In June 1920, assessing the international significance of the revolutionary era that had brought him to power in Russia, Vladimir Lenin adopted a theatrical idiom for one of its most important events, the Revolution of 1905. &“Without the &‘dress rehearsal&’ of 1905,&” he wrote, &“the victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible.&” According to Lenin&’s statement, political anatomy borrowed in a teleological sense from the performing arts.

This book explores an inversion of Lenin&’s statement. Rather than question how politics took after the performing arts, Paul du Quenoy assesses how culture responded to power in late imperial Russia. Exploring the impact of this period&’s rapid transformation and endemic turmoil on the performing arts, he examines opera, ballet, concerts, and &“serious&” drama while not overlooking newer artistic forms thriving at the time, such as &“popular&” theater, operetta, cabaret, satirical revues, pleasure garden entertainments, and film. He also analyzes how participants in the Russian Empire&’s cultural life articulated social and political views.

Du Quenoy proposes that performing arts culture in late imperial Russia&—traditionally assumed to be heavily affected by and responsive to contemporary politics&—was often apathetic and even hostile to involvement in political struggles. Stage Fright offers a similar refutation of the view that the late imperial Russian government was a cultural censor prefiguring Soviet control of the arts. Through a clear picture of the relationship between culture and power, this study presents late imperial Russia as a modernizing polity with a vigorous civil society capable of weathering the profound changes of the twentieth century rather than lurching toward an &“inevitable&” disaster of revolution and civil war.