Recurring masks: The impact of the Italian commedia dell'arte on the Russian artistic imagination

This dissertation investigates the impact of the Italian commedia dell'arte on the Russian artistic imagination by analyzing selected cases from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. While the Russian modernists' infatuation with the commedia and its famous masks has been widely studied, little has been written about the commedia's broader impact on Russian culture. This dissertation demonstrates that there has been a rich tradition of Russian Harlequinized art that has extended for three centuries, where the term "Harlequinized" describes art or literature that contains core features of the commedia.;The first chapter discusses affinities between the art of medieval Russian minstrels---the skomorokhi---and the commedia dell'arte, and describes the sensational success of the first Italian performances for the Russian court in 1731. Chapter Two explores Vasilii Trediakovsky's 1733--1735 translations of Italian scenarios, and analyzes how Aleksandr Sumarokov both imitated and russified the commedia in his 1750 comedy The Monsters. Chapter Three proposes a new reading of Nikolai Gogol's short story The Overcoat (1842), suggesting that Akakii Bashmachkin's personality and destiny strongly parallel those of the commedia mask of Pulcinella. Chapter Four shows that the Russian modernist infatuation with the commedia came not only from the West, but was also a continuation of the tradition of Harlequinized art in Russia. Chapter Five focuses on Vladimir Nabokov's last novel Look at the Harlequins! (1975), which establishes an artistic dialogue between the ancient commedia and modern literary production.;By tracing the recurrence of Italian masks within Russian culture, this thesis demonstrates that the commedia dell'arte has been a source of inspiration for the Russian artistic imagination across three centuries. There were two major waves of infatuation with the commedia in Russian cultural history---first during the reign of Anna Ioanovna (1730--1740), and second during the modernist era (roughly 1890--1930). The first wave was influenced by direct encounters with Italian performers and was a powerful transmitter of the European baroque onto Russian soil. During the second wave, Russian modernists revived and reinterpreted the commedia based largely on secondary sources in a rebellion against nineteenth-century realism.