El currículo 2017

Dear Nina Yakovlevna,

I did want to make a contribution to your book along with many others pinned [sic] into your collection. But the more I thought about the proposed preface, the more difficult its realisation seemed. What I want to say about the puppet theatre is too much for a preface and, without keeping to the mould of your book, involuntarily I would begin to hinder the author and to speak to the point. Yet if I am not to speak in this way, I find it difficult to assume a formal tone in relation to the subject, as such, and to the book about it, both of which, as I see it, are indisputable in their own right, without me. The puppet theatre in general and your activity in particular, just like your book, speak for themselves, and they more than suffice to make any external recommenda- tion seem ridiculous. You yourself are quite aware of the success of your puppets, I have no doubts at all about the success of your book - so let us acknowledge that the preface is superfluous.

However, I still wish to make a written response to your book. To this end, therefore, I enclose the following reflection concerning one of your perform- ances. I it to you to do whatever you wish, to publish it at the beginning, middle or end of the book, or not at all. One reservation must be made, however: I wanted to be lavish in expressing my delight, but I'm afraid that my subtle praise has proved too subtle. What if some simple-minded person were to think I was delighted, not by you, but by the little grove of trees in Sergiev Posad. So I hasten to explain to you without any subtlety whatsoever that this entire reflection must be understood allegorically, to wit: that the Efimovs have been able to make use of the pond and the grove in their performance, turning all the spectators into actors, that the original form of Greek tragedy has been realised here, that it's not at all a question of trees, but of the ability to make people look at an enclosed patch of nature as they would a holiday orchestra and that, in short, the Efimovs have succeeded in overcoming the crisis of the theatre towards which our era is heading, and in introducing the theatre into the daily life of ordinary people. I hope this will be clear.

A summer rain was spitting. \Ve began to think that the planned open-air puppet show wouldn't take place. Nevertheless, those who had been invited, including ourselves, pushed their way between the beds of the small kitchen garden. Then we had to climb down to a deep ditch with slippery, clayey sides and cross over it using a pole. But, in fact, it was essential to overcome these difficulties. An abandoned garden with a birch avenue and a little pond had been selected for the performance, situated on a slope and secluded, virtually cut off, from the already isolated Krasiukovskaia Street, cut off from the general life of Sergiev Posad. Children and adults thronged the slope, and in the clusters ofall age groups, from babes in arms to old folk, one felt some sort of festiveness, expectancy, such as happens on the eve of extraordinary days in families with a settled rhythm of domestic habits.

One's cheery excitement - the wine of unexpected freedom - is related to this isolation from normal conditions and living habits. Walking along the streets of an unfamiliar town, being alone with nature or in war - this too is a holiday, when it is recognised as being a qualitatively new and blessed time- all this acts in a similar way. It breaks the fetters of the countless petty cares of everyday and opens the way for the unrestricted lines by which life, even in its naturalistic sluggishness, is transformed into art. And then the deeper forces of our existence, usually overloaded with trivia, and too significant and perhaps just as hostile to the tedium of everyday, declare themselves. Holiday

(prazdnik)comes from the wordprazdnyi,which means 'empty, idle'. And very frequently it is enough to remove the load of usual and trivial everyday things for there to appear the face of prophetic knowledge, suffocated by trivia and the sense of a deep-rooted connection with the world, and a joy in being that verges on the aesthetic. Contrary to what people usually think, as they torment themselves, a holiday doesn't need cares, but rather freedom from them. And this freedom first and foremost is achieved through a strict isola- tion from the workday world. By now all peoples have forgotten about the commandment concerning the sabbath and the impenetrable divisions between sabbath and the other six days have been removed. On the other hand, only the frame, the border, and the immaculate edge can reveal the

distinctivespace ofartistic creativity. This space is idle in the evaluation ofexter- nal space, which is, however, saturated with joy and important meaning and which every working day pulsates with the springs oflife. Out of humaneness we do not stone people for breaking the sacred precinct ofthe sabbath, but out of vapidness we have preferred to replace the stone wall with an uncommit- ting string rope. On the other hand, we have ceased to see the sun, life has

grown dim and dried up and the world has become poisoned with boredom. So we all turned up here in this fenced off space and discovered an isolat- ing frame. It is true that man needs very little to experience thrilling joy. A few dozen trees and a sturdy high fence, together with a ditch and places to cross it, proved an adequate isolation from all kinds of terrors, the weariness of and the countless cares of existence in these difficult times. The Revolution, the ruin of the year1922,the poverty and unreliability of life in all its aspects-

all this remained on the other side of the fence. And when the sky suddenly cleared and the washed sun, descending into evening, lit up the birch trees, the brightly coloured crowd, and a few beautiful scraps of old fabric that the Efimovs had tenderly brought to the puppet theatre from the trunks ofgrand- mothers, a living fairytale lit up in the consciousness like a sunbeam. The puppet booth, the puppets and the children surrounding the theatre, every- thing together was fashioned into a single art form, one that was more than an art form, because apart from the pre-existing intention of the performers there sounded the prophetic voices of the soul, and the mysterious forces of nature crept in. Words, which in other circumstances would probably have gone unnoticed, when spoken in this setting by the puppets acquired an unex- pected weight, and the popular sayings really did sound like the condensed wisdom oflife. Dolls made of rags, pieces of wood and papier came to life as clear as can be and acted independently. They no longer followed the movements of the hand that directed them, but on the contrary they them- selves directed the hand, they had their own desires and tastes, and it became perfectly obvious that in a certain setting special forces were acting through them. This performance started out as a game, but later on it grew into the very core oflife and verged on either magic or mystery.

Of course, the puppeteers, who bear a crusading responsibility and are carried away by the whirlwind of the action, have no time to think about what is happening, and it would be a hindrance to split themselves in two, in order to compare their puppet consciousness with their usual one. But as the pres- ent book shows, even they recognise the puppets as 'wanting' or 'not wanting' this or that, as 'approving' or 'disapproving' the setting in which they have turned up. As for the spectators, or more precisely the co-participants in this puppet ritual, for them it is even more patently evident that the puppet theatre is something incomparably greater than the plus the puppets, that in this ritual some third element takes part, and this third is the thing for which theatre itself exists.

up of spectators, the puppeteers raise higher still the potential of mysterious forces acting within them, through a second isolation, their own puppet booth. And finally, in clothing their hand with the persona of the puppet and permitting the reason oftheir hand to take on an independent face, they liber- ate it [the reason of the hand] from its subservience to intellectual reason, which conversely becomes a subservient organ of manual [reason]. Thrice removed from the external world by three successive degrees of isolation, the hand becomes a body, a transmitter and organ for the influence offorces other than those that are known in our everyday consciousness. In the puppet theatre there appear the principal devices of imitative magic, which always begins with play, with imitating, with teasing, to make way later for the other forces that have thus been attracted, which accept the challenge and fill the receptacle that has been offered them.

No one, of course, is taken in by the illusion. The puppet theatre has the great virtue ofnot being illusionistic. But while they are not 'like the real thing' and make no claim to appear so, the puppets do in fact bring to life a new real- ity.Itenters into the space it has liberated and the holiday frame of life. The choir of spectators is united by the puppet and the choir itself nurtures it, via the puppeteer, with its own profound emotions, which have no place in the everyday world. Most profound and cherished for us is our childhood, which lives in us, but is tightly screened off from us. We have forgotten about it, about this primordial proximitytoall existence, when we still nestled close to the life of nature. We have forgotten it, but it continues to live in us and it declares itself unexpectedly at certain times.

So, American psychology has elucidated well enough that the psycholog- ical process of religious conversion is nothing less than a return to childhood, the surfacing of the most profound strata of the personality that have formed during the very early years. 'If you don't convert yourself (Le., do not overturn your personality) and do not become as children (i.e., not just children in general, but precisely as the children you once were), then you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.'5 Indeed the Kingdom of Heaven is 'peace and joy through the action of the Holy Spirit'.6

So, the spiritual harmony, which is suddenly revealed in religious conver- sion, lives in those same layers of the personality that the puppet awakens in us. The puppet theatre is the hearth that is nourished by the childhood submerged within us and which in turn awakens within us the slumbering palace of the childhood fairytale.

Once united in this 'paradise', now we are divided from one another,

because this 'paradise' has become hidden from the eye. But through the puppet theatre we see once more this lost Eden, even if only dimly, and so we embark upon an intercourse with one another in what, like a secret, we cher- ish most, what each of us guards within ourselves - and guards not just from others, but from ourselves too. Shining in the rays of the setting sun, the theatre opens like a window onto an eternally living childhood.