[In the following essay, originally published in 1972, Monter probes the thematic unity of Pushkin's "Little Tragedies" in their concern with "the recognition of love and the recognition of death."]

A critical attempt to correlate separate works of the same author could hardly be more justified than in the case of Pushkin's four "Little Tragedies." All were completed in the fall of 1830: The Miserly Knight (Skupoi rytsar'), Mozart and Salieri (Motsart i Sal'eri) and The Stone Guest (Kamennyi gost') on October 23, October 26, and November 4 respectively. Pushkin may have been thinking about these three since 1826, but for such finished works their dates of completion are still remarkably close. The fourth play, The Feast during the Plague (Pir vo vremia chumy), was composed entirely during the 1830 autumn at Boldino where Pushkin was forced to stay later than he had expected because of a contemporary plague of cholera. Pushkin himself wished to unite the four plays under one heading, and he considered several less original generic titles before deciding finally upon "Malen'kie Tragedii" ("Little Tragedies"), a term which implies greater thematic as well as technical unity.

From the very beginning, critics said that these plays were for reading and not for acting. The "stage" history of The Miserly Knight is really the history of the baron's monologue, which the great actor Shchepkin loved to recite. Of the four plays only Mozart and Salieri was performed during Pushkin's lifetime and, unlike stagings of Pushkin's earlier poetic works (not meant as plays but containing some dialogue), it was not a success. Pushkin's popularity was waning by 1830, perhaps, as Akhmatova suggests, because it became more difficult for contemporaries to identify with his new, un-Byronic heroes. But with audiences of any age, these plays are too condensed, too highly "poetic" for the theater. Some critics defend their theatricality on the grounds of the sharp conflicts in each scene, but the "Little Tragedies" portray not conflict but the essence of conflict. As Bryusov wrote in 1915, "Pushkin gave in his dramas the elixir of poetry; the spectator must convert it into the living wine of poetry." Perhaps the most interesting of all the many failures to stage some of the "Little Tragedies" successfully is one which worked completely against this idea of the audience collaborating with the poet. The 1915 Stanislavsky production of all the plays except The Miserly Knight in one show underplayed the rhythm of the verses and stressed the famous actor's method of reexperiencing the role (perezhivanie). Alexander Benois's lavish costumes and decor for the Moscow Art Theater, accurate though they may have been, tended, as one critic noted, to use specific details that Pushkin himself could not have known. Thus, the feasters themselves were lost in a faithful reconstruction of the architecture of old London. Obviously, Pushkin relies less on specific detail than on the suggestiveness of his poetry. It is enough that his night in Madrid "smells of lemon and laurel" ("limonom i lavrom pakhnet").

Benois, unlike any of his predecessors, did look for a way to unite the plays. He made them into a "trilogy of death," beginning with The Stone Guest and Feast during the Plague and ending with Mozart and Salieri as an "apotheosis," the "death of a genius, a demi-god." He saw the plays as allegory: "the human soul struggles with God and with other souls, conquers them and in the end becomes hopelessly damned, ruined." Benois could easily have included the miserly Baron in this synthesis.

Most of the excellent body of critical writing on the "Little Tragedies" stresses their similarities with the tradition of European literature rather than their internal unity. Indeed these plays, with their borrowed plots and characters, seem to exemplify the dictum that "the best writers expropriate best, they disdain petty debts in favor of grand, authoritative larcenies." Paradoxically, these works so clearly borrowed and so remote in time and place from Pushkin appear to be as close to the poet biographically and emotionally as anything he wrote. The two most personally motivated plays, The Miserly Knight and The Stone Guest, were published only in 1836 and 1939 (after Pushkin's death) respectively. In the fall of 1830 Pushkin was faced with a recurrent quarrel with his notoriously stingy father, adding material worries to psychological ones over his own impending marriage, over the prospect of becoming the husband rather than the Don Juan (Pushkin alters the legend to make the stone guest himself more of a presence, as the title reflects). As he sat out the cholera epidemic and waited to rejoin his fiancée, Pushkin thought about death and love, but not as separate categories. The intensity of his feelings distilled them into equally intense but abstract, impersonal art.

"Dread (strakh) is the uniting feeling in the four tragedies," claims one critic. Another speaks of the "pathological elements" in the "Little Tragedies." These elements lie just below the surface. Certainly it is naive to claim that "as in Boris Godunov Pushkin in the 'Little Tragedies' undertakes the complicated task of the construction of a tragedy without a love intrigue" in all of the plays except The Stone Guest. The love plot of the latter is something more than conventional, as we shall see, but in each of the other plays a distorted love does exist. An extraordinary passion for persons, things or abstractions gives each plays its dramatic momentum, until this passion finally consumes either its object or itself.

In each of Pushkin's probable sources for The Miserly Knight there is a double plot line: one involving the sexus avarus prototype and another conventional love plot with the younger generation triumphing. As Tomashevsky points out, Pushkin, aside from his famous remark that "Moliere's miser is miserly, and only that" ("U Mol'era Skupoi skup—i tol' ko"), must have noticed that "the character of Harpagon unites miserliness with amorousness." He states, however, that the love intrigue is generally external to the miser plot in most plays and Pushkin eliminates it. Not altogether. The most memorable scene of the play, the Baron's monologue, is in effect a perfect fusion of what had been two separate theatrical strains.

The Miserly Knight treats a conflict to the death between the miserly father and his son. If the father is the skupoi, the son is the covetous one; but, for both, poverty is shameful and money a means to power. There are other similarities between the two. Taking the love plot away from the son and giving it to the father in another form, Pushkin began an evening-out of audience sympathies, in spite of his own probable identification with the son. The duel, prevented by the Duke at the end, is actually fought between the Baron and Al'ber throughout the play. Each desires the death of the other and is obsessed by the fear that the other will outlive him. The son asks, "Will my father really outlive me?" ("Uzhel' otets menia perezhivet?"). The Baron says, "When I have scarcely died, he, he will go / … having stolen the keys from my corpse, / He will open the chests with a laugh" ("Edva umru, on, on soidet siuda / … ukrav kliuchi u trupa moego, / On sunduki so smekhom otopret"). When tempted by the Jew in the first scene to poison his father, Al'ber attacks violently this incarnation of his own desire; but in the third scene he accepts the challenge of his father with such alacrity that he leaves his imprint on the glove he hurriedly picks up.

The father has greater insight into his own desires. He sees things clearly whenever he can focus the spotlight of his passion upon them. Pushkin's use of lover imagery in the knight's monologue makes it possible to regard the second scene as a magnificent perverted love story. The knight "like a young rake awaits a rendezvous" ("kak molodoi povesa zhdet svidan'ia"). He hastens to the "faithful chests" ("vernym sundukam"). Visions of nature are revealed to him from his dark cellar. The lines "I am above all desire, I am serene; / I know my power!" ("la vyshe vsekh zhelanii; ia spokoen; / la znaiu moshch moiu!") describe the consummation of love. It is important, however, to note that the real climax of the knight's passion is described in other terms, those of murder. The action of inserting the key in the lock is compared to that of plunging a knife into a victim. The feeling derived therefrom is "pleasant and terrifying at the same time" ("priiatno i strashno vmeste"). Death and love are united in one gesture. Finally, when the dying Baron calls for his keys, he is really calling for his life which has been concentrated in these objects. Pushkin's miserly knight, unlike the misers of Plautus and Molière, is not comic; his reactions are not mechanical in the Bergsonian sense. Rather they are symbolic of a love so great that it destroys itself in pursuing its object.

In Mozart and Salieri the theme of nasledniki is used more concretely as a pretext for murder itself, not just for the desire to murder, and in this play the poison is actually given. The "cherished gift of love" ("zavetnyi dar liubvi"), like the "first gift of (Al'ber's) father" ("pervyi dar ottsa") is the blow of death. Salieri's wife gives him poison instead of children. Symbolically, he carries this poison with him for eighteen years. Rationalizing that Mozart was useless because he left no artistic successors, Salieri kills the man he believes to be the greatest genius of the art both have loved from birth. But already in the first monologue Salieri speaks of killing music: "Having killed sounds, / I dissected music, like a corpse" ("Zvuki umertviv, / Muzyku ia raz"ial, kak trup"). Salieri dominates this play as does the Baron the previous one. Like the Baron, Salieri feels both pain and pleasure at the height of his passionate illusion: "It is both painful and pleasant / As if I had paid a heavy debt" ("i bol'no i priiatno / Kak budto tiazhkii sovershil ia dolg"). Killing what he loved has made Salieri free, but only as long as the final music lasts. His short-lived freedom from envy and doubt about his own talent is juxtaposed with the shortness of Mozart's life. But Mozart is aware of his coming death (he understands the man in black) and writes his Requiem, while Salieri sinks further into self-delusion at the end.

In the last three plays music is played or sung by men or women as an assertion of life in the face of death. Mozart plays his own music, hums a tune by Salieri, and listens to a beggar play a tune of his. In The Stone Guest Laura sings Don Juan's song and their affinity is thereby established. One of the entranced guests exclaims "But love itself is a melody" ("No i liubov' melodiia"). Later, Don Juan calls himself "an improvisor of love songs" ("Improvizatorom liubovnoi pesni"). Pushkin differs from his sources in stressing that the Don is a poet.

But love, which reaches the heights of music, is also tainted with death. Laura refuses to think of growing old: "why / Think of that?" ("zachem / Ob etom dumat'?"). Don Juan's words to Donna Anna: "What does death mean? for the sweet instant of a rendezvous / I would give my life without a murmur" ("Chto znachit smert'? za sladkii mig svidan'ia / Bezropotno otdam ia zhizn' ") seem similar in tone, but there is, of course, much more to the Don than what he says to the woman he is seducing. In this play, more than in any of Pushkin's sources, Don Juan seems to be relentlessly courting his own death. He uses death to seduce Donna Anna, asking her to stab him, in what sounds like a parody of similar requests made in classical tragedy. He claims to have been reborn: "It seems to me that I am born anew" ("Mne kazhetsia, ia ves' pererodilsia"), a travesty on the romantic concept of redemption through love. Pushkin's irony stems from the fact that while the Don knows how to use life and death to serve the ends of love, he is not aware of how close his kind of love is bringing him to death.

He courts Donna Anna first in a cemetery, at the grave of her husband. Pushkin has made Don Alvaro the husband of Anna, not her father, and the Don invites him to his wife's bedroom, not to dinner at his house. Sexuality, traditionally associated with Don Juan's vigor and love of life, is here specifically connected with death. The statue is asked to "stand guard at the door" ("stat' na storozhe í dveriakh"). The image of death not just knocking at the door at the end, but actually keeping watch over Don Juan's activities is explicit with Pushkin. The Don's relationship with the statue is as intense, if not more intense, than his relationship to the women. At the beginning of scene 4, when he has Donna Anna alone in his room, he speaks again and again about her dead husband. Don Juan is different with different women, but one thing remains constant: with all his women he seeks the morbid. He remembers Inez for the "strange pleasure" ("strannuiu priiatnost' ") he found "In her sad gaze / And deadly pale lips" ("v ee pechal'nom vzore / I pomertvelykh gubakh") and in her weak voice. This "strange pleasure" is similar to that of the knight opening his treasure or of Salieri listening to Mozart's Requiem. He makes love to Laura in the presence of a corpse freshly killed by him. To have the corpse become a husband able to witness the seduction of a previously virtuous wife takes the pleasure three steps further. Anna, who says that "A widow should be faithful to the very grave" ("Vdova dolzhna i grobu byt' verna") is courted and first weakens "By that grave" ("Pri etom grobe"). The metonomy of the tomb standing for the dead one becomes a reality for her in exactly the way she fears.

For Don Juan much the same thing happens. Donna Anna asks him "What do you ask for?" ("Chego vy trebuete?"); he answers, "Death" ("Smerti"), meaning only the unreal romantic cliche of dying at her feet. Note how frequently he uses the conditional mood when talking to Donna Anna. In one speech toward the beginning of scene 3 the phrase "If I were a madman" ("Kogda b ia byl bezumets") is repeated three times. As in Pushkin's poem of 1833, "Ne dai mne Bog soiti s uma," the conditional mood is used to express the would-be freedom of the poet (here the lover) in madness. The poem ends with the possible consequences of madness: imprisonment by society, and divorce from the beloved sounds of nature; at the end of the play Don Juan is abruptly cut off from life: he calls to Donna Anna, but he has taken the hand of death.

In The Feast during the Plague love and death coexist, each intensifying the other. The play, like Wilson's The City of the Plague, concerns the attempt to deal not with the inevitable presence of death, but with the fear of death, which love of life only increases. As Thucydides wrote of the Athenian plague: "The most terrible thing of all was the despair into which people fell … for they would immediately adopt an attitude of utter hopelessness, and by giving in in this way, would lose their powers of resistance." Pushkin's way of treating the plague seems, however, to be unique. Unlike Boccaccio's heroes and heroines of the Decameron, Pushkin's characters do not attempt to remove themselves from the plague and create a pleasant life outside it. They hold their feast in the street where death's cart has the right of way. Wilson's drama has the same setting, but his Walsingham tries to dispel people's fears by saying that other kinds of death (death in battle or death at sea) are worse, and by wishing "Freedom and pleasure to the living." Pushkin's nameless "presider" ("predsedatel' ") celebrates death itself.

Close as he keeps to the parts of Wilson that he has chosen, Pushkin's play has a far greater intensity. Mary is no longer "sweet" but "pensive" ("zadumchivaia"), and the same word, which ends the play is also original with Pushkin. One effect of the brevity of the "Little Tragedies" is that, just as in a lyric poem, a repeated word becomes very important. One scholar has noted the repetition of the word priiatno in the other three plays, as well as its connection with murder and illness. In The Feast during the Plague the word is also used as part of an oxymoron: Mary's song is called "doleful and pleasant" ("unyloi i priiatnoi"). Since it is a song about death, one may and should connect it to the appearances of this word in the other three plays.

The two songs, Mary's and that of the presider, both honor love of life, but reflect different answers to the questions posed by the confrontation with death. Mary's song describes what the plague has done to life, with successive images of emptiness and quiet except in the cemetery where graves "like a frightened herd / Press together in a tight line" ("kak ispugannoe stado / Zhmutsia tesnoi cheredoi"). Thus, paradoxically, only death is given an attribute of life. The second part of the poem, in a strange mixture of the pathetic and the practical, urges Edmond not to court death by kissing the lips of his dying Jenny, but to wait until the plague is over to visit her grave. The song of the presider is completely original with Pushkin. This "hymn in honor of the plague" treats it not as something temporary, but as a recurring phenomenon like winter. The entire poem is an extended oxymoron epitomizing the paradox of the play itself. The "winter heat of feasts" ("Zimnii zhar pirov") is expanded to the deadly but beautiful breath of "rose-maidens" ("devy-rozy") and finally to the reason for the feast during the plague. The oxymoron illustrates the paradox of the "inexplicable pleasures" ("neiziasnimye naslazhden'ia") in a dark love, hinted at in the other three plays. Man is intoxicated by the very struggle with death: "There is an ecstasy in battle" ("Est' upoenie í boiu"), for in this struggle lies his greatest challenge, that of seeking a pledge of immortality ("Bessmert'ia, mozhet byt', zalog!"). The "deep pensiveness" ("glubokaia zadumchivost") of the presider at the end of the play is ambiguous. On the one hand, it should be connected with the same inspiration which enabled him to compose the hymn, the same genius which led Mozart to write his Requiem. But it is also close to that passion which gave the Baron his sensation of enacting a murder, spurred Salieri to kill Mozart, and brought Don Juan to invite death upon himself. The gap between immortal art and death is bridged only by an inspiration ever closer to madness. The four "Little Tragedies" explore this ground between the recognition of love and the recognition of death. Pushkin, when he asserts the former, also relentlessly implies the latter.