Dostoevsky and The Fairground Booth

Posted on October 13, 2016 by michaelcraig

Planning an extra chapter about Dostoevsky and the Fairground Booth in the book Blok, Meyerhold and the Fairground Booth thefairgroundbooth.com. Its come about due to further research into the symbolist painters of the time who were involved with theatre set design and theatre in general in Russia and Europe: Benois, Somov,Golovin and more particularly Dobuzhinsky. He designed sets for The Devil’s Play, and an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Devils. Dobuzhinsky also designed the frontispiece for Blok and Meyerhold’s play The Fairground Booth.

Dobuzhinsky’s illustration for the set of “The Devil’s Play”

This chapter and section will give an extra depth to the discussion about The Fairground Booth. It will also serve one of my intention which is to put the play in the wider context of Russian and European literature.

Attached are the frontispiece for The Fairground Booth and the set design for the fist part of  The Devils Play by Remizov
+Russian Theatre Documentary Series
thefairgroundbooth.com michaelcraig.copernicusfilms.com
#Dobuzhinsky #thefairgroundbooth

"The Fairground Booth" and "Petrushka"

This post is a fragment from a chapter of the book which will be published some time next year. The context is a comparison between the ballet "Petrushka" and "The Fairground Booth". Both share roots in the Russian fairground and the figures of the commedia dell'arte. To understand a play like The Fairground Booth which has no plot, no characters, no real sense of forward movement or natural time and broke from the traditions of realism and naturalism, requires an approach to Russian culture which moves beyond its surface reflections. When, as Bakhtin states, Dostoevsky's work embodies elements of carnival, (something which is not immediately associated with Dostoevsky), then it becomes clear why it is possible to find clues to the meaning of "The Fairground Booth" in works of literature as various as "The Brothers Karamazov" and The ballet "Petrushka" and vise a versa.