SOURCE: Levitt, Marcus C. “The Illegal Staging of Sumarokov's Sinav I Truvor in 1770 and the Problem of Authorial Status in Eighteenth-Century Russia.” Slavic and East European Journal 43, no. 2 (summer 1999): 299-323.

In this essay, Levitt discusses the episode in which P. S. Salykov ordered the staging of Sumarokov's Sinav I Truvor against the playwright's will.

Authors and authorship had little formal legal status in eighteenth-century Russia. Over the course of the century the basic elements and institutions of literary life—from writer and audience, to the text, means of dissemination, and its very linguistic medium—underwent dramatic changes (Levitt Early Modern ix-xviii). If William Todd, in his ground-breaking study of literary institutions in the age of Pushkin, could refer to a “vexing multiplicity” of institutional choices facing the writer (46), for A. P. Sumarokov (1717-1777) the situation was the reverse: he struggled to define the emerging role of the writer...