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RE: Re: [xmca] Vygotsky and Gordon Craig's Hamlet



Thanks, Professor Kotik-Friedgut!

 

Yes, that's what I thought. So it's rather odd that Yaroshevsky says Vygotsky had personal knowledge of the production. Of course, he must have read the reviews; but they were pretty unfavorable.

 

I guess my real question is this: When and why did Vygotsky start to see Hamlet as the portrait of a single mind, with a self-directed, soliloquizing "foreplane" and a social-interactive, communicative backstage?

 

The Craig production does contain this idea, because Craig saw Hamlet as a monodrama, a one man show, like Chekhov's play about tobacco. But Craig's idea of Hamlet-as-monodrama was diluted with all kinds of symbolist ideas, i.e. Hamlet-as-myth, myth-as-religion, Hamlet-as-medieval-mystery-play, etc.

 

And the biggest single difference between Vygotsky's early draft of Hamlet and the one that ends up in Chapter Eight of Psychology of Art seems to be precisely that: Vygotsky gives up on the idea that Hamlet is a religious mystery play (he even rejects the idea that Vygotsky's sparing of Claudius in Act Three is religiously motivated!) and from that moment on sees it as purely psychological.

 

I think the 1924 production Vygotsky saw was pretty close to the original Craig version, and that production was criticized as being covert religious propaganda.  Vygotsky is pretty hard on it too!

 

David Kellogg

Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

 

PS:

 

By the way, I very much enjoyed your work on Vygotsky's theatre pieces in "Psyanima", and I noticed that Vygotsky's review of children's theatre includes another complaint about Chukovsky's "Crocodile", which suggests that the note we find in "Educational Psychology" really is Vygotsky's.

 

dk

 

 

--------- 원본 메일 ---------
보낸사람: Bella Kotik-Friedgut <bella.kotik@gmail.com>
받는사람 : "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
날짜: 2013년 2월 01일 금요일, 05시 15분 35초 +0900
제목: Re: [xmca] Vygotsky and Gordon Craig's Hamlet
Vygotsky came to Moscow in 1913

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 6:09 AM, kellogg <kellogg59@hanmail.net> wrote:

> Does anyone happen to know whether Vygotsky personally saw the Gordon
> Craig version of Hamlet in Moscow in 1912? He would have been sixteen, I
> guess, and it was about the time he was starting to write about Hamlet.
>
>
>
> I'm reading a book which attempts to reconstruct the Gordon Craig version
> of Hamlet (directed by Stanislavsky). It has the interesting that the
> production was greater than the sum of its antithetical parts. Craig saw
> the play in intensely psychological terms (Craig believed that only Hamlet
> was a real person, and everybody else in the play has the same status as
> the ghost). Stanislavsky, on the other hand, saw it in equally intense
> sociological terms (Stanislavsky believed that it should be historically
> accurate, and that is why he insisted on a medieval rather than a
> Renaissance setting).
>
>
>
> And so of course it occurs to me that Chapter Eight of Psychology of Art
> is an attempt to square the circle. But on p. 172 he speaks disapprovingly
> of the 1924 revival of the Gordon Craig version by Michael Chekhov, because
> it transforms Hamlet into an action hero, puts Claudius in the role of
> nemesis, and confers extraordinary depth of character on Hamlet.
>
>
>
> Kozulin seems to think that Vygotsky really sided with Craig against
> Stanislavsky, that is, he saw the work as a mystery play and not a bit of
> realism. I am not so sure: The way I read Vygotsky, he really turns Craig
> upside down: Hamlet is the ONLY person in the play who has no real
> character at all.
>
>
>
> I also think that reading Hamlet as a myth or a mystery play makes it
> quite impossible to achieve what Vygostky is really trying to get out of
> the play: a little model of the mind as a sociological backstage and
> a psychological proscenium, with the great midstage occupied by various
> forms of speech.
>
>
>
> David Kellogg
>
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
> <kellogg59@hanmail.net>
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
>


--
Sincerely yours Bella Kotik-Friedgut
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