McQuillen, Colleen The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature and Costumes in Russia (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 154 McQuillen, Colleen. The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature and Costumes in Russia. Studies of the Harriman Institute. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2013. xiii + 282 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 (paperback). Given the number of publications attempting to find a master trope for early modernist aesthetics, the venture is clearly an alluring one. For any new efforts the yardstick of comparison would be Green and Swan’s The Triumph of Pierrot (University Park, PA, 1986) and Douglas Clayton’s Pierrot in Petrograd (Montreal, 1993) — vast interpretative works exploring the notion of commedia dell’arte as an extended metaphor for the modernist imagination and an expression of fin-de-siècle cultural views. Coleen McQuillen hangs her own interpretation of the modern from a different kind of peg; the motif of masquerade (comprising masked and costume balls) is seen as a prism for refracting the diversity of artistic cross-currents of the time, and as a unifying platform for the wide spectrum of political and cultural debates. Such an analysis, without doubt, provides a valuable contribution to modernist studies, but in order to appreciate this vantage point the reader would still have benefitted from a brief comparison with the established scholarly landmarks. The book’s sub-title specifies clearly the terrain of examination, focused on ‘stylizing life, literature and costume in Russia’. The same type of clarity, however, does not apply to the chronological boundaries of the study, which range from 1872 to 1914 (p. 3). These limits require further explanation and justification, for the earlier date is most commonly associated with the Russian realist doctrine, while the activities of Russian avant-garde authors (extensively discussed in various chapters) would extend far beyond 1914. The book is divided into two parts, the first concentrating primarily on the theoretical issues of ‘parody, imitation and stylisation as discursive strategies in literature and in social performances of personal identity’ (p. 29). The three chapters in this section are well researched and suggest an original reading of the era’s social and cultural agenda (ethical, political and gender issues); but the whole is unfortunately somewhat less than the sum of its parts: in their totality these chapters do not coalesce into a coherent interpretation of the modernist imagination, defined here in terms of ‘relativistic approaches to art and self’ (p. 25), or more specifically through loosening the links between the signifier and signified. The first two chapters seem to demonstrate the opposite. When examining costume parties in Sologub’s Petty Demon and Dostoevskii’s Demons, chapter one affirms a strict one-way correlation between ethics and aesthetics, when everything beautiful speaks of goodness, and impurity reveals itself through the distorted. The same kind of referential rigidity is asserted in chapter two, which associates political conservatism with national costumes, as opposed to the widespread trend of impersonating foreign nationals among terrorists in the years surrounding 1905. REVIEWS 155 The second part explores the issues of reception by treating costume design as a legible poetic language. Informative, engaging and meticulously researched, this is, surely, the strongest section of the book. Some justification is offered for the study’s chronological starting point as it mentions the weakening of the Russian state control of visual and performing arts in the 1870s–80s (p. 119). The overall narrative also becomes more spontaneous, more fluid, and effectively more in tune with the playful and carnivalesque subject-matter of the work (as compared to the discourse of the first part, heavily charged with specialized, and at times cumbersome, terminology). Chapter four interprets non-representative costumes (such as ‘Dawn’, ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Duma’) worn at the series of balls hosted by the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, while chapter five ‘constructs an imaginative projection of the cultural legacy through the character costumes of mythological and historic figures’. In both chapters insightful parallels are drawn with the writings of Leonid Andreev (Black Maskers), Anna Akhmatova and Viacheslav Ivanov, leading (chapter six) to the inquiry into the abstract costume practices in the avant-garde works of Blok, Maiakovskii and Kruchenykh. Seen as an utmost representation of semantic freedom, their works are juxtaposed (chapter seven) to its antithetical...