Hamlet Underground: Revisiting Shakespeare and Dostoevsky

Chris Thurman

doi:10.18778/2083-8530.18.06

Authors

Chris Thurman University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.18.06

Keywords:

Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Hamlet, Hamletism, underground, nihilism

Abstract

This is the first of a pair of articles that consider the relationship between Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from the Underground and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Acknowledging Shakespeare’s well-known influence on Dostoevsky and paying close attention to similarities between the two texts, the author frames the comparison by reflecting on his own initial encounter with Dostoevsky in David Magarshack’s 1968 English translation. A discussion of previous Anglophone scholarly attempts to explore the resonance between the texts leads to a reading of textual echoes (using Magarshack’s translation). The wider phenomenon of Hamletism in the nineteenth century is introduced, complicating Dostoevsky’s national and generational context, and laying the groundwork for the second article—which questions the ‘universalist’ assumptions informing the English translator-reader contract.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Chris Thurman, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Chris Thurman is Associate Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is also a columnist for Business Day. His most recent book is Still at Large: Dispatches from South Africa’s Frontiers of Politics and Art (2017). He is the editor of South African Essays on ‘Universal’ Shakespeare (2014) and Sport versus Art: A South African Contest (2010). His other books are Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life (2010); the literary anthology Text Bites (2009); and At Large: Reviewing the Arts in South Africa (2012). He edits Shakespeare in Southern Africa and is president of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa.

References

Catteau, Jacques. Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation. Translated by Audrey Littlewood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Google Scholar

Cooperman, Stanley. “Shakespeare’s Anti-Hero: Hamlet and the Underground Man.” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 37-63.
Google Scholar

Denby, David. “Can Dostoevsky Still Kick You in the Gut?” The New Yorker 11 June 2012 (accessed 7 June 2018). .
Google Scholar

Dostoevsky, Fyodor>. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863). Translated by David Patterson. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988.
Google Scholar

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Zapiski iz Podpol’ya (1864). Letchworth: Bradda Books, 1974.
Google Scholar

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Translated by David Magarshack (1968). New York: Random House, 2001.
Google Scholar

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground (1864). Translated by Michael Katz. New York: Norton, 2001.
Google Scholar

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Undergound (1864). Translated by Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes. Richmond: OneWorld Classics, 2010.
Google Scholar

Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood (1920). Mineola: Dover, 1998.
Google Scholar

Frank, Joseph. “Dostoevsky: The Encounter with Europe.” The Russian Review 22.3 (1963): 236-52.
Google Scholar

Frank, Joseph. “Nihilism and Notes from Underground” (1961) in Fyodor Dostoevsky: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.
Google Scholar

Jones, John. Dostoevsky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Google Scholar

Lantz, Kenneth. The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004.
Google Scholar

Levin, Yuri [Iurii]. “Dostoevskii and Shakespeare” (1974) in Dostoevskii and Britain, ed. W.J. Leatherbarrow. Oxford: Berg, 1995.
Google Scholar

Levin, Yuri. “Shakespeare and Russian Literature: Nineteenth Century Attitudes.” Oxford Slavonic Papers (New Series), 22, 1989.
Google Scholar

Lord, Robert. Dostoevsky: Essays and Perspectives. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.
Google Scholar

Mochulsky, Konstantin. Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (1947). Translated by Michael A. Minihan. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967.
Google Scholar

Polevoy, Nikolai. Gamlet. Moscow (Courtesy British Library), 1837.
Google Scholar

Rinkus, Jerome J. “Reflections on Turgenev’s ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’” in Perspectives on Hamlet, ed. William G. Holzberger and Peter B. Waldeck. Cranbury: Associated UP, 1975.
Google Scholar

Schaar, Claes. The full-voic’d quire below. Berlings: CWK Gleerup, 1982.
Google Scholar

Shakespeare, William. Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon, 2005.
Google Scholar

Simmons, Ernest J. Dostoevsky: The Making of a Novelist. London: John Lehmann, 1950.
Google Scholar