The Occult and Popular Entertainment in Late Imperial Russia

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Mannherz, Julia Brooks, Jeffrey
Copyright Year	2011
Abstract	The occult featured prominently in Russian popular entertainment in the last decades of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mainstream newspapers entertained their readers with reports about mysterious events, cheap pamphlets advertized the recreational qualities of magical practice, while theatres and in particular film made use of the newest technological developments to show the supernatural in action. Jeffrey Brooks has argued that authors of popular texts “felt a duty to enlighten their less well-educated readers and free them from superstitions that limited their understanding of their modern world.”1 This article revisits the seemingly incongruous affinity between stories about supernatural forces and the quintessentially modern media of mass consumption. It argues that the relationship between the occult and the public sphere was much more complex than previously suggested and characterized by ambiguity. Leisure-time pursuits in fin-de-siècle Russia were exemplary modern phenomena. The rise of commercial literature as well as the increasing popular success of theatre productions and of film screenings owed much to the rapid process of urbanization and to the relaxation of censorship regulation in the Russian empire of the post-reform period. While five daily newspapers were printed in St. Petersburg in 1860, this number rose to 22 in 1880.2 One of the most successful newspapers, which also frequently reported supernatural events, was The Petersburg Flyer (Peterburgskii listok). The sheet was aimed at a poorly educated audience of ordinary workers and employees. Founded at the height of the reform period in 1864, The Petersburg Flyer increased its numbers of weekly issues from the original four to five in 1871 and to seven in 1882. It attained a circulation of 9,000 in 1870, a number that rose
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Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article