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Nikolai Evreinov & Others: »The Storming of the Winter Palace«

In 1920, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, dramatist Nikolai Evreinov directed a cast of 10,000 actors, dancers, and circus performers—as well as a convoy of armored cars and tanks—in The Storming of the Winter Palace. The mass spectacle, presented in and around the real Winter Palace in Petrograd, was intended to recall the storming as the beginning of the October Revolution. But it was a deceptive reenactment because, in producing the events it sought to reenact, it created a new kind of theater, agit-drama, promulgating political propaganda and deliberately breaking down the distinction between performers and spectators.

Nikolaj Evreinov: “The Storming of the Winter Palace” tells the fascinating story of this production. Taking readers through the relevant history, the authors describe the role of The Storming of the Winter Palace in commemorating Soviet power. With a wealth of illustrations, they also show how photographs of Evreinov’s theatrical storming eventually became historical documents of the October Revolution themselves.
 

250 pages | 20 color plates, 85 halftones | 5 1/2 x 8 3/4 | © 2017

Think Art

Art: Photography

History: Military History


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Table of Contents

Foreword
 
Protagonists
Nikolai Evreinov- The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920)
Nikolai Evreinov- The Storming of the Winter Palace.
An Article by the production’s director in chief (1920)
Nikolai Evreinov- The Storming of the Winter Palace.
Recollections of the staging to celebrate the third anniversary of the October Revolution (unpublished typescript, 1924)
Konstantin Derzhavin- Open-Air Theater (1920)
Konstantin Derzhavin- A Miracle (1920)
Konstantin Derzhavin- The Mass as Such (1920)
Konstantin Derzhavin- The Storming of the Winter Palace.
On the fifth anniversary of the staging (1925)
Dmitri Tëmkin, Iosif Slepian- What Is Required of the Audience during the Production (1920)
Lev Nikulin- November Eight 1920 (1920)
Lev Nikulin- Baltic Sea (1932)
Sergei Radlov- On Mass Actions and More Important Things (1923)
Iuri Annenkov- Nokolai Evreinov (1960)
Nikolai Petrov- Mass Spectacles (1960)
 
Photographs of the 1920 staging in sequence
 
Contemporary witnesses
Anon.- Announcement on the Decoration of Petrograd during the Third Anniversary Celebrations of October (1920)
Vlagin – On the October Celebrations (1920)
Anon.- The Staging of the Storming of the Winter Palace (1920)
F. Lenski- An Exhibition in Memory of the Great October (1920)
Anon.- At a Rehearsal for the Staging of The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920)
Anon.- Motion Pictures and the Staging of The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920)
Anon.- The Storming of the Winter Palace.
An Eye-Witness Report (1920)
Anon.- Proletarian Action.
At the Staging The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920)
Nikolai Shubski- On Uritski Square (Impression of a Muscovite) (1920)
Anon.- The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920)
Arthur Holitscher- The Chaos of the Arts (1921)
Adrian Piotrovski- The Pageants of 1920 (1922)
Platon Kerzhentsev- The Successes of the New Theater (1922)
René Fülöp-Miller- Theatricalized Life (1926)
Nina Gourfinkel- The Monumentalist Style of the Revolutionary Spectacles (1930)
Aleksei Gvozdev, Adiran Piotrovski- The Theaters and Pageants of Petrograd in the Epoch of War Communism (1933)
Sergei Eisenstein- Cinema and Theater. Nikolai Evreinov (1943)
 
Historical photographic “documents””
Leonid Volkov-Lannit- History is Written with the Lens (1971)
Photographs of the theatrical Storming of the Winter Palace as historical documents
 
Essays
Igor Chubarov
Nikolai Evreinov’s “Revolution In Itself”
Sylvia Sasse
“History is Written with the Lens:” How the Photo of the Theatrical Storming becomes a Historical Document
Inke Arns
Battlefield History: Artistic Reenactments as Participatory Deconstructions of History
 
Appendix
List of figures
Glossary- persons, places, terms, abbreviations
Index
 

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