Author Archives: Theo Gardner-Puschak '20

Post-Soviet, Yet Not Post-Irony

During the Stalin era in the USSR , systematic purges of thinkers and artists resulted in mass terror among these groups. By the late 1940s, the message for creatives from the regime was clear: comply, or risk your life. The official artistic doctrine was Soviet Realism, consisting of idealized depictions of the lives of typical Soviet workers. After Brezhnev’s death, the period of Glastnost began, which signaled an “opening” of the harsh constraints of the state. This was an interesting, exploratory period for Soviet artists, as they discovered exactly what they could get away with under the new order. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, questions about how to artistically handle the legacy of the USSR arose. Instead of completely constructing a new “school” of art, post-Soviet creatives reached into the Soviet pass to construct their work. By ironically adding to and copying some of the Soviet Realist themes from the USSR, artists were able to make sharp commentary on the regime, both before and after its existence.

Irony is present in much late and post-Soviet art, especially art that recalls Socialist Realism and the realities of living in the Soviet State. In the SOTS-art (Russian pop art) school of painters, parody of Socialist Realism themes is a central tenant. Often, the prescribed themes behind a picture or work are exaggerated to an ironic degree, thus calling attention the the absurdity of the vast amount of sincere state propaganda preceding it. For example, in Komar and Melamid’s painting The Origin of Socialist Realism, complete irony interrupts a classic, Socialist Realist painting of Stalin. Stalin sits bolt upright in a chair, the picture of firm, guiding leadership. A muse has come to offer her services to him. He looks on without paying any attention to the muse. The title itself is ironic: The Origin of Socialist Realism may bring to mind a stolid, bad creation myth, but that could not resemble less of the truth. In reality, Stalin is gazing ahead, “creating” Socialist Realism, while the muse is attempting to whisper in his ear, to no avail. The inherently hilarious juxtaposition of the painting is evident. Socialist Realism could not possibly have been created by one of the least Socialist and Real figures around: a muse depicted artistically in a classical style.

The movie Window to Paris, created two years after the USSR’s collapse, also contains elements of irony that seek to push back against the tragedies of the past decades, and create a hopeful brand of art for the future. Although it an essential part of the movie, and an understandable one at that, the way in which Nikolai convinces the children to return to Russia is inherently unusual. Imploring them back into the state so many have been trapped in for so long is tragic, as they could feasibly complete their educations in France and return to Russia later. As one little boy says “Our parents will be happy when we stay”. And what parent wouldn’t want the brightest future for their children. The last irony of Window to Paris is exactly this. It is a borderline Socialist Realist value to place the future of one’s children behind the good of the state, yet this somehow prevails in this post-Soviet film.

Moscow May Not Believe in Tears, but it Believes in…

Moscow believes in the Soviet ideal, as proven time and again in Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. Throughout Vladimir Menshov’s award-winning 1980 film, subtle returns to the ideal citizens depicted in early Socialist Realism are interspersed with more modern ideas of gender roles. Without knowledge of Menshov’s politics, it seems as if the movie serves two purposes: grounding the viewer within their preordained role in society, and serving as a vehicle for the Soviet woman to re-affirm her stake, aided by the introduction of a more “modern” (1970s/80s) role for women. This may have been a vitally important task: citizens of the USSR were restless, just 11 years before the fall of the Soviet Union, and any chance to modernize and re-evaluate staid traditional policies might have pacified the people for some much-needed time. With this admission though, and even with the strong female presence found in the film, state ideology is never questioned or contorted beyond recognition. Moscow is a Soviet film at heart, with the intent of bringing culture back into a semi (and modernized) Soviet Realist style.

Moscow Does Not Believe in Tear is a story of three women at its core, and their experiences and trials throughout the film highlight the main themes applied by the writer and director. All migrants from the countryside, or “boonies” as is stated in the film, the women have extremely different mindsets and philosophies. I found region and education to be closely linked, heavily weighted factors throughout the film. Although studying to further their education, the women are all markedly different from the majority of true “Muscovites” that feature in the film. This may be purely a result of class (The Worker’s Dormitory they reside in versus the luxurious apartments of the elites), but I believe education is also a vital piece. The men that Liudmila, and to a lesser extent Katya, are interested in wooing are all have a distinctly academic and educated flavor, with a few notable exceptions. The opening scene is particularly indicative of the role Liudmila will play in the movie: she disparages the country boy, and worker, Nikolai. This will come back to haunt her, as her own husband (Sergei), a Muscovite hockey player, will descend into alcoholism, and the marriage will end tragically. Katya also suffers for adopting a toxic mindset. In her focus on education, she too bears a faint trace of the bourgeois, as does Liudmila’s taste in men. Her seeming acceptance of education and the Muscovite high life reaches its climax at her willingness to go along with Liudmila’s dinner party, which proves to be a vessel to meet eligible bachelors of a higher class. Katya pays for this violation by ending up a single mother. The good-for-nothing TV host father of her child and his clearly bourgeois family elites wants nothing to do with her or her daughter as soon as her ruse has been revealed. When shown that Katya is a member of the true favored Soviet Class (she is of rural origins, and a factory worker) they immediately treat her with disdain. In this way Katya plays a typical Soviet Worker Woman, and pays for her infidelity to the ideology dearly. She only reaches peace and happiness with the vaguely impoverished Gosha, himself a worker.

Unlike her roommates, Tonya has the “right” idea about men from the beginning of the movie. She is engaged in a constant, unending relationship with a fellow rural worker, which ends in as blissfully as it began. She makes no attempt to join in dinner-party like shenanigans, content to hold-true to a Soviet Realist ideal by marrying her fellow worker, and a typical Soviet man. With this, we can see the two distinct pathways taken by the women of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. In the eyes of the regime, the two women that ultimately pay during the movie chose the wrong path: pursuit of men of a higher, merit-less class, driven in part by slightly frivolous education. We see the opposite as well: ultimate obedience, in love and in life, to the collective national experiment of a working man’s state. The movie’s forward-thinking idea of gender dynamics can be encapsulated with one idea. The three women’s ability to choose between different classes and types of men, and to take the paths described above, creates a compelling film that counts a female audience as perhaps its largest stakeholder. With any luck, this was not simply a byproduct of a political agenda. We can only hope it was a sincere leap in the right direction, and a positive influence for Soviet and global cinema in the years to come.

 

A Mother Borne Against a Vicious Tide

At first glance, Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem appears to be straightforward artistic representation of unimaginable pain and oppression. Joseph Stalin’s purges killed and imprisoned a huge percentage of creative individuals during the 1930s, and his harsh policies remained until his death in 1953. Many artists, writers, and political dissidents were imprisoned in Gulag work camps, and many died or were executed there. Millions were interned in the gulags at different times, and the conditions were unimaginably harsh. With little knowledge of Akhmatova’s life, and reading Requiem for the first time, I imagined it to be a tale of her time in the Gulag. Lines such as “We don’t know, we are the same everywhere. / We only hear the repellent clank of keys, / the heavy steps of soldiers” bring to mind the frustration of a prisoner driven mad by the routine and banality of unjust and cruel captivity. Akhmatova’s unusual use of point of view clued me in to Requiem’s real background: it is not story of Akhmatova’s time in the Gulag, but her experiences when her loved ones suffer that fate. It is an easy inclination to read the poems as 3rd person, with Akhmatova addressing herself as “You”, but the frequent mention of her son gave me pause, and I eventually recognized the true narrative behind the cycle.

Another assigned work, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope immediately illuminates any obscured or ambiguous sections of Requiem, as the female Mandelstam gives her personal account of Akhmatova’s association with the Gulag and other forms of the Purges. We learn that the “son” (I flung myself at the executioner’s feet. / You are my son and my terror.”) in Requiem is Akhmatova’s son Lev, who was imprisoned in a Leningrad-area Gulag camp. This took an enormous emotional toll on Akhmatova, as she visited Lev and witnessed his pain firsthand. She writes, “If I could show your former ironic self, / that once carefree sinner of Tsarkoye Selo, / so popular in your circle of friends”. The sentiment offered here is universal: humor (specifically irony) before tragedy is often hard to comprehend as existing, and is portrayed as unimaginable in writings after the event. To offer a current instance of the phenomenon, I must turn to the recent election. There was much disgust among liberal thinkers and comedians at the irony prevalent before the surprise of November 8th. “How could we have acted like this”,  and “How could we be so oblivious to the possibility of catastrophe” were themes repeated often on social media as a collective post-mortem began after the results were finalized. This is an almost direct analog to Akhmatova’s nostalgia and regret for her son’s once “Ironic, carefree, [sinning]” past, when all were oblivious to the tragedy that would soon become fate and reality for so many of their friends and family.

As revealed by Nadezhda Mandelstam, the other subtext of Requiem becomes apparent. Akhmatova’s husband, Nikolay Punin, would meet his death in the Gulag. Her poems, which may be viewed as suicidal when lacking this knowledge, deal intimately with the concept and theory of death, presumably after Punin passed. As she writes in the epilogue of Requiem, “The hour of remembrance has grown close again. /  I see you, hear you, feel you.” Although Lev made it out of the camp alive, Akhmatova would live the rest of her life with the loss of Punin. As is evident in Requiem, Akhmatova also believed that Lev would most likely die in captivity, and this fear greatly influenced her poetry. Helpless against a brutal regime and powerless to save her husband and son, Akhmatova turned to the only area where she could have a voice: art. Her poetry in Requiem attests to the brilliance that emerged from this period of tragedy and loss.

A Passport to Propaganda in Poetry

By the 1930s, the new Soviet Union was already unrecognizable from the fledgling society that rose up after the Russian Revolution of 1917. With Lenin’s death, pure Marxist ideology fell by the wayside as Stalin steadfastly increased the state’s power and moved toward pure authoritarianism. This trend gradually spread to cover all segments of society, including art. Although they were often tolerated in the years immediately after the Revolution, any artistic ideas that could be interpreted in a subversive way were quickly and efficiently stamped out. The fin de siècle and symbolist ideas present in the artistic landscape of pre-revolutionary Russia were replaced by a state sponsored style and theme: Socialist Realism.

In its essence, Socialist Realism painted the state in the best light possible, creating a cultural representation of a perfect Soviet Society. This is exemplified perhaps nowhere better than in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “My Soviet Passport”. The poem is the ultimate distillation of Soviet Realism: it paints the Soviet state and nation as supremely righteous and enviable, while managing to diminish countless other nations at the same time. Mayakovsky begins the poem with “I’d rip out / bureaucracy’s guts / I would .” This is the epitome of pure, socialist rage against capitalism and the bourgeois, although it is ultimately ironic and misplaces. The Soviet government itself would go on to be highly bureaucratic. The Soviet citizen the poem is written from the perspective of notices special treatment being paid to travelers from Great Britain and the United States. The narrator depicts the customs agent as bending over backwards to please and pay respect to the citizens of these great, capitalist societies. It is an extremely unflattering portrait of deference being shown to undeserving old British “uncles” and “lanky Yankees”.

The passport collector’s reaction to the sudden appearance of a Soviet passport under their nose is very different from their reaction to that of any other nation. It is one of shock, awe, and disconcerted reverence. The officer handles it like a “bomb” and a “snake”. These are not pleasant descriptions, but are definitely empowering ones to a Soviet citizen who wishes for reverence and respect from the global community. As a new nation with an untested form of government, the USSR desperately wanted acknowledgement and respect from other nations,  and probably desired the inspiration of a small amount of fear. In a small way, this parallels the version of America that many of our President Elect’s supporters hope will solidify in the coming years. Through his realist poetry, Mayakovsky paints a strong young Soviet Union, one that already has a vaunted position on the world stage. This was obviously intended to place some artificially constructed pride of country in a reader’s heart, as well as providing validation of a powerful and fear-inspiring society.

By the end of his study of “The most valuable of certificates” (the Soviet passport), Mayakovsky makes no pretense about the poem’s true intention. With a burst of nationalistic sentiment that would surely have pleased the state censors to no end, Mayakovsky brings the poem to a close. “Envy me / I’m a citizen / of the USSR!” he writes. In a front to back reading, the poem’s true intention may be clearer, yet its goals are never subtle when read in any manner. Whether it be through fear or genuine ideological fervor, Mayakovsky does an excellent job of promoting the new government’s most central ideals.

Supreme Tragedy

The formidable Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said “Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?” This quote does much to categorize Russian poetry during the second, third, and fourth decades of the 20th century. Political tumult and changes marked this period so drastically that it is almost impossible to divorce art from the Russian Revolution and the young Soviet Union. Many poems between 1918 and the 1930s were focused on the current political and social themes of the time, usually related to the Soviet Union, yet there are a select few that appear rather innocent. Even so, it is veritably impossible to analyze a poem from 1918 without the thought “How is this not about the revolution” entering the brain. Some poems, like Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poems Grow” initially seem to have to political subtext. However, with closer analysis, and a passing understanding of Tsvetaeva’s life and Russian history, the innocent and purely artistic facade of the poem melts away. In the first stanza, Tsvetaeva writes:

Poems grow in the same way as stars and roses,

Or beauty of no use to a family.

To all the wreaths and apotheoses,

One answer: –From where has this come to me?

Although seemingly about the craft of poetry, Tsvetaeva is writing about her own life. The poem was written in August 1918, almost a year after the revolution. Around this time, as a result of the upheaval of the revolution, the city of Moscow (Tsvetaeva’s home) was plunged into a deadly famine. Marina Tsvetaeva made a brutal decision: placing her young daughter in an orphanage in 1919 in the hopes she would survive the famine. She would die there of starvation. When read in the context of these events, the poem takes on an entirely different meaning. When Tsvetaeva writes “Or beauty of no use to a family”, she is literally talking about poems not being something concrete that can be eaten or bartered. The first line “Poems grow in the same way as stars and roses” is her expression of helplessness in the face of the artistic and poetic muse. Poems come to her, yet she has no way of converting verse into a way to save her starving daughter. The last line is her bewilderment at the relentlessness of her creativity. She wonders why she has the ability to create  poetry, and marvels at the way poems “grow” inexplicably. These are not happy thoughts, though. Her gift is great, yet ironic: it gives her no way to feed her family. In the end, her poems served only as personal comfort. Her daughter Irina died alone and abandoned in 1920. Her mother could only scream into the void.

 

 

Cultural Prophecies for Russia’s 20th Century

On November 7th, 1917  Vladimir Lenin ignited the ultimate stage in a decades-long series Bolshevik of “revolutions” against Russia’s Tsarist government. This would result in the former Tsar Nicholas’ execution, and ignite a multi-year civil war that eventually placed Lenin at the head of the new and unprecedented Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1921, the year of the end of the civil war, the celebrated Russian poet Alexander Blok lay on his deathbed. His disillusionment with Lenin’s new state was evident to those surrounding him. Beyond his masterful verse, Blok seemingly had the gift of prophecy. Although the fraught nature of  early 1917 may have betrayed the utter transformation held by the year’s end, Blok drew further connections, writing of a single “great event” in his diary. Even before this, though, Blok’s poetry held many clues as to the writer’s feelings about Russian and her future.

In Russia, Blok writes “I cannot offer you my pity, / I carry my cross as I can… Squander your wild beauty / on every new magician!”. This stanza, written in 1908, reverberates over the next decade of Russian history with incredible accuracy and foresight. Additionally, it is instrumental in understanding the historical context of Blok’s own play, The Puppet Show, and Stravinsky’s celebrated ballet Petrouchka.

The “you” in the Stanza is quite obviously Russia, as is demonstrated clearly by the poem’s title (Russia). Blok speaks from a point of exhaustion and removal, unable to offer himself to guide Russian through the numerous trials ahead and the coming century. He is offering advice of a sort to the nation, but also speaks from a place of defeat. Blok has his own, personal struggles, and cannot serve as a cultural masthead to lead his countrymen in the decades to come. The second part of the stanza speaks of Russia “and squander your wild beauty”, which probably is a behest to not ,be charmed by fast-talking political showmen (“new magicians”). This relates to Petrouchka, as the puppet Petrouchka in the ballet is in love with the Ballerina, even though she loves the Moor. The Ballerina represents Russia, absorbed by wild charms yet never fulfilled in the Tsarist era. Petroucka is most probably an analog of Blok. This is strikingly similar to The Puppet Show, as Pierrot (Petrouchka’s parallel character) has another episode of unrequited love, saying “My girlfriend smiled into his face”. The Columbine (Pierrot’s love) is obsessed with the Harlequin, another mysterious, magician-like figure who she has no real idea of. The Harlequin and Moor are accurate foretelling of the Bolshevik fervor which would soon sweep the nation, intent on change. The public fell “victim” to the Bolsheviks in a similar way to the Ballerina and Columbine, as Blok could only stand by and watch reason be lost.

An Itinerary Indicative of Geographic Context

Nazi Germany reached the Volga River in late fall of 1942. Hitler was intent on crossing the Volga, completing the conquest of Stalingrad, and capturing the rich oil fields of the Caucasus. It is widely accepted in historical circles that the Soviet Union would have been defeated had Stalingrad been a German victory, and the Third Reich’s forces been able to cross the Volga. The Volga is one of many Russian rivers, as is the Dnieper, that have appeared over and over again in name and image in our study of Russia’s culture. There have also been innumerable nameless rivers that are mentioned in the works we have reviewed so far this semester. The Russian visual artistic tradition is as reliably river-featuring as Russian literature. In my review of the paintings for this session, I was struck by the absolute breadth of styles and subjects present even within the Itinerants school of the late 19th century. From Vereshchagin’s paintings of exotic Napoleonic locales, to Makovsky’s epic historical scenes, the 14 Itinerants had as many focuses as there were painters part of the “Society of Traveling Exhibitions”. As a result of this, I focused my analysis on the factors that many of the paintings did have in common. Rivers and bodies of water featured in several paintings, across the Itinerants. Usually in the background, the rivers did not feel like a forced subject, or even prototypical setting. The rivers featured in many of the  paintings felt like a well-established character, one that makes sense when familiar with even a small portion of Russian literature. It is this vaguely unconscious quality that gives the rivers their borderline omni-present quality, in most Russian landscape painting and some outdoor portraits.

The Itinerant Isaak Levitan, quite clearly made rivers the absolute focus of many of his paintings. Levitan’s work is reminiscent of some of the river-obsessed literature we have surveyed, placing rivers at the heart of Russian identity, landscape, and cultural. His ideas of bodies of water emphasize their importance and beauty, as shown in “Evening Bells”.

Levitan’s colleague Mikhail Nesterov incorporated rivers into his art in a slightly different fashion. His rivers appear like a subtle reminder within the paintings, evoking the sentiment “We are here. You owe us everything”. Perhaps most indicative of Nesterov’s attitude is the prominent featuring of a river in his self-portrait.

Other artists feature rivers occasionally, and often in an extremely symbolic fashion, recalling the place they occupy in Russian culture, as Yereshenko does in “Blind Musicians”.

Savrosov (Evening Flight), however, hints at bodies of water, often featuring them around the periphery, as a minor character of sorts among the other pillars of the painting.

This is perhaps the most accurate way of depicting flowing water in Russian life: familiar and omnipresent.

As a Hatter

As an artist, Gogol stands apart from all other creators of literature that we have encountered in the course. His stream-of-consciousness style is remarkable, and he has a certain singular way of painting the desires, motivations, and experiences of the pitiful mid-tier Russian civil servant that immediately took hold of my imagination, and I am sure that of others. He does all this with incredible humor, and manages to construct a narrative with incredible speed and power. The previous Gogol work we studied, The Nose, was understandably fixated on its titular focus. However, this olfactory obsession is not contained to The Nose. At several painfully obvious points in Diary of a Madman, the Gogol work we most recently studied, Gogol brings the faces’ most famous organ to the forefront. On page 165, he rather innocently writes “I had to hold my nose” (as a result of a nasty smell). Later, however, he mentions a dog “trying to sink his teeth” into the narrator’s nose. Again, on page 170, Gogol writes “It’s not as if his made of gold”, in reference to the narrator’s romantic adversary, the Kammerjunker. This is slightly more telling, using the nose as a central to pin an entire personality on. The narrator’s nose is mentioned again on page 176, and on page 178, perhaps most noticeably as the last word in the entire work. This last flourish convinces me that mention of the nose is not coincidental, and instead is entirely purposeful by Gogol. In the last sentence, the King of France is said to have a wart “right under his nose” as a way of devaluing him and demeaning him in the insane narrator’s mind. This goes hand and hand with the earlier description of the Kammerjunker’s nose being “not gold” as a way of rejecting his (in the narrator’s mind) superiority and wealth. I first thought of “noses” in the context of Gogol’s The Nose, it is quite evident after study that Gogol does have a strange fixation on the body part, and particularly enjoys using it as a barometer for certain characters when observed by the narrator.

When reading Diary of a Madman, I initially took the title as a semi-ironic take on the state of the archetypal St. Petersburg bureaucratic existence. As the story progressed, becoming more surreal and Kafkaeque, I took the title at face value, watching with interest as Gogol initiated a subtle descent into insanity. This was cemented during the talking dog (at the apartment) sequence, and carried on into the narrative past this first real expression of “madness” in the narrator. My opinion of the title changed for a third time during the final, “King of Spain” sequence. During this period of the story, in which the narrative becomes feverish and hazy, the title seems more of an overdone farce, Gogol commenting on a modern ideal of insanity, and taking it to full, demonstrative irony. The idea and demonstrated version of madness certainly fits Gogol’s writing in The Nose. I am glad to have discovered Gogol as a writer, realizing his place in the pantheon of surrealists alongside Kafka and Murakami.

Tragedy in Ignorance (Paint for your Audience)

Throughout history, lower classes in practically every society have been severely disadvantaged and depressed, often without hope of improving their circumstances or social mobility. Almost never has this been more true than in Tsarist Russia. Before the Serfs were liberated by Alexander II in 1861, they were bonded to the land they worked. Without being overly pessimistic, the Serfs had very little going for them during the time most of the painters we studied for today were active. Although Orest Kiprensky was technically born a serf, he was quickly sent off to boarding school at the Imperial Academy of Arts, no doubt an educational institution for the privileged. In this way, he was divorced from serfdom, and from the direct experiences of the group he was born into. He, like so many of his contemporaries, spent extensive time in Western Europe, specifically Italy. This travel, especially at the time, would have been a luxury incomprehensible to 99% of the Russian population. Briullov was educated at the Academy as well, and also traveled widely. This was also the case for Alexander Ivanov. Tropinin was born into serfdom, but lucked into an Academy education, and probably had an experience far from his family and those he grew up with. Alexei Venetsianov came from a privileged merchant background. His wealth and stature is evident considering the fact that he “bought a village” and “painted scenes of peasants and rural life”. As a member of the “higher” classes, and definitely not a serf, it is easy to see why Venetsianov painted pictures showing happy peasants. He would have wanted to believe, like we all do in some way, that he was not complicit in the suffering of classes lower than his own. This is plainly evident in this portrait of a radiant peasant girl plowing the fields in spring, exerting no energy.

 springplowland

Venetsianov’s reasons for painting bucolic serf and peasant scenes are closely aligned with the experiences of Briullov and Ivanov. This doesn’t explain why Kiprensky and Tropinin painted peasant scenes free of turmoil, as they were both “from” the lower classes in a way, and would have a better understanding of their struggle. It comes down to marketing: Kiprensky and Tropinin needed to sell paintings to nobles and aristocrats who had no interest in seeing pain and suffering on their walls, particularly in the context of the serfs they oppressed. This is evident in Tropinin’s portrait “The Lace Maker” which depicts a peasant girl approaching her labor with the utmost serenity and grace.

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This would have been a very non-confrontational image for the aristocracy to view and purchase. It only supports their world view. Thus, Tropinin and Kiprensky compromised their knowledge of the true peasant experience to obtain the widespread dispersion and appreciation of their art.

What is “Old” Is New Again

As I myself have written at length about, Russian culture is obsessed with the idea of itself. The Russian nation’s identity is inexorably tied with its self perception, perhaps to an unhealthy level. In the 1800s, introspective pondering took maximum hold over the nation’s psyche. Russia found herself finally with a rich, unified history to look back on, and from which to derive a “Russian” identity. 500, 400, and 300 years beforehand, the direct impact and remnants of the Mongol occupancy were too fresh for Russia’s arts and culture to flourish in a self-derivative way, unconscious of their bastard influences. Before Muscovy united the lands east of the current Baltic states, and until that event was in not-recent memory, the singular Russian cultural focus of “Russian-ness” couldn’t be pursued.

Tchaikovsky’s seminal ballet Swan Lake (1875) represents an era of culture that would have been impossible hundreds of years prior. The great artists of the 1800s, (Tchaikovsky and Pushkin included) drew heavily on a Russian folk tradition that emerged after the solidification of a singular Russian state. The plot of Swan Lake is derived mostly from Russian folktales, just as Pushkin’s epic poem Ruslan and Liudmila is. Pushkin uses devices and imagery extremely reminiscent of folktales to craft a distinct story that is absolutely separate from any of its influences. Pushkin builds a poem that has a folktale-like framework, one that would be familiar to any adult in the 19th century from their childhood. In Swan Lake, the choreography is very similar to the basic structure of the Moiseyev ensemble dances. Extended sections of Swan Lake feature male and female dancers in front of a gender-balanced ensemble. This pairing by gender, as well as the basic ensemble structure is very alike when compared to the folk dancing. Musically, Swan Lake has many folk influences as well. Some melody lines in the ballet are starkly simple, giving reminder to the homophonic, almost monophonic Russian folk music. Often a single voice (melody line) dances above a drone-like, semi-static accompaniment. This is also a motif evident in Swan Lake.