ABSTRACT
A leksandr Vasilievich Druzhinin was a prose writer, journalist, critic, and translator. A significant literary figure of his time, Druzhinin was the chief advocate of the theory of ‘pure’ art and opposed those of his contemporaries who called for art’s civic responsibility and political significance. This theoretical approach was fully implemented in his entertaining stories and popular essays about St. Petersburg life. In the 1850s he turned to literary criticism and regularly published his series of literary reviews Letters from an Out-of-Town Subscriber [Pis’ma inogorodnego podpischika] in The Contemporary [Sovremennik], the leading literary journal of the time. His works introduced Russian readers to the novels and biographies of Richardson, Thackeray, Dickens, Crabbe, Radcliffe, Balzac, and many other contemporary English and French writers. Many of his literary essays contain critical comments on translations and translators. An admirer of English literature, Druzhinin published several of his own highly readable and ‘normalizing’ translations of Shakespeare: King Lear (1856), Coriolanus (1858), King Richard III (1860), and King John (1865, published posthumously).
