And deprived of creativity, Faust—Everyman, Every Poet—finds his energy turning to disgust. To get rid of Mephisto, it is not enough for Faust to declare ‘Avaunt thee’ and be on his way. Faust is obliged to ‘charge him’ with an ‘assignment’, hence the hideous command to sink the first thing that strikes his jaded eye. Byronic spleen, rebellion, and boredom eventually render all matter inert. If Boris Godunov is in essence comedic, then A Scene from Faust is the darkest possible tragic terrain for a poet, a rare moment of Pushkinian nihilism. None of The Little Tragedies can match its metaphysical bleakness.

The Little Tragedies

By 1830, the idea of the dramatized miniature was not new for the poet. In an undated jotting some time during 1826, Pushkin listed ten topics for dramatic consideration: ‘The miser’, ‘Romulus and Remus’, ‘Mozart and Salieri’, ‘Don Juan’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Berald of Savoy’, ‘Pavel I’, ‘the devil in love’, ‘Dimitry and Marina’, and ‘Kurbsky’. It is not known for certain why only three of those topics, plus one timely addition, were later realized and loosely grouped in a cycle. We do know, however, that Pushkin attended carefully to omens and thresholds. The autumn of 1830 was one such liminal moment.

In the autumn of 1830, Pushkin (rather to his own surprise) found himself deeply and stubbornly in love. But wedding negotiations were stalled in Moscow. He retreated to his distant estate of Boldino to gather his wits, improve his finances, and write. Quarantined because of an outbreak of cholera, the poet confronted death, the uncertainty (but for him the necessity) of marriage, and perhaps most agonizing, the awareness of his slipping fame with the Russian public, for prose had begun to replace poetry on the literary market. All these pressures conspired to raise his genius to fever pitch. The four Little Tragedies can be seen as dramatizations of essential passions (weaknesses, vices, the dark side of certain strengths) that Pushkin felt obliged to examine, even to exorcize, in order that this threshold be successfully crossed. Bidding farewell to his bachelor life, he worked through his prior encounters with miserliness, envy, lust, and contempt for death, stylizing them by attaching them to a mainstream legend in the European literary tradition.

The last play of the cycle, Feast in Time of Plague, stands somewhat apart. It was not on the 1826 list. It does not showcase a personal appetite like envy, greed, or lust—all of which are oriented towards an individualized target and to various degrees graft resentment onto love. Rather it poses a question, surely one prompted by Boldino under the cholera: trapped in a circle of death, which is the more courageous, to revel or to repent? The communal, tableau-like texture of Feast, punctuated by speeches, songs, and sermons, contrasts with the more intimate one-to-one tone of the preceding three. Subtitled simply ‘from Wilson’s tragedy’, its source is Act I, Scene 4 of John Wilson’s lengthy ‘The City of the Plague’ (1816), the full text of which was contained in an 1829 anthology of British verse drama published in Paris and part of Pushkin’s library.11 Wilson’s melodramatic, rather gothic original opens with two naval officers on the banks of the Thames about to enter plague-stricken London. They encounter a mad prophetic astrologer, several grief-stricken (and beautiful) mourning widows, and a stranger-atheist who confesses that he has blasphemed Christ and mocked death in ‘most brutal and obscene song’ during grotesque revelries: ‘we were lost, yet would we pluck| The flowers that bloomed upon the crater’s edge.’ This fumy desperation is the starting point for Pushkin’s ‘edited’ version of Scene 4 (shorter than Wilson by 92 lines). Some stretches are rendered quite precisely, others are omitted or creatively mistranslated. To place Feast in the context of Pushkin’s dramatic plotting, and to sample how the poet extracts from and condenses other playwrights to achieve his own emotional-moral arc, it suffices to look at the Master of Revels.

Walsingham moves from defiance of death (his ‘Hymn to Plagues’) to anger and fear (his realization that his debauchery has made him unworthy to join his wife Mathilda in heaven) to confused reflection (the closing stage direction, ‘lost in thought’). In Wilson’s original, these clashes are far more violent, rebellious, Romantic, ‘Byronic’. The Pestilence is routinely compared to slaughter in navy and army battles (with moral preference allotted the Plague, since it is more democratic, killing all ages, male and female). Several revellers accuse the priests of self-serving hypocrisy, and Walsingham, in a God-fearing moment, challenges one young hot-headed atheist to a duel. In contrast, Pushkin’s protagonist is a post-Romantic. For all the bravado of his Hymn and the cheering of his fellow revellers, this is no Dance of Death—that honourable, if grotesque, medieval genre designed to reconcile us to our mortality. The evolution of Walsingham from defiant poet sustaining other like-minded rebels, to conscience-stricken widower, to a man who has dismissed the priests and is now ‘lost in thought’, is a moral trajectory also reflected in the other three Little Tragedies. But in those other three, death is not an omnipresent, indifferent condition of the environment; it catches each protagonist unawares.