“The Executioner of the Lord”: A. V. Lunacharsky’s play “Oliver Cromwell” and political discussions in the Bolshevik Party

Abstract

The article discusses the history of the play “Oliver Cromwell” by Anatoly Lunacharsky. Using the tools offered by representatives of New Historicism (S. Greenblatt, L. Montrose), the author studies the play by putting it into political contexts. The author answers questions such as what was Lunacharsky’s author’s intention, how he described the leader of the revolution and how this description was related to his perception of the situation in Soviet Russia. The article looks at how readers of different views characterized the play and how the political context influenced this. It is shown that Lunacharsky described problems relevant to Soviet Russia through a literary text about the English Revolution. Lunacharsky pushed the idea that civil peace should be established in the country under the rule of a leader who would be able to restore order in the state through beneficial violence. The perception of the drama by contemporaries was ambiguous. The article discusses the debate that ensued after the release of the work of fiction (in particular, the play evoked strong indignation among left-wing groups). It is shown that those disputes were associated, among other things, with discussions about the degree of permissible centralization of the party, its bureaucratization and the growing influence of the leaders. The political context influenced both the author of the play and its perception: in the text of the play readers of different views guessed allusions to contemporary events. Some ideas that Lunacharsky probably hadn’t initially included in the play gradually crystallized out during the discussions (this relates, first of all, to the direct comparison of Cromwell with Lenin).