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""Between Two Fires" addresses an important series of topics for anthropology in general and for the study of the Soviet Union and for postsocialist Russia in particular. Lemon weds current theoretical concerns to an understudied but significant community."--Martha Lampland, author of "The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary"

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Between Two Fires

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.................................................................................viiNote on Orthography and Transcripts.............................................................ixIntroduction....................................................................................11 Pushkin, The Gypsies, and Russian Imperial Nostalgia..........................................312 Roma, Race, and Post-Soviet Markets...........................................................563 "What Is Your Nation?" Performing Romani Distinctions.........................................804 The Gypsy Stage, Socialism, and Authenticity..................................................1245 The Hidden Nail: Memory, Loyalty, and Models of Revelation....................................1666 "Roma" and "Gazhje": Shifting Terms...........................................................1947 Conclusion: At Home in Russia.................................................................226APPENDIX A Roma and Other Tsygane in the Commonwealth of Independent States.....................237APPENDIX B Dialect Dierences....................................................................239APPENDIX C Vlax-Lovari Romani Glossary..........................................................241Notes...........................................................................................247Bibliography....................................................................................271Index...........................................................................................293

Chapter One

In Russia, media incarnations of the Soviet war hero Budulaj fanned the spark of exotic difference that set him apart from Russians and "closer to nature." That spark was signified by musicality: in the late 1970s TV series, Vozvrashchenije Budulaja (The Return of Budulaj), Budulaj loses his memory, but when he plays his harmonica he recalls, if not all the events of his life, at least his true Gypsy self. The ubiquity of similar depictions of "Gypsy song," the tautness of their intertextual links, loaned such moments in the TV show a forceful authenticity.

This chapter traces how forms of art, especially theatrical and musical art, attach to forms of identity in ways reinforcing national and racial ideologies. As one might expect in Herder's Europe, Soviet and Russian national ideology both subsumed the singing Gypsy and opposed itself to him. Crucial here is Pushkin's Byronic 1824 poem Tsygany (The Gypsies; Pushkin's spelling). Or rather, what is crucial are readers' receptions of it as a source of truth about Gypsies. Russian imperialism, Soviet internationalism, and finally post-Soviet Russian nationalism have each embraced and excluded Gypsies by citing such "classics." In their deployment, these texts have performatively transfigured political and social life by naturalizing social relations between Roma and non-Roma, interpellating Roma as "the Gypsy"; that is, the repeated citation of poetic lines in particular contexts limits the terms of discursive interaction.

"Either Gypsy Art or Gypsies Themselves"

Fascination with the Gypsy saturates several European national imaginaries, such as those of Spain or Hungary, but the Russian romance with Gypsies has no equivalent force in most other countries, where Roma are a much larger, much more visibly impoverished minority, such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, or Romania. In Russia, the figure of the Gypsy is elaborated through Russian romantic literature from the nineteenth century onward (see Hamill 1943; Scherbakova 1984; Janicki 1989). In the 1980s and 1990s, late- and post-Soviets continued to invoke nineteenth-century authors (especially Pushkin) to underwrite first Soviet internationalism and then Russian nationalism.

Literary texts thus figure importantly as sources for both theatrical and real-time performative citations. The method I use in tracing these literary invocations recalls Said's strategic formation, "a way of analyzing [how] groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres acquire mass, density, and referential power amongst themselves and thereafter in the culture at large" (1978:20). In theme the chapter departs from literary critic Katie Trumpener's perception that in Western European literature, images of Gypsies act "as figurative keys to an array of literary genres and to the relations between them" (1992:873). This was so in Russia as well; moreover, writings about Gypsies keyed slippages between categories of art and those of everyday cultural identity.

I met few Soviets who did not perform such slippages when quoting or even mentioning poetic "Gypsy" texts. For instance, in 1993 after I had been teaching English at the weekend class for children of Moscow Romani performers for nearly two years, we taped a case of such a conflation of Gypsies' art and identity, one keyed by familiar images and by allusion to Pushkin. The class was attended mostly by members of the troupe Gilorri, though a few Russian girls participated. While taping a class, we interviewed one of these Russian girls, a six-year-old named Katja, about two pictures of "Gypsy girls" that she had painted with tempera. The child was shy about speaking in front of the camera, and so her grandmother, in her sixties, whispered prompts. The end of the interview turned to questions of identity:

Author: And you yourself, who are you?

Grandmother [prompting]: I'm Russian.

Katja: I'm Russian [pause].

G [prompting]: But I really love Gypsy-

K: But I really love Gypsy ...

G [prompting]: Art.

K: Art.

G: Louder.

A: Why?

K: Because there [tam] there is much joy, because there [tam] there is always merrymaking ... there [tam] it is very nice.

A: Would you like to be a Gypsy?

K: Yes.

(Lemon and Nakamura 1994, videotape transcript, translated from Russian)

The girl's projection of wishful identity onto a painted world "there" (tam, "over there") had itself been projected into her speech. Just after this interview, the grandmother admitted to the camera that, regarding love of Gypsies, "It's as if I've transferred my own inner feelings to my granddaughter." Whence was such a projection launched into a six-year-old's consciousness, or for that matter, into her grandmother's? Certainly not from immediate contextual surroundings at the school, where the Romani children wore jeans and wrote English words into notebooks, but from textual memory, memory of past performances and citations. Earlier in the interview, the grandmother phrased her prompts as if they referred to the girl's paintings, but in fact they described things not visible within that imaginary frame: "Say that she is dancing and that the moon is shining on her," she said, though the girl had painted no moon. Such utterances evoked familiar imagery from film, literature, and the stage.

There is nothing necessarily sinister in such ventrilocution-in many speech communities such orchestrations are seen as caring ways for elders to involve children in talk (Briggs 1984). More important to note here is not the mere transmission of images, but the...