Russians in Berlin: The Blue Bird

There is a lot to be said about Russians in Berlin. In the 1920s they were probably the largest immigrant group. Most of them were refugees from the Bolshevik revolution and its subsequent civil war and terror. Some came to be very well known, like the writer Vladimir Nabokov. So many were Berlin Russians that Charlottenburg district got to be popularly known as Charlottengrad…

There were also artists like Vassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall. And Pavel Tchelitchew, less known than the other but whose works have an unmistakable touch of the 1920s. His are the set designs shown in this post, done for a Russian-German cabaret called Der Blaue Vogel (The Blue Bird) That name should not be confused with another animal of the same colour and times, The Blue Rider...  Nor with The Blue Mouse, another Berlin cabaret founded by the Danish Argus Bang, but that is a completely different and not wholly veracious story...). It was a literary and folkloristic cabaret composed of Russian emigrants, founded in 1921 in Berlin, by J. Duvan-Torzoff.
The style of the show was strongly influenced by the Letuchaya Mysh (The Bat, the first Russian cabaret, created by Nikita Baliev in 1908 at the Moscow Art Theater, known as Stanislavsky and Anton Chekhov own scene) and characterized by a stylized representation in all the elements: sets, costumes, sounds and music, movements of the actors. This was combined with the choice of using a mixture of several languages: Russian, French, English and German.

The contents concerned mainly literary parodies, such as those of Maurice Maeterlinck's works (L'Oiseau bleu was one of his plays, which had its premier in 1908 at the Moscow Art Theater), but also folkloristic staging in Russian style, with elements of social criticism.

The Blaue Vogel knew significant popularity under the direction of J.D. Jushnij, who also performed as conférencier, taking the company on tour all over the world. The project ended in 1931, after over 3000 performances. In 1945, in Munich, some Russian artists tried to revive the Blaue Vogel, but with little success.

Set design by Pavel Tchelitchew

What follows is a piece from 1924 by Ferdinand Hager, a great admirer of the Blaue Vogel:

Contrary to all other birds, the bluebird usually migrates in the summer. And I, its faithful friend and admirer, am sitting in the heat of Berlin, bent over foreign newspapers, following its proud flight. This year I followed the cabaret of Russian emigrés, The Blue Bird, through Austria, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, all of Switzerland and the Bohemian spas, and everywhere I read of victories, triumphs, and cheers.

What is it that compels such a variety of people to a unanimous, nearly identical assessment and enthusiasm? There are, aside from religion, only two personal experiences capable of achieving such a result: that of genuine art and genuine humanity. And I believe it is just these two things that allow these minor entertainment arts from Russia to assume the proportions of a revelation for Europe and America. Perhaps it is wrong to speak of "minor arts" at all. it is major art in a minor key. It is modest: for a miniature, it sacrifices no less time, work, and spirit than would be required for an entire drama—and everything just to captivate the senses, to tune the soul for a few minutes through light, gesture. color, motion, and sound. The principles are: national flavor; resort to native popular painting in its sentimental and grotesque elements, treated here with a most modern audacity; an astounding pairing of expressionism and primitivism; and, in consequence, the introduction of expressionism to the stage. And, alongside sturdy folk art stand vital cross-sections from past epochs: the Rococo, the Renaissance, the Russian eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the most modern Americanism, not mimicked, not caricatured but lived and raised to the level of overpowering effectiveness.

What the Russians have to offer is a cultivated art—not that for: pour I'arr understood only by those possessed of a superior aesthetic turn of mind but rather a bit of fantasy lent naive form in which lifeless objects take on human essence or are filled with human essence; an art that glimpses in objects, in a machine or a toy, the smiling caricature of human actions and deeds.

Set design by Pavel Tchelitchew

It is no accident that it is precisely Russian art that we seek out and treasure today. It is somehow the expression of a deep longing for which we no longer find any resonance in Western European art. We expect of it the fulfillment of some kind of hope slumbering within us, unsuspected and inexplicable, and that is what unites all the different people over whose native lands the Blue Bird has made its summer migration.

For only in this way can one explain how all of these people listen for an entire evening to performances conducted in an utterly foreign language- and understand. That is where the Russians' achievement is manifest: they fill an entire evening using scarcely any of the words of the country in which they are performing, and one understands them anyway, as one rarely has understood anything. For the spectators do not consider what they have seen and heard might be—they simply experience it. [ . . . I

But what is this remarkable thing that sweeps the audience along, that excites it, that causes this cold, spoiled audience of the European metropoles to give up their inner reserve and feel the feelings, join in the action on the stage? It is perhaps quite simply what the emcee does, with such cheerful and cordial directness, beyond all the limitations of distance, as if to every spectator personally: he speaks. All of these things and characters on the Russian’s stage speak. They do not declaim ; they do not present something ; they are not supposed to be works of art, they speak. They speak and we understand.

Hager's text from « The Weimar Republic sourcebook », Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Dimendberg, University of California Press