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In February  the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow staged Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka’s opera Ivan Susanin for the first time in the Soviet era. Contemporary critics lavishly praised the work, and during its first season the Bolshoi performed the opera no less than twenty-six times.1 Ivan Susanin went on to enjoy widespread acclaim throughout the Soviet period and beyond. Yet such fame was not new: Russian music lovers had thrilled to the sounds and sights of the composition known as “the first Russian opera” for generations before . Originally entitled A Life for the Tsar, the work premi èred at St. Petersburg’s Bolshoi Theater in November  before an enthusiastic audience that included such notable cultural figures as A. S. Pushkin and N. V. Gogol’ in addition to Tsar Nicholas I and the royal family . Henceforth, it became a mainstay of the repertoire of the Russian imperial theater, opening every season for the next eight decades until the revolutions of  rendered it “ideologically obsolete.”2 The opera’s nineteenth-century librettist, a courtier of German descent named G. F. Rozen, colored the text of Glinka’s masterpiece in undeniably monarchical tones.3 As a result, A Life for the Tsar required substantial revision before its Soviet debut in  as Ivan Susanin. While Glinka and his musical compositions have been the subject of numerous studies, the details of S. M. Gorodetskii’s transformation of A Life for the Tsar have received scant attention. On occasions when Soviet musicologists discussed the rewriting of the libretto, they took great pains to justify the changes by attempting to prove that Rozen, influenced by imperial courtiers or the tsar himself, perverted Glinka’s original intentions by forcing the composer to glorify the autocracy. While “disrespect for libretti and accusations against   Reinventing the Enemy The Villains of Glinka’s Opera Ivan Susanin on the Soviet Stage  S B E librettists have a long and respectable history,”4 this attack on Rozen assumed a particularly opportunistic character because it justified the Soviet rewriting of the libretto and the appropriation of Glinka’s music, which before the Revolution had been regarded as a Russian national treasure.5 Indeed, it is ironic that Soviet musicologists attempted to defend the revisions to Glinka’s opera by blaming the libretto’s “shortcomings” on the political atmosphere of the s even as they avoided mention of the social realities and political exigencies that gave shape to the Stalinist version of the opera. As a social-historical document, the text of the libretto can serve as an avenue for studying the political and cultural climate of the society that produced and received it.6 This chapter provides a new perspective on the study of Glinka’s opera by examining a key feature of the revision, the depiction of the Polish villains, in light of these historical circumstances.  While the creators of the Soviet version of Glinka’s opera supplied the work with a heavily revised libretto, the basic contours of the legend remained intact. According to the story, which was first popularized in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Russian peasant named Ivan Susanin sacrificed his life during the winter of – in order to save the newly elected tsar, Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov.7 Taking advantage of the political confusion of the interregnum known as the Time of Troubles, Polish armies invade Muscovy, scheming to place a Polish prince on the Russian throne. At a village near Kostroma, the Poles look for a guide from among the local peasants who would help them capture Mikhail Fedorovich . Pressed into Polish service, Susanin feigns cooperation with the Poles, all the while secretly intending to lead them astray and send a warning to the young Romanov. Ultimately, Susanin guides the invaders deep into a dense, snowy forest. When the Poles realize that the faithful peasant has deceived them and has no intention of disclosing to them the whereabouts of the tsar, they torture him to death before they themselves perish from exposure. In the years following the Bolshevik Revolution, A Life for the Tsar vanished from the stage due to its overtly monarchist character. In the midto late s, however, a dramatic shift in party ideology linked to the development of more effective mobilizational propaganda led the Stalinist party hierarchy to selectively reinterpret aspects of the tsarist past.8 As other contributions to this volume detail, historical figures such as Peter the Great, Aleksandr Nevskii, and even Ivan the Terrible came...

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