Raising the Curtain

How the architecture in non-Russian republics became a subversive tool of resistance

This book revolves around two modernist opera theaters--each designed by a leading female architect--on the Soviet periphery, in Lithuania and Belarus. They are the Opera and Ballet Theatre in Vilnius (1962-74) by Nijole Buciute and the Comic Opera in Minsk (1973-81) by Oxana Tkachuk. Raising the Curtain reveals how each theater was commissioned, planned and built, examining the contemporary political and cultural events that had been unfolding on the stages of the republics before and at the time of the theaters' creations. The book also looks at how modernist architecture co-created the self-imaginaries of the "new nations" of Belarus and Lithuania. Addressing the long-neglected processes of nation building within the Soviet Union and the way in which built environments contributed to this helps us comprehend the forces that propelled the Soviet Union toward its collapse, while placing architecture's entanglement with them at center stage.