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# A new monument to Alexander Tairov and Alisa Koonen, founders of Moscow's legendary Kamerny Theatre, on Tverskoy Boulevard, where they staged upheavals and discoveries in world theatre
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/novyi-pamiatnik-sozdateliam-legendarnogo-moskovskogo-kamernogo-teatra-aleksandru-tairovu-i-alise-koonen-na-tverskom-bulvare-gde-oni-ustraivali-perevoroty-i-otkrytiia-v-mirovom-teatralno/
- Published: 2026-05-17T15:25:38.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:05.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Architecture, Art, Moscow, Heritage, People

A new monument to Alexander Tairov and Alisa Koonen, founders of Moscow's legendary Kamerny Theatre, on Tverskoy Boulevard, where they staged upheavals and discoveries in world theatre. Today the Kamerny is called legendary because it has literally entered the textbooks and become part of the great heritage of the avant-garde; but in its own lifetime it became a legend thanks to a succession of new words that rang out from its stage to the whole world.

Tairov's revolution in world stagecraft was not confined to the fact that he created his own concept of a "synthetic theatre", set against the everyday realism of the Moscow Art Theatre and the conventionality of Meyerhold. There was also the concept of the actor as master, built on the model of Alisa Koonen's universal talent, with its dramatic range, musicality, personal expression and unique plasticity. And there was the three-dimensional space of the set, devised jointly with Alexandra Exter, Alexander Vesnin and the Stenberg brothers: an architectural stage of slanting planes, hovering cubes, staircases and vertical levels. The use of the stage's entire volume, horizontally and vertically alike, wholly changed the outlook of stage designers and designers in general.

Here too, on Tverskoy Boulevard, at number 23, where the Pushkin Moscow Drama Theatre now stands, Tairov and Koonen lived in their own flat, in the left wing, literally adjoining the theatre's premises. In 1974, after the deaths of the avant-garde couple, their flat was annexed to the foyer.

Like many talented undertakings of their time, Tairov's unprecedented theatre was destined for a difficult fate: persecution, damning reviews in the press, productions taken off, a ban on foreign tours. Yet in Europe Tairov and Koonen enjoyed great success; Shaw and Zweig worshipped them, the Expressionists applauded them, and the director Jean-Louis Barrault said outright that it was the Kamerny's tours that influenced his choice of profession.

In the 1920s they were cursed for bourgeois aestheticism, and in 1937 the theatre was forcibly merged with the company of Okhlopkov's Realistic Theatre. They were declared anti-popular and politically blind. What, then, was to be expected in the post-war years, when the campaign against "kowtowing to the West" was in full swing? The theatre's main artery was severed: it was forbidden to stage plays by contemporary Western authors and foreign classics in general. A cross, one might say, was put on premieres.

In 1949 Tairov's theatre was named the chief breeding ground of "Westernism" and of "formalist tricks alien to the Soviet man"; Tairov himself was removed from the running of the institution he had created, and soon afterwards the heavy iron fire curtain was forcibly lowered and the theatre was simply liquidated in law.

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