Nikolai Evreinov

Having matriculated from the school in 1901, Evreinov turned his attention to music and studied with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov at the Moscow Conservatory for a couple of years.

In 1910, Evreinov quit his job at the Ministry of Railways to take the helm as producer, dramatist, and composer of the False Mirror Theatre in Saint Petersburg.

[1] In 1920 Evreinov staged the mass spectacle The Storming of the Winter Palace, a re-creation of that pivotal event of the October Revolution on its three-year anniversary.

The mass spectacle form took the pre-revolutionary Symbolist utopias of "ritual theatre" (whose formulation was largely a response to the abortive 1905 revolution), and recast their 'people' as the proletariat.

Kerensky leaps to a car for an escape, and is pursued along a path between the two large groups of spectators by trucks full of the Red Guard waving bayonets, to the Palace.

He pointed out that nature is full of theatrical conventions: desert flowers mimicking the stones; mice feigning death in order to escape a cat's claws; complicated dances of birds, etc.

[3] His plays include the monodramas The Presentation of Love (1910) and In the Stage-Wings of the Soul (1911), the tragi-farce A Merry Death (1908, based on Alexander Blok's The Puppet Show), and The Chief Thing (1921); the last two of which were heavily indebted to the commedia.

According to Spencer Golub, The Chief Thing play provides a "compendium of Evreinovian aesthetics and devices" and features Harlequin "as death-defier and life-transformer".