Authors

Discussion

Dimitrii Samozvanets (1771), a later tragedy of one of the most prominent Russian dramatists, Aleksandr P. Sumarokov, stands out in his dramatic legacy. First, it stands out as a work of literature: set in seventeenth-century Russia and centred around the conflict of good and evil; the tragedy looks strikingly different from Sumarokov’s earlier works, set in the days of yore and preoccupied with conflicts of duty and honour. Second, the tragedy communicates an unclear political message: a disturbing figure of the infamous usurper from recent Russian history is an unusual literary choice made during the reign of Ekaterina II, whose own legitimacy was problematic. Unusual as it is, Dimitrii Samozvanets is an important milestone in the history of Russian tragedy, in the formation of Sumarokov’s literary method and the history of relationships between Russian literature and the empire. This paper will concentrate on the tragedy’s evil main hero, who is rather peculiar both as a literary tragic character and as a depiction of a monarch. I seek to read Dimitrii Samozvanets in order to determine whether the hero represents a point in the political debate about a ruler's legitimacy and duty or if he is a hero of a new type who belongs to a philosophical rather than a political paradigm.

I argue that Dimitrii demonstrates the permeability of the eighteenth-century tragedy for the traits that would be developed and valued later and that it should be acknowledged by the genre's history so that we shape our three-dimensional understanding of it.

Dimitri represents a new type of hero: the artistic focus in this tragedy shifts from the truth itself to the character in his relation to it. It is not yet the Romantic paradigm where such a hero would provoke understanding and pity, where his uniqueness would outweigh any norm and reason. However, the hero appears in Sumarokov’s text, and the terror he represents is existential rather than social. Thus, Dimitrii Samozvanets may be seen as a bridge between the classicist depiction of a hero and the breeding development of Russian Romantic tradition.