Raising the Curtain. Operatic Modernism and the Soviet Nations

No other building typology holds such a long record of complicity with the political powers of a nation state as the opera theatre does. As both a shelter for and a display of the fantastic, the extravagant, and the hyperbolic, the opera theatre aptly stages a desired vision of a society unbound by limits of the rational. For a nation as an imagined community, the opera theatre is the designated space of self-imagination.

Raising the Curtain centres on two modernist opera theatres built on the western periphery of the Soviet Union, now located in the capitals of Lithuania and Belarus: the Opera and Ballet Theatre in Vilnius, Lithuania, inaugurated in 1974, and the Comic Opera in Minsk, Belarus, which opened in 1981. Both were designed, by a lucky coincidence, by architectural collectives led by women, Nijole Bučiūtė (1930-2010) and Oxana Tkachuk (b. 1933) respectively.

Drawing upon the close relation of operatic environments to national imaginaries, the book expands the stories of the theatres’ creation into an interrogation of the national condition in the Soviet non-Russian republics. Lithuania and Belarus exemplify the broad range of Soviet national scenarios, presenting two polar extremes of the paths taken: Lithuania was the first republic to leave the Soviet Union in 1990, while Belarus retained its reputation as the “last Soviet republic” well into the 21st century. Raising the Curtain puts centre stage the involvement of architecture of Soviet modernism with the geopolitical transformations of the era, offering an intimate look at the tectonic shifts  which still reverberate across the globe. 

Oxana Gourinovitch, PhD TU Berlin, is an architectural historian, architect, and curator. The publication is based on her PhD thesis, which was awarded the Tiburtius Prize in 2021. The publication is supported in part by the Graham Foundation’s publishing grant.