The Russian Folk-Theatre

T HE history of the folk-theatre can be divided roughly into two phases, the first ending with and the second beginning with the reign of Peter the Great (Peter reigned for thirty-six years from 1689-1725). During the first phase we find the emergence of the most primitive dramatic forms based, initially, upon ritual observances connected with the agricultural year, with animal husbandry or the social life of the village in which the prolonged complexities of the marriage ritual played an important part. Clearly, the content and direction of the dramatic activity of this period was directed by the tastes and needs of a peasant community and an entirely rural way of life. The eighteenth century, in many ways a period of traumatic upheaval and innovation in Russia witnessed a considerable change of emphasis too in the popular theatre. Such features of Peter the Great's reign as the relaxation of the power of the church, hitherto a persecutor of all types of popular entertainment, the growth of literacy, the secularization of literature, the building of Russia's first public theatre (in 1702) and in general the expansion of urban civilization all lead to the emergence, alongside the peasantry of an entirely new class of actor and audience. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries while ritual drama remained entirely the prerogative of the peasantry, certain plays in the folk-repertoire, and notably Tsar' Maksimilian, perhaps the most popular of them all, were performed just as frequently by the artisans and factory hands of the towns as by the youths of the villages. Among the immediate results of these changes were the development of an urban folk-literature and the interchange of methods, ideas and repertoire between the old theatrical traditions of the country and the new ideas of the towns. On the one hand, for example, the repertoire of the Academic Theatre, (as performed in the spiritual academies of Kiev and Moscow in the latter half of the seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth) was brought to the peasants by wandering students performing dramatic scenes to earn a little extra cash during the vacations, while on the other hand students brought up in the country took their early theatrical tastes to the seminaries where folk-plays were often performed in leisure hours

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• The Quack Doctor in the Russian Folk and Popular Theatre

  Elizabeth A Warner•Folklore•1982

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