GITIS aspires to combine styles, to draw teachers and directors from across the country’s theaters: Maria Knebel’, for example, directed at the Children’s Theater in Moscow. Even under the hegemony of socialist realism, each school was said to develop a trademark style: the studio at the Kamerny began with principles of ballet, the Maly with mimetic etudes. GITIS stands apart also through breadth: it encompasses all aspects of stage work, accommodating faculty in choreography, stage diction, circus management, variety production, dramatic criticism, theatrical history, costuming, set design, and so forth. The faculty for stage movement occupy their own low building, furnished with a magnificent, polished hardwood and a sprung dance floor, surrounded by risers and gymnastics equipment, where one can learn everything necessary to choreograph and perform elaborate combat scenes without leaving campus (since 2009 the campus has expanded to include a grand new facility across town). By the time students leave, they are expected to have forged enduring professional contacts—and later to find just the person to create the effect of soft rain on moss, or to play a theremin.
GITIS is a dense node of cultural and social production, condensing and concentrating resources and networks, admitting some while evicting others. In coldest winter at GITIS, someone had opened the fortochka to release excess heat. Such steady delivery of heat is not always the case across Russian territory,19 but we were in the center of the center, near the avenue carrying government cavalcades each morning to the Kremlin. Few in the room were native to this place; more than half had come from afar, thousands of kilometers away, from Irkutsk, Ekaterinburg, Rzan’, Surgut … and a handful from still other, farther cosmopolitan centers—Doha, Seoul, Paris, Stockholm. Small groups from America visited for a week or so. Many teachers hailed from the provinces, having settled in Moscow decades before. Now the cohort I know best has dispersed, working in Vladivostok and Riga, on film sets in ja Siberia or in South America; some return triumphantly to Moscow openings. Several have become stars, gone to Cannes or Broadway, choreographed in Hollywood. Some are not (yet) famous, but work steadily in television and theater, and some supplement this work with acting lessons for businessmen. A few have left the profession. But back then, in that studio, biographies from beyond the moment submerged, reemerging only in short bursts as we focused on making contact with each other here and now.
A fortochka works with a building’s system of kommunikatsija, its networks of cables, pipes, and wires carrying water, electricity, sound, and data (the analogous English usage of “communications” can be found among U.S. building professionals). The Russian word kommunikatsija can be used to talk about human communication,20 and metaphors about communication as infrastructure abound (Stalin likened language to railway tracks), to inflect the ways material conditions in Russia are ideologically burdened.21 Russian pipes built above summer bog and winter ice, over and under streets, come under foreign critique as ugly, too visceral. Such criticism demonstrates disregard for sound reasons to build above marsh and permafrost; fuel and water pipes rupture underground, as America is learning, and we might learn better. Russian communication, too, comes under too quick criticism. In this light, a telepathy lesson that opens a fortochka is bound to be misread unless we cross borders drawn during the Cold War.
1.Do We Have Contact?
INTERSECTIONS: ACTORS AND PSYCHICS
This book connects and contrasts hitherto separately treated places, practices, and situations, following actors and psychics and those who cross their paths. Others have written about Soviet theater or about telepathy science as distinct topics, and in rich and insightful ways. This project instead sniffs along the edges where fields of expertise converge and diverge. Some of these overlaps are easy to see, such as when American security forces hire psychologists like Paul Ekman or when Russian detectives quote Constantine Stanislavsky.
In 1996 I started to collect books from street vendors near Moscow metro stations, books that forged hybrids of theatrical and criminological knowledge, branding technologies for intuition, like What Is in His Subconscious? Twelve Lessons in the Psychotechnology of Penetrating the Subconscious of Your Interlocutor (A chto u nego v podsoznanii? Dvenadtsat’ urokov po psikhotekhnologii proniknovenija v podsoznanie sobesednika). The author, psychologist Aleksandr Panasjuk, begins by challenging the Russian proverb asserting that one must “eat a pound of salt” together in order to know and then to trust: “That is what they say who do not know the science of psychology. For science maintains that one can decipher another person in a few seconds!” (1996, 12).
Panasjuk then voices the retort of an imaginary reader: “But what if they are acting?” He reassures us that even the greatest actors have limits—even Innokenty Smoktunovsky, the Soviet-era star whose repertoire ranged from Prince Hamlet to Prince Myshkin, could never pull off a decent Lenin. It follows that ordinary people find it even more difficult “to act” all the time. Therefore, if your interlocutor does not want you to intuit what he is feeling, he must work quite hard. Diplomats, yogis, professional actors, and the like may have taken the time to train themselves to limit and control their gestures and tone, to tame their automatic tells—but rest assured, most mortals have not mastered the control: “If your partner has not studied in special schools or internalized Stanislavsky’s system in the theatrical institute, then it will be incredibly hard for him not to manifest, through unconscious behavioral reactions, his true stance” (Panasjuk 1996, 46). Readers are promised specialized techniques from psychology and theater for penetrating an other’s subconscious—if not to read thoughts, then at least to discern attitudes.
Scholars working elsewhere have theorized similar intersections across scientific experimentation; art; demonstrations of the magical, occult, or paranormal; and to some extent criminology,1 demonstrating where similar aesthetic and technical conventions regulate attention and focus in ritual, in the lab, and behind the proscenium arch. Lights go on and off, doors, curtains, and windows open and close, sorting and separating senders from receivers, setting up barriers to some senses and channels for others, and segregating or linking actors and audiences, subjects and experimenters.2
It is commonplace to assert that just as modernity produces tradition, science produces the occult,3 and that new forms of media motivate and empower mediumship.4 Such claims warrant more thinking at the intersections. Luckhurst (2002) argues that telepathy is magic gone modern. In making this claim, he and other scholars identify junctures among formally distinct, public arenas (“law,” “ritual”) and more diffuse forms of sociality. They describe the nineteenth-century turn to spiritualism and hypnosis as echoing fears and hopes about messages crossing once inconceivable distances. Telepathy, psychokinesis, and all the paranormal powers did more than merely run alongside the novelties of mass printing, trains and telegraphs, radio and film, and now the cell phone and the digital image.5 Strong feelings both for sounds transmitted along thin wires and for voices from the ether animated the extension of empires and states (see especially Galvan 2010, 2015).
Perspective matters a great deal to this story: because perspectives are both many and limited, I do not claim to paint a general landscape of fields, even within one country.6 As a sociocultural, linguistic, and historical anthropologist, trained both to be attuned to interactions and to search the archives, my goals are not to catalog taxonomies, to distill origins, or even to posit causal explanations. I am motivated instead by questions like this one: As people move among situations, from the bureaucratic to the magical to the mundane, for whom do which channels seem clear? For whom are which channels invisible? Who aims for, who avoids, which contacts? How do these social facts constrain and enable human actions or even a sense of the possible?
In this book I move among settings in which professionals encounter