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5 Tragedy, Comedy, Carnival, and History on Stage  Caryl Emerson “Tragedy plays on our emotions, it involves us and demands our sympathy for the protagonist; comedy appeals to our intellect, we observe critically and laugh at the victim. Yet comedy may be considered the more serious of the two because it has a greater power to disturb the audience’s conventional attitudes, whereas tragedy … purifies …”1 “In the usual sense of the word, there is no meaning to comedy. Meaning is what comedy plays with.”2 Between 1825 and 1830, inconsistently but suggestively, Pushkin referred to his Boris Godunov as a comedy, a tragedy, and a “Romantic tragedy.”3 The front cover of the 1831 edition did not help to clarify matters: Boris Godunov, sochinenie [composition]. How significant for Pushkin were these shifts of label? Or for that matter, dramatic genre in general?4 At the beginning of the Boris year, January 1825, Pushkin’s lycée friend Ivan Pushchin brought the poet a manuscript copy of Alexander Griboedov’s Gore ot uma [Woe from Wit], a dazzling Russian variant on the French comedy of manners. Pushkin had compliments as well as criticisms on the play, but prefaced both by saying: “One must judge a dramatic writer by the laws which he acknowledges for himself.”5 What laws did Pushkin set for himself in his Boris, which he completed later that same year? These questions resist a straightforward answer. Pushkin did indeed title his play a komediia, but today’s connotations were not Pushkin’s. In the pre-Petrine period, the term “comedy” did not have to designate a comic, lighthearted, or laughing text; it referred to events presented on stage through conversation.6 By the early nineteenth century, the Russian term komediia had come to reflect a narrower European usage, 157 which included the popular Shakespearean festive comedy, the Italian commedia, and the French comédie, as well as other non-tragic and nonepic staged works. But a Russian playwright still enjoyed considerable leeway along this terminological fault line. Pushkin, who was a master at juxtaposing the received genres of his time and always eager to exploit ambiguity, surely took advantage of all these overlapping meanings. It is our thesis that Pushkin’s gradual shift in nomenclature was palpable and significant. From 1825 to the end of the decade, “comedy” as an appellation gradually falls away; in Pushkin’s references to his play, only the label “tragedy” remains. The present chapter steps back to ask how each of these two fundamental dramatic modes is experienced, coded in, juxtaposed to its opposite, and how expectations change when a playwright alters the proportion of one to the other within a single work. Among the most 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 finding 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, indifferent to destiny, addicted to simple pleasures, cynical toward the workings of justice. In a drama that strives for a responsible representation of historical events, is it possible 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 figure or a pretentious ideology. Nor was comic activity mere temporary distraction from a tragic denouement – what is often called “comic relief,” a dramatic device handled skillfully by Shakespeare in his myth-based plots (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 . It becomes an historical agent. The idea was radical. There were few precedents for “historically significant” 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 158 Caryl Emerson [18...

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