Alexander Pushkin Drama Analysis
Alexander Pushkin’s dramas represent an interesting point of development in his career as a writer, for they were written during a period of flux after some of his finest lyrics and longer poems and before his later prose works. They contain many of the elements, such as the development of characters and their interaction, that are central to prose writing. They were conceived and written, however, in verse, not prose, and the characters must be coordinated and portrayed within this formal scheme. Pushkin’s dramatic works, and particularly the Little Tragedies, combine successfully the formal strictures of poetry with the in-depth character analysis that proved to be so influential in later Russian literature.
Boris Godunov
Although not one of Pushkin’s greatest works, Boris Godunov is an interesting and important play. Pushkin conceived of it primarily as an example to later writers, demonstrating greater concern with the literary form itself than with the subject matter. The play was based on a Shakespearean model. Like his illustrious predecessor, Pushkin was casual about observing the three unities of time, place, and action. He wrote his play, like William Shakespeare’s dramas, in blank verse, occasionally introduced prose dialogues, and had frequent scene changes.
Boris Godunov is a chronicle play that centers on the reign of Czar Boris Godunov, prime minister and power behind the throne during the reign of his brother-in-law, Fyodor. Boris was chosen for the throne after the death of Fyodor in an election that his enemies decried as false. He was also assumed to have had Fyodor’s younger brother Dimitry, the only surviving member of the Ryurik Dynasty, murdered in 1591. Although this charge has since been repudiated, it was accepted at the time when Nikolai Karamzin published his great history of Russia, Istoriya gosudarstya rossiyskogo, Pushkin’s source, in 1816-1829. Although the reign of Boris began on a good note, he eventually ran into problems accentuated by the great famine of 1601-1603. Once his popularity had waned, he was easy prey for pretenders to the throne. It is on this note that the play begins.
Boris Godunov opens with a conspiratorial conversation between two boyars, followed by a scene in the Kremlin in which the boyars reaffirm Boris’s right to rule. The action shifts almost immediately to the Chudov Monastery and the monk Grigori Otrepev, the future False Dimitry and Pretender to the throne. Hearing of the murder of the child Dimitry, who would have been his contemporary, Grigori decides on a scheme to escape the deadening routine of the monastery. He will claim that Dimitry has survived after all and is none other than himself. Donning secular attire, he flees from the monastery. He is intercepted at the Lithuanian border but escapes into Lithuania (at that time united with Poland). With the assistance of the Poles and the aid of disgruntled boyars who are indifferent to his true identity (including Pushkin’s forebear, Afanasy Pushkin), he eventually ascends the Russian throne.
In Cracow, Grigori meets and falls in love with the beautiful Marina Mniszek, the only person to whom he reveals his true identity. Marina’s partiality for him is linked to her own political ambition, not to affection. Her scornful rebuff of his attentions prompts him to be proud in turn with her, a move that earns her respect and opens her eyes to the possibility that he will indeed be able to attain his goal. Anxious to subdue a potentially threatening neighbor, the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania lends military support to the claims of the Pretender and invades Russia. Boris assumes that he will not need foreign help to overcome...
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this threat and makes the fatal mistake of rejecting the aid of the Swedish king.
The Pretender harnesses the discontent of local military forces, and Ukraine rises in revolt. With the death of Boris (from a heart attack), the boyars are free to act; Prince V. V. Golitsyn has Boris’s wife and son murdered. The triumphant Pretender enters Moscow, and the play concludes with the boyar Mosal’skij exhorting the populace to hail the Czar Dimitry Ivanovich, a command that is met with silence. Pushkin had in fact intended for the people to respond; this is one instance in which the censor’s meddling produced a more desirable ending.
Because Pushkin believed that Boris was responsible for the murder of Dimitry, the play depicts the rise of the Pretender as retribution for Boris’s crime. One of Pushkin’s great strokes of characterization is to have Boris die with a clear conscience, having accepted the punishment due to him. Nevertheless, his guilt is visited on his own son, who is killed at the end of the play.
Pushkin’s dialogic style is stiffer and his metrical structure less adequate in Boris Godunov than in the four plays collected in English as Little Tragedies. His major characters are less interesting and complex. Boris Godunov attained greater stature as Petrovich Mussorgsky’s opera than it enjoyed as a play. Although not Pushkin’s greatest drama, it prepared the way for the later tragedies.
According to the critic D. S. Mirsky, Pushkin’s Little Tragedies are “dramatic investigations” of character and situation, a designation that Pushkin himself had applied to them. Written in blank verse, they can be considered closet dramas rather than stage plays. Their brevity enabled Pushkin to focus on a single climactic situation illuminating the major characters.
The Covetous Knight
The Covetous Knight is purported to be a scene from a play of the same name by the Englishman Chenstone. Perhaps Pushkin confused his name with that of the writer William Shenstone, author of The Schoolmistress (1742) but not of this play. Like the other Little Tragedies, The Covetous Knight has a fairly simple plot. The poor knight, Albert, is unable to pay for a new helmet and is embarrassed to appear in a shirt of mail when the other knights are wearing satin and velvet. His problems would be alleviated if his avaricious father, the baron, a miserly knight with large quantities of gold, would bestow some on his son. Albert’s servant Ivan has attempted to borrow money from the Jewish moneylender Solomon but has not succeeded. Solomon suddenly appears, reluctant to lend money but with a plan to help Albert obtain a large sum. Acquainted with an apothecary, Solomon confides to Albert that a few tasteless, colorless drops of poison in the baron’s wine will make the son a rich man. Albert is disgusted and chases Solomon away.
As the second scene opens, the baron is in his vault ready to drop yet a few more gold coins into the sixth of his treasure chests. He contemplates the power that his money represents. Not only can he control the arts and “free genius,” but virtue itself would submit to him and “bloody villainy” would obey him. He gloats over the suffering he has caused, the crimes he has forced others to commit. When the moment comes to unlock the chest, he is seized with fear. As he inserts the key into the lock, a strange feeling grips him, and he feels like a murderer plunging a knife into a victim’s body. This is a foreshadowing of his own death.
Albert visits the baron’s castle with his friend the duke, who has promised Albert that he will attempt to wrest some money from the covetous father. The baron slanders his son, claiming that Albert had wanted to kill him or had at least longed for his death. When Albert, who has been concealed, comes rushing into the room to cry that his father’s statements are lies, the duke banishes him from his presence. Thereupon the baron does in fact die, calling for his keys while choking. The cause of his death is not explained in the play; it would seem to have been a consequence of his own greed. Perhaps Albert has, in fact, poisoned him.
Mozart and Salieri
The shortest of the Little Tragedies is Mozart and Salieri, based on a legend that Salieri poisoned Mozart. As the play opens, Salieri is delivering a monologue, recounting the single-mindedness with which he devoted himself to his art. Yet now, having tasted success, he has come to be consumed by envy for his friend Mozart. Salieri is especially tormented by Mozart’s lack of earnest diligence, and by his love of silliness and practical jokes.
Mozart enters, accompanied by a blind fiddler who plays for them something “from Mozart,” and Salieri is stunned to see his rival willingly desecrate his art. Mozart has brought a new piece for Salieri to hear. He asks Salieri to imagine that he, Mozart, is with a beautiful woman or a friend, “perhaps with thee,” and then has a sudden vision of darkness or the grave. Then he plays. It is a brilliant prefiguring of the actual outcome of the plot. Salieri responds ardently, saying, “Thou, Mozart, art a god, and thyself knowest it not;/ I know, I.” In this he expresses the essence of their relationship, for Mozart seemingly toys with his divine gift, one that Salieri recognizes but does not share. Salieri invites Mozart to dine with him, and Mozart leaves to make arrangements.
On Mozart’s departure, Salieri delivers his second long monologue. He is determined to get rid of Mozart, who has eclipsed his fellow composers and is so great a genius that he could never leave any musical heirs. Salieri brings out a vial that he always carries against the day when he might wish to commit suicide, having decided instead to use it to poison Mozart.
The two meet, and Mozart is uncharacteristically solemn. When pressed, he reveals that he had been thinking about his Requiem Mass. Salieri expresses surprise at Mozart’s choice of so solemn a piece, whereupon the latter tells him a strange story. A stranger dressed in black commissioned Mozart to write a requiem mass and then vanished. Mozart finished the piece, but the man never returned to claim it, and Mozart is reluctant to part with his work. Then Mozart reveals that he feels the constant presence of the man in black and senses him sitting at the table with them. The man is death, and the Requiem Mass for Mozart’s funeral.
Pushkin’s inclusion of this episode serves not only to foreshadow the ending of the play, but also to reveal the differences between the two protagonists. Salieri knows that Mozart is sufficiently gifted to have had a presentiment of his own fate. He suggests that they uncork a bottle of champagne (the better to poison his rival) or read The Marriage of Figaro (1786), an obvious attempt to flatter and distract his enemy. The brilliant Mozart is blind to the fact that his “friend” loathes him, is consumed by jealousy, and might possibly be tempted to kill him. Mozart alludes to Salieri’s inability to get along with his fellow musicians, mentioning that Beaumarchais had been Salieri’s friend. He innocently asks if Beaumarchais had really poisoned someone and receives a casual reply from Salieri. Salieri then pours the poison into Mozart’s glass and suggests that he drink. Mozart utters an ironic speech: “To thy/ Health, friend, to the sincere tie/ Uniting Mozart and Salieri,/ Two sons of harmony.” He drinks to the health of his murderer—who, by his lack of sincerity, precisely because of the absence of any tie joining them, has killed him. Salieri has inserted the ultimate disharmony into Mozart’s life. Mozart then plays part of his Requiem Mass, and Salieri weeps with pain and pleasure, distressed at the tragedy but simultaneously relieved. Calling them both “priests of beauty,” Mozart says that he feels unwell and goes home to die. Pushkin’s drama inspired Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (pr. 1979), which in turn served as the basis for the Academy Award-winning film of the same title (1984).
The Stone Guest
The Stone Guest, often considered the greatest play of Little Tragedies, draws on the Don Juan legend. Don Juan has been exiled from Madrid for having killed the commander of the municipal garrison. He goes to the monument for the slain man and encounters Doña Anna, his widow. Concealing his true identity, he attracts her attention and excites her interest. They arrange to meet at her home. He says that he desires only death at her feet, an ironic reference to his later fate. On her departure, he invites the statute to come, too. When it nods in agreement, he is horrified.
Don Juan arrives at Doña Anna’s, tells her who he really is, and swears (with seeming sincerity) that he loves her. Thereupon the statue itself appears and tells Don Juan to give it his hand. He perishes as the statue crushes him. Just as The Covetous Knight is about the dehumanizing effect of avariciousness, and Mozart and Salieri is concerned with the deadly power of envy, so in The Stone Guest does one encounter the fatal consequences of extreme emotion.
The Feast in Time of the Plague
The Feast in Time of the Plague is Pushkin’s translation of one scene of the play The City of the Plague (1816), by the Scottish writer John Wilson; the translation is generally accurate. The two songs of the scene are, however, original. The plot is simple. A group of young men and women are having a feast during a plague. The principal characters consist of a speaker, the singer Mary, Luisa, a young man, and a priest. As the scene begins, the young man speaks movingly of Jackson, so recently one of their number and a merry addition to their company. He is a victim of the plague, and his armchair has been left empty in tribute.
Mary’s is the first song; unlike the blank verse of the dialogue, it is written in trochaic tetrameter. Mary sings of the sorrow brought by the plague, focusing on the death of her alter ego, Jenny: “I beg thee, do not come near,/ To the body of the Jenny;/ Do not touch the dead lips,/ Go far from her.” She remembers how her parents had loved to hear her sing, how innocent her voice had been before the plague. The young man wants free, dynamic song that will distract them from their sorrow. Thereupon the speaker himself sings in celebration of the plague, remarking on the intoxication of its breath. His blank verse song is strongly reminiscent of the songs of Shakespeare.
An old priest appears and reproaches them for being ungodly madmen, celebrating a “godless feast.” “Is it thou,” he reminds the speaker, “who three weeks ago, on thy knees/ Sobbing, embraced the body of thy mother.” The speaker leaves the feast and is sunk in deep pensiveness as the rest continue. Like Mozart and Salieri, The Feast in Time of the Plague contains the suggestion that those who are endowed with the creative impulse are jealously persecuted by the less gifted. Indeed, all four of the Little Tragedies can be seen as a defense of art and freedom, whether threatened by the tyranny of official control or by the envy of the untalented.
The Water Nymph
Pushkin’s remaining dramatic works, The Water Nymph and Stseny iz rytsarskikh vryemen (scenes from knightly times), remained unfinished and were published as fragments. The first concerns the seduction of a miller’s daughter by a prince. When he deserts her to marry someone more fitting his station, she casts herself into the Dnieper. She becomes a water nymph, and years later, the child-nymph with whom she had been pregnant lures the father to a doom not specified by the end of the scene. Although the play is in blank verse, it closely resembles Nikolai Gogol’s later prose tales and, like them, is based in part on Ukrainian folk legend. It differs from the Little Tragedies and from Stseny iz rytsarskikh vryemen as well in having a native setting rather than a Western European one.
Stseny iz rytsarskikh vryemen
Stseny iz rytsarskikh vryemen is a blank verse playlet similar to The Covetous Knight. Not only is the setting in medieval Western Europe, but also the main characters are similar. After the knight, Albert, has accidently killed his groom, Jacob, with a heavy slap of his gauntleted hand, Francis agrees to take Jacob’s place. From having been Albert’s friend and equal (although he is impoverished), Francis becomes an inferior and a servant. This difference is stressed by Albert’s use of the familiar form of the pronoun “you” with Francis, while the latter must respond with the formal, respectful form of the pronoun.
Albert’s beautiful sister, Clothilda, ridicules Francis’s love for her, and Francis’s smoldering resentment explodes when Albert expects him to be a butler as well as a groom. He leaves in fury. He returns home to find his father dead. With no other recourse, Francis turns highwayman with other disenchanteds and ambushes Albert and Rothenfeld. Francis is captured and brought to Rothenfeld’s castle. He sings a beautiful song (in iambic tetrameter) about a poor knight, and Clothilda begs that, as a reward, he be spared the noose. Rothenfeld agrees but casts Francis into the dungeon for life.
Both Stseny iz rytsarskikh vryemen and The Covetous Knight strongly prefigure the works of Dostoevski. Both have proud heroes who are disinherited aristocrats, men who might be willing to plot crimes for material gain but, more important, for vengeance. The proud man is the victim of an inferior, unjust society, a character echoed later in Raskolnikov, from Dostoevski’s Prestupleniye i nakazaniye (1866; Crime and Punishment, 1866) and Stavrogin from Besy (1871-1872; The Possessed, 1913).
