Abstract
In the second half of the nineteenth century, urban Russia witnessed sweeping demographic and cultural changes resulting from the end of serfdom, railroad construction, and industrialization. Most relevant to this study, wealthy merchants emerged as arts patrons and active participants in public cultural life. The state and nobility remained robust sources of patronage, to be sure, but the expansion of the art market and new entertainment enterprises, including private opera companies, signaled the growing involvement of “middling” social strata in commodified leisure. The Revolution of 1905, which brought the relaxation of censorship, a press boom, and further erosion of noble privilege and cultural authority, only accelerated these developments.
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Notes
Cultural theorist Raymond Williams used the concept “structure of feeling” to describe the emotional and interpretative relationships of a given historical period and place—“the deep community that makes communication possible.” Structure of feeling denotes modes of experiencing and reacting that are widely shared through various cultural forms, and not individually conceived. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press Ltd., 2001), 64–67.
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 54.
Boris Kolonitskii, “‘We’ and ‘I’: Alexander Kerensky in His Speeches,” in Autobiographical Practices in Russia / Auto biographische Praktiken in Russland, ed. Jochen Hellbeck and Klaus Heller (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2004), 182; and
Richard Abraham, Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 179.
Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 86.
For images of Nicholas II, see Richard Wortman, “Publicizing the Imperial Image in 1913,” in Self and Story in Russian History, ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 109–10. On the desacralization of the monarchy and depictions of Nicholas as an unmanly, feckless, and immoral traitor, see Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 9–29.
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 15.
Julie A. Cassiday, The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 6.
Ibid., 6–7. For discussions of melodrama and melodramatic performance in Soviet legal practice and film see Lars T. Lih, “Melodrama and the Myth of the Soviet Union,” in Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, ed. Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 178–207; and
Elizabeth A. Wood, Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). On the importance of sincerity and other melodramatic imperatives in Party card verifications at academic institutions of the 1920s, see
Igal Halfin, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 284–332.
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© 2013 Anna Fishzon
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Fishzon, A. (2013). Epilogue. In: Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137023452_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137023452_7
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