THE IMAGE OF SHAKESPEARE AND SHAKESPEAREAN THEATRE IN SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY’S WORKS

Abstract

The authors analyze the corpus of Shakespearean and theater studies by a Russian writer and thinker Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950), who wrote about Shakespeare since the 1920s. The purpose of the work was to review and streamline the principles of analysis of the image of Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s theater, Shakespeare’s dramaturgy in Krzhizhanovsky’s heritage, taking into account the newly discovered archival documents. The authors explore the works of Krzhizhanovsky as a kind of metatext, representing a look at Shakespeare from the standpoint of a figure of the Silver Age. Krzhizhanovsky, who did not follow the path of academic literary criticism or art criticism, in his essayistic studies evaluates the path of Shakespeare’s creativity and theater as a salvation from the temptation of metaphysical philosophy; he analyzes the nature of Shakespeare’s theater based on the concepts of time, ways of perception, gives a number of brilliant genre definitions for tragedy and comedy, explores the structure of Shakespeare’s play; he does all this in the context of his own time. At the same time, the authors detect certain dynamics: Krzhizhanovsky reasons about Shakespeare with global philosophical generalizations, where Shakespeare is a synonym for theater and theatricality; in the finale, in the 1940s, he goes deeper and focuses on private moments of creativity, such as Shakespeare’s “songs,” images of children in his plays, and so on.