Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture (original) (raw)
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Women in Nineteenth Century Russia: Lives and Culture, 2012
Her book, The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (2000), examines the theatricality of show trials in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as their roots in avant-garde theatre and cinema. She has published several scholarly articles on Russian theatre of the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Stalinist film. She is currently writing a monograph on early nineteenth-century theatre and theatricality, which investigates the role of gender performance in the construction of Russian national identity, and completing an article on the personality cult surrounding Vladimir Putin.
“The Tragedy of a Russian Woman”: Anna Karenina in the Moscow Art Theater, 1937
Russian Literature, 2009
Staged at a peak of Stalinist terror and aggressively promoted by the state, Anna Karenina in the Moscow Art Theater is an unusual cultural and ideological event of the late 1930s. In its disturbing lack of obvious political or emotional relevance to the socialist experience, the grand spectacle of adultery and suicide on the country's main dramatic stage prompted a conflicted critical construction of the play's Soviet meaning and resonance. Situating Anna Karenina in contemporary political and cultural landscapes, this essay exposes and interprets the rupture between the production's mediated publicized image and immediate theatrical actuality, and brings to light the play's inherent logic and implications created through a uniquely theatrical exchange among the Stalinist state, stage, and audience.
The Soviet Actress in the Literature of "Perestroika
1989
ow willperestoika affect the status of women in Soviet Russian culture? Is it possible to restructure traditions that are centuries old? Is anyone even suggesting that those traditions need to be restructured? Have any alternatives been proposed? Theatre offers an exceptional medium through which to study the attitudes of society toward any number of issues, and the status of women is no exception. One method of analysis, certainly, is to examine the contents of the plays themselves. We propose, rather, to examine the relations in the professional community itself and how those attitudes and issues are related to the larger population - not only through plays but through the large body of journalistic literature that surrounds the Soviet theatre. In this paper we propose a brief overview of the status of the Soviet Russian actress as a cultural symbol. Theatre in Russia has always held a special attraction for women, both as participants in performance and as viewers. Russian women ...
Theatre and Identity in Imperial Russia
Theatre History Studies, 2011
{ 163 } BOOK R E V IE wS fully surmounted these difficulties, expertly crafting a valuable and enjoyable contribution to the field.
Iconic Female Writers of Russia's Long-Twentieth Century
There is a Film Studies attribution counted to this course This course discusses important literature written by women and significant film by women and about women within, primarily, the canon of Russian and Soviet studies. Within this specialized area there are many ways that the syllabus intersects with women's and gender studies on a broader, transnational spectrum. Our course begins by discussing the challenges and specific qualities of female-authored works, and draws connections between female Russian authors and Western authors. Once we enter the period of the Soviet Union, the course offers a basic comparison: women of all races struggled for decades to justify leaving the sphere of domesticity to join the labor force; and once in the labor force, find equitable work; by contrast, in the USSR, women's place outside of home and family was rarely challenged. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and these developments drew North American suffragists, and female journalists, engineers, and artists to Russia. The African American actress Frances Williams moved to Moscow in 1934 to perform in a country that had supposedly eliminated racism in the time of International Friendship. This is one example of many in the course that will examine the roles, experiences, and representations of women and other marginalized groups while investigating the cultural construction of gender. Theoretical texts about feminism and gender complement primary readings, and student assignments will engage students in these theoretical texts and primary works of literature and film. Course description This course will draw from decades of cultural production, from the Silver Age to the post-Soviet period, to explore the articulation of feminist discourse in literature and film, as well as the development of feminism in Russia across the past 20th-century. We will discuss emergent social movements, and the power dynamics between different social and gender groups in private, public and political struggles for justice as we discuss the meaning of sexuality in Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Russian society. To this end, we will compare the progress and status of gender equality in North America, Europe and Russia, as these countries were home to some of the most radical social movements. In placing representations of the body in significant films, theatrical performances, dramas, novels and stories-from modernism to the post-Soviet period-this course will examine the cultural debates these bodies fostered in their socio-historical background. Contemporary works on the syllabus synthesize aesthetics and gender statements, offering the literature and visual art to help us understand how gender is constructed in post-Soviet society. The body, dress, gesture, and methods of embodiment (embodiment of cultural norms, gender roles, for instance) will be re-occurring themes in the literature and film that we discuss.
The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, 2019
This chapter considers the artistic and cultural contribution of the 'second wave' actresses of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) who worked at the MAT itself and at the MAT Studios in the revolutionary and civil war period (1910s-1920s) and who went on to have distinguished careers as performers, teachers and directors in Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR (1920s-1970s). The MAT had been founded in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and soon became famous throughout Russia, Europe and America for its staging of the new drama of Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen and others and for innovative stagings of the classics. The leading actresses of the original MAT included Stanislavsky's wife Lilina, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, Maria Andreyeva and Olga Gzovskaya. Stanislavsky himself was a true patriarch, who expected obedience, submission and unquestioning trust from the actresses he trained early in his career, but, at the same time, an idealized view of the female performer as muse was an essential element of his artistic vision (Ignatieva 2008). Examination of the work of the first generation of actresses at the
Transgressive Women in Modern Russian and East European Cultures
This book brings together groundbreaking analyses of the various ways female artists and activists in Russia, Poland, and the Balkans dare to behave badly, according to extant social and political norms. The chapters range in focus from traditional actresses on stage and screen to feminist activists in street theater and political organizations.