Russia's Theatrical Past: Court Entertainment in the Seventeenth Century

In the 17th century, only Moscow's elite had access to the magical, vibrant world of the theater.

In Russia's Theatrical Past, Claudia Jensen, Ingrid Maier, Stepan Shamin, and Daniel C. Waugh mine Russian and Western archival sources to document the history of these productions as they developed at the court of the Russian tsar. Using such sources as European newspapers, diplomats' reports, foreign travel accounts, witness accounts, and payment records, they also uncover unique aspects of local culture and politics of the time. Focusing on Northern European theatrical traditions, the authors explore the concept of intertheater, which describes transmissions between performing traditions, and reveal how the Muscovite court's interest in theater and other musical entertainment was strongly influenced by diplomatic contacts.

Russia's Theatrical Past, made possible by an international research collaborative, offers fresh insight into how and why Russians went to such great efforts to rapidly develop court theater in the 17th century.

Claudia Jensen is Affiliate Instructor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Washington. She is author of Musical Cultures in Seventeenth-Century Russia and editor (with Milos Velimirovic) of Nikolai Findeizen's History of Music in Russia from Antiquity to 1800, volumes 1 and 2. Ingrid Maier is Professor Emerita of Russian at the Department of Modern Languages, Uppsala University. She has published several monographs on modern and historical Russian linguistics, Russian cultural history, and Russian translations of 17th-century newspapers, including editions of these translations (Vesti-Kuranty). Stepan Shamin is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is author (in Russian) of Foreign "Pamphlets" and "Curiosities" in Russia from the 16th to the Beginning of the 18th Centuries and Seventeenth-Century Kuranty. Daniel C. Waugh is Professor Emeritus of History, International Studies, and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington. He is author of The Great Turkes Defiance and (in Russian) of History of a Book: Viatka and "Non-modernity" in Russian Culture in the Era of Peter the Great.