Le teorie riformatrici di Luigi Riccoboni nella Russia del XVIII secolo

Abstract

The paper reconstructs the circumstances which led Luigi Riccoboni to dedicate his book De la reformation du theâtre (1743) to Elisabeth Petrovna, Empress of Russia. As the documents at our disposal testify, Riccoboni’s work – introduced to the Petersburgian Court by the poet Antioch D. Kantemir, Russian ‘resident’ at Paris – was not officially received by the Czarina; nevertheless, the theoretical arguments exposed in it – on the one hand – and the still backward Russian cultural development at the time – on the other – lead one to believe that De la reformation exerted a considerable influence on thinking about the theatre, its political dimension and its educational potential, which in 1756 persuaded Elisabeth to establish the National Russian Theatre. The author believes that traces of Riccoboni’s theories can also be found in the Russian theatre of the second half of 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century, even though the name of the great ‘Lelio’, in a well-documented way, surfaces again only at the beginning of the 20th century thanks to the famous actor and producer Konstantin Sergeevic Stanislavsky.