If we keep considering the ephemeral, what exactly are the limits? In some senses human history is representative of ephemerality right? The past has come and gone. It has not survived the passage of time. In this way can historical places be considered ephemeral? They are no longer but once were. Especially places whose legacy has lived on. The part that is remembered or held in high esteem is past but the physical place is still here. Like any of the great capitals of the world. For example the Paris of the nineteen teens and twenties is a distinct place in time but it is no longer that place. Yes? Am I taking the idea of the ephemeral too far?
I have a place to tell you about that seems ephemeral to me in that it had a brief period when it was one thing, renown and rising, but now is no longer. It’s called Kaunas, Lithuania and I bet you’ve never heard of it. As I say it had a brief ‘golden age’ between 1919 and 1939 when it replaced Moscow as the de facto avant garde center of the East to rival Paris in the West. Kaunas became the capital- cultural, political, religious, social – of Lithuania when the traditional capital Vilnius was claimed by Poland at the end of the Great War. Everything concerning the Lithuanian culture and people up and moved to Kaunas in Free Lithuania and a brief period of ‘Greek city state like’ cultural foment ensued.(link to mansbach)
Rather than emphasizing the political in their nascent capital, the intelligentsia put forward an idealistic, hopeful, tolerant, spiritual cultural concept and in 1922 the Public Arts Theatre was founded that by 1924 had newly naturalized Lithuanian Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (1875-1957) as its director. If you know Goncharova you probably know Dobuzhinsky (link?). He was with Natalia since the days of World of Art and it was he who established her connection to Kaunas by having her do sets and costumes for Tales of Tsar Saltan in 1932. Also in 1932 was Mikhail Chekhov’s production of The Death of Ivan the Terrible which was staged in both Kaunas and Riga, Latvia which was Chekov’s home base. Dobuzhinsky and Chekhov were old friends and worked together frequently in the early 30s and presumably it was this connection that led to Gontcharova creating costume designs for Ivan.
So here we land at the crux of the matter. It is the physical presence of the Ivan costume designs that leads to an understanding of Kaunas, Lithuania. The ‘lack of ephemerality’ in the presence of the book here in the 21st c, it is tangibly real, helps us recognize the lost place from which it came. There is much work to do. What can we learn from the experiment of interwar Kaunas? Does the presence of Gontcharova’s work mean that she was physically there? Or did she work remote as it were? Love to hear your ideas.
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