“Following Our Own Path”: Pavel Katenin’s Political Theater

Abstract

AbstractThe present article focuses on the tension arising from Pavel Katenin’s aesthetic and literary vision for the reception of Antiquity in Russian mythological drama: his avid support of Classical purism and his denunciation of dramatists, for whom ancient myths served merely as a resource of historical parallels, is challenging to reconcile with the revolutionary conception of his play Andromache. The paper argues that Katenin regarded antiquity as an idealized universe from which numerous motifs could be drawn for inspiration. Semantic and structural means employed in the tragedy are analyzed as shedding light on the extent of Katenin’s transformation of the ancient myth to reflect the ideology of his time. The paper suggests that Classical antiquity served as a “mask,” allowing contemporary Decembrist circles to apply ancient models and situational resolutions to their own political crises. The dramatist’s conflation of masked political ideology with extreme innovation and intricate intertextual allusion is put forward as a cause of the brevity of the stage life that Katenin’s Andromache was allowed in St. Petersburg’s Bolshoi Theater.