In Chizhova’s novel too, Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays function as an alternative aesthetic and morality to those prevalent in Soviet society, which F. is alienated from. In Sonnet 29, ‘When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes/I all alone beweep my outcast state’, the poet most obviously turns away from an unfeeling society that hounds him.93 The only consolations for the poet, as for both F. and the narrator of Chizhova’s novel, are art and love. The sonnets referring to time, age and death (especially Nos 71 and 74, cited in English in the text) call upon the addressee to preserve the poet’s memory after death, as the narrator does as a ‘witness’ to the life of her beloved F. The well-known scenes from Richard III (1592–1593), Romeo and Juliet (1595), Henry IV, Part One (1596–1597)
