Russian Empire -- Tatar Theater the Politics of Culture in Late Imperial Kazan.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways in which Tatar intellectual discourse on the meaning of Tatar identity and the Tatars’ place within the Russian empire was embodied on the theatrical stage. It also explores the internal dynamics of early-twentieth-century Tatar society, and studies the divisions within the Tatar reform movement. My main protagonists are the iashliar, the second generation of Tatar reformers and innovators of Tatar theater, who, already educated in reform Muslim schools in Kazan, rebelled both against the traditional norms of Tatar society and the social and cultural centrism of the older generation of reformers, the jadids. Theater was seen by the iashliar as a new public space in which they could propagate emerging notions of nationhood (taken in the European Romantic sense) and school the audience in European-like sensibilities. Importantly, theater was essential to the Tatar cultured public’s perception of their society as modernizing and progressive. Unlike other forms of cultural production and intellectual endeavor which flourished in Tatar society after the First Russian Revolution of 1905, theater offered an opportunity for co-experience among playwrights, actors and the audience, thereby testing the ways in which intellectuals’ deliberations on identity, nation and modernity converged with the tastes of the general public. By analyzing Tatar theatrical reviews and drama, I attempt to reconstruct Tatar theatrical performances in the early 20th century Kazan. I seek out the ways in which these demonstrated the limits and diversity of expressions of Tatar identity, arguing that, at the turn of the last century, the meaning of Tatar identity was highly contested, with different groups such as jadids, iashliar, the wealthy Tatar bourgeoisie and the lowbrow public offering competing claims. I also demonstrate the extent to which Russian imperial censorship structured Tatar theatrical repertoire, thereby affecting audiences’ tastes, and show how some iashliar bought into the Russian imperial conceptual framework of struggle between the “rational and progressive West” and “irrational and barbaric East.” Finally, I analyze how, after the October Revolution, the fluidity of Tatar identities was structured into a rigid narrative of heroism and suffering informed by Soviet ideological tropes.