EMPATHY AND KNOWLEDGE OF OTHERS

Julya paces the parquet, blond hair coiled severely, hands clasped atop padded buttocks encased in a boxy gray, ill-fitting suit. She sputters abuse at her audience: fifteen classmates sprawled on the floor, their teacher seated in a chair, and a video camera. Moscow, November 2002. The Americans prepare to invade Iraq, Putin serves his third year as president, and these students begin their first term at the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts (RATI/GITIS).Footnote ¹ Inside its walls, Julya depicts the head of her high school, an older woman in a town two hours north. She yells: “I REQUEST that TODAY at the meeting with ZhshzhshshzhshuGAnov you ALL be there!” (Zjuganov is the leader of the Russian Communist Party.) Some students slap the parquet laughing. Their teacher is less impressed.

The assignment had been: observe the behavioral “details” of some person and translate them into a performance. The critique session that followed the performance addressed less how to depict an other, as how to derive that depiction: by selecting “details” from “observation,” and, most of all, interpreting them without collapsing their attachment to the other into the world of the self. At stake was a particular technology for empathy. Instructors at GITIS explicitly and repeatedly claimed that staging “interesting” and/or “realistic” representations of social life demanded such “empathy” (empatija), along with “sympathy” (sympatija) and “compassion” (sostradanie)—they grounded such feeling not in experience of the self, but in knowledge of others in the world.

Social science prefers to presume the ultimate opacity of others' intentions and motives, charting behaviors, patterns, and relationships while carefully avoiding “mind reading.” But not everyone thinks this way. Anthropologists have charted diverse ideologies about the (im)possibility, (un)desirability, and conditions for knowledge about others, of knowing what another feels or thinks, or the appropriateness or inappropriateness of trying to interpret another (see Mannheim Reference Mannheim1991; Besnier Reference Besnier, Hill and Irvine1992; Robbins Reference Robbins2001; Reference Robbins2008; Keane Reference Keane2008; Schieffelin Reference Schieffelin2008; Stasch Reference Stasch2008).Footnote ²

In Moscow during the time of my fieldwork, teachers at GITIS asserted that it is possible to know others … through long training. People in Russia do speak and write at length about how to judge the feelings and motives of others, how to deploy such judgments to live, trade, vote (Does she love me? Will he cheat me?). Such anguish suggests a tendency to separate feelings from illusory physical expressions, but also the possibility to read and discover them. Indeed, at the Academy students learned that knowing others requires excavating evidence of “given conditions”—“details,” “rhythms,” and “events” (“What color is her lipstick?” “Did someone interrupt her?” “What happened before the door opened?”)—attached to historical trajectories very specific to post-Soviet Russia. Feeling then, on stage at least, becomes the product of knowledge, an end of interpretation, not its starting point.Footnote ³

FEELING ACROSS SCALES: THEATER IN THE WORLD

Julya's teacher pressed for nearly an hour for her to depict a communist party member with more empathy. At the time, this surprised me; in both West and East, people of similar age and professional status as this teacher (in 2002 almost forty years old) frequently had depicted persons like Julya's school head as ethically bankrupt agents of the former state. During the fifty-year commemoration of World War II heroes and dead (twenty-seven million), U.S. journalists and analysts stressed that the hammer-and-sickle on commemoration banners were worrisome signs that the state was pushing nostalgia for Stalin.Footnote ⁴ However, the incident with Julya demanded a closer look at expressions of empathy for such people: for elderly Communist Party members and old World War II veterans, even for the former state itself, for its unappreciated deeds and its rusted infrastructures.Footnote ⁵

Taking such expressions seriously does not mean taking them at face value, but it does demand working against ways in which sentimental categories have configured Cold War paradigms for so long. Along with the space race, democracy, and production figures, during the Cold War feelings were a field of competition.Footnote ⁶ In Russia as anywhere, many sentiments launch their careers in some Ministry of Information or Department of Creative Advertising. However, the encounter between Julya and her teacher produced forms of feeling that cannot be reduced to propaganda effects. For one thing, the 2002 timing suggests that later, public circulations of sympathy had broad grounding. Here is the value of ethnography of seemingly “small” interactional details—such “minutiae” of “everyday” life is not mere efflorescence, but rather one source for emergent political performances and social constellations. Cold War discourses especially continue to downplay the social significance of feeling among “ordinary” people in Russia, perhaps more than in other places. For example, on 5 November 2008, U.S. television and print magnified a presumably icy response by President Medvedev to the election of Barack Obama, all but ignoring any more mundane but exuberantly positive reactions inside Russia, and contrasted this to celebrations elsewhere in the world.Footnote ⁷

For many readers, it may seem counterintuitive when sentiments such as “affection” or “pity” adhere to state forms and agents—“paranoia” or “aversion” seem more appropriate. However, even a brief perusal of popular Soviet and recent Russian films, novels, music videos, and memoirs tells a more complicated story. Pioneering scholarship in history and anthropology, by tracking how states co-opt or reconstruct family structures (as through matrimonial and reproductive practices), has shown how forms of governance can direct sentiments such as love and empathy to reel in loyalty, reorganize labor, regulate rights to property, or remake persons.Footnote ⁸ These works motivate me to ask: might we illuminate tangled connections among expressions and events across levels of analysis if we attend to ways people knit threads of sympathy even for a state or its agents?Footnote ⁹

Why track these threads through theater, at a theatrical academy? One, it is hardly possible to discuss representations of social and political relations in Russia without addressing the ways in which those producing representations have condensed problems of surface and subjectivity, trust and verification, through tropes such as the stage proscenium, from Marquis de Custine's Reference de Custine1839 travelogue to Margaret Mead's ethnography of Russia “from a distance.” Two, as in much of Europe, within Russia theater is seen to anchor tradition and engender change, mainly by crossing domains, linking poetry to commerce, ritual to riot (see Agnew Reference Agnew1988; Clark Reference Clark1995). Three, over the twentieth century, many prominent scholars of Russia and the USSR (Western and Russian) positioned theatricality as a lens through which to view Tsarist governmentality, Bolshevik paradigm shifts, Stalinist subjectivity formation, Soviet cultural identities, post-socialist anxieties, and post-Soviet “virtual politics.”Footnote ¹⁰ Some of that work presupposes anti-theatrical tropes (see Barish Reference Barish1981), particularly “masking,” and less often treats performance neutrally, as one among other modes of performativity. (While Austin remarks that utterances on stage are mere “etiolations” of language (Reference Austin1975: 22), to represent another's words on stage does have effects—just not directly.)Footnote ¹¹

Finally, some of what theater accomplishes materializes at “large” scales, where people perceive practices and ideas to move across national bounds. In the early 1990s, when I first visited GITIS with Russian friends enrolled in the directing program, I was struck that local assessments of its symbolic and cultural capital seemed undiminished by regime change. Even as film production and theater attendance were in crisis at the time in Russia, theatrical pedagogy still emanated value from “here,” performing Moscow as its locus, not the West (see Lemon Reference Lemon2008). And later, while conducting ethnographic fieldwork at GITIS (Reference Goffman2002–2003, fall 2005), I found that, in contrast with experiences during my earlier fieldwork in Russia, few cared whether or not an etnograf was observing, American or otherwise. For one thing, I was not the only observer writing down or recording the process. The GITIS archives overflow with records similar to my fieldnotes. In fact, books describing pedagogical encounters and conflicts with directors during rehearsals—theatrical bildungsroman—have constituted a popular genre in Russia for decades (e.g., Tairov Reference Tairov2000; Tovstonogov Reference Tovstonogov and Bean1972; Zakharov Reference Zakharov2000; and Butkevich Reference Butkevich2002; see also Bulgakov's parody written in 1936–1939 [Bulgakov 1965]). For another, being watched—and learning to become interesting to watch—was a constant for students worried more about famous teachers' evaluations than the writings of a foreign visitor, even one from America.Footnote ¹² Finally, GITIS draws people from disparate places to teach and send back out again: the main 2002 directing/acting cohort included only a handful of Muscovites; the rest hailed from the Urals, small Russian cities, the Caucasus, and Ukraine, with a few from Korea, Kuwait, and France.

Institutional structure fortifies the magnetism of this center. Since the 1920s, Soviets have attained theatrical training along several paths. Less formal roads passed through amateur dramatic circles in factories, universities, or local Palaces of Culture (see Costanzo Reference Costanzo1998; Zakharov 2000). To become a professional, eventually one had to audition at one of a handful of theatrical institutes or studios attached to theaters (The Moscow Art Theater [MKhAT] being more famous overseas, but GITIS larger and more diversified). In the 1920s, GITIS was organized as a Kombinat joining two parts: the institut trained theatrical producers, actors, and directors, who auditioned as individuals, while the texnikum recruited entire groups from the Soviet republics and regions to train together and then to return home as collectives, to run regional theaters and “raise the cultural level.”Footnote ¹³ This initiative wedded Russian ensemble training to nationalities policy. Later, the kombinat was collapsed into one institute, yet the practice of training selected groups, alongside the main cohorts composed of individual applicants, continued, broadening from national minorities to friendly socialist states and non-aligned client states, as well as Russian provinces. A similar organization persists. When I began fieldwork in 2002, a collective had just been deployed to the northern oil town of Surgut, and another was being prepared for South Korea.

Quite likely then, aesthetics and ideologies about feeling produced in interactions at GITIS, like that between Julya and her teacher, potentially resonate in realms and texts and interactions far from Moscow. But more to the thrust of this paper: while one interaction in one institution, no matter how central, can not represent all of Russian cultural production practice, to track its inter-textual and institutional bearings can begin to illustrate how the problems of understanding others—other persons, other states—transpose across scales.

CHRONOTOPIC RELATIVITY: EMPATHY AND OTHER OTHERS

Scholars have detailed how historically contingent situations and relations make sentiments, how ideology, social expectations, or institutional possibilities can determine them.Footnote ¹⁴ Empathy, sympathy, and antipathy may be even more complexly constructed than other affects in that they denote second-order feelings—feelings for the feelings of others (see Pinch Reference Pinch1996: 24–32). Perhaps, this meta-level invites even more explicitness than do other sentiments in debates over whom should express what, for whom (beggars? bankers?), how (through art? propaganda? advertising?), and to what ends (for charity? for an election?). Because they invite second-order discourse, sympathy and its refusals become visible—and visibly performative—at “scales” normally held to be radically different—the interactional and the international.

In “The New American Cold War,” historian and political scientist Stephen Cohen describes a Western tendency to discount Russian anxieties about NATO encroachment as something akin to lack of empathy (Reference Cohen2006). Cohen's prescription to consider Russian feeling as historically grounded in real, material invasions and destruction (especially during World War II) has yet to be taken up by U.S. policymakers or the press.Footnote ¹⁵ One obstacle may be that his argument runs against constructions of empathy that really require sympathetic mirroring, or “sameness.” Indeed, as Cohen argues, because Russia failed to serenely replicate an idealized image of America, “the Cold War ended in Moscow, but not in Washington,” as if diversions from that mirror-ideal signal return to socialist repression, not reaction to any events initiated elsewhere. Washington thus fails to envision motives for an “other” who seems to exist only through opposition to “self.”

Self-other identity dominates much social thought, especially in presupposing the workings of empathy. A prominent example: Benedict Anderson (Reference Anderson1983: 31) opens the argument tracking national co-feeling through print capitalism with a nineteenth-century novel depicting a young man “who is moved” by a newspaper account of a “destitute vagrant.” The young man does not “care in the slightest who the dead vagrant individually was; he thinks of the representative body.” He was one of us. Print-capitalism, Anderson argues, mediated depictions of diverse happenings across disperse territories, calibrating them into a homogeneous “here-and-now,” to produce a sense that “meanwhile” others do as I do. By standardizing print and synchronizing the ritual of newspaper-reading, national community came to seem real while diverse readers came to imagine themselves as connected to, as like, readers they have never met. An implication is that practical possibility for empathy must be denied those who remain other.

As Pinch notes of Hume's epistemology of Emotion: “The possibility of sympathy depends upon the general resemblance among people … the force of sympathy begins with our ‘idea of our own person’” (cited in Pinch Reference Pinch1996: 35). What defines sympathy begins to leak into the other second-order feelings, to colonize and foreclose all possibilities of knowledge of others. Note how, according to common U.S. renderings of American method acting, the process known as “becoming a character” begins with the self, with projecting one's familiar emotions into others, as when many U.S. drama instructors instruct beginning students to lay on the floor with lights out, to block out the world, and to “imagine a time when you were sad.”Footnote ¹⁶

Instructors at GITIS move through a different epistemology of emotion (they do not even bring up “emotion memory” until a student's later years in the program).Footnote ¹⁷ There, actor and director training begins not with recalling one's own emotions, but with observing others. The student builds knowledge of textual and material details, events and networks that extend far beyond the skin of any one actor—or her memory. Practices of extension, not post-Freudian introspection, sustain the possibility to know another person—and through such knowledge to craft empathy on stage. At GITIS, artists learn to focus attention on particular kinds of social and environmental knowledge in order to mediate empathy for an “other.” This mediated empathy was considered more “real” than any such feeling grounded in the self.

Julya's teacher frequently and forcefully claimed, as did his colleagues, not only that empathy does not presuppose likeness among selves and others, but also that good acting requires techniques for discovering events and conditions in some time-space that may not contain the self. They argued, that is, for a kind of chronotopic relativity, as I will explain below.

These claims may seem strange to readers accustomed to the mythology of U.S. performance professionals who trace the emotional melding in “method acting” to Russia and Stanislavskii. One trouble is that U.S. observers pay less attention than we might to the complicated ways that Russian avant-garde techniques, alongside those of Stanislavskii, actually survived through official Social Realism. As during Revolutionary times the modernist avant garde all pressed to dislodge “automatic” reactions, directors such as Meierkhol'd, Vakhtangov, and other non-realists aimed to deactivate those forms of realism that stimulated sympathy too habitually, to allow new ways to see social reality. They choreographed deliberately mechanical, puppet-like manners, their actors spoke across the proscenium and let audiences watch them costume, to disrupt audience illusions of eavesdropping on familiar forms of life. Such techniques of ostranenie (estrangement) were to allow audiences to achieve social analysis before leaping to empathize with characters “like me.” Meierkhol'd was later sidelined and executed (Vakhtangov died in the early 1920s and escaped censure); still, their students and students' students continued to work, and many of their techniques survived Stalinism in the academies and in various productions. At GITIS in the early twenty-first century, they remained in play, some practices continuously, some revived in the 1960s.

Another trouble is that English translations brutally distort and dismiss Stanislavskii's emphases on social and material detail, as if he focused much more than he did on actors' individual “emotion memory” as a path to merge with a character (see Carnicke Reference Carnicke1984). He in fact shared a broad impulse with his “rebel” students Meierkhol'd and Vakhtangov (some claim that Vakhtangov synthesized the other two). While Stanislavskii did not encourage actors to mock or “estrange” characters, he did not ask them to meld, either. At GITIS, a subtle interplay of distance with empathy between actor and character is attributed to Stanislavskii—there he is credited for insisting that an actor neither judge nor become a character, but advocate for her.

Actor empathy should then connect across different domains without collapsing them. The actor's own, inner feelings distract from events and texts in the world—attention to these leads to sharper, truer feelings about the feelings of others. Empathy requires knowledge, then, of variably distant texts and events, a “there-and-then” that contrasts with the actor's “here-and-now.” It also requires learning to detect and maintain differences and separations among these space-times.

The ways in which GITIS teachers manipulated space-time was not far from Bakhtin's idea of chronotope, which he developed during a period overlapping early Soviet stage practice.Footnote ¹⁸ For Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981), chronotope describes a combination of temporal with spatial logics that unfold a story in a certain way, according to an identifiable trajectory and principles of agency. Chronotope is not simply a point or a plane in space-time, not merely a scenic backdrop or surround of period and place. It shapes the logic by which events unfurl, their syntax, the rhythmic quality of plausible actions and counter-actions. Bakhtin distinguished the Greek romance from later literary forms by noting that in the former obstacles and events leave no trace on the heroes, whereas in the Tolstoyan novel, “Anna Karenina and Kitty Scherbatskaya are not the same people on page 500 as they were on page 50.”Footnote ¹⁹ By contrast again, at a Chekhovian dacha, some expect phrases to ring without response or events to follow without “reason” (if one accepts that Chekhov's plays presage absurdist time-space, a chronotope incapable of “meaningful” human agency).

Bakhtin saw chronotopic shifts both within texts (dialog that recalls another event, flashbacks) and around them (winks to writers/readers about other texts or tellings). A chronotopic detail (“fast car chase/on a highway”) may come to be associated with genre, to signal genre (“crime/adventure”). Bakhtin sometimes uses chronotope to talk about orientations among authors, audience, and genre all at once: “Once upon a time” signals both that a “fairy tale” is beginning and that, since a tale is beginning, “attend ye well” (see Bauman and Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990).

Bakhtin borrowed “chronotope” from Soviet physiologist A. A. Ukhtomsky, whose lecture on chronotope in biology he attended in 1925 (Morson and Emerson Reference Morson and Emerson1990: 368). Much as Whorf, writing about linguistic relativity, responded to Einstein's notion that subjects who move differently across space will fall through different wrinkles in time,Footnote ²⁰ so too did Bakhtin aspire to describe the relative coexistence of multiple chronotopes within texts or across spaces of activity, calling interaction among chronotopes intervalic, and their multiplicity, heterochronia.

COLD WAR CHRONOTOPE VERSUS HETEROCHRONIA

What both Julya (interpreting her school head) and Americans (interpreting Russia) fail to see are the heterochronic conditions of their objects. While empathy surely works through modalities other than time-space, in the case at hand, as we will see, the teacher urges shifts across generational chronotopes. Moreover, precisely chronotopes still filter attempts in the United States to represent social life in Russia:Footnote ²¹ we can never explain or interpret, social interactions in Moscow—much less interactions that themselves judge social worlds—until we can discern those filters.

U.S. journalists and politicians, even some prominent area scholars, write as if Putin had reincarnated Stalin, depicting recent changes as products of Stalin's times.Footnote ²² A recent line from an article in Conde Nast Traveler about budget seaside escapes seems frivolous, but provides a structurally revealing example: “The sunny Black Sea resort of Sochi—beloved by Stalin and a favorite of Vladimir Putin—has pebbled beaches….” Each name slides into the five-letter slot—never mind that Sochi was a beloved destination for nearly every “ordinary” Soviet person on vacation in the decades between the two leaders (see Koenker Reference Koenker2009).Footnote ²³

After 1991, a wave of ethnography and political science documented the so-called “Transition,”Footnote ²⁴ but historical accounts in English of the USSR mainly focus on 1917 through the 1930s, the literature running disproportionately thin after Stalin's death in 1953 into the early 1980s.Footnote ²⁵ On the whole, “revisionist” scholarship has produced strong work that has questioned simplistic readings of the “totalitarian” 1930s, but still, access to more recent archives remains difficult,Footnote ²⁶ and while scholarship on late socialist periods is growing,Footnote ²⁷ whether it will penetrate media and diplomatic visions of Russia remains to be seen. All too many of the latter summarize and dismiss the 1960s through the early1980s: as in the Greek romantic chronotope (as Bakhtin describes it) events from that period change nothing, as if, in the absence of catastrophe on the scale of Stalin's purges or Gorbachev's market transformations, nothing happened.Footnote ²⁸ Old traumas and new tremors thus eclipse fully half the socialist period.

The shadow of Stalin's time dims our vision of how those alive in Russia now remember or imagine socialism. It also clouds understanding ways events, relations, and structures formed during the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s still matter. That past is not past—its traces more than mere “signs of nostalgia” or “bureaucratic holdovers.” That past sorely needs to be made visible to non-scholars outside Russia who deal with it: people in post-millennial Russia do not experience the present as a leap over empty “stagnant” time, from some more “eventful” Revolutionary or Stalinist time. Despite actual continuities from the 1930s (see Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2000), and despite ways some Russians do appropriate images of Stalin to criticize the current state,Footnote ²⁹ events and relations and texts crafted after Stalin's time live and shimmer as reality. They constitute “here-and-now” for post-Soviets who live pulling at strands linking them to material objects and institutions, images and signs emergent at various points in socialist time.

Late Soviet times, some scholars have been trying to tell us, were neither Stalinist nor even so totalitarian. While late Soviet-era party speeches and slogans could give the impression that they wallpapered public culture via “hegemony of form” (Yurchak Reference Yurchak2005), they could not actually achieve semiotic unity across social venues. Their makers could not always achieve this even within texts or inter-textual series. Myriad Soviet cultural products—television cartoons, films, variety shows, children's plays, and even the newspapers—display slippages, contradictions, and nonsequiturs to hegemony.Footnote ³⁰ Increasingly, the area literature attends to complexities of late socialism—but, again, such works have yet to change dominant discourses not only in the U.S. press, but also in advice to our executives and diplomats on matters of foreign policy.

The strands that post-Soviets knit together from the meaningful past differ from those that most raised in kapstrany (capitalist countries) might pluck out, prone to look for reddish patches of socialism as we assume it had been—to miss altogether continuities not colored by obvious nostalgia or difference. Signs read locally as continuity are easily misread as signs of change because—to kapstran eyes—they seem to clash against socialist fabric.

For instance, in the 1990s more than one U.S. journalist read the fashion for keeping large, purebred dogs in small Moscow apartments as a sign of Transition Freedom, when in fact the practice was decades old (see Nelson Reference Nelson and Seigelbaum2006). In 2007, an otherwise chipper article published in a U.S. glossy fashion magazine, detailing courses for young Moscow women on geisha-like techniques (e.g., Kegel exercises), attributed the phenomenon to Stalin's purges, depriving women of their men. But it was not young women in 2007 who survived the deficit of men, but their great-grandmothers, and their grandmothers (people like Julya's school head) who came of age during that fatherless time. The popularity of hyper-feminine signs, moreover, need not reflect some post-Soviet surfacing of Stalin-era trauma, for lipstick and kitten heels were popular in the Soviet 1960s.

The enduring focus on Stalin's time continues to warp accounts of the past and the present. It blocks knowledge “from there” moving “to here”—and then blames any blockages on censorship “over there.”Footnote ³¹ This projection hermetically seals “there” from “here,” in ways that make imagined anti-community seem more real than it is or was. Thus, while Russians routinely collect minute details about life in the United States, the doings of our movie stars and politicians, Americans hardly recall the names even of any Soviet cosmonauts, even though they were the first of our species in space; and if we do know Laika, the dog who tragically burned in the stratosphere as “another victim of Soviet science,” we do not know her canine colleagues, Belka and Strelka, who returned to earth alive and barking.

That Soviet past is not past to Russians now. In contrast to places such as Eastern Germany, where regime change swept away socialist-era media and rendered forms of everyday socialist life instant “history” (Ten Dyke Reference Ten Dyke, Berdahl, Bunzl and Lampland2000, but cf. Boym 2001), Russia did not undergo a sudden or total “transition.” The new state replaced textbooks and shook ministries, but many old forms and signs remain. Among the new imports, Soviet goods—candy, tea, cars—continue to circulate; statues of Lenin remain standing in most cities; and every person with a television set continues to have access, every day, to representations of social life crafted in the USSR. Series and films from all decades cycle regularly, and not only on a niche nostalgia channel, like Nikolodeon in the United States. This was so throughout the 1990s—the state's re-appropriation of television after 2000 did not produce this. Acceleration of access to Hollywood may have modified relations among older forms and genres, but it did not negate them; many chronotopes live side by side. Such heterochronia has shaped public culture and mundane forms of discourse through the decades since 1991. It may have amplified sentimental effects of state efforts to reframe Soviet-era events as continuous across times, but Putin propaganda alone did not make people weep for World War II soldiers.

And as we will see, Julya's teacher at GITIS treats recognition of chronotopic variation as a prerequisite to crafting empathy. But we will not be able to see this if we rely on Cold War assumptions about the past. I focus on one case, then, not to argue that it embodies Putin's Russia, but rather to discern motes that can blur vision of our others and Moscow others.

METHODOLOGY: CIRCLES AND FOOTINGS

Bakhtin indicated that multiple chronotopic perspectives compete and interact much as he (and Voloshinov) insisted that any word belongs not only to a speaking self but also to another, is always already dialogical (e.g., I say “communist” in jest aware that you meant it otherwise). However, he only gestured to such chronotopic interactions, and it remained to work out methods to demonstrate this. Here I forward one such methodology, hoping neither to ignore “native” categories about interaction nor take them at face value.

The teachers at GITIS did not use the term “chronotope” to talk about connections between multiple time-spaces in performances; they spoke of “circles of attention.” Stanislavskii sketched this (predominantly spatial) metaphor to account for ways that frames of observation overlay one space for speech and action within others. A “large” circle could be the “world” outside a theater; next, the building housing audience and actors together; then, the proscenium dividing them; and so on, until the smallest circle, the focus of a single actor, say, on a letter within the radius from a stage lamp. The actor must learn to be aware of the boundaries between each circle while seeming unaffected by some of them, to keep them “organized” in a way that will channel audience response, for example to achieve that fourth wall illusion of being “private in public”—seeming to read the letter as if in no way addressing the audience, while also maintaining professional awareness of audience constraints on perception. (Contrast this to Anderson's readers, who project their act of reading from here-and-now, ideally with nothing dividing them from readers gazing at papers in the next house, street, or town.)

Meierkhol'd and Vakhtangov (like others later, in the post-Stalinist 1950s and 1960s, such as Ljubimov and Efros) attempted to subvert this structure: that they so attempted reminds us that “circles of attention” is a metaphor for performance communication, not a discovered ontology (as GITIS teachers claim). In fact, much about “circles of attention” parallels other twentieth-century theories of communication that (contra Saussure) try to account for its workings across space and time (and scale)—Bakhtin's chronotopes, Voloshinov's schema for reported speech within speech, and Goffman's embedded frames and footings (Goffman 1981).

While “circles of attention” is practically helpful to actors wanting to imagine and separate levels of address (for instance, to simultaneously address another character and be heard by the audience), the metaphor is less helpful as a methodology for describing actual interactional movements: its form (circles replicating proscenium lines) treats all vectors of attention in interaction as if they really nest one “within” another. And again, while Bakhtin was interested in heterochronia (existence of multiple chronotopes across) and intervalic chronotopes (the explicit contrast of chronotopes),Footnote ³² and while he describes criteria by which to distinguish chronotopes within and across texts, he did not leave tools to discern how authors or speakers shift among them. This is why I also introduce Goffman's sociologically more concrete terminology for shifting footing (1979).Footnote ³³

Through footing, interactants display relationships to signs and conditions, as well as to others. For instance, as Julya finishes her sketch, wipes her mouth and steps back, she shifts footing in several ways: (1) she shifts from representing speech as belonging to another, to speaking “her own” words, and (2) she shifts from addressing her audience as if they were someone else's students “there-and-then,” to addressing them in the “here-and-now.” One could use Stanislavskii's language to say that she has broken a (realist) circle of attention; just so, but the language of footing breaks, or shifts, reveal still other connections, social and semiotic.

This works because Goffman did not envision audiences or speakers as unities in the first place, but broke them into numerous configurations: hearers into intended addressees, unaddressed participants, eavesdroppers, and so on. He divided any speaker across positions—animator, author, principal, and figure—whereby no speaker need fill all roles at once.Footnote ³⁴ So, whenever Julya utters words she is their animator; when she claims to repeat from memory, the school head is (imputed) author, but Julya only (apparent) animator. The principal is the one spoken for, on behalf of: when Julya parodies words, she, not their author, is principal. Julya becomes her own figure [line 93] when she claims “[it was] not that I just yelled.”

Layers can become complex: a dominant trope for Goffman (especially once we get to figures) is lamination. Goffman also suggests (here following Bateson) that footings leak, that one footing can become visible inside another, that present footings can evoke other ones in ways that shift entire frames for interpretation. Lamination then becomes either a source of pain and confusion, or of productive power, especially for those who shape communicative frames, as on stage.

Plenty of theater directors in Moscow work toward footings that both distance layers (these claiming allegiance to Meierkhol'd and Vakhtangov) or meld them (these to figures such as Vasil'ev and Grotowski). Teachers at GITIS—at least in the first years of training—positioned themselves along a middle path, one authorized by institutional tradition and text, between these modernist and mystic avant gardes.

CHRONOTOPES ACROSS GENERATIONS

By tracking one interaction, I hope to show soon how Julya's teacher leads her to shift footings and thus to layer chronotopes. I prefer the image of “layering” over “lamination” to describe this aesthetic value, whereby theatrical practitioners at GITIS aim not to reconcile difference from the other, to “become the character,” but first to disarticulate the other's “then-and-there” from the actor's “here-and-now.” The hoped-for result: to perform with an empathy that will call out emotion-rich audience response. To demonstrate, I move now to recorded interaction, transcribed in sections below. I watched many hours of this and other footage with students, but not with teachers, for they cast me as another student, and did not invite me to meetings where they discussed students (behind glass: we could see, but not hear them). Teachers did, however, refer reflexively to other criticism sessions. Here and elsewhere, I aspire not to “interpret” what all participants “really thought” speech “meant” (through methods such as interview questions about semantic content), but rather to suggest echoes of and connections to social and textual fields across “real-time” interactions.

In this first bit, Julya paces angrily, then bellows in a stentorian tenor:

1 Julya:

Well, explain to me. Where were you loitering, you little trollops?!

2

[pauses, as if listening to a response] Yes… ? [pause].

3

Umhhm. [pause] Impudence! Rudeness! Retarded children of retarded parents!

4

[pauses, paces] I request,

5

I REQUEST … that TODAY … at the meeting with ZhzhshshzhzhuGAnov…

6

you ALL be there!

7 Class:

[laughter]

8 Julya:

I don't understand what here is funny!

9 Class:

[laughter]

10 Julya:

You study for free! On government funds! Get out, if you don't want to

11

study! That's all I have to say. I hope that we have understood each other!

12

[wipes mouth, steps back, breaks character and frame]

13 Class:

[applause, “Bravo!”]

14

Visiting female student from France: That's the lady over there?! [gestures down the hall]

15

Student next to her: Noooo!

16 Julya:

“Hello” from the philological faculty!

17 Teacher:

That's who?

18 Julya:

It's my school head. Mine, mine.

The hilarity is contagious. Even the visiting student from France laughs (though she mistakenly [line 14] takes the object of mockery to be the department secretary down the hall). The other students, sitting along a wall flanking the teacher, laugh almost to tears when Julya's character demands [lines 5–6] that they attend a rally for communist politician Zjuganov. They double up at her abusive insults, no strangers, they, to pedagogical invective (see Lemon Reference Lemon2004).

If we were to look through lenses configured by Cold War chronotopes (e.g., capitalist: socialist, then: now), we might read this moment as demonstrating how Julya's generation is finally “free” to mock officials. But the problem is this: clashes with bosses were common to late socialist theater and film since at least 1956 (e.g., Riazanov's Carnival Night). Satirical send-ups of aggressive, angry bureaucrats reverberated for decades before Transition. If an observer raised in a kapstrana might read Julya as newly able to mock “Stalinist” authority figures because of changes since 1991, a post-Soviet subject (or scholar of Soviet literature and film) will recognize a well-worn parody. Thus, Julya's refusal of empathy might seem to fit U.S. chronotopes that frame Russian motives “after the fall of Soviet power,” but it actually anchors in time and space quite differently.

Born too late to have known the Soviet state, the students nevertheless recognize this figure—the angry, strict, female bureaucrat. Julya's character reverberated even with very specific sonic details; if we were to play dialog from the scene in Riazanov's 1979 film Garazh, where a female leader angrily shouts down collective members, we would hear a tight match between Julya's “ShzhshZhshzhshuganov” and the clenched and slurred “zhshzhshzhsh” voiced by that fighting film character. Julya, just eighteen years old, in her first year in acting school, raised in a Russian province hours north of Moscow, could easily deploy Soviet-made signs to make her classmates laugh in 2007.

By measure of laughter, Julya's performance was successful, among the best all semester. Perhaps for that reason it evoked one of the longest sessions of pedagogical critique that I recorded during 2002–2003—offerings judged less promising were often dismissed with fewer words. Possibly, the teacher defends authority (as we will see below [line 47], he does point fleetingly to a role alliance with the school head), or hopes to soften and mask it by arguing that the student is blinded by her own relation to authority. Perhaps.

GITIS teachers certainly performed categories such as generation, gender, and so forth in ways that reinforced institutional hierarchies. But it is worth lingering over ways they also configured differences into productive aesthetic solutions. They argued explicitly that empathy cannot emerge from affinity (whether among characters or between character and actor) but must arise through conflict among differences. Elsewhere I have discussed how this aesthetic of conflict runs through parallel representations, in media and on stage, of terror, national belonging, and romantic love (see also Lipovetsky Reference Lipovetsky, Balina, Condee and Dobrenko2000; Borenstein Reference Borenstein2007; Lemon Reference Lemon2004; on “conflict” as an aesthetic value during Krushchev's thaw, see Condee Reference Condee, Taubman, Krushchev, Gleason, Gehrenbeck, Kane and Bashenko2000; see also Dostoevsky, passimFootnote ³⁵). Here, I am interested in how a conflictual aesthetic is presented as amenable to sociality and empathy, rather than rupture and terror. GITIS teachers taught techniques to discover and feel for others not by constructing affinity (as, a la Method, through internalized, emotion-autobiography)), but through seeking chronotopic matrices centered differently, somewhere and sometime outside the self.

The process, as we will see, involved first finding that other matrix, identifying its extensions, and only then layering that chronotope with that of “here-and-now,” in ways that simultaneously held them in conversation while keeping them distinct. To recognize relative time-spaces does not erase the author's origo: there is no “becoming” the other.Footnote ³⁶

To see how, I return to the transcript. I pick up the discussion just after the teacher has interrogated Julya about material details: did the school head wear lipstick? How did she do her hair? How did she sit? These questions do not move Julya to talk about her school head as anything besides an angry authority figure—to the contrary, to the question about wedding rings, Julya asserts that her character bossed around her husband. I start the transcript at the moment when the teacher switches tactics, to develop chronotopes. At line 19, he begins to anchor the school head in time and in space, to reel out the trajectory of one life “in this country” (I have bolded places to note):

19 Teacher:

In principle, you say she is sixty-four years old?

20 Julya:

Yes, she is sixty-four.

21 Teacher:

That means, she was in 1980 how old? Forty-two.

22 Julya:

Yes, yes she already was.

23 Teacher:

So, twenty-two—she was twenty-two in 1960. This suggests this strange question:

24

people finding themselves in this country, they…

25

here you are talking about a person who hit

26

what they call the prime of life

27

a forty-three, forty-four-year-old woman, she encountered the break.

28

That break acted upon people in specific ways:

29

and some bought themselves out,

30

some broke, they lost everything.

31

And some other part of those people guarded themselves in.

32 Julya:

Yes, yes, yes, that's her.

33 Teacher:

And that part who guarded themselves in

34

they live in a fantastical, perpetual conflict with everything.

35 Julya:

Yes.

36 Teacher:

It's a conflict with Coca-Cola and chewing gum.

37

With night clubs and with discotheques.

38

With techno dancing and with television.

39

Ok. With that everything is clear.

40

But—what does she love?

41 Julya:

She loves … the communist party. And, well, without any irony, because

42

every lesson, not every lesson but every period began, in principle, with the

43

point that we are retards,

44 Teacher:

Ok, fine-

45 Class:

[laughter]

46 Julya:

And uhm-

47 Teacher:

I can also begin a lesson that way.

48 Class:

[laughter]

49 Julya:

[But] you in that you don't believe! And she believes it.

50 Teacher:

She believes in that, or in-

51 Julya:

She believes that this time has spoiled us,

52

and that we are gray and our parents are gray.

53 Teacher:

That means then, that there is some other kind of other time?

54 Julya:

Yes, but, she's all … there [gestures behind]

55–57

[????????]

58 Teacher:

So look, you know … in order to understand the volume of a person,

59

you have to ask these kinds of questions:

60

How is she like after a shot of vodka?

61

How is she when with her own [inaudible]?

62

And how does she sing:

63

“So many golden lights on the streets of Saratov?”

64 Julya:

Completely different-

65 Teacher:

Right!

66 Julya:

-we were at her house on her birthday.

67 Teacher:

Right! There, there is always, always a split!

68 Julya:

-very much that way, completely-

69 Teacher:

This split is always very strange, very terrifying.

At the beginning of this segment [line 19], the teacher extracts agreement about Julya's own words in the here-and-now: “you say she is sixty-four?” “Yes.” Then, he jumps backwards, in two-decade increments, to 1980, to 1960, then forward again to the early 1980s and then 2002. At the nadir, 1960, the school dean was herself near Julya's age. Here the teacher—very briefly—lines up “here-and-now” with “there-and-then”; but he does not rest there. Instead, after a stitch of a phrase (“she was twenty-two in 1960”), he moves ahead to situate the school head's encounter with the 1980s “in this country,” a chronotope that he develops as a “break.” Note that he does not isolate a single moment catalyzing the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 (common in many accounts of Transition),Footnote ³⁷ but more amorphously, beginning in the early 1980s (more common to local accounts of perestroika). And note: it is within this chronotope—not the chronotope of her childhood, not during Stalin's Time—that he begins to develop a conflicted (“realistic” as he will call it) subjectivity for the character, as one who manifests “a split.”

Notice that the teacher implies heterochronia by stressing that others of the school head's age reacted variously to the period of socialism's unraveling, “in specific ways” [line 28]. These various chronotopic orientations imply that generation (if marked through binary difference opposed to Julya's “self”) alone cannot explain her character's actions and feelings. It was, after all, people of her age who first laughed at the films and plays mocking authority made by Riazanov and others of the Soviet “60s generation.” Moreover, as he locates the school head's golden years in the late-socialist chronotope, and anguished encounter with rupture in another, he begins to depict a subjectivity that zigs and zags through several chronotopes.

After charting movement across time-spaces, the teacher shifts footing here-and-now. In line 40, he simultaneously shifts his relation to the figure as he shifts from monolog addressing all the class to address a question to Julya (for the rest to overhear, of course):

The question disrupts the picture of a segment of the population “in this country” always at “war with everything” (e.g., “techno-dance and television”). With this question, he changes “scales,” zooming from frames for national crisis to those for personal sentiment. Up to now, Julya has responded with enthusiastic “yesses” of recognition (“Yes, yes, yes, that's her.”) as her teacher recounted a familiar story about “the break.” But she resists the shift in scale and perspective to assert: “she loves … the communist party” “without any irony.” Julya claims to know an other's feelings through binary (political) opposition (“the communist party”) to her own self-position in time and space. Julya claims to know what the school head “loves” via her own encounter with the woman: “every period began, in principle, with the point that we are retards” [line 42]. This difference is really only projection from self.

The teacher stops her with another brief alignment [line 47]: “Okay fine—I could say that, too.” The students laugh; that a teacher might unleash insults is familiar enough (this teacher deported himself gently).Footnote ³⁸ In shifting to this footing, he aligns a figure of himself (“I can also begin a lesson that way”) with the abusive figure from the past, but also implies that Julya misses how such words adhere to roles, not to entire life trajectories—he, too, can animate them within institutional relations. As he will continue more explicitly, such words alone cannot flesh out the real difference of an other who lives across relations, contexts, and chronotopes.

Julya seems to pick up the general point—that words may index roles less than others' biographies—as far as concerns her teacher now, she continues to figure her former school head as sincere author and animator of harsh words: “…in that you don't believe! And she believes it” [49].Footnote ³⁹ And in line 51, Julya describes her teacher's words as a signaling opposition to her own “generation”: “She believes that this time has spoiled us.”

In line 53, her teacher seizes her phrase: “That means then that there is some other kind of time.” Julya, he argues, has grounded her character not through knowledge of others' chronotopes which would mediate empathy, but by condensing and projecting her own position as object of verbal abuse. Her representation reduces the school head to a single vector beginning from the self, rather than heterochronic recognition of other-grounded difference. The teachers at GITIS spoke often about de-stabilizing ready-made skhemy (schema), and I think they meant by this those matrices of binaries that identify others through opposition to self. Rather more in the mode of Bakhtin and Voloshinov (or Peirce and even Jakobson), who did not privilege opposition among signs, a la Saussure, as the motor of all meaning, the teacher now presses Julya to modulate her understanding of difference to attempt to know another otherwise.

In practice, GITIS students and teachers did not always aim for this ideal. In other assignments, students distinguished “social types” such as Chechens, beggars, or prostitutes in ways that denied heterochronic recognition, and teachers did not criticize this (see Lemon Reference Lemon2004). And teachers frequently blamed disagreements upon nation and geography (“What can you know about life in the Urals?”) or generation (“Your generation is lost to egoism”), even as they valorized conflict as a source of creativity.

Difference in itself does not create conflict: in fact, differences can make social systems and economies “work” (Irvine Reference Irvine1989). Conversely, as Bourdieu notes (Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986), those striving for similar objects from similar positions may enter conflict. Meanwhile, as the conditions of inter-subjectivity make divergent perspectives possible, only under certain conditions do people take up the possibility of seeing “difference” as a “problem” and work to harden perspectives into performances of “difference” and “identity.” At some moments, GITIS instructors (such as Julya's teacher in this case) seem quite aware of this emergent process, at others less so, and in this, they do no worse than any one.

RELATIVE EVENT-LOGICS, “CUBIST” TIME-SPACE

Having encountered resistance to ways a hateful other unfurls a life across “some other time and space” (“but she's all … there”), the teacher moves to the relations among details, to the syntax of miniscule events, materials, and texts: “what is she like after a glass of vodka?” [line 60]. What is she like when singing a familiar old “table song” (one for drinking together)? Such material and social details signal speech genres and chronotopes marked as “nostalgic,” those numerous and beloved rituals devoted to finding something to commemorate. As such, they introduce the character's own capacity to remember. She sings old songs—like anyone else in Russia—and in doing so, she evokes not only a figure of herself in some past, but also relating to some past. The question is not just to imagine what she is like when drinking or singing, but also how she imagines herself to be as she engages her own nostalgia.Footnote ⁴⁰ Such details—signaling as they do the chronotopic event-logic of nostalgic toasting—are familiar enough to finally spark an epiphany for the student. At least, she exchanges with her teacher (lines 62–68) rapid-fire “yesses.”

His questions resonate again with familiar texts—they follow precisely the event-logic of several 1970s Soviet hit films. Consider Riazanov's Office Romance, in which a brusque, female bureaucratic manager discovers how to unfold her own empathy for others after letting a male underling see her water flowers, after they sing a song, after they drink a little bit of wine. The film encouraged Soviet viewers to see the female boss as more than just a bureaucrat, as “also a woman” who can feel for others; the teacher also encourages Julya to see her school head this way. In so doing, he echoes, accidentally or otherwise, texts from the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s (from the very lacunae in U.S. readings of the Soviet past) that themselves demonstrate compassion, tenderness, and so on as familiar Soviet-era categories. As Office Romance shows, such feelings hardly were relegated to bedroom or kitchen time-space, but were depicted entangled with work and with the state. (For emotions were not just targets of state engineering, but were also sites for constructing and deploying knowledge about others, even within state institutions. See recent works by Rivkin-Fish Reference Rivkin-Fish2005; Field Reference Field2007; and Costanzo Reference Costanzo and Siegelnaum2006).

The teacher wants Julya to voice the school head not by opposing identities (e.g., us: them/people: state), but through a different method—by recovering details and intertextual links that entail events following a chronotopic logic other than her own. The objective is to layer chronotopes within a performance “here-and-now,” without melding, synthesizing, or compressing them. The product resembles less an ID photo embedded in plastic (Goffman's metaphor of lamination) than a set of jagged overlays—more Russian Cubo-futurist translucence than naturalist transparency (probably no accident given the overlaps among intellectual circles in Moscow since the 1910s–1920s).Footnote ⁴¹

To approach this aesthetic ideal, the teacher does less to explain and define and more to non-referentially indicate what should be done. In some ways, this interaction is unusually explicit in communicating about how it unfolds, or ought to. Still, in order to lead the student to new chronotopic orientations, the teacher models rather than describes footing shifts:

72 Teacher:

This should be a precious piece of work, but right now it's not valued:

73

“Yeah, sure, I know them, they are like that,” but . . .

74

In any case, I'm not interested in them as a “they.”

75

I am interested in how she doesn't just scream.

76 Julya:

[raising hand]: Can I try?

In lines 72–74, the teacher shifts through three footings, each signaled by moves from two different uses of “I”: “I” as teacher, “I” a figure, and then back again to his own “I” the teacher. The “I” in the middle, in line 73, really indexes “you,” a figure of Julya (or some generalized acting student-novice). In this way, he models to Julya the very process of shifting footing, maneuvering her to overhear an evaluative representation of her own (internal) voice, then to hear him criticize the words that “her” voice has chosen: “But … in any case, I'm not interested in them as ‘they.’” The students had been hearing similar criticisms for months at GITIS. To render a character as a representative “they,” especially if defined in relation to the actor's self, was mere “sociology” and thus “not interesting” (author's fieldnotes, 2002).

The teacher's strategy to embed a footing shift in a criticism seemed effective, at least in so far as Julya (line 76) eagerly raises her hand and asks to try again. He has more to convey, however:

77 Teacher:

Just a minute. That's the first thing.

78

For the second thing, it seems to me that here is a very important moment:

79

You now exist in a straight line, drawn ahead of time.

80

Crudely put, you're now located inside yourself. You thought something up-

81 Julya:

Mhm-hmmh

82 Teacher:

-you remembered, you said, “okay, I'm the dean, she yells,” right?

83 Julya:

Mhm-hmmh.

In lines 79–83, the teacher shifts footing again, this time through shifting pronouns. He first authors a description of Julya as a figure in the second person: “You now exist in a straight line, drawn ahead of time” (This footing describes the chronotope in which Julya currently works as ruled by linear, egocentric, Cartesian logic grounded in memory). In the middle of line 82, he shifts to animate a figure of Julya speaking in the first person, as if thinking about how to animate still someone else: “You said, ‘Ok, I'm the dean, she yells.’” The move is complex, and it is critical to understanding how GITIS teachers posit that multiple chronotopes prepare the epistemological ground for creating empathy. Here the teacher juxtaposes at least three chronotopes and footings: (1) His own (“It seems to me that here is a very important moment”), (2) a figure of a student who figures, and (3) the school head. “I here-and-now” lays across “you here-and-now” across “you there-and-then” across “she (your other) there-and-then.” In this way, the teacher models the technique of shifting while retaining distinctions among multiple time-space perspectives.

He seems rhetorically successful, judging by the student's enthusiastic “Mhm-hmmh.”

He moves then to outline more directly something similar to Bakhtin's notion that chronotope bears a specific logic of events:

84 Teachers:

So what transpires next is most important, from the actor's point of view:

85

SHE WANTS TO YELL?

86

Well, in general, does any person want to yell?

87 Julya:

MMnm, well, in principle, no … but she doesn't understand that!

88 Teacher:

One second, then something happened.

89

That very “something happened” is now not happening.

90

Okay, now a simple question, you were yelling at Kuznetsova?

91 Julya:

At Kuznetsova and at Vika.

92 Teacher:

Why?

93 Julya:

Well, I honestly speaking, simply, not that I just yelled,

94

I remembered a case when I-

94a Teacher:

When what?

94b Julya:

-when we, when she was walking at the stairway,

95

she was always standing there to see who came in,

96

and Ira and I were returning from Moscow-

96a

Teacher: and?

97 Julya:

-and we open the door, and from above we hear:

98

“Where were you loitering, you little trollops?!”

100 Teacher:

Just a second—youwere late?

101 Julya:

Uhhhhh … well … how to put it, well just, before that day we weren't there.

102 Teacher:

You skipped a whole day?

103 Julya:

Yes, yes, yes.

104 Teacher:

Ev-ent. That's an event. Now a question:

105

what are you yelling at Kuznetsova for, and Sadovskaja?

106

Oh! HERE'S WHERE NOW—you are constituted by this yelling,

107

you yell now without a reason!

In line 85, the teacher abruptly yells: “SHE WANTS TO YELL?, and then repeats the question as a universal about human motivation. Perhaps the iconicity, unexpectedness, and repetition force the question, but at any rate, having extracted agreement that “in general” no one desires to yell, the teacher introduces the problem of the event: “something happened.” Now finally, for the first time, he uses the second person pronoun to align Julya as her character [line 90]: “you were yelling at Kuznetsova? Why?”

Julie persists, however, to justify her character's words through her own memory (93–101): Julya and friend return from Moscow and encounter the head who seems to live in a Greek Romance without eventful events, as she is “always standing there to see who came in.” The teacher confronts her (“you were late”) to separate perspectives on this event—it was you who confronted her with an event. His repeats the word “Ev-ent.” To bracket one's own memory of an event, to mark a chronotopic horizon to begin somewhere outside the acting self,Footnote ⁴² again resembles Bakhtin's sense of chronotopes constituted by autonomous and relative logics of eventive unfolding.

Up until this point, the teacher has been speaking loudly and with animation. He almost whispers the moral instruction about the aesthetic rule [not reproduced in transcript here]: “Stanislavskii said,” that the actor has “no right” to perform “a relation” but should instead “advocate for the character.” To do that, one must begin by connecting histories, texts, and biographies beyond experience. Otherwise meaning is reduced to opposition, to monstrosity:

138 Teacher:

I see a fool, a monster, a person who I don't like—and I show my relation to him.

139

Not him as he lives, but my relation.

140

Try to find … a more natural, stranger existence.

141

Thereare all kinds of things to yell at here, at that one, at her, [gestures]

142

she is also dressed who knows how—a future teacher, who knows how!

143

[points] And that one sitting legs spread out all over Moscow region,

144

you could also yell at her,

145

[looks at another] and that one: a student at the theatrical institute, with braids!

146

In a yellow t-shirt, understand?

147

At GITIS!? A future actress! In a yellow t-shirt, with braids!?

Only after the teacher has stressed a “then-and-there” that follows its own logic, does he, in this last bit, bring that chronotope into a “here-and-now.”Footnote ⁴³ He demonstrates ways that an actor, working the logic of events ordered within another's chronotopic trajectory, might thereby react in a performance context (within some “circle of attention”). He demonstrates how to layer one temporality into another, erasing neither. He less fashions a conduit ritually calibrating time-spaces as he lays translucent sheets one over the other, each recognized as distinct.

CONCLUSION: FULL CIRCLE

Chronotopes outline the “conditions,” “reasons,” and “conflicts” that GITIS masters insist must underwrite “interesting,” “real,” “empathic” performances. In discussing this brand of realism—which posits that empathy must be grounded not in feeling, but in knowledge, particularly knowledge of multiple chronotopes—I do not concede that it is better, more real or more empathic, than any other.

What I find evocative, however, is how this realism appeals to levels of “reality” other than the actor's experience, including text and intertext. The teacher never mentions that Julya's performance and his own admonitions echo Soviet-era texts and their chronotopic configurations. But I think this may speak to their pervasive force—the virtual not only the visceral can “go without saying” (contra Bourdieu's focus on embodiment (Reference Bourdieu1977)—a force which may be evoked indirectly, as through quotation (“…after she sings ‘The Golden Lights’…”). The epistemological grounding of empathy thus requires less affinity or identity than it does intertext. Its efficacy adheres less in similarity among viewers who orient to a given text at a given moment than in a critical mass of texts that persist across time-spaces in ways that allow imagining others to move among them, and differently than one's self might move.

Places like GITIS see themselves as radiating this magical intertext. Nearly twenty years after communism ended, GITIS continues to transmit texts—and techniques—across national borders. Even as many views of “globalization” configure transnational movements as Americanization, and dominant accounts of “Transition” describe incursions of ideas (“democracy”) and objects (“cigarettes”) from the West into Eastern Europe and Russia, GITIS has radiated images, ideas, and trained practitioners to other places—an alternate global locus. Its operations in Moscow challenge pictures of movements of knowledge and values as emanating from the West, to be blocked by an Iron Curtain. Movements through and from GITIS (as other institutions) traversed paths across and within the so-called second and third worlds. And people still come there from far-flung places to learn its secrets.

We are at risk of erasing such movements when we read “Putin's Russia” without the knowledge that supports empathy, instead through Cold War chronotopes that project a mirror of the self. The misreception of Stanislavksiian techniques in the United States is just one example: In the context of ideological competition, Americans dismissed Soviet-era theatrical technique stressing social or material detail as the “later work” of a declining Stanislavskii (never mind that his early work also emphasized such detail), as if he had sold out to a regime “over there,” as if the flames of feeling burned vital only “here,” in American versions of method, while the USSR reduced art to mechanized mimesis through socialist realism. Similar misreadings prevent us from seeing the fine grain of Soviet life, and also its extensions of its values, immaterial they may seem, to other places and into the present.

Not unlike many who interpret figures such as “Putin's Russia” as a return to “Stalin's Time,” Julya also denies eventness to the chronotope of the school head, figuring her in stasis: “She was always standing there to see who came in” [line 95]. Her teacher recapitulates concerns with which I began this paper: as Julya resists seeing her own actions within the event-logic of an other's chronotope, so too have many failed to see how U.S. actions resound across a heterochronic world, in which past events live in the present differently than we expect them to. Thus the image of “Putin's Russia” not only leapfrogs decades, but also erases the effects of events generated in spaces “outside” the former USSR.Footnote ⁴⁴

I find the GITIS teachers' ideals compelling: knowledge of others that does not begin from opposition to the “here-and-now,” to the self, is possible. Empathy need not rest upon sympathetic affinity. At GITIS, crafting empathy requires recognizing a relativity of chronotopes in order to layer them without collapsing them; one must maintain a “there-and-then” (along with embedded longings for still more “there-and-thens”) while yet reacting to a “here-and-now.” A young actor attempting to voice an elderly communist is urged neither to subsume this other under a standard, modular self, nor to fill the other with the spirit of the self.

This empathy and the knowledge that mediates it are in turn mediated by material details grounded not only in bodily encounter but also through investigation of intersections among texts. Actors at GITIS begin their training not with emotion memory, but with learning an epistemology for organizing others' chronotopes within circles of attention. This epistemology stresses the interactions of “details” (podrobnosti)—both visceral and textual—within “given conditions” (“after a shot of vodka”). Before acting students attempt to voice others, they must learn to mediate “details” in ways that help them to separate and layer chronotopic logics.

This understanding of chronotope as a material-textual logic links empathy to a very specific form of realism (and certainly not the only aesthetic ideal in Moscow). Above, I identified ways that Western scholars, philosophers, and cultural producers have mapped the workings of realism to an empathy limited by affinity: American method acting, empirical philosophies, and Andersonian accounts of the print-capitalism all portray empathy as emerging when self identifies with the other. When the U.S. method actor's first step is to tap the river of her own past tears, she pours her own time-space into another life; she describes the goal behind research into the character as a melding into one, “becoming the character.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Print-capitalist realism similarly assures individualized reading-selves that other “citizens” are versions of the same, who read as I do, when I do across a unified time-space.

But unified time-space, while it may seem to lay ground for empathy-as-identification, is really only a product of this limited definition of empathy. The eventness of events is mediated by multiple chronotopes (circles of attention, perspectives, etc.). Until Julya understands this, she cannot fathom that she has caused a reaction that she has misread as the essence of the other. Similarly, U.S. observers might do well to attend to how U.S. actions (e.g., proposing to place troops or anti-missile systems near Russia's borders) resonate with post-Soviet chronotopes; our Moscow others may not count the “same” events to constitute “the twentieth century” as we do.

This means also that we more seriously regard sentiment for the past, and Soviet sentiment in general. American versions of Soviet history repeat again and again that, in 1932, Stalin praised fiction writers as “engineers of the human soul,”Footnote ⁴⁶ as if all Soviets believed that everything, including the human heart, was controlled by “the plan.” In the divisions of academic labor that assigned the first and second worlds to “hard” political scientists and the third world to “soft” anthropologists (Pletsch Reference Pletsch1981), there was little place for affect.Footnote ⁴⁷ Scholars serious about the “big” picture excised feelings from their variables; under Cold War paradigms, critics of socialism denied the resonance of those variables in that system. “Socialism” was “totalitarian,” was cold, stern, rational; that which was soft, silly, or warm was not counted as part of the system, but as a paradox exposing the absurdity of cruelty (e.g., that Stalin loved musicals and Sochi).

We have documented well state repressions under socialism. But what else could “the state” do besides dominate or denounce? And what did people do through it, and in it? What do they, and we, hope to do now? What do we do when we romance bureaucrats, mourn soldiers, or show a little sympathy for a weary state?