“No text is an island”

This chapter discusses recent Hamlet translations in Russia in the context of the history of translation theory and canonicity. The introduction provides a short description of the history of Hamlet translations in Russia, while the main part focuses on the analysis of the translations that have appeared in the period from 1999 to 2008. As the article demonstrates, the Russian Hamlets of the twenty-first century are closely linked to previous canons of Hamlet and depend not really on the source text but on the complex intertextual (and intersemiotic) relations primarily among translations within the target culture.