Jamie Catherine Blake, Ph.D. 2022

Advisor: Annegret Fauser

Dissertation Title: Architects of Russian America: Transnational Musical Networks in the Early Twentieth Century

Find it in the library here.

Dissertation Abstract:

Historiography has tended to mark Russian presence in the United States with the beginning of the “first wave”—the emigrants who fled the 1917 Russian revolution and ensuing civil war. This timepoint, however, ignores an entire generation of Russian-American immigrants expressly because so many of these early emigrants were Russian Jews. Moreover, the 1900s and 1910s saw major touring artists from the Russian Empire finally start to reach the United States in substantial numbers. The networks which formed between early Russian-American immigrants and Russian touring artists proved to be crucial, as the former became cultural mediators for the latter. Meanwhile, audiences in the United States looked to these newly-arriving Russian performers as exemplars of Russianness and Russian culture. As artists such as ballerina Anna Pavlova, violinist Mischa Elman, pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch, and operatic bass Fyoder Chaliapin performed on US stages, audiences and critics took their performances as an opportunity to better understand what Russianness looked and sounded like, convinced that nationality—and indeed race—would be visible and audible in ways that they could pinpoint and describe.

Through extensive archival work, this dissertation reveals the complex implications of social networks among early Russian emigrants and visitors in the United States. Ultimately, many of these visitors would, themselves, become emigrants, and so what had begun for many of them as a global expansion of their performance work in Russia eventually became their diasporic lives. This study examines the formation of these early networks through documents correspondence, personal and published writings, keepsakes, interviews, journalism, and critical press coverage. The combination of self-fashioned emigrant writing, the private work of institutions to brand and market Russian performers, and public reception history provides a fascinating window into discourses of Russianness in the United States. A poorly-understood conflation of race, geography, and nationality, Russianness at the turn of the century was largely marketed as an exotic novelty. By the 1920s, however, expectations of peculiar exoticisms in Russian classical music began to fade as Russian music and Russian performers became integrated into US musical institutions and cultural life.