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Maurice Maeterlinck 1911 (64)
Maurice Maeterlinck 29 August, 1862 –6 May, 1949 was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was a Fleming, but wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. His plays form an important part of the Symbolist art movement, which was influenced by Theosophy. Among his favorite themes were those of death and the meaning of life, occultism, ethics and natural history. He was educated at a Jesuit college and read law, but a short practice as a lawyer in his home town convinced him that he was unfit for the profession. He was drawn toward literature during a stay in Paris, where he associated with a number of men of letters, in particular Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who greatly influenced him. Maeterlinck established himself in Paris in 1896 but later lived at Saint-Wandrille, an old Norman abbey that he had restored. He was predominantly a writer of lyrical dramas, but his first work was a collection of poems entitled Serres chaudes [Ardent Talons]. It appeared in 1889, the same year in which his first play, La Princesse Maleine, received enthusiastic praise from Octave Mirbeau, the literary critic of Le Figaro, and made him famous overnight. Lack of action, fatalism, mysticism, and the constant presence of death characterize the works of Maeterlinck’s early period, such as L’Intruse (1890) [The Intruder], Les Aveugles (1890) [The Blind], and the love dramas Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), Alladine et Palomides (1894), and Aglavaine et Sélysette (1896). The shadow of death looms even larger in his later plays, Joyzelle (1903) and Marie Magdeleine (1909), Maeterlinck’s version of a Paul Heyse play, while L’Oiseau bleu (1909) [The Blue Bird] is marked by a fairy-tale optimism. Le Bourgmestre de Stilemonde (1919) [The Burgomaster of Stilemonde] was written under the impact of the First World War.
“in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers’ own feelings and stimulate their imaginations”
As a young man, Maurice Maeterlink attended a Jesuit convent school and then studied law, as his parents wished. After a couple of years, he abandoned the legal track to become a writer and made his debut with the play La Princesse Maleine (1889). Together with actress Georgette Leblanc, he spent a few summers in Normandy in an old monastery that the church had given him permission to use. There he presented his plays under the direction of Leblanc. Maeterlinck then married Renée Dahon, also an actress.
Maeterlinck was a symbolist and agnostic who, in dreamlike dramas and poetry, examined the inner life of humankind and the subconscious. Milieus and epochs in his dramas are often fluid and indeterminate, which strengthens the symbolism. He dedicated himself to creating moods rather than to describing reality. Some of his dramas were written for puppets because Maeterlinck believed that human actors would stand in the way of the symbolic. In addition, he argued that the puppets were a powerful image of humankind’s dependence on fate.
Maeterlinck was a symbolist and agnostic who, in dreamlike dramas and poetry, examined the inner life of humankind and the subconscious. Milieus and epochs in his dramas are often fluid and indeterminate, which strengthens the symbolism. He dedicated himself to creating moods rather than to describing reality. Some of his dramas were written for puppets because Maeterlinck believed that human actors would stand in the way of the symbolic. In addition, he argued that the puppets were a powerful image of humankind’s dependence on fate.
Furthermore, Maeterlinck’s graceful gothic realm affected Roerich’s art and philosophical outlook in ways that no other cultural space did. Concrete points of connection joined Maeterlinck and Roerich. The two shared a neo-Romantic/Symbolist idealization of the medieval, an attraction to various forms of mysticism (especially Theosophy), and a conviction that art reflected, even conferred, spiritual wisdom. On all these points, the effort of giving form to Maeterlinck’s rarefied, twilit realm of castles and convents shaped Roerich’s thinking. Much of Maeterlinck’s impact consisted of reinforcing affinities Roerich already felt for certain authors, ideas, and symbols. In this way, Maeterlinck influenced how Roerich portrayed female characters, assigned meaning to color, and painted architecture. More directly, Maeterlinck left his own distinct imprint: his writings encouraged Roerich to adopt one of the most important leitmotifs of his middle and later paintings. This was the cavern, a passageway to wisdom that, with the mountain, served as a crucial symbol in Roerich’s many works depicting the attainment of spiritual enlightenment. This essay will present a brief overview of the Maeterlinck productions with which Roerich was involved, then turn to Maeterlinck’s use of the cave motif. It will go on to analyze how Roerich used that motif, as well as how he joined it metaphorically with his painting of mountains.
Maeterlinck’s career intersected with fin-de-siècle Russian culture in numerous ways. He was invited to contribute to World of Art (Mir iskusstva), and the many writers and thinkers influenced by him included Valery Briusov, Alexander Blok, Vasily Rozanov, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Konstantin Balmont. If Debussy, Fauré, and Sibelius tried their hand at musical works based on Maeterlinck, so did Ilya Sats, Nikolai Cherepnin, Alexander Grechaninov, Sergei Taneev, and Sergei Rachmaninov. Russia’s premier group of Symbolist painters, the Blue Rose, was devoted to Maeterlinck; Kandinsky and Chagall were likewise intrigued by him. Theater directors—among them Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Vera Komissarzhevskaya, and Alexander Tairov (whose Belgian-born wife, actress Alisa Koonen, admired her compatriot’s talent)—also responded to Maeterlinck.
It was at the Moscow Art Theater, in September 1908, that Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird had its world premiere. Common to many of Maeterlinck’s plays were the motifs of the subterranean space—a cavern or dungeon, into which the protagonist, usually female, descends or is imprisoned— and the high place, most often a tower. Roerich was greatly attracted to these paired tropes. In his designs for Maleine and Beatrice, he put emphasis on both, especially the former, and used both for years afterward. For both men, underground enclosures and elevated spaces were metaphysically significant. The overarching goal of Maeterlinckian drama is to portray the soul at various stages on its path from insensibility to awakening. Rejecting the Catholic Church, Maeterlinck turned to a universalist mysticism that derived from Neoplatonic idealism, the Christian meditations of Eckhart and Boehme, Spinozan pantheism, Swedenborgianism, Romantic transcendentalism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Blavatskian Theosophy. He believed that, while a divine intelligence pervades the universe, and the soul survives death in one form or another, a veil of mystery separates humanity from God and the truth. To gain enlightenment, the soul must overcome this spiritual blindness.
