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THEATRE AND IDENTITY IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA
By CATHERINE A. SCHULER University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2009 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-58729-799-1
Chapter One
THE CULTURE WARS NATIONAL CRISES, NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS, NATIONAL THEATRE
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Directions taken by modernizers of Russian culture in the eighteenth century complicated the task of nineteenth-century national patriots who hoped to reinvigorate pride of nation and national cultural identity, thereby investing institutions like the Russian national theatre with greater value. Serfdom, one of the institutions barely touched by modernization, was a particularly glaring example of the contradictions in Russian claims to modernity. Not surprisingly, the intimate relationship that developed between the Russian national theatre and the serf system constituted one of the theatre's greatest challenges. Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, its spirit lived on in the Russian imperial theatres, the foundations of which were built on patriarchal paternalism and the serf economy. That fact, however, was not universally troubling. Nikolai Evreinov, for example, a notorious provocateur of the Silver Age avant-garde, argued that embryos of the best Russian theatre, including Silver Age modernism, were contained in serf theatre. So what if a few eggs were broken in the baking process: the cake was fine!
Callous as his views may seem to us today, Evreinov was surely right to see a whisper of modernity in serf theatre and performance. After all, the process by which estate owners introduced theatre onto the estate was astonishingly similar to the way in which Peter and his successors introduced theatre at court. In both instances ruling elites were determined to "civilize" more backward elements of the population-whether in the interests of modernization or to impress other elites, both foreign and native. Achievement of this goal usually required coercion of less powerful social groups into a new style or genre of cultural performance. Insofar as theatre had a value in these scenarios, it was as an instrument of social and cultural engineering. Ironically, however, the processes set in motion by Peter I had the perhaps unforeseen consequence of creating two similarly disaffected social groups: educated nobles who were increasingly estranged from the autocracy and trained, often well-educated serfs who were increasingly aware of their continued debasement and chafed against it. One result of the flourishing commercial trade in trained serfs was that imperial theatres in the capital cities acquired significant numbers of artists and production staff from serf estates. Thus, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russian national theatres in Moscow and St. Petersburg had become spaces in which disparate social categories could mingle, even though their positions in the administrative and production hierarchies of these institutions remained distinct and unequal until very late in the imperial period. This merging of professional and artistic interests, however, helped not only to temper social differences among individuals but also to transform the Russian national theatre into a significant social and signifying practice. Theatre began to play a vital role both in the intellectual life of the empire and in the construction and public representation of national identity. In turn, new enthusiasm for Russian plays, authors, and artists allowed the Russian national theatre to develop and mature both institutionally and professionally. These complementary developments mark a significant stage in Russia's process of cultural modernization.
Despite visible progress in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, however, Russian theatre and drama were still marginalized by preferences and preconceptions instilled in spectators during the eighteenth century. Although many serf theatres and a few commercial theatrical enterprises were established in the provinces after 1762, rural Russians did not rush to embrace this signifier of foreignness. For the more sophisticated urban spectators who attended theatre in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the purchase of serf performers by the state theatres offered certain evidence of their low standards and poor quality. In the capital cities, attendance at the Russian theatres fluctuated with both the seasons and the political mood, thus making a constant audience difficult to maintain. Although elite Russians with money and leisure time made private theatricals a cottage industry, distinctions between amateur and professional were carefully preserved. Finally, although greater numbers of literate Russians were writing plays, the plays (with few exceptions) were either adaptations or translations from the Western repertoire. Indeed, from the inception of the Russian national theatre until Aleksandr Ostrovskii appeared in the 1850s, critics complained of the lack of a national repertoire. All of these factors impeded the development of a viable national theatre in Russia. The greatest impediment, however, was the attitude of the ruling elite-the autocrat and his or her closest advisors-and the nobility toward Russian national identity.
Although the nobility constituted a tiny minority of the total population, their numerical inferiority did not prevent the members of this estate from shaping Russia's cultural and artistic landscape well into the nineteenth century. The presence of a nobility deeply indoctrinated in the superiority of Western European languages, literature, art, and culture complicated the process of naturalizing Russian drama and theatre in Russia. The example of Filipp Filippovich Vigel', a prolific memoirist and acolyte of sentimental novelist and historian Nikolai Karamzin, is instructive. His views on the Russian theatre during the period not only were common among the nobility but also exemplify the challenge faced by native authors and practitioners. Claiming to have had no experience of theatre until he arrived in St. Petersburg in 1800, Vigel' had this to say about the Russian effort:
In St. Petersburg, nothing gratified me as much as theatre, which I saw for the first time in my life; for there was none in Kiev, and I wasn't allowed to go in Moscow. A few words about that would be appropriate here. I never saw the Russian troupe, or, more accurately, I never even heard about it, and I didn't know the name of a single actor; compared with the present, not even one-tenth [of the nobility] could speak French, and it would have embarrassed those of us who were fluent in the language to be seen in the Russian theatre: it was left to the swarm of landowners, merchants, and raznochintsy who were passing through. Our scraggy repertoire seemed inexhaustible to this pack; it listened without boredom or weariness to incessantly repeated tragedies by Sumarokov and Kniazhnin.
Although a small backlash against slavish imitation of the West emerged in the late eighteenth century and the French revolution raised doubts among the ruling elite about the continued viability of French models, the nobility, with rare exceptions, continued to favor foreign education, fashion, literature, language, art, and culture. Vigel', for example, professed to love the theatre passionately, but he was proudly indifferent to Russian drama and theatre-an attitude typical of his social group. Destined by birth for the life of a fashionable officer in the guards, Vigel' enjoyed all of the advantages that accrued to the noble estate. His family placed him in a French boarding school in Moscow that promised to transform Russian children into "real Frenchmen." Like so many fashionable members of the nobility, Vigel' learned to despise his own language, people, and traditions. He and many of his social peers were persuaded that only the French could create high art and culture and that only this art and culture were worthy of a Russian nobleman's attention. Events in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, however, conspired to change many nobles' views on the value of Russian identity and culture. Not surprisingly, nothing did more to improve the fortunes of Russian plays and playwrights or theatre and theatre artists than war with France.
There is little doubt that 1812 marked a turning point in Russian life, literature, art, and culture. War with France, which was ongoing in the first decade of the nineteenth century, did not affect the nobility's attitude toward the French language and culture immediately. Napoleon's invasion of holy Rus' in 1812, however, created both a real and a symbolic crisis. Although the cultural and intellectual colonization of the nobility by France was accomplished peacefully during Catherine's reign, foreign occupation of the Russian soil was another matter entirely. In the face of a serious threat to Russian sovereignty, the Russian nobility was suddenly faced with a dilemma: continue to insist upon the superiority of French language, culture, and cultural products or seek new ways to demonstrate loyalty to the Russian fatherland. Needless to say, most chose the latter. Indeed, although the educated nobility had become increasingly estranged from the autocrat during the eighteenth century, the interests of the fatherland as the autocrat conceived them were still their interests. Mobilized by the impending threat to their economic advantage, hereditary privilege, and native soil, the Europeanized nobility, many of whom could not speak their native language, suddenly began to see a renewed value in Russianness. Not surprisingly, native playwrights and theatre artists were among the beneficiaries of this new attitude as audiences flocked to Russian theatres in St. Petersburg and Moscow for productions of a new, more patriotic-and often nationalist-Russian drama.
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Russian national theatres in St. Petersburg and Moscow began to move from the periphery to a more central position in the social and intellectual life of the inhabitants of those cities. War with France, calls for national unity, and heightened interest in international and domestic politics quickened the process during the first decade. Nonetheless, national theatre and drama still had many obstacles, both social and aesthetic, to overcome before they were fully assimilated into the cultural environment. The root of their challenge lay in the continuing instability of individual, collective, and institutional identity, a problem exacerbated at the end of the eighteenth century by the ruling elite's seemingly monomaniacal preoccupation with hierarchy. Indeed, the noble functionaries who governed the imperial theatres reproduced hegemonic social conventions and order within them: just as Paul I explained to his nobles that they did not exist unless he looked at them, so too the fortunes of Russian playwrights and theatre artists were contingent upon the nobility's interest in them. The status of the Russian national theatres in St. Petersburg and Moscow remained low until the educated nobility began to see something more in them than state-subsidized serf theatres.
Although Russian national theatres in St. Petersburg and Moscow were potentially powerful instruments of identity construction, social and cultural conditions in the last decades of the eighteenth century conspired to thwart this function. During the last years of Catherine's reign, only a tiny minority of the educated nobility expressed an urgent need for Russian plays, productions, and performers; thanks to both ignorance and insufficient resources, the quality of Russian dramaturgy, acting, and production remained low; and, perhaps most importantly, average Russian spectators had so far failed to establish deep emotional connections with the Russian national theatre, national themes, native characters or the actors who portrayed them, and perhaps the very idea of Russian national culture. Indeed, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russian national theatres in St. Petersburg and Moscow rarely tapped into a collective national consciousness rooted in common identity and traditions. If plays by August Kotzebue and his imitators evoked strong emotion in the auditorium of the Russian theatre, the emotional investment of spectators in national symbols, myth, and ceremony remained low. The dynamics of social and cultural development changed dramatically in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars; as the need for unifying texts and symbols grew, so too did the significance of Russian drama and theatre. Sentimental and romantic plays began to draw Russian spectators into the worlds of Russian history and social life, while a new generation of Russian actors evoked the Russian national soul (russkaia dusha) on the stages of Russian national theatres in the capital cities. This is surely the basis of Rafael Zotov's contention that the origins of a uniquely Russian theatre are located not in the middle of the seventeenth century but at the beginning of the nineteenth.
The intention of this chapter is to describe the processes by which Russian spectators across the social spectrum began to connect emotionally with Russian actors and dramaturgy, thus transforming the Russian national theatre into an effective architect of national myth and unified cultural identity. The organizing questions are threefold. How did rapidly shifting social and political dynamics stimulate interest in, and even create an urgent need for, Russian theatre and drama at the beginning of the nineteenth century? How did this need create a space for Russian sentimental and romantic plays with comparatively popular appeal? Finally, how did Aleksei Iakovlev and Ekaterina Semenova, the first celebrity actors of the Russian stage in St. Petersburg, stir national feeling through visceral performances of a largely invented, but urgently needed, Russian national soul?
RUSSIAN NATIONAL THEATRE: IDEA AND INSTITUTION
The transfiguration of the Russian theatre from a signifying prop into a signifying practice at the beginning of the nineteenth century must be understood in the context of national theatre as both an institution and an idea. Long before the romantic spirit of nation, national unity, and national identity touched the Russian theatre, "national theatres" were established institutionally in Russia. Peter I's youngest daughter, Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, chartered the national theatre on October 30, 1756. Two terms were used in the Complete Collected Laws of the Russian Empire to locate this theatre among existing theatres in St. Petersburg: russkii, which invokes nation and ethnic cultural identity, and rossiiskii, which not only denotes a political geographical unit but also connotes empire. This semantic inconsistency underscores the challenge faced by advocates of national theatre and drama as they strove to instill russkaia soul (dusha) into a rossiiskii institution.
From their inception in the last half of the eighteenth century, Russian national theatres in St. Petersburg and Moscow were at a disadvantage. Theatre had, after all, come to Russia through foreign examples, first German then Italian and finally French. Foreign troupes were the first to enjoy support from the Russian court and the first to be established as continuously producing, professional enterprises. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Elizaveta Petrovna and Catherine II encouraged native playwrights and theatre artists to develop a craft but preferred French, Italian, and German dramaturgy, actors, and production practice. Although members of the educated nobility flirted briefly with the Russian theatre after 1756, the novelty soon wore off; attendance at Russian language performances by this crucial social group dwindled rapidly, especially in St. Petersburg. The reasons for their inconstancy are not hard to locate. Not only were they indoctrinated in the superiority of foreign literature, art, and performance, but the quality of foreign plays and productions really was measurably better. Indeed, by all accounts, until the nineteenth century Russian plays and productions were woefully inadequate in comparison with their foreign competitors. How could it have been otherwise? The arts of playwriting, acting, design, and criticism were in their infancy in Russia; the educated nobility, which constituted the only discriminating audience, snubbed the Russian professional theatre; and members of the larger public, which still preferred more primitive genres of entertainment and had not developed the skills of informed spectatorship, were apparently neither aware of nor troubled by the lesser quality of the Russian theatre.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THEATRE AND IDENTITY IN IMPERIAL RUSSIA by CATHERINE A. SCHULER Copyright © 2009 by University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission.
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