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The Operatics of Everyday Life, or, How Authenticity Was Defined in Late Imperial Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Anna Fishzon
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Abstract

In this article, Anna Fishzon explores how the phenomena of celebrity culture and early sound recording contributed to notions of audientic selfhood in late imperial Russia. Public discussions about celebrities like the Bol'shoi Theater bass Fedor Shaliapin helped forge understandings of sincerity and spoke to contemporary concerns regarding the relationship between fame and artifice, the public persona and the inner self. Fishzon suggests that the emergent recording industry penetrated and altered everyday emotional experience, the arena of work, and the organization of leisure, linking gramophonic discourses to celebrity culture and its rhetoric of authenticity and sincerity. In part because Russian audio magazines and gramophone manufacturers heavily promoted celebrity opera recordings, sonic fidelity was equated with the capacity of the recorded voice to convey “sincerity,” understood, in turn, as the announcement of ardent feelings. Fan letters to Shaliapin and Ivan Ershov document these new sensibilities regarding self, authenticity, desire, and emotions.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 70 , Issue 4 , Winter 2011 , pp. 795 - 818
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2011

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References

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Mark D. Steinberg and the anonymous readers of Slavic Review for their careful reading and many invaluable suggestions. I also would like to thank my colleagues at Williams College, especially Sara Dubow, Joel Revill, William Wagner, and Chris Waters, who gave helpful feedback on an earlier draft of the article I presented at a History Department Colloquium in 2009. Allison Miller offered perceptive comments on an early draft as well, and Ian Beilin inspired, read, and criticized numerous incarnations of the article. The current version has benefitted from the generous insights and steady encouragement of Eric Barry, Igal Halfin, Mara Heifetz, Anya Paretskaya, and Richard Wortman.

1. On notions of sincerity and personal authenticity in Europe and the United States, see, for example, Martin, John, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (December 1997): 1309-42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar; Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).Google Scholar

2. See Benjamin's, Walter famous 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Arendt, Hanna, ed., Illuminations, trans. Zohn, Harry (New York, 1968), 217–51.Google Scholar On the role of "sincerity" in consumer capitalism, see Campbell, Colin, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford, 1989), esp. 173–201 Google Scholar.

3. See, for example, Dyer, Richard, Stars (London, 2002)Google Scholar; and Rojek, Chris, Celebrity (London, 2001).Google Scholar

4. Adorno, Theodor, “The Curves of the Needle,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. In making this claim, I am influenced by Peter Brooks, who put forward similar ideas about the operations of melodrama during the French Revolution. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, 1995), 15; and Brooks, Peter, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution,” in Bratton, Jacky S., Cook, Jim, and Gledhill, Christine, eds., Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London, 1994).Google Scholar In her book on Bolshevik melodrama, Julie A. Cassiday demonstrates that the Soviet state employed theatrical and cinematic plots in the show trials of the late 1920s and 1930s. Legal discourse, stage, and screen, she argues, used the standard melodramatic formula of confession, repentance, and social reintegration. Show trial spectators and participants, accustomed to film scenes of grandiose avowal and avant-garde theatrical techniques that encouraged interaction between the performer and audience, accepted courtroom proceedings and verdicts. Cassiday, The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (DeKalb.2000).

6. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva, f. 912 (personal fond of Fedor Ivanovich Shaliapin), op. 4, d. 258, 1. 11 (letters from spectators to Shaliapin, 1901-1934).

7. Ibid.

8. Vera declared, "I never heard your singing because I do not attend secular concerts. If you would give a concert of sacred music then I would try to be there. If your voice is divine, as they say and write, then how I would like to be uiere! The church is my heart's favorite delight." Ibid., 1. 12.

9. Ibid.

10. By "image" here I mean, following Richard Dyer, a "complex configuration of visual, verbal, and aural signs." The image is generated by various media texts and the body of the celebrity and often has explicit narrative content. Dyer, Stars, 32.

11. Rojek, Celebrity, 18.

12. Ibid., 18-19.

13. Ibid., 13.

14. Similar points have been made in relation to celebrities in McReynolds, Louise, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar, and Sylvester, Roshanna, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves (DeKalb, 2005), esp. 106–28.Google Scholar

15. On the marketing of Nicholas II, see Wortman, Richard, “Publicizing the Imperial Image in 1913,” in Engelstein, Laura and Sandler, Stephanie, eds., Self and Story in Russian History (Ithaca, 2000), 94–119;Google Scholar Kolonitskii, Boris, '“We' and 'I' : Alexander Kerensky in His Speeches,” in Hellbeck, Jochen and Heller, Klaus, eds., Autobiographical Practices in Russia / AutobiographischePraktiken in Russland (Gottingen, 2004), 179–96.Google Scholar

16. Dyer, Richard, “ A Star Is Born and the Construction of Authenticity,” in Gledhill, Christine, ed., Stardom: Industry of Desire (New York, 1991), 137.Google Scholar

17. See Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity; Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

18. Dyer, "A Starts Born," 133.

19. Ibid., 133-35. For audiences, photographs (publicity postcards, posters, and so on) of celebrities in roles and "in life" are crucial referents of such a "reality," or the "real" existence of the star.

20. On the ways realist performance practices introduced by opera impresario and stage director Sawa Mamontov elaborated notions of selfhood and identity, see Olga Haldey, Mamontov's Private Opera: The Search for Modernism in Russian Theater (Bloomington, 2010), esp. 130-70. Haldey presents a wealth of evidence regarding Mamontov's interest in psychological portraits, yet stresses his pioneering modernism and melodramatic flair rather than his realism. I argue that psychological "truth" was increasingly understood in melodramatic terms and therefore agree with Haldey that the non-nationalist, deeply personal and occasionally stylized "realism" of Mamontov's Private Opera differed considerably from tile nineteenth-century realism advocated by Vladimir Stasov, for example.

21. I again draw on Dyer's analysis of Hollywood stars. In Heavenly Bodies, Dyer con-tends that film stars express ideas of personhood "in large measure shoring up the notion of the individual but also at times registering the doubts and anxieties attendant on it." The star, after all, is more than just an on-screen image. "A series of shots of a star whose image has changed…at various points in her career could work to fragment her, to present her as nothing but a series of disconnected looks; but in practice it works to confirm that beneath all these different looks there is a…core [namely, a flesh-and-blood person] that gives all those looks a unity." Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York, 1986), 10.

22. Dyer, "A Star Is Born," 134.

23. Ibid., 135.

24. "Levaia noga g. Shaliapina," Budil'nik, no. 42 (1910): 3.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid. Emphasis added.

27. For accounts of these incidents, see Borovsky, Victor, Chaliapin: A Critical Biography (New York, 1988), 349–63.Google Scholar

28. The French film and record company Pathé Brothers manufactured and sold their machines, cylinders, and discs in Moscow and had branch offices in St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Odessa, and Warsaw. Emile Berliner's Gramophone Company, best known for its recordings of European opera celebrities, had been active in Russia since the late nineteenth century.

29. Initially appearing in the guise of the quasi-independent (and not altogether legal) joint-stock company run by Max Rubinskii, Gramophone opened a record-pressing plant in Riga in 1902, and in 1910 operated offices and retail stores in many cities, including St. Petersburg, Moscow, Khar'kov, Tbilisi, and Omsk. Smaller German record companies like Sirena Record and Lyrophon mushroomed and the catalogues of upstarts such as the Russian Metropol-Record competed with those of Gramophone and Columbia, driving down prices of discs. For a brief history of both foreign and domestic gramophone companies in Russia and a catalogue of vocal recordings made by the Russian branch of The Gramophone Company (1899-1915), see Griunberg, P. N. and Ianin, V. L., Istoriia nachala gramzapisi v Rossii: Katalog vokal'nyhh zapisei rossiiskogo otdeleniia kompanii 'Grammofon' (Moscow, 2002).Google Scholar

30. Katz, Mark, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley, 2004), 9.Google Scholar

31. Ibid., xiii. See also Kenney, William H., Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945 (New York, 1999).Google Scholar

32. A Pathé Brodiers advertisement in Budil'nih, for example, featured three sisters whose dull existence in a provincial backwater was enlivened when their father bought a gramophone. The family listened to records together. Budil'nik, no. 13 (1912): 3.

33. Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records, and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (New Haven, 2005), 38.

34. Coined in the 1920s in England by Compton Mackenzie, a prominent record journalist and audior, "gramophilia" and "gramophobia" apdy describe the two sets of practices and behaviors attributed to gramophone lovers and detractors respectively by the Russian press in the 1910s. On the adoption of these terms in England, see Symes, Colin, Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording (Middletown, 2004), 19.Google Scholar

35. "Kuda, kuda, kuda vy udalilis?" (Where, where, ah where have you gone?) is an aria sung by the poet Lenskii in Act 2, Scene 2 of Petr Tchaikovskii's opera Evgenii Onegin (1879). Leodnid Sobinov (1872-1934) was the reigning tenor at the Bol'shoi Theater in the 1890s and early 1900s. His most celebrated roles were Lenskii, Werther, Romeo, Alfredo (La Traviata), and the Duke of Mantua (Rigoletto).

36. Anastasiia Vial'tseva (1871-1913) was the most famous Russian diva of the fin de siècle. Christened "The Incomparable One" (nesravnennaia) by fans and reviewers, her operetta, opera, and art song performances were featured regularly in entertainment journals, as were her personal habits and predilections. Nikolai Shevelev (orig. Sheviukhin, 1868-1929) was a baritone in Sawa Mamontov's Private Opera from 1896 to 1901; he sang in Kiev in 1901-2, in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1905, and in Tbilisi in 1919-1922. Shevelev created the role of Griaznoi in Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov's Tsarskaia nevesta (The Tsar's Bride, 1898) and the Messenger in Skazka o tsare Saltane (The Tale of Tsar Saltan, 1900). His repertoire also included the tide role in Anton Rubinshtein's Demon (1871), Onegin, Mazeppa, Rigoletto, Escamillo (Carmen), and Hans Sachs (Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg). Oskar Kamenskii (1869-1917), another baritone, was known as the "Russian Battistini."

37. Novyi (pseud.), "Grammofon," Budil'nik, no. 40 (1910): 3.

38. Siefert, Marsha, “Aesthetics, Technology, and the Capitalization of Culture: How the Talking Machine Became a Musical Instrument,” Science in Context 8, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Budil'nik, no. 12 (1908): 2, cover.

40. In the acoustic era, the voice was the easiest and most practical instrument to record. In his memoir, Gaisberg admitted that producers "had to choose 'titles' so as to obtain the most brilliant results without revealing the defects of the machine. The first of the instruments to be recorded successfully was the human voice because its range of frequencies was within such a limited compass. Next in order came…brass, wind, and percussion instruments. Therefore in the pre-1914 catalogues…vocal and military band records predominate." Frederick William Gaisberg, Music on the Record (London, 1946), 78.

41. "Nashi otzyvy (otmetki liubitelia)," Novosti grammofona, no. 1 (January 1907): 9.

42. Ibid., 9-10.

43. Ibid., 10.

44. Ibid., 12.

45. The St. Petersburg Novosti grammofona ceased to exist in 1908. But it was soon followed by other magazines devoted to sound recording, among them the Moscow bi-weekly Grammofonnaia zhizn' and the St. Petersburg mondily Grammofonnyi mir, with more inclusive and varied cultural and social agendas. By the 1910s, the narrative configuration of audio magazines had changed in a few significant ways: more space was allotted to celebrity photographs and gossip, the review field included nonclassical recordings, and less patronizing editorial commentary tacitly acknowledged that subscribers had evolved, too. Yet despite the leavened content, these later periodicals retained many of the features of their predecessor, fulfilling didactic and informative functions in similar modes and realms. The evaluative framework of the record reviews first introduced in Novosti grammofona was regularized, as were the other departments: product reviews, technical articles, and the letters section. On Grammofonnyi mir (1910-1917) and the colorful life and ideas of its editor Dmitrii Bogemskii, see L. I. Tikhvinskaia, "Fragmenty odnoi sud'by na fone fragmentov odnoi kul'tury," in E. V. Dukov, ed., Razvlekatel'naia kul'tura Rossii XVIII-XIX vv: Ocherki istorii i teorii (St. Petersburg, 2000), 430-63.

46. "Nashi otzyvy (otmetki liubitelia)," 10-12. In a review of Gramophone's recordings of arias from Tchaikovskii's opera Pikovaia dama (The Queen of Spades, 1890), for example, the baritone Polikarp Orlov's performance of Tomskii's ballad "Three Cards" was praised for its “vivid dramatics" and of special note was his "strong" voice, which "sustained a crescendo until the [aria's] final chord and laugh." Herman's aria "What is our life?—a game!" was "performed with great feeling by [Aleksandr] Davydov," and the lines '"Let the loser weep, cursing his fate!' were pregnant with sincere pathos." Ibid., 12.

47. The HMV trademark was first employed by the Gramophone Company in advertis-ing in 1900 and has appeared on its records since 1909. Symes, Setting the Record Straight, 29.

48. The Victor Talking Machine Company, based in Camden, New Jersey, was the parent company of Gramophone. For a more in-depth analysis of the Victor Caruso ads and similar ads featuring Geraldine Farrar, see ibid., 27-29.

49. Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, 2003), 218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar "Inasmuch as [the product's] mediation could be detected," notes Sterne, "there is a loss of fidelity or a loss of being between original and copy." Emphasis in the original.

50. Ibid., 219. Sterne then turns to Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in which the term aura is defined as "the unique presence in time and space of a particular representation, its location in a particular context and tradition." Sterne stresses not the part of Benjamin's essay that expresses regret over the "widiering" of aura, freed from its time, space, and tradition in the age of mechanical reproduction but a footnote that qualifies his definition of aura: "Precisely because audienticity is not reproducible, the intensive penetration of certain (mechanical) processes of reproduction was instrumental in differentiating and grading authenticity." Sterne elaborates on aspects of Benjamin's analysis of film to assert that the mediation resulting from sound-reproducing technologies is a cultural radier than an ontological problem: "The very construct of aura is, by and large, retroactive, something that is an artifact of reproducibility radier than a side effect or an inherent quality of self-presence. Aura is the object of a nostalgia that accompanies reproduction. In fact, reproduction does not really separate copies from originals but instead results in the creation of a distinctive form of originality: the possibility of reproduction transforms the practice of production.…[A]uthenticity and presence become issues only when there is something to which we can compare them." Ibid., 220.

51. Gaisberg, Music on the Record, 68.

52. Siefert, "Aesthetics, Technology, and the Capitalization of Culture," 439.

53. Eisenberg, Recording Angel, 41.

54. Ibid., 89.

55. Novosti grammofona, no. 3 (June 1907): 49.

56. Novosti grammofona, no. 1 (January 1908): 11.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid., 10.

59. Novosti grammofona, no. 4 (July 1907): 65.

60. On Mamontov's and Stanislavskii's commitment to psychological truth, see, for example, Haldey, Olga, “Sawa Mamontov, Serge Diaghilev, and the Rocky Path to Modernism”, Journal of Musicology 22, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 559–603 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Konstantin Stanislavsky and Pavel Rumiantsev, Stanislavski on Opera, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York, 1998). On Ershov's performance history and practice, see Abram Gozenpud, Ivan Ershov: Zhizn' i stsenicheskaia deiatel'nost' i issledovanie (St. Petersburg, 1999).

61. Rossiiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka (RNB), f. 275 (personal fond of Ivan Vasil'evich Ershov), op. 1, d. 68,11.1-2 (letter from Mariia Sergeevna Platonova, daughter of the academic S. F. Platonov, to Ershov).

62. Since Zubasheva had been a longtime patron of the Mariinskii Theater, and the totalizing discourse of the Soviet regime had not yet been fully institutionalized in 1924, the structural resemblance of the first letter to much of the fan mail composed before 1917 is certainly understandable, and I believe, expected. Much more striking are the stylistic continuities between Zubasheva's first and second letter, written in 1934.

63. RNB, f. 275, op. 1, d. 57,11.1-2.

64. Ibid., 1. 2. Zubasheva wrote, "I have become a different person and everything is different. For me, marriage was also this kind of turning point. Later—the birth of my child—it completely changed everything; but it was not as acute, not as sudden, and without this sensation of a thunderous blow. Normally I am a slow, dull person—[I am] not inclined to ecstasy. I didn't think I was capable of experiencing it. And I am so happy that I experienced it. And now, when I see you without your make-up—I cannot help but sense Tannhauser in you. And I am so terribly happy when I catch Tannhauser's gestures in you; your manner of holding up your head with your hand—your hands in general…the manner in which you raise your head, turn your head—it is so thrilling for me to catch this—at concerts, or on the street. I hope that you will forgive this letter. I wanted to stop myself from writing it, but I couldn't …So be it."

65. Ibid., 1.3.

66. Ibid. "Your first Siegfried…I can compare in intensity only to the turning points that occurred in my life with the birth of my first child and upon marriage (I got married at age 16 and was madly in love with my husband). This is not surprising. You had that effect on many…I know men who have experienced you in the same way. One man—Lev Nikolaevich Sil'vanskii, my old friend, loves to recall how he—as a young provincial student—heard [you] (and on a gramophone no less!!)…and was so shaken that he inadvertently sat in a bucket of water and fish, which he had been holding in his hands."

67. Ibid., 1. 4. "I felt suddenly torn from my life—a very full, very good life—and everything faded before this pull toward you. For a couple of weeks my heart raged from mad happiness…and despair—that I was losing my life…Later…a surprising tiling— captivity on some level is transformed into spirituality…gives a purely spiritual thrill, religious, holy (forgive me for my silly word, forgive this. This is so absurd, but I trust that you will understand me). Of course, I could have 'gotten to know' you. But I did not want to. I humbly felt that I was an unattractive, plain, 30-year-old female supplicant…and could not be interesting to you, unnecessary…not needed for anything! To be on your heels, stare at you, pester you with entreaties—I did not want that. Soon after, my husband left me. I lived through a lot that was difficult these past 10 years; much material deprivation—near indigence, many spiritual losses, deaths and departures of the people dearest to me. Most painful was the death of my son, to whom I gave my youth, all of my hope, private life, everything. He died when he was already grown, 14 years old, after an especially difficult illness. So here it is, Ivan Vasil'evich. All these 10 years, through tragedy and happiness, through hardship, exertion, and pain, my love for you—unrealized, as far away as a star, worshipping you like an unapproachable God—shined on me and filled me up."

68. Ibid., 11. 4-5 .

69. Ibid., 1.5.

70. On Edison's "tone tests," see Siefert, "Aesthetics, Technology, and the Capitalization of Culture," 441-45.

71. Adorno, "Curves of the Needle," 48-50.

72. Slavoj Žižek, citing Adorno, has suggested that the voice-as-object displays a "spectral autonomy" and can be experienced as undead, traumatic. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (New York, 2001), 44-46,56-58; see also, Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York, 2001), 116-21. Certainly a disembodied, "natural sounding" recorded voice, severed from a subject, bearing no traces of technological intervention or other evidence of material life, might seem, paradoxically, machine-like. Crackling and other distortion metonymically evoked human warmth and imperfection, reattaching the object-voice to an external reality.