Representing Russia's Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song by Adalyat Issiyeva (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Representing Russia's Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song by Adalyat Issiyeva David Salkowski Representing Russia's Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song. By Adalyat Issiyeva. (AMS Studies in Music.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. [xxi, 406 p. ISBN 9780190051365 (hardback), $61; also available as e-book, ISBN and price vary.] Music examples, illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. Of the many important terms Adalyat Issiyeva introduces to the nonspecialist reader in this remarkable book, perhaps the central one is inorodets, [End Page 621] meaning literally a person "of different descent" (p. 10). Applied to ethnic non-Russians in the Russian Empire, the term highlights one of the fundamental contexts underlying this study: the vast landmass of the Russian Empire was inhabited by a multitude of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups who were regarded as "others" by European Russians. Issiyeva cites a surprisingly candid Russian military officer who notes the irony that it is the local community (in this case, the Chuvash people), not the minority, governing Russians, who were the "others" (p. 68). This paradox of imperial incorporation and the way Russians negotiated it through scholarly and cultural production animates the pages of this impressive study. While on its surface Issiyeva's work is an investigation of musical representations of imperial "others" in nineteenth-century Russian music, it accomplishes far more, giving a deep, fluid, and incisive analysis of the relationship between empire and ethnographic knowledge. Through meticulous and detailed work with sometimes obscure sources, she provides an account of the development of (musical) ethnography in imperial Russia. This in turn establishes essential context for understanding the better-known names of Russian music, as they are themselves products of a multi-ethnic, expanding empire. The subtitle of the book reflects both its structure and a greater trajectory of knowledge production. Issiyeva's first three chapters concern the representation of the Russian Empire's non-Russian ethnicities within folk song and ethnographic studies about the folk music of Russia's Asian subjects. The second group of three analyzes the ways in which this knowledge of imperial "others" was metabolized by composers and institutions into art song, a genre that, as Issiyeva notes, has often been overlooked by scholars of Russian nationalism and orientalism, in comparison to opera and symphonic music (p. 6). In chapter 1, Issiyeva focuses on representations of imperial others in a number of folk genres, including the bylinas (an epic oral form of poetry), soldier songs, and children's songs. This story rhymes with larger European narratives of seeking national identity in the folk traditions of an imagined past while also speaking to the specific challenges of imperial governance. A particularly compelling example is found in Alexander Nikulin's Collection of Songs Compiled for Children, published in two editions in Polish-speaking Vilna (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1870 and 1881 (Sbornik pesen sostavlennyi dlia detei Aleksandrom Nikulinym [Vilnius: A. G. Syrkina, 1870] and Sbornik pesen sostavlennyi Alexandrom Nikulinym, odobrennyi Uchenym Komitetom Narodnogo Prosvyashcheniia dlia upotrebleniia v shkolakh Vilenskogo Uchebnogo Okruga [Vilnius: A. G. Syrkina, 1881]). Issiyeva notes that from the first edition to the second—which spans a decade of uprisings and repressions in the imperially controlled Kingdom of Poland—an innocuous children's collection expands into an ideological tool (pp. 37–38). These Russian-language songs, approved for use in Polish schools, use stereotypes of Caucasian subjects to demonize the "bad" imperial other (the "evil Chechen" of Mikhail Lermontov's "Cossack Lullaby") and model the proper integration of the "good" subject, exemplified by assimilated Georgians in the song "Appeal." Issiyeva notes that the melody of this latter song contains references to both Mikhail Glinka's art song "Do Not Sing for Me Thy Song of Georgia" and an aria from A. Verstovskiĭ's Askold's Grave (p. 39), thus folding these "good" neighbors into an imperial frame on a musical level. [End Page 622] In chapter 2, Issiyeva demonstrates the role of scholars in supplying knowledge of local customs and traditions in Russian Asia to imperial officials as well as the ethnographic work generated by certain military officials themselves. This chapter also shines important light on the history of ethnography outside Europe. For instance...