Boris Godunov Research Articles

Historical Roots of Russian Silence

Historical Roots of Russian Silence Yelena Mazour‐Matusevich It is just sheer misery; so silence is the best. (Pushkin, Boris Godunov) For centuries, Russian writers, intellectuals, and foreign travelers remarked on the mysterious phenomenon of the so‐called Russian silence. The most famous, though far from sole quote, belongs to Alexander Pushkin (1799‐1837). In his historical drama, Boris Godunov, he used the term “bezmolvie” in reference to the common people's reaction to tumultuous political events of the sixtieth century Russia. This term can only loosely be translated as silence, “bez” meaning “without,” and “molvie” meaning “speech.” This type of silence does not necessarily imply peace and quiet. It can be quite loud, sometimes deafening. Pushkin vividly captured noises of the “multitude” with the abundance of verbs relating to inarticulate sounds: to cry (nineteen times), wail (eight times), curse (seven times), groan (six times), laugh (four times), weep (four times), scream (two times), and murmur (two times). In his play, the crowd moans, shouts, sighs and yet, Pushkin says, “People remain mute.” Therefore, the silence that Pushkin brings to attention is of a special kind. It is a silence of a noisy mass made of individually “mute” people. The best approximation might be the neologism “social mutism,” the term derived from the word “mute” and the French term “mutisme,” more adequately rendering this phenomenon, characterized by the absence or incapacity of articulate, commonsensical, and transparent speech. It must be made clear that this type of speech stays in opposition to mythic‐poetic language, in other words, to all traditional forms of expression such as ritual songs or performances, proverbs, legends, poems, folktales, indirect allusions, parables, etc. Social mutism refers to the lack of public opinion based on the general and socially shared distrust of logical discourse and reluctance to use words in a clear and straightforward fashion: A Russian instinctively fears simple and accessible truths, seeking everywhere a hidden sense, and creating a mystery out of nothing. There is no public opinion in Russia because everything public and transparent is perceived as a lie and evil. People, just like five hundred and thousand years before, remain mute [bezmolvnyj]. The above description, written in 2012, asserts the persistence of this phenomenon in Russia, which, although repeatedly noted, remains without explanation or even working hypothesis. Providing such a hypothesis is the goal of this essay, which will argue that Russian social silence might have resulted from a prolonged and unchallenged application of certain religious practices to public sphere. Evidently, collective mutism is not restricted to the Russian culture alone. Historians have long remarked on the difficulty of studying the mentality of the illiterate “silent majority,” because these people left no written documents. Albert Camus, raised by a semi‐mute and illiterate mother, saw the project of his life as an attempt “to extract this poor family from the fate of the poor, which is to disappear from history without leaving a trace: the Mutes.” However, there is a simple point, which tends to be overlooked in the discussion of silent majority: even though it might appear mute, it does not mean that it must also be deaf. Humans learn to speak by listening to others speaking. The clearer and more articulate the speech the baby hears, the clearer and more articulate his own language will be. Could the same process take place in a culture when its educated elite shares its language with the rest of the population? This is at least how it happened in the Western civilization. What is now commonly referred to as logical discourse, the type of speech based on provable affirmations, was developed during the middle ages by the educated elite, the theologians, who made this type of speech their profession. Based on the inheritance from classical antiquity of Socratic and Aristotelian methods of argumentation, this professional language, although remaining within strict limits of tradition, left room for improvisation. Medieval clerics not only processed and reproduced their common intellectual and spiritual heritage, they were often eager to add and comment on it. Medieval manuscripts abound in elaborate and lengthy commentaries. Moreover, educated members of the medieval clergy were trained to comment on traditional texts if they...

Uspenskii and Zhivov on Tsar, God, and Pretenders: Semiotics and the Sacralization of the Monarch

Relatively few works on history published in the Soviet Union in the last years of the old regime were translated into English or other Western languages. An important exception was, however, provided by the publications of members of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, especially Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman (Tartu) and Boris Andreevich Uspenskii (Moscow). (1) From the 1970s onward, many works by these two authors appeared in English, including some that belonged to the disciplines of social and cultural history. Tsar and Pretender, one of the essays by Uspenskii reproduced in the new collection Tsar and God, (2) was first published in English in 1984, in a volume of essays by Lotman and Uspenskii titled The Semiotics of Culture, only two years after its appearance in Russian. (3) The other essay from the 1980s in this collection, however, Tsar and (co-authored by Uspenskii and Viktor Markovich Zhivov), appears in English translation for the first time. (4) Although Tsar and was first published five years later than Tsar and Pretender, the two essays seem to have been written more or less simultaneously. (5) They are in many ways complementary, so that their republication together in an English edition is a very welcome development, which enables us to assess their significance. (6) Do they deserve the status attributed to them by the editor and the publisher of the new collection, which prompted the editors of Kritika to commission this review under the rubric ofclassics in retrospect? (7) Tsar and Pretender It may be appropriate to begin our consideration of this essay by examining the term samozvanchestvo (which Uspenskii uses consistently, in preference to sarnozvanstvo or samozvanshchina, which are preferred by other scholars, some of whom draw distinctions between their usage and significance). (8) David Budgen, whose 1984 translation of the article is reproduced in the Tsar and collection with only stylistic changes to its scholarly apparatus, rendered samozvanets as pretender and samozvanchestvo as royal imposture. (9) Uspenskii, however, uses the term samozvanets very broadly, to include not only impostors such as the First False Dmitrii and Emel'ian Pugachev but also the (perceived) usurpers Boris Godunov, Vasilii Shuiskii, and Catherine the Great, as well as mock tsars like Simeon Bekbulatovich and Fedor Romodanovskii--placed temporarily on the throne by Ivan IV and Peter the Great, respectively. The title Tsar and Pretender might therefore be translated more adequately (albeit more freely) as True and False Tsars. The starting point for Uspenskii's article is the classic study by K. V. Chistov of Russian popular socio-utopian legends, which presented samozvantsy as the realization of popular legends about returning tsardeliverers. (10) Without criticizing Chistov's interpretation, Uspenskii claims that his own approach complements it: where Chistov's explanation had cast light not so much on the appearance of samozvantsy as on the social reaction they provoked, Uspenskii asserts that his own work explains the pretenders' psychology and the complex of notions that underpinned it, and that these notions were primarily religious (114). (11) It is at this point that Uspenskii introduces the concept of the of the monarch in 16th-century Russia. He links this with the adoption of the title of by the Muscovite rulers, noting that the term had sacred connotations in Russia: it was the word used in the Old Testament for kings of Israel such as David and Solomon, and it was also applied to God in liturgical texts, resulting in the paired phrases heavenly and earthly god, and corruptible/incorruptible (tlennyi/netlennyi) (114-15). Other features of the sacralization of the monarch in the 16th century included the addition to the coronation ceremony of the rite of anointing, which equated the tsar with Christ (Greek christos = the anointed one) (114). …

A Tale of Three Genres: History, Fiction, and the Historical Detektiv

True history began with Sir Walter A. J. P. Taylor wrote, provocatively (as always). (1) Undeniably, Scott had an enormous influence on historians: Thomas Babington Macaulay for one, Thomas Carlyle for another. Macaulays admiration fixed on Scott's style of narration, which Macaulay applied in his own work with almost indiscriminate vigor. His romantic excess earned him contempt of latter-day historiographers like G. P. Gooch, who quipped: Truth bartered for telling phrase. (2) Yet according to Carlyle, Scott taught him to look upon past as peopled by living men, abstractions ... not diagrams and theorems; [a rebuke to men of Enlightenment] but men in buff coats and breeches, with color in their cheeks, with passion in their stomachs and idioms, features, and vitalities of very men. (3) This was stuff of social history. Across Atlantic, Scott was, according to Peter Novick, the most popular and imitated author in early nineteenth century. George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, William H. Prescott, and other amateur drew inspiration from Scott's florid style, style in sense given by art historians and anthropologists as vehicle of expression within group, communicating and fixing certain values. (4) In Russia, Scott also enjoyed a popular vogue. The similarity of his historical approach to that employed by Nikolai Karamzin in his monumental 12-volume history has often been commented on, although there is no direct evidence of his influence. As for Pushkin's writing in a historical vein, relationship is well established if complex. (5) It should be recalled that both Karamzin and Pushkin approached writing of history as poets. Karamzin perceived this as a double advantage: history provided dramatic incidents poet could exploit, and there was poetic charm in what was remote in time. (6) No doubt these were among reasons Pushkin relied on Karamzin's work for his historical detail and defended him against his critics. But Pushkin was searching for appropriate genre in which he could best work through his historical imagination: drama (Boris Godunov, 1824-25), historical novel (the unfinished Arab of Peter Great, 1827), romantic poem (Poltava, 1828-29), historical poem (The Bronze Horseman, 1833), historical monograph (History of Pugachev Rebellion, 1834) and again, after eruption of Scott's novels on Russian scene, historical novel (The Captains Daughter, 1836). In each of these genres Pushkin found different possibilities for combining dramatic, lyrical, romantic, and historical elements. That he ended up with historical novel reflects, in view of Jurij Striedter, his appreciation through reading Scott of an emerging new historical consciousness. This was, in his view, best way to solve problem of how to retain a sense of historical distance and yet narrate events as a story. (7) His multiple experiments in genre gave inspiration to Russian writers (although not historians) like Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, who invented new genres that departed from novel as it was evolving in West European literature. (8) Undeniably influenced by Scott, did these writers of history and their spiritual descendants err in crossing line between fact and fiction? David Hackett Fischer thinks so. In his lengthy list of historical fallacies, he defines aesthetic fallacy by making oblique reference to Scott as one who subordinated historical precision to demands of character and plot. Hackett seals verdict by invoking Virginia Woolf's stern but in his view sound maxim that of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible. (9) But are they? The most notable recent theoretical attempt to close gap, although not one greeted enthusiastically by many historians, was Hayden White's Metahistory. White argued that deep structural content of history, at least in 19th century, was generally poetic, and specifically linguistic; its narrative was emplotted and its explanatory argumentation imitated literary conventions. …

Tairov’s Theater, Evreinov’s Monodramatic Moment, and the Lessons of Eugene Onegin , a Drama in Verse

Tairov’s Theater, Evreinov’s Monodramatic Moment, and the Lessons of Eugene Onegin, a Drama in Verse Caryl Emerson Learning literature through theater is a bottomless source of excitement—and one reason, surely, is the sense of urgency imposed by performance. With novels, art exhibits, architectural monuments, even movies, the reader or spectator is boss. The story (as well as interesting theories that might explain the story) can be “paused,” bookmarked, contemplated, revisited at will. But live music and live theater depend for their communication on the uninterrupted forward thrust of a concept. Polemical or ideologically-driven theater, so familiar to twentieth-century Eastern Europe, can begin with an idea or desired effect and then strap both set and cast to it. But a pragmatic approach to stage work is more often the rule. The concept works itself out intuitively during rehearsals, as a creation-in-process by those skilled practitioners in the temporal arts we call actors, musicians, dancers, projectionists, all the while being nourished here and there by a directorial hint or hunch. The ensemble succeeds (more or less well) on opening night, is tuned up throughout the run, and often it is only after the show is struck that principles emerge with the contours of a formal theory. Such was my experience co-managing, with Simon Morrison, Princeton University’s production of a dramatic adaptation of Eugene Onegin in February 2012. The Onegin project was the second of our all-campus “creative restorations” of a Pushkin Centennial project that fell casualty to the Stalinist cultural anti-revolution. Both paired a famous Moscow theater with a score by Sergei Prokofiev, who in 1936 had been lured back to Moscow partly by commissions to compose incidental music for stagings of the poet’s greatest works. Our first restoration was Boris Godunov, musicalized but de-operatized, which had been scheduled to open in 1937 in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s newly-constructed GosTiM theater off Gorky Street. But the production, the theater, and the director were all dead by 1940. The resurrected premiere of this Boris Godunov, undertaken at Princeton in 2007 in the spirit of Meyerhold’s rehearsal notes but with a twenty-first-century set, was written up as a forum for Pushkin Review/, volume 10 (2007): 1–46. The focus of that issue [End Page 1] was the view from “inside the show”: testimonials from the director and student cast, our worst and best moments up to opening night, how the Boris Tale shifted morally and historically when illustrated as tragedy or as comedy. This present Pushkin Review forum is devoted to our revival of the second commission from 1936: a dramatic adaptation, also with Prokofiev’s music, of Evgenii Onegin, by Alexander Tairov’s Moscow Chamber Theater (the Kamerny). The tasks here were less tragic but more delicate. Tairov’s Theater Takes on Pushkin’s Greatest Book Onegin the Play contained none of the potentially troubling political subtexts of tyranny, treason, Catholic Poland, or pretendership that the historical drama Boris had in such abundance. It is a love story. But the project was abandoned by its theater even earlier than Boris was by Meyerhold, in December 1936, after the orchestral parts had been prepared but before director, composer, or actors had sat down to serious table work, much less gotten up on a stage. Thus no memoirs were written, no “rehearsal diaries” by Tairov of the sort that Meyerhold was keeping so splendidly for Boris Godunov. The directorial record for Boris is so moving and dramatic in its own right that in June 2013, Vladimir Jurowski could stage Prokofiev’s incidental music in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall as a dialogue between Meyerhold and Prokofiev, each speaking his own recorded words, with Tsar, Ksenia, and Holy Fool largely as backdrop.1 Onegin at the Chamber Theater never generated that sort of theater history. In 2011, we inherited from various archives a fabulous musical score, a few scribbled-on typescripts of the play, and a dozen costume sketches—but no stage set and no transcripts of conversations that might have led to a “concept.” The drama carved out of Pushkin’s novel-inverse (by the modernist prose-writer and theater...

The First English History of the Russian Time of Troubles: Samuel Purchas’s “Late Changes” (1625)

Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, first published in 1625, is a collection of travel accounts similar to that edited by Richard Hakluyt in the late sixteenth century, but it also includes the earliest secondary history of the Time of Troubles in English. Purchas’s chapter entitled “The late changes and manifold alterations in Russia since Ivan Vasilowich to this present …” combines documentary publication with narrative history. This article examines the source materials used by Purchas and discusses his own commentary on events. Purchas considers that historians should demonstrate the justice of God’s providence in punishing a people’s sins, and he assesses the reigns of Ivan IV and Boris Godunov in this light. He enlivens his narrative with elaborate metaphors, including that of Russia during the interregnum of 1610–1612 as a “many-headed monster”. This metaphor was commonly used by conservative writers in early modern England to designate the ordinary people, but Purchas uses it more creatively in relation to Russia, to signify not only the multitude but also the rival candidates for the throne, including pretenders (samozvantsy).

Вселенское Православие и Московское царство в начале Смуты: источники информации о событиях в России

The author demonstrates that relations between the Russian state and the four Eastern Orthodox Christian patriarchates were not interrupted at the beginning of the Time of Troubles and continued in the traditional way. The main focus is on sources of information available in the Orthodox East concerning events in Russia: officials of the Russian church hierarchy (Arseny Elassonsky, Ignatius, Nectarios, and Matthew Kolitsydis), diplomatic missions (1603–1606), information about the Pretender Dmitry circulating in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1602–1604), and Greek priests at the court of Prince Vasily Ostrozhky. The author investigates the levels and content of information about Russia at the end of the reign of Boris Godunov and during the reign of False Dmitry I that was promptly transmitted to the Patriarchs.

Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage by Inna Naroditskaya (review)

REVIEWS 887 but Absurdopediia russkoi zhizni Vladimira Sorokina is the most exhaustive and compelling exploration of Sorokin’s work in any language, and looks set to be so for some time yet. Department of Politics, Languages and David Gillespie International Studies, University of Bath Naroditskaya, Inna. Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2012. xvi + 401 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £45.00. At the centre of Inna Naroditskaya’s ingenious and engaging new book is the idea that ‘[a]s real tsarinas disappeared from Russia’s political stage, a number of magical tsarinas materialized in Russian fairy-tale operas’ (p. xii). In order to explore this insight in greater detail, Naroditskaya first examines the role of Russia’s four eighteenth-century tsarinas as patrons of opera, drawing on Richard Wortman’s work on imperial ceremony and spectacle to argue that opera was an ideal vehicle through which they could promote — and almost literally stage — the potency of their own rule. In particular, Naroditskaya argues for the decisive role played by Catherine the Great in establishing Russia’s tradition of historical and fairytale operas. She then turns her attention to the nineteenth century, noting that with the establishment of a nationalist musical historiography, this feminine lineage was violently repressed. Where Russian tsarinas used opera to represent themselves in artistic form, they now became the object of a masculine historiography that tended to dismiss them as artistically inferior and derivative of foreign models. As Glinka was crowned the father of Russian music, his eighteenth-century female antecedents were effaced in a process that Naroditskaya terms ‘the transformation of historical empressesintosupernaturaloperatic(anti)heroines’(p.5).Devotingchaptersto individual studies of operas by Glinka (Ruslan and Liudmila), Dargomyzhskii (Rusalka), Rimskii-Korsakov (Mlada and Sadko) and Chaikovskii (Queen of Spades), she reveals how ‘Russian male protagonists and their creators were prone to mid-to-late-nineteenth-century psychosis, which, in part, reflected on the past, fictional and historical. […] The idea that their Russia had been shaped not only by Peter but more recently and more obviously by foreign female(s), haunted these men’ (p. 238). This obsession is perhaps clearest in Naroditskaya’s final example, Chaikovskii’s version of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades. Where scholars like Simon Morrison have examined the opera’s syncretism as a premonition of symbolist aesthetics, Naroditskaya prefers to see its temporal ambiguities as indicative of an almost oedipal struggle between a strong eighteenth-century precursor (Catherine the Great) and a nineteenth-century tradition desperate to overcome such an overwhelming SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 888 authority. Yet this struggle was fated to be metonymic, not just because artistic influence is almost always tangential, but also because the nineteenth-century ban on the representation of imperial subjects on the Russian stage meant that the presence of eighteenth-century tsarinas was often indicated by means of absence, illusion or apparition. Written with great verve and assurance, Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage is nonetheless a work whose seemingly simple guiding thesis accommodates a range of subtle and sensitive readings. Some might cavil at Naroditskaya’s apparent willingness to blur the boundaries between creative artists, fictional characters and broad characterizations of Russian culture, and her account of how a nineteenth-century tradition of masculine nationalism sought to eradicate its feminine roots in the eighteenth century rests on the fact that there were simply no female claimants to the throne in Russia after Catherine the Great. It would be an interesting counterfactual exercise to wonder how the book’s thesis might have looked had there been a nineteenth-century Russian tsarina to rival her, and Naroditskaya chooses not to make any comparisons with the representation of the male ruler in Russian opera (consider, for example, Musorgskii’s handling of the figure of the tsar in both Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina). At times, her account reads like a careful but persistent psychoanalytic analysis of its subject matter (Naroditskaya’s use of the word ‘psychosis’ in the passage cited above is telling). If Freudian theories will potentially strike some as being out of place in a piece of historical musicology (however...

Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the Time of Troubles by Isaiah Gruber (review)

Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the of Troubles. By Isaiah Gruber. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2012. Pp. xi, 299. $48.00. ISBN 978-0-875-80446-0.)Isaiah Gruber's new book offers a lively account and an exciting analysis of Russia's Time of Troubles, 1598-1613-a period of dynastic collapse, social upheaval, and foreign invasion.The book is built in carefully planned layers. After a general stage-setting introduction, it opens with an exploration of the trope of Russia as Israel, or God's Chosen People, imbued with particular sanctity but also burdened with weighty responsibilities. Gruber notes that most, if not all, earlymodern Christian states invoked New Israel imagery, but in Muscovy these ideas gained heightened trenchancy because of Russia's status as the sole surviving Orthodox state.The second chapter switches gears, documenting the ups and downs (mostly ups) of monastic business ventures, especially the salt trade, the inflows and outflows of their accounts, and their favored position relative to the tsarist administration.This chapter, in combination with its sequel, chapter 4, will prove essential to the layered argument that Gruber builds. The bottom-line finding is that the monasteries and the patriarchate were widely, and accurately, viewed as in cahoots with the tsarist administration, cushioned from economic hardship by their great wealth and unsympathetic to the desperate plight of starving Muscovites. This reputation would contribute to the most important religious trend that Gruber highlights as the book progresses: the disintegration of any shared sense of Orthodox truth and the opening of a cacophonous space for conflicting and competing claims to representing divine will.If the even-numbered chapters explore ecclesiastical wealth, political insider status, and lack of charitable activity, the odd numbered chapters follow the political ideologies and rhetorics of legitimation concocted by church leaders through the dizzying sequence of regime changes of the Troubles. When the ancient tsarist line died out with Ivan theTerrible's last son in 1598, the newly created patriarch, Iyov, manufactured what Gruber casts as a startlingly novel set of justifications for the elevation of Boris Godunov to the throne. Iyov experimented and tinkered, ultimately producing a game-changing set of criteria. Along with familiar elements of tsarist succession such as divine will and clerical affirmation, Gruber identifies the innovative introduction of legitimation through popular choice (voxpopuli) and the bestowal of the throne by a woman (vox feminina)- in this case, the widow of the late tsar and sister of Boris. …

Untranslatable Pushkin and the infectious stage (Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin by American undergraduates)

In 2007 and again in 2012, Princeton University undergraduates brought to the stage in English two works by Alexander Pushkin (one play and one adapted novel in verse). Sergei Prokofiev provided incidental music for both in 1936, at two different Moscow theaters (Meyerhold's company and Tairov's Moscow Chamber Theater). Neither production survived the rising tensions of the Terror in the arts and each was abandoned before opening night. This essay describes the recuperation of these Pushkin “Stalinist Jubilee” projects on an American campus by one of their co-managers, with special attention to the type of humanities education available through such performance activities. Eleven images and eight short video-clips are embedded in the discussion.

Pushkin, Alexander. ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila Pushkin, Alexander. ‘Boris Godunov and ‘Little Tragedies Pushkin, Alexander. ‘Eugene Onegin (review)

Pushkin, Alexander. ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila Pushkin, Alexander. ‘Boris Godunov and ‘Little Tragedies Pushkin, Alexander. ‘Eugene Onegin (review)

The Poetics of Home:

The Poetics of Home:

New Series of Pushkin Editions in English

New Series of Pushkin Editions in English Roger Clarke Alma Classics of Richmond, United Kingdom, is bringing out a new series of Pushkin texts in English. Their intention is, during the next few years, to publish in paperback volumes, purchasable individually, the whole Pushkin corpus in English translation, with appropriate commentaries and background material. This series will supersede the fifteen-volume set of Pushkin's works in English published by Milner and Company in England between 1999 and 2003. The Milner edition is out of print, but Alma Classics (formerly One-world Classics) now own the rights to that material and will draw on it, with corrections, revisions, and additions, in developing the new series. Five volumes have already appeared— Ruslan and Lyudmila (2009: dual-language text, reprinted in 2012) Boris Godunov and the Little Tragedies (2010) Eugene Onegin (2011: dual-language text) The Queen of Spades and Shorter Prose Fiction (including unfinished works) (2011) The Captain's Daughter and A History of Pugachov (2012) The translations and extensive commentaries in the first three volumes are by Roger Clarke, the Series Editor for the project. The last two volumes are made up primarily of Professor Paul Debreczeny's translations, first published by Stanford University Press in 1983 and reissued (with permission) by Milner; but the texts have been re-edited and re-presented and are supplemented with some new translations and commentary. Alma Classics is proposing in 2013 to bring out a volume of some of the lyrics, followed by a new translation of The Tales of Belkin. Volumes already issued can be ordered from the publisher Alma Classics on www.almaclassics.com, or through high street and electronic booksellers. [End Page 161] Copyright © 2012 by its author

The Soviet Union, Russia: Yuri and I: A memoir

56 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXV, No.3, Spring 2012 The Soviet Union, Russia: Yuri and I A memoir Hafeez Malik* Professor Yuri V. Gankovsky and I started first as academic colleagues; gradually we became friends, and then ended as “brothers”. This transformation could take place only between two “Asians” not between American friends. In the American culture is the concept of friendly relations which develops between two individuals, when they live close to each other, or work in the same place. When the environment changes or people move to different neighborhoods, they refer to each others: “we were good friends”. Yuri was a native Russian and I a man of Pakistani origin. Being white and Slavs Russians are considered a kind of European; but they do have traits of Asian culture in them. Their interaction with Muslim Asia dates back to the time when Ghingiz Khan’s grand’s son Batu (1257-1266) conquered Russia in 1240 and his descendents ruled over it for 250years. Russians also tell you (half in jest) that the Ulama in the entourage of IbnFadlan who came from Bagdad in 921 under Caliph Al Muqtadir’s instruction invited the Czar to accept Islam. The Czar accepted all the modalities of fasting and praying, but declined emphatically when it came to foregoing Vodka at the table. But Russia did better for itself; it conquered practically all of Muslim Central Asia, and especially Tatarstan in 1552. Since then there has been heavy mixing of Slavic blood with the Muslim blood of Tatars. A saying goes “you scratch a Russian and underneath you find a Tatar”. Incidentally Czar Boris Godunov was of Tatar origin, and an opera named after him, celebrates his origins. Even Ivan the Terrible who defeated the Tatars had married a beautiful Muslim princess from the Caucasus, and christened her with the name Maria. *Hafeez Malik is a professor Emeritus of Political Sciences, Villanova University, Villanova PA. He is the Editor of the Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. 57 Russia is also a land where Orthodox Christianity and Islam have intermingled sometimes in hostility, but more often than not in peaceful coexistence. Their interaction is assured by geography’s enduring pattern of persistence. Geographically Russia is an extension of Asia. Accompanied by Fr. Kail C. Ellis, I traveled on a Soviet built highway from Chelyabinsk to Ufa. Somewhere in the midpoint a pillar is erected by the highway bearing on one side East and the other side West. In other words Asian Russia is east of the Ural range and European Russia west of it. We stopped there and and had a brief picnic; and contemplated the vastness of this geographically determined mélange of the East and West. ( I ) As a faculty member I joined Villanova University in August 1961 to teach courses on South Asia and Communism. As a PhD candidate at Syracuse University I studied international relations with emphasis on the Soviet Union. These subjects were offered by Professor W.W. Kulski, a former Polish Ambassador (of Poland’s government in exile in London) to Britain during the World War II period. Like Henry Kissinger he spoke with heavy European accent, and was deeply immersed in the intricacies of Soviet Political system and the pivotal role of the communist parties in the Soviet Union and the East European states. He was a grand connoisseur of the cold war diplomacy. Unlike Kissinger, professor Kulski was fluent in Russian and French as he had earned his PhD from the Sorbonne Paris in the 1920s. He became my mentor at Syracuse, and taught me to control my emotions in assessing the historical developments. Be a realist was his message, which he illustrated from Poland’s three tragic partitions and dismemberments of its territory between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Since then realism has been my creed. Under professor Kulski’s masterful care I started my doctoral dissertation on the role of nationalism in the formulation of Pakistan’s foreign policy, but ended up in presenting the reality of Muslim nationalism in India. He encouraged my deviation, and both of us were happy with the final magnum opus...

Crowd, Mob, and Nation in Boris Godunov: What Did Musorgsky Think, and Does It Matter?

When Musorgsky revised his opera Boris Godunov in 1871–72 as a condition for its eventual performance in 1874, he made many changes that went far beyond what the Imperial Theaters demanded of him. Among these changes was the composition of a crowd scene outside Moscow, in which the rebellious populace hails the Pretender, to replace a crowd scene at Red Square in which a submissive, hungry crowd begs Boris for bread. The original scene came, like the rest of the libretto, directly from Pushkin's eponymous play. The new scene reflected a new view of the historical events, and Musorgsky wrote his own text for it. The two scenes are ideologically at odds, particularly as regards their view of the Russian nation in relation to the Russian people. Moreover, the two scenes share the episode of the Holy Fool and the thieving boys, which Musorgsky transferred from the one score to the other. Obviously, Musorgsky regarded them as incompatible within a single production and thought he had made conflating them impossible. And yet, at the Bolshoy Theater, beginning in 1927, the two scenes have indeed been played that way, inconsistencies and redundancies be damned. The Bolshoy production of 1939 (which became widely known and influential through recordings and film) might be written off, the way we tend to write off the art of the Stalinist era, as a politically motivated anomaly. But many other productions and most recordings since 1948 have included both scenes without any such evident motivation, indicating that the Bolshoy production is now regarded as canonical. Is the historiographical contradiction involving the theme of the conference at which this article was first presented (“Opera and Nation,” Budapest 2010) to be regarded as a blemish? If not, what considerations can be seen to outweigh it? Can Musorgsky's political ideas be deduced from the work in which we assume they are embodied? And if they can be, should they be regarded as an aspect of the work that performers need respect?

Crowd, mob, and nation in Boris Godunov: What did musorgsky think, and does it matter?

When Musorgsky revised his opera Boris Godunov in 1871–1872 as a condition for its eventual performance in 1874, he made many changes that went far beyond what the Imperial Theaters demanded of him. Among these changes was the composition of a crowd scene outside Moscow, in which the rebellious populace hails the Pretender, to replace a crowd scene at Red Square in which a submissive, hungry crowd beg Boris for bread. The original scene came, like the rest of the libretto, directly from Pushkin’s eponymous play. The new scene reflected a new view of the historical events, and Musorgsky wrote his own text for it. The two scenes are ideologically at odds, particularly as regards their view of the Russian nation in relation to the Russian people. Moreover, the two scenes share the episode of the Holy Fool and the thieving boys, which Musorgsky transferred from the one score to the other. Obviously, Musorgsky regarded them as incompatible within a single production and thought he had made conflating them impossible. And yet, at the Bolshoy Theater in 1939, the two scenes were indeed played that way, inconsistencies and redundancies be damned. The Bolshoy production (which became widely known through recordings and film) might be written off, the way we tend to write off the art of the Stalinist era, as a politically motivated anomaly. But other productions, including one in San Francisco in 1992, and one that was mounted in 2010 at the Teatro Regio in Torino, have included both scenes without any such evident motivation, possibly because the Bolshoy production is now regarded by some as canonical. Is the historiographical contradiction involving our theme of Opera and Nation to be regarded as a blemish? If not, what considerations can be seen to outweigh it? Can Musorgsky’s political ideas be deduced from the work in which we assume they are embodied? And if they can be, should they be regarded as an aspect of the work that performers need respect?

“She troubles me like a passion”: Shakespearean Echoes in Pushkin’s Marina Mniszek

In the extensive body of scholarship concerning Shakespeare's influence on Pushkin, (1) more studies have examined Pushkin's employment of particular motifs than his depiction of characters, which is especially strange given the poet's stated admiration of Shakespeare's method of characterization. In a drafted letter of July 1825 to N. N. Raevsky (the younger), writes: Read Shakespeare; he is never afraid of compromising a character of his, he makes him speak with all the unconstraint of life because he is sure to find the language of his character for him at the right time and place. (2) Further, as described by M. N. Bobrova, in both and Shakespeare, comprehension of historical events flows through the personalities of the characters and their complex psychologies. (3) In Boris Godunov, borrows Shakespearean motifs and methods of staging (4) in creating his own unique, paradoxical, and complicated characters. Among the individual figures in Pushkin's play, considerably less work has been dedicated to finding models for Marina than for Boris and the Pretender, (5) despite the frequently observed connections between Pushkin's heroines and Shakespeare's, especially in Mistress into Maid and Romeo and Juliet, Egyptian Nights and Antony and Cleopatra, Pohava and Othello, Graf Nulin and The Rape of Lucrece, and, of course, Andzhelo and Measure for Measure. Nonetheless, critical observations of parallels between Marina Mniszek and Shakespeare's heroines have, for the most part, been limited to passing remarks. In her monograph on and Shakespeare, Catherine O'Neil makes a bold statement on Pushkin's appropriation of Shakespeare's heroines, of which Marina is a notable exception: Pushkin was drawn to the Shakespearean heroines who are brave and sometimes reckless in love, defiant of those who oppose their love, and above all constant: Juliet and Desdemona. (6) Indeed, Marina's calculation in romantic relations makes her an outlier among Pushkin's heroines. (7) Moreover, her willingness to divorce sex from love represents a significant departure from Shakespeare's heroines. A number of Pushkin's letters, as well as the memoirs of his contemporaries, indicate that the personality of Marina Mniszek and the role that she played in history utterly fascinated the poet. (8) most explicitly describes his thoughts about Marina in his draft letter of 30 January or 30 June 1829 to N. N. Raevsky (the younger): A tragedy without love appealed to my imagination. But apart from the fact that love entered greatly into the romantic and passionate character of my adventurer, I have rendered Dimitry enamored of Marina in order to better throw into relief the strange character of the latter. It is still no more than sketched out in Karamzin. But most certainly she was a strange, beautiful woman. She had only one passion and that was ambition, but to such a degree of energy, of frenzy that one can scarcely imagine. After having tasted of royalty, watch her, drunk of a chimera, prostitute herself with one adventurer after another--share now the disgusting bed of a Jew, now the tent of a Cossack, always ready to give herself to anyone who could present her with the feeble hope of a throne which no longer existed. Watch her boldly face war, destitution, shame, and at the same time negotiate with the king of Poland as one crowned head with another--and end miserably a most stormy and most extraordinary life. I have only one scene for her, but I shall return to her, if God grants me life. She troubles me like a passion. (9) According to this account, had invented the fountain scene (10) in order to illustrate the unusual character of Marina Mniszek. Apparently, Marina's unfeminine lack of interest in romantic love and her promiscuity for the sake of political gain attracted the poet's attention. …

The Ninth: Beethoven and the world in 1824

A decade after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had given way to an era of retrenchment and repression, 1824 became a watershed year. premiere of the Ninth Symphony, the death of Lord Byron - who had been aiding the Greeks in their struggle for independence, Delacroix's painting of the Turkish massacre of Greeks at Chios and Pushkin's anti-tyrannical play Boris Godunov all signalled that the desire for freedom was not dead. And all of these works and events were part of the flowering of the High Romantic period. In The Ninth, eminent music historian and biographer Harvey Sachs employs memoir, anecdote and his vast knowledge of history to explain how the premiere of Beethoven's staggering last symphony was emblematic of its time - a work of art unlike any other - and a magisterial, humanistic statement that remains a challenge down to our own day and for future generations.

Lighting Boris Godunov with Andrei Tarkovsky

It is early spring in 1983, and I am lighting a revival of another of the myriad productions that the Royal Opera at Covent Garden has at its disposal. A very excited production manager comes to the production desk and whispers in my ear (rather loudly), “We have Andrei Tarkovsky to direct Boris Godunov next season.” I was familiar with the name Tarkovsky, but my filmic experience had been shaped almost exclusively by Hollywood and British cinema, particularly as a young boy in the Second World War. Russian film had passed me by—something to be remedied. However, sometime after this, Andrei Tarkovsky and the set designer Nicholas Dvigubsky duly arrived in London to begin the tortuous process of designing Boris Godunov. As a film director, Andrei was clearly a very visual being, and Nicholas, as a painter, was equally visual. Unfortunately, their visions did not always coincide, resulting in a lot of heated Russian expletives. I was not party to all of this, but the word came down from our model room that “all was not going swimmingly”! They did eventually arrive at a solution which, by and large, still stands today as a monument to their perspicacity and originality (fig. 1).

Boris Godunov at the Interstices of Opera and Film

Boris Godunov at the Interstices of Opera and Film

Through a Glass Darkly: Doubling and Poetic Self‐Image in Pushkin's “The Gypsies”

^S/ijozzrt and Salieri. Lenskii and Onegin. Dmitrii Samozvanets and Boris Godunov. Evgenii and Tsar Peter. Don Juan and the Commander. young Count and Silvio. Pugachev and Petia Grinev. Italian Improviser and the poet-dandy Charskii. ... Even the casual reader cannot help but notice the prevalence of mutually contentious, yet perversely interdependent, male character pairs, or doubles, in Pushkin's narrative and dramatic works.1 This feature of Pushkin's literary imagination receives occasional mention in the scholarship; in the present article I propose to build upon some previous scholarly insights to consider the overarching significance of doubles for Pushkin's creative psyche. I will do so through close analysis of his 1824 poema The Gypsies, a work that at first glance would seem to have little to do with the literary double.2 That doubling can nevertheless be shown to be operant in even such a text lends credence to my hypothesis that this device is an essential engine of Pushkin's poetic imagination, one that is deeply implicated in his creative aspirations and insecurities and, indeed, in the poetic self-portrait that can be traced in