Selling the Russian Soul in Nazi Germany: Vladimir Novikov at the Berlin State Opera, 1937–41

Vladimir Novikov (1892-1964) was a Russian-born theatrical set designer who attained prominence in Nazi Germany as the Berlin State Opera’s (BSO’s) resident artist for productions by Eastern European composers. After serving with distinction in the imperial Russian army during the First World War, he emigrated in 1917, wandering first to Istanbul, then to Sofia and Prague, and finally to Berlin in 1924, where he linked up with various monarchist and radical right Russian émigré communities. He later joined the Russian National Socialist Movement (ROND) that operated on the margins of Nazi politics. Novikov initially took up a job with the film company Ufa and by 1930 he had secured a position at the BSO. Between 1937 and 1941, he designed sets for at least six major BSO productions, including Rimsky-Korsakov’s Invisible City of Kitezh (1937, known to Nazi critics as “the Russian Parsifal”), Smetana’s Bartered Bride (1937), Stravinsky’s ballet The Fairy’s Kiss (1937), Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1938), Glinka’s A Life For the Tsar (1940) and Tchaikovsky’s Enchantress (1941). After the war, Novikov emigrated to the United States and died in the nursing home of an Orthodox convent in Nanuet, New York.

The poster will argue that pre-1941 and even pre-1939 Nazism could accommodate certain forms of Slavophilia that coexisted, uneasily, with doctrines of Slavic racial inferiority. The project will examine Novikov’s stage work as evidence that a romanticized idea of the “Russian soul” could find a home within the world of National Socialist values and aesthetics. A convinced anti-Semite, Romanov restorationist and Slavofascist, Novikov conjured a kind of Slavic orientalism, essentializing characteristics of the Russian nation into a package fit for presentation to the German public. The designer saw in Nazism an antidote to the “Judeo-Bolshevik menace” and, believing that Nazi ideology could be reconciled with an anti-Bolshevik Russian ultranationalism, carved a niche for himself selling a stylized völkisch Russianness to Nazi audiences. For their part, even before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made it politically germane to do so, German critics responded positively to Novikov’s mystical imagery and imperial nostalgia. This was reflective of a broader tolerance of benign, non-Soviet markers of Russianness in cultural life under Hitler: visible, for instance, in numerous Nazi films glamorizing imperial Russia and the popularity of prerevolutionary Russian music in concert halls across the Reich. In sum, using Novikov’s work as a case study, the poster hopes to elucidate how Nazism toyed with an alternative, more positive conception of Russian culture distinct from Judeo-Bolshevism, complicating notions of a monolithic anti-Slavic racial animus in the pre-Barbarossa Nazi worldview.

In addition to presenting the above argument, the poster will feature photographs of Novikov’s sets, printed originally in BSO concert programs accessed in the Berlin State Archive (Landesarchiv Berlin). It will also feature a photograph of Novikov himself from ca. 1940, derived from the same source. Accompanying each image will be a caption with background information about the featured opera, an explanation of the symbolism in Novikov’s design, and excerpts from reviews by Nazi critics.