The Accidental Evolution of the Moscow Art Theatre Prague Group

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Senelick
Keyword(s):  
Yale University ◽  
The West ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Documentary History ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Moscow Art Theatre ◽  
Independent Existence

During the period of confusion and divided loyalties that followed the 1917 Revolution in Russia, the resources of the Moscow Art Theatre were severely depleted, and its artists and staff found themselves giving barebones performances for the enlightenment of often mystified working-class audiences. By 1919 the decision was taken to split the company, with a contingent sent out on tour with the intention of rejoining the parent group for the new season. In the event, with civil war raging between the forces of the Red Army and the White Guard, this did not happen, and groups of former members of the Art Theatre worked independently in the provinces and eventually abroad. While some returned to Moscow in 1922, the ‘Prague Group of the Moscow Art Theatre’ continued to lead an independent existence, and in this article Laurence Senelick traces the events leading up to and following its creation – which caused much annoyance to Stanislavsky and confusion in the West. A frequent contributor to New Theatre Quarterly, Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a recipient of the St George medal of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for services to Russian art and scholarship. His latest books are Stanislavsky: a Life in Letters (Routledge) and the forthcoming Soviet Theatre: a Documentary History (Yale University Press).

Review Article : Ancien Regime and Enlightenment. Some Recent Writing on Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe Review Article Jeremy Black Roger Bartlett and Janet M. Hartley, eds, Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment. Essays for Isabel de Madariaga, London, Macmillan, 1990; x + 253 pp.; £45.00. Otto Büsch and Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, eds, Preussen und die Revo lutionäre Herausforderung seit 1789. Ergebnisse einer Konferenz, Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1991; xv + 371 pp.; DM 168,-. Heinz Duchhardt, Altes Reich und europäische Staatenwelt 1648-1806, Munich, Oldenbourg, 1990; viii + 125 pp.; DM 64,- hardback, DM 28, paperback. Lindsey Hughes, Sophia, Regent of Russia 1657-1704, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1990; xvii + 345 pp.; £19.95. Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova, eds, The Enlightenment and its Shadows, London, Routledge, 1990; viii + 232 pp.; £35.00. Bernhard R. Kroener, ed., Europa im Zeitalter Friedrichs des Grossen: Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Kriege, Munich, Oldenbourg, 1989; 316 pp.; DM 48,-. Jerzy Lukowski, Liberty's Folly. The Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, London, Routledge, 1991; xx + 316 pp.; £40.00. Peter Nitschke, Verbrechensbekämpfung und Verwaltung. Die Entstehung der Polizei in der Grafschaft Lippe (1700-1814), Münster, Waxman, 1990; 222 pp.; DM 49,90. Robert A. Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, 1463-1789. From Munici pal Republic to Cosmopolitan City, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990; xiii + 395 pp.; US $49.95. H. M. Scott, ed., Enlightened Absolutism. Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe, London, Macmillan, 1990; x + 385 pp.; £35.00. Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776-1789: Vol. I: The Great States of the West, Vol. II: Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East, translated by R. Burr Litchfield; Princeton, Prince ton University Press, 1991; xiv + 1044 pp.; US $75.00 together, or I: $42.50, II: $39.95

1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Black
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Review Article ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
The West ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
The Enlightenment

The Nazi Occupation of Theaterwissenschaft

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 365-375
Author(s):  
Laurence Senelick
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
Documentary History ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Post War

Theaterwissenschaft was first developed as an academic field in Germany. In Berlin, Max Herrmann pursued a sociological and iconological approach; in Cologne and in Munich, Carl Niessen and Artur Kutscher followed an ethnographic and mythological direction, respectively. With the Nazi takeover in 1933, Herrmann was dismissed and replaced by a non-scholar, Hans Knudsen. Niessen’s open-air Thingspiel was co-opted to support Nazi ideas of Volkstum. Kutscher renounced his liberal background and joined the Party. In Vienna, Josef Gregor got the local Gauleiter to found a Central Institute for Theatre Studies that disseminated anti-Semitic propaganda. The most egregious case is that of Heinz Kindermann, who rose to be the most influential aesthetician of National Socialism, proposing a biological foundation to theatre studies and offering a racial-eugenic approach to theatre history. As this article demonstrates, in the post-war period, theatre studies sedulously avoided dealing with the Nazi interlude, where official denazification permitted these men and others to carry on teaching and publishing, winning honours and titles. It was not until the 1980s that attempts were made to confront this past. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Conference on Transglobal Theatre. His most recent books include Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters (Routledge, 2013); and (with Sergei Ostrovsky) The Soviet Theatre: A Documentary History (Yale University Press, 2014).

A History of Stanislavski in Translation

1990 ◽  
Vol 6 (23) ◽  
pp. 266-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Benedetti
Keyword(s):  
The West ◽  
Theatre Education ◽  
The Real ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Documentary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
A Minor ◽  
The Rose ◽  
Moscow Art Theatre

Stanislavski has become a minor industry, both in theatre training and in publishing, with courses and related books endorsing, elaborating, or questioning his ‘System’. But how much of the System is really accessible to an English-speaking readership, and how full a view of Stanislavski's fully-formed ideas does it represent? Even the order and timing of the appearance of his works in English has, argues Jean Benedetti, determined our reception of his thought, and left us ignorant, sometimes wilfully, of the real development of his thinking: and in the following article, he traces the complicated and often fraught history of the translation of Stanislavski's works into English, revealing how (sometimes from the best of intentions) a slanted and incomplete view of the System still dominates our perceptions. Following a career in the theatre, film, and television. Jean Benedetti was Principal of the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama from 1970 to 1987, and since 1979 has been chairman of the Theatre Education Committee of the International Theatre Institute. In 1982 he published Stanislavski: an Introduction, and his biography of Stanislavski, the first in the West in forty years, was published in the autumn of 1988, and in paperback earlier this year. He is currently working on a documentary history of the Moscow Art Theatre.

GEOGRAPHY, ENLIGHTENMENT, AND IMPROVEMENT Geography and Enlightenment. Edited by David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. viii+455. ISBN 0-226-48720-2 (hb). $52·00. 0-226-48721-0 (pb). $25·00. Nature's government: science, imperial Britain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world. By Richard Drayton. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xxi+346. ISBN 0-300-05976-0. £25·00. Enlightenment geography: the political languages of British geography, 1650–1850. By Robert J. Mayhew. London: Macmillan, 2000. Pp. viii+324. ISBN 0-333-79186-X. £45·00.

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
FELIX DRIVER
Keyword(s):  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Lecture Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
University Of Chicago Press

What is Enlightenment? Few questions in the history of ideas can have given rise to more controversy, sustained over more than two centuries and extending into the furthest reaches of contemporary thought. In comparison, the ‘where’ of Enlightenment – the sites from which philosophes garnered their evidence, the settings in which their ideas took shape, the networks through which they were disseminated, the contexts in which they were interpreted – has received much less attention. It is not that these geographies have been altogether neglected. Distinctions between different ‘national’ Enlightenments (French, Scottish, English, and so on) are familiar, perhaps all too familiar, to historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At a smaller scale, it is difficult to imagine historical accounts of the Enlightenment world without some sort of tour of those paradigmatic sites – the coffee house, the botanic garden, the lecture theatre. There is a geography here, of sorts: but in truth it is often simply a stage for action, a passive background (sometimes ‘national’, sometimes ‘local’) to the real business of social and intellectual change. In recent years, however, intellectual historians in general, and historians of science in particular, have begun to pay more attention to these and many other sites, not simply as inert contexts but as vital components of the making and communication of new knowledge. Thus is a genuine geography of knowledge in the making.

scholarly journals On the Question of Medieval Artillery in the Muslim Regions of Contemporary Russia

Islamovedenie ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-40
Author(s):  
Nabiev Rustam Fanisovich ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Northern Eurasia ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Islamic Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Relationship Of

The article deals with the problem of the spread of artillery weapons from the East to the West through the territory of the Eurasian steppes. Among the regions important for the devel-opment of firearms were countries with Islamic culture, which are currently part of the Russian Federation and the CIS. They were one of the most important links in the movement of new technologies from the East to Europe. Evidence of the development of artillery in the northern Muslim countries is not only written sources, but also finds of genuine medieval weapons. The author shows that the Muslim peoples of northern Eurasia have contributed to the world process of the development and spread of firearms. The article substantiates the view that in the territory of Russia powder technologies, the newest at that time, began to be used much earlier than in Western Europe. The author also identifies a number of areas of research into the history of powder technologies in the medieval Muslim world, such as sources of information, regions, landscapes, the main ways of spreading technologies, as well as terminology from the standpoint of cultural relationship of languages

scholarly journals THE CRISIS OF MODERNITY OF THE ARAB-ISLAMIC WORLD

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Raul Ludovic Bereczki
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Islamic Fundamentalism ◽  
The West ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Religious Sects ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Perverse Effect

The Westernization of Islam, which began at least two hundred years ago, has two major consequences: a positive one, meaning the enlightenment of the elites which tried to reform Islam; and a negative one, "the perverse effect of contact with the West", as the experts often call it, which consists of the development of religious sects within the Muslim societies. The direct and striking conclusion, upon first analysis, is that Islamic fundamentalism is the product of Western modernity. Of course, the line of explanation has its origin in colonial times, seen as a major disappointment by those Muslims who believed in the benefits of a European-style modernity, and continues with the Cold War period, with the examples of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the mobilization of Islamist elements was beneficial in the fight against the Soviet enemy and the active proselytism practiced by the latter.

scholarly journals The Enlightenment Philosophy Impact on the Musical Culture of Russia in the 18th–19th Centuries

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-37
Author(s):  
A.V. Kamenets ◽  
◽  
L.V. Molina ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Russian Music ◽  
Democratic Attitudes ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Life Problems ◽  
West European ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

this article discusses the key ideas of the philosophy of the Enlightenment (applying democratic attitudes, referring to real-life problems and issues, promoting humaneness and humanism) that have influenced the Russian musical culture. A connection is traced between the worldview of the West-European philosophers of the Enlightenment and the works of European composers and musicians that influenced the Russian musical culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. The article highlights how the philosophy of the Enlightenment affected the development of the operatic and singing art in Russia and how it in many ways dictated subsequent trends in the Russian music.

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