Amateur and Proletatian Theater in Post-Revolutionary Russia (Book Review)

Date

2021-07-01

Author

Pamir Dietrich, Ayşe

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

48
views

0
downloads

Shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917 they issued a decree of the Soviet of People’s Commissars on 9 November 1917 that placed all the theaters under the authority of the arts section of the State Commission for Education, and all served as agitprop (agitation and propaganda) theater. So the Soviet theater was a director’s theater, but not a writer’s theater. It was utilized to do what has been ordered rather than provide only entertainment, and used as a propaganda and communication agent. An experimental artistic institution, the Proletkult was founded in September 1917 by Alexander Bogdanov during the course of the war. Its stated goals were a total break with the bourgeois past, radically modifying existing artistic forms, rejecting all existing professional theater and promoting a new, so-called proletarian culture. However, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party approved a decree on 1 December 1920 which condemned both the institution as a duplication of services that competed with existing bureaucratic systems, like Narkompros headed by Anatoly Lunacharsky, and its hostile idealist philosophy. As a result, Proletkult was integrated into Narkompros. During the Civil War, Proletkult opened theaters in factories, and supported amateur theater activities all around the country that helped to transmit the culture of the working classes. This book is a collection of translations of primary sources related to the amateur and proletatian theater. It is about how the proletarian theater was used as a propaganda agent and the difficulties faced by the amateur theater and their actors after the Bolshevik Revolution. The book consists of five parts. The first part, “Aims and Objectives” includes nine articles by Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, Kerzhentsev, Lvov, Kogan, Piotrovsky and Shklovsky. Those by Lunacharsky and Bogdanov contain information on proletarian culture. The Kerzhentsev, Lvov, Kogan, Piotrovsky and Shklovsky articles provide information on amateur theater, explain what drew people to the amateur theater, and how it diverted the workers from tackling the difficulties of real life. The second part of the book, “Amateur-Professional Relations” includes three articles by Kalinin, Pletnev and Kerzhentsev, that are concerned about the relations between amateur and professional theaters; they discuss how the proletarian theater functioned as an “amateur-professional hybrid”. The third part, “Repertoire Issues” includes six articles by Mgebrov, Kerzhentsev and Pletnev that discuss the repertoire of the proletarian theater which was mostly an imitation of the professional stage and adaptation of old plays. The fourth part, “Production Approaches and Examples” includes thirteen articles by Kerzhentsev, Mgebrov, Kalinin, Gaideburov, Smyshlaev, Tikhonovich, Moscow Proletkult and N.N.V. that examine the amateur stage performances and the aesthetics of the amateur theater. The fifth part, “Training” includes four articles by Smyshlaev, Kerzhentsev and Moscow Proletkult, discussing how to raise the standards of the artistic formation of the workers. The book which consists of primary sources related to the amateur and proletarian theaters are the first-hand accounts from the first decade of the Revolution. It is a valuable source for researchers who are interested in the amateur and proletarian theater of this specific period.

URI

https://www.ijors.net/issue10_2_2021/reviews/aysedietrich.html
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/102236

Journal

International Journal of Russian Studies

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Russian involvement in Afghanistan and its outcomes Pamir Dietrich, Ayşe (2023-01-01) Summary : The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and ten-year war that followed were the result of long, historical interest in the country by Russia that dates back to the 19th century combined with the Soviet Union’s desire to protect and promote friendly communist regimes. The war failed to achieve the Soviet Union’s goals, and even contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but even today the Russian Federation maintains an active interest in Afghanistan for many of the same reasons that its ...
Writing Resistance Revolutionary Memoirs of Shlissel’burg Prison, 1881-1906 (Book Review) Pamir Dietrich, Ayşe (2022-01-01) This book is about the memoirs of the members of one branch called People’s Will (Narodnaya volya) of the Populist Movement (Narodnik Movement) that conducted terrorist activities, and were imprisoned in Shlissel’burg Fortress between 1884 and 1905. Young is the editor and the translator of these memoirs. Who were the Populists? After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 under Tsar Alexander II and the dissatisfaction with it, the Populist Movement, which was a spontaneous and purely national socialist re...
Eastern in the West, Western in the East: Deliberate and ambivalent facets of the identity of early Republican Turkey abroad Zelef, Mustafa Haluk (2014-03-01) This paper represents an attempt to reflect on the Turkish identity in the formation period of the Republic, from its constitution in 1923 until 1939. The discussion is focused around two buildings that were constructed in 1939, both of which were built abroad to represent the new state; the Embassy of Turkey in Tehran and the Turkish pavilion at the New York World's Fair. These buildings were both featured in the same issue of the architectural magazine Mimar, and offer a fruitful starting point for delvin...
Close encounters between Turkey and the US: American indirect influences on Turkey’s political and socio-cultural life during the 1950s Yorgun, İbrahim; Akgün, Saadet Seçil; Department of History (2017) This thesis analyzes indirect American influences on Turkey’s political and socio-cultural Iife during a period when major political changes as well as cultural wars were ignited by the two major world powers: the US and the USSR. This was also the time when the world order was shaped by the Cold War in which Turkey played a major role. The study, without mentioning too much political details related to the major events, also attempts to analyze in a historical context how Turkey was drifted away from her n...
Czechoslovakia after 1989 through Arendt’s Eyes: From Pariahs to Strong Men Grıffıth, James Edmond Carr (Brill, Leiden , 2020-10-01) Dissident circles during the Czechoslovak communist regime were organized in semi-private islands of resistance. They saw themselves as a parallelpolisin line with Arendt’s notion of political action by pursuing “life in truth,” authentic experience, and ultimately freedom. The heroes of these circles were that society’s pariahs. In their quest for authenticity, they turned to the past to find meaning, to understand the nature of their communities and the needs for political action towards the future. As su...

Citation Formats

A. Pamir Dietrich, “Amateur and Proletatian Theater in Post-Revolutionary Russia (Book Review),” International Journal of Russian Studies, vol. 10, no. 10/2 2021, pp. 149–150, 2021, Accessed: 00, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.ijors.net/issue10_2_2021/reviews/aysedietrich.html.