Farce as Tragedy

Elizabeth Kiem
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

Kirill Serebrennikov in the Theatre of High Putinism

Cover Photo, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Facebook

In June I took my kid to Moscow for the first time. He’s eighteen years old, well-informed and fair-travelled, a cultural relativist and the son of lifelong Russophiles. I wanted him to get a sense of life in a high-functioning authoritarian state, where political repression exists alongside cultural expression and where art, entrepreneurship and entertainment sidle up against hypocrisy in ways that are sometimes more seductive than sinister.

So we stayed on Tverskaya, ate on Patriarchs’ Pond, took in a show at the Gogol Center. Checking into the hotel I said, “there were sandbags outside yesterday.” Over borsht I said, “the black marias pulled up on Bronnaya.” And at the theatre, when Kirill Serebrennikov joined the cast of Dead Souls for a standing ovation, I whispered to my son, “Now, they’re after him.”

I was reminding him (and myself) what it looks like, the modern police state of Moscow. It looks like Paris, London, Brooklyn and Berlin: hip and organic; deluxe and garish. But it also looks like Moscow at the crest of one of the 20th century’s most terrible waves of repression. In fact, the “Russia Day” celebrations that lined Tversakya the day before we arrived had starred re-enactors dressed in the garb of all of the different eras of the national history — including, apparently, that of the Terror of Stalinism.

Anyone for a midnight roundup? (Instagram)

Joining the re-enactors of Russian glory from Ancient Rus to the Great Patriotic War were some real-time representatives from the Era of High Putinism. Thousands of protestors also convened on Tverskaya on June 12, dressed as global citizens and carrying signs of protest against the corruption and “thievery” that has become the signature epithet of today’s Kremlin.

The protesters were my son’s age. Some of them clashed with the boyars and bogatyrs just outside of the Ritz Carlton. About 800 were arrested.

AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko

It was all quiet on Tverskaya 24 hours later as we set out to explore old haunts. My son had just read Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and so we went north, to where Woland first made his appearance and Berlioz lost his head. We talked about artistic repression under Stalin, which waxed and waned in an apparently deliberate game of mixed messages. Shostakovich and Bulgakov were two favorite targets of the regime’s vicissitudes. Vsevolod Meyerhold was an outright victim. The avant-garde productions of his theatre, the authorities said, were antagonistic to the Soviet People. He was shot by a firing squad in 1940.

And so to the Gogol Center, Moscow’s most celebrated new theatre, run by Kirill Serebrennikov, the Meyerhold of his time. To be honest, I had failed to notice the rise of Serebrennikov, who at 47 is a controversial critical darling, an outspoken LGBT activist, and an experimental producer who doesn’t shy from sexual or political edges. He only came to my attention in May, when special forces raided his theatre, detained the staff and started leveling charges of fraud. Because Putin’s “fraud” is Stalin’s “antagonistic.”

When we arrived at the Gogol Centre in June, the scene was festive, summery. We milled about among progressive, bookish, experimental young Muscovites in ironic t-shirts and artisinal scents. We could have been anywhere cosmopolitan and crowd-sourced, keen on design and doing-good, skilled at marketing, engaging and educating. We applauded the over-long production of “Dead Souls,” and afterwards discussed Gogol’s intent, rather than Serebrennikov’s fate.

A scene from Serebrennikov’s “Dead Souls” ©Gogol Center

One week after we returned from Moscow, The Bolshoi Theatre abrubtly (and perhaps unprecedently) cancelled a premier. The new ballet, said a spokesperson of the theatre, was not ready.

It was lost on no one that the subject of the new ballet, the defecting dancer Rudolf Nureyev, was likely to run afoul of the Kremlin’s infamous ban on “homosexual propaganda.” It was equally clear that ballet’s celebrated director, Kirill Serebrennikov, was not one to be constrained by the country’s conservative homophobic tastes.

The story now enters a critical new chapter. Serebrennikov has been arrested and charged with embezzlement. The evidence against him is predictably farcical, ensuring that any judicial outcome will be the calculated result of a show trial. Artists inside and outside Russia have joined in supporting the embattled director. But there have been dissenters as well — high-profile members of a cultural/political elite who dismiss the suggestion that the case against Serebrennikov is politically motivated.

While in Moscow, I re-read Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, written in 1926, some years before the cultural crackdown on avant-garde art took its most murderous form. Benjamin spent a month in Moscow, criss-crossing the city on thin ice, searching for tickets to Meyerhold’s much discussed production of The Inspector General. The show, apparently, raised numerous controversies, many of them artistic, but some hinting at ideological sins: “The major point of contention is his [Meyerhold’s] use of velvet and silk, fourteen costumes for his wife; the performance, moreover, lasts five and a half hours.”

The Inspector General. Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Among the souvenirs my son brought home from Russia were a handful of postcards featuring the portraits of movie stars from the 1950s. He knew none of them; I could name a few. They were actors whose careers blossomed in the so-called Thaw that followed Stalin’s death, but a bit of research would probably reveal the risks inherent to being a creative in a regime devoid of creativity when it comes to policing the stage.

I have been looking at them, artists frozen in time and place. Actors who may have escaped political persecution but who are also lost to history. No Meyerholds, they … just beloved. And I wonder, will my son remember Serebrennikov? Will he remember the dog-mask worn by Chichikov in a loincloth?

Will I?

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Elizabeth Kiem

Written by

Work in progress. dancerdaughter.com

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