Ilia Outekhine

I am going to speak here about some ideas of a man whose name is known mainly by historians of theatre. His heritage has not been appreciated but by some theorists of theatre. I believe, however, that when the specialists on semiotics get acquainted with his ideas, they would like to place him in their pantheon, in spite of rather unscientific character of his writings.

Nikolai Evreinov lived in the first half of our century and was taking an active part in theatrical life of pre-revolutionary St.Petersburg and in ardent aesthetical discussions of that time. Along with his playwriting and stage directing activities, he worked on historical and theoretical treatises. Within the scope of his studies you can find topics as various as the origin and history of theatre, the history of corporal punishments, animal behaviour and psychology, psychotherapy and what we would call today "the semiotics of everyday behaviour", which is just what will be discussed further.

The notion of theatre is everywhere used by Evreinov as a powerful metaphore: he tries to understand behaviour in terms of theatre. True theatre with stage and coulisses is regarded as extreme and ultimate expression of a more general law concerning human behaviour and perception.

On stage, the realism of what is presented is very different from reality of life: not a real object or a real action, but an image of this object or action is needed in theatre. The things that are too real often appear useless on stage, as they are not impressive. Thus, discussing the power of simulacra, recent postmodernist philosophers often mentioned the case of a movie episode, containing violent fighting when the head was to be cut to one of the fighters. While shooting this episode, a tragic accident occured and the actor was actually decapitated. This accident was shot, but not included in the film because of lack of convincing realism. In arts, the true is less convincing that the false and artificial.

To be impressive, the presentation of life on stage or on the screen requires a special transformation of life. In result, a huge cardboard sword can seem more appropriate on stage than a true sword. So, the truth of life - in scenery and in the behavior - has no appearance of truth.

But is there any truth of life without theatrical transformation? That is a question. Evreinov subjects the notions of truth and illusion to a careful analysis in what concerns spontaneous, unaffected behaviour. He claims that there is no fundamental difference between pretended behaviour, as in a pretended play, and natural sincere behaviour.

One of Evreinov's aphorisms even sounds somewhat shocking and provocative. Evreinov says that sincerity is of no value in human relations, it is just a fruit of laziness. When one tries to be sincere, or is longing for frankness and for openess, it means that he has not enough fantasy to do something more interesting, that he does not make an effort to present himself before other people in a more conscious and significant way. That is, he argues that unaffectedness, naturalness and spontaneity, often regarded as a virtue distinctive of a well educated man, make one's behaviour plain and uninteresting, lacking of individuality, creativity and self-expression.

This claim is a part of an original theory, where behaviour is treated as a set of roles accepted in a given culture. In fact, since all our behavioural acts have a definite cultural form, no behaviour can be absolutely natural. All behaviour is cultural in a sense. Cultural anthropology testifies that even the most natural acts such as eating, walking, or sexual intercourse - not to say about more complicated actions - are performed differently in different cultures, in spite of their biological background common to all human beings.

Culturally accepted forms of behaviour are translated from generation to generation and are acquired through learning, in the interaction with other members of community. That is why what is regarded as natural and unaffected varies across cultures, social groups and situations. When adult people ask children to stop clowning around, it means that the children are asked to perform a role. And this role is difficult to learn: it is not easy to behave "naturally", as it involves mastering of certain norms of naturalness. Until these norms have been mastered, children's behaviour is liable to be interpreted by adults as clownery, for children are always playing, all the time trying this or that role in a continuous pretended play of life.

Life of humans by no means can be reduced to simpliest and most efficient ways of satisfying basic needs. Cultural norms reglamenting behaviour often give to human actions a form which is very far from being the most efficient from practical point of view. Evreinov argues that this necessity of giving cultural form to pragmatic needs has its roots in a ubiquous and all-embracing "will to transform", or instinctive " theatre drive ". Primitive man, as well as man in advanced cultures ,transforms all his deeds - birth of a child, education, hunting, marriage, war, justice and punishment, religious worship, funeral - into a theatrical show. Ritualization of behaviour is the way to organize the world through culturally accepted patterns. The strange and unknown world thus becomes close and manageable.

Theatre drive brings about this all-penetrating cultural reglamentation concerning not only acts of behaviour, but also artefacts, for every thing around us has its definite style, and its form and place are not accidental. According to Evreinov, human condition implies a theatricality. The theatricality has two facets: norm and play. Play is a self-sufficient activity directed rather to the process itself, not to its result. The notion of play is fundamental for Evreinov (as well as for some other theorists of culture, such as J.Huizinga). He claims that both for a savage and for a child, and for all of us in a sence, the meaning of existance is play. That means that the learning of a norm is only possible through a kind of play, whereas the following a norm is more or less conscious performance, playing of a role.

Play in children transforms reality, and only this transformed reality where the child is an actor is important to him. To be transformed, reality should leave enough space to fantasy. So, a good toy should not be exact copy of an object, and often a piece of wood is better for playing than a complicated mechanic machine (by the way, the same refers to the realism of the scenery in theatre).

Evreinov turns to prehistoric man, savages, and children in order to find out the original principles independent from civilization. Play and theatre drive are present in children, in prehistoric man, and in savages. But the origin of theatre drive is deeper than human culture. Theatricality is not a cultural addition to biological nature of man. We can trace biological roots of theatre in animals' behaviour and, therefore, it is possible to consider life in whole - not only human life in culture - sub specie theatri.

As to animals, their behaviour is determined by innate programs in a much greater degree than in humans. Correspondingly, animals have considerably lesser amount of culturally transmitted traditions than humans, who learn the norms of both symbolic and "spontaneous" behaviour. Meanwhile, animals play, imitate, behave symbolically, and even lie intentionally. Devices directed to mistaken interpretation range from camouflage - found even in plants - to behavioural models (thus, a wolf can pretend to be dead). Higher animals lie quite intentionally. Have you seen, for instance, a cat pretending to have an injured leg and to be lame, thus asking for his master's caress?

Those animal species who have fewer ready camouflage devices fixed in the morphology of their organism are more clever in lying and pretence, and man, practically lacking organic devices for mimicry, is the champion in double-dealing. Note that pretence involves at least elementary form of self-consciousness, for to pretend, one must, first, imagine oneself in a certain way and, second, predict the reaction of the other. A capacity of imagination, or fantasy, is needed both for lying and for playing.

And for being aware of oneself one also needs imagination, because, as well as before other people, one appears before himself within this or that behavioural script, pertaining to a definite set of roles, and these roles are a building material for his image of self. To say it in other words, theatrical transformation is not only the way to manage the world through cultural patterns, but also a way to manage oneself. Even a mirror cannot show us honestly what we are without any theatre, because we are not able to see us out of this or that context or script: we approach to the mirror to see what in what we see does not correspond to our ready image. We amend what is wrong or just convinve ourselves that all is OK. The same refers to self-perception.

Imagination allows us to represent non-existing, future or unreal situations. Such fantasies, normally unaccessible to other people, form the interior world of a person. Applying the notion of theatralicalization to this sphere, we can treat, for instance, dreams as theatrical representations of desire, while the fulfillment of desire, as a kind of innovative theatrical activity.

Sometimes fantasies and dreams make up a whole parallel life, more important and more real for the person than the reality shared with other people. As far as this interior life does not critically affect exterior behaviour, it is regarded by other people as normal, whereas what is usually treated as madness is but an extreme degree of implementation of one's fantasies into the real life. That is what Evreinov calls "pathological theatricalization of life". Between norm and madness is placed what is usually treated as eccentricity of behaviour.

Here we touch upon the main topic of our exposition, "theatre for oneself", or what is the same, "the conscious stage direction of life". As we will see below, eccentricity and even some cases of madness are covered by this notion, but "theatre for oneself" has another no less important aspect. It is not only performing a role - say, a role of "a charming cynic" or "an artistical personality" in fashionable society, or of "a tired housewife" before her husband -, but also the perception of what is going on as a kind of show, as a performance. The ability to understand something as an episode, as a story - that is why it is possible to expose it as a story - is the result of theatrical transformation of reality by our perception. So, looking through a keyhole is also a genre of "theatre for oneself". Evreinov says about one of his frends that he amused himself in the way as follows: he used to take a cab and to ride across the city, observing the buildings, people on the streets, other cabs. He called it "living cinema".

Practically, this lover of cab riding was observing living pictures, setting their frames freely according to his will. These frames extracted this or that piece of reality and transformed it into a picture, a piece of art, which is opposed to the reality outside the frame. It is due to the frame that the picture acquires its unity and coherence. In these terms Evreinov treats the sense of humor: as the ability to set original frames.

So, setting a frame to organize theatric perception of things and events makes us spectators in our theatre for ourselves, while placing ourselves in this frame makes us actors of this theatre. Two kinds of photographs correspond to this distinction. On the one hand, there are photographs where a particular event is captured, with no intentional pose. Following the eye of the photographer, the spectator can see here an interesting situation, a part of a story. On the other hand, the album of photographs is full of poses and smiles produced intentionally in order to be fixed by the camera and to make a definite impression.

In the first years of our century the expressive means of artistical photography were not yet wholly developed, and photography was generally regarded as a craft, as a technical device useful to fix images, not an art. That is why Evreinov pays attention only to those photographs where people try to appear in a desired way, as before a mirror.

The album of photographs illustrates the life of a man as a continuity of significant moments. To make up an album, one chooses the best pictures and creates his personal history as he would like to see it. The personal history or biography is very different from the flow of the real life, because it contains only selected moments, among which the most significant ones are the key points of life history: they are marked with rites.

Taking part in rites is a special genre of theatre for oneself. The rites give meaning and form to the events of life, but for the meaning to be really enjoyed, a sincere involvement in the performance is needed, not pretence or purely formal following to the rules. Of course, the times are changing and the form of a rite also can change its meaning or even loose it, and so parodies on traditional forms are another kind of theatre for oneself. Thus, the moment of death is a particularly important point of one's life story, and many anecdotes are known about outstanding personalities who made a show when taking their definite leave. The last words or gestures get a particular value, be it an historical sentence or a joke.

Theatre of one's own death is the continuation of the theatre of his life. In everyday life, theatrical transformation can be visible to other people only when this usually non-marked sphere turns out to be highly reglamented and thus becomes a ceremonial performance, or when commonly accepted patterns of symbolic actions are substituted for other different ones. Thus, for example, Russian ambassador in Naples compte Skavronski was very fond of opera. All his domestic staff, including cab drivers, had studied music and were speaking with improvised opera recitatives. In solemn occasions, they formed ensembles and big choirs, which even inspired the guests to conversate as if they were on opera stage.

There exist a certain limit beyond which such eccentric theatre of everyday life is interpreted as madness, particularly when the stage director has enough means to consecutive and large scale realization of his fantasies. Some cases are known from the history when personalities on whose will depended the life of millions of people constructed castles in the air and lived in a quite particular reality. A good example of this was quite recent for Nikolai Evreinov: the life of Louis II, king of Bavaria. Evreinov regards the criteria of mental health as culture dependent and relative, and thus from his point of view the case of Bavarian king is just an example of thorough theatricalization of life.

Louis II of Bavaria was famous for his passion for architecture and music. He used to spend a lot of money on construction of new palaces and on opera. Being reserved and uncommunicative since very young, he tried to avoid society and even made the artists perform his beloved operas before him alone. He was so enthusiastic about Wagner's creations that often imagined himself a hero of this or that opera and dressed correspondingly: for instance, in the image of Loengrin he rided in a small boat accompanied by a swan. He ordered a special pool on the roof of one of his palaces, where the water was tinted with copper sulphate to become bright blue and waves were made with a special machine. Living in his lucid dreams, he was always surrounded by people not visible for others. During the dinners served on a long table for many guests, he sat alone, but as he thought he was Louis XIV, he spoke with the famous personalities of that time who he believed were present at the dinner. He made other people follow his fantasies.

Tired of disorder in state affairs and of the lack of money, he planned to sell Bavaria and to buy a desert island where to rule with less trouble, for which purpose a special ambassador was sent around the world, so that to find buyers for Bavaria and a convenient quiet spot to buy instead. In 1886 he was declared mad by a special commission, and soon after this he commited suicide.

His life was a continious performance, rather sympathetic with relatively innocent ideas like selling his own state or arranging an artificial volcano in Bavaria. At the same time, we know about some much more malignant figures from universal history whose eccentricity was beyond any reasonable limits, such as Roman emperor Nero. It would be probably of some interest to regard the tyrants of our times - or just top politicians - in the perspective of their theater for themselves, enormously amplified and partly created by mass media. Evreinov observed the case of one of influent personalities of late zarist Russia - namely, Grigory Rasputin -whose influence and authority were based, as Evreinov believes, on a kind hypnotism like that which is indispensable for a good actor on stage.

Evreinov, however, was more interested in other aspects of theater for oneself - for instance, in erotic theatre. Many cases of sexual pathology he regarded as excessive theatre. Anyway, theatricalization is a necessary condition of satisfaction, normal or pathological. The attractiveness of anything - and, particularly, erotic attractiveness of a situation, role, dress, pose or thing - depends on the fantasies that attach to the object a subjective significance and invest it with erotic value and appetitiveness. Evreinov claims that appetitiveness is an underestimated notion, as it is the criterion of acceptability of everything in the world, be it sturgeon or constitution. For the appearance often means more then the real being. Only what has undergone a theatrical transformation and thus has been invested with attractiveness by one's fantasy is good and acceptable. Note that in the same way "to appear" is more important than "to be" in culture, as only what is organized according to the patterns of a given culture can be relevant to it.

The idea of appearance being the only relevant state of affairs, both in cultural picture of the world and in the perception, along with some other details of Evreinov's works, reveals a distinct influence of Nietzsche. In several occasions Nietzsche claims that we have no access to the truth, to the reality itself, for our perception is always mediated by the language we use. And the language is essentially metaphoric. What Evreinov calls instinctive "theatre drive" is in a sense analogous to what Nietzsche discusses as creative passion to invent metaphors, to turn the necessary into arbitrary.

Even more pronounced is the impact of Nietzschean thought on Evreinov's pan-theatrical theory where the embodiment of illusory appearance into reality is concerned. Metaphors die and become part of reality. Unfortunately, here we have no space to consider in this perspective such topics as mask and the internalization of the mask, the mutual influence of arts (particularly, theatre) and life, etc.

I will dwell on one example only. It is the problem of nudity and clothes, much discussed after the first attempts to extend the limits of decency on stage, particularly, after dance perfomances by Isadora Duncan who danced barefoot in a light tunic. The supporters of this innovation argued that the nude and the naked is not the same. Naked body can be shameful and indecent, whereas the nudity is a kind of spiritual clothes and thus is analogous to material clothes. Every nude is naked, but not all naked people are nude at the same time. Nudity may have aesthetical value and therefore should be accepted on stage. Nakedness also may be accepted on stage, but only as ugliness having no aesthetical value by itself.

Both nudity and nakedness are related to clothes. The surface of clothes and some areas of body surface not covered with dress are intended to be open to the regards of other people, and no shame or confusion is felt until usually hidden areas become an object of others' attention. The topography of these areas is determined by cultural norms and, of course, our norms of decency in clothes differ from what was acceptable in the beginning of the century.

I said elsewhere about the conception of face by M.Voloshin who developed ideas very close to Evreinov's theory. Voloshin proposed to regard as face, in a broad sense, all body surface that can be opened to others' regards with no shame excited. So, face is a kind of internalized mask for areas not protected by clothes. In the extreme, all body surface can be a face.

The origin of dress was not propelled by the need to protect the body from natural enviroment. Protective function of dress is a by-product which has acquired its actual importance not related to the initial impulse to transform some areas of body surface. Initially, theatre drive when directed towards one's own body induced men to decorate their body surface. Resulting contrast between covered and uncovered areas excited erotic interest: covered areas got a special attractiveness, while the dress started to work as a frame for exposure of the uncovered areas.

The shame about exposure of usually hidden zones appears when dress comes into common use. Evreinov foresaw further development of cultural norms tending to overcome and reject this shame, giving freedom and right to self-expression to the body independently from the dress. Such cultural change would mean the birth of "a spiritual dress" instead of material clothes: undressed people would behave as if they were dressed. Dance and stage were to be catalysts of this change, and at last the nudity would loose its character of creative self-transformation and would place itself among other everyday habits.

Evreinov's conception is not a strict scholarly construction. It is rather an original performance of his theatre for himself. Nevertheless, the talent and broad knowledge of the author brought him to deep insights into the function of cultural devices and their subjective meaning.

The initial step of Evreinov's theory may be illustrated by the revelation of bourgeois gentilhomme from Moliere's comedy who found out that he was "speaking prose". This episode mentioned by Evreinov now has become a commonplace example for popular books on semiotics. So, ordinary everyday behaviour has the same relation to symbolic behaviour as ordinary speech to artistic literary speech. But the semiotic organization of ordinary non-marked behaviour becomes patent only if checked against marked, or symbolic behaviour.

To conclude, I would like to remark that some points of Evreinov's theory of behaviour have much in common with the understanding of life as an ensemble of language games according to late Ludwig Wittgenstein. Today such approach does not seem an illusory novelty, it is enough assimilated to become a fair part of semiotically understood reality .