[pvg]

She (Caroline Kennedy-Pipe ) - and the Hamlet thing is mostly colour but it did send me down a clickhole of tracking down 'Stalin hated Hamlet'. That the "story of bloody intrigue in the court of Denmark supposedly reminded Stalin of Kremlin politics" sounded a bit off to me - after all, Stalin famously commissioned Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible.

It seems around 1940 or so Stalin did stop a Hamlet production (based on a Pasternak translation) at the Moscow Art Theatre. Recollections vary somewhat but the most plausible explanation is that Stalin felt Hamlet (the character) was weak. Completing the circle, the Russian wikipedia page on Ivan The Terrible has a quote from a Central Committee critique of a different movie in which, as an aside, part two of Eisenstein's film is criticized as ahistorical and as portraying Ivan as too weak "like Hamlet". The second part was not screened until some years after Stalin and Eisenstein's deaths. Hamlet itself was not staged in the last 12 years of Stalin's life.

[bryanrasmussen]

I'm imagining the Stalin from Death of Stalin sitting around complaining that Hamlet takes nearly two hours and doesn't hardly kill anybody! And then dies himself!

[pvg]

Hah, it's hinted at in the movie but Stalin was actually something of a performing arts (and theatre in particular) superfan - that's why the Hamlet bit caught my eye.