These days, many people say that people have become completely uncivilized, whereas things used to be better and different. However, can we imagine the following situation today?
Let’s say a journalist who writes a music column recently visits one of the theaters in Kharkiv. Actors who are unhappy with his articles surround the poor guy and beat him up brutally.
Today, something like that seems completely unthinkable. Yet 130 years ago, exactly such an incident took place in our beloved city. The incident caused such an uproar that not only local newspapers but also national magazines wrote about the scandal.
The name Viktor Ivanovich Gabel (1846–1892), better known by his pen name “Rodon,” means little to most people today. Yet in the second half of the 19th century, this comic actor was extremely popular and in high demand.
Coming from a noble family, Gabel originally planned to devote his life to the legal profession. However, after graduating from the law school at St. Vladimir’s University in Kyiv in 1867, he joined the Kyiv Drama Troupe and spent nine years in the provinces, touring various cities and gaining increasing popularity.
But this success was not enough for Viktor Gabel. After moving to Moscow in 1876, he won over local art lovers and eventually even opened an operetta theater bearing his own name.
The comic-buff “Rodon” was known for his inexhaustible sense of humor and was rightly considered a master of witty improvisation, often weaving topical satire into the dialogue of his roles.
In the 1880s, a certain Moscow factory owner named Stepan Ivanovich indulged in all sorts of outrageous antics, becoming something of a celebrity for his misdeeds, scandals, and foolishness.
Once, while at the circus, he saw a performance by the famous animal trainer and clown, Tanti.
This clown had a “trained pig” that, at the audience’s request, could use its snout to find letters scattered across the floor of the arena to spell out a specific word—a short one, of course.
Stepan Ivanovich and his friends were seized by a wild idea to buy this pig from Tanti so they could roast it and eat it, no matter how much it cost him. In the end, the deal went through, and the five rascals got the pig.
Rodon’s response was immediate. While performing at the theater, he sang verses he had composed himself on current events, with lyrics roughly as follows:
So the merchants, caught up in their drunken frenzy,
decided—to feed their lies
—that they would eat the trained pig at Tanti’s.
And they actually
did eat a pig from the circus…
Alas, Viktor Ivanovich Gabel never managed to become a good theater impresario. After all, to succeed in the provinces, an operetta theater had to compromise artistic standards at least occasionally in order to cater to the public’s tastes. And “Rodon” never agreed to do that.
In the summer of 1886, his troupe came to Kharkiv for a series of performances.
A journalist for the women’s magazine *Modny Svet*, writing under the pseudonym “Knyazhna,” wrote the following in the July 1886 issue:
In Kharkiv, at a commercial garden, actors from Mr. Rodon’s troupe—dissatisfied with the reviews written by Mr. R., a thoroughly modest and impartial critic—surrounded him and brutally beat him. R. began calling for help. The police and theater managers arrived. To draw up a report, everyone went to the theater office. There, ignoring the police, the actors once again began to berate and beat the reviewer until the theater guards and police officers intervened forcefully. What can one think of this unheard-of outrage? They really are savages.
And really, what can one think about this? After all, such an incident is completely unthinkable for Kharkiv today.
By the way, what injuries did the “modest and impartial reviewer” of the music column—who worked either for the newspaper *Yuzhny Krai* or for *Kharkiv Provincial Gazette*—and for which of his articles—history remains silent.
As for “Rodon” himself, he died in Odesa on June 8, 1892, and was buried in Moscow at the Vagankovo Cemetery.
