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Sandbox for the article on Symbolist theatre and its summary in Russian Symbolism and Symbolism

Konstantin Stanislavski's 1908 Moscow Art Theatre production of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird.

Symbolism was a modernist movement that, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, developed particular forms of drama and theatrical production. Its innovations contributed to a series of avant-garde revolutions that followed in its wake—Expressionism, Futurism, Russian Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism.

It reacted against the realism and Naturalism promoted by, amongst others, André Antoine and his Théâtre Libre company and Konstantin Stanislavski and his Moscow Art Theatre company (though Antoine's productions were not exclusively Naturalistic and Stanislavski soon began to experiment with Symbolism). The Symbolists proposed that the material world was merely an illusory surface appearance, beneath which deeper truths were hidden. Consequently, instead of the secular, socially-conscious techniques of realism and Naturalism, they promoted a mystical, subjective drama that sought to represent human consciousness. This presented a problem for the Symbolists, however, since it involves a rejection of the objectivity of dramatic form.

non-dramatic and un-dramatisable; time and space; characters/forces.

Symbolist drama is often characterised by a lack of action, frequent pauses, and strange dialogue. Lyrical and static. It often made use of the form of the one-act play.

Symbolists wrote their plays with no regard to their commercial appeal, nor to the practicalities of staging. Consequently, many remained unstaged for years. Their subject-matter included eroticism, gender, and a universal sexuality that permeates all things.

Mysticism • To find a substitute for the loss of religious belief in a scientific age. Criticise the proponents of Naturalism for merely reproducing the tawdriness and materialistic values of contemporary bourgeois life. Symbolism understood the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.

According to the principles of Symbolism, the function of a work of art was not to signify reality (whether material or spiritual), but rather to evoke a more essential reality understood by the Symbolists to exist beyond the reach of the senses. Correspondences, analogies -> metaphor, symbol, comparison, allegory.

The Symbolist movement came to an end with the First World War and the October Revolution, but its impact on modern theatre was felt in the Soviet mass spectacles, Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, the theatre of Samuel Beckett, Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theatre, Tadeusz Kantor's Theatre of Death, and the theatre of Robert Wilson.

People to include

Symbolist playwrights include Maurice Maeterlinck, Paul Claudel, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and William Butler Yeats.

Important directors to have developed a Symbolist theatre include Paul Fort, Aurélien Lugné-Poë.

People to be included: • Stéphane Mallarmé • Stanisław Przybyszewski • Oscar Wilde • Edward Gordon Craig • Adolphe Appia • Konstantin Stanislavski • Vsevolod Meyerhold and Aleksei Remizov • Valery Bryusov • Fyodor Sologub • Vyacheslav Ivanov • Andrei Bely • Leonid Andreyev • Nikolai Minsky • Innokenty Annensky • Mikhail Kuzmin • Alexander Blok • Nikolai Evreinov • Émile Augier? • Saint-Pol-Roux • Ion Minulescu

19th-century Symbolism

From Naturalism to Symbolism

Each of the four great playwrights of Naturalism in the theatre towards the end of the 19th century—Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Anton Chekhov—began to explore, in their later works, a more symbolic mode of expression.

Hauptmann's The Assumption of Hannele (1893) adopts a more Symbolist dramaturgy than his earlier plays and includes a dream sequence.

Influence of Wagner and Nietzsche

The theories of theatre advanced by Richard Wagner and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche were important influences on the movement. The Symbolists responded to Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, in which a work of art employs more than one of the arts in order that, in the words of Charles Baudelaire, each art would "come into play where the other reaches its limits." Something about theatre as the total art form. It was also Wagner's vision of theatre as a ritual experience of communion, which abolishes the separation between stage and auditorium, that appealed to the Symbolists. The monthly journal La Revue Wagnérienne (1885-1888) acted as a forum for the analysis and dissemination of Wagner's ideas among the Symbolists. In it in 1885, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé imagined a ritual theatre for the masses that would be idealised, mystical, simple, and impressionistic. It would utilise all of the arts in a combination that returned to the simple elements of drama. In contrast to Wagner, however, Mallarmé argued that it was poetry, rather than music, that should act as the central element. He also argued for the autonomy of each art in the Gesamtkunstwerk, such that each art employed would reinforce and complement the other without, however, becoming completely fused in a synthesis.

Mallarmé wrote only one play, however—the dramatic poem Hérodiade (1898).

Static drama and a theatre of mood

Maurice Maeterlinck, an avid reader of Arthur Schopenhauer, considered man powerless against the forces of fate. He believed that any actor, due to the hindrance of physical mannerisms and expressions, would inadequately portray the symbolic figures of his plays. As the English theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig would do, Maeterlinck concluded that marionettes were an excellent alternative. Guided by strings operated by a puppeteer, Maeterlinck considered marionettes an excellent representation of fate's complete control over man. He wrote Interior, The Death of Tintagiles, and Alladine and Palomides for marionette theatre.

From this, Maeterlinck gradually developed his notion of "static drama." He felt that it was the artist's responsibility to create something that did not express human emotions but rather the external forces that compel people. Materlinck once wrote that "the stage is a place where works of art are extinguished. [...] Poems die when living people get into them."

He developed his ideas on static drama in his essay "The Tragic in Daily Life" (1896), which appeared in The Treasure of the Humble. The actors were to speak and move as if pushed and pulled by an external force (fate) as puppeteer. They were not to allow the stress of their inner emotions to compel their movements. Maeterlinck would often continue to refer to his cast of characters as "marionettes."

Maeterlinck's conception of modern tragedy rejects the intrigue and vivid external action of traditional drama in favour of a dramatisation of different aspects of life:

“ Othello is admirably jealous. But is it not perhaps an ancient error to imagine that it is at the moments when this passion, or others of equal violence, possesses us, that we live our truest lives? I have grown to believe that an old man, seated in his armchair, waiting patiently, with his lamp beside him; giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about his house, interpreting, without comprehending, the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice of the light, submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny—an old man, who conceives not that all the powers of this world, like so many heedful servants, are mingling and keeping vigil in his room, who suspects not that the very sun itself is supporting in space the little table against which he leans, or that every star in heaven and every fiber of the soul are directly concerned in the movement of an eyelid that closes, or a thought that springs to birth—I have grown to believe that he, motionless as he is, does yet live in reality a deeper, more human, and more universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who conquers in battle, or "the husband who avenges his honor." ”

He cites a number of classical Athenian tragedies—which, he argues, are almost motionless and which diminish psychological action to pursue an interest in "the individual, face to face with the universe"—as precedents for his conception of static drama; these include most of the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles' Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus, and Philoctetes. With these plays, he claims:

“ It is no longer a violent, exceptional moment of life that passes before our eyes—it is life itself. Thousands and thousands of laws there are, mightier and more venerable than those of passion; but these laws are silent, and discreet, and slow-moving; and hence it is only in the twilight that they can be seen and heard, in the meditation that comes to us at the tranquil moments of life. ”

Anti-theatricalism and actor/puppet debates

Distrustful of theatrical production, the Symbolists promoted the "spectacle dans un fauteuil" (literally a "show in an armchair," or a play that is designed only to be read). Maeterlinck suggested that many of the greatest dramas in the history of theatre were "not stageable"—including William Shakespeare's great tragedies King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. An actor's enactment of a character introduced "human and unpredictable elements" that, he argued, were unsuited to a masterpiece, since: "Every masterpiece is a symbol and the symbol will not tolerate the active presence of man." Having banished the actor's physical presence, Maeterlinck imagined a character could be presented as "a shadow, a reflection, a projection of symbolic forms, or some being with all the appearance of life though not actually living." Shadow puppets and marionettes were coming to be seen as more desirable alternatives to the all-too-human actor.

Théâtre de Art and Théâtre de l'Œuvre

The first manifesto of Symbolism in the theatre was written by Gustave Kahn in 1889.

The French poet Paul Fort founded an amateur company that came to be called the Théâtre de Art (originally Théâtre Mixte) in 1890, when he was 17. Following a production of Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci in January 1891, Fort committed the company to Symbolism. His production of Pierre Quillard's The Girl with the Severed Hands (La Fille aux mains coupées), described by its author as "a mystery in two tableaux," opened a few months later. Before a backdrop by the painter Paul Sérusier, as Edward Braun describes it:

The characters on stage declaimed in melodious verse and at times sang in chorus. They were separated from the audience by a gauze and moved slowly and rhythmically in soft lighting against a backdrop of gleaming fold decorated with the stylised figures of angels and framed with red drapes. On the forestage there was a narrator in a long blue tunic standing at a lectern, who described in heightened prose the action, the locations, and the inner thoughts of the characters.

Quillard argued in "On the Absolute Pointlessness of Accurate Staging," an article published in May 1891, that Symbolist theatre relied on the spectator's complicity and collaboration. Rather than the accurate representations offered by Naturalism, Symbolist staging evoked images in the audience's imagination. His assertion that "the word creates the setting and everything else" was adopted by Fort as a guiding principle.

Aurélien Lugné-Poë and Camille Mauclair founded the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in 1893.

After us, the Savage God

Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi and Yeat's reaction.

20th-century Symbolism

First phase of Russian experiments in theatre

The Russian Symbolist movement, and the ideas of Valery Bryusov in particular, represented the avant-garde in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Bryusov was a poet and the leader of the first (or "Decadent") phase of Russian Symbolism. He also wrote one of the first Russian Symbolist plays, Earth (1904). He coined an important slogan of the movement, which proclaimed its commitment to an anti-social individualism: "The personality of the artist is the essence of Art."

In a famous article entitled "Unneccessary Truth" (1902), which was first published in the influential World of Art journal, Bryusov criticised the realism of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), which had been founded four years earlier by Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. As Stanislavski would come to do with his 'system,' Bryusov placed the burden for a modernist transformation of the art of the stage squarely on the shoulders of the actor: the "art of the theatre", he wrote, "and the art of the actor are one and the same thing." He called for a form of acting that released the actor's creativity and the audience's imagination from the limitations of the conventions of realism. Rather than an exact, naturalistic representation of material reality, the "sole obligation" of the theatre was, he argued, "to assist the actor to reveal his soul to the audience."

The actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold left the MAT in the spring of 1902 and by the autumn had established a company with Alexander Kosheverov in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine. When, in 1903, Meyerhold assumed sole responsibility for the company, he renamed it the "New Drama Association." Having toured a number of other Russian cities, in 1904 the company moved to the more cosmopolitan Tbilisi in Georgia; see Benedetti (1999a, 155), Rudnitsky (1981, 27-48) and Leach (2004, 55). Rudnitsky explains that, two years before Stanislavski's experiments, this had been "the first sign that there was in Russia a director who would at least try to depart from the aesthetic system of psychological realism and in practice apply the principles of Symbolism to the theatre. For Meyerhold soon made it known that 'New Drama' was for him not only Ibsen, Hauptmann and Chekhov, but also Maeterlinck, Przybyszewski, and Schnitzler" (1981, 33).

In 1904, Stanislavski finally acted on a suggestion made by Anton Chekhov two years earlier that he stage several one-act plays by Maurice Maeterlinck. Materlinck's essay on symbolist drama "The Tragic in Daily Life" (1896) had been published in Russian translation in 1901 (as part of his The Treasure of the Humble). In May 1904, the poet Konstantin Balmont (who had translated Maeterlinck's three plays into Russian) met with the playwright to seek his opinions on their staging. Maeterlinck explained that he wished his dialogue to be spoken with an understated expressivity that should fall somewhere between romantic declamation and total realism. Despite Stanislavski's enthusiasm, however, he struggled to realise a theatrical approach to the static, lyrical qualities of Maeterlinck's drama. When the triple bill consisting of The Blind, Intruder, and Interior opened at the MAT on 14 October [O.S. 2 October], the experiment was deemed a failure.

Second phase visions of ecstatic, participatory ritual

Despite the Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov's attempts to write plays, it was his unrealised, utopian ideas about theatre that proved far more influential. Ivanov regarded it as having the potential to be the most powerful of the arts and capable of taking over the function of the Church and restoring religious belief in a society that had lost its faith.

Ivanov's theories were part of a shift in the second phase of Russian Symbolism away from the influence of French decadence and the ideas of Valery Bryusov, with its abstract evocations of inner states, and towards an ecstatic (in both the religious and philosophical senses) theatre of mass participation. This involved an increased attention to the German philosophical tradition, and the ideas of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche in particular. The ideas of Aleksei Remizov (who was the literary manager of Vsevolod Meyerhold's New Drama Association at this time), Fyodor Sologub, and the Mystical Anarchism of Georgy Chulkov were all part of this second phase of the movement.

Ivanov proposed the creation of a new type of mass theatre, which he called a "collective action," that would be modelled on ancient religious rituals, Athenian tragedy, and the medieval mystery play. Writing in an essay on the mask, which was published in the magazine Vesy (Libra or The Scales) in 1904, Ivanov argued for a revival of the ancient relationship between the poet and the masses. Inspired by The Birth of Tragedy and Wagner's theories of theatre, Ivanov sought to provide a philosophical foundation for his proposals by linking Nietzsche's analysis with Leo Tolstoy's Christian moralising, and ancient cultic performance with later Christian mysteries. The idea that the Dionysian could be associated with a concept of universal brotherhood would have been completely alien to Nietzsche, who had stressed the fundamental differences between the two traditions. Ivanov, however, understood Dionysus as an avatar for Christ. By means of the mask, he argued, the tragic hero appears not as an individual character but rather as the embodiment of a fundamental Dionysian reality, "the one all-human I." By means of hero's example, therefore, staged myth would give the people access to its sense of the "total unity of suffering."

Rejecting theatrical illusion, Ivanov's modern liturgical theatre would offer not the representation of action (mimesis), but action itself (praxis). This would be achieved by overcoming the separation between stage and auditorium, adopting an open space similar to the classical Greek orchêstra, and abolishing the division between actor and audience, such that all become co-creating participants in a sacred rite. Ivanov imagined staging such a performance in a hall in which furniture is distributed "by whim and inspiration." Actors would mingle with the audience, handing out masks and costumes, before, singing and dancing as a chorus, collective improvisation would merge all participants into a communal unity.

Thus, he hoped, the theatre would facilitate a genuine revolution in culture and society. Writing in Po zvezdam in 1908, Ivanov argued:

The theatres of the chorus tragedies, the comedies and the mysteries must become the breeding-ground for the creative, or prophetic, self-determination of the people; only then will be resolved the problem of fusing actors and spectators in a single orgiastic body. [...] And only, we may add, when the choral voice of such communities becomes a genuine referendum of the true will of the people will political freedom become a reality.

While some, such as the director Meyerhold, enthusiastically embraced Ivanov's ideas (at least insofar as they proposed overcoming the division between actor and audience in a collective improvisation), others were more skeptical. The poet Andrei Bely argued that the realities of a modern, class-divided society could not be abolished by means of masks and costumes, however earnestly adopted:

Let's suppose we go into the temple-theatre, robe ourselves in white clothes, crown ourselves with bunches of roses, perform a mystery play (its theme is always the same—God-like man wrestles with fate) and then at the appropriate moment we join hands and begin to dance. Imagine yourself, reader, if only for just one minute, in this role. We are the ones who will be spinning round the sacrificial altar—all of us: the fashionable lady, the up-and-coming stockbroker, the worker and the member of the State Council. It is too much to expect that our steps and our gestures will coincide. While the class struggle still exists, these appeals for an aesthetic democratization are strange.

Meyerhold and Stanislavski's Theatre-Studio

Design (by Nikolai Ulyanov) for Meyerhold's planned 1905 production of Hauptmann's Schluck and Jau at the Theatre-Studio he founded with Stanislavski, which relocated the play to a stylised abstraction of France under Louis XIV. Around the edge of the stage, ladies-in-waiting embroider an improbably long scarf with huge ivory needles.

See also: Theatre-Studio

The director Vsevolod Meyerhold, prompted by Stanislavski's positive response to his new ideas about symbolist theatre, proposed that they form a "Theatre-Studio" (a term which Meyerhold invented) that would function as "a laboratory for the experiments of more or less experienced actors." Meyerhold had recently returned to Moscow with the results of the experiments he had conducted with his "New Drama Association" in the Ukraine and Georgia. The Theatre-Studio aimed to develop Meyerhold's aesthetic ideas into new theatrical forms that would return the MAT to the forefront of the avant-garde and Stanislavski's socially-conscious ideas for a network of "people's theatres" that would reform Russian theatrical culture as a whole. They were "looking for what had been found by the other arts", Stanislavski said, "but thus far had been inapplicable to ours." Realism and the depiction of everyday life "had outlived its time", he felt:

The time had come for the unreal on stage... One must show not life as it flows by in reality, but as we dimly perceive it in our dreams, visions, moments of elevated feeling. This is a spiritual state and it must be conveyed in the theater, just as painters of the new school show it in their canvases, musicians of the new trend in their music and the new poets in thier verse. The works of these painters, musicians, poets have no clear outlines, definite finished melodies, clearly expressed ideas. The strength of the new art lies in the combination and pairing of colors, lines, musical notes, in the harmony of words. They create overall moods unconsciously affecting their audience. They convey allusions which cause the spectator himself to create through his own imagination.

Officially attached to the MAT but actually subsidised privately by Stanislavski himself, the Theatre-Studio was inaugurated on 15 June [O.S. 3 June] 1905. Meyerhold was to be its artistic director, with Stanislavski serving as a co-director. Its company consisted of actors from Meyerhold's "New Drama Association," actors from the MAT, some from the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, and students from the Art Theatre School. Stanislavski hired a run-down theatre for the Theatre-Studio on the corner of Povarskaya Street and Merzlyakovsky Lane, the former Nemchinov theatre in the Girsh house. At the first meeting of its members, Stanislavski defined the studio's task as "to find together with new currents in dramatic literature correspondingly new forms of dramatic art." In his proposal, Meyerhold had described its task as the search for "new means of representation for a new dramaturgy." Valery Bryusov became involved as its literary advisor and helped to define the company's artistic principles.; see Benedetti (1999a, 156), Braun (1995, 30), and Magarshack (1950, 270).

Central to Meyerhold's approach was the use of improvisation to develop the performances.

When the studio presented scenes from Maeterlinck's The Death of Tintagiles, Hauptmann's Schluck and Jau, and Ibsen's Love's Comedy on 23 August [O.S. 11 August] 1905 at Pushkino, Stanislavski was encouraged. When the work was performed in a fully-equipped theatre in Moscow, however, it was regarded as a failure and the studio folded. Meyerhold drew an important lesson: "one must first educate a new actor and only then put new tasks before him," he wrote, adding that "Stanislavski, too, came to such a conclusion." Meyerhold would go on to explore physical expressivity, co-ordination, and rhythm in his experiments in actor training (which would found 20th-century physical theatre), while, for the moment, Stanislavski would pursue psychological expressivity through the actor's inner technique. In 1905: Leopold Sulerzhitsky became Stanislavski's personal assistant. Meyerhold later credited Sulerzhitsky with continuing the experiments of the Theatre-Studio in Stanislavski's productions of Knut Hamsun's The Drama of Life (1907), Leonid Andreiev's The Life of Man (1907), Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird (1908), and the MAT's production of Hamlet (1911) with Edward Gordon Craig. Reflecting in 1908 on the Theatre-Studio's demise, Stanislavski wrote that "our theatre found its future among its ruins." Nemirovich disapproved of what he described as the malign influence of Meyerhold on Stanislavski's work at this time.

Rudnitsky observes that:

Stanislavski at that time still believed in the possibility of 'peaceful coexistence' for Symbolist abstractions and the live, physical and psychological realization of completely credibly acted characters. Stanislavski's subsequent Symbolist productions showed his ineradicable striving toward realistic justification and prosaic circumstantiality of Symbolist motifs.

Stanislavski's later experiments

Sugar and Mytyl in Stanislavski's 1908 MAT production of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird.

His experiments attempts to stage symbolist drama forced (a greater focus on) a shift from outer to inner action. He began to develop the techniques of psychological realism and to pursue a more systematic investigation of the actor's process. Something here about his interest shifting from productions to process/pedagogy.

Stanislavski's activities began to move in a very different direction: his productions became opportunities for research, he was more interested in the process of rehearsal than its product, and his attention shifted away from the MAT towards its satellite projects—the theatre studios—in which he would develop his 'system.' On his return to Moscow, he explored his new psychological approach in his production of Knut Hamsun's symbolist play The Drama of Life. Nemirovich was particularly hostile to his new methods and their relationship continued to deteriorate in this period. In a statement made on 8 February [O.S. 27 January] 1908 Stanislavski marked a significant shift in his directorial method and stressed the crucial contribution he now expected from a creative actor:

The committee is wrong if it thinks that the director's preparatory work in the study is necessary, as previously, when he alone decided the whole plan and all the details of the production, wrote the mise en scène and answered all the actors' questions for them. The director is no longer king, as before, when the actor possessed no clear individuality. [...] It is essential to understand this—rehearsals are divided into two stages: the first stage is one of experiment when the cast helps the director, the second is creating the performance when the director helps the cast.

Stanislavski's preparations for Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird (which was to become his most famous production to-date) included improvisations and exercises to stimulate the actors' imaginations; Nemirovich described one in which the cast imitated various animals. In rehearsals Stanislavski sought ways to encourage his actors' will to create afresh in every performance. He focused on the search for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the characters are seeking to achieve at any given moment (what he would come to call their "task"). This use of the actor's conscious thought and will was designed to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly.

Together these elements formed a new vocabulary with which he explored a "return to realism" in a production of Gogol's The Government Inspector as soon as The Blue Bird had opened.

The Craig—Stanislavski Hamlet

File:Craig's design (1908) for Hamlet 1-2 at Moscow Art Theatre.jpg

Symbolist Shakespeare at the MAT: Craig's 1908 design for Stanislavski's production of Hamlet (1911-12). This staging of act one, scene two prompted an ovation, which was unheard of in mid-performance at the MAT.

See also: Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet

In his treatment of the classics, Stanislavski believed that it was legitimate for actors and directors to ignore the playwright's intentions for a play's staging. One of his most important—a collaboration with Edward Gordon Craig on a production of Hamlet—became a landmark of 20th-century theatrical modernism. With it, Stanislavski hoped to prove that his recently-developed 'system' for creating internally-justified, realistic acting could meet the formal demands of a classic play, while Craig envisioned a symbolist monodrama in which every aspect of production would be subjugated to the protagonist: it would present a dream-like vision as seen through Hamlet's eyes. Despite these contrasting approaches, the two practitioners did share some artistic assumptions; the 'system' had developed out of Stanislavski's experiments with symbolist drama, which had shifted his attention from a naturalistic external surface to the characters' subtextual, inner world. Their production attracted enthusiastic and unprecedented worldwide attention for the theatre, placing it "on the cultural map for Western Europe," and it has come to be regarded as a seminal event that influenced the subsequent history of production style in the theatre.

Influence and legacy

Need to draw link between Symbolist theories and Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and Samuel Beckett's dramaturgy.

Influence of theories of mass ritual theatre in the Soviet period. The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920)

Symbolism in Russia

Alexandre Benois designed symbolist sets for Stravinsky's Petrushka in 1911.

The foremost symbolist composer was Alexander Scriabin who in his First Symphony praised art as a kind of religion. Le Devin Poem (1902-1904) sought to express "the evolution of the human spirit from pantheism to unity with the universe." Poème de l'extase, first given in 1908 in New York, was accompanied by elaborately selected colour projections on a screen.

In Scriabin's synthetic performances music, poetry, dancing, colours, and scents were used so as to bring about "supreme, final ecstasy." Andrey Bely and Wassily Kandinsky articulated similar ideas on the "stage fusion of all arts."

In more traditional theatre, The Cherry Orchard and some other late plays of Anton Chekhov have been described as being steeped in symbolism. Nevertheless, their first production by Constantin Stanislavski was as realistic as possible. Stanislavski collaborated with the English theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig on a significant production of Hamlet in 1911-12, which experimented with symbolist monodrama as a basis for its staging. Meyerhold's production of Blok's Puppet Show (1906) is usually cited as a high point of symbolist theatre in Russia. Two years later, Stanislavski won international acclaim when he staged Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird in the Moscow Art Theatre.

Nikolai Evreinov was one of a number of writers who developed a symbolist theory of theatre. Evreinov insisted that everything around us is "theatre" and that nature is full of theatrical conventions, for example, desert flowers mimicking stones, mice feigning death in order to escape cats' claws, and the complicated dances of some birds. Theatre, for Evreinov, was a universal symbol of existence.

See also

• Silver Age of Russian poetry

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