Fyodor Sologub on the Theater and Tragedy

• Main Author: Galina V. Petrova
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2019-12-01
• Series: Studia Litterarum
• Subjects: theatre criticism; biography of fyodor sologub; symbolist theater; solipsism; tragedy; mass culture
• Online Access: http://studlit.ru/images/2019-4-4/Petrova.pdf

The article examines the development of Fyodor Sologub’s views on the nature and aims of the theater. The focus is on the little known critical sketches by Sologub that he regularly published in the weekly magazine Teatr i Iskusstvo weekly from 1912 to 1917 and that, finally, formed his lengthy theoretical work “Reflections and dreams of the theater” issued in 1918 in the Russkaya Mysl magazine. The author argues that in the 1910s, Sologub develops a new utopian model of the theater that overcomes his early solipsistic idea of the “Unified will theater.” Sologub dreams of the birth of the “joyful tragedy” whose collective protagonist would triumph over Fate. The article demonstrates that Sologub’s “dreams” of the theater came into conflict with his critical reflections concerning the development of theatrical forms in the 1910s. Sologub’s idea of the “theater of rabbits” turned out to be prophetic as it predicted the inevitable development of the mass culture phenomenon in the 20th century that served the interests of the “super-rabbit” “genius of the kin.”