Theatre and Identity in Imperial Russia (review)

{ 163 } BOOK REV IEwS fully surmounted these difficulties, expertly crafting a valuable and enjoyable contribution to the field. —MONICA STuFFT University of San Diego \ Theatre and Identity in Imperial Russia. By Catherine A. Schuler. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. ix + 326 pp. $49.95 cloth. Identity, in the form of the fundamental national question (Who are we?), emerged as a pressing issue in nineteenth-century Russia as a legacy of the modernization program of Peter the Great, who, through projects great and small, had tried to force Russia’s civil and social life to more closely resemble that of its European neighbors. As Catherine A. Schuler notes, the Russian theatre remained inchoate up until the late eighteenth century and even then depended heavily on imported forms. As with other facets of Russian life, however, the theatre began to seek native authenticity, and its representational function implicated the theatre in the larger national search for identity. Schuler shows how modernization and the construction of a distinctive national identity intersected with theatrical representation through three distinct periods: the years leading immediately up to the war of 1812; the interwar period beginning after the Napoleonic Wars and ending with the Crimean War of 1855; and the postwar period immediately following this. Her engaging narrative follows Russian intellectuals and theatre artists as they grappled with evolving notions of national identity and soul. A trend emerges first of Russian theatre’s increasing independence from Western traditions followed by the exploration of more complex and contingent negotiations of identity. Schuler’s study covers a lot of ground,and each chapter,after a short preface, begins with a contextualizing account of Russian social history (e.g., the ideals and motivations of the Decembrists circa 1825). While Schuler could likely achieve some of her rhetorical goals with less Russian history at the beginning of each chapter,her prologues do offer the generalist a clear path into the milieu while providing the specialist with a series of connections between political and social classes that often remain stratified in Russian area scholarship. Most notably , Schuler consistently finds and develops meaningful connections between Russian intellectual movements and the theatre. Thus, for example, we come to { 164 } BOOK REV IEwS understand how Vissarion Belinsky’s essays on the 1837 production of Nikolai Polevoi’s new translation of Hamlet served not only to champion the career of actor Pavel Mochalov but also to extol the virtues of a transcendent Russian soul, the russkaia dusha. Schuler’s extensive discussion of the Russian intellectual tradition attempts to connect the world of elite Russian thinkers with the less exalted social sphere occupied by Russian actors. The breadth of scholarship here should offer several new avenues of investigation for other Russian theatre scholars. Theatre and Identity in Imperial Russia tracks Russian imperial acting via its actors, coaches, and managers vis-à-vis the evolving sense of nation relative to Western Europe, particularly France. The picture Schuler paints of Russian theatre prior to the prewar tensions with France is not a pretty one. Russian theatre depended, for the most part, on traditions imported from France, Germany , and Italy. Moreover, the country had yet to effectively marshal the talent and bureaucratic organization to allow for the flourishing of a formidable homegrown theatre community; however, the imminence of war with France occasioned reflection about continued reliance on an imported French theatre aesthetic. As the Russian gaze turned inward in response to international tensions , audiences in Moscow and St. Petersburg discovered new and unaccustomed predilections for Russian actors over French ones. Schuler does a fine job identifying actors’techniques onstage as reflective of Russia’s evolving relationship with the West. Thus, Aleksei Iakovlev’s authentic, masculine, and raw acting style appealed to a nation gearing up for conflict with France. At the same time, audiences increasingly compared an actress like Ekaterina Semenova favorably with the French actress Mlle George in the tense period leading up to Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow. Schuler’s account of Semenova’s victory in this “contest of ideology and aesthetics” between the two actresses highlights the remarkable fact that Russian audiences chose Semenova as their national favorite (53), an emerging emblem of russkaia dusha, even...