The Great Experiment

On Claus Guth's “Khovanshchina” at the Berlin Staatsoper

After spending two weeks in western Ukraine, in part to report a story about the Lviv National Opera for the Financial Times, it felt a bit counterintuitive to come back to Berlin and settle in at the Staatsoper for three-and-a-half hours of Russian opera. 

The Lviv National Opera. If you look closely, you can see the smaller statues bundled up as protection against bombardment. (Photo: Olivia Giovetti)

Amid the initial debates of canceling Putin versus Pushkin, I’ve been sympathetic to the de-russification of Ukrainian art, while also reluctant to abandon the Russian repertoire wholesale. As Elif Batuman points out in her New Yorker essay on rereading Russian writers in the shadow of the full-scale invasion, Pushkin himself — along with Dostoevsky and a host of other notable literary figures — was the victim of state repression. Of course, as Batuman notes, “being a victim of imperial repression doesn’t make you incapable of perpetuating repressive ideas.” This statement was made in di…