Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia

“An impressive work of literary analysis and historical reconstruction that presents the tragedies of Alexander Sumarokov as focal points of the mythology of eighteenth-century Russian absolutism.”
— Richard Wortman, Bryce Professor Emeritus of European Legal History, Columbia University

“Kirill Ospovat’s Terror and Pity is the most important work on Russian Elizabethan literature since the publication in 1936 of Grigorii Gukovsky’s path-breaking book on the noble fronde. The book analyses Sumarokov’s tragedies through the perspectives of Russian court politics, European political thought of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and modern political theory. This approach not only gives new life to the plays that did not look particularly engaging for a long time, but also allows to reinterpret the phenomenon of court theater and Russian eighteenth-century cultural history.”
— Andrei Zorin, Professor of Russian, University of Oxford

“The book advances an important claim for eighteenth-century Russian drama. In this study, tragedy, and perhaps even Russian literature of the period more generally, emerges as not merely borrowing from European models, but instantiating and fully participating in the political and literary dynamics broadly characteristic of early modern European court culture. Terror and Pity identifies and skillfully explicates the affective mechanisms that articulated power relationships for the elite theater audiences at the court of Elizaveta Petrovna. Ospovat’s case studies – Alexander Sumarokov’s two early tragedies Khorev and Gamlet – are aptly chosen to capture the Russian tragedic imagination at its very inception and to illustrate the book’s key argument: that in the absence of a full-fledged or fully permissible political theory, court theater came to perform the conceptual structures underwriting autocratic rule. Yet another of Ospovat’s signal achievements is the book’s thought-provoking engagement with the early modern theory of drama and politics in circulation in mid-18th century Russia; the influential twentieth-century writings of Walter Benjamin, Norbert Elias, and Carl Schmitt, as well as a rich array of recent scholarship on Russian history, European neoclassical tragedy, Shakespeare, and early modern court politics.”
— Luba Golburt, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley