1. Lev Tolstoi, “Neskol'ko slov po povodu knigi ‘Voina i mir,’ “ L. N. Tolstoi: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii in 90 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1955),16:7.

2. According to the Soviet folklorist Kirill Chistov, legends about a “returning tsar/tsarevich “(together with the accompanying themes of salvation and pretendership) first became a social force among Russians at the end of the sixteenth century, that is, around the time of Boris Godunov. Ivan the Terrible himself was an important figure in the rise of these legends: his violent policies greatly enhanced popular notions of “what a tsar could do,” while at the same time disrupting every social class and making necessary the enserfment of the peasantry. This bondage, in turn, fostered a desperate hope for liberation. Dmitrii the Tsarevich was the first of this type of “deliverer” on Russian soil, and the biography ascribed to him closely follows the formula for the genre. See Chistov,Russkie narodnye sotsial'no-utopicheskie legendy XVI1-XIX vv. (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), pp. 27–31;on Boris and Dmitrii, pp. 33–60.

3. See his “Stat'ia desiataia: Boris Godunov,” in the series “Stat'i o Pushkine” (1843–1846),in Belinskii, Vissarion, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7 (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1966), pp. 505.Google Scholar The article first appeared in Otechestvennye zapiski, 1845, vol. 43, no. 11.

4. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7:522.

5. The tradition of redefining, rather than investigating, Pushkin's play continues to the present day. See, for example, the recent reading by A. D. P. Briggs, Alexander Pushkin: A Critical Study(London: Croom Helm, 1983), pp. 157–77. Briggs makes a case for the hidden unity of Boris Godunov, and then recommends “tidying up” the text by appending a list of dramatis personae, numbering the scenes, and dividing them into five Acts (p. 174).

6. With its unstable synthesis of sentimental narrative and scholarly apparatus, Karamzin'sHistory quickly came under attack by professional historians. But Karamzin was not only historian to his people; he was their first, and greatest, mythologist. His History transformed the Russian past into a fund of accessible and richly poetic stories, which was then mined for plots by dozens of Russian artists for the rest of the century. See Jurij Striedter, “Poetic Genre and the Sense of History in Pushkin,” New Literary History, 7, no. 2 (Winter 1977): 295–309. Karamzin's History as mythologizing agent is discussed in the opening paragraphs.

7. See Mark G. Pomar, “Russian Historical Drama of the Early Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D.diss.; Columbia University, 1978), chap. 7. Pomar surveys the major historical dramas of the 1810s and 1820s, and reads Pushkin's Boris as an inversion of their traditional techniques.

8. When Shakhovskoi, for instance, reworked Pushkin's “Fountain of Bakhchisarai” for the stage, it was hailed triumphantly as a “romantic tragedy” at its premiere in September 1825. See Aleksandr Slonimskii, “Boris Godunov i dramaturgiia 20-kh godov,” in Konstantin Derzhavin, ed.,Boris Godunov A. S. Pushkina (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennyi akademicheskii teatr dramy, 1936),pp. 58–59.

9. Pushkin's debt to Shakespeare is an established part of the canon and was often and openly stressed by the poet himself. But the Russians’ discovery and use of Shakespeare in the early nineteenth century was, as elsewhere on the continent, both highly specific and polemical. For Pushkin's generation the basic source was Letourneur's French prose translations, revised by Guizot and Pichot and accompanied by a lengthy theoretical essay on Shakespearean dramaturgy. Thus packaged, Shakespeare was a tool to be used by progressive Romantics against the conservatives.Russians admired the English playwright for his freedom from the constraints of classicism. Constraints that Shakespeare himself might have imposed often went unnoticed in prose translations that were little better than plot summaries. The plays, in short, were perceived less as artistic structures than as anti-structures, as a celebration of the right to violate rules. Pushkin himself often used Shakespeare in this way, as an alternative to Racine. Against this background, Pushkin's “Shakespearism “is both rich and ambiguous. There is a good discussion in Levin, Iurii, “Nekotorye voprosy Shekspirizma Pushkina,” in Pushkin: Issledovaniia i materialy, vol. 7 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1974),p. 62 Google Scholar.

10. This idea is ably developed in Arkhangel'skii, K. I., “Problema stseny v dramakh Pushkina(1830–1930),” in Trudy Dal'’ nevostochnogo pedagogicheskogo instituta, series 7, no. 1 (6) (Vladivostok,1930), pp. 5–16 Google Scholar. Pushkin did not write his play for the stage of his time, Arkhangel'skii argues,and this is why his Boris has been declared “unstageworthy.” The Elizabethan stage, with its traces of mystery-play structure still intact, would have made possible an intense, uninterrupted flow of events before the spectator's eyes—the very essence of Pushkin's dramatic principle (pp. 7–10).

11. Slonimskii, Boris Godunov, p. 45.

12. Pushkin to Bestuzhev, November 30, 1825. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad:Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1937–59), 13:244–45. All references to Pushkin's works will be cited and translated from this 17-volume Jubilee Edition, hereafter PSS.

13. “O poezii klassicheskoi i romanticheskoi,” PSS, 11:36.

14. “O tragedii,” PSS, 11:39.

15. Pushkin to N. N. Raevskii fib, second half of July 1825, PPS, 13:197.

16. “Pis'mo k izdateliu Moskovskogo vestnika,” PSS, 11:66–69.

17. One recent reading of the play (Stanislav Rassadin, Dramaturg Pushkin [Moscow: Iskusstvo,1977], pp. 12–35) argues ingeniously that there is a unifying framework for these diffuse scenes, and it is contained in the four specific historical dates that Pushkin provides in the text. Rassadin's interpretation of these dates makes of the play a succession of different “philosophies of history. “

18. Frolov, V. V., “Khronotop v ‘Borise Godunove’ A. S. Pushkina i printsipy kinomontazha, “in Kino i literatura: sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Moscow: Vsesoiuznyi gos. institut kinematografii, 1977), 16:3–18.Google Scholar

19. Consider only one comparison, Pushkin's famous open-ended narod bezmolvstvuet versus the ending Karamzin gives to his scene of the Godunovs’ death (wife and son) by strangling: “Thus was God's punishment brought to bear on the murderer of the True Dmitrii, and a new punishment began for Russia under the scepter of a false one!” Nikolai Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo, vol. 11 (St. Petersburg: Evdokimov, 1892; reprint ed., Slavistic Printings and Reprintings 189/11,The Hague: Mouton, 1969), p. 123.

20. Il'ia Serman has suggested that the key to the Pretender is precisely his creative personality:he read Pimen the way a poet, and not a monk, would read a chronicle. The Pretender was a poet in an era when poetry had no value; he was a creator in a society where all roles were fixed. See I. Z. Serman, “Pushkin i russkaia istoricheskaia drama 1830-kh godov,” in Pushkin: Issledovanie i materialy, vol. 6 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1969), pp. 120–25.

21. This very interesting idea has been explored in several articles by Olga Arans. See her “An Interpretation of Pushkin's Tragedy Boris Godunov” (delivered at the Midwest Slavic Conference,May 7, 1982, Chicago) and especially the longer Russian version in unpublished manuscript, “O vine Borisa Godunova v tragedii Pushkina.” Arans suggests that Pushkin “trapped Boris in his own time “by making him the victim of a sixteenth-century understanding of personal guilt, that is, guilt as a projection of the people's collective unconscious. In this reading, the narod may indeed be the hero of the play, but not in the progressive sense that later Soviet Marxist critics had in mind.

22. Tynianov, Iurii, Arkhaisty i novatory (Leningrad, 1929 Google Scholar; repr. Slavische Propyläen, vol. 31.Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967), p. 262.

23. For a survey of the major works, see Brody, Ervin, The Demetrius Legend and its Literary Treatment in the Age of the Baroque (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1972)Google Scholar and Emanuel Salgaller, “The Demetrius-Godunof Theme in the German and Russian Drama of the Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1956). In Russian, see Mikhail Alekseev, “Boris Godunov i Dmitrii Samozvanets v zapadnoevropeiskoi drame,” in Derzhavin, ed., Boris Godunov A. S.Pushkina, pp. 73–124.

24. This conceptual strategy for conceiving poetry and history has been suggested by Hayden White: “The historian performs an essentially poetic act, in which he prefigures the historical field and constitutes it as a domain upon which to bring to bear the specific theories he will use to explain'what was really happening in it’ “ (Metahistory [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973],p. x). I would suggest, further, that historians perform poetic acts and poets perform historical acts through the same mechanism, that is, through the choice of a prefigured field (genre) which makes the events within its confines make sense.

25. For a good discussion of these categories and their conventional uses, see Lindenberger, Herbert, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

26. From its very inception Khomiakov's play was linked to Pushkin's and conceived as its sequel-, in chronology and form. In October 1828 Pushkin read his Boris Godunov during two literary evenings at the Venevitinovs; Khomiakov was also there and read his Ermak. After the reading Pushkin shared with those present his plans for a Dmitrii play. It was to open with an executioner awaiting Shuiskii at the gallows and joking with the mob. That play was not written, however, and Khomiakov began his own drama on the theme only after Pushkin's Boris appeared in print in 1831.Like its predecessor it is written largely in iambic pentameter, unrhymed, and contains occasional excursions into prose. See Boris Egorov, “Poeziia A. S. Khomiakova,” prefacing A. S. Khomiakov:Stikhotvoreniia i dramy (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1969), p. 12. See also his note on the play(n.103) in the same volume, p. 578.

27. Aleksei Khomiakov, Dimitrii Samozvanets, in A. S. Khomiakov: Stikhotvoreniia i dramy, p. 452.

28. In Khomiakov as well as Pushkin, the hailing of a new tsar was not the final word. Liapunov,next hero to be cast up by the Time of Troubles, remains alone on stage at the end to curse Vasilii Shuiskii: “The lion's been destroyed, now we'll settle with the fox.” In curious parallel with Pushkin,the censor also tampered with Khomiakov's closing line, which he too was forced to omit.

29. Act III, vi, p. 365:Mne pamiatny sadov zelenyi sumrak Alleia lip i pleshchushchii fontan …(I remember the green twilight of the gardens,The avenue of limetrees and the splashing fountain …)

30. In a letter to N. N. Raevskii/z/.s, January 30 or June 30, 1829, Pushkin calls his Pretenderan “aimable aventurier” who resembles Shakespeare's Henry IV. PSS, 14:47–48, draft in French.

31. The model for the Russian history play of the 1830s was Kukolnik's Ruka vsevyshnego otechestva spasla ( “The Hand of the Almighty Saved the Fatherland “), 1834—a work which significantly took its title from a line in Ozerov's historical melodrama Dmitrii Donskoi, written 27 years earlier. See Pomar, “Russian Historical Drama,” pp. 299–300.

32. For the intriguing, if perhaps excessive, claim that Pushkin used samozvanstvo as a general device for portraying character and therefore all his creations are more or less pretenders, see V. N.Turbin, “Kharaktery samozvantsev v tvorchestve A. S. Pushkina,” Filologicheskie nauki, vol. 6 (48)(Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1968), pp. 85–96.

33. Mikhail Lobanov, Boris Godunov (St. Petersburg: tip. Kh. Gintse, 1835), opening page ( “K chitateliu “).

34. The trilogy ultimately remained untitled. From the start, however, Boris was the inspiration and culmination of all three plays. See Tolstoi's letter to Karolina Pavlovna (January 12, 1865), in which he refers to the projected trilogy as a “large dramatic poem entitled Boris Godunov.” In Aleksei Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964), 4:167.

35. Aleksei Tolstoi to Mikhail Stasiulevich, November 12, 1869. “The Moscow period ‘Tartarized‘[otataril] us,” he wrote further in this same letter, “but from that it doesn't follow that we areTatars; it was nothing other than a passing morbus ignobile of our history” (Aleksei Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:322).

36. In his notes for actors in the premiere production of The Death of Ivan the Terrible, Tolstoi stressed Boris's calculation but also his nobility and desperation:Godunov's ambition is just as unlimited as Ivan's lust for power, but Godunov's ambition is combined with a sincere wish for the good… . He loves it because his enlightened and healthy mind shows him the good as a first condition for the prosperity of the country, which is his whole passion, and toward which he feels the same calling as a virtuoso feels toward music. “Proekt postanovki na stsenu tragedii Smert’ loanna Groznogo,” in Iampol'skii, Isaak, ed., Dramaticheskaia trilogiia: Smert’ loanna Groznogo, Tsar’ Fedor Ioannovich, Tsar’ Boris (Leningrad:Sovetskii pisatel', 1939), p. 451.Google Scholar

37. In this brief essay, Karamzin condemns the chroniclers for their harsh judgment of Boris.He wrote the piece two years after the Emperor Alexander I had assisted in deposing (and perhaps in murdering) his own father, Paul I. The death of Paul I in Petersburg might well have been the subtext for ruminations on the death of Dmitrii in Uglich. Alexander too had come to the throne “irregularly,” by regicide, and perhaps parricide, paving the way for a competent ruler to assume power.But then the subtext changed. The immense experience of Napoleon's invasion and Tsar Alexander'sown drift to the right brought to the fore another aspect of the Boris tale: not the good deeds of Boris but his illegitimacy and lack of royal blood. The lesson for the conservative regimes in the Age of Napoleon was that the low-born cannot achieve political greatness except through crime. See “Istoricheskiia vospominaniia i zamechaniia na puti k Troitse,” in Karamzin, Sochineniia Karamzina, vol. 8 (Moscow: tip. Selivanskogo, 1804), pp. 300–77. The quoted sentence appears on p. 374.

38. Zhukov, Dmitrii, Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoi, Seriia biografii (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia,1982), p. 350.Google Scholar

39. This could explain why Tsar Boris is so widely considered the least successful play of the trilogy. See, as exemplary of Russian criticism, Fedor Batiushkov's essay on “Graf Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoi” in D. N. Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, ed., Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX v., 3 (Moscow: “Mir,” 1910), p. 421. This opinion is generally shared by Western critics; see, for example,Neil S. Parsons, “A Hostage to Art: The Portraits of Boris Godunov by Pushkin and A. K. Tolstoy, “Forum for Modern Language Studies, 16, no. 3 (July 1980): 250–52. Tsar Boris is the only play of the trilogy that has not been translated into English.

40. The Aleksei Tolstoi/Musorgskii question is frequently addressed in the Musorgskii literature,but not, I believe, conclusively. From a cryptic inscription on an edition of Pushkin's works, one scholar has suggested that the composer first got the idea for an opera based on Pushkin's Borisafter the premiere of Tolstoi's Death of Ivan the Terrible on February 12,1867. See Shlifshtein, Semen, Musorgskii: Khudozhnik. Vremia. Sud'ba (Moscow: Muzyka, 1975), pp. 134–36.Google Scholar

41. Mikhail Pogodin, a great admirer of Karamzin's History, took issue with its image of Boris Godunov in a critical essay, “Ob uchastii Godunova v ubienii Tsarevicha Dimitriia,” Moskovskii vestnik, 1829, 3:90–126. He points out Karamzin's logical inconsistencies, Boris's leniency in the treatment of traitors, and the impossibility of trusting either the domestic chronicles or the eyewitness accounts of foreigners. If Boris were judged by today's court, Pogodin asserts, “he would only be placed under suspicion, and a weak suspicion at that” (p. 125). But even if a court of law were to condemn Boris, should History follow suit? “No, no! We will be just to this great man, who so well understood virtue, if not with the heart, then at least with his fertile mind, which during his brilliant reign raised Russia to great heights of power and glory.” This essay, made famous by Pushkin's marginal glosses on it, played a significant role in the Boris polemics of the 1830s.

42. For a sampling of Boris in Kostomarov's hands, see Nikolai Kostomarov, “Smutnoe vremia Moskovskogo gosudarstva V nachale XVII stoletiia,” in Sobranie sochinenii N. I. Kostomarova, vol. 4(St. Petersburg: tip. Stasiulevicha, 1903), pp. 12–45 and 100–109.

43. Aleksei Tolstoi to Mikhail Pogodin, May 12, 1869, in Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:293.In February of that year Tolstoi had requested a copy of Pogodin's newly published Istoriia v litsakh o Tsare Borise Fedoroviche Godunove, and this was a belated acknowledgment: “I have always supported your view on our Varangian period,” Tolstoi wrote to Pogodin in May. “I love Kostomarov very much as a man and as a poet, but I do not follow his historical enthusiasms. “

44. Aleksandr Fedotov, Godunovy; Istoricheskaia tragediia v 5 deistviiakh s prologom(St. Petersburg: tip. Shmidta, 1884). For more on Fedotov's theatrical activities, see the obituary inEzhegodnik imperatorskikh teatrov (1894–95) (St. Petersburg: Izdanie Direktsii Imperatorskikh teatrov,1895), pp. 418–21.

45. See, for example, “Plach’ Ksenii Godunovoi,” recorded in 1619, in Putilov, B. N., ed.,Narodnye istoricheskie pesni (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1962), p, 144.Google Scholar

46. Her potential for popular sainthood is aptly summarized by Aleksei Suvorin in the preface to his Dmitrii play of 1904:The brief mentions of Ksenia which are met in Russian chronicles of that time are full of sympathy for her. These chroniclers knew that she had lived not only with the Pretender but had been subject to all sorts of dishonor from others as well, from Russians and foreigners alike,wandering from monastery to monastery during the Time of Troubles and the general violence.And what is most remarkable is that Russian contemporaries, so scrupulous about a woman's “sin” and even more so about maidenly sin, in this fallen grandeur, in this involuntary hostage,in this nun against her will they saw a righteous woman (pravednitsa) who suffered for others,suffered with all of Russian society, and by means of this “dishonor” and suffering “purchased for herself future honor and eternal life,” a dwelling in paradise.From the introductory essay “O Samozvantse v dramakh,” in Tsar Dmitrii Samozvanets i Tsarevna Ksenia (St. Petersburg: tip. A. S. Suvorina, 1906), p. xii.

47. Godunovy received first prize in a competition sponsored that year by the journal “Biblioteka dlia chteniia.” See Teatral'naia entsiklopediia, 5 (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, “1967), pp. 434–35.

48. Bakhtin, Mikhail, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 421.Google Scholar

49. Jakobson expands the term “translation” to include three different kinds of transmission:intralingual (reworking a text within the same language), interlingual (reworking from one national language to another), and intersemiotic (transmutation of verbal to non-verbal sign systems). See his essay “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in Brower, Reuben A., ed., On Translation (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. See Itamar Even-Zohar, especially his Introduction (v-xi) and “Translation Theory Today:A Call for Transfer Theory” (1–7) in Poetics Today (Special Issue on Theory of Translation and Intercultural Relations), 2, no. 4 (Summer/Autumn 1981).

51. For a brief survey of the evidence, see, in English, Vernadsky, George, “The Death of the Tsarevich Dmitry: A Reconsideration of the Case,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 1–19 Google Scholar; also the recent rehabilitation of Boris in Skrynnikov, Ruslan G., BorisGodunov, trans. Graham, Hugh F. (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1982)Google Scholar, chap. 6( “Drama in Uglich “). In Russian, see Polosin, I. I., “Uglichskoe sledstvennoe delo v 1591 g.,” in Polosin, I. I., Sotsial'no-politicheskaia istoriia RossiiXVI-nachalaXVII v. (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1963), pp. 218–45Google Scholar, and Rudakov, A. A., “Razvitie legendy o smerti tsarevicha Dmitriia v Ugliche, “in Istoricheskie zapiski, vol. 12 (1941), pp. 254–83Google Scholar.

52. Platonov, Sergei, Boris Godunov, Tsar of Russia (1924), trans. Rex Pyles, L. (Gulf Breeze,Fl.: International Academic Press, 1973), p. 205.Google Scholar

53. On the survival and cultural re-production of texts, see Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, “Contingencies of Value,” Critical Inquiry, 10, no. 1 (September 1983): 23–27.Google Scholar

54. For a discussion of this process as part of the larger question of parody, see Saul Morson, Gary, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)Google Scholar, chap. 4 ( “Recontextualizations “), especially pp. 110–11.

55. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,” Critical Inquiry, 7,no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 221.Google Scholar

56. Nepomniashchii, Valentin, “ ‘Naimenee poniatyi zhanr,’ “ in his Poeziia i sud'ba (Moscow:Sovetskii pisatel', 1983), pp. 212–50.Google Scholar

57. Ibid., p. 224.

58. Ibid., p. 225.

59. Ibid., p. 245.

60. Schmidt, Paul, ed. and trans., Meyerhold at Work (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980),p. 126.Google Scholar