“In Her Own Repertoire”: Ksenia Kourakina on the Stage of the Cameo Theater Krivoe Zerkalo [Distorted Mirror]

Abstract

This article presents an attempt to reconstruct the intermediate repertoire of the cameo theater Krivoe Zerkalo [Distorted Mirror]. During the Soviet period of the theater’s activity, the “singer of intimate songs” Ksenia Kourakina (1903–1988) enjoyed considerable success among the sideshow actresses, who, according to the press announcements, performed “in her own repertoire” (a Russian expression, meaning “behaving in her own typical manner”).

The possibility of a partial reconstruction has been provided by materials of the State Museum of Musical and Theatrical Art (St. Petersburg). The funds of Kourakina’s archive comprise a repertoire list of 35 items, a number of musical materials (partly published, partly handwritten), as well as an autobiography written by the singer in 1950. Another source of information was the press of Petrograd (which was called Leningrad from 1924 to 1991), primarily, the journal Rabochiy i teatr [The Worker and the Theater]. The scarce amount of responses by reviewers to Kourakina’s performances, along with an analysis of the available part of the sources, allowed us to arrive at the following conclusions.

Ksenia Kourakina’s overall repertoire was diverse both in terms of genre and of subject matter and, most importantly, reflected the tastes and preferences of the Soviet public in the late 1920s. The time-tested pre-revolutionary “hits” coexisted in it with new infatuations. Kourakina performed new songs about miners and street children, “street songs” and a particular song about a brick factory — the famous song Kirpichiki [The Little Bricks]. Some of them have subsequently become iconic in the history of Soviet culture. However, Kourakina herself maintained a preference of pre-revolutionary songs of the “era of tabby gowns,” — such as, Dolores, Latinsky kvartal [The Latin Quarter], etc. The most significant of them is Shumit nochnoy Marsel [Marseille is Bustling with Noise at Night] by Yuri Milyutin and Nikolai Erdman. Having been composed already in the Soviet era, it made use of the musical and literary cliches of the Silver Age, “referring” to the works of Alexander Blok, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, to Georges Bizet’s Carmen, an opera that was very popular in pre-revolutionary Russia.

On the stage of Krivoe zerkalo Ksenia Kourakina did not limit herself to merely performing her songs as interludes. She “played out” the plotlines, making use of the so-called “declamatory singing” that combined “musical melodiousness, declamation and acting”. Thereby, Kourakina’s interludes presented “song theater,” the foundations of which had been previously laid by Alexander Vertinsky, Izabella Kremer and Ilia Ilsarov on the stages of Russian cabarets and cameo theaters even before 1917.

Keywords: Ksenia Kourakina, cameo theater Krivoe Zerkalo [Distorted Mirror], stage in the era of NEP, Matvey Blunter, Yuri Milyutin, Nikolai Erdman