the soviet and post-soviet review 45 (2018) 385-401 brill.com/spsr

Book Reviews ∵

Mayhill C. Fowler Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 282 pp., $75.00 (hb), isbn 9781487501532.

The Ukrainian theater in the early Soviet period has been well served by recent publications. In 2004, Irena Makaryk of the University of Toronto published Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: , Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics, whose title fully describes the contents. Eleven years later Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz put out Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant ­Experimentation, a collection of documents in translation that expanded and deepened the earlier study. These studies were inward looking, deeply probing Ukrainian phenomena within the Ukrainian sphere (although Makaryk’s study provided a good deal of extra-Ukrainian context). Mayhill C. Fowler has an even more outward-looking perspective, explor- ing the symbiosis between artists in the Ukraine and the broader terrarium of Soviet life: in her words, “the story of the unmaking of the Russian Imperial Southwest and the making of the Soviet cultural periphery” (p. 10). “Russian Imperial Southwest” is one of several terms she prefers in order to clarify her arguments. It refers to all those provinces of the pre-Revolutionary that were the stamping-grounds of the “Imperial Russian theatrical network.” This comprises not only the Pale of Settlement, but everything ad- jacent to the borderlands of the Habsburg Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as Cossack Malorossia and Black Sea Novorossia. The scope enables her to examine not only Ukrainian, but Polish, Yiddish, German, and other cultures that co-existed within the fluctuant borders of this territory. “The provinces were central to theatrical production in the Russian Empire, and the lived experience of theatre in the southwest borderlands created the necessity for structural change in the Soviet period” (p. 19). Fowler describes her outlook as transnational. “Taking transnational meth- odologies to cultural production incorporates center and periphery, Moscow and the regions, in one story; transnationalism, as a concept, requires taking the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/18763324-20181320

386 book reviews variety of cultures inside the seriously” (p. 11). Fowler complains that previous studies of Soviet theatre have been Moscow-centric whereas monographs on Ukrainian theatre remain parochial. She wants to investigate the two-way traffic that ultimately benefitted the formation of Soviet culture to the detriment of national and ethnic cultures. The individual identities of once-thriving artistic scenes became relegated to a periphery, tributaries to the all-engulfing Soviet enterprise. This proves to be a very fruitful approach and yields provocative analyses. A more questionable coinage is Fowler’s use of “beau monde” – French for “the fashionable world, the best society” – to mean “the backstage world of artists and officials” that “incorporates not only the text, but also the live performance in greater context” (p. 13). She sees an interpenetrative rela- tionship between artists and the cultural bureaucracy in the Soviet system, where boundaries of privilege, license and identity often blur. For instance, she expands the title of a literary journal of the period, The Literary Fair, to refer to “the people and places dominating the journals, theatres, cafés, and police denunciations: in short, the entire world of 1920s … all the ma- jor talents of Kharkiv’s Golden Age” (p. 63) and by extension “as a milieu for those artists, officials, and artist-officials shaping culture in the Soviet Ukraine” (p. 77). Behind the scenes of officialdom, “literature was only a servant” (p. 67), yet theatre folk and similar bohemians rubbed elbows with bureaucrats of the arts establishment, living in the same buildings, frequenting the same restau- rants, and denouncing each another with a minimum of scruples. To focus in more detail on the way “the cultural topography of the Soviet Union centered increasingly on Moscow” as “the relationship between the is- lands of literary fairs transform … Moscow [into] a center and Soviet Ukraine a periphery” (p. 87), Fowler makes use of what Vyacheslav Ivanov would call dyads. Her central chapters contrast a figure who flourished on the provincial scene with one who migrated to the capital: Mykola Kulish and Mikhail Bul- gakov for playwriting, Ostap Vyshnia and Ilf-Petrov for comedy, Les’ Kurbas and Shlomo Mikhoels as official artists who came to sticky ends. The decline and fall of Soviet Ukrainian culture as it was absorbed into a more monolithic Soviet culture is further elucidated in the final chapters on the dealings of the arts officials Andrii Khvylia and Vsevolod Balyts’kyi, and cabaret in both the Gulag and the Kremlin. None of these stories (a favorite word of Fowler’s) has a happy ending, however. Whether provincial or centrist, the artist, no matter how privileged or honored, was incorporated into the system and thus made ultimately disposable. Although the Bolsheviks originally paid lip service to the independence of national cultures and vowed to support them, over time theatrical institu- tions began to be categorized “by ethnicity and not by region” (p. 120). The

the soviet and post-soviet review 45 (2018) 385-401