The Cult of Shakespeare in Soviet Russia and the Vilified Ophelia

Abstract

This article examines the representations of Ophelia in Soviet academic and literary texts, as well as in Grigori Kozintsev's internationally renowned film version of Hamlet. Analyzing the Soviet cult of Shakespeare, I argue that Soviet portrayals of Ophelia — ranging from a threatening mechanical creature to a shrinking doll — reflect the difficulty of legitimizing Shakespeare and his plays, even under conditions of strict ideological control. Accepting Shakespeare as a proto-socialist writer, and lauding Hamlet as a people's hero, requires a struggle against the text and a policy of determined misreading. As a disruptive girl character, not easily assimilated into the centralizing force of communist ideology, Ophelia is marginal to the masculine project of state-building into which Shakespeare, and consequently Hamlet, are co-opted. In Soviet portrayals, she embodies the doubt about how Shakespeare's foreign birth and bourgeois origins might affect his potential for properly educating proletarian readers. This representational trend continues beyond the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991; at the same time, post-Soviet women authors query Ophelia's marginal status, using her as a point of entry into the cultural canon.