The issue of studying noble amateur theater of the 18th-19th centuries

The research aims to identify how the topic of Russian noble amateur theater of the 18th – first half of the 19th century is presented in scientific literature. The paper analyzes the works of historians and culturologists fully or partially devoted to this topic. The research is novel in that it presents the first-ever attempt to identify and provide a historical overview of the corpus of texts devoted to the Russian noble theater. The history of the study of aristocratic amateur theater in Russian science is compared with the tradition of studying the same phenomenon in France, where amateur aristocratic theater reached its highest peak in the second half of the 18th century. As a result of the study, it was possible to assess the degree of knowledge of the phenomenon in Russia and France and to establish several reasons why this part of the history of Russian theater was overlooked by historians.