The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 | Page 4

are given to Russian
star-actors, in order if possible to draw talent of every sort forth from
the dry steppes of native art. The Russian actors are compelled on pain
of punishment to go regularly to the German theater, with a view to
their improvement, and in order to make this as effective as may be,
enormous compensations attract the best German stars to St. Petersburg.
And yet all this is useless, and the Russian theater is not raised above
the dignity of a workshop. Only the comic side of the national character,
a burlesque and droll simplicity, is admirably represented by actors
whose skill and the scope of whose talents may he reckoned equal to
the Germans in the same line. But in the higher walks of the drama they
are worthless. The people have neither cultivation nor sentiment for
serious works, while the poets to produce them, and the actors to
represent them, are alike wanting.
Immediately after the submission of Poland in 1831, the theaters,
permanent and itinerant, were closed. The plan was conceived of not
allowing them to be reöpened until they could be occupied by Russian
performers. But as the Government recovered from its first rage, this
was found to be impracticable. The officers of the garrisons in Poland,
however numerous, could never support Russian theaters, and besides,
where were the performers to come from? In Warsaw, however, it was
determined to force a theater into existence, and a Russian newspaper
was already established there. The power of the Muscovites has done
great things, built vast fortresses and destroyed vaster, but it could not
accomplish a Russian theater at Warsaw. Even the paper died before it
had attained a regular life, although it cost a great deal of money.
Finally came the permission to reöpen the Polish theater, and indeed
the caprice which was before violent against it, was now exceedingly
favorable, but of course not without collateral purposes. The scanty

theater on the Krasinski place, which was alone in Warsaw, except the
remote circus and the little theater of King Stanislaus Augustus, was
given up, and the sum of four millions of florins ($1,600,000) devoted
to the erection of two large and magnificent theaters. The
superintendence of the work of building and the management of the
performances was, according to the Russian system, intrusted to one
General Rautenstrauch, a man seventy years old, and worn out both in
mind and body. The two theaters were erected under one roof, and
arranged on the grandest and most splendid scale. The edifice is
opposite the City Hall, occupies a whole side of the main public place,
and is above 750 feet in length. The pit in each is supported by a series
of immense, stupid, square pilasters, such as architecture has seldom
witnessed out of Russia. Over these pilasters stands the first row of
boxes supported by beautifully wrought Corinthian columns, and above
these rise three additional rows. The edifice is about 160 feet high and
is the most colossal building in Warsaw. As it was designed to treat the
actors in military fashion and according to Russian style, the building
was laid out like barracks and about seven hundred persons live in it,
most of them employed about the theater. The two stages were built by
a German architect under the inspection of the General whose
peremptory suggestions were frequent and injurious. Both the great
theater as it is called, which has four rows of boxes, and can contain six
thousand auditors, and the Varieté theater which is very much smaller,
are fitted out with all sorts of apparatus that ever belonged to a stage. In
fact, new machinery has in many cases been invented for them and
proved totally useless. The Russian often hits upon queer notions when
he tries to show his gifts.
On one side a very large and strong bridge has been erected leading
from the street to the stage, to be used whenever the piece requires
large bodies of cavalry to make their appearance, and there are
machines that can convey persons with the swiftness of lightning down
from the sky above the stage, a distance of 56 feet. A machine for
which a ballet has been composed surpasses everything I ever saw in its
size; it serves to transport eighty persons together on a seeming cloud
from the roof to the foot-lights. I was astonished by it when I first
beheld it although I had seen the machines of the grand opera at Paris:
the second time I reflected that it alone cost 40,000 florins [$16,000].

Under the management of two Russian Generals, who have hitherto
been at the head of the establishment, a vast deal has in this way been
accomplished for mere external show.
The great Russian theatre of