26 June 1917. Kazimir Malevich

Non-fiction

Project 1917 is a series of events that took place a hundred years ago as described by those involved. It is composed only of diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers and other documents

Kazimir Malevich

Moscow, Russian Empire

The art of theatre was left far behind the art of literature, painting, music. Painting, through Cubism, futurism has come to color, Suprematism, literature of poetry to letter, music to sound as it is.

The art of theatre stayed behind by the lilac bushes and the lovers’ bed, in cherry gardens, among the bushes of autumnal gardens, with violins, blue birds, has been frozen in a skirt of love, sorrow, melancholy, death, fear and gossip. They adorn this nonsense with sequins of characteristically subjective ability to act.

Repeating a successful show that has survived 100 stagings is the same as cutting out your own tongue, ripping out your nervous system, and substituting it with oakum or a cuckoo clock. An actor who repeats a “successful show” turns into a cliché. Actors of the Art Theatre are lifeless clichés. As the theatre itself, the artists have died long ago, and only its first illusion still holds among the crowd and their corpses still seem alive. It cannot be saved. The search for the blue bird is all in vain, they cannot find solutions, no matter how hard they look in thick books by Dostoevsky and others. They only need to find the flown-away life of the spirit that has died as a result of successful performances.

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