The Icon and the Axe

The extraordinary popularity of Hamlet in Russia may have come in part from certain similarities to the popular drama about the evil Tsar Maximilian confronted by his virtuous son. But the principal reason for the sustained interest of the aristocracy lay in the romantic fascination with the character of Hamlet himself. Russian aristocrats felt a strange kinship with this privileged court figure torn between the mission he was called on to perform and his own private world of indecision and poetic brooding. By the early nineteenth century there seemed nothing surprising in a Russian aristocrat's leaving his boat to make a special pilgrimage to "the Hamlet castle" at Elsinore. Standing on the Danish coast in the straits where the Baltic Sea moves out into the Altantic, this castle loomed up before Russian ships en route to Western Europe like a darkened and deserted lighthouse. Lunin paid a nocturnal visit to it at the beginning of his trip to Western Europe in 1816 that led him onto the path of revolution.141

Particular attention was always paid to the famous monologue "To be or not to be," which posed for Russia the one "cursed question" that was -quite literally-a matter of life or death. The famous opening phrase was translated in 1775 as "to live or not to live";142 and the question of whether or not to take one's own life subsequently became known in Russian thought as "the Hamlet question." It was the most deeply personal and metaphysical of all the "cursed questions"; and for many Russians it superseded all the others.

In the spring of 1789, when Europe was standing on the brink of the French Revolution, the restless young aristocrat Nicholas Karamzin was writing the Swiss phrenologist Lavater in search of an answer to the question of why one should go on living. There is, he complained, no real joy in living, no satisfaction in the knowledge of one's own being. "I am-even my / is for me a riddle which I cannot resolve."143 Three years later, after extended wandering through Europe (including visits to Lavater and to a performance of Hamlet in Drury Lane Theatre),144 he returned to write a story-not about the social and political turmoil that was convulsing the continent but about "Poor Liza," who solves the riddle of being by ending her own life. The suicide of sensitivity-in protest to an unfeeling world- became a favorite subject of conversation and contemplation. Visits were frequentiy made by young aristocrats to the pond where Liza's Ophelia-like

drowning was alleged to have taken place. The lugubrious institution of Russian roulette was apparently created out of sheer boredom by aristocratic guards officers.

Radishchev was perhaps the first to turn special attention to Hamlet's monologue in his own last work: On Man, His Mortality and Immortality, and resolved the question by taking his own life thereafter, in 1802. The last decade of the eighteenth century had already seen a marked rise in aristocratic suicides. Heroic suicide had been commended by the Roman Stoics, who were in many ways the heroes of classical antiquity for the eighteenth-century aristocrats. Although this "world weariness" was a Europe-wide phenomena and the Russian mirovaia skorb' is an exact translation of Weltschmerz, the term skorb' has a more final and unsentimental sound than the German word Schmerz. By the late years of the reign of Alexander I the high incidence of aristocratic suicide was causing the state grave concern and was used as an important argument for tightening censorship and increasing state discipline.145

The rigid rule of Nicholas I did not, however, relieve Russian thinkers of their compulsive preoccupation with "the Hamlet question." Indeed, it was this search for the meaning of life-more than ethnographic curiosity or reformist conviction-that inspired the turn to "the people" by Belinsky (and the radical populists after him). Belinsky felt that preoccupation with the cursed questions set his own time apart from that of Lomonosov and the confident, cosmopolitan Enlightenment:

In the time of Lomonosov we did not need people's poetry; then the great question-to be or not to be-was solved for us not in the spirit of the people (narodnost'), but in Europeanism.148