PART III
4
By now, the house is full; the boxes blaze;
Parterre and stalls—all seethes;
In the top gallery impatiently they clap,
And, soaring up, the curtain swishes.
—Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
The transition from musical life to theatrical life in prereform Russia adds two important elements to the picture: “story” and institution. Unlike the scattered and roughly structured musical world, theater was firmly anchored in the Imperial Theater complex of the two capitals. In common usage, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, theater has come to mean almost exclusively stage drama. A New Yorker will speak quite distinctly about going to an opera, the ballet, a musical, or the theater. The usage arose partly out of increased specialization in roles, metiers, genres; and partly from the efforts of dramatic practitioners to identify their work as art and their workplace as a temple—thus the deification of legitimate "theatuh" as drama and its sharp and sometimes nasty divorce from other stage genres. But in early nineteenth-century Europe and America, drama shared stages, direction, and very often casts with musical and entertainment genres. The Russian theater fit that pattern as well as European styles of theater architecture, royal monopoly, censorial control, audience scandals, fights over profit versus art, and the overflow of theater into journalism, literature, gossip, and everyday life. Russian theater shared other things with “marginal” states and emerging nations of northern, southwestern, and eastern Europe which took their models from the core: France, Italy, Britain, and the German lands (though feelings of marginality sometimes emerged within the core itself). Actors emulated Talma, Garrick, Mars, Georges, and Rachel just as much as writers copied Molière, Voltaire, or Metastasio. In time, wavelets of revulsion erupted in the periphery against Gallomania or other foreign “tyrannies” and the international styles of classicism. National expression took a multitude of forms, from the deployment of folk culture on stage and native historical plays to critical demands that naturalistic acting replace “unnatural declamation.” The story of Russia’s theatrical life brought not merely a gradual emancipation from foreign repertoires, but a whole drama of changing power relations, native styles, and provincial-capital interchange.1
Laurence Senelick has aptly described the wellspring of Russian theater, the eighteenth-century court, as a “performative” environment. Richard Wortman has rigorously reconstructed its elaborate theater of power, housed in splendid edifices, lavishly decorated, choreographed by masters of the court, and finely ritualized for the role-playing monarchs and courtiers. Contemporaries dubbed Tsar Alexander I “the Talma of the North”; and the eternally mordant Marquis de Custine commented in 1839 on the court of Nicholas: ''I see it increasingly as a theater where the actors pass their time in dress rehearsals. No one knows his part and the first night never arrives, because the director is never satisfied with his subjects’ performance. So both actors and director spend their lives in ceaselessly preparing, correcting and perfecting an interminable social comedy, entitled 'On the Civilization of the North.' If this is tiresome to watch, just imagine what it must be to play."2
In the narrow sense, Russian theater itself started at the top with buildings and institutions. The Russian court was among the first to put on secular scripted performances, though at first spectators other than tsars and tsarinas had to stand in the wings. School dramas and mystery plays long preceded the coming of a Russian theater establishment in the middle of the eighteenth century, as did puppet shows, carnival acts, dance routines, and folk dramas. Some of their forms gradually folded into the fixed conventions of the imported European stage. The ragged history of theatrical institutions from Tsar Alexei to Elizabeth has been thoroughly tracked. The Romanov court eventually maintained four exclusive royal stages in the Winter Palace’s Hermitage, Tsarskoe Selo, Gatchina, and Peterhof. Some seventeen theatrical companies—French, Italian, German, and British—appeared at the Russian court between 1730 and 1783, bringing the glories of Racine, Corneille, Molière, and a galaxy of operas and ballets. Amid these foreign incursions, the stepson of a merchant, Fëdor Volkov (1729-63), organized a comedy troupe in Yaroslavl in 1750 and performed at merchant homes and warehouses. Empress Elizabeth invited the Volkov troupe to Petersburg and in 1759 brought it under court administration. Although minor theaters had sprung up earlier in the provinces, Volkov was canonized as the father of Russian theater since his was the first professional, public, continuous state theater. Catherine II quickened cultural importation, took a personal interest in the theater, and wrote a number of works for it.3
In Moscow, after several failed public theaters in the 1750s and 1760s, the famous Petrovsky or Maddox Theater arose. An English magician, mechanic, and set decorator of Jewish origin, Michael (or Menkol) Maddox (17421825), worked as a magician in Petersburg in 1767 and founded a troupe in Moscow in 1776, based on actors from ruined companies and the serfs of his associate, Prince P. V. Urusov. In 1780 he moved the troupe to a newly built stone theater on the broad Petrovka thoroughfare, near the future site of the Bolshoi Theater. The theater, a commercial entertainment venue, mounted Russian operas and comedies. The premises also hosted balls and masques in their rotunda for as many as two thousand guests, many of them gentry seeking grooms for their daughters. The ambience of costume and intrigue is captured in Mikhail Zagoskin’s tale “Concert of Demons.” A Moscow aristocrat, Elizaveta Yankova, the “granny” of a famous memoir, combined elitism with anti-Semitism when in old age she recalled Maddox as “a Jew [zhid], a charlatan, and a speculator” because of his massive popular entertainments, attended not by “important people” but those of the middle ranks and by idlers and spendthrifts. When Maddox complained to the government about unfair competition from the private Sheremetev Theater, its owner is said to have commented: “I do not sell fun and good times.” Bankrupt, Maddox was forced out in 1801 and the theater was taken over by the Board of the Moscow Foundling Home. After a fire swept the theater in 1805, the Imperial Theaters took over the troupe.4
A Soviet account stressed the Petrovsky’s progressive repertoire of Voltaire, Lessing, Beaumarchais, Schiller, and Russian works mildly critical of serfdom and “tyranny,” and also attributed that theater’s humanitarian impulse to its serf actors. Aside from lack of evidence, the argument seems odd in that the management continued to keep its actors enserfed, whereas the tsarist government that took it over immediately freed them. Prior to the takeover in 1806, the Petrovsky Theater was Russia’s rare example of an urban privately owned public commercial theater (as opposed to a manorial theater) staffed by serfs. Maddox and Urusov started with a cast of about thirty and a band of about thirteen musicians. The corps of serfs and wards of the foundling homes was expanded by purchases of serfs including Alexander Stolypin’s entire seventy-four-member serf theater company bought for 32,000 rubles. S. F. Mochalov, a serf from the manorial theater of N. N. Demidov, entered the Petrovsky troupe in 1803 and by luck got his freedom three years later when the imperial system took over. He played major roles in Shakespeare, Molière, Kotzebue, and Ozerov with an electricity that was noted by contemporaries. His serf actress wife bore one of the most famous actors in Russian history: P. S. Mochalov.5 Thus at the dawn of the nineteenth century, a pattern was in place. Foreign companies came and went, the dynasty possessed an embryonic theater system, serf theaters multiplied and were already feeding the capital stages. Private commercial theaters in the two capitals would not reappear until the 1880s.
Imperial Playhouses
Aside from the exclusively private theaters for royalty and guests and some short-lived wooden playhouses, St. Petersburg came to possess three imperial public theater buildings: Bolshoi Stone, Alexandrinsky, and Mikhailovsky. Each had its own character. The Bolshoi Stone (Bolshoi Kamenny) Theater, the first permanent one, was completed in 1783 on the site of the present St. Petersburg Conservatory across Theater Square from the Mariinsky Theater (fig. 23). The first to match European standards in grandeur, it had three tiers and a capacity of two thousand spectators. Rebuilt in 1802-4, consumed by fire in 1810, and restored in 1818, in 1836 the house was again renovated by Albert Cavos, son of the composer, with five tiers and a new stage. By that time, the Bolshoi Stone Theater had come to be the major opera and ballet stage. Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar premiered there in 1836. In 1860, the venerable house lost its preeminence to the new Mariinsky, also designed by Cavos. The Bolshoi Stone saw its last performance in 1886; it was demolished soon after and its walls used for the St. Petersburg Conservatory, erected in 1896 and still occupying the same site. In the early years, the Bolshoi Stone had a wooden “sister,” the Maly or Small Theater on Mars Field, then known as Tsaritsyn Meadow. It fell victim to the arbitrary Emperor Paul who, seeing it in the middle of a usable drill field in 1796, said to the governor-general: “Let that, sir, not exist.” In one night about five hundred laborers aided by torches dismantled the structure. Revived in 1802 on Catherine Square, it served as the capital’s main theater during the rebuilding of the Bolshoi Stone, 1810-17.6
The Alexandrinsky and Mikhailovsky Theaters still stand. The former, an architectural jewel crafted by Carlo Rossi in 1832, separates Theater Street and Catherine (now Ostrovsky) Square, just south of the Nevsky. On opening, it was named after Tsar Nicholas’s wife, Alexandra Fëdorovna (fig. 24). The theater proper occupies a modest part of the building, which is elegantly adorned in the imperial style. Along with the usual tiers of boxes, a tilted amphitheater offers ideal sight lines to the stage. The stage itself is so vast that the house must have looked small, as it still does, when looking out into the foreshortened space of the audience. Behind the curtain, stage hands worked their magic without the electricity that now powers the elaborate visual and aural effects, trap doors, and flying contraptions. In 1836, the dramatic troupe from the Bolshoi was relocated there and the Alexandrinsky became the primary dramatic stage of the capital.7 A year after its opening, A. P. Bryullov, brother of the painter, built a house for French and German productions: the Mikhailovsky Theater, on the square of the same name (fig. 25). The state-supported foreign troupes played on alternate nights. The French company clearly dominated this house and it was considered de rigueur for the diplomatic community, the court, and the upper circles of the aristocracy to attend. When the tsar appeared, society followed suit. It was joined, in less exalted seating, by the French emigré community, from shop owners to tutors and serving maids. Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, who lived a few feet away, was a frequent visitor. Although merchants’ sons also came to mingle with the quality and students to perfect their French, the tone was restrained and there was no gallery.8
Moscow, in the two decades after 1805, experienced the most turbulent period of its theater history until the Revolution of 1905. The theater company migrated to several private homes until the conflagrations of 1812 forced it to evacuate the city. Moscow was in ruins—an estimated 2,626 remained of its 9,158 wooden and stone structures. After the war, a reassembled troupe returned to perform in the homes of the Moscow magnates. The Moscow Imperial “Theater,” then, consisted of a troupe of wandering players forced to move at least six times in twenty years and to cease working for two years during the war with France. The troupe catered to the aristocracy and mounted French and Italian operas and ballets as well as vaudeville-operas with Russian themes and patriotic pageants. Moscow theater had difficulty competing with the numerous balls and shows where the gentry could do theater for themselves and by themselves.9
In the meantime the burned-out ruins of the Petrovsky rotted away to the sound of the birds and frogs who had settled in swampy vegetation that grew within its ravaged walls. It took more than a decade for a new theater to replace the Petrovsky as a permanent home on the same site. Known ever since as the Moscow Bolshoi Theater, it opened its doors on January 6, 1825. The building, with its clean classical lines and eight-columned Ionic portico atop which Apollo rode his chariot, was made to face Petrovsky (now Theater) Square (fig. 26). The grand opening featured a classically inspired “Prologue: a Celebration of the Muses,” with music mostly by Verstovsky and Alyabev. According to Boris Shteinpress, the reported success of the performance, long attributed to Verstovsky’s music, belongs to Alyabev. It is easy to see why Alyabev’s music would have charmed the audience. His miniature oratorio with strings, harp, and a largely female chorus with some vocal solo and trio passages, was done up in eighteenth-century harmonic and instrumental vocabulary with a wide dynamic range. The declarative and triumphant cadences of its finale make it a cousin to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. In mood and structure, the music fit nicely with the classicism of the performance motifs and of the newly unveiled edifice.10
After a devastating fire in 1853, Cavos rebuilt the Bolshoi in the form that it now has and it reopened in 1856, an immense and spectacular building with marvelous acoustics. At the time of its reopening, Cavos reported the new theater’s dimensions to an English visitor who noted that, in magnitude of stage and proscenium and diameter of the ceiling, the Bolshoi surpassed San Carlo in Naples, La Scala in Milan, and Covent Garden in London. On the bel-étage, each loge was a suite of “so many little drawing-rooms furnished with sofas, mirrors, and damask hangings,” a place amply suitable for rest, entertaining guests, and refreshment. Below the loges and the two imperial boxes were arrayed five hundred stalls seats for a total capacity of two thousand. As had been the case for about a century, women displayed themselves in the frame of the box during performance. But now, their servants stood outside the boxes instead of inside them or on the outer porches of the theater.11
The Moscow Maly Theater (fig. 26), the city’s oldest dramatic theater, has been mythologized in Soviet literature as the House of Shchepkin, and thus an escape hatch from serfdom; as the House of Ostrovsky, and thus the cradle of realism; and as the “second Moscow University,” and thus a rallying point for the intelligentsia and other progressive forces in Russian life. There is truth in all these claims. The Maly Theater opened in 1824 a few months before the Bolshoi and was rebuilt in 1840. Another gem of early nineteenth-century theater architecture, the Maly’s huge structure stands long and proud beside its more famous sister, the Bolshoi. Its size is deceptive, for the theater proper occupies a modest part of it. The Maly conveys a sense of intimacy by the reduced proportions of the imperial box and side boxes, the small parterre, an even smaller amphitheater behind it, two flanking open spaces resembling a baignoire, and three tiers above that. Yet the theater is capable of mounting large-scale productions. Beneath a very deep stage lay the vast machinery room full of monstrous iron contraptions that moved the stage above and created special effects. The backstage is still a labyrinth of staircases, glistening foyers, dressing and makeup rooms, and the offices of the Directorate.12
Front Office
The engine that ran this theatrical empire for over a century, the Imperial Directorate, came into being officially in 1766. With its Moscow branch (founded in 1806) it fell in 1826 under the newly formed Ministry of the Court, and in 1842, the Moscow houses rejoined the central Directorate in St. Petersburg. The Directorate comprised the Chief Director and three members (one for Moscow in certain periods), each heading an "office." At various times it held sway over the Russian, French, and ballet troupes of both capitals, the Petersburg German troupe, and the orchestras and schools. Often “assisted” by powerful outsiders, directors made policy and brokered art, money, work, and sex. The Directorate leaders, as serf owners and owners of serf theaters, tended to transfer the social hierarchies and disciplinary culture of regiment or estate to their serf-like underlings. In an interlock of state and manor house, performers flowed from the seigniorial home to the imperial stage and back again, blurring the distinction between a public and a private sphere.13
Chief Court Steward A. L. Naryshkin, the first director to keep his post for any length of time (1799-1819), came from an old boyar family. A witty and boisterous Maecenas, he became a legend among many such legends for his gargantuan hospitality and lavish spending. Unlike other ebullient old-time aristocrats, Naryshkin was one of the few imperial directors to display politeness to his actors. But generosity weakened his financial management. Naryshkin, who naturally looked upon the Imperial Theater complex as his personal fiefdom, freely borrowed its artists for his vast domestic entertainments. Since Tsar Alexander I was Naryshkin’s personal friend and often attended the festivities, misuse of office could not be invoked. Along the two-way street between theater and home, the director in 1807 sold to the Imperial Theater his troupe of serf actors; later, long after retirement, he rented it his chorus as well. The rented singers chose a deputy to petition the crown for freedom from Naryshkin’s ownership in 1825 and the negotiations ended in the manumission of most of the original two dozen choristers for the redemption price of eight thousand rubles.14
When the Mongol Prince P. I. Tyufyakin (1769-1844), appointed Naryshkin’s vice director in 1812 to restore fiscal responsibility, succeeded him from 1819, the wicked stepmother replaced the fairy godmother. This abusive tyrant regularly mistreated actors of both sexes, including an eight-year-old boy whom he struck with his opera glass. Mikhail Buturlin recounts that during a trip to Paris to inspect its theatrical riches, Tyufyakin earned the scorn of a French wit who said of “le prince Tioufiakine” that “tout faquin est prince” (“every fool’s a prince”). His secretary Rafail Zotov got his job through connections and rose steadily to become Chief of Repertoire. He left a lengthy record of the Directorate’s inner workings, including management cabals, artistic feuds, and a brisk traffic in bribes, medals, and the promotion of favorites. He claims that Tyufyakin, whom he admired, paid him to translate a play for his current mistress.15 After several short-term directors came A. M. Gedeonov (dir. 1834-58), a man with court connections and, like many literary and theatrical people, a heroic war record from 1812. Throughout his long tenure, he and his subordinate in Moscow Alexei Verstovsky lorded it over the system. Bureaucratic corruption, a way of life in Tsar Nicholas’s Russia, could hardly bypass the theater administration. Under Gedeonov, according to Avdotiya Panaeva, a hostile witness, the tsar’s underlings pilfered, embezzled, and built themselves glorious homes. A friend of Panaeva called the administration a “Tatar invasion.” A boss frequently described as a tyrant, womanizer, panderer, and arrant snob, Gedeonov nevertheless had his defenders. One, the violinist Afanasev, who worked at the Petersburg opera in the 1850s, maintained that Gedeonov was no more than a kindly despot whose bark was worse than his bite.16
An early Moscow director, F. F. Kokoshkin (1823-31), had been a prosecutor—not so strange in a system where officials constantly moved from one métier to another. A writer, actor, and theater lover, he also scouted the provinces to recruit future Moscow stars. His successor, Mikhail Zagoskin (1789-1852, dir. 1831-42), came from a Penza landowning family descended from Tatars. Connections led him into the theater system in 1817. Zagoskin’s soft-handed manner with staff made him a weak manager. He eventually became a well-known historical novelist. Since Zagoskin knew nothing about music, the composer Verstovsky gradually became the real force, belying his modest titles of Inspector of Music (1825) and of Repertoire (1830). In the years 1825-59, he wielded enormous creative and administrative power in two of the five great imperial houses, the Bolshoi and the Maly. Verstovsky’s promotion from Collegiate to State Councilor in 1853 followed his appointment as head of the Imperial Moscow Theaters. He dwelt among the elite in the heartland of Moscow, first on Old Equerries Street and then on Bread Lane, where Prince Kropotkin (b. 1842) and Konstantin Pobedonostsev (b. 1827), respectively, were growing up. Verstovsky kept company with conservatives, Slavophiles, and Official Nationalist ideologues who also happened to be ardent lovers of the arts—people such as Sergei Aksakov, Stepan Shevyrëv, and Mikhail Pogodin. A contemporary painting shows Verstovsky at the piano at Aksakov’s Abramtsevo estate, with Gogol and the actor Shchepkin in attendance.17
Like many figures in an arena where creativity and management converge, Verstovsky has gotten mixed reviews from memoirists. Some Soviet commentators held his conservative friends against him, while others appreciated his contributions to theater as manager, pedagogue, and composer. Verstovsky has been called good-natured, stubborn, willful, sometimes cruel, demanding, hard-driving, and opinionated. His correspondence and other traces bear out this complex image. Verstovsky was forceful enough to marry a serf’s daughter, actress Nadezhda Repina, against the will of his father who apparently thought that it was one thing to manage actresses, another to marry them. Verstovsky, like most other theater executives, addressed his singers and actors with the familiar “ty” form for “you”—thereby putting them in their place as social underlings. Yet, playwright Alexander Ostrovsky claimed that artists did not mind being addressed that way, especially when accompanied by praise. Verstovsky could make life hard for actors, yet one of them concluded that the good outweighed the bad in him. A conscientious man, he attended rehearsals religiously. At least one sign of loyalty and humanity was his continued correspondence and collaboration with the composer and condemned criminal Alyabev.18
Verstovsky and Gedeonov, bowing to aristocratic desires, smiled upon Italian opera and French plays and equally disfavored some of the best-known figures of Russian drama: Turgenev and Ostrovsky and the actors Shchepkin and Mochalov. Verstovsky’s voluminous, detailed, and friendly but deferential correspondence with Gedeonov reveals a good deal about his pivotal role in Moscow theater life. Much of it concerned mundane traffic back and forth of artists and productions from Petersburg to Moscow, hiring and firing actors, the costs of foreign artists, scandals and insult-matches. One finds here and there a flattering note to an elevated figure such as cellist and courtier Matvei Vielgorsky. A report on the audition of a provincial actor, I. I. Lavrov, indicates the all too human side of the somewhat insecure Verstovsky as a composer. In 1853, Lavrov, then working in a provincial theater, tried out for the Moscow stage and cleverly chose as his number an aria from Verstovsky’s opera Askold's Grave. As the composer’s positive response shows, Lavrov’s gambit paid off.19
From the front office to the stage and backstage of the Russian drama, opera, and ballet world, the distance in power and status was enormous. Serfdom provided an important pool of performers and support staff. Rentals and purchases of manorial serfs occurred from about 1800 to the 1830s in the Petersburg theaters (Moscow ceased buying in 1824). Around 1800, Naryshkin purchased a dozen performers from the defunct Zorich estate; other directors bought individual serf musicians from landowners. In 1822, when Vera Khlyustina sold the violinist Afanasy Amatov, he and the theater each paid her two thousand rubles for his freedom (for Amatov, the equivalent of more than two years’ salary). Imperial choreographer Glushkovsky in 1824 purchased for the Moscow Bolshoi a ballet corps of eighteen serf girls from a Riazan landowner. Such transactions not only enriched the staff of the Imperial Theaters, but endowed the purchased serfs and their families with freedom from bondage. But the freedom was far from absolute: physical punishment, sexual exploitation, discipline, and heavy restrictions were all a part of the “serfdom of theater.” Ex-serf performers still remained in the taxable classes and thus subject to disabilities, including incarceration, corporal punishment, switching to menial duties, or transfer to the army. Ex-serf musicians were treated little better than house serfs.20
Foreign actors appeared from the very beginning, some recruited by Russian theater managers on junkets to Paris to see Talma act and study French theatrical art. A French vaudeville of 1802, Allons en Russie, poked fun at mediocre Parisian talents who set their sights on good jobs in St. Petersburg.21 Russian nonserf actors acquired by ascription, connections, accident, and a dozen other ways accounted for the remaining personnel, mostly foundlings, orphans, the children of serfs, servants, soldiers, and others at the bottom of the social scale, rarely the child of an impoverished noble. The Imperial Foundling Schools, in addition to training in more menial occupations, provided courses in performance and graphic arts to talented youngsters who might be drafted into the Imperial Theaters or the Academy of Arts. In Europe, foundlings and orphans had been a traditional source for performance skills. By the early nineteenth century, acting “dynasties” were shaping up. Serfs were officially excluded from the Theater School in 1817, though there is no evidence of any attending at that moment.22
The Theater Directorate tended to hire foreign players for orchestra first chairs and soloists and filled the remaining positions with Russians recruited from Theater School pupils, serf orchestras, and the Capella. A Pskov serf owner in 1829 sold thirteen male serf musicians to the Directorate in order to bail himself out of debt. The acquisition of a twenty-seven-piece orchestra from the Chernyshev estate in Orël—some of its musicians veterans of the Beethoven concert cycle of the 1820s—included instruments, sheet music, and the players’ families who were immediately and forever freed by the transaction. The Inspector of Music supervised the musicians: from the late eighteenth century, the post was held successively by a Pole (Kozlovsky), a Russian cuirassier officer, an Italian, and two Germans. The last, Ludwig Maurer, spoke Russian badly. During his tenure (1841-62) the orchestra reached a high level of disorder. Musicians would go ill, skip work, pay the conductor to excuse their absences, refuse to tune instruments, make rude noises, leave the pit before the finale, play wrong notes, and miss cues. Some were arrested. The Moscow orchestra reached to over ninety in the 1840s. Players came mostly from the commoners, including serfs, trained at the Moscow Theater School, which also had a Noble Pension attached. They were conducted by a string of German and other European conductors one of whom, J. J. Feltzman, in the words of a contemporary, “led the orchestra with the cold-bloodedness of a true German.” N. Ya. Afanasev, a first violinist in this orchestra in the 1830s, related that the lazy and miscreant musicians exceeded even those of Petersburg in absenteeism and in fights that broke out between the acts of an opera.23
Behind the scenes the regisseur or stage manager oversaw casting, reading, rehearsing, costumes, and physical plant. The most famous set designer of this period, the Italian Pietro Gonzago, worked in Russia from 1792 to his death in 1831 and was followed by the equally renowned Andrei Roller (Andreas Leonhard, 1805-91). Their elaborate machinery created the waves, storms, clouds, and thunder for the great stage spectacles. Writers—unlike in some other countries, all male—had little impact on the how their works were staged unless they worked in the theater. They received higher rates of pay for verse than for prose. Authorial status remained shaky due to favoritism, brittle contracts, and a lack of copyright laws until 1828. At one time a governor general of Moscow could stage a play of Sumarokov without his permission.24
Three celebrities of artistic direction emerged in St. Petersburg during the reign of Alexander I: Didelot for ballet, Cavos for opera, and Shakhovskoi for drama. Charles-Louis Didelot, called “the Byron of the ballet,” served the Imperial Theaters from 1801 to 1829, with a break in 1811-16 (fig. 27). As dramatist, composer, choreographer, artist, director, mechanic, and teacher, he drove himself day and night. Isolated by language from Russian life and wholly obsessed with his art, fired and rehired several times and once jailed, Didelot waged a continuous war with the cast and Directorate and died a few years after retirement at his country home in Ukraine. At work, this strict disciplinarian struck and bruised pupils of both sexes and pulled the hair of soloists between curtain calls for performance errors. He frightened his young charges at the Theater School when he appeared at 11:00 A.M. each day to review the dancers who had been working out in the icy studio since dawn. School veteran Avdotiya Panaeva recounts that when Didelot was dismissed for a time in the 1810s, the pupils greeted the news with joy. But manager and writer Rafail Zotov claimed that Didelot, despite an “ungovernable temper,” was “loved and adored by everybody,” and noted that it was Didelot who turned from the practice of hiring French ballerinas to recruiting Russians from the Theater School.25
Didelot's own view of things is recorded in a memo of 1828 to the front office in which he explained in angry and puzzled tones that the ballet company, the most ornate and expensive element of the Imperial Theaters, failed to carry its clock-like elegance into daily life. A picture of the real-world looseness of backstage comes through palpably in the document: lateness, insubordination, and truancy from rehearsals. Didelot’s staff of maîtres de ballet seem to have lacked power over the dancers; the summoning bells planted all over the theater and the graded fines for lateness could not ensure punctuality. Coryphées and figurantes constantly complained about their placement on the stage, and principal dancers appeared in costumes of their own devising. All of them, Didelot lamented, struggled to remain on stage until their dying day—however stout or decrepit they might appear to the public. Didelot made no bones about the need for early retirement of dancers because his esthetic required the display of youth and physical beauty. Having worked in the Imperial Theaters for nearly three decades, he could think of no more imaginative solution to his problems than increased discipline; and as an answer to the perpetual excuse for tardiness, “My carriage came late,” he demanded more carriages.26
For the first three decades or so of the century, the crown of Russian operatic composing sat on the head of the Italian Catterino Cavos (1775-1840) who lived in Russia for forty-two years (fig. 28). Father of the theater architect Albert Cavos, the great-grandfather of the Silver Age artist Alexandre Benois (and thus an ancestor of actor Peter Ustinov), Cavos worked permanently in the Imperial Theater system from 1806 as, successively, conductor of the Russian Opera, Inspector of the Court Orchestra, and Director of Music. In the memory of the musician Yury Arnold, Cavos had the manners and tone of educated society, was friendly and decent, but lacked warm or intimate relations with his colleagues. To the end of his life, Cavos maintained iron work habits—morning rehearsal with singers, afternoon orchestra rehearsal, and evening performance. Cavos’s greatest contribution was promoting Russian themes in opera and ballets in collaboration with Russian composers.27
The achievement of the central figure in the creative life of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters in this era, the playwright, manager, and teacher Alexander Shakhovskoi, has suffered neglect. Born in Smolensk in an ancient but middling gentry family, Shakhovskoi attended the Noble Pension of Moscow University before entering the military service which took him to St. Petersburg where personal contacts pulled him into theater life. About him, one wise and learned scholar wrote: “It is, perhaps, only in our own day [1953], when the art of the theatre has come to mean the sum of the play, actor, and producer, greater than any one of these single parts, that we can best appreciate the multiform, but happily coordinated contribution of one of the first great men of the Russian theatre.” As director of repertoire from 1802, Shakhovskoi dominated the stage, with a break for the war of 1812, until 1826. His attitude toward money and professionalism resembled Anton Rubinstein’s. Believing that only talent should be rewarded, he fought for an anti-star system which led to endless battles with the imperious would-be luminaries of the Russian dramatic stage. Shakhovskoi also promoted a Russian repertoire in an age when most “Russian” performances were translations. He wanted a national idiom to replace the ''powder, embroidered coats and red heels from Paris."28 The Imperial Theaters Directorate abhorred competition and steadily upheld the monopoly which was reinforced by government decrees. Nor did it deign to administer according to sound accounting principles. No Meyerbeers worked in the Russian system to keep costs down and box office up. Expenses exceeded the combined total of ticket receipts and subsidies. So, in spite of the monopoly and a heavy state subsidy, the system ran on a deficit. The tsars continued to fatten the Imperial Theaters’ budget for the extravagant outlays required. For them theater held equal value to the great palaces and imperial displays in terms of its political projection of majesty, power, and European cultural sheen. The spending was very uneven. An annual budget in rubles of around 1810 assigned 855,079 to the Petersburg theaters and 365,000 to Moscow’s. In the breakdown (minus the cost of wardrobe and props) the budget allowed 54,600 for the Petersburg Russian troupe and 35,000 for Moscow’s; 175,648 for the Petersburg French company, 66,340 for Moscow’s; 85,620 for the Petersburg ballet, 32,093 for Moscow’s; 148,930 for the Petersburg orchestra, 37,690 for Moscow’s.29 Thus, the state spent about a third more on St. Petersburg than on Moscow, and a great deal more on foreign companies than on Russian, some of this due to higher salaries for non-Russian performers.
Backstage Stories
In the era of late serfdom, theater presented not only dramaturgical works of the imagination but its own real-life backstage dramas whose plots throbbed with competition, humor, jealousy, and rage among the actors; the farces and burlesques of mischievous and drunken cast members; melodramas of villainous managers and vulnerable players; and tragedies of seduction and the ruin of actresses. The backstage scenario starred performers at every level, including walk-on roles for policemen who sometimes appeared to restore order in the wings. Within the vast backstage space, the behavioral dynamic remained largely invisible to the public. It was conditioned in large measure by the highly choreographed worlds that molded it: the stage itself where the actors played roles according to a plot; the front office which scripted their offstage deportment—dress, deference, discretion; and the theater schools which trained them. Tensions stored up in these arenas exploded in venomous rivalry and malicious gossip—as well as in tender attachments of friendship and love. Theatrical discipline, crucial to a good performance, requires a professional outlook in which personal problems and their attendant emotionalism are supposed to be left at the stage door. Managers tried to enforce it by reprimand, fine, flogging, arrest, dismissal, and assignment into the army. Some authorities exercised fair judgment and tried to fit the punishment to the misdeed, but the surviving sources naturally stress dramatic abuse over normal maintenance of order. In fact, all too often, those wielding authority failed to leave their own emotions and prejudices at the door, and introduced favoritism, sexual procuring, personal vendettas, and arbitrary and excessive retaliation. And, lest it be forgotten, all those possessing and exuding superordinate power were males.
The physical expression of displeasure on the part of superiors to inferiors grew out of the culture of Russian social relations. The closer a boss was to the daily labor, the more likely that blows would rain. A. V. Karatygin claimed that corporal punishment was not permitted at the Imperial Theaters in this period, but the violinist Afanasev said that it prevailed up to the 1830s and 1840s. Middle and upper management, whose dignity would not permit them to raise the hand, employed contempt towards underlings. When Tyufyakin tried to use the familiar "ty" to the eminent actor Yakov Bryansky (17901853), his daughter Panaeva recalled, the latter threatened to quit and was backed by the rest of the cast. Because of this, Tyufyakin’s successor Gedeonov never tried it with Bryansky, though he did so with all other subordinates. When the equally eminent singer Ekaterina Semënova (not the tragedienne) corrected Gedeonov on this violation of her dignity, he banished her to Moscow. He ordered the withdrawal of back pay for pregnant actresses until they had “recovered,” invoking the strictures on immoral behavior and debauchery of the cast. This in truth was a recurring problem, though hardly worse than the debauchery of the directors. Gedeonov also enforced the rule that actors had to memorize twenty-five lines per day. Shakhovskoi became known for his verbal abuse. According to his goddaughter Panaeva, he would say to his students: “You, my dear little bastard, keep hitting the taverns and you won’t learn the role.” He could reduce women to tears: “Use your voice, you whine! You, you sweet little idiot, are deaf! Where is the meter, you belong in a laundry, not on stage.” He told Karatygin that he should be working in a fair booth.30
In prereform Russia, jail loomed as an occupational hazard for all kinds of people. Students, seminarians, professors, teachers, journalists, censors, publishers, officials, and other unlucky folks found themselves incarcerated as temporary punishment. The Directorate used a brig in the basement of the Bolshoi Stone Theater, the nearby guardhouse, or a cell in the Peter-Paul Fortress. Though most theatrical inmates ended up there for drunkenness and disorder, jail time could be earned in many ways. Gedeonov, for example, threatened to confine Panaeva’s mother for walking on stage without permission. In 1810, the Moscow actor Yakov Sokolov, for refusing to take a role on short notice, got three days in a guardhouse where he fell ill. Hearsay has it that even the renowned set designer Roller was jailed for a few days on order of the emperor because of a foul-up in the scenery. A lapse in deference or simple carelessness could bring down the thunder of the bosses. In 1822, V. A. Karatygin failed to rise when the interim director A. A. Maikov, a man of vaulting arrogance, entered the dining room. Said Maikov: “one ought to feel the nearness of a director.” Governor General Miloradovich put Karatygin in the fortress for two days. Miloradovich, known to historians as one of the defenders of the throne killed during the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, enmeshed himself in theater life by virtue of his office and through romantic entanglements. He came of Hercegovian ancestry and had fought in almost every Russian war since his teenage years. His brilliant career earned him the love of his men and a chest emblazoned with medals. Suffused with the culture of military discipline, this general despised actors, could not even comprehend their insubordination, and was known to threaten them with the madhouse for disobedience. The Maikov-Karatygin tiff acquired political overtones when Miloradovich interpreted the actor’s rudeness to a superior as subversive and called him a “young liberal.” Two years after an alarming 1820 mutiny in one of the tsar’s favorite regiments, authorities everywhere bristled at the slightest sign of disrespect for the constituted order.31
Petty hurts to professional pride often sting the most. Actresses could be forced to play different roles in different theaters on the same day. One singer, made to perform while afflicted with bronchitis, lost her voice and her career. Vera Samoilova (1824-80) had running battles with Gedeonov in the 1840s over costumes. At one point, she refused to go on and was ordered to do so by the tsar from his box. Alexandra Kolosova managed to aggravate drama coach Shakhovskoi by switching to Pavel Katenin for acting lessons and going to Paris to study under Talma and Mlle. Mars. Shakhovskoi, backed by Miloradovich, took away her roles and punished her for overstaying her tour in Moscow where she had been warmly received. The actress then actually went to nearby Tsarskoe Selo and got an audience with Alexander I who consoled her and promised to rectify things. She was nevertheless suspended for going outside the chain of command.32
Actors, who fomented conflict as well as being victimized, often engaged in intrigue and gossip. Panaeva’s mother Bryanskaya, for example, feuded bitterly with her rival A. M. Karatygina. Performers of both sexes upgraded their public acclaim by buying bouquets to be thrown to them at curtain time. Panaeva alleges that some Alexandrinsky Theater actresses even rented bouquets for performance and returned them to nearby Gostiny Dvor at half price. Tales of inebriation and disorder abound. A former serf who behaved drunkenly in the chorus of the Alexandrinsky Theater was sent to be beaten by the theater’s furnace attendant—just as estate serfs were beaten in the stable. Some merchants who patronized male actors as jesters and imbibing companions would wine and dine them in return for their no doubt vivacious company—a custom that led to a lot of alcoholic excess among actors. During the pre-Lenten merriment, actors sometimes had to be rounded up in the taverns. Disputes among male actors occasionally turned physical: when one of them hit an antagonist on the head, the victim was recompensed with the perPetrator’s benefit money. Afanasev described “coupling” backstage among actors, students, and managers in the 1850s. A scandal erupted once when the curtain inadvertently rose on the scene of a pair in a compromising position. Gedeonov, dallying with an actress in a dressing room, once delayed the orchestra rehearsal. The virtuoso violinist Henryk Wieniawski, who sought the favors of Adelina Patti, crushed his rival in a door jamb. Nor were executives above scandal. Gedeonov and Rafail Zotov nearly fought a duel over the former’s request for housing for a vaudeville actress. To avoid losing Gedeonov, Tsar Nicholas fired Zotov.33
According to the earliest theater rules published in 1784, the comportment and moral makeup of the actors backstage had to be aligned with the noble and elevated behavior of the characters on stage. But in practice, tsarist theater—like many others—had all the makings of an erotic hothouse. Young actresses, ballerinas, and choral singers with great physical charms inhabited all the theaters. They and all others were enveloped by the aphrodisiac ambience of performance and rehearsal life: close quarters, the flimsiness or fancy of costumes, the frottage of perspiring bodies, and the pure delirium and exhilaration of stage and backstage existence. It can hardly be wondered that sexual affairs and romantic liaisons at every level bloomed in this libidinous environment. Some were more or less equal relations; others arose from a nexus between a performer’s understandable desire for economic, creative, professional, and personal advancement on the one hand and the passions of a powerful admirer on the other. In the imperial houses, the males at the top were landowners, serf owners, officers, bureaucrats—some geared to the sexual pleasures made possible by that power. Rafail Zotov recounts that it was commonplace, even accepted, for those in management to take young mistresses from the cast. Males in the audience were enchanted by the genuine talent of stars and by the adulation shown them by the public, an attraction perhaps enhanced by the very distance between the stalls and the stage.34
Leonid Grossman, slightly exaggerating, wrote that Guards officers and high officials “looked on the female performers as a vast gynaeceum, differing from a serf harem only in brilliance, refinement, and range of choices.” In stage romances and sexual liaisons, the techniques of approach varied immensely and differed from the relatively simple methods associated with landowner-serf girl sex. Courtiers and royals wielded the greatest power but also required certain discreet arrangements. When the time came, they gave their mistresses large dowries and married them off, as was customary in other European courts. Nataliya Apollonskaya was among the alleged mistresses of Nicholas I. The radical publicist of the 1860s Nikolai Dobrolyubov wrote an unpublished denunciation of the tsar as a “destroyer of virginal innocence.” Working from rumors, he claimed that Nicholas routinely entered actresses’ dressing rooms to watch them in deshabille and that Gedeonov pimped foreign female performers for himself, the tsar, and other dignitaries.35
General Miloradovich, who ex officio held sway over the St. Petersburg theater system, had a passion for female dancers and pupils of the Theater School, a passion not hard to satisfy, given his position. On December 14, 1825, the very morning of his death, the fifty-four-year-old Miloradovich breakfasted with one of them, the twenty-one-year-old ballerina Ekaterina Telesheva (1804-57). A soloist of the St. Petersburg Bolshoi Stone, she captured many admirers, including the governor general and the playwright Alexander Griboedov. The latter would go to Shakhovskoi’s dacha where actress pupils were on hand, in order to “enjoy himself with a daring hand along the swan’s down of lovely breasts.” The erotic preference for ballerinas over actresses (including singing ones) was a classic case of seeking a sexual object devoid of too many complications. For certain kinds of males, the alleged lack of cerebral talent may have been precisely the attraction, in addition to the splendor surrounding ballet, the graceful athletics, and the scanty costumes. In any case, the preference lasted well down to the end of the dynasty and even increased.36
If the theater building itself was an erotic playground, the Imperial Theater School which fed it was seen by many as a training ground for its sexual culture, though this was by no means its intended purpose or main function. Theater manager Rafail Zotov noted that Paris Conservatoire pupils commuted daily at their own expense and that only about two hundred of its roughly four hundred annual graduates would get work in Paris theaters, while the rest went off to the provinces or became teachers. In contrast, the Russian school sheltered, fed, and transported its many fewer pupils and guaranteed graduates a post in one of the two capitals, an income, and a pension. In 1836 its elegant new quarters, which also housed the Directorate, opened as part of the ensemble designed by Carlo Rossi on Theater Street, made famous as the title of the much-admired autobiography of the twentieth-century dancer Tamara Karsavina.37 Pupils, including females after 1757, increasingly came from theatrical parents. By 1800 the enrollment norm was about fifty of each sex who studied religion, languages, mathematics, geography, history, dance, fencing, singing, declamation, mythology, and music. A detailed memoir drew a somewhat mixed picture of life inside the walls. Its author, Alexandra Asenkova, an orphan girl, mentioned no sexual harassment or attachments, noted the rigorous schedule and the mediocre training, and recalled that the staff was mostly kind. Indeed, she remembered her school years as the happiest of her life. She graduated in 1815 with a dream in her heart to see her name on an affiche. Her debut in the popular Shakespeare in Love, alongside the famous Yakovlev as the bard, ushered this lower-class orphan not only into a career but into a state-owned apartment and into the high-toned society of the salons. Compared to seminaries, military academies, and most other schools where rote learning and corporal punishment ruled, the Theater School apparently offered a privileged refuge.38
Other accounts are not so rosy. A convent-like wall of rules surrounded the school to isolate female pupils. The tsar forbade shops and cafes to be built near it. According to Panaeva, admission policy sometimes favored sexual allure over talent. Girls who spoke no Russian and read no music were stood in the chorus as ornaments. Female pupils customarily sought a well-placed admirer who would have a carriage and apartment waiting for them upon graduation. A middle-aged official, infatuated with a beautiful teenage German pupil, set her up in a flat after graduation and married her. When he suffered paralysis, the young wife deserted him. Anna Natarova (1835-?), whose parents were freed serfs of the Sheremetevs, recorded a kind of mutual hazing at the school in the 1840s that had nothing to do with social origin: after the separation of the drama and ballet troupes in 1836, acting pupils began calling dancers “the brainless” while the latter called the former “the uglies.” Dancers did better in the sexual patronage market than actresses, though this hardly guaranteed stability or happiness. Pupils would flirt with each other on the sly during lessons, but the real sexual energy came from mature men outside the school. The son of Rafail Zotov claims that the policeman Leonty Dubelt frequented the school’s off-limits classes and dressing rooms with a prurient purpose. In 1853, a cause célèbre erupted over allegations by a discharged whistle-blower of officials pimping schoolgirls for persons in power. Vasily Insarsky, the investigator, found grounds for an indictment but, after some resignations, a cover-up cleared the major suspects, including Gedeonov. During the inquiry, the school director invited Insarsky to look at the practice classes of the seminude adolescent dancers, apparently as a bribe. Yet the very fact that a case was made reinforces the older Zotov’s claim that public morality in the theater had improved since the early nineteenth century.39
Among fashionable officers, to be “in love” with a pupil at the school was considered de rigueur, and they would patrol Theater Street or ride horseback beside the school’s well-known Green Carriage (fig. 29) to snatch some conversation with female pupils. Some admirers pursued this and other carriages on foot and even harnessed themselves to them. Yakubovich, the duelist who shot Griboedov, once smuggled himself into the school disguised as a peddler. Patrons worked hard to get introductions, devise modes of seduction, and organize the keeping of their mistresses. Natarova dispassionately explained why some dancers acquiesced so easily to “arrangements.” They came from humble backgrounds with families in need. This and the familiarity in the school with a refined (though not luxurious) environment created a longing for security and made them easy marks for rich men. Pupils so inclined communicated with their beaux by secret letters, a coded system of gestures, a nod or a wave of a scarf, from the stage to the front rows—which Stanislavsky later dubbed the “mimetic telegraph.” Once a favorite pupil had graduated to the stage, the admirer would court her through applause and claques consisting of his friends. Konstantin Bulgakov, a witty troublemaker, enraged his commander, Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, by deserting his guard post on Haymarket Square to rush to the Alexandrinsky Theater a half-mile away to see his favorite. Ardent young men and rich and powerful older men each, in their different ways, formed their attachments by way of charm, money, position, looks. Some resorted to other methods. Prince Vyazemsky was put in a fortress for kidnaping a dance pupil who was, it was said, admired by Tsar Alexander.40 Numerous male viewers with no access to female performers fell madly in love at a distance, a habit treated with great irony in Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk.
Man-in-pursuit-of-woman dominates the tales of amatory life in the theater. Did gentry women find lovers on the Russian stage? Did same-sex love flourish in the shadows? The obstacles to the first kind of nexus were probably much greater than to the second. Since the sources are mute on both, we can only speculate. Homosexual conduct was a crime, and an 1832 law on sodomy could bring Siberian exile to offenders. Most of society seemed quite unaware of them or of transvestites: when survivors found a complete woman’s costume in the closet of a deceased Italian male resident of Moscow, they could not figure out its purpose. 41 Of lesbianism, I have found no traces, but homoerotic love was no secret in St. Petersburg literary and art circles. Serena Vitale’s statement that “homosexuality was quite widespread in high society at the time” may be too sweeping, but several prominent figures are often named, including Prince Dondukov-Korsakov, believed to be the lover of the married minister of education Sergei Uvarov, and Ivan Dmitriev, poet and minister of justice under Alexander I. The only documented homosexual figure of the theater world, F. F. Vigel (1786-1856), left informative memoirs of theater life. Pushkin once wrote to him: “To serve you I’ll be all too happy, / With all my soul, my verse, my prose, / But Vigel, you must spare my rear.”42
The stories about power and abuse, intrigue, scandal, and harassment, however exaggerated, are too many and too consistent to be dismissed. When faced with injustice, actors found ways to resist. It is fashionable nowadays to employ the metaphor of the “backstage culture of resistance” in a nontheatrical meaning to denote general “social spaces” where dissent can be played out silently or otherwise.43 In the present instance, it would be silly and pious to emphasize the physical backstage of the theater world as an arena of resistance against the state, as embodied in management. But theater people were as adept as any member of the lower orders at deploying the “weapons of the weak” in everyday life. Males and females used their contacts, appealed, went over the heads of their superiors, refused to perform, and generally made trouble in finely calibrated gestures deployed to get their way while avoiding dismissal. In at least one case, a kind of radical politics was invoked when the actor Mikhail Shchepkin, backed by the cast of the Moscow Maly Theater, threatened to inform Alexander Herzen’s emigré revolutionary newspaper The Bell about managerial abuses. Some of the roughhouse, drunkenness, and absenteeism backstage and in the pit might be compared to the familiar modes of peasant resistance to landowner and steward, but it would be an error to romanticize it.44
The other side of the picture was displayed by the noted Soviet scholar Vsevolodsky-Gerngross. His prerevolutionary work, drawing heavily on Stepan Zhikharëv and Faddei Bulgarin, tried to sympathize with the problems of the Imperial Theater administration—a rare thing in the historiography. While granting the justice of some actors’ complaints, he also noted that many of them went into theater only in order to get free of serfdom; and then abused their new position by making unseemly demands. The Directorate had to deal with lazy, opportunistic, stubborn, disruptive, drinking, lying, cheating, deceiving, and shirking actors. Theater personnel lived under a strict regimen, but in relative comfort too. A stage manager, S. P. Solovëv, had, among his myriad duties, the unpleasant task of imposing fines, transmitting reprimands from higher-ups to the cast, and marshaling everyone for the 6:00P.M. “first bell.” In his engaging and doleful memoir, Solovëv lamented his unpopularity, his lack of friends, and indeed lack of a life.45
What of actors’ lives outside the theater? When in the 1790s Semen Vorontsov, the Russian ambassador in London, was asked to help recruit dancers of good morals for the Imperial Theaters, he replied that he “detested the society of theatrical people,” who would compromise his noble birth and his position. The Russian public inherited the traditional European view of actors and entertainers. Performers, almost a caste, remained, in Rafail Zotov’s words, “outside ordinary society.” “Everyone” liked to get actors drunk, he said, but would not treat them as equals. Actresses who married officers had to quit the stage. The ballerina Anna Natarova once heard that a metropolitan of the Russian Church asked whether theater girls crossed themselves. Audiences admired stars but saw ordinary actors as vestiges from minstrel days, transient and shady. Some of those merchants who opposed the stage threatened to disinherit sons who went off to an acting career. The merchant’s son Pëtr Plavilshchikov (1760-1812), who had been a student at Moscow University, was invited to good houses. But this was uncommon in the early nineteenth century. The theatrical parents of Panaeva (b. 1819) had wanted her to become a ballerina and so enrolled her at the Theater School. She managed to escape school, theater, and parents by marrying. But as a product of the theatrical world, Panaeva was coolly received in her husband’s noble family and in high society.46
Class bigotry reinforced moral suspicion of actors among the gentry. The voracious theater lover Vigel occasionally alternated the term “world of actors” with “backstage riff-raff.” The government made a dent in the class-based system in 1839 when Tsar Nicholas bestowed on actors of the first rank after ten years of service the title of Personal Honored Citizen; and after fifteen years Hereditary Citizen. These titles exempted holders from conscription, corporal punishment, and the poll tax, and theoretically gave them admission preference to certain schools. Untitled actors remained raznochintsy. Offstage, the profession enjoyed little in the way of prestige. If socially elevated musicians were prohibited from appearing before the general public in a professional capacity, how much more would this apply to acting? The prejudice was codified in an 1827 law by which a noble lost rank by appearing on stage, softened a bit a few years later by a directive which restored the rank to those who left the stage. Many nobles adored performing in any genre but not before a diverse ticket-buying public. This “social stage-fright,” unlike the ordinary kind, was not an occupational disease but a status anxiety: the reluctance by men and women of the upper classes to put themselves in the power of an audience, to be judged, applauded, or jeered—just as they themselves were wont to do from their seats. Professional theater people thus suffered not so much for what they did as whom they did it for. Theater had yet to reach that moment in history when paid performers began to look down from their superior perch to a humble and imploring public.47
Star worship, fully in place by the late eighteenth century, had its limits. For example, the actor Alexander Martynov (1816-60) was beloved enough to be feted by Nekrasov, Ostrovsky, Yazykov, Shevchenko, Druzhinin, and other writers—forty in all—at a restaurant in 1859. When he died prematurely the following year, a huge crowd followed his cortege through the streets of St. Petersburg. But A. I. Saburov, a notoriously rude head of Grand Duke Konstantin’s court before his appointment at the Imperial Theaters, wondered about all the fuss over a mere actor. “Pity!” he exclaimed. “Now ticket sales will drop off.” This reflected an opinion in some quarters that awarding talent with celebrity status menaced the rank-and-serfdom system. Even foreign stars were not immune to snobbery. In Rafail Zotov’s story, “Two Prima Donnas” (1842), one of them at an aristocratic evening mingles with the musicians, “crosses the line,” and breaches the social barrier between guests and “staff.” In real life, the diva Pauline Viardot, whose fame swept Russia like a gale, appeared at a ball of Countess Rostopchina in 1844 and was invited to dance. This met with negative gossip by mothers of eligible daughters. Though technically the married Viardot could not compete for a nuptial partner with those daughters, as a person of the theater, she was seen as a pretentious social intruder and a distraction.48
Lacking the lineage—to say nothing of the wardrobe, social skills, and income—needed to enter an enchanted social circle, actors tended to intermarry and socialize with each other as most professional people tend to do. The Lenten months and August set them free; some actors worked summer jobs in suburban sites to supplement a meager income. Salaries for most theater employees were usually three times lower than those of foreigners, though they did include housing, firewood, and a few other perquisites. Leading players cherished the benefit performance as a key boost to their income. The custom, originating in France in 1735, lasted in Russia until 1908 in the Imperial Theaters. On benefit nights, an actor or group of actors received a portion of the box office. The beneficiary had to follow a ritualized custom in order to advertise the coming event. Older actors with families often assumed silly costumes and wigs, painted up like clowns, and did folk dances on stage. The beneficiaries would then go round town begging high officials, society people, and merchants to come to their performance and they were sometimes received rudely or shown the door. These circus-like parades were said by some commentators to humiliate actors. Yet V. R. Zotov claimed that actors abused the system by demanding benefits consisting of poor plays that would attract large crowds at inflated prices.49
Imperial Theater actors had no right to leave town or marry without permission. At least one male actor was arrested for disobeying this rule. Marriage outside the profession was rare. A few well-known love matches catapulted actresses, but not actors, upward, a well-tested practice in the Latin world. The most famous Russian instance was that of the tragedienne, Ekaterina Semënova (1786-1849). Her mother, a serf of Smolensk Province, had been given to a teacher at the Cadet School in St. Petersburg who first sired her children and then married her off to a servant. The daughter Katerina entered the Theater School and became the star known as Semënova Bolshaya. She lived with Prince I. A. Gagarin, an art and theater enthusiast, bore him children, but refused to marry him until 1828, since as a titled princess she would be denied the public stage. Her sister Nimfodora cohabited with V. V. Musin-Pushkin in blinding luxury and proudly went about in her own carriage with liveried lackeys. A disaster awaited the singer Darya Bolina who tired of the theater at age eighteen and married a nobleman. Later appointed a governor, he turned this poorly educated and mismatched woman into a human wreck.50
In the Imperial Theater system, a classic battleground of social power, skirmishes broke out almost daily. In the long term, performers and musicians could win a battle for continued career and a pension, but almost never the war for dignity or status. Part of the problem arose from the very nature of the theatrical enterprise where self-pride is the almost inevitable companion of talent and success with audiences. When pride turned to pretension and demand for privileges, conflict was bound to arise and the actors’ opponents almost always embodied a formidable combination of state authority, economic leverage, and social superiority. Any creative triumph under the footlights could be psychologically reversed backstage at the whim of an overseer. As with serf actors on private estates, the contrast between the temporary assumption of exalted roles and the permanent status of underling engendered acute pangs of double identity. Actors on the imperial stages understandably did not ponder the indisputable fact that their station in life was infinitely better than that of serf actors. So the record left by commentators on both sides, bristling with fictions and rumors as it is, leaves us with a real sense of theater life as a social landscape blemished by the kind of ascription, inequality, and abusive authoritarianism that prevailed almost everywhere else, and yet also as a very lively arena of extraordinary color, euphoria, and emotion.
Audience as Cast
On the other side of the stage unfolded quite a different drama, with the audience as cast playing very stylized social roles in a living seminar on class, gender, sexuality, the body, and cultural consumption (fig. 30). The nearly ascriptive character of the seating culture, only partly affected by the market, assured one’s place in the audience geography. Costume, mannerisms, and language signaled status: satin-gowned misses with decolletes and lorgnettes; gilded youths glancing into the female sector of the second tier, signaling to their mistresses on stage, or hissing the “unfavorite” of the moment; rich merchants from Gostiny Dvor basking in an elevated milieu; destitute but animated students and government clerks straining to see both the audience and the stage from high up in the gallery. The drama here was played out in public space, with its sights and sounds—the buzz, the hush, the applause—and its placement amid the furniture and architecture in seating hierarchies. Every performance was tripled: backstage, on stage, and in the house. A rich and complex field of interaction arose each evening as the audience played to the players through silence, clapping, gestures and noises, and the awarding of flowers in the soloist wars; and to each other in an interior show of glances, flirtation, fashion, surveillance, and gossip. Promenading in the foyer, clustering at intermission, and courting at the stage door added side shows to the main event. In a famous scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the stage performance is reduced to insignificance as compared to the stalls-to-loge exchange of glances that launches an almost lethal courtship.51
The “look” of a theater, exterior and interior, played a large role in spectator consumption, particularly for those who had no other access to magnificent edifices. The palatial façade, intimidating in other settings, must have lent a sense of enormous privilege to the middle and lower classes entering for the first time. Performance space for audience drama was particularly ornate. Candelabra, oil lamps, and huge chandeliers suspended from the ceiling illuminated the plush and gilt of the loges, the symmetrical rows, the drapes and tassels in the side boxes and the imperial box, the carved wooden ornament, and the immense curtain that transected the stage. The journal Dramatic Messenger in 1808 explained in rapturous tones that theater required spatial grandeur to gratify the senses, shake up the mind, and enhance the refinements of the performance. A European style of seating prevailed in Russia’s Imperial Theaters from the outset. The “orchestra” meant the space behind the musicians, divided into stalls up front, whose first rows had expensive numbered seats, and an open pit or parterre behind it where patrons usually stood. Ringing the parterre was the baignoire (a row of boxes or loges), and above it the bel-étage, considered the choicest placement outside the two-tiered imperial box situated in the center of the half-circle. Above the bel-étage rose a few more tiers up to the galleries, at the top of which, near the ceiling, were the cheap seats of “heaven.” The side boxes practically overlooked the stage.52
The stalls played a leading role in audience performance. Their nucleus, a masculine crowd of young dandies and Guards officers, set the tone and had the best “lines.” At the Bolshoi Stone, the ten rows of stalls held a few hundred men, the young supplemented by a regular body of older officers and high officials who, in Pushkin’s words, “arrived from their barracks and council chambers” weighted with worldly concerns. Although Pushkin could not read minds, literary scholars tend to quote as gospel his statement that the older crowd attended theater more “for form than for pleasant relaxation.” Pushkin’s own sector of the “left flank” of the stalls in the years 1817-20 included Yakubovich; Alexander Ulybyshev; Vasily Engelhardt; and the dramatists Griboedov, Gnedich, Katenin, Shakhovskoi, and Khmelnitsky. Though women rarely broke the unwritten gender rule for the stalls, a general’s daughter with a secret protector began to transgress that rule in the 1840s.53
The loges, the natural abode for ladies and families, played a relatively reserved role in audience performance. Here a magnate could show off his eligible daughters or display a well-turned-out family in a replica of domesticity: comfortable chairs, refreshments, servants in attendance. Loges housed the prime target of masculine gaze—discreet and clandestine for some, bold and direct through a well-aimed rolled-up program or an opera glass for others. Conversely, the theater box constituted a prime showcase for the display of feminine charms, natural and sartorial. One bought a ticket or subscription to be seen as well as to see. Unfortunately for the performers, the house was kept dark before curtain time, so that the main fashion show had to take place during the action on stage. Subscribers welcomed guests into their loges, though filling them up was considered vulgar and stingy. Wealthy merchants who packed their boxes with the maximum complement of twelve viewers were considered to be in violation of good taste. Well-born ladies and gentlemen needed the extra space to stretch.54 Social standing was clearly determined by social sitting, in form as well as location.
Many never sat at all in the Imperial Theaters. At the turn of the century, only six rows of stalls were set up, with as many as a thousand viewers, sometimes packed like sardines, standing behind them in the parterre throughout the performance. Early in the nineteenth century, the stalls were extended back leaving space for about four hundred standees. For Russians accustomed to be on their feet through a three-hour Orthodox Church service, this was apparently no great hardship, and in fact permitted a certain amount of freedom to move and socialize. Sources vary greatly on who stood. Grossman, writing of the late 1810s, roughly identified them as “teachers, journalists, youth, Guards officers, the most lively of all.” One of those upright spectators, Nikolai Polevoi, later a dramatist, said that “we connoisseurs made it a point to go to the parterre.” By all accounts, even early in this period, much of the standing audience comprised what Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment would contemptuously call the “town criers”: the urban middle, educated elements—teachers, writers, and journalists. This loose collection was amplified by the merchantry which had thronged the theater virtually from the start. In the mid-eighteenth century, Empress Elizabeth, noting the thinness of the audience, had ordained that prominent merchants and wives be invited to the opera and theater “on condition that they not be hideously dressed.” The prosperous merchant Ivan Tolchënov made it into the court theater and home entertainments of magnates from the 1770s. Merchants packed the houses, coming and going in accordance with the rhythm of their trade.55
In a variant of Pushkin’s observation, Rafail Zotov claimed that the socially variegated crowd standing in the parterre came to the theater for the art, as opposed to the seated public who came for the show. Although this opinion is impossible to verify, Zotov—a seasoned theater man—insisted that “the parterre is a crucial element in the theater. Without it, the passion of the middle classes [srednoe soslovie] for theater would not develop. . . . The life imparted by the parterre encourages actors and lessens their fear of the stern and informed judgment that is located there.” Parterre wits tried to arbitrate success and writers often catered to them. Zotov’s argument finds some basis in the report that, although the show normally ran from six to nine, parterre people came as early as three or four o’clock in the afternoon to get places. It may well be that Russia’s parterre in the early nineteenth century resembled that of France in the previous century when it was pretty much the domain of the middle class: “lawyers, schoolmasters, writers, students, and schoolboys,” all male and standing squeezed together. The French parterre also included upper-class men and writers who preferred it to the loge which they saw as a salon made up of distracting women who had no interest in theater. Commenting on the gallery—the cheapest places—the journalist Bulgarin in 1826 spoke of a “grateful crowd” of clerks, salespeople from fashion shops, lackeys, servant girls, valets, artisans, and customs guards."56 The one certain thing about audience responses is that class did not necessarily correlate with public manners: the snobby stalls and the plebeian gallery made the most noise.
Commentators tend to speak of theater audiences in general terms; but the Imperial Theaters public in this era varied between the capitals, among the theaters, and over time, including seasonal time. In 1802 the Bolshoi Stone, in ordering preferential subscriptions in the first two tiers for people of high rank, solidified the familiar visual picture of privilege upside down: the aristocracy in the lowest tiers and the rest in diminishing rank rising to the gallery. Yet by the 1840s, journalists noted that merchants and midlevel officials had moved downwards spatially and upwards in prestige to the second tier.57 A striking illustration of how social mobility could defy the hierarchical seating geography emerges from a light-hearted 1825 feuilleton by Faddei Bulgarin. This conservative Polish renegade, journalist, novelist, critic, backbiter, snob, foe of Pushkin, vigorous apologist for the monarchy, and one of the most popular writers of his time, read the pulse of a large segment of Petersburg educated society and theater audiences. His impressionistic and snide feulleton subtly chronicles a man who starts out in the heavenly spheres atop the theater and then—as wealth, position, and family increase—works his way through the parterre and into the best boxes in order to demonstrate his status and display his marriageable daughters. Each stage of this once enthusiastic theater lover’s social climbing increases his malaise and diminishes his real mobility.58 This familiar lament in the literature of bourgeoisification insists that one’s inner freedom (and innocence) evaporate along the corrupt highway of ambition with its ritualized gateways and checkpoints involving changes of apparel, habits, and diction.
The Alexandrinsky, primarily a drama theater, evoked its own brand of commentary. Contemporary observers, using such terms as “beau monde,” “connoisseurs,” “the better sort” (chistaya publika), “beards” (merchants), “students,” and “the gallery,” show a rough consistency about audience makeup. The main attendees at drama seem to have been middle and lower officials; merchants, sometimes with their clerks; visiting landowners with families; and newly graduated pupils (since enrolled pupils were restricted in theater attendance). The writer Nikolai Nekrasov in 1845 saw in the gallery “a remarkable variety and a multicolored mixture” of people, including masons, guards, cooks, retired soldiers, and domestic servants. In his own arbitrary division of the public, he saw those who came for entertainment, for art, and for the actresses.59 These and other observations of maids, lackeys, and other underlings in the gallery, an exuberant pack of theater enthusiasts in the stalls, an array of ladies and gentlemen in the boxes, and a rich assortment of middle classes in various places, point to the Alexandrinsky’s status as the theatrical gathering place for a broad cross-section of the urban population, excluding the clergy who were forbidden by Church law to attend.
Moscow had a harder time pulling in the aristocracy during the reign of Alexander I because of competition from private theaters and the constantly changing venues of the imperial company. “Granny” Yankova archly recalled that few in her social set attended the theater even after the hated Maddox house was gone. “Now every kartuznik [workingman, i.e. those wearing the kartuza or peaked cap], cobbler, corset maker, and modiste goes to the theater. But in our day, not only did many commoners shun theater as something shameful, but some in our own circle thought all that play-acting was sinful.”60 Yankova despised the system of tickets whereby anyone could gain entry; she preferred private theater, by invitation only and exclusive to “her crowd.” And after all, her friends actually possessed opulent theaters of their own. With recovery after the disasters of 1812 and the erection of the new Bolshoi and Maly, these houses attracted audiences whose composition hardly differed from those in St. Petersburg.
In a public space where ushers wore imperial livery, personal appearance and comportment had meaning. The Marquis de Custine noted in 1839 that a uniform or civilian garb that accorded with one’s station in life was required in the theater. The composer Alyabev, while in the military, spent a month in the Peter-Paul Fortress for wearing a frock coat instead of his uniform to the Bolshoi Stone in 1822. Count Samoilov, Herzen tells us, offended Nicholas I by wearing outlandish apparel to the theater. Rather than a reprimand, the tsar chose instead public ridicule from the stage. An actor was ordered, while playing in a vaudeville, to mock the count and his costume. Unperturbed, Samoilov rewarded his impersonator with a diamond. What is remarkable about this petty incident is that Count Samoilov had once reached for his sword when Nicholas, then a grand duke, harassed him on parade. Whatever had inhibited stern retribution at the time of the drill field incident, Nicholas as all-powerful autocrat reduced his postponed retaliation to the level of burlesque. Pushkin was disciplined for rude behavior and language to an official in the stalls; and later for openly showing people sitting nearby a portrait of Louvelle, the French assassin of the Duc de Berry in 1823. Pushkin’s raucous “left flank” hardly differed from the fops, beaux, wits, and show-offs in eighteenth-century London theaters.61 The aristocratic ordinances about self-control and good manners prevailed at soirée, salon, parade, and court reception. But when male bonding ruled, as at a stag evening or in the mess hall, the men let down their hair. In the theater stalls, personal assertion and showing one's colors in a bit of excess became a standard feature of audience role-playing. The natural ebullience of young men combined with social arrogance at times attained near-riotous levels. It is rather extraordinary how much buffoonery, playful shenanigans, and even scandalous behavior went on under an imperial roof.
Applause as a social and cultural act fell under the rules of comportment. Emperor Paul at his Gatchina theater enunciated a principle of audience behavior in an absolute monarchy: clap and laugh aloud only when the tsar does. The rule remained in force in all theaters whenever a monarch attended. At the very end of this era, Tsar Alexander II ascended the throne in Moscow and attended the Bolshoi Theater. During the performance of Donizetti’s Elixir of Love, a very funny opera, the public had to hold in their glee. Modern audiences are largely shielded from direct contact with backstage drama, however much they may glean from magazines, novels, plays, and movies. Powerful figures in early nineteenth-century European and Russian audiences had access to the backstage world, were privy to its tribal conflicts, and joined in by means of claques and scandals. In Britain, claquers had originally been provided with noise-making boards, a practice which mercifully died out. The claque came to be employed mostly for or against performers. In Paris, during a drama about Cleopatra, when the serpent poised itself to strike the queen of Egypt, a claque member who disliked the actress portraying her cried out: “I agree with the asp.”62 Young Russian bucks happily emulated the practice. The aura of festivity, Eros, and adventure backstage led to duels, kidnaping, secret trysts, bribed servants, and even cross dressing—as if in mimicry of the comedies of manners acted out on stage. The “left flank” exhibited disdain for the—in their judgment—run-of-the-mill actress. Strenuous ovations for the “wrong” performer brought frowns from those in power. Miloradovich, offended by an officer claque, ordered their commander to have them cease applauding their favorites at the ballet. The commander cheekily requested from the general a list of whom to clap for and whom not. Audience members were not above taunting and insulting stars, especially females. At the Alexandrinsky in the 1830s, Guards officers threw men’s underwear at an actress who was performing poorly. This widely known scandal spurred popular interest in the private lives of theater people and thus indirectly in the theater itself.63
The best-known scandals involved some highly visible theater people. When in 1822 Ekaterina Semënova brought her supporting actress Maria Azarevicheva on stage for a curtain call after a performance at the Bolshoi Stone, the poet and dramatist Pavel Katenin (1792-1853) shouted an insult. Semënova reported the incident to General Miloradovich, Azarevicheva’s admirer, and the tsar ordered the expulsion of Katenin from the capitals.64 (After three years in Kostroma Province, he was permitted to return.) A more complicated case involved Elena Andreanova (1819-57), Gedeonov’s mistress whom the stalls frequently hissed because Gedeonov denied them access to the stage door. In 1843, Gedeonov had the disruptors removed from the theater with the help of police, and a few students were expelled from university. A big scandal erupted over Andreanova’s rivalry with Smirnova who was hotly supported by the influential caricaturist Mikhail Nevakhovich, her lover and later husband. He constantly roasted Gedeonov and other theater officials, including his own brother, Alexander Nevakhovich. On a night when Andreanova was featured, he organized the public in a clangorous war of hissing at her.65
Interventions of another sort emerged from among the lower orders in parterre and gallery. When townspeople, recently urbanized peasants, and sometimes even merchants encountered staged fiction for the first time, they often reacted as if what they saw was real. As spectators at folk fairs, and other forms of outdoor entertainment where classes mingled and noise and show were the norm, they had jostled one another and voiced their opinions loudly about what was going on—at once interacting with and contributing to the spectacle. All over the Western world, the “civilizing” of boisterous publics played a major role in theatrical history, as did the parallel “hierarchization” of stage art. Apparently Russian theater audiences were very disorderly in the eighteenth century, but in the view of a British scholar, towards the century’s end they “tended to settle down.” He quotes the visitor John Carr who in 1802 spoke of the “silence and decorum” of a Russian theater audience and compared it favorably with audiences in England.66 But an arch Russian observer, writing almost a half-century later, used the derisive term okroshka (a summer soup of assorted vegetables) for the crowd at the top of the Alexandrinsky. They wore loud clothes; merchants in their well-combed beards sat beside their daughters who ogled the uniformed men; sales clerks gawked at the opulence of the theater. Sweaty “experts” gossiped about the lives of the actors on stage; and all performed their own ballets, comedies, and melodramas.67 What the reporter saw as simple vulgarity was in fact a colorful and vivid tableau of athletic enthusiasm, spontaneity, and engagement in varying forms with the stage, the rest of the house, and each other.
Lackeys and other enserfed menials had yet a different kind of experience in the theater. At least until the end of the eighteenth century, custom dictated that when gentry entered the theater, the servants were left outside at the carriage porch with the coats and cloaks. In wintertime, sleeping on the outer garments did not suffice to protect these servants from the bitter cold, so they tore off wood from the theater itself to build fires. To prevent disorder, a civic guard directed by army officers watched over the lackeys, a guard that at least on one occasion comprised as many as 180 men. Audiences inside the theater were sometimes distracted by the sound of shouts and the whips of the guards being applied to the backs of hundreds of waiting servants. No doubt because of the discomfort and even peril of this arrangement for the theatergoers, around the turn of the century lackeys were permitted to stand behind the families of their masters outside the boxes and sometimes inside them. Thus was created for the first time in a large public space the cultural anomaly of serfs-as-servants actually being able to watch actors (including recent serfs) playing idealized peasant serfs. Unlike the experience of workers watching workers perform as workers in the early Soviet period, reactions to this moment have not been captured in the sources. Lamentably, the greatest figure in Ukrainian literature, Taras Shevchenko, while still a serf laboring on the decor of Petersburg theaters, attended as a ticket holder performances at the Petersburg Bolshoi theater, but left no record of his impressions.68
Given audiences so socially differentiated, one could hardly expect to find within the huge spaces of the Imperial Theaters anything like a community or even common consciousness of what was going on. Each segment of the audience tended to replicate inside the theater its own quotidian haunts: family circle, salon, club, tavern—isolated private communities within a public space, a mosaic of ghettos. Thus from the 1830s onward, once all the permanent theaters were built, something on the order of seven to eight thousand urban spectators entered lavish edifices almost nightly from September to May (except for Lent) and fashioned within their walls a rough version of urban society at large. Situated sociographically between a church congregation and a crowd at a popular festival, it was an indoor assortment more spontaneous than the former and more restrained than the latter. The still relatively un-solemnized aura and constricted space of the theater allowed each segment to observe with admiration, envy, or both the social intercourse of other groups. Whether or not middle- and lower-class spectators did, as in eighteenth-century France, “learn social graces” there, they could, as it were, eavesdrop at a society salon, an officers’ mess, or a noble family evening. And, though we have no solid evidence, perhaps the spectators of all classes could find in the audience space not only a “theater for themselves” but a school as edifying as the production on stage.69
The next chapter unrolls some of what audiences saw on stage in this period. As to how they saw it, a few general comments are in order. Vigel and Sergei Zhikharëv, important observers of theatrical life in these years, tended to patronize audiences; like many Enlightenment figures in Europe, they doubted the taste of the plebs. Zhikharëv considered merchant audiences primitive and uninformed, unable to understand much of what they watched and prone to garbling the names of actors, authors, and plays. After the curtain at an 1809 performance of Voltaire’s Tancred with Semënova and Yakovlev—generally recognized as a supreme moment in the Russian neoclassical theater—a spectator demanded that the author appear on stage. A misinformed know-it-all in the audience shouted that “Racine” had been dead for fifty years. Spectators from all strata could be frightened or angered by the action on stage. When a cowardly villain from a Shakhovskoi play made his stage exit, according to a Vyazemsky epigram, whistling erupted not only from the parterre and gallery, but from the stalls as well. This was not a uniquely Russian mode of response. Urban folklore relates that at the 1816 premiere of Rossini’s opera Otello in Naples, when Othello approached Desdemona in her bed, the audience shouted to the actress: “Watch out, he has a knife [sic]!”; and that a German viewer of Mozart’s Don Giovanni shouted to the pursuers of Don Juan: ''He ran away down the alley to the right!"70
Misreading a text or performance is not the same as not “understanding.” Viewers of all classes added their own meanings based on life experience, previous attendance, present circumstance, seating, line of sight, audibility, and even the company seated near them. Politesse did not equate with comprehension, and intervention on the part of spectators often indicated their sharp attention to the performance. Remarks about the “loge ladies” and tired bureaucrats who came only to show off or conform and who understood nothing of what went on on stage are purely subjective. Even a failure to record in memory what one saw proves no lack of engagement at the time of performance. People often recall the experience of the theater environment better than they do the stage action. Pavel Medvedev, a small-time Moscow merchant, told his diary almost nothing about the plays he saw in the 1850s but rhapsodized about the male youth in the audience (he was bisexual). Yakov Kostenetsky, son of a landowner of modest means, went to the theater two or three days after his first arrival in Moscow in the late 1820s. What struck him much later about the ballet he saw, Cavos’s Prisoner of the Caucasus, were the props and decor—an eagle flying over mountain peaks—a premonition of his disgrace and exile to the Caucasus. The serf lackey Bobkov, given theater tickets by an actor friend, understood nothing the first time he went, but then his appreciation widened through regular attendance.71
What did the lower classes get from theatrical performances? The only sure answer seems to be pleasure, excitement, and a sense of magic and wonderment, the aura of directness in live performance; and for some, a sensuous grasp of the nuances and richness of the spoken Russian language, a respect for talent, and scorn for its obverse. Ordinary folk had no means or inclination to chatter analytically in the manner of salon habitues about what they saw. But the commonality did serve as historical agents. In the decade 1836-46, the public at the Alexandrinsky underwent a social shift in favor of merchants, clerks, officials, students, and other nongentry spectators. The shift there and in other theaters effected a change in repertoires and styles of acting, and the resulting popularity of certain performers.72 For nongentry audiences, occupying space for three hours with the elite and exposure to interior decor that most of them might never see elsewhere, may have engendered among them a feeling of being part of “a public,” of sharing an emotional response to what went on on the stage.
For educated society, theater was designed by authors and adapters as a school of morals. To the extent that they imbibed the lessons taught from the stage, this part of the public engaged in what Elise Wirtschafter has aptly called “civic society,” a prepolitical community of moral concern. Moments of a larger public solidarity clearly came when the performance struck a national chord. In 1807, during Ozerov’s patriotic play Dmitry Donskoi, the actors had to stop speaking for five minutes as the audience exploded in approval. Many more expressions of national identity erupted in the era of the Napoleonic wars. This temporary and faintly carnivalic moment of solidarity, when social gradations were downplayed, by no means marked an embryonic civil society. The theater, notwithstanding rhetoric about its democratic nature, remained far from social leveling. Not only did certain groups shun theater and different publics sometimes attend different theaters, but within each house social, spatial, psychological, and cultural distances reinforced the hierarchical order of the outside world. What theater did do at various times was to serve audiences as a rendezvous for habitues, a fashion show, an incubator of culture, a school of manners, a site of social mimicry and contestation, an arena of competition for favorites, a festival, and a staging area for further action backstage or in the salons.73
Besides the performances in the house, backstage, and on stage, the Imperial Theaters of St. Petersburg provided almost nightly a fourth show, which took place outside the theater. Footmen, lackeys, and valets—most of them serfs—acted out their script on the porches of the building or on the adjacent square. Contemporary pictures depict coachmen huddled in animated conversation around the stove ( grelka) in a half-dozen specially built shelters on winter nights on the huge windblown Theater Square. Having no transcripts of these lost dramas, we can only extrapolate speculatively from what we know about the life and work of serfs and servants in the entourages of Russia’s aristocratic families. One need not take Pushkin’s well-known verse, “and round the fires the coachmen curse their masters and beat their palms together,” as a sufficient summation of the outdoor scenario. In this nocturnal scene, with its props—the icy wind, the frosty breath of the horses, the roar of the fire—minute social markers would be on display in diction, apparel, and size of the drivers’ conveyances; and one might well imagine that, amid the general grousing and camaraderie, one could hear some one-upmanship rooted in the relative status of the masters, gossip about them, and perhaps a bit of bragging as well. At curtain time, the drivers rushed into their carriages. Since all four-horse carriages had to be filled before a two-horse conveyance could pull up, anarchy worked in tandem with inequality in this final scene of a night at the theater.74
A Crooked Mirror?
As in other conservative European eighteenth- and nineteenth-century monarchies—“enlightened” or not—Russian rulers forbade the stage presentation of pornography and the ridicule or criticism of monarchy, state officials, army, and Church as well as excessive caricaturing of the gentry. Serfdom as a system was out of bounds, though serfs were constantly impersonated on the boards. From 1750, no dramatic portrayal of dynasty, clergy, or police was permitted. Patrolling the zones of public expression led to the banning of many works in the eighteenth century, even though Catherine II was tolerant of plays featuring jibes at the gentry and even the priesthood. The French Revolution led to harsher measures in Russia. The burning of Ya. B. Knyazhnin’s Vadim of Novgorod in 1793 became the most celebrated case of political censorship of eighteenth-century drama. Though rehearsed at the Court Theater in 1789, with Pëtr Plavilshchikov as Vadim, it never reached the stage, allegedly because its ninth-century antityrannical polemic was thought to be aimed at Catherine or at her own pro-autocracy play about Ryurik. And yet Knyazhnin’s Ryurik and his rival Vadim both get fair treatment, and Catherine and the censors had permitted other “antityrant” plays to be shown. Some scholars suggest that political misunderstanding or professional jealousy were at work. In any case, the timing was bad: the French Revolution broke out in 1789 and in the next year Alexander Radishchev’s notorious Journey from Petersburg to Moscow appeared, only to be suppressed and burned. The empress commuted Radishchev’s death sentence and exiled him to Siberia. Knyazhnin was much luckier.75
When Tsar Paul ascended the throne, censorship interventions increased drastically from the 340 in Catherine’s long reign to 234 in his much shorter one (1796-1801). Paul also posted NCOs in the theater, dictated an early curtain time, and closed theaters for ten months to mourn the death of his mother. A quirky and rare example of risqué opera, Olinka or First Love (1796), precipitated a scandal. Called “pornographic” by some, it was no more than an updated Lysistrata which demonstrated the potential of women to withhold their sexual favors from men. During its performance at the serf theater of Alexander Stolypin, the outraged audience, after catching the main direction of the plot, began exiting one by one. When Emperor Paul got wind of it, the author, Prince Alexander Beloselsky-Belozersky, senator, diplomat, landed magnate, art patron, and the father of Zinaida Volkonskaya, barely escaped the tsar’s wrath by means of a ruse. Tsar Alexander I eased the censorship and restored several works to the stage, but also standardized print censorship. Political sensitivity rose at the time of the Napoleonic menace. Even the remote town of Petrozavodsk felt the lash of the censors who railed at an 1809 performance of Dido Inside Out for its shabby portrayal of royal personages—the Queen of Carthage and a founder of Rome. The play was also condemned for offending decency, having no redeeming value, and being “insulting to the refined sensibilities of the noble audience.” With the onset of reaction and officially promoted religious mysticism, the censors from 1817 on cracked down on any unflattering allusion to the faith in print, fiction or nonfiction, Russian or in translation. Serfdom as a topic was declared unacceptable.76
Under Nicholas I, the Ministry of Public Education censored publications including drama criticism, while the Ministry of Interior oversaw theater. Drama fell under dual control and the screws were tightened. In 1837, Sergei Uvarov urged the tsar to codify rules about putting Russian royals on stage: pre-1613 rulers were allowed if presented with suitable dignity (though in opera only with the tsar’s permission); the Romanov tsars were taboo. By this time, only the lower and middle classes and the provincial gentry could be mocked, peasants had to be idealized, and colloquial language was banned. By 1842 the censorial regime had reached into the provinces. Enforcement, however, was another matter. Since moral message and satire were essential tools of dramaturgy, and since the upper classes most often appeared on stage, the playwrights had to walk a thin line. No formula ever solidified, and so a good deal of trial and error prevailed. Like playwrights, filmmakers, and writers in other times and places, Russian dramatists and directors either remained well within the bounds of propriety, however shady and blurred, or set out to test the patience of the authorities who always had a representative in the front rows. Through textual coding, actors’ speeches and gestures, and audience responses, a theater of politics functioned continuously.77
Nicholas' fish-eyed censors often descended to absurdity in their efforts to keep high-born personages off the stage: in the 1840s, the eighteenth-century court figures Dashkova and Shuvalov were renamed in one play and Josephine Bonaparte became Mme. Leclerc in another. Church officials were no doubt pleased when the word “dieu” became “divinite.”78 The Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov’s Liberation of Moscow in 1612 was closed down by Governor General Zakrevsky, a poorly educated soldier with a coarse administrative style, after one performance at the Moscow Bolshoi. The alleged cause? An actor’s reference to St. Petersburg as “a city with a foreign name” elicited a storm of applause by the Muscovite audience.79 The biggest sin was holding up “society” to scorn, one that bedeviled a masterpiece of Russian theater, Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, staged in a drastically cut version in 1831. Young people all over Russia memorized and recopied whole scenes from it that were cut by the censor for their offensiveness. When Gogol lampooned audience mentalities in the playlet The Theater Lets Out After the Performance of a New Comedy (1842), a censor saw it as “audacious in respect to civil servants, the government and the Russian people.” Ivan Turgenev’s Charity Case ( Nakhlebnik) got censored because it allegedly depicted the gentry as cruel and heartless.80 Russian rulers could despise the nobility and officialdom, but to allow the general public to do so might lead to the spread of impiety and disrespect for authority. Almost gone were the days when aristocracy and nobility, bursting with self-confidence, could laugh at themselves or each other in public. Needless to say, no Russian Scaramouche ever appeared on an imperial stage.
It took a while for theater criticism to join the plays as objects of attention. Under Tsar Alexander I, drama criticism, though spotty, flourished in journals for a time. In 1804 Ivan Pnin (1773-1805), a Radishchevite enlightener who opposed serfdom, declared theaters “a branch of public education”; and another journalist wrote that an actor is “a public figure, just like a professor who gives public lectures, and like orators of old.” By 1815, the authorities, realizing that press notices had the potential to decode variant meanings in the theater, forbade even favorable commentary about it and its personnel in any periodical.81 The ban was not enforced and in 1825 Alexander Shakhovskoi, responding to an attack on him, asked Miloradovich for stronger measures against theatrical criticism. These were imposed shortly after the general was killed in the Decembrist Uprising. Faddei Bulgarin challenged this harsh regime on the grounds that wild political talk in mansions, barracks, and merchant stalls would replace the careful scrutiny of the nation’s only public arena. The authorities were convinced. Bulgarin was protecting his own turf as an editor, but other journals benefited from his victory. Critics could now speak out within certain parameters. This was much more than a technical victory for the press. The critic, as an intermediary between work and audience, personified the public character of theater and represented an independent force outside the private household character of the court and the manor house. This bothersome fact accounted for the constant miniwars between the authorities and the press.82
Bulgarin's Northern Bee, the most widely read privately owned popular newspaper, enjoyed a circulation in the 1830s of about seven thousand, which dropped in the 1840s and resurged to about ten thousand during the Crimean War. Bulgarin, an alert press man with plenty of adventure and travel behind him in France, Poland, and Russia, had a feel for the demands of the urban middle class of officials, lower gentry, clerks, merchants, and teachers; and he believed that printed matter had to match the taste of reader and spectator. He pioneered a continuous conversation that gave the reading and theatergoing public of the middling layers of the capital a sense of collective identity altogether different from that of the salons. The more specialized journals, Repertoire (later combined with Pantheon in 1841) frequently ran afoul of the censors for its sharp tone. V. R. Zotov, who worked for them, once received a scolding from a censor who asked: “Why do you gentlemen as editors assault our theater, plays, some actors, and almost all writers?” Cruelty and ridicule, he warned, must give way to fair and constructive criticism. Repertoire was closed in 1846 and the policeman Dubelt told Zotov that he was hated by the Imperial Theater people. When a journalist, on the basis of a rehearsal, foolishly filed a rave review of the singer Viardot in 1843 even though the actual performance had been canceled, he had to spend a week in the guardhouse; and his journal, The Russian Veteran, could no longer do theater reviews. An angry Gedeonov wrote that journalists knew nothing of art but filled their columns with inflammatory invective. He once asked a journal not to heap too much praise on an actress (Nikulina) lest it turn her head.83
Vissarion Belinsky commented on theater as an important and influential sideline to his literary criticism. More closely involved with theater, Stepan Zhikharëv (1788-1860) studied at Moscow University and, as a member of Friends of the Russian Word, the Free Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, and Arzamas, mingled with the best literary minds of the age. He ardently dreamed of becoming a successful playwright himself and actually wrote or translated about thirty pieces, none of them ever performed in public. A friend of many actors and playwrights and an enthusiastic theatergoer, Zhikharëv left rich and often emotional memoirs of theater life and personalities. Though hardly a reactionary, he worshiped Tsar Alexander I and distanced himself from those friends who became outright radicals. Shortly before his death, he was appointed chair of the Theatrical Literary Committee under the Directorate of Theaters. By the 1820s, Sergei Aksakov, father of two prominent Slavophiles and a supporter of the “Moscow school” of acting, from 1828 on added a drama section to his journal, Moscow Messenger.84
The ring of censorial protection widened when drama’s social ambit expanded to search into the lives of other estates, particularly the merchantry. Until after Nicholas I died in 1855, no class could be honestly probed on stage if the treatment led to systemic critique. Many plays that passed the publication test could not be performed, a comment on general illiteracy and the growing accessibility of theater. The arts could thus mock the foibles of various classes only as aberrations from the norm, not as essential traits. Since the portrayal in public of Russian tyrants, priests, or bandits would undermine the trinity of Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Narodnost, and since class derision was severely limited, foreign surrogates such as historical operas, romantic rescue works, brigand ballets, and unflattering scenes of Catholic Europe were sometimes read as Aesopian commentary.
Was censorship a crooked mirror that distorted real life by requiring false representation on stage? Yes and no. Playwrights in their texts and actors through grimaces and gestures, omissions and ad lib lines, often cut a path of truth through the censorial thickets. Censors could also fall asleep on occasion. And then of course much that was legally allowed possessed a certain social accuracy. If we speak of the stage’s distortion of reality, then the censors were hardly more guilty than the producers of stylized classical tragedies, patriotic confections, and baroque fantasies that shared the stage with the plays that applied themselves to Russian life. Russian censors often overreacted but hardly differed from their European contemporary (and even later) confreres. In Madrid and Brussels, whistling, shouting, and calls for encores were forbidden. In Berlin, no new play could be reviewed before its third showing.85 Napoleonic and Restoration France, Austria, Prussia, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Naples provided their own little censorship absurdities and some that were not so absurd. Censorship, combined with repertoire decisions and public taste, allowed a blurred image of Russian life. The real value of looking into the mirror of censorship lies in its accurate reflection of the values, fears, and anxieties of the regime and the social imagery it rejected: corrupt officials, bad government, deep social tensions and class conflict, impiety, gross immorality, barbarous behavior, and liberal or radical political ambitions. It sought to protect privileged groups from public infamy and the decline in respect that it would surely induce.
A recent study of the Petersburg Imperial Theaters in the first decades of the twentieth century asked how much the court affiliation of these houses affected their role as public cultural institutions. The author’s answer, amply demonstrated throughout the book, was that they were bifunctional (he uses the term “ambivalent”), serving both the monarchical ideology and its social manifestations as well as the broader public.86 Oddly enough, the answer is the same for the era of serfdom. It could not have been otherwise. In spite of ticket prices, sartorial rules, and censorship, the theaters always remained public. And in spite of lavish state subsidies, their repertoires had to reflect public taste to some degree. In the early years, that public was relatively narrow, though never wholly exclusive to the aristocracy, and it then gradually expanded to include a wide variety of social categories. And as the scope of audiences broadened, the social content of the drama correspondingly unfolded.
Theater in the Round
Theater life did not begin and end with bell and curtain, entrance and exit. The imperial houses reached out to the surrounding world. Salons became extensions of backstage and audience where strong opinions were aired, works read and critiqued, performances vetted, plans hatched, and networks sustained—all of which helped to shape the workings of the theatrical bodies themselves. Alexei Olenin’s salon became a cradle of classicism. In the reign of Alexander I, the Petersburg salon of Admiral A. S. Shishkov, who sought to preserve the glories of the ancient Slavonic language, attracted the critic Zhikharëv, the dramatist N. I. Gnedich, and the poet and statesman Gavrila Derzhavin to discuss drama and acting. Their ideas floated into the stalls where salon-critic became spectator-critic. Gnedich, a vigorous commentator on the roles of author and actor in creating a work of art, naturally argued on behalf of the former. The playwright, he maintained, was the key to success, not actors—even great ones. Displaying the hubris often associated with his profession, Gnedich protested that dramatists did not write plays for actors like “some kapellmeisters” who compose an opera on demand. In Moscow in the late 1820s Sergei Aksakov attended the salon of F. F. Kokoshkin, a theater official and translator of Molière and Tasso. At his home on the Arbat gathered actors, writers, and professors. Aksakov’s own Saturday salon assembled theater figures and the Slavophiles Alexei Khomyakov and Sergei’s son, Konstantin. Stage performers’ salons were a rarity at the time, but M. D. Lvova-Sinitskaya held one in Moscow and surrounded herself with a pleiad of writers, actors, and composers.87
In Moscow, Pechkin’s coffee house—or the Iron Tavern—stood on Kuznetsky Bridge near Theater Square. The owner, Ivan Bazhenov, was the actor Mochalov’s father-in-law. Pechkin’s served as a meeting place in the 1830s to 1850s for Shchepkin, Ostrovsky, other theater people, and their intelligentsia friends. Male actors of the Maly Theater, mostly raznochintsy, frequented its five rooms to play billiards, read the papers, and talk. Westernizing intellectuals such as Herzen, Belinsky, Katkov, and on occasion even that flamboyant prophet of anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin, came to Pechkin’s. These and provincial actors, merchants, and petty officials created a colorful, noisy atmosphere unlike the restraint of the courtiers and high officials encountered in the salons. Their orality bristled with word games, jokes, verbal battles, acting gestures, and witty improvised verses about themselves and the critics. Sometimes there reigned at Pechkin’s colossal drunkenness, and many of the habitués died relatively young, having proudly paraded their epic drinking bouts. The pianist and composer A. I. Dubuque blended—as creative and convivial people often do—an exceptional wit and an unquenchable thirst for alcohol. At the Brittania Tavern students also discussed theater.88
The amateur theatrical, a popular Russian pastime right up to the Revolution, formed a mimetic bridge between theater and life. On its modest platforms appeared cognoscenti, students, soldiers, servants, and especially gentry. Unlike serf theater or the modern amateurism of players with day jobs, this enterprise featured mostly noble families with unlimited leisure time acting before chosen audiences. The class taboo against the public stage and the related lowly status of professionals in no way inhibited the craze for private acting among many sectors of the gentry—whether urban officialdom or rural landowners. Unlike professional and serf actors, amateur gentry performers obviously harbored no fear of audience displeasure or punishment for muffing their lines. Home theater enjoyed a good deal more freedom and flexibility than did the imperial stage: families did the casting, chose their audiences of friends, family, and servants, and moved freely through languages and genres. Although sociability and self-entertainment probably prevailed as motives, Elise Wirtschafter is right in stressing moral pedagogy as an impulse for mounting plays at home.89
A 1750 decree of Tsarina Elizabeth allowing private home plays suggests not a beginning but recognition of an established habit. In the 1760s, graduates of the Petersburg Cadet school and the Moscow University theater under Mikhail Kheraskov had carried their taste for theater out to the estates and thus fed both amateur theatricals and serf theater. Grandees with serf theaters also performed on their own. In a truly wondrous reversal, P. B. Sheremetev, with Empress Catherine present, staged in his home Philippe Destouches’s Le philosophe marié in 1765. His son played a lackey, while other noblemen in servants’ livery impersonated ushers and ticket collectors. When these grandees transferred the court repertoire to their estates, they had their serfs play counts and princes. In 1774, the real-life counts Sheremetev and Razumovsky and princes Kurakin and Gagarin—owners of serf theaters—performed at the Little Hermitage theater in the Winter Palace. The most famous of the magnate actors, Prince Ivan Dolgoruky, acted at home, at court, and in Sheremetev’s theater. In public he wore fragments of his stage costumes, mixing mufti with uniform dress. Starting in the 1780s, the noted Tula landowner and memoirist, Andrei Bolotov, fitted out an estate building with two hundred seats where he and his family acted before an audience of gentry, townsmen, and probably peasants.90
Amateurism blossomed in the nineteenth century. Grandmother Yankova recalled with glee how her aristocratic lady friend always forgot her lines and would walk over to the souffleur and cry "comment?'' The father of the writer Natalya Grot and his circle did Molière at home in the original. Yury Arnold appeared as a child in Kotzebue’s melodramas. Mikhail Buturlin, serving in a provincial garrison in 1827, attended domestic comedies on nearby estates as part of his duty. The Stankevich family—including Nikolai, one of the most influential thinkers of the 1830s—indulged their eclectic tastes in speeches from high-art drama and opera arias. In this household, as in many others, the drawing room accommodated wholly contrasting genres and levels of seriousness. Needless to say, as Alexandra Stankevich-Shchepkina reminds us, her family never even dreamed of going on stage, though her sister did and she herself married the son of Mikhail Shchepkin. Prince Pëtr Kropotkin, on seeing Fanny Elssler in Gitana, reenacted it at home for an audience of servants, with a serf girl dancing the Gypsy. His family even tackled Racine’s Phèdre. The practice may have been accelerated by do-it-yourself literature such as an 1842 piece in Repertoire and Pantheon entitled ''An Easy Method for Building a Domestic Theater''—a homemade rig made of boards that could be set up in minutes by two lackeys.91 Bertold Brecht liked to distinguish between dilettantism, the copying of professional stage art, and true amateurism which creates its own art.92 For noble theatricals, dilettantism would seem to be the operative term, and for the gentry imitation was the greatest form of flattery.
A variant on gentry amateur theater can be found in private galas that dealt in patriotic self-congratulation and dynastic praise. One mounted at a Moscow theater in 1814, celebrating the taking of Paris by Russian troops under Tsar Alexander, combined folk fair with aristocratic amateurism. The daytime popular segment featured Gypsy performers, carousels, and fair booths. Evening brought a performance of Immortality, a Melodrama, here meaning theatrical action accompanied by music. A chorus of aristocratic and court ladies who personified characters such as Russia, Europe, and Glory delivered verses lamenting the absence of the tsar-angel and offering him thanks from the liberated peoples of Europe. The language of exaltation and triumphalism was very much in the lineage of eighteenth-century panegyric odes and dynastic ceremonies from the time of Catherine II.93 The organizers were thus able to include the “people” in the tribute to the tsar but exclude them from the more elevated proceedings.
Schools opened many avenues to theatrical penetration of society. Secular school theaters in the eighteenth century appeared in Novgorod, Kazan, Smolensk, Tver, Irkutsk, and, in the first decade of the new century, in Vyatka and Nizhny Novgorod. When playwright Mikhail Verevkin directed School for Husbands at Kazan in 1760, he announced that “Molière is now known in Tartary.” At the Smolny Institute, performance by aristocratic girls bred social self-confidence. By the nineteenth century, all kinds of educational institutions had regular amateur theatricals done by pupils, students, and faculty. An amateur student theater at the newly established Kazan University ignited Sergei Aksakov’s lifelong devotion to theater. At the Nezhin pension, the young Gogol played Creon in Ozerov’s Oedipus in Athens, an old woman in Krylov’s Lesson to Daughters, and opposite his schoolmate Kukolnik in Fonvizen’s The Minor.94 In the 1850s, Petersburg Mining Institute students expended feverish efforts on vaudevilles, concerts, plays, and especially opera, since they were banned from the stalls at the Italian opera. K. A. Skalkovsky recalled their special relationship with actors who had attended this institute. Students fought over the virtues of a certain singer, her husband, maid, and dog, and held a mock requiem service when she left the capital. Skalkovsky staged his own opera, Alonso, or a Villain Punished. “In accordance with Russian custom,” he wrote, “no one knew his lines and the orchestra howled mercilessly.” As good eclectics and exuberant youngsters, the students also copied the cancan which they saw in the French farces at the Mikhailovsky Theater. In Moscow, a more permanent liaison opened between the university and the Maly Theater, often called ''the second Moscow University."95
School amateurism grew out of an institutional environment. Relatively closed corporations—school, army, prison—contain important elements feeding the impulse to self-entertainment: a fixed locale, bonding, a captive audience (and cast), and the need for relief from the hard duty of regiment and classroom. Catriona Kelly has noted widespread soldiers’ and prison camp performances whose repertoires resembled traditional folk drama which soldiers often performed for money at fairs. Officers in garrison or on bivouac killed time in self-entertainment. During the Russo-Turkish war of the late 1820s, Mikhail Buturlin and fellow officers put on French plays at a local estate in a persistent effort to keep life normal in wartime.96
Did theater-going help shape everyday behavior? Some contemporaries thought that it ought to. An 1849 etiquette manual, Handbook for Young and Old of Both Sexes, taught that the art of polite story-telling in company could be cultivated by “frequent attendance at the best dramatic productions.”97 Yury Lotman, going way beyond the overflow of theater practices into home and school, argued that theatricality was a principal molder of the aristocracy’s identity. As “foreigners” in their own land, westernized Russian nobles played the role of Europeans every day. This view may be a bit exaggerated in so far as it implies a wide scope and the uniqueness of the Russian case, though its fundamental accuracy cannot be denied for the upper reaches of the nobility. In everyday transactions, the theater of power that E. P. Thompson called the “studied and elaborate hegemonic style” of the eighteenth-century British aristocracy comprised setting, manners, gestures, costumes, and habits that vividly set off its users from the lower orders. Some of the French philosophes, Rousseau in particular, censured the nobility’s quotidian theatricality. They saw it as a perfect example of the fraudulence of aristocratic values and they denounced the stage as a schoolroom where society learned false role playing.98
Though generalizations need to be qualified even for Britain and France, theatricality as an expression of personal power applied to certain segments of the Russian elite. Petersburg court ritual was partially reenacted in some drawing rooms and reception halls where the grand “scenarios of power” fashioned at the top were transmuted into librettos of power at a lower level. French neoclassical tragedy in particular mirrored the order and culture of the court: rational, rigid, restrained, reserved. Litany and liturgy formed part of the structure of the classical performance: the three unities, the balletic movements of the actors, and declamation that echoed the annunciatory accents of official occasions. During the peak of neoclassical drama, c. 1760-1830, the behavioral style of high society became theatricalized; actors and aristocrats in effect imitated one another, and the affectation of theatrical costume was at full flood. Books like Paris Theaters, or a Collection of Remarkable Theater Costumes (1829) served a function similar to the fashion and screen magazines of our time. Dynastic court ritual could not provide librettos for all practices. Gentry “actors” in daily life acquired emploi, deportment, lines, and costumes from observing foreigners; from expressive patterns of the French language; from fiction; from news stories in the foreign press; and from theater attendance. As in Europe, where people looked to the stage for clues as to appearance and social identity, so in Russia the stage radiated outward certain forms and patterns of behavior.99
Long before theater took hold, the Russian elite went about in European apparel with the help of tailor or couturier in emulation not of actors but of foreigners abroad or in Moscow and St. Petersburg. By the early nineteenth century, theater had amplified the mimetic aspect of public life, and the influence of stage costuming had become continuous for both sexes. Acts of display on stage were replicated by the public both inside and outside the theater.100 The public gaze and the role-playing response to it were taken home to the salons and soirées and to balls and receptions. For females especially, in the words of Helena Goscilo, the body became a “public entity.”101 Seeing a familiar object, personage, or situation represented on stage, in print, or on canvas causes the “shock of recognition.” Even when, or especially when, the image distorts through malice or friendly satire and is subjected to a public gaze, it registers sharply in the consciousness of the onlooker. Spectators of the class or set portrayed on stage, depending on the nature of the work, identify with protagonists, laugh at them, or despise them. Those choices—whether accompanied by a thrill of pride, smugness, or a twinge of tension or guilt—reflect and even shape one’s own self-image. Theater is a crystallization of what human beings are doing all the time: playing roles. In “real” life, the roles vary as does the level of self-conscious acting. In theater, only the roles vary, not the consciousness. Stepping “out of character” is a constant for people of the stage; a rarity among those in life. And in each generation, it all depended on what was being shown on stage.