The "Golden Age" of opera-going in Russia, from the 1840s through the 1880s, coincided with the flourishing of Russian prose realism. During this period, opera and literature exerted a reciprocal influence on one another, each adopting and providing a new context for the other's artistic conventions. Opera permeated the culture of the drawing room so often depicted in literature, and literature simultaneously discovered the opera theater. The relationship between these two artistic genres inspired the use of performative models and conventions in Russian literary art, and led to the interpolation of specific operatic subtexts into literature and life.
To many, these genres were antithetical, since opera historically aimed for the high stylistic register, and prose fiction experimented with the low. But the author shows that the attempt to translate opera into prosaic contemporary lives was characteristic of nineteenth-century Russia, since literature provided an alternative cultural theater in Russia to which the opera theater was analogous and parallel. As contested and self-regarding social space, the opera theater offered its visitors a rare public forum. The reception of opera as an art form in Russia resembles the impact of the early cinema on Russian audiences in the early twentieth century, since opera and film both brought about an aesthetic reconfiguring of social space.
This book treats opera-going in imperial Russia from multiple perspectives, and discusses such canonical works as Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and Goncharov's "Oblomov, " major operatic works including Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" and Verdi's "La Traviata, " the impact of Western opera in Russia and the Russian-style prima donna. The book engages with poems, sketches, feuilletons, stories, and rarely-discussed Russian novels, as well as non-fictional reminiscences, reviews, and visual images. Throughout, the book is enriched with examples and anecdotes about performers, spectators, and critics, and reception histories of specific operatic works.

"In "Mapping St. Petersburg," Julie Buckler rewrites the exclusionary ideology of classicism that has dominated pictorial and verbal discourses on Petersburg from Pushkin's 'Bronze Horseman' to the Petersburg Tricentenary of 2003. Meticulously researched and illustrated, deftly theorized, and vividly written, the book presents an exhilaratingly concrete study of Petersburg urban design and architectural history, focusing on the many 'eclectic' rental buildings, markets, cemeteries, and places of amusement that constitute a physical testimony to the aesthetic tastes and mixed social experience inscribed in them. Buckler explores the rich array of lowbrow and middlebrow writing on Petersburg that furnishes the forgotten matrix of urban folklore on which the Russian realist novel drew. Her intellectual mission: to restore to visibility the elided 'middle' of Russian society and taste that has been so carefully expunged from the cultural record and has only recently become a focus of interest for Russian imperial historians and students of cityscape as embodied myth."--Monika Greenleaf, Stanford University

"This is a fascinating book. It is beautifully written and contains countless original details, insights, and observations. The rich array of materials offers a great deal of new information about and analysis of the cultural history of St. Petersburg. Buckler's approach represents a major contribution not only to Russian studies and comparative literature but also to cultural geography, history, and urban anthropology."--Alexei Yurchak, University of California, Berkeley

"This strong, timely book celebrates the three-hundredth anniversary of St. Petersburg in a manner that isgenuinely--not just rhetorically--interdisciplinary. In this exotic ex-centric city, with its autoreferential literary legacy and its 'anti-Moscow' mystique, the spatial and verbal arts came together concretely in a monolithic myth of violent beginnings and apocalyptic ends. So monolithic was this myth that it cultivated its own areas of blindness. Buckler brings these blind spots back into the light."--Caryl Emerson, Princeton University