Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 297

Mayhill C. Fowler, Beau Monde On Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Xvi, 282 pp. $75.66 (cloth).

Mayhill Fowler’s account of Soviet Ukraine’s “beau monde” has managed to accomplish something that the central characters in her book often found elu- sive: telling a story that is both Soviet and Ukrainian. Through the “collective biography” of a group of Ukrainian playwrights and one “arts official,” Fowler examines the development of Soviet Ukrainian theatre in the 1920s and 1930s, a project that produced incredible art but ultimately culminated in tragedy for its participants and an overall “provincialization” of Soviet Ukraine’s cultural scene by 1940. Fowler begins her narrative with a paradox: How come many of the leading cultural figures of the disproportionately came from Ukraine but cultural production in Ukraine itself remained marginal in Soviet culture? The answer to the first part of the question lies in what Fowler insists is Ukraine’s unique cultural milieu which derives from the Ukrainian lands’ historic role as Russia’s “imperial Southwest.” The answer to the second part of the question is part of a broader argument about shifting relationships between artists and the Soviet state. Ultimately, Fowler argues while the cultural hybridity and varied networks of the imperial Southwest allowed for innovative cultural production, the new role of the state in cultural production brought on with the creation of the USSR meant a radical shift. At first, this shift allowed for unprecedented resources to create theatre as part of a larger project to create culture that was both Soviet and Ukrainian. However, by the 1930s the state was not just “sup- porting” the arts but creating it, increasingly marginalizing any artistic produc- tion that was not coming out of Moscow. These two distinct yet interconnected arguments that illuminate the reasons for a seemingly paradoxical aspect of Soviet culture structure Fowler’s collective biography of Soviet Ukraine’s beau monde through the life and work of its key players: , Mykola Kulish, Ostap Vyshnia, and Andrei Khvylia. In her use of the term “beau monde,” Fowler draws on William Weber’s description of British theatre culture and defines the beau monde as “elites, artists, officials, hangers-on, friends, enemies, and the loose circles of milieux crossing the world of the arts and the world of officialdom (15–16).” Unlike Weber’s Britain, however, “in the Soviet case, it might not be clear who were the elites (artists or Party officials) and who were the professionals working for them (professional artists, or professional officials) (16).” The beau monde con- cept, expertly deployed and shaped by Fowler, manages to provide readers both with a conceptual framework to understand “how the relationship between art and authority worked in practice (17)” as well as a justification for the unique-

Canadian-American Slavic Studies © verlag ferdinand schöningh, 2020 | doi:10.30965/22102396-05401016 298 Book Reviews/Comptes rendus ness of theatre’s beau monde and why that art form is best equipped to tell this story. As Fowler puts it, “… planning and control, with which we associate the Soviet project are inimical to good play. The world of the theatre then allows an examination of the paradoxes of Soviet artistic culture: theatre was by its nature not a mass medium, yet it was created for the Soviet masses. Theatre was a place of spontaneity and play, in a planned and controlled dictatorship. Theatre represented the world, and simultaneously tried to change it (4).” Fowler begins her narrative with a description of the “imperial southwest” that was eventually unmade in the Soviet Union in chapter one “The Rus- sian Imperial Southwest: Theatre in the Age of Modernism and Pogroms.” In this chapter Fowler describes the cultural hybridity of local theatre that stemmed from both the presence of various cultures in the region (Polish, Jew- ish, Ukrainian, Russian, and still others) as well as theatre networks that drew on Russian and Habsburg political structures. To illustrate the world of the imperial southwest, Fowler focuses on the Theatre of Luminaries, a Ukrainian- language theatre group that managed to thrive in the even when Ukrainian-language theatre was technically banned. Through this exam- ple, Fowler shows how state policy in the center was often reversed by local officials fearful of local reprisals. In addition, while this theatre troupe per- formed in Ukrainian, their musicians were often Jews and the networks they operated within were multi-ethnic and linguistically varied. As is evidenced by the inclusion of “pogroms” in the chapter title, Fowler does not idealize this hybrid past as one of peaceful or even tolerant co-existence. However, the “vio- lence” of this region’s ethnic heterogeneity that Fowler mentions remains vague in her narrative. Perhaps the specifics of pogroms and local violence are too far outside the purview of Fowler’s story, but because this history is all too often whitewashed in the historiography, it may have been helpful to the reader to provide details. Fowler describes the beginnings of the project to create art that was both Soviet and Ukrainian undertaken by Kurbas, Kulish, Vyshnia, and Khvylia in the 1920s, in an era she refers to as “the literary fair,” defined as “the first gen- eration of a Soviet beau monde (64).” The state, including the secret police, is what allows this literary fair to flourish through official support for this project but it is also what ultimately leads to its downfall. One of the reasons for this is the literary fair’s notion of what Soviet Ukrai- nian theatre meant proved radically different from the type of Soviet Ukrainian culture production that came out of korenizatsiia. For the literary fair, Fowler argues, “… ethnic particularism offered a means not to create universal Soviet culture, but rather to promote their own national culture locally in the compli- cated ethnic patchwork of Soviet Ukraine (118–119).” In a multi-ethnic, hybrid

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