Can Discomfort Be Part of Art? — My Experience with Petrushka

Andrei Popov, Balagany in Tula on Holy Week, 1873. Public domain, via the State Russian Museum.

A ballet made me think about the role of discomfort in art.

Petrushka (1911) is one of Stravinsky’s three major ballets, alongside The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. I already loved both of those, so I approached Petrushka with high expectations. (For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrushka)

The story itself is bleak — corruption plays out openly at the fair’s edges, and genuine feeling loses to brute force. Even at the end, there’s no redemption; the spirit is simply left defeated.

A few years ago, I watched it for the first time — and simply didn’t enjoy it. It felt unpleasant and unsettling, and I didn’t know what to make of it.

Because of its reputation, I kept returning to it, watching it again from time to time. Each viewing left me with the same unease, but something in that repetition began to change.

I stopped trying to evaluate the work and let the discomfort sit as it was. Once I did that, the unease stopped feeling like a flaw and started to look like the point: an uncompromising attempt to portray a darker reality, inseparable from the ballet’s structure and dramatic truth.

That shift left me with a question that goes beyond my personal reaction to this one work:

Is discomfort necessarily opposed to artistic value, or can it sometimes be an essential part of it?