The uncensored Boris Godunov: the case for Pushkin's original comedy, with annotated text and translation

Abstract

Chester Dunning, with Caryl Emerson, Sergei Fomichev, Lidiia Lotman, and Anthony Wood. The Uncensored Boris Godunov: The Case for Pushkin's Original Comedy with Annotated Text and Translation. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. xv, 550 pp. $29.95, paper.Reading the extremely rich volume compiled by Chester Dunning and his esteemed colleagues, one begins to wonder just how many cultural resources were available to Pushkin during his Mikhailovskoe exile. How was someone living in virtual isolation able to keep track of so many intellectual currents at hand elsewhere in Russia and Western Europe? How was Pushkin able to exhibit such a detailed and oftentimes strikingly grasp of the Time of Troubles, while at the same time developing new generic possibilities that made all sorts of demands on the theatre? No matter how much one has studied what is increasingly received as Pushkin's most important single work, this volume greatly deepens one's appreciation for how much the poet was able to invest in a single text. It also expands our sense of what a work of art can be.Admittedly, the above are solely my impressions, for the authors focus almost exclusively on their argument that the 1825 text of Boris Godunov is a masterpiece of at least the rank of the version published in 1831. Readers unfamiliar with the textological issues at hand may be advised to turn first to Sergei Fomichev's catalogue of the major differences between the original redaction and the later version, which Pushkin rewrote to satisfy censors' demands (p. 155). Although much of the material cut from the 1825 version has long been available in appendices and notes, here it is reconstructed for the first time as a contiguous text. Fomichev meticulously deciphers Pushkin's manuscripts and Anthony Wood translates it in a manner that manages to be both illuminatingly and idiomatically playable for the stage. Dunning pays particular attention to the distinction in the final lines; the 1825 version ends with a historically accurate cheer for the Pretender, as opposed to the infamous narod bezmolvsrvuet of the 1831 version. While arguments have been made that the 1831 ending has its aesthetic merits, Dunning devotes most of the first chapter to detailing how recent scholarship usually has handled the matter inadequately, to the detriment of the play's reception and interpretation. This survey additionally provides an extensive introduction to the massive secondary literature on what Caryl Emerson later argues is something approaching a tragicomedy of history (p. …