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Reviews

Laura J. Olson.  Performing Russia:  Folk Revival and Russian Identity (BASEES/Routledge Curzon Series on 

Russian and East European Studies 7).  New York and London: Routledge Curzon, 2004.  Notes.  Bibliography.  

Index.  viii + 286 pp.  $114.95 (cloth).  ISBN 0-415-32614-1.

Laura Olson’s book, Performing Russia:  Folk Revival and Russian Identity, is primarily about folk 

music, particularly folk vocal music, but the book’s implications may be as broad as its title suggests.  Olson 

combines traditional scholarly research and citation with the results of extensive fieldwork, mainly attendance at 

concerts and interviews with folk revivalists in Russia today.  Some sections reflect her conversations with 

village singers, whose role in the folk revival movement is as complex as the trends and approaches in the 

movement’s philosophy. 

From the first lines of the book, Olson creates her persona as a scholar who is first and foremost a 

participant-observer.  This predetermines her relationship to informants and to the whole topic, allowing her a 

fortunate access to the material.  As a singer concerned with her own repertoire and performance, she herself can 

request comments, correction and encouragement.  Given the cultural distance many Russian folk revivalists 

must traverse to learn and perform traditional music, Olson is more like them than set apart by foreignness.  Her 

implicated position in the research causes her distance from the material and her authorial presence to vary, 

moving between description, citation, and abstraction.  As summaries, comments, or critical remarks interweave 

with information from interviews, it is not always clear who is talking and from what point of view. 

The book ranges from the status and performance of folk music before the Revolution, through Soviet 

definition and manipulation of folklore, to the nascent folk revival movement of the later Soviet period and the 

flourishing schools, ensembles and collecting projects of the Soviet period, nearly up to the present.  Olson 

outlines currents of thought and musical practice that parallel issues in many other cultural spheres – the status 

of peasants vis-à-vis urban intellectuals; ongoing echoes of the Soviet “folk chorus” approach versus revivalist 

demands for greater authenticity and autonomy for performers; ways of imagining or appropriating Russian 

culture as it is recreated in particular kinds of performance or “discovered” in research; focused cultivation of 

local styles versus selection of styles and songs from all over the country; and some continuing censorship of 

folk material, as with the song “Porushka Parania” (135).  She addresses the particular popularity of Cossack 

songs and culture, which tend to engage more boys and men in performance ensembles than other stylistic 

definitions, and the gender-specific songs and crafts taught in some programs for young people. Olson can be 

refreshingly critical of the assumptions and behavior of some revivalists when they actually interact with 

villagers; she notes that village women may refer to the old traditional songs as “fol’klor” (‘folklore,’ a foreign 

word, learned from educated visitors) but call the Soviet-era songs they really love “narodnye pesni” (folk 

songs).  The book is valuably grounded in a variety of disciplines, including ethnographic or musicological 

fieldwork and literary history and analysis, and situated by rich footnotes and bibliography.  In places, it is the 

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footnotes that offer larger synthesizing observations, in order not to interrupt the flow in chapters on more 

specific topics. 

Read as a whole, the book begins slowly and becomes much more engaging once Olson turns to the folk 

revival movement; the final chapter offers a few lively and thickly-described scenes in which genuinely creative 

encounters take place among members of current ensembles precisely backstage, for an optimistic vision of 

ongoing musical evolution.  The difference in tone between sections may be hard to avoid:  collectivization was 

a tragedy from many points of view, maintenance of folk tradition not least among them, and much of the Soviet 

material may simply be inherently turgid.  A reader may regret that Olson’s critical reactions do not kick in 

during the first section, or at least the second, devoted mainly to the “fakelore” of the Soviet-era folk choruses.  

If she can describe with such non-judgmental sympathy the point of view of village people who really love best 

to sing cruel romances or the Soviet popular songs of their youth, perhaps she could also have sought more 

space for potential resistance in the actual experience of the folk choruses.  Her view of the “fakelore” period 

seems to be adopted rather uncritically from the revivalists she interviews – perhaps because of her 

identification with the work and perspective of the revivalists, or her caution as an “outsider” who avoids 

imposing her own Western musical background (and “Western” definitions of “folk music!”) on the material she 

learns and studies. 

As the book points out, there is also an additional CD available – though it is in fact not a CD, but a web 

site providing information and the possibility of listening to snippets of the recordings she describes; the entire 

recordings can be downloaded if the reader obtains a password from Olson.  While this somewhat cumbersome 

arrangement costs the reader some effort and defers the possibility of listening to the tracks in sequence or for 

pleasure, it reflects Olson’s concern for the integrity of the performances and for copyright protection.  The wish 

to provide protection is entirely reasonable, given how Western or World music have appropriated and devoured 

fragments of “mysterious” traditional Slavic music for the past few decades.  Some of the audio tracks are 

technically quite rough, with minimal editing and processing.  Overall, it is a teaching tool rather than a 

recording for entertainment. 

It is a great shame that Performing Russia is so expensive:  the hard-cover edition seems aimed only at 

libraries or specialists with research budgets.  But it would make a great text for a class:  it is clearly written, full 

of engaging details, and suggestive of ways a North American could engage in an authentic, productive and 

sophisticated way with “someone else’s” traditional culture – something we all hope our students will want to 

do.

Sibelan Forrester 

Swarthmore College

FOLKLORICA 2005, Vol. X No. 2