In this provocative new interpretation of Pushkin's most enigmatic work for the stage, Douglas Clayton makes contributions to literary history, genre studies, a domain he calls poetic or lexical semantics, and to the poet's religious-political worldview—in order of increasing vulnerability and breadth of claim. Of undisputed excellence, in this reviewer's opinion, are the opening chapters on Push kin's relation to the theater and to the dramatic genre system of European Romanticism. Chapter 2, on the “war of prefaces" waged by reformist French dramatists and especially by Victor Hugo in his 1827 forward to Cromwell, sheds much welcome light on Pushkin's sequence of unfinished, fragmentary "drafts for a preface" to Boris, which are read here almost as meditations on Hugo's concerns. It is refreshing throughout the book to have boilerplate Soviet-era misreadings refuted in such a competent way: the myth of Pushkin's passionate faith in the narod, for example, or the Marxist oversimplification of his complex working relationship with two emperors.

Clayton has chosen not to hold the play to strict historical account, preferring instead to see its early-seventeenth-century settings "overlaid" or “overwritten" with events and issues contemporaneous with Pushkin's own era. (He calls the play "not a history at all, but metahistory" [122].) This multi-layered, metaphorical approach inevitably blunts much of the accurate historical detail Pushkin did embed in the play, for which the poet researched many sources in addition to Karamzin, allowing himself to hint at in art what the Historian Laureate could not write into his officially-approved narrative. But it also enables persuasive aesthetic observations. At the beginning of chapter 8, for example, Clayton sums up the case for Boris Godunov as Pushkin's most impressive "Moscow [or Muscovite] text," equivalent to The Bronze Horseman as the foundational Petersburg text. In support of this claim, Clayton proposes to revise Jakobson's assertion, in his famous essay on Pushkin's sculptural myth, that statues coming to life was a phenomenon and an anxiety for Pushkin only in the 1830s. In fact, Clayton argues, we see an equivalently fantastical animation of dead matter already in 1825, in the medieval Moscow of Boris Godunov. The prePetrine counterpart to the profane statue was the holy icon. And the "shaping images—images that arguably come to life in the text of Boris Godunov—are those of the icons of St. George the Wonderworker, Boris and Gleb, the murdered innocents, and Dimitry, who was canonized in the Russian Orthodox Church" (166).

The centrality of these pre-Petrine, "Muscovite," articles of faith, not only to the body of the play but to Pushkin's own maturing conservative worldview, is the most controversial aspect of this new book. The hypothesis that select symbols at work inside the play can be used to demonstrate Pushkin's biographical evolution from a political radical to a "Romantic conservative" is intriguing, but some of the evidence adduced seems stretched. Can we say that Boris Godunov's promise to Basmanov to overturn mestnichestvo was a gesture that Pushkin in his own life would have resented, threatening as it did nobility of birth by a system of promotion by merit? (The ambitious Pushkin had no anxieties about winning on both scores, if only the tsar would respect his desire to serve.) Because Pushkin was drawing closer to the monarchy as he matured, and because the Romanov tsars despised Tsar Dimitry, is this reason to believe that Pushkin, independently, did not come to his own positive assessment of this remarkable figure? (There is plenty of indication in Pushkin's texts that he admired in Dimitry his protean inventiveness and humaneness, although Clayton gives a disapproving and rather dark reading of the Pretender: "This ability [on Dimitry's part] to master all genres and to speak all languages suggests a lack of unity and coherence in his character and turns out, in the final analysis, to be a fatal flaw in his personality" [127].) Clayton carefully analyzes networks of thematic associations and lexical patternings: chapter 6 for images of "horse and rider [and snake]," chapter 7 for select word pairs and paronomastic play. Occasionally, however, one feels that the semantic reach of the pairs is so broad and so fundamental to dramatic movement that almost any plot detail, in some form, could be made to fit. These capacious pairs include speech and silence, blindness and seeing, and the roots prav- and slav-/slov-, which Clayton then links in authoritative synthesis as pravoslavie. The clusters are indeed there and vital, but all of medieval Muscovy ran on those parameters; for that reason they are omnipresent, and it is hard to work with them as disciplined organizing principles inside the text. Likewise, the pervasive image of mounted horse and snake is associated first with St. George [Georgii] the Wonderworker, then with "St. George's Day" [Iur'ev den'], then with the frequency of miracle—although chudo is certainly as often associated with Nikolai Chudotvorets, patron saint of Russia, as with St. George. When the Pretender in the Garden tells Marina that he has "prepared a miracle for the world," this need not be "arrogating to himself the title of St. George" even as it is true that the tsar's emblem is this icon (139); other saints work miracles too. The ending sentence of chapter 6 is emblematic of the risk and the excitement of this "cultural-semiotic" methodology. The real and false miracles of Dimitry, wonderworking icons, the political rise and fall of a runaway monk—"these miracles too," Clayton concludes, "are part and parcel of the ideological and spiritual world of Orthodoxy that Pushkin evokes in his text" (140). Evoke is a favored verb in this book, but its meaning is perhaps too multi-directional. Does it indicate approval? Parody? Endorsement? Simply to "call something to mind" with a cluster of cognate images feels insufficient.

Closing the real Pushkin down around anyone text is always a liability, and Clayton puts much brave material out for us to consider. But it seems that he is not always his own best advocate. "Pushkin ... had adopted an increasingly antirevolutionary stance," Clayton notes sensibly about the poet's final years, “and intellectually had nowhere to go but to affirm the traditional values of the Russian state" (167). It purchases us little to say that Pushkin had "nowhere to go intellectually" at any point in his life, even at his physically and materially most desperate. And "traditional values of the Russian state" is simply too vague an ideology to guide us effectively through the life or the play. The traditions of Ivan the Terrible? Of Peter the Great? Of the early Alexander I, or of the freshly crowned Nicholas I , whom Pushkin so hoped to impress in September 1826? Evidence suggests that Pushkin's median ideology was that of an enlightened aristocrat—which did not prevent him from playing around in Russian with stirring freedom-loving phrases long clichéd in French poetry (his defiant Lycee verses, the cause of his exile), just as it did not prevent him in 1833 from calculating how much money he could gain if he turned over sluggard serfs on the Boldino estate to the state for "recruit quittance." How many of these gestures can be read back into a drama on medieval Muscovy or forward into a consistent "traditional" Russian value system is difficult to say. One last detail. Given the enormous attention paid to the three pillars of Official Nationality, it was surprising, in the final chapter, to find the famous triad listed [167, 168] in blasphemous order: autocracy, orthodoxy, nationality. Pravoslavie always came first.

Caryl Emerson
Princeton University

Citation:
Emerson, Caryl. Rev. of J. Douglas Clayton. Dimitry's Shade: A Reading of Alexander Pushkin's "Boris Godunov." Pushkin Review / Pushkinskii vestnik 06-07 (2003-04): 189 - 91. <http://www.pushkiniana.org>

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