Introduction: The history of a story -- Permutations: victim, villain, scavenger -- Trauerspiel and counterhistory in a time of palace coups -- The rebel, the sycophant, and the epigones -- Arbitrariness and expedience meet legality, or the fatal flaws of the well-tempered autocrat -- The fin de siecle's diminished Dmitrys -- Conclusions and reintroductions: the re-resurrection of tsarevich Dmitry.
Summary:
Is each moment in history unique, or do essential situations repeat themselves? The traumatic events associated with the man who reigned as Tsar Dmitry have haunted the Russian imagination for four hundred years. Was Dmitry legitimate, the last scion of the House of Rurik, or was he an upstart pretender? A harbinger of Russia{u2019}s doom or a herald of progress? Writing the Time of Troubles traces the proliferation of fictional representations of Dmitry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, showing how playwrights and novelists reshaped and appropriated his brief and equivocal career as a means of drawing attention to and negotiating the social anxieties of their own times. -- From publisher's website.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.