The Authentic Shakespeare and the Stalinist Cosmopolitan Vision

• In Event: Embodied Practices as Sites of Interpretation and Recreation

Abstract

This paper seeks to illustrate a curious page in the history of Soviet Shakespeareana: the work of the Shakespeare Cabinet at the All-Russian Theater Society. Among its numerous functions, the Cabinet was employed in a “consulting” function–assisting Soviet theater companies in properly staging Shakespeare. In addition to providing physical and correspondence-based consultations, the Shakespeare Cabinet held yearly Shakespeare conferences from 1939-1948 in which it discussed the state of Shakespeare production in a given year. Focusing on print materials published in the late 1940s, such as Jozef Jusowski’s Image and Epoch (1947) and Mikhail Morozov’s Shakespeare in the Soviet Union (1947), the paper attempts to theorize a Soviet model of Shakespearean adaptation in which historical scholarship, theater criticism, and contemporary production were seen to work in tandem, while contextualizing the ideological significance of this paradigm within the broader Stalinist “cosmopolitan” vision.

Author

• Ilya Nemirovsky, Harvard U