The Melodrama of City Life in Early 20th-Century Russia

The last two decades have seen a proliferation of studies concerning the so-called Silver Age of Russian culture (ca. 1890–1917). One can easily see the attraction: whereas Russian scholars have been keen to compensate (or, as some argue, to overcompensate) for the blanket prohibition imposed on the topic during the Soviet era, their Western colleagues have flocked just as eagerly to the newly available archival treasures that illuminate pivotal historical events; the wealth of philosophies, aesthetic trends, literary styles, and artistic masterpieces created during that remarkable time; and its colorful personalities, each boasting his or her particular brand of genius masking madness.¹ A number of researchers who have attempted to decipher the mysteries of the Silver Age by analyzing its artistic products, poring over artists’ memoirs, and interpreting contemporary criticism have focused on that most ephemeral of arts, and perhaps the most defining art form of the period—the theater.² Alas, while our attempts to delve into an artist’s mind in order to decode ideas and intentions are famously fallacious, it is perhaps even more futile to attempt to comprehend the collective consciousness of the artist’s public.³ Yet the historian Anna Fishzon in her lively, well-written, and thoroughly enjoyable book Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera takes aim at that very impossibility as she reads the collective psyche of the Russian operatic audience, one ecstatic love letter at a time.

In an expansion of the approach used by scholars of the U.S. mass media, Fishzon interrogates the emerging celebrity culture in early 20th-century Russia and, within its context, the relationships—both real and fervently imagined—between operatic stars (and an occasional populist politician) and their (mostly female) fans.⁴ Using, among others, the tools of psychoanalysis, she demonstrates how the fans molded their daily lives into operatic plots by living out the emotional adventures of their favorite characters, all the while fantasizing about celebrity singers like the bass Fedor Shaliapin (1873–1938) and tenor Leonid Sobinov (1872–1934) as hybrids of extraordinary humans and heroes of paperback romances. It stands to reason, then, that it is Chaikovskii’s Tat´iana, the lover of romances both literary and musical, who emerges as an especially seductive role model for a so-called psikhopatka (or madwoman), a much-ridiculed, particularly ardent female fan who haunts and stalks her (male) singer idol, dogging his steps and inundating him with long letters full of effusive proclamations of devotion (79–112).⁵

These letters—and the satirical newspaper feuilletons that parodied them—are used by Fishzon to articulate a distinct definition of an authentic self that, she argues, was shared by a large cross-section of early 20th-century Russian city dwellers, whether or not enamored with the theater. Specifically, their particular subjectivity was based on an idea of “sincerity”: spontaneity; a breach of societal decorum by harboring and, more important, expressing inappropriate sentiments (such as writing love letters to a married opera star whom they had never personally met but who, they believed, would—indeed, should—reciprocate their feelings); and generally an overt, demonstrative emotionalism, ranging from screaming bravo and fainting in public to an exceptionally purple epistolary style. In a word, the world of a psikhopatka (and of fandom overall) is characterized by what Fishzon identifies as melodrama—a style or mode of behavior exhibited by the characters in realist dramas, Romantic operas (particularly when realistic—that is, psychologically truthful—acting is demanded in their productions), and early silent cinema. “Melodramatic imagination,” Fishzon argues, was adopted by opera fans in their daily fantasy lives that revolved around their favorite stars. For their part, the stars and the impresarios who “packaged” and “sold” them fed the fans’ infatuation by cultivating the image of a unique, rebellious, larger-than-life yet approachable artiste, which fit the hero model seen on stage and screen, fueled by the press, and popularized in...