Mamontov's Private Opera: The Search for Modernism in Russian Theater

1 The Silver Age and the Legacy of the 1860s

15 one The Silver Age and the Legacy of the 1860s From the early days of the Moscow Private Opera through the present day, Mamontov’s supporters and his detractors, his contemporaries and modern scholars have all identified one characteristic of his company that made it unique. The artistic policies, internal structure, and daily operations of Mamontov’s enterprise were to a large extent driven by ideology—the aesthetic views of its leadership, most importantly Mamontov himself. As the exact nature of that ideology remains a matter of debate, it is a goal of this study to illuminate the nature of Mamontov ’s aesthetic platform and trace its impact on various aspects of his company’s operations, as well as its relationships to its critics, competitors , and audiences. This question is crucial to understanding the role played by the MPO in the history of Russian theater at the dawn of the Silver Age. From the moment it opened its doors, Mamontov’s company positioned itself at the epicenter of the cataclysmic aesthetic shift that saw the new generation of modernist artists confront, battle, and ultimately displace their predecessors. As a result, it was inevitably drawn into the aesthetic debate that underlined that struggle, and as we shall see, its response to the issues of the debate was an outgrowth of Mamontov’s personal aesthetic preferences, shaped and tested over three decades. We shall start, therefore, with an overview of the major ideological currents that guided the development of the arts in Russia from the 1860s, the time of Mamontov’s personal aesthetic maturation, through the 1890s, the time of the aesthetic coming-of-age of his company. 16 · mamontov’s private opera In the late nineteenth century, as Western civilization stood on the verge of the modern era, an age-old debate over the meaning and value of art in society was once again taking center stage in the aesthetic discourse. The debate focused on the extent of art’s engagement with reality. Its main issue has been summarized by Charles Harrison as follows: “Should we measure all forms of cultural production alike according to what we might summarily call their realism, [or] does the true potential of culture lie . . . in its autonomy vis-à-vis social and utilitarian considerations and in its pursuit of the aesthetic as an end in itself?”1 Both trends of thought coexist in constant dialogue within Western cultural discourse to this day, their relative centrality to the spirit of an age in perpetual flux, continuously rethought and reevaluated. At any moment in history one of these trends may become dominant, while the other is marginalized but never completely absent from aesthetic consciousness. As the autonomy of art, arguably, lies at the very core of modernist aesthetics, the discourse was becoming increasingly polemical in Russia and elsewhere as the new century approached. In order to position themselves within that discourse, clarifying (and perhaps simplifying) it, critics, philosophers, and aestheticians seized upon a convenient—and conventional—dichotomy, the followers of realism waving the banner of “truth” and modernist aestheticians dedicated to “beauty.”2 Naturally, to the practitioners of the arts—whether poetry, painting, or music—the issue was more complex. To them, the dividing line between truth and beauty was, at best, blurred: whatever the aesthetic affiliation, rare was an artist who would not wish his or her works to be both beautiful and relevant. A perfect example of that complexity is the philosophy of Charles Baudelaire, creator of the first aesthetics of modernité. In his 1863 Le peintre de la vie moderne, the poet urged artists to experience and to capture the reality of their fluid and transient modern world. And yet, he was also a dedicated follower of writer and aesthetician Théophile Gautier , who had famously declared: “Nothing truly beautiful can serve any useful purpose whatsoever; everything useful is ugly . . . The most useful part of the house is the toilet.”3 With Gautier, Baudelaire proclaimed aesthetic autonomy an essential quality of true art, and beauty its highest goal. “Since Baudelaire,” wrote Matei Calinescu, “the aesthetics of the silver age and the legacy of the 1860s · 17 modernity has been consistently an aesthetics of imagination, opposed to any kind of realism.”4 And it is this side of Baudelaire’s argument that made a particularly strong impact on young Russian intellectuals of the early Silver Age. His writings on the subject were quoted...