In Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge, Mayhill C. Fowler tells the story of the rise and fall of a group of men who created culture both Soviet and Ukrainian. This collective biography showcases new aspects of the politics of cultural production in the Soviet Union by focusing on theater and on the multi-ethnic borderlands. Unlike their contemporaries in Moscow or Leningrad, these artists from the regions have been all but forgotten despite the quality of their art. Beau Monde restores the periphery to the center of Soviet culture. Sources in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Yiddish highlight the important multi-ethnic context and the challenges inherent in constructing Ukrainian culture in a place of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Jews. Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge traces the growing overlap between the arts and the state in the early Soviet years, and explains the intertwining of politics and culture in the region today.

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"Mayhill Fowler’s account of Soviet Ukraine’s 'beau monde' has managed to accomplish something that the central characters in her book often found elusive: telling a story that is both Soviet and Ukrainian."

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"Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge is a tour de force that will have far-reaching consequences for the way we understand Soviet national culture, and how we understand the field of Ukrainian studies itself."

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"Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge indeed offers an outstanding account of un-making the late imperial South East and the subsequent development of early Soviet culture in the newly created Soviet Ukraine…[it] presents an elaborate theoretical and contextual account which can help to locate the artists and their art in a specific time and a specific locality. It should be interesting for both academic and non-academic readers."

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"This engaging book is a model of interdisciplinary work, undoubtedly facilitated by Fowler’s background in theatre… Her study challenges established historians who ignore cultural production, and it deserves to be read by scholars of diverse disciplines. "

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"This book offers a necessary reappraisal of the formative Soviet decades in Ukraine and helps us understand better how Soviet culture developed across the Soviet Union… It offers a new and original angle to studying Soviet nationalities policy."

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"An elegantly written and entertaining book, with a well-crafted argument and a timely focus on Ukraine’s cultural diversity and identity politics."

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"The interaction of minority national cultures, empire, and international modernism is at the heart of Mayhill Fowler’s study of theatre in early twentieth-century Ukraine. Fowler offers several useful ideas for researchers working in the field of Soviet/Russian imperial culture and beyond."

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"Mayhill Fowler’s book is an engrossing and persuasive new look at the formation of Soviet culture as it took shape within the performing arts. Her basic tenets may be usefully applied to other aspects, among them the way in which émigré culture sought to define itself in opposition to its Soviet counterpart."

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"This book is cultural history at its best. Fowler’s subtle reading of forgotten cultural events draws out their significance in a way that opens up new conceptual vistas. Her work makes a major contribution to Ukrainian studies and the field of Soviet cultural history; it can also attract a wider audience of theatre lovers."