Vasily Kamensky - The October Revolution

The October Revolution

He welcomed the October Revolution of 1917, and was one of the first writers elected to the Moscow Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. In November he "persuaded Filippov, the Moscow baker (his shops had been the center of struggle during the February Days and even earlier during the 1905 revolt in Moscow), to subsidize a small café for poets. It was located in an old laundry on a small pereulok called Nastasyinsky just off the Tverskaya." (Soon anarchists began frequenting the Poets' Café, and after it closed in April 1918 they set up their journal Anarkhiya there.) For the first anniversary of the October Revolution, he turned Stenka Razin into a play; Robert Leach writes that this "most convincing version created a very strong impression when it was presented at the Vvedensky People's House, Moscow":

Stenka Razin was played by Nikolai Znamensky from the Moscow Art Theatre, the play was designed in an attractive childish-primitive style by Pavel Kuznetsov and directed by Meyerhold's former pupil, Arkady Zonov, and Vasily Sakhnovsky, formerly Komissarzhevsky's partner at the theatre named after Vera Komissarzhevskaya. It was, wrote one critic, an 'enormous success', partly at least, it should be noted, because it 'reeked of streets and circus'.... The play employs an utterly direct and simple style, with plenty of clowning but a minimum of Futurist mannerisms, and achieves something of the spirit of the folktale.