Stone Guest Research Articles

СКРЫТЫЙ НАБЛЮДАТЕЛЬ (ОБ ОДНОМ ИНВАРИАНТНОМ МОТИВЕ У ПУШКИНА)

It is shown that the same scene or situation passes through Pushkin’s works in which an observer watching for two or more objects is present. If an object of dangerous observation is a woman, the scene, as a rule, ends up with her faint or death. The presence of such an observer can be considered as uncontrolled intrusion of fate into human’s life. Uncovering the scheme under consideration is especially important since poetics of Pushkin is extremely laconic, so even in a finished text one is led to reconstruct some implicit details. Then, a given invariant (related just to the property of reticence) can serve as a tool for independent check. In particular, its application agrees with interpretation of the final scene in “The Stone Guest” that was suggested by us earlier from completely different rationale.

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Интертекст в повести Сергея Довлатова “Заповедник” (Пушкин и русская классика)

The article considers the intertextuality of the story of S. Dovlatov “The Reserve” and installed and pushkin’s and postpushkin’s connections and allusions. The intertexteme “Pushkin’s Reservation” initially programs the explication of literary-oriented ties and parallels, the extra-textual allusions and reminiscences, as well as inner-textual references and citations. Consequently, it updates the notion of “Mikhaylov Text”, primarily setting the grounds for numerous literary inductions that are to emerge in Dovlatov’s text and oriented (above all) to A. S. Pushkin’s creative activities. This constitutes the principal objective of the paper under studies. Among the pretexts to Dovlatov named Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”, “Belkin story”, “Dubrovsky”, “Stone guest”, “Captain’s daughter”, “I loved you...”, “Andrew Chenier”, “Again I visited...”, “I erected a monument to himself miraculous...” and others. However, as shown in the article, the mosaic of the pretexts of “The Reserve” is much wider and richer. Postpushkin’s pretexts in the work designated by the names of I. Goncharov (“Oblomov”), A. Blok (“The Stranger”, etc.), A. Solzhenitsyn (“Matryona”), V. Shukshin (“Cut”), V. Erofeeva (“Moscow – Petushki”), V. Piecuch (“The Life of a scoundrel”), novels by I. Il’f and E. Petrov (“Twelve chairs”, “Golden calf”) and others. The work concludes that the interpretation of the intertext in the novel by Dovlatov allows you to enter more capacious literary allusions and parallels, set the semantic synchrony between different texts of classic and modern literature.

Ratzel's stone guest: The art of politics in the work of Friedrich Ratzel

In this essay I demonstrate that Friedrich Ratzel's Lebensraum essay can itself be read as a biopolitical text because it contains something more than a pure description of the Darwinian struggle for life, namely an imperative. I therefore interrogate Ratzel's ideas in the light of Michel Foucault's theory of biopower. In order to unveil the deeply biopolitical character of Ratzel's Lebensraum idea, I point first to Ratzel's specific notion of culture, which he shares with the cultural studies approach (Kulturwisenschaften) developed by the Leipzig circle. Secondly, I detect the main ‘stone guest’ in this text – Ratzel's idea of politics and the ‘art of state politics’ (Staatskunst), by folding ‘politics’ into German cultural imperialism. Finally, by interrogating Ratzel's notion of science, I show his construction of geography as ‘power-knowledge’ in ways designed to reveal to politicians the keys for an understanding of human and political life.

Gdzie jest Komandor? Motyw śmierci w kontekście nieobecności Kamiennego Gościa w utworach Tadeusza Micińskiego „Przy grobie Don Juana Tenorio” i Bolesława Leśmiana [„Zbladła twarz Don Żuana, gdy w ulicznym mroku”

Where is the Commander? The death motif in the context of nonpresence of the Stone Guest in works by Tadeusz Miciński Przy grobie Don Juana Tenorio [By the grave of Don Juan Tenorio] and Bolesław Leśmian Zbladła twarz Don Żuana, gdy w ulicznym mroku [Don Juan’s face turned pale] The story of don Juan, persistently retold by many poets, seems to be only a pretext for show­ing the problem of presence/absence of Commander and, as a consequence, death motif in the Tadeusz Miciński and Bolesław Leśmian’ s poems. In the don Juan Tenorio history’s final fragments, the Stone Guest was coming to call for don Juan’s conversion. On the seducer’s incessant refusals and rebelling against the laws set by God and society, the Stone Guest was killing him. Don Juan de Maraña, by contrast, has decided to enter a convent — Commander has reclaimed the sinner. In my article I would like to present the motif of death, love, pride, punishment and conversion in two Young Poland’s poems and I would like to describe these problems considering the époque’s esthetic and cultural dimension.

O ROMANCE HISTÓRICO BRASILEIRO CONTEMPORÂNEO E SUA RELEITURA DE MITOS HISPÂNICOS

Analyzing the novel O Chalaca (1994), by Jose Roberto Torero, this article aims to expose about the reading made by this novel related to the Hispanic literary myths of picaro and Don Juan, intending to point how the Contemporary Brazilian historical novel collects the meaning of those myths in its own deeply overthrowing reconstruction of the official history signs. This meaning integration occurs mainly by parody and intertextuality, language resources projected in the text architecture along the carnivalization of language, what reassures the deconstructionist aiming of this novel type, what it is related to the goal of proposing alternatives of the official historiography discourse. Such myths, taken mainly from the picaresque novel Lazarilho de Tormes, by anonymous, and the play El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de Piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the stone guest), by Tirso de Molina, they were marked by the intemporal and dynamic character that distinguishes a myth, becoming recurrent in a great variety of following works, taking important part in the occidental cultural-literary imaginary. In the contemporary historical novel, which is highly conscious of its intertextual constitution (usually expressed through metalanguage, which gets emerged the textual material in its discoursive nature), developing the deconstructive traits of the contemporary literature, once those myths are inserted in an “ex-centric” social space, refused by the society hegemonic rules.

The Don Giovanni moment: essays on the legacy of an opera

List of ContributorsIntroduction, by Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz1. Don Giovanni: And what communion hath light with darkness?, by Ingrid Rowland2. Don Juan and Faust: On the Interaction Between Two Literary Myths, by Ernst Osterkamp3. Hidden Secrets of the Self : E. T. A. Hoffmann's Reading of Don Giovanni, by Richard Eldridge4. Don Juan in Nicholas's Russia (Pushkin's The Stone Guest), by Boris Gasparov5. M rike's Mozart and the Scent of a Woman, by Hans Rudolf Vaget6. The Gothic Libertine: The Shadow of Don Giovanni in Romantic Music and Culture, by Thomas S. Grey7. Don Juan as an Idea, by Bernard Williams8. Kierkegaard Writes His Opera, Daniel Herwitz9. The Curse and Promise of the Absolutely Musical: Tristan und Isolde and Don Giovanni, by Lydia Goehr10. Authority and Judgment in Mozart's Don Giovanni and Wagner's Ring, by Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht11. Mozart's Don Giovanni in Shaw's Comedy, Agnes Heller12. Giovanni auf Naxos, Brian Soucek13. to Adorno's Homage to Zerlina, by Berthold Hoeckner14. Adorno and the Don, by Nikolaus Bacht

Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture. By Boris Gasparov. pp. xxii + 268. Russian Literature and Throught. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2005, 30. ISBN 0-300-10650-5.)

Between 1863 and 1890, Russian literature and music appear to evolve along very disparate lines. A side-by-side chronology of major works sees Chernyshevsky’s polemical What Is to Be Done, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment belonging to the same decade (the 1860s) as Dargomyzhsky’s The Stone Guest, Borodin’s Prince Igor (both operas left incomplete at the composers’ deaths), and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. This pattern continues into the 1870s and 1880s, with Dostoevsky’s disturbing novel The Brothers Karamazov sitting incongruously alongside Rimsky-Korsakov’s sparkling early fairy-tale operas, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina (also left incomplete). At first glance, this looks like a clear case of a lack of social engagement on the part of Russian composers, with perhaps Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov (premiere 1874) serving as the sole honourable exception. And it is at this point that Boris Gasparov invites the reader to think again: to look more closely at those operas that are so often consumed uncritically and to see that they, too, are as typical of their epoch as the weighty historical novels whose philosophical message is rather harder to miss.

The Lamentations of Don Juan and Macbeth

In 1772, Gottlieb Stephanie introduced an adaptation of Macbeth to replace a banned Viennese Don Juan scenario. This essay uses Stephanie's “new stone guest” to uncover broader historical and thematic connections between Macbeth and Don Juan literature. Both tales have roots in anti-Machiavellian theater, which describes the psychic wreckage brought about when one suppresses the conscience in attempting to subdue fortune. Stephanie expresses this shared vision most vividly by folding a lamento into his tragedy. A closing lamentation delivered from hell was a fixture in Don Juan lore, and modern scholarship tends to interpret it as a carnivalesque defiance of temporal and divine stricture. Stephanie, however, draws on a different treatment of the episode: the protagonist's plaint represents a quest for immortality that has turned into a desire for annihilation. Instead of offering defiance, Stephanie's Macbeth follows the course of many Don Juans in despairing over the possibility of grace.

Alexander Pushkin's Little tragedies: the poetics of brevity

Alexander Pushkin's four compact plays, later known as The Little Tragedies, were written at the height of the author's creative powers, and their influence cannot be overestimated. Yet Western readers are far more familiar with Pushkin's lyrics, narrative poems, and prose than with his drama. Setting out to reclaim a cornerstone of Pushkin's work, Evodokimova and her contributors offer the first thorough critical study of these plays. They examine the historical roots and connective themes of the plays, offer close readings, and track the transformation of the works into other genres. Included are new translations by James Falen of the plays The Covetous Knight, Mozart and Salieri, The Stone Guest, and A Feast in Time of Plague.

The Legend and the Self: The Stone Guest and Don Guan

The Legend and the Self: The Stone Guest and Don Guan

Shakespeare and Eastern Europe (review)

210Comparative Drama The LongestDay, and later in Tora, Tora, Tora. I notice also how fully this history of interaction between Yiddish and English yielded experiences and situations that are now applicable in many multicultural circumstances in which two or more languages are involved. Television series have even begun including Spanish dialogue. One must be grateful for the dedicated scholarship ofthis work. My father, a Yiddish actor, died before Berkowitz was born. In his adulthood, the Yiddish theater diminished radically, and he could do nothing to stop this change. He had no idea that there were young people who would discover the value ofthis rich, active aspect of modern Jewish cultural life. There are now several works in English and in Yiddish, as Berkowitz details in his notes and bibliography, thatwill provide guidance to those interested in enlarging the scholarly identity oftheYiddish theater, theYiddish language, the processes ofsecularization without ethical degeneration, and the social vitality ofpopular theater. David Bleich University ofRochester Zdenëk Stííbrny. Shakespeare and Eastern Europe. Oxford and NewYork: OxfordUniversityPress,2000.Pp.xix+ 176. $55.00. The present volume, part ofthe Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, offers a concise and valuable reminder of the Bard's importance for Eastern Europe and Russia but goes further in demonstrating the return obligations ofWestern theater to Slavic responses. Zdenëk Stííbrny, Emeritus Professor in Prague's Charles University, is equally comfortable and well equipped to handle the broad array of theatrical traditions that are involved and to provide an enjoyable excursion across borders and through the years ofShakespeare's influence. The inevitable reiterations oflong-known truths unavoidable in summary accounts ofthis sort are kept to a minimum once we get past the opening brief, ifstill tedious discussion ofEast European history. Stnbrny quicklylivens things up by introducingthe immortal persona ofPickleherring, clown intermediary of performances put on by English players touring the continent as far as Poland. Pickleherring, Stííbrny points out, performed the same function as Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, for he served up song, dance, and sometimes bawdy asides to liven up the audience. In a number ofearly adaptations played on the continent , individual scenes from Shakespeare's workswere adapted for Pickleherring farces, or Pickleherringwas introduced willy nilly into Shakespeare's plays, some- Reviews211 times in radical disjunction with the original text's meaning. Pickleherring reached Russia along with Shakespeare's works. Early committed fans ofShakespeare includedAlexander Sumarokov, Catherine II, Nikolai Karamzin, and, most tellingly, Alexander Pushkin. Sumarokov was moved by his neoclassical sensibilities to try to improve his source, and although his adaptation of Hamlet showed considerable skill in the use of alexandrines and observance ofthe unities, this type ofrefinement ultimately did an injustice to the Bard's broader genius. Catherine II did better, Stfibrny notes, to the point of repairing parts ofthe hasty plotting of The Merry Wives ofWindsor in her 1786 adaptation, a keen satire of Russian mores. Karamzin's reading of Shakespeare and his version of Julius Caesar is of interest chiefly for their influence on Alexander Pushkin and particularly the master Russian play, Boris Godunov. Stfibrny, neatly summarizing Pushkin's debt and his originality, does justice to both as well as to the Shakespeare connections of CountNulin, The Stone Guest, The Covetous Knight, and Angelo. He also describes Mikhail Lermontov's obligations (more tenuous than Pushkin's) in Masquerade, Vissarion Belinsky's Hamletessay and its origins in German philosophy,Turgenev's well-known piece on Hamlet and Don Quixote as lasting human (read: particularly Russian) types, and Turgenev's own prose, including the powerful tale"King Learofthe Steppes." Shakespeare was almost as basic as Harold Bloom imagined for Dostoevsky and Chekhov, although Stïforay's account makes clear that Chekhov's greater engagement with theater shows more explicit attachments in the episodes, characters , and language of all his major plays. For contrast, we are also offered a reviewofTolstoy's notorious repudiation of Shakespeare, followed closely by those of George Bernard Shaw and George Orwell. In this as in other cases in which Shakespeare is criticized, a particular advantage of the study is that it gives as full and honest an appraisal as in the instances ofthe more worshipful responses. One can also appreciate Stribrny...

Don Juan and Don Alejandro: The Seductions of Art in Pushkin's Stone Guest

Don Juan and Don Alejandro: The Seductions of Art in Pushkin's Stone Guest

Adding to the "Guest" List: Hugo's Hernani and Pushkin's Don Juan

Leporello: Milady, this is the list of the beauties that my master has loved: it's a list that I have made; look at it, read it with me. In Italy, six hundred and forty; in Germany, two hundred and thirty-one; a hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one; but in Spain there are already a thousand and three.(Madamina, il catalogo e questo delle belle die amb ilpadron mio: un catalogo egli e che hofatt'io; osservate, leggete con me. In Italia seicentoquaranta, in Almagna duecentotrentuna, cento inFrancia, in Turchia novantuna, ma in Ispagna son gid mille e trLorenzo da Ponte, Il dissoluto punito ossia UDon Giovanni: Dramma giocoso in due atti, 1.5

The Don Juan Theme. An Annotated Bibliography of Versions, Analogues, Uses, and Adaptations (review)

REVIEWS Armand E. Singer. 77ie Don Juan Theme. An Annotated Bibliography of Versions, Analogues, Uses, andAdaptations. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1993. Paper. 415 pp. Bibliographers should sin on the side of excess. Since the early 1950s, professor Singer has dedicated his energies to the collection and cataloguing of items related to the Don Juan theme. His 1954 book contained 1370 entries, and was followed by three supplements; his 1965 book contained 1985 entries, and was followed by five supplements (1966-1980) which provided an additional 600 items. Now, his final offering ("I am crying surcease to these labors; I think I have paid my bibliographic dues to the memory ofthe world's most notorious seducer") provides us with 3107 items — "versions, analogues, uses, and adaptations" — which deal with, however tangentially, the Don Juan theme. This bibliography contains no listings of secondary material or criticism (which would have added another 5000 entries ). The book is divided into three parts. The first part (items 1-266) contains items extracted from pre-Tirso legend, folklore, literature, history, and myth. Singer lists folklore and literary versions ofthe hero who faces a statue , the avenging statue, the stone guest, the man who attends his own funeral , etc. Some items here are less useful, as in the sections on "real life" types, which list noted "seducers" such as Alexander the Great, Warren Beatty, Charlie Chaplin, John Cheever, Jason, Jupiter, and Napoleon III; the "Doña Juana" types include Isabel II, Messalina, and Lola Montez (where is Madonna ?). A listing of the Don Juan-like figure in literature could be potentially endless, but Singer provides a generous selection from literatures in Spanish, German, French, Italian, Indian, Arabian, Chinese and other languages . The second part (items 267-3081, plus addendum) provides a rich, abundant , and frequently surprising listing ofplays, poems, musical dramas, operas , novellas, novels, ballets, musical compositions, short stories, puppet 273 274BCom, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Winter 1994) shows, versions in art (paintings, engravings, set decorations, sculptures), and "other" creations by major (Balzac, Molière, Zorrilla, etc.) and minor individuals. While some of this is of little interest to scholars — Oprah Winfrey makes an appearance with her 1990 show on "Husbands who encounter flirtatious women in the workplace" —Singer includes everything that might have real or anecdotal value to someone pursuing the appearance of the Don Juan type in the ancient and modern worlds. Hispanists will be less interested in learning that the hero of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness ofBeing seduces women, or that Philip Roth's bumbling Portnoy tries to do so, or that a moving statue makes an appearance in D.M. Thomas 's novel, The Draughtman's Contract (Peter Greenaway's film version gets no mention) than in having access to accurate detail about literary works which mention Don Juan (Tirso's or Zorrilla's) or the Don Juan type. Singer's painstaking efforts pay off. We learn of the impressive permutations of Don Juan in European literatures (Singer goes well beyond Leo Weinstein's classic 1959 study, 77ze Metamorphoses ofDon Juan and even Ignacio-Javier Lopez's more recent Caballero de novela: Ensayo sobre el donjuanismo en la novela española moderna, 1880-1930, Barcelona: Puvill , 1986), ofhis transformation in other media, and even ofthe appropriation of his name to sell suspenders, sexual aids (a Don Juan "happy ring" was sold by a North Carolina mail order firm), razor blades, lipstick, and an alcohol-filled chocolate candy made in Bologna. Part three is a useful chronological listing ofversions (pp. 38-415). Singer's definitive volume is valuable, all-inclusive, thorough, and entertaining . We even get a limerick: Don Juan, an old man ofgreat honor, Offered marriage in old Tiajuana To a flighty teenager; All it did was enrage her; She replied, "You're too old; I Don Juana. What more could we ask for? David T Gies University ofVirginia ...

Against Apocalypse: Politics and James Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover"

Admittedly, James Merrill is not a poet in the manner of, say, Denise Levertov. Although Levertov wants to attain such osmosis the personal and the public . .. that no one would be able to divide our poems into categories, she nevertheless bases her answer to the question What Is Political Poetry? largely on political or social content (128), and, like many contemporary poets, she has been an activist. One recent study her poetry distinguishes her clear moral and ideological position from much modern poetry which remains hermetic and socially disengaged (Smith 232), a description Robert von Hallberg might find suitable for Merrill's work: Politics, with few exceptions, is a subject Merrill deliberately disdains. . . . From [Merrill's] camp viewpoint politics is stylelessly overladen with content; it can be ignored because the camp sensibility is premised, as Susan Sontag has noted, on detachment (110-11). Von Hallberg offers up passages where Merrill no sooner broaches a issue than he retreats (Merrill refers in Book Ephraim, section J, to nuclear research / Our instinct first is to deplore, and second / To think no more of [33]) and quotes The Broken Home: rarely buy a newspaper, or vote. / To do so, I have learned, is to invite / tread a stone guest within my house (142).1 Indeed, Merrill has plainly conceded, We all have our limits. I draw the line at politics or hippies (Recitative 32). (Spoken in 1967, these must have sounded like fighting words.)

Tirso de Molina, "The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest", trans. with an introduction and commentary by Gwynne Edwards (Book Review)

Tirso de Molina, "The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest", trans. with an introduction and commentary by Gwynne Edwards (Book Review)

Liszt and Musorgsky. The Genuine and False Documents of the Relationship between the Two Composers

Quoted bv N. Findeizen: V. V. Bessel. Petersburg 1909, pp. 35-37. My acquaintance with Fr. Liszt grew out of the poliev of our publishing house. I went to Weimar for the first time on the advise of Musorgsky and C. A. Cui to show him the piano scores of the operas, Dargomizhsky's Stone Guest and Cui's Wtlltam Ratcliff, which had just come off the press. In order to make the text of The Stone Guest intelligible to him, a German or French translation had to be added (Ratcltff was published with both Russian and German texts). Then WI. P. Musorgsky, who had mastered the German language, undertook to interline Bodenstedt's translation of The Stone GZuest, which seemed quite close to the original version hy Pushkin, and gave me this copy for Liszt. Arriving in Weimar, I decided to keep this copy as a token of memory, and make another copy of it fol Liszt: and I actually accomplished the task within one night. During the day I callecl on Liszt who received me very cordially, I might say kindly, took from me both piano scores andl requested me to come again at 9 o'clock on the following day. By mistake I arrived at the Gartenhouse svhere he lived by 8 o'clock. The house or rather villa surrounded by plants in which Liszt had the whole upper floor to himself stands in the vicinity of a beautiful court park on the edge of the town. Approaching the house, my attention was caught bv the sounds of a piano; I sat down on a bench and listened for an hour to the parts of the two Russian operas he took the greatest interest in. When the clock in the tower of a nearby church struck nine, I went up the stairs. The servant of dark skin from WIontenegro (who was to steal from him later on) showed me up in a kindly manner to the maestro (he was generally addressed as Meister or Herr Doctor). Liszt came to meet me and spoke about The Stone Guest in the tone of the most sincere rapture and praised Ratcltff extensively too.-If I were still the conductor of the theatre here, I would present here both operas without delayhe said resolutely and with eonviction. He suggested that I call on Hans von Bulow who was holding the office of eourt opera eonduetor in Munich at the time and tell him that I was visiting him on his advice and handing him over the piano seore of Ratcliff . . . When I was saying good-bye to Liszt, he asked me to eall on him in Weimar whenever I was to visit GEermany.

Dostoevsky and Opera: Prokofiev's The Gambler

F, as is often maintained, great literature is rarely transferred successfully to the operatic stage, someone forgot to tell the Russians. Virtually all the classics of the Russian operatic repertory are based on works of Russian literature that were recognized as masterpieces in their own right before being transformed into librettos. The stories, fairy tales, and long narrative poems of Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), often called Russia's Shakespeare, inspired many Russian operatic composers: Mussorgsky (Boris Godunov), Tchaikovsky (Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades), Rimsky-Korsakov (Tsar Saltan and The Golden Cockerel), Glinka (Ruslan and Ludmilla) and Dargomyzhsky (The Stone Guest), to name only a few. Not far behind is Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), who was a special favorite of RimskyKorsakov (May Night and Christmas Eve). Dmitri Shostakovich's opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, comes from a muchloved short story of the same title by Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895), a writer still highly regarded in Russia. But conspicuous by their absence are the two titans of nineteenthcentury Russian literature: Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). Perhaps Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and RimskyKorsakov passed them over because they were their contemporaries. Yet Rimsky-Korsakov did write an opera, The Snow Maiden, based on a play by another well-known contemporary, the playwright Nikolai Ostrovsky (1823-1886). More likely, the enormous scale and complexity of the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and the huge task of reducing them to manageable and dramatically viable librettos, intimidated the composers. How could one hope to convey in a oneevening opera the epic sweep and abundance of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, or the lengthy philosophical excesses of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment? 96

"El Convidado de Piedra", a "Zarzuela" by Rafael del Castillo

celon6s his three act zarzuela, El convidado de piedra, which, because of its theme, deserves to be rescued from its present obscurity. The initial page of the first edition of the work carried after the title this comment: zarzuela arreglada sobre el drama del mismo titulo.1 An immediate problem which suggests itself is to which specific play, if any, entitled El convidado de piedra he refers. As far as can be ascertained, there was no work of a Spanish writer that actually bore this title previous to the time of Castillo although the Don Juan plays of both Tirso de Molina and Antonio de Zamora were popularly known by this title.2 During the first seventy-five years of the nineteenth century, only two Don Juan plays had attained any popularity whatsoever; these were the works of Zamora and Jose Zorrilla. Zamora's play, which was produced yearly until 1844,3 carries the stone guest reference in its subtitle: No hay plazo que no se cumpla ni deuda que no se pague o el convidado de piedra. The year 1844 marked the composition of the more popular play, Don Juan Tenorio, by Zorrilla who makes no mention at all of the stone guest in the title.