Review of the exhibition “The Judgment of Paris. The Birth of the Goddess” at the festival “Diaghilev PS”

The central event of the Diaghilev PS festival was the exhibition “The Judgment of Paris. The Birth of a Goddess”, presented by the St. Petersburg Theater Museum in the wing of the Sheremetev Palace. The way the exhibition shows the life and fate of theatrical goddesses of pre-revolutionary and Stalinist times was amazing Tatyana Kuznetsova.

The name, in St. Petersburg palace style, does not hint in any way at the dramatic content of the exhibition. Although, of course, there is plenty of splendor here. Engravings, photographs, posters, portraits of beautiful ladies from two centuries cover the walls of four small halls. Earthly goddesses were painted by outstanding, major and completely unknown artists: the number of their adherents could number in the millions, like that of the pig farmer Glasha – Marina Ladynina, but it could also be limited to a single one, like that of the “Duncanist” Elena Galperina, who was immortalized by her first husband Yuri Annenkov. Among the host of fatal beauties, unearthly maidens and charming beauties, any Paris would have lost his head.

Paris, however, is a collective creature here. Not even a creature – an image of an era that chooses its idols. Epochs are represented by the polyphony of opinions of people who lived at a particular time. The polemics of real people (from their diaries, personal letters, newspaper clippings, directives) are placed next to the exhibits in the form of a network chat with “icons” of the disputants. And the first blissful hall with all its picturesque abundance turns out to be only a prologue to the dramatic fights that take place in the remaining halls between the great contemporaries who have become icons of their time.

The second hall is given to Maria Savina and Vera Komissarzhevskaya, two antipodean actresses – a stronghold of stability and an eternal rebel, who played together for some time at the Alexandrinka Theater. Their characters and general situation are summed up in a nutshell by “chat”. Writer Sofya Smirnova-Sazonova, wife of actor Alexandrinka Nikolai Sazonov: “Komissarzhevskaya’s benefit performance went off with a bang and brilliance. When she first came out, a howl arose in paradise, just like an animal howl. They waved scarves from the upper tiers”. Savina: “My audience doesn’t wave their laundry.” Komissarzhevskaya: “There are no roles. Savina plays all the roles.” There is little painting in this room; photographs of heroines in iconic roles predominate. Among Savina’s masterful transformations and Komissarzhevskaya’s constant inspiration, the miraculously taken photo of Vera Fedorovna’s dress racks (600 of the actress’s toilets were burned after her sudden death from smallpox) and the flood of people that spilled on the St. Petersburg street around the actress’s coffin were not lost. But most vividly, the irreconcilability of positions and the intensity of public confrontation are reflected in the “chat” of the rulers of the thoughts of the era (from Leo Tolstoy, who with some timidity conveyed his “too crude” “The Power of Darkness” to Savina, to Pobedonostsev, who was struck by the play: “What a denial of the ideal, what a humiliation of moral feeling, what an insult to taste…”), interrupting each other with a stream of caustic, bitter, enthusiastic, angry and derogatory remarks.

The heroines of the third hall, Alisa Koonen and Zinaida Reich, goddesses of their brilliant husbands, do not seem to notice each other: in the “chat rooms” of each there is no mention of their rival. But they are not rivals, each has its own country: the theaters of Tairov and Meyerhold seem to exist at different poles. And the goddesses are contrasting: the exquisite Koonen, who retains a flair of decadence even in the image of the red Commissioner (here Alexandra Ekster’s expressive sketches compete with photographs of the actress), and the spicy beauty Reich – the embodiment of the sensuality of the 1920s, whom her husband, who adored her, stripped down to her underwear right on stage, multiplying four Gogol disguises of the mayor Anna Andreevna. There are two male portraits competing here: Meyerhold with his flowing mane and piercing gaze by Alice Poret, and Alfred Eberling’s eerily cozy Stalin, in a protective jacket against the backdrop of world-art turquoise shading. But “Man of the Crowd” dominates – the faceless swarming mass from Yakulov’s painting received its own replicas in chats (“They say that Mikhail Bulgakov, after Meyerhold’s performance, sat down to write a film script for The Government Inspector. In the foreground he has both unbridled passion and eternal femininity.”). In the same feed, people of art – from Pasternak to Shklovsky – argue heatedly about productions, acting, and the newsmakers themselves. And they are frightened by the curses of Soviet newspapers, rejoice at foreign triumphs and suicidally return to their homeland (violinist Yuri Elagin: “My attempts to persuade Meyerhold to stay in Europe evoked heated protest from Reich. When I painted a picture of his possible death in front of him, she called me a traitor and, with her characteristic inner strength, or better yet, fanaticism, began to influence Meyerhold.”). Meanwhile, Stalin had already decided the fate of the “cunning Meyerhold,” and Zinaida Reich wrote to him in vain, hiding her fear behind female coquetry: “Dear Joseph Vissarionovich! I have planned a date with you on May 5th, if you can. I will now write to Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov about the organization of this meeting.”. She would be stabbed to death in her own apartment four weeks after Meyerhold’s arrest. And the artist Lyubov Shaporina will draw a line under the chatter: “Middle Ages. And so we, poor people of the 20th century, are forced all the time not to scream in horror, but to pretend that we don’t see or hear.”.

The last room is dominated by posters – posters of famous Soviet comedies with stars Lyubov Orlova and Marina Ladynina. Eisenstein gave their creators (both comedies and the stars themselves) a damning description in the “chat”: “At the end of 1921, two front-line soldiers came to take an exam for the troupe of the First Workers’ Theater of Proletkult. Two friends. Both are from Sverdlovsk. Both are in overcoats and with backpacks on their backs. One is blue-eyed, suave and sweet. Balanced flawlessly on the wire. The other is rude and unapologetic, prone to fist fights. Their names were Grigory Alexandrov and Ivan Pyryev”.

The local heroines – multiple winners of Stalin Prizes – are silent. Only once Marina Ladynina, a peasant by birth and Stanislavsky’s favorite young actress (“In her I see the future of the Moscow Art Theater”), who left the theater for Pyryev, broke down: “Ivan, go to hell with this role from me!.. Against the backdrop of Zamoskvoretsky bridges and Minin and Pozharsky, take off your butt in quilted pants and take another one. Anyone will be happy. I’ve had enough. We need to think about the soul“). Forever frightened by the revolution, the noblewoman Lyubov Orlova only sparingly reports the details of her retouched biography, the names of the film crew of the next film and meetings with the happy heroines of labor; the screenwriters of “Jolly Fellows” Nikolai Erdman and Vladimir Mass, sent to the camp, as well as the shot cameraman Vladimir Nielsen, seemed to have never existed.

In this hall, Soviet happiness is created personally by Comrade Stalin, who watches films, comes up with titles for them, and edits scripts and characters. But although his instructions dominate in the wall “chat”, they are outweighed by the voice of the destroyed intelligentsia, lost in the feed – the voice of Shaporina: “Nausea rises in my throat when I hear calm stories: one was shot, the other was shot, shot, shot. This word is always in the air. People pronounce these words quite calmly, as if they would say “I’m going to the theater.”“