Soviet (In)finite Jest: Leonid Yengibarov’s Pantomime and State Erasure

Abstract

This article presents Leonid Yengibarov’s innovations to Soviet pantomime and the ways in which his interdisciplinarity prompted philosophical reflection and dialogue. Yengibarov’s performances emphasized the tragicomic, a move away from traditional clowning and toward the recognition of and reflection on ethical responsibility. This unconventionality marked him as unpredictable in the decidedly curated reality of Soviet entertainment and often led him to deviate from what the state considered acceptable. As such, this article likewise explores the underlying reasons, particularly the socio-political, for why the custodians of public order, opinion, and law ultimately worked toward the erasure of his art, and perhaps even his life.

“Shut up! We can’t hear the mime!”

—Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis)

Before his mysterious death at the age of thirty-seven, Russian-Armenian mime and clown Leonid Yengibarov (1935–1972) was widely known and beloved throughout the Soviet Union, and yet, he is virtually unknown outside of that space today, with only a few studies dedicated to the artist, who, experts and contemporaries agree, exerted an enduring influence on the world of pantomime. ¹ He was a modern clown, which meant he shared the modernist impulse for the tragic ² and the trait most empathically embodied by the twentieth-century clown, that of being unbound by tradition and cultural norms. ³ In the late 1950s, when Yengibarov was making a name for himself, the tragicomic movement, with its attendant existential disquietude and poetic-philosophical interpretations of life, had not yet been fully realized on the Soviet stage, and puppetry, not pantomime, was the predominant form for comedic foolery. What makes Yengibarov stand out among his contemporaries, is that as a clown, mime, equilibrist, acrobat, juggler, and poet, Yengibarov balanced his philosophically driven non-verbal acts on the dangerous terrain of the highly censored stage under the unapologetic gaze of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and their relay observers.

Yengibarov’s altercations with the law are ambiguous in nature not because they were not egregious or ever-present, but because they took on a form that cannot be categorized in the traditional sense of crime and punishment. In his study of post-Stalinist censorship, D.V. Lozhkov states that a 1956 resolution adopted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) indicates that Glavlit, the authority overseeing printed materials and performing arts, “became excessively carried away with political editing, although this was the responsibility of the relevant departments of the CPSU Central Committee” and not the Glavlit. Lozhkov further maintains that Glavlit unofficially considered protecting the state its primary function, “[b]ut besides this, there were a number of unspoken prohibitions that were not recorded anywhere in the documents, but which determined the policy of censors and editors.” ⁴ Censorship, especially theater censorship, within the Soviet context cannot always be traced to the letter of the law; in fact, in most cases, censorship was not “lawful” nor was it neatly incorporated within official decrees or penal codes. “Censorship in the theatre,” writes Anna Tamarchenko, “has always been more petty and strict than censorship in general—that of literature, for instance.” ⁵ The theater censors had absolute control over any work’s content and production: “‘The most notable feature’ of Soviet theatre censorship (according to O. Litovsky, the man who was in charge of it for seven years from 1931–7) ‘is that it is not formal. [. . .] The censorship considers itself called upon to ‘penetrate to the very core of the creative process in the theatre.’” ⁶ The tricky nature of Soviet law lies in the fact that in its published form, it was not censorial, and instead consisted of an intricate structure of organizations, such as Glavlit and Glavreperkom that would either impede or uplift certain artists and their performances depending on the latter’s deviation from or adherence to political orthodoxy. As Mark Zaitsev states,

It is much more difficult to pin down the formal structure of theatre censorship than to discuss the manifestations of it. Technically, there is, in fact, no censorship. But this must be understood to mean only that there is no single person or committee that dictates what the theatre-going public is to see. Instead, there is a complex and somewhat nebulous network of review committees and advisors whose individual decision constitute a powerful web of constraint. ⁷

In this environment of constant uncertainty and control, Yengibarov, through his pantomime, novelettes, films, and interviews, sought to emphasize the artist’s “subjectivity” or lichnost’—a charged term in pre- and post-revolutionary Russia which could mean a person or individual with independent consciousness, condition, and character. ⁸

A study dedicated to the notion of lichnost’ after Stalin states that the project of the “new Soviet person” became even more relevant than under Stalin due to the Soviet leadership looking for new control mechanisms that would replace terror. “This,” the volume’s editor notes, “led to an increase in the role of the state, as well as to the emergence of a paradox: despite increased pressure from state institutions, the post-Stalin era person became a more creative and autonomous lichnost’.” ⁹ The study also delineates three main strands of “subjectivity” (though at times using the two terms interchangeably) in the post-Stalin years: firstly, subjectivity that refers to the human being as a unitary entity possessing reason; secondly, as a destabilized self; and thirdly, as a thinking and affective being who lives with others. My article mainly explores this third type of subjectivity with respect to the artist’s consideration of the other (audience) and the role of his art realized through deep philosophical exploration of ethical responsibility. It further focuses on Yengibarov’s genre transfiguration and reversals, as well as his deviations from traditional clowning, including the more technical aspects of his acts, such as the elimination of excessive stage props to draw attention both to the individual artist and his message. Transcending genre was an act of reworking his artistic interdisciplinarity to defy the state’s censorship of his work and deny the finality of official truth, which demanded the strict categorization of an art form that has, for centuries, resisted boundaries. ¹⁰ Furthermore, turning to Yengibarov and the jarring fashion in which the censorial apparatus cast the artist into obscurity provides an opportunity to examine the blank spots created by Soviet censorship in its underexplored forms of imposed forgetting and erasure.

I. Subjectivity without a Mask

In his performances, Yengibarov would appear without a coxcomb, mask, or make-up to highlight his autonomy as an artist, pioneering a sub-genre of the “mime biopic” on the Soviet stage where the mime was at once performer and writer. ¹¹ Yengibarov created and traversed multiple genres and intermedia, which made his work novel at the time and unpredictable for those concerned with control. Clown and literary critic Jon Davison, recognizing Yengibarov’s development of the “clown biopic” genre in clowning and mime, traces the basic narrative of clown-as-hero to the works of Marcel Marceau and Charlie Chaplin, both inspirations to Yengibarov. The message of these performers is clear, writes Davison—“find your own clown.” ¹² Even though pantomime can be taxonomized under the larger umbrella of “fool,” identifying Yengibarov by any one of his talents quickly limits his artistic and pantomimic subjectivity and reduces the polyphonic nature of his work. Yengibarov’s ethical responsibility as an artist could be understood in terms of his artistic pietas toward his audiences dwelling within an unethical state. In his study of various forms of lichnost’ in Russia, Richard Wortman broadly characterizes lichnost’ as lifting “the concept of the individual to an ideological, emotional plane, signifying a personhood endowed with a devotion to a cause, possessed by duty.” The moment the members of the state realize the state’s failure, is the moment lichnost’ comes to signify “a charismatic word with rhetorical power and resonance,” a service to a more individualistic cause Yengibarov endeavored to effect through his work. ¹³ Eric Naiman, on the other hand, examines lichnost’ as “Soviet subjectivities” that partially represent the “triumph of the word.” ¹⁴ Yengibarov’s work as a mime was particularly dangerous because it lacked a determinative script and the clarifying buttress of language. His was the triumph of non-verbal speech.

II. Deviations: Progressive Directions and the Woman Question

Before the boom in the 1960s following Yengibarov’s reinvention of pantomime in the USSR, there had been the puppet theater with Petrushka chief among its figures though now denuded of his former patronizing, disturbing, and often misogynistic elements. ¹⁵ At various points in Soviet performance history, the governmental surveillance organizations utilized both pantomime and puppetry as propaganda, which they themselves enjoyed as long as no deviations from the official line were observed. In one of his early pantomimes, “The Life of a Woman” (“Zhizhn’ zhenshchiny”) presented as part of the documentary, Introducing Leonid Yengibarov (Leonid Yengibarov, znakom’tes’, 1966), Yengibarov mimes the rearing of a young girl, her subsequent motherhood signaled by the rocking of an imaginary baby to sleep, and later, as a woman stooped at the weight of old age, all stages of which are affectively communicated to the audience through his vivid facial expressions evolving from happy to weary to sad. Here, Yengibarov demonstrates the traditional purpose of the life of a woman within the constraints of existing gender norms. One of the unique aspects of Yengibarov’s performances was that “[he] was also acting the whole time he did it, using his face and the rest of his body to maintain the characterization.” ¹⁶ The role of a woman as a theme had certainly been employed in the preceding decades in theatrical performances, but in urban settings particularly, it had not been given subversive weight, a status reserved for depictions of class. Petrushka the puppet, for instance, is conservative when not anti-authoritarian, and is quite hostile not only to his unnamed puppet wife, but to other puppets on the stage playing feminine characters. One would imagine these performances elicited varying reactions, including laughter, from the body of an audience comprised of different genders.

Yengibarov’s pantomimes and poetic prose tap into social-cultural issues and disturbing phenomena within Soviet society, including the limitations on women. His shorter numbers from the early 1960s, the titles of some of which begin with “The Life of ___” suggesting an existential angle, raise questions about the gap between propaganda and reality, including the Central Committee’s claims about women’s emancipation and the Party’s supposedly radical transformation of the family unit. Scholars of Soviet gender studies are not entirely convinced by the quantitative data on the topic of women’s freedom collected by the USSR Academy of Sciences. Such data was, no doubt, meant to validate the idea that communist ideology had not fallen behind the West in terms of women’s rights. ¹⁷ Some scholars have even called these scientific findings “organizational fiction,” ¹⁸ following Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, while others have shown how this skewed data resulted from numerous factors including inaccessible archives, the discrepancy between socialist claim and “textual” socialism, and the insufficiency of theoretical practices when approaching the “woman question” (zhenskii vopros) and the “sexual question” (polovoi vopros). ¹⁹ Yengibarov’s observations in his prose, which often served as scripts for his pantomimes, demonstrate gender-bending and gender-fluidity. In one such script, “Drawn” (“Narisovannyi”), Yengibarov engages in doubling and subversion—the two techniques of the fool’s domain—but with a linguistic critique, namely of Russian as a gendered language. The short script begins with: “There is an artist (khudozhnik: masculine gender), who drew me. And now I live. Drawn. There, and here. On the paper, and here, somewhere between autumn and winter. But where am I, really?” ²⁰ After establishing the “I” and “I as Art” as the same, a leitmotif in his work, Yengibarov raises the question of gendered nouns and verbs: “It is even funny—I don’t quite know how to say this: you drew (narisovala: feminine gender) me or drew (narisoval: masculine gender) me. Because you are an artist (khudozhnik: masculine gender), which means you drew (narisoval: masculine gender) me, but you are a woman.” ²¹

The cultural commissars’ holistic approach to slowly gnawing at Yengibarov’s stage freedom, and the mime’s own compressed schedule make it difficult to pinpoint exactly which of Yengibarov’s sundry themes or messages the authorities considered pernicious. ²² Within the “complex,” “multilevel,” and “all-encompassing system of control,” as Lozhkov says, pinpointing specific censorial directions toward theater artists is a tricky task. ²³ It is also worth noting that Arlen Blium’s characterization of this feature of censorship in the Soviet Union singles out five levels of censorship from the author/artist’s own self-censorship at the first level to the final level of ideological censorship where censorship “was carried out by the party leadership” in the form of “instructions.” Often the artists themselves were not aware where exactly on the censorship scale they fell due especially to the ambiguities of the middle levels, involving hints, secret surveillance, and other preliminary measures. ²⁴ These activities, however, as both Lozhkov and Blium stress, were bizarrely intertwined, giving rise to a complex system of interactions. Despite Yengibarov’s frequent presence on the stage, the Stalinist distrust of comedy (pantomime was understood as part of this category) and of the artist’s popularity extended over Khrushchev into the Brezhnev era. In many respects, the gravity of Yengibarov’s expurgation from the official written word and cultural coverage provides some measure of his dissent.

III. Types of Censorship: Travel Forbidden

The transformations in the circus, theater, and other forms of entertainment in the Soviet Union throughout its existence were inevitably orchestrated for propagandistic purposes by the main cultural networks acting as functionaries of administrative law. These networks responsible for cultural output in the Soviet Union were not always explicit in reprimanding the creators of “undesirable” intellectual, including performative, works. In fact, evasion, omittance, and an understood rule of moving the spotlight off of “objectionable” artists, especially those who were already famous, seem to have been more popular forms of coercion when it came to the performative arts. We can extrapolate the general understanding of the law and regulatory network Natalia Skradol describes during the Stalinist years onto the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, since Soviet censorship remained largely unchanged over the span of the state’s life, especially with regards to theater: “In the era of ‘high Stalinism,’ the notions of ‘law’ and ‘legality’ were understood broadly. Even though it was a period of mass arrests and the murders of innocent people, it was also a time when law was practiced and created at all levels, from informal workplace gatherings to the infamous show trials. [. . .] legal practices were simply at work everywhere.” ²⁵ This intentional ambiguity in relation to Soviet “law” is further discussed in Evgenii Dobrenko and Jonsson-Skradol’s study of gossmekh or state laughter, referring to it as “one of the paradoxes of Stalinism” that manifested itself in dangerous “politically colored statement[s].” ²⁶ The reason that this and other studies of Soviet censorship often do not refer to specific laws or decrees that constitute the censorial apparatus, according to the authors, is because it heavily relied on the spoken word. “The absence of law as the main regulating principle, on the one hand,” these authors write, “and the premise of unlimited democracy, on the other, combine to imply, quite literally, that each subject of power is willing to dedicate his or her whole being to the construction of discursive practices that replace the law.” ²⁷ Historian and journalist Fyodor Razzakov notes the ambiguous nature of censorship in reference to Yengibarov’s potential success: “At the end of the 1960s, Yengibarov was supposed to also conquer the West, but that trip fell through due to the intrigues of certain envious people.” ²⁸ Razzakov bases his commentary on the Soviet illusionist Igor Kio’s testimony about Yengibarov’s plans for extending his performative reach beyond the state’s borders. According to Kio, “Yengibarov’s first ‘western’ country was going to be the Federal Republic of Germany. Had this [Yengibarov’s already-advertised tour there] premiered, I am sure a success on a scale no smaller than that of Oleg Popov in the fifties would have awaited him. Yengibarov’s star would have risen on the international horizon.” ²⁹

The censorial apparatus, however, had other plans for Yengibarov. After Yengibarov’s towering success in November of 1964 in Prague, where he won first place in the International Clown Competition, the Glavrepertkom became uneasy, and without any explanation, forbade Yengibarov subsequent visits to Czechoslovakia, later also showing grave concern for his much-anticipated tour there in 1972. Although in this case, the censor was a little too late—the city of Prague had already dubbed Yengibarov “our Praguer” (nash prazhskii paren’) and one of their journalists had coined the phrase that became a frequent epithet for him throughout the Union: “the clown with autumn in [his] heart” (kloun s ocen’iu v serdtse). ³⁰ This love was not unrequited. In a short prose-poem, “Confession” (“Priznanie”), Yengibarov writes:

O, how fashionable it has become to title one’s articles: “These Many Words About Such and Such . . .” And I, this foreigner, also desires to write: “A Billion Words About Prague”—a billion of the kindest words and . . . But I remembered that for those words there would be no room even in a hefty tome. I crossed out almost everything. And left you, Prague, only one word: “Love [you]!” ³¹

Indeed, this reciprocity lasting well into the 1970s irked the authorities overseeing cultural coverage. ³²

IV. Types of Censorship: Turning off the Spotlight

The leading journals of the time, Soviet Circus (Sovetskii tsirk) and Soviet Stage and Circus (Sovetskaia estrada i tsirk), which published on clowning, pantomimes, and other relevant performances and events, either maintained a deafening silence on the most popular Soviet mime and his victories within or outside the USSR, or in the few existing mentions of Yengibarov, downplayed his popularity, art, and the revolutionary changes he made to the world of mime. There exist, however, a rare, sympathetic article by Rudolf Slavksy published in the 1962 edition of the Soviet Stage and Circus, entitled “Pantomime in the Hands of the Clown” (“Pantomim v rukakh klouna”), and, from a few years earlier, a laconic record of Yengibarov in the magazine’s 1959 edition, which also happens to be one of the few textual and journalistic mentions of Yengibarov throughout his performative career. The reading public’s expectations were equally dissatisfied after Yengibarov’s Prague win, when a state “supervisor” accompanying Yengibarov, lest the mime temporarily escape censorship, was entrusted with writing something about the competition in Prague. This time, with pressure from the Goskomizdat (State Committee for Publishing), which neglected to send a state reporter or photographer to the event, the magazine decided to entirely steer clear of publishing any words on Yengibarov, his performance, or his win. Unable to curb the public’s enthusiasm for Yengibarov in Czechoslovakia, which subsequently crossed the border into the USSR, the director of the SoyuzGosTsirk (Soviet State Circus, unofficially, the “Moscow Circus”) Nikolai Barzilovich, decided to permit an inconsequential note. To quench readers’ curiosity, the magazine published a blurry photograph of Yengibarov, copied from a piece in a Czechoslovak newspaper. ³³

V. The Differing Responses of Funny versus Tragic Clown to the Demands of the State

Although this article’s focus is on the relationship of certain artists to the state and the degrees of tolerance toward artists’ performative methods and their formulae in preserving, highlighting, or moderating their individuality and personality, it is important to understand the place of laughter qua laughter in the Soviet Union. It should be noted that those entertainers who were characterized as “simple clowns” ³⁴ and whose main purpose was laughter and not existential disquietude, did not face erasure on the magnitude of a Yengibarov, perhaps largely due to their utilization of laughter as an end unto itself and not necessarily as a means of social criticism. According to Dobrenko, laughter is not always revolutionary or related to freedom (his critique of Bakhtin’s relatively positive view of laughter). In his discussion of Stalinist laughter and its later adaptations by subsequent first secretaries of the Central Committee and Soviet censorship megastructure, Dobrenko identifies a much more sinister laughter—state laughter—which found its complete expression in modernist de-carnivalization of laughter and recruited various motleyed entertainers as its participants. “The official Soviet doctrine,” writes Dobrenko, “with its political instrumentalization of art, viewed laughter almost exclusively as the ‘weapon of satire’ (and classified all other kinds of laughter as ‘devoid of ideological principles’ and ‘meaningless giggles’.” ³⁵ Some Soviet clowns and mimes, for reasons of their own, reconfigured their acts as “positive satire,” relying on derivative clowning, slapstick, and traditionally laugh-inducing techniques, such as the clown’s flop and bodily failure on stage, something that later came to be called theory of conflictlessness. ³⁶

For instance, Oleg Popov, known as the “sunny clown” (solnechnyi kloun), in his much-beloved acts, especially his popular, “Adventure with Car No. Oi, Ai—00-13,” which relied on traditional clowning techniques with the goal of inducing belly laughter, crucial labor in trying times. Largely unthreatened by his performances, the state allowed Popov to tour Poland, Germany, Belgium, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Cuba, and even the United States. ³⁷ By 1960, Popov was already known in the United States well enough to have articles written about him in various magazines. Lyudmila Kafanova’s piece, “Inimitable Clown,” on Popov, for instance, in the 1960 edition of The USSR magazine, describes Popov as “the awkward, stumbling, unwittingly comic lad.” ³⁸ In order to continue working outside the borders of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries, Popov published an Appeal from the SoyuzGosTsirk to the Artists (Voozvanie Soiuzgostsirka k artistam) in the 1961 edition of the Soviet Stage and Circus, with the editorially provided title “Workers of the Soviet Circus, just like the Soviet peoples, are preparing to honorably welcome the XXII Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” Popov opens his announcement: “I am proud of our Communist Party. The project of her new program—a program of building a communist society inspires artists to new creative daring. We—the clowns—in particular have much work to do. After all, communism is impossible without joy, without a smile and laughter.” ³⁹ State newspapers and magazines would regularly publish such “letters” (pis’ma) by writers and artists, which can be considered opinion pieces only to a degree.

On the other hand, Yengibarov’s self-ascribed category of “tragic clown,” a moniker his audience embraced, was in many ways a reversal of the “simple clown”:

[Tragic] clown connects not with the notion of making us laugh but with the idea of extending play as far as it will go. Clowning in this way pulls the clown in a number of directions at the same time. The desire to make the audience laugh is likely to be present, just as it was in simple clown, but that impetus is over-ridden by whatever preoccupation lies at the heart of the clown’s tragedy. ⁴⁰

In its association with the tragic here, play is related not only to improvisation, but also to the demands of the stage and the “I” of the artist. The mime-clown Alexander Iliev who considers Yengibarov among his major influences remarks on the drama and tragedy of mime: “Maybe tragedy?—The path of tragedy was the primary way that led me to results. In a position of a tragic impasse, my Self opened the floodgates and became autonomous.” ⁴¹ In his prose-poem, “Humor,” Yengibarov writes, “A clown must be an absolutely serious person.” ⁴² To present himself as a non-traditional mime and clown, Yengibarov could have more rigorously implemented the immediately recognizable clowning tropes that heavily rely on bodily agility, but he instead tried to minimize the use of the most popular and characteristic clowning techniques, such as tripping and falling, which Popov’s repertoire employed abundantly. It is a truth universally acknowledged that relatively benign instances of the failure of the flesh instigate laughter. ⁴³ Degradation and debasement of the body are traditional clowning and miming techniques from which Yengibarov distanced himself especially in the last decade of his life. This way of inducing laughter, as entertaining as it may be, did not appeal to Yengibarov. On the contrary, he embraced the tragic and the tragicomic in attempting to effect a more contemplative-philosophical register which foregrounded the artist’s personality and presented his way of clowning as a worldview. Despite Yengibarov’s acclaim both as a mime-clown and writer, Yengibarov’s opinion was never allowed to grace the pages of any periodical. This absence has as much to do with Yengibarov’s refusal to participate in simple clowning, as remaining a non-participant in state laughter and so noncompliant to understood, albeit unwritten, state regulations.

VI. The Crime of “Amoral Love”

Yengibarov’s philosophical takes on frowned-upon issues, such as reflections of the self and its relation to and translatability into reality, may have been momentarily masked by the entertaining acrobatics and antics in his pantomimes, which did generate laughter, and as such, could have briefly obstructed the watchful eye of the censor, but his eschewal of directing any social criticism in his acts toward the West, Imperial Russia, or other non(or anti)-socialist subjects, by no means, fooled the organs upholding cultural artistic standards. An article from 1965 broaches Yengibarov’s so-called “western break,” which it quickly categorizes as the mime’s “eccentricity.” ⁴⁴ In the eyes of officialdom, Yengibarov’s non-conformity to communist ideology was odd, and above all, committed the crime of “amoral love” (amoral’naia liubov’), a phrase that at the time was customarily ascribed to artists peering to other shores, instead of proselytizing the ideological needs of their native state in a safe, monological format. A mere glance at Yengibarov’s library, however, reveals a dialogical mindset, which the guardians of the law would frequently seek to limit and contain. In addition to masterpieces with a satirical pitch by Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov and the rebellious poetry of Armenian writers like Yeghishé Charents and Paruyrk Sevak—who, to use George Orwell’s term, had long become “unpersons” and perished either in the Great Purge or Brezhnev’s ruthless campaign against unruly writers—Yengibarov’s shelves also held critical works in English and French on such notable comics as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Japanese kabuki, and many of the like figures and genres. ⁴⁵ His favorite writer, however, was Hans Christian Andersen. “It was namely Andersen,” writes Maria Romanushko, “who unveiled to [Yengibarov] the existence of another reality.” ⁴⁶

VII. The Mime’s Window into Reality

Yengibarov’s observations of reality, particularly during his frequent walks in the city, an activity that was a source of creative inspiration, was surely in contrast with the curated official truth. His pantomimes, “Windows” (“Okna”) and “The Storyteller” (“Skazochnik”), which warrant a closer look, demonstrate this discrepancy with the sensitivity of a poet, pensiveness of a philosopher, and the hope of an uncompromising optimist. The script for the former pantomime establishes the window as a microcosm: “Windows. Behind each one, there are people. Windows tell us about them.” Yengibarov then focuses on a particular window and its story, and episodically describes its temporal-spatial mutations. In the first stage, Yengibarov projects a realistic picture of life: “The window was a regular window. Sometimes the lights were on until late, and sometimes for two, three days, there would be no light at all. There were random tobacco pipes scattered in the corner of the windowsill, and in the place of flowers, bottles of kefir, never of wine.” Like a reel, the image then changes to a display of what appears to be a sudden fabrication of that reality, which at the same time, signifies the rotten state of the modified world-picture represented through the window: “Everything was as usual. But one day, they washed the window, hung beautiful, but boring and mandatory curtains, and, of course, geraniums: poisonous green leaves and sickly flowers, pink like bruises.” The tragic climax of the story is that “Laughter and guitar riffs are no longer heard from behind the window,” a laughter that is not prompted ceremoniously, but genuinely felt. ⁴⁷ In a Yengibarovian fashion, however, the ending is regenerative: There appears an artist, who in springtime, paints a true, and therefore, happier image of the window, where the window is again back to being ordinarily dusty, ornamented by its familiar kefir bottles and tobacco pipes. “I really liked this picture,” Yengibarov writes at the end of the script. ⁴⁸ His pantomime and prose illustrate that happiness is directly commensurate to freedom, and not to a tidied and imposed “reality,” a notion “The Storyteller” reaffirms. This piece depicts an “evil and unintelligent person” who steals from a writer all his colorful pencils and forces him to write only in black and white, after which the distressed writer leaves his desk to walk in the rain. He then encounters color outside, in the real world, away from the proscriptive reality of his room:

Tired, he stopped, a wet falling birch leaf touched his cheek, and he saw that the leaf was dark green. He then noticed the asphalt was silver-gray, the horizon already bright-blue, and the rooftops clean, tile-red. He smiled, picked all those colors and returned home. He is again writing. He is again happy. ⁴⁹

The element of coercion and tragedy reversed through the taking back of reality and the artist’s role in foregrounding that reality are leitmotifs in Yengibarov’s art.

VIII. Transformation and Elevation Vis-à-vis the Tragic

Even though Soviet apparatchiks may have furrowed their brows in disapproval at Yengibarov’s creations, most of his contemporaries appreciated the artist’s unorthodox reconfigurations in mime and predilection for the tragic. Actor and director Rolan Bykov recollects that after seeing Yengibarov on the stage for the first time, he ran to the dressing room, and without a greeting, said to him: “Do you know you’re a genius!” Bykov continues, “His pantomimes, from my point of view, were new creations due to their deep philosophical content. Even now, many people perform pantomimes authored by Yengibarov, but unfortunately, not everyone talks about his authorship. For example, few people know that the play on an invisible violin was invented by him.” ⁵⁰ There is a tendency among some scholars to swiftly conflate the gloominess of Yengibarov’s stage persona, Lyonia, and the character’s childlike nature, perceived as either caprice or naivety. This view prevents the serious consideration of the tragic in Yengibarov’s pantomimes. ⁵¹ At an evening of remembrance organized for Yengibarov in 1982 at the Palace of Culture on Dubrovka, the host, Mikhail Kozakov, a Soviet actor, theater and film director, in his laudatory speech about the mime, addresses this very point: “[Yengibarov’s work] might seem to one as naive and perhaps too . . . even sentimental, but I think that this is an advantage and not a fault.” ⁵² Yengibarov was well aware of the critiques, or rather oversights, Kozakov expresses here.

Yengibarov raises the question of the mime’s melancholy and the tragicomic in a film script from 1969, “Mime with Sad Eyes” (“Mim s pechal’nymi glazami”), in which the confused passers-by wonder, “Why isn’t [the mime] smiling? Nonsense!” ⁵³ Before realizing his vocation, Yengibarov’s wandering mime must confront his self and more profoundly comprehend the immense ethical responsibility of being an artist, a mover of hearts. The character does so with the help of other great “movers,” as he sits in the art gallery, “among the frozen ecstasy of human passions,” surrounded by Picasso and Van Gogh’s works, Ben Shahn’s politically charged paintings that focus on injustice, and Mikhail Vrubel’s mystical daemons. The mime’s transmutation in the story is conceivably cathartic, something Aristotle would attribute to the power of recognition in the genre of tragedy, according to him a far superior genre: “Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes,” Aristotle writes in the Poetics, are necessary parts of tragedy and its “most powerful elements of emotional interest.” ⁵⁴ Only after himself arriving at this moment, is Yengibarov’s mime able to enter the circus ring and perform, even if aware of the fact that he is “pursued by powerful spotlights.” The metaphor of navel-gazing, a deep contemplation in mysticism, is enduring at the end of the script where Yengibarov extends a similarly profound recognition to the audience of the story, which, in a “thunderous applause,” is “amazed by the artist’s revelation.” In establishing a dialogic relationship between the artist and the audience, that in Yengibarov’s work is expressed as a movement, Yengibarov’s “tired, smiling mime stands in the arena, with sad eyes.” ⁵⁵ Evoked here is the understanding of comedy from ancient drama, where comedy and tragedy are complementary forms and where the comic does not necessarily predicate laughter, but the quiet understanding of something actively being revealed and the elation that comes with such a realization.

IX. The Clown’s Childishness as Unfunny, Yet Regenerative

The character of the child in Yengibarov’s mimes and prose represents transformation and resistance to stagnation. This function of the mime recalls the child’s oblivion in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where the child is the final spiritual transformation in the three metamorphoses: camel, lion, child. “The child is innocence and forgetting,” Nietzsche writes, “a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’” ⁵⁶ The child creates an unsanitized game, not shunning invention and reform. In one of his longer pantomime scripts, “Prologue to the Book, Dear Circus” (“Predslovie k knige ‘Liubimyi tsirk’”), which comments on the immortality of the clown, Yengibarov aligns the child with other figures he implies are simultaneously wise and foolish: “The Clown will not die. Whether a sad chudak ⁵⁷ or a cheerful squabbler, ironic idiot or a philosopher who finds himself in silly situations, in a mask or without it, from childhood to ripe old age, he will be with us, the sarcastic sage, with the eyes of the sad child.” ⁵⁸ It is the child who curiously looks in the mirror with a kind of openness unknown to the custodians of hermetically sealed truths and only then, holds up a mirror to society. Yengibarov’s titular “mime with sad eyes” employs the mirror as a prop to convey this point. The cathartic applause of the story’s audience that sees itself reflected on the stage is only possible after “the mime looks himself in the mirror” first. ⁵⁹ Similarly, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra reevaluates his own teachings after he has a strange dream: “Did not a child step up to me, carrying a mirror?” ⁶⁰ In Yengibarov too, the child is a teacher, and as such, the child reverses the Soviet phenomenon of referring to the leaders of the state as “our fathers,” and those same leaders treating the intelligentsia as “their children” who they thought needed to be taught the ways of the law, both written and unofficial. ⁶¹ With reference to Khrushchev’s tactics of infantilization, Romanushko asserts,

[A]nd so, this grandfather Khrushchev, the primary revealer of Stalin’s deeds, decided to become the patron saint of young talents. He arranged regular meetings in the Kremlin with young creative philologists, artists, composers, actors. He smiled at them in a fatherly way, like at his own children. And naturally, expected love in return. He wanted this talented youth to be “domesticated,” soft, and docile. ⁶²

Instruction in how to uphold the law was indeed one of the most important functions of the state, which tirelessly refined its ability to predict and discourage deviations in any field. But Yengibarov’s world of meaning-making that entailed a manner of invention and play was fertile ground for unpredictable and unapproved artistic directions.

X. Yengibarovian Reverberations Today

Marcel Marceau’s observation about Yengibarov—“He is a great poet of movement” ⁶³ —shrewdly acknowledges not only the technical aspects of Yengibarov’s body motion on the stage but also Yengibarov’s conceptual and figurative transitions, which can be seen as a transmigration of sorts between his selves on the stage, in film, poetry, and life. ⁶⁴ French-Armenian mime Vahram Zaryan, who is the inventor and champion of the non-mime movement, names Yengibarov and his unconventional techniques in mime as influential for the movement. In a recent interview with the artist, Zaryan however notes, “I push myself to go beyond Yengibarov’s modernization of mime. Non-mime is about distancing, going farther from classical mime to be able to return to the body, to the self. My performances are not only theatrical, but experimental.” ⁶⁵ Even though Zaryan also acknowledges the role of Étienne Decroux’s techniques and Marcel Marceau’s stylistics in non-mime, he frames the concept of genre as malleable, as he puts it, “necessitated by the material.” There is a certain vocational aspect to the mime’s performance, an idea prominent in Zaryan and Yengibarov, both of whom indicate the inevitability of their mime as an “I.” Without disregarding Zaryan’s singularity as an artist, Yengibarov’s contemporizing of mime during his time and its influence on future generations of mimes cannot be overlooked. When discussing his mime persona with his friend and actor, Yuri Belov at the end of his studies in 1959, Yengibarov is said to have been determined to diminish boundaries between the artist and the self: “Let it just be ‘Lyonia’ [ . . . ] After all, he is I. Why search for some pseudonyms? Lyonia will perform under the name Lyonia.” ⁶⁶ He followed the same pattern in his 1966 documentary where he plays himself. This mode of establishing a necessary sameness across and between his different selves was Yengibarov’s way of claiming responsibility for both his art and himself as a human being actively living in the world. In “Autobiography” (“Avtobiografia”), Yengibarov writes, “The most important thing for me in life are responsibility and solicitude in front of an inkwell and blank sheet of paper. I think, this is happiness.” ⁶⁷ To him, the primary medium in pantomime was the person not “playing,” but “being” the mime, unescorted by the comfort of the mask. In “The Art of Pantomime,” Yengibarov reiterates this point: “familiar to all [the mime] tells stories, warns us that the world is replete with dangerous contrasts.” ⁶⁸ The “dangerous contrasts” refers to the well-established mechanism of the state’s trickery and performativity, as well as its political dance between what appeared and what was.

XI. Final Erasure in the Brezhnev Era

Yengibarov’s performances during his last years were especially daring, and as such, they received corresponding reprimands from the appropriate bodies representing different aspects of the law overseeing the performative arts. During the Brezhnev award fever in 1971, Yengibarov performed one of his most popular numbers that includes acrobatics and medals. After the accomplishment of each trick on the stage, he reveals a medal, then two, then three, and finally at the end of the performance, he opens his coat to showcase rows of medals secured to the lining of the coat. ⁶⁹ This performance would have been perceived as particularly confrontational considering Brezhnev’s impatience with the intellectuals. The early seventies were especially suffocating as Yengibarov experienced more frequent rejections and disruptions to his career. On July 25, 1972, the day of his death, Yengibarov is said to have gone to the VDNKh (Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy) to ask permission to play a poet, his dream character, which, of course, was immediately rejected. ⁷⁰ His sudden death at home later that afternoon in the arms of his mother remains a mystery especially in view of several inconsistent autopsy reports with varying causes of death that range from angina to the flu to a heart attack. Similarly, persistent claims such as, “that day was really hot in Moscow,” an assertion unsupported by the meteorological statistics from Moscow in 1972 which show relatively mild temperatures that July, or theories of an overworked Yengibarov as a possible explanation for his death, seem to protest too much. What is certain, however, is that the newspapers and magazines at the time chose to remain entirely mute about his death. The Soviet Stage and Circus, which one would expect to mention this important event, likewise had no words to spare for the empire’s greatest mime even after his death, but a month later, published a long article on the Soviet clowns, Nikulin and Shuydin. It was only during glasnost and perestroika that the central Soviet newspaper, Culture and Life (Kul’tura i zhizn’) offered a laudatory mention in 1986, fourteen years after Yengibarov’s death: “[ . . . ] duet of Yuri Nikulin and Mikhail Shuidin, and the extremely gifted Leonid Yengibarov.” ⁷¹ If the petty but rigorous campaign of erasing Yengibarov was only intermittently conspicuous during his lifetime, the loud silence on his death was an affirmation of its constancy.

XII. By Way of Conclusion

Yengibarov’s attempts to transcend the limits of traditional clowning techniques and move away from earlier forms, which depended on the audience’s laughter, was his way of resisting the state’s collectivization and instrumentalization of its laughter-inducing entertainers. While Yengibarov’s art was only conditionally tolerated by the censors of his time, mainly due to his popularity, his presentation of serious themes, poetic-philosophical dimensions, and unconventional approaches to humor pushed the boundaries both of what was lawful and acceptable. For Yengibarov, there was no special “mime logic,” just like there was no “clown logic”—the fusion between theater, circus, literature, and the artist’s life had to be organic, to embrace the cluster of philosophical inquiries the twentieth century presented. What was unique about Yengibarov’s performances, was not merely its use of the tragic as a method but showing his audiences that if the mime clown could persevere and transcend any given context, despite the forces of history, tradition, and ideological imperatives, so could they. In his view, the artist was to be a careful observer, an exemplar, and act as an ethical mirror to his audience. Unbound by genre conventions, both Yengibarov’s pantomime and writing offered new directions in mime and transformations in theater and dialogue that necessitated daily reversals, subversions, and expressions of freedom, all of which were antithetical to the complex mechanism of the Soviet administrative law and censorship, which claimed the right to speak for the entire culture. As a staunch defender and pioneer of the idea that pantomime is not a silent form of entertainment, but a highly expressive, contemplative, and interdisciplinary art, Yengibarov was taking back his right to speak and the audience’s right to engage in an existential insight about the self, that self’s reality, and possibilities-to-be. To his own question as to why he prefers silence, Yengibarov responds, “That is not true. Is pantomime, after all, a silent art? Do you not hear the hands of Marcel Marceau groaning as they try to unbend the iron bars of the countless cells?” ⁷²