Hamlet at the End of History: The Specter of Capitalism Haunting Communism
Rezumat
Abstract: In this paper I analyze two versions of Hamlet written and published after the fall of communism in Romania and Russia. Starting from the distinction made by Carl Schmitt in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956) between the real Elizabethan temporality that erupts in Hamlet and the atemporal-literary form of tragedy, I explore the mutations of the tragic produced by the adaptation of Shakespeare’s play in the post-communist East.
Keywords: tragedy, Hamlet, post-communism, capitalism, Romania, Russia
Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.
Bibliografie
Bibliography
Akunin, Boris. Hamlet. Versiune. Tragedie în două acte [Hamlet. A Version. Tragedy in Two Acts]. Translated by Mihaela Lovin and Ileana Alexandra Orlich, preface by Ileana Alexandra Orlich. Bucharest: EuroPress, 2014.
Baghiu, Stefan, and Anca Simina Martin. “After-Tragedy of Monsters: Vampire Fears, Melodrama, and the Modern Horror.” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024).
Borza, Cosmin, and Claudiu Turcuș. “Tragicomedia Occidentului: emigrația economică în romanele și filmele românești din anii ’90.” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024).
Chelcea, Liviu, and Oana Druţǎ. “Zombie Socialism and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Post-Socialist Central and Eastern Europe.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 57, no. 4–5 (2016): 521–44.
Contea, Bogdan. “Romanul comunismului românesc înainte și după istoria lui Mihai Iovănel” [The Romanian Novel about Communism before and after Mihai Iovănel’s History]. Transilvania, no. 5-6 (2023): 65–73.
Höfele, Andreas. No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Friedrich Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Iovănel, Mihai. “Inside the Labyrinth: The Post-Communist Novel Between Anti-Communism and Nostalgia.” Central Europe, no. 1 (2024): 49–60.
Iovănel, Mihai. Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. Iași: Polirom, 2021.
Moraru, Christian, ed. Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and the Global Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. London-New York: Verso, 2005.
Morozov, Victor. “Cvasi în direct: evenimentul revoluției române în Istoria lui Mihai Iovănel” [Quasi Live: The Event of the Romanian Revolution in Mihai Iovănel’s History]. Transilvania, no. 7-8 (2021): 133-138.
Morozov, Victor. “Într-un oraș mic: Revoluția Română, între Videograme dintr-o revoluție și A fost sau n-a fost?” [In a Small Town: The Romanian Revolution between “Videograms of a Revolution” and “12:08 East of Bucharest”]. Transilvania, no. 11-12 (2019): 115-120.
Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina. Emanciparea prințului Hamlet. In Moartea lui Ariel. Bucharest: Unitext, 1997.
Neill, Michael, and David Schalkwyk, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Orlich, Ileana Alexandra. Subversive Stages: Theater in Pre- and Post-Communist Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Budapest-New York: Central European University Press, 2017.
Schmitt, Carl. Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play. Translated by David Pan and Jennifer R. Rust. New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2009.
Terian, Andrei. “Representing Romanian Communism: Evolutionary Models and Metanarrative Scenario.” In Beyond the Iron Curtain: Revisiting the Literary System of Communist Romania, edited by Stefan Baghiu, Ovio Olaru, and Andrei Terian, 23–42. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2021.
Terian, Andrei. “Tragedy in Romanian Literature: Some Conceptual Delimitations.” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024).
Wachtel, Andrew Baruch. Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
