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Chapter Six Horse and Rider: The Semantics of Power The tendency to metaphor is the stenography of a great personality, the shorthand of its spirit. —Pasternak, “Notes on the Translations of Shakespeare” THANKS TO THE ambiguous nature of its genre, Boris Godunov, like a number of Pushkin’s works, can be viewed in a variety of ways. It stands at the juncture of three elements in Pushkin’s work—poetry, prose narrative, and dramatic dialogue—that interact and overlap to give the work much of its complexity. At first sight, the fact that the work is composed entirely of dialogue would seem to undermine the principle of an overriding authorial perspective, but in fact the play is profoundly metapoetic and thus reflects the concerns of Pushkin’s lyrical poetry more than is immediately apparent. Since the work is more read than performed, and seems to have been intended as such by the author to a considerable extent (especially as he adapted it for publication), it might be thought appropriate to read it simply as narrative. However, as we have seen from the discussion of Pushkin and Shakespeare in chapter 2, the historically motivated chain of scenes that we find in Shakespeare’s historical dramas is largely undermined by the technique of ellipsis, which disrupts the principle of narrativity . In fact, as he himself stressed, Pushkin relied for narrative context and continuity on the familiarity of his readers (or audience, should the work be staged, although this possibility seems to have faded early) with Karamzin ’s History. Thus, it might be seen as legitimate to view the work as a set of reflections (in dialogue) on Karamzin’s narrative—in a word, not history at all, but metahistory. We recall that the secret report on the work prepared for Nicholas described it as resembling a sequence of conversations taken from a Walter Scott novel, not a Walter Scott novel as such, which is what Nicholas recommended to the author that he transform the work into. Pushkin ignored the advice, and when he did finally write a novel in the style of Scott (The Captain’s Daughter), he characteristically broke with the novelistic principle in an important way by writing the work almost entirely in the first person, again disrupting generic expectations. 122 The issue of how to read the work is further complicated by the issue of poetry. At first sight, poetry in a dramatic text is not the same as lyric poetry ; in the latter everything is subjected to the lyrical principle. In particular , all narrativity is subverted through the lack of sentence perspective characteristic of narrative prose; that is to say, poetry is characterized by the lyrical perspective, which is totally “I” oriented.1 In drama there is a conflict of perspective between the different acting subjects. Yet paradoxically, behind it all, in Boris Godunov the presence of the single authorial perspective can be heard in the unity of poetic metaphors and themes that overrides the individualism of each dramatis persona. Thus each character is both an independent individual speaking and engaging in conflict with other characters, and at the same time a reflection of the author’s own lyrical voice, a figment of his imagination, with the author mimicking the different voices (almost like a technician working different marionettes) in working out the argument of the play. In this sense, generalizations about the language and imagery of the play are legitimate and can be analyzed fruitfully. An examination of the lexical material of Boris Godunov reveals a complex system of semantics in which a number of fields intersect. Numerous readers have been struck by the apparently systematic structure of Pushkin’s poetic semantics, and it has been suggested either implicitly or explicitly that it might be able to describe this system and define its nature and its limits—a sort of map of Pushkin’s poetic reflections or his aesthetic worldview. Of the attempts to contribute to such a system, the best known are those of Khodasevich (1924) and the contributors to a book edited by Nils Åke Nilsson on Pushkin’s “poetic codes,” especially Gasparov and Paperno (1979), and Zholkovsky (1979). An exhaustive analysis of the lexical patterns would be tantamount to a description of the worldview of that writer as it is expressed in the text, since characteristic uses of lexical material are idiosyncratic and accrete through the writer’s unique biographical experience. Moreover, the relationship of the writer to certain lexical elements is frequently obsessive...

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