Petrushka and the Fairground

Few things are as colourful and charming as a fairground at full tilt, overwhelming every sense with blaring music, deafening mechanical squeals, lurid colours and lights and the mingled smell of fast food and recently dried varnish. The Russian funfairs, though less elegant (it was said) than their Italian or French counterparts, were every bit as appealing. The sensual impressions they made, as Ivan Shcheglov, an activist in the People's Theatre movement, recalled in the late nineteenth century, were unforgettable:

But inside the circle [of the fairground] -- good heavens, what goes on inside the circle! You can hardly take it in, let alone describe it. First, the music -- truly, the music alone could deprive someone who'd just arrived of his senses, because the point is that it's not the music, it's all sorts of music -- several kinds together, and your ears are deafened simultaneously by a satanic compound of wind and strings, steam and barrel organs, accordions, with the classic squeal of 'Petrushka' rising above all, in place, as it were, of a tuning fork . . .  And then there are the cries of the men and women selling things . . .  They are shouting now quite differently from the way they usually shout in streets and markets, with a sort of special frenzy, until tears come into their eyes and they go hoarse.

The Russian fairgrounds offered a range of entertainments equal to any in Europe: swings, roundabouts, roller-coasters, puppet shows, dancing bears, acrobatics and clowns inside wooden booths and on the street, Harlequinades and sleigh rides, stalls with drinks and gingerbread. Between the late eighteenth century and the Revolution a visit to these fairs was a nearly obligatory item on the itinerary of foreign visitors to Russia, and many of them have left vivid accounts of what they saw there. A German visitor wrote in the 1840s:

There are booths with clever horses and stupid people doing tricks, with bears and boxers, apes and actors; there are big and little roundabouts, Russian swings and ordinary ones, and two ice hills as well, if the weather is still cold enough at Easter; sellers of brandy, nuts and gherkins, Prenniks [ = pryaniki, spiced gingerbread], and kvas [small beer made from fermented bread and water], kislie shchi [fizzy kvas] and spun sugar, apples and sausage, spice cakes and pig's tripe, carob, pickled herrings and rotten apples  -- and bread and cakes and music here, there and everywhere. You can see trick riding and beheadings followed by resurrections, giantesses and dwarfs, boring transformation scenes with a Taglioni look-alike; and lately entrepreneurial nterests have brought in roundabouts with steam-boats and steam-trains, which have done very well despite the simple naivety of the general public.

Petrushka, The Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre by Catriona Kelly. 1990.  Pages 18-9.