was transposed to St. Petersburg and given new intensity by Gogol.137 Perhaps the most important of all was Sir Walter Scott, whom Gogol called 'the Scottish sorcerer,' and whose works inspired the writing of history as well as of historical novels.138 Pseudo-medieval romances helped give an active, historical cast to the 'spiritual knighthood' of higher order Masonry. Russians dreamed of being 'a knight for an hour,' to cite the title of a famous Nekrasov poem; or of recreating the masculine friendship and implausible heroism of Posa and Don Carlos in opposing the authoritarianism of the Grand Inquisitor and Philip II in Schiller's Don Carlos. They also identified themselves with the metaphysical quest of such favorite romantic heroes as Byron's Cain and Don Juan, Goethe's Faust and Wilhelm Meister.
But there was one Uterary character who seemed particularly close to the soul of the aristocratic century. He was the favorite stage figure of the 'marvelous decade,' the subject of one of Belinsky's longest articles, and a source of unique fascination for modern Russian thought: Shakespeare's Hamlet.
The romantic interest in the melancholy prince began in the eastern Baltic, on the gloomy marshes that divide the German and Slavic worlds. It was in Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) that the 'magus of the North,' Johann Hamann, first taught the young Herder to regard the works of Shakespeare as a form of revelation equal to the Bible and to use Hamlet as his basic textbook for this new form of symbolic exegesis.139 Hamann was an influential pietist preacher, a student of the occult, and a bitter foe of what he felt to be the excessive rationalism of his neighbor and contemporary, Immanual Kant. If Kant's influence was great, indeed decisive, on the subsequent development of Western philosophy, the immediate influence on ordinary thinking of men like Hamann was far greater, particularly in Eastern Europe. For better or worse, Kant's critical philosophy never gained a serious hearing in Russia until the late nineteenth century, whereas Hamann's quasi-theosophic idea of finding symbolic philosophic messages in literary texts became a commonplace of Russian thought.
By the time Herder moved east from Konigsberg to Riga, Russia had already welcomed Hamlet as one of the first plays to be regularly performed
on the Russian stage. Sumarokov started the Russian critical discussion of the tragedy with his immodest claim to have improved on the original by his garbled translation of 1747.140 Whether or not Herder first imparted his fascination with the original version directly while in Russian-held Riga or only indirectly through his later impact on German romantic thought, Hamlet became a kind of testing ground for the Russian critical imagination.
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
To the men of the 'remarkable decade'-many of whom courted or committed suicide-Hamlet stood as a kind of mirror of their generation As with so many attitudes of the period, Hegel was their indirect and unacknowledged guide. Hegel had associated the melancholy and indecision of Hamlet with his subjectivism and individualism-his 'absence of any formed view of the world' or 'vigorous feeling for life'147-problems be* setting any modern man who stands outside the rational flow of history as a proud and isolated individuum. This pejorative Hegelian term for 'individual' was precisely the label that BeUnsky adopted in his famous letter to Botkin rejecting Hegel. It is in the context of this strange struggle that Belinsky waged with Hegel-always accepting Hegel's basic terminology, definitions, and agenda-that one must read Belinsky's extended portrayal of Hamlet in 1838 as a true idealist dragged down by the venal world about him.148
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Belinsky was captivated not only by the quality of frustrated idealism in Hamlet but also by the intense way in which the part was played by Paul Mochalov. This extraordinary actor played the role of Hamlet repeatedly until his death in 1848, the last year of the 'remarkable decade.' So popular did the play become that simplified versions began to be given in the informal theatricals presented by serfs seeking to entertain their landowners; and the term 'quaking Hamlet' became a synonym for coward in popular speech.149
