Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia

Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia PDF Author: E. Anthony Swift
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520925874
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
This is the most comprehensive study available of the popular theater that developed during the last decades of tsarist Russia. Swift examines the origins and significance of the new "people's theaters" that were created for the lower classes in St. Petersburg and Moscow between 1861 and 1917. His extensively researched study, full of anecdotes from the theater world of the day, shows how these people's theaters became a major arena in which the cultural contests of late imperial Russia were played out and how they contributed to the emergence of an urban consumer culture during this period of rapid social and political change. Swift illuminates many aspects of the story of these popular theaters—the cultural politics and aesthetic ambitions of theater directors and actors, state censorship politics and their role in shaping the theatrical repertoire, and the theater as a vehicle for social and political reform. He looks at roots of the theaters, discusses specific theaters and performances, and explores in particular how popular audiences responded to the plays.

Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia

Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia PDF Author: E. Anthony Swift
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520925874
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the most comprehensive study available of the popular theater that developed during the last decades of tsarist Russia. Swift examines the origins and significance of the new "people's theaters" that were created for the lower classes in St. Petersburg and Moscow between 1861 and 1917. His extensively researched study, full of anecdotes from the theater world of the day, shows how these people's theaters became a major arena in which the cultural contests of late imperial Russia were played out and how they contributed to the emergence of an urban consumer culture during this period of rapid social and political change. Swift illuminates many aspects of the story of these popular theaters—the cultural politics and aesthetic ambitions of theater directors and actors, state censorship politics and their role in shaping the theatrical repertoire, and the theater as a vehicle for social and political reform. He looks at roots of the theaters, discusses specific theaters and performances, and explores in particular how popular audiences responded to the plays.

Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia

Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia PDF Author: Richard Stites
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300137575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description
Richard Stites explores the dramatic shift in the history of visual and performing arts that took place in the last decades of serfdom in Russia in the 1860s and revisualises the culture of that flamboyant era.

Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge

Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge PDF Author: Mayhill C. Fowler
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487513445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
In Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge, Mayhill C. Fowler tells the story of the rise and fall of a group of men who created culture both Soviet and Ukrainian. This collective biography showcases new aspects of the politics of cultural production in the Soviet Union by focusing on theater and on the multi-ethnic borderlands. Unlike their contemporaries in Moscow or Leningrad, these artists from the regions have been all but forgotten despite the quality of their art. Beau Monde restores the periphery to the center of Soviet culture. Sources in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Yiddish highlight the important multi-ethnic context and the challenges inherent in constructing Ukrainian culture in a place of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Jews. Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge traces the growing overlap between the arts and the state in the early Soviet years, and explains the intertwining of politics and culture in the region today.

Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire

Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire PDF Author: Jeffrey Veidlinger
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253002982
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
In the midst of the violent, revolutionary turmoil that accompanied the last decade of tsarist rule in the Russian Empire, many Jews came to reject what they regarded as the apocalyptic and utopian prophecies of political dreamers and religious fanatics, preferring instead to focus on the promotion of cultural development in the present. Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire examines the cultural identities that Jews were creating and disseminating through voluntary associations such as libraries, drama circles, literary clubs, historical societies, and even fire brigades. Jeffrey Veidlinger explores the venues in which prominent cultural figures -- including Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Moykher Sforim, and Simon Dubnov -- interacted with the general Jewish public, encouraging Jewish expression within Russia's multicultural society. By highlighting the cultural experiences shared by Jews of diverse social backgrounds -- from seamstresses to parliamentarians -- and in disparate geographic locales -- from Ukrainian shtetls to Polish metropolises -- the book revises traditional views of Jewish society in the late Russian Empire.

A History of the Theatre Laboratory

A History of the Theatre Laboratory PDF Author: Bryan Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317191544
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
The term ‘theatre laboratory’ has entered the regular lexicon of theatre artists, producers, scholars and critics alike, yet use of the term is far from unified, often operating as an catch-all for a web of intertwining practices, territories, pedagogies and ideologies. Russian theatre, however, has seen a clear emergence of laboratory practice that can be divided into two distinct organisational structures: the studio and the masterskaya (artisanal guild). By assessing these structures, Bryan Brown offers two archetypes of group organisation that can be applied across the arts and sciences, and reveals a complex history of the laboratory’s characteristics and functions that support the term’s use in theatre. This book’s discursive, historical approach has been informed substantially by contemporary practice, through interviews with and examinations of practitioners including Slava Polunin, Anatoli Vassiliev, Sergei Zhenovach and Dmitry Krymov.

Performing Justice

Performing Justice PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Wood
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501711474
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
After seizing power in 1917, the Bolshevik regime faced the daunting task of educating and bringing culture to the vast and often illiterate mass of Soviet soldiers, workers, and peasants. As part of this campaign, civilian educators and political instructors in the military developed didactic theatrical fictions performed in workers' and soldiers' clubs in the years from 1919 to 1933. The subjects addressed included politics, religion, agronomy, health, sexuality, and literature. The trials were designed to permit staging by amateurs at low cost, thus engaging the citizenry in their own remaking. In reconstructing the history of the so-called agitation trials and placing them in a rich social context, Elizabeth A. Wood makes a major contribution to rethinking the first decade of Soviet history. Her book traces the arc by which a regime's campaign to educate the masses by entertaining and disciplining them culminated in a policy of brute shaming.Over the course of the 1920s, the nature of the trials changed, and this process is one of the main themes of the later chapters of Wood's book. Rather than humanizing difficult issues, the trials increasingly made their subjects (alcoholics, boys who smoked, truants) into objects of shame and dismissal. By the end of the decade and the early 1930s, the trials had become weapons for enforcing social and political conformity. Their texts were still fictional—indeed, fantastical—but the actors and the verdicts were now all too real.

Stage Fright

Stage Fright PDF Author: Paul Du Quenoy
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271048077
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
"Explores the relationship between culture and power in Imperial Russia. Argues that Russia's performing arts were part of a vibrant public culture that was usually ambivalent or hostile to the tumultuous political events of the revolutionary era"--Provided by publisher.

Petersburg/Petersburg

Petersburg/Petersburg PDF Author: Olga Matich
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 029923603X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Since its founding three hundred years ago, the city of Saint Petersburg has captured the imaginations of the most celebrated Russian writers, whose characters map the city by navigating its streets from the aristocratic center to the gritty outskirts. While Tsar Peter the Great planned the streetscapes of Russia’s northern capital as a contrast to the muddy and crooked streets of Moscow, Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg (1916), a cornerstone of Russian modernism and the culmination of the “Petersburg myth” in Russian culture, takes issue with the city’s premeditated and supposedly rational character in the early twentieth century. “Petersburg”/Petersburg studies the book and the city against and through each other. It begins with new readings of the novel—as a detective story inspired by bomb-throwing terrorists, as a representation of the aversive emotion of disgust, and as a painterly avant-garde text—stressing the novel’s phantasmagoric and apocalyptic vision of the city. Taking a cue from Petersburg’s narrator, the rest of this volume (and the companion Web site, stpetersburg.berkeley.edu/) explores the city from vantage points that have not been considered before—from its streetcars and iconic art-nouveau office buildings to the slaughterhouse on the city fringes. From poetry and terrorist memoirs, photographs and artwork, maps and guidebooks of that period, the city emerges as a living organism, a dreamworld in flux, and a junction of modernity and modernism.

Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre

Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre PDF Author: Laurence Senelick
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442249277
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 693

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Book Description
A latecomer continually hampered by government control and interference, the Russian theatre seems an unlikely source of innovation and creativity. Yet, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it had given rise to a number of outstanding playwrights and actors, and by the start of the twentieth century, it was in the vanguard of progressive thinking in the realms of directing and design. Its influence throughout the world was pervasive: Nikolai Gogol', Anton Chekhov and Maksim Gor'kii remain staples of repertories in every language, the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavskii, Vsevolod Meierkhol'd and Mikhail Chekhov continue to inspire actors and directors, while designers still draw on the graphics of the World of Art group and the Constructivists. What distinguishes Russian theater from almost any other is the way in which these achievements evolved and survived in ongoing conflict or cooperation with the State. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre covers the history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on individual actors, directors, designers, entrepreneurs, plays, playhouses and institutions, Censorship, Children’s Theater, Émigré Theater, and Shakespeare in Russia. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian Theatre.

When Art Makes News

When Art Makes News PDF Author: Katia Dianina
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1609090756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
From the time the word kul'tura entered the Russian language in the early nineteenth century, Russian arts and letters have thrived on controversy. At any given time several versions of culture have coexisted in the Russian public sphere. The question of what makes something or someone distinctly Russian was at the core of cultural debates in nineteenth-century Russia and continues to preoccupy Russian society to the present day. When Art Makes News examines the development of a public discourse on national self-representation in nineteenth-century Russia, as it was styled by the visual arts and popular journalism. Katia Dianina tells the story of the missing link between high art and public culture, revealing that art became the talk of the nation in the second half of the nineteenth century in the pages of mass-circulation press. At the heart of Dianina's study is a paradox: how did culture become the national idea in a country where few were educated enough to appreciate it? Dianina questions the traditional assumptions that culture in tsarist Russia was built primarily from the top down and classical literature alone was responsible for imagining the national community. When Art Makes News will appeal to all those interested in Russian culture, as well as scholars and students in museum and exhibition studies.