The History of Russian Vaudeville from 1800 to 1850

by Tselebrovski, Alexander V.

? There is no significant scholarly work on the history of the Russian vaudeville. The author of the dissertation makes an attempt to explore the history of vaudeville in Russia from 1812, when the first original vaudeville was written by A. Shakhovskoi, to the 1850s, when vaudeville as a genre was finalized as a form and brought to its classic completion. Two phases of the history of vaudeville in Russia, aristocratic and democratic-raznochinnyi, are considered in close connection with the political, social, and cultural events of Russian society of the time. The first phase embraces the period from 1812, when the first original Russian vaudeville was produced in St-Petersburg, to 1825, when tsar Aleksandr I died and Nicholas I inherited the crown of the Russian empire. The second phase, democratic-raznochinnyi, includes the years from 1826 until 1855, the years in which Nicholas I ruled. The division of the history of Russian vaudeville is made on the assumption that political events in Russian society always have been closely connected with and often caused changes in its cultural, art, and literary life. Vaudevillists such as A. Shakhovskoi, N. Khmelnitskii, A. Griboedov, and A. Pisarev present the first phase. F. Koni, P. Karatygin, and N. Nekrasov familiarize the reader with the second phase. The author of this dissertation analyzes the most exemplary works of each of the aforementioned authors. For better understanding the peculiarities of the development of vaudeville in Russia, the dissertation also presents a broad socio-cultural background of the first half of the nineteenth century and shows how theatre in general, and vaudeville in particular, mirrored the changes of the socio-cultural life of the nation in their own way.