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Fandom, authenticity, and opera : mad acts and letter scenes in fin-de-siلecle Russia
\"In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, printed literature and performances - from celebrity narratives and opera fandom to revolutionary acts and political speeches - frequently articulated extreme emotional states and passionate belief. A uniquely intense approach to public life and private expression - the 'melodramatic imagination' - is at the center of this study. Previously, scholars have only indirectly addressed the everyday appropriation of melodramatic aesthetics in Russia, choosing to concentrate on canonical texts and producers of mass culture. Collective fantasies and affects are daunting objects of study, difficult to render, and almost impossible to prove empirically. Music and art historians, with some notable exceptions, have been reluctant to discuss reception for similar reasons. By analyzing the artifacts and practices of a commercialized opera culture, author Anna Fishzon provides a solution to these challenges. Her focus on celebrity and fandom as features of the melodramatic imagination helps illuminate Russian modernity and provides the groundwork for comparative studies of fin-de-siلecle European popular and high culture, selfhood, authenticity, and political theater\" -- back cover.
Book
The Operatics of Everyday Life, or, How Authenticity Was Defined in Late Imperial Russia
In this article, Anna Fishzon explores how the phenomena of celebrity culture and early sound recording contributed to notions of audientic selfhood in late imperial Russia. Public discussions about celebrities like the Bol'shoi Theater bass Fedor Shaliapin helped forge understandings of sincerity and spoke to contemporary concerns regarding the relationship between fame and artifice, the public persona and the inner self. Fishzon suggests that the emergent recording industry penetrated and altered everyday emotional experience, the arena of work, and the organization of leisure, linking gramophonic discourses to celebrity culture and its rhetoric of authenticity and sincerity. In part because Russian audio magazines and gramophone manufacturers heavily promoted celebrity opera recordings, sonic fidelity was equated with the capacity of the recorded voice to convey “sincerity,” understood, in turn, as the announcement of ardent feelings. Fan letters to Shaliapin and Ivan Ershov document these new sensibilities regarding self, authenticity, desire, and emotions.
Journal Article
QUEUE TIME AS QUEER TIME: AN OCCASION FOR PLEASURE AND DESIRE IN THE BREZHNEV ERA AND TODAY
Waiting in queue is perhaps the most emblematic experience of late Socialism. Goods deficits and long lines were common throughout Russian history, but in the 1970s they became exceedingly inconvenient and frustrating. Or, more likely, the queue grew strange and intolerable only retroactively, in the wake of perestroika. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the queue with its stretched temporality has continued to serve as a metaphor for the entire Brezhnev era-indeed, as its central organizing principle and symbol. In scholarly and fictional accounts, it both incarnates and comments on social relations, the second economy, and the logic of scarcity. The latest scholarship on Brezhnev-era consumerism, social life, and aesthetic pursuits militates against the cliche of gray masses suffering immobilization and a lost belief in Bolshevism. And yet the weight of the evidence suggests that an impasse--at once temporal and rhetorical--was continually manifested in late-socialist official ideology, social formations, and cultural production.
Journal Article
Confessions of a Psikhopatka: Opera Fandom and the Melodramatic Sensibility in Fin-de-Siècle Russia
This article looks at satirical depictions of opera fans and devotees' letters to the Bolshoi Theater celebrity bass Fedor Shaliapin to gain a sense of the ways urbanites fantasized and moralized on the eve of revolution. It argues that the imperatives and narrative structure of melodrama–both as a genre and meaning‐making system–shaped fans' yearnings and self‐expression. The letters document the emergence of new sensibilities regarding self, desire, and feeling–sensibilities made possible and reinforced by Europe‐wide phenomena like modernism, mass media, celebrity culture, and consumerism, as well as a political culture and myths specific to Russia. Fans loved and confessed melodramatically, verbally paying tribute to the authenticity and extraordinariness of the star, the virtue of pathos, and the autonomy of the emoting individual. Devotees appropriated press‐generated negative images of fans (as transgressive psikhopatki) in the arrangement of their identity, inverting the valuation and meaning commonly ascribed to them. Through the practice of confessional letter writing, born of an unrequited desire for intractable personalities who constantly alternated between operatic roles and “real life,” fans imagined and fashioned themselves as highly expressive, exceptional, and therefore ethical beings. The article seeks ultimately to initiate a discussion about the relevance of the melodramatic sensibility beyond the fin de siècle: melodramatic understandings of self and sincerity were furthered by Bolshevik political culture, autobiographical practices, and performances. Melodrama also offered a potentially radical aesthetics and subversive approach to Soviet life.
Journal Article
QUEUE TIME AS QUEER TIME: AN OCCASION FOR PLEASURE AND DESIRE IN THE BREZHNEV ERA AND TODAY
Эта статья доказывает, что эпоха Брежнева с ее очередями, фильмами и литературой породила то, что Дж. Халберстам и другие теоретики называли «квирвременем»: формой времени, которая воплощает творческую фантазию позднего социализма и продолжает быть темой произведений советской и постсоветской диаспоры. Квир-время делает упор на настоящем, упраздняет нарратив и охватывает изолированный момент. Это время характеризуется воображаемым будущим, безразличным к биологическому воспроизводству, наследию прошлых поколений и национальной истории. Начало статьи демонстрирует, как различные формы массовой культуры—мультфильм «Голубой щенок» (1976г), серия мультфильмов «Чебурашка» (1969-83гг) и повесть Натальи Баранской «Неделя как неделя» (1969г)—пробудили чувства квир-времени и пространства. Затем статья рассматривает роман Владимира Сорокина «Очередь» (1983г). Очередь для некоторых была выражением смирения и скуки. Но в то же время очередь представляла собой общественную формацию, способствующую случайным, ни к чему не обязывающим, знакомствам, встречам и притворству. Описанная Сорокиным, очередь являлась символом и оживлением застоя, исступленным эхом «развитого социализма», отвергнувшего на неопределенное время ранние идеи о светлом коммунистическом будущем. В конце статьи рассматриваются русско-американские романы «Очередь» Ольги Грушиной (2010г) и «Свободный мир» Дэвида Безмозгиса (2011г), которые подытожили квир-время очереди и показали экзальтацию остановки времени в нерепродуктивном пространстве. Возможно, эти два романа показывают, что последнее советское поколение потеряло не только страну и ее культуру, но и времени, а также желания и опыта, которые связаны с этой концепцией. Эти авторы воскрешают в памяти период застоя и оплакивают волшебное, потерянное время.
Journal Article
The Fog of Stagnation
This article argues that a queer temporality emerged during the era of Soviet Stagnation: the Stalinist past was unspeakable and the future postponed or foreclosed. In response to the limited horizon of “developed socialism” – the loss of narrative coherence and futurity, the never‑to‑arrive communist promise – an expanded present rich in possibility and feeling was brought into being in animated films, providing a time and space where one could desire again. Iurii Norshtein’s Ëzhik v tumane (Hedgehog in the Fog, 1975), Fëdor Khitruk’s Vinni‑pukh films (1969‑72) and Bremenskie muzykanty (Bremen Musicians, 1969) activated desire and altered fantasy not, as one might expect, through a reestablishment of linear time, but a reimagining of stagnation as a domain of thrilling, non‑teleological explorations. Where the fog in Ëzhik v tumane precipitated a lack and set the libido in motion, Vinni‑pukh provided a partial solution to the Brezhnev‑era desire crisis by staging polymorphous perversity and an elastic “kitchen time”; and Bremenskie muzykanty further developed the new socialities, loves, and forms of enjoyment communicated by such queer temporality. Gaps, magically intimate spaces, queer embodiment, and disfigured time were performed within the diegetic frame as well as instantiated by the film‑as‑object, asking spectators to playfully examine the impasses of late socialism, and imagine a libidinally saturated life, abounding with potentiality.
Journal Article
