work
Hamlet
also: Гамлет
Shakespeare's tragedy, quoted (in free paraphrase) as the epigraph to 'At the Cemetery': the gravedigger scene's meditation on death erasing worldly cunning frames the sketch's own graveyard walk.
Reading notes
- At the Cemetery §3 Hamlet
The epigraph paraphrases the gravedigger scene of Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act 5, Scene 1), where a skull unearthed in a graveyard prompts musing on how death erases a man's schemes and cunning -- the same theme the sketch's cemetery walk goes on to deflate.
- A Story Without an End §47 как говорит Гамлет
Vasilyev half-quotes Hamlet's advice to the Players (Act 3, Scene 2) on the power of a truly affecting performance to 'amaze the very faculties of eyes and ears' -- reaching, mid-crisis, for a piece of literary connoisseurship, part of his running self-dramatization even as he begs the narrator not to leave.
- In Moscow §1 the Moscow Hamlet
The narrator's self-chosen label, borrowed from Shakespeare's brooding, self-analyzing prince; by 1888 "a Hamlet" was common Russian shorthand for an educated man paralyzed by self-conscious inaction, here turned on a specifically Moscow type of performed ennui.
- In Moscow §26 Good night, Bernardo!
The opening line of Shakespeare's \emph{Hamlet} (Francisco's line to the sentry Bernardo in Act 1, Scene 1); the narrator's demand that even a walk-on actor speaking this single line project having read "eight volumes" of Shakespeare scholarship satirizes empty credentialism.
- The Bridegroom and Papa §62 Гамлетовский прием
Milkin explicitly names his stratagem a "Hamlet's trick": Shakespeare's prince famously feigns madness (his "antic disposition") to protect himself while pursuing his own hidden aims. Milkin invokes the same tactic for a far pettier end -- ducking an unwanted marriage rather than avenging a murdered father -- which is the sketch's final, deflating literary joke.