In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter Four Boris Godunov as Metahistory and Metapoetry Пьеса Пушкина не история, а философия истории в художественном образе. Pushkin’s play is not history, but the philosophy of history in artistic form. —Batiushkov, 1900 Зачем ты послан был и кто тебя послал? Чего, добра иль зла, ты верный был свершитель? Why were you sent and who sent you? Of what were you the faithful executor—good or evil? —Pushkin, Eugene Onegin IN THE DRAFT PREFACE OF 1830, written in the form of a letter to N. N. Raevsky, Pushkin insisted that before reading it, he must read “the last tome” (i.e., books X and XI) of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State (Wolff, 1999, p. 245). How are we to understand this request? In making it Pushkin invokes the entire question of the relation between history and literature, a question that was to become of even greater actuality later, when Pushkin was himself to write certain historical events (the Pugachev revolt, Peter’s career) as history and as works of literature.1 As in several other cases (e.g., “The Stone Guest”), an understanding of the work is predicated on the reader’s familiarity with other preceding texts, so that the ellipse—the omission of already known information—becomes an important device.2 L. M. Lotman writes (1996): “Adopting a basic plot that had entered the consciousness of the reader through the works of his predecessors , he used it to create a new interpretation of the characters and their interrelations that would break with accepted ideas” (p. 134). In fact, Pushkin’s technique could not necessarily rely on that foreknowledge: the spectator in popular theater could hardly be expected to have read Karamzin and understand the subtle ways in which Pushkin diverges from his predecessor ’s text, and the reader of “Banquet in Time of Plague” could even less be expected to know John Wilson’s City of the Plague. In other words, Pushkin deliberately adopts a rather opaque technique of counterpoint to the original text that makes his works problematic. In the case of Boris Godunov, 80 for example, the fact that the reader/spectator knows that the pretender will in turn be killed is important to understanding the ending of the play. If the original last line of the play—“Long live Tsar Dimitry!”—was deeply ironical because of this foreknowledge, the silence of the people in the final version is full of foreboding—they will be as silent then as they are at the murder of the young tsar Feodor and his mother; Dimitry cannot rely on the people to save him, despite his temporary popularity. In a sense, the plot runs from the murder of the real Dimitry to the murder of the false one—both of them taking place outside the confines of the text. We might see this tendency to maximum reduction of detail in part simply as the shorthand of a writer who is impatient with the necessity to fill in all the background, and who instead focuses on the issues of interest to him, issues outlined in the previous chapter. Beyond it, we can see the double role of Pushkin as historian and poet: “He wanted to be both poet and historian and strove for complementarity of history and fiction as two distinct modes of historical representation that can and, indeed, must coexist ” (Evdomikova, 1999, p. 3). As Evdokimova rightly asserts (in a critique of postmodernist relativization of historical truth), for Pushkin this was first and foremost a question of choice of genre. Pushkin is clear about when he is writing history (and what demands that makes on him) and when he is writing poetry or fiction. They are exercises in different genres, and Pushkin ’s approach to literature was of maximum laconicism, whereas in writing history he attached particular attention to detail. In this he was a follower and admirer of Karamzin, whose History of the Russian State was filled with detail, accompanied by a large number of documents from the chronicles. Of it Pushkin wrote to Zhukovsky on 17 August 1825: “My tragedy is growing and I hope to finish it by the winter, consequently my reading consists solely of Karamzin and the chronicles. What a marvel these last two volumes of Karamzin are! What vigour! They are as gripping as yesterday’s newspaper , as I wrote to Raevsky.”3 The key to understanding the relationship of history to literature in the play lies in Pushkin’s very idiosyncratic technique, which for want of a better term I call “overprinting.” In chapter 1 I quoted Vladimir Turbin’s essential insight as to the function...

Share