“Crucified on the Cross of Mass Culture”: Late Soviet Genre Politics in Alexander Zhurbin's Rock Opera Orpheus and Eurydice

摘要

Alexander Zhurbin's Orpheus and Eurydice (Orfei i Evredika) (1975), the first Soviet rock opera, recasts Orpheus as a popular singer corrupted by the excesses of contemporary youth culture: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The history of the creation of Zhurbin's important work—together with its reception by Soviet critics, officials, and listeners—has been little discussed. Interviews with Zhurbin, contemporary Soviet primary and secondary sources, as well as more recent appraisals of late Soviet culture, reveal the changing estimations by Soviet critics of “high” and “low” and “popular” and “art” that Zhurbin's genre-blurring composition helped instigate.