He worked hard on his English beginning in 1828 (and by the early 1830s had become passively quite good with it); Italian he might have guessed at through French or absorbed through the operas of Mozart and Rossini; German he never knew. Pushkin’s interest in Shakespeare, Byron, Schiller, and Goethe was mediated wherever possible through French prose translations, hearsay from friends, and French critical studies—which, Dolinin argues, liberated his genius to amend the original in his own mind and supply details out of his own personal poetics. It also permitted Pushkin to idealize second-rate poets whose simpler syntax and vocabulary he could understand (such as the now forgotten British Romantic Barry Cornwall) and to underestimate or even ignore the pontificating, verbose, and overly clever aspects of masters such as Lord Byron. Pushkin was a great cosmopolitan in the first instance because he considered himself a European and was curious about other cultures. But the limitations of his linguistic equipment shielded him from the direct aesthetic impact of the original and enabled his own genius to leak into (or even improve upon) his source. This alchemy applied to most of Pushkin’s encounters with European genres between 1815 and the mid-1830s: the ode, elegy, long ‘Byronic’ poem, stylized folktale, neoclassical verse drama, comédie italienne, short story or conte, epistolary prose, travel notes, and eventually the prose of a historian. Dramatic form was of special urgency.

Pushkin adored the stage. But he was critical of most Russian performance practice in St Petersburg of his time: the pompous, stilted diction of neoclassical tragedy as well as the predictability and crudeness of most melodrama and vaudeville. Part of his alchemy was his commitment to staged spectacles that were at once fast, funny, startling, smart, and deep—whether comic or tragic. Pushkin first tried his hand at dramatic satire at the age of 16. By the mid-1820s he was not only writing a full-length play, but wished to contribute as a Russian playwright to the more general reform of European theatre. For him, being cosmopolitan meant more than just taking from other cultures. It also meant taking seriously the possibility that one could offer an innovation or synthesis of one’s own that other national cultures might find useful in the evolution of their traditions.

Pushkin’s fellow Russian poets were thrilled by this assumption that the Russian literary language was capable of absorbing and perhaps even adding to the European legacy. After all, England, Italy, France, and Spain had been producing masterpieces in the vernacular during those centuries when Russia, in the eyes and ears of Europeans, was savage, silent, and dark. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the written Russian language was an unwieldy mass of archaisms, awkward poetic borrowings, uncoordinated linguistic registers and mongrel styles. When compared with mature literatures further west, Russian was a very young and untried vehicle for secular aesthetic expression, even in Pushkin’s gifted hands. But there were deeper obstacles to reciprocal, two-way cosmopolitanism. For all Pushkin’s precocity and genius, ‘giving back’ to Europe was not easy to achieve for the brilliant aristocratic poets of his generation.

The reason was not Russian backwardness or primitiveness, but rather the reverse. Russian noblemen (and women) of letters in the empire of Nicholas I were raised at the minimum bilingually, in French and Russian. Often they commanded English or German as well. It was a rare West European who bothered to learn any Russian. And why should they? The Russian officers who occupied Paris in 1814 spoke as pure a French as any of their defeated foe. Pushkin, under police surveillance his entire adult life, was never allowed to travel outside the Russian Empire. Had he been, it would not have crossed his mind that his literary counterparts in Europe could appreciate his poems—or even decipher the alphabet in which they were printed. As far as Europe could tell, Russia in its own tongue produced little more than barbaric, visual arabesques. When Pushkin in the 1820s made an effort to enter the debates over theatre reform in the French press that had been triggered by August von Schlegel and Victor Hugo—theoretical treatises that eventually confirmed Shakespeare as the model for Romantic drama on the Continent—he knew well that his own innovative Boris Godunov would be accessible solely to audiences at home.2 Nor could the spread of Pushkin’s theatrical ideas happen extra-verbally, that is, through realization in a theatre and subsequent reviewing in the periodical press. Although Pushkin had hoped otherwise, no staging of his controversial historical drama took place during his lifetime. Public theatre houses in Russia had become the property of the crown in 1803 and remained an Imperial monopoly until 1882, with their repertory controlled by a government bureaucracy. If a play survived censorship for print, it was then censored for public performance, a separate and more severe filter. There were also restrictions on certain characters and themes, as in Western European theatres.