Theater of Power ~ Hamlet and the Poetics of Autocracy in Early Modern Russia

Ospovat's talk will explore the interaction of absolutist politics and tragic aesthetics in Aleksandr Sumarokov's adaptation of Shakespeare's masterpiece. Shakespeare's final catastrophe was here substituted with a happy ending: the Russian Hamlet triumphs over Claudius and pardons the captive Polonius, who immediately commits suicide. Sumarokov thus turns his play into a celebration of royal triumph - an allusion to Empress Elizabeth's successful coup d'état of 1741. Offering an in-depth reading of the play's double ending, I will compare it with the theatrical mechanics of royal violence and judicial terror as they were mirrored and perpetuated by tragedy. By importing the genre of tragedy into Russia, Sumarokov aligned dramatic introspection and the emotional impact of drama on the audience with the moral discipline imposed by the 'absolute' monarchy in its claim for disciplinary authority.

Kirill Ospovat has studied Russian literature in Moscow and held postdoctoral appointments in Munich, London, Chicago, and Berlin. He is currently a research associate at the Dept. of Philology at the Higher School of Economics in S. Petersburg and a visiting lecturer at Princeton University.