Vadim Nikolayev

Vadim Danilovich Nikolayev (Russian: Вади́м Дани́лович Никола́ев; was born on September 19, 1967) is a Shakespeare scholar from Russia, the writer, the translator of poetry and prose, the essayist and the author of first Russian encyclopedia about William Shakespeare.^[1]

Main Shakespeare-related works

Nikolayev was the compiler (together with Alexander Sharakshane) and the translator of forty-seven Shakespeare's sonnets in William Shakespeare. Sonnets: The Anthology of Modern Translations (St. Petersburg: Azbooka-classic Publishing House, 2004, reprinting — 2005, 2007).^[2][3] A copy of the book is available in the library of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.^[4]

His other main work is the encyclopedia Shakespeare (Moscow, Kharkiv, 2007).^[5] The encyclopedia was discussed on April 23, 2008 by the Shakespeare Committee of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which noted that "the author has done a huge work, noteworthy at all amateurs of Shakespeare's creativity".^[1] Russian electronic encyclopedia World of Shakespeare further specified that Nikolayev's report at the scientific conference Shakespeare Readings (in 2008), titled Shakespeare and Christianity, "caused lively discussions", although "most participants disagreed with the statement that Shakespeare put forward anti-church ideas and did not consider suicide to be a sin".^[6] Shakespeare Readings is a prestigious scientific international conference, which is held in Moscow.^[7]

In his article Shakespeare and The Count of Monte Cristo Nikolayev found parallels between Shakespeare's plays (Romeo and Juliet, The Winter's Tale, and especially The Tempest) and the novel of Alexandre Dumas.^[8]

In his article Hamlet — the Image and the Stereotype Nikolayev tried to prove that Hamlet is a psyhopath with the ideas, which preceded Nietzsche's ideas. Nikolayev thinks that traditional image of Hamlet has been created by the romantics, that Shakespeare wanted to destroy Elizabethian stereotypes of heroic avenger and jealous avenger (Othello).^[9]

Translations

Besides Shakespeare's sonnets, Nikolayev also translated into Russian fragments of Hamlet, one scene from Troilus and Cressida, the poems of Petrarch, Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, George Gascoigne, Philip Sydney, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Bartholomew Griffin, John Donne, Jonathan Swift, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Adam Mickiewicz, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Baudelaire, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, and Richard Aldington, as well as one of the Roger Waters' songs.^[10][11] In 2013 Nikolayev prepared for the edition Stevenson' A Child's Garden of Verses and translated almost all poems.^[12]

In the same year Nikolayev published his translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. In the afterward From the Translator he criticized first Russian translator of Saint-Exupéry's novella, Nora Gal.^[13] In 2015 this Nikolayev's translation has been published as the audiobook.^[14]

Fiction

In 2014 Nikolayev published historical novel Bogatyr's Armed Force of Monomakh. Rus' in the Fire! The author of the annotation wrote that the book «came back «beautiful and violent» world of our martial ancestors». Ilya Muromets, Dobrynya Nikitich and Alyosha Popovich are the members of Vladimir Monomakh's armed force in this historical novel.^[15]

Other

Nikolayev was an editor-in-chief of Svetez'Ъ Publishing House.^[16] He published the book Notes on Different Themes (Moscow, 2011).^[17] He is an author of philological and biographic articles, and he also published his own poetry in periodical press.^[2] Eight poems of Nikolayev was set to music by Russian composer (author of instrumental music, fantasy symphostory, also singer-songwriter) and surrealistic painter Terentiy Travnik.^[18]

External links

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References