This lecture event, cosponsored by The Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and The Sound & Society workshop will be rescheduled for Fall 2019

Olga Panteleeva

Lecturer in Musicology at Utrecht University

The Politics of Cultural Superiority in Putin’s Russia

There will be no pre-circulated paper for this workshop 

Abstract: Increasing anti-Western sentiment in Russia has received much attention in political science and sociology. However, scholars in these disciplines tend to adopt top-down approaches, centering on the official discourse emanating from the Kremlin. These approaches fall short of theorizing the widespread grassroots support for Putin’s government. Building on current theories of populism and political emotions I argue that one of the sites where feelings of Russian cultural and moral superiority are manufactured, creating the demand for populist policies, is classical music. Classical music has been a trump card for Russia in the power struggle with the “bourgeois West” since the 1930s. Appropriation of Western European masterpieces for the Soviet artistic canon, further contributed to the idea that Russia is heir and guardian to the great Western European culture, which is being abused in the licentious West. In this talk I explore the debates around the genre of Regieoper – an approach to operatic staging universally associated in Russia with Western European music culture. Positioning contemporary discourses around opera within the long tradition of equating aesthetic with ethics, I show how the “cultural heritage” became paramount in constructing the ideas of national superiority in Putin’s Russia.

Bio: Olga Panteleeva earned her doctorate in musicology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015 and has since been a Lecturer in Musicology at Utrecht University. During the 2017-18 academic year she was a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University. Her research focuses on contemporary politics of music, the history of musicology, and music during the Cold War. Her book The Making of Soviet Musicology examines the ways in which humanistic knowledge was created in the Soviet state and traces the institutionalization of musicology as a legitimate humanities discipline in the 1920s. Her current research project, ClassicalMusic and the “Cold War 2.0”, investigates the role of classical music in the construction of Soviet and post-Soviet identity vis-à-vis “the West”.  Building on insights from Cold War studies and political science, this project examines the ways in which the Cold War trope of Russian cultural superiority has regained relevance during the Putin era.