Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia/Songs for Fat People: Affect, Emotion, and Celebrity in the Russian Popular Song, 1900-1955

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Sep-Dec 2004 by Gentes, Andrew A

Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger, eds. Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. x, 338 pp. Illustrations. Suggested Reading. Index. $54.95, cloth. $18.95, paper.

David MacFadyen. Songs for Fat People: Affect, Emotion, and Celebrity in the Russian Popular Song, 1900-1955. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002. xx, 354 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Audio-visual Sources. Index. $75.00, cloth.

MacReynolds and Neuberger's collection is one of an increasing number spanning both the imperial and Soviet eras and as such focuses attention on overlooked (or unimagined) continuities. The topic here is melodrama broadly conceived. Drawing upon Peter Brooks, who is invoked repeatedly throughout and whose 1976 study The Melodramatic Imagination established theoretical precepts for scholarly analyses of melodrama, the editors write: "Simply stated, melodrama exaggerates the circumstances of time and place in which it is produced, and as a result it offers a uniquely accessible mode of analysis for audiences to perceive the interaction among politics, art, and everyday life" (p. 5). But what is melodrama? Well, we learn from such contributors as Richard Stites, Beth Holmgren, Otto Boele, Lars Lih, Joan Neuberger, and Helena Goscilo that it is, respectively: theatrical imports popular before the mid-nineteenth century; Helena Mniszek's The Leper and Anastasia Verbitskaia's The Keys to Happiness, both Positivist romances "especially equipped to allure audiences of fledgling consumers" (p. 83); pseudonymous Count Amori's "sequels" or "alternative endings" to popular stories and themselves best-sellers just before the revolution; unmaskings ofdvurushniki-"'an unprincipled gang of political careerists,'" according to Stalin's Short Course, '"who, having long ago lost the confidence of the people, strive to insinuate themselves once more into their confidence by deception, by chameleon-like changes of color, by fraud, by any means, only that they might retain the title of political figures'" (p. 190); the movie Slave to Love by Nikita Mikhalkov, who "fabricated films within the film [to] function as a counterpoint to the conflict between public and private by setting up a contrast between the frivolous and the serious, or 'love' versus 'revolutionary heroism,' which in turn are represented by the melodrama (as a realm of emotion, private life, escapism, and fantasy) versus the drama of documentary (the realm of reason, public life, courage, and the 'real')" (pp. 272-73); and, finally, funerals for such celebrities as silent screen star Vera Kholodnaia, Anna Akhmatova, Iosif Stalin, and Vladimir Vysotskii.

If, given these numerous variations on a theme, the theme itself loses acuity (despite nearly every contributor's sometimes pro forma nod to Brooks), and functions primarily as a vehicle to bring together forays into low- to middle-brow Romanov or Soviet culture, content still manages to supersede form to offer several intriguing perspectives. Like in any thematic collection there are inconsistencies here regarding interpretations and applications of melodrama. For instance, it is difficult to reconcile Julie Buckler's equation of melodrama and nihilism with Neuberger's explanation of "melodrama as a genre that 'engages with and processes the complexity of modernity and the politics of cultural change'" (p. 280). Surely the latter is a creative enterprise whereas nihilism is, well, nihilistic. But this is nit-picking; and it should be added straightaway that Goscilo's essay "Playing Dead," subtitled the "Operatics of Celebrity Funerals, or, The Ultimate Silent Part," is one of the cleverest and most entertaining this reviewer has ever read. Hers and other provocative contributions render Imitations of Life appropriate for upper level undergraduate and graduate students as well as specialists.

By contrast, MacFadyen's Songs for Fat People cannot be recommended, albeit with the caveat that anybody willing to wade through his impenetrable prose will find an encyclopedia's worth of information on estrada performers Tamara Tsereteli, Petr Leshchenko, Aleksandr Vertinskii, Leonid Utesov, Liudmila Zykina, and others. This is MacFadyen's final instalment in a troika of volumes covering "estrada, the over-arching form of Slavic artistic expression that includes the popular song, an emotional demonstration in an often colourless, dogmatic society" (pp. 4-5). Thus is established the direction toward which the author, thoroughly enamoured of this originally Gypsy song form, wishes to lead the reader, but it is a difficult journey to complete. This is a self-indulgent book, one whose author seems purposely to be striving for opacity rather than clarity. MacFadyen even acknowledges while discussing his tripartite project that he has "gone further and further down a road of lyricism or of private expression" (p. 260). Perhaps this rationalizes for him passages like the following: "In creating assemblages of events, in connecting the affected and affecting, desire is so free, so flawlessly social, that it creates a radically novel mode of interaction, one of willing submission to a weakened form of subjectivity. One becomes part of everything; binary structures become multiple and opposites multiply" (p. 245). Private expression is one thing, and it perhaps enhances to some interesting and detailed analyses of song lyrics here, but so bizarre and self-referential does MacFadyen become ("Our feet are firmly on the ground or stage from start to finish, no matter how far we go in the processes of dissipation that desire both invites and invokes" [246]), that he merely obscures his already fuzzy thesis that estrada artists "show the power of emotional affirmation as a tool within, despite, and even against politics" (p. 36). In the Manichean universe MacFadyen creates, politics, especially Soviet politics, is an evil counterpoised by the unalloyed good that is lyrical emotion. He tendentiously repeats this dichotomy despite his own evidence showing popular song and Soviet politics intimately entwined, to the extent that certainly the former and maybe even the latter could not have lasted as long as it did without the other (Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev were big estrada fans). In other words estrada, like certain other art forms, clearly benefited from political support. Songs for Fat People will be mostly useful for its footnotes and as a prophylactic curio to show doctoral candidates.