Cubists of Gesture: Vadim Shershenevich about Theatre Actors of 1920s

The article is devoted to the theatrical texts of the imagist poet Vadim Shershenevich, when his work in the theatre as a director and playwright was overand the poet focused on theatre reviews, feuilletons, and critical texts. Shershenevich creates four portraits of leading theatre and film actors — Igor Ilyinsky, Anatoly Ktorov, Grigory Yaron and Nikolay Bravin, which reflect the technologies of acting relevant for the second half of the twenties of the 20th cen- tury. Shershenevich was one of the first to articulate the difference between a theatre actor and a film actor, and to postulate new roles that should appear in still silent cinema at that time. He focused on the expressive possibilities of gesture, and foresaw new opportunities for operetta and actors who devoted themselves to this genre. In these brochures, Shershenevich refuses to follow the biographical method of analyzing the creative path of actors, polem- icizing with other brochures in this series, and leaves more opportunities for exploring the actor’s expressive means. He describes changes in gestures, movements, pauses of an actor in a movie, analyzes how the actor’s appearance works to create an image, how it changes with the growth of acting skills, how the category of “funny” has been transformed in the new era, and how actors in drama theatre and operetta expressed it.