Songs. Poems. Sonnets

The gift illustrated edition is printed on matte coated paper Omelea with a bookmark of the same color as the headband. You can view the entire book in electronic form by following the link on the SZECO website.

The collection of... works by William Shakespeare (1564–1616) in translations by various writers includes one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, thirty-seven songs, and five poems: "The Phoenix and the Turtle," "Complaint of a Lover," "Venus and Adonis," "Lucrece," and "The Passionate Pilgrim." The edition is adorned with initials, title pages, and illustrations by the British artist Charles Robinson (1870–1937).

In Russia, interest in Shakespeare's works began to grow in the first half of the 19th century due to performances of his comedies on domestic theater stages, such as "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Twelfth Night," and "The Taming of the Shrew." The tragedies also enjoyed great success: "Romeo and Juliet," "Macbeth," "King Lear," "Hamlet," and "Othello." By the early 20th century, there were already more than a hundred translations of various works by the English classic in Russian. In 1902, the publishing house "Brockhaus and Efron" released a complete collection of Shakespeare's works as part of the series "Library of Great Writers." This collection included the sonnets, which are the most famous part of Shakespeare's poetic legacy. The editor of the entire series was the well-known literary historian and critic Semyon Afanasyevich Vengerov. He not only involved such first-class poets and writers of his time in the work on the translations of Shakespeare's sonnets, as Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov, Tatyana Lvovna Shchepkina-Kupernik, Nikolai Alexandrovich Kholodkovsky, Alexander Mitrofanovich Fedorov, and Vladimir Alexandrovich Mazurkevich, as well as other talented writers, but also paid tribute to the translators of previous years: Nikolai Vasilyevich Gerbel and Count Ivan Andreyevich Mamun (the first translator of Shakespeare's sonnets into Russian). All one hundred fifty-four sonnets by Shakespeare are printed in their translations in this collection. The book also includes thirty-seven songs and five poems by the English classic: "The Phoenix and the Turtle," "Complaint of a Lover," "Venus and Adonis," "Lucrece," and "The Passionate Pilgrim."

The edition is decorated with initials, title pages, and colored illustrations by the British artist Charles Robinson. He illustrated the included sonnets of Shakespeare in 1915. Robinson was 45 years old at that time, and he had long been deservedly known as a prolific artist. One could say that Charles became a hereditary illustrator, as his father also created illustrations for books. Both of Charles's brothers also became artists. In 1892, Charles Robinson got a place at the Royal Academy but could not finish due to a lack of money. This did not prevent him from receiving an order in 1896 to design "A Child's Garden of Verses" by Robert Louis Stevenson. Robinson created more than a hundred pen-and-ink drawings for this collection. Stevenson's book with his illustrations was a success. Later, Charles sometimes illustrated several books annually. His illustrations were regularly reissued in Aesop's Fables, "The Adventures of Odysseus," Perrault's fairy tales, Mother Goose's poems, Omar Khayyam's rubaiyat, and dozens of other books.