Our Notes & References

First book edition of this important translation/adaptation – very rare: we couldn’t trace any example passing through the trade in recent years, and OCLC locates only one copy (Princeton); apparently no copy in the UK.

The translations of Shakespeare by the poet and literary critic Apollon Grigoriev (1822–64) “belong to the most successful in the entire 19th century, when numerous translations and revisions of Shakespeare’s works were carried out in Russia” (Dmitriev, our translation here and below). A dedicated Shakespearean scholar and promoter, Grigoriev knew “almost all his works by heart” (Boborykin). At the age of 16, he translated King Lear from French, and later in his career, published his translations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1857) and this Merchant of Venice (1860). His last translation, Romeo and Juliette, was completed while Grigoriev served his term in debtor’s prison and was published posthumously in 1864.

Grigoriev translated The Merchant of Venice for the Aleksandrinskii Theatre and titled it “The Jew of Venice”; notably he used the word “zhid” (or “yid” in English) which did not necessarily have anti-Semitic connotations in the 1860s, yet it was gradually replaced with the possibly more neutral word “evrei” towards the mid-1870s. He also changed the structure of the play by focusing on the conflict between Shylock and Antonio and excluding parts that are not directly related to this subject, possibly at the theatre’s request.

The performance was well received and was staged 14 times between 1860 and 1863 in Moscow and St Petersburg; several more performances also took place in the provincial cities of Voronezh, Kharkiv, Astrakhan and Novgorod. Theatre and Music Bulletin [Teatralnyi i muzykalnyi vestnik] remarked: “Grigoriev very skilfully confined himself to preserving everything that defines the personality of the tragedy and its action, and rendered it in a translation free from all the bulky wordings that are not proper to the Russian language, i.e. avoided what our translations of Shakespeare generally suffer from” (quote from Dmitriev).

The play was published both as part of a magazine Drama Collection [Dramaticheskii sbornik], and around the same time as this separate edition in 1860. Previously, only three translations of the entire play were available for Russian readers: one in verse by the Kharkiv philologist Vasilii Iakimov (1833), and two in prose by the writer Nikolai Pavlov (1839) and by Nikolai Ketcher in his unfinished collection of Shakespeare’s works (1841−1850).

Provenance

Fedor Kapitonovich Prusakov, Moskva (playwright and owner of a private music and drama library; large purple ink stamp to board label and title).

Bibliography

Levin Iu., “Perevody shestidesiatykh godov”, Shekspir i russkaia kultura, Nauka, Moskva-Leningrad, 1965.

Levin Iu., Shekspir i Russkaia literatura XIX veka, Leningrad, Nauka, 1988.

Dmitriev A. P., “Shekspirovskie perevody Apollona Grigorieva: tvorcheskaia laboratoriia, tsenzurnaia istoriia, kriticheskie otsenki”, Dva veka russkoi klassiki, tom 4, #3, 2022.