In the especially fruitful autumn of 1830, while stranded by cholera at his estate of Boldino, he completed Eugene Onegin, wrote a major collection of prose stories (The Tales of Belkin), and composed his experimental Little Tragedies. In 1831 he married Natalya Goncharova and sought to put his personal and professional affairs on a more stable footing. The rest of his life, however, was plagued by financial and marital woes, by the hostility of literary and political enemies, and by the younger generation’s dismissal of his recent work. His literary productivity diminished, but in the remarkable ‘second Boldino autumn’ of 1833 he produced both his greatest prose tale, The Queen of Spades, and a last poetic masterpiece, The Bronze Horseman. In 1836 he completed his only novel-length work in prose, The Captain’s Daughter. Beleaguered by numerous adversaries and enraged by anonymous letters containing attacks on his honour, in 1837 he was driven to challenge an importunate admirer of his wife to a duel. The contest took place on 27 January, and two days later the poet died from his wounds.

JAMES E. FALEN is Professor Emeritus of Russian at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of Isaac Babel: Russian Master of the Short Story (University of Tennessee Press, 1974) and has translated Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, for Oxford World’s Classics.

CARYL EMERSON is A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She has published widely on Mikhail Bakhtin and on Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Russian literary criticism, and Russian operatic and song repertory.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Translator’s Note

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of Alexander Pushkin

BORIS GODUNOV

Historical Introduction

A SCENE FROM FAUST

THE LITTLE TRAGEDIES

I. THE MISERLY KNIGHT

II. MOZART AND SALIERI

III. THE STONE GUEST

IV. A FEAST IN TIME OF PLAGUE

RUSALKA (THE WATER-NYMPH)

Explanatory Notes

INTRODUCTION

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN (1799–1837) is Russia’s most cosmopolitan playwright. This fact is sometimes obscured, because Pushkin’s best-known play, Boris Godunov (1825), concerns Russian history, a Russian dynastic crisis, and is known outside its homeland primarily as the literary source for Modest Musorgsky’s intensely nationalistic opera composed four decades later. Peel away the Kremlin gongs and ragged masses crowding the operatic stage, however, and Boris Godunov resonates with the most varied echoes of Western European theatre: Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Corneille, Racine, Italian seriocomic opera, all of them stripped down, reduced to their essentials (as Pushkin conceived them), and presented in compact scenes that snap open and closed like entries in a medieval Russian chronicle. The four Little Tragedies that Pushkin wrote in 1830—so little, in fact, that they resemble the final acts of tragedies—are also stripped down and condensed. Not only are they pan-European, set respectively in a medieval castle, Vienna, Madrid, and London; they are also pan-human, each focusing on a single moral defect and its attempts to justify itself: avarice, envy, lust, and defiant feasting in the face of death. Two of the four tragedies announce their source in English playwrights. The fragmentary Scene from Faust builds off a German legend. Rusalka is a Danube River mermaid tale, shifted eastward and lightly Slavicized. In drama as elsewhere, ‘Russianness’ for Pushkin meant a hybrid: the ability to refract, integrate, condense, and translate everyone else.

But translation and condensation are not quite the right terms for what Pushkin does. He was cosmopolitan along a highly personal vector, and everything he touched turned irreversibly into his own trademark gold. Pushkin did not really ‘borrow from’ or ‘translate’ European poets, although in dramatic experiments he loved to start with someone else’s story. He would be intrigued by another poet’s choice of form, text, or narrative plot. Often he could glimpse this alien whole only partially. But what resulted was a wondrous symbiosis between Pushkin’s genius—his absolute control over the lexical and rhythmic resources of the Russian language—and his linguistic ‘deficiencies’, a reciprocity superbly explicated by Alexander Dolinin in his discussion of ‘Pushkin and English Literature’.1 How this creative dynamic worked is crucial if we are to place the dramatic verse translated in this volume in the context Pushkin dreamed for it.

Of the European languages and cultures that stimulated Pushkin—French, English, German, and Italian—only French was deeply, thoroughly known. From early adolescence, Pushkin was utterly at home in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature. But precisely because French Romantic theatre disappointed him, he resolved to look elsewhere for dramatic inspiration.