Fishzon, Anna. Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Sicle Russia (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 545 The highly idiosyncratic bibliography cites a personal email to the author with both time and date, includes a selection of texts which have little direct relevance to Chekhov and omits a significant number which do. The paucity of reference to books by actors and directors of Chekhov is revealing, as is the absence of any audio-visual material. Better proofreading might have ironed out the occasional grammatical lapse or syntactical hiatus, the odd misspelling or semantic confusion, some muddled dates (p. 59) and what, on page 217, looks like a misreading and/or mistranslation of a Stanislavskii stage direction. More seriously, the book contrives to avoid any discussion, at length or in depth, of any single one of Chekhov’s full-length plays, let alone any act thereof. London Nick Worrall Fishzon, Anna. Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2013. xvii + 273 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £55.00. After a period in which turn-of-the-century Russian music was largely the preserve of musicologists and literary scholars, it is now the case that some of the most interesting and original work in the field is being carried out by cultural and intellectual historians keen both to use music as a historical source and to apply historiographical methodologies to the study of music. Recent studies of the Russian Music Society by Lynn Sargeant and of Jewish musicians in the Russian Empire by James Loeffler have moved the debate from questions of composition and performance to issues of institutions and society, and Anna Fishzon’s new book continues this trend. At the same time, she draws on work by historians of Russian popular culture, as well as on Mark Steinberg’s recent survey of fin-de-siècle emotions, resolutely putting to one side canonical historical interpretations of Russian opera and foregrounding instead the often unruly, untutored and undisciplined ideas that have long been associated with popular appreciation of the form (and which many critics have dismissed as illegitimate, both as a form of aesthetic reaction in the first place, and as a proper subject for subsequent scholarly enquiry). Her main argument is that a study of popular reactions to opera allows us to understand ‘the sensationalization of everyday life as a central aspect of modernity’ (p. 1). This trend is, moreover, tied up with the immediate historical context of early twentieth century Russia: ‘As the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 threw into question long-held hierarchies and epistemological positions, operatic utterances — on record and in everyday life — enabled individuals to perform and ultimately transcend the perceived crisis of meaning, fixing SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 546 once again morality and truth’ (p. 184). Reception studies have often focused on the ways in which canonical works of art have been translated, whether across genres within cultures (as in the case of operatic adaptations of literary works, for instance), or across national and linguistic borders. Now, however, due attention is being paid to the role played by audiences not just in the consumption of culture, but in the ways their participation in the cultural field actively constitutes meaning and value, and Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia is an important contribution in this regard. Fishzon readily admits that tracing this process is far from straightforward, not least because of ‘the evanescence of sensibility as a historical phenomenon’ (p. 187), yet by drawing on a rich range of sources such as ‘theater periodicals, satirical feuilletons, sound recordings, images of opera stars, and fan letters’ (p. 2), she is able to establish the means by which traditional ‘high culture’ was commodified through recording, marketing and popular appreciation. After a brisk programmatic introduction, Fishzon first turns to an account of how merchant patrons such as Mamontov and Zimin established a new kind of operatic spectacle; by promoting highly individuated performances that moved beyond the former reliance on stock characters, their theatres collapsed traditional class distinctions and hierarches, thereby opening the way for a new form of subjectivity. The second chapter examines...