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Prefaces to the Paperback Edition
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
I am grateful for the opportunity to add some prefatory remarks to the paperback edition of our book, which differs from the original in several modest ways: The paperback edition contains four minor (single word) corrections in our chapters, a one-word correction in the play, and a few minor layout corrections in two scenes of the play. First, I wish to pinpoint when Pushkin started writing his Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepiev. It is well known that he completed it on November 7, 1825. Pushkin’s earliest notes concerning the play appear in his “Second Masonic Notebook” and date from November 1824.1 That means he probably started working on the play in November 1824 and took almost exactly a year to write it. Although Pushkin moved sharply away from Nikolai Karamzin’s view of Grishka Otrepiev, his grim portrayal of Tsar Ivan IV was strongly influenced by the controversial interpretation of the “terrible tsar” found in volume nine of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State. In our book I discuss the possible influence of Friedrich Schiller’s unfinished play Demetrius on Pushkin’s Comedy (pages 69–73). Since writing that passage, I have done additional research on this topic. Interested readers will find a stronger case for Schiller’s influence on Pushkin’s play in Stanford Slavic Studies, vols. 29–30.2 Just as the first edition of our book was about to go to press, my colleague Sergei Fomichev made several minor corrections to the play based upon careful scrutiny of the original manuscript of Pushkin’s Comedy. Fortunately, we were able to include all those changes in our book. Prefaces to the Paperback Edition xv Nevertheless, I was unable to add a note about one of those changes – until now. In Scene 17 (“The Tsar’s Council”) Basmanov reassures Tsar Boris that Grishka Otrepiev will soon be captured and brought to Moscow to be displayed “in an iron cage” (page 391). It has been suggested that Pushkin borrowed this striking image from a notorious and widely reported promise made by Marshal Michel Ney to Louis XVIII – to bring Napoleon to the king “in an iron cage.” That is possible, but as a child Pushkin may have read about Tamerlane defeating the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I in 1402 and then displaying him in an iron cage for the entertainment of his soldiers. Pushkin may also have read about Ivan the Terrible’s grandfather, Grand Prince Ivan III (r. 1462–1505), who reportedly ordered two Polish conspirators to be placed in an iron cage on the frozen Moskva River and then burned to death. But it is more likely that Pushkin mined the history of the Time of Troubles for this image. In 1612, the bloodthirsty and cruel “third false Dmitry” (the so-called Pskov pretender) was captured, paraded for many miles in chains, and then reportedly placed in an iron cage before Moscow for the amusement of the national militia. Upon reflection, however, it seems even more likely that the iron cage reference came from an episode much closer to Pushkin ’s own lifetime. It is well known that Catherine the Great resorted to using an iron cage. I am not thinking of the apocryphal story about Catherine locking her wig maker in an iron cage to keep her bad hair a secret. Instead, I am referring to the fate of that other famous Russian Pretender, Emelian Pugachev – the cossack chieftain who claimed to be Catherine’s unfortunate husband, Tsar Peter III. In 1774, after his powerful rebellion was suppressed, Pugachev was allegedly transported to Moscow for his execution in an iron cage. As noted in our book, Pushkin was keenly interested in Pugachev at the time he wrote his Comedy; and soon after becoming historian laureate of Russia he published Istoriia Pugachevskago bunta (1834). Good historian that he was, by then his research led him to modify Pugachev’s iron cage into the more accurate “closed sledge.” Later historians described it as a “wooden cage on wheels.” There is a woodcut of that wretched vehicle located in the State Historical Museum in Moscow.3 In our book I briefly discuss Pushkin’s use of his own family’s historical records in developing the characters of the two Pushkins portrayed in his Comedy (pages 80, 474 n104, and 480 n126). While conducting research for a biography of Tsar Dmitrii (r. 1605–06), I recently came xvi Prefaces to...