by Tim Rayborn
He became emotionally entangled with a young woman, Henriette Vogel, who was gifted with a fine mind and musical talent, but who was dying—yes, a romantic tragedy was brewing. Seeing her impending death and his own perceived failures, he agreed to a murder-suicide pact with her. On November 21, 1811, on the banks of a small lake outside of Berlin, he shot her and then himself. This seemed the only possible end to him, and in his last letter to his sister he wrote of meeting death with “inexpressible serenity.” Because of the suicidal nature of their deaths, they were denied burial in consecrated ground and were instead buried at the site where they died. As you might expect, this little area soon became a place of Romantic pilgrimage. The gravesite fell into some disrepair over the next several decades, which probably only added to its reputation.
Today, von Kleist is regarded as one of the finest German writers of his era, at last receiving the acclaim that he felt was denied him during life. The wandering writer who feels unappreciated for his gifts and cannot accept the world, dying by his own hand with his beloved on the shores of a lake … It’s almost too stereotyped to be true, but it all happened!
Alexander Griboyedov (1795–1829)
Getting ahead of himself II
Griboyedov’s death qualifies as one of the more grisly among those of his fellow theatrical colleagues, akin to something out of a war movie or a horror story, or some combination of both. Born in Moscow, he supported himself by working for the civil service; in his free time, he wrote plays, poetry, and some music. His plays were entertaining if unmemorable, except for one, Woe from Wit, a satire of post-Napoleonic Moscow that portrayed stereotypes to a degree a little bit too uncomfortable for the censors, who made significant cuts before they allowed it to be printed. However, unofficial copies circulated, as such things are wont to do, so the Russian people did get to read what he intended, if not actually see it acted onstage. It is now considered a classic of Russian literature.
His work in diplomacy ultimately resulted in him being sent to Tehran as an ambassador in the aftermath of the Russo-Persian War (1826–1828). This conflict had ended with Persia defeated and forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Turkmenchay, in which Persia agreed to cede control of several northern territories to Russia, along with various other concessions. Needless to say, Russians were not popular with Persians at this time, and it was dangerous for diplomats to even be in the country.
Indeed, not long after his arrival, an incident occurred that was to have tragic consequences. An Armenian eunuch escaped from the harem of the shah, as did two Armenian women from the harem of the shah’s son-in-law; they sought refuge in the Russian mission. The furious shah wanted them returned, but Griboyedov refused.
This defiance caused an uprising among angry locals, and egged on by their local religious leaders, they stormed the building. The Cossacks that were assigned to protect the embassy did their best to hold back the mob, but they could only do it for so long. Eventually, Griboyedov and his assistants were caught out when the attackers broke through a ceiling and descended on them. Griboyedov was shot and killed and his body was thrown from the window to the masses below. It is said that the corpse was decapitated and that the head was put on display in the stall of a local food vendor. The rest of the uniformed body was paraded through the streets in celebration before being dumped on a garbage heap a few days later. It was eventually identified and taken back to Tbilisi in Georgia for burial.
The Persians claimed that there was more to the story, saying that Griboyedov and his cronies had insulted the locals and kidnapped some women who had converted to Islam, taking them against their will back to the embassy. This, they claimed, caused the riot. Actually, there is some evidence that British spies incited the mob, because they wanted to limit Russian influence in the area and possibly start another conflict. Poor Griboyedov was caught up in a situation that he had no part in making.
Meanwhile, the shah, realizing that this incident had potentially catastrophic consequences, sent his grandson to live in Moscow as a kind of goodwill hostage, and he offered the Shah Diamond, a priceless eighty-eight-carat diamond, as a gift to the Russian Tsar Nicholas I. It can still be seen in the collection known as the Kremlin Diamond Fund.
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837)
He couldn’t stomach it
Pushkin is often thought of as the father of modern Russian literature. A Romantic poet, playwright, and novelist, he left a number of excellent works in his short life. He was born into noble stock—his great-grandfather on his mother’s side was the African Abram Gannibal, who was taken from Cameroon to Constantinople as a slave for the Ottoman sultan, but who shortly after ended up the Russian court, being presented to Peter the Great; the two became friends and Gannibal prospered.
As a young man, Pushkin was attracted to social reform and radical causes, despite his upper-class status. This obviously didn’t sit too well with the ruling establishment, and in the spring of 1820, he was exiled to southern Russia, under the pretense of an “administrative transfer” from his work. He spent time in the Crimea and the Caucasus, then finally settled in Moldavia. During this time, he became a Freemason and also joined the Filiki Eteria, a secret society dedicated to the ousting of the Ottomans in Greece and to establishing an independent Greek republic.
He came into conflict with the Russian government again, which then confined him to his mother’s estate in northwestern Russia in 1824. The following year, he petitioned Tsar Nicholas I for release, and this request was granted, but soon after, his work was associated with the Decembrists revolt—wherein a group of officers protested Nicholas taking the throne. Pushkin’s work was popular with them, so he was guilty by association. The uprising was suppressed, its leaders executed or exiled, and back to his mother’s estate Pushkin went.
During this confinement, he wrote his most famous play, Boris Godunov, about the life of the tsar of that name (1551–1605). However, given Pushkin’s trouble with the authorities, the censor would not permit it to be shown; the excuse given was that the play included depictions of the Orthodox Patriarch and monks, and it was forbidden to portray them onstage. The work was originally intended as a closet drama—a type of play that was not staged but rather read aloud by one person, or perhaps a small group, in private. In any case, the censorship was not lifted until 1866, and a full public performance was only staged in Saint Petersburg in 1870, based on an altered edition. Amazingly, the uncensored version was only first performed in 2007 at Princeton University in an English translation.
Despite these difficulties, Pushkin’s works came to be viewed favorably and he was a great inspiration to the generation of Russian composers who followed him, such as Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and Mussorgsky, all of whom set his works to music as operas. Another of Pushkin’s dramas, Mozart and Salieri, perpetuated the false story that Salieri murdered his younger rival out of jealously, thus keeping alive an urban legend that found its way into the twentieth century in Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus, and its film version.
By the 1830s, he was allowed to travel freely again and had married a much younger woman, Natalya Goncharova, who was greatly admired by the court and the tsar himself. In fact, Pushkin suspected that he was permitted some of his freedoms simply because the tsar desired her company at court. He grew increasingly suspicious of her dealings and in 1837, accused her brother-in-law Georges d’Anthès of having an affair with her. They settled the dispute by a duel, in which d’Anthès got the first shot off and wounded Pushkin in the stomach, fatally, it turns out. Pushkin managed a return shot that only grazed his opponent’s arm. Pushkin pardoned his foe on his death bed and died two days later, while d’Anthès was eventually exiled from Russia, since dueling was illegal.
Fearful of a political demonstration and violence at Pushkin’s funeral, the tsar had it moved from Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg to a much smaller church and restricted attendance to family, close friends, and court members. The body was then secreted
away at midnight and buried at his mother’s estate, a quiet ending for a would-be revolutionary.
The Old Price riots (1809)
Sometimes bad things happen for mundane reasons. When the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden burned down on September 20, 1808, it was a great tragedy, as the props, costumes, and play scripts were lost, along with original music by composers such as George Frideric Handel and Thomas Arne. Worse, at least twenty-two people were killed when the roof crashed down on them. The total damage was estimated at about £250,000, an absolutely enormous sum for the time. The fire was believed to be accidental, probably caused by some smoldering fabric set off by a spark from a theatrical gun that was not properly extinguished after a performance.
Work on a new theater began soon after, and it was completed and set to reopen almost exactly one year later, on September 18, 1809. There was a problem, though. The costs for building the replacement were so high that management was forced to raise prices, an age-old problem that brings age-old protests. Price hikes were introduced across the board, and some seats that had previously been open to the public were converted into private boxes for rent at expensive annual sums, which exposed some of the class divides that were already causing dissention in other areas of London life.
This gentrification of their entertainment did not sit well with the public, and on opening night, they were at the venue and mad as hell. While the manager, John Philip Kemble, attempted to give a rousing speech from the stage about the restoration of the theater, filled with patriotic pride, the crowd grew increasingly restless. The Times reported: “We believe not a single word … was heard by the most acute listener in the house: hisses, groans, yells, screeches, barks, coughs, shouts, cries of ‘Off! lower the prices! six shillings! pickpockets! imposition! Cut-purse!’” It may or may not be significant that the intended play for opening night was Macbeth, which has a long history of bad luck attached to it (see the chapter on superstitions in act II). Was this mishap yet another example of “the Scottish Play” causing disruption?
In any case, thus began the Old Price riots, which, despite their name, didn’t do all that much rioting and caused little damage or injury. They were intended as a form of loud civil disobedience to force the manager to revert to the, well, old prices. Kemble mishandled some things in trying to deal with the disorder, such as when he hired professional boxers Daniel Mendoza and Samuel Elias to act as bouncers for some of the louder and more unruly patrons. This, as you can imagine, didn’t go over well, and the disruptions escalated. These riots would carry on for the next two months, and Kemble was ultimately forced to apologize and lower prices back to what they had been previously—score one for the people! In the future, theaters were more careful about how they raised prices in view of this boisterous revolt, being fearful of another uprising.
Vampires onstage: a nineteenth-century obsession
Blood-sucking freaks
For modern readers, the word “vampire” conjures up Dracula, whether in Bram Stoker’s novel or the character’s countless screen appearances. Or perhaps it’s the more recent vampire fandoms, from Lestat to Buffy to Twilight. Somehow the concept of a blood-drinking monster (often tragic and all too human) never loses its appeal, and new works about these immortal creatures appear every year.
In the nineteenth century, there was a craze for such beings on the theater stage, where they made the jump from literature. Beginning in France in 1820, the vampire play soon found its way to London and eventually to America, with at least thirty-five productions appearing over the course of the century. They originated as gothic dramas with themes of romanticism and the triumph of good over evil, but eventually, they reveled in implied perversions, moral ambiguities, violence, and demonic overtones. Playing on fears associated with death and sexuality, the vampire’s actions allowed audiences to revel in the forbidden; the drinking of blood had erotic and religious overtones, and could even be an uncomfortable mixture of the two.
One of the most important vampires before Dracula was Lord Ruthven. He had many of the familiar vampire characteristics: he was a reanimated dead body (or sometimes a fallen angel), though a handsome and appealing one, he was wealthy, he wandered the world, and he was always looking for new victims—specifically, young women—desiring their blood. The first play to feature him was Le Vampire, a three-act melodrama that debuted in Paris in 1820. The setting of the play is, unusually, the Inner Hebrides islands off the coast of Scotland. In the story, Ruthven is a somewhat tragic figure, who genuinely loves one of the female characters, but he is also a murderer who delights in killing and mutilating his victims. He is eventually destroyed, not with a wooden stake, but a humble pistol; several of our more familiar tropes were not yet present. The play was a huge hit; not only did the performances sell out, but so did the copies of the script, though the critics naturally hated it. One review lamented: “Ruthven tried to [drink the blood of] the young bride who flees before him. Is this a moral situation? The whole play indirectly represents God as a weak or odious being who abandons the world to the demons of hell.”
The play’s success spawned imitations, of course, with another critic noting: “There is not a theatre in Paris without its Vampire!” Some of these plays were serious, some were well-done, and some were awful. A few were comedic parodies. The idea of the vampire became so popular that plays started including the word in their titles to help bring in audiences, even when there were no vampires in the story!
An English adaptation of the play was inevitable, and by August 1820, The Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles opened in London, spawning its own imitations, operas, ballets, comedies, and other such works. It offered up more spectacle than its French counterpart, with elaborate sets and the striking scene of Ruthven being dispatched by a lightning bolt and disappearing into the earth (through a type of trap door onstage). Perhaps surprisingly, it was a critical as well as a commercial success. The vampire craze had bitten England (though not as severely as it had France) and would continue on and off for decades. Several of the plays were set in Scotland, which seemed to be a curious blend of familiar and exotic for audiences, though probably less so for English audiences than for French ones. Since those audiences tended to be made up of the lower classes who were not thoroughly educated in the ways of geography, even a relatively nearby country such as Scotland contained some air of the unfamiliar.
Over the next few decades, the English would incorporate elements of German Romantic and supernatural themes into their vampire plays, including Faustian pacts and demonology, which added a darker feel to many stories. There were plays with wonderful names like Thalaba the Destroyer (which used Orientalist images of the “mysterious” East, a departure from the slightly less mysterious Scotland), The Vampire Bride, or the Tenant of the Tomb, several called simply The Vampire (originality was apparently not prized), and Giovanni the Vampire!!! Or, How Shall We Get Rid of Him? (okay, this one was a satire, based loosely on the character of Don Giovanni). Other plays brought in werewolves and even Frankenstein’s creature to create onstage monster mashes that prefigured the classic horror B-movie film crossovers.
The craze faded as the century wore on, and vampires began to appear more often in burlesque productions and comedies. These vampires were mainly harmless, mostly objects of laughter and fun, but there was still enough of an appetite for them that they never completely vanished. And so it seemed the vampire had been tamed. Little did people know that Bram Stoker would soon unleash the most terrifying vampire of all on an unsuspecting literary world, restoring these creatures of the night to their proper place in the horror genre.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
About those curtains …
The incomparable Oscar Wilde cannot possibly be covered here in any way that does him justice. Playwright, poet, humorist, and writer, Wilde shocked the prudish sensibilities of the Victorian Age and paid the ultimate price for daring to do so. He was imprisoned for homosexuality, and the ordeal took a
permanent toll on his health; he died only shortly after being released. He is known for his dark novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, a splendid gothic horror that exposes the undercurrent of vice and sin in society, when a beautiful youthful man makes a Faustian deal to remain young forever, while only his portrait ages. It prompted one newspaper to declare that the work was “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” They just don’t write reviews like they used to!
Wilde’s plays were, perhaps surprisingly, quite popular, though sometimes there was a definite disconnect between what the public liked and what the censors allowed. For example, his Salomé was written in French and tells the story of the eponymous dancer in the title, who ultimately demands the head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist) on a silver platter. It was not permitted to show in London because the Licensing Act forbade the depiction of biblical characters onstage; it played in Paris in 1896.
His society comedies, such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, enjoyed enormous popularity, and while on the surface they were amusing to polite society, there is still subtle criticism of the strict social rules that governed everyday affairs. His final comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, was very well received and established him as a major literary force. A farce about adopting fake identities in order to escape from social obligations, it has similar themes to Wilde’s early works, but the humor was enough to win over audiences and its opening night was a triumph.