<\/p>
In his history of Russian culture, James Billington notes the influence of Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet on modern Russian thought and drama. It was \u201cone of the first plays to be regularly performed on the Russian stage,\u201d so that \u201cHamlet became a kind of testing ground for the Russian critical imagination.\u201d The main reason \u201clay in the romantic fascination with the character of Hamlet himself. Russian aristocrats felt a strange kinship with this privileged court figure torn between the mission he was called on to perform and his own private world of indecision and poetic brooding.\u201d Hamlet\u2019s soliloquy, whose opening line was translated to Russian as \u201cto live or not to live,\u201d \u201cbecame known in Russian thought as \u2018the Hamlet question.\u2019 It was the most deeply personal and metaphysical of all the \u2018cursed questions\u2019; and for many Russians it superseded all the others.\u201d <\/p>\n
A. Radischev was, Billington suggests, \u201cperhaps the first to turn special attention to Hamlet\u2019s monologue in his own last work: On Man, His Mortality and Immortality, and resolved the question by taking his own life thereafter, in 1802. The last decade of the eighteenth century had already seen a marked rise in aristocratic suicides.\u201d This \u201c\u2018world weariness\u2019 was a Europe-wide phenomena,\u201d but took special hold in Russia. Hamlet serves as \u201ca kind of mirror\u201d for the generation at the turn of the eighteenth century, and in this they tended to follow Hegel\u2019s treatment of Hamlet: \u201cHegel had associated the melancholy and indecision of Hamlet with his subjectivism and individualism \u2013 his \u2018absence of any formed view of the world\u2019 or \u2018vigorous feeling for life\u2019 \u2013 problems besetting any modern man who stands outside the rational flow of history as a proud and isolated individuum.\u201d Turgenev bemoaned the influence of Hamlet on the Russian character, contrasting Hamlet and Don Quixote in a famous essay that called for more reckless, idealistic activism to replace the Russian penchant for mournful brooding. <\/p>\n
Russian interest in Hamlet continued into the 20th century. Pasternak wrote a brief poem on Hamlet (1948), presenting the Shakespearean hero as an isolated Christ-figure standing against oppression and hypocrisy. Here is the poem in a translation by Jon Stallworthy and
Peter France: <\/p>\n
The buzz subsides. I have come on stage.
Leaning in an open door
I try to detect from the echo
What the future has in store. <\/p>\n
A thousand opera-glasses level
The dark, point-blank, at me.
Abba, Father, if it be possible
Let this cup pass from me. <\/p>\n
I love your preordained design
And am ready to play this role.
But the play being acted is not mine.
For this once let me go. <\/p>\n
But the order of the acts is planned,
The end of the road already revealed.
Alone among the Pharisees I stand.
Life is not a stroll across a field. <\/p>\n
The Soviets, for their part, disliked Shakespeare\u2019s prince, ridiculing him (in Billington\u2019s words) \u201cas a symbol of the brooding and indecisive old intelligentsia\u201d: \u201cA production of Hamlet during the period of the first five-year plan portrayed the Danish prince as a fat and decadent coward who recites \u2018to be or not to be\u2019 half-drunk in a bar. A critic of that period went so far as to claim that the real hero of the play was Fortinbras. He alone had a positive goal; and the fact that he came from victory in battle to pronounce the final words of the play symbolized rational, militant modernity triumphing over the \u2018feudal morality\u2019 of pointless bloodletting that had dominated the last act prior to his arrival.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In his history of Russian culture, James Billington notes the influence of Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet on modern Russian thought and drama. It was \u201cone of the first plays to be regularly performed on the Russian stage,\u201d so that \u201cHamlet became a kind of testing ground for the Russian critical imagination.\u201d The main reason \u201clay in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"yoast_head":"\n