Pushkin’s letters are among the most widely read and cited in the Russian epistolary tradition. In reviewing an edition of Voltaire’s correspondence, Pushkin himself gave a psychological rationale for a fascination with an author’s sub-canonical works:

A writer’s letters (along with other sub-canonical types of writing, such as diaries, notebooks and marginalia) occupy a liminal space on the border of conventional literary and linguistic categories. Letters are written, but it is the oral nature of the genre that is emphasised in the very first lines of traditional manuals on letter writing: 'A letter is a conversation between those who are absent … To write a successful letter, imagine that you are in the presence of the one who will read you, that he is hearing the sound of your voice.'

The need 'to imagine that you are in the presence' of the addressee erodes the borders of individual authorship. In no other type of writing does an author have such strong obligations towards the reader and addressee: a shared frame of reference has to be established, the reader’s opinions taken into account and reactions anticipated. Pushkin was a past master of adjusting to the stylistic expectations of his correspondents, even to the point of mimicking their epistolary 'voices'.

Brecht, Lessing and dramaturgy

Brecht was the most radical theorist and practitioner of twentieth-century theatre. His methods of writing and developing plays, his training for writers, actors and directors, his interrogation of design and stage lighting, and his collaborations with composers, singers and musicians defined a particular kind of political theatre - and practitioners the world over continue to modify and rework Brecht's theory and praxis to make interventionist theatres of their own. Central to his theatre-making, and the vital motor for the articulation and dissemination of his ideas, is the dramaturg - but curiously this centrality is not highlighted in literature about Brecht. This essay will address that neglect by examining Brecht's own employment as a dramaturg, his writings on dramaturgy, and his organisation and training of dramaturgs within the Berliner Ensemble.

Brecht's reinvention of the dramaturg rewrote a theatrical role first adopted by the German Enlightenment playwright and critic Gotthold Lessing. From 1767 to 1769 Lessing was the official dramaturg at the Hamburg National Theatre and, in an extraordinarily ground-breaking experiment, wrote plays and published critiques of the National Theatre's repertoire, its actors' performances and the creative processes undertaken in each production. Lessing's objective was to articulate the artistic travails normally hidden from the public and to generate a critical discourse on the repertoire and working practices of the institution itself.

Brecht was not a great comedian, but several of his friends were. Both Karl Valentin and Charlie Chaplin influenced the playwright, and led him to invent stage characters who could be described as political clowns. The first of these clowns, Galy Gay, appeared in 1926, as the humble Irish porter who becomes a 'human fighting machine' in Man is Man.

The play remains an important document of Brecht's political humour, as well as of his development of epic theatre and a Marxist aesthetic in the 1920s. It has also been regarded as a critique of militarism, imperialism and what Brecht later called 'the bad collective' which destroys individualism; but the comic aspects of the play deserve special attention, since they reveal Brecht's innovations in political clowning. As if to acknowledge his closeness to comedy, Brecht has characters in the play speak of scenes in Begbick's canteen as 'numbers' - that is, variety acts like those performed in music halls.

The play's innovations moved the clowning of Brecht's contemporaries from cabarets and films into German theatres which were far more solemn, and less appealing to working-class audiences, than the popular art forms in which Valentin and Chaplin performed. Early in his career Brecht called for more ‘fun’ in the theatre, and the fun of clowning by Chaplin and Valentin became a model for Galy Gay’s adventures in Man is Man. ‘It’s a jolly business’ to see a man ‘surrender his precious ego’, Brecht once said about Galy Gay’s agreement to give up his name and identity, and accept that of Jeriah Jip (BT, p. 19).

Pushkin’s unique place in the Russian national consciousness owes less to his greatness as a poet than to the fact that a myth of Pushkin lies at the heart of the Russian national identity which is defined by a conflict between a lofty image of Russia’s majesty, and the bleakness of her past and uncertainty of the present. It can be described as a cross between an inferiority complex and a superiority complex. Russianness is realised in a dichotomy that was engendered by Pushkin. It was he who created that Russia which, in the words of the nineteenth-century poet Fedor Tiutchev, 'the mind cannot grasp' by creating an enchanting fairytale about this huge, cold, bleak and cruel land. Pushkin made possible Turgenev’s young noblewomen, Tolstoy’s noble heroes, Chekhov’s good-natured protagonists, Bunin’s dark alleys and Blok’s beautiful stranger, the captivating music of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, the painter Isaac Levitan’s melancholy canvases and Diaghilev’s exquisite ballets. That is why Pushkin is of such vital importance to Russians, and why his status in Russia is so hard for foreigners to fathom.

The one writer who falls out of this magical list is Dostoevsky. It is no coincidence that he was the first to articulate the idea of Russia’s messianic role using the image of Pushkin, for he found himself at the heart of the Pushkin myth. Dostoevsky was the first to reveal the depth of the national trauma. Dostoevsky is Pushkin in reverse. He is the inner side of Russian national identity, whilst Pushkin is its radiant exterior. Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), the founding father of Soviet literature, understood this only too well.

The contribution of Brecht to the scenography of the twentieth century goes far beyond important changes in the appearance of the stage. In his writing and in his practice, he deconstructs the human complexity of the 'director-designer relationship' and offers a mode of creating theatre which, in an organic way, links not only the end products of dramaturgy and scenography, but also centralises within this process the working practices of dramatist, director and scenographer. We have to consider therefore the relationship between Brecht's political and philosophical view of theatre and his expectations of scenography; the way in which these expectations developed in the collaboration with Caspar Neher; and finally the reverberant effects which these ideas and practices have had, and still have, upon contemporary theatre.

Alexander Pushkin, like his near-contemporary Lord Byron, took great pride in his aristocratic ancestry. He was born into the family of Sergei L'vovich Pushkin and Nadezhda Osipovna Pushkina née Gannibal, whose ancestors on both sides included prominent figures in Russian history. Through his father, Pushkin belonged to an ancient line of nobility dating back to the twelfth century (not the thirteenth as Pushkin thought); their names are cited twenty-one times in Nikolai Karamzin’s monumental History of the Russian State (1818), the authoritative historical work on Russia in Pushkin’s lifetime. The Pushkin clan stayed close to power up to the end of the sixteenth century, falling from grace under the Romanovs, whose dynasty dates from the early seventeenth century. Several ancestors were conspirators and mutineers and suffered in particular under Peter the Great. By 1799, the year of the poet’s birth, the Pushkin family had lost all their influence and most of their fortune, and, as he grew older, Pushkin came to identify with their lot: 'They were persecuted. And I am persecuted' (PSS, vol. xi, p. 388).

On the maternal side, Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Abram (originally Ibrahim) Petrovich Gannibal was born in Africa in 1696; he may have been the son of an Abyssinian prince, as Pushkin believed. He was sent as a slave to the court of Peter the Great, where he became the tsar’s informal secretary and constant attendant. Eventually he attained the status of hereditary nobleman and was awarded several estates for his loyal service. While Gannibal achieved distinction as a military engineer, a notorious jealous streak marred his private life.

The period immediately after the First World War was a time of unprecedented upheaval throughout Germany, and nowhere more so than in Bavaria. After defeat in the war (for which the German propaganda machine had failed to prepare the public), and the abdication of the Kaiser, Germany experienced its abortive revolution, which included the establishment of a Soviet State of Bavaria. When this had been brutally suppressed (ironically by a socialist government in Berlin), the country staggered from crisis to crisis during the Weimar Republic until, eventually, Bavaria became the power base of the Nazi party. So, as he was setting out on his career as a writer, Brecht experienced, albeit indirectly, both fighting in the trenches of a world war and fighting on the streets during a failed revolution.

The sacrifices demanded of his generation during this period affected the young Brecht profoundly, encouraging in him a detached view of humankind, both individually and in society, and an enduring mistrust of all forms of idealism. It is against this turbulent background, and to give expression to these developing social and aesthetic attitudes that the (sometime medical student, sometime vituperative theatre critic) son of the manager of an Augsburg paper-mill wrote his first three full-length plays: Baal (1918-22), Drums in the Night (1919) and In the Jungle of the Cities (1921-4), an early draft of which was produced in Munich in 1923 under the original title, In the Jungle (Im Dickicht).

Among modern poets set to music, Pushkin occupies an unparalleled position. According to the Russian scholar Valerii Kikta, in opera alone there are no fewer than 141 works based on Pushkin’s oeuvre, including one rock opera (Tsar, Saltan by V. Sokolov, 1980) and excluding works that take Pushkin as their subject. The Gypsies, for instance, has inspired no fewer than eighteen operas - among them, Rakhmaninov’s Aleko (1893), Tsygany by Rimskii- Korsakov’s disciple V. Kalafati (1941), Gli zingari by Ruggerio Leoncavallo (1912) and Zigäunen (1883) by Walter von Goethe (the poet’s grandson) - plus a half a dozen ballets. The first of over sixty Pushkinian pieces for the musical theatre, the ballet Ruslan and Ludmila, or the Overthrow of Chernomor, the Evil Sorcerer by Friedrich ('Fedor Efimovich') Scholz, appeared in 1821 just as Pushkin achieved his first success. The early Soviet period celebrated the centennial of his death with the opera Pushkin’s Death (Gibel' Pushkina) by G. Kreitner (1937), while in the post-Soviet period Pushkin has already inspired The Captain’s Daughter, a ballet produced in 1998 by the former 'chairman' of Soviet music, the octogenarian Tikhon Khrennikov, and the ballet Alexander and Natalie (Aleksandr i Natali, 1990) by V. A. Pikul', a product of more frivolous times. A host of cantatas, programmatic symphonic and chamber compositions, and numerous pieces of incidental music for films and stage productions, also form part of this musical corpus. The collective output of about 500 authors of 'romances' (art songs) and choruses based on Pushkin’s lyrical poetry numbers in the range of several thousand pieces.

Four years Pushkin’s senior, Leopold von Ranke began his career as an obscure Prussian schoolmaster and ended it with an uncontested reputation as the nineteenth century’s most distinguished historian. Published in 1824, Ranke’s first book, Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples, led to his appointment as a supernumerary professor at the University of Berlin in the following year. Since 1825 also marked Pushkin’s first sustained engagement with a historical subject - his tragedy, Boris Godunov - let us begin by comparing these two great contemporaries. Although it is tempting to regard them as polar opposites in their approach to the past, Pushkin and Ranke each deserve a place on the spectrum of European historical writing prompted by the political demands and philosophical insecurities of the French Revolutionary era. As Goethe declared, 'Anyone who has lived through the revolution feels impelled towards history. He sees the past in the present and contemplates it with fresh eyes.'

Ranke lived to the age of ninety, by which time he had published some forty-five volumes of formidable historical scholarship: nine more were to follow by 1890. Though Pushkin devoted much of the last decade of his short life to work on historical subjects, he completed but a single History of Pugachev, finished at Boldino in the autumn of 1833 and published a year later. Many of his most significant ideas about the past were expressed in a variety of fictional genres that Ranke would have dismissed as inherently inauthentic. Inspired partly by Shakespeare, Boris Godunov was written in the shadow of Nikolai Karamzin’s incomplete History of the Russian State (twelve volumes, 1818-29).

Bertolt Brecht anno 1928 (as encountered by Elias Canetti): the son of the provincial middle classes with the airs of a big-city proletarian, the enemy of capitalism transfixed by the best and worst of American culture, the pioneer of a revolutionary aesthetic who claimed he wrote only for money, the man who treated fast cars like women and women like cars, and yet contributed through his work to the movement for women's reproductive freedom. In his contradictory character, a character to a large extent self-created, Brecht epitomised the ambivalences of a Germany which, during his first thirty-five years, made the move from the provincial margins of European culture to become the capital of the twentieth century.

Beginning with the earliest examples of Russian silent film, Alexander Pushkin and his work have remained popular subjects throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet period. Pushkin films, which number more than 100, vary in aesthetic quality, but they contain impressive achievements and telling experiments. As an art form, cinema has performed the pedagogical labour of transmitting Russian culture’s fascination with Pushkin, and it has also contributed a large body of interpretive work about him. It is the latter that interests us here. How has cinema read Pushkin’s life, his writings and the myths about him?

This chapter will treat three kinds of Pushkin films: life stories, literary adaptations and films alluding to Pushkin or his work. In their different ways, they extend and complicate the myth of Pushkin’s foundational place in modern Russian culture. As a result, these films make new myths about poetic and cinematic inspiration. Confidence that an audience in Russia would know Pushkin’s works well enough to catch both passing allusions and fully fledged allegory marks them all. Biographical films, many of them focused on Pushkin’s fatal duel in 1837, have regularly retold the story of his life. The life stories make Pushkin’s biography into an exemplary Russian life. They may also offer allegorical narratives about how Russia treats its poets and how poets should live their professional lives.

The Threepenny Opera is unique. Since its first performance in Berlin, at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on 31 August 1928, it has enjoyed a popularity matched only by the best-known Broadway musicals or the most established operas. It has led a protean existence in commercial theatres, in subsidised regional and national theatres and in opera houses. It has spawned a film, a novel and countless recordings of its music by a bewildering range of performers.

Yet it is clearly not an opera in any conventional sense; the word opera in the title implies a parody. Formally the music is too disunited to make it, for its time, a 'proper' opera, even though operatic devices such as recitative, ensembles and choruses are used. Neither is it a musical in the sense that we now accept the term, even though the Marc Blitzstein revival in the 1950s ran in New York for more than 2,500 performances. Successful Broadway musicals tend to have socially conventional plots with plenty of spectacle and picturesque romanticism, not Marxist-inspired social criticism as their motivation.

It is worth getting to know Kurt Weill a little better before going on to the work itself in more detail. Weill is a paradoxical character; a classically trained composer who in his youth was regarded as at the leading edge of the avant-garde, but who wrote 'Mac the Knife' - one of the most ubiquitous and durable popular tunes of the century.

The standard metrical unit in Russian versification is the foot. A foot is composed of two (binary metres) or three syllables (ternary metres). The alternation of stressed or unstressed syllables determines the type of foot. Russian words have a single stress and the placement of that stress is inherent. The most common foot in Russian poetry is the iamb, consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The second most common foot is the trochee, consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. The number of feet, normally between two and six, determines the length of the line. Hence the iambic tetrameter consists of four iambic feet (composed of eight or nine syllables), and the iambic pentameter consists of five iambic feet (composed of ten or eleven syllables). Iambic tetrameter was the metre of choice for narrative verse and lyric poetry in the early nineteenth century. Many of Pushkin’s narrative poems, including Ruslan and Liudmila, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, The Gypsies and The Bronze Horseman are written in this metre, using an irregular rhyme scheme that mixes couplets and alternating rhyme. Further features that add expression and variety to poetic speech are rhythm, intonation and enjambment. Rhythm is the result of the actual rather than theoretical stress pattern. In the standard iambic line the words, ordered according to rules of syntax, fall into a pattern of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. In an iambic line of eight or nine syllables the metre calls for up to four metrical stresses.

Pushkin was never political in the narrow sense of the word. He never occupied an influential governmental post, and penned no significant political treatises. Yet from the 1810s to the present day the most diverse sociopolitical groups have declared Pushkin their ally. He has been variously a conservative, a liberal, a gentleman revolutionary, an ideologue of peasant revolution and a stylised Orthodox monarchist. The reasons why such diverse factions strive to make Pushkin their own lie in his long-standing and unique symbolic significance in Russian culture. The most important task facing researchers today is to free the image of Pushkin as a political poet and thinker from this accumulation of later, often tendentious, stylisations.

St Petersburg: awaiting reforms

St Petersburg: awaiting reforms: Pushkin’s political views were formed in the liberal period of the reign of Alexander I. Taught by Alexander Kunitsyn, one of the most brilliant political writers in the liberal camp, Pushkin acquired at the Lycée his first ideas about the contractual nature of power, and generally about liberalism in the spirit of Charles Montesquieu, the eighteenth-century French political theorist whose work on constitutions set out a contractual relationship between absolute rulers and subjects. In Russia, the years 1817 to 1820 saw, however, a turning away from reform.

In the realm of theatre, Pushkin was a provocateur. Passionate about spectacle, he criticised most Russian performance practice of his time - neoclassical tragedy, melodrama, vaudeville, sentimentalist and patriotic-historical drama - for its pompous diction and predictable plotting. Only verse comedy and religious drama were exempt. He had strong opinions on theatre reform and hoped to enter Russia into pan-European debates over the proper purposes of drama. As a playwright, however, Pushkin encountered constant obstacles. He abandoned all his teenage efforts at verse comedy; attempts to publish his play on Grishka Otrepiev and Tsar Boris were frustrated for years. Plans and dramatic fragments (about twenty-five) far outnumber the completed works.

The masterpieces that did emerge, Boris Godunov (1825-30) and the four Little Tragedies (1830), have thrilled and mystified readers. But their stageability remains in dispute. Did Pushkin write 'closet drama'? In the plays themselves, events often occur with lightning speed, in improbable locales. Even with Shakespearean precedent, the on-stage battle scenes in Boris (where regiments gallop off and horses die on stage) are difficult to envisage; the penultimate scene of Rusalka takes place on the bottom of a river. Pushkin’s words can be as difficult to realise as his spaces - especially the stage directions.

The charge of social and cultural energy inherent for Russians in the figure of Pushkin and his legacy was released in the diaspora of the 1920s and 1930s with extraordinary force and consequence. The staggering dislocations of war and revolution caused the mass exodus of Russians from their native land in the five years following 1917. It has been plausibly argued that social upheavals over a period of time exert a substantial influence on the self-definition of given communities, and in this case both the émigrés and the Russians at home redefined themselves culturally. Inevitably, Pushkin’s experiences of exile and the trauma of his violent death in 1837 had special resonance among the newly dispossessed. The first wave of emigration, especially in the deportations of 1922, carried with it a disproportionate number of the highly educated cultural elite determined to preserve not only their Russian identity, but to create a culture abroad. Language and literature contained the dynamic energy to invigorate such a project, for which Pushkin was its unifying symbol. Pushkin had come to embody for Russians an intense vitality, especially since the historic anniversary observances of 1880, and the potency of Pushkin’s name was continually reaffirmed in Russia Abroad during the period between the twentieth century’s two world wars. The discussion that follows is bracketed by the Pushkin celebrations of 1924 and 1937 and is focused on activities in Paris, the capital of Russia Abroad.