Most dangerous for any playwright was monotony of technique. Even satiric laughter, if applied too predictably, could lose its cleansing force—and murders, if habitual, cease to shock. Didactic moralizing is always inappropriate, Pushkin warns, for it is not the business of the dramatic poet to ‘excuse, condemn, or prompt’. Authentic tragedy must be as ‘impartial as Fate’. And impartiality can be achieved only if the playwright resolves to ‘express the people of the past, their minds, their prejudices’ within the value-system of their own time.

Pushkin had long felt that this task was beyond the means of tragedy as presently construed on the European stage. It was also beyond the competence, or the intent, of Romantic playwrights such as Victor Hugo, whose writings about drama Pushkin found far more satisfying than the verbose and sentimental plays that Hugo actually authored. One inspiration for dramatic reform that Pushkin explicitly acknowledged was the rising cult of Shakespeare; there is some faint possibility that he knew of Goethe’s 1774 Sturm-und-Drang drama Götz von Berlichingen, with its brief mobile scenes and idiomatic speech. In November 1825, Pushkin finished a play of his own that he titled a Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepev, referring to it in letters to his friends as his ‘romantic tragedy’. How might this provocative pot-pourri of genre labels—romantic, tragic, comedic—have served Pushkin’s turn to history and the Time of Troubles?

Boris Godunov

In the mid-1820s, Russia’s encounter with Napoleon and the nation’s bristling entry onto the European political stage was still fresh. Russian literature (along with the rest of Europe) was rife with ‘Napoleon’ tales: the ambitious underling of humble birth who struggles to a position of supreme power, justifying his crimes through appeals to the public good or national glory. Between 1821 and 1824, Nikolai Karamzin, Russia’s historian laureate and a close personal friend of the poet, published volumes nine to eleven of his History of the Russian State, covering the period from Ivan the Terrible’s son Fyodor (r. 1584–98) to the ascension of the False Dimitry (1605). At the centre of these volumes sat the story of Boris Godunov, an untitled boyar, gifted statesman, and elected monarch with a dubious, perhaps criminal past. The failure and then fall of the brief Godunov dynasty (six years of the father, two months of the son) was the formal cause for the country’s collapse into its first civil war, the bridge between Russia’s two major dynasties.

Throughout 1825, Pushkin was under house arrest at his parental estate of Mikhailovskoe in the Pskov district, south-west of Petersburg. During his previous four years of ‘southern exile’ Pushkin had been closely watched by the authorities, but he had been relatively free, mobile, in touch with urban culture and in the society of friends. A quarrel with his military superiors and an indiscreet reference to ‘atheism’ in a private letter subjected the poet to new punitive action. At Mikhailovskoe he was genuinely cut off. The degree of isolation and desolation that marked such provincial exile in pre-telegraph-era Russia, with its impassable roads and dearth of cities, is hard for us to imagine. Nevertheless, it is a thrilling aspect of Pushkin’s poetic economy that confinement both infuriated him and stimulated him to unprecedented creative heights. The poet’s involuntary ‘groundings’ were especially productive for his dramatic experiments. Mikhailovskoe was nowhere, but even more distant and desolate was his father’s property at Boldino, a village in Nizhny Novgorod province several hundred miles south-east of Moscow. Trapped by a cholera epidemic in Boldino in the autumn of 1830 Pushkin wrote, among much else, his four Little Tragedies; confined to Mikhailovskoe a half-decade earlier, he managed to research and write his Boris play in under a year.

Pushkin’s primary source was Nikolai Karamzin. But the poet conducted his own research on several sensitive issues. He consulted medieval chronicles as well as accounts by foreign mercenaries, the most important being the Frenchman Jacques Margeret, who entered Russian service in 1600 and served both Tsar Boris and the False Dimitry with distinction. Captain Margeret appears as a character in Pushkin’s Scene 16, based on a pivotal (and precisely dated) battle in December 1604, speaking, in French, some famous lines from his own 1607 memoir. Such fastidious historical detail is characteristic of Pushkin as historian and playwright. Like Friedrich Schiller before him, he saw no necessary conflict between dramatic art and accurately documented history. Indeed, certain opinions voiced or enacted in the play—the common people’s enthusiasm for the Pretender, Tsar Boris’s tyranny and unpopular enserfment policy, the psychology of the crafty Prince Shuisky and the embittered General Basmanov, whose defection to the Pretender sealed the fate of the Godunov dynasty—were better and more boldly researched by Pushkin than by any Russian historian before or since. Here the magnificence of Musorgsky’s opera has probably done a disservice to the play. By focusing on the tsar’s guilt and the Pretender’s Polish love affair (both irresistibly operatic themes), the libretto largely ignores Pushkin’s political and military scenes, where so much of the keen intelligence and cutting edge of this historical drama lies.

Of special importance to the poet were his own family papers at Mikhailovskoe.