This is really not the point

Abstract

I. Shaytanov offers his polemical response to D. Ivanov’s review of William Shakespeare. Sonnets, a book compiled and commented by Shaytanov, that was published in the journal Inostrannaya Literatura. The author addresses several of Ivanov’s criticisms and is disappointed that the collection’s main component, the poetics of genre Shakespeare itself, completely escaped the critic’s attention, even though it is crucial for the book’s distinct and innovative approach. Shaytanov points out that the concept of genre, with its origin in historical poetics (a system pioneered by A. Veselovsky with subsequent studies by Y. Tynyanov, M. Bakhtin, V. Propp, and Y. Lotman — scholars who upheld dissimilar and often incompatible views), is the main criterion of understanding and translating Shakespearean sonnets in the book. Ignoring the genre conventions, Russian translators ended up struggling with limitations since they focused on rendering the text rather than the genre, whereas Shaytanov’s own translations included in the volume deal with the genre of Shakespeare’s sonnets first and foremost. Failure to recognize the book’s principal subject resulted in missing its point.