From the mid-18th century onwards, the decorative images of land-workers cultivated in the court pastoral have been submitted to a series of reevaluations in fictional texts and economic treatises. These new representations contrasted with the genre paintings of the Northern school and comically condescending literary depictions insofar as they integrated
sympathy into the revised version of the rapport between the reader (spectator) and the peasant characters. This study focuses on a new critical agency that the peasant character was granted in the dramatic texts presented to the audience of the court theatre in St Petersburg in the mid-1760s.