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Abstract: The article examines the representation of the image of Peter I in The Czar (1777), a tragedy by an English playwright Joseph Cradock, in the context of the “Petrine myth” in the eighteenth-century English literature. The goal of the study is to consider poetological aspects of Peter I’s image, the means of its creation and imagological functions. The originality of the author’s interpretation of the image is explored in connection with characteristic of the tradition of the Russian Tsar’s reception in the English literature of the Enlightenment with emphasis on the specificity of the artistic form and characterology of the tragedy. Thus, the article dwells on Cradock’s interpretation of Russian history of the first decades of the 18th century and his use of anachronisms, directly associated with the compositional strategies of the playwright. The study focuses on the author’s attitude to Peter I, displayed through the arrangement of the system of characters and the use of various means of reflected characterization, including the allusive plane of the dramatic piece. The study highlights the interaction between the elements of classical and sentimentalist poetics and the functions of melodramatic pathos in connection with characterizing the image of Peter I in the structure of The Czar. The research also analyzes the peculiarities of the English-Russian cultural dialogue in the tragedy and the specificity of presentation of the image of the Russian Tsar and the image of Russia as a whole. The Czar was inspired by the “Petrine myth”, which, as it is shown in the article, was partially deconstructed by Cradock. Thus, an apologetic tradition of Peter’s representation in the eighteenth-century English literature was interrupted: the tsar is portrayed in the tragedy first of all as a hostage to his character, unrestrained impulses and anger that lead to the deaths of tsarina and Prince Alexis. The historical material, substantially reconsidered in The Czar, made it possible for Cradock to put forward the problems of vice and virtue, role of personality in history, state and civil duty, and dangers of despotic rule. The representation of the image of Peter the Great complies with the classical and neo-classical genre poetics (conflict between duty and sentiment, normativity of artistic form, classical references and, simultaneously, concern with the Enlightenment interpretation of the problems of state government and international relations) and is presented in a polemical political context through the prism of excesses of despotic power. The image of the protagonist is also placed in the focus of the imagological representation which involves the traditional stereotypes of perception of Russia: cold, barbarity, wildness, and despotism, but, on the other hand, the country is depicted as “a blooming garden of the world”, combining the highest merits of European civilizations during the rule of Peter I. This ambivalence confirms the objective inertia of imagological reception and also exposes changes of valorization of the image of Russia, determined by the Western awareness of civilizational shifts that occurred in the 18th century in the national being of the country seen as a culturally distant “other”.

About the author(s) :

Oleg Yu. Polyakov

Vyatka State University (Russia, Kirov)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9362-7720

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 15.09.2025; date of publication: 31.10.2025

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