In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, printed literature and performances - from celebrity narratives and opera fandom to revolutionary acts and political speeches - frequently articulated extreme emotional states and passionate belief. A uniquely intense approach to public life and private expression - the 'melodramatic imagination' - is at the center of this study. Previously, scholars have only indirectly addressed the everyday appropriation of melodramatic aesthetics in Russia, choosing to concentrate on canonical texts and producers of mass culture. Collective fantasies and affects are daunting objects of study, difficult to render, and almost impossible to prove empirically. Music and art historians, with some notable exceptions, have been reluctant to discuss reception for similar reasons. By analyzing the artifacts and practices of a commercialized opera culture, author Anna Fishzon provides a solution to these challenges. Her focus on celebrity and fandom as features of the melodramatic imagination helps illuminate Russian modernity and provides the groundwork for comparative studies of fin-de-siècle European popular and high culture, selfhood, authenticity, and political theater.

In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, printed literature and performances - from celebrity narratives and opera fandom to revolutionary acts and political speeches - frequently articulated extreme emotional states and passionate belief. A uniquely intense approach to public life and private expression - the 'melodramatic imagination' - is at the center of this study. Previously, scholars have only indirectly addressed the everyday appropriation of melodramatic aesthetics in Russia, choosing to concentrate on canonical texts and producers of mass culture. Collective fantasies and affects are daunting objects of study, difficult to render, and almost impossible to prove empirically. Music and art historians, with some notable exceptions, have been reluctant to discuss reception for similar reasons. By analyzing the artifacts and practices of a commercialized opera culture, author Anna Fishzon provides a solution to these challenges. Her focus on celebrity and fandom as features of the melodramatic imagination helps illuminate Russian modernity and provides the groundwork for comparative studies of fin-de-siècle European popular and high culture, selfhood, authenticity, and political theater.

A study of commercialized opera culture in Russia, exploring the 'melodramatic imagination'

Russia in the late nineteenth century may have been an autocracy, but it was far from silent. In the 1860s, new venues for public speech sprang up: local and municipal assemblies, the courtroom, and universities and learned societies. Theatre became more lively and vernacular, while the Orthodox Church exhorted its priests to become better preachers. Although the tsarist government attempted to restrain Russia's emerging orators, the empire was entering an era of vigorous modern politics. All the while, the spoken word was amplified by the written: the new institutions of the 1860s brought with them the adoption of stenography. Russian political culture reached a new peak of intensity with the 1905 revolution and the creation of a parliament, the State Duma, whose debates were printed in the major newspapers. Sometimes considered a failure as a legislative body, the Duma was a formidable school of modern political rhetoric. It was followed by the cacophonous freedom of 1917, when Aleksandr Kerensky, dubbed Russia's 'persuader-in-chief', emerged as Russia's leading orator only to see his charisma wane. The Bolsheviks could boast charismatic orators of their own, but after the October Revolution they also turned public speaking into a core ritual of Soviet 'democracy'. The Party's own gatherings remained vigorous (if also sometimes vicious) throughout the 1920s; and here again, the stenographer was in attendance to disseminate proceedings to a public of newspaper readers or Party functionaries. How Russia Learned to Talk offers an entirely new perspective on Russian political culture, showing that the era from Alexander II's Great Reforms to early Stalinism can usefully be seen as a single 'stenographic age'. All Russia's rulers, whether tsars or Bolsheviks, were grappling with the challenges and opportunities of mass politics and modern communications. In the process, they gave a new lease of life to the age-old rhetorical technique of oratory.

Paul Robeson's Voices is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage examines Robeson's voice as it exists in two broad and intersecting domains: as sound object and sounding gesture, specifically how it was fashioned in the contexts of singing practices, in recital, concert, and recorded performance, and as subject of identification. Olwage asks: how does the voice encapsulate modes of subjectivity, of being? Combining deep archival research with musicological theory, this book is a study of voice as central to Robeson's sense of self and his politics. Paul Robeson's Voices charts the dialectal process of Robeson's vocal and self-discovery, documenting some of the ways Robeson's practice revised the traditions of concert singing in the first half of the twentieth century and how his voice manifested as resistance.

A prevailing belief among Russia’s cultural elite in the early twentieth century was that the music of composers such as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Nikolai Medtner could forge a shared identity for the Russian people across social and economic divides. In this illuminating study of competing artistic and ideological visions at the close of Russia’s “Silver Age,” author Rebecca Mitchell interweaves cultural history, music, and philosophy to explore how “Nietzsche’s orphans” strove to find in music a means to overcome the disunity of modern life in the final tumultuous years before World War I and the Communist Revolution.

Polish Theatre Revisited explores nineteenth-century Polish theatre through the lens of theatre audiences. Agata Łuksza places special emphasis on the most engaged spectators, known as “theatremaniacs”—from what they wore, to what they bought, to what they ate. Her source material is elusive ephemera from fans’ lives, such as notes scribbled on a weekly list of shows in the Warsaw theatres, collections of theatre postcards, and recipes for sweets named after famous actors. The fannish behavior of theatremaniacs was usually deemed excessive or in poor taste by people in positions of power, as it clashed with the ongoing embourgeoisement of the theatre and the disciplining of audiences. Nevertheless, the theatre was one of the key areas where early fan cultures emerged, and theatremaniacs indulged in diverse fan practices in opposition to the forces reforming the theatre and its spectatorship.