The Kamerny Theatre: An Artistic History in Political Times (1914-1950)

FAIN: FEL-288906-23

Dassia N. Posner
Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book on the history of Moscow's Kamerny Theatre, an avant-garde theater founded by Ukrainian-Jewish director Alexander Tairov and dissolved during Stalin’s purges (1914-1950).

With the support of this National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, I will complete the first monograph in English on the Moscow Kamerny Theatre (1914-1950), founded by Ukrainian-Jewish director Alexander Tairov and lead actress Alisa Koonen. Drawing from the massive but little-known Kamerny archives, my book will illuminate and analyze this theatre’s complex intersections of experimentation, international artistic dialogue, and Stalin-era persecution over its thirty-five-year existence. My aim is to restore the full significance of the Kamerny and its artists to the historical record by revealing the richness of their brilliantly innovative work and the broad impact of their creative revolutions in the context of the cultures they bridged, the tumultuous political times in which they lived and worked, and the disinformation campaign that forced the theatre’s liquidation and erasure.