German-born teacher (c. 1630 – 1691)
George Hüfner (also known as Yuri Mikhailovich Givner and Yuri Gibner; c. 1630 – 1691) was a German-born teacher who lived in the German Quarter of Moscow and acted as a translator for the Embassy Order. In 1675, he was the director of the court theater for Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Hüfner is credited as the director and possibly the author of one of the earliest Russian plays, the Temir-Aksakov plot (comedy about Tamerlane and Bayezid). Researchers have identified features in Givner's plays that reflect elements of 17th-century English comedy, Western Russian school drama theatre, medieval miracles, and even court ceremonies.
He used historical narratives rather than the Bible as a source for his dramatic works, unlike his predecessor, Pastor Gregory. "Temir-Aksakov's Action" described the struggle between the Central Asian Emir Timur (Tamerlane) and the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid Lightning, which ended with the defeat of the Ottomans and the capture of the Sultan at the Battle of Ankara in 1402.
Biography.
According to most sources, George Hüfner was a native of Saxony, although there is a version about his possible origin "from Moscow Germans". In 1649 he went to Poland, where he entered the military service of the hetman Wincenty Gosiewski. During the Russian-Polish war, Hüfner was captured after the capture of Dubrowna and brought to Smolensk in 1656. Prominent members of the Moscow foreign colony, colonels Johann von Hoven and Wilim Bruce, having learned that the prisoner was "a learned man, capable of learning Latin and German", obtained permission for him to go to Moscow and become a teacher in the German Sloboda. Soon Hüfner married the daughter of one of the inhabitants of Sloboda, Andrei Ut, and got his own court. Since the beginning of the 1670s the name of the Saxon was fixed in Russian texts as Yury Givner (Hüfner) or "Yuriy Mikhailov". This variant was reflected in the comedy of A. N. Ostrovsky's comedy "Comedian of the 17th century" (1872), one of the characters of which is the German teacher Yuri Mikhailov. The Soviet literary scholar P. N. Berkov also noted that Hüfner was called Yakov in a number of documents.
In 1672, Johann Gottfried Gregor, rector of the Church of St. Peter and Paul and master of the University of Jena, was entrusted with the management of the first court theater. Hüfner and his relative —the painter and "master of perspective" Peter Engels (Ingles)— were among the closest collaborators of the pastor. On February 16, 1675, Gregor died, and Hüfner took over the management of the theater. In a short time, he staged several productions, including the three-act "Comedy about Tamerlane and Bajazet," compiled from various sources. At the end of 1675, on the recommendation of the Smolensk voivode Prince Mikhail Golitsyn, the management of the theater was transferred to the former teacher of the Kiev-Bratsk college, Stepan Chizhinsky, and Hüfner returned to the post of teacher of Latin and German languages with a salary of "55 rubles, 8 altyns daily".
When in the summer of 1679 Andrew Vinius was promoted to clerk of the Apothecary's Order, Hüfner was invited to fill the vacant position in the Embassy Office on the advice of other translators. On a special examination he showed sufficient knowledge of German, Dutch and Latin languages, as well as the ability to speak and write Russian. The official appointment took place on October 25, 1679, the salary was defined in "65 rubles and 9 altyns daily", — that is, in total, according to the calculation of the order, 163 rubles 55 kopecks a year. In 1683 Givner was sent with stolnik Pyotr Potemkin to France and Spain, but arbitrarily returned to Moscow before the end of the embassy, for which he was temporarily deprived of his salary. The same year he was put on bail for insulting the foreigner Colonel Olaf von Gran.
Being an ardent Lutheran, the translator opposed the mystic writer Quirinus Kuhlmann, who came to Moscow in 1689. According to cultural historian A. M. Panchenko, "the fact that the Jesuits opposed Kuhkmann does not need any comments. Another interesting fact was that Lutherans, pastors Meineke and Bartold, and translator of the Embassy Order Yuri Mikhailovich Hüfner expressed an even harsher opinion about Kuhkmann". Hüfner and another employee of the Embassy Order, clerk Ivan Tyazhkogorsky, familiarized themselves with the papers seized from Kuhkmann and compiled the so-called "Translators' Opinion", which was then attached to the search case. The authors of the "Opinion" wrote about Kuhkmann and his Moscow patron, merchant Conrad Norderman, that they:"believed in that heresy called Quakory, of which there are many in the Holand and English lands and other places in the region, similar to the schismatics here: they live in a peculiar way, and have everything in common, and do not honor anyone, and before monarchs do not take off their hats, and not only their sovereigns, but also do not call them lords, and they say that the only Lord God reigns over them, and they, monarchs, are people like them".On October 4, 1689, Kuhlmann and Norderman were executed on Red Square for "hereticism" and disrespect for the tsar's authority. Hüfner's intolerance towards "alien" Europeans led to the fact that in 1690 he was accused of insulting Catholics according to a "klyausa". The Polish resident complained to Tsar Ivan Alexeevich: "He, George, distributed in New German Quarter letters about the expelled Jesuits, of their existence in Moscow by Luther and Calvin, in scolding and in mockery at them, Jesuits". As a result, Hüfner's salary was delayed for six months. A few months later, he died.
Court theater activities.
The first play.
Alexei Mikhailovich wanted to organize his court life like European royal courts and was aware that theatrical performances were an important part of the entertainment of Western European monarchs. The sovereign entrusted the organization of the Russian theater to Artamon Matveev, the manager of the Embassy Order and the tutor of Tsarina Natalia Kirillovna. On May 15, 1672, Matveev sent Colonel Nikolai von Staden to Courland with the instruction to hire two people in Riga "who could create all kinds of comedies". In Moscow, however, little hope was placed in this mission, and almost immediately after von Staden's departure, the court turned to the German Quarter, where amateur productions were occasionally performed.
On June 4, just six days after the birth of Tsarevich Peter Alekseevich, there was a royal decree that Pastor Gregory, without waiting for foreign directors, should "create a comedy". The production had to "act out the Book of Esther from the Bible". The plot for the first performance was not chosen by chance: the story of Esther resembled the story of Natalia Naryshkina's election as the bride of Alexei Mikhailovich and, therefore, was expected to arouse great interest at court. A large amount of money was allocated for the production —695 rubles— and the manuscript of "Artaxerxes' Action" was later presented to the Tsar and bound in morocco with gilding by his order. Written by Gregory in German, the text of the play in seven acts ("Artaxerxes' Action") was translated into Russian in the Embassy Order. Y. K. Begunov points out that the translators were the scrivener Peter Dolgovo and the nobleman Ivan Poborsky. The participation of scrivener Ivan Yenak is presumed.
Rehearsals began on September 21 in the parsonage. The play was performed by the sons of "various ranks of foreign servants and merchants" from German Quarter. According to the historian S. K. Bogoyavlensky, the artists were students of the Lutheran school. Literary scholars N. K. Gudzii and V. V. Kuskov also believed that the artists were students of the Lutheran school. Kuskov estimated that there were 60 people in Gregory's troupe. Contemporary researcher K. A. Kokshenyova writes about 64 actors, noting that female roles were played by men.
Hüfner, together with his teacher Johann Palzer and the author of the famous notes on Russia, physician Lavrentiy Ringuber, supervised the work on the text of the roles, designed to be performed for many hours. Timothy Hasencruch and Simon Gutovsky were responsible for the musical accompaniment of the performance. On October 17, 1672, in the village of Preobrazhensky near Moscow, the first performance of "Artaxerxes' Action" took place. For this purpose, a wooden "Comedy House" with an area of 90 square meters was built on the bank of the Yauza River, with about 55 square meters occupied by the stage. Subsequent performances were held there, and in wintertime, in the Kremlin, in the upper chambers of the Apothecary's order, where at the end of January 1673, under the guidance of the Streltsy centurion Danila Kobylin, the "Potyeshny Yard" ("A Funny Yard") was organized. The scenery was transported and mounted on both stages of the theater.
Hüfner as a director.
In 1673–1674, the troupe was supplemented by 26 Russian podjaks and bourgeois children, although the pay for foreigners remained higher. At the same time, in Moscow, a state acting school was opened at the yard of the Dane Vinonta Ludden — one of the first educational institutions of this kind in Europe. By the end of 1674, the school had trained more than seventy "playgoers": children and adults of different ranks, with each student receiving an altyn per day. The 19th-century historian S. M. Solovyov exclaimed: "Thus the theater school was founded in Moscow before the Slavic Greek Latin Academy!"
Classes at the school were held mainly during fasts, when courtiers could not watch performances for religious reasons; many students were taken to the Germans under guard and "held by force". During these years, Gregory and Hüfner staged "biblical" plays: "Judith" ("Holofernes' Action"), "A Pity Comedy about Adam and Eve", "A Comedy about Tobias the Younger", and "A Small Cool Comedy about Joseph". In addition, the court theater performed a "French dance" staged by the engineer Nicholas Lim, and on Shrovetide in 1675, the tsar was shown a musical performance of "Orpheus" — an arrangement of Heinrich Schütz's ballet "Orpheus and Eurydice" (1638), made by Chizhinsky.
Hüfner also actively participated directly in the organization of productions, as indicated by numerous receipts for comedy costumes and money for the preparation of props. Together with the pastor and artists, he presented himself to Alexei Mikhailovich and received a reward of about 1500 rubles at the exchange rate of the early 20th century. In the list of guests admitted to the tsar's hand at the solemn reception in the Kremlin on April 7, 1673, the name of "teacher Mikhailov" stands immediately after Gregory. After replacing the pastor in February 1675, Hüfner began to prepare new performances: "Comedy about Saint the Brave" and "Temir-Aksakov's Action". The director's assistants were Lavrenty Blumentrost (Gregory's stepfather) and Ivan Volosheninov, a "talker" from Meshchanskaya Sloboda.
In his work with the artists, Hüfner focused on the manner of performance adopted in the German theater of the 17th century. Each actor had to affectively "represent" all the signs of passions and feelings that his character was endowed with. Hüfner's productions used sound and light effects and rather complex props. For example, in "Temir-Aksakov's Action," real armed horsemen participated. The stage depicted a "cannon ridge" and "shooting rockets". The plays were decorated with picturesque scenery, arranged on a backstage system, using special "frames of perspective writing" in combination with a trellis curtain. For the manufacture of 32 decorations, Peter Engels and Andrei Abakumov, who worked in the village of Sofronov, were provided with 700 arshins of canvas and "any other attire" on 18 wagons in the summer of 1675. With Hüfner, the "upper room of three sazhen" and "hay" were added to the "choromina" in Preobrazhenskoe. Additionally, in the fall of 1675, a second theater school opened in Meshchanskaya Sloboda for natives of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but it lasted less than half a year. The performances did not achieve the previous success, and, receiving an insignificant salary ("3 rubles per month, plus 6 measures of bread, oats on the same, and a pud of salt for the year"), Hüfner was not honored with a personal tsar's award.
The importance of theater.
From the very beginning, the theater was fully financed by the treasury, using revenues from the Vladimir, Galicia, and Novgorod regions. In addition to the royal family and invited nobles, some servants and foreign diplomats were allowed to attend the performances. The public was notified about the performances by "special falconers" and "horse stables". According to