Gamlet. Prints Datskii [Hamlet. Prince of Denmark].: Series Shkol'naia Biblioteka.

Translation by Boris Pasternak. Preface and comments - M. Morozov.

Signed to print 7/VIII 1942. The book was issued during the Second World War.

Second book edition of Hamlet in Pasternak's translation.

Vsevolod Meyerkhold, Soviet theater director, asked to Pasternak translate this play in 1938. Meyerhold decided that Hamlet should be played by two actors: man and woman. One should read tragic monologue another mimicking him.

Meyerkhold tested for Hamlet his wife, an actress Zinaida Reich.

Pasternak finished his translation in the spring of 1939. By this time Meyerhold was arrested and shot, his wife was killed by unknown person in her apartment. Pasternak felt he could also be arrested. He wanted to finish this translation as his latest book. He wrote in a letter to his father that he would have gone mad without the work on Hamlet.

The only publication of illustrations by Russian artist Nikolai Kuz'min. His portrait of late Zinaida Reich in character of Hamlet is placed on the front cover.

Preface for this publication is illustrated with photos of English, American, Armenian and Russian actors. It is more detailed as compared with the first edition of the translation. In the preface mentioned theatrical performance of Hamlet by Russian director Sergei Radlov who at that time had already been in occupied territory, and later left the Soviet Union with his theater with German troops. After the war, Radlov came back to Russia and was arrested.

Zakharenko, 1995. # 112

OCLC locates three copies, all are in USA: Harvard Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford University.