Anatolii Lunacharskii, On the People's Festivals. May 1920

Lunacharskii, the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, wrote this programmatic essay on mass festivals as instruments of revolutionary education. He draws on ancient Greek spectacles and David's festivals during the French Revolution, arguing that entertainment must serve a "higher educational purpose" while defending the conscious organization of even spontaneous popular elements.

Original Source: А. В. Луначарский, О народных празднествах // Вестник театра. — 1920. — № 62 (27 апр. – 2 мая).

It is absolutely beyond dispute that the chief artistic offspring of the revolution always has been, and always will be, popular festivals.

In general, any genuine democracy naturally strives toward popular festivity. Democracy presupposes the free life of the masses.

For the masses to feel themselves, they must express themselves outwardly, and that is possible only when, in Robespierre’s phrase, they themselves become a spectacle for themselves.

If organized masses pass in procession to music, sing in chorus, perform large gymnastic maneuvers or dances, in short, arrange a kind of parade, but not a military parade, and one, as far as possible, saturated with content that expresses the ideological essence, hopes, curses, and every other emotion of the people, then the other, unorganized masses, crowding the streets and squares where the festival takes place, merge with that organized mass. Thus one can say: the whole people demonstrate their soul to themselves.

When the painter David, on the commission of the government of the Great French Revolution, arranged one brilliant festival after another, for which Gossec, Méhul, and Cherubini wrote the music, he borrowed much from the memories that had survived of the popular festivals of Ancient Greece.

I remember a number of magnificent festivals born of the Russian Revolution. May 1, 1918 was celebrated in Petrograd with extraordinary brightness and pictorial richness. There were many successful moments in the October celebrations of that same year.

Nevertheless, in this respect we proved less alive, endowed with less creative genius, both in our organizers and in the responsiveness of the masses, than the French at the end of the eighteenth century.

Yet we absolutely must outstrip them, despite some unfavorable conditions of our climate, which often make both the spring day of May 1 and the autumn day of October 25 not entirely suitable for an open-air festival.

Only one enthusiasm must be guarded against in every way. Many people imagine that collective creativity means a spontaneous, independent expression of the will of the masses. Yet until social life accustoms the masses to a kind of instinctive observance of higher order and rhythm, one cannot expect a crowd, left to itself, to create anything beyond cheerful noise and a motley swaying of festively dressed people.

A real festival must be organized, like everything in the world that aims to produce a highly aesthetic impression.

A festival needs the following elements. First, a genuine upsurge of the masses, a genuine desire to respond with full heart to the event being celebrated. Second, a certain minimum of festive mood, which can hardly be found in times that are too hungry and too crushed by external dangers. Third, talented organizers are required not only in the sense of, so to speak, the “general” of the festival, thinking through the overall strategic plan and issuing general directives, but in the sense of an entire staff of assistants capable of entering into the masses and guiding them—guiding them not artificially, not in such a way that rational organization is pasted onto the face of the people like a plaster, but so that the natural impulse of the masses, on the one hand, and the leaders’ enthusiastic, thoroughly sincere design, on the other, merge with one another.

I think that at present all these elements are to a greater or lesser degree in place, and perhaps this year’s May Day festival will in this sense be a major step forward.

One could write a great deal about popular festivals, and someday I may be able to set out all my thoughts on the subject in a separate brochure, where it will also be convenient to share the lessons of past experience. Here, however, I want to note one more characteristic feature that must never be forgotten.

Popular festivals must be divided into two essentially different acts. The first is the mass appearance in the strict sense of the word, which presupposes the movement of the masses from the outskirts toward a single center—or, if there are too many of them, toward two or three centers—where some central action takes place of the type of an elevated symbolic ceremony. This may be a spectacle—grandiose, decorative, fireworks-filled, satirical, or solemn. It may be the burning of hostile emblems, and the like, accompanied by thunderous choral singing and coordinated, richly polyphonic music, bearing the character of celebration in the full sense of the word.

During the processions themselves, not only must the moving masses be a captivating spectacle for the stationary masses on the sidewalks, balconies, and in windows, but the reverse as well. Gardens and streets should be a varied spectacle for the moving masses through appropriately decorated arches and the like.

It would also be good if, on a smaller scale and in somewhat smaller groups, an evening procession were organized by torchlight or some other artificial illumination. Such lighting, for example, created astonishing sonorous chords during the Petrograd festivities: the procession of the united firefighters of all Petrograd in bright brass helmets, with flaming torches in their hands.

The second act is a celebration of a more intimate character, either indoors—since every hall should become a kind of revolutionary cabaret—or outdoors: on platforms, on moving trucks, simply on tables, barrels, and the like.

Here, a fiery revolutionary speech is possible, as well as the recitation of couplets, the appearance of clowns with some caricature of hostile forces, some sharply dramatic sketch, and much, much more. But it is necessary that every such improvised stage in all its numbers bear a pointedly partisan character. It is good if this is infused with unbridled, immediate laughter and the like.

It is extremely pleasant if, besides performers who are professional artists—who should be dispersed for this purpose throughout the crowd in the streets and in all the little improvised eateries (alas, the food crisis may not allow this), or at least in halls and corners given over to popular merrymaking—amateurs are also drawn in: jokers, merrymakers, or people carrying this or that passion in their breast, ready to speak a sharp word, deliver a sturdy speech, share some amusing prank, and so on.

Of course, on such barrels and tables there may also climb those whom the French call “barbers”—a person who thinks he is greatly amusing the public but in fact drags out some outrageous tedium. In that case the public may, without ceremony and with friendly laughter, pull down the unsuccessful artist, who must immediately be replaced by another.

As much as possible—uninhibitedness. That is the main thing. True, in all times such uninhibited merriment has presupposed wine, which, as is well known, greatly contributes to lifting spirits, but which is also sometimes fraught with disgraceful consequences. Perhaps without Dionysus’s help, but also without his harm, things will go a little grayer, but considerably more decent.

The May Day celebration for which we are preparing, even by its very plan, as set out in the basic decree, correctly takes into account this festival’s structure: a mass celebration that concentrates the whole crowd, followed by scattered merrymaking that breaks into intersecting circles. Processes of labor, accompanied by singing and music and directed toward its more or less elevated forms—tree planting, cleaning and improving gardens, laying monuments, or beginning necessary construction, and so on, rather than hauling manure or anything else that has only a very indirect relation to any human festivity—can serve as a first act, perhaps not sufficiently concentrated but renewed in its very idea. And in the evening, according to the original plan, it is proposed to disperse the popular masses into separate groups, more or less numerous, and to give them the maximum of joy, music, spectacle, and merriment.