Examining theatrical performance under Stalinist cultural mandates
 
Talk of Joseph Stalin’s “show trials,” the public prosecutions in Moscow’s Hall of Columns in the late 1930s, is so familiar as to obscure the relationship between actual shows—in the Soviet Union’s major theaters—and politics. Travesty Actors: Self and Theater in Stalinist Culture examines theatrical performance within the context of the Soviet cultural establishment’s fashioning of a “genuine Soviet person.” Boris Wolfson focuses on prominent and controversial plays by artists including Aleksandr Afinogenov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha, and Natalia Sats and the efforts of theater companies, like the Moscow Arts Theater, the Meyerhold Theater, and the Central Children’s Theater, to adhere to this cultural mandate while grappling with repression, censorship, and conflicting interpretations of its aims. Drawing on archival materials, diaries and memoirs and eyewitness accounts, Wolfson greatly illuminates the achievements of Soviet theater during this harsh period and the cultural significance of artistic theories and practices for articulating and enacting ideological programs.

BORIS WOLFSON (1975–2024) was an associate professor of Russian at Amherst College. He coedited the volume Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action.
 
SIMON MORRISON is a professor in the Departments of Music and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.

“[Travesty Actors] could not be more timely. For Wolfson, the public spectacles, theatrical performances and show trials that characterized Stalinist culture were designed to model the political transformations that the audience should undergo, and thus to reshape the spectator's consciousness. Creative artists became key to fashioning the new man, or Homo sovieticus, and ushering in the bright Soviet future.” —Times Literary Supplement

“At the very least, Travesty Actors proves the value and vibrancy of Stalinist theater, a topic that scholars have tackled only rarely. More ambitiously, Wolfson’s monograph confirms the merit of bringing Performance Studies to bear on the study of Stalinist subjectivity, a topic that appears woefully relevant in the present day. Whether you had the joy of knowing Boris or not, I urge you to read Travesty Actors so that you can explore its rich analysis of Stalinist side effects, as well as whatever side affects it evokes in you.” —Slavic Review

“Boris Wolfson was the expert on the Stalinist theater. This stunning, engrossing book—the only English-language book on the Stalinist theater—offers a vivid, dramatic and intellectually provocative narrative of very brave playwrights creating theater in a time of absolute terror. Based on extensive primary research, this book adds so much to our understanding of the living details of those dark Soviet 1930s, and it presses us to think deeply about art under dictatorship, a topic relevant even to our present day.” —Alisa Ballard Lin, The Ohio State University