Vygotsky,the theater critic

The new theater

This was not an easy task because after the October Revolution in 1917, Russian theatrical life came to an almost complete stop. Part of the traditional audience had disappeared and theaters were ransacked by persons in search of cloth and other useful things. Those groups who chose to keep their theater open faced immense difficulties. Theaters were not heated, inflation was high, the new audience was not used to traditional plays, and actors were given ration cards as pay. Within a few years, however, things got somewhat better and in 1922, when Vygotsky published his theatrical reviews in Gomel, Moscow had already 46 officially registered theaters and studios (Orlovsky, 1954). Several of these theaters (e.g. the Moscow Art Theater, the Maly Theater, the Kamerny Theater) and their directors (e.g. Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Tairov, Vakhtangov) became justifiably world-famous and this part of Russian theatrical history has been described in much detail (Braun, 1995; Leach and Borovsky, 1999; Malaev-Babel, 2013; Roose-Evans, 1989). Most famous, perhaps, was the Moscow Art Theater (MAT), founded by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1898. The MAT survived the October Revolution and initially even enjoyed some protection by Lenin. Writers such as Bulgakov and Babel and, before the October Revolution, Chekhov wrote plays for the MAT and Stanislavsky’s method acting approach was copied all over the world. As a student, Vygotsky was a frequent visitor to the MAT and the Kamerny Theater (Vygodskaya and Lifanova, 1996) and on the final pages of his Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky used Stanislavky’s analysis of a dialogue in Griboedov’s play Woe from Wit to illustrate the hidden thoughts and motives behind spoken words (Vygotsky, 1934). In the years following the October Revolution, the authorities gradually tried to bring the theaters under their control and plays that focused on social exploitation of the working masses and class struggle became fashionable. Even the mediocre plays by Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment, were staged at some point but without much success (cf. Vygotsky, 1923d).

The critic

It was during this period of searching for a new acceptable repertoire, of experimenting with styles, of finding a new audience, that Vygotsky wrote his reviews for the local Gomel newspaper Nash Ponedel’nik [Our Monday] and the regional newspaper Polesskaya Pravda [The Polessky Truth]. By far the largest number of them were reviews of plays but he also discussed classic ballet (Vygotsky, 1922a), a poetry night (Vygotsky, 1922b, 1922c) and operettas (Vygotsky, 1922d), and published an interview with the director of a travelling company (Vygotsky, 1923c). Vygotsky’s comments on the poetry night are of some interest as he in no mean terms condemned the proletarian culture [proletkult] movement supported by Lunacharsky and others. Vygotsky’s viewpoint was that ‘if you take a kerosene lamp of the brand USSR and an electric one of an imperialistic factory, then the electric one, notwithstanding the brand, is more revolutionary and closer to October’. In other words, proletkult leads to second-rate poetry and Pasternak and Mandelstam were ‘more leftist’ than the proletarian poets Kazin and Alexandrovsky, ‘despite their origin’ (Vygotsky, 1922b: 4). Given the names of Pasternak and Mandelstam – and an additional positive remark about the poetry of Akhmatova – it seems clear that such terms as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘leftist’ were synonymous with ‘excellent’ and that Vygotsky preferred good poetry to proletarian doggerel.

The problem of finding – or raising – a new theater audience, now that part of the older intelligentsia had left, also becomes apparent in several of Vygotsky’s reviews. In his review of a guest performance by the famous classic ballerina Ekaterina Gel’tser, he remarked that ‘classic dance is difficult and unpopular’ and that it needs clarification, because there are ‘widespread prejudices between ballet and the new audience’ (Vygotsky, 1922a: 4). In a similar spirit, he reproached a speaker for the use of foreign words while talking to a totally unprepared audience (Vygotsky, 1922c). These remarks clearly reflected the tensions and conflicts created by the fact that people from a very different cultural background now began visiting theaters and displayed behavior (shouting, interrupting the performance) that was seen as totally inappropriate by the older cultural elite.

As a theater critic Vygotsky was quite demanding and did not avoid sharp criticism of the actors, the mise-en-scène, the play and the directors. Given that he personally knew the local actors and himself contracted the companies that visited Gomel, the writing of these reviews must have been a delicate process at times. One thing that he required from the actors was that their play showed an inner dynamic or development as the drama unfolded. Just as a game of chess has an opening, a midgame and an endgame that require different skills in the player, a theatrical performance has various acts, during which the actor cannot play in exactly the same manner (Vygotsky, 1922a, 1922h). Vygotsky also frequently observed that actors were miscast. About the actor Kaminsky he remarked, for example, that

… the troupe makes the systematic mistake of giving Kaminsky the leading roles – from lovers to strong-willed and dramatic figures. In these roles the little-experienced actor ruins both himself and the role. It is sad to see his helplessness. And this, by the way, in almost every performance. Both might the actor find himself work in the troupe that he is up to and the troupe might find suitable performers for each of these roles. (Vygotsky, 1923c: 3)

Yiddish theater

This brings us to Vygotsky’s reviews of the Yiddish theater of that time (cf. Kotik-Friedgut and Friedgut, 2008). Professional Yiddish theater was born in Rumania in 1876 with the founding of Abraham Goldfaden’s troupe. Other groups soon followed and Yiddish theater became very popular in central Europe and, later, in western Europe and North and South America. Initially the repertoire consisted of lighter vaudevilles and comedies accompanied by music, song and dance but gradually a more serious repertoire evolved. Among the plays that became classic are Uriel Costa (by Gutzkow), Bar Kokhba (Goldfaden), A Mensch Zol Men Zeyn (Schorr) and The Dybbuk (Ansky), all of which were seen and reviewed by Vygotsky. Most of the early groups formed travelling companies which did both outdoor and indoor performances and Goldfaden, for example, toured Imperial Russia, settled for some time in Odessa and Lvov, and eventually moved to New York, where the thousands of Jewish immigrants formed an enthusiastic new audience. In the early 1920s, when Vygotsky wrote his reviews, Poland had become another major center of Yiddish theatrical activity. Gomel, with its large Jewish population, was a city where Yiddish plays were also well received, of course. There are several documents that show that Vygotsky was involved in the reorganization of the local Jewish theater in 1921, but here much still needs to be clarified. What is beyond doubt is that Vygotsky was thoroughly acquainted with the Yiddish repertoire and playwrights. He wrote with authority about the Jewish playwrights Asch, Ansky, Goldfaden, Gordin and Schorr and obviously had strong opinions about the merits of their plays and how these should be played. In fact, this was true for Vygotsky’s reviews in general: he did not avoid apodictic statements (e.g. ‘Schiller is about theater of deep emotions’ [Vygotsky, 1922f]; ‘talentless vituperation’ by Gippius [Vygotsky, 1922b]) about the merits of playwrights, plays and theatrical innovations. Thus, this 26-year-old young man must have seemed a real authority to his contemporary readers.

From theater and art to psychology

Vygotsky must have wondered continually what makes an actor into a good actor. This is an intricate problem but in several of his reviews Vygotsky made comments relevant to its solution. When talking about flying, for example, actors should not make flying movements with the arm (see above). When talking about a sad event it may be advisable to speak in a happy voice, or vice versa, as the conflict between the content of the message and the way of speaking creates emotional tension in the onlooker.

The issue of quality in acting is similar to that of quality in writing. Throughout his conscious life Vygotsky was an avid reader of novels and poetry and many times he must have thought about the difference between mediocre and good writing. His Master’s thesis at Shanyavsky University was an analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Written in 1916, it was an entirely subjective analysis written from the viewpoint that readers are authors who are free to create their own interpretation of plays, novels and poems. In the years that followed Vygotsky changed his views – after the October Revolution anything that reeked of subjective or spiritual matters became suspect – and again tried to explain the effect of art in terms of the artist’s technique.

Different factors may have played a role in that change. From 1919 Vygotsky was teaching literature to an ill-educated public at various schools and evening courses and inevitably the issue of the difference between good and bad writing would arise. From 1921 he also taught at the teacher training college (see above) and increasingly became involved with matters of didactics and psychology. At that college in 1922 and 1923 – and continued at Moscow University in 1924 – he even conducted little experiments that formed the very opposite of his earlier subjective views (Vygotsky, 1926). Hypothesizing that breathing is connected to emotional and aesthetic experience, he tested whether the reading of different texts evoked different breathing patterns. The results confirmed his expectations and Vygotsky suggested that the (silent) reading of Dostoevsky evokes another breathing pattern than the reading of Chekhov and that skilled authors can create special aesthetic effects by playing with the rhythm of the text and its content.

In 1925 Vygotsky submitted The Psychology of Art as his doctoral dissertation (Vygotsky, 1986[1925]). In that thesis he made use of several of his previous literary reviews and returned to the analysis of Hamlet. However, unlike before, he now resisted subjectivism in literary reviews. His new position was that to understand the aesthetic effects of a work of art we must first of all understand the artist’s technique, the subtle interplay between form and content that creates emotional conflicts and tensions in the recipient (Van der Veer, 2007a: 39). It is not content as such that determines the recipient’s aesthetic reaction, nor is it the style or form as such. Crucial is the artificially created conflict between form and content, perhaps induced by a paradoxical rhythm of writing (Vygotsky, 1986[1925]: 203). Crucial is that the readers or audience will feel contradictory emotions that are ultimately resolved in a new feeling. This was the conclusion Vygotsky reached in his analysis of three forms of art, notably the fable, the short story and the tragedy (see Valsiner’s article in this issue).

From the psychology of art to general psychology

Vygotsky’s interest in art and theater never faded but from 1924 he primarily published about psychological matters. It is easy to see how Vygotsky’s reviews of literature and theater performances contributed to his writing of The Psychology of Art. Also, his academic publications are replete with examples taken from novels, poems and plays. But it is more difficult to show how his literary work may have sensitized him to specific psychological problems. I will suggest just a few, admittedly speculative, links. By 1927, Vygotsky developed his theory of the higher mental functions. Alfred Binet, psychologist, actor and playwright, had suggested that memory artists simulate an excellent memory but do not actually have it. Rather, they rely on memory techniques that form part of our culture (Binet, 1894). Vygotsky gave that idea a curious twist by claiming that human mental development exactly consists in the mastering of such cultural tools. Memory that relies on culturally acquired techniques is genuine, human memory. Of course, actors as well use conventional gestures, facial expressions and body postures to simulate moods and emotions. Can we, by analogy, conclude that actors who make use of these cultural tools actually feel the corresponding emotions? Some approaches to acting (e.g. Stanislavsky’s method acting) would seem to suggest it. Can we go one step further by suggesting that children learn the means of expressing emotions of their culture going, perhaps, through a stage of vaudeville expression (crying, shouting) to the more refined expression of serious drama? In a manuscript on emotions written in the early 1930s (cf. Van der Veer and Valsiner, 1991), Vygotsky suggested something like that, writing that our emotions become more controlled and refined as we grow older.

Such examples show that, with hindsight, it is possible to see in Vygotsky’s work as a theater critic the overture for his later psychological writings. Retrospectively, it is easy to see certain parallels between his early and later writings and to claim that Vygotsky the psychologist profited from this early work. I certainly do believe that. However, we should be cautious in our claims. Scientific development does not always proceed along the shortest path and with Baldwin we can say that a truly developmental series of events ‘cannot be constructed before it has happened, and … cannot be exhausted backwards, after it has happened’ (quoted in Van der Veer, 2007b: 49). In other words, although Vygotsky’s scientific development certainly received inputs from his work as a theater critic, this early work cannot fully predict or explain that later development.

Conclusion

The Gomel period in Vygotsky’s career remains under-researched, although it is clear that Vygotsky was an active participant in the new regime’s attempts to reform the social and cultural life in the country. In this article I have reviewed his theater reviews from 1922 and 1923 and paid some attention to his later psychological investigations. With Nabokov (1980), Vygotsky seems to have abhorred poshlost’ [vulgarity], clichés and routines in plays. The reviews show Vygotsky to have been a knowledgeable and demanding critic eager to lift the level of the local theater. It is likely that his work as a theater critic stirred Vygotsky’s interest in the creation of aesthetic reactions, a topic that was central in his doctoral dissertation. The analysis of the problem of aesthetic reaction and the ample reading of the psychological literature in that context may have paved the way for Vygotsky’s later psychological writings.