The Artistic Action “The Conquest of the Winter Palace” for Celebrating the Anniversary of the October Revolution in the History of the Formation of Performative Arts

The article is devoted to the issue of formation of performative art in the context of development of spectacular forms of Soviet state holidays. While examining the time and space of official festivities, the author traces the process of design of texts of symbolic pictures narrating on the advent of “the happy life” of the new socialist era in the history of humankind. The theatrical pageantry replicating the chief events of Soviet history, being a significant component of mass holidays, is researched by the author within the dynamics of the process of formation of new forms of culture occurring during the course of the entire specified stage of research. In the variety of the mass shows of 1920 the most large-scale is the grandiose stage work “The Conquest of the Winter Palace” replicating the events of October 1917 in real time and space, accompanied by the performance of the proletarian anthem, revolutionary songs, marches and gunshots. This constructed quasi-military atmosphere unified the sound space of the festivity, singling it out from the everyday routine spatial/temporal domain. The application of performative means created the conditions for the perception of the developed action as a real-time historical event. These were the means by which the sacred chronotope of the Soviet holiday was created: the traditional spatial/temporal dimension of the holiday received an innovational interpretation through the implementation of new symbols which are significant for the formation of the Soviet state. The publication is prepared within the framework of scholarly project No. 20-012-00366–А “Performative forms of musical art as a phenomenon of modern culture” supported by the RFFI.