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Speaker(s): Boris Wolfson, Amherst College

Boris Wolfson, Amherst College

‘Stage Fright: Performing (for) Stalin in New Soviet Drama, 1932-1934’

January 16, 2013: 5.15pm

Pigott Hall (Building 260), Room 216

The task of creating new scripts for the Soviet stage was invested in the early 1930s with an urgency that complicates our understanding of the era's cultural dynamics. The contradictory attempts to define a Soviet dramatic idiom played a crucial role in shaping one of the decade's most important spectacles of power, the First Congress of Soviet Writers. How do the efforts to stage a ‘living human being’ for Stalin's many audiences disclose the force of Soviet performance?

BORIS WOLFSON teaches Russian culture at Amherst College. He has published on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian cultural history, and is completing a study of theater, performance, and modes of self-understanding in the Soviet 1930s.