Abstract
Few images capture the preoccupations of fin-de-siècle Russian cultural life better than two widely circulated photographs of the famous Bol’shoi Theater bass Fedor Shaliapin, one as Ivan the Terrible, another as himself, reclining with a cigarette. In the photograph of Shaliapin “in life,” he sits, facing the camera, elbow on the back of the chair, head leaning on his hand ( figure I.1 ). With his elegant suit and tie, prominently displayed cufflinks and pinky ring, hair arranged in a wisp curving upward, the erstwhile peasant Fedor now embodies Wildean sangfroid, gazing into the distance with determined stylization, as if fashionable appearance were a remedy for the boredom and emptiness of inner life. In the other photograph, “in role,” the stylish celebrity is unrecognizable. Eyes gleaming with ardor, large prosthetic nose protruding, neck stretched forward, Shaliapin-as-Ivan gives everything away (figure I.2). Psychic nuances—anxiety, drives, and paranoia—seem to be pushing against and rupturing the costume, loudly announcing themselves in posture and gesture. Here Shaliapin is turned inside out; he is all depth. One photograph is about image, the sleek surface; the other is about interiority and emotional intensity. Together they represent the contradictory impulses and offerings of spectacularization and the spectacular in Russia, and modern life generally.
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Notes
See, for example, Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Others made similar points about the representation and selling of “reality” in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European cities, though perhaps less directly than Schwartz; see also
Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996);
and Roshanna P. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005).
I borrow the concept “melodramatic imagination” from Peter Brooks, who understands melodrama as both a genre and meaning-making system that privileges excess, confession, and a Manichaean under-standing of inner life. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). In Petersburg Fin de Siècle, Mark D. Steinberg argues that the public mood in Russia on the eve of World War I was especially pessimistic, mournful, and dark. Steinberg reads the mass-circulation press and fiction of the period to chart “public experience, public reception, and public representation of the mean-ings of urban life.” Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 6. While his focus is on melancholy, many of his sources are melodramatic in tone and content. Melodrama—as narrative, genre, and meaning system—is acknowledged throughout his book but rarely analyzed in depth. See, for example, ibid., 91, 99, 119–21, 138–41, 146, 152, 157, 172–79, 191–97, 222–23, 256.
For example, Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003);
Beth Holmgren, Rewriting Capitalism: Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the Kingdom of Poland (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998);
and Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger, eds., Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Lynn M. Sargeant treats satirical depictions of audiences and female piano students, albeit briefly, in her excellent book on the professionalization of Russian musicians (see later).
Sargeant, Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 141–54.
James H. Johnson and Michael P. Steinberg have touched on reception, including fan letters, but not systematically. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995),
and Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Julie A. Buckler’s and Boris Gasparov’s books on Russian opera culture (the latter more musicological) discuss reception but do not delve into “lay” responses to music. See
Buckler, The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000),
and Gasparov, Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Paul Du Quenoy, Olga Haldey, and Lynn Sargeant certainly address reception, but in their work the audience member typically is a professional music critic.
Du Quenoy, Stage Fright: Politics and the Performing Arts in Late Imperial Russia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009);
Haldey, Mamontov’s Private Opera: The Search for Modernism in Russian Theater (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Sargeant, Harmony and Discord.
Rosamund Bartlett, Wagner and Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Buckler, The Literary Lorgnette; Gasparov, Five Operas and a Symphony;
Simon A. Morrison, Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
Richard Taruskin’s important contributions include Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and On Russian Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
See Murray Frame’s The St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters: Stage and State in Revolutionary Russia, 1900–1920 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2000), and School For Citizens: Theatre and Civil Society in Imperial Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006);
Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005);
and Inna Naroditskaya, Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
For example, McReynolds, Russia at Play; Beth Holmgren, Starring Madame Modjeska : On Tour in Poland and America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011);
Anna Fishzon, “Confessions of a Psikhopatka : Opera Fandom and the Melodramatic Sensibility in Fin-de-Siècle Russia,” Russian Review 71, 1 (2012): 100–21, and “The Operatics of Everyday Life, or, How Authenticity Was Defined in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 70, 4 (2011): 795–818.
James Loeffler, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 151–59.
Following Joan Scott, Michel Foucault, and others, I am employing a concept of politics not limited to “power as it is exercised by and in relation to formal governmental authorities” but one that takes “all unequal relationships as ‘political’ because involving unequal distributions of power.” Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History: Revised Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 26.
For example, see Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 359–420; Holmgren, Rewriting Capitalism; McReynolds, Russia at Play.
On the vital role of voluntary associations in the growth of Russia’s public sphere, see Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996);
and Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle; and Mark D. Steinberg and Valeria Sobol, eds., Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 3–17.
Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
Daniel Cavicchi, “Loving Music: Listeners, Entertainments, and the Origins of Music Fandom in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 237. Musical professionalization, a process by which musicians and music journalists established institutions of training, elite status, authoritative discourse, and criteria for inclusion that distinguished professionals from artisans and amateurs, originated in medieval Europe, but gained momentum only in the late eighteenth century, and arguably did not begin in earnest in Russia until the founding of conservatories in the 1860s. On musical professionalization in Imperial Russia, see Sargeant, Harmony and Discord, esp. 83–217. On the professionalization of actors in Russia, see Frame, School for Citizens, 147–71. Peter the Great built the first public theater in Russia in 1701, but opera largely was associated with court life until the nineteenth century, when the theatergoing public broadened and European troupes visited regularly. On the “social geography” of operagoing in the mid-nineteenth century, see Buckler, The Literary Lorgnette, 12–56. For an account of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theater culture in Russia, see also
Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia, and Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003).
See Alfred Rieber’s classic study, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982);
and Thomas C. Owen, “Impediments to a Bourgeois Consciousness in Russia, 1880–1905: The Estate Structure, Ethnic Diversity, and Economic Regionalism,” in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 75–89. For sympathetic depictions of merchants as liberal industrialists and patrons of culture, see for example,
Daniel R. Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990);
James L. West and Iurii L. Petrov, eds., Merchant Moscow: Images of Russia’s Vanished Bourgeoisie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); John E. Bowlt, “The Moscow Art Market” and William Craft Brumfield, “Building the Bourgeoisie: The Quest for a Modern Style in Russian Architecture,” in Between Tsar and People, ed. Clowes, et al., 108–28, 308–24.
Nicolas Spulber, Russia’s Economic Transitions: From Late Tsarism to the New Millennium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 17.
On the history of sosloviia as legal categories, see Gregory Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 11–36. For a view of Russian social stratification and identities more broadly defined, see
Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).
For example, McReynolds, Russia at Play; Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917. First Edition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003);
and Daniel R. Brower, “The Penny Press and Its Readers,” in Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Scholars writing on fin-de-siècle Russia repeatedly assume the boulevard to be a mixture of the high and low, commercial and avantgarde culture. Yet, they also continually draw a boundary between the aims of the Russian “intelligentsia,” who put forward a critique of boulevard culture, and those of its middle-class creators, more concerned with profits than the enlightenment and moral welfare of Russia’s lower classes. I argue that the distinction between the critics and producers was far from clear, particularly if we look at the promoters and patrons of music and the performing arts. For example, see Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 359–420.
Also see Catriona Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 156–229.
In his famous analysis of biographies in American popular magazines, Leo Lowenthal noted a significant shift in emphasis between 1901 and 1941. Earlier in this period the subjects of the biographies were “idols of production”—people celebrated for their achievement, social productivity, and advancement through hard work. In later years, they were “idols of consumption … stemming predominantly from the sphere of consumption and organized leisure time.” Idols of consumption were entertainers or athletes whose “private” lives, appropriately, were devoted to consuming rather than “serving the basic needs of society.” Stars belonging to the world of entertainment, according to Lowenthal, were models for average people who imitated their fashions and hobbies. The appearance of “idols of consumption” suggests a shift in economic imperatives—from production to consumption—but the categories offered by Lowenthal are too neat. Entertainers, at least in capitalist Russia, were recognized for philanthropic, “socially useful” work as well as their leisure pursuits and spending habits. Lowenthal, “The Triumph of Mass Idols,” in Literature, Popular Culture and Society (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1961), 115, 121.
By “revolutionary politics” I mean not the political history of the revolution, or politics in the strict sense of actions and events, but political culture as defined by Lynn Hunt: “common values, shared expectations … [and] implicit rules that expressed and shaped collective intentions and actions.” Hunt elaborates: “Revolutionary political culture cannot be deduced from social structures, social conflicts, or the social identities of revolutionaries. Political practices were not … the expression of ‘underlying’ economic and social interests. Through languages, images, and daily political activities,” and, I would add, affects, revolutionaries constituted new social identities, interests, and relations. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 10, 12.
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Fishzon, A. (2013). Introduction. In: Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137023452_1
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