Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin is recognized as the father of Russian literature. Scholars often compare Pushkin’s impact on Russian literature to that of Shakespeare on English literature; however, Pushkin’s significance to Russian literature is much greater. Prior to Pushkin, Russian literature was limited to folk tales, church stories, and some verse and drama imitative of Western forms. Survey courses of Russian literature make little mention of pre-nineteenth-century Russian authors. Before the 1800’s, little if any of Russian literature could compare with Western works in depth or originality.

Pushkin changed that. In a career that spanned barely twenty years, Pushkin established Russian as a modern literary language. Pushkin created poems and stories that freed Russian literature of conventions imposed by other European languages—especially French. Suzanne Massie (1980, p. 244) writes that Pushkin “gave Russians their Russianness, fashioning for them eternally an image of themselves that embodied their deepest and most precious feelings.” Pushkin created a literature uniquely Russian in form and content.

Considering Pushkin’s role in founding Russian literature, one might have difficulty understanding how Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov fits into that foundation. Celebrated mostly for his poetry and prose, Pushkin wrote very few plays. His first and only full-length drama, Boris Godunov was never staged during Pushkin’s lifetime. It met with mixed reviews when published in 1831. Even in Russia, where nearly every citizen can recite at least a few lines of their genuinely beloved Pushkin by memory, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov has enjoyed only sporadic theatrical production (Briggs 1999, p. 97). The first full performance, in 1870, was a failure, and various directors and companies have struggled since to mount productions capable of winning approval from the critics (not to mention from government censors during both tsarist and Soviet times—see Rusnitsky, 1988).

How could the greatest Russian bard create a play that has caused such consternation for directors, tsars and apparatchiks, and Pushkin scholars? Boris Godunov is certainly no flop, no weak experiment of a poet dabbling in drama. Pushkin’s language and characterization are as engaging in this play as in any of his other works. Boris Godunov has been a challenge for readers of Pushkin because that is precisely what Pushkin wanted it to be: a challenge to Russian drama. In his effort to break free of contemporary conventions and genre labels, Pushkin created a new kind of realistic play laden with challenges for readers and audiences of his time and our own.

To challenge Russian drama, Pushkin rejected a number of contemporary dramatic conventions. First of all, Pushkin disregarded the unity of time, one of the neoclassical unities prescribed particularly by French drama. Dealing with the historical subject of the reign of Tsar Boris Godunov, Pushkin refused to condense the events of the play into a single day or any such stylized, continuous time period. Instead, the play faithfully plots significant events of Boris’s reign—his election to and acceptance of the throne in 1598; the appearance of the first False Dmitri, pretender to the throne, in 1603; the battles of autumn, 1604; the death of Boris and the murder of his family in 1605—accurately on the historical timeline. Pushkin makes no effort to fill in the gaps between the events of his history; he simply and economically shows only those moments from that seven-year span that contribute to the telling of the story.

Pushkin similarly violates the unity of place in Boris Godunov. In twenty-three scenes, the play presents twenty different locations. Scenes shift in quick succession from Moscow to the Lithuanian frontier to Poland and back. We visit the Kremlin and other palaces, monasteries, forests and battlefields, and even a rustic roadside tavern. These changes of place rarely receive any exposition in the dialogue. Four lines into the tavern scene, one of the traveling priests notes that they are at the Lithuanian border (Pushkin, 1999, p.390), but that onstage explanation of location is the exception. Pushkin faithfully notes the location at the beginning of each scene but does not assign his characters to tell us where they are.

This relatively quick shifting of time and space poses obvious difficulties in producing the show. The director must decide how to economically yet clearly identify different settings that may, like the palace of the Patriarch, appear for hardly more than a minute. As Emerson (1986, pp. 97–98) points out, Pushkin has often been given credit for discovering the principle of cinematic montage 75 years before that principle could be executed. Technically, Boris Godunov seems well suited to cinematic treatment.

Along with time and place, Pushkin tosses out unity of character in Boris Godunov, thus challenging the audience to determine who is the central character. Pushkin develops the character of Tsar Boris quite well, showing his guilt over his involvement in the murder of the real Tsarevich Dmitri¹ alongside his efforts to raise his son to become a progressive tsar. However, the title character of the play is not at all the indisputable hero. Pushkin focuses at least as much attention on the False Dmitri, with his ambition to seize the throne and his passion for the Polish merchant’s daughter Marina. Other characters are drawn richly enough to lead various directors to focus on people other than the tsar and the pretender. A 1999 production at the St. Petersburg Bolshoi Drama Theater focused on Father Pimen, an old monk who “chronicles the story as it unfolds” and “becomes a guide to our understanding of the play’s tumultuous events” (Pannik 1999).

Even the narod—the Russian people, as represented by the crowds in the play—receives sufficient treatment in the play to justify arguments that it is the hero of Boris Godunov. Pushkin shows numerous aspects, often contradictory, of the narod. We see the crowd, or members of it, alternately cynical (in Scene 3, one man asks what all the crying and demonstrating is about before the monastery, and another answers, “How are we to know? It’s the boyars’ deal, they’re too good for us”), brutish (a woman at the same gathering roughly scolds her crying child), bloodthirsty (in the penultimate scene, the crowd cries, “Long live Dmitri! Destroy the family of Boris Godunov!”), and sympathetic (in the final scene, a member of the crowd argues that Godunov’s children should not be held guilty for their father’s crimes). The crowd is even assigned the “last word”—or, more accurately, the last commentary. As the boyar Mosalskiy exhorts the crowd to hail the False Dmitri, who has just killed Godunov’s family and assumed the throne, the crowd performs Pushkin’s much-debated closing stage direction: "Народ безмолвствует" (“Narod bezmolvstvuet”—“The people keep silent.”) While modern audiences and critics may enjoy such deep and multivoiced characterization, the Russian audiences of Pushkin’s time may have expected a clearer focus on just one main character.

Pushkin further defied conventions by mixing tragedy and comedy in Boris Godunov. The play contains plenty of grim Russian themes: tsarecide, invasion, conspiracy. However, Pushkin, who himself included the word “comedy” in two of the four subtitles he wrote for the play (Korneyeva 2000), intersperses numerous comedic bits. In Scene 3, amidst the crowd gathered at the monastery praying and crying for Boris to accept the crown, two men not wanting to look out of place have the following conversation:
 

Один: Все плачут,/ Заплачем, брат, и мы.	One: Everyone’s crying,/ Let’s cry too, brother.
Другой: Я силюсь, брат:/ Да не могу.	Another: I’m trying, brother,/ But I can’t.
Первый: Я также. Нет ли луку?	The first: Me too. Aren’t there any onions?

Later, the entire inn scene, written in prose in contrast to the unrhymed pentameter used in much of the rest of the play, is composed for laughs. The two wandering monks helping the False Dmitri escape Russia start right in drinking wine and spouting rhyming Russian folk sayings (among them a comment to the False Dmitri, whom they still believe is a monk: "Знать, не нужна тебе водка , а нужна молодка..."—“Znat’, ne nuzhna tebe vodka, a nuzhna molodka”—“You know, you don’t need vodka; you need a girl”). The scene builds to a climax with bumbling and illiterate guards entering the inn, mistaking each of the old wandering priests for the pretender they have been sent to capture, then recognizing the real pretender, only to have him pull a knife and dive out a window.

Other scenes have potential for comedic interpretation as well. In a 2000 production, British director Declan Donnellan brought out the humor of the fountain scene, where the pretender confesses his love to Marina. Korneyeva (2000) describes the laughable absurdity of the scene, as “A runaway monk has nearly succeeded in seducing a snooty Polish damsel who spurned the courtship of many a nobleman.” This scene and others show a deliberate effort by Pushkin to show the tragic and comedic elements of life side by side on the stage. Even theatergoers of our own time can feel uncertain of how they should react when tragedy and comedy alternate from scene to scene.  Pushkin’s contemporaries had few foreign examples, like Shakespeare, and certainly no domestic examples of such a mixing of genres.

The most significant and perhaps problematic violation of convention lies in the very structure of the plot. Boris Godunov does revolve around a conflict, the struggle for the Russian throne.  However, Pushkin only gives us glimpses of events, sufficient to reveal certain details of character and history but too brief to develop any “sustained or intricate plots” (Emerson 1986, p. 97). Neither Tsar Boris nor the pretender get the chance to act out a resolution of their conflict on stage. The two antagonists never meet for a climactic battle. Boris simply dies in Scene 20, not of any plot or even of grief over his guilt, as one might expect of a traditional tragedy. Servants simply declare, “He has fallen ill.” “The tsar is dying.” The False Dmitri does not gets even less clear resolution. His last appearance on stage, Scene 19, shows him camped out in the forest with the smashed remnants of his fleeing army, defeated in another battle, whimpering over his wounded horse, and bedding down for the night on the bare ground. The pretender never appears on stage again, even though the play ends with his apparent victory, entering Moscow, killing Boris Godunov’s wife and son (contrary to a boyar’s declaration that Maria and Feodor have poisoned themselves), and assuming the throne.

A clear resolution of the play is most firmly rejected by the narod’s silence at the end. Tsar Boris in Scene 7 laments how the narod blames him for all their ills, despite his best efforts to help and protect them. In Scene 21, popular support is said to be the basis of the pretender’s strength. Ultimately, though, at the declaration of Dmitri’s assumption of the throne, the narod, in their famous silence, deny the pretender any affirmation of his rule, thus foreshadowing the continuing crisis of succession Russia would face.

So what was Pushkin doing creating a play that has come to be “generally regarded as a disordered failure of a play with some surviving residue of quality material” (Briggs, 1999, p. 98)? The apparent disunity of Boris Godunov was no accident, no aberration amidst Pushkin’s otherwise brilliant literary output. Pushkin deliberately rejected the traditional unities in favor of unifying his play around his concept of historical realism. Even here, though, Pushkin’s idea of realism differed from others. He obviously did not demand any realistic continuity of time or space. He accepted the artificiality inherent in a stage production and rejected the idea of the fourth wall. In one draft preface to Boris Godunov (Wolff 1971, pp. 246–247), Pushkin wrote, “...quel diable de vraisemblance y a-t-il dans une salle coupée en deux dont l’une est occupée par 2,000 personnes, censées n’être pas vues par celles qui sont sur les planches?” (“...what the hell kind of verisimilitude is there in a room cut in two where the one half is occupied by 2,000 people who aren’t supposed to be seen by the people on stage?”). A complete portrayal of every detail of a person or story is unnecessary, he argued in notes on popular drama (Wolff 1971, p. 264); if such complete imitation were necessary in art, “Why then do we like painted statuary less than those in plain marble and bronze?”

In his historical realism, Pushkin wanted to capture the essence of events that had shaped Russia. The dramatic poet was to be “impartial as Fate” (Wolff 191, p. 268). Pushkin represents this ideal in Boris Godunov in the initial portrayal of Father Pimen as a dispassionate chronicler of history, keeping his composure even as he records the terrible events of the past. Pushkin explained further:

Neither [the dramatic poet] himself, nor his political opinions, nor his secret or open prejudices, were to find expression in his tragedy—but only the people of the past, their minds, their prejudices. It is not his business to excuse, condemn, or prompt. It is his business to resurrect a past age in all its truth. (Wolff 1971, p. 268)

This concept of historical realism prevented Pushkin from adapting the historical events of Boris Godunov’s troubled reign into a more coherent, theater-friendly tale. He did not try to condense this portion of history into a neat dramatic package with a clear conflict, climax, and resolution. As Emerson points out, Pushkin does not impose any “future certainties” or “artificial closures” on the story (1986, p. 96). He never intrudes on the action of the play with any outside perspective. “We hear and see only what the participants themselves hear and see—and in a sequence that makes sense only from within the event” (p. 132). History does not come with tidy endings or morals. Participants in historical events often cannot see how their present figures in the patterns of the past or future. Inconvenient as such an approach may have been for those used to traditional drama, Pushkin wrote Boris Godunov to portray history as it is: messy and open-ended.

Boris Godunov may not have sparked the grand reform of Russian drama that Pushkin sought. Violating so many conventional unities, the play struck too many of Pushkin’s contemporaries and many later audiences as too incoherent for them to comprehend. Even if the play did not fulfill Pushkin’s aims, Pushkin nonetheless succeeded in creating a thought-provoking play that broke free of previous genres and embodied his concept of historical realism.

Briggs, A. D. P. (1999). Writers and repertoires, 1800–1850. In Leach, R., and Borovsky, V. (Eds.), A history of Russian theatre. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Emerson, C. (1986). Boris Godunov: transpositions of a Russian theme. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Korneyeva, I. (2000). A Boris Godunov that beats Chaplin. Moscow News. Section: Culture, No. 25. June 28, 2000. (Electronically retrieved, Lexis-Nexis, April 9, 2001.)

Massie, S. (1980). Land of the firebird: the beauty of old Russia. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Pannik, C. (1999). City honors Pushkin with three good Godunovs. The St. Petersburg Times. May 25, 1999. (Electronically retrieved, Lexis-Nexis, April 9, 2001.)

Пушкин, А. С. (1999). Стихотворения. Поэмы. Москва: ЭКСМО-Пресс. (Pushkin, A. S. (1999). Stikhotvoreniya. Poemy. Moskva: EKSMO-Press.)

Rudnitsky, K. (1988). Premiere of Boris Godunov at the Taganka. Izvestiya. June 24, 1988. p. 3. Reprinted in Current Digest of the Soviet Press. Section: The News of the Week; Domestic Affairs; The Arts. Volume XL, No. 25 (July 20, 1988).  p. 27. (Electronically retrieved, Lexis-Nexis, April 9, 2001.)

Skrynnikov, R. G. (1982). Boris Godunov. Graham, H. F., translator and editor. Gulf Breeze, Florida: Academic International Press.

Wolff, T. (1971). Pushkin on Literature. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd.

You can find hundreds, maybe thousands of pages about Pushkin on the Web. When typing his name into a search engine, keep in mind that there are different transliterations of Pushkin's name:
"Alexander" = "Aleksandr"
"Sergeevich" = "Sergeyevich" = "Sergeevitch" = "Sergejevich" and other spellings!
"Pushkin" = "Puškin"

Pushkin page by Katharena Eiermann

Pushkin page by Stephany Gould Plecker, James Madison University

Read Boris Godunov online!
Complete Russian text at the Russian Virtual Library
English translation by Alfred Hayes at Project Gutenberg (thanks to Miklos Mezosi, Ph.D., Lorand Eotvos University, Budapest, for the heads up!)

Abstract of dissertation—"The poetic and semantic structure of Boris Godunov"—by Irene Ronen, University of Michigan, 1992

Yale's Slavic and East European Studies links—excellent index!

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