Opera and Obsolescence in the Russian Culture Wars.

SOVIET Union; RUSSIA

The article considers the persistence of pre-revolutionary Russian operas in the Soviet repertory, as tolerated remnants of a bourgeois past. Another layer of anachronism in the mid-twentieth-century productions that continue to be staged in Russia is explored. Also explained is the theme of cultural obsolescence as played out in the history of opera at the two great turning points in Russian twentieth-century history, those of 1917 and 1991. Described as well, is the era of the October Revolution and the ensuing civil war, when the very existerussiance of opera as an institution was threatened.