Mourning the soviet victims in a cosmopolitan way: Hamlet from Kozintsev to Riazanov

The article contextualizes Grigorii Kozintsev’s celebrated films, Hamlet and King Lear, and El’dar Riazanov’s Beware of the Car, in the historical environment of post-Stalinist Russia. Scrutinizing Kozintsev’s political and artistic itinerary, the Shakespearean productions are interpreted as works of mourning for Soviet victims. In his writings on Shakespeare as well as in his films, Kozintsev insisted that his ideal was not historical accuracy but rather a self-conscious modernization of the classical text. Having found in Shakespeare an adequate cultural idiom that was resonant, cosmopolitan and ambitious, Kozintsev developed his language for a mournful meditation about the long Soviet period. In response, his former student, Riazanov, inserted a parody on Kozintsev’s Hamlet into his popular but subtle epitaph on Soviet utopianism, Beware of the Car.