Running with the Courier: Louisa May Alcott’s Dramatization of Michel Strogoff

ABSTRACT

Louisa May Alcott’s For Russia and the Czar is a play found among the author’s manuscripts at the Houghton Library of Harvard University. My transcription of the play based on Jules Verne’s famous novel on Strogoff’s adventure is presented in the current issue of Resources for American Literary Study immediately after this introductory article, which focuses on the impact of theater in the author’s early life and narratives. This article also discusses the minimal editorial interventions involved in the author’s transcription of Alcott’s For Russia and the Czar. A long article on Alcott’s early thrillers on Russia and Tartary will follow in another issue of Resources for American Literary Study; that article will aim to clarify the biographical and political circumstances which led Alcott to write about czardom starting from the transcendentalist debate on Tartary and Tartars which preceded Verne’s Romantic configuration of a “Russia in Europe.”