Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin (b. Moscow, 1799; d. St. Petersburg, 1837) is Russia's greatest, most beloved poet, and Boris Godunov (1825) is his only full-length drama. The eldest son of an impoverished, frivolous, but ancient family, Pushkin had an exotic lineage, of which he was exceedingly proud: his mother, "the beautiful creole," was the granddaughter of a black African princeling who had been taken hostage by the Turkish sultan, transported to Russia, and adopted by Peter the Great; having distinguished himself as a military engineer, he married into high society and fathered a huge family. The poet, a prodigy from the age of fourteen, insisted that his African blood contributed to his creative genius, rebelliousness, and sensuousness. Pushkin was very superstitious. In St. Petersburg, at the age of nineteen, he visited a German fortuneteller. She told him that he would suffer two periods of exile and that his thirtyseventh year would be especially dangerous for him. If he survived it, however, he would live a long and prosperous life. The danger, she prophesized, would come in the form of a white horse, a white head, or a white man.

At age twelve Pushkin was enrolled in the prestigious Lycée, an elite academy for young noblemen outside the capital, and three years later made his debut in print. The Lycée became his first disciplined, loving, and loyal home. Among his closest mentors and father-figures was the Romantic writer Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), who was to author Russia's first scholarly, readable Russian history (1818–1826). Volumes 9–11 provided Pushkin with the storyline for Boris Godunov, set between 1598 and 1606. Two years after his graduation, Pushkin was arrested on the order of Tsar Alexander I for a seditious poem and exiled under military supervision to the south of Russia (Kishenev and Odessa). It was Pushkin's way, whenever confined, to bristle, complain, joke—and then buckle down to work, taking advantage of the stimuli around him. Although technically attached to the state service, Pushkin did no work for his captors. In the early 1820s he began his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, and wrote several long "southern poems" in the style of Byron. Pushkin did not know English adequately to read him (or Shakespeare) in the original until the late 1820s; but like all aristocrats of his generation, he was completely fluent in French. English poets and playwrights were therefore approached through French (often prose) translations.

In 1824 an indiscreet comment about atheism in a private letter to a friend occasioned Pushkin's second exile. This time he was confined under house arrest at his parents' estate in Mikhailovskoe (outside of Pskov) for two years. His father was hostile, local monks were enlisted to spy on him (their loose behavior actually gets into a scene of Boris Godunov), and visitors were monitored. It was here, in isolation and restlessness, that Pushkin wrote Boris Godunov, drawing on Karamzin's history, Shakespeare's chronicle plays, memoirs by early-17th-century French mercenaries, and his own family papers (two of his ancestors had taken part in the inter-dynastic Time of Troubles, and they have roles in the play). Pushkin finished his drama a month before the Decembrist Revolt, an ill-fated demonstration against the monarchy on December 14, 1825, in which many of his acquaintances took part. Hundreds of participants were exiled, and five conspirators were hanged. Although Pushkin's temperament was far more radical than his politics, only his house arrest had prevented him from standing together with his fellow rebel-poets and friends.

The new tsar, Nicholas I, pardoned Pushkin, agreed to read all his work personally, and even attempted to court his favor. At first the poet was thrilled to have the tsar as his personal censor. But as the years passed, Pushkin realized that Nicholas was allowing his police underlings to delay and obstruct his work. Boris Godunov was detained in the censor's office for six years, during which time the chief censor plagiarized from Pushkin's manuscript for his own novel on the same historical period. In 1829, in deep need of money because of his gambling debts, about to re-mortgage his property and his serfs, and on the brink of marrying into an impecunious family, Pushkin agreed to strategic changes in the play that satisfied the censor. Boris Godunov was approved for publication only after extensive cuts and the deletion of three whole scenes.

The final years of Pushkin's life were difficult, despite his growing output and mastery of new forms. His wife, Natalya Nikolaevna, considered the most beautiful woman in the empire, was expensive to maintain, and their family grew rapidly. An appointment as Historian Laureate brought Pushkin great intellectual pleasure—he finished a history of the 18th-century peasant pretender-rebel Pugachov and began writing a history of Peter the Great—but the market for poetry was giving way to a taste for popular prose. The tsar appointed Pushkin to a minor court rank so that he could dance with the bewitching Madame Pushkin at official balls. At one of these balls, a dashing young French adventurer in the Russian service, Baron Georges d'Anthes, fell in love with Natalya and pursued her vigorously. Pushkin, incensed, challenged him twice to a duel. D'Anthes finally could no longer avoid the summons, and on January 27, 1827, the two men met in the outskirts of Petersburg. Pushkin, age thirty-seven, was mortally wounded in the duel and died two days later. The tsar feared public demonstrations and ordered the body to be buried secretly. D'Anthes, a white man with blond hair, was eventually exiled from Russia.

Pushkin adored the stage, but the fate of his historical drama was not a happy one. When he read his completed play illicitly to friends in 1826, it was a sensation. Upon its publication early in 1831, after much fretful tinkering over the text, the drama seemed to please no one. It was not recognizable as historical tragedy; the tone was too buoyant, too chatty, and the love plot, so essential to kingship drama, was hopelessly parodied. Nor did the play qualify as historical comedy—that is, as a treatment of world-historical events from the perspective of a buffoon or a Falstaff—for its subject matter was too dark, its concerns too solemnly dynastic. Although Pushkin had hoped otherwise, no staging of the play took place during his lifetime. Public theater houses in Russia had become the property of the crown in 1803 and remained an imperial monopoly until 1882, with their repertory controlled by a government bureaucracy. If a play survived censorship for print, it was then censored for public performance, a separate and more severe filter. There were also restrictions on certain characters and themes, as in Western European theaters. No actor was allowed to depict a Romanov tsar on stage (Pushkin was within bounds, since his play ends eight years before the founding of the Romanov dynasty in 1613). Also forbidden were portrayals of ecclesiastics, and Pushkin's play featured several, including an irreverent patriarch and two drunken itinerant monks. The premiere of the play (also with extensive cuts) did not take place until 1870. It was poorly received.

This history of poor receptions mystified and challenged Vsevolod Meyerhold in the 1920s and 1930s. He worshiped Pushkin as a playwright and potential director and sought, with Sergei Prokofiev's help, to embody the poet's spirit on stage. That spirit Pushkin himself had defined in 1830, when he wrote that a dramatist had to be as "dispassionate as fate" while at the same time delivering to the audience a lively, gripping dramatic spectacle that aroused laughter, pity, and terror. It is our hope that the Pushkin 2007 production will succeed in this spirit where Pushkin could only dream.

Caryl Emerson