Description
Book SynopsisSituated on the intersection of comparative literary criticism, political history and theory, and cultural analysis,
Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia offers an in-depth reading of early Russian tragedy as a political genre.
Imported to Russia by Aleksandr Sumarokov around 1750, tragedy reenacted and shaped the symbolic economy and the often disturbing historical experience of “absolutist” autocracy. Addressing half-forgotten texts and events, this study engages with literary and cultural theory from Walter Benjamin to Foucault and “new historicism” in order to contribute to a broader discussion of early modern “poetics of culture.”
Trade Review“Kirill Ospovat’s
Terror and Pity is the most important work on Russian Elizabethan literature since the publication in 1936 of Grigorii Gukovsky’s path-breaking book on the noble fronde. The book analyses Sumarokov’s tragedies through the perspectives of Russian court politics, European political thought of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and modern political theory. This approach not only gives new life to the plays that did not look particularly engaging for a long time, but also allows to reinterpret the phenomenon of court theater and Russian eighteenth-century cultural history.” -- Andrei Zorin, Professor of Russian, University of Oxford
"The book advances an important claim for eighteenth-century Russian drama. In this study, tragedy, and perhaps even Russian literature of the period more generally, emerges as not merely borrowing from European models, but instantiating and fully participating in the political and literary dynamics broadly characteristic of early modern European court culture.
Terror and Pity identifies and skillfully explicates the affective mechanisms that articulated power relationships for the elite theater audiences at the court of Elizaveta Petrovna. Ospovat’s case studies – Alexander Sumarokov’s two early tragedies
Khorev and
Gamlet – are aptly chosen to capture the Russian tragedic imagination at its very inception and to illustrate the book’s key argument: that in the absence of a full-fledged or fully permissible political theory, court theater came to perform the conceptual structures underwriting autocratic rule. Yet another of Ospovat’s signal achievements is the book’s thought-provoking engagement with the early modern theory of drama and politics in circulation in mid-18th century Russia; the influential twentieth-century writings of Walter Benjamin, Norbert Elias, and Carl Schmitt, as well as a rich array of recent scholarship on Russian history, European neoclassical tragedy, Shakespeare, and early modern court politics.” -- Luba Golburt, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
PART I
POLITICAL THEATER AND THE ORIGINS OF RUSSIAN TRAGIC DRAMA
Theater at Court
Sumarokov and the réformation du theater
Political Theater and the Poetics of Autocracy
“Scenarios of Power”: The Politics of Tragic Plots
Dramatic Experience: Tragedy and the Emotional Economy of the Court
PART II
KHOREV, OR THE TRAGEDY OF ORIGIN
Poetry, History, Allegory
Khorev and the Scenario of Marriage
Pastoral Politics and Tragedy
The Tragedy of Suspicion
PART III
POETIC JUSTICE: COUP D’ÉTAT, POLITICAL THEOLOGY, AND THE POLITICS OF SPECTACLE IN THE RUSSIAN HAMLET
Tragedy and Political Theology
The Drama of Coup d’état
Anatomy of Melancholy, or Gamlet the Hero
Investigations of Malice
The Catharsis of Pardon
EPILOGUE
THE THEATER OF WAR AND PEACE: THE “MIRACLE OF THE HOUSE OF BRANDENBURG” AND THE POETICS OF EUROPEAN ABSOLUTISM
Tragedy and Political Theology on the Battlefield
Frederick, or the Performance of Defeat
Peter, or the Tragedy of Triumph
Conclusion: Tragedy, History, and Theory
Bibliography
