1 - ‘Better halves’? Representations of women in Russian urban popular entertainments, 1870-1910

Summary

Railway train, oh railway train!

Brightly painted, on you run –

Take me, take me, railway train

To my Petersburg bit to have some fun!

This chapter extends an earlier study of mine, on misogyny in the Russian popular puppet show Petrushka (the equivalent of Punch and Judy). In that earlier study I argued that in the Petrushka show a female character was very often held up to ridicule whilst the male hero was not, that sexuality was an important element in this ridicule, and that this situation raised important problems of audience reaction which had not been properly dealt with by the three standard interpretations of Petrushka (vulgar Marxist class-based analysis, reading of the text as primal fertility ritual and the Bakhtinian theory of carnival). The aim now is to move out from the study of the character and ramifications of one discrete popular urban tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and make some observations about the representation of women in a range of genres used for urban entertainment at that period. As before, I shall be putting considerable emphasis on the context of performance, and shall be analysing the question of the audience's reception. But I hope to take the final part of the discussion rather further, expanding a little on the possible implications of patterns in popular entertainment for wider issues of urban history at the turn of the century.