The Erotic Bondage of Serf Theatre

Abstract

T he twentieth century had barely begun when the influential publisher Aleksei Suvorin attended a private performance of Hamlet at the Hermitage Theatre in Moscow. The star of the show was Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, a stagestruck amateur, who had also made the translation. Suvorin, who was in the unenviable position of supporting the autocracy even though he was intimately aware of its corruption and imbecilities, found the Duke's performance not all that talented and the whole spectacle distasteful. The description in his private journal (February 14, 1900) concludes: And why do Grand Dukes bother about this? Why do they have to play at lesser Neros and oblige their Petersburg underlings to applaud them?' In his self-absorbed way, the Grand Duke was a throwback: his obsession recalled the court theatricals of Elizabeth and Catherine and the estate theatres that

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