The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 | Page 4

compelled on pain of punishment to go regularly to the German theater, with a view to their improvement, and in order to make this as effective as may be, enormous compensations attract the best German stars to St. Petersburg. And yet all this is useless, and the Russian theater is not raised above the dignity of a workshop. Only the comic side of the national character, a burlesque and droll simplicity, is admirably represented by actors whose skill and the scope of whose talents may he reckoned equal to the Germans in the same line. But in the higher walks of the drama they are worthless. The people have neither cultivation nor sentiment for serious works, while the poets to produce them, and the actors to represent them, are alike wanting.
Immediately after the submission of Poland in 1831, the theaters, permanent and itinerant, were closed. The plan was conceived of not allowing them to be re?pened until they could be occupied by Russian performers. But as the Government recovered from its first rage, this was found to be impracticable. The officers of the garrisons in Poland, however numerous, could never support Russian theaters, and besides, where were the performers to come from? In Warsaw, however, it was determined to force a theater into existence, and a Russian newspaper was already established there. The power of the Muscovites has done great things, built vast fortresses and destroyed vaster, but it could not accomplish a Russian theater at Warsaw. Even the paper died before it had attained a regular life, although it cost a great deal of money.
Finally came the permission to re?pen the Polish theater, and indeed the caprice which was before violent against it, was now exceedingly favorable, but of course not without collateral purposes. The scanty theater on the Krasinski place, which was alone in Warsaw, except the remote circus and the little theater of King Stanislaus Augustus, was given up, and the sum of four millions of florins ($1,600,000) devoted to the erection of two large and magnificent theaters. The superintendence of the work of building and the management of the performances was, according to the Russian system, intrusted to one General Rautenstrauch, a man seventy years old, and worn out both in mind and body. The two theaters were erected under one roof, and arranged on the grandest and most splendid scale. The edifice is opposite the City Hall, occupies a whole side of the main public place, and is above 750 feet in length. The pit in each is supported by a series of immense, stupid, square pilasters, such as architecture has seldom witnessed out of Russia. Over these pilasters stands the first row of boxes supported by beautifully wrought Corinthian columns, and above these rise three additional rows. The edifice is about 160 feet high and is the most colossal building in Warsaw. As it was designed to treat the actors in military fashion and according to Russian style, the building was laid out like barracks and about seven hundred persons live in it, most of them employed about the theater. The two stages were built by a German architect under the inspection of the General whose peremptory suggestions were frequent and injurious. Both the great theater as it is called, which has four rows of boxes, and can contain six thousand auditors, and the Varieté theater which is very much smaller, are fitted out with all sorts of apparatus that ever belonged to a stage. In fact, new machinery has in many cases been invented for them and proved totally useless. The Russian often hits upon queer notions when he tries to show his gifts.
On one side a very large and strong bridge has been erected leading from the street to the stage, to be used whenever the piece requires large bodies of cavalry to make their appearance, and there are machines that can convey persons with the swiftness of lightning down from the sky above the stage, a distance of 56 feet. A machine for which a ballet has been composed surpasses everything I ever saw in its size; it serves to transport eighty persons together on a seeming cloud from the roof to the foot-lights. I was astonished by it when I first beheld it although I had seen the machines of the grand opera at Paris: the second time I reflected that it alone cost 40,000 florins [$16,000].
Under the management of two Russian Generals, who have hitherto been at the head of the establishment, a vast deal has in this way been accomplished for mere external show.
The great Russian theatre of St. Petersburg has served for a model, and accordingly nothing has really been improved except that part of the performance which is farthest removed from genuine art, namely the ballet.