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7 Pushkin's Boris Godunov 7 PUSHKIN’S BORIS GODUNOV A chance encounter with Musorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov as a teenager was the beginning of a love aff air with Pushkin’s 1825 history play, and with the composer of its most famous operatic transposition, that has lasted to the present day. It worked itself out through a dissertation, a book, several decades of delivering lecture-recitals on the Russian “realistic” art song (Dargomyzhsky and Musorgsky), and in 2006 culminated on a fascinating production of the play planned by Vsevolod Meyerhold, with music by Sergei Prokofi ev, for the 1937 (“Stalinist”) Pushkin Jubilee. Th at production (along with much else in the fi rst year of the Great Terror) never made it to opening night. It was my good fortune, in 2007, to co-manage at Princeton University a “re- invention” of this aborted 1936 production of Pushkin’s drama (see Chapter 20). Th e central textbook for that all-campus project, acquainting Princeton’s director and cast with the author, period, history, and play, was a recent volume by Chester Dunning (with contributions from myself and two Russian Pushkinists): Th e Uncensored Boris Godunov: Th e Case for Pushkin’s Original “Comedy” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Th e volume as a whole defended the unpublished 1825 version of the play and Pushkin’s excellence as an historian (not only as a playwright) during the mid-1820s. Dunning’s book also contained a new acting English translation of the 1825 play by Antony Wood. Th e excerpt below, from my chapter 5, continues the debate around Bakhtin’s carnival, suggests the genre of a “tragicomedy of history,” and revises an idea about the working of time already sounding at the end of “Tatiana”: if indeed there can be reversible and irreversible heroes in a history play, then Pushkin creates his Pretender as the former, his Tsar Boris as the latter. Pushkin adored the stage, but he was not a man of the theater. He had no practical experience working with scenes, sets, or players, and never benefi ted from the feedback of rehearsals or live performance. He wrote plays with the dramatic imagination of a poet. Following the 2006 entry below on Boris Godunov, a postscript from the pen of just such a “theater person,” Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950), will tie Pushkin’s play into my current research project on unrealized works for the Stalinist stage. — 162 — ---- 7. BORIS GODUNOV: TRAGEDY, COMEDY, CARNIVAL, AND HISTORY ON STAGE 2006 ---- BORIS GODUNOV: TRAGEDY, COMEDY, CARNIVAL, AND HISTORY ON STAGE 2006 “In the usual sense of the word, there is no meaning to comedy. Meaning is what comedy plays with.”1 [ . ] Among the ancient distinctions between the lofty epic-tragic genres and the lowly comic ones is that epic and tragedy must bear responsibility: for founding a city, for realizing justice, for fi nding out enough about the world to assign cause and blame. It is emblematic of comedy that its characters do not shoulder these burdens. Comic heroes in all genres (Falstaff , Sancho Panza, Master Elbow, the Good Soldier Švejk) have the right to be inept as historical agents, indiff erent to destiny, addicted to simple pleasures, cynical toward the workings of justice. Is it then possible, in a drama that strives for a responsible representation of historical events, to combine tragic and comic worlds in a trustworthy way? For Pushkin, the comic had tasks to perform more serious than topical satire, that is, than the humiliation of a pompous public fi gure or a pretentious ideology. Nor was comic activity a mere temporary distraction from a tragic denouement — what is often called “comic relief,” a dramatic device handled skillfully by Shakespeare in his tragedies or problem comedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Measure for Measure) and in the delightfully comic-erotic scenes in his chronicle and history plays. Pushkin understood such relief, as well as the verbal wit essential to it, designing entire scenes in its spirit. But on balance, comic behavior in Pushkin is not especially therapeutic, neither for stage heroes nor for their audience. Comedic behavior becomes an historical agent. Th e idea was radical. Th ere were few precedents for “historically signifi cant” comedic episodes on the nineteenth-century stage. A telling illustration can be found in the genesis of the opera Boris Godunov, some three decades after Pushkin’s death. In July 1870, in between his two versions of Boris, Musorgsky played a portion of his newly-composed “scenes with peasants” to a musical gathering at Vladimir Stasov’s estate, Pargolovo. It is 1 Robert I. Williams, Comic Practice / Comic Response (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 55. — 163 — ------------------------------------------------ PART II. ON THE MASTER WORKERS ------------------------------------------------ unclear from Musorgsky’s account precisely which scenes were performed, but most likely they included the opening mass chorus in the courtyard of Novodevichy Monastery. Th e composer’s shockingly “Shakespearean” choral dramaturgy was surely in evidence: a stylized mass song or choral lament punctuated by cynical, individualized voices in self-ironizing counterpoint. Th e eff ect must have been comic. But at the same time these peasants were passing irreverent judgment on power-makers in the Muscovite state, as occurs in Pushkin’s equivalent scene. Such judgments were a potential historical force. Th at evening, Musorgsky communicated to Rimsky- Korsakov his bemused concern over the reception of those scenes. “I’ve been at Pargolovo twice and yesterday I played my pranks [shalosti] before a large audience,” he wrote. “As regards the peasants in Boris, some found them to be bouff e (!), while others saw tragedy.”2 Th e exclamation mark is signifi cant. Commoners crowded into a public square could have two meanings: they were either trivially festive (that is, festive without historical consequence) or else emblematic of the fi xed fate of a people or a nation, carriers of the distanced wisdom of a Greek tragic chorus. It was impermissible not to be told which convention applied. Musorgsky was well aware that he had given mixed signals, and that only tragedy carried with it the weight of historical respect. In historical drama, or in historical music-drama, a serious mixing of tragedy and comedy — for purposes more profound than comic relief or satire — could only create ambiguity about a nation’s destiny and the power of its heroes to shape that destiny. In addition to genre confusion, there were more practical problems. Th roughout the nineteenth century, tragedy and comedy each had its own sphere of concerns, its own linguistic registers and stylistic norms. Th e internal architecture of the imperial theaters in the Russian Romantic period was not conducive to a fl exible combination of these two modes. If ancient tragedy had been designed for an arena stage or theater-in-the-round, and neoclassical tragedy — the special target of Pushkin’s impatience — for the fl at, deep box of the proscenium stage, then Boris Godunov was surely conceived in the spirit of the Elizabethan thrust or apron stage, with its several levels jutting exuberantly into audience space, making possible overlapping scenes of action and corners of intimacy. As we know from Pushkin’s disgruntled commentary, he did not consider the neoclassical imperial theaters of 1826 properly equipped to mount a dramatic spectacle 2 Musorgsky to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, 23 July 1870; see Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson, Th e Musorgsky Reader (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 148. — 164 — ---- 7. BORIS GODUNOV: TRAGEDY, COMEDY, CARNIVAL, AND HISTORY ON STAGE 2006 ---- such as Boris.3 Th e popular stage could perhaps do it justice — but Boris was not vaudeville, operetta, or farce. It was thoughtful comedy, yet with the rapid pacing, simultaneous exits and entrances, radical refocusings of audience attention, and fl uid linkage of scenes that are the trademarks of Pushkin as dramatist. For comedy is not only a genre. It is a terrain, a tempo, a youthful world view for processing events and responses to events that is intrinsically hostile to pomposity and heroic self-absorption, traits associated with old age. Th e comic spirit tends to ridicule any slowness in gesture or articulation. From early adolescence on, Pushkin felt very much at home in this world. For him, comedy cut across genre or period. Whereas he took constant potshots at neoclassical tragedy, he was enthusiastic about neoclassical verse comedy throughout his life. Among his earliest playwriting eff orts at the Lycée was a fi ve-act comedy.4 In recent times, literary-critical minds of the fi rst order, such as Andrei Siniavsky in his Strolls with Pushkin, have made the comedic lightness, swiftness, and decentering of Pushkin’s texts illustrative of all the values most precious to the poet: chance, gratitude, generosity, superstition, and a joyous surrender to fate.5 Indeed, the comedic is so pervasive in Pushkin that it is diffi cult to assemble a comprehensive list of the devices employed. L. I. Vol’pert opens her 1979 essay on Pushkin and eighteenth-century 3 See his draft article on Boris Godunov written in 1828 (intended for, but not sent to, the editor of Moskovskii vestnik): “Firmly believing that the obsolete forms of our theatre demand reform, I ordered my Tragedy according to the system of our Father Shakespeare . ” Pushkin then provocatively lists his departures from neoclassical unities and formulas. In Tatiana A. Wolff , Pushkin on Literature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 220–23, esp. 221. 4 A. D. Illichevskii to P. N. Fuss, 16 January 1816: “Pushkin is now writing a comedy in 5 acts, under the title ‘Th e Philosopher.’ Th e plan is rather successful and the beginning, that is, the fi rst act which so far is all that is written, promises something good; as regards the verses — what’s there to say — and such an abundance of witty words! God only grant him patience and perseverance, which are rare qualities in young writers .
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