UC Berkeley

Russian Opera in the Age of Psychological Prose examines the relationship between opera and literature in Russia between 1866 and 1881, considering the ways in which both art forms reflected and contributed to contemporaneous understandings of human subjectivity. The status and psychology of the individual was a vital issue for Russian writers of the time, owing to both the new social circumstances that arose from Alexander II's Great Reforms and the still-reverberating salvos from the radical critics of the 1860s, who believed that the political destiny of Russia depended on the psychological constitution of Russians. I argue that opera, a genre that has always traded in the externalization of inner emotional states, played an important and little-understood role in these conversations. Interdisciplinary in orientation, my project draws liberally from the fields of musicology, Slavic studies, psychology, comparative literature, and the history of ideas.

After an extended historical and theoretical introduction in "Opera, Literature, and Psychological Realism in 1870s Russia," three chapters focus on the works of Modest Musorgsky and Pyotr Chaikovsky, Russian opera's most celebrated psychologists. "Boris Godunov and the Terrorist" discusses Musorgsky's treatment of Tsar Boris' upstart antagonist, the historical figure of Dmitri the Pretender, in light of the contemporary controversy surrounding Dmitri Karakozov's 1866 assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II. Considering texts by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Chernyshevsky, this chapter contextualizes the Pretender's ambiguous operatic fate within a broad debate about the morality and psychology of political violence. In "Nowhere Man: Evgeny Onegin and the Politics of Reflection in Nineteenth-Century Russia," I put Chaikovsky's opera in dialogue with the reception history of Pushkin's novel, investigating the ways in which the opera responds to, and transforms, key questions about the status and politics of introspection in contemporary Russian culture. Taking its title and central questions from Tolstoy's 1869 War and Peace, "Khovanshchina, The Maid of Orleans, and the Force that Moves the Nations" interrogates Russian ideas about the role of the individual in history. I juxtapose Chaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans with Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, examining the divergent takes these operas present on history and human agency.

Together, these studies propose that opera, far from a mere nationalist vehicle or cultural divertissement, served as public staging ground for the exploration, reflection, and enaction of many of the most important social and intellectual issues of late imperial Russia.