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The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia.

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The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia. By Julie A. Buckler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. [vii, 294 p. ISBN 0-8047-3247-7. $45.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

Julie A. Buckler's The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia is a valuable addition to our understanding of the development of Russian culture during the nineteenth century. The central thrust of her argument is that western opera--including its plots, characters, and performers--was an extremely important component of Russian culture far beyond the confines of the opera house. What has sometimes been seen as a zero-sum contest between the western European and the Russian homegrown culture is shown to be the development of a triumphant Russian culture which incorporates both streams. Buckler's book succeeds in showing how that assimilation took place in the area of opera as musical genre, literary topic, and social activity; she shows how opera in all its facets was experienced by audiences and incorporated into the realist literature of the nineteenth century.

For music historians, this study is a worthy addition to that of Robert Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism, and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981) and the more recent "Ital'yanshchina" chapter in Richard Taruskin's Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Each of the three studies addresses a different aspect of mid-nineteenth-century Russian musical culture, although some of Buckler's ideas can be seen in embryo in Taruskin's chapter. A fourth book,...

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