Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement by Simon Morrison (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.3, 2004 849 the two major works, The Poetics ofPlot and Genre and Image and Concept. Providing a detailed analysis of Freidenberg's writings, the author remains faithful to her goal of creating a forum foran exchange of ideas. She juxtaposes Freidenberg's palaeontological approach to folklore with Petr Bogatyrev's formalism or Viktor Zhirmunskii's sociological conception, analyses the evolution of the literary system within Freiden? berg's and Iurii Tynianov's frameworks, and compares Freidenberg's and Grigorii Gukovskii's historical poetics. By introducing this polylogue of epistemological and ideological positions, Perlina construes an intellectual biography ofthe epoch, rather than of the single person. She prepares a secure ground for the reassessment of Freidenberg's theories in the seventh part of the monograph, where Freidenberg's contribution to semiotics and the Bakhtin-Freidenbergcorrelation are made obvious. Perlina's rigorous study is at the same time a very 'human' book. The author has succeeded in re-creating a portrait of the woman, who was a dedicated scholar and a strong personality, and whose scholarship became for her the way to survive and to bear with dignity 'the siege of the human being', as Freidenberg described physical and moral life under the tyranny of Stalinism. It remains to hope that Freidenberg's unique memoirs will be published in the near future to reveal the full scope of their author's remarkable and tragic fate at the service of Soviet scholarship. University of Exeter Vladislava Reznik Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement. By Simon Morrison. (California Stu? dies in Twentieth Century Music). Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univer? sity of California Press. 2002. ?40. xii + 3iipp. ISBN 0-520-22943-6. While scholars have offeredsome fresh insight on Russian Silver Age opera in recent years, it still remains a relatively neglected topic, making Simon Morrison's Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement a welcome publication in this area. However, the four operatic works considered by Morrison in this book are considered almost ex? clusively in the context of literary Symbolism; he makes little mention of the other musical developments taking place at the time. This is a little disappointing, as this could have added an additional dimension to the book, as well as helping to unifywhat at times feels more like a collection of essays than a cohesive work. That having been said, the reader who is prepared to persevere through some of the more disjointed aspects of this work will find research that is generally both original and engaging. Morrison states his overall purpose as 'to illustrate how attempts to create Russian Symbolist operas pushed dramatic technique to an extreme' (p. 17). However, in order to address this issue he also has to consider a much more fundamental one?does the genre of 'Russian Symbolist opera' actually exist, and if it does, how is it defined? The answer, Morrison concludes, seems to lie not in the conception of an opera but in its reception?indeed, he surmises, 'it would appear that the only way to create a Symbolist opera is by accident. A Symbolist opera cannot be designed; it can only arise by default out of its reception' (p. 171). Morrison's firstoperatic case study, Tchaikovksky's The Queen of Spades, seems to be a case in point. The opera was premiered in 1890, while the Russian Symbolist movement was barely in its infancy,yet the influence it exerted on leading Symbolist poets marks it out, in Morrison's view, as 'themasterpiece of Russian Symbolist opera' (p. 104). He suggests that the insertions and alterations made by Modest Tchaikovsky in developing the libretto from Pushkin's novella were intended to accentuate 'Sym? bolist' aspects of the story,particularly those relating to the supernatural and to the concept of fate. He also argues that the multiplicity of anachronistic literary and mu? sical borrowings were not shortcuts or mistakes from a hurried creative process (the 850 Reviews entire opera was composed injust forty-fourdays), as many have contended, but were deliberately intended to create an illusory and ambiguous sense of time and place. Morrison then continues to consider Rimsky-Korsakov's 1905 opera The Legend of theInvisible City ofKitezh and...