Theatre & Identity in Imperial Russia (review)

Catherine Schuler's contribution to the Studies in Theatre History & Culture series is a vital and engaging text that not only introduces the reader to the history and development of the Russian stage during the nineteenth century, but also demonstrates how this development coincided with and reacted to the struggle to redefine Russian national cultural identity during that turbulent period. Theatre & Identity in Imperial Russia is a deeply specialized and thoroughly researched text, and the author focuses upon historical personages who are largely absent from more general discussions of theatre history (August Kotzebue and Nikolai Gogol are two notable exceptions). While it may seem that such a text would appeal only to specialists and Russophiles, nothing could be further from the truth. Schuler's ability to combine her broad cultural knowledge with a compelling narrative structure makes this book difficult to put down—the all-too-rare historical page-turner. The work should be tremendously useful to scholars and teachers interested in relationships between national identity and theatre, between Russian and European approaches to dramatic forms in the nineteenth century, and between theory and production practice in an emerging theatre culture.

Schuler utilizes materials from the multiple literary journals that flourished in Europe during the nineteenth century, and her study focuses upon materials from over twenty Russian theatre, literary, and cultural journals such Dramaticheskii vestink (Dramatic Herald), Vestnik evropy (European Herald), and Teatral (Theatre Connoisseur). Theatre & Identity in Imperial Russia is suffused with primary observations (most written by educated nobles) of the Russian stage, many of which appear in English for the first time here. The author's extensive use of these materials not only illuminates the activities of major political, social, and artistic figures, but also introduces the reader to a number of intriguing figures who are probably unknown to all but serious scholars of Russian theatre.

Two of the more compelling figures of the era, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Shakhovskoi and Pavel Katenin, are treated in chapters 2 and 3, respectively. Shakhovskoi was the primary representative of the teatraly, a small group of educated nobles with a deep and abiding interest in theatre. These intellectuals were, at best, amateurs in the field, but they were able to take on positions of great influence as the Russian theatre began to develop. Using their elevated position as members of the nobility, as well as their access to all aspects of Russian intellectual life, some teatraly administered organizations where they were able to advance their designs on the theatre. Perhaps no teatral was more influential than Shakhovskoi, who was not only a successful playwright, but also ran the imperial theatre in St. Petersburg (albeit behind the scenes), taught acting, zealously promoted the careers of actors loyal to him, and likely arranged for sexual liaisons between actresses and influential members of the nobility. He did more than anyone else at the beginning of the nineteenth century to advance the state of Russian theatre, becoming what Schuler calls a "protodirector" in the theatre, filling roughly the same role in Russian theatre that Goethe did for the Germans or Garrick for the English.

Chapter 3 turns to Pavel Katenin, a military officer with sympathies for the Decembrists who wrote plays, regularly contributed to intellectual journals such as Syn otechestva (Son of the Fatherland), and strongly influenced the artistic direction of two leading actors in the Russian theatre, Vasilii Karatygin and Aleksandra Kolosova. Somewhat paradoxically (at least to Western eyes), the would-be revolutionary was also a classicist, soundly rejecting the principles of Romanticism in his 1829 essay "O teatre" (On the theatre). Like Shakhovskoi, Katenin was interested not only in literature, but also in theatrical production, and his prodigies performed onstage what Schuler calls "The Decembrist Aesthetic." Schuler expertly charts Shakhovskoi's and Katenin's influences upon the course of Russian theatre history, and the many individuals and stories covered in the book are always contextually explicated in terms of the overall sweep of nineteenth-century...