One of the major issues addressed in Fowler’s Beau Monde is the tension between the cultural exchange inherent in Ukrainian culture, and the Soviet desire to portray Ukrainian culture as authentically as possible, thus requiring the separation of the different ethnic elements of Ukrainian culture into different institutional and aesthetic forms. This prompts the question, how did the policy of cultural separation affect inter-ethnic relations between artists and people more generally in the Soviet Ukraine?
Chapter one starts with the portrayal of inter-ethnic relations in Chekhov’s story “Rothschild’s Fiddle”, which depicts the contradiction that such relations held. On the one hand, while Jews and gentiles participated in each other’s musical ensembles, Jews suffered under fierce anti-Semitism from there gentile counterparts in these ensembles.
As shown in the reading, the Russian Empire even encouraged this cultural exchange in that, as opposed to the situation the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there were no guilds to limit the travel of musicians: “Soviet ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski told a revealing story about recording a musician he assumed was an authentic Klezmer, only to find out that the fellow was, in fact, a Pole playing Jewish tunes in Kyiv courtyards. Unlike Austria-Hungary, whose strictly enforced guild system made it difficult for musicians to travel outside their local district, Russia had no such guild system limiting musicians’ mobility. (Fowler, Pg. 47)
Lastly, the cultural exchange not only occurred between artists in the context of musical ensembles, but also in the domestic sphere: “Ukrainian women often served in Jewish homes. Jews, therefore, would hear Ukrainian lullabies and everyday sounds and, in turn, Ukrainian women would have taken Jewish melodies back to their own families.” (Fowler, Pg. 47)
As can be derived from the text, this mutually beneficial cultural exchange happening within the domestic sphere did not occur without some level of antipathy between Jews and gentiles engendered by the employer-employee relationship that was between Jews and gentiles. This is most readily seen in the Ukranian play The Hireling, which depicts a Ukrainian orphan abused by a Jewish master.
As Fowler goes on to describe, during the Soviet era, the policy of Korenizatsiia tried to separate the different elements of Ukrainian culture: “The literary fair solved this dilema, like good Soviets, by organizing the arts according to ethno-national categories: Jewish audiences were assigned to the Jewish theatre with Jewish artists and Jewish plays; Ukrainian audiences to the Ukrainian theatre with Ukrainian artists and Ukrainian plays; Polish audiences to the Polish theatre with Polish artists and Polish ; and so forth.” (Fowler, Pg. 119)
The question is, did this attempted separation of the arts change the relationship between Jews and gentiles in Ukraine more generally? Did the policy of Korenizatsiia paradoxically lessen anti-Semitism between artists in the Soviet era, did anti-Semitism lessen for other reasons, or does Fowler just neglect to mention anti-Semitism in the Soviet era to the extent that she brings it up in the pre-Soviet context?
One glimpse we get into the relationship between Jewish and Ukrainian cultural institutions has to do with the Ukrainian theater lending money to the Yiddish theater even when it did not have enough money for itself. This would indicate a level of respect and friendship between the artistic communities of the two ethnicities, even when the Soviet government officially privileged the Ukrainian language theater because it was a theater associated with the titular nationality.
While there was this level of financial friendship, and while Fowler does recognize that the ethnic categories set up by the Soviet government broke down both “artistically and institutionally”, the example she gives of possible interaction between Ukrainian and Yiddish theater involves the director of the Yiddish theater in Kharkiv, Saul Guzhnovskii, refusing to put on the Ukrainian play Myna Mazailo because of fears that his Jewish audience would not be able to understand it, even if it were translated into Yiddish. This is despite the fact that as a general principle, Guzhnovskii believed that there should be more Ukrainian plays translated into Yiddish, and performed on the Yiddish stage.
Tangentially, I want to conclude with the question: Just as the policy of Korenizatsiia separated the constituent parts of Ukrainian culture, could it be that the Tsarist policy of Ukrainian and Yiddish cultural repression brought the cultures together?
This is a minor point, but your last tangential question – on how Tsarist policy shaped theatrical culture in Imperial Ukraine – gets precisely at Fowler’s narrative of the imperial period falls short. Fowler’s claim, here, is more subtle than the Russian empire simply encouraging more cultural exchange compared to counterpart empires. It argues that Tsarist attempts to control cultural production (especially in minority languages) coexisted alongside its flourishing – restrictions Ukrainian theatrical programming, for example, somehow coexisted with a more vibrant Ukrainian theatre scene than Habsburg Galicia; and that restrictions on Jewish mobility (the Pale of Settlement and all that) in fact coexisted with unusually mobile Jewish musicians with a pan-Imperial audience.
In fact, Fowler goes one step further and argues that these Tsarist policies, in practice, actually encouraged cultural production: the Russian state’s “inability to enact [censorship policies] in practice created great opportunities for artists[…] legal restrictions circumscribed [mobility…] yet the [theatrical] network produced and extraordinarily mobility[.]” (52-53) But, frustratingly enough, I don’t think any casual explanation is given. It’s understandable, since Fowler’s main point here is to establish the sheer richness of Ukrainian theatrical culture, rather than explain its pre-Soviet origins – but the natural thing to do is compare pre-Soviet and Soviet-era narratives, and Fowler doesn’t help us here. (For example, the pan-national mobility remains, but the state takes now takes more initiative in directing cultural production. What changes, now?)
I think the Chekhov story illuminates an interesting tension between anti-semitism and integrated cultural production in the Russian Empire that it seems was lost in the Soviet era. The protagonist is virulently anti-semitic but that bigotry plays second fiddle to his desire to produce the music he wants to play. The author explains why the Jewish orchestra continued to invite him to play with them despite his anti-semitism, because he was so talented, but never explains why he continues to agree to play with them. On the one hand, this emphasizes the harsh anti-semitism that existed under the Tsarist regime but it also highlights the way cultural production and exchange was able to transcend prejudices. Under the Soviet regime it seems like the attempts at isolating ethnic groups from each other may have decreases anti-semitism but it also decreased incentive to work together despite prejudices.
I found her narratives in Chapters 2 and 3 difficult to follow and wish she had been more explicit about applying her examples to the moments when she lays out her argument. However, I think Fowler’s narrative in Chapter 1 effectively demonstrates the eponymous “state and stage in Soviet Ukraine.” While the Soviet government invested their efforts in theatre for the promotion of korenizatsiia, the tsarist state advanced their own centralized agenda in service of preserving its own power. But artists in both systems found ways to engage in cultural exchange outside of prescribed hierarchies. (94) I also think the first chapter does a good job of setting up how the collapse of imperial networks made it easy for the Red Army and Soviet officials to take such a prominent role in theatrical production. I found the paradox between the roles of the elite and the masses in production and reception fascinating in Chapter 3. (117)
To address your last question and draw upon what others have said in the comments, I think that the Imperial Period (it’s policies and what actually happened on the ground) laid the groundwork for the transition to Soviet policy and cultural construction. I think this feels like an obvious point — that is typically the way that history works — but I think that Fowler wanted to emphasize the shifts that occurred and spent a great deal of time describing theater in Tsarist Russia for a reason. Most texts we have read gave us a little background on the imperial period (some just a few sentences), but Fowler chooses to devote a whole chapter to it. The cultural exchange, the theater that took place mainly outside of big cities, and the lack of ability of officials to enforce censorship policy are the three components I think Fowler wants us to remember about theater in the imperial period. While giving no credit to tsarist officials, I think she shifts the credit to people on the ground that did not have to comply with the policies of the officials so much.
When Fowler moves into the revolution and the creation of the Soviet Union, I think she strongly wants to suggest that the groundwork laid in the tsarist period is really important in explaining theater under Soviet power. I think there are many ways we can see the influence in a way that is significant. For one, Fowler talks about artists and writers that rose to power and officialdom in chapter 2. These people were not elites by any means, they came from modest backgrounds from all different places in the Soviet Union. I think the emphasis on theater that took place outside of major cities in the tsarist period has a lot to do with this. The arts flourished all over the place in the imperial period (not because of the officials or policy, but in spite of the officials and their policy) and that focus on arts probably had some part in influencing writers in those areas that would later go on to become Soviet officials in cultural construction.
“The question is, did this attempted separation of the arts change the relationship between Jews and gentiles in Ukraine more generally?”
I think that the effort by officials to enforce the separation perhaps had the most impact towards affecting the relationship between Jews and gentiles in the Ukraine. At the beginning of the first full paragraph on page 120, Fowler contends that, “these categories [referring to separate language theaters] necessarily broke down in practice, both artistically and institutionally…yet cultural and political elites still aspired to the full separation of cultural institutions by ethnicity…” Fowler then cites some examples of this in practice and I think that it is perhaps very telling of how these “cultural and political elites” perpetuated ethnic separation, even when these cultural categories had the potential to (and eventually did) break down in practice.
A couple of moments in the reading suggest that Soviet policy might not have been completely successful in separating the various aspects of Ukrainian culture in theater. The first is the story about the Soviet ethnomusicologist who “told a revealing story about recording a musician he assumed was authentic klezmer only to find out that the fellow was, in fact, a Pole playing Jewish tunes in Kyiv courtyards” (47). This suggests that the cultural integration may not always be recognizable and separable even to a Soviet expert. The Cherry Elf story explores a similar dilemma. A major theme of the work is struggle to define what it means to be a “Soviet Ukrainian” which Vyshnia presents through his vague list of characteristics of Scratchranians. These both suggest some cultural exchange or fluidity despite Soviet policy and present the conflict of geographic space and ethnicity in the construction of Soviet culture.