"Normalizing" the nation through the total work of art : Ten Days that Shook the World in Prague after 1968
Abstract
During the early years of political "normalization" after the Russian-led invasion into Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Prague National Theatre produced a new Soviet opera titled Ten Days that Shook the World, based on John Reed's (in)famous account of the Bolshevik Revolution. With a large cast, two choirs and scores of extras from the Czechoslovak People's Army, it was the largest opera production the National Theatre ever put on.
Due to its use of montage and various epic devices, and its generically modernist musical and vocal style, the opera was contrasted with the song operas of Socialist realism, and even deemed "experimental" (cf. New Grove Online).
I argue, however, that its modernist features, which may be linked to Eisenstein and Brecht as well as the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, are employed here in the service of a unified operatic concept that aims to control both the production of meaning and the audience's affective response. The Prague production was clearly meant to solidify the official account of the October Revolution (with Trotsky notably missing), and to serve as a reminder of the inevitability of its historical aftermath, including the post-WWII developments in Czechoslovakia.
I interpret the opera as a particular take on the Gesamtkunstwerk, characterized by the tendency to erase the distinction between reality and fiction, history and myth, document and propaganda, and I demonstrate how it is indebted to the Soviet opera project of the 1930s and its Wagnerian ambitions. In working with a broader understanding of the total work of art I follow, among others, Matthew Wilson Smith (2007), who pointed out the conceptual connections between Wagner, Brecht and Leni Riefenstahl.
It is crucial for my interpretation that this particular vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk was mobilized at a specific historical juncture, namely the consolidation of power after the so-called Prague Spring. The Czech production of Ten Days thus becomes a potent case study of the points of contact between various aesthetic-political conceptions that share a strong totalizing impulse, and a testing ground for the revolutionary claims that underpin them.