Imitations of Life

Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger, eds.

"Melodrama bore all the defects and virtues of its parent, the French Revolution. Given to wild flights, neck-breaking twists and turns, stark judgements of good and evil, the genre also brought public attention onto private life and the vicissitudes of underprivilege. Melodrama taught much to the Russians who appropriated it. As the contributors to the present volume demonstrate, it taught them how to see, to understand and even how to accomplish history. An imitator surely, but also a creator of life--we can all be grateful to Neuberger and McReynolds for bringing this to our attention."--James von Geldern, Macalaster College

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction / Louise McReynolds and Joan NeubergerThe Misanthrope, the Orphan, and the Magpie: Imported Melodrama in the Twilight of Serfdom / Richard StitesMelodramatizing Russia: Nineteenth-Century Views from the West / Julie A. BucklerThe Importance of Being Unhappy, or, Why She Died / Beth HolmgrenMelodrama as Counterliterature? Count Amori’s Response to Three Scandalous Novels / Otto BoeleHome Was Never Where the Heart Was: Domestic Dystopias in Russia’s Silent Movie Melodramas / Louise McReynoldsAlcohol is Our Enemy! Soviet Temperance Melodramas of the 1920s / Julie A. CassidayMelodrama and the Myth of the Soviet Union / Lars T. LihSoviet Family Melodrama of the 1940s and 1950s: From Wait for Me to The Cranes Are Flying / Alexander ProkhorovConventional Melodrama, Innovative Theater, and a Melodramatic Society: Pavel Kohout’s Such a Love at the Moscow University Student Theater / Susan ConstanzoBetween Public and Private: Revolution and Melodrama in Nikita Mikhalkov’s Slave of Love / Joan NeubergerPlaying Dead: The Operatics of Celebrity Funerals, or, The Ultimate Silent Part / Helena GosciloSuggested ReadingContributorsIndex