The Cosmic Iceberg of Integration

For more than twenty years, the Russian opera diva Anna Netrebko was leading an iconic transnational life, working in most prestigious theaters all over the world and living between her three luxurious homes in St Petersburg, Vienna and New York. In all her social media, she was advertising this lifestyle as highly enjoyable and enriching. She was stressing how much at home she was feeling both in the West and in Russia, advocating a cultural mix of Russian and European dressing styles and life habits (Mattison, 2005; LIFE, 2022). She became an embodiment of the mass media fairytale about a transnationally (and even supra-nationally) integrated cosmopolitan with the Cinderella roots, who lives as if above the state while also in every state of her professional membership (Smirnova, 2022). And when the global world started to break apart in the milieu of the post-2022 geopolitics, Netrebko firmly declared that she would stay above the politics, still hoping to be integrated in every national culture as she always used to be (Netrebko, 2022). To her great surprise, this cosmopolitan membership was suddenly interrupted by the political loyalty requirement at both ends. And Netrebko found herself sidelined first in the global opera industry because of her political neutrality, and then in Russian culture because of her attempt to restore the disrupted European career (KP.RU, 2023). This example shows how easily super giant stars can be thrown down from the sky, and leads us to look into a rather tragic story of their integration. Netrebko’s de-idolization was perceived by my informants as ‘the end of something’—not exactly the end of their careers but the end of something that had been keeping their work and lives together: they were ‘perplexed and disoriented by the loss of something precious that was running away’ from them. They clearly saw their ‘own lives getting out of control’ until they started to see that this ‘pivotal something’ was actually their integration.