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

press release:   Please join us for the next in our Spring Lecture Series: Kirill Ospovat's lecture, titled "Theater of Power: Hamlet and the Poetics of Autocracy in Early Modern Russia." This 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, Kirill Ospovat 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.  

The Speaker:

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 St. Petersburg and a visiting lecturer at Princeton University. His research interests focus primarily on the cultural poetics of early imperial Russia and various forms of knowledge and discourses imported to Russia after Peter I which played a pivotal role in modeling the political order and the political subjects, thus shaping and propelling the imperial cultural renovation. His book "Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia", forthcoming with the Academic Studies Press, explores the origins of Russian tragedy in the mid-eighteenth century as a mode of political imagination.