Beth Holmgren

Russia--women--culture

Introduction by Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren Part I: Spiritual Facilitations 1. The Second Fantasy Mother, or All Baths Are WomenOs BathsNNancy Condee 2. The Ritual Fabrics of Russian Village WomenNMary B. Kelly Part II: Body Works 3. Keeping A-breast of the Waist-land: WomenOs Fashion in Early-Nineteenth-Century RussiaNHelena Goscilo 4. Female Fashion, Soviet Style: Bodies of IdeologyNOlOga Vainshtein 5. Getting under Their Skin: The Beauty Salon in Russian WomenO LivesNNadezhda Azhgikhina and Helena Goscilo Part III: Domestications 6. Flirting with Words: Domestic Albums, 1770ETH1840NGitta Hammarberg 7. Domestic Porkbarreling in Nineteenth-Century Russia or Who Holds the Keys to the Larder?NDarra Goldstein 8. Dirty Women: Cultural Connotations of Cleanliness in Soviet RussiaNNadya Peterson Part IV: Performing Arts 9. Women on the Verge of a New Language: Russian Salon Hostesses in the First Half of the Nineteenth CenturyNLina Bernstein 10. Stepping Out/Going Under: Women in RussiaOs Twentieth-Century SalonsNBeth Holmgren 11. Pleasure, Danger, and the Dance: Nineteenth-Century Russian VariationsNStephanie Sandler 12. OThe IncomparableO Anastasiia VialOtseva and the Culture of PersonalityNLouise McReynolds Part V: Class Acts 13. Gendering the Icon: Marketing Women Writers in Fin de Si cle RussiaNBeth Holmgren 14. Handicrafts and Creative Freedom: Russian WomenOs ArtNAlison Hilton Contributors Index

Toward an Understanding of Gendered Agency in Contemporary Russia

Assessments of Russian women’s current social and political status must take into account the complicated legacy of Soviet women’s “emancipation.” Although the Soviet government enforced women’s access to higher education and a broad array of professional opportunities, it never challenged traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, or the double burden tacitly assigned women. It did not invest in products and services that would have eased “women’s work” as homemakers and caretakers, nor did it protect women from sexual harassment on the job. The transition years have bared, glorified, and globalized the patriarchal state that lay just beneath the socialist veneer of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Putin government has repackaged that patriarchy as conventionally and commercially masculinist. Women do exercise some power as consumers and mothers; they seek other-than-material fulfillment in facilitating positions rather than face opprobrium as public leaders. Some are attempting to scout new forms of agency as managers and business entrepreneurs. Yet there is no straightforward upward ladder for women in work and no generally acceptable movement toward lobbying for women’s rights. The women who wield the greatest sociopolitical influence in Russia today are media pundits, writers of serious literature, and journalists who combine writing with general social and political activism. In order to bridge the great divide in historical conditioning and contemporary circumstance that separates us from Russian women, we must work toward a better understanding of their complex forms of agency.

Acting Out: Qui pro Quo in the Context of Interwar Warsaw

In the turbulent context of interwar Polish politics, a period bookended by the right-wing nationalists’ repression of an ethnically heterogeneous state, several popular high-quality cabarets persisted in Warsaw even as they provoked and defied the nationalists’ harsh criticism. In their best, most influential incarnation, Qui pro Quo (1919–1932) and its successors, these literary cabarets violated the right’s value system through their shows’ insistent metropolitan focus, their stars’ role-modeling of immoral behavior and parodic impersonation, and their companies’ explicitly Jewish–Gentile collaboration. In the community of the cabaret, which was even more bohemian and déclassé than that of the legitimate theater, the social and ethnic antagonisms of everyday Warsaw society mattered relatively little. Writers and players bonded with each other, above all, in furious pursuit of fun, fortune, celebrity, artistic kudos, and putting on a hit show. This analysis details how the contents and stars of Qui pro Quo challenged right-wing values. Its shows advertised the capital as a sumptuous metropolis as well as a home to an eccentric array of plebeian and underworld types, including variations on the cwaniak warszawski enacted by comedian Adolf Dymsza. Its chief female stars—Zula Pogorzelska, Mira Zimińska, and Hanna Ordonówna—incarnated big-city glamour and sexual emancipation. Its recurring Jewish characters—Józef Urstein’s Pikuś and Kazimierz Krukowski’s Lopek—functioned as modern-day Warsaw’s everymen, beleaguered and bedazzled as they assimilated to city life. Qui pro Quo’s popular defense against an exclusionary nationalism showcased collaborative artistry and diverse, charismatic stars.

Collecting the Show on the Road: Spotlight on Anna Mieszkowska and the Polish Cabaret Archive

The article introduces and then gives a transcription of an interview with Anna Mieszkowska, an archivist at the Polish Academy of Sciences who specializes in collecting materials relating to Polish cabaret of the interwar and wartime era. The introduction justifies the historical and cultural importance of her work and outlines the materials housed in this unique archive and how they are organized. In the interview, Mieszkowska chronicles her efforts to document prewar and emigre cabaret. She began her research tentatively in the 1980s, despite the inattention given by Polish theater studies of that time to cabaret and official disapproval. Mieszkowska’s research and related travels became easier after the fall of communism, but more urgent due to the advancing age of surviving performers. The interview also touches on Mieszkowska’s personal engagement with her subjects and their surviving friends and family, the place of cabaret in Polish culture, and comparison of Polish cabaret traditions with those of other countries, ending with an appended list of significant cabaret artists.