kind of pas-
sionate equation between Man, Society, Nature, and Objects.
 Antonin Artaud 149

It is not a question, however, of putting metaphysical ideas directly on the

stage but of creating various kinds of temptations, of indrafts of air around
these ideas. And humor with its anarchy, poetry with its symbolism and its
images provide a kind of elementary notion of how to channel the temptation
of these ideas.
We must now consider the purely material aspect of this language. That
is, of all the ways and means it has of acting on the sensibility.
It would be meaningless to say that this language relies on music, dance,
pantomime, or mimicry. Obviously it utilizes movements, harmonies, and
rhythms but only insofar as they can converge in a kind of central expression,
without favoring any particular art. . . .
It is with an altogether Oriental sense of expression that this objective and
concrete language of the theatre serves to corner and surround the organs. It
flows into the sensibility. Abandoning Western uses of speech, it turns words
into incantations. It extends the voice. It utilizes vibrations and qualities of
the voice. It wildly stamps in rhythms. It pile-drives sounds. It seeks to exalt,
to benumb, to charm, to arrest the sensibility. It releases the sense of a new
lyricism of gesture which, by its rapidity or its spatial amplitude, ultimately
surpasses the lyricism of words. In short, it ends the intellectual subjugation
to language by conveying the sense of a new and more profound intellectual-
ity which hides itself under the gestures and signs, elevated to the dignity of
particular exorcisms. . . .

TECHNIQUE

It is a question, therefore, of making the theatre, in the proper sense of the

word, a function: something as localized and as precise as the circulation of
the blood in the arteries, or the apparently chaotic development of dream
images in the brain, and this by a powerful linkage, a true enslavement of the
attention.
The theatre cannot become itself again—that is, it cannot constitute a
means of true illusion—until it provides the spectator with the truthful pre-
cipitates of dreams in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his
savagery, his fantasies, his utopian sense of life and of things, even his
cannibalism, pour out on a level that is not counterfeit and illusory but
internal.
In other words, the theatre must seek by every possible means to call into
question not only the objective and descriptive external world, but the inter-
nal world, that is, man from a metaphysical point of view. It is only thus, we
believe, that we may once again be able to speak about the rights of the
imagination in connection with the theatre. Neither Humor nor Poetry nor
150 The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto

Imagination mean anything unless, by an anarchic destruction generating a

fantastic flight of forms which will constitute the whole spectacle, they suc-
ceed in organically calling into question man, his ideas about reality, and his
poetic place in reality.
But to regard theatre as a second-hand psychological or moral function,
and to believe dreams themselves have only a replacement function, is to
diminish the profound poetic bearing of both dreams and theatre. If the
theatre, like dreams, is bloody and inhuman, it is in order to manifest and to
root unforgettably in us the idea of a perpetual conflict and a spasm in which
life is constantly being cut short, in which everything in creation rises up and
struggles against our condition as already formed creatures; it is to perpetuate
in a concrete and immediate way the metaphysical ideas of certain Fables
whose very atrociousness and energy are enough to demonstrate their origin
and their content of essential principles.
This being so, one sees that by its proximity to the principles that trans-
fuse it poetically with their energy, this naked language of the theatre, a
language that is not virtual but real, must make it possible, by utilizing the
nervous magnetism of man, to transgress the ordinary limits of art and
speech, in order to realize actively, that is to say magically, in real terms, a
kind of total creation in which man can only resume his place between
dreams and events.

THEMES

We have no intention of boring the audience to death with transcendent

cosmic preoccupations. That there may be profound keys to thought and
action with which to read the spectacle as a whole does not generally concern
the spectator, who is not interested in such things. But they must be there all
the same; and this concerns us.
THE SPECTACLE. Every spectacle will contain a physical and objective
element perceptible to all. Cries, groans, apparitions, surprises, theatrical
tricks of all kinds, the magical beauty of costumes taken from certain ritual
models, dazzling lighting effects, the incantatory beauty of voices, the charm
of harmony, rare notes of music, the colors of objects, the physical rhythm of
movements whose crescendo and descrescendo will blend with the rhythm of
movements familiar to everyone, concrete apparitions of new and surprising
objects, masks, puppets larger than life, sudden changes of lighting, the phys-
ical action of light which arouses sensations of heat and cold, etc.
MISE EN SCÈNE. It is in terms of mise en scène, regarded not merely as
the degree of refraction of a text on the stage but as the point of departure of
all theatrical creation, that the ideal language of the theatre will evolve. And
 Antonin Artaud 151

it is in the utilization and handling of this language that the old duality
between author and director will disappear, to be replaced by a kind of
unique Creator who will bear the double responsibility for the spectacle and
the plot.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE STAGE. It is not a question of eliminating
spoken language but of giving words something of the importance they have
in dreams.
Also, one must find new methods of transcribing this language, which
might be related to the methods of musical notation or might make use of
some sort of code.
As for ordinary objects, or even the human body, elevated to the dignity
of signs, it is obvious that one can derive inspiration from hieroglyphic
characters, not only in order to transcribe these signs in a legible way that
enables one to reproduce them at will, but also in order to compose on the
stage symbols that are precise and immediately legible.
This code language and this musical notation will also be invaluable as a
means of transcribing voices.
Since it is fundamental to this language to make a specialized use of
intonations, these intonations must constitute a kind of harmonic balance, a
kind of secondary distortion of speech that must be reproducible at will.
Similarly, the ten thousand and one facial expressions captured in the
form of masks will be labeled and catalogued so that they can participate
directly and symbolically in this concrete language of the stage; and this
independently of their particular psychological utilization.
Furthermore, these symbolic gestures, these masks, these attitudes, these
individual or group movements whose innumerable meanings constitute an
important part of the concrete language of the theatre—evocative gestures,
emotive or arbitrary attitudes, the frenzied pounding out of rhythms and
sounds—will be reinforced and multiplied by a kind of reflection of gestures
and attitudes that consist of the mass of all the impulsive gestures, all the
failed attitudes, all the slips of the mind and the tongue that reveal what
might be called the impotences of speech, and in which there is a prodigious
wealth of expressions, to which we shall not fail to have recourse on occa-
sion.
There is, besides, a concrete idea of music in which sounds make en-
trances like characters, in which harmonies are cut in two and are lost in the
precise entrances of words.
From one means of expression to another, correspondences and levels are
created; and even the lighting can have a specific intellectual meaning.
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. They will be used for their qualities as
objects and as part of the set.
152 The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto

Also, the need to act directly and profoundly upon the sensibility through
the sense organs invites research, from the point of view of sound, into
qualities and vibrations of sound to which we are absolutely unaccustomed,
qualities that contemporary musical instruments do not possess and which
compel us to revive ancient and forgotten instruments or to create new ones.
They also compel research, beyond the domain of music, into instruments
and devices which, because they are made from special combinations or new
alloys of metals, can achieve a new diapason of the octave and produce
intolerable or ear-shattering sounds or noises.
LIGHTS—LIGHTING. The lighting equipment currently in use in thea-
tres is no longer adequate. In view of the peculiar action of light on the mind,
the effects of luminous vibrations must be investigated, along with new ways
of diffusing light in waves, or sheets, or in fusillades of fiery arrows. The
color range of the equipment currently in use must be completely revised. In
order to produce particular tonal qualities, one must reintroduce into lighting
an element of thinness, density, opacity with a view to producing heat, cold,
anger, fear, etc.
COSTUMES. As for costumes, and without suggesting that there can be
any such thing as a standard theatrical costume that is the same for all plays,
we shall as far as possible avoid modern dress—not because of any fetishistic
and superstitious taste for the old, but because it seems perfectly obvious that
certain age-old costumes intended for ritual use, although they were once of
their time, retain a beauty and appearance that are revelatory by virtue of
their closeness to the traditions that gave them birth.
THE STAGE—THE AUDITORIUM. We are eliminating the stage and
the auditorium and replacing them with a kind of single site, without partition
or barrier of any kind, which will itself become the theatre of the action. A
direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the
spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, because the spectator, by
being placed in the middle of the action, is enveloped by it and caught in its
cross-fire. This envelopment is the result of the very shape of the room.
For this reason we shall abandon existing theatre buildings and use some
kind of hangar or barn, which we shall have reconstructed according to
techniques that have resulted in the architecture of certain churches or certain
sacred buildings, and certain Tibetan temples.
In the interior of this construction, special proportions of height and depth
will prevail. The room will be enclosed by four walls without any kind of
ornament, and the audience will be seated in the middle of the room, below,
on movable chairs to allow them to follow the spectacle that will go on all
around them. In effect, the absence of a stage in the ordinary sense of the
word will allow the action to spread out to the four corners of the room.
Special areas will be set aside, for the actors and the action, at the four
cardinal points of the room. The scenes will be played in front of white-
 Antonin Artaud 153

washed walls designed to absorb the light. In addition, overhead galleries

will run right around the periphery of the room as in certain primitive paint-
ings. These galleries will enable the actors to pursue each other from one part
of the room to the other whenever the action requires, and will permit the
action to spread out on all levels and in all perspectives of height and depth.
A cry uttered at one end of the room can be transmitted from mouth to
mouth, with successive amplifications and modulations, to the other end of
the room. The action will unfold, will extend its trajectory from level to level,
from point to point; paroxysms will suddenly break out, flaring up like fires
in different places; and the quality of the true illusion of the spectacle, like
the direct and immediate hold of the action on the spectator, will not be an
empty phrase. For this diffusion of the action over an immense space will
mean that the lighting of a scene and the various lighting effects of a perfor-
mance will seize the audience as well as the characters; and several simulta-
neous actions—several phases of an identical action in which the characters,
clinging together in swarms, will withstand all the assaults of the situations,
and the external assaults of the elements and the storm—will have their
counterpart in the physical means of lighting, thunder, or wind whose reper-
cussions the spectator will undergo.
Nevertheless, a central area will be set aside which, without serving as a
stage properly speaking, will enable the main part of the action to be concen-
trated and brought to a climax whenever necessary.
OBJECTS—MASKS—PROPS. Puppets, enormous masks, objects of un-
usual proportions will appear by the same right as verbal images, to empha-
size the concrete aspect of every image and every expression—and the
counterpart of this will be that all things which usually require their objective
representation will be treated summarily or disguised.
SETS. There will be no sets. This function will be adequately served by
hieroglyphic characters, ritual costumes, puppets thirty feet high representing
the beard of King Lear in the storm, musical instruments as tall as men,
objects of strange shape and unknown purpose.
IMMEDIACY. But, people will say, a theatre so removed from life, from
facts, from current preoccupations . . . From the present and events, yes!
From profound preoccupations which are the prerogative of the few, no! In
the Zohar [a commentary on the Pentateuch written in Aramaic, and the most
important book of the Cabbala], the story of Rabbi Simeon who burns like
fire is as immediate as fire.
WORKS. We shall not perform any written plays but shall attempt to
create productions directly on stage around subjects, events, or known works.
The very nature and arrangement of the room require spectacle and there is
no subject, however vast, that can be denied us.
154 The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto

SPECTACLE. There is an idea of total spectacle that must be revived.

The problem is to make space speak, to enrich and furnish it: like mines laid
into a wall of flat rocks which suddenly give birth to geysers and bouquets.
THE ACTOR. The actor is at once an element of prime importance, since
it is on the effectiveness of his performance that the success of the spectacle
depends, and a kind of passive and neutral element, since all personal initia-
tive is strictly denied him. It is an area in which there are no precise rules;
and between the actor from whom one requires the mere quality of a sob and
the actor who must deliver a speech with his own personal qualities of
persuasion, there is the whole margin that separates a man from an instru-
ment.
INTERPRETATION. The spectacle will be calculated from beginning to
end, like a language. In this way there will be no wasted movement and all
the movements will follow a rhythm; and since each character will be an
extreme example of a type, his gesticulation, his physiognomy, his costume
will appear as so many rays of light.
THE CINEMA. To the crude visualization of what is, the theatre through
poetry opposes images of what is not. From the point of view of action,
moreover, one cannot compare a cinematic image, which, however poetic, is
limited by the properties of celluloid, to a theatrical image, which obeys all
the exigencies of life.
CRUELTY. Without an element of cruelty at the foundation of every
spectacle, the theatre is not possible. In the state of degeneracy in which we
live it is through the skin that metaphysics will be made to reenter our minds.
 Chapter Eighteen

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

Albert Camus

Translated by Justin O’Brien.

Original publication, in English: From The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Es-
says, trans. Justin O’Brien (1955; New York: Vintage, 1991).

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French writer of Algerian origins. He

came to France at the age of twenty-five, joined the resistance movement
during the occupation, and after the liberation was a columnist for the news-
paper Combat. But his journalistic activities had been chiefly a response to
the demands of the time; in 1947 Camus retired from political journalism
and, besides writing his fiction and essays, was very active in the theatre as
an “existentialist” dramatist (e.g., Caligula, 1944; The Misunderstanding [Le
Malentendu, 1944]; The State of Siege [L’Etat de Siège, 1948], and The Just
Assassins [Les Justes, 1949]). He also adapted plays by Calderon, Lope de
Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Faulkner.
According to Camus’s Nobel Prize biography,

The essay “Le Mythe de Sisyphe” (“The Myth of Sisyphus,” 1942) expounds
Camus’s notion of the absurd. . . . Meursault, the central character of
L’Étranger (The Stranger, 1942), exemplifies much of this essay: man as the
nauseated victim of the absurd orthodoxy of habit, later—when the young
killer faces execution—to be tempted by despair, hope, and salvation. Dr.
Rieux of La Peste (The Plague, 1947), who tirelessly attends the plague-
stricken citizens of Oran, enacts the revolt against a world of the absurd and of
injustice, and confirms Camus’s words: “We refuse to despair of mankind.
Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve
them.” (“Albert Camus: Biography,” Nobelprize.org. 17 Sep 2012: http://
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1957/camus.html)

155
156 The Myth of Sisyphus

Other well-known fiction works by Camus are La Chute (The Fall, 1956) and
L’Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom, 1957). As noted in the intro-
duction to this volume, his austere search for moral order in an absurd uni-
verse found its aesthetic correlative, paradoxically, in the classicism of his
art, for Camus’s plays and fiction “depend for their effect on ratiocinative
devices, discursive thought, and consistent or coherent character.”

***

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of
a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had
thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than
futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of
mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice
the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ
as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To
begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole
their secrets. Aegina, the daughter of Aesopus, was carried off by Jupiter.
The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus.
He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that
Aesopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunder-
bolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the
underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto
could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the
god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said also that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his
wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the
public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by
an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission
to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the
face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no
longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger,
warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the
gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was
necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and,
snatching him from his joys, led him forcibly back to the underworld, where
his rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much
through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred
of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which
the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price
that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about
 Albert Camus 157

Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe
life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body
straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred
times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone,
the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh
start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted
hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time
without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone
rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to
push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that
toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down
with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never
know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his
suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when
he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is
superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would
his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?
The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this
fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it
becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebel-
lious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks
of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the
same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by
scorn.

***

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in
joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his
rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling
too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it
happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is
the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights
of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus,
Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he
knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he
realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl.
Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my ad-
vanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.”
Sophocles’ Oedipus, like Dostoyevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the
absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
158 The Myth of Sisyphus

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manu-
al of happiness. “What! by such narrow ways—?” There is but one world,
however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are
inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs
from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd
springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says Oedipus, and that
remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches
that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who
had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It
makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His
rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his tor-
ment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence,
the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret
calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price
of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the
night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If
there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one
which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows
himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man
glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that
slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which be-
comes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon
sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is
human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is
still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s
burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods
and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth
without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that
stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a
world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
 Epilogue: There Is No Avant-Garde
Theatre (1962)
Eugène Ionesco

Translated by Donald Watson

Original publication, in English: From Notes and Counter Notes, trans. Don-
ald Watson (New York: Grove Press, 1964).

Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994) was a Romanian and French dramatist. Iones-

co did not write his first play until 1950: The Bald Soprano, which was
staged by Nicolas Bataille on May 11, 1950, at the Théâtre des Noctambules
in Paris. The Bald Soprano went unnoticed, however, until a few established
writers and critics (Jean Anouilh, Raymond Queneau, and Jacques Lemarc-
hand) saw the play and supported it publicly. Their campaign to attract an
audience for the play succeeded and the middle-aged Ionesco soon found
himself in a position of international renown. He went on to write more than
twenty plays, including Rhinoceros (1959), The Chairs (1952), Jack or The
Submission (1955), The Lesson (1951), Exit the King (1962), and Macbett
(1972).
At the source of all these plays is a personal obsession, a philosophical
anguish over the fate of man, which is to be an isolated spirit condemned to
die while the heavy and opaque material world that surrounds and assails him
remains. Derision is Ionesco’s principal means of projecting his anguish: he
derides familial and social relationships and the theater itself, with its long-
established form of didactically expounding truisms and supposedly reveal-
ing reality onstage. Indeed, the action of most of his plays takes place within
a family. But this is not so much to demonstrate certain social phenomena as
to show the encirclement to which man is condemned—an encirclement or
confinement that for Ionesco is the modern configuration of hell.

159
160 Epilogue: There Is No Avant-Garde Theatre

Ionesco is often considered a playwright of the Theatre of the Absurd.

This is a label originally given to him by Martin Esslin in his 1961 book of
the same name, placing Ionesco alongside such contemporaries of his as
Samuel Beckett, Jean Genêt, and Arthur Adamov. Esslin called these writers
“absurd” based on Albert Camus’s concept of the term, claiming that Beck-
ett, Ionesco, and others better captured the absurdity or ultimate meaningless-
ness of existence in their plays than did any work by Camus (or Jean-Paul
Sartre, for that matter). However, Beckett, Genêt, Adamov, and Ionesco were
in fact united less by a common philosophical position than by a commonal-
ity in what they rejected: the accepted conventions of the traditional French
theatre, the emphasis upon the word, the linkage of cause and effect, a bias
toward realism, and the psychological development of character.
Notes and Counter Notes (1964) is a collection of Ionesco’s theoretical
writings—like Shaw’s and Brecht’s—which include musings on why he
chose to write for the theatre, direct responses to his critics, and ideas about
the ways in which he thought the contemporary theatre should be reformed.

***

What is meant by “avant-garde theatre”? Deliberate or not, great confusion

has arisen round these words, mainly owing to prejudice. The expression
itself is confusing and the idea that avant-garde theatre is “ridiculous” might
even be caused merely by faulty definition. A critic in one of the foreign
countries where I have been lucky enough to see my plays acted—favorable,
moreover, to my work—still wondered whether this kind of theatre was not
after all just a transition, a stage in the development of drama. So that is what
avant-garde means: a kind of drama that opens the way to another kind of
drama, which will be definitive. But nothing is definitive, everything is just a
stage in development, our very lives are essentially transitory: everything is,
at one and the same time, the culmination of one thing and the announcement
of something else. So one can say that the French theatre of the seventeenth
century prepares the way for Romantic drama (which is not worth much
anyway in France), and that Racine and Corneille are the advance guard of
the theatre of Victor Hugo, who himself blazed the trail for what came after
and rejected him.
And again: the mechanism governing forward and rear positions is far
more complicated than the blinkered dialecticians imagine. There are some
productive “avant-garde” movements which arise from opposition to the
achievements of preceding generations or, on the other hand, others which
are encouraged or facilitated by a reappraisal of sources, of old and forgotten
works. Shakespeare is always far more contemporary than Victor Hugo (cit-
 Eugène Ionesco 161

ed above); Pirandello far more “avant-garde” than Roger Ferdinand; Büchner

infinitely more poignant and alive than, for example, Bertolt Brecht and his
imitators in Paris.
And this is where matters seem to become clearer: in reality, the avant-
garde does not exist; or rather it is quite different from what it is thought to
be.
As the avant-garde is, we all agree, revolutionary, it has always been and
still is, like most revolutionary movements, a turning back, a reappraisal. The
change is only apparent: this “apparentness” is of enormous importance, for
it is this that allows (by presenting something new and yet going beyond it)
reassessment and restoration of something permanent. For example: the po-
litical upheavals that appear at moments when a regime is worn out and
“liberalized”—when the structure has weakened to such a point that collapse
is anyway imminent, ready to take place, as one might say, unaided—prepare
and allow for a strengthening and reconstitution of the social structure ac-
cording to an archetypal and changeless model. There is a real change on the
personal plane, obviously, on the level of superficial conditions, idiomatical-
ly speaking: that is to say things—identical in essence—assume different
names, without modifying the deeper reality or the fundamental pattern of
society.
What has really happened? Simply this: authority (which had been re-
laxed) has tightened up, “order” is re-established, tyranny clamps down again
on freedom, the leaders of the state recover their taste and vocation for power
with a quiet conscience, for they feel themselves to be invested with a kind of
“God’s Grace,” with an alibi provided by a firm and reliable ideological
justification for the cynicism inseparable from power. And there we have the
basic hierarchical social structure, clearly reaffirmed and reconstituted, with
the king (the political leaders) upheld by dogma and the church (the ideolo-
gists, the writers, the artists, the journalists, the propagandists, all back in
obedience) and either supported or suffered by the majority—the people (the
believers, the faithful, or the passive) who are no longer capable of insurrec-
tion.
Almost the same thing happens with artistic revolutions, when there is
really an attempt at revolution, or a revolutionary experiment coming from
the avant-garde. This happens inevitably, of its own accord as you might say,
at a moment when certain modes of expression have become exhausted and
worn out, when they have deteriorated, when they have wandered too far
from some forgotten model. Thus, in painting, the moderns have been able to
rediscover in the painters we call “primitive” forms that are pure and perma-
nent, the basic laws that govern their art. And this rediscovery—dictated by
the history of art where forms and models lose their power—has been made
possible thanks to an art, an idiom that springs from a reality lying outside
history.
162 Epilogue: There Is No Avant-Garde Theatre

It is indeed in the union between the historical and the unhistorical, the
topical and the untopical (that is to say the permanent) that we can seek this
changeless basic material which we can also succeed in finding, instinctively,
in ourselves: without it, any work of art is valueless; it keeps everything
alive. So finally I maintain quite fearlessly that the true avant-garde or revo-
lutionary art is that which, boldly setting its face against its own times, looks
as if it is untopical. By casting off all claim to topicality, it reveals its links
with this universal basic material we have already spoken of, and being
universal it may be considered classical; but it should be understood that this
classicism must be rediscovered by passing through and going beyond the
new elements that should permeate this kind of art. Any attempt to return to
some sort of “historical” classicism by turning one’s back on what is new
would only encourage the development of an outdated and academic style.
For example: Endgame by Beckett, a so-called avant-garde play, is far closer
to the lamentations of Job, the tragedies of Sophocles or Shakespeare, than to
the tawdry drama known as committed or boulevard theatre. Topical drama
does not last (by definition) and it does not last for the good reason that
people are not truly or profoundly interested in it.
It is also worth noting that social changes are not always related to artistic
revolution. Or rather: when the mystique of a revolution becomes a regime, it
returns to artistic forms (and so to a mentality) that are outmoded, with the
result that the new realism is bound up with the mental clichés we call
bourgeois and reactionary. Conventionalism repeats itself and the bewhis-
kered academic portraits of the new reaction are—stylistically—no different
from the academic portraits, with or without whiskers, of the bourgeois peri-
od which did not understand Cézanne. So we can say, somewhat paradoxical-
ly perhaps, that it is the “historical” which is moribund, and the non-histori-
cal which remains alive.
Chekhov in his drama shows us dying men in a particular dying society:
the destruction, as time runs out and gnaws away, of the men of a certain
period; Proust too had done this in his novels—and so had Gustave Flaubert
in L’Education sentimentale, although he showed as a background to his
characters not a declining but a rising society. So it is not the collapse or the
break-up or the erosion of a social system which is the principal theme, the
truth of these works, but man eroded by time, his destruction seen at a certain
historical moment but true for all history; we are all murdered by time.
I mistrust pacifist plays, which seem to be showing us that it is war that
destroys mankind and that we only die in wartime. This is more or less what
one young critic seemed to be saying, obstinately dogmatic, when comment-
ing on [Brecht’s] Mother Courage. More of us die in wartime: topical truth.
We die: permanent truth, not topical yet always topical, it concerns every-
 Eugène Ionesco 163

body, and so it also concerns people not involved in war. Beckett’s Endgame
is more true, more universal, than Schéhadé’s Histoire de Vasco (which in no
way prevents this play from having high poetic qualities).
Since at first sight “what concerns us all fundamentally” is curiously less
accessible than what concerns only some people or what concerns us less, it
is obvious that avant-garde plays, whose aim (I apologize for being so insis-
tent) is to rediscover and make known a forgotten truth—and to reintegrate it,
in an untopical way, into what is topical—it is obvious that when these works
appear they cannot help being misunderstood by the majority of people. So
they are not “popular.” This in no way invalidates them. The plainest realities
are discovered by the poet in silence and solitude. The philosopher too, in the
silence of his library, discovers truths difficult to communicate: how long did
it take for Karl Marx himself to be understood, and even now can everyone
understand him? He is not “popular.” How many people have succeeded in
assimilating Einstein? The fact that only a few people are capable of a clear
understanding of the theories of modern physicists does not make me doubt
their validity; and this truth that they have discovered is neither invention nor
subjective vision, but objective reality, outside time, eternal, and the scientif-
ic mind has only just touched the fringe of it. Where we are concerned with
an unchanging truth, all we ever do is approach, move away, and then draw
closer again.
There also exists—as we are meant to be talking about the theatre—a
dramatic idiom, a theatrical method of approach, a trail to blaze, if we are to
reach a reality that has objective existence; and this trail to blaze (or path to
find again) cannot be other than one belonging to the theatre, which will lead
to a reality that can only be revealed theatrically. It is what we might agree to
call laboratory research.
There is no reason why there should not be drama for the people (I am not
quite sure who the people are, unless it is the majority, the non-specialists),
boulevard theatre, a theatre of propaganda and instruction, composed in some
conventional idiom: this is popularized theatre. We must not for this reason
prevent the other kind of theatre from continuing its work: a drama of re-
search, laboratory drama, the avant-garde. If it is not taken up by a large
public, this in no way means that it is not of vital importance to our minds, as
necessary as artistic, literary, or scientific research. We do not always know
what use it is—but as it fulfills a mental requirement, it is clearly quite
indispensable. If such drama has an audience of fifty people every evening
(and it can have that number), the need for it is proved. This kind of theatre is
in danger. Politics, apathy, malice, and jealousy are, unfortunately, a danger-
ous threat on every side to such writers as Beckett, Vauthier, Schéhadé,
Weingarten, and others, as well as to their supporters.
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 Index

Abingdon Square, 35 The Art of the Actor and the Theatre of

Absurdism, v, 1, 3, 18, 21, 30–31, 57, 83, Stanislavsky, 92
98, 107, 111, 113, 143, 155–158, 160 Artaud, Antonin, v, 1, 2, 17, 22, 31, 32,
Acconci, Vito, 38 112, 118, 143, 147–154
Action, 35, 36, 38 L’Artiste, le savant et l’industriel, 11
Adamov, Arthur, 30, 148, 160 Auden, W. H., 3
Aeschylus, 52 Augier, Émile, 6
Aestheticism, 3, 4, 19 Automatism, 18, 111, 114, 118, 121,
Ajax, 52 124–126
Akimov, Nikolai, 20 L’Avant-Garde, 11
Albee, Edward, 31 Avant-gardism, v, 1–40, 57, 65, 91, 143,
Alighieri, Dante, 114 144, 147, 148, 159–163
The American Dream, 31
American Notes, 35 B. Beaver Animation, 35
L’Amour la Poésie, 118 Bakunin, Mikhail, 11
Amphitryon, 41 The Bald Soprano, 30, 159
Anderson, Laurie, 38 Barlach, Ernst, 34, 136
Andreyev, Leonid, 7 Baron, Jacques, 114
Angels in America: Millennium Bataille, Nicolas, 159
Approaches, 32 Le Bateau-Lavoir, 39
Anouilh, Jean, 29, 159 The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (Die
Antigone, 52 Hermannsschlacht), 41–42
Antoine, André, 70 Baty, Gaston, 21
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 2, 21, 34, 57 Baudelaire, Charles, 114, 123
Appia, Adolphe, 42 Bauhaus, 2, 139–140
Aragon, Louis, 2, 21, 114, 118 Beata Beatrix, 77
Arcadia, 29 Beckett, Samuel, 30, 49, 98, 148, 160, 162,
Aristophanes, 27, 79 163
Aristotle, 77 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 94, 132
d’Arnim, Achim, 114 The Beggar, 136
Arrabal, Fernando, 148 Bely, Andrei, 7

177
178 Index

Benedikt, Michael, 1 The Cenci, 147

Bérénice, 52 Cézanne, Paul, 26, 162
Bergson, Henri, 13, 129 The Chairs, 159
Berky, Bob, 38 Chaos theory, 3, 10, 21, 24, 27, 29, 148
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 45 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 132
Biomechanics, 65 Chekhov, Anton, 5, 49, 66, 162
The Birds, 79 Chong, Ping, 31
The Birth of Tragedy, 5 Chouang-Dsi, 108
Blau, Herbert, 34 Churchill, Caryl, 34
The Blind, 49 Clarke, Martha, 38
Blok, Alexandr, 7 Classicism, 12, 16, 26, 57, 96, 123, 129,
Blooded Thought, 34 155, 162
Bluebeard, 31 Claudel, Paul, 14
Bogosian, Eric, 38 Cocteau, Jean, 2, 4, 34
Boiffard, Jacques-André, 114 The Color of Time, 34
Bolshevism, 14, 20, 24, 65, 70 Combat, 155
Boy on a Straight-Back Chair, 35 Comédie-Française, 58
Braque, Georges, 26 Communism, 20, 22, 24, 135
Bread-and-Puppet Theatre, 31 Comte, August, 13
The Breasts of Tiresias, 21 Congdon, Constance, 35–36
Brecht, Bertolt, 137, 147, 160, 162 The Connection, 31
Breslau Academy, 140 Copeau, Jacques, 21
Breton, André, v, 2, 7, 18, 111–126, 147 Copenhagen, 29
Breuer, Lee, 35, 37 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 12
Briusov, Valery, 7, 69–79, 139 Corneille, Pierre, 70, 77, 160
Broadway, 27, 33 Craig, Edward Gordon, 6, 42, 139
The Broken Jug, 41 Crevel, René, 114, 118
Bronnen, Arnolt, 137 Critique of Judgment, 26
Brook, Peter, 34, 148 Critique of Practical Reason, 26
Büchner, Georg, 5, 19, 137, 160 Critique of Pure Reason, 26
Bullins, Ed, 37 Croce, Benedetto, 97
Burden, Chris, 38 Cubism, 26, 115
The Burnt Belly, or The Crazy Mother, 148 cummings, e. e., 21
Buzzati, Dino, 155 Curie, Marie, 117
The Cuttlefish, 92
Cabaret Voltaire, 22, 39, 105
Cabbala, 153 da Vinci, Leonardo, 58, 78
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 2 Dada, v, 1, 4, 7, 9–10, 17, 21, 22, 31, 39,
Caesar-Antichrist, 18 105–110, 111, 123, 125
Calderón, Pedro, 77, 155 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 7
Caliban, Richard, 36 Darwin, Charles, 12–13
Caligula, 29, 155 Deafman Glance, 31
Camille, 31 The Dehumanization of Art and Other
Camus, Albert, v, 28–29, 155–158, 160 Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature,
Capitale de la Douleur, 118 129
Carrière, Eugène, 114 Delteil, Joseph, 114
Carrive, Jean, 114 Descartes, René, 12
Carroll, Lewis, 114 Desire Caught by the Tail, 34
Cellini, Benvenuto, 78 Desnos, Robert, 4, 114, 118
 Index 179

Deuil pour Deuil, 118 Ferdinand, Roger, 160

Diderot, Denis, 12–13 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 121
Donnay, Maurice, 58 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 42
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 157 Le Figaro, 49, 81
A Dream Play, 23, 63 The Figural Cabinet I and II, 34
Duchamp, Marcel, 10 Film, 2, 65
Dullin, Charles, 147 Finley, Karen, 38
Dullin, Charles, 21–22 The First Celestial Adventure of Mr.
Dumas fils, Alexandre, 6 Antipyrine, 105
Dürer, Albrecht, 140 First Manifesto of Surrealism, 118
First Surrealist Manifesto, 18
Each in His Own Way, 98 Flamel, Nicolas, 114
The Earth, 69 Flaubert, Gustave, 162
L’Eduation sentimentale, 162 Fleck, John, 38
Egocentric Space Lines, 139 The Flies, 29
Einstein, Albert, 14, 19, 25–26, 129, 163 Flying Karamazov Brothers, 38
Eisenberg, Avner, 38 Foreman, Richard, 35, 37
Eisenstein, Sergei, 20, 39, 143 Form(al)ism, 21, 28, 34–35, 91–96, 111,
Electra, 52 144
Eliot, T. S., 3 Fornés, María Irene, 35, 37
Elizabeth Bam, 143, 145 Fourier, Charles, 10
Elizabethan theatre, 27, 72, 73 Franco, Francisco, 129
Éluard, Paul, 114, 118 Franz-Ferdinand, Archduke, 19
Endgame 162 Frayn, Michael, 29
Enlightenment, 12–14, 15, 16, 26 Freud, Sigmund, 13, 16, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25,
Enrico IV, 98 111, 113
Environmental theatre, 34 From Morn to Midnight, 136
Ernst, Max, 118 Futurism, v, 1, 2, 4, 7–9, 20–21, 22, 27, 31,
Esperpentos, 30 39, 81–86
L’Esprit contre la Raison, 118
Esslin, Martin 28, 29, 30, 31, 160 Galileo Galilei, 12
The Eternal Dream 87 Gallows Humor, 37, 38
Êtes-vous Fous 118 The Gas Heart, 105
Euclid, 6 Gas Masks, 39
The Eumenides, 52 Gasset, José Ortega y, v, 129–134
Evolutionism, 11–12, 13, 15 Gelber, Jack, 31
Evreinov, Nikolai, 69 Genêt, Jean, 30, 148, 160
Exile and the Kingdom 155 Gérard, Guine, 114
Existentialism, 15–16, 28–29, 155 Gesamtkunstwerk, 7
Exit the King, 159 The Ghost Sonata, 23, 27, 63
Expressionism, v, 1, 2, 4, 14, 21, 22–24, Gilbert and George, 38
27, 32, 39, 63, 87–89, 135–138 La Gioconda (The Mona Lisa), 85
Giraudoux, Jean, 29
The Fall, 155 The Glass Menagerie, 1
A Family, 136 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 26, 29, 140
Fascism, 9, 20, 81 Gogol, Nikolai, 143
The Father, 63 Göring, Reinhard, 136
Faulkner, William, 3, 155 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich, 5, 19, 26
La Femme 100 Têtes, 118 Grand Guignol, 57
180 Index

Le Grand Jeu, 118 Irrationalism, 13, 16, 21, 57

Grand Union, 34 Irwin, Bill, 38
Gray, Spalding, 38 Ivanov, 5
Greek theatre and civilization, 12, 27, 28,
41, 58, 60, 70, 77, 79 Jack or the Submission, 159
Greenspan, David, 35 Jameson, Fredric, 32
The Grotesque, 3, 30, 97, 143 Jarry, Alfred, v, 1, 3, 5, 18, 19, 31, 39, 42,
Grotowski, Jerzy, 34, 148 57–61, 143
Guare, John, 36 Jenkin, Len, 35
Gulliver’s Travels, 102 Job, 162
Jonas, Joan, 38
Hamlet, 50, 52, 60, 71 Jones, Jeffrey M., 35
Handke, Peter, 31 Jouvet, Louis, 21
Happenings, 34, 39 Joyce, James, 3
Hasenclever, Walter, 23, 136 Jung, Carl Gustav, 23, 25
Hassan, Ihab, 32 The Just Assassins, 155
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 137
Hay, Deborah, 38 Kafka, Franz, 143
Heaven and Hell, 87 Kaiser, Georg, 21, 23
Hebbel, Friedrich, 4 Kalidasa, 77
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13 Kandinsky, Wassily, 1, 7
Heisenberg, Werner, 19, 29 Kant, Immanuel, 26, 42, 117, 129
Heraclitus, 114 Kantor, Tadeusz, 34
Hernani, 129, 130 Kaprow, Allan, 34, 39
Hinkemann, 135 Käthchen of Heilbronn, 41
Histoire de Vasco, 162 Kelly, John, 38
Hitler, Adolf, 87 Kennedy, Adrienne, 35, 36, 37
Homer, 156 Kharms, Daniil, 21, 143–145
Hoppla, We’re Alive!, 135 Kierkegaard, Søren, 29
Howe, Tina, 35 Kilian, or The Yellow Rose, 88
Hughes, Holly, 38 King Baldoria (Le roi Bombance), 81
Hugo, Victor, 130, 160 King Lear, 50, 153
Humorism, 3, 97–104 Kipper Kids, 38
Huysmans, Charles-Marie-Georges, 115, Kleist, Heinrich von, 5, 6, 19, 26, 29,
123 41–47, 139
The Hyacinth Macaw, 35 Kokoschka, Oskar, 39
Komissarzhevskaya, Vera, 65, 73
Ibsen, Henrik, 1, 42, 54, 66, 77 Kommissarzhevsky, Fyodor, 91, 92
If You Please, 111 Kornfeld, Paul, 23, 87–89, 135
Iizuka, Naomi, 36 Krapp’s Last Tape, 49
Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kushner, Tony, 32
Kingdom, 35
Impressionism, 1, 4 Labiche, Eugène-Marin, 21
Interior, 49 Landscape, 49
The Interpretation of Dreams, 23 “The Larry Sanders Show”, 33
Intrigue and Love , 137 Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore-Lucien
The Intruder, 49 Ducasse), 114, 118
The Invasion, 30 Laverdant, Gabriel, 10
Ionesco, Eugène, 30, 57, 148, 159–163 Lavoisier, Antoine, 14
 Index 181

Légitime Defense, 119 Meiningen, George II, Duke of Saxe, 66,

Leguizamo, John, 38 70
Lemarchand, Jacques, 159 Metatheatre, 98
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 14, 20, 22, 24 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, v, 20, 65–66, 69, 73
Lepage, Robert, 34 Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti
The Lesson, 159 Simoni, 58
Levitan, Isaac, 76 Mikhoels, Schlomo, 20
Lewis, Monk, 114 Miller, Tim, 38
The Libation Bearers, 52 The Miser, 58
The Life of the Bee, 49 Miss Julie, 63
Limanowski, Mieczyslaw, 92, 95 The Misunderstanding, 155
Limbour, Georges, 114 Modernism, v, 1, 3–5, 7, 10, 14, 21, 32, 34,
The Lion King, 33 129–134
Littérature, 111, 112 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 41, 58
Living Theatre, 31, 148 Monk, Meredith, 38
Lope de Vega, Félix Arturo, 155 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 12
Lorca, Federico García, 28 Montano, Linda, 38
Lucas, Craig, 37 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat,
The Lucky Hand, 34 Baron de La Brède et de, 12–13
Ludlam, Charles, 31, 35 Morise, Max, 114
Lugné-Poë, Aurélien, 6, 42, 57, 147 Moschen, Michael, 38
Lulle, Raymond, 114 Moscow Art Theatre, 65, 69, 70, 73
Mother Courage and Her Children, 162
Mabou Mines, 31, 34 Mounet-Sully, Jean, 60
Macbeth, 50 The Mountain Giants, 97
Macbett, 159 A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 12 White, 35
The Machine Wreckers, 135 Müller, Heiner, 34
The Madman and the Nun, 92 Mussolini, Benito, 81
Madonna, 38 Muzeeka, 36, 37, 38
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 5, 6, 42, 49–55, 66, Mystery-Bouffe, 20, 27
69, 77, 143
The Magnetic Fields, 18, 111 Nadja, 118
Magnuson, Ann, 38 Napoleon, 41
The Maids, 30 The Nation, 136
Malkine, Georges, 114 Native Speech, 35
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 3, 7, 69 Naturalism, 1, 3, 4, 5, 17, 19, 23, 24, 25,
Malraux, André, 15, 31 27, 57, 63, 65, 69, 74, 78, 83, 87, 96,
Man and the Masses, 135, 136 132, 133, 137
The Man Who Dug Fish, 37 Naville, Pierre, 114, 118–119
Mann, Thomas, 3 Nazism, 42, 135, 140
Marinetti, F. T., v, 2, 7, 9, 57, 81–86, 139 Neoclassicism, 1, 12, 24, 29
“Marionette Theatre”, 6, 41–47 Neoromanticism, 19
Marx, Karl, 13, 163 Newton, Sir Isaac, 14, 25, 26–27, 91
Marxism, 119 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 7, 13, 23, 129
Masson, André, 19 Night Coil, 35
The Master Builder, 54–55 Night Thoughts 114
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 20–21, 27 No Mercy, 35
Mednick, Murray, 35 Noll, Marcel, 114
182 Index

Notes and Counter Notes, 160 Priestly, Joseph, 14

Prince Friedrich of Homburg, 26, 41
Oberiuty, 21, 143–145 La Princesse Maleine, 49
Oedipus at Colonus, 52 Prometheus, 52, 79
Oedipus the King, 157–158 Proust, Marcel, 3, 162
On the Theatre, 65 Psychology of the Unconscious, 25
One Shoe Off, 35, 37 Puppet Theatre, 6, 41–47
O’Neill, Eugene, 21
Open Theatre, 31 Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns,
Oppenheimer, Joseph Süss, 88 11–12
Orton, Joe, 30 Queneau, Raymond, 159
Othello, 52, 76, 77
Overboard, 31 Rabbe, Alphonse, 114
Overmyer, Eric, 35 Racine, Jean, 58, 160
Oxtiern, ou Les Malheurs du libertinage, Raikh, Zinaida, 65
13 Realism (a.k.a. representationalism), 1, 3,
OyamO, 36 4, 5–6, 7, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27,
59, 69–79, 91, 92, 94, 105, 126, 132,
Palme, or The Offended One, 87 143–144, 160, 162
Parade, 34 Reckless, 37
Parks, Suzan-Lori, 35, 36 Red Eye of Love, 36, 37
Les Pas Perdus, 112 Reinhardt, Max, 73
Pascal, Blaise, 12 Renaissance, 12, 26, 108
Pasteur, Louis, 117 The Resurrection of Lady Lester, 36
Pataphysics, 3 Reverse Psychology, 35
Le Paysan de Paris and Traité du Style, The Revolt of the Masses, 129
118 La Révolution et les Intellectuels. Que
Pelléas and Mélisande, 5, 49 peuvent faire les surréalistes?, 118, 119
Penthesilea, 26, 41 La Révolution Surréaliste, 117
Péret, Benjamin, 21, 114, 118 Rhinoceros, 159
Performance art, 34, 38, 39 Rhoda in Potatoland, 35
Philoctetes, 52, 53 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges, 118
The Philosopher’s Stone, 148 Richardson, Jack, 37
Picasso, Pablo, 26, 34, 115 The Ride Across Lake Constance, 31
Picon, Gaëtan, 114 Ridiculous Theatre, 31
Pinter, Harold, 49 Right You Are (If You Think You Are!), 98
Pirandello, Luigi, v, 3, 22, 97–104, 131, Rilke, Rainer Maria, 3
160 Rimbaud, Arthur, 3, 16, 69, 114, 117, 123
Piscator, Erwin, 139 The Robbers, 137
Pitoëff, Georges, 21–22, 147 Rodents and Radios, 36, 37
Pixérécourt, René Charles Guilbert de, 21 Rodrigues, Olinde, 10
The Plague, 155 Romanticism, 1, 3, 20, 23–24, 26, 29,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 69 41–42, 57, 108, 118, 123, 129, 130,
Poggioli, Renato, 4, 28 132, 133, 136, 160
The Poor Cousin, 34, 136 Rosenthal, Rachel, 38
The Possessed, 157 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 77
Postmodernism, 7, 31–32, 34 Rousseau, Henri, 34, 39
Pound, Ezra, 3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 12–13
Pravda, 65 Roussel, Raymond, 115
 Index 183

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 13 Stalin, Joseph, 21

Sade, Donatien Alphonse François Standard of the Breed, 35
Marquis de, 13, 114 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 65, 69, 91, 92
Saint-Denys, Hervey, 114 The State of Siege, 155
Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de, 11 Stein, Gertrude, 17, 21, 35
Salacrou, Armand, 29 Steppling, John, 35
Sardou, Victorien, 21 Sterne, Laurence, 104
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 29, 160 Stevens, Wallace, 3
Schechner, Richard, 34 Stoppard, Tom, 29
Schéhadé, Georges, 162, 163 The Stranger, 155
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 23, Stravinsky, Igor, 131
42 Strindberg, August, v, 1, 23, 27, 32, 49, 63
Schiller, Friedrich von, 26, 29, 137 Sturm und Drang, 26
Schlemmer, Oskar, 34, 139–140 Stylization (Conventionalism), 65–66,
Schönberg, Arnold, 34 69–79
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 23 Suicide in B-Flat, 27
The Schroffenstein Family, 41 The Suppliants, 52
Scribe, Augustin, 6, 21 Surrealism, v, 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 16, 18, 19, 21,
Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 118, 120 22, 23, 25, 27–28, 31, 32, 39, 57–59,
The Seduction, 23, 87, 88 111–126, 147
Sellars, Peter, 34 Surrealism and Painting, 116, 118
Sentimentalism, 13 The Surrealist Manifesto, 112, 115, 116,
Serban, Andrei, 34 117
Seurat, Georges, 115 Suss, the Jew, 88
Sexual Electricity, 81 Swift, Jonathan, 114
Shakespeare, William, 14, 58, 70, 72, 76, Switchback, 35
77, 79, 94, 114, 160, 162 Symbolism, v, 1, 3, 4, 5–7, 14, 19, 23, 25,
Shaw, George Bernard, 14, 160 27, 31, 32, 34, 42, 49–55, 69–70, 97,
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 77 147, 149
Shepard, Sam, 27, 35, 36
Sherman, Stuart, 38 Taine, Hippolyte, 13
Shiner, David, 38 Tairov, Aleksandr, 20
Silence, 49 Tattoo Girl, 36
Six Characters in Search of an Author, 22, Taubin, Amy, 38
98 Tavel, Ronald, 35
Slat Dance, 139 Taymor, Julie, 33
Smith, Anna Deavere, 38 Teniers the Younger, David, 43
Smith, Jack, 38 Théâtre Alfred-Jarry, 147
Social-problem plays, 1 The Theatre and Its Double, 148
Socialist realism, 21 Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, 6, 7, 57, 73
Sokel, Walter, 1 Théâtre des Noctambules, 159
The Son, 136 Theatre of Cruelty, 22, 143, 147–154
Son of an Engineer 35 Theatre of the Mind, 7
Sophocles, 53, 157, 162 Theatre of Silence-and-Images, 31
Sorge, Reinhard, 14, 23, 136 Theatricalism, 57–61, 65–66
Soupault, Philippe, 18, 21, 111, 113, 114 Theory of Pure Form in the Theatre 91
The Spiritual and the Psychological Tieck, Ludwig, 5, 19, 26
Person, 87 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), 59
The Spurt of Blood, 148 To Damascus, 23, 63
184 Index

Toller, Ernst, 21, 23, 135–138 Wagner, Richard, 7, 66, 132

Tong, Winston, 38 Waiting for Godot, 30
Tonight We Improvise, 98 The Water Hen, 92
The Tragic, 49–55, 77 The Wayfarer, 69
Transfiguration, 135, 136 The Weavers, 137
The Treasure of the Humble, 49 Wedekind, Frank, 39, 77
Treppenwitz, 139 Weil, Simone, 13
Triadic Ballet, 139 Weingarten, Romain, 163
Tzara, Tristan, 7, 9, 17, 105–110, 111, 118 Weinstein, Arnold, 36
Well-made play, 19, 24, 31
Ubu the King, 57 Wellman, Mac, 35
Ubu Unchained, 57 Wellwarth, George, 1
Unruh, Fritz von, 136 Werfel, Franz, 136
Williams, Tennessee, 1
Vaché, Jacques, 115 Wilson, Robert, 31
Une Vague de Rêves, 118 Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy, 21, 91–96
Vakhtangov, Evgeny, 20 Woolf, Virginia, 3
Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del, 30 Wooster Group, 31
Vauthier, Jean, 163 Woyzeck, 137
Verhaeren, Emile, 66
Verlaine, Paul, 69 Yeats, W. B., 3, 42, 49
Vestris, Gaetan, 44 Young, Edward, 114
The Victory of Samothrace, 84
Vinaver, Michel, 31 Zeuxis, 59, 71
A Visit to the Paris Exposition of 1889, 34 Zohar, 153
Vitrac, Roger, 21, 114, 147 Zola, Émile, 132
Volksbühne (theater), 139 Zuckmayer, Carl, 137
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), 12
Vvedensky, Aleksandr, 21, 143
 About the Editor

Bert Cardullo is professor of media and communication at the Izmir Univer-

sity of Economics in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in film history,
theory, and criticism as well as popular culture. The author of many essays
and reviews over the years, he has had his work appear in such journals as
the Yale Review, Cambridge Quarterly, Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal,
and Cineaste. For twenty years, from 1987 to 2007, he was the regular film
critic for the Hudson Review in New York. He received his master’s and
doctoral degrees from Yale University and received his B.A., with honors,
from the University of Florida in Gainesville. Cardullo is also the author,
editor, or translator of a number of books, among them World Directors in
Dialogue: Conversations on Cinema, André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, In
Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art, European Directors
and Their Films: Essays on Cinema, and World Directors and Their Films:
Essays on African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern Cinema.

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