Coretti de-Utina's early Bolshevik involvement (1913-1916)

Petrograd (1913-1917)

While studying at the St. Petersburg Music Conservatory, Coretti was introduced to an esteemed member of the Petrograd Conservatory and popular pianist, Nikolai Burenin, and it wasn't long before he offered her a interesting proposition in joining his latest venture, the Society of Fine Arts. Burenin and fellow pianist (and director of the St. Petersburg Theater of Musical Drama) Mikhail Bichter organized the Society in 1911 under the League of Education and received permission in early 1913 from E.P. Karpov (chief director of Imperial Theaters) to turn the organization into a independent society with its own charters. The organization was divided into four sections: Musical, Dramatic, Literary and Artistic (sculpture and painting). The musical section, headed by Burenin, consisted of more than a hundred singers, pianists, violinists, cellists, musicologists and professors from the conservatory. Around the Russian capital, the Society arranged “literary & musical mornings”, which gathered large audiences of five to six hundred people consisting of workers and peasants. The carefully organized program promoted the best works of Russian romance, folk and classical music such as the works of Glinka, Tchaikovsky and Glazunov. The majority of the public concerts were usually held in the hall of the Tenishev Secondary School (at 33-35 Mokhovaya) as well as at the Zemsky School, Worker's Clubs and the Labor Exchange. Touring with the Society of Fine Arts, Coretti soon discovered that she was performing before audiences of revolutionaries who used the concerts as fronts for their anti-government meetings. A significant part of the income from the paid concerts went to the Bolshevik party. Through the underground revolutionary Burenin, Coretti was introduced to Countess Sofia V. Panina, F.I. Drabkina, V.V. Gordeeva, A.I. Mashirov and many other revolutionary actors, composers, musicians, artists and writers. From her new Bolshevik acquaintances, she became more familiar with the unrelenting fury and brutality of the Tsarist gendarmerie and Okhrana (secret police) upon the lower classes. The leaders of the proletariat were shadowed, hunted and sent to rot in distant Siberian prisons for their illegal underground activities.

From late April to early May 1914, the underground Bolshevik newspaper, Path of Truth (Pravda), announced the "Literary & Musical evenings" at the Ligovsky People's House, located on 63 Tambovskaya Lane, on Petrograd's outer edges near the numerous factories and industrial plants. The Ligovsky house was built in 1903 on the edge of St. Petersburg, housing classrooms, an observatory, legal advice, a savings bank. By 1913, the Bolsheviks used the building to offer entertainment and education to the impoverished workers/peasants who couldn't afford to visit the theaters, cabarets and musichalls in deeper in the city.

Literary & Musical Morning

Dedicated to the music of the oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa & America

Onstage, Corette dressed in ragged clothes with a sickle in her hand, before a backdrop of a blue sky and large grain field (very similar to her performances with the Louisiana Amazons), sang a series of Blues and Spirituals. Her songs of oppression, pain, anger & hope touched the hearts of the tired Russian peasants.

Early 1915, the Fine Arts Society appeared at the Women's Medical Institute where they offered a heavily censored concert for the wounded soldiers. Other Russian performers included monarchist, chauvinistic, anti-Jewish and anti-Armenian jokes and songs in their programs, much to the disgust of Burenin. The society soon began subtly including anti-war and pro-Bolshevik propaganda into their programs. Quickly, the hospital administration caught on and began issuing warnings. However, after the third concert, the Society was barred from appearing in war hospitals and infirmaries after a warrant was issued by the Okhrana.

Early 1916, the Fine Arts Society organized a concert held at the Tenishev School, with the participation of Maxim Gorky, who gave a fiery propaganda filled speech despite the presence of the secret police. A financially successful author, playwright and editor, Gorky (born Alexei Peshkov in 1868) was well noted for publicly opposing the Tsar, exposing the Tsarist government's control of the press and had been arrested and even exiled on numerous occasions. He supported liberal appeals to the government for civil rights and social reform. He was personal friend of Lenin since 1902, and was acquainted with many revolutionaries. His reputation grew as a literary voice of Russia's bottom strata of society and a fervent advocate of social, political and cultural transportation. Gorky also had a passionate love of the theater. One of his aspirations since the 1890s, was to develop a network of provincial theaters for the peasants in hopes to reform Russia's theatrical world. In 1904, he was able to open a theater in his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, but unfortunately the government censors banned every play that he proposed and Gorky abandoned the project. On December 31, 1913, after the Romanov Tercentenary, Gorky was allowed to return home Russia after eight years of living in exile in Italy. By March 1914, he was living in St. Petersburg working as an editor for the underground Bolshevik Zvezda and Pravda newspapers. After the concert, Burenin introduced Coretti to Gorky, who confessed to her that despite his disdain for female entertainers, he was her biggest fan, expressing that her Negro folk songs captured the essence of the struggles of the proletariat. Gorky and Coretti became close friends, and she may been a frequent guest at his Petrograd apartment on 23 Kronversky Avenue where there was constant drinking, dancing, gambling and frequent readings of 18th Century pornographic novels (Marquis de Sade was rather popular). During these nights at Gorky’s home, Coretti would've mingled with publishers, academics, revolutionaries, the great singer Fyodor Chaliapin and even Lenin himself.