| During and after her lifetime, the early twentieth-century actress-entrepreneur Vera Fedorovna Kommissarzhevskaia was the object of contradictory mythologization. Symbolist poets like Aleksandr Blok idealized her as the "youth of these last, crazy, terrible but wonderful years." Conservative critic Aleksandr Kugel' further bolstered the actress's identity with the younger generation and, conversely, with the marker of conservative attitudes towards female social behavior, femininity, by dubbing her the "fragile child of her time." Kommissarzhevskaia was the "lyrical note" on the Russian stage, yet her voice also "echoed the world orchestra" (Blok). Like a prescient mystic, the actress was eulogized as the "unfurled banner of a promised Spring" (Blok). But the determination with which she advocated theater reformation likened her to a "Joan of Arc" (Osip Mandel'shtam) her tours were "Religious Processions" (Aleksandr Serebrov) and her talent and conviction "led her to Golgotha" (Nikolai Evreinov). This varied typology was founded on a complex base composed of the actress's personal and professional ideology, cultural modeling, and her audiences' aesthetic and political orientation.In this dissertation, I analyze the conflict between public and private representations of the self, based on a study of the actress's personal letters: the fundamental object of inquiry is to determine to what extent Kommissarzhevskaia directed her own-myth making or commodification. I proceed with an analysis contrasting discourse and thematic concerns found in the actress's epistolary self-representations with three primary public images: the Symbolist Eidolon, the femme fragile, the militant martyr. I argue that Kommissarzhevskaia's personal letters can be seen as cultural artifacts: self-reflexive women's writing that encapsulates the period's dominant literary impulses, social themes, and aesthetic preoccupations through the experience of the individual. |
