The transformation of Shakespeare’s images in Pasternak’s works of 1910s–1920s

The urgency of the work lies in the fact that English culture and literary tradition were significant in the life and creative development of Pasternak. The article is devoted to the problem of interaction of Russian and English literatures in the Boris Pasternak’s works. It deals with the facts of direct appeal of the poet to the creative heritage of English poets and playwrights, special attention is paid to the images of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which manifested not only in the poet’s correspondence with his relatives, but also in the poems (The Decade of Presny, Shakespeare, English Lessons etc.) and in the novel Doctor Zhivago. The images of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Macbet’s witches, Ophelia, Desdemona, Birnam forest) allow Pasternak to describe the events taking place in the family and in the country in whole. They become the topic of Pasternak’s literary-critical articles (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (on behalf of the translator), Notes on Shakespeare, etc.). They express not only the understanding of the main images of his works, the interpretation of their conflicts and Pasternak’s observations on Shakespeare’s style, but also the reasoning about his own method of translating. Thus, the Pasternak was under the influence of Shakespeare’s style long before working upon the translations of his plays. From 1940 to 1949 Pasternak translated Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, Othello, etc. Shakespeare’s images and the problems touched upon in his tragedies, as well as the stylistic and genre features of his plays, gradually penetrated into life and, as a result, Pasternak’s writings. The study tested that the interest in foreign culture contributed to the enrichment and expansion of the ideological and aesthetic worldview of the poet, actively mastering the artistic discoveries of the past and adopting them in the present.