'Village Voice' staff theater reviews 2013–17 (original) (raw)
Related papers
"Over Gogol Again": The Russian Formalists, Andrei Bely, and Mikhail Bakhtin on Gogol's Humor
AATSEEL, 2018
The “convex,” palpable, and multifaceted style of Gogol had mesmerized twentieth-century literary theorists. More than most other “classics,” he was a perfect case in point for the theorists as unalike in their beliefs and values as Andrei Bely, the Opoyaz Formalists, and Mikhail Bakhtin. For the Formalist Boris Eikhenbaum, Gogol’s manner was ideal to illustrate skaz, i.e., a special way of telling the story with the voice that is not neutral but, on contrary, is so peculiar that it constitutes another character in that story. Eikhenbaum’s aim was to show how Gogol’s special way of telling the story by merrily alternating masks, tragic and not, laid bare the fundamental playfulness of art as such. This vision of art was the reason why, while writing about the tragic and the comic as equivalent in “The Overcoat,” Eikhenbaum ultimately diminished the importance of the tragic element (which, according to him, shielded the sentimental readers from the artistic essence of the work, which had allegedly emerged from Gogol’s inner drive to wordplay). That is why Eikhenbaum and his fellow Formalists seem to have championed Gogol’s humor at the expense of the noble and humane tendency ascribed to him by others. The Formalists’ major opponent, Mikhail Bakhtin, conversely, focused on this tendency with regard to Gogol’s humor. In emphasizing the final cause of Gogol’s humor, Bakhtin had been anticipated by Alexander Slonimsky, who, despite his use of the Formalist terms, also spoke about the butt of the joke in Gogol. Andrei Bely, interestingly, did not want to dwell on the subject of Gogol’s humor and discussed his style instead. Yet this was not done to slight humor in Gogol; on the contrary, Bely wrote: “[I]t can be said about Gogol’s humor: it is all; it is everywhere; therefore, is it humor after all?” This leads me to a tentative conclusion. Despite Bely’s penchant for philosophy and Eikhenbaum’s principled decision to avoid it in scholarship, they have one thing in common. Gogol’s humor mattered to them structurally, and this structural understanding made the comic in Gogol’s humor less important to them. Unlike Bakhtin or Slonimsky, humor was a matter of formal cause for Eikhenbaum and probably for Bely as well. To what degree it was and what is at stake when formal cause is opposed to final—these are the issues tackled in my paper.
Gogol’s comedy The Governmental Inspector (Revizor) as an example of asymmetric power relations
2011
My current research is based on a premise that the system of significance, not only of the main actors, but also of those below them, the ordinary people, are contributing toward the observed political behavior through construction of new social norms. This perception, not as a static set of psychological attitudes, but as a dynamic process of identity change, does not take the ordinary actors as simple learners or as simple homines economici. The symbolic world, being relatively autonomous and self-sustained, acts as an intervening factor in the framework of institutional diffusion, changing its timing, shapes and direction. For the purpose of theoretical clarification I present here a short analysis of the comedy by a classic of Russian literature, Nikolaj Gogol, The Governmental Inspector (Revizor). This analysis follows the medieval and more recent genre of exempla, a method that uses stories that include obvious moral and other practical teachings. The main reason to use this comedy as an exempla is that it shows particularly well how an external factor, including the perception of this factor, can influence the behavior and probably also the identity in a system of social relations, and how this influence can be interpreted following different theoretical approaches, some conventional and some alternative, that, surprisingly, look similar to the main approaches in this research.
NEW RUSSIAN DRAMA: THE FAMILIARITY OF THE STRANGE
It's often said that Russia and America are very similar—huge, multiethnic, somewhat unsophisticated nuclear powers that have more in common with each other than with the smaller and more cosmopolitan countries of Western and Central Europe. The plays presented at the New Russian Drama Conference, held May 7–9, 2010 at Towson University in Baltimore, both confirmed and refuted that contention. The purpose of the conference, according to the New Russian Drama project's website, was to help " [promote] the Russian plays for potential professional productions, by allowing invited theatre professionals to meet with Russian artists and to view student productions of select plays. " Attendees saw five productions, two of which portrayed a gritty, crime-filled world reminiscent of American television drama, and several others which clearly reflected American influences. Nevertheless, all five displayed elements of a kind of satiric/fantastical whimsy that could only have come from the Russia of Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Zamyatin. It was this combination of a familiar-yet-strange sensibility that made all five plays striking, each in its own way. Interestingly, the two most American-seeming of the productions both concerned children and their plight in post-Soviet Russia. One—in my opinion the most successful of all the productions at the conference, Martial Arts by Yury Klavdiev—relates the story of a ten-year-old boy who comes home one day to find his drug-dealer parents have been murdered. He is joined by a neighbor girl, who befriends him and provides a kind of childish normalcy to counterbalance his extremely abnormal life. Klavdiev's play, deftly translated by David M. White with Yury Urnov, combines a Tarantino-like depiction of a violent underworld with a fantastic element reminiscent of Russian works like The Master and Margarita.
Jacobin, 2019
In Sunday’s election Ukrainian voters dealt a decisive rebuttal to the post-Maidan establishment. Yet well-organized nationalist forces represent a time bomb under the new president-elect.