The Monodramatized October Revolution

The Analysis of Evreinov’s Direction of The Storming of the Winter Palace

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the mass spectacle The Storming of the Winter Palace in 1920, staged at the very site where the October Revolution took place, and the theatrical ideas of the director Nikolai Evreinov. After the revolution, participatory festivals were organized in Petrograd to celebrate revolutionary anniversaries, within which large-scale mass spectacles were staged. Among these spectacles, the most spectacular was The Storming of the Winter Palace, involving about 10,000 performers and reenacting the historical event of the October Revolution in front of about 100,000 audience. These spectacles served as Bolshevik propaganda; at the same time, artists were involved in staging them as part of their own artistic exploration. Evreinov was also interested in realizing his theatrical ideas through the mass spectacle that he staged. Before the revolution, Evreinov had developed a conception of theatre that conceived of life itself as theatre. He argued that humans possess a “theatrical instinct” that enables them to transform both the self and the external world in order to improve their lives, and he called this transforming process the “theatricalization of life.” This conception of theatre is reflected in the staging of The Storming of the Winter Palace. Previous studies have already pointed out the relationship between The Storming of the Winter Palace and the “theatricalization of life,” but from this perspective, the staging has not yet been analyzed in detail. Thus, this paper clarifies the theoretical relationship between them based on detailed analyses of the staging of this spectacle. In particular, it focuses on the theatrical theory of the “monodrama,” which Evreinov developed in 1909 as a practical method of stage direction. The idea of “monodrama” is a method of presenting everything on stage from the subjective perspective of a particular character’s consciousness. In monodrama, all elements on the stage are changed following the particular consciousness. Evreinov argued that audiences would be able to feel as if they became the character himself through the monodrama’s presentation. This structure of this idea underlies the staging of The Storming of The Winter Palace. Furthermore, this study reveals the possibility that the monodramatic structure of the staging of The Storming of the Winter Palace could lead audiences toward the “theatricalization of life.”