When Slavic Review asked me to read Travesty Actors, I gladly accepted the invitation. The book’s author, Boris Wolfson, was a dear friend and collaborator, with Julie Buckler and myself, on Russian Performances, the first systematic attempt to unite the fields of Russian and Performance Studies.Footnote ¹ Wolfson’s untimely death in 2024, however, cut short his friendships and work on Travesty Actors. Reading and reviewing the book have let me enjoy Boris’s subtle thinking and sparkling eloquence once again. Even more poignantly, the book has helped me to relive the playfulness and passion that he brought to the project of introducing performance, in the broadest sense of this word, into Russian Studies, where it has become a popular analytic tool thanks in part to his efforts. Holding Travesty Actors in my hands and reading its seven chapters—sometimes buoyant, sometime bleak, but always trenchant—have helped me realize the loss that our field has sustained and savor Boris’s vibrant intellect again.

Starting this review with my own deeply personal, affective response to the only monograph in English devoted to Stalinist theater is a deliberate choice made in response to Travesty Actor’s argument. The book cleverly demonstrates that the unintended “side affects” (11) of many phenomena, whether a Soviet dramatist’s effort to craft a Stalinist self or my attempt to review a late colleague’s book are no less important than their professed goals. In fact, Travesty Actors proves that Soviet theater between 1929 and 1939 not only produced, but actually privileged such side affects as “the truest, most real part of the theatrical experience” (11) by showing how playwrights Iurii Olesha, Aleksandr Afinogenov, and Mikhail Bulgakov ultimately failed to transform themselves into a “genuine Soviet person” (14). By examining the theater they created alongside the ego-documents and auto-fiction they left behind, Wolfson demonstrates how all three men engaged in the struggle not only to shape, but just as importantly to embody the performativity that Stalinism demanded of the “genuine Soviet person,” only to be dashed on the rocks of their own success. If Soviet theater’s “purpose in the 1930s was to represent Power, both figuratively and literally” (13–14), then Olesha, Afinogenov, and Bulgakov found themselves in the catch-22 of exercising their prodigious creative powers in a country that increasingly ceded all power and all creativity to the beloved vozhdʹ (leader) Stalin.

The argument in Travesty Actors rests on a delicate balance, laid out in the book’s Introduction, between theatricality, a quality dependent on theatrical practice in a specific time and place, and performativity, the broader notion that our subjectivity emerges in the process of what we say and do. Chapter 1 applies this crucial distinction to Soviet children’s theater, one of whose striking peculiarities was its preference for casting adult women in the role of boy-protagonists. These travesti-aktrisy (travesty actresses) provide Wolfson with his overarching analytic trope, illustrating the uneasy and rapidly spiraling side affects that arise when a self performs Otherness to secure not just its livelihood but its life. He convincingly argues that this particular form of Soviet drag placed its performers on an existential “middle ground, neither authentic nor artificial, existing in the interspace between realism and caricature, type and person, normal and abnormal” (17), and hence provides the prototype for Stalinism’s ambivalent subjectivity. The travesti-aktrisa’s “fundamental malleability, this counterintuitive and absolute identification with the other as the self” (45), lets reality and representation trade places, making cross-gender crossdressing an apt metaphor for Stalinism’s ideological conditioning.

The book’s remaining chapters illustrate this bold contention by analyzing Olesha’s fixation on the theatrical stage (Chs. 2 and 3), Afinogenov’s on its audience (Ch. 4), and Bulgakov’s on the backstage (Chs. 5 and 6). Although these chapters draw selectively on the playwrights’ oeuvres and archives, Wolfson’s fine eye for the telling detail, as well as his highly inventive yet contextually grounded interpretations, more than justifies this selectivity. The reading of Olesha’s diaries in Ch. 2, for instance, deftly shows how the dramatist’s efforts to write his Soviet self in his diary were at cross purposes with his staging of that self, since wielding the intelligent’s pen could never make Olesha the “modern, internationally masculine” (55) man he hoped to become. Similarly, Wolfson’s nuanced reading of Afinogenov’s failed efforts to stage The Lie in Ch. 4 exposes the increasingly heavy hand of Stalin, who by the mid-1930s had become not only the USSR’s ultimate theatrical censor and spectator, but also its supreme playwright. In Ch. 6, Wolfson reads Bulgakov’s controversial play Molière, or A Cabal of Hypocrites, through the lens of the title character’s unwitting decision to marry his own daughter, an act of incestuous hubris that mirrors the troubled relationship between backstage power and staged performance under Stalin. As these examples show, Travesty Actors does not simply uncover the fears and anxieties experienced by all three playwrights, but just as importantly uses these side affects to craft innovative, multifaceted readings that reveal the theatrical inflection of Stalinist performativity.

Given the intelligence, insight, and sensitivity of its seven chapters, the conclusion of Travesty Actors might seem short. In a mere three paragraphs, Wolfson states the book’s findings and then traces the fates of Olesha, Afinogenov, and Bulgakov beyond 1939. My own side affect in response to this abrupt ending led me to wonder what Boris left unsaid, especially since Northwestern University Press published Travesty Actors only after his unfortunate death and on the basis of a manuscript that had languished in the proverbial desk drawer for about a decade. Editor Simon Morrison assures readers that Wolfson’s draft “was essentially complete” (vii), requiring only minimal editing and updating on his part. I wonder: Did the two decades of labor that Boris poured into Travesty Actors, as well as the hiatus between 2013 when he first completed the manuscript and his death in 2024, lead him to broader speculation about and application of his findings?

It saddens me not to be able to ask Boris what he now thinks of likening Stalinist subjectivity to a performance in drag, so I will trust our decade of shared work on Russian Performances, which created a certain harmony in our individual side affects. It is no coincidence that Travesty Actors uses crossdressing actresses to explain Stalinist subjectivity, while my own monograph, Russian Style, views Putin-era performativity as cis-gender drag.Footnote ² I know how profoundly Boris’s scholarship on the Stalinist travesti-aktrisa informed my book, and I would be honored to know whether my scholarship on post-Soviet drag (a reference to which Morrison included among his updates) might have helped Boris augment the conclusion of his. If Russian Style had appeared before the illness that took Boris’s life, we might have had lively conversations about how gender was just as much a side affect of Stalinist subjectivity as were Olesha, Afinogenov, and Bulgakov’s apprehensions. I would have been curious to know whether Boris would question his gendering in the description of the “fantastical self-coercion” induced by the travesti-aktrisa: “To recognize a thirty-five-year-old-mother of two as an eleven-year-old boy just like yourself means, above all, acknowledging that the most fundamental categories of life, including gender, are subject to manipulations by forces unseen” (44). For all its astuteness, this vision presumes a boy spectator in a country whose population, according to the 1939 census, was over 52% female. If I only could, I would ask Borya about the stakes of such identification for girl spectators, not to mention children whose gender fell outside Stalinism’s heteronormative binary. Similarly tantalizing moments in Travesty Actors—for example, the leading role of a “breeches” actress named Lelia in Olesha’s A List of Good Deeds or Bulgakov’s fascination with Molière’s supposed incest—suggest that the sides affects of gender and sexuality merit a larger place in the story Boris told. Simply put, the material examined in Travesty Actors is so rich in gendered and sexual side affects that it begs for closer scrutiny from those of us who follow in his footsteps.

Boris never lived to see his magnum opus in print, but I know he would be thrilled to overhear the scholarly conversation that this remarkable book has already inspired and to witness the innumerable side affects it will undoubtedly create. At the very least, Travesty Actors proves the value and vibrancy of Stalinist theater, a topic that scholars have tackled only rarely. More ambitiously, Wolfson’s monograph confirms the merit of bringing Performance Studies to bear on the study of Stalinist subjectivity, a topic that appears woefully relevant in the present day. Whether you had the joy of knowing Boris or not, I urge you to read Travesty Actors so that you can explore its rich analysis of Stalinist side effects, as well as whatever side affects it evokes in you.