“...this bowdlerized regularization of Shakespeare’s beloved play...elicits considerable scholarly interest. Ospovat’s reading of Gamlet through Machiavelli, Benjamin, and Schmitt transforms it into an astonishingly relevant depiction of the rise of charismatic tyranny during moments of political crisis (states of exception), perceived or real.”
— Catherine A. Schuler, University of Maryland, The Russian Review (Vol. 76, No. 3, July 2017)

“An impressive work of literary analysis and historical reconstruction that presents the tragedies of Alexander Sumarokov as focal points of the mythology of eighteenth-century Russian absolutism."
— Richard Wortman, Bryce Professor Emeritus of European Legal History, Columbia University

“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

Kirill Ospovat received his PhD from the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU, Moscow) in 2005. He has held various postdoctoral appointments in Russia, Germany, the UK, and the US, most recently in the ERC-funded research group “Early modern drama and the cultural net” at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Acknowledgments

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