It is Alexander Burry's contention that Pushkin's “little tragedy,” The Stone Guest, shaped the afterlife of the Don Juan legend in Russian literature. However, his book pursues dual aims. It addresses later works directly referencing Pushkin's play, but also follows Don Juanism in modern Russian literature, using Pushkin as a typological parallel, or sounding board, for the author's reflections. Burry skillfully contextualizes the material and incorporates many informative critical views, but the book is more an absorbing and suggestive guide to Russian Don Juanism than a continuous proof of Pushkin's enduring influence. Pushkin's model may not be essential to all the works discussed, but their interpretation often benefits from Burry's foregrounding of The Stone Guest.
Burry establishes the defining elements of Pushkin's Don Juan play, some first noted by Anna Akhmatova. The Commander is cast as the husband, not the father of Donna Anna, so Don Juan's duel with him becomes an act of sexual rivalry, and his final meeting with the Commander is staged not at supper but outside Donna Anna's bedchamber. Perhaps Pushkin has Don Juan accomplish the liberation of Donna Anna as well as her seduction, and he is matched by an emancipated new female character, Laura. This Don Juan is a rebellious artist figure, returning unbidden from exile, a poet adept at verbal seduction. He is presented as morally ambiguous, perhaps predatory, but maybe finally seeking true love. Instead of receiving divine punishment, the hero is plunged into psychological darkness, “tragically destroyed on the precipice of happiness” (64). Burry sees 1830, when the “little tragedies” were completed not long before the poet's marriage, as a turning point in Pushkin's life from his relatively libertine youth to maturity, enabling Pushkin to find potential in both sides of the drama. Burry emphasizes the autobiographical linkage of Pushkin's younger self with his projected nemesis, the Commander.
Burry then treats Russian Realist writers dealing with a romantic hero like Don Juan. They “find ingenious ways to reconceptualize Pushkin's linking of art and seduction, and his tantalizingly ambiguous portrait of a man who may or may not have reformed through genuine love” (70–71). There certainly is Don Juanism in works like Anna Karenina and “The Lady with the Dog,” though it goes too far to say that they display “an underlying rewriting of The Stone Guest” (81). Burry reminds us how subtly retribution for transgression is worked out in Lev Tolstoi's novel, and how subtly love transforms the adulterous pair in Anton Chekhov's story.
Burry next addresses the conscious Don Juan adaptations of the Silver Age poets Aleksandr Blok, Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. Blok, with his sense of promiscuity, degeneracy, and betrayal of the ideal Beautiful Lady, evokes retribution with apocalyptic overtones, enacting the defeat of Don Juan with faint hope that the ideal can be reborn. Tsvetaeva radically reworks the material: though her Don Juan, like Pushkin's, is a poet, he is out of place in cold Russia and “meet[s] his fate at the hands of Carmen” (129). Tsvetaeva imagines a transcendent fate for Don Juan in a spiritual love that she, as poet and equal, could offer him (130). Gumilev creates a playful parody, Don Juan in Egypt, where the irrepressible hero enjoys an active afterlife, as does the Commander. In A Poem without a Hero, Akhmatova evokes both “a real-life, Don Juan-like love triangle” (138), punished in the poem, and also the licentiousness of her Silver Age youth, punished in the advent of Stalinism and war.
Finally, Burry takes on post-Soviet treatments of Don Juan by Venedikt Erofeev, Vladimir Kazakov, and Liudmila Ulitskaia. Erofeev's Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander features a rebellious hero who will not be circumscribed, but only uses sexual seduction as a means to procure alcohol. This is a poisonous alcohol which destroys its imbibers, stressing the destructive and self-destructive charm of this apparently liberated Don Juan (156). Kazakov attempts to escape the confines of reality altogether by absurdist parodies of the legend in his Don Juan cycle. This Don Juan parades a poetic wit and eludes capture in a world of pure verbal play. Both Erofeev and Kazakov display active familiarity with Pushkin's play. For Burry, Ulitskaia, “though she explicitly refers neither to Donjuanism nor to Pushkin's The Stone Guest” (172), seems to continue his line of thinking in Sonechka, The Funeral Party, and Sincerely Yours, Shurik. Motifs like artistic passion, serial erotic adventures, and rebirth through love can be celebrated with no ensuing moral retribution, or, as reality requires, they can be critiqued.
