Russian influences

Russian influence has reached deep into the American cultural landscape. Russian performers traveled extensively throughout small-town America in the era before electronic media. Anton Rubenstein's extensive tour of one-night stands in the 1870s brought classical music to the American "sticks" for the first time and defined piano performance for American ears in the process. A generation later, Anna Pavlova's and Mikhail Mordkin's barnstorming ballet companies shocked many an American hamlet with their scant costumes and dramatic performances on vaudeville stages and in beer halls. Native-born American dancers eventually had to begin to Russify their names to find bookings in large swaths of the American Midwest and South. Petr Tchaikovsky wrote home excitedly during the 1890s that, in America, he had at last found his audience.

The list of American thespians trained in the "method" of Konstantin Stanislavsky (or in an American distillation of translations of some of Stanislavsky's works) would account for many a star on Hollywood Boulevard.

Stanislavsky's and Chekhov's influences extend much further across the American stage than a mere list of their students and protégés might imply. The two men, who worked together closely for some three decades in Moscow, came to represent alternative visions of modern theater that have arguably shaped American drama performance for more than a half-century.

Russian influences on American film, though heavily circumscribed by the decades of the Cold War, are not limited to the theatrical legacies of Balanchine, Stanislavsky, and Chekhov. Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein was famed for his editing techniques and use of montage sequences, an influence visible in such well-known scenes as the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Francis Ford Coppola has stated he found artistic inspiration in Eisenstein's October and Ivan the Terrible. Today, Russian influences can be seen in animation and documentary films.

Russian performers reshaped American culture because the boundary between "high" and "popular" culture was less tightly drawn than in Europe. George Balanchine could choreograph for circus rings, Hollywood sound studios, and the Broadway stage even as he reinvented and reinvigorated classical dance. Adolph Bolm-who eventually helped to establish both the San Francisco and the Chicago ballet companies-drew fresh energy from American populist approaches to the arts; meanwhile, Serge Koussevitzky found nothing unusual in cultivating American composers and conductors from the deep recesses of the American countryside.

Some Russians—such as Balanchine, Koussevitzky, and actor Chekhov—became towering cultural figures as they visibly redefined various American performing art forms. Hundreds of other Russians who ended up on American shores exerted a much subtler and quieter influence through teaching. Over the past century, millions of young Americans have learned how to dance, skate, play music, and act from Russian emigres.

When considering Russian influence on American culture, it is important to remember that Russia, like the United States, is, and has long been, a diverse and multicultural society. Among the group of great artistic figures whom Americans see as "Russians," there are Ukrainians, Georgians, and many other ethnic groups. The cultural achievements, both high and low, of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union are the consequence of a blending of confessions, ethnicities, linguistic groups, and cultures. When reflecting on the power of creative performances from those lands that once constituted the tsarist Russian empire to recast American culture, one can as easily use adjectives such as "Jewish," "Ukrainian" and "Georgian."

An examination of Russian influence on American performing arts begins to suggest some of the profound ways in which Russia "matters" to America. The depth of cultural interaction has long been either limited to a short list of luminous stars-Koussevitzky, Stravinsky, Nabokov-or largely ignored.