Meet Nikolai Evreinov, the 19th century Nathan Fielder

This is an adapted and fully-annotated blog post version of my latest video essay. It’s just as good as the video – maybe better, because I had to mute and blur some clips for copyright reasons! In 1920, just three years after the Russian revolution, the new government staged a re-enactment of The Storming of the Winter Palace. It was one of the biggest re-enactments in history, with almost ten thousand performers, many of whom had been involved in the actual storming, 320 military vehicles, and an honest-to-god warship. Watching all of this were 100,000 spectators, and actually, we probably shouldn’t call them spectators, because they got involved in the re-enactment too. A lot of historians think the man behind it, Russian director Nikolai Evreinov, was just a Soviet propagandist, but the truth is much more interesting and complicated. In fact, I think the best person to compare Evreinov to is someone who became famous a century later: comedian Nathan Fielder. I’m not saying this because they both created re-enactments so elaborate and spectacular, some people mistook them for reality. It’s because, in their heart of hearts, both men believe the way to be happy and to truly understand human behaviour is by turning life itself into theatre. And it’s that shared belief that I really want to drill into here. Now, you might be wondering why you’ve never heard of Nikolai Evreinov before. A big reason is that, as with Nathan Fielder, people in the early 20th century couldn’t tell whether he was serious or not. On the one hand, Evreinov was one of the three most important directors in Russia, alongside Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of realist theatre and method acting, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, the pioneer of symbolism in theatre. On the other hand, Evreinov was viewed as “just” a comedian. Some of his most popular works were his theatrical parodies, and his theory that all of life was just theatre was considered so bizarre, people assumed he was joking. As for Nathan Fielder, some people couldn’t tell whether his work on Holocaust awareness or aviation safety was just a joke, or something serious. First, I want to tell you about Nikolai Evreinov.

About what he believed, what he made, what he got wrong and what he got right, and why he was so far ahead of his time. Then I want to talk about Nathan Fielder and how his shows, Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, refract Evreinov’s ideas through the lens of neoliberalism and late stage capitalism. That’s a lot – but stay with me, I promise it’ll be fun. Portrait of Nikolai Evreinov by Ilya Repin (1915) Nikolai Evreinov was born in Moscow in 1879 to an upper class family and almost instantly fell in love with the theatre. As a child, he staged puppet shows, and at the age of seven, he wrote his first parody. This habit would get him into trouble at school, where he was almost expelled for writing a parody about his teachers. Another time, he played a prank by getting his class to pretend an absent student had actually died – he draped the entire room in mourning, covered the teacher’s desk in candles and crosses, and directed all the students to cry. Pretty elaborate work for a kid! Evreinov studied law in St. Petersburg as a teenager and in his spare time, wrote and acted in plays. Everything in his life was about theatre – even his law school thesis was about the performative aspects of public executions. But when his parents separated, Evreinov had to get a real job in the civil service. In his spare time, he began writing his first full-length plays, which were starting to get noticed. Probably the best known of these is The Beautiful Despot, which debuted in 1906, when Evreinov was only in his 20s. The play opens in the drawing room of a grand country estate where a master is chatting with his servants. Everything about it, from the props to the costumes to the furniture, looks like it’s from the early 1800s. It’s only when a journalist arrives wearing modern clothes from the 20th century that the audience realises this isn’t actually a period drama but actually a contemporary story. It turns out that the master of the estate was once a famous liberal, progressive journalist.

After he became disenchanted by modern life, he decides to live as his great-grandfather did, recreating his lifestyle in perfect detail, and gets a bunch of likeminded friends to role play as his servants and companions. To be clear, this is pretty unusual kind of story for its time. The master isn’t portrayed as a madman, like Don Quixote, nor is he forced into this imaginary world because he’s been marooned on an island like Robinson Crusoe. It’s not some passing whim, either – he’s put a huge amount of effort into this immersive role play, sustained it for several months, and he’s not doing it solo – he’s convinced other people to take part. It’s more like Westworld than anything else – but of course, Westworld wouldn’t come out for another seventy years. So at first, the 20th century journalist can barely believe what he’s seeing. He pulls books down from the shelves – they’re all from 1808, just like the newspapers. He talks to the servants he recognises, and they won’t break character: Journalist: I can’t quite recall where—but still—I don’t know, perhaps I’m mistaken. (Picks up book and reads): “The Political, Statistical, and Geographical Journal; or, The Contemporary History of the World. 1808. Third part. Third book. September.”—(Picks up another.)—“The Genius of the Times,” 1808.—“St. Petersburg Review”—“Northern Mercury”—all September, 1808.—Tell me, that is, er, tell me, what are these papers, old ones? Maid: I don’t know; we don’t know anything about those things. (Lights the last candles.) Journalist: I don’t understand what sort of candles these are. They’re funny. Maid: Funny? They’re the best sort of tallow. Journalist: Tallow? Listen. What does this all mean? Come, I entreat you, tell me what it’s all about? My head’s going round.—Oh! Why, you’re Baroness Nordman, or I’ve gone mad, or I’ve got hallucinations, or I’m dreaming!

Maid: But, sir!—— Journalist: You’re Baroness Nordman, whom I met only a year ago at the Sociological Society! Maid: But, sir!—— Journalist: I’ve no more doubts. You’re Helen, Baroness Nordman. Maid (withdrawing): Lord preserve us! What are you talking about, sir? I’m a serf, a chambermaid, my name’s Grusha, I wash the floor. Journalist: A serf? (Pause.) But serfdom was abolished in 1861!!! Maid: Lord preserve us! Why it’s only 1808 now! Eventually, he figures it out and starts to argue with the master about why on earth he’s doing this. The master responds by saying that the modern world has destroyed beauty, it’s turned gardens into factories, torn apart ceremonies and rituals, made everything about money, and is being overrun by extravagant Yankee millionaires – so, basically just like today, then. But the master isn’t interested in changing society any more. Instead, by retreating to a more private world, he and his fellow travellers get to walk and ride in the fresh air, look at the stars in clear skies, build bonfires and read books. It’s a world full of physical sensation – the same world that people want to find today, away from their screens. One of the most shocking moments in the story is when you discover that the master’s chambermaid used to be a leader of the feminist movement. A few years ago I might’ve said it was unbelievable, then we got tradwives. It would be easy to dismiss Evreinov as a cultural conservative, just another guy infected with nostalgia for a lost golden age. But this play is more complicated than that. His protagonist wants beauty and sensation and excitement, and the only place he thinks he can get it is in the past, not the present or future. He knows he can’t literally turn the clock back and doesn’t want to force his ideas on anyone else, so he builds his own golden age and, rather than living in it on his own, invites other people in to make it feel more real. Now, The Beautiful Despot is not a great play. It has a great hook and it’s entertaining in its own way, but it lacks any kind of plot and its characters are completely flat.

Luigi Pirandello does the same thing far better in his play Henry IV, and it’s likely Pirandello was influenced by Evreinov. No, what makes The Beautiful Despot fascinating is that unlike practically every story where someone builds a make-believe world, this one is not a cautionary tale. Evreinov is saying that people should construct their own worlds to make themselves happier. And I think that earnest belief is something he shares with Nathan Fielder. It’s not that illusion and performance can be just as good as the real thing, but that there is no such thing as the real thing – that it’s illusion and performance all the way down. This idea became the centrepiece of Evreinov’s grand unified theory, that everyone should seek to turn their lives into theatre to their fulfil their deepest desires in a way that everyday life cannot. Before we go into that further, I want to pull the camera back a little bit. At the start of the 20th century, not only was Russia going through rapid industrialisation that was destroying the nature that Evreinov loved so much, but it had just lost a war with Japan. This was an international humiliation, the first time a major European power had been defeated by an Asian nation. Ogata Gessen (1904) Traditional class structures and hierarchies were breaking apart, realism in art was being overtaken by new forms like impressionism and cubism and futurism. Nothing seemed stable. And most importantly, there was the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. So it’s not surprising that Evreinov, a man who came from the aristocracy but was no longer tied to it, a man who had to work for a living but resented having to lower himself to the masses, would both challenge authority but refuse to march alongside the workers. Evreinov’s next big project after The Beautiful Despot was setting up The Ancient Theatre. The idea here was to reconstruct past forms of theatre, from 11th century medieval plays onwards, to try and understand and illustrate how different they were from modern theatre. In particular, he wanted to show how medieval theatre wasn’t just a show you bought a ticket for to amuse yourself, but an interactive artistic experience that was so tightly woven into the fabric of life that it felt like life itself.