Dimitry's Shade: A Reading of Alexander Pushkin's Boris Godunov

Introduction

This book grew out of a research project into Pushkin’s poetic language that examined the recurrence and function of certain lexical items in the text of Boris Godunov as examples of “poetic etymology.” The research was based on the hypothesis, which is more fully exposed in chapters 6 and 7, that the very shape of Pushkin’s language, the combinations of lexical roots and the play with these roots, expressed his inner ideological concerns, obsessions even, and that these in turn molded the final text. However, the book itself goes way beyond the confines of this research to develop a series of theses about the work. In chapter 1 I situate my own arguments, which in many particulars run counter to accepted views, by tracing the main trends of critical thought about the play. Chapter 2 is devoted to the issue of Boris Godunov as an attempt to reform Russian theater ; it was to fail for several reasons—mainly because Russian critical thinking and theatrical practice were not sufficiently sophisticated to put Pushkin’s ideas into action, and also because they were overtaken by the events of the Decembrist uprising and the subsequent change in the ideological climate in Russia. I then go on to argue in chapters 3 and 4 that the text of Boris Godunov was intended by Pushkin to express his own thinking about the Russian state, especially that of his own time, and his own place within that state, even though the play ostensibly deals with events at the end of the sixteenth century—for Pushkin some two hundred years distant. Here I challenge the usual view that Pushkin rejected drama as political comment, or rather, I suggest that his work functions on a far deeper and more sophisticated level.1 I argue that while Boris Godunov is far from a pièce à thèse, in it Pushkin struggles to come to terms with the issues of revolution and regicide—issues incarnated in the two key political figures that dominated Pushkin’s life up to 1825, namely, Tsar Alexander I and Napoleon Bonaparte, whose clash came to symbolize the forces of reaction and revolution. The figures of the two are “overprinted” onto the characters of Boris and Dimitry respectively. Suggestively, where Dimitry was Boris’s nemesis, Alexander Introduction xi was Napoleon’s—but Pushkin was to see the shade of Napoleon coming back to haunt Alexander in the revolutionary movements in various countries after 1815. The first half of the 1820s was a time of ideological turmoil in Russia that was to lead, a scant few weeks after Pushkin completed the text of the play, to the Decembrist uprising. Pushkin was intimately involved in the debates of the Decembrists and flirted with their ideas, only eventually to reject them and return to a conservative stance he had already expressed in the ode “Liberty.” I further argue that a central theme of the play is the notion of miracle (chudo)—the miracle of Dimitry’s meteoric rise to fame, and the parallel miracle of Napoleon’s career. Pushkin was fascinated by the (for him) apparently inexplicable and even supernatural origin of the success of these giants of humble origin, a success that could not simply be reduced to the workings of the forces of history. The centrality of the miracle in Pushkin’s thought finds a parallel in the thinking of the seventeenth-century Muscovites who inhabit his play. I attribute this to a residual “Orthodox” element in his thought, an element that was inextricably related to his sense of national pride as a Russian. Post-Soviet Russian literary studies, in one of those U-turns that are characteristic of Russian intellectual thought, have been too ready to seek religion in writers that were formerly viewed as revolutionaries . I would like to distance myself from any notion that Pushkin was preaching Christianity here or elsewhere, but insist that his worldview was shaped in many particulars by what I would call an Orthodox discourse, the residual set of values that he as an ethnic Russian could not help but absorb, and that his choice of material for Boris Godunov made aspects of that discourse inevitable components of the text. In chapter 6 I use the analysis of different lexical items to show how the work is shaped, both on the textual and on the thematic level, by what I call the codes of speaking and silence, seeing and blindness; in chapter 7, I suggest that the icon...