Meet Nikolai Evreinov, the 19th century Nathan Fielder – mssv

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Meet Nikolai Evreinov, the 19th century Nathan Fielder

June 16, 2026

32–48 minutes

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This is an adapted and fully-annotated blog post version of my latest video essay. It’s just as good as the video – maybe better, because I had to mute and blur some clips for copyright reasons!

In 1920, just three years after the Russian revolution, the new government staged a re-enactment of The Storming of the Winter Palace. It was one of the biggest re-enactments in history, with almost ten thousand performers, many of whom had been involved in the actual storming, 320 military vehicles, and an honest-to-god warship. Watching all of this was 100,000 spectators, and actually, we probably shouldn’t call them spectators, because they got involved in the re-enactment too.

A lot of historians think the man behind it, Russian director Nikolai Evreinov, was just a Soviet propagandist, but the truth is much more interesting and complicated. In fact, I think the best person to compare Evreinov to is someone who became famous a century later: comedian Nathan Fielder.

I’m not saying this because they both created re-enactments so elaborate and spectacular, some people mistook them for reality. It’s because, in their heart of hearts, both men believe the way to be happy and to truly understand human behaviour is by turning life itself into theatre. And it’s that shared belief that I really want to drill into here.

Now, you might be wondering why you’ve never heard of Nikolai Evreinov before. A big reason is that, like Nathan Fielder, people in the early 20th century couldn’t tell whether he was serious or not.

On the one hand, Evreinov was one of the three most important directors in Russia, alongside Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of realist theatre and method acting, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, the pioneer of symbolism in theatre. On the other hand, Evreinov was viewed as “just” a comedian. Some of his most popular work were his theatrical parodies, and his theory that all of life was just theatre was considered so bizarre, people assumed he was joking. As for Nathan Fielder, some people couldn’t tell whether his work on Holocaust awareness or aviation safety was just a joke, or something serious.

First, I want to tell you about Nikolai Evreinov. About what he believed, what he made, what he got wrong and what he got right, and why he was so far ahead of his time. Then I want to talk about Nathan Fielder and how his shows, Nathan for You and The Rehearsal refract Evreinov’s ideas through the lens of neoliberalism and late stage capitalism.

That’s a lot – but stay with me, I promise it’ll be fun.

Portrait of Nikolai Evreinov by Ilya Repin (1915)

Nikolai Evreinov was born in Moscow in 1879 to an upper class family and almost instantly fell in love with the theatre. As a child, he staged puppet shows, and at the age of seven, he wrote his first parody.

This habit would get him into trouble at school, where he was almost expelled for writing a parody about his teachers. Another time, he played a prank by getting his class to pretend an absent student had actually died – he draped the entire room in mourning, covered the teacher’s desk in candles and crosses, and directed all the students to cry. Pretty elaborate work for a kid!

Evreinov studied law in St. Petersburg as a teenager and in his spare time, wrote and acted in plays. Everything in his life was about theatre – even his law school thesis was about the performative aspects of public executions. But when his parents separated, Evreinov had to get a real job in the civil service. In his spare time, he began writing his first full-length plays, which were starting to get noticed. Probably the best known of these is The Beautiful Despot, which debuted in 1906, when Evreinov was only in his 20s.

The play opens in the drawing room of a grand country estate where a master is chatting with his servants. Everything about it, from the props to the costumes to the furniture, looks like it’s from the early 1800s. It’s only when a journalist arrives wearing modern clothes from the 20th century that the audience realises this isn’t actually a period drama but actually a contemporary story.

It turns out that the master of the estate was once a famous liberal, progressive journalist. After he became disenchanted by modern life, he decides to live as his great-grandfather did, recreating his lifestyle in perfect detail, and gets a bunch of likeminded friends to role play as his servants and companions.

To be clear, this is pretty unusual kind of story for its time. The master isn’t portrayed as a madman, like Don Quixote, not is he forced into this imaginary world because he’s been marooned on an island like Robinson Crusoe. It’s not some passing whim, either – he’s put a huge amount of effort into this immersive role play,...