“Hunting to die looking at the epoch...” (On the “Shakespeare Sonnet” by A. Voznesensky)

The article analyzes the epochal ambitions of Andrei Voznesensky, one of the most authoritative representatives of the Sixtiers, based on the material of his so-called “Shakespeare Sonnet”. The article considers the poet’s translation skills and estimates whether the analyzed poem can be considered a translation of sonnet 66 by W. Shakespeare and whether it is a sonnet in the proper sense. It turns out that the time concept “epoch”, along with its occasional synonym “era”, is represented very widely in Voznesensky’s vocabulary. Despite the fact that the poet turned to translation more than once, he never became a professional translator: his poetic personality was too vivid. Therefore, his translations were not even transcriptions, but rather original works written based on foreign-language poems, the texts of which he addressed in one way or another. “Shakespeare Sonnet”, written by him in 1983, is strikingly different from the traditional translations of the 66 sonnet underlying it. Voznesensky maximally authorized it both stylistically and structurally in terms of versification.