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Club Petroushka, Émigré Performance, and New York's Russian Nightclubs of the Roaring Twenties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2020

NATALIE K. ZELENSKY
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Abstract

In the midst of the Prohibition era, New York City proliferated with nightclubs that presented patrons with imagined worlds of music and entertainment. This essay explores the role of music in creating such imagined worlds, looking specifically at the Russian-themed nightclubs founded by and employing émigrés recently exiled from Bolshevik Russia. Examining Midtown's Club Petroushka as a prime example of such a space, this essay focuses on the so-called “Russian Gypsy” entertainment that caught the eye and ear of the club's patrons, whose ranks included Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx, and the Gershwin brothers. Based on an examination of archival material—including memoirs, compositions, and extant recordings of Club Petroushka's musicians and photographs detailing its interior—as well as on advertisements and reviews from Russian American and other newspapers and magazines, this essay contends that the “Russian Gypsy” music presented at Club Petroushka enabled a transformative experience for patrons while providing a performative space for its recently exiled musicians. I argue that two aspects of this music in particular enabled the transformative process as it was delineated in contemporary discourses: 1) heightened emotionality; and 2) playing with a sense of time (a musical attribute I call “achronality”). Examining the complex cultural entanglements at work in the performance of “Russian Gypsy” music and situating my analysis within a theoretical framework of night cultures proposed by Brian D. Palmer and mimesis proposed by Michael Taussig, this essay illuminates the multivalent role of this musical trope for the different constituencies comprising Club Petroushka, while it also documents the largely overlooked Russian-Romani musical tradition as it took shape in the anti-Bolshevik, first wave Russian diaspora.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 480 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2020

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References

References

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Stites, Richard. Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar
Tebbutt, Susan, and Saul, Nicholas. “Introduction.” In The Role of the Romanies: Images and Counter-Images of ‘Gypsies’/Romanies in European Cultures, edited by Saul, Nicholas and Tebbutt, Susan, 1–11. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
von Geldern, James, and McReynolds, Louise, eds. Entertaining Tsarist Russia: Tales, Songs, Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life, 1779–1917. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Wasserman, Suzanne. “Re-creating Recreations on the Lower East Side: Restaurants, Cabarets, Cafes, and Coffeehouses in the 1930s.” In Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections, edited by Diner, Hasia R., Shandler, Jeffrey, and Wenger, Beth S., 155–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Zelensky, Natalie K. Performing Tsarist Russian in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuznetzoff, Adia. “Ekh rodnye.” Recorded 1942. Track 6 on Songs of Inspiration: Russian Gypsy Songs. Decca A-303.Google Scholar
Russian Eagle Orchestra. “Occhi tzchorina (Dark eyes).” Recorded November 1923. Victor 77366.Google Scholar
Shishkina, Anna. “Otchi Tchornyja.” Recorded October 1927. Columbia 20364-F.Google Scholar
Basil Fomeen Collection. Music Division. Library of Congress. Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Nicolas Remisoff Papers. Collection no. 0199. Special Collections. University of Southern California Libraries. Los Angeles, CA.Google Scholar
Acton, Thomas. “Modernity, Culture and ‘Gypsies’: Is There a Meta-Scientific Method for Understanding the Representation of ‘Gypsies’? And Do the Dutch Really Exist?” In The Role of the Romanies: Images and Counter-Images of ‘Gypsies’/Romanies in European Culture, edited by Saul, Nicholas and Tebbutt, Susan, 98–116. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Bobri, Vladimir. “Gypsies and Gypsy Choruses of Old Russia.” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 40 (January 1, 1961): 112–20.Google Scholar
Bulgakowa, Oksana. “The ‘Russian Vogue’ in Europe and Hollywood: The Transformation of Russian Stereotypes through the 1920s.” Russian Review 64, no. 2 (April 2005): 211–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bumgardner, Eugenia. Undaunted Exiles. Staunton, VA: McClure, 1925.Google Scholar
Carter, Alexandra. “London, 1908: A Synchronic View of Dance History.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 23, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 36–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crowe, David M. A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erenberg, Lewis A. Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Garcia, David F. Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music's African Origins. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, Stephen. New York Nights. New York: George H. Doran, 1927.Google Scholar
Hassell, James E. Russian Refugees in France and the United States Between the World Wars. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, Janet. The ‘Mir Iskusstva’ Group and Russian Art, 1898–1912. New York: Garland, 1977.Google Scholar
Law, Alma. “Nikita Balieff and the Chauve-Souris.” In Wandering Stars: Russian Émigré Theatre, 1905–1940, edited by Senelick, Lawrence, 16–31. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Layton, Susan. Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Lefkowitch, Henry. Russian Songs: Collection of Most Popular Russian Folk Songs, Love Songs and Gypsy Romances. New York: Metro Music, 1936.Google Scholar
Lemon, Alaina. Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Postsocialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Konecny, Mark. “An Intimate Gathering: Russian Cabaret at Home and Abroad (Memoirs and Contemporary Accounts of Variety Theater 1909–1935).” Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture 12 (2006): 121–88.Google Scholar
Mannherz, Julia. “Nationalism, Imperialism and Cosmopolitanism in Russian Nineteenth-Century Provincial Amateur Music-Making.” Slavonic and East European Review 95, no. 2 (April 2017): 293–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matich, Olga. “The White Emigration Goes Hollywood.” Russian Review 64, no. 2 (April 2005): 187–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McReynolds, Louise. Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Naroditskaya, Inna. “Is Argentine Tango Russian, and How Jewish is Russian Tango?” Gli Spazi della musica 6, no. 2 (2017): 53–68.Google Scholar
O'Keeffe, Brigid. New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Palmer, Brian D. Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Peretti, Burton W. Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piotrowska, Anna G. Gypsy Music in European Culture: From the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Pistrick, Eckehard. Performing Nostalgia: Migration Culture and Creativity in South Albania. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2015.Google Scholar
Polland, Annie, and Soyer, Daniel. Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840–1920. New York: New York University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Lʹvov, N. A., Prach, Ivan, Brown, Malcolm Hamrick, and Mazo, Margarita. A Collection of Russian Folk Songs. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Raeff, Marc. Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Roberts, John Storm. The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Saylor, Oliver M. “The Strange Story of Chauve-Souris.” In Balieff's Chauve-Souris of Moscow. New York: Dancey-Davis, 1922.Google Scholar
Scott, Derek B. “Orientalism and Musical Style.” Musical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 309–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverman, Carol. “Rom (Gypsy) Music.” In Europe, edited by Timothy Rice, James Porter, and Chris Goertzen, 301–24. Vol. 8 of The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. New York: Garland, 2000.Google Scholar
Silverman, Carol. “Music, Emotion, and the ‘Other’: Balkan Roma and the Negotiation of Exoticism.” In Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by Steinberg, Mark D. and Sobol, Valeria, 224–47. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Silverman, Carol. Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Simpson, Sir John Hope. The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey. London: Oxford University Press, 1939.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stites, Richard. Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993.Google Scholar
Tebbutt, Susan, and Saul, Nicholas. “Introduction.” In The Role of the Romanies: Images and Counter-Images of ‘Gypsies’/Romanies in European Cultures, edited by Saul, Nicholas and Tebbutt, Susan, 1–11. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
von Geldern, James, and McReynolds, Louise, eds. Entertaining Tsarist Russia: Tales, Songs, Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life, 1779–1917. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Wasserman, Suzanne. “Re-creating Recreations on the Lower East Side: Restaurants, Cabarets, Cafes, and Coffeehouses in the 1930s.” In Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections, edited by Diner, Hasia R., Shandler, Jeffrey, and Wenger, Beth S., 155–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Zelensky, Natalie K. Performing Tsarist Russian in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuznetzoff, Adia. “Ekh rodnye.” Recorded 1942. Track 6 on Songs of Inspiration: Russian Gypsy Songs. Decca A-303.Google Scholar
Russian Eagle Orchestra. “Occhi tzchorina (Dark eyes).” Recorded November 1923. Victor 77366.Google Scholar
Shishkina, Anna. “Otchi Tchornyja.” Recorded October 1927. Columbia 20364-F.Google Scholar