Since the present volume deals with modern Spanish culture, it seems crucial to reflect upon the relationships between those three words and the theoretical consequences of how we choose to define culture. I will look first at the changes in the meaning of the word culture in the modern period and then raise some of the theoretical questions that underlie recent scholarship on such topics as high and low culture, gender and culture, culture and politics, and what we mean when we talk about Spanish culture.

The first thing we must do as critics of “modern Spanish culture” is to recognize that the concept of culture which underlies our academic endeavors is itself a modern one. Raymond Williams has reminded us that prior to the late eighteenth century, the word culture did not refer to a static state, or to a standard of intellectual perfection, but to a process. Culture was a synonym for cultivation, and could refer to plants, animals, or human faculties. Williams reads the transformation of the meaning of the word culture as a defensive move responding to the vast economic and social changes unleashed by the industrial revolution - materialism, emphasis on utility, the organization of the working class, and other factors (we might add changes in the role of women). It is important to recall that one of the pre-modern meanings of culture was related to “cult” in the sense of reverence or adoration. This meaning would remain embedded in the new idea of culture, as a higher spiritual state which could be achieved through reading “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold's famous phrase.

Upon Antoni Gaudís birth in 1852, less than ten years had passed since the foundation in Madrid of the first national School of Architecture, an institution born of the old Academy of Fine Arts. The vigorous urban development characteristic of Spain during the Restoration gave rise to a new generation of well-prepared builders. The young Gaudí, who had studied at the Facultad de Ciencias of the University of Barcelona, was now able to complete his education at the School of Architecture in Barcelona, established only a few years prior to his graduation. This wave of architecture graduates, educated in Madrid or Barcelona, would practice their profession within the framework of the new urban plans encouraged by the legislation of 1864,1876, and 1892 which regulated the expansion of major cities. Barcelona, with its 1859 Plan Cerdá, and Madrid, with its i860 Plan Castro, set the pace for the rest of the nation in urban design. This was further emphasized in the former case by the strategic talent of Ildefonso Cerda, who put in place the cornerstone of modern urbanism with his Teoría General de la Urbanizacion (A General Theory of Urbanization). The bourgeoisie, a prosperous class which was made wealthy by mining, railroads, Basque metallurgy, and Catalan textiles, embraced urban development and real estate with a fervor that was further nourished by foreign investments and a dynamic stock market.

The so-called Restoration of 1874-1875 did not exactly restore the situation of any former regime. Only from a sociological point of view did it restore, and even strengthen, the rule of the “Moderado” power block, formed in the 1840s as an amalgam of the old nobility, new landowners enriched by the disentailment of the church's lands, urban developers, Catalan textile industrialists, politicians and military upstarts. Alfonso XII's reign was a continuation of his mother's in this sense alone. Politically, the troubles which had characterized not only the rule of Isabel II but the whole of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, reaching a climax during the 1868-1874 revolutionary period, came to an end. What ensued was what Pérez Galdós called “los años bobos” (the foolish years), years without events. These resulted not only from the strongly authoritarian, almost dictatorial, hand of Antonio Canovas del Castillo, but also from the loss of prestige of the revolutionaries and to the exhaustion of the people, which after so many political upheavals welcomed the stability of the Restoration.

In his classic 1947 study of the representation of national identity in film, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, Siegfried Kracauer underscores the value of popular cinema, commercial genres with their “persistent reiteration of... pictorial and narrative motifs” in the cultural historian's reconstruction of the “inner life of a nation.” In my study of Spanish film before 19751 have sought to attend, at least in part, to Kracauer's view. Thus where many histories of Spanish cinema have focused primarily on the development of a modern Spanish art cinema that largely coincides with the emergence of a dissident anti- Francoist culture, I have been guided by somewhat different concerns. I am more interested in examining the psychic, social, and ideological functions of film in Spanish society, particularly as regards the role of cinema in presenting images of nation and national identity.

To that end I have divided this essay into three chronological blocks, deliberately rejecting the temptation of a continuous historical narrative. This three-part structure allows for the observation of revealing continuities and discontinuities in the history of the Spanish film industry that do not always coincide with those of political history or with the boundaries between popular and art cinemas. The first section deals with the 1930s and 1940s, the period of the Republic, Civil War, and the first decade of Francoism.

The currently healthy state of Catalan language and culture seems far removed from the pessimism expressed by the poet Gabriel Ferrater in an article entitled, from a quotation by Paul Valéry “Paul Reboux”, “Madame se meurt” (“Madame is Dying”). In this article, published in Castilian in 1953 during the height of Franco's power and censorship, Ferrater pronounced Catalan culture dead. According to Ferrater, the Catalan language was also in mortal danger since it was being expressed culturally - by which he meant in the printed word - only in “high” literary texts, chiefly poetry. But spoken Catalan was in everyday use, and we can say, borrowing the words of the later writer and journalist Montserrat Roig, that Ferrater expressed in this article “a fatal divorce between the life of culture and science... and the collective or 'total' life of Catalan society.” Time proved Ferrater wrong. In 1976, two decades after his statement, and a mere two months after General Franco's death, Roig could affirm emphatically that “Madame vit encore” (“Madame is still alive”) (ibid.).

Roig's post-dictatorship optimism is in clear contrast to the pessimism of Ferrater, who committed suicide in 1972 and therefore was unable to see the changes in post-Franco Spain. In the post-Franco era, the hopeless divide that Ferrater saw between cultural (literary representation) and scientific life - which in Francoist Catalonia found expression exclusively in Spanish - and the everyday sphere (or “collective life” in Roig's words) in which Catalan was mostly used, came to seem perfectly negotiable. Montserrat Roig and many other representatives of Catalan culture in the years of political transition saw it as their collective task to bridge this divide.

For decades, Soviet scholarship insisted that the national character of the Russian theatre was unmistakable and that its origins were to be found in pagan ceremonials and the agrarian cycles of peasant life. Actually, from the very beginnings, Russian performance, as opposed to ritual, was initiated and molded by foreign influences. The wandering jesters or skomorokhi had Byzantine antecedents; the occasional Orthodox liturgical “mysteries,” as well as the first court dramas, were fashioned on Latin plays of the Jesuit academies in Poland and Ukraine. Even the earliest folk dramas can be shown to have been affected (contaminated, to use the term in its dramaturgical sense) by contact with non-Russian models drawn from the touring repertoires of the Englische Komedianten (professional companies of players from London) or European puppet shows.

What does make the Russian theatre stand out from other national theatres is its secular bias and the cross-fertilization of court and popular theatres. Theatre in the West can be shown to have evolved from two distinct strains, the professional (embodied by itinerant troupes of motley entertainers) and the amateur (represented by performances sponsored initially by church, then by school or court). In Russia, the two strains would coexist and commingle: although professional theatre was often hampered by its governmental ties, the amateur was frequently productive of reform and fresh impulses.

It is a special Russian irony that the eighteenth century - during which explicitly religious values lost a great deal of their position and power within Russian culture - should have seen an influential if subtle reaffirmation of religious attitudes, however disguised, towards its end. Much, though not all, of this reaffirmation was connected to the development of Russian Freemasonry. The attitudes, activity, and organization of Russian masons played a vital role in the very early stages of the creation of a “civil society” in Russia, a frequently arrested process not complete to this day. At the same time, however, the culture of the educated elite - particularly that portion of it eventually to be called the intelligentsia - took on many attitudes significantly colored by religious values and aspirations which have never disappeared from the culture. The Russian church, however, failed to recover the grip it lost on Russian society during and after the reign of Peter the Great.

When Peter told the Russians that he wanted them to become “European,” he basically meant that he wanted to endow them with European energy and dynamism. He wanted to wake them from what he understood to be a sleep of lethargy and barbarism, to make entrepreneurs of the traditionalist merchantry, to make statesmen, administrators, generals, admirals, and scientists of the gentry. (The peasants had to undergird and support this “Westernization” with their meager resources, since there was nobody else to do so.)

The Russian musical tradition has grown from two basic sources over the last one thousand years: the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church and the folk tradition. Running side by side, these two streams have provided a rich flow of melodic and emotional inspiration to many generations of composers, eventually intertwining in the music of nineteenth- century Russian masters such as Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov, Aleksandr Porfir'evich Borodin and Petr Ilych Tchaikovsky. In the twentieth century, liturgical and folk sources continued to be essential ingredients of the music of such composers as Sergei Vasil'evich Rachmaninov, Igor Fedorovich Stravinsky, Sergei Sergeevich Prokofiev and Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich.

Particularly in works like Mussorgsky’s historical operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina; Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia; and Prokofiev’s score to Sergei Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible, the materials of Russian folk and liturgical music were combined and transformed through the techniques of Western harmony and counterpoint into what has become immediately recognizable as the Russian classical tradition.

The Basque Country has two of the most studied sites in modern Spain: Mondragón and Rentería. Yet they are usually studied with very different purposes in mind: in the case of the Mondragón Corporatión Cooperativa (MCC), the object of study is a world-famous industrial and banking cooperative, anxiously scrutinized by business experts from north America and Japan, much as Spaniards once admired the Altos Hornos de Vizcaya foundries, now being dismantled. In the case of Rentería, a radical town on the outskirts of San Sebastián - the provincial capital of Gipuzkoa - with putrid river and matching atmosphere caused by a Spanish government paper factory, the story bodes well for no one. Here harried political scientists and sociologists, Spanish and foreign, still labor, often at the behest of the Spanish government, to discover why Gipuzkoan towns like Rentería, Hernani, and Oyarzun are still unmanageable at the end of Spain's long post-Franco Transition to democracy.

Indeed, not much sense can be made of the Basque Country or its extraordinarily vibrant present-day politics and cultural ferment unless equal weight is given to the economic success of the Mondragón Cooperative - as opposed to Basque heavy industry and fisheries - and to the incoherence of Basque nationalist politics as reflected in Renteria, Hernani, Bilbao and San Sebastián. For in the Basque Country, that is, the provinces of Alava, Vizcaya, and Gipuzkoa, which make up the Basque Autonomous Community (or CAV), there is both an unusual concentration of old money and high-tech business acumen and of radical Marxist-Leninist Basque nationalism, spearheaded by Herri Batasuna (or HB).

A few months after Franco's death, many observers feared “that Spain may well revert, in the not too distant future, to the pattern or the path it had entered in the thirties, a pattern of extreme and polarized pluralism,” an experiment in democracy which had been “chaotic and far too brief.” In general, these observers continued to see Spanish society as torn by conflict - in keeping with the myth of the two Spains - as well as prone to violence and the extermination of the adversary. Even though the level of political violence in Spain since 1875 had been significantly lower than in other European countries, the dramatic experience of the Civil War had contributed to this image of backwardness, lack of civic culture, extremism, passion and cruelty. “Spain for some time to come needs to live under an authoritarian regime,” wrote Gerald Brenan in 1950, when he perceived the belief that parliamentary democracy could be an alternative to Franco to be a “very dangerous illusion.” Twenty years after that, no one was sure how Spaniards would react to Franco's death and many feared that they might simply revert to old, violent habits.

Theater is more than a literary genre. The written dramatic text might be viewed in parallel with narrative or poetry, but theater encompasses performance and the practical considerations of bringing that performance to an audience. Theater is also potentially more subversive than literary works intended to be read in private; thus it has frequently been subject to greater suspicion, censorship, and repression. On the other hand, theater may be more directly open to international currents; acting companies may tour abroad, and works staged at home may come from other nations and periods. The study that follows is not limited to playwrights but rather examines various facets of stage history in postwar Spain.

The Spanish Civil War is considered a point of rupture in national culture. In the case of theater, Spain lost hundreds of playwrights, directors, and actors through death or exile: Garcia Lorca was assassinated in the early weeks of the war; Alejandro Casona wrote most of his major plays in Argentina; Cipriano de Rivas Cherif headed an acting company in Mexico; Margarita Xirgu directed theaters and acting schools in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. As the victorious Francoists established their national theater, suspect dramatic texts, too, were banished: the works of García Lorca, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, and others disappeared for decades. Still, the rupture was by no means total. As César Oliva explains, prior to 12 April 1939, there was leftist theater, rightist theater, and a wide area in between without overt political bias; with the war's end, only rightist theater was allowed, but there was no decline in theatrical activity.