Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination by Natalie K. Zelensky (review)

Natalie Zelensky's title Performing Tsarist Russia in New York may mislead some readers. The book is not about the introduction of the music of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, and their compatriots to American orchestras nor about pioneer theatrical performances of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky. The subtitle, Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination, is more informative. Zelensky's introduction lays out her thesis: "Two main themes inform this study: the role of music in creating and sustaining the First Wave Russian émigré community in New York and the musical representation of Russia in American culture, which both mirrored and transformed this role" (p. 5). What Zelensky explores is not so much how Russian vernacular music was injected into the American cultural bloodstream, but how it contributed to building a pervasive, appealing, but factitious image of Russia. Over time, this image became totally unmoored to lived reality, though it persists even today.

Unlike the "huddled masses" of persecuted Jews and political radicals who fled Russia in the nineteenth century, the "First Wave" of post-Revolutionary arrivals to the United States was seeking a haven, not an opportunity. These "White Russians," drawn from the nobility, military, and professional classes, mourned their lost lives of privilege and looked back to Tsarist Russia through rose-colored glasses. The nostalgia for what they had left and the hopes for a swift return coalesced into the invention of a Neverland, peopled with dashing Cossacks, haughty princesses, peasants energetically dancing the hopak, and "gypsies" intoning mournful ballads, invariably to the strains of a balalaika. Ukrainian embroidered blouses, hussar uniforms, and boyar headdresses were mixed and matched to create a native "Russian" fashion that never was.

Musically, although the Orthodox liturgy retained its authenticity, folk songs were often faux-folk, with lyrics by poets and notes by composers; "gypsy" orchestras and choirs were, more often than not, made up of ethnic Russians. As this fantasy Russia proved attractive beyond the émigré community, it was promoted commercially through restaurants, cabarets, nightclubs, concerts, charity drives, and phonograph records. This whiter-than-White Russia evolved into an admired contrast to its evil twin, Bolshevik Red Russia. Once the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) became a US ally in the Second World War, however, even Soviet army songs won popularity among the émigrés' second generation. There is little difference between the repertoires of the Don Cossack Choir, led by the ex-White Lieutenant Serge Jaroff, and the Red Army Chorus, founded by Aleksandr Aleksandrov, composer of the Soviet national anthem.

Zelensky has researched these periods not only through standard sources but also by interviews with survivors and their relations. She offers close musical analysis of both the notation and the interpretation of such inevitable standards as "Dark Eyes" and "Two Guitars." Ranging from a church in Harlem to Tin Pan Alley, the transformations this fairy-tale Russia underwent are astutely analyzed by Zelensky; and she is sympathetic to the plight of the fugitives as they realized the futility of return.

The first half of the book is the stronger part, cleaving close to the stated themes. The postwar period with its influx of displaced persons and refugees provides Zelensky less material. By the time we get to the Cold War, her thesis changes direction to investigate the exportation of American music to the Soviet Union. A detailed case study of the Broadway composer Vernon Duke (born in Vilno Gubernia as Vladimir Dukelsky and raised in Kiev) and his association with the Russian-language Radio Liberty tells us mostly about the infiltration of US pop culture into Soviet ears.

The last phenomenon Zelensky discusses is that of the so-called Russian balls still held in New York, whose participants are ethnically diverse, socially varied, and, to an outsider's gaze, somewhat ridiculous. As a scholar, she takes them seriously as a last-gasp survival of the émigré traditions. Still...