page_title: Russian symbolism
section_title: Music and theatre
hierarchical_section_title: Russian symbolism / Music and theatre
caption_attribution_description: Ballet "Petrushka" by Benois
context_page_description: Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It represented the Russian branch of the symbolist movement in European art, and was mostly known for its contributions to Russian poetry.
context_section_description: The foremost symbolist composer was Alexander Scriabin who in his First Symphony praised art as a kind of religion. Le Divin Poème (1902-1904) sought to express "the evolution of the human spirit from pantheism to unity with the universe." Prométhée (1910), given in 1915 in New York City, was accompanied by elaborately selected colour projections on a screen.
  In Scriabin's synthetic performances music, poetry, dancing, colours, and scents were used so as to bring about "supreme, final ecstasy." Andrey Bely and Wassily Kandinsky articulated similar ideas on the "stage fusion of all arts."
  As to more traditional theatre, Paul Schmidt an influential translator, has written that The Cherry Orchard and some other late plays of Anton Chekhov show the influence of the Symbolist movement. Their first production by Constantin Stanislavski was as realistic as possible. Stanislavski collaborated with the English theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig on a significant production of Hamlet in 1911-12, which experimented with symbolist monodrama as a basis for its staging. Meyerhold's production of Blok's Puppet Show (1906) is usually cited as a high point of symbolist theatre in Russia. Two years later, Stanislavski won international acclaim when he staged Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird in the Moscow Art Theatre.
  Nikolai Evreinov was one of a number of writers who developed a symbolist theory of theatre. Evreinov insisted that everything around us is "theatre" and that nature is full of theatrical conventions, for example, desert flowers mimicking stones, mice feigning death in order to escape cats' claws, and the complicated dances of some birds. Theatre, for Evreinov, was a universal symbol of existence.
caption: Alexandre Benois designed symbolist sets for Stravinsky's Petrushka in 1911.
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