The Uncensored 'Boris Godunov': The Case for Pushkin's Original Comedy, with Annotated Text and Translation by Chester s> Dunning Caryl Emerson , Sergei Fomichev Lidiia Lotman Antony Wood (review)

Abstract

SEER, Vol.85,No.2, April2007 Reviews Dunning, Chester; Emerson, Caryl; Fomichev, Sergei; Lotman, Lidiia and Wood, Antony. 77Te Uncensored 'Boris Godunov': 7he Case for Pushkin's Ornginal Comedy, withAnnotated Textand Translation. Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2oo6. xxv + 550 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. ?3I.50. ITcomes as something of a surpriseto learn that, of all Pushkin'sworks,Boris Godunov has generated the most secondary literature.Any doubts as to the accuracy of this claim will be allayed by this volume's thirty-four-pagebibliography . As this important new addition to the list makes clear, works published since I9I7 almost invariablyrefer to the first published version of the play, the hithertocanonical I83I version.With its dedicationto Karamzin and its hotly debated final stage instruction'narodbezmolvstvuet',thisversion is often takenas an account a laKaramzin of the Time of Troubles. The very existence of an earlier, unpublishedversion, which Pushkinread to admiring friendsin I825 and regardedas his finestwork to date, is scarcelymentioned. In, for example, volume seven of the I937Jubileeedition of Pushkin,pre-i831 variantsare dismissedas early drafts.This despite the fact that Petr Morozov had published the I825 version, entitled Komediia o tsareBorisei o Grishke Otrep 'eve,as early as I887. In this version, which challenges rather than endorses Karamzin's view of history, the narod,far from remaining ambiguously silent, enthusiasticallyhails the Pretenderas Tsar Dimitrii. This was too subversivefor many late Tsarist scholars,who were anxious to promote Pushkinas the 'nationalpoet', and equallydisquietingfor Soviet scholars,who were unwillingto revise the saintedBelinskii'sview of the play as expressedin his tenth article on Pushkin. This volume makesa spiritedand, in my view, wholly successfulattemptto reinstatethe I825version alongsidethe I83I version. This it does in two ways. The firsthalf of the book consistsof three chaptersby Chester Dunning, two by Caryl Emerson, one by Sergei Fomichev, and concluding remarks by Dunning and Emerson. It is Fomichev who succinctlysummarizesthe seven differencesbetween the two texts - perhaps a startingpoint for any reader (P. 153) whilst, overall, the chapters marshal the arguments in favour of the canonicity of the I825 text. To begin with, they make the point that the common assumptionthat later versions always representan improvementon earlierversionsis totallyunwarranted,especiallyin repressivesocieties,where outside pressuresof every sort come into the equation. Then the implications of the word komediia, and indeed of komidiia, are examined in detail, as are possibleclassificationsfor the play:historicalcomedy; tragic-comedy;tragedocomedy . The authorsconclude (p. I82) that the I825 text is a 'tragicomedyof history',a 'genre-mixingexperiment' (p. I83). They are carefulto emphasize Pushkin'soutstanding talents as a historian and term him a 'poet-historian' (p. 7I). Like all good works of research this book suggests further lines of investigation, notably the relationship between BorisGodunov and Schiller's unfinishedplay Demetrius. 336 SEER, 85, 2, 2007 The second half of the book is devoted to an annotated edition of the Russian text, with facing English translation,transcribedby Sergei Fomichev from a manuscriptheld in the Pushkinskii Dom.In a brief translator'spreface Antony Wood acknowledgeswhat he has lost in translation.There are minor deviationsfrom Pushkin'smetre, a shorteningof some passagescaused by the relative conciseness of the English language and occasional inconsistencies. What Wood gains, however, far outweighs any enforced losses. As readersof his translationof 7The Bridegroom, withCount NulinandtheTaleoftheGolden Cockerel (London, 2002, reviewed in SEER,82, 2004, 3) will realize, this translatorhas a keen ear for the cadences of Pushkin'spoetry and a deft choice of appropriate vocabulary. He is equally adept at rendering prose passages such as the scene 'A Tavern on the LithuanianFrontier',which is perhaps the most obviously comic scene in the play and is full of rhyming tags. Books by several hands can be extremely repetitious, but this pitfall has largely been avoided, apart from a repeated reference to Letopis- o mnogikh miatezhakh (pp. 62 and 145) and a small amount of overlap in the notes. The book is very well produced, with only three minor printing errors,none of them in the text of the play or the extensive notes. Furthermore and it is rare that this can be said about academic works -the book is extremely good value for money. Maidenhead MICHAEL PURSGLOVE Leatherbarrow, W. J. A Devil's Vaudeville...