He was intensely proud of the fact that several Pushkins took part in the Troubles, on both sides of the civil war, and two are featured in the play. Gavrila Pushkin (d. 1638), who early joined the Pretender’s cause, was re-created quite accurately; the second ‘namesake’, Afanasy, was based loosely on two Pushkin brothers who served Godunov. Alexander Pushkin’s relationship towards his own surname in the play is a fascinating thread to follow. The exiled poet had no reason to love the reigning Romanov tsar, Alexander I. But he was at the peak of his poetic fame in the mid-1820s and could only covet the status of national poet-playwright, somewhat like the German people’s reverence towards Friedrich Schiller, who had died two decades earlier while at work on a Demetrius drama. Such playwrights combine in one person the voice of freedom against oppression, an enlightened helpmeet to rulers, and a prophet of their nation’s future greatness. Today’s readers of Boris Godunov should be alert to the fact that whenever a Pushkin speaks in the play, on either side of the conflict, he voices uncomfortable truths—about serfdom, Boris’s reign of terror, support for the Pretender—that were well documented in foreigners’ histories and unwelcome as part of the official history endorsed by the House of Romanov. ‘Oh, how I loathe this rabid [lit. rebellious] brood of Pushkins!’ the harassed Tsar Boris confesses in Scene 10 to Prince Shuisky. As a loyal Muscovite subject and thus spy, Shuisky has just arrived at the Kremlin to report a Pretender in Poland, news vouchsafed to him in confidence the night before by his trusting friend Afanasy Pushkin.

This question of the role of Providence in Dimitry’s brief life—and in the long-term life of Russian dynasties—prompts our final comment about Boris Godunov, its debts and potentials. Pushkin explicitly named only three influences on his drama: Karamzin, Russian chronicles, and ‘our Father Shakespeare’. The Shakespeare connection must be handled with care. From the tragedies Pushkin borrowed little more than the idea of a mixed high and low style, and even that was limited to what survived in the French prose translations available to the poet. There is in Pushkin a compactness, emotional restraint, lack of titanic heroes, and reluctance to bring the supernatural (witches, ghosts) on stage that is altogether alien to Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, or King Lear. It is true that Pushkin, like other Romantic-era playwrights who celebrated Shakespeare, takes pleasure in ignoring the neoclassical unities of time and space. But the feel of his drama is not the feel of a broad, thickly ornamented Shakespearian canvas, where heroes thunder out monologues on the stormy heath, swords clank and swagger, and atrocities are committed on stage. There is nothing of the gothic in Pushkin’s playwriting. His monologues are more often muttered than declaimed. Horrors happen in the wings and are only subtly invoked. Individual scenes respect the trim eighteenth-century convention of only a handful of actors—two, maybe three speaking persons—on stage at one time. When Pushkin labels a protagonist ‘Narod’, ‘the People’, we see and hear one face at a time, not a mobbed crowd.

Shakespearian comedy might have contributed something to Pushkin’s mixed-style vision in Boris, but only indirectly. The one incontestably comic scene, Scene 8, ‘An Inn near the Polish Border’, with its slapstick monks and incompetent police, took its comedic device of a clever, literate person ‘faking a reading’ of a criminal suspect’s profile in order to save an unjustly threatened life not from the English Bard but from Italian semiseria opera: Act I, Scene 9 of Rossini’s 1815 La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie), which Pushkin probably saw staged in Odessa. Boris Godunov remains a serious history play. For all of its razor-sharp comic moments, it could never treat national history—its wars, successions, popular sufferings—the way Falstaff does, bumbling, tippling, and womanizing his way through major battles and political watersheds. Shakespearian tragedy and comedy are far less reflected in Boris than are the war-saturated chronicle plays, which would have appealed to Pushkin for several reasons. History was dominant over the predictable, privatizing dynamics of guilt or love. A ‘Muscovite’ chronicle-play could dramatize gratifying analogies between Elizabethan England and post-Napoleonic Russia, two triumphantly rising empires. But what of the ghastly end of Boris: one royal house slain, a doomed Pretender on his way to the throne, civil war and invasion in the wings? Contrary to the rising and affirmative spirit of Shakespeare’s chronicles, Pushkin brings Russia to the brink of her collapse. Could this really be what the poet meant by Providence?

The answer to that paradox might lie in the fact that Pushkin did not intend his 1825 ‘Comedy’ to be the end.