THE PICTURESQUE GIFT OF NIKOLAI SAPUNOV AND THE THEATER

Abstract

The Studio on Povarskaya (Studio Theater on Povarskaya), which originated at the Moscow Art Theater, was created in May 1905 by the efforts of one of its leaders, K.S. Stanislavsky, and actor V.E. Meyerhold. N.N. Sapunov was appropriate in the new Studio, most of all, which he liked for its staged ideas and plans, the planned repertoire, in which the main role was assigned to playwrights – neo-romantics and symbolists, the search for new forms for its stage implementation, the desire to create new principles of theatrical art.

After the studio closed in October of the same year,                 V.E. Meyerhold received an invitation from     V.F. Komissarzhevskaya to work in her theater, which became the center of attraction of new forces of Russian culture. This proposal was accepted by the director. V.F. Komissarzhevskaya and                    V.E. Meyerhold were united by a great desire to get rid of stage everyday life and naturalism, to find new theatrical forms. Such a master as V.E. Meyerhold, who had an amazing gift of visual and plastic vision of the performance, needed the expressiveness of real painting on the stage. He attracted young artists to the theater of                          V.F. Komissarzhevskaya, N.N. Sapunov, S.Y. Sudeikin,                  B.I. Anisfeld, and V.I. Denisov, who did not belong to this circle, but was close to them. Talented painters, these young masters were inexperienced in matters of stage technique, solving spatial problems. But this was not required by V.E. Meyerhold. He freed the decorators from painstaking and careful work with the layout and guided them to solve the performance in a purely pictorial plan. During the Meyerhold period in the theater of    V.F. Komissarzhevskaya, which lasted from 1906 to 1907, the leading artists were inseparable friends N.N. Sapunov and S.Y. Sudeikin as an students of K.A. Korovin. In their stage painting, images of symbolist poetics appeared with its understatement, foggy dreams and ghostly dreaminess. It became weightless, airily light or decoratively sharp, exciting, built on unexpected combinations of exquisite coloristic consonances of color. In this publication, the author, as a result of studying archival and bibliographic sources, analyzes the painting of N.N. Sapunov, which impresses with its amazing beauty and harmony, inescapable decorative fantasy. The master was able, having left nature, to transform everything visible: nature, objects-into a world of beauty, exciting, alluring, animated and sometimes mysterious. The author traces the creative path of N.N. Sapunov, in whose talent, with its inexhaustible decorativeness, V.E. Meyerhold recognized another feature of the master's talent – the acute irony of grotesque vision.