Curtain Call

Abstract

Abstract This chapter follows Rosenstrauch during his first years in St. Petersburg, the great seaport and capital of the Russian Empire. It explores St. Petersburg’s role as Russia’s “window to Europe”—the meeting place for people, goods, and influences from the West and from the Russian interior. It describes the city’s large ethnic German community, and the conditions facing Rosenstrauch and the local German theater troupe under its manager, Joseph Miré. Rosenstrauch was successful as an actor, but over time he soured on the theater. Analyzing the incomes of actors and the expenses that he faced, the chapter argues that he must have struggled financially. The German theater also lacked social prestige, because the Russian elite, including its ethnically German members, was oriented culturally toward France. Lastly, he suffered emotionally from the tension between the ideal of the bourgeois family man whom he played on stage and the reality of his broken marriage and the disrepute of his occupation as an actor. His crisis reached a critical point when his oldest son was murdered in 1806. This shocking event caused him to experience a personal religious conversion and become a fervent Lutheran believer, and eventually to he quit the acting profession altogether.