Book review: Mamontov's Private Opera

"Haldey deserves great credit for re-creating this lost world of art for its own sake and restoring it to its proper place in the pages of Russian history. The book joins a growing roster of sound studies that effectively debunk the Soviet and, as is too often the case, the lingering Western assertion that the arts in Russia were merely a primordial swamp of repressed political messages that oozed along with social antagonisms only resolvable through inevitable revolution." —Revolutionary Russia