oxford world’ s classics BORIS GODUNOV and other dramatic works Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin was born in Moscow in 1799 into an old aristocratic family. In 1817 he received a nominal appointment in the government service, but for the most part he led a dissipated life in the capital while he continued to produce much highly polished light verse. His narrative poem, Ruslan and Lyudmila (pub. 1820), brought him wide- spread fame. At about the same time a few mildly seditious verses led to his banishment from the capital. During this so-called ‘southern exile’, he composed several narrative poems and began his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. As a result of further conflicts with state authorities he was con- demned to a new period of exile at his family’s estate of Mikhailovskoe. There he wrote some of his finest lyric poetry, completed his verse drama Boris Godunov, and continued work on Eugene Onegin. He was still in enforced absence from the capital when the Decembrist revolt of 1825 took place. Although several of his friends were among those executed or imprisoned, he was not implicated in the affair; and in 1826 he was par- doned by the new Tsar Nicholas I and permitted to return to Moscow. By the end of the decade, as he sought to become a truly professional writer, he turned increasingly to prose composition. In the especially fruitful autumn of 1830, while stranded by cholera at his estate of Boldino, he completed Eugene Onegin, wrote a major collection of prose stories (The Tales of Belkin), and composed his experimental Little Tragedies. In 1831 he mar- ried Natalya Goncharova and sought to put his personal and professional affairs on a more stable footing. The rest of his life, however, was plagued by financial and marital woes, by the hostility of literary and political enemies, and by the younger generation’s dismissal of his recent work. His literary productivity diminished, but in the remarkable ‘second Boldino autumn’ of 1833 he produced both his greatest prose tale, The Queen of Spades, and a last poetic masterpiece, The Bronze Horseman. In 1836 he completed his only novel-length work in prose, The Captain’s Daughter. Beleaguered by numerous adversaries and enraged by anonymous letters containing attacks on his honour, in 1837 he was driven to challenge an importunate admirer of his wife to a duel. The contest took place on 27 January, and two days later the poet died from his wounds. James E. Falen is Professor Emeritus of Russian at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Isaac Babel: Russian Master of the Short Story (University of Tennessee Press, 1974) and has translated Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, for Oxford World’s Classics. Caryl Emerson is A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She has published widely on Mikhail Bakhtin and on Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Russian literary criticism, and Russian operatic and song repertory. oxford world’ s classics For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS ALEXANDER PUSHKIN Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works Translated with Notes by JAMES E. FALEN With an Introduction by CARYL EMERSON 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Introduction © Caryl Emerson 2007 Translation and other editorial material © James E. Falen 2007 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799–1837. [Plays. English. Selections] Boris Godunov and other dramatic works / Alexander Pushkin ; translated with notes by James E. Falen ; with an introduction by Caryl Emerson. p. cm.—(Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press)) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978–0–19–921130–2 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0–19–921130–2 (alk. paper) 1. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 1799–1837—Translations into English. I. Falen, James E., 1935– II. Title. PG3347.A2 2007 891.73′3—dc22 2006028321 Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc ISBN 978–0–19–921130–2 13579108642 CONTENTS Introduction vii Translator’s Note xxxiii Select Bibliography xxxv A Chronology of Alexander Pushkin xxxvii BORIS GODUNOV 1 Historical Introduction 3 A SCENE FROM FAUST 93 THE LITTLE TRAGEDIES 99 i. the miserly knight 101 ii. mozart and salieri 121 iii. the stone guest 133 iv. a feast in time of plague 165 RUSALKA (THE WATER-NYMPH) 177 Explanatory Notes 203 This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is Russia’s most cosmopolitan playwright. This fact is sometimes obscured, because Pushkin’s best-known play, Boris Godunov (1825), concerns Russian history, a Russian dynastic crisis, and is known outside its homeland primarily as the literary source for Modest Musorgsky’s intensely nationalistic opera composed four decades later. Peel away the Kremlin gongs and ragged masses crowding the operatic stage, however, and Boris Godunov resonates with the most varied echoes of Western European theatre: Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Corneille, Racine, Italian seriocomic opera, all of them stripped down, reduced to their essentials (as Pushkin conceived them), and presented in compact scenes that snap open and closed like entries in a medieval Russian chronicle. The four Little Tragedies that Pushkin wrote in 1830—so little, in fact, that they resemble the final acts of tragedies—are also stripped down and condensed. Not only are they pan-European, set respectively in a medieval castle, Vienna, Madrid, and London; they are also pan-human, each focusing on a single moral defect and its attempts to justify itself: avarice, envy, lust, and defiant feasting in the face of death. Two of the four tragedies announce their source in English playwrights. The fragmentary Scene from Faust builds off a German legend. Rusalka is a Danube River mermaid tale, shifted eastward and lightly Slavicized. In drama as elsewhere, ‘Russianness’ for Pushkin meant a hybrid: the ability to refract, integrate, con- dense, and translate everyone else. But translation and condensation are not quite the right terms for what Pushkin does. He was cosmopolitan along a highly personal vector, and everything he touched turned irreversibly into his own trademark gold. Pushkin did not really ‘borrow from’ or ‘translate’ European poets, although in dramatic experiments he loved to start with someone else’s story. He would be intrigued by another poet’s choice of form, text, or narrative plot. Often he could glimpse this alien whole only partially. But what resulted was a wondrous symbiosis between Pushkin’s genius—his absolute control over viii introduction the lexical and rhythmic resources of the Russian language—and his linguistic ‘deficiencies’, a reciprocity superbly explicated by Alexander Dolinin in his discussion of ‘Pushkin and English Litera- ture’.1 How this creative dynamic worked is crucial if we are to place the dramatic verse translated in this volume in the context Pushkin dreamed for it. Of the European languages and cultures that stimulated Pushkin—French, English, German, and Italian—only French was deeply, thoroughly known. From early adolescence, Pushkin was utterly at home in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature. But precisely because French Romantic theatre disap- pointed him, he resolved to look elsewhere for dramatic inspiration. He worked hard on his English beginning in 1828 (and by the early 1830s had become passively quite good with it); Italian he might have guessed at through French or absorbed through the operas of Mozart and Rossini; German he never knew. Pushkin’s interest in Shakespeare, Byron, Schiller, and Goethe was mediated wherever possible through French prose translations, hearsay from friends, and French critical studies—which, Dolinin argues, liberated his genius to amend the original in his own mind and supply details out of his own personal poetics.