laugh-filled or comic] a man | for such a crafty deed’. What we notice most about Salieri, both in his monologues and in his morosely self-absorbed exchanges with Mozart, is his absolute humourlessness. In Pushkin’s universe, laughter is healthy, humbling, comedic, wisdom-bearing, harmonious; it reduces us to our proper proportions in the world and makes ethical behaviour easier.

With whom did Pushkin identify in this play? Of course great art requires both the winged inspiration of Mozart and the drudging revision of Salieri. But great poets, such as Anna Akhmatova, have argued that Pushkin paired himself with Salieri. The true Mozarts could improvise brilliantly on the spot (Akhmatova had in mind Pushkin’s admiration for his friend, the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz), whereas fastidious workhorses like Pushkin left manuscripts crammed with crossings-out. Again spontaneity, responsiveness, the capacity to seize a cue and transform it into art with no loss of energy or excitement, emerge as central spiritual values for Pushkin the playwright. This argument, that inspired improvisation is the mark of both true poetry and true love, is pursued in the third and longest little tragedy, The Stone Guest.

Here too autobiographical resonances abound. Pushkin kept a Don Juan list, womanized indefatigably, and in 1830 must have been intensely curious about the effect of his impending marriage on this heretofore defining aspect of his life. His variant on the Don Juan legend, however, is remarkable for its emphasis on two themes not central to the Molière and Mozart versions and not immediately related to libido: the all-conquering nature of poetry, and the all-consuming rights of the present moment against the claims of memory, loyalty, or a cumulative past. Laura is as much the heroine of the play as Dona Anna. She embodies the absolute present of improvisation, inspiration, and desire. The Stone Guest is the most ‘performative’ of the four tragedies; its three scenes are packed with movement. But these scenes tend to forget one another. In the first, Don Juan has escaped from exile and is planning seduction strategies with Leporello near a monastery. In the second scene, Laura, who—she assures Don Carlos—’never loves two men at once’, is a double for Don Juan, whose verses she sings; when Juan actually appears and slays Don Carlos, the two reunited lovers behave as if there had never been a rival. By Scene 3, Laura herself is forgotten. Dona Anna has now become everything—and Don Juan, stripping off one disguise after another, brings her to the brink of a kiss. The Statue finally intervenes and the seducer dies uttering Dona Anna’s name. In this little tragedy, time works as it does in comedies. The present moment swells to justify every action, without looking back and without regrets.

The death waiting at the end of each of these little tragedies is never a surprise. It is also not very significant. The conflict itself is important, not the outcome, for our psyche contains both antagonists. All those vices—greed, envy, lust, blasphemy in the face of death—have the shadow of virtues clinging to them: envy its awareness of divine injustice; avarice its respect for industry; lust (which is capable of seducing absolutely every living thing) its link with the amoral drives of art; and a reluctance to respect the plague contains within itself the courage not to collapse meekly into death. A true vice is confirmed as such only when it becomes an obstacle to creativity, which is the sole reliable index of immortality. Otherwise, the poet presents the alternatives as impartially as fate. In his final finished drama, Rusalka, Pushkin puts aside this complexly double-sided vision of tragedy and creates a new cast of characters in a new sort of space, as superstitious and as non-sentimental as the poet himself, a space where death is not an end. It is scarcely felt as a boundary.

Rusalka

The folkloric story of a maiden seduced, abandoned, with child, who drowns herself in despair and is transformed into a seductive aquatic creature, was popular in Pushkin’s era and frequently staged, usually in a comic or sentimental vein. Like The Little Tragedies, Rusalka was a Russian ‘translation’ of a pan-European theme. Like all his literary experiments in legend or folklore, Pushkin’s sources were predominantly West European, the French translations of the Brothers Grimm (and not, as Soviet-era Pushkin scholars were obliged to repeat, from the poet’s much-celebrated Russian peasant nanny). Why Pushkin took up the Water-Nymph story in the early 1830s is unclear.