Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism

Myroslav Shkandrij is head of the Department of German and Slavic
Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is the editor of The Cultural
Renaissance in Ukraine: Polemical Pamphlets, 1925–1926.

This collection of 18 scholarly articles deals with Shakespeare’s
reception in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and Cuba, and with
Marxist theorizations of the Bard’s work. The focus throughout is on
performance history. The meeting of ideology with the plays resulted in
interpretations and critical commentaries that expose ambivalences in
Communist attitudes toward all classics and demonstrate in particular
how theatre has been used to serve and subvert official ideology. Among
the many discoveries here are Irena Makaryk’s account of Shakespeare
in the Ukraine in the 1920s, Laura Raidonis Bates’s look at the
poet’s reception in interwar Latvia, and the focus of Arkady Ostrovsky
and Laurence Senelick on the way his reputation was used by the regime
to impose Socialist Realism in the 1930s in the USSR.

However, the main thrust of this history is on ambivalences, which are
particularly marked during the postwar era. Werner Habicht, Lawrence
Guntner, and Maik Hamburger describe performances on the East German
stage; Martin Hilsky, Krystyna Kujawinska-Courtney, and Zoltan Markus
discuss the reception in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary,
respectively. Invariably, the context brought unexpected contemporary
meanings to the plays, and the public interpreted them as critiques of
current political regimes and commentaries on the current situation.
What emerges is not only the impossibility of a monolithic view of the
stage in this part of the world, but the resourcefulness of players and
directors and the richness of new interpretations captured by these
productions. Articles by Xiao Yang Zhang and Shu-hua Wang show how
Chinese authorities and commentators viewed Shakespeare, while Maria
Clara Versiani Galery examines Cuban articulations of The Tempest and
the image of Caliban in the context of decolonization.

The book not only demonstrates the lack of a coherent Bolshevik
approach, which veered from condemnation of Shakespeare as a sympathizer
of the aristocracy and bourgeois traditions to reverence for him as an
indispensable classic, but also the writer’s enduring popularity and
his cultural relevance—particularly in the most chilling times. The
book will be of interest to a number of publics, since it brings
together in a stimulating and illuminating manner Shakespeare
scholarship with East European history and Marxist politics.