No actor was allowed to depict a Romanov tsar on stage—there, Pushkin was within bounds, since his play ends eight years before the founding of the Romanov dynasty in 1613—but also forbidden were any ecclesiastics, and Pushkin’s play featured several, including an irreverent Patriarch and two drunken itinerant monks. Boris Godunov was detained in the censor’s office for six years and approved for publication only after extensive cuts and the deletion of three whole scenes. The premiere of the play (also with extensive cuts) took place only in 1870.

What might we say, then, of Pushkin as cosmopolitan dramatist? He took from everywhere, gave back to nowhere, and was never staged during his own lifetime. Whether Pushkin ever intended to create more than ‘closet drama’ is still debated. Most experts assume that Pushkin never intended The Little Tragedies for the stage, although by the beginning of the twentieth century, each had been set as a chamber opera.3 Sceptics point out that scene changes in Pushkin often occur with lightning speed, into and out of improbable locales. The on-stage battle scenes in Boris (where troops clash and horses die on stage) are not easy to envision and so brief that there is hardly time to reconnoitre. The penultimate scene of Rusalka takes place on the bottom of the Dnieper River. And then there is the special challenge of Pushkin’s stage directions. Technically no more than acting or directing cues, inaudible and invisible to the audience, they are nevertheless always fastidiously crafted, laconic but with a narrative tone of their own. Some of Pushkin’s stage directions have whole histories attached to them, most famously the final cue ‘narod bezmolvstvuet’ (the people are silent/the people fall speechless) that appeared for the first time in the 1831 printed text of Boris Godunov. Because of its hint of moral outrage and popular resistance, it was quickly seized upon by critics as key to interpreting the entire play. (The 1825 uncensored original version of the play ended differently, with the cheer ‘Long live Tsar Dimitry Ivanovich!’)4 If the 1831 variant is preferred, how should that powerful directive of non-response be performed so that it shocks an audience the way it shocks a reader? In their aborted 1937 production of Boris Godunov, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Prokofiev devised one solution: to introduce an untexted humming chorus, crescendo it throughout the final scenes, and then, at the last moment, abruptly cut it off. Like a pistol shot, the people’s silence is heard.

A different sort of stage-direction problem, less psychological than technical, is presented by The Little Tragedies. How are we to experience those ‘time-evacuated’ stage cues that call for a process but then leap instantly to its results? Examples include Laura’s cue ‘(she sings)’ in The Stone Guest, immediately followed by applause for her completed song, and Mozart’s ‘(he plays)’ in Mozart and Salieri, followed without pause by Salieri’s tears shed for the performed Requiem. It would seem that these stylized cues, which register in the head instantaneously but tolerate no true duration, are not the stuff of real staged time and space. Yet The Little Tragedies, in their very faithful, very different chamber-opera realizations, have been easily opened up by composers into real performance time at the pivotal moments. Perhaps these playtexts conceal many such accordion-like joints, designed to be realized by competent players the way eighteenth-century musicians realized figured bass in a score. So much seems to us now improbable, glued as we are to the printed canon, but the entertainment halls of St Petersburg were staging gothic spectacles far more imaginative than this. Pushkin spoke eagerly about actors for his as-yet-unapproved Boris.

It is possible, of course, that with these dramatic experiments the alchemist-dramatist Pushkin was creating yet another hybrid: a type of play that could be staged, recited out loud, or read to oneself with equal success and all to brilliant effect, but in each case to very different effect. This possibility should be allowed to hover over the remainder of the Introduction, which will briefly place each dramatic work in the context of Pushkin’s life. Before doing so, we might consider the most extensive surviving commentary by Pushkin on the tasks facing Russian drama in his day: his prefatory remarks to an unpublished review, dated 1830, of another historical drama, Mikhail Pogodin’s Marfa Posadnitsa.5 Pogodin was a friend of Pushkin’s, a good historian, and his play a rather melodramatic and moralizing exercise on a routine topic: the heroic resistance of Novgorod to Moscow’s Grand Prince Ivan III in the late fifteenth century. The play does not merit the generous attention Pushkin gave it, but the comments prefacing the review are of the utmost importance. They suggest how Pushkin hoped the Russians (and specifically his own practice) might fit into European drama, during that fertile year, 1830, that witnessed both the appearance of Boris Godunov in print and the writing of the four Little Tragedies.

Modern European drama, Pushkin writes, was born in the public square. As a popular form, its primary task had always been to please, entertain, and astonish. Thus drama must never turn tedious; ‘the people demand strong sensations, for them even executions are spectacles’. To strive for verisimilitude is a mistake, although in saying this Pushkin did not necessarily endorse the gothic or fantastic; rather, playwrights should feature emotional peaks and high-paced moments. The cruder emotions—laughter, pity, terror, shock—are essential to all dramatic success, high or low. Thus theatre was enfeebled when ‘poets moved to court’: drama grew decorous, took on problems of state, began to speak pompously and to tremble before high officials. In Pushkin’s view, tragedy in Russia had yet to shed its servile tone and rigidity of form. Characters had forgotten how to speak on stage freely, without constraint, and instead of conversations between living people one heard monologues, often broken up into alternating voice-lines but without any true responsiveness or sense of spontaneity.