Vagabonding Masks

Olga Partan is Assistant Professor of Russian at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts. She received her PhD with a dissertation on the commedia dell'arte in Russian culture from Brown University in 2004. She has authored several articles and book chapters on Russian literature and the performing arts, and a Russian-language memoir You were right, Filumena! (Moscow: PROZAiK, 2012).

"Olga Partan’s research is interdisciplinary and innovative. [...] Partan easily combines a variety of different fields in the overall picture of Russian culture’s infatuation with the commedia dell’arte. The author enthusiastically and fascinatingly surfs in the immense world of literature and art, substantiating her very interesting and innovative hypothesis that the impact of Italian commedia dell arte on Russian culture was significant not only during the epoch of Russian modernism, but from its very first performances in early modern Russia until the beginning of the twenty first century." — Women East-West Newsletter

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsA Note on TransliterationIntroductionChapter 1: Early Harlequinized ArtChapter 2: Anna Ioannovna’s Italian DecadeChapter 3: Russifying the Commedia dell’Arte: Vasilii Trediakovsky and Aleksandr SumarokovChapter 4: Ramifications of the Italian DecadeChapter 5: Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat: The Italian Ancestry of Akakii BashmachkinChapter 6: The Modernist Revival of the Commedia dell’ArteChapter 7: The Commedia dell’Arte in Evgenii Vakhtangov’s Princess TurandotChapter 8: Harlequin and His Lath: Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel Look at the Harlequins!Chapter 9: From the Empress Anna Ioannovna to the Empress of Popular Culture, Alla PugachevaEpilogue: The Italian Arlecchino on the Post-Soviet Stage