24 April 2006


"Let us recall the staged performance of "Storming the Winter Palace" in Petrograd, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, on 7 November 1920. Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students and artists worked round the clock, living on kasha (the tasteless wheat porridge), tea and frozen apples, and preparing the performance at the very place where the event "really took place" three years earlier; their work was coordinated by the Army officers, as well as by the avant-garde artists, musicians and directors, from Malevich to Meyerhold. Although this was acting and not "reality," the soldiers and sailors were playing themselves - many of them not only actually participated in the event of 1917, but were also simultaneously involved in the real battles of the Civil War that were raging in the near vicinity of Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering from severe shortages of food. A contemporary commented on the performance: "The future historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest and most brutal revolutions, all of Russia was acting"54; and the formalist theoretician Viktor Shklovski noted that "some kind of elemental process is taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical."
-slavoj zizek "Repeating Lenin"
available: http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

-John Steinbeck, "East of Eden" (Penguin Classics edition, 2000, p. 134.)

Anonymous said...

America is brainwashed by this man.

Anonymous said...

North, South, or Central?

Anonymous said...

Well now. This may be a simple troll, but it's too simple and I want some splainin'. Brainwashing is pretty powerful stuff, and I would have guessed maybe the Bible, or even Monster Truck Garage as guilty parties before I said Steinbeck. You treat literature as something important in the States, so it almost comes off as a backhanded compliment. Is America also brainwashed by Bashevis Singer, Bellow, Hemingway, Faulkner, and O'Neill? Worse yet, the evil Toni Morrison, as she was touted by arch-brainwasher Oprah! Is Canada brainwashed by Michael Ondaatje? Please elaborate, Anonymous User.

-Freddy G.

Anonymous said...

he's refering to the mind of the lonely man. not steinbeck silly!
america loves their lonely men so get off it...

but, if you want to talk about steinbeck, then yes - every student must read the bugger.