The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia (review)

Julie A. Buckler's The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia is a valuable addition to our understanding of the development of Russian culture during the nineteenth century. The central thrust of her argument is that western opera—including its plots, characters, and performers—was an extremely important component of Russian culture far beyond the confines of the opera house. What has sometimes been seen as a zero-sum contest between the western European and the Russian homegrown culture is shown to be the development of a triumphant Russian culture which incorporates both streams. Buckler's book succeeds in showing how that assimilation took place in the area of opera as musical genre, literary topic, and social activity; she shows how opera in all its facets was experienced by audiences and incorporated into the realist literature of the nineteenth century.

For music historians, this study is a worthy addition to that of Robert Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism, and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981) and the more recent "Ital'yanshchina" chapter in Richard Taruskin's Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Each of the three studies addresses a different aspect of mid-nineteenth-century Russian musical culture, although some of Buckler's ideas can be seen in embryo in Taruskin's chapter. A fourth book, MurrayFrame's The St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters: Stage and State in Revolutionary Russia, 1900- 1920 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), while treating a later period, has a pertinent introduction, including the historiography of the Imperial Theaters.

In each of her seven chapters Buckler analyzes historical accounts of Russian social and cultural life through the techniques of literary criticism, including new historicism, feminist criticism, and semiotics. She takes on a formidable task and arrives at a valid overall picture. As always, though, the devil is in the details. In general, her application of techniques of literary criticism to the Russian social and cultural landscape, still old regime during the period under examination, does not take enough account of the significant differences between Russia and the bourgeois society of western Europe. Given that the audience for this book is not likely to have much acquaintance with autocracy under Nicholas I, Alexander II and III, or with the social structure of a society still comprised of a small elite and an enormous underclass, some of her phrases—for example "the vast and inclusive middle space of cultural life" (p. 1), "ordinary citizens" (p. 16), and the "middle classes" (p. 44)—require mapping onto a social template that differs significantly from that of contemporaneous western Europe. The book makes the somewhat mysterious society of Russia seem quite understandable, but this may be an illusion that should be dispelled or at least qualified.

The chapter that will interest historians of theaters and audiences particularly is chapter 2, "Attending Opera." Here Buckler begins with a concise account of the "choppy narrative of structures built, reconstructed, renamed, and consumed by fire" (p. 17). But the description of the theaters and theater troupes of the capital—the Bolshoi, Malyi, Aleksandrinskii, Mikhailovskii, and Mariinskii—useful as it is, does not satisfy the desire for a clear longitudinal account of repertory, social custom, and class makeup of specific theaters, which changed greatly over the century (as did the Russian cities themselves). The author has included descriptions of opera performances and audiences in Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev, and Odessa through the eyes of memoirists, letter writers, and Soviet scholars (among them Zotov [1860], Losskii [latter part of the nineteenth century], Skal'kovskii [1899], Grossman [1926], and Nikolaeva [1984], all cited in Buckler's bibliography). Unfortunately not all of these writers are specific about which theater they describe, and they are writing about various decades. To give a single example, the reader needs more help in interpreting descriptions of audience behavior at the Mikhailovskii, the favored theater of the St. Petersburg aristocracy...