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"Opera Soviet Union."
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Prokofiev's Soviet operas
Prokofiev considered himself to be primarily a composer of opera, and his return to Russia in the mid-1930s was partially motivated by the goal to renew his activity in this genre. His Soviet career coincided with the height of the Stalin era, when official interest and involvement in opera increased, leading to demands for nationalism and heroism to be represented on the stage to promote the Soviet Union and the Stalinist regime. Drawing on a wealth of primary source materials and engaging with recent scholarship in Slavonic studies, this book investigates encounters between Prokofiev's late operas and the aesthetics of socialist realism, contemporary culture (including literature, film, and theatre), political ideology, and the obstacles of bureaucratic interventions and historical events. This contextual approach is interwoven with critical interpretations of the operas in their original versions, providing a new account of their stylistic and formal features and connections to operatic traditions.
BOOK
Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, Second Edition
Acclaimed for treading new ground in operatic studies of the period, Simon Morrison's influential and now-classic text explores music and the occult during the Russian Symbolist movement. Including previously unavailable archival materials about Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, this wholly revised edition is both up to date and revelatory. Topics range from decadence to pantheism, musical devilry to narcotic-infused evocations of heaven, the influence of Wagner, and the significance of contemporaneous Russian literature. Symbolism tested boundaries and reached for extremes so as to imagine art uniting people, facilitating communion with nature, and ultimately transcending reality. Within this framework, Morrison examines four lesser-known works by canonical composers--Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Scriabin, and Sergey Prokofiev--and in this new edition also considers Alexandre Gretchaninoff's Sister Beatrice and Alexander Kastalsky's Klara Milich, while also making the case for reviving Vladimir Rebikov's The Christmas Tree.
eBook
Three Loves for Three Oranges
In 1921, Sergei Prokofiev's Love
for Three Oranges -one of the earliest, most
famous examples of modernist opera-premiered in Chicago.
Prokofiev's source was a 1913 theatrical divertissement by Vsevolod
Meyerhold, who, in turn, took inspiration from Carlo Gozzi's 1761
commedia dell'arte -
infused theatrical fairy tale. Only by examining these
whimsical, provocative works together can we understand the full
significance of their intertwined lineage. With
contributions from 17 distinguished scholars in theater, art
history, Italian, Slavic studies, and musicology, Three Loves for
Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev illuminates the
historical development of Modernism in the arts, the ways in which
commedia dell'arte's self-referential and improvisatory elements
have inspired theater and music innovations, and how polemical
playfulness informs creation. A resource for scholars and theater
lovers alike, this collection of essays, paired with new
translations of Love for Three Oranges, charts the transformations
and transpositions that this fantastical tale underwent to provoke
theatrical revolutions that still reverberate today.
eBook
Beyond Tula
Combining burlesque absurdism and lofty references to classical literature with a tongue-in-cheek plot about an industrializing rural proletariat, Beyond Tula--subtitled \"a Soviet pastoral\"--actually appeared in the official Soviet press in 1931. This novel offers an uproarious romp through the earnestly boring and unintentionally campy world of early Soviet \"production\" prose.
eBook
Negotiating “Historical Truth”
In 1925, when Soviet composer Iurii Shaporin began writing his first opera, Polina Gebl’, about the Decembrist Ivan Annenkov and the French emigrée shopgirl who followed him into exile, he had no idea how tumultuous its journey would be. It took twenty-eight years and countless revisions for the opera to gain official approval. When it finally premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in 1953, with the title The Decembrists, the love story had been backgrounded and the historical plot line vastly expanded; scenes, characters, and arias had been added, dropped, or altered; and Polina herself had been written out entirely.
The negotiated process by which Polina became The Decembrists reveals much about the evolving relationship between music and power in the Soviet Union, especially in the high-stakes realm of Socialist Realist opera, in which a suitable exemplar had yet to be produced. Amidst the pressures of the late-Stalinist state’s assault on the creative intelligentsia, and in the wake of major opera scandals in the 1930s and 1940s, the Bolshoi Theater saw in Shaporin’s work an ideal candidate to fill this void: a historical opera with an unimpeachable subject, the Decembrist Revolution, understood as the foundation point of the revolutionary legacy to which the Bolsheviks laid claim. This article analyzes the intense negotiations among Shaporin, the Bolshoi and its consultants, and official censors to ensure The Decembrists’ historical accuracy, which they believed would guarantee its acceptance. Yet, as the article demonstrates, while Soviet musical authorities upheld “historical truth” as their standard, in the end the Socialist Realist ideal of “artistic truth” was far more important for The Decembrists’ success.
Journal Article
Ghostly Paradoxes
Ghostly Paradoxesis an innovative work of literary scholarship that traces the reactions of Russia's major realist authors to spiritualist events and doctrines and demonstrates that both movements can be understood only when examined together.
eBook
Nuclear logics
Nuclear Logics examines why some states seek nuclear weapons while others renounce them. Looking closely at nine cases in East Asia and the Middle East, Etel Solingen finds two distinct regional patterns. In East Asia, the norm since the late 1960s has been to forswear nuclear weapons, and North Korea, which makes no secret of its nuclear ambitions, is the anomaly. In the Middle East the opposite is the case, with Iran, Iraq, Israel, and Libya suspected of pursuing nuclear-weapons capabilities, with Egypt as the anomaly in recent decades. Identifying the domestic conditions underlying these divergent paths, Solingen argues that there are clear differences between states whose leaders advocate integration in the global economy and those that reject it. Among the former are countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, whose leaders have had stronger incentives to avoid the political, economic, and other costs of acquiring nuclear weapons. The latter, as in most cases in the Middle East, have had stronger incentives to exploit nuclear weapons as tools in nationalist platforms geared to helping their leaders survive in power. Solingen complements her bold argument with other logics explaining nuclear behavior, including security dilemmas, international norms and institutions, and the role of democracy and authoritarianism. Her account charts the most important frontier in understanding nuclear proliferation: grasping the relationship between internal and external political survival. Nuclear Logics is a pioneering book that is certain to provide an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers, and practitioners while reframing the policy debate surrounding nonproliferation.
eBook
Five Operas and a Symphony
In this eagerly anticipated book, Boris Gasparov gazes through the lens of music to find an unusual perspective on Russian cultural and literary history. He discusses six major works of Russian music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing the interplay of musical texts with their literary and historical sources within the ideological and cultural contexts of their times. Each musical work becomes a tableau representing a moment in Russian history, and together the works form a coherent story of ideological and aesthetic trends as they evolved in Russia from the time of Pushkin to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s.Gasparov discusses Glinka'sRuslan and Ludmilla (1842), Mussorgsky'sBoris Godunov (1871) andKhovanshchina (1881), Tchaikovsky'sEugene Onegin (1878) andThe Queen of Spades (1890), and Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (1934). Offering new interpretations to enhance our understanding and appreciation of these important works, Gasparov also demonstrates how Russian music and cultural history illuminate one another.
eBook
Religion, \Westernization,\ and Youth in the \Closed City\ of Soviet Ukraine, 1964-84
Zhuk explores the connections between cultural consumption and popular religiosity among the youth of Dnepropetrovsk during the Brezhnev era. Given its closed, sheltered existence, Dnepropetrovsk became a unique Soviet social and cultural laboratory in which various patterns of late socialism collided with the new Western cultural influences. Using archival documents, periodicals, personal diaries, and interviews as historical sources, Zhuk focuses on how the consumption of Western popular music among Dnepropetrovsk's youth stimulated their interest in religion and contributed to popular religiosity and various forms of religious identification.
Journal Article