The Russian word kapustnik (кап≈устник) has always meant cabbage pie. Yet few non-Russians know that it also has another, non-culinary meaning. In the 19th century, lovers of cabbage pie and witty entertainment decided that the former had something in common with the latter, and they started calling virtually all theatrical parodies or humorous sketches kapustniki.
There is no perfect translation for this culturally-laden term. English has a few similar words – vaudeville, variety, skits or concert parties – but none have either the aftertaste of cabbage or the comedic ingenuity of this thoroughly Russian word. A kapustnik is simply a funny variety show incorporating dance, music, parodies, satires and lyrical literature – a mix of radically different numbers brought together into a many-layered cabbage pie.
Actually, the contemporary meaning of kapustnik is not that far removed from the peasant tradition of communal labor, festivities, and hospitality. As early as the 18th century, a kapustnik or kapustka in Vladimir, Ryazansk, Yaroslavl and other regions referred to harvesting and processing cabbage at the invitation of one’s neighbors (see Cuisine, page 57). When the work was done, everyone sat down to a meal, surely to be followed by singing, fortune telling and skits.
From Lent to Zeitgeist
Cabbage is arguably Russia’s favorite vegetable. It is grated in shchi (cabbage soup), pickled with carrots, stewed with mushrooms and meat. And, of course, it makes great pies. But cabbage really comes into its own during Lent, a time of penitential prayers, spiritual humility, and physical abstinence from meat, milk and other animal products. Lent lasts 40 days, beginning each year after the feasting of Maslenitsa and stretching to Easter.
Observing the Lenten fast is an important part of Russian Orthodox culture. For centuries, Russian food – in fact all of Russian life – has been divided into ferial and fasting. As many as two hundred days a year were fast days. What is more, in pre-Revolutionary Russia, Lent also involved a voluntary avoidance of loud ceremonies and festivals.
And yet it was Lent – with its restricted diets and limits on social entertainment – that gave rise to the distinctively Russian form of the kapustnik. The first kapustniki were put on during Lent in the early 19th century. These shows were usually for family and friends, often coinciding with amateur dramatic performances at the estates of the nobility.
Russia’s military victory over Napoleon infused productions of this era with a deep sense of national pride. For instance, there were productions based on the story of Dmitry Donskoy that, contemporaries noted, were particularly popular with audiences. Indeed, Russian theater came alive in the era of Napoleon, Kutuzov, and Pushkin. As the Russian philosopher and semiotician Yury Lotman wrote, “There are eras when art enters all aspects of life, sensitizing its everyday course.” This was one of those times: the Golden Age of Russian arts and letters.
Art invaded life through the rise of artistic clubs and salons. These often had rather humorous rules and regulations that stipulated behavior, dress codes and secret signs. But they were more than just silly clubs. Most circles and societies were genuine spiritual and artistic centers for the Russian nobility and intelligentsia.
In his memoirs, Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, a close friend of the poet Alexander Pushkin, described Zinaida Volkonskaya’s renowned salon, where the atmosphere “carried the stamp of service to art and thought... In this house, there were readings and concerts, and dilettantes and amateurs staged Italian operas... When one remembers the whole atmosphere of the time, this movement of ideas and the heart, it seems as though you are carried away not into the real past, but into some mythical era.” This was not nostalgic exaggeration. The exciting and sublime artistic mood which Vyazemsky eloquently underlined is a faithful reflection of the era.
This zeitgeist was felt not just at Zinaida Volkonskaya’s salon. The famous Arzamas literary society, itself a forerunner of future theatrical kapustniki, was extremely light-hearted. Over time, parody and the desire to see the humorous side of things serious and staid became vitally important to 19th and 20th century kapustniki.
One former member of Arzamas remembered: “Thanks to [poet Vasily] Zhukovsky’s indefatigable efforts, Arzamas was at once a parody of scientific academies, Masonic lodges, and secret political societies... Every meeting was merrier than the one before. Every meeting began with a reading of the [joke] minutes of the last meeting. It wound up with a good dinner, which was also mentioned in the next minutes... To distance ourselves further from society, we renounced the names by which everyone knew us, and replaced them with new ones from Zhukovsky’s ballads.” When Pushkin joined Arzamas some time later, he was given the nickname “Cricket.”
A key figure in the history of the kapustnik is 19th-century actor Mikhail Shchepkin. After shows at Shchepkin’s noisy and crowded home, performers and writers lingered to enjoy his famed hospitality and to discuss their art, to make merry and play games, to improvise performances in which they parodied each other – and, of course, to eat cabbage pie. Shchepkin, a master storyteller, was the center of attention. Born into a peasant family, he was the archetypal self-made man, rising to become principal actor at the Moscow Maly Theater. As a result, he said, he knew Russian life “from the Court to serfdom.”
Shchepkin was also a frequent guest at Bazhanov’s Coffee House, better known as the Pechkin Coffee House. Named after the owner of a neighboring inn, the popular Pechkin’s was located next to Teatralnaya Ploshchad. The coffee house had a famous billiard room and served equally renowned breakfasts and lunches, but was best known for its clientele and the continual jesting, improvised sketches and verbal duels. The writer Alexei Pisemsky wrote that Pechkin’s Coffee House was just about the “cleverest and wittiest place in Moscow.”
Enter the Avant Garde
History repeated itself at the turn of the 20th century, when art and a cultural revolution once again seduced society in the guises of modernism and, later, the avant garde. Theater, poetry, and other genres saw an unprecedented renaissance, and the kapustnik grew into a full-fledged art form, with its own history and famous names. It became a close relative of new theatrical forms such as the estrada and the cabaret, the musical and the miniature. Innovation was encouraged, and all forms of art pushed the boundaries, as directors experimented fearlessly and broke accepted rules.
Humor as a theatrical category also changed, developing from frivolous and playful satire – designed merely to entertain – into a many-splendored thing that not only amused, but also challenged the intellect. Meanwhile, some humorists saw the many possibilities hidden in the kapustnik.
The opening of the Moscow Arts Theater (MAT) in 1898 led to a number of theatrical innovations. By tradition, kapustniki had been staged here daily during Lent, but later began to appear at New Year’s and other times. In February 1910, the first paying kapustnik was staged, with proceeds devoted to needy MAT actors. An important feature of the “new” kapustniki was that spectators were now involved, and parody and satire of current events became a vital part of any successful production.
Thus, in one 1910 performance, the awesome figure of opera legend Fyodor Shalyapin appeared in Eastern dress, battling with the small and nimble Leopold Sulerzhitsky, a teacher at the MAT studio. “Of course, there was no real struggle [between them],” Konstantin Stanislavsky later wrote. “It was just a comic dig at pretense, a caricature of the funny side of things, a satire on the corruptibility of the jury and the fighters themselves.” One reviewer wrote that the most successful part of the evening was a circus act featuring a mute Stanislavsky as the “ringmaster,” and a brilliantly made-up clown played by the actor Nikita Baliev.
Stanislavsky, as the ringmaster, appeared in top hat and tails, with a huge nose and black mustache. He cracked a whip, and onto the stage galloped a trained stallion, played by another actor. The sketch ended with a quadrille performed by the whole troupe, riding on hobby-horses. While such a spectacle may seem innocent to modern eyes, it was hugely successful at the time. Audiences loved to see their favorite serious actors presented in ludicrous and silly productions.
Kapustniki were so popular that even the composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninov participated in one at MAT. And the Bolshoi Theater got into the act with an operatic kapustnik. In that show, based on Rossini’s Barber of Seville, men and women swapped parts and hilarious new scenes were inserted in the opera. For example, in one scene, a large basket descended onto the stage containing two red-cheeked old women in Russian national costume, played by renowned opera singers Leonid Sobinov and Sergei Migay. When the basket landed on the stage, these stars of the stage sang a series of chastushki – short, scathing and often obscene Russian folk songs. Contemporaries wrote that the show was a resounding success, and almost impossible to get into. The show was performed only three or four times, and tickets were extremely expensive.
The kapustniki gave birth to at least one theater. Nikita Baliev, a constant fixture in and organizer of MAT kapustniki, joined with his friend Nikolai Tarasov, a gifted businessman and generous patron of the arts, to create Bat cabaret theater (“Letuchaya Mysh”), which became famous both in Russia and abroad. Bat’s very identity, it turned out, was an ironic reference to MAT. The latter had a seagull on its main stage curtain, in reference to its signature play, Chekhov’s The Seagull. Bat put bats on its own curtain. It also stridently attacked elitism, thus taking a swipe at MAT, which was Russia’s first and most important theater.
Those behind Bat combined traditional kapustnik parodies with their own vision of art. Baliev’s pointed wit was mixed with Tarasov’s more ironic, understated style. As a result, according to critic Nikolai Efros, the theater reflected a complex mix of parody, condensed brilliance and slightly elegiac melancholy.
Tarasov died tragically young, at the age of just 28. After his death, the Bat might well have closed, but Baliev soldiered on, managing not only to keep the theater open, but to transform it. Many of Bat’s new productions combined music and dance, presaging the arrival of the musical in Russia. The French Au Clair de la Lune contained ideas from the Parisian Varietes and Cabaret, while shows such as The Overcoat and How Ivan Ivanovich Quarelled with Ivan Nikiforich from the series Tales from Gogol were major events not just for Bat, but for all Moscow.
After the Revolution, in the 1920’s, most of Bat’s troupe left Russia to enjoy success in Paris under the name La Chauve Souris, and later became a Broadway smash. One American book about the theater’s time in America includes the impressions of Charlie Chaplin, Paolo Negri, and Melanie Griffith, among others. Unfortunately, when Baliev died, the theater also ceased to exist. Yet, at the end of the 1980s, it was resurrected in Moscow and restarted a tradition of lyrical, musical productions.
In 1908, the same year that the Bat opened in Moscow, St. Petersburg saw the opening of the Crooked Mirror theater. The two theaters had as many differences as similarities. And while Crooked Mirror was not directly connected with kapustnik performances, as was the case with Bat, in its crafty sketches, wriggling just on the other side of reality, you might say you could smell the cabbage wafting about. The Crooked Mirror had an important influence on subsequent generations of humorists, from the miniatures of the great Arkady Raikin to the perennial student television favorite KVN and even current advertisements on the popular Radio Baltika.
The St. Petersburg actress Zinaida Kholmskaya, who founded Crooked Mirror, said that the theater preferred to work with parodies, which could easily incorporate lots of different topics, whether from the theater, literature, or everyday life. Crooked Mirror’s major hit was a version of Gogol’s Inspector General, which was a sensation due to its unusual staging. In fact, Crooked Mirror presented Gogol’s comedy in five different ways, parodying the styles of five different directors, including Stanislavsky.
According the Kholmskaya, the Stanislavsky parody was the funniest. There was virtually no text, and Gogol’s script was replaced by everyday sounds in a naturalistic style. (The earliest MAT productions abounded in realistic sounds, such as squeaks, rustling, dogs barking, birds singing, etc.) The impression was one of lifelike realism, but the kapustnik had found new targets for its wit. In the Crooked Mirror’s rendition of Stanislavsky’s Inspector General, the mayor groaned, wheezed, scratched himself, drank kvas, and chased and killed flies for hours. The cacophony accompanying his picking up a letter included cows mooing, horses neighing, hens clucking, and cats mewing. In addition, the action was moved from a provincial Russian town to Ukraine, and all the characters adopted silly Ukrainian accents.
The Crooked Mirror’s Inspector General in the style of the German comedian Max Linder was staged like a cinema comedy with all the attendant pratfalls. The mayor flew around the stage, with the other characters following him in a crowd. Everyone ran into the pie-seller, and naturally all the pies and all the people fell into a heap. It was a smash hit everywhere – in Petersburg, Moscow, and beyond. But, like the Bat, Crooked Mirror could not survive in the Soviet Union, and eventually shut down.
Surviving the Soviet Era
The Bat and Crooked Mirror both brought wide public recognition to small-scale theater and the kapustnik, which has since become a recognized form in its own right, with its own history, future, and archives. But the Soviet era was a difficult time for the kapustnik, as laughter can be a particularly powerful weapon against authoritarianism. Nonetheless, through resourcefulness the kapustnik survived to become a semi-legal safety-valve for the post-Stalinist intelligentsia. The most fruitful topic for parody was of course everyday Soviet reality.
In the 1960’s, rumors spread around Leningrad about a strange show being performed at the N.K. Cherkasov Institute of Theater, Music, and Cinematography – now the St. Petersburg Theater Academy – on Mokhovaya street. The show, called The Birds, was a transparent satire on Soviet holidays. Russians love holidays and feasts, but in the Soviet Union most holidays commemorated either the events of the Revolution or particular professions, like steel, oil and construction workers. Especially important on State-sponsored holidays was participation in street demonstrations, with the inevitable speeches by Party leaders. The Birds transmogrified all these practices to the avian world. After magpies described in verse the day-by-day procession of holidays they had witnessed among humans, the radio began to broadcast the familiar, disembodied dictator’s voice, calling on people to take part in holiday demonstrations. A relentless kapustnik-style parody ensued, skewering revolutionary songs and even Party Congresses. Needless to say, it was an underground affair: only trusted people were allowed in.
Meanwhile, back in the capital, Moscow’s House of Actors was home to a group led by Alexander Eskin that staged some sparkling productions in the kapustnik tradition. In these, Rostislav Plyatt often parodied Soviet announcers, who had the amazing ability to turn even a fascinating topic into the most tedious report about “socialist ideals.” “What do we value in an actor?” Plyatt asked in one typical parody. “The ability to be disciplined, regular response to social calls, punctual payment of member’s dues. That’s what’s important. And talent here is irrelevant. We don’t need geniuses, but cadres. We need planned, organized, well ordered acting performances.”
The kapustnik is, by its nature, dissident and rebellious, a freedom-loving joker not constrained by considerations of genre, professional interests, or the ties of a planned economy. The charm of the kapustnik, and the reason it remains popular to this day, lies in its all-embracing permissiveness. This defiantly humorous genre thrives on silliness unacceptable to serious experts, such as paunchy actors doing delicate ballet steps or impersonating the dying swan from Swan Lake; a tone-deaf director, dancer or writer singing an opera aria; a pretty young girl dressing up as a miserable old hag or wearing a clown costume. Anything goes in a kapustnik, if the end result is inventive and funny.
Perhaps the most persistent and popular example of contemporary kapustniki is KVN (acronym for Klub Vesyolykh i Nakhodchivykh – Club of the Hilarious and Witty). This TV program exists where theatrical kapustniki meet estrada, with a lacing of nihilistic student humor. The game show – a humor competition between student groups – debuted in the 1960’s, and swiftly achieved national fame, thanks to television. But it did not reach its potential until the 1990s, when censorship disappeared.
The competitive aspect is what makes KVN so interesting, that and its daring spirit (a la kapustniki), unexpected jokes on current events and its memorable individuals. Today’s best-known teams come from Sochi, Pyatigorsk, Moscow and Minsk (Belarus). But KVN is an open international competition, attracting teams not only from across the former Soviet Union, but also the United States, Israel, and Germany.
Where kapustniki will go from here is anyone’s guess. If history is any guide, the next stage in this art form’s development will be triggered by a new artistic or cultural revolution. While something so momentous hardly seems in the offing, such things are a bit difficult to predict. No matter... the kapustnik will continue to evolve, improvising itself into new situations, thriving off any opportunity to laugh at the human condition. RL
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