Maksimilian Voloshin
Three Articles on the Theatre

Maksimilian Voloshin (1877-1932) was a Russian poet, artist, critic, translator, and philosopher, a figure whose attractiveness was and still is based on his deep spirituality, his cultural breadth, and the wide range of his interests. As a poet he was famous for several subjects. He was known as a poet whose verse explored Paris and, at the same time, Eastern Crimea, Cimmeria, as a poet of portraits and a poet of occult quests, as a poet who depicted facets of Russia's internal strife and a poet who called on humanity to re-examine the bases of European civilization, which had taken "the paths of Cain." As an artist Voloshin mastered drawing, oil painting, engraving, pen and ink sketches, and finally settled on watercolours, creating in this medium hundreds of landscapes of his loved Cimmeria. These watercolours became original, poetic inscriptions, supplementing his verse depictions and accenting their musical moods. Voloshin was also a master of the epistolary genre, and many of his letters, numbering in the thousands, are models of literary craft, crammed with thoughts, warmed by lively humour, filled with valuable information about the cultural life of the first two decades of the twentieth century. Voloshin's memoir writings were maximally frank, heedless of the censor, stylistically profuse in imagery, and unbuttoned in their exposition. Finally, as a critic of literature and art Voloshin acquired great fame among his contemporaries. Many of his critical articles became cultural events perspicatiously discovering for his readers new talents - Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelshtam, Mixail Kuzmin and many others-stimulating thought and disseminating new, often paradoxical ideas.

Maksimilian Voloshin was also one of the most knowledgable theatre critics of his time. His articles on Russian and French theatre were published for about twenty years in the prerevolutionary press of Moscow and Petersburg. He began writing on the theatre in Paris, where in 1904 he became the Paris correspondent for the first Russian Symbolist magazine Vesy and for the newspaper Rus' . And from that time on he placed in these and many other publications--papers like Utro Rossii, Russkaja molva, Molodaja zhizn', and such journals as Teatral'naja Rossija, Maski, Apollon, Russkaja xudozhestvennaja letopis' -- the articles and essays that were later to make up the important collections titled Parisian Theatres and The Images of Creativity.

Toronto Slavic Quarterly offers its readers three of Voloshin's articles on the theatre, appearing for the first time in English:
Faces and Masks
Does the Moscow Art Theatre Have the Right to Dramatize The Brothers Karamazov? It Does.
Theatre -- A Dream Vision

These articles are part of a book that will soon be published on our site:

© Zahar Davydov

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