Authors

Discussion

From a cultural-historical perspective, the First World War as well as the Russian Revolution were not only considered a "shock" to Europe, but activated interest in the epoch that reacted with its artistic means to the traumatic experience of the Thirty Years' War – the Baroque. Literary scholars trace the interest in the Baroque in the culture of early 20th century modernism. Viktor Shklovsky for example classified Meyerhold, along with Eisenstein and Mayakovsky, as "baroque men". The style of Meyerhold is based on the 'fragmentary', rather than on consistency. According to Shklovsky, Meyerhold’s theatrical language is characterized by the techniques of convexity and protrusion (Baroque terms). The Baroque style, which emerged from a sense of uncertainty and instability, was close to Meyerhold's world view and his crisis perception of the Soviet reality of the 1920s and 1930s. His attempt to show through theatrical language the absence of truth is particularly evident in his reflections on the figure of the impostor. Meyerhold creates the image of the impostor in two productions Revizor (1926) and Boris Godunov (1924-1925; 1934-1937) and thus places Gogol's text in the genre of tragicomedy. My thesis, then, is that Meyerhold postulates a new reading of Gogol in terms of a baroque tragicomedy, centred on the figure of an adventurer or 'hanswurst' – a typical figure for theatrical performances of the baroque travelling stage – in tragic circumstances.