Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works Read Online

Birth of his fourth child, Natalya (23 May). Writes a series of religious poems and the final lyric in a cycle of six poems commemorating the friendships he formed at the Lycée.

BORIS GODUNOV

To the memory, precious to Russians, of Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, this work, inspired by his genius, with reverence and gratitude is dedicated.

Alexander Pushkin*

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

I HAVE not wished to encumber the text of the play with a copious historical annotation, but a brief review of the background and setting will be useful. Somewhat more detailed explanations of specific references are given in the notes at the back of the book.

Pushkin’s drama takes place during a period, at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, that Russians call ‘The Time of Troubles’, an era of dramatic and violent events. The seeds for these events had been sown in earlier years, in the time of the longest-reigning monarch in Russian history, Ivan IV (‘the Dread’ or ‘the Terrible’). Infamous for his cruelty and debauchery, and the strange piety of his later years, Ivan had fathered three sons with claims to the throne. The eldest, also named Ivan, was his father’s favourite and the heir apparent. The tsar, however, in a fit of rage one day, had struck and killed his eldest son with a poker; and so the next in line, Fyodor, a retiring and weak-minded figure, succeeded to the throne upon his father’s death. During Fyodor’s reign (1584–98), while Boris Godunov was the real power in the realm, Ivan’s last living son, the boy prince, Dimitry, died under mysterious circumstances in the town of Uglich.

Although modern scholarship tends to exonerate Boris of any role in the prince’s death (the boy actually may have died from a wound he inflicted on himself during an epileptic seizure), Pushkin follows his source, the historian Karamzin, in assuming Boris’s guilt. And certainly there were plenty of accusatory rumours rife at the time. In any case, with the young tsarevich no longer alive, the death of Fyodor in 1598 brought to an end Russia’s ancient dynasty and ushered in a kind of interregnum and a fifteen-year-long period of rebellion, war, and lawlessness.

The action of the play opens on the death of Fyodor in 1598 and goes on to cover the entire period of the Godunov dynasty. With no living heir to the throne, Boris Godunov, a lesser noble of Tatar descent who had been a close adviser to Ivan IV and the virtual ruler under the weak and reclusive Fyodor, was chosen as tsar by a national council of boyars, church officials, and merchants. As the brother-in-law of the deceased Fyodor and thus a member of the royal family, he had a legitimate claim to the throne, but he had to deal with the resentment and intrigues of envious rivals among the higher nobility, who considered him an upstart. An able, well-meaning, and ambitious man, he had the misfortune to reign (1598–1605) during a period of growing unrest. His abolition of the peasants’ right to move from one estate to another (which effectively established serfdom) was unpopular with both peasants and landowners. Crop failures in the years 1601–3 resulted in widespread famine and led to peasant uprisings. Boris’s suppression of his opponents and his brutal campaign against the south-western borderlands made his reign increasingly tyrannical and unpopular. All of this, coupled with the suspicions of his complicity in the young prince’s death, gave rise to various plots and challenges to his authority, to which he responded with increasingly harsh and repressive measures. When an impostor appeared, claiming to be Ivan’s youngest son Dimitry, miraculously escaped from the attempt on his life in Uglich, many dissaffected elements rallied to his cause, particularly disgruntled nobles and the Cossacks of the south-west. In 1604, with some Polish support and a ragtag army of Cossack insurgents and Russian exiles, this ‘False Dimitry’ crossed the border from Poland and moved against the tsar. After some initial success he was repulsed and forced to retreat; but with the struggle still unresolved, Boris, in April 1605, suddenly died, and his 16-year-old son Feodor succeeded him on the throne. Many of the Muscovite nobles and commanders, however, went over to the Pretender, who in June of 1605, with his Russian supporters and his Polish allies, entered Moscow. The young Feodor and his mother were murdered, and Dimitry was proclaimed tsar. Here, with the cataclysmic close of the short-lived Godunov dynasty, is where Pushkin’s play ends, although it was hardly the final chapter in the ‘Time of Troubles’.

The Aftermath

Within a year of his accession, Dimitry was assassinated and Prince Shuisky was named tsar. War with Poland ensued; and at the same time, two more False Dimitrys appeared to claim the crown. Marina Mniszech, the ambitious Polish woman who had married the first ‘False Dimitry’, continued her effort to gain a crown by attaching herself to the second ‘False Dimitry’ and subsequently to a Cossack rebel chieftain. Various boyar families struggled for supremacy, and rebellious Cossacks as well as Sweden and Poland sought to take advantage of the general anarchy. Shuisky was soon deposed by a boyar faction that then elected Władyslaw, the son of Poland’s King Sigismund, to the throne. Sigismund, however, desired the Russian crown for himself and war with Poland continued amid widespread lawlessness. Finally, a popular uprising drove an occupying Polish army from the Kremlin and, at last, in 1613, the ‘Time of Troubles’ came to an end with the election as tsar of Mikhail Romanov, who established the dynasty that was to survive for some 300 years, until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY*

BORÍS GODUNÓV, a Russian boyar; Regent and later Tsar of Russia

IRÉNA, the Tsarina, widow of Tsar Fyódor (after his death, a nun), sister of Borís

MARIA GODUNÓVA, Borís’s wife; on his accession, Tsarina

FEÓDOR, Borís’s son

KSENIA, Borís’s daughter

KSENIA’S nurse

Prince VASÍLY SHÚISKY, boyar of the royal dynasty of Rúrik

Prince VOROTÝNSKY, boyar of the royal dynasty of Rúrik

SHCHELKÁLOV, secretary of the state council

BASMÁNOV, general in Borís’s army

Prince MOSÁLSKY, a boyar

AFANÁSY PÚSHKIN, a noble

GAVRÍLA PÚSHKIN, his nephew

SEMYÓN GODUNÓV, relative of Borís, head of his secret police

PATRIARCH, Head of the Russian Orthodox Church

ABBOT of the Chudov Monastery

FATHER PÍMEN, a monk

GRIGÓRY OTRÉPEV, a monk; later the Pretender Dimítry

MISAÍL and VARLÁM, itinerant monks

KHRUSHCHÓV, a Russian adherent of the Pretender in Poland

KARÉLA, a Cossack chieftain

NIKÓLKA, a simpleton

ROZHNÓV, a Russian nobleman captured by the Pretender

HOSTESS of an inn on the Polish border

CZERNIKÓWSKI, a Polish priest

Prince KÚRBSKY, Russian boyar exiled in Poland, son of a great adversary of Iván IV

SOBÁNSKI, a Polish nobleman

MNÍSZECH, Polish military governor

MARINA, his daughter

WISNIOWIÉCKI, Polish nobleman, friend of Mníszech

MARGERÉT and ROSEN, foreign officers in the tsar’s service

A POET

Other boyars, servants, soldiers, guests, urchins, voices in the crowd

SCENE 1
The Palace of the Kremlin (20 February 1598)

The Princes SHÚISKY and VOROTÝNSKY

SCENE 2
Red Square

The people