Hamlet

Reading notes

• The Baron §23 Hamlet

  Shakespeare's tragedy of the Danish prince, a fixture of the nineteenth-century Russian stage and the play being performed on the night of the story's central scandal.

• Poetry and Prose §29 Hamlet

  Shakespeare's tragedy of the Danish prince; the stage vignette that follows parodies a famous scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, deflated by a broken false mustache.

• From the Memoirs of an Idealist §7 "save us, o cherubim of heaven!" as Hamlet says

  A comic, half-remembered tag from Shakespeare's Hamlet, invoked by the narrator with mock solemnity at the sight of his pretty landlady -- typical of the story's habit of puncturing high literary posture with low domestic comedy.

• Swan Song (Calchas) §69 from "Hamlet"

  Svetlovidov performs the recorder ("flute") scene from Act III of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," in which the prince rebukes Guildenstern for trying to "play upon" him as though he were an instrument -- a speech about being used and misread by those who claim to love you. Nikita Ivanych, drafted into the role of Guildenstern, is himself in that moment genuinely and simply devoted to Svetlovidov, which gives the borrowed lines an unintended second meaning: unlike Hamlet's courtiers, Nikitushka wants nothing from the old actor but to see him safely home.

• Visiting Friends §27 kingdom of Denmark

  Podgorin's opening pleasantry echoes Marcellus's line in Hamlet that something is rotten in the state of Denmark -- a stock way of asking, half-ironically, whether all is well.