Confessions of a Psikhopatka : Opera Fandom and the Melodramatic Sensibility in Fin‐de‐Siècle Russia

This article looks at satirical depictions of opera fans and devotees' letters to the Bolshoi Theater celebrity bass Fedor Shaliapin to gain a sense of the ways urbanites fantasized and moralized on the eve of revolution. It argues that the imperatives and narrative structure of melodrama–both as a genre and meaning‐making system–shaped fans' yearnings and self‐expression. The letters document the emergence of new sensibilities regarding self, desire, and feeling–sensibilities made possible and reinforced by Europe‐wide phenomena like modernism, mass media, celebrity culture, and consumerism, as well as a political culture and myths specific to Russia. Fans loved and confessed melodramatically, verbally paying tribute to the authenticity and extraordinariness of the star, the virtue of pathos, and the autonomy of the emoting individual. Devotees appropriated press‐generated negative images of fans (as transgressive psikhopatki ) in the arrangement of their identity, inverting the valuation and meaning commonly ascribed to them. Through the practice of confessional letter writing, born of an unrequited desire for intractable personalities who constantly alternated between operatic roles and “real life,” fans imagined and fashioned themselves as highly expressive, exceptional, and therefore ethical beings. The article seeks ultimately to initiate a discussion about the relevance of the melodramatic sensibility beyond the fin de siècle : melodramatic understandings of self and sincerity were furthered by Bolshevik political culture, autobiographical practices, and performances. Melodrama also offered a potentially radical aesthetics and subversive approach to Soviet life.