SOURCE: "Pushkin and Neoclassical Drama," in Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin, University of California Press, 1985, pp. 312-38.

[In the following essay, Karlinsky characterizes Pushkin's works as "the culmination of Russian eighteenth-century neoclassicism."]

"Pushkin is our first classicist and romanticist, which makes him a realist." … (The latter definition depends upon the epoch, and also the temperament of the commentator.)

Igor Stravinsky¹

It has been the fate of many a great Russian writer to acquire in Western countries an image that is the very opposite of what he has actually stood for and believed. Ultraconservatives, such as Gogol and the mature Dostoevsky, are venerated as fearless indicters of tsarist tyranny. The humanitarian activist Anton Chekhov, with his wide-ranging program of social betterment and environmental concern, is seen as a gloomy prophet of despair and doom. Vladimir Mayakovsky, who detested anything bucolic and put his hopes for a better future in industrialization and urbanization, was depicted in an American educational film as a poet of farms, herds and open plains.

Most misunderstood of all in popular lore is Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). A writer whose work represents the culmination of Russian eighteenth-century neoclassicism and is pervaded by it, Pushkin is usually seen as someone who finally and definitively put an end to the neoclassical tradition. More deeply steeped in French language and literature than any other Russian writer, Pushkin is often credited with emancipating Russian literature from French influence. Beneficiary of the advances in the development of literary Russian that were achieved earlier by Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Batiushkov, Krylov, and, eventually, by Shakhovskoy and Khmelnitsky, Pushkin is still often said to have created the modern literary language all by himself, with no outside help.

Pushkin was interested in drama and the theater from his childhood. He reputedly attempted composing comedies while he still lived at his parents' home, even before he was enrolled at the boarding school, the Lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo in the environs of St. Petersburg, at the age of twelve. His classmates at the Lyceum recalled that during his school years he began writing a verse comedy in the French neoclassical manner, a work that was later destroyed. The literary tastes of the teenaged Pushkin are outlined in detail in his poem "Small Town" ("Gorodok"), written when he was sixteen. The longest eulogy in the poem is reserved for Voltaire, "the rival of Euripides, the gentle friend of Erato [i.e., the muse of amorous poetry], and a descendant of Ariosto and Tasso." In a later passage devoted mainly but not totally to his favorite playwrights, Pushkin lists Ozerov, Racine, Molière ("the gigantic Molière"), Fonvizin, and Kniazhnin.

Kniazhnin (as the author of verse comedies) and Fonvizin were to remain Pushkin's lifelong favorites, as evidenced by the epigraphs from their plays and allusions to them in his prose works of the 1830s. Ozerov initially attracted Pushkin through Ekaterina Semyonova's performances in his tragedies and because of the myth that his untimely death was caused by harassment inflicted by his envious literary enemies. But in the essay "My Remarks on the Russian Theater," which dates from January 1820 and usually opens the volume of Pushkin's critical essays in the academic editions of his collected works, we read of "the unfortunate Ozerov's imperfect creations," indicative of Pushkin's later disdain for Ozerov's tragedies, a disdain that led to disagreements with his friend and literary ally, Viazemsky, Ozerov's biographer and champion.

At the time of the opening of Shakhovskoy's The Lipetsk Spa Pushkin was the youngest member of the literary club "Arzamas," founded by Zhukovsky and Viazemsky to oppose the Archaists' attacks on sentimentalism and nascent Russian romanticism. With youthful fervor, Pushkin had earlier ridiculed Shakhovskoy in epigrams directed against the conservatism of the Archaists' literary position. Disgusted by Shakhovskoy's mockery of Zhukovsky, whom Pushkin regarded as his poetic teacher, and by the lampooning through the character of Countess Leleva's admirer, the retired hussar Ugarov, of two other people close to him—his uncle (the minor poet Vasily Pushkin) and Sergei Uvarov (later Pushkin's enemy, but at the time a fellow member of "Arzamas")—the teenaged Pushkin recorded in his diary for 1815 "My Thoughts on Shakhovskoy," a murderous denunciation of the playwright, his personality, and his supposed technical deficiencies.²

In a few years, however, as Iury Tynianov has shown in his study "The Archaists and Pushkin," Pushkin's friendship and literary alliance with the junior Archaist Katenin put an end to his hostility to the Archaist camp. By 1819, Pushkin was introduced to Shakhovskoy by Katenin and became a regular visitor to Shakhovskoy's "garret," that is, the literary salon presided over by Shakhovskoy's mistress, Ekaterina Ezhova. In his letter to Katenin from his Mikhailovskoye exile, written on September 12, 1825, Pushkin recalled the reading by Katenin of his Andromache at the "garret" as one of the happiest evenings of his life. Pushkin's coining of the term "the Lipetsk flood" to describe the resurgent popularity of verse comedy after 1815 shows his awareness of the importance of Shakhovskoy's first verse comedy for this development. Subsequently, Pushkin not only authorized but even encouraged Shakhovskoy's dramatizations of his Ruslan and Liudmila in 1824, The Fountain of Bakhchisarai in 1825, and The Queen of Spades in 1836.

No initial unpleasantness marred Pushkin's personal and literary contacts with Nikolai Khmelnitsky. The record of their encounters is scant, especially in Pushkin's writings. In his letter to Nikolai Gnedich of May 13, 1823, Pushkin recalls being shown the manuscript of Khmelnitsky's comedy The Irresolute Man and offering Khmelnitsky his advice. Pushkin's letter of early May 1825 to his brother Lev mentions that the poet received a copy of the journal The Russian Thalia that contained some excerpts from a comedy by Khmelnitsky and adds: "And Khmelnitsky is my old love [Pushkin used the word liubovnitsa in the theatrical sense of "the woman with whom a character is in love"]. I have such a weakness for him that I'm prepared to place an entire couplet in his honor in the first chapter of Onegin (but what the deuce! They say he gets angry if one mentions him as a playwright)."

A possible cause for this purported anger may have been Khmelnitsky's rapid advancement in the civil service hierarchy, which was soon to lead to his appointment to the governorship of Smolensk. By failing to evoke Khmelnitsky's name in the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin cheated him of the kind of immortality he had bestowed on Kniazhnin, Ozerov, Shakhovskoy, and Katenin by including theirs in stanza 18 of that chapter. But mentioned or not, Khmelnitsky is, as we shall see, very much present in the first chapter of Eugene Onegin. Pushkin's profession of love for Khmelnitsky's plays in the cited letter to his brother helps explain the impact Khmelnitsky had on the two major works that were being written or planned at the time, Boris Godunov and Count Nulin. The last mention of Khmelnitsky in Pushkin's correspondence occurs in the letter addressed to him on March 6, 1831, in his capacity as the governor of Smolensk, in response to a request that Pushkin donate copies of his books to the Smolensk municipal library. After a ceremonious first section of the letter addressed to His Excellency the Governor, Pushkin switches to an informal second section in which he protests that while he respects the governor, he loves Khmelnitsky the man as "my favorite poet."

Pushkin's supremacy in Russian literature was established with the publication in 1820 of Ruslan and Liudmila, a mock-heroic epic that incorporated what he had learned from the narrative poems of Ariosto and Voltaire, from Russian eighteenth-century humorous poems by Maikov and Bogdanovich, and, as Leonid Grossman has persuasively shown, from the ballets of his contemporary, the French choreographer Charles Didelot.³ His narrative poem "The Gabrieliad" (1821) had its roots in the blasphemous and erotic eighteenth-century poems by Voltaire and Evariste Parny. With his hugely successful verse tales The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1820-21) and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1821-23), Pushkin turned to Byron for the model of his verse narratives and plunged into the typically romantic exoticism of the idealized Near East, made popular in France and England by Chateaubriand and Byron.

Pushkin's trajectory from this point on has been traditionally described by Russian scholars as a gradual overcoming of the romanticism of this period and finding his way to a realistic and socially critical depiction of the iniquities of Russian life of his time. Yet, a detailed examination of his dramatic projects that date from the same period as his "Southern" verse tales and an awareness of Pushkin's continuous fascination with the neoclassical verse comedy as practiced by Shakhovskoy, Khmelnitsky, and, eventually, Griboedov, indicate that Pushkin's neoclassical tastes remained alive and well throughout, despite the veneer of his later romantic and realistic orientation.

Pushkin's earliest surviving attempts to write for the stage date from his time of exile in the south of Russia, where Alexander I had banished him for some youthful revolutionary poems. Parallel with the composition of the ultraromantic The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, Pushkin made sketches for a comedy in couplets of iambic hexameter and for a neoclassical tragedy in five acts in the manner of Sumarokov and Kniazhnin. The latter project is all the more amazing because by that time Pushkin had made amply evident his disdain for the neoclassical tragedy not only of Sumarokov but even of Ozerov.

The subject he had selected was that of Vadim of Novgorod, the episode from the Primary Chronicle that had already been dramatized by the Empress Catherine and Kniazhnin. But where Catherine couched her version in the form of an imitation of Shakespeare and Kniazhnin draped the fragmentary legend of Vadim on a framework borrowed from Corneille and Metastasio, Pushkin was planning his own treatment of the situation, while retaining the usual anachronistic confusion between the pre-Christian Novgorod of the ninth century and the republican city-state that was destroyed by the rulers of Moscow five centuries later. Because Pushkin could not decide whether he wanted to write a tragedy or a narrative poem about Vadim and left sketches for both, we have a reasonably clear idea of his conception. Had the tragedy materialized, it would have been the familiar eighteenth-century love-versus-duty play, with a heroine named Rogneda (the Old Russian equivalent of the Scandinavian name Ragnhild, which was the name of the heroine of Kniazhnin's Vladimir and laropolk), who is torn between her duty to her father and her love for Vadim, the leader of the republican resistance to the autocratic rule of Riurik the Varangian. Interesting as an indication of the anti-monarchist sympathies of the young Pushkin, his play about Vadim had no future, as Pushkin himself must have realized. Had he completed it, it would, for all his genius, most likely have joined such other stillborn, belated exercises in neoclassical tragedy as Katenin's Andromache and Küchelbecker's The Argives.

Far more promising and giving greater cause for regret that it was not completed is the fragmentary comedy about gambling fever that Pushkin began sketching in his Kishinyov exile in 1821. Printed in academic editions of his writings under the title derived from its first words, "Say, by What Chance" (Skazhi, kakoi sud'boi), the fragment has been dubbed The Gambler by some scholars. There is only one completed scene, couched in the kind of iambic hexameter in which Kniazhnin and Kapnist wrote their comedies. But in tone and diction it is far more reminiscent of Khmelnitsky. There also exists a disjointed but detailed outline of the other scenes, which has enabled Alexander Slonimsky, among others, to postulate the plot and the action of this unwritten comedy.⁴ The milieu is of the kind that was more usually associated in the eighteenth century with melodrama than with high comedy: the world of addicted gamblers and of the cardsharps who prey on them. The characters bear the names of the actors of Shakhovskoy's St. Petersburg company, for whom Pushkin clearly intended this play.

The completed scene shows a young widow Valberkhova (i.e,. the actress Maria Valberg, who had played young widows in The Lipetsk Spa, Khmelnitsky's Castles in the Air and, for that matter, in Molière's The Misanthrope), bickering with her gambler brother Sosnitsky (i.e., the part was intended for the actor Ivan Sosnitsky). In the unwritten portion, a young man in love with Valberkhova (he was to be played by the tragedian Iakov Briansky) plots to cure her brother of gambling in order to win Valberkhova's heart. His strategy is to induce a professional gambler (the character actor Alexander Ramazanov) to fleece Sosnitsky until he stakes on a card his old serf tutor (Mikhail Velichkin, who specialized in playing comical old men, such as Baron Volmar in The Lipetsk Spa). Horrified that he has gambled away the freedom of a trusted old servant who has looked after him since childhood, Sosnitsky renounces cards forever. Then the ruse is explained to him and everything ends happily. Similar in many ways to the worldly comedies of Shakhovskoy, Pushkin's projected The Gambler was also meant to sound a serious note about the abuses of serfowners' privileges, the theme of Pushkin's own impassioned poem, "The Village" (1819). In the 1920s, the Symbolist poet Valery Briusov did a reconstruction of this play, calling it Urok igroku (A Lesson to a Gambler), which in the opinion of Slonimsky missed the point of the relationship between Valberkhova and her suitor.⁵

In his book On Pushkin, Sergei Bondi has proposed a four-step periodization for Pushkin's activity as playwright. Step one comprises his "Decembrist" projects, the unfinished tragedy and comedy of 1821-22; step two is the "realistic" Boris Godunov; step three is the plays of 1830, that is, the "little tragedies" and Rusalka; and step four is the unfinished drafts for "social dramas" set in medieval Western Europe that date from the mid-1830s.⁶ Up to a certain point this periodization works, even though its transparent aim is to sustain the official Soviet conception of Pushkin moving toward ever greater realism, nationalism, and social awareness. Yet, it is unsatisfactory in the long run, not only because it distorts the progression of Pushkin's ideas, but because it ignores several other drafts that do not fit Bondi's scheme and fails to notice the mutual interpenetration of the dramatic and narrative genres that is so important in Pushkin's output in the 1820s.

While working on the drafts for his neoclassical tragedy about Vadim, Pushkin was at the same time introducing elements of romantic drama into his narrative poems. The center of The Fountain of Bakhchisarai is an impassioned melodramatic monologue by Zarema, one of the two heroines of the poem. This monologue later became the showpiece for Ekaterina Semyonova in Shakhovskoy's adaptation of this poem for the stage. Another narrative poem, The Gypsies (1824), is written for much of its length in the form of dramatic dialogues that read like a romantic play in verse. The diction of these dramatized poems owes nothing to any conceivable neoclassical model. But the case is very different with two other verse narratives dating from the first half of the 1820s, the opening chapters of Eugene Onegin and, especially, Count Nulin (1825).

The novel in verse Eugene Onegin is, of course, Pushkin's greatest achievement, an ever-fascinating poem that is also one of the central, most influential works of Russian literature. Volumes have been written about its style, so amazingly precise and so relaxed at the same time. Every possible source and influence have been analyzed by commentators. However, Pushkin himself acknowledged his debt to the two most important stylistic predecessors who helped shape the tone of Eugene Onegin. He encoded quotations from them in the first four lines of his novel …

My uncle, a man of most honest principles,
When he became so ill it was no joke,
Forced me to respect him
And could invent nothing better.

These somewhat opaque opening lines of Eugene Onegin can be recited by heart by most Russians. Numerous commentators have pointed out that the words samykh chestnykh pravil (of most honest principles) are a quotation from Ivan Krylov's fable "The Donkey and the Peasant," which Pushkin heard Krylov recite at a party in 1819, the year the fable was published.⁷ The citation is usually interpreted as an act of homage to Krylov, whose fables Pushkin valued above La Fontaine's.

But the fourth line of this quatrain is also a paraphrased quotation, in this case from the third scene of Khmelnitsky's Castles in the Air, which Pushkin must have seen when it premiered in St. Petersburg in July of 1818. The maid Sasha, in praising her employer Aglaeva's late husband for having willed all his property to his widow, says: "Umnee nichego on vydumat' ne mog" ("He could invent nothing more intelligent"). In incorporating this Khmelnitsky phrase into the opening of his masterpiece, Pushkin both got around the obstacle of not being able to mention Khmelnitsky the playwright (about which he wrote to his brother) and paid Khmelnitsky as handsome an homage as he did to Krylov in the first line. Since Onegin's uncle and Aglaeva's husband are both characters whose main significance lies in their dying and leaving an inheritance to the protagonists, Pushkin connected the beginning of Eugene Onegin to Khmelnitsky's comedy on a deeper level than a mere citation of words.

It was after he had completed the opening chapters of Eugene Onegin in 1824-25 that Pushkin became interested in Shakespeare and began a serious study of his plays. As Mikhail Alexeyev has shown in his excellent study of the relationship of Pushkin to Shakespeare, it was a question of relinquishing the eighteenth-century prejudices against Shakespeare that Pushkin had inherited from La Harpe and Voltaire in favor of the more up-to-date French view of Shakespeare brought about by the critical writings of Mme de Staël and the commentary of François Guizot and Amedée Pichot in their revised 1821 edition of Pierre Letourneur's old translations, originally published in the 1770s.⁸ "Mais quel homme que ce Schakespeare! [sic] Je n'en reviens pas. Comme Byron le tragique est mesquin devant lui!" Pushkin wrote to his friend Nikolai Raevsky in July of 1825. The full realization of Shakespeare's magnitude led Pushkin, as it did so many other writers of his generation, to lose his former high regard for both Molière and Byron.

Boris Godunov (1825, published 1830), Pushkin's only completed full-length play, was the result of his study of the man he came to call "our father Shakespeare." In honor of Shakespeare, Pushkin dispensed with the unities of time, place, and (though he denied it) action, something that only the Empress Catherine had had the audacity to do before in Russia. The violation of the unity of style, a unity previously taken for granted in Russian drama, is flaunted by mixing scenes in blank verse, rhymed verse, and prose. The central conception, however, is a profoundly eighteenth-century one, because Boris Godunov is an instance of "adaptation to our customs" of Shakespeare's historical plays just as Kniazhnin's Vladimir and Iaropolk was of Racine's Andromaque.

The overthrow of Tsar Boris in 1605 by the low-born pretender known as the False Dimitry became a subject for dramatic works within a few years after it occurred. From Lope de Vega's El gran Duque di Moscovia, published in 1617 but apparently written earlier, to Kotzebue's melodrama and Friedrich Schiller's unfinished last tragedy about the False Dimitry, both at the very end of the eighteenth century, there appeared in the West more than one hundred tragedies, novels, and even harlequinades about this series of events.⁹ In Russia, there were at least two plays called Dimitry the Impostor, one by Sumarokov (1771) and one by Narezhny (1800). Studying Shakespeare's Richard II, Richard III, and both parts of Henry IV, Pushkin must have noticed that all these plays deal with the toppling of an incumbent monarch whose claims to the throne are uncertain or tainted, by a self-appointed pretender whose claims are even less secure. Reading the story of Boris Godunov's fall in The History of the Russian State by Nikolai Karamzin (whose version of the events has been disproven by later historians), Pushkin realized its similarity to Shakespeare's histories and its suitability for a Shakespearean dramatization. He dedicated the play to Karamzin's memory.

Because it is a play about Russian history, written by Russia's national poet, there is general agreement among Russian commentators that Boris Godunov is one of the great masterpieces of Russian drama. Some critics, confusing Pushkin's play with the choral sections of Modest Musorgsky's opera, have described it as a folk tragedy, as a depiction of a people's revolution, or as a profound analysis of the dialectics of history.¹⁰ But patriotic homilies aside, Boris Godunov is on many levels an unsatisfactory play. Both Mirsky and Nabokov saw it as something of a failure. No director has ever been able to make it work on the stage. Although Pushkin copied many of Shakespeare's techniques, he somehow failed to notice that in each of the historic plays he imitated there is a dramatic arch that unites the activities of the antagonists and allows for the development of their characters and for a satisfactory final resolution of the play's action.

But in Boris Godunov, as John Bayley has aptly pointed out, "between Boris and the pretended Dimitry there is no dramatic relation at all. Not only do they never meet but each is absorbed in his own affairs, and their historical antagonism is not transposed into psychological terms but left in the realm of the accidental or the historically determined."¹¹ Individual scenes may contain wonderful poetry or function as effective self-contained dramatic units (e.g., the scene at the fountain between Dimitry and Marina or the scene at the inn on the Lithuanian frontier), but they do not add up to a viable continuum. The addition of Musorgsky's tense and haunting music does make Pushkin's tragedy work in a theater, but it is a music light years removed from the tone and the atmosphere of the original play. John Bayley was quite right when he wrote that Pushkin made a far better application of the dramatic principles of Shakespeare's stagecraft in his historical narrative poem Poltava (1828-29) than in his tragedy.¹²

In the midst of his work on Boris Godunov, Pushkin became acquainted with Griboedov's The Misfortune of Being Clever. Charmed by the new possibilities of rhymed iambic lines of varying lengths that Griboedov so effectively exploited for dramatic purposes in his comedy, Pushkin added to Boris Godunov the beautifully wrought scene in Marina Mniszech's dressing room. In the lilting dialogue between Marina and her maid Rózia (the Polish diminutive of Rose), Pushkin abandons Shakespeare's manner for Griboedov's and Shakespeare's and Karamzin's matter for that of the same third scene of Khmelnitsky's Castles in the Air already quoted in the first quatrain of Eugene Onegin. Marina's dreams of being a tsarina in Moscow, and Rózia's lively advice and comments closely follow Aglaeva's dreams of marrying a count and moving to St. Petersburg and her conversation with her maid. Despite having strayed into the beginning of the seventeenth century and having acquired a Polish name, Rózia is an unmistakable soubrette of early nineteenth-century Russian verse comedy in general and a near-twin of Sasha from Castles in the Air in particular. Pushkin must have understood that for all its charm, this scene did not belong in his Shakespearean tragedy. He removed it from the main text and relegated it to an appendix, where it now regularly appears.

The combination of Shakespeare and Khmelnitsky, ludicrous as such a conjunction may sound to most people, was also responsible for Count Nulin, a lively and witty narrative poem Pushkin wrote one month after completing Boris Godunov. As Pushkin put it in a later explanatory note on Count Nulin, the idea for this poem came to him as he was rereading "The Rape of Lucrece," which he qualified as "a rather feeble poem by Shakespeare." It set him wondering what would have happened if, instead of submitting to Tarquin, Lucrece had routed the man by slapping his face. Tarquin might have desisted and, Pushkin says, "the world and its history would have been different."

The beginning of Count Nulin, with its description of a lusty country squire's departure for the hunt with a pack of hounds and the boredom and loneliness of the wife he leaves behind, has no connection to either Shakespeare or Khmelnitsky. But then a carriage bell is heard, the carriage overturns, an unknown but attractive male traveler and his servant are invited into the house to recuperate, and we are suddenly in Pushkin's favorite Khmelnitsky comedy, Castles in the Air. The strategem of having the male protagonist's carriage break down in front of the heroine's home in order to get them acquainted was in fact a trademark of Khmelnitsky's, to which he resorted, as Moisei Iankovsky has pointed out,¹³ in no less than three of his twelve plays. It was Khmelnitsky's own invention, because in Collin d'Harleville's Les châteaux en Espagne, on which two of these three plays were based, there are no carriage accidents. There, the young man blunders into the chateau by mistake, after having lost his way. That Pushkin borrowed the patented device of his "favorite poet" so openly to start the action of Count Nulin should leave no doubt that he wanted the connection of this poem to Khmelnitsky to be obvious. It may well be that Count Nulin is the equivalent of that couplet in honor of Khmelnitsky of which Pushkin had written to his brother a few months earlier.

Pushkin's treatment of Castles in the Air in Count Nulin is similar to the procedure Khmelnitsky applied to the full-length French comedies on which he based his brief Russian plays. Only the general situation and a few concrete details are retained. The characters placed in this situation are each writer's own. The bored wife in Pushkin is quite unlike Khmelnitsky's ambitious widow Aglaeva, and the serious, modest midshipman of Castles in the Air is nothing like the feather-brained fop Count Nulin. But the experiences that these two couples have during their encounter are, up to a point, remarkably alike. In both cases, the lady of the house hears a carriage bell, hopes it is a visitor, witnesses a carriage breakdown through the window, and invites the accident victim and his manservant into the house. In both cases, the man is pleasantly surprised to find himself hospitably received by an attractive and seeming available young woman, is encouraged by her to press his suit, and then, to his consternation, rejected and encouraged to leave.

The main difference is that Aglaeva dismisses the unlucky midshipman on the day of his arrival, after realizing that he is not the wealthy count for whom she took him. Count Nulin is invited to spend the night, and it is during his nocturnal visit to the bedroom of his hostess that the poem turns into a comical parody of the analogous scenes in "The Rape of Lucrèce." The repulsed seduction is the dramatic high point of Count Nulin and because of it this poem is generally described as Pushkin's parody of Shakespeare.¹⁴ But the allusions to Khmelnitsky's comedy (which also include the character of the heroine's soubrette confidante Parasha, not needed for the action of the poem except to serve as the counterpart of Sasha in Castles in the Air; and the discussion of the news and newspapers by the two protagonists), take up far more space and contribute more to the poem's narrative plot than do the elements drawn from Shakespeare.

Pushkin was to succumb to the temptation of the demon of neoclassical verse comedy on two more occasions, in a sketch for a play that dates from approximately 1827 and in a novella written in 1830. The sketch is an expository dialogue between a gentleman and the maid of the lady to whom he is engaged. It begins….

"It has taken you a long time to resolve
yourself to leave Moscow."
"Have you been well, my dear?" "And you,
sir, are you well?"

The maid works for two sisters. The older, Olga Pavlovna, is a widow engaged to the traveler just arrived from Moscow. The younger, Sophia Pavlovna (the name and patronymic of the heroine of The Misfortune of Being Clever), has a suitor named Èlmirov. Finding an unsigned amorous note from Èlmirov to Sophia, the nameless protagonist tries to bribe the maid with a gift of jewelry so that she will pass the note to Olga. His apparent aim is to test Olga's fidelity.

Brief as it is, the fragment makes mincemeat of all the standard schemes of dividing Pushkin's work into classical, romantic, and realist stages, schemes that were mocked by the epigraph from Stravinsky's essay on Pushkin at the head of the present [essay]. If it really dates from 1827 (the dating is approximate), it is contemporary with the seventh chapter of Eugene Onegin. This is the chapter in which the impact of Griboedov's comedy on Pushkin is most evident, both in its epigraph from that comedy and in the satirical description of Tatiana's Moscow relatives, which echoes Chatsky's and Famusov's speeches about the elderly women and men who run Moscow society. (Tatiana's romantically surrealistic dream in the fifth chapter also owes something to the dream of Griboedov's Sophia.) The verse of the 1827 fragment is likewise derived from Griboedov.

The opening scene of The Lipetsk Spa, which shows Prince Kholmsky's conversation with Olenka's maid Sasha, was the probable model for the opening scene of this projected comedy. Bribing a maid with a gift of jewelry occurs in both Shakhovskoy's Don't Listen … and Griboedov's The Misfortune of Being Clever. A plot that involves an act of entrapment in order to test a woman's fidelity was already old in 1789 when Lorenzo da Ponte based his libretto for Mozart's Cosí fan tutte on it. In Russian neoclassical comedy of the nineteenth century it is central to Khmelnitsky's Mutual Tests (Vzaimnye ispytaniia, 1819) and Griboedov and Zhandr's Pretended Infidelity.

The itch to write a verse comedy in the Shakhovskoy-Khmelnitsky manner is also evident in the 1828 sketches for Pushkin's translation of Le mari à bonnes fortunes by Casimir Bonjour. This was to be an abridgment of a light French comedy that was a hit in Paris in 1824, rendered in couplets of rhymed iambic pentameter and with the action transposed to Moscow from Paris. But Pushkin must have realized that the day of this type of comedy was over in Russia. Shakhovskoy had not written in this form for almost a decade, Khmelnitsky was about to retire from playwriting, Alexander Pisarev (for whose vaudevilles and comedies Pushkin had a low regard) died in 1828. Though Pushkin had already written a masterful verse comedy with preservation of the classical unities in Count Nulin, his love affair with the genre did not find its final resolution until the 1830 prose novella "Mistress into Maid" ("Baryshnia krest'ianka").

The cycle of five novellas Pushkin wrote in Boldino in the fall of 1830 is united by the framework of a fictitious narrator Ivan Belkin who has supposedly collected these stories. The cycle is therefore called The Tales of Belkin. As Vasily Gippius has shown in a masterful essay, these tales operate on two levels: as entertaining narratives and as witty parodies of literary and dramatic conventions.¹⁵ Thus "The Coffinmaker" is a gentle debunking of Hoffmannesque tales of the supernatural. "The Station Master," which Gippius says cannot be understood without knowing the sentimental dramas of Beaumarchais, Lessing, and Schiller, reverses the familiar plot of the seduction of a daughter of a lower-class family by a dissolute aristocrat, a plot that was also familiar in Russia from the dramatizations of Karamzin's "Poor Liza" by Ilyin and Fyodorov.

"The Snowstorm" plays with the improbable coincidences of sentimentalist drama, while "The Shot," despite outward trappings that point to adventure tales by Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, is a parodistic retelling of Victor Hugo's Hernani.¹⁶ "Mistress into Maid" is a neoclassical comedy turned into a prose narrative. Belinsky, who took a strong dislike to this story, discerned its origins when he described it as "improbable, vaudevillelike, showing the life of landowners from its idyllic side."¹⁷ Pavel Katenin saw "Mistress into Maid" as a reworking of Le jeu de l'amour et du hasard by Marivaux into a short story in a manner analogous to Pushkin's later reworking of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure into his narrative poem "Angelo."¹⁸ And yet, apart from the young noblewoman Silvia disguising herself as a servant—a widespread ploy in eighteenth-century opera and comedy, including The Marriage of Figaro and She Stoops to Conquer—there is little in common between Pushkin's novella and the comedy of Marivaux. The comedies that were on Pushkin's mind while he was writing "Mistress into Maid" were not by Marivaux but by Katenin's good friend Shakhovskoy.

The presence of Shakhovskoy is initially signaled by a quoted line from his First Satire (addressed to Molière) that appears on the first page of "Mistress into Maid." The passage from which this line comes ridicules Russian landowners who seek to improve the crop yields of their estates by introducing newfangled agricultural methods imported from England and go broke as a result. The thesis about the wastefulness and absurdity of imitating English-style farming, expressed in the 1807 satire, was developed by Shakhovskoy in 1819 into a full-length comedy The Prodigal Landowners, which contrasted the silly Anglomaniac Prince Radugin with his uncle General Radimov, who prospers by staying with the traditional Russian farming methods.

This is precisely the theme of the opening pages of Pushkin's "Mistress into Maid," which describe the feud between two neighboring landowners, the sensible traditionalist Berestov and the Anglomaniac Muromsky, who slowly ruins himself by forcing his serfs to farm à l'anglaise. The Shakhovskoy connection is further driven home by the information that Muromsky is a close relative of Count Pronsky, a distinguished and powerful statesman. This must be the one-time sentimentalist of The New Sterne, who has come to his senses and made an important career in the quarter century that separates Pushkin's novella from the play, rather than Colonel Pronsky of The Lipetsk Spa, who was not a count. The appearance of Berestov's son Alexei, a healthy and lusty young fellow who affects a Byronic pose of disappointment and dejection, is Pushkin's mocking of emotional stances that imitate literary fads, just as The New Sterne was Shakhovskoy's mockery of an earlier variant of the same phenomenon.

Muromsky's daughter Liza disguises herself as a peasant wench in order to meet the son of her father's enemy. The description of the two young people's romance moves away from Shakhovskoy and becomes a parody of all those Karamzinian plays where a young aristocrat woos a peasant maiden named Liza who later turns out to be a nobleman's daughter, a connection that is emphasized when Pushkin makes Alexei and Liza read Karamzin's "Natalia, the Boyar's Daughter." Pushkin's Liza is a mistress of numerous disguises, just as Shakhovskoy's Natasha was in The Married Fiancée. She has to impersonate not only a peasant but also an affected, bejeweled, and heavily made-up society lady. For each of these impersonations, Liza develops a new personality and a set of appropriate speech mannerisms. Despite her lack of any theatrical training, she is an accomplished comedienne, as inexplicably as Shakhovskoy's Natasha.

The resolution of "Mistress into Maid," which involves the reconciliation of the feuding fathers, Alexei's plans to marry the young woman he thinks is a peasant, and the lucky chance that reveals her true identity to him, is worked out with the sure hand of a writer of eighteenth-century comedies of intrigue and disguise. Especially typical of that whole genre is the character of Liza's serf confidante and abettor in her disguises, the soubrette Nastya. Pushkin was capable of depicting believable, realistically observed Russian serfs and servants: Tatiana's nurse in Eugene Onegin, Masha's maid Palasha in The Captain's Daughter, and the hero's serf tutor in the same novel. But whenever he writes something inspired by the tradition of the neoclassical verse comedy of the Shakhovskoy-Khmelnitsky-Griboedov type, we invariably get lively and witty soubrettes of the French and Russian comedie traditions who could not possibly have existed in actual Russian life. Nastya in "Mistress into Maid" is the last of this line, which also includes Rózia in the dressing-room scene of Boris Godunov, Parasha in Count Nulin, and the nameless maid in the 1827 draft for a comedy.

Writing "Mistress into Maid" must have exorcised Pushkin's fascination with the spirit of neoclassical comedy, for it is absent from his plays, verse tales, and prose narratives written from that point on. Within weeks after completing the last of The Tales of Belkin, Pushkin set to work on his cycle of "little tragedies" (this was during the miraculously productive Boldino autumn of 1830, when in a period of three months he produced, besides the cycle of stories and the cycle of plays, a large number of lyric poems and essays, in addition to writing "The Little House in Kolomna" and completing Eugene Ïne gin).

Inspired by a genre devised by Barry Cornwall (pen name of Bryan Waller Proctor, a rather pallid poet admired in his day by Byron and Keats) of brief dialogues in verse that combined features of drama and narrative poetry, Pushkin had been planning since 1826 to write a series of what he called "dramatic investigations" or "dramatic studies," each one concentrating on an analysis of one particular passion. In 1827, he listed the subjects he intended to use in these investigations: The Miser, Romulus and Remus (in which the she-wolf that raised them was to be a character), Mozart and Salieri, Don Juan, Jesus, Berald of Savoy, Tsar Paul I, A Devil in Love, Dimitry and Marina (whose relationship was left dangling in Boris Godunov), and Prince Kurbsky (the one-time adviser of Ivan the Terrible who later went over to the Poles and wrote the tsar famous vituperative letters; Kurbsky's son, invented by Pushkin, appeared in Boris Godunov).

Only three of these projects were realized in 1830. "The Miser" became Skupoi rytsar', the brief play Pushkin preferred for personal reasons to palm off as a translation of a nonexistent English play The Covetous Knight by William Shenstone.¹⁹ The ruse was necessitated by the similarity between the disagreements on money matters between the old Baron and his rebellious son in the play and the actual situation between Pushkin and his father; "covetous" is not the right word to convey the Russian title, "avaricious" being much closer. Mozart and Salieri, converted in recent times into a London and New York hit play Amadeus by Peter Schaffer and stemming from newspaper reports about Antonio Salieri's deathbed confession that he had poisoned Mozart,²⁰ is a study of envy.

The Stone Guest, the longest and most dramatic of the "little tragedies," derived, very remotely, from Molière's play about Don Juan and da Ponte's libretto for Mozart, investigates various kinds of amorous involvement between men and women. The three female characters are Inez (in an earlier draft she was a miller's daughter) whom Don Juan seduced and abandoned and who died because of it; the actress Laura, whose relationship with him is that of a friend and equal, despite their sexual involvement; and Donna Anna, who in this version is not the daughter, but the widow of the Comendador, a man Don Juan had killed in a duel. Donna Anna's particular attraction is her virtue and unavailability, which compel the famous seducer to love rather than merely desire her. In a provocative study of The Stone Guest, Anna Akhmatova has argued persuasively that this play, written just when Pushkin was to give up the sexual freedom of his earlier life in order to marry, contained elements of self-portraiture in both Don Juan and the Comendador.²¹

In addition to being studies of particular passions—avarice, envy, sexual drive—the three "little tragedies" are also united by the theme that was central to Boris Godunov: the incumbent defending his status from an aggressive usurper. Just as Boris had to defend his throne from the False Dimitry, the Baron in The Covetous Knight has to defend his hoard from his son Albert, Salieri has to defend his position in the musical world from Mozart, and the statue of the Comendador has to stop his murderer from possessing his wife. The outcome of this situation, common to all four plays, is variable. In Boris Godunov and The Covetous Knight, the usurpers triumph, while in Mozart and Salieri and The Stone Guest they are destroyed by the defending incumbents.

Usually grouped with the three "little tragedies," but only because it was written at the same time with them, is Feast During the Plague, Pushkin's compressed adaptation of several scenes from John Wilson's romantic drama The City of the Plague.²² A dramatic poem rather than a play, it is a disturbing and beautiful meditation about our perpetual fascination with death. It treats in romantic terms what Ozerov had expressed in sentimentalist and neoclassical terms in Polyxena. It is also utterly unstageable (though its production has been tried). Feast During the Plague and the three "little tragedies" are philosophically complex works, they contain magnificent poetry, but none of them is very effective dramatically. Because they are by Pushkin, Russian theaters keep staging them. But like all of Pushkin's plays, the "little tragedies" function far better on the operatic stage than as spoken drama. The operatic setting of The Stone Guest is by Alexander Dargomyzhsky, of Mozart and Salieri by Rimsky-Korsakov (with the utilization of much of Mozart's own music), and of The Covetous Knight by Sergei Rakhmaninov.

Both Anna Akhmatova and Naum Berkovsky have connected the figure of the gentle Inez, the miller's daughter in the draft for the first scene of The Stone Guest, with the genesis of Pushkin's most effective play, dramatically and poetically: the regrettably unfinished folk drama Rusalka.²³ Like Shakespeare and Molière before him, Pushkin did not disdain borrowing themes from unimpressive sources. The magic operas about the water sprites of the Dnieper, based on Das Donauweibchen (see pp. 186ff.), took up residence on the stages of Russia when Pushkin was four years old and they remained there for at least a decade after he died. It was the plot of the first of the Water Sprites that Pushkin decided to convert into a drama couched in an idiom derived from his detailed studies of Russian folklore.²⁴

In Das Donauweibchen and its four Russian avatars, the heroine is an elemental spirit who has had an affair with a mortal man, has a daughter by him, and objects to his plans to marry a mortal woman. In an early draft for Rusalka that dates from 1826, it can be seen that Pushkin intended to keep this situation. In the final version written in part in 1829 and in part in 1832, he chose to follow the widespread Slavic folk legend, which also served as the source for Adolphe Adam's ballet Giselle, about a peasant maiden who is seduced and abandoned by a nobleman and who then returns to haunt him as a supernatural creature.²⁵ Instead of having to choose between a woman and a mythological being, Pushkin's Prince is initially involved with a poor miller's daughter whom he abandons when dynastic reasons force him to take a bride of his own social standing.

The language of Rusalka is an expressive blend of high romantic poetry and of diction derived from traditional Russian songs and laments. Dramatically, it is enormously effective. Rusalka is the only play by Pushkin in which the principal characters really interact with one another. As in a folk legend, there are no proper names, yet the characters are individualized and their emotional predicaments are convincingly drawn. The miller's daughter, who drowns herself in the Dnieper after she is betrayed by her lover and is then reincarnated as a "rusalka, cold and powerful"; her scheming father, who is driven insane by the realization of what he had done to his daughter; her initially faithless and then penitent lover, the Prince; the Prince's neglected, anxious wife; the rusalka's young daughter, born into a supernatural world, but curious about her human origins—all these are splendid creations, believable on the psychological level, hauntingly poetic, and dramatically absorbing.

Rusalka was potentially the great and original folk drama that Pushkin's countrymen have credited him with having written in Boris Godunov. Its lack of an ending is so self-evidently deplorable that numerous hands have tried supplying it with one. Three amateurish attempts were made in the second half of the nineteenth century, and one of them was temporarily accepted by critics as the discovery of Pushkin's own manuscript for the conclusion of his play. In the twentieth century, final scenes for Rusalka were written by Valery Briusov and Vladimir Nabokov, but matching Pushkin's language proved beyond even their considerable talents. The ending Dargomyzhsky devised for his 1856 opera is at best a makeshift solution. Only Pushkin himself could have provided an appropriate finale, but in the last five years of his life he seems to have lost interest in writing drama in verse.

Pushkin's involvement with Shakespeare, which began in 1824, was crowned in 1833 by "Angelo," his reworking of Measure for Measure into a narrative poem.²⁶ Pushkin himself considered it the finest of his narrative poems, but it remains to this day undeservedly neglected by both critics and general readers.²⁷ After abandoning Rusalka, Pushkin made sketches for three historical dramas in prose, set in Western Europe in medieval times. All three were to show persons of humble origins rising to great social prominence and then coming into conflict with the ruling elite of their time. In 1835 Pushkin wrote several scenes for the first of these projects, which had no title in his manuscript and was called by later editors Scenes from the Time of Knighthood. Like the majority of Pushkin's dramatic projects, it has literary sources, in this case La Jacquerie by Prosper Mérimée, the story "Tournament in Revel" by Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky (1825), and one of the same author's critical essays.²⁸

Set in Germany, the play was to include among its characters Berthold Schwartz, the semilegendary inventor of gunpowder, and to be centered on a revolt against the local feudal hierarchy led by a merchant's son who has become a minnesinger. The sketches are so pallid and undramatic that it is hard to believe they are the work of the mature Pushkin. The other two of this group of projects exist only as outlines. One is about the son of a hangman in France who ends up as a feudal lord. The other is based on the medieval legend of Pope Joan, an artisan's daughter whose love of learning led her to study theology in male attire and who was elected pope and then exposed as a woman when she gave birth to a child (by the Spanish ambassador to the Vatican) in a public place.²⁹ This was to be a Faustian drama, with devils and other supernatural beings participating in the action. Pushkin was not sure whether the subject was more suitable for a drama or a poem in the manner of Coleridge's "Christable."³⁰

"The twentieth century began in the fall of 1914 together with the war, just as the nineteenth century began with the Congress of Vienna. Calendar dates mean nothing," wrote Anna Akhmatova in her "Fragments of Memoirs."³¹ For the study of Russian literature, a far clearer picture emerges if we assume that the eighteenth century began in 1730 (Trediakovsky's proposal to use contemporary vernacular in imaginative literature) and ended in 1830, the date of publication of Boris Godunov. Poet-playwrights of Pushkin's generation may have been exposed to sentimentalist and romantic currents from the time of their adolescence, but they were all born in the eighteenth century and came to literary maturity when neoclassicism was still the norm. Some of them, such as Khmelnitsky and Alexander Pisarev, never quite emerged from it. Others were converted to romanticism, first Pushkin and after him, one by one, Katenin, Griboedov, and Küchelbecker. For these men, such a conversion was still a matter of choice.

But by 1830, the literary compass needle of Russian drama had permanently shifted from the pole of Molière to that of Shakespeare and Schiller (and, on a lower level, from Metastasio to Kotzebue and from there to Scribe). Playwrights born in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century turned their backs on neoclassical drama. The last to learn his craft from Russian neoclassical comedy was one of Russia's greatest playwrights, Nikolai Gogol. His Inspector General (1836) casts a long, lingering look of farewell at the theater of Fonvizin, Kapnist, and Shakhovskoy and then sets off, full sail, for the new shores of nineteenth- and twentieth-century drama, where Russian playwrights would become an integral part of the international theatrical world.

Notes

¹ Igor Stravinsky, "Pushkin: Poetry and Music," in Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), p. 542 (appendix). The quoted portion is Stravinsky's idea of a typical Russian muddle-headed view of Pushkin.

² See Gozenpud's introductory essay to his edition of A. A. Shakhovskoy, Komedii, stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1961), pp. 35-37, for an analysis of allusions to Vasily Pushkin and Sergei Uvarov in The Lipetsk Spa.

³Pushkin í teatral'nykh kreslakh (Leningrad, 1926), pp. 122-31. Despite a few factual errors, Grossman's book is an excellent summary of Pushkin's early theatrical impressions that found wide reflections in his narrative poems of the 1820s.

⁴ In his commentary to this fragment in A. S Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad, 1935), vol. 7, pp. 673-77. The seventh volume of the edition of Pushkin's complete collected works, issued to commemorate the centenary of his death in 1937, was the first one of the series to be published. It contained both his completed and uncompleted dramatic works and included some 350 pages of detailed scholarly commentary by the finest Pushkin specialists of the period, among them Boris Tomashevsky, Mikhail Alexeyev, and Sergei Bondi. The scope and the scrupulously honest scholarship of this commentary make this volume the best single source of information on Pushkin the dramatist that has ever been published. But the objectivity of the commentators and the absence in their work of mandatory ideological and nationalistic biases angered the Soviet government. The commentary was dropped from subsequent printing of the volume (reportedly, on the personal order of Stalin), and the rest of the centenary edition was published without scholarly annotations.

The intellectual integrity of the editors of the 1935 volume contrasts heartbreakingly with the compulsory cliches that pervade some of their later publications on Pushkin (e.g., Sergei Bondi's book O Pushkine [Moscow, 1978]). In the notes that follow, this volume will be referred to as Pushkin, 1935.

⁵ See Pushkin, 1935, p. 668.

⁶ Bondi, O Pushkine, p. 179.

⁷ In his annotated translation of Eugene Onegin (New York, 1964), Vladimir Nabokov devotes almost two pages to detailed explication of this three-word quotation from Krylov (vol. 2, pp. 29-31). For some reason, Nabokov chose to render "The Donkey and the Peasant" ("Osel i muzhik") as "The Ass and the Boor."

⁸ M. P. Alexeyev, "Pushkin i Shekspir," in his book Pushkin (Leningrad, 1972), pp. 240-80. The same mate rial is presented in Shekspir i russkaia kul'tura, ed. M. P. Alexeyev (Moscow and Leningrad, 1965), pp. 162 ff.

⁹ For a survey of Western treatments, see M. P. Alexeyev, "Boris Gudunov i Dimitry Samozvanets v zapadno-evropeiskoi drame," in "Boris Gudonov" A. S. Pushkina, ed. K. N. Derzhavin (Leningrad, 1936), pp. 79-124.

¹⁰ A rare instance of cogent argument for the originality of Pushkin's historical insights in Boris Godunov is Ilya Serman's fine essay "Paradoksy narodnogo soznaniia v tragedii A. S. Pushkina 'Boris Godunov' " ("Paradoxes of Popular Consciousness in Pushkin's Boris Godunov"), Russian Language Journal 35 (Winter 1981): 83-88.

¹¹ John Bayley, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (Cambridge, 1971), p. 166.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ In Russkaia stikhotvornaia komediia kontsa XVIII-nachala XIX v. ed. Moisei Iankovsky (Moscow-Leningrad, 1964), pp. 24-25.

¹⁴ George Gibian, "Pushkin's Parody On 'The Rape of Lucrece'," The Shakespeare Quarterly 1 (October 1950): 264-66.

¹⁵ V. V. Gippius, "Povesti Belkina," in his book Ot Pushkina do Bloka (Moscow-Leningrad, 1966), pp. 7-45.

¹⁶ See David M. Bethea and Sergei Davydov, "Pushkin's Saturnine Cupid: The Poetics of Parody in The Tales of Belkin," PMLA 96(1) (1981): 18-19 (note 11). This is an excellent study of the literary models and parodistic content of The Tales of Belkin. Its survey of earlier commentators shows that every possible source and resemblance has been explored, except for the Karamzinian drama and neoclassical comedy of Pushkin's time. "Mistress into Maid" ("The Lady Peasant" in this study) has been traced to sources as remote as Romeo and Juliet and Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor (note 24 on p. 20). Proximate sources, such as the plays about "Poor Liza" and Shakhovskoy's comedies remained outside the commentators' purview.

¹⁷ V. G. Belinsky, Sobranie sochinenii (St. Peters-burg, 1911), vol. 3, p. 489.

¹⁸ Cited in Gippius, "Povesti Belkina," p. 26.

¹⁹ On the possible connection between Pucshkin and Shenstone, see Richard A. Gregg, "Pushkin and Shenstone: The Case Reopened," Comparative Literature 17(2) (1965): 109-16.

²⁰ On the origins of the legend about Salieri's murder of Mozart and Pushkin's sources for the play, see Mikhail Alexeyev's detailed study in Pushkin, 1935, especially pp. 525 ff. It is curious that Pushkin's poetic genius unjustly convicted two people who had actually lived, Boris Godunov and Antonio Salieri, of murders they did not commit. On affinities between Pushkin and Mozart, see Vladimir Markov, "Mozart: Theme and Variations," in The Bitter Air of Exile, ed. Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel, Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977), pp. 455-57.

²¹ Anna Akhmatova, " 'Kamennyi gost' Pushkina," in her book O Pushkine (Leningrad, 1977), pp. 89-109, and also note 7 on p. 168.

²² See Henry Gifford, "Pushkin's Feast in the Time of Plague and Its Original," American Slavic and East European Review 8 (February 1949): 37-46.

²³ Akhmatova, O Pushkine, pp. 165 and 169. N. Berkovsky, " 'Rusalka,' liricheskaia tragediia Pushkina," in his book Stat'i o literature (Moscow-Leningrad, 1962), pp. 357-403.

²⁴ For a thorough analysis of Rusalka's connection to The Water Sprite comic operas, see Sergei Bondi's commentary in Pushkin, 1935, pp. 623-36.

²⁵ The manuscript of this play contained no title. The editors, recognizing the similarity of Pushkin's play to The Water Sprite, gave it the same title, Rusalka. The word rusalka refers in the Russian poetic and dramatic tradition to three different kinds of beings. In The Water Sprite operas, as in Zhukovsky's romance in verse Undina, it is an undine, a water sprite in female form. In Russian translations of Western fairy tales, such as Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," the word rusalka is used to denote a mermaid, a creature half-woman half-fish, who lives in the ocean. Neither an undine nor a mermaid was originally a human being.

But in Pushkin's play, just as in Gogol's story "May Night," rusalka is a young woman who is driven to drown herself because of her misfortunes and is only then reincarnated as a supernatural, water-dwelling being, whose aim is to punish those who have caused her suffering—a very different being from either an undine or a mermaid. Despite the similarity of the plot of Pushkin's play to Water Sprite, the heroine has a totally different nature and this is why I prefer to use the word rusalka for her, rather than water sprite or mermaid.

²⁶ See Alexeyev, Pushkin, pp. 276 ff.

²⁷ See George Gibian, "Measure for Measure and Pushkin's 'Angelo,' " PMLA 66 (June 1951): 426-31.

²⁸ See Bondi's commentary in Pushkin, 1935, pp. 652 ff. The excommunication of Alexander Bestuzhev (1797-1837; Marlinsky was his pen name) from Russian literature by Belinsky in 1840 prevents critics to this day from examining the impact on Pushkin of this important romantic critic and innovative prose writer, who was Pushkin's close friend and correspondent. The vast field of Eugene Onegin studies has still to discover the affinities between Bestuzhev's travelogue in verse and prose, A Journey to Revel, published in 1821, and Pushkin's celebrated novel in verse, begun in 1823.

²⁹ On the legend of Pope Joan and an account of Pushkin's interest in it, see Iulian Oksman's commentary in Pushkin, 1935, pp. 695-700.

³⁰ To demonstrate Pushkin's ties to the verse comedy of the Shakhovskoy-Khmelnitsky school, the present chapter has had to encompass discussions of the poet's nondramatic writings. The points could best be made through examining his literary practices and ignoring his theories about drama, which, though highly important, do not always reflect his true stylistic orientation. The reader will find valuable discussions of the relationship between Pushkin's theories on drama (as stated in his essays and personal correspondence) and his plays in the chapter "The Drama" in John Bayley's Pushkin and in the other critical sources mentioned in the annotations to the present chapter. See also two of Pushkin's essays on drama theory in Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, An Anthology, ed. Laurence Senelick (Austin, 1981).

³¹ Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniia (Paris, 1983) vol. 3, p. 146.