Semenenko A. Hamlet the Sign. Russian Translations of Hamlet and Literary Canon Formation

Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2007. — 206 p.This work is an attempt to answer one very simple question: What is Hamlet? — or more specifically: What is the Russian Hamlet? This question is closely linked with larger issues in literary criticism such as problems of translation, literary canon formation, and textuality. These problems will be studied here based on the material of Hamlet translations into Russian as an illustrative example of how a literary canon appears and develops through centuries, how a text survives through time and becomes a “classic.”
The other question posed here is more general, and concerns the transformations which a text such as Hamlet undergoes in the course of its history.
Although canon formation has lately become one of the most disputed questions in literary studies, no investigation of canon in translation seems to have been undertaken yet. The analysis of canon formation in translation will approach the problem from “the back door,” so to speak, and will make it possible to scrutinize some intricate questions in this field. That is to say, though the material of my study is the translated texts, I intend to propose some findings which are relevant not only to the theory of translation and canon studies but also to the whole phenomenon of Hamlet. Why Hamlet, then? To the best of my knowledge, Hamlet has been translated into Russian more than in any other country in Europe (and probably in the world). From 1748 to the present, there are twenty-two translations from the original and far more Russian texts based on the original Hamlet. However, only four texts can be acknowledged as canonical in different periods of Russian literature. Why only these four and how did they become canonical? — these are the first questions I pose in my study as I attempt to answer another, more general, question about the mechanisms of literary canonization.