For decades, Soviet scholarship insisted that the national character of the Russian theatre was unmistakable and that its origins were to be found in pagan ceremonials and the agrarian cycles of peasant life. Actually, from the very beginnings, Russian performance, as opposed to ritual, was initiated and molded by foreign influences. The wandering jesters or skomorokhi had Byzantine antecedents; the occasional Orthodox liturgical “mysteries,” as well as the first court dramas, were fashioned on Latin plays of the Jesuit academies in Poland and Ukraine. Even the earliest folk dramas can be shown to have been affected (contaminated, to use the term in its dramaturgical sense) by contact with non-Russian models drawn from the touring repertoires of the Englische Komedianten (professional companies of players from London) or European puppet shows.

What does make the Russian theatre stand out from other national theatres is its secular bias and the cross-fertilization of court and popular theatres. Theatre in the West can be shown to have evolved from two distinct strains, the professional (embodied by itinerant troupes of motley entertainers) and the amateur (represented by performances sponsored initially by church, then by school or court). In Russia, the two strains would coexist and commingle: although professional theatre was often hampered by its governmental ties, the amateur was frequently productive of reform and fresh impulses.

It is a special Russian irony that the eighteenth century - during which explicitly religious values lost a great deal of their position and power within Russian culture - should have seen an influential if subtle reaffirmation of religious attitudes, however disguised, towards its end. Much, though not all, of this reaffirmation was connected to the development of Russian Freemasonry. The attitudes, activity, and organization of Russian masons played a vital role in the very early stages of the creation of a “civil society” in Russia, a frequently arrested process not complete to this day. At the same time, however, the culture of the educated elite - particularly that portion of it eventually to be called the intelligentsia - took on many attitudes significantly colored by religious values and aspirations which have never disappeared from the culture. The Russian church, however, failed to recover the grip it lost on Russian society during and after the reign of Peter the Great.

When Peter told the Russians that he wanted them to become “European,” he basically meant that he wanted to endow them with European energy and dynamism. He wanted to wake them from what he understood to be a sleep of lethargy and barbarism, to make entrepreneurs of the traditionalist merchantry, to make statesmen, administrators, generals, admirals, and scientists of the gentry. (The peasants had to undergird and support this “Westernization” with their meager resources, since there was nobody else to do so.)

The Russian musical tradition has grown from two basic sources over the last one thousand years: the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church and the folk tradition. Running side by side, these two streams have provided a rich flow of melodic and emotional inspiration to many generations of composers, eventually intertwining in the music of nineteenth- century Russian masters such as Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov, Aleksandr Porfir'evich Borodin and Petr Ilych Tchaikovsky. In the twentieth century, liturgical and folk sources continued to be essential ingredients of the music of such composers as Sergei Vasil'evich Rachmaninov, Igor Fedorovich Stravinsky, Sergei Sergeevich Prokofiev and Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich.

Particularly in works like Mussorgsky’s historical operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina; Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia; and Prokofiev’s score to Sergei Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible, the materials of Russian folk and liturgical music were combined and transformed through the techniques of Western harmony and counterpoint into what has become immediately recognizable as the Russian classical tradition.

The Basque Country has two of the most studied sites in modern Spain: Mondragón and Rentería. Yet they are usually studied with very different purposes in mind: in the case of the Mondragón Corporatión Cooperativa (MCC), the object of study is a world-famous industrial and banking cooperative, anxiously scrutinized by business experts from north America and Japan, much as Spaniards once admired the Altos Hornos de Vizcaya foundries, now being dismantled. In the case of Rentería, a radical town on the outskirts of San Sebastián - the provincial capital of Gipuzkoa - with putrid river and matching atmosphere caused by a Spanish government paper factory, the story bodes well for no one. Here harried political scientists and sociologists, Spanish and foreign, still labor, often at the behest of the Spanish government, to discover why Gipuzkoan towns like Rentería, Hernani, and Oyarzun are still unmanageable at the end of Spain's long post-Franco Transition to democracy.

Indeed, not much sense can be made of the Basque Country or its extraordinarily vibrant present-day politics and cultural ferment unless equal weight is given to the economic success of the Mondragón Cooperative - as opposed to Basque heavy industry and fisheries - and to the incoherence of Basque nationalist politics as reflected in Renteria, Hernani, Bilbao and San Sebastián. For in the Basque Country, that is, the provinces of Alava, Vizcaya, and Gipuzkoa, which make up the Basque Autonomous Community (or CAV), there is both an unusual concentration of old money and high-tech business acumen and of radical Marxist-Leninist Basque nationalism, spearheaded by Herri Batasuna (or HB).

A few months after Franco's death, many observers feared “that Spain may well revert, in the not too distant future, to the pattern or the path it had entered in the thirties, a pattern of extreme and polarized pluralism,” an experiment in democracy which had been “chaotic and far too brief.” In general, these observers continued to see Spanish society as torn by conflict - in keeping with the myth of the two Spains - as well as prone to violence and the extermination of the adversary. Even though the level of political violence in Spain since 1875 had been significantly lower than in other European countries, the dramatic experience of the Civil War had contributed to this image of backwardness, lack of civic culture, extremism, passion and cruelty. “Spain for some time to come needs to live under an authoritarian regime,”wrote Gerald Brenan in 1950, when he perceived the belief that parliamentary democracy could be an alternative to Franco to be a “very dangerous illusion.” Twenty years after that, no one was sure how Spaniards would react to Franco's death and many feared that they might simply revert to old, violent habits.

Theater is more than a literary genre. The written dramatic text might be viewed in parallel with narrative or poetry, but theater encompasses performance and the practical considerations of bringing that performance to an audience. Theater is also potentially more subversive than literary works intended to be read in private; thus it has frequently been subject to greater suspicion, censorship, and repression. On the other hand, theater may be more directly open to international currents; acting companies may tour abroad, and works staged at home may come from other nations and periods. The study that follows is not limited to playwrights but rather examines various facets of stage history in postwar Spain.

The Spanish Civil War is considered a point of rupture in national culture. In the case of theater, Spain lost hundreds of playwrights, directors, and actors through death or exile: Garcia Lorca was assassinated in the early weeks of the war; Alejandro Casona wrote most of his major plays in Argentina; Cipriano de Rivas Cherif headed an acting company in Mexico; Margarita Xirgu directed theaters and acting schools in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. As the victorious Francoists established their national theater, suspect dramatic texts, too, were banished: the works of García Lorca, Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, and others disappeared for decades. Still, the rupture was by no means total. As César Oliva explains, prior to 12 April 1939, there was leftist theater, rightist theater, and a wide area in between without overt political bias; with the war's end, only rightist theater was allowed, but there was no decline in theatrical activity.

A salient characteristic of the European nation-state is its multiple cultural identities which share a socio-political space - laws, economy, values, symbols, and traditions - where the activities of the state endow the population with a corporate sense and the intellectual or éélite create an identity by defining and promoting a nationalist language, or discourse, and a culture which provides images and ideas for ordering ways of thinking and believing. The separate cultural identities co-exist in the overarching nation-state, but they seek local power and cultural parity.

In the case of Spain, toward the end of the nineteenth century the country found itself in transition between a proto-industrial economic structure and industrialization, a transition that brought with it a changing social structure defined by the consolidation of a monied middle class, an emerging organized working class, and the instability of the traditional petit bourgeois. bourgeois. On the other hand, the political structure, characterized by an ineffective administration, a corrupt electoral system, an illiteracy of some 75 percent, and an antiquated educational system, was unable to develop in Spain a capitalist democracy of the level of the rest of Europe. At the same time, the country found itself entangled in colonial wars which it lost - the so-called Disaster of 1898 - leaving the national treasury seriously diminished.

Any national literature is to some significant extent a mirror held up to its people’s collective countenance: its myths, aspirations, national triumphs and traumas, current ideologies, historical understanding, linguistic traditions. But it is also more than that - more than a reflection in the glass of what has come before and what is now, even as one glances into it, passing from view. It is, in a real sense, generative of new meaning, and thus capable of shaping that countenance in the future. For the society that takes its literary products seriously, the text of a novel or poem can be a kind of genetic code for predicting, not concrete outcomes or actual progeny, but something no less pregnant with future action: the forms of a culture’s historical imagination. The variations seem limitless, and yet how is it we are able to determine any given work of literature is clearly identifiable as Russian? Why could Flaubert’s Emma Bovary in some sense not be imagined by the great realist who created Anna Karenina? How is Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov both alike, but more importantly, unlike Dickens’s Micawber? What, in short, can be shown in a mirror that speaks back?

Few societies have been more dependent on their literature for overall meaning (social, psychological, political, historical, religious, erotic) than the Russia of the modern period (1800 to the present). For a variety of reasons we will touch upon in the pages to follow, Russians have turned repeatedly to their literature as the principal source of their national identity and cultural mythology. But this relationship to the written word is a two-edged sword. It gives Russian literature both a high seriousness that can be genuinely inspiring and at times an intrusive didacticism that can be annoying to a more pluralistic (or “secular”) Western audience.

The essay is an essentially rhetorical genre, in which the author need not defend his or her views in a rigorously logical manner, nor justify conclusions with formal disciplinary support. Rather, the essayist gives a personal, reasonable, informed opinion on subjects of common and usually immediate interest, to a literate public. As such it is a literary form particularly suited to the dissemination of ideas, controversy, and the critique of ideology. There are a variety of types of essays (historical, philosophical, topical) and related subgenres and modes (treatise, newspaper article, autobiography, meditation, confession). It is best to think of the essay not as a predetermined form but rather as a variable model of communication between writer and public that reflects the expressive needs and particular ideological agenda of the author and which, depending on literary quality and degree of intellectual richness, complexity and sophistication, may transcend its immediate purpose and achieve the status of a classic.

The twenty-odd years following the death of Franco - although they have seen the deaths of such central figures to poetic writing as Jorge Guillén, María Zambrano and, from another tradition, Gabriel Celaya - have been ones of extraordinary vitality for poetry. Developments have been particularly swift and multi-directional not just because of poetry's continuing ability to act as the prism for change through language and as the catalyst for intense new ways of participating in culture, but also because of a confluence of the following processes: the opening out of poetry to a wide range of cultural and theoretical perspectives from beyond the immediate Spanish contexts; the development of new poetic languages to express desire, sexual, and gendered identity; the publication of new works in new voices from earlier established poets (José Ángel Valente and Francisco Brines chief among them); an especially acute sensitivity to the creative possibilities offered by reworkings of poetic traditions in contexts of radical novelty; an increasingly sophisticated and enliveningly partisan apparatus of critics, prizes, and autonomous regional authorities needing to remake their cultures; a growth in prestigious and successful collections and poetry lists (in Madrid Adonais, Visor and Hiperión; Renacimiento in Seville; El Bardo and, lately, Tusquets in Barcelona); considerable numbers of collections and periodicals devoted to poetry, more than one thousand volumes of verse published a year, and an audience avid if not for poetry to read in print then certainly for poetry read out in performance and recital.

The Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship were pervasive in the cultural life of Spain from the start of the armed conflict on 18 July 1936 until the Generalísimo's death on 20 November 1975. With a country divided into two irreconcilable factions, most individuals had to choose a side, willingly or not, and their private plans or desires seldom coincided with the events that engulfed them. Any cultural object, be it a novel, a movie, or a daily column in a newspaper, was scrutinized for its political impact by special governmental, political, and religious organizations which existed solely to multiply the rules that creators and producers had to obey and to reinforce the limits of transgression. If one takes into account this restricted field of operations and its consequences, the narrative of this period reveals itself as daring, experimental, and accomplished.

A novel that appeared in the first year of the war, Cinematógrafo (1936) by Andrés Carranque de Ríos, is a reminder that several creative strains in Spanish culture were drastically interrupted by the insurrection. Carranque, besides being a writer, was an actor in several movies who sympathized with anarchism. He draws a funny and scathing portrait of the primitive Spanish film industry. His main characters are exploited, frustrated by poverty and physical limitations, but manage to see beyond their private suffering and to act for the larger social and political good. Carranque's novel presents a contrast to the dreamy and Utopian novels published in the anarchist series La novela ideal (The Ideal Novel) and La novela libre (The Free Novel) that for thirteen years, until interrupted by the war, churned out almost 600 titles with runs of between 10,000 and 50,000 copies.

Spain is a country of dancers. Residents of small towns and villages perform ancestral folk dances during the local festivities. Crowds gather on Sundays before the cathedral of Barcelona to perform Catalonia's emblematic sardana and young people fill the discotheques every weekend. When Felipe González, a native of Seville, was elected prime minister in 1982 the Andalusian folk dance sevillanas enjoyed a popular revival that still endures.

Blessed with one of the most diverse dance cultures in the world, Spain is invariably identified with Andalusian flamenco. Today's Spain, with its well-defined autonomous regions, presents a much wider spectrum of dance than that which was promoted by the Franco regime. A new generation of artists is leading flamenco into the twenty-first century, while Spanish modern and ballet dancers and choreographers are well equipped to hold their own anywhere in the world.

Born as a melding of Spain's gypsy, Moorish and Jewish heritages, flamenco furnishes an outlet for individual temperament. Centered around rhythm, or compás, its musical structures provide opportunities for improvisation and communication between singers, guitarists, and dancers. The contrast between driving staccato heelwork, pressed downwards towards the earth, and the majestic lifting of the upper body illustrates the dichotomy of the flamenco essence, as eloquent an expression of intense sorrow as it is of uncomplicated, sheer love of life and joy.