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The Director’s Prism: E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde

The Director’s Prism is a work — at once multilayered and highly focused — about making theatre and making meaning. Its subject is the shared poetics of Russia’s Silver Age and early Sovietera theatrical avantgarde. Dassia Posner’s project is to explore that poetics by examining the work of three directors, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein, “each of whom deeply mined the colliding perceptual planes of the fantastical tales of the German romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann in their quests to develop theatre that embraced the plural, the simultaneous, and the polyphonic” (xx). In as much as Hoffmann’s work, in turn, mined the poetics of Carlo Gozzi and the artist Jacques Callot (above all his renderings of commedia, both staged and imagined), the book is secondarily concerned with the rich intersection of aesthetic forces at play in the Russian theatrical avantgarde between 1910 (the year of Meyerhold’s Columbine’s Garter) and 1926 (his Revizor): commedia (both traditional and modernist), romanticism, the grotesque, and the fantastic. In teasing out these particular strands from the complex poetics of the Russian avantgarde, Posner seeks to elucidate the architecture of theatrical montage — as a mode of dramaturgical construction and as an approach to the collaborative production of meaning in interaction with an audience.