Article

Name: Lady Macbeth in the Context of Russian Culture: From a Character to a Plot

Authors: M. N. Klimova

Tomsk State University, Tomsk, Russian Federation

In the section The Plot in Literature and Folklore

Abstract: Lady Macbeth, the ambitious wife of the title character of the Scottish tragedy of W. Shakespeare, became a household name. Her name is represented in collective consciousness both as a symbol of insidiousness and as a reminder of the torments of a guilty conscience. Lady Macbeth entered the world culture, as an image of a strong and aggressive woman, who is ready for a conscious violation of ethical norms and rises even against the laws of her nature. N. S. Leskov describes appearance of that kind of a character in a musty atmosphere of a Russian province in his famous novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (1864). He pegged this image as the product of a suffocating lack of freedom of his contemporary reality. The author moved typical features of the Shakespearean heroine to a Russian soil, into the thick of people’s life and created a special love-criminal plot of complex origin for the purposes of its full disclosure in new conditions. The novella plot organically absorbs a number of Shakespearean motifs and images despite of the fact that it is outwardly far from the events of the tragedy “Macbeth”. Notwithstanding that Leskov’s novella had been leaving out by critics’ attention for more than 60 years, it was included in the gold fund of Russian classics in the 20 th century, evoked many artistic responses in literature and art, gained international fame and complemented the content of the “Russian myth” in world culture. Not only Leskov’s novella is discussed in the article but also other variants of the Russian Lady Macbeth’s plot such as the poem of N. Ushakov, the story of Yu. Dombrovsky, named after the Shakespearean heroine, as well as a fragment of the novel by L. Ulitskaya “Jacob’s Ladder” with discussing of the draft of one of the possible staging of the essay. Also, a hidden presence of this plot for the first time is noticed in the story “Rus” by E. I. Zamyatin and in the ballad-song “Lesnichikha” by V. Dolina. Moreover, the article gives analysis of transpositions of this literary source into theater, music and cinema languages: its first stage adaptation by director A. Dikiy, the opera “Katerina Izmailova” by D. D. Shostakovich, and its screen versions and cinema remakes such as “Siberian Lady Macbeth” by A. Wajda, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” by R. Balayan, “Moscow Nights” by V. Todorovsky, “Lady Macbeth” by W. Oldroyd. The moral evaluation of the Katerina Izmailova’s story left for Leskov as a frightening mystery of an immense Russian soul, but in the further processing of the plot it ranges from condemnation to justification and even apology of the heroine. Adaptations of this plot are also differ in the degree of dependence of the central female image from his Shakespearean prototype.

Keywords: Russian literature, English literature, Shakespearean plots, intertextual relations, plot, motif, remake, screen versions of Russian classics

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