Understanding the Novel though Popular Culture: Notes on Russian and Soviet (Avto)instsenirovka

This paper attempts to provide a better understanding of the aesthetic nature and cultural function of the (Avto)instsenirovka genre in Late-Imperial and Revolutionary Russia. Widely spread at the end of the 19th century in the context of working-class theatres and temperance reform, theatrical adaptations of novels often served lowbrow audiences as first approaches or ‘surrogates’ for the reading of source texts. Rejected by cultural elites of the 1910s, who perceived it to be a violation of the concept of authorship, in the new political landscape of the 1920s the genre contributed to the birth of a new kind of ‘peasant’ theatre that was shifting from orality to literacy. It is within the theoretical framework of popular culture, in its receptive aspects more than in its ways of production, that this common (yet so far little-analysed) theatrical genre can today give insight into the changes in mass taste and cultural consumption of pre-revolutionary and Soviet society.