The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theatre (review)

238Comparative Drama The book has been superbly edited. I noted only two proofreading errors. The endnotes are profuse with information and ideas. (Unaccountably the page numbers have been omitted from several articles and chapters.) The index is precise and thorough. Altogether, this is a remarkable achievement. Denis Salter McGiIl University Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter. The Play ofIdeas in Russian Enlightenment Theatre. DeKaIb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. Pp. 296. $40.00 casebound. Elise Wirtschafter offers an intelligent reading of some 260 largely forgotten plays. She suggests the lapse of memory is unjust, not so much in the light of aesthetic standards but because the texts shed considerable light on the formation of Russian society in the eighteenth century. The overriding and convincing argument ofthe book is that theater both reflects and shapes Russian social history at a crucial moment of its transition into the modern era. Since the plays at issue illuminate Enlightenment principals that have recenüybeen looked at with considerable nostalgia and some hope ofcontemporary revival, the exercise is not narrowly academic but engaging for our own time. After a redundant but thankfully briefhistory using long-available studies on the formation ofpublic theater after Peter I,Wirtschafter demonstrates why the typical dismissal of eighteenth-century plays for their excessive optimism and stereotypical characters is unjust. Beyond the stereotypes and happy endings , Russian playwrights most often imitating Western texts explored fairly complex and compelling dilemmas: the conflicts oflove and duty, passion and economic stability, service to society and personal moral obligations, female agency and the prevalent patriarchy. The last, the Russian condition reminds us, is a particularly challenging topic that should not be reduced to a simplistic interpretation of male-female relations. Eighteenth-century Russian society to all appearances might appear to offer a perfectly conventional model of patriarchic despotism, male domination, and female subjugation to unjust social norms, if it were not for the four women who ruled the country from 1725 to 1796. Wirtschafter bravely salvages some material for feminist critique by differentiating between a dominant patriarchal despotism and a limited female agency, yet the historical evidence reflected in the plays she explores clearly subverts the narrow gender-based view in favor of a broader appreciation of Reviews239 issues troubling both sexes. Two undervalued writers, Catherine II and Princess E. Dashkova, cases in point, demonstrate through their works that the patriarchal order allowed not only women who were "legitimate bearers of independent authority" (66) but talented female playwrights involved in the pressing social topics of the day. Wirtschafter is an honest historian without agendas to impose, hence the chapter entitled "The Patriarchal Household" can transcend reductive explications to reveal important values and ideas played out onstage concerning emotions , loyalty, and family duty. It is true that women onstage and off were expected to perform "extraordinary feats of faithfulness" to fulfill their Alcestis roles of loyal wife (adapted by Sumarokov from Euripides in 1759), and that men were not assigned equally high standards in matter of carnal love. But such ideas ofmoral virtue were notjustifications for the baser urges or drive to power; men were expected to learn as much as women from Alcestis and her numerous spin-offs.A distant ancestor ofthis reviewer,A.A. Rzhevsky, demonstrated in his tragedy The False Smerdis (1769) some ofthe important lessons at issue by creating a dichotomy of heroic woman and base male. Smerdis, a "typical tyrant ofthe 18lh century Russian stage" as Wirtschafter puts it, is all patriarchal and monarchial authority originating in vile impulses of revenge and bloodshed, while his wife, the noble Fedima, committed by her sense of duty to a monstrous marriage, fulfills the audience's highest expectations of human decency, loyalty, and devotion. In a number of cases, the plays explored by Wirtschafter are particularly appealing because they show a high degree ofself-reflection in questioning the sacred tenets of the Enlightenment. Ya. Kniazhin's comedy, The Unsuccessful Peace-Maker, or Without Dinner IAm Going Home (1787), for example, shows dry logic to be inadequate in the face of complicated family relationships. In another play, based third-hand on Shakespeare and Nicholas-Thomas Barthe's transformation ofTheMerry Wives ofWindsorinto Les Fausses Infidelities (1768), the human passions...