Shakespeare's Plays in Russian Culture
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Master’s Degree programme in Lingue e letterature europee, americane e postcoloniali Second Cycle (D.M. 270/2004) Final Thesis Shakespeare’s Plays in Russian Culture Supervisor Ch. Prof. Shaul Bassi Assistant supervisor Ch. Prof. Laura Tosi Graduand Aleksandr Pozdnyakov Matriculation Number 982973 Academic Year 2015 / 2016 Index Introduction………………………………………………………………………………p.3 Part I Hamlet: Translational and Staging Transformations of the Original for the Russian Scene…………………………………………………………………………….p.9 1. First theatrical attempts, the advantages of Pasternak’s translation for the scene…………....……..………………………………………………………p.11 2. Triumph of Kozintsev’s Hamlet on stage and on screen.…………………....p.28 3. Other remarkable Soviet and Post-Soviet productions........…………………p.34 4. Hamlet in Russia of the 21st century…….………………….……………….p.42 Part II Popularity of some foreign screen adaptations of Romeo and Juliet among the Russian audience………………………………………………………………………...p.52 1. Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968) as the worldwide acclaimed adaptation of Shakespeare's timeless love story………………….………………….…........p.54 2. Russian variations on a theme of Romeo and Juliet……………………………...p.66 3. The newest screen version of Romeo & Juliet by Carlo Carlei (2013).................p.71 4. Branagh Theatre Live: Romeo and Juliet. Theatre+cinema………………..........p.79 Conclusion.………………………………………………………………………….…...p.84 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………......p.87 2 Introduction The object of my research is screen and theatre adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in Russian culture. Thus, works of Shakespeare are no longer the domain of only the British. Thanks to the adaptations and translations into different languages people in most corners of the globe are familiar with Shakespeare’s body of work. The purpose of this work is to explore the adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in Russian culture, the main features of their functioning on the theatre scene and cinema, and translations in the context of the epoch. To achieve this goal in the thesis the following tasks should be resolved: - examine, summarize and comment on adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays; - represent the creative interpretation of Shakespeare’s legacy in the literary and historical context of the era in Russia; - carry out a review by comparing translations of the original text and screen adaptations, to identify the similarities and differences of English and Russian texts; to define peculiarities of interpretation. The resource of the thesis are films, based on Shakespeare’s plays, theatre adaptations, the translations in the Russian language of Shakespeare, theoretical, historical and literary-critical works. The first acquaintance of the Russian reader with Shakespeare was due to translations. Shakespeare has been translated into Russian over two hundred and fifty years. Early information about Shakespeare came into Russia mainly through the French and German press. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century the works of Shakespeare shifted into the Russian language through the French classical adaptations of Jean-François Ducis. 3 For the first time in Russia the name of Shakespeare was mentioned in the Epistle of versification (1748) by Alexander Sumarokov among the names of famous poets of the past. He published Hamlet the same year – a classical tragedy, created on the basis of the French translation-paraphrase of Laplace (1745). The romantic cult of Shakespeare in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century was entirely prepared by pre-romantic influence of European literature. Such Russian writers as V.K. Küchelbecker, A.S. Pushkin, A.S. Griboyedov, O.M. Somov relied on the example of Shakespeare and created a distinctive national literature, filled with the spirit of nationality. After the Decembrist uprising in 1825 dramas and historical chronicles of Shakespeare helped to understand the historical and political tragedy of the participants. Imprisoned V.K. Küchelbecker, translated Macbeth and historical chronicles from 1828 to 1832. He also wrote Discourse on eight historical dramas of Shakespeare and especially of Richard III (1832). The most interesting representative of the number of Russian admirers was and remains Alexander Pushkin. “In a fateful coincidence, the Father of English literature was an important influence on the Father of Russian literature.” (John Givens) Russians refer to Pushkin as ‘our everything’, but Shakespeare has also captured the hearts and minds of Russian readers and authors for over two centuries. Following the Decembrists Pushkin worked on the creation of a national literature, and succeeded in doing it more than any other. The Shakespearism of the poet became something more than blind adherence to the literary fashion of the English playwright, which was widespread in Western Europe at that time. Pushkin considers Shakespeare to be romantic, understanding the true "romantic" art, corresponding to the spirit of the age and connected with people. Pushkin sought to develop a system of fiction Shakespeare, applied to the problems of his age. He considered objectivity, truthfulness of characters and real image of time the main feature of the Shakespearean manner. According to Shakespeare’s manner Pushkin based his 4 tragedy Boris Godunov (1825), whose objectivity of the image of era and characters of that time he borrowed from Shakespeare. Though Russian literature was saturated by Shakespeare’s influence, it took longer for Shakespeare to find a home in Russian theatre. Hamlet was one of the first plays to be performed in the mid-nineteenth century (there are stories about serfs adapting the tragedy and performing it for their masters), while stars from Europe and further afield brought Shakespeare’s scripts to Russian audiences. One of the greatest was the African- American actor Ira Aldridge, who, unable to perform in his homeland, became a huge star in Russia, playing roles including Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Othello in the 1850s, when he was decorated by Tsar Alexander II. The 1930s marked the beginning of a love affair with the father of English literature in Stalin’s Russia. By the 1934 Writers’ Congress Shakespeare was proclaimed the proper inheritance of the proletariat. A large portrait of the bard even decorated the congress hall in recognition of the three hundred and seventieth anniversary of his birth. In nearly every speech on drama, delegates proclaimed their allegiance to the playwright and to Maksim Gorky as the two presiding muses of Soviet theater. The number of complete translations of Shakespeare's plays in Russia is more than three hundred. The first attempt was made by I.A. Velyaminov in 1808. He translated Othello and three years later S.I. Viskovatov translated Hamlet. It should be mentioned, that N.M. Karamzin made the prose translation of Julius Caesar from the original in 1787. As important as Karamzin’s translation was, even more noteworthy was the introduction he wrote to accompany it, which, according to Simmons, represents “the first adequate critical presentation of Shakespeare in Russia.” He argued for a reassessment of Shakespeare’s importance as a playwright and made a case for placing Shakespeare above Corneille and Racine as a dramatist. Karamzin’s translation was ahead of its time, but did not meet positive response from readers, and in 1794 it was banned. 5 There is Shakespeare of Lozinski and Shakespeare of Shchepkina-Kupernik, Shakespeare of Pasternak and Marshak, which continues the idea of the functioning of the different translations as part of a mosaic picture of foreign language text in the field of Russian literature. The Shakespeare collection was published in separate editions in 1936– 1941 and 1957– 1960. The difficulties, encountered in bringing the editions to the Soviet public, included differences in approaches to translation and in who the intended audience of the collection should be. Gustav Shpet and Alexander Smirnov were editors-in-chief of the first complete Soviet collection of Shakespeare’s plays. They developed instructions on how Shakespeare’s plays were to be rendered in Russian. Translators were to observe a rhythmic equivalency in their work that strove for a strict correspondence between the number of lines in Shakespeare’s original and that of the translation, both to preserve metrical and syntactic patterns unique to Shakespeare and to maintain the tempo of the characters’ lines. I will analyze the advantages and disadvantages of these translations for screen and theatre adaptions. The active functioning of the tragedy Hamlet in Russian art began in the forties of the twentieth century, thanks to the translation of Pasternak, which the Moscow Art Theatre became interested in. After a successful performance, on the basis of this translation G. Kozintsev created his famous movie in 1964, which received numerous international awards and nominations, among them Special Jury Prize of Venice Film Festival (1964), BAFTA Award for Best Film nomination (1966), Golden Globe for Best Foreign-Language Foreign Film nomination (1967), etc. Among all the Shakespeare plays it was Hamlet which had a triumphant position on the Russian scene throughout the century. It is worth mentioning, that apart from triumph of Hamlet in the Russian theatre, the most popular foreign screen adaptations in Russia were Romeo and Juliet (1968) and The Taming of the Shrew (1967), both staged by Franco Zeffirelli. The first one was a 6 phenomenal success in Russia. It won Best Foreign