Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Introduction 1
5. The Misanthrope, the Orphan, and the Magpie: Imported Melodrama in the Twilight of Serfdom 25
6. Melodramatizing Russia: Nineteenth-Century Views from theWest 55
7. The Importance of Being Unhappy, or,Why She Died 79
8. Melodrama as Counterliterature? Count Amori’s Response to Three Scandalous Novels 99
9. HomeWas Never Where the Heart Was: Domestic Dystopias in Russia’s Silent Movie Melodramas 127
10. Alcohol Is Our Enemy! Soviet Temperance Melodramas of the 1920s 152
11. Melodrama and the Myth of the Soviet Union 178
12. Soviet Family Melodrama of the 1940s and 1950s: From Wait for Me to The Cranes Are Flying 208 208
13. Conventional Melodrama, Innovative Theater, and a Melodramatic Society: Pavel Kohout’s Such a Love at the Moscow University Student Theater 232
14. Between Public and Private: Revolution and Melodrama in Nikita Mikhalkov’s Slave of Love 259
15. Playing Dead: The Operatics of Celebrity Funerals, or, The Ultimate Silent Part 283
16. Suggested Reading 321
17. Contributors 325
18. Index 327