Paris, 1860

Paris during Napoleon III’s Second Empire appeared on the surface to be one of Europe’s most commanding modernizing cities. Under Prefect George-Eugène Haussmann’s unrelenting reconstruction of the city center, Emperor Louis-Napoleon reimagined his capital as a city of grand boulevards, elegant townhouses and ultramodern infrastructure. Together, Louis-Napoleon and Haussmann achieved their up-to-date vision with remarkable success. Paris became the city that would long be celebrated throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century down to the twenty-first.

Behind Haussmann’s facades lurked a more multifaceted city, one in which scarcity and ignominy played hideand-seek with vainglory. Charles-Louis Napoleon seemingly inherited his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte’s grandiose sense of self. Exiled following his uncle’s demise, Charles-Louis became embroiled in family intrigues intent on returning a Bonaparte to the French throne. He left London for Paris immediately following the collapse of the French government in early 1848 and eventually won election as President of the new Second Republic by year’s end. Prevented by constitutional prohibition from running for re-election, CharlesLouis dissolved the Second Republic and proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III of the Second Empire. Self-proclamation proved more easily declared than achieved. Faced with lingering opposition, Louis-Napoleon grew ever more authoritarian. Various foreign adventures took their toll, with his despotic regime eventually collapsing in 1870 following the debacle of the FrancoPrussian War.

Early during his rule, Louis-Napoleon tried to curry favor of the working class through social reform, including the establishment of a state insurance fund, granting factory workers the right to organize, the extension of education to girls and women, the construction of a national rail network, the establishment of major banks, the reduction of tariffs and the expansion of economic life. He systematically asserted the power of the state over that of the Roman Catholic Church. In the process, he watched over the transformation of France into an increasingly prosperous, integrated, largescale capitalist society.

The Second Empire’s profound contradictions nurtured a deeply cynical society, one which stirred the arts to respond. Many today recall the period as much for its famous artists — such as Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet and Camille Pissarro, and writers, including Alexander Dumas, fils, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola — as for imperial folly and controlling state regulation. Theatrical and musical life

similarly flourished as all of the arts responded to the uncertainties of a society undergoing profound political, social and economic change. In an ever-morecentralized France dominated by Paris, such creativity naturally took hold in the capital.

Outsiders often feel the tempo of change more readily than embedded communities; and this was the case with the Parisian musical theater. The operetta became the era’s signature night out on the town, shaped foremost under the virtuosity of German immigrant Jacques Offenbach.

Operettas share many characteristics with opera and modern musical theatre; yet it is quite distinct as something of a weigh station between both. Like opera, operettas place music and singing front and center in on-stage storytelling. Unlike opera, breaks and transitions among musical numbers are spoken rather than sung. Like the musical, acting is more important than in opera. Unlike the musical, character development remains spare, storylines less intricate. Derived from French comic opera, operettas focus on light humor. In the case of Second Empire French operetta, performance became a vehicle for social satire denied the printed page by regime censors.

Offenbach’s immigrant story is similar to that of many of the creators of American musical theater a century later. Born in 1819 into the family of a cantor at a synagogue in Cologne, Jacob changed his name to Jacques upon entering the Paris Conservatoire as a child protégé cellist at the age of thirteen. He dropped out of school after a year of study to pursue a successful recital career.

His performances took him to London, where he appeared before Queen Victoria and fell in love with the French

stepdaughter of the British concert manager John Mitchell, Hérminie d’Alcain. In 1844, he converted to Catholicism and married Hérminie, whose birth father had been the Spanish ambassador to France and a Carlist general.

Hérminie inspired Offenbach’s first successful tune, “À Toi” (To You), leading American master lyricist Alan Jay Lerner to quip in his 1986 celebration of the American musical, The Musical Theatre, that “marital love, as an inspiration, seems to be more rare than one would imagine. To my knowledge, only two popular composers actually wrote love songs to their wives, Irving Berlin and Harold Rome.” The couple, Lerner continues, “had five children and lived happily ever after, despite an occasional wander by Jacques from the straight and narrow.” 13

Offenbach enjoyed success as a performer and composer before and after returning to Cologne for two years following the July Revolution of 1848 in France. In 1855, as Paris prepared for an international exhibition that was sure to attract tourists, he found himself perfectly suited for the contemptuous world of Second Empire Paris.

Offenbach attracted backers to lease and remodel the diminutive wooded Théâtre Lacaze just off the Champs-Élysées. According to city regulations, the theater’s limited seating capacity required that there be no more than three actors with speaking parts appearing on stage at one time (this restriction was later modified to permit four speaking characters at a time). Converting the venue to the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, Offenbach fashioned miniature one-act comedies bringing together music, speaking and pantomime. His first play, Les deux aveugles (The Two Beggars), was an instant hit.

Offenbach produced more than forty works satirizing his times over the next six years. Emperor Louis-Napoléon and Empress Eugénie revealed that they had joined the ranks of his admirers by constantly praising his shows to their American dentist, Dr. Tom Evans. At the time of his death in 1880, the composer was at work on one of his most influential works, The Tales of Hoffman, which was among more than a hundred operettas, countless songs and orchestral works that he left behind. His music offered a sharp contrast to the emerging cult of Richard Wagner’s portentous style. Both composers lampooned one another, with differences between French and German musical styles setting them apart as much as their personal graces.

Offenbach’s fame and creative influence spread as he travelled and performed throughout Europe and the United States during the height of his fame, influencing such other seminal figures as Richard Strauss (the younger) in Vienna and William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan in London. Once carried to the New World, the operetta transmogrified into the more spare genre of the American musical play. By century’s end, Offenbach’s works inspired groundbreaking musical theater from Moscow to San Francisco. Second Empire Paris’s munificent cultural environment made it all possible.

St. Petersburg (Leningrad), 1960

Some cities maintain a core personality that transcends every conceivable change in political regime, economic structure and population. They retain an essential personality when home to millions as when they played host to only a few thousand residents. St. Petersburg, Russia, is such a place.

Marveling at how, in the span of barely two generations, Russia’s age of underdevelopment produced one of the world’s great literatures, Marshall Berman increasingly found himself drawn to one particular street, the Nevsky Prospekt, for an explanation. Writing in his 1982 masterpiece pondering the meaning of modernity, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Berman remarked, “Finally, the Nevsky was the one place in Petersburg (and perhaps in all Russia) where all the existing classes came together, from the nobility whose palaces and townhouses graced the street at its starting point near the Admiralty and the Winter Palace, to the poor artisans, prostitutes, derelicts, and bohemians who huddled in the wretched fleabags and taverns near the railroad station in Znaniemsky Square where the Prospect came to an end. The Nevsky brought them all together, whirled them around in a vortex, and left them to make their experiences and encounters what they could. Petersburgers loved the Nevsky, and mythologized it inexhaustibly, because it opened up for them, in the heart of the city.” 14

Berman is writing about Nevsky Prospekt at its height under the Romanovs when the boulevard served as the Russian Empire’s grande alllée. But this street continued to play an elemental role in Russian cultural life long after power and majesty had departed for Moscow. It did so because it remained an essential place of contact among the great city’s various contradictory components. It seems the Nevsky has always provided meeting places for all sorts of “poor artisans, prostitutes, derelicts, and bohemians.”

Recalling his student days in his 2003 memoir, Provoking Theater, written with John Freeman, Kamas Ginkas, a groundbreaking Jewish-Lithuanian theater director who helped to define Russianlanguage theater over the past half century, remembers the Nevsky’s Saigon Café as standing at the center of artistic inspiration. Having been celebrated in cultural histories of the late Soviet era, the Saigon was just the sort of place where those on the edge of society reshape all that is around them. This shabby and unexceptional, but well-located, low-end Soviet eatery was home to precisely the sort of urban and often vodka-fueled delirium that undermines urban propriety and cultural authority.

As Gimkas evokes the place, Saigon,

really was not even a café, and its name was not the Saigon. That is just what people called it. It was a dinky street-corner place, maybe 30 square meters, with no seats or tables, where they served lousy coffee. It was basically just a dirty little hole. You stood at these elbow-high counters to drink your coffee, which cost a couple of kopeks, or you brought along something stronger of your own. It was on the corner of Liteiny and Nevsky Prospekt. If you look down Nevsky toward the Admiralty, it would be at your left on the farthest corner from the center. It was around for a long time, into the late 1970s, before it eventually fell apart. This semi-underground place attracted alcoholics, unemployed people, dissidents, crazies, and geniuses. It brought together all of Leningrad’s outsiders with an intellectual and bohemian bent. The KGB naturally knew all about it. Its agents were always there listening to what was going on. Everything avant-garde in Leningrad was connected to this spot in one way or another. It was a place where all the rejects of the Soviet era congregated. 15

Those “rejects” included not just the student Gimkis and his theatrical friends from Georgy Tovstonogov’s nearby Bolshoi Drama Theatre around the corner, such as the epochal actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky. They counted the creators of the city’s influential underground music culture, Boris Grebenshikov, Viktor Tsoi and Sergey Kuroykhin, who dropped by, as did such seminal writers as Sergei Dovlatov, Yevgeny Rein and the future Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. Before its destruction in the 1980s, the distinctly seedy Café Saigon was arguably among one of the most creative patches in a country that covered one-sixth of the Earth’s land mass, just as the Nevsky had been a century before when its denizens invented Russian literature.

Alas, this spot is now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the site of a highend bathroom fixtures store, having been gentrified to the point of destroying even a scintilla of inspiration. St. Petersburg and Russia have lost a valuable resource.

For much of its history, Nevsky Prospekt has been a powerful mixing bowl of urban life. Today’s social scientists “problematize” these places of group interaction as “zones of contact.”

First used by Mary Louise Pratt in the early 1990s, “contact zones” are the spaces in which “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” 16 Pratt observes that “commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure,” such zones are often full of improvised relationships and “co-presence” that mark the coming into contact of peoples “geographically and historically separated...usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.” 17

Nevskii Prospekt. 2013. Photo: Alex Fedorov. 2013. Wikimedia Creative Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

among the most productive corners of the urban environment, and such communities must be revitalized from time to time for them to continue to enrich the city at large. Shabby and unexceptional though they may be, places like Leningrad’s Café Saigon are among the richest and most productive corners of urban life and help explain why a city such as St. Petersburg has remained creative across its many incarnations as St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and St. Petersburg once again. Like wetlands in the natural environment, mixing bowls of urban diversity often appear to outsiders to be little more than wastelands. They are the first places to be rebuilt, redesigned, reconceived and reconstituted when “reformers” think about “improving” a city. Yet this is a terrible mistake. Whether described as a “compelling arena of incoherence,” “zone of contact,” or an “inter-zone,” such neighborhoods are where creative cities create. Like wetlands, zones of contact are