Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera

Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia

A. Fishzon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137023452
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

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-siècle European popular and high culture, selfhood, authenticity, and political theater.

1

Entrepreneurs and the Public Mission of the Russian Private Opera

Liza Mamontova: Inner conflict and modern Russian subjectivity

On October 27, 1872, Savva and Liza Mamontov arrived in Rome, their three children and nanny in tow, planning to stay for seven months. While Savva periodically returned to Russia to oversee railroad construction, Liza remained in a rented villa through late May, tending to their ailing son Andrei and carousing with a circle of Russian expatriates. The couple would play a key role in the transformation of Russian opera 13 years later, when the Imperial Theaters dissolved their monopoly (1882) and private enterprises appeared in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Savva Ivanovich Mamontov, a railway magnate and prominent arts patron, founded, financed, and directed the influential Moscow Private Opera (1885–87; 1896–99). Elizaveta Grigor’evna Sapozhnikova Mamontova (1847–1908) organized arts and crafts workshops at Abramtsevo, the family summer residence and art colony just north of Moscow. Though not directly involved in Savva’s opera enterprise, she provided the inspiration for many of its productions, encouraging the artists he employed to study and revive Russian peasant architecture and handicrafts, and create murals and sets based on folklore themes.

In 1872, Savva and Liza had decided to spend their second consecutive winter in Italy on the advice of doctors, who had warned that the harsh Moscow climate adversely affected little Driusha’s kidney condition. But there was another, more selfish reason for their trip. The Mamontovs went to Rome hoping to forge a connection with a group of Russian artists and intellectuals residing there—the young sculptor Mark Antokol’skii, the painter Vasilii Polenov, a St. Petersburg art history professor by the name of Adrian Prakhov, and others.¹ Savva had not yet established his art colony, and the rather naïve Liza was only beginning to discover Europe, but the couple’s name, money, and genuine curiosity about everything allowed them to realize their dream easily. They were immediately welcomed into a “family” of warm, creative people whose mirthful dinners, history lessons, edifying excursions, and artistic workshop proved formative, laying the foundation for later collaborations at Abramtsevo and the Moscow Private Opera. Liza kept a diary during these trips and in the early 1900s composed a memoir based on it. Later in life, she waxed most enthusiastic about the Roman winter of 1872–73:

Rome was no longer a foreign city to me; with every arrival my life merged with it more—because there I experienced so much that was good, the best years of my youth. And that winter I can call only a “celebration of life.” So many new feelings and aspirations awakened in my soul during those months, so many new relationships were formed; not fleeting but enduring friendships . . . that completely changed the very structure of my life, pushed me to develop intellectually . . . This eternal city never left me; and from that moment forward, through every kind of circumstance, it opened in me more and more interests. In all the difficult moments of my life, there, in that country of beauty and spiritual elevation, I have found peace and consolation, and that is why my thoughts always go there with gratitude.²

In November, Antokol’skii introduced Liza and Savva to the endearingly awkward, “lanky, red-headed, and unattractive” composer Mikhail Ivanov, or “Mikele,” also nicknamed “Encyclopedia.”³ He in turn brought the Mamontovs to a party hosted by Adrian and Emiliia Prakhov. Liza approached the Prakhov house with some apprehension: she “had never before been a guest at the home of professors and therefore assumed a serious disposition, expecting immediately to be involved in some sort of academic conversation, probably about history.”⁴ Much to her relief, Liza found both the hosts and the company gathered at the dinner table to be loud, lively, inebriated, and completely unserious—at least that evening. Emilia L’vovna introduced Polenov as “Don Basilio,” Ekaterina Mordvinova as “the general,” and Mordvinova’s younger sister Marusia as “princess.” Antokol’skii was called by his Hebrew name, Mordukh, and Liza and her husband soon became Lizen’ka and Savvochka to everyone present.⁵

Though Liza was embraced by her new acquaintances, she initially did not feel comfortable in their company. A prominent Moscow silktrader’s daughter taken to posh European resorts as a toddler, Liza was nevertheless a sheltered girl of seventeen with little formal education or worldliness when she met Savva in 1864 and married him five months later. In middle age, Liza described herself during her early “Rome life” as an “undeveloped” nervous wreck who observed the knowledge, behavior, and past experiences of her atheist and occasionally hedonistic coterie with both awe and incomprehension. Liza recalled how she grew to love and eventually emulate the people she feared most, particularly the eccentric Ekaterina Mordvinova. Already widowed at age 23, Ekaterina was born Princess Obolenskaia, “married for love,” and participated in Alexander Herzen’s émigré circle:

Mordvinova bore the strong imprint of her past, a mixture of two opposing currents in public life. First, the aristocratic stratum in which she was born and spent her childhood, and then, the environment of her young adulthood, spent among Russian and Polish émigrés. She was such a lady [barynia] in her upbringing and habits, but assumed the guise of a radical [demokratka], spoke very gruffly, larded her speech with sharp expressions, smoked, and so forth. Her manner grated on me—I’ve never liked gruff people and rude expressions. But underneath was something else that I found very compelling and we soon became friends, even close friends.⁶

It was Mordvinova who openly addressed and curtailed Liza’s struggle with her insecurities, enabling her to take pleasure in the city and relationships that so altered and “enriched” her life:

[Ekaterina] almost instantly got after me about my constant self-analysis. And, truly, this company disturbed my inner peace, and I experienced very strongly the weight of finding myself among new types of people, more evolved than me. After a conversation with one of them, I would torture myself by parsing every word I said and invariably feel depressed. The next day I would meet my interlocutor embarrassed, and the more interesting the person was to me, the more I tortured myself.

Mordvinova comprehended Liza’s agitation, “the state of her soul,” and assured her that it was “shameful to fret over [her] ‘I’ so much. ‘Is it really true,’” she would ask, “‘that all of those around you are less worthy of your attention than your own I, over which you fuss so painstakingly? Leave it alone and tend to others. Believe me, you will find life easier.’”⁷ Liza was stunned by these words, but “understood that there was truth in them,” and on many occasions thanked Mordvinova for her “friendly advice.” The recognition of the relative unimportance of her I, however, did not stop Liza from engaging in further self-examination. Rather, she “began working on [her]self in a different way,” taking the direction suggested by Mordvinova; and, indeed, “life became easier.”⁸ Liza’s approach to self-fashioning—based on a dialogical notion of I, and formulated as the search for inner truth through the admiration and comprehension of others—was disseminated at the turn of the twentieth century, as we shall see, by new realist dramatic modes and aesthetic practices that her husband shepherded to prominence.⁹

The Rome circle spent virtually every day together immersed in an assortment of activities: in the mornings, excursions were taken to Pincio, where the children could run around and play. Afternoons were devoted to visiting the galleries and studios of fellow artists. After lunch, most of the men absconded to the “Gigi Academy” (essentially a barn with a lofty title), where interested models and artists congregated to sketch or sculpt. Savva tried his hand at sculpting and developed a great passion for it. He began going to the academy regularly to work with Antokol’skii, who discerned Savva’s “unquestionable” artistic talent and encouraged him to approach sculpting more seriously. A few productive hours at the academy were followed by gatherings at one of the homes of the circle’s participants. Evenings of animated debates about art, opera, politics, and antiquity often passed into nights of bacchanalia. Adrian Prakhov’s history lectures and Ivanov’s sober reflections on music were terminated by the prankster of the group, Emiliia L’vovna, with toasts and lewd jokes. Bottles of vodka were opened, champagne was poured; Antokol’skii performed impressions of various “Jewish types,” Savva sang arias, Mikele treated the company to his compositions, Adrian recited poetry, and Emiliia played the piano—quite well, according to Liza, especially Chopin.¹⁰

Savva valued and enjoyed their life in Italy nearly as much as Liza did. When his business associates and the exigencies of railroad construction summoned him back to Russia in January 1873, Savva wrote to her that he had “never experienced life as fully and as well [as he did in Rome], in the company of truly good people.” He struggled to adjust to Moscow and wondered how he ever would be able to “reconcile [him]self to its emptiness and ugliness.”¹¹ In another letter to Liza, dated January 15, 1873, he predicted that their time in Rome would be the best of their lives.¹²

But the following year, Savva did not accompany his wife and children to Rome, opting instead to remain in Russia and supervise the construction of the Yaroslavl’-Arkhangel’sk and Donetsk railroad lines. Liza characterized her sojourn in Italy in 1874 as “more placid and serious.”¹³ Though Antokol’skii organized semiweekly drawing and sculpting lessons, and Ivanov offered to teach Liza Italian, poor health, the birth of Lev Antokol’skii, and a series of partings limited opportunities for festivity. Ekaterina Mordvinova left Rome shortly after the death of her younger sister Marusia; a sudden bout of homesickness prompted the Prakhovs to move back to Petersburg; rheumatism plagued Antokol’skii for the better part of December and January; Polenov, cursing Italy and dreaming of Russia, decided to forsake both and join Il’ia Repin in Paris.¹⁴ The little “family” was breaking up. “Despite the fact that . . . I was happy in Rome that year,” recalled Liza, “thoughts of my husband and Russia did not leave me for a minute. News of the famine in Samara oppressed me and I kept thinking that if I were living in Moscow, perhaps I could be of some use.”¹⁵

A year earlier, shortly after Savva’s departure in January, Liza informed him, not without regret, that their circle had been “living more modestly” since he left, “staying at home two, sometimes three nights a week.” It seemed to her that “everyone simultaneously felt the need to be more focused and set to work.”¹⁶ Now Liza lamented her lack of purpose, missed Savva, and yearned for Abramtsevo, where she hoped to establish a hospital and a school. It was her turn to lose Rome to memory and set to work.

In studies of Abramtsevo and late-nineteenth-century Russian art and music, Elizaveta Mamontova is depicted (to the extent that she is depicted at all) as a deeply religious Slavophile, interested almost exclusively in peasant handicrafts and old Muscovite architecture.¹⁷ Elizabeth Valkenier, for example, in her book Valentin Serov, points to the fact that Liza “set up a training school and workshops that crafted furniture, toys, and embroidery based on folk designs threatened by mass production” as evidence of her quaint moral values and narrow cultural outlook.¹⁸ Viewing her from the perspective of Serov, who first became acquainted with the Mamontov family in his boyhood, Valkenier describes Liza as “a gentle, compassionate person who enveloped family, friends and dependents in warmth and motherly love.”¹⁹ Thus Liza emerges here, as elsewhere, an emblem of piety and maternal kindness, a serene and retiring figure, perpetually dispensing filial care and subjecting Abramtsevo visitors to religious rituals.²⁰

I foreground Liza Mamontova, a marginal figure in Russian cultural studies, to show that while she may have been on the discursive margins of opera, her subjectivity was not. As I will demonstrate later, the advent of private opera and cultural entrepreneurialism brought the feminine subject, marginal by definition, to the center of fin-de-siècle culture. In this period, operatic performance of the kind developed and popularized under Savva Mamontov’s aegis at the Moscow Private Opera aimed to reveal the emotional essence of characters and posited that essence as the defining feature of humanity. Such performance modes resonated with audiences and began to define the commercialized, and therefore feminized, culture of fandom. Although the image of the female fan and her project of self-fashioning was a constitutive component of opera culture at the turn of the twentieth century, entrepreneurs like Mamontov and “serious” music journalists certainly failed to acknowledge it. On the contrary, they hoped to link operatic notions of personal authenticity to private enterprises and their ethos of artistic freedom, innovation, and service to high culture, construed as masculine. Recent scholarship on the Silver Age has reproduced this gendered interpretation of Russian culture, establishing Savva Mamontov’s eclecticism, cosmopolitanism, and interest in high art through a tendentious comparison with the provincialism, narrowness, and religiosity of his wife.²¹

Most renderings of Liza suggest that her identity was forged primarily in relation to the Russian Orthodox faith, and, in simpler terms, they attribute to Liza a squeamishness toward preoccupations outside her own limited purview that is be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Entrepreneurs and the Public Mission of the Russian Private Opera
• 2 Russia’s New Celebrities: Offstage Narrative and Performance
• 3 Deviant Audiences and the Feminization of Fandom
• 4 Authenticity in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, or, How the Gramophone Made Everyday Life Operatic
• 5 Fan Letters, Melodrama, and the Meaning of Love
• 6 Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index