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Hamlet and Soviet Humanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Arthur P. Mendel
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Extract

The “thaw” slips farther back into History. Displaced from our attention by the renewed obscurantism, those heady days are seldom studied any more. This is unfortunate. For, it seems to me, it is particularly now, as a counter to the broadening repression, that we should gather and preserve the achievements of that hopeful decade. It is in this vein that I want to go back to the period and recall a dramatic and brilliant expression of the liberal, “thaw” spirit, as well as a splendid contribution to the rich gallery of Russian Aesopian polemics: Soviet Shakespeare criticism and, especially, the revival of sound and insightful commentaries on Hamlet by Soviet critics and playwrights.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , December 1971 , pp. 733 - 747
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1971

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References

1. Chushkin, N. N., Gamlet-Kachalov (Moscow, 1966), p. 309.Google Scholar

2. Anikst, A, “Gamlet,” in Shekspirovskii sbomik (Moscow, 1961), p. 97.Google Scholar

3. Vertsman, I, “K problemam ‘Gamlet, ’” in Shekspirovskii sbomik (1961), p. 129.Google Scholar

4. Kozintsev, Grigorii, Nash sovremennik: Viliam Shekspir, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1966), pp. 276, 277, 307, 320.Google Scholar

5. Kozintsev seems to consider Polonius and Osric even more repulsively demoralized than the tyrant, Claudius himself. “A terrible image, the power of inertia,” Polonius is the character through whom “Hamlet studies the nature of groveling. He is the habitual spy, who sniffs about, peeks furtively, eavesdrops.” What Polonius is for the present, Osric is for the future, “the new generation of Elsinore.” One of the many “bullies and cowards” in Shakespeare's gallery, he is typical of the “obsequious, power-hungry, young men” who are above all distinguished by “their mindlessness.” “Osric has no opinion of his own about anything, even about whether or not it is hot or cold or about the shape of the clouds. He is content to be the echo of high-placed judgments. He is one of a generation brought up in the belief that to think is dangerous and to feel, senseless.” Ibid., pp. 262, 269, 330, 214.

6. Vertsman, , “K problemam ‘Gamlet, ’” p. 111 Google Scholar; Anikst, “Gamlet,” pp. 71, 75, 88; Kozintsev, Nash sovremennik, pp. 172-75, 192-94.

7. Urnov, D, “Mysl' i monolog,” Shekspirovskii sbornik (1961), p. 178.Google Scholar

8. From Evtushenko's “Stantsiia zima” as translated in McLean, Hugh and Vickery, Walter N., eds., The Year of Protest, 1956: An Anthology of Soviet Literary Materials (New York, 1961), p. 1961.Google Scholar

9. Astangov, M, “Mysli o ‘Gamlet, ’” Shekspirovskii sbornik (1961), p. 167.Google Scholar

10. Hamlet’s association here with works by Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, and Lenin (What Is To Be Done?) and Herzen (Who Is To Blame?) would hardly be lost on Soviet readers.