Walpurgis Night or Soviet madhouse heterotopia Cover Image

Вальпургиева Ночь, или гетеротопия советского сумасшедшего дома
Walpurgis Night or Soviet madhouse heterotopia

Author(s): Laura Piccolo
Subject(s): Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts, Human Geography, Russian Literature, Social Theory, Theory of Literature
Published by: Vilniaus Universiteto Leidykla

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on the heterotopic space of the Soviet mental institution in the (non-) dialogue between the Soviet utopian discourse and heterotopia, and on its literary representation in Venedikt Erofeev’s tragedy Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander (1985). The association between heterotopia and the concept of madness is highly productive: invisible spaces of the body, where hallucinations are generated, are heterotopian; the psychiatric hospital, a separated space, usually located on the outskirts of the town, is heterotopian. In the Soviet society heterotopias of deviation (prisons, labour camps, psychiatric hospitals, etc.) played a crucial role in the maintaining of utopian discourses: they enclose anyone who can hamper the realisation of the socialist utopia. In Erofeev’s play Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander, a half-Jewish alcoholic poet named Lev Gurevich is committed to a mental hospital on April 30th (i.e. on Walpurgis night). Here he dies that same night with the other patients of his ward, on a ‘Sabbath’, parallel to the official celebration of May Day. Alcohol and death are, indeed, forms of non-being, which create an escape both from Soviet society (the utopian space) and from the mental hospital (a heterotopian space). The tragedy was put on stage as late as 1989. Every year Erofeev’s drama is symbolically staged on April 30th at the Na Yugo-Zapade Theatre (Moscow). Thus in the theatre, yet another heterotopic space “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces […] that are themselves incompatible” (Foucault), both the literary and the mythical Walpurgis Night coexist ritually and ‘heterotopically’.

  • Issue Year: 57/2015
  • Issue No: 5
  • Page Range: 186-197
  • Page Count: 12
  • Language: Russian