But the equation of money with potency or freedom always remained suspect, a contamination of the muse and a sign that the age of poetry was coming to an end. It would be replaced by an age of iron, of ‘dreadful times’ and ‘dreadful hearts’. Especially odious was money calculated, withheld or locked up. All value, to be valuable, was obliged to circulate.

The same fraudulent idea of creativity as a material good to be calculated and ‘paid for’ underlies the rival economies of art in Mozart and Salieri. In this second little tragedy, however, the antagonists are more perfectly matched and more indispensable to each other. It is a peculiarity of all Pushkin’s playwriting that the monologue-confession, designed to acquaint the audience with the anguish and inner sufferings of the hero, does not, as a rule, endear the hero to us; more often than not, words piled on words (even Pushkin’s gorgeous words) make us suspicious. There is too much self-centredness in the showcase monologue. Virtue and purposeful activity belong to the responsive, the interruptible, the verbally spare and easily distracted characters: the jesting and accommodating Pretender, the generous but frustrated Albert, the good-natured, straightforward Mozart who enters with a laugh and seems to take more trouble arranging his dinner than writing his Requiem. If Mozart is all lightness and movement, then it is Salieri, heavyweight, who controls the words.

The first scene is given almost entirely in Salieri’s zone, framed by two huge soliloquies. Since he is so gifted at self-criticism that is also self-justification, we tend not to doubt his sincerity. But envy—unlike the simpler, one-way passion of miserliness—is two-sided and restless. Its ‘hate–love’ cannot be trusted. As opposed to the account-keeping Salieri, a ‘son of harmony’ like Mozart (the musical equivalent of the generously spending, chivalric son Albert) is utterly, unselfconsciously at home in his element. He no more questions his musical gift than a tree in the snowy forest questions the boundless and undeserved energy that will flow into it, come the spring sun. Salieri too is a creator, of course. Although Mozart delights in his rival and includes them together in the ‘happy, chosen few’, Salieri is gifted enough to know better. He remains an outsider, a ‘servant of art’ competent to appreciate greatness that he himself cannot create. What is more, this conscientious Viennese pedagogue is obsessed with the fact that Mozart’s genius is so very great it cannot be broken down into analysable or teachable parts. Thus it cannot circulate. ‘No successor will he leave behind’, Salieri laments, because no formula can be extracted from him. Such genius exhausts and depresses us. It belongs to itself alone.

This dilemma would be rich enough, but Pushkin does not rest there. In the second scene, supposedly Mozart’s zone, the binary between talent and genius, rule-bound work and undeserved grace, is undone. It is true that Mozart would rather jest or make music than nurse past injuries, but in fact what he talks of in the second scene (the visit of the Man in Black) and the music we hear (a Requiem) are anything but light-hearted or comedic. They are ominous, solemn, and bravely matter-of-fact. The modesty of the true creative artist in the face of death is a major theme in The Little Tragedies. That Salieri has been carrying around poison for years on the chance that he would end his own life with it might speak in his favour, but Pushkin does not play up this option, nor the hint that Salieri had hoped to drink together with (die together with) his poisoned friend. Salieri recovers quickly from his covert act of murder. For it isn’t only ‘villainy and genius’ that ‘sit ill together’ but also villainy and genuine, good-spirited laughter. Salieri doubts that Beaumarchais could have poisoned someone, because he was, Salieri insists, ‘too droll [lit.