ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
Re-enactment of the Storming of the Winter Palace, 1920. View of the ‘Reds’.
At the same time, as Susan Buck- Morss notes, mass theatre not only staged
revolution, it staged the staging of revolution: the performance was potentially
politically precarious, since it recreated the conditions for
revolutionary overthrow. 70
Although Evreinov was something of a classicist, not known for his
experimental approach to productions, he had published several books on
theatre, including the three- volume Theatre for Oneself (1915– 17), in which
he called for the end of theatre on stage and its realisation in everyday life.
Under the slogan ‘Let every minute of our life be theatre’, he encouraged
people to become the actors and playwrights of their own lives. 71 This chimed
with the Bolshevik ambition to ‘theatricalise life’, in other words, to evolve
with scenic means a form of environmental propaganda that exceeded what
might be attainable within proscenium theatre. Through the size and scale of
the re- enactment, a performance could become greater than reality. One of
its goals was to work on popular memory: mass spectacle’s ‘theatricalisation
of life’ sought to turn historic events of the recent past into ‘lived memory’,
continually re- activated, in order to maintain the euphoria of revolutionary
promise while consolidating an origin myth in which the masses make their
own history and announce solidarity with the world proletariat. Taken as a
whole, the four mass spectacles in St Petersburg formed a genealogy of the
Russian Revolution through a two- line family tree:
60