#soviet hamlet

[noirferatu]

ГАМЛЕТ — 1964.

[windsweptlassie]

ГАМЛЕТ / HAMLET

[remainingso]

FRIGHTED WITH FALSE FIRE!

A Soviet Hamlet AU:

Above all else, know this: you are never alone in Elsinore.

They say there is something rotten in the core of the Soviet Union, but for something to rot it must have been alive at some point. Perhaps a truer statement would be to say that there is something cold and harsh and essentially non-living here.

Hamlet Sr. appears with a red band tied around his arm and curses on his tongue. Traitor, he whispers in Hamlet’s ear, your uncle has betrayed me, but more importantly, he has betrayed the very cause we fought for. Later, Hamlet will check the security tapes over and over but hears nothing besides his own scratching breathing. When his father fades away, he leaves behind only a slip of red cloth—Hamlet takes it and it stays wrapped around his wrist until the day he dies.

A note: that day will come just a few weeks later.

When Claudius smiles at Hamlet, it is the same smile he wears to meetings with the American President: one that is sly enough to unnerve but pleasant enough to sell his supposed honesty. Horatio is the only one who dares to frown in response.

Laertes leaves for France and comes home with bursting ideas about democracy and freedom and Claudius only smiles, clasps his back, and beckons him back into the cold concrete halls. Soon enough, his foreign ideals are dropped in favour of vengeance and loyalty.

After she drowns, Ophelia’s name is stricken from all the records. A black bar where a girl once was.

A paradox: there is no God in the Soviet Union, but everyone prays anyways. Hamlet sees Claudius on his knees and stays his hand. He looks up and sees blinking red lights and wonders if God watches them all on grainy security cams. He wonders if there is an afterlife that is more than this endless concrete purgatory. He wonders if hell looks like a nuclear bunker.

In the end, Elsinore collapses, the USSR collapses, Hamlet collapses too as the poison eats away at his stomach.  

[remainingso]

THE RABBLE CALL HIM LORD

An Imperial Russian Hamlet:

The war in Europe is ending, but the Russian Empire is dying. The old Tsar is dead. Amidst the ceaseless protests in the street, his brother takes the throne. 

Elsinore is cold. Elsinore is always cold.

No one cares which brother it is who sits on the throne—the war still rages on in Europe, the bitter wind still shakes every window in Petrograd all the same.

The old Tsar’s ghost comes in a bloodied military uniform. He tells his son about his brother’s treachery but fails to mention his failures on the warfront. He says, remember me, and only later does he feel relief that having been spared the title of Russia’s Last Tsar.

Hamlet shouts to be or not to be? and his words are swallowed by the storm. He does not pause to realize that he is one of the few left in the city with that choice. Most would rather be but either a gunshot or yawning hunger wrenches the not to be from their throats.

No one knows if Ophelia was drowned or froze in the river. She’s dead, all the same. The gravediggers can barely make a dint in the permafrost ground to bury her.

Laertes comes in from the cold, rattled by the mob. His voice is hoarse when he shouts for his father. Outside, people scream, not for Laertes-King, but for bread, for peace, for a warm place to rest their aching bones. You left us starving, they cry, so now we will eat you alive. Tsar Claudius puts a hand on Laertes’s shoulder, draws himself up, and orders the doors to the Winter Palace barred shut.

When the October Revolution turns the palace inside out, everyone is already dead within.

Horatio does not belong in this world of decadence and royalty. It doesn’t matter. The Bolsheviks shoot him anyways.

Tomorrow, red flags will fly from every window in Leningrad