antirealistic system of dramatic production developed in the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) in the early 1920s by the avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Meyerhold (Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyevich) drew on the traditions of the commedia dell'arte and kabuki and on the writings of Edward Gordon Craig for his system, in which the actor's own personality was eliminated and he was entirely subordinated to the director's will. Coached as gymnasts and acrobats and emphasizing pantomime rather than words, the actors threw themselves about in puppetlike attitudes at the director's discretion. For these productions the stage was exposed to the back wall and was then furnished with harshly lit, bare sets consisting of scaffoldings, ladders, and ramps that the actors used. Biomechanics had lost its appeal by the late 1920s, though Meyerhold's emphasis on external action did become an element in Soviet actor-training techniques.
Ilf and Petrov
▪ Soviet humorists
Soviet humorists active at the end of the 1920s and in the '30s. The intimate literary collaboration of Ilya Ilf (pseudonym of Ilya Arnoldovich Faynzilberg; b. Oct. 3 [Oct. 15, New Style], 1897, Odessa, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]—d. April 13, 1937, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) and Yevgeny Petrov (pseudonym of Yevgeny Petrovich Katayev; b. Nov. 30 [Dec. 13, New Style], 1903, Odessa, Russian Empire [now in Ukraine]—d. July 2, 1942, Crimea, U.S.S.R.) resulted in a number of immensely popular satirical works.
Born into a poor Jewish family, Ilf worked at various trades while a youth, becoming a journalist in Odessa at age 18. He went to Moscow in 1923 to begin a career as a professional writer. Petrov, the son of a teacher, began his career as a news-service correspondent, worked briefly as a criminal investigator, and went to Moscow in 1923, where he became a professional journalist. Initially, Ilf worked on the staff of Gudok (“The Whistle”), the central rail-workers' newspaper, while Petrov worked on the satirical journal, Krasny perets (“Red Pepper”). In 1926 Petrov moved to “The Whistle,” and he and Ilf formed their unique literary partnership.
In 1928 they published the first fruit of their collaboration, Dvenadtsat stulyev (The Twelve Chairs), a rollicking picaresque novel of farcical adventures within a framework of telling satire on Soviet life during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. The work was an instant success, and its rogue-hero—the irrepressible Ostap Bender—became overnight, and remained, one of the most popular personages in Russian fiction. Killed off at the end of The Twelve Chairs, Bender was resurrected in a sequel, Zolotoy telyonok (1931; The Little Golden Calf), an equally humorous but more serious and trenchant satire centring upon pretenders who claim to be the son of a dead Soviet hero.
In 1936, following a tour of the United States, Ilf and Petrov wrote Odnoyetazhnaya Amerika (“One-Storied America”), a witty account of their automobile trip across that country. In large part an exposé of the materialistic and uncultured character of American life, the work nevertheless indicates that many aspects of capitalist society appealed to the authors. A kind of sequel to this work was the long story Tonya (1937), which portrays with appropriate satirical touches the life of Soviet people compelled to live in a capitalist society. In addition to these major works, from 1932 Ilf and Petrov collaborated on a number of humorous and satiric sketches for the newspaper Pravda.
In 1937 Ilf died of tuberculosis. Petrov continued his literary work, writing for the newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta (“Literary Gazette”) and the magazine Ogonyok (“Little Light”). He died in 1942, when the airplane in which he was traveling from Sevastopol to Moscow crashed.
Bakhtin, Mikhail
▪ Russian philosopher and literary critic
in full Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin
born Nov. 17 [Nov. 5, Old Style], 1895, Orel, Russia
died March 7, 1975, Moscow, U.S.S.R.
Russian literary theorist and philosopher of language whose wide-ranging ideas significantly influenced Western thinking in cultural history, linguistics, literary theory, and aesthetics.
After graduating from the University of St. Petersburg (now St. Petersburg State University) in 1918, Bakhtin taught high school in western Russia before moving to Vitebsk (now Vitsyebsk, Belarus), a cultural centre of the region, where he and other intellectuals organized lectures, debates, and concerts. There Bakhtin began to write and develop his critical theories. Because of Stalinist censorship, he often published works under the names of friends, including P.N. Medvedev and V.N. Voloshinov. These early works include Freydizm (1927; Freudianism); Formalny metod v literaturovedeni (1928; The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship), an attack on the Formalist (Formalism)s' view of history; and Marksizm i filosofiya yazyka (1929; Marxism and the Philosophy of Language). Despite his precautions, Bakhtin was arrested in 1929 and exiled to the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. From 1945 to 1961 he taught at the Mordovian Teachers Training College.
Bakhtin is especially known for his work on the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor), Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (1929; 2nd ed., 1963, retitled Problemy poetiki Dostoyevskogo; Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics), which he published under his own name just before he was arrested. It is considered one of the finest critical works on Dostoyevsky. In the book Bakhtin expressed his belief in a mutual relation between meaning and context involving the author, the work, and the reader, each constantly affecting and influencing the others, and the whole influenced by existing political and social forces. Bakhtin further developed this theory of polyphony, or “dialogics,” in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (1975; The Dialogic Imagination), in which he postulated that, rather than being static, language evolves dynamically and is affected by and affects the culture that produces and uses it. Bakhtin also wrote Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaya kultura srednevekovya i Renessansa (1965; Rabelais and His World).
Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasyevich
▪ Russian author
born May 15 [May 3, Old Style], 1891, Kiev, Ukraine, Russian Empire
died March 10, 1940, Moscow
Soviet playwright, novelist, and short-story writer best known for his humour and penetrating satire.
Beginning his adult life as a doctor, Bulgakov gave up medicine for writing. His first major work was the novel Belaya gvardiya (The White Guard), serialized in 1925 but never published in book form. A realistic and sympathetic portrayal of the motives and behaviour of a group of anti-Bolshevik White officers during the civil war, it was met by a storm of official criticism for its lack of a communist hero. Bulgakov reworked it into a play, Dni Turbinykh (“The Days of the Turbins”), which was staged with great success in 1926 but was subsequently banned. In 1925 he published a book of satirical fantasies, Dyavoliada (“Deviltries”; Diaboliad), implicitly critical of Soviet communist society. This work, too, was officially denounced. In the same year he wrote Sobachye serdtse (Heart of a Dog), a scathing comic satire on pseudoscience.
Because of their realism and humour, Bulgakov's works enjoyed great popularity, but their trenchant criticism of Soviet mores was increasingly unacceptable to the authorities. By 1930 he was, in effect, prohibited from publishing. His plea for permission to emigrate was rejected by Joseph Stalin. During the subsequent period of literary ostracism, which continued until his death, Bulgakov created his masterpieces. In 1932, as literary consultant to the Moscow Art Theatre staff, he wrote a tragedy on the death of Molière, Molière. A revised version was finally staged in 1936 and had a run of seven nights before it was banned because of its thinly disguised attack on Stalin and the Communist Party.
Bulgakov produced two more masterpieces during the 1930s. The first was his unfinished Teatralny roman (Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel, originally titled Zapiski pokoynika [“Notes of a Dead Man”]), an autobiographical novel, which includes a merciless satire on Konstantin Stanislavsky and the backstage life of the Moscow Art Theatre. The second was his dazzling Gogolesque fantasy, Master i Margarita (The Master and Margarita). Witty and ribald, and at the same time a penetrating philosophical novel wrestling with profound and eternal problems of good and evil, it juxtaposes two planes of action—one set in contemporary Moscow and the other in Pontius Pilate's Judea. The central character is the Devil—disguised as Professor Woland—who descends upon Moscow with his purgative pranks that expose the corruption and hypocrisy of the Soviet cultural elite. His counterpart is the “Master,” a repressed novelist who goes into a psychiatric ward for seeking to present the story of Jesus. The work oscillates between grotesque and often ribald scenes of trenchant satiric humour and powerful and moving moments of pathos and tragedy. It was published in the Soviet Union only in 1966–67, and then in an egregiously censored form.