Contemporaries testify that the poet intended at least a trilogy of plays: a False Dimitry and a Vasily Shuisky, followed by something from the interregnum, that ‘would resemble the Shakespearian chronicles’.6 These sequels would bring the story to its necessary ‘providential’ culmination, the inauguration of the Romanov dynasty in 1613. In an October 1836 letter to his friend Pyotr Chaadaev, an aristocratic sceptic who denied Russian history any place in the civilized world, Pushkin retorted that Russia had its own ‘special mission’ and that ‘the drama begun at Uglich and concluded at the Ipatiev Monastery’ (where the first Romanov tsar, Mikhail, was crowned in 1613) was ‘sublime’.7 Perhaps the sublimity Pushkin had in mind, in the spirit of his early title for the play, was a comedic one: when seen as a single arc, the trajectory of events from 1591 to 1613 was rounded, justified, balanced, triumphant, a shape designed to work out. For comedy, despite its black humour and occasional blood-soaked setback, is always forward-looking, focused on potentials in the present and future that will lead to the birth of the new, as opposed to backward-looking barren tragedy, which it vanquishes. Pushkin experts have argued that the poet’s uncompromising insistence on Boris’s guilt for the death of Dimitry of Uglich—a hypothesis taken from Karamzin but challenged by other historians, even in the 1820s—can be defended as part of the poet’s belief in historical patterning: an unjust dynastic murder, motivated by personal ambition, made possible a new (and glorious) dynasty.8 Fate was a precious concept to the poet, although he deployed it differently in his dramas than anywhere else.

When Pushkin, illicitly, read his completed ‘Comedy’ aloud to his friends in 1826, it was a sensation. Upon its publication early in 1831, after a half-decade of delays in the censorship, some scandals, and much fretful tinkering over the text by its author and others, Boris Godunov seemed to please no one. It was not recognizable as historical tragedy: the tone was too buoyant, too chatty, and the love plot so essential to neoclassical kingship drama was hopelessly travestied. Nor did the play qualify as ‘historical comedy’—that is, as a treatment of world-historical events from the perspective of a buffoon or a Falstaff—for its subject matter was too dark, its concerns solemnly dynastic. In Shakespeare’s hybrid spirit but with a neoclassical sense of proportion and purpose, Pushkin had produced something like a ‘tragicomedy of history’.9 In such a genre, historical particulars are respected but assumed to fit into a larger frame. The audience is allowed to glimpse this frame only rarely. Meanwhile, we must trust to chance and fate. Or as Gavrila Pushkin puts the matter wisely at the end of Scene 19, watching the defeated Dimitry fall asleep (and fall out of the play) alongside his dying horse: ‘He’s in the care of Providence, it’s clear, | And we as well, my friends, must not despair.’

A Scene from Faust

Boris Godunov remained Pushkin’s sole history play. For his later dramatic projects he turned to legend, biographical rumour, preexisting authored works, or stock plots in the European repertory. All ended up as miniatures: fragments, ‘little’ tragedies, the truncated (and perhaps incomplete) masterpiece Rusalka. The tiny Scene from Faust, written in the Boris year 1825 but apparently after the play was finished, is a curious and—for Pushkin’s pen—uncharacteristically cruel fragment. One seeks in vain for substantial, spiritually satisfying links between it and Goethe’s complex, questing hero. But the value of Pushkin’s scene does not lie there. Rather, it exemplifies the poet’s skill at filtering a lesser-known culture and language (German) through successively more familiar ones (French and English), in order to examine a character-type or moral scenario of some urgency to his own creative evolution.10

Pushkin did not know German and his library contained none of Goethe’s work in the original. His upbringing had been rather Germanophobic; his father, Sergei Lvovich Pushkin, was famous for insisting that he would continue to prefer ‘Molière to Goethe and Racine to Schiller’ despite attempts by some Russian Romantics to push the cause of the German Sturm-und-Drang poets. Pushkin the son paid vague but inconclusive tribute to Goethe’s genius. His rendering of a seacoast encounter between Mephisto and Faust can best be understood not in connection with Goethe’s great drama, but as part of Pushkin’s ‘outgrowing’—or better, his testing—of a crucial stimulus on his own work and worldview: Lord Byron.

A Scene from Faust brings into dialogue two bestselling types of hero on the literary scene of Pushkin’s day: the Devil as gothic villain, and the young man suffering from ennui and Byronic spleen. Both types are corrosive and corruptible. Pushkin’s Faust resembles Byron’s Manfred (who in turn had been influenced by Goethe’s Faust), but the disillusionment and solitary, rebellious pride have now gone further and into even blacker regions. The Devil does what he is always scripted to do in a Faust tale, which is to exploit our deepest anxieties, doubts, cravings for certainty or for pleasure, and then to negate or ridicule their value. The originality of Pushkin’s Faust comes into sharp focus in the second half of their dialogue. None of the temporary benefits reaped by Goethe’s hero remain operable for him: pursuit of youth, satiety in love, search for knowledge (the natural-science enthusiasms of Goethe never registered on Pushkin at all). What startles us in the scene is the ferocity with which personal boredom and negation degenerate into indifference and then into wanton impersonal destruction. As soon as Faust points out the ‘patch of white’ on the horizon, Mephisto immediately sinks the ship—for that is why the Devil exists, to carry out our darkest whims. What is destroyed is defined as a ship of fools (with rogues, monkeys, pots of gold, chocolate, syphilis) but its cargo is of no account; in Faust’s frame of mind, all humanity is that ship.

Pushkin’s Mephisto might profitably be seen, then, as the professional nay-sayer, the world-spirit whose job is to sober us up and to discipline, or perhaps punish, our imagination. It is the Devil’s task to expose every human desire and discredit every fond memory (‘for boredom thrives on contemplation’). As such he is an image of Pushkin’s anti-Muse, that force which makes it impossible to create.