Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin by Simon Karlinsky (review)

Reviews185 movement" of Coriolanus' speeches, which convey a sense of Coriolanus as an "attacker" by their pattern of pursuing "the delayed idea, the buried trigger," which the character must "work fiercely" to reach (p. 153). Later in that discussion, Goldman takes on the larger questions of why we believe real people have "characters" which we think we are capable of describing (p. 140). He suggests that while in ordinary life "character" may be a "problematic" matter, a "radically unsatisfactory concept" (p. 164), in tragedy characters "author" themselves; they believe they have unassailable identities which belong to them no matter what they do. Though his experiences compromise that view, the tragic hero tries to "take over" the script and "make his part his own" (p. 165). Because the actor transmits that effort of enactment to us, we feel the self as a possession of our own. This possession of a self through the mediation of an actor "is absolutely central to the experience of tragedy"; it is the cause of our feeling of "positive accomplishment" (p. 167) at the drama's end. Through action and self-discovery we feel "the sensation of having come upon something of our own, a self or part of one, that shimmers or presses at the source of action, that attempts to unfold itself into the world" (p. 168). Our sense that there is, finally, something about the tragic figure that is truly his, and our sharing of that experience through the actor's performance, becomes "of irreplaceable value in our own drama of selfdiscovery " (p. 168). Recently Stephen Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore, among others, have been asking challenging and critically invigorating questions about self and character which have helped us see familiar Elizabethan texts in new contexts and more fully to comprehend the elements in them that fascinate us. We live in rich times for literary criticism, and to this exciting period of exploration of questions re-opened, or emerging, or newly defined, Michael Goldman has made and continues to make distinguished contributions. HARRY KEYISHIAN Fairleigh Dickinson University Simon Karlinsky. Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Pp. xxi + 357. $38.50. The only thing worse than reading a long-forgotten verse-play is to read about a long-forgotten verse-play. Simon Karlinsky has done his best to make the ordeal bearable; and, for the most part, he has succeeded in bringing some life into otherwise lifeless art-forms. And unlike some American critics of Russian literature Karlinsky gives credit where it is due, citing copiously from Soviet studies, and damns the impostors who get stuck on political fly-paper. Karlinsky, like Jan Kott, is a superb "gossip": he gleans the best from Russia's human and inhuman comedy and enthralls the reader with his recounting of both low- and high-life. We learn that the Russian critic Belinsky "played the part of the father in an amateur student [redundant] 186Comparative Drama production" (p. 125) of Ablesimov's TAe Miller: A Wizard, a Cheat, and a Matchmaker (the "corrected" translated title provided by Karlinsky, although the Russian is simply Mel'nik, koldun, obmanècik i svat and does not indicate Karlinsky's preferred version); that Nabokov erred in his judgment of Iakov Kniazhnin, especially the latter's verse-comedies; that "Ozerov came closer to portraying the only form of love [homosexual ] that attracted Gogol and that he himself would not dare depict in a play" (p. 209); that "Zagoskin had a poor ear for meter and had to count syllables and feet laboriously when composing his verse dialogue" (p. 263) . And Karlinsky cites Catherine IFs prowess, both in the boudoir and at her writing-desk, to definitely prove Mae West's assertion that Cathy was truly Great. These may not be startling observations, but they are an integral part of Russian drama prior to 1830. Certainly readers unacquainted with pre-twentieth-century Russian theater and drama will suffer from "factitis" after the second chapter. They may hardly care that Mikhail Popov's Aniuta, performed on August 26, 1772, is the first Russian comic opera (for some reason, neither do the Soviets, who fail to mention...