‘One Cannot Act Hamlet, One Must Be Hamlet’: The Acculturation of Hamlet in Russia

Abstract

This essay offers a ground-breaking account of Hamlet’s acculturation in Russian culture. Tracing stagings, translations and readings of Hamlet since the eighteenth century, Thomas Grob examines Russian cultural identity and its relationship to European culture through the lens of literary importation, beginning with an examination of Hamlet as one of the first English plays to be translated and performed in eighteenth-century Russia. The multiple Russian Hamlets include the political Hamlet of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, the tragic lover, the Chekhovian melancholic Hamlet, and a modern existentialist Hamlet. The volatility and mythopoeic potential of the character for Russian culture is crucially based on the distance between the ‘original’ and his reception during the process of migration, enabling politically and aesthetically inflected performances of identity.