Pyotr Gnedich as a translator and director of Shakespeare’s plays in Russia in the 1880s–1910s

The aim of the article is to recreate the place of the translator and director Pyotr Petrovich Gnedich (1855-1925) in the formation of the Russian Shakespeare image. Gnedich is relatively known as an art critic and fiction writer, but his translations and directorial work, his place in the formation of Russian Shakespearean literature remain little known; recreating his role in the development of Russian Shakespeare gives the work scientific novelty. The material used is Shakespeare’s translations by Gnedich, published at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries (some of them have never been republished), criticism of these translations and their staging, memoirs and articles by Gnedich and his contemporaries. To achieve the objectives of the study, the authors use historical-systemic, biographical, and textual methods. The research, constructed by the method of recreating the historical and cultural context, is interdisciplinary; it touches on the problems of linguistics (in the field of translation studies) and theater studies. Using press material of the turn of the 20th century, the authors for the first time recreated the stages of Gnedich’s appeal to Shakespeare: (1) translation (and production) of Hamlet (1891); (2) translation (and production) of A Yorkshire Tragedy attributed to Shakespeare (1895); (3) translation, carried out jointly with Yu.P. Bakhmetyev, (and production) of the parts from the Henry IV (1895); (4) first production of Julius Caesar in Russia (translated by D.L. Mikhalovsky, 1897); (5) translation (and production) of The Taming of the Shrew (1899); (6) production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (translated by N.M. Satin, 1901); (7) production of The Merchant of Venice (translated by P.I. Weinberg, 1903); (8) translation (and production) of The Winter’s Tale (1902); (9) translation of the comedy Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1908); (10) translation of Hamlet, 2nd edition (1917). Gnedich led the experience of Shakespeare translations from purely theatrical versions of translations to more literary ones, which were included in authoritative collections and formed a new word in the Russian Shakespeare interpretation. If at first (the first translation of Hamlet) Gnedich published plays as material for staging, with cuts and instructions for the artist, then later he came to the idea of an accurate, literary correct translation, focused on fidelity to the original. Gnedich demands a scrupulous fidelity of the translation to the original, contrasting his translations with earlier versions and leaving translation comments. Accuracy of translation, compliance with the principle of equilinearity, is the main requirement that Gnedich strives for and which will become the measure of future debates about the new, Soviet Shakespeare already in the 1930s. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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