![]() The best description of a street performance and the puppeteers’ life of the period was given in 1843 in “Peterburgskiye sharmanschiki” (Petersburg Hurdy-Gurdy Men), a short story by Dmitry Grigorovich (1822-1899). The popular folk comedy of Petrushka evolved, interwoven with various European traditions. The stringed marionettes ( string puppets) were very popular, as were the automata, the shadow plays, the panoramas and the rayok or “optical theatre”.įyodor Volkov (1729-1763), considered as Russia’s first professional actor, founded his own puppet theatre while studying at the Nobleman’s Cadet Corps.īy the 19th century the puppet theatre had cemented its place in Russian culture. The repertoire of the period included adaptations of romances of chivalry, Bible stories and farcical skits, with sumptuously costumed characters and many props and other accessories. Kunst gave the first public puppet performance, free and open to all, in the Kremlin’s Red Square.įrom that time the first dynasties of puppeteers began to evolve, at first the Yakubovskis, of Polish origins but naturalized and converted to Russian Orthodoxy, who gave performances from the early 1700s to the 1760s. Later he invited to Moscow a Gdansk-based company led by Johann Kunst, a disciple of the German puppeteer Johann Velten. In 1701, by order of the Tsar, he undertook a series of tours along the Volga and in the Ukraine. One of them, Jan Splavski, a performer of Hungarian origin, became the first puppeteer to have his name entered in Russia’s historical records. The majority of foreigners were Germans, Danes and Dutchmen. At his invitation, puppeteers began to arrive from various European countries, not quite as freelance as they were in Europe, since in Russia their tours had a certain political meaning. It is also in the records that puppet shows were staged at the court of the Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovitch (1629-1676), while the first professional puppet theatre appeared in the reign of Peter the Great (1672-1725). In it the puppeteer is demonstrating his figures above a sort of circular tent booth fixed around his body at the waist, very similar to those in Persia, China and Central Asia. The puppet performance appears to be part of a fairground show alongside bear games, music, dances, etc. ![]() It is a drawing with a brief caption by Adam Olearius (1603-1671), a German scholar and secretary to the Holstein embassy in Russia, in his description of a journey to Persia via Russia. The oldest evidence of a show given by a skomorokh is dated 1636. They were little clay figures with holes for the fingers of the puppeteer. The earliest Russian puppets, probably animated by the skomorokhi (travelling players), were unearthed by archaeologists in Moscow’s Red Square at some time in the cultural layer of the 15th century. Following the Russian October Revolution (1917), the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was the largest and leading constituent of the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR), a Union that lasted until 1991. By the 18th century, the Russian Empire was one of the largest empires in history. It shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea, and shares maritime borders with Japan and the United States state of Alaska. ![]() Russia (Russian: Россия, Rossiya), officially the Russian Federation (Russian: Российская Федерация, Rossiyskaya Federatsiya) is, geographically, the largest country in the world, extending across northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe.
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