Theatricality as Estrangement of Art and Life In the Russian Avant-garde

“We, too, will show you life that’s real—very! / But life transformed by the theater into a spectacle most extraordinary!” writes Vladimir Mayakovsky in the prologue of his famous Mystery Bouffe. This transformation of life “into a spectacle,” both on stage and in reality, is one of the most distinct features of the phenomenon of theatricality. It is to some extent the metamorphosis of the real, the habitual, the ordinary into the theatrical. The parallel between theatricality and the ideas of the Russian Formalist school of literary criticism has often been pointed out, particularly in relation to the Formalist concept of literariness. ¹ Nevertheless, the affinity between theatricality and the phenomenon of making the familiar strange, central to Russian Formalism, has rarely been addressed. In 1917, Russian Formalist scholar Victor Shklovsky coined the term ostranenie to describe the artistic strategy of presenting the well-known as if seen for the first time. The term is translated into German as Verfremdung, which became the cornerstone of Bertolt Brecht’s anti-Aristotelian dramaturgy of estrangement.