“Traces” of Shakespeare in Yu. Dombrovsky’s essay “And I Could...”

The research aims to identify the forms of the SHAKESPEARE concept in Yu. Dombrovsky’s essay “And I Could…”. The research is novel in that it is the first to trace the evolution of the author’s creative attitudes based on the analysis of Dombrovsky’s metapoetic text. The paper identifies signs of the emergence of the author’s new poetological attitude towards the artistic assimilation of reality, which is not amenable to logocentric understanding, but implies a multiplicity of interpretations, connected with changes in the socio-cultural situation of the last third of the 20th century. In the text of Yu. Dombrovsky’s essay “And I Could…”, this manifests itself in the consideration of the development of events related to Alexander Pushkin’s reaction to the news of the death of Tsar Alexander I and the Decembrist uprising. At the same time, the understanding of specific historical realities occurs through the lens of the SHAKESPEARE concept. As a result, it is determined that the ideological component of the essay by the realist writer is genetically connected to Hamlet’s problem of choice between suicide and life. This connection is not expressed as intertextual, but exists in the form of “traces” in which the formal and substantive attachment to the source text “is erased”; it is weakened, which is, in turn, a sign of postmodernism.