private life

In the article the correlation of the private and the public in the French court society of the second half of the XVIIth century is considered; the changes in the share of the themes touching upon private life are traced; the means of its depiction are analyzed.

The article raises the question of whether the people from M. E. Saltykov’s circle in his provincial periods of life should be noticed. N. S. Rzhevskaya, a talented singer and composer, a friend of Saltykov in his Tver and later Ryazan periods, was one of them; her relationships with the writer were based on trust.

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020), the novel about Shakespeare’s son and wife, is considered as the continuation of postmodernist interest in Shakespeare exemplified by A. Burgess’s and R. Nye’s novels about the Bard. However, O’Farrell’s approach to history through the lens of everyday family life, her present-tense narrative and especially her manner of reinterpreting the historical facts all point to another, more recent literary influence – Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels.