Vvedensky’s Christmas at the Ivanovs’ was written in 1938, at the time when the war waged in the Soviet press against the ‘formalists’ and ‘decadents’ was at its height. The play’s setting is not the Leningrad of the early Soviet period, but a bourgeois household in the Russia of the 1880s.The story is split into nine scenes or tableaux, which together follow the fate of a family whose name is Puzyrev (and not, as the title of the play might suggest, Ivanov) one Christmas eve. The action begins with the seven Puzyrev children (aged between one and eighty-two) being given a bath by their nanny and eagerly discussing the forthcoming festivities. One of the girls, the thirty-two-year-old Sonya, begins to indulge in sexual innuendo, which offends her nanny so much that she promptly decapitates the ‘child’. By and large Christmas at the Ivanovs’ has been discussed either as a parody of a classics of Russian literature, or as a forerunner of the Western Theatre of the Absurd. For by defamiliarizing the word, the text, and the world, Vvedensky’s play underlines the fact that dramatic text, like any utterance, is ‘co-created’ by the addressee towards whom it is oriented, however much it might try to pass itself off as an objective ‘picture’ of reality.
(Graham Roberts)