Shakespeare & Pushkin

Modern researchers pay attention first of all to the typological connections of Pushkin's works, but it seems to us that the productive method of studying the similarity of English-Russian communications in this context is not associated with specific figurative-thematic or genrethematic calls, not with the commonality of individual motifs and, finally, not with the concepts of the Russian poet’s responses to specific works of the English bard, but with the genetic textand meaning-generating links of the Russian poet’s creativity with Shakespeare’s poetics in nuce. No wonder M. P. Alekseev noted that Shakespeare was for Pushkin “the problem of worldview”. On the other hand, it seems fundamental that E. W. M. Tillard justified the need to introduce the category “picture of the world” in relation to the analysis of Shakespearean dramas, because, as S. Coleridge said, in any particular, the great playwright opened the universal, potentially existing, and opened in the image of homo generalis. In this retrospect, the statement of H. Bloom, the author of the bestseller “Western Canon”, “there is a man before and after Shakespeare” entails another consideration: “there is a man before and after Pushkin”. Both are the creators of the latest drama. A student of M. P. Alekseev, great comparatist Yu. D. Levin thought: “In the history of Russian experme... Pushkin is the Central figure. It was he who carried out the creative processing of Shakespeare’s poetics, which was then mastered by the development of Russian drama.” About the exceptional importance of Pushkin in the arrangement of Shakespeare’s poetics on Russian soil indirectly expressed in his notebooks Pushkin's friend P. A. Vyazemsky: “What threw our dramatic art on the narrow road of the French? – he asked. – Thin Sumarokov tragedy. If he had been an imitator of Shakespeare, we would have perfected his thin imitations of the English, as we have now perfected his pale imitations of the French.” Brilliant poets were led to creative achievements by impartial comprehension of human nature, and on this way they showed the image of man in the fullness of his own historical reality. This was expressed primarily in the independent dignity of poetry, which neither Shakespeare nor Pushkin was able to find support for religious, rhetorical, philosophical or political considerations that were not in its favour. No wonder the context of Pushkin’s creativity, V. S. Nepomnyashchy believes, not literature, not culture, not history even as such, but existence itself in its universal understanding, integral unity. It is noteworthy that, according to G. Bloom, and Shakespeare’s plays give “us the opportunity to join what can be called the primary aesthetic value.” The link between the two poets was the “grandeur of the idea”, the integrity of the artistic consciousness, the ability, as Heraclitus said, “to see everything as one”, and the deep psychological development of an unpredictable human character.