Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917–1938 / Lynn Mally
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RIVOlUTIONARY ACTS RIVOlUTIONARY Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London Copyright © 2000 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2000 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2016. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mally, Lynn. Revolutionary acts : amateur theater and the Soviet state, 1917–1938 / Lynn Mally. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8014-3769-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-0720-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Amateur theater—Soviet Union—History—20th century. I. Title. PN3169.S65 M27 2000 792'.0222'094709041—dc21 00-009282 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ For Bob and Nora Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 1 The Revolution Loves the Theater 17 2 Small Forms on Small Stages 47 3 From "Club Plays" to the Classics 81 4 TRAM: The Vanguard of Amateur Art 109 5 Shock Workers on the Cultural Front 146 6 Amateurs in the Spectacle State 181 Conclusion 213 Glossary 223 Bibliography 225 Index 243 Preface THI S B 0 0 K began as a study of the Leningrad Theater of Working-Class Youth, known by its acronym TRAM. But as my work on this theater and its Moscow affiliate continued, I discovered that these popular youth stages were simply the most visible representatives of a much wider phenomenon of amateur theater that blossomed in the early Soviet period. My research then grew to include the amorphous network of impromptu stages that inspired, imitated, and eventually outlasted TRAM. Expanding this project beyond TRAM, which has its own archives and extensive secondary literature, made this book much harder to write. I hope that the end product has more to say about the place of theater and the amateur arts in the cultural transformation be gun with the October Revolution. At the early stages of this project I was taken under the wing of two remarkable experts on Russian theater, Vladislav Ivanov and Maria Ivanova. They introduced me to a new field and gave me invaluable bib liographic assistance. What began as a professional relationship ended as a friendship. Their book-lined apartment was a haven for me on my trips to Moscow. The Internet has made the work of writing a little less solitary. I was bolstered by good-natured criticism and cyber pep talks from Louise McReynolds, who tried to hem in my natural tendencies to ward social history. Susan Larsen has been a wonderful reader, both on the 'Net and off. Evgeny Dobrenko aided me with his broad knowledge of mainstream Soviet culture. Susanna Lockwood Smith shared her in sights into the world of amateur music. Alice Fahs and I shared many conversations on theater, popular culture, and writing, all of which x Preface helped me to refine my thoughts. The friendship and bibliographic as sistance of Joan Ariel and Ellen Broidy were very important to me. Two theater lovers, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Alvia Golden, helped me see this project in a broader perspective. I am particularly grateful to Alvia for thinking up the title. Many colleagues have given me comments on individual chapters, in cluding Jim von Geldern, Lewis Siegelbaum, and Anne Walthall. A con vivial group of Russian scholars in southern California, including Robert Edelman, Choi Chatterjee, Arch Getty, Georg Michels, Elise Wirtschafter, and Mary Zirin, read versions of assorted chapters. Laurie Bernstein saw me through a research trip to Moscow. Stan Karas smoothed my way through Soviet newspapers of the 1930s. Viktorina Lefebvre helped me to compile the bibliography and the notes. My warmest thanks go to John Ackerman of Cornell University Press. I re ceived research support for this project from the International Research Exchange Board (IREX), the Social Science Research Council, and the University of California, Irvine. It is customary for authors to thank their families, but I believe that I have special reasons to do so. Robert Moeller has always been my first and final reader. I am grateful for his erudition, patience, and most of all his sense of humor. And my daughter Nora deserves a special mention because she continues to teach me about the passion and commitment that go into amateur theater. Portions of chapter 4 were previously published in "The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Youth Theater TRAM," Slavic Review 51, no. 3 (Fall 1992) and "Performing the New Woman: The Komsomolka as Actress and Image in Soviet Youth Theater," Journal of Social History 30, no. 1 (Fall 1996). I gratefully acknowledge the permission of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the Journal of Social History to reprint them here. Chapter 5 includes revised sections of two published articles. I thank the Ohio State University Press for allowing me to incor porate sections of my "Autonomous Theater and the Origins of Socialist Realism: The 1932 Olympiad of Autonomous Art," The Russian Review 52, no. 2 (April 1993). Copyright 1993 by Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. The journal Russian History gave me permission to in clude parts of "Shock Workers on the Cultural Front: Agitprop Brigades in the First Five-Year Plan," Russian History23, no. 1-4 (1996). HIVllUTllNAHY ACTS Introduction "THE Y E A R since the last festival of the October Revolution will enter the history of Russian theater," proclaimed Adrian Piotrov skii, a prominent Leningrad scholar, cultural activist, and local bureau crat, in 1924. '1t is the first year that the triumph of the mass movement known as amateur theater {samodeiatel'nyi teatr] has become apparent." Piotrovskii listed what he believed were amateur theater's significant accomplishments, including its influence over the most progressive pro fessional stages. "Maybe this coming year will lead us to a long awaited, unified theatrical style, rooted in the 'amateur' performances of Soviet youth."1 For Piotrovskii, amateurs were the main source of creativity in Soviet theater and he was not alone in his convictions. Many observers expected a new, participatory socialist culture to emerge from the ama teur stage. This book examines amateur theaters as a distinctive medium of ur ban organization and entertainment in the first two decades of Soviet power. Amateur theaters served a variety of functions for their partici pants, audiences, and sponsoring institutions. They provided avenues of artistic and political self-expression for their mainly youthful actors. Housed in local gathering spots and workplaces, they offered a vital i. A. I. Piotrovskii, "God uspekhov," in his Za sovetskii teatr! Sbornik statei (Leningrad: Academia, 1925), 67 68. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. On Piotrovskii's career, see Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cam bridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); James von Geldem, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and E. 5. Dobin, ed., Adrian Piotrovskii: Teatr, kino, zhizn ' (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 196<}). 2 Introduction form of entertainment for urban neighborhoods. State agencies used them to disseminate political information and mark important celebra tions. Finally, they constituted a popular forum to help shape a unified and widely accepted Soviet theatrical repertoire. Focusing on the two capital cities, Moscow and Petrograd/Leningrad, I argue that the study of amateur theater allows us to trace crucial trans formations in Soviet cultural life from the early revolutionary years to the late 1930s: the growing status and prestige of artistic experts; the ar ticulation of a unified Soviet artistic canon; and efforts to control sponta neous forms of cultural expression by the lower classes. I aim to show that amateur theaters are an important-and understudied-form of cultural production and consumption in the Soviet Union.2 This work also adds to a lively conversation about how the population at large contributed to the formation of the Stalinist aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism. Early Soviet amateur stages were extremely diverse. Some inhabited beautiful halls and offered elaborate training programs; others were fly- by-night operations. Some played home-made propaganda sketches; others staged Chekhov and Schiller. What united them was their com munity base and nonprofessional standing. Participants did not earn a living from their cultural work. The Russian language offers two common words for amateurism: liubitel'stvo, rooted in the verb to love (as amateur is rooted in the Latin amare); and samodeiatel 'nost', literally translated as "doing-it-yourself."3 Although the words can be used in terchangeably, Soviet writers increasingly distinguished between the two. Liubitel 'skii teatr came to stand for all that was bad in amateur activ ities. Samodeiatel'nyi teatr, by contrast, represented all that was good in 2. For overviews of Soviet amateur theater, see S. lu. Rumiantsev and A. P. Shul'pin, eds., Samodeiatel'noe khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo v sssR. 2 v. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi in stitut iskusstvoznaniia, 1995); V. B. Blok, "Khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo mass," in A. Ia. Zis', ed., Stranitsy istorii sovetskoi khudozhestvennoi kul'tury (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), 11 42; V. Ivashev, ed., Ot "zhivoi gazety" do teatra studii (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1989); V. N. Aizenshtadt, Sovetskii samodeiatel'nyi teatr: Osnovnye etapy razvitiia (Kharkov: Khar'kovskii gosudarstvennyi institut kul'tury, 1983); and N. G. Zograf et al., eds., Ocherki istorii russkogo sovetskogo teatra v trekh tomakh (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1954 6o), v. 1: 467 J8, v. 2: 46o J8.