Hamlet Underground: Revisiting Shakespeare and Dostoevsky

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.

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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.

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Published

2018-12-30

How to Cite

Thurman, C. (2018). Hamlet Underground: Revisiting Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 18(33), 79–92. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.18.06

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