Two Comedies By Catherine The Great Empress Of Russia

Download or read book Two Comedies by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia written by Lurana Donnels O'Malley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2023-10-06 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catherine the Great (1729-1796) wrote over two dozen plays and operettas, but not until this edition has a complete translation of any of them been available to an English- speaking readership. Oh, These Times (1772) is a satirical attack on many vices Catherine wished to root out from her society: religious hypocrisy, superstition and slander. The main character, Mrs. Pious, is a superficially religious old woman who resembles Moliere's Tartuffe. Catherine again sets her sights on superstition in The Siberian Shaman (1786), this time by satirizing shamanism as a deceitful profession which preys on the gullible. This play was part of a group of three plays usually known as Catherine's "anti-masonic" trilogy, written as a warning against the growing influence of the freemasons. In a comprehensive introduction, Lurana Donnels O'Malley relates the plays to Catherine's status and philosophy.

Download or read book The Dramatic Works of Catherine the Great written by Lurana Donnels O'Malley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first in-depth study of Catherine the Great's plays and opera libretti, this book provides analysis and critical interpretation of the dramatic works by this eighteenth-century Russian Empress. These works are shown to be remarkable for their diversity, frank satire, topical subject matter, and stylistic innovations. O'Malley reveals comparisons to and influences from European traditions, including Shakespeare and Molière, and sets Catherine in the larger field of Russian literature in the period, further illuminating her relationship to the aesthetic debates of the period. The study investigates how Catherine expressed her social ideas throughout her drama and exploited the stage's power to promote political ideals and ideology. O'Malley sets close textual analysis within an historical framework, analyzing the major plays according to content, style, themes, characters, and relation to Catherine's life and political aims.

Download or read book Two Plays by Olga Mukhina written by John Freedman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-31 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Olga Mukhina is one of the most talented, young playwrights in Russia. Born in Moscow in 1970, she has already garnered enviable praise from critics and audiences throughout Russia and Europe since her first play, Tanya-Tanya, was performed in 1996. Tanya-Tanya is an atmospheric, poetic tale that observes three couples at a suburban Moscow home who dance, drink champagne, kiss, fall in and out of love, and struggle with dignity and humor to keep some semblance of control over their lives. The parallels with Chekhovian drama are undeniable and clearly intended by the author. You, Mukhina's most recent work, is a love poem to her hometown of Moscow as well as a scathing attack on the apathy of people blindly wrapped up in their own happiness and sorrow.

Download or read book Russian Women, 1698-1917 written by Robin Bisha and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-16 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This collection offers a treasure trove of primary sources of interest to students of women's history. Carefully introduced and annotated, these documents illustrate the diversity of Russian women's lives." -- Barbara Alpern Engel "There is no other work that offers such a wide variety of documents and such a successful combination of literary and historical materials." -- Ann Hibner Koblitz This rich anthology of source materials makes available for the first time in any language a multitude of primary sources on the lives of Russian women from the reign of Peter the Great to the Bolshevik revolution. The selections are drawn from a wide variety of documents, published and unpublished, including memoirs, diaries, legal codes, correspondence, short fiction, poetry, ethnographic observations, and folklore. Primacy is given to sources produced by women and previously unavailable in English translation. Organized thematically, the documents focus on women's family life, work and schooling, public activism, creative self-expression, and sexuality and spirituality, as well as on the cultural ideals and legal framework which constrained women of all social classes.

Download or read book Writing the Self, Creating Community written by Elisabeth Krimmer and published by Women and Gender in German Stu. This book was released on 2020 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the world of German women writers who emerged in the burgeoning literary marketplace of eighteenth-century Europe.

Download or read book The Beauty of the Primitive written by Andrei A. Znamenski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-16 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past forty years shamanism has drawn increasing attention among the general public and academics. There is an enormous literature on shamanism, but no one has tried to understand why and how Western intellectual and popular culture became so fascinated with the topic. Behind fictional and non-fictional works on shamanism, Andrei A. Znamenski uncovers an exciting story that mirrors changing Western attitudes toward the primitive. The Beauty of the Primitive explores how shamanism, an obscure word introduced by the eighteenth-century German explorers of Siberia, entered Western humanities and social sciences, and has now become a powerful idiom used by nature and pagan communities to situate their spiritual quests and anti-modernity sentiments. The major characters of The Beauty of the Primitive are past and present Western scholars, writers, explorers, and spiritual seekers with a variety of views on shamanism. Moving from Enlightenment and Romantic writers and Russian exile ethnographers to the anthropology of Franz Boas to Mircea Eliade and Carlos Castaneda, Znamenski details how the shamanism idiom was gradually transplanted from Siberia to the Native American scene and beyond. He also looks into the circumstances that prompted scholars and writers at first to marginalize shamanism as a mental disorder and then to recast it as high spiritual wisdom in the 1960s and the 1970s. Linking the growing interest in shamanism to the rise of anti-modernism in Western culture and intellectual life, Znamenski examines the role that anthropology, psychology, environmentalism, and Native Americana have played in the emergence of neo-shamanism. He discusses the sources that inspire Western neo-shamans and seeks to explain why lately many of these spiritual seekers have increasingly moved away from non-Western tradition to European folklore. A work of intellectual discovery, The Beauty of the Primitive shows how scholars, writers, and spiritual seekers shape their writings and experiences to suit contemporary cultural, ideological, and spiritual needs. With its interdisciplinary approach and engaging style, it promises to be the definitive account of this neglected strand of intellectual history.

Download or read book Desperate Magic written by Valerie Kivelson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars' courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy. Broadly comparative and richly illustrated with color plates, Desperate Magic places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. Piecing together evidence from trial records to illuminate some of the central puzzles of Muscovite history, Kivelson explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused. Assembled, they create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture in extracting and shaping confessions, Kivelson addresses methodological and ideological questions about the Muscovite courts’ equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated. Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people scrambling to survive in a fiercely inequitable world. Masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and officers and soldiers alike believed there should be limits to exploitation and saw magic deployed at the junctures where hierarchical order veered into violent excess.