It is true that in 1826 he had fathered an illegitimate son with one of his serfs, Olga Kalashnikova, but about such things young men felt no guilt (embarrassment, but no guilt, especially since the mother was then satisfactorily married off). More likely it was Pushkin’s fascination with the challenge of a folk- or fairy-tale drama. It would integrate the supernatural into the realistic but not as Shakespeare did—with witches, ghosts, and a life beyond the grave retaining their power to shock and horrify. Everything would happen more tidily, as in folktales, where there is no oddness registered at all. ‘Miracles’ and irrational episodes are a routine part of everyday folk life. Death has no power to end anything. The ‘dry-ground life’ of the seduced and abandoned Miller’s Daughter is her prehistory.

The six compact scenes in Rusalka cover seven years (as does Boris Godunov) and observe the same tripartite shifting geography of home—away—home: first the mill on the Dnieper, where the Miller’s daughter is deserted by her Prince; then the Prince’s castle, where he and his Princess spend seven childless years; and again home, the Dnieper both underwater and on shore, where the Prince encounters the mad Miller and glimpses Rusalochka, his daughter, sent by her mother to invite him home. So very distant from the comic-operetta mode is Pushkin’s treatment of this story that some critics have elevated it to tragedy, albeit of a lyric fairy-tale sort, and claim that Pushkin hoped to stage it as a new dramatic hybrid. Paradoxically, more Shakespearian tragedy resonates in this ‘fairytale’ drama than in Boris Godunov. In addition to the drowned Ophelia, there are the chanting rusalki who recall the witches in Macbeth (in an early draft, not only the voice but the full-bodied ghost of the Miller’s Daughter, dripping and green-haired, turns up at the Prince’s wedding feast). And framing the whole is King Lear: a wilful father who, having lost his beloved (and wilful) daughter, goes mad, and only in his madness can he acknowledge his many years of bad parenting and avarice. Cordelia must die in the Shakespearian scenario, but a water-nymph both can—and cannot. Like an awakened conscience, it is fertile and forever.

We end this introduction with a provocative statement of James Falen’s from his own Introduction to his 1990 translation of Eugene Onegin. Falen isolates three ‘essential clues’ to Pushkin’s ‘artistic nature and to his conception of creativity’: his ‘sensuality, his courting of chance, and his trust in fate’.15 Without a doubt, these energies infuse the poet’s most marvellous lyrics, several of his longer narrative poems (especially Ruslan and Lyudmila), and Pushkin’s entire tempestuous life. But it is striking to what extent these values are displaced or deployed differently in the dramas.

Sensuality, for example, is more graphically present as a metaphor for some other desire than for itself. Tsar Boris compares his disillusionment with ‘the highest power’ to the physical depletion, boredom and coldness after a consummated act of love. The miserly Baron equates visiting his chests of gold with ‘a tryst |; With some licentious harlot’. Even Don Juan, who is all sensuality, ends up lending his vitality to the spirit of poetry, the ideal of perfect beauty, and the power of the imagination (as Leporello brags of his master) to fill out a ‘bit of slender ankle’ glimpsed in passing. There is even a certain chasteness in Don Juan, for all that he can seduce every living thing. But more intriguing still in the dramas is the relationship between chance and fate.

It would seem that fate takes all. The Little Tragedies are not structured to allow for arbitrariness or chance, since they are largely denouements. Rusalka is basically over (she is pregnant and about to be abandoned) before it begins. Only across the broader expanse of Boris Godunov might chance have had a freer hand, but even there, once chance events solidify into rumour, the voice of conscience, or the body of the Pretender, consequences are fated. As we saw, Pushkin had no conceptual problem extending this providential arc to the whole of the Time of Troubles. And here we confront one of the most stunning aspects of Pushkin as playwright.

On the surface his scenes are fatefully closed and one way. But often, at the closing moment, they open up into a question or a paradox. And within each scene, Pushkin has the uncanny dramatic gift of making each actor sound and act free. We the audience do not feel the controlling hand of the author. Rather, we are inside the consciousness of each participant, where motivation appears not self-serving, foolish, or ambitious but simply necessary, the logical way to behave for a person whose access to the world comes solely through that one limited angle of vision. Even the tiniest roles are bathed in this free-standing respect for the individual perspective.