Apollon Grigoriev’s Translations from Shakespeare: Creative Laboratory, Censorship History, Critical Assessments

Abstract

The review article summarizes the available and for the first time introduced into scientific circulation information about the creative history of translations of Shakespeare’s dramas by Apollon Grigoriev: “Lear,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Shylock, the Venetian Jew” and “Romeo and Juliet,” about their passage through censorship, stage fate and responses to them from literary and theater critics. The text of the youthful translation of “King Lear” has come down to us only in a number of quotations from the censor’s report, which are published for the first time as part of an article. A hypothesis of the author consists in the fact that there is connection between the translations of “King Lear,” made simultaneously by Grigoriev and the actor Vasiliy Karatygin. The article contains a comparative analysis of critical assessments (a number of responses were found in periodicals for the first time). A textual study of manuscripts and lifetime editions revealed censorship and editorial interference in the text, which changed the author’s version. The research shows that Grigoriev’s translation strategy in his work on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was formed in the process of reviewing the translation of the same comedy by Nikolay Satin. Grigoriev also took into account the experience of Alexander Druzhinin’s translation of the tragedy “King Lear.” Work on the tragedy “Romeo and Juliet” was determined by the mnemonic experience of the performance, translated by Mikhail Katkov.

Keywords

• apollon grigoriev
• w. shakespeare
• dramaturgy
• censored history
• stage fate
• translation experiment
• critical assessments
• text criticism
• journalism