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6 The Ebb and Flow of Influence: Muffling the Comedic in the Move toward Print  Caryl Emerson “Returning to ‘Boris Godunov,’ I’d like to ask: what in the world is it good for? It can’t go on stage, it’s impossible to call it a narrative poem, a novel, a history in voices – or anything at all; for which of the human feelings does it hold any value or virtue? Who will want to read it, once the initial curiosity passes? I read it through today for the third time, and already skipped over a lot; and when I finished I thought: O! (a cipher).” Pavel Katenin, 1 February 1836 Nowhere was Pushkin’s behavior as provocative as in the realm of theater . This provocation attached both to his unruly, outspoken person in the theater stalls and to his aesthetic judgments. By 1817, the year Pushkin finished the Lycée, performance arts in the capitals functioned “not only as a theater, but as a club”; the theater was a forum to quarrel, hiss, cheer, create scandals, seduce, and debate art and politics.1 The cutting edge of Russian culture was here. Memoirs of the period attest that the hotheaded Pushkin was a familiar figure, conversant with all dramatic camps from Shakhovskoi to Katenin, praising them in public, berating them in private, but aligning himself with none. Indeed, Pushkin found fault with almost all Russian performance practice of his time: tragedy, melodrama, vaudeville, historical and patriotic drama. His own ambitions in drama, which were considerable, encountered constant obstacles and left relatively modest fruit. As Fomichev has remarked, nowhere in Pushkin’s work “is there so sharp a disproportion between the impressive quantity of creative plans (about 25) and the small number of realizations.”2 192 It was suggested in chapter 2 that even the completed 1825 Comedy was in a sense an incomplete project, the first part of a trilogy. The complete historical cycle, culminating in the triumph of a new dynasty, would be fueled by ambition, social injustice, violent retribution, popular humor, pure chance – a daring set of causalities, unfit for both romantic and neoclassical modes of telling history. If Pushkin had imagined his trilogy as three serial chronicle plays on a Shakespearean model, then, as real history is crooked, progress through it also would be crooked and catch people by surprise. Arguably, the real protagonist of this larger historical arc would have been neither the beleaguered Boris, nor the progressive and wildly popular Dmitry, but the grimmer, more tenacious Prince Vasily Shuisky – schemer, flatterer, and court chameleon, who must be vanquished by the rising sun of the Romanovs. In the first installment of this trilogy, Boris Godunov’s fate is tragic and the Pretender’s is Romantic. The partially concealed comedic ligature that survives them both is Shuisky. He is that deep well of plots and resilience, hampered by neither power nor love, innocent of the burdens of sincerity, who adjusts, twists, grasps the potentials of the moment, while never showing his hand – “un singulaire mélange d’audace, de souplesse et de force de caractère,” as Pushkin remarked admiringly in a draft preface from 1828.3 Through his person, we learn that History, which in Karamzin’s view was the “Sacred Book of Nations,” need not be moved forward by beneficent agents or preordained acts. Carriers of history can be petty, their alliances opportunistic or accidental. For one of the strategies of a “tragicomedy of history” is to stitch together the comically trivial and the tragically lofty so that the boundaries between them are blurred. Foreground and background change places. At any given time, the spectator cannot distinguish a genuinely historical agent from a purely local disruption distracting from that agency – because reality on stage is dynamic, not rhetorical or structural. It moves forward in rapid dialogue, glancing over its shoulder for possible spies. Just how crucial Prince Shuisky is to this type of dialogue is clear from the first ten scenes, which move from the closeted exchange between Shuisky and Vorotynsky (where the interlocutor is foolish), to the closeted exchange between Shuisky and Afanasy Pushkin (where the interlocutor is wise). In between, the “transitional rulers” Boris and Dmitry forge their identities and flag the causes that will trap them. Shuisky is the perfect swing character. He is always at the right place, in the right mood, at the right time: a complainer and blackmailer with The Ebb and Flow of Influence 193 [3...

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