Introduction

This chapter examines the range of engagements with Shakespearean drama during the first post-revolutionary decades–in academia, on stage, and in political discourse. It explores the politics of early Soviet translation, affected both by early avant-garde tendencies and by intensifying Marxist ideologies. The past decades have seen a turn towards interrogating the relevance and usefulness of Shakespeare’s works–at individual, social, and global levels. The term “Soviet” does not point to any ethnic or linguistic cohesion or even to a shared national past but rather derives from the Russian word for “council” and was selected in part to suggest the democratic, collective, grassroots nature of the state that emerged from the October Revolution of 1917. The Soviet emphasis on ideologically “correct,” nationally homogenous approaches to Shakespearean drama on stage and in print was closely tied to the increasingly recognized need for cultural competition with the West.