There was a hearth, and a fire burned inside it, the flames not painted or polished. The idea of a painted hearth recalls the fairy tale Golden Key by Alexei Tolstoy. That cherished story later found its way into sweets and children’s names, yet at its birth it did not strike everyone as childish. Some readers sensed the earliest archetypes right away, while others heard echoes from figures they had not yet met in the tale.
Faina Ranevskaya recalled that she could not guess the references herself, but theater people explained them to her. The central figure Pinocchio becomes for Gorky, Malvina Blok’s wife Lyubov Mendeleev, and Blok himself is shown as Pierrot. The villain Karabas-Barabas, the head of the puppet theater, is read as Meyerhold. The idea of a puppetry doctor appears as Doctor Dapertutto, a nod to the chief editor of a periodical that published pieces on theater, literature, and art between 1914 and 1916. Dapertutto draws from Hoffmann’s fables as a sinister, one legged figure who favors a crimson cloak and red feathers. In public memory, this character blends with Mephistopheles, the tempter, and Dr. Evil. Many theatergoers saw Meyerhold as a tyrant who treated actors as mere puppets.
Even the mannerisms and details of Karabas-Barabas echo Meyerhold. The long beard of Karabas-Barabas mirrors a long scarf that Meyerhold favored. Recollections of a harsh fate for Meyerhold surface in a letter to Molotov from the imprisoned director, describing torture and pain in vivid terms. The whip associated with Karabas-Barabas is recalled, and it becomes known that Meyerhold carried a Mauser pistol to rehearsals and laid it on the table. This cross-pollination of characters invites questions about who Papa Carlo might be. Seagull, seagull, I am a seagull.
In truth, Papa Carlo is Konstantin Stanislavsky. He would unlock a door with a precious golden key, and after passing through, he and the puppets would glimpse a room where a marvelous puppet theater awaited. Yet those images are kept for later. The puppets, with their small voices, would be allowed to entertain and delight, while a broader message pointed toward a different, personal stage. The speaker then recalls a Christmas described as the cleanest and brightest holiday in the world, a memory of home and family among Russian households. The Nativity is painted as vividly as Christmas tree candles, with a big green tree and cheerful children at the center, and adults who might not be especially bright still gathering and enjoying themselves as lights flicker.
That sentiment stands as the sole optimistic thread in the piece before fear returns. Yet fear does not take hold here. Christmas, in the speaker’s view, operates on a simple mechanism: everyone should make up and become a little different for a while. A wild, forestlike notion emerges about the reason to play dress up for Christmas, beyond the birth of the baby Jesus. The speaker imagines another sacred image, a small fairy or figure who holds a deeper significance.
Ivan Shmelev is invoked to describe pre-revolutionary Christmas streets that transformed the city: markets and squares filled with a forest of Christmas trees, a frozen Theater Square, people in sheepskin coats wandering among snow and twinkling lights, dogs near the trees, bonfires, and a cold that somehow stays warm. The author notes that Christmas trees are now bought not for Christmas itself but for the New Year, and by January 7 the trees grow old, are discarded, and forgotten. The message is that the new Soviet Christmas carries a mature, wiser meaning, not merely crisp paper and a single bulb that has burned out. The time calls for embracing a new sense, a new birth, a reaffirmation of Christmas.
Thus a collective willingness to compromise is urged. The following poem presents a bleak, harlequin tableau on a road. A fog that does not rise, a crew carrying what remains of their plunder. The Harlequin’s daytime face is pale, even more so than Pierrot, and Colombina hides in a corner in tattered, colorful scraps. The call goes out to traveling actors to master their craft, to let truth walk and to feel light in the air again. The soul’s secret has been penetrated by decay, yet the demand remains that music, song, and new paths lead toward a distant paradise of overseas tunes that once opened the roads.
The speaker calls for a moral and emotional upheaval: cry, drink, move on. The question of why songs travel abroad is set aside for the moment, even as Pinocchio and the others are acknowledged as not yet born in the immediate sense of the story. At the same time, a new door appears behind a stove-painted canvas, and a fire, a bowler hat, and something else await. Not a descent into a new theater, but something brilliantly new and dazzling.
The final exhortation urges rising up: a golden key found and held, a resolve that cannot be denied. Stand up, Carlo. Rise, wooden Pinocchio, rise, the wronged Meyerhold, rise, confident Stanislavsky, rise, Malvina Blok. Orthodox Christmas stands here, prickly yet kind, bright as ever. Everyone should stand tall. The idea of fresh beginnings lingers, and the speaker declares a readiness to move forward without delay. The time has come to depart, to move toward whatever lies ahead with a renewed sense of possibility.