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Ambiguity as Agent in Pushkin's and Shakespeare's Historical Tragedies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
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The question of Shakespeare's influence on Pushkin's work in the period beginning 1824-25 has often been examined in critical works on Pushkin. This influence has generally been construed as one of the decisive factors in Pushkin's poetic and personal maturation away from his early naive Byronism. At the same time, Pushkin found in Shakespeare a release from the outworn conventions of French classical drama that had until then provided the precepts for writers for the Russian stage. For Pushkin, two specific features of Shakespearean drama were congenial: the abandonment of the three classical unities in favor of the primacy of character in dramatic action, and generic mixtures of comedy and tragedy, poetry and prose.
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References
I am very grateful to David M. Bethea, Caryl Emerson, and Stephanie Sandler for their helpful and insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
1. The literature is far too extensive to cite in full here, but key works that address this matter include the following: Alekseev, M. P., Pushkin: Sravnitel'no-istoricheskie issledovaniia (Leningrad, 1984), 253–92Google Scholar; Bayley, John, Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary (Cambridge, Eng., 1971), 165–85Google Scholar; Emerson, Caryl, Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (Bloomington, 1986), 110–19Google Scholar; Levin, Iu. D., Shekspir i russkaia literatura XIX veka (Leningrad, 1988), 32–49 Google Scholar; G. O. Vinokur, “Boris Godunov: Shekspirizm, reforma tragedii,” in “Kommentarii k Borisu Godunovu,” Polnoe sobranie sochineniia A, S. Pushkina (Moscow, 1935), 7: 481–96; and, most recently, Greenleaf, Monika, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, 1994), 156–204Google Scholar. These discussions provide an excellent foundation for an understanding of Shakespeare's influence on Pushkin's overall artistic development, but no one has attempted a detailed comparative analysis of Shakespeare's plays in conjunction with Boris Godunov, which most Russian and Soviet scholars consider structureless and fragmentary.
2. I want to make it clear at the outset that all my comments about Pushkin's historicism in this paper are based entirely on Pushkin's dramatic treatment of the specific historical events of the Time of Troubles—with the aid of Shakespearean historical methods—in this particular play. Any broader conclusions are beyond the scope of the present study.
3. Levin, Shekspir i russkaia literatura XIX veha, 35. Throughout this article, translations from Russian sources (including Boris Godunov) are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
4. Emerson, Boris Godunov, 110–11.
5. Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 161.
6. For example, see Levin (Shekspir i russkaia literatura XIX veka, 36).
7. See the play's first review, authored ostensibly by Faddei Bulgarin, in the work edited by V. V. Kunin entitled Zhizn’ Pushkina: Rasskazannaia im samim i ego sovremennikami: Perepiska, vospominaniia, dnevniki (Moscow, 1987), 2: 65.Google Scholar
8. For a brief summary of similarities to other Shakespeare plays, see Emerson (Boris Godunov, 238ra69). Greenleaf's chapter on Boris Godunov (Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 156–204) focuses on intersections with, and reversals of, themes and scenes from Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet—although her main concern is, after all, not with Shakespeare per se but with illustrating the presence of Renaissance themes (in particular, a failed Machiavellian ideology) in Pushkin's play.
9. Garber, Marjorie, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London, 1981), 100 Google Scholar. The problem of succession and its enactment in the dramatic and linguistic aspects of Richard III are also discussed in an article by William C. Carroll entitled ‘ “The Form of Law': Ritual and Succession in Richard III,” in Woodbridge, Linda and Berry, Edward, eds., True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age (Urbana, 1992), 203–19Google Scholar. This article is an example of the recent “revisionist” Shakespeare scholarship (cf. note 16).
10. Emerson, Boris Godunov, 118.
11. Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 161–62.
12. Ibid., 165.
13. Although my interpretation conflicts with Greenleafs on several minor points (noted here and below, cf. note 14), she and I are in agreement on the fundamental point that “Boris Godunov [was] not assimilated to the legible structure of the Shakespeare/ Karamzin chronicle cycle” (Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 163).
14. In a recent paper, Alexander Dolinin develops a theory about Pushkin's view of history which, on the whole, accords well with my own understanding of the paradoxical structure of Boris Godunov and the historicism such a structure necessarily implies. Dolinin juxtaposes Pushkin's views on history with the views of French romantic historians (Augustin Thierry, Francois-Auguste Mignet, Guizot, et al.) and argues that Pushkin's views indicate a path not toward realism and historicism, but rather toward an archaized resurrection of eighteenth-century sentimentalist views: “History becomes a realm of hazard—without emplotment, without pattern… . Hence meanings are trans-historical, providential; coincidences, chance, in Pushkin's definition, are a weapon of Providence” ( “Historicism or Providentiahsm? Pushkin's History of the Pugachev Rebellion in the Context of Contemporary Codes” [paper, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, October 1995], 6). With respect to Boris Godunov, I would only amend this statement by claiming that just as, on the one hand, Pushkin's historicism in the play is clearly distinguished from the French romantic emphasis on the production of meanings by its fragmentary presentation, so too, on the other hand, Karamzin's insistence on a clear progression of cause and effect and on clear moral lessons to be gleaned from the course of history is similarly eschewed (as is the historical moralism that Schlegel ascribes to Shakespeare). Rather, in Boris Godunov, the peculiar “providential” principle suggested by the play's subtle counterpoint of structure and fragment, symmetry and chaos is a principle that is hidden, difficult to tease out, morally confounding, and lopsided. Pushkin advocates no easy, moralizing solutions to history's riddles. The inkling of Providence present in this play could just as easily be termed an inkling of mystery—or of poetry. Yet that is not to deny its existence, as Greenleaf s exclusive privileging of the fragment seems to do.
15. Several critics have recently chosen metaphors relating to clothing and theatrical costuming to express Boris's ultimate inscrutability; thus, Greenleaf (Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 170) asks playfully, “In what way is [Boris's] speech like a striptease? “ while Stephanie Sandler explicates as follows: “Clothes are a desired costume for this Tsar; being a Tsar, in some sense, is finally nothing more than looking the part” (Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile [Stanford, 1989], 101). In another vein, Willis Konick's thesis that a “secret” is the center and motivating force of Pushkin's play is useful in distinguishing Boris Godunov from a Shakespearean play like Macbeth, in which the central dramatic force is provided by the main character's unequivocal, accumulative guilt ( “The Secrets of History: Pushkin's Boris Godunov,” Occasional Papers in Slavic Languages and Literature 1, no. 1 [Summer 1982]: 53–63).
16. Although Shakespeare's aesthetics certainly place a value on harmony and stability, recent criticism has debated whether or not these ideals are actually attained in some of his plays. In particular, Carroll (“'The Form of Law, '” 218) argues that the ending of Richard III presents the ideology of legal succession (which is, ostensibly highly valued) in an ironic key—perhaps indicating an uneasy premonition that Elizabeth II, the reigning monarch when Shakespeare's play was written, would die without leaving an heir, thus exposing the English monarchy and the principle of succession to the need for a complete reinterpretation. Interestingly, these events closely parallel the traumatic events of the Russian Time of Troubles which occurred at precisely the same time and which are the subject of Pushkin's drama. Greenleaf's interpretation (Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 188) of the Henry plays as a cynical lesson in Machiavellian theory (“that extraordinary power is begotten and maintained by the readiness to commit violence and then call it by another name “) derives from the same recent trend in Shakespeare criticism. Yet whether or not this “cynical lesson” is interpolated from the plays’ harmonious facades, the fact still remains that Boris Godunov works in opposition to such harmony (coercive though it may be); thus, in Greenleaf s formulation, “Boris Godunov's ‘new princedom’ fail[s]” (185).
17. My intent here is not to make an original contribution to Shakespeare scholarship, but instead to sketch out the two plays’ thematic and linguistic contours in order to facilitate a meaningful comparison with Boris Godunov. Although the agency of language in drama is my primary concern, the fact that Pushkin most likely read Shakespeare in French should not provide a stumbling point, since my arguments derive not from specifics of phrase, but from linguistic factors that do survive translation: dialogic word play, literalization of metaphor, etc.
18. Turner, John, “The Tragic Romances of Feudalism,” in Holderness, Graham, Potter, Nick, and Turner, John, Shakespeare: The Play of History (Iowa City, 1987), 132.Google Scholar
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 137.
21. On the passivity of Pushkin's heroes in contrast with those of Shakespeare, see Levin (Shekspir i russkaia literatura XIX veka, 45–46) and Vinokur ( “Boris Godunov,” 485–86).
22. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London, 1944), 210.Google Scholar
23. Ibid., 204.
24. Ibid., 205.
25. “Although the histories are permeated by a humanistic moral pathos in the spirit of Renaissance philosophy, government interests are valorized over abstract morality, and a usurper … becomes a positive hero when he does battle with rebellious vassals. In Shakespeare the destruction of criminals who have transgressed moral principles is not predetermined: in his historical plays both villains and innocent victims perish in accordance with the concrete train of events” (Levin, Shekspir i russkaia literatura XIX veka, 39–40). Levin's insight into the identity of moral and aesthetic principles in Shakespeare is astute, but his case is overstated; in my interpretation, in Shakespearean drama the aesthetic principle is always, ultimately, allied with the good, albeit sometimes problematically (as current Shakespeare criticism explores; cf. note 16 above). This situation is very different from the amoral dictatorship of aesthetic form that Levin seems to envision.
26. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, 208–9.
27. Blagoi, Dmitrii, Masterstvo Pushkina (Moscow, 1955), 116–42Google Scholar. This is an excellent study of the play's most general symmetries; the conclusions drawn relating to the narodnost’ of the drama are, however, strongly influenced by Soviet ideology. Irena Ronen devotes the entire sixth chapter of her dissertation to an excellent and elaborate discussion of the play's pyramidic structure (“Poeticheskaia i semanticheskaia struktura Borisa Godunova” [Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1992]).
28. Both scenes, incidentally, have strong echoes of scene Ill.vii in Shakespeare's play in which Richard accepts the crown: in a mocking pageant surrounded by monks, he at first refuses; at his acquiescence, the people “are mum, say not a word” (Ill.vii.3). Very likely this cue from Shakespeare was the partial inspiration for Pushkin's “narod bezmolvstvuet,” along with the borrowings from Karamzin discussed by Emerson (Boris Godunov, 138–39). Admittedly, there is some question about whether this ending was originally intended by Pushkin, or whether it was imposed by the censor (see Alekseev, Pushkin, 221–52). Since this question is now impossible to answer, however, I choose to disregard the problem of authorial intention in this matter and to base my reading (as have most other scholars before me) on the published text of the play. In any case, the fact that it is specifically the first and last scenes of Pushkin's play (in its published version) that so closely echo the scene of Richard Ill's coronation would seem to beevidence of careful craftsmanship and thus to argue for the intentionality of the play's ending in silence. If this is true, then the contrast between Pushkin's and Shakespeare's dramatic sensibilities is shown up especially vividly by the respective placement of the scenes in question: a scene that is at the center (act III) and climax of Shakespeare's dynamic play provides simultaneously the points of departure and arrival (beginning and ending) of Pushkin's ambiguous work.
29. Sandler provides an excellent analysis of the problematics of language and dramatic form in Boris Godunov in her article entitled “Solitude and Soliloquy in Boris Godunov,” in David M. Bethea, ed., Pushkin Today (Bloomington, 1993), 171–84Google Scholar, as well as in the two Boris Godunov chapters of her Distant Pleasures (77–139).
30. Emerson (Boris Godunov, 140) sees this paradoxicality of Boris's position as an expression of Pushkin's distrust of the principle of “bestowed legitimacy,” which, in Karamzin's portrayal, the illegitimate Boris leaves to his legitimate son.
31. I. Z. Serman also makes the excellent case that the narod maintains “in utter defiance of logic, two mutually irreconcilable ideas” (“Paradoxes of the Popular Mind in Pushkin's Boris Godunov” Slavonic and East European Review 64, no. 1 [January 1986]: 35): namely, Boris's guilt and the (False) Dimitrii's authenticity.
32. I am here disagreeing with Sandler's contention that the adjective accidental constitutes an evasion of responsibility on Boris's part, since his speech seems to indicate, on the contrary, that responsibility (whether guilt is a factor or not) is keenly felt (Distant Pleasures, 95).
33. Greenleaf, 188.
34. The Letters of Alexander Pushkin, trans. J. Thomas Shaw (Bloomington, 1963), 2: 365–66.
35. Abram Terts's jocular claim in “Progulki s Pushkinym” (Sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1 [Moscow, 1992]) that the False Dimitrii is nothing other than a poet and thus is beloved by Pushkin himself ( “Samozvanets! A kto takoi poet, esli ne samozvanets? Tsar'?? Samozvannyi tsar', '’ 422) is clearly founded upon an awareness of the Pretender's existence primarily as a linguistic principle in the world of the play. (Serman, “Paradoxes of the Popular Mind,” 32, makes a similar argument regarding the Pretender's essentially poetic nature.) I give a grimmer analysis of the Pretender's linguistic essence, since in the context of Pushkin's Shakespearean models, the widespread linguistic duplicity the Pretender exemplifies and fosters cannot be seen as other than dangerous. (Greenleaf's astute observation on the marked difference between the unresolved macaronic chaos and mutual incomprehension in scene 16 of Boris Godunov, and a similar battle scene in Shakespeare's Henry V—in which, however, “Prince Hal's verbal virtuosity will help incorporate all of these defective dialects and peripheral populations” [Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 191]—furthers my point that the Pretender's linguistic prowess in Pushkin's play is uncontrolled, unordered, and therefore ambivalent at best.) I also hold that it is important in the interpretation of Boris Godunov to carefully separate certain of Pushkin's own beliefs and values from the facts of the play itself. Thus, although Pushkin himself likely believed Boris guilty of the tsarevich's murder (Sandler, Distant Pleasures, 97), this does not necessitate Boris's guilt within the world of the play; similarly, then, Pushkin's fondness for linguistic play and mischief—which the False Dimitrii shares—does not, however, directly imply that the Pretender must be read as a positive figure.
36. Emerson makes similar arguments about the ending of Boris Godunov, taking as her starting point Pushkin's own claim that Boris Godunov is an experiment in the genre of “Romantic tragedy “: “Romantic (open) forms of closure are incompatible with the traditionally resolute closing-down of tragedy, and the paradox for Pushkin was to bring the two together…. The ending is simply open, unknown. In a formal sense this could be Pushkin's parodic comment on endings” (Emerson, Boris Godunov, 131–37).
37. Sandler (Distant Pleasures, 108–39) treats these various retellings of the tsarevich's death in detail, finding in them an “undoing of objectivity” (128) whose outcome is that “history … remains a multiplicity of stories” (136). Sandler thus implies a theory of history similar to the modern fragmentary view proposed by Greenleaf (Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, 165) and countered by Dolinin (cf. note 14 above). My point is just the opposite of that argued by Sandler and Greenleaf; I propose that these various versions of the past actually serve, through the shared power of myth, superstition, symbol, and faith, to create a unified history even in the midst of social chaos and a factual vacuum. This version of historicism is, however, profoundly antithetical to western European notions.