work
The Death of Ugolino
Death of Ugolino
also: Смерть Уголино
"Смерть Уголино" (The Death of Ugolino), a Russian romantic tragedy by Nestor Kukolnik (1834) based on the Ugolino episode of Dante's Inferno, a popular showcase melodrama for a declamatory tragedian of the old school. The noble father names it among the grand old-fashioned vehicles he dreams of staging under a new, stricter management.
Reading notes
- The Critic §55 The Death of Ugolino and Belisarius... a good roasting for some damned Othello... The Robbed Mail Coach
The noble father's closing wish-list of old warhorse melodramas and tragedies -- Nestor Kukolnik's The Death of Ugolino, the stock tragic role of Belisarius, Shakespeare's Othello, and the pulp-melodrama title The Robbed Mail Coach -- caps the story with his real ambition laid bare: not artistic reform, but a return to the crowd-pleasing repertoire of his own vanished youth, where he imagines himself once again drawing full houses.