Platón

1920 · ref. R5163 — Peterburg: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo State Publishers 1920. Fourth edition. Hardcover. Fine. Later black cloth preserving the original illustrated wraps; pp. 156 with illustrations by Vidberg. "Within the discursive world created by the Soviet mass spectacles the event announces itself as new by virtue of its shift from the individual to the mass and the instigation of a collective subject as both the subject and object of the drama. In this way it distinguishes itself from the old 'pre-modern' society. More specifically it took the pre-revolutionary Symbolist utopias of 'ritual theatre' whose formulation was largely a response to the abortive 1905 revolution and recast their 'people' as the proletariat" Kleberg 1980 44-64. Platon Kerzhentsev's THE CREATIVE THEATRE was the most influential formulation in this direction -- his book was in its fourth edition by 1920. The October revolution had he claimed provided the social base for the realization of the ritual community valorized by the Symbolists; by the time of the fourth edition he was able to claim that "much of what seemed a utopia two years ago now appears to be on the way to becoming reality" Kleberg 1980 62. "This claim was based on the explosion of mass spectacles that had occurred in the intervening years" Smith "Meyerhold Mass Theatre and Fascism". The theory for Soviet mass spectacles. Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo [State Publishers] hardcover books