ABSTRACT

Resignifying and/or rewriting Shakespeare’s plays has become one of the means of establishing the imperial canon and subsequently “writing back” to the Empire in British colonies (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 189–91). A similar phenomenon has taken place with Anton Chekhov’s works in the other countries formerly part of the Soviet bloc. 1 Until the fall of the pro-Soviet regimes in 1989, their stagings required a political statement, especially on the part of the director. This was the case not only because of the propagandist requirements imposed by the state censorship starting in 1971, but also because they belonged to what was perceived as the culture of the Russian colonizer (Verdery 96). Next to more recent Soviet plays, Chekhov’s works were commonly used as propagandist tools in productions that embodied the communist agenda. Paradoxically, especially during Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, 2 more daring directors began staging the same plays as anticommunist allegories, contesting the regime from within in complicity with the audiences and, sometimes, even the political censors.