Performing Gender on the Russian Stage, 1800-1825

FAIN: FT-55105-07

Julie Cassiday
Presidents and Trustees of Williams College (Williamstown, MA 01267-2600)

For the NEH Summer Stipend, I will finish researching and writing a monograph on the performance of gender in Russia's professional theaters during the reign of Alexander I. Chapters will focus on gender as an aspect of theatrical and social performance in late Neoclassicism and Sentimentalism, the Russian actress as public woman, serf theater, the tragedies of Vladislav Ozerov, Prince Alexander Shakhovskoi's comedies, and the emergence of mixed gender and genres at the end of the Alexandrine era. This study draws on archival and library materials available only in Russia to show how professional theater created new models of masculine and feminine behavior for Russian spectators and citizens in the early nineteenth century.