Boris Godunov, Little Tragedies, and Others: The Complete Plays (Vintage Classics) - Softcover

Pushkin, Alexander

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593467566 ISBN 13: 9780593467565

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

The award-winning translators bring us the complete plays of the most acclaimed Russian writer of the Romantic era.

Known as the father of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin was celebrated for his dramas as well as his poetry and stories. His most famous play is Boris Godunov (later adapted into a popular opera by Mussorgsky), a tale of ambition and murder centered on the sixteenth-century Tsar who preceded the Romanovs. Pushkin was inspired by the example of Shakespeare to create this panoramic drama, with its richly varied cast of characters and artful blend of comic and tragic scenes.
 
Pushkin’s shorter forays into verse drama include The Water Nymph, A Scene from Faust, and the four brief plays known as the Little Tragedies: The Miserly Knight, set in medieval France; Mozart and Salieri, which inspired the popular film Amadeus; The Stone Guest, a tale of Don Juan in Madrid; and A Feast in a Time of Plague, in which a group of revelers defy quarantine in plague-ridden London. These new translations of the complete plays, from the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, freshly reveal the range of Pushkin’s enduring artistry.

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ALEXANDER PUSHKIN (1799–1837) was a poet, playwright, and novelist who achieved literary fame before he was twenty. He was born into the Russian nobility and his great-grandfather was the African-born general Abram Petrovich Gannibal. Pushkin’s radical politics brought him censorship and periods of banishment, but he eventually married a society beauty and became part of court life. Notoriously touchy about his honor, he died at age thirty-seven in a duel with his wife’s alleged lover.
 
About the Translators: RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY have translated works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov, Leskov, and Pasternak. They were twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina). They are married and live in France.

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From the Introduction by Richard Pevear


Figlyarin, sitting at home, decided
That my black grandfather Gannibal
Was bought for a small jug of rum
And fell into some skipper’s hands.

That skipper was the glorious skipper
By whom our country was set moving,
Who turned the rudder of our native ship
Forcefully onto its majestic course.

—Pushkin, “Post Scriptum”


Peter the Great (1672–1725), the last tsar and first emperor of Russia, was the “glorious skipper” who forcefully turned his country to the West, and in 1703, on a stretch of marsh­land facing the Gulf of Finland, began to build the city of St. Petersburg, giving Russia a major seaport open to Europe. “Finally Peter appeared . . . Russia entered Europe like a ship launched with the blow of an axe and the thunder of cannons.” So Pushkin wrote in an unfinished essay entitled  “On the Insignificance of Russian Literature” (1834). Pushkin was to play a similar role in that literature to the role Peter played in Russian history, and with as enduring an effect on its significance.
 
Throughout his work, Pushkin remained in complex rela­tions with Peter: in his unfinished first novel, The Moor of Peter the Great (1828), portraying his black great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781), the son of a Central African prince, who was captured by the Turks as a boy, sold into slavery, and then sent to Russia, where he was personally adopted by Peter (hence his patro­nym), and was eventually granted nobility and high military rank; in the narrative poem Poltava (1829), dealing with the decisive battle in which Peter’s forces defeated the Swed­ish army and made Russia the leading nation of northern Europe; in his last long poem, The Bronze Horseman (1833), in which the mounted statue of Peter the Great on Senate Square in Petersburg comes ominously to life, at least in the deranged mind of the poem’s hero, and goes galloping after him through the city.
 
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) was born a poet, but he became a master of prose and drama as well, and it was the body of his work as a whole that set Russian literature on its new course. In particular, he was intent on reforming Rus­sian drama, a task he outlined in drafts of an introduction to his first play, Boris Godunov, and in an article “On National Drama,” both written in 1829–1830 and both left unpub­lished. In the latter he raises the question directly: Can our tragedy, formed on the example of Racinian tragedy, lose its aristocratic habits? How can it move

“from its measured, orderly, dignified, and polite dialogue to the crude frankness of popular passions, to the freedom of public-square opinions? How can it suddenly drop its obsequiousness, how can it do without the rules it is used to, without the forced accommodating of everything Russian to everything European; where, from whom can it learn an idiom comprehensible to the people? What are the passions of this people, what are the strings of its heart, where will it find resonance—in short, where are the spectators, where is the public?”

Suggestions of an answer to these questions are given in the drafts for an introduction to Boris Godunov. The play was writ­ten in 1825, but not published until 1831, and not passed for performance by the theater censors until 1866, some thirty years after Pushkin’s death. But he read the script to his friends, as he mentions in his notes, adding this enigmatic comment:
“My tragedy is already known to almost all those whose opinion I value. From the number of my listeners there is one who was absent, the one to whom I owe the idea of my tragedy, whose genius inspired and sustained me, whose approval appeared to my imagination as the sweetest reward and was the only thing that diverted me in the midst of my solitary labor.”
 
The absent one, left nameless here, is the poet, novelist, critic, and historian Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), whose twelve-volume History of the Russian State, elegantly written and rich in detail drawn from many years of research, was the first real account of Russia’s complex past. Pushkin names him in the next part of the drafts:

“Studies of Shakespeare, Karamzin, and our old chronicles gave me the idea of clothing in dramatic forms one of the most dramatic epochs of recent history. Uninhibited by any other influence, I imitated Shakespeare in his free and broad portrayal of characters, in his loose and simple plot construction; I followed Karamzin in his lucid development of events; in the chronicles I tried to divine the way of thinking and the language of that time. Rich sources! Whether I made good use of them, I don’t know—but in any case my labors were zealous and conscientious.”

For Pushkin, the example of Shakespeare’s theater, with its roots in the public square, not in courtly palaces, was essential to the reform of Russian drama, and in writing Boris Godunov, he acted on that belief. First of all, he replaced the French twelve-syllable alexandrine couplet, which had come to dom­inate Russian plays, with the iambic pentameter of English blank verse. But he went further than that, introducing ver­nacular prose in some scenes and playful rhyming in others, allowing for a great variety of voicing. He first referred to the play as a comedy, then came to call it a “romantic tragedy,” but it more closely resembles Shakespeare’s history plays in its composition and social inclusiveness. Even the comic passages are not there simply for entertainment; they also have their place in the historical drama. The drunken vagrant monks in the eighth scene, the foreign captains with their absurd accents in the sixteenth, the holy fool in the seventeenth—all cast their own light on the serious events of the play.* Then there are long monologues, brief scenes of pure action, candid personal exchanges, drama within drama—as in the superb thirteenth scene, the impostor’s courtship of Marina Mnishek. The example of Shakespeare gave Pushkin an opening to this great variety.
 
The influence of the old chronicles is less obvious. Push­kin certainly studied them and drew details from them, but he did not imitate their language, as he seems to suggest. Boris Godunov is written in the natural living speech of his own time. He did, however, include a chronicler among his characters: the elderly monk Pimen of the fifth scene. Refer­ring to him in a letter to the editor of The Moscow Messenger (1828), he wrote:

“The character of Pimen is not my invention. In him I have brought together the features that captivated me in our old chronicles: simpleheartedness, a touching meekness, something childish and at the same time wise, a zeal—one might say a pious zeal—for the God-given power of the tsars, a total absence of vanity, of partiality—all breathe in these precious memorials of times long past . . .”
 
Pimen is a dramatic embodiment of the chroniclers. In his only scene, he sketches out the events of his final chronicle, which also happen to be the background of the play itself, and he converses with the young Grigory (Grishka) Otrepyev, who participated in the historical action and will become a major character in Pushkin’s portrayal of it.
 
For the events of “one of the most dramatic epochs of recent history,” his source, as he said, was Karamzin’s His­tory of the Russian State....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593467566
• ISBN 13: 9780593467565
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: EDITIONS GALLIMARD; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8.; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien