Writing the Time of Troubles: False Dmitry in Russian Literature 1618118633, 9781618118639

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WRITING THE TIME

OF TROUBLES False Dmitry in Russian Literature

The Unknown Nineteenth Century Series Editor JOE PESCHIO (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)

Editorial Board ANGELA BRINTLINGER (Ohio State University, Columbus) ALYSSA GILLESPIE (University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana) MIKHAIL GRONAS (Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire) IGOR PILSHCHIKOV (Tallinn University, Moscow State University) DAVID POWELSTOCK (Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts) ILYA VINITSKY (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia)

WRITING THE TIME

OF TROUBLES False Dmitry in Russian Literature

MARCIA A. MORRIS

Boston 2018

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morris, Marcia A., 1952- author. Title: Writing the Time of Troubles : False Dmitry in Russian literature / Marcia Morris. Description: Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018. | Series: Unknown nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018023375 (print) | LCCN 2018034102 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618118646 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618118639 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Kings and rulers in literature. | Boris Fyodorovich Godunov, Czar of Russia, 1551 or 1552-1605—In literature. | Lzhedmitrii I, Czar of Russia, -1606—In literature. | Russian literature—18th century—History and criticism. | Russian literature—19th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PG3015.5.K56 (ebook) | LCC PG3015.5.K56 M67 2018 (print) | DDC 891.709/35847045—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023375 © Academic Studies Press, 2018. ISBN 9781618118639 (hardcover) ISBN 9781618118646 (ebook) Book design by Kryon Publishing Services (P) Ltd. www.kryonpublishing.com Cover design by Ivan Grave On the cover: False Dmitry I in Coronation Robes, by Szymon Boguszowicz (oil on canvas, ca. 1606). Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

In memoriam William E. Harkins, Scholar, Teacher, Mentor

Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii A Note on Translation, Transliteration, Names, and Abbreviationsviii Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitryix Chapter 1. Prelude

1

Chapter 2. Two Visions of Tyranny: The Late Eighteenth Century

18

Chapter 3. Verbal Self-Fashioning: The Early Nineteenth Century

50

Chapter 4. Two Visions of Reform: 1866

85

Chapter 5. Contingent Self-Fashioning: The Fin de Siècle

105

Dmitry: Re-resurrection and Conclusions

133

Sources Cited

142

Index156

Acknowledgments

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he longer one works on a project the greater the obligations one accrues. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Deborah Martinsen for reading two versions of Writing the Time of Troubles and gently pointing out unwarranted moments of prolixity—also for helping me locate the text of Nikolay Chaev’s Dmitry the Pretender. I am likewise beholden to Milla Fedorova for drawing my attention to Boris Akunin’s Children’s Book and to Olga Meerson for introducing me to Lyudmila Taymasova and her Tragedy in Uglich. Deborah Martinsen, Robin Miller, and Amy Ronner have been boon companions and unfailing interlocutors as I worked through the final stages of the manuscript. Thank you for inspiring me by your work and for having so much patience with mine! Over the past several years, I have presented parts of Writing the Time of Troubles to Georgetown University’s Slavic Research Seminar; I am deeply grateful to my department colleagues for their comments and suggestions. I also read an early version of the Boris Akunin material at the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institut and am indebted to its members for the feedback I received from them. The staff at the Library of Congress’s European Reading Room have gone the extra mile in helping me locate obscure texts—many thanks! It’s been a privilege to work with Faith Wilson Stein, Oleh Kotsyuba, Carolyn Pouncy, Ekaterina Yanduganova, and Kira Nemirovsky at Academic Studies Press: thank you for your forbearance and guidance. I am also grateful to the press’s anonymous readers who made numerous suggestions that greatly improved the final book. My work on Writing the Time of Troubles has consumed nearly as many years as did the Troubles themselves. I owe my greatest debt of appreciation to my husband, Martin O’Mara, for his unfailing patience and support.

A Note on Translation, Transliteration, Names, and Abbreviations

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ranslations are mine unless otherwise indicated. I have used conventional spellings for the names of well-known authors but adopted J. Thomas Shaw’s System I for transliterating other personal and place names in the text as well as in the discursive parts of the endnotes. For quoting from and citing primary as well as secondary Russian sources, I use Shaw’s System II (Library of Congress without diacritics). When quoting from secondary literature in English, I have retained the system used by the author. The spelling of many Russian personal names has varied from one era (and one text) to the next. I have regularized all names to one standard usage (i.e., “Dmitry” over “Dimitry”). The author of each work I examine made an onomastic choice regarding the man who followed Boris Godunov on the throne. Some referred to him as “False Dmitry,” others as “Dmitry the Pretender,” still others as “Grishka Otrepev,” and yet others as “Dmitry,” pure and simple. As a rule, I follow each individual author’s usage when discussing that author’s text, but in so doing I make no judgments regarding “Dmitry’s” “real” identity. I have used the following abbreviations: ChOIDR Chteniia v Imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom universitete LOII Trudy Leningradskogo otdeleniia instituta istorii MERSH Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History RIB Russkaia istoricheskaia biblioteka SGGD Sobranie gosudarstvennykh gramot i dogovorov khraniashchikhsia v gosudarstvennoi kollegii inostrannykh del TODRL Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury ZhMNP Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia

Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. —Rudyard Kipling

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n the spring of 1605, a young man purporting to be Dmitry, Ivan IV’s sole surviving son, ascended Moscow’s throne. Eleven months later, he was dead—the victim of a murderous conspiracy. A brutal, eight-year struggle for sovereignty erupted. News of Dmitry’s precipitous rise and fall spread rapidly across Russia and into western Europe,1 but his true identity and aspirations are disputed to this day. Was he indeed the last son of Russia’s “Terrible” tsar, miraculously rescued from an assassination attempt in 1591? Or was he a pretender, as his detractors alleged? Did he rule the Russian lands wisely, or was he little more than an adventurer? Unfortunately, history offers few definitive answers: the evidence is limited and flawed. Yet the man who would be tsar has provided a perennial source of fascination—precisely because of the mystery that surrounds him. Dozens of dramas, novels, and monographs—written across centuries as well as national borders—have offered riveting accounts of Dmitry and his deeds, sparking as much as slaking the curiosity of successive generations of readers. We might easily imagine that the enigma of Dmitry—his debatable origins, his uncertain allegiances, the conflicting passions he inspired among supporters and disparagers—would titillate sensation seekers. What is somewhat less expected, however, is the abiding attraction he has exercised over successive generations of Russian novelists and dramatists. Writer after writer adapted selected aspects of his story as narrative scaffoldings for their own fictional works, often drawing explicit attention to their acts of appropriation   1 For a list of plays written about Dmitry, see Erwin C. Brody, The Demetrius Legend and Its Literary Treatment in the Age of the Baroque (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972). See also his “Pushkin’s ‘Boris Godunov’: The First Modern Russian Historical Drama,” Modern Language Review 72 (1977): 858–59.

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by choosing the same familiar titles for their plays and novels (most frequently, Dmitry the Pretender). Why were so many belletrists drawn to Dmitry? Writing the Time of Troubles identifies four successive waves of eighteenthand nineteenth-century Russian writers who coopted the equivocal person of Dmitry not just as a thrilling protagonist for historical plays and novels but also as a vehicle for addressing and contesting identity—Dmitry’s own, to be sure, but also modern Russia’s. In their works, politics—past and present—seeped into and mixed with fiction, compelling these playwrights and novelists to ask the following: was Dmitry (or Russia) unique, the product of providential exceptionalism? Or was he (and, by extension, Russia) a fabricated construct, an alloy of east and west? Was Dmitry (or Russia) true to Orthodoxy, or had he (and Russia) yielded to apostasy? Was the unhappy turn that Russian history made after Dmitry’s downfall his fault or the boyars’? Put differently, could early seventeenth-century Russia’s trauma be traced to a single “great man”? To a congeries of boyars? To “the people”? What were the implications of past trauma for the present? The dual focus of these questions—on the premodern Dmitry and on modern society—tied Russian writers’ present ineluctably to their medieval past, revealing their intuition that vital aspects of Old Russia’s legacy remained intact and relevant even after Peter the Great’s reforms. Of course, all human societies experience trauma at some point in their histories. The aspects that differentiate one society from another in this regard are the shape and scope of its trauma as well as the means that it adopts to come to terms with it. Russia underwent a crisis in the opening years of the seventeenth century that shook it to its core and that has never been fully overcome.2 Later writers would tie the period’s conundrums to similar dilemmas in their own times, asking whether time-honored traditions were necessarily sacrosanct and whether true rulers must be born or could be chosen. It is characteristic of Russian culture that several generations of intellectuals repeatedly interrogated these issues through works of belles lettres. It is also characteristic that subsequent experiences of trauma were assimilated to the seventeenth century’s ur-trauma: the earlier period’s uncertainties remained both foundational and, to a great extent, unresolved. Imperial Russia’s historical fiction about Dmitry fell into two main subtypes: static texts that   2 In Daniel Rowland’s words, “The events of the Troubles, including the virtual disappearance of the God-established tsardom, violent social strife, and massive foreign intervention, were so traumatic that they forced writers to search deeply in their stock of received ideas for some sort of explanation” (“Did Muscovite Literary Ideology Place Limits on the Power of the Tsar [1540s–1660s]?” Russian Review 49 [1990]: 131).

Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry

viewed modern realities as the preordained outcome of early modern crises and dynamic texts that celebrated the allure and possibility of change. During Russia’s imperial period, both belletrists and historians worked with the Dmitry material, each appropriating insights from the other. Members of both callings generally made one of two assumptions regarding the historical Dmitry: either his life had come to a tragic end in 1591, or it was providentially prolonged until 1606. Which assumption they supported was a function more of subjective preference than of facts: the known “facts” could not be made to privilege one answer over the other, since the seventeenth-century documents containing them were, more often than not, heavily infused with propaganda and replete with authorial bias. While it will probably never be possible to render a “true” accounting of Dmitry’s life, a stock version of it has coalesced over time. Its veracity can be debated, but its popularity cannot. Based in large part on documented events but also on polemical assertions and imaginative flourishes, the story begins with Ivan IV the Terrible’s union with Maria Nagaya, his sixth or possibly seventh wife, and the birth of their son Dmitry.3 After Ivan’s death in 1584, Fyodor, his oldest surviving son, ascended the throne. According to many contemporaries, the new tsar was weak in mind and body; as a result, he relied heavily on his brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, to manage day-to-day affairs. One of Godunov’s first orders of business was to exile Fyodor’s much younger halfbrother to the provincial town of Uglich, where he was said to have died of a knife wound in May 1591. Godunov reacted to Dmitry’s presumed passing by dispatching an investigatory commission to Uglich. Based on the testimony of townsfolk, the commission concluded that the boy had fallen on his own knife during an epileptic seizure. Although rumors that the child had been murdered immediately began to circulate among certain Russians and resident foreigners, few at the time seem to have given protracted thought to his sadly foreshortened life. In 1598 Tsar Fyodor died without surviving issue, and with him died the Moscow line of the Rurikid dynasty, which had presided over the Russian lands for more than six hundred years. After several weeks of frenzied machinations, a national assembly offered the crown to Boris Godunov. At first Godunov prospered, and his modest efforts toward modernization and rapprochement with the west met with approval. But in the opening years of the new century, famine and disease descended on Russia and undermined the good will the   3 There is disagreement as to whether one of Ivan’s prior marriages was actually formalized.

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boyar tsar had earned through his earlier successes.4 As conditions worsened, Russians began to impugn Godunov for having seized a throne to which he had not been born. Reports proliferated suggesting that in 1591, in anticipation of the childless Fyodor’s demise, Godunov had ordered Dmitry’s death. He could do nothing to forestall these rumors. More alarming still, in 1603 a young man surfaced in Poland claiming to be Dmitry, miraculously preserved from death. Godunov insisted that the man in question was a defrocked monk named Grigory Otrepev, but his claims rang hollow, and Russians began to flock to Dmitry’s banner. With backing from Poland—which coveted Russia’s lands—and Rome— which coveted its souls—Dmitry/Otrepev, subsequently known as the First False Dmitry, marched on Russia. Boris Godunov mounted a hard-fought defense against the pretender but succumbed to a stroke in April 1605. Many of Moscow’s leading boyars, including its most capable general, Pyotr Basmanov, took the occasion of Godunov’s death to betray Fyodor Godunov, Boris’s son and successor. These acts of treachery secured Dmitry’s victory. Once Moscow had been captured and subdued, Dmitry ordered Godunov’s wife and son put to death, sparing only his daughter, Xenya, whom, according to his detractors, he reserved for his own pleasure. His alleged depredations against the Godunov family notwithstanding, Dmitry was one of Russia’s more progressive rulers. To a greater extent than Godunov, he fostered relations with the west, and he chose his wife, Marina Mniszek, from among the ranks of Poland’s noblewomen. He sought to reform Russia’s economy and government and planned to sponsor schools. Unfortunately, his projects enraged his detractors and served as one of the pretexts for Prince Vasily Shuisky’s coup against him in 1606. Vasily Shuisky became tsar after Dmitry. His authority was tenuous, however, and a host of new claimants to the throne, pretending to be variously attested and unattested scions of the ruling line of the House of Rurik, crept out of Russia’s woodwork to plague and undermine him. In 1610 Shuisky was deposed and forced to take monastic orders. During the course of these events, King Sigismund of Poland conspired to put his son, Władysław, on the Russian throne. It was not until the autumn of 1612 that Russian patriots managed to drive the Poles from Moscow under the joint leadership of a merchant, Kuzma   4 For a succinct summary of the epidemics that overtook Russia in the opening years of the seventeenth century, see John T. Alexander, Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17.

Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry

Minin, and a nobleman, Prince Dmitry Pozharsky. In early 1613 a national assembly “elected” the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov tsar, and Russia began its long process of healing. The period between Fyodor’s death in 1598 and Mikhail’s election in 1613 has come to be known as the Smuta, or Time of Troubles.5 During these years, Russians suffered untold privations, and hunger and disease stalked the land. Robber bands and foreign invaders raped and pillaged. Pretenders multiplied vertiginously, securing the allegiance of various boyar factions and contending among themselves for primacy. Lines of political authority vanished, as did the hope that a “true” tsar might be found. The Russia of the Troubles was a premodern society. Its inhabitants, who were largely illiterate and too thinly settled across eastern Europe’s vast expanses to have reliable access to news, looked to the Orthodox Church to inform and guide them. Information came, as often as not, in the form of rumors. The Troubles, during which highly exaggerated stories of Godunov’s murderous proclivities and Dmitry’s intentions to convert Russia to Catholicism spread wildly, scarred the country and provoked a concerted reaction. In the face of terrible hunger and disease, Russians fought doggedly for the two institutions they held most dear—their sovereign dynasty and the Orthodox Church. Even today, their struggles continue to animate historiography and literature. Russian literature is no stranger to recurrent characters and plotlines: novelists and playwrights have regularly enlisted the most varied and colorful episodes of Russian history as inspiration for their works. The protagonists and the events of the oprichnina, the Time of Troubles, the era of palace coups, the Napoleonic Wars, as well as a host of others have all provided inspiration. Western Europe has likewise contributed rich material: Russian adaptations and imitations of such classics as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Faust abound. In Writing the Time of Troubles, however, I examine a specifically Russian protagonist within the context of Russian literature. In doing so, I analyze representations of Dmitry in terms of the culture that produced and reproduced him. Moreover—unlike literary rewritings of Romeo, Juliet, or Faust— Dmitry is both a literary construct and a “real,” “historical” figure; the dramatists and novelists who have immortalized him have frequently, if not always,   5 In dating the onset of the Time of Troubles to 1598, I follow Chester S. L. Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 1.

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appropriated material and interpretations from the histories written by their contemporaries. Therefore, while writing about literature, I will from time to time also make reference to history. Why focus on Dmitry rather than his predecessor, Boris Godunov, or his successor, Vasily Shuisky—both of whom have also figured prominently in Russian literature? Why not the even more famous Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great?6 In part, the answer lies in the seventeenth-century protohistorical material that dramatists and novelists drew on in portraying Dmitry. In the eyes of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and some nineteenth-century men of letters, the material was bounded and closed: Dmitry was a pretender; Vasily Shuisky made a precipitous end of him; a new royal dynasty arose to vitiate and erase his reign. His story was told variously as a cautionary tale, a means of effacing dangerous new ideas, and/or a foretokening of the Romanovs, but it always ended in the same way—with Dmitry consigned to the abyss. Yet the material could also be read quite differently, as radically open-ended. Some of the nineteenth century’s most gifted writers came to wonder whether the man who ruled as Dmitry might not actually have been who he claimed to be, or— even if he was not—whether he might not have offered Russia a different, freer future. Several of the century’s Dmitry fictions explore his plans for Russia. What might have happened if his career had not been cut short? Might life have been more vibrant, more just? In these readings, Dmitry was a tabula rasa: he arose from nowhere, implausibly and with no credible witnesses to vouch for him. As a newcomer and a figure of mystery, he offered a novel vision of what Russians might do and who they might become. Thus, for a number of nineteenth-­ century belletrists, Dmitry was a man of infinite possibilities: his outer life was

  6 Indeed, excellent studies of these figures already exist. N. V. Riasanovsky has applied the tools of intellectual history to stories about Peter in order to document the evolution of his image over time (The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]). Xenia Gasiorowska mined many of the same stories in order to synthesize a “composite image” (Xenia Gasiorowska, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian Fiction [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979]). Kevin M. F. Platt has read Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible as “heroic figures and avatars of social identity” and uncovered the relations between Russian culture and politics as well as the ways in which Russians produced and used history (Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011]). Caryl Emerson examined literary, historical, and musical instantiations of Boris Godunov’s story and documented its rich potential for generic transposition (Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986]).

Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry

poorly documented, his inner life hardly documented at all. These lacunae begged to be filled by fiction. By contrast, the “real” biographies of other famous late medieval and early modern figures have always been, if hardly rich, then at least richer in historical detail. Their substance is better articulated and attested to. Boris Godunov, for example, occupied a known place within Russian society: his forebears were documented as was his alliance with the Russian royal family. His deeds spanned many years and were attested to in Russian chronicles and western European travelogues. From a literary perspective, his outer world offers less fertile soil for fictive intervention than Dmitry’s; it is his inner world that fascinates. Nineteenth-century dramatists asked how Godunov understood his own aspirations and what it cost him to pursue them. Heady stuff indeed: Godunov’s inner life makes for great psychological drama. But his outer life is less conducive to imaginative reworking and less susceptible to fictionalization, thereby narrowing the range of possibilities for belles lettres. The same could be said for the other great player in early seventeenth-century Russia’s power games, Vasily Shuisky. Like Godunov, Shuisky captured writers’ attention because of his ambition—he was a man who sought to rise above the station to which he had been born but who tumbled back after forfeiting his contemporaries’ affections and loyalties. Ivan the Terrible has also spawned his share of fiction. Unlike Godunov and Shuisky, his aspirations never outran his possibilities—very much to the contrary, in fact. He traumatized his subjects by sham-abdicating his throne, rechristening himself “Ivan of Moscow,” and going through the motions of ceding sovereignty to Simeon Bekbulatovich, a descendant of Russia’s erstwhile Mongol overlords. Why did he shock his people in this way? Why did he pretend to abandon his throne? Again, fiction is well suited to fill these lacunae. However, Ivan’s outer world, like Boris Godunov’s and Vasily Shuisky’s, can be sketched in, even if only very approximately, on the basis of the facts of his “real” life. It is therefore only partially malleable. This hardly disqualifies him as a subject for fiction, but it does constrain an author’s possibilities. Considerably more is known about Peter the Great, who, like Ivan, briefly assumed a mock-humble name, “Peter Mikhailov,” and abandoned his capital. While the meaning he ascribed to his actions remains an enigma, ripe for literary exploration, his outer world is comparatively well documented, lending itself as much to historical as to literary treatment. Dmitry, by contrast, has provided Russia’s purveyors of fiction with broad imaginative scope. He represents the ultimate unknown and unknowable. Although a transformative

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thinker like Ivan IV, Boris Godunov, and Peter the Great, he nevertheless remains a man of obscure and contested origins, which has allowed imaginative authors to treat him both as tortured introvert and as swashbuckling extrovert. He is equally at home in tragedy and adventure fiction. A second consideration in choosing to study Dmitry fictions is their protagonist’s liminality. Dmitry intervened in Russian history after the Rurikids but before the Romanovs, at an in-between time in the country’s dynastic fortunes. Subsequent commentators have disagreed as to whether he was a tyrant, a man of the people, or something between. Many have noted that he was crowned but perhaps not royal, Russian but beholden to Poland. Dmitry himself claimed to be an Orthodox believer, but his detractors derided him as a creature of the pope. Even his affairs of the heart are difficult to disentangle: was he a romantic lover, a cynical rapist, or a bit of both? As a historical actor, Dmitry simultaneously created and mediated oppositions, an aspect of his life that was carried over into representations of him as a fictional protagonist.7 Bjørn Thomassen has defined liminality as “moments or periods of transition during which the normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behavior are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination, construction and destruction,”8 a formulation that captures both the concrete shocks experienced by Russians living through the Time of Troubles and the more abstract notion of mediation embodied by the period. Hein Viljoen and Chris N. van der Merwe view such moments as ones in which an individual or a community loses its “plot”: “working through a trauma involves rewriting the plot, incorporating the disaster in some way,” in order to make its story intelligible and bearable.9 They further note that “in a divided society different stories   7 Images in early Russian literature of Dmitry representing one pole or the other of a binary opposition are unsurprising. As Iu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskii have written, “The basic cultural values (ideological, political, and religious) of medieval Russia were distributed in a bipolar field and divided by a sharp boundary without an axiologically neutral sphere” (“Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture [to the End of the Eighteenth Century],” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985], 31). The authors of late medieval tales and stories used Dmitry for their own sharply ideological purposes, creating a villain against whom they aimed their polemics.   8 Bjørn Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern: Living through the In-Between (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 1. Thomassen applies liminality to social and political theory rather than literature, but his insights have cross-disciplinary implications.   9 Hein Viljoen and Chris N. van der Merwe, “Introduction: A Poetics of Liminality and Hybridity,” in Beyond the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature, ed. Chris N. van der Merwe and Hein Viljoen (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 1.

Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry

about the same events are told.”10 Dmitry’s early modern detractors denigrated him as the quintessential representative of novelty and destruction, the potentially negative term in a liminal equation; but a number of nineteenth-century writers recognized his positive capacity for imagination and construction. This recognition opened the way for belles lettres not only to document Dmitry’s deeds but also to uncover their potential relevance for subsequent moments in Russian history. Dmitry fiction simultaneously mirrored the events that engendered it and created a foundation for new events; it offered a “reflection and enactment of boundaries in . . . literary texts”11 and served as “starting idea[s] to beget more crossing points.”12 The relationship between Russian history and fiction is hardly a new topic, and a number of important studies investigating it have appeared in the last several decades. Dan Ungurianu, for example, has authored an extensive survey and analysis of Russian historical novels of the imperial period.13 Andrew Baruch Wachtel has taken an intergeneric approach, comparing pairs of texts written by a single author, one historiographical, the other literary. He concludes that the authors he studies evidence “an implicit recognition that historical truth cannot be achieved through any one perspective” but rather “emerges from the uneasy coexistence of multiple ways of seeing and narrating the past.”14 Caryl Emerson’s analysis of generic transpositions of Boris Godunov documents how “stories cohere as recognizable wholes in the process of a radical shift” across genre and medium.15 Focusing on revolutionary moments in Russian history, Kevin M. F. Platt asks, “What special possibilities for literary creation arise in . . . periods of rapid transition from one set of social institutions to another, from one world to another?”16 My focus in Writing the Time of Troubles is neither as broad as Ungurianu’s nor as compact as Platt’s, since the cultural periods I examine are not bound to each other by a particular dominant like revolution. Unlike Emerson 10 Ibid., 2. 11 Ibid., 3. 12 Subha Mukherji, “Introduction: Thinking on the Threshold,” in Thinking on Thresholds: The Poetics of Transitive Spaces, ed. Subha Mukherji (London: Anthem, 2011), xviii. 13 Dan Ungurianu, Plotting History: The Russian Historical Novel in the Imperial Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). 14 Andrew Baruch Wachtel, An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 12. 15 Emerson, Boris Godunov, 3. 16 Kevin M. F. Platt, History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3.

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and Wachtel, I restrict myself to literary genres. The fictional Dmitry texts I examine date to multiple time periods but document only one. It is a notable peculiarity that they occur in clusters: the first cluster arose in the late eighteenth century; the second in the 1820s and 1830s; the third in 1866; and the fourth at the fin-de-siècle. This book seeks to illuminate two sets of circumstances: the general one of rewriting the Dmitry story, which I refer to as recurrence; and the particular one of each individual text’s interactions with other fictional and nonfictional discourses of its day, which I refer to as transference.17 As a vertical, diachronic phenomenon, recurrence entails identifying the source materials for historical fiction and tracing how writers’ knowledge of these materials changes over time. More important, it also entails tracing the evolution of the fictions themselves, for although they are often closely related to historiography, historical fictions constitute their own discrete mode of d­ iscourse and must be evaluated according to their own criteria. This is ­particularly challenging given that Russians have been less willing than many peoples to draw a sharp line between historiography and imaginative literature. As we shall see, Nikolay Karamzin, early nineteenth-century Russia’s most celebrated historian, began his career in literature. Although he utilized impressive numbers of original source materials in his History of the Russian State, he also embroidered creatively on them, occasionally turning history into the facsimile of a psychological thriller. Alexander Pushkin, the progenitor of modern Russian literature, served as the empire’s official historian; conversely, Mikhail Pogodin, best known as a historian, wrote fiction. None of these cases was unusual: Russian poet-historians have flourished throughout the centuries. As Aleksandr B. Kamenskii has argued, Russians, to a much greater extent than westerners, have believed that their future is constrained by their past: “The Russian, finding himself or herself at another crossroads in history . . . pauses, ponders, and involuntarily glances back at the road already traveled, seeking in it the answer to the question of which road to take.”18 Thus, retelling the events of the Time of Troubles has been only one phase—albeit a highly significant one—in the larger, high-stakes project of fashioning an acceptable future from the past. Nothing less than the fate of Russia has depended on it. Evaluating the foundational material for Dmitry fictions involves dividing premodern legends and stories into two distinct bodies: one c­ oncerning 17 I do not, of course, use “transference” in the psychoanalytic sense of unconsciously redirecting emotions from one person to another. 18 Aleksandr B. Kamenskii, The Russian Empire in the Eighteenth Century: Searching for a Place in the World, trans. and ed. David Griffiths (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 5.

Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry

Dmitry the child and one treating Dmitry the man. Unfortunately, the ­explanatory power of both types of sources is equivocal. The most apposite surviving official document dedicated to the child is the Investigatory Report on the Death of Tsarevich Dmitry Ivanovich of 1591 (Sledstvennoe delo o ubienii tsarevicha Dimitriia Ioannovicha 1591 goda), which is said to have been commissioned by Boris Godunov. The Report unquestionably reflects the biases of both its sponsor and its authors and is, accordingly, less than fully credible as a historical source. Moreover, the boy whose death prompted the investigation emerges as a pale and formless cypher, leaving a hole in the center of the narrative. The Report paints many vivid pictures—of grieving widows, bereaved mothers, nervous stablemen, and angry drunkards—but these highly interesting secondary characters displace Dmitry and dilute the Report’s biographical merits. Other bits and pieces of Dmitry’s childhood can be gleaned from oral legends and travelers’ accounts, but like the Report, these sources generally focus on the aftershocks from his death rather than on his life. The earliest extant sources construct Dmitry as a function of his genealogy and social affiliations rather than as a person. A clearer picture of the living, breathing man emerges from the extensive body of seventeenth-century texts that cast Dmitry as an imposter.19 Nonetheless, while supplying the types of detail so saliently missing from the earlier stories, these sources deny the child’s familial and social connections to the adult Dmitry; they detach him from his natal identity. Thus, the Dmitry of late medieval and early modern sources survives as textually incomplete: he is either solely notional—a disembodied placeholder for dynastic aspirations—or solely actualized—a deracinated representative of action and adventure. The potential for and/or desirability of synthesizing these two sides of Dmitry’s life seems to have eluded seventeenth-century Russian writers. Subsequent belletrists and historians who dealt with both bodies of source texts ultimately had to decide whether to link them and create an integrated human being or keep them separate and leave a biographical gap. In this sense, they faced the choice either of reading the disparate texts as different stages of the same story or of recognizing them as discrete entities. The stakes for historians were nothing less than ascertaining the “truth”: they set out to marshal the facts conducing to Dmitry’s rise and fall and, from them, to infer the political, economic, and social forces at work in early modern Russia. For belletrists, however, premodern truths were often less important than modern ones. They asked what the legends and tales about Dmitry revealed 19 Most of these texts have been printed in SGGD.

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about human nature—his own, his contemporaries’, and their descendants’. Was his story temporally bounded, or was it exemplary of Russian cultural universals? If the latter, then were these universals nuanced, manifesting themselves differently at different times? The frequency with which belletrists posed such questions in the past has prompted me now to ask another: how can we explain the persistent rewriting of Dmitry’s much-contested story? Scholars in the field of trauma studies have recently addressed themselves to diverse instances in which literature has functioned to contextualize and process anguish and suffering. As Michelle Balaev has argued, the trauma in question may be experienced by either an individual or a group; the response to it may be unmediated or intergenerational.20 Alan Gibbs adds that trauma processing may aid either the perpetrator or the victim.21 As noted earlier, Viljoen and van der Merwe view trauma as a force that shatters life’s coherence and gives rise to liminality.22 Thus, literature’s response to trauma has been enlisted in a variety of causes. As a means of theorizing the writing of national cataclysm, trauma studies offer a fruitful avenue for exploring the recurrence of the Dmitry plot in Russian literature. It is tempting to identify Dmitry with Joseph Campbell’s “hero with a thousand faces,” whose obscure origins and infant exile ultimately yield the promise of a brilliant future.23 The Russian realization of Campbell’s archetype is fractured, of course, since the promised future fails to materialize, whether because the hero is a scoundrel or because his contemporaries fail to recognize him and spoil his hopes. It is the chain of events following this fracture that produces trauma. In this reading, Russians have consistently failed to integrate the disasters that accompanied Dmitry’s defeat (or their own) and, as a result, have been regularly impelled to reenact them. As appealing as such a reading is, however, it slightly misses the mark. Most studies of trauma literature have addressed twentieth- and twenty-first-century plays and novels that were written in close proximity to 20 Michelle Balaev argues for a maximally flexible framework for understanding trauma that “emphasizes the multiplicity of responses to an extreme experience and the importance of cultural factors in determining the significance of the event (The Nature of Trauma in American Fiction [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012], xi). 21 Alan Gibbs identifies both narratives about US aggression in Vietnam and those about the Holocaust as examples of perpetrator and victim trauma literature, respectively (Contemporary American Trauma Narratives [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014], 18–19). 22 Viljoen and van der Merwe’s research focuses on South African apartheid and the literature it has generated. 23 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon, 1949), 321–26.

Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry

their authors’ experiences of the represented trauma.24 The immediacy of the literary response ameliorates any potential ambiguity regarding the identity of the distress being reenacted. By contrast, although a number of Dmitry prefictions were written immediately after his reign, fully realized fiction followed at a considerable temporal remove. It is highly unlikely that each and every one of these later fictions constituted a response to one and the same precipitating trauma. Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov follow Aleksandr Veselovskii in positing a “non-linear model of history traversed by traces of the past.”25 By this they mean that “manifestations of verbal creativity do not disappear with the stage of social development that gave them birth but, rather, become reanimated when the socio-political demand for them arises again,” creating “point[s] of nonconvergence between the recursive temporality of culture on the one hand and the progressive conceptions of historical time on the other.”26 Of particular relevance to the Dmitry tradition is Kliger and Maslov’s notion of sociopolitical demand: individual moments in cultural history have created the conditions for the reemergence of a specific type of protagonist, who, in turn, resurrects the Time of Troubles in order to illuminate contemporary challenges. Thus, while Dmitry fictions are responses to trauma, the trauma in question can be localized to the moment of their composition as well as universalized to the moments they depict. The Time of Troubles is assimilated to late eighteenth-­ century and nineteenth-century traumas by analogy: at various points in ­history, the harrowing elements of Dmitry’s story have been read as simulacra for other current disruptions. This raises the issue of continuities and discontinuities. In what ways do later cultural periods resemble and/or differ from earlier ones? How is the trauma of each period processed by its literary texts? What is the method of transference? While the phenomenon of recurrence is diachronic, transference is synchronic. Its mechanisms should, at least in theory, resemble those enlisted by new historicists. In Stephen Greenblatt’s words, new historicism consists in 24 Laurie Vickroy goes so far as to assert that trauma narratives are a contemporary phenomenon (Reading Trauma Narratives [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015], 3). Catherine Silverstone, by contrast, has added a longer-term diachronic perspective but focuses on performance history when reading violence in Shakespeare (Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance [London: Routledge, 2011]). 25 Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov, “Introducing Historical Poetics: History, Experience, Form,” in Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, ed. Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 5. 26 Ibid., 5, 6.

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“develop[ing] terms to describe the ways in which material . . . is transferred from one discursive sphere to another and becomes aesthetic property.”27 Building on Frederic Jameson’s call to study the “more tangible” historicity of how we read the past through the lens of contemporary culture,28 Greenblatt’s new historicism seeks “to deepen our sense of both the invisible cohesion and the half-realized conflicts in specific cultures by broadening our view of their significant artifacts.”29 Scholars have applied new historicist insights with particular success to Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, illuminating a discrete period—the early modern—as well as a discrete genre—drama—both of which are highly germane to the Dmitry tradition.30 Although many new historicists have readily acknowledged the utility, and even the necessity, of diachrony as well as synchrony, they have ­unfortunately tended to focus their practical readings of texts almost exclusively on ­synchrony.31 Such an approach is too one-sided. To adopt a rigorously new ­historicist reading of Dmitry texts would be to leave the critical dimension of recurrence unexplained. What is needed is a methodology that balances ­transference with recurrence and synchrony with diachrony, in practice as well as in theory. The so-called new formalism is even more extreme in this regard. For example, one staunch proponent, Evan Horowitz, has condemned the insights offered by new historicism out of hand, arguing that historicizing literature entails an unreasonable risk: in his view, certain aspects of historical experience cannot be integrated into literature at all, while those that can “must pay a hefty toll.”32 Marjorie Levinson, who participates in new formalism as a “movement” 27 Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 11. 28 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 9. 29 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 13–14. 30 Even scholars working on the periphery of literary studies have adopted some of its premises. The philosopher Stanley Cavell, for instance, has suggested that “Shakespeare could not be who he is . . . unless his writing is engaging the depth of the philosophical preoccupations of his culture” (Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 2). 31 In Louis A. Montrose’s words, Greenblatt “reorients the axis of inter-textuality, substituting for the diachronic text of an autonomous literary history the synchronic text of a cultural system” (“Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser [New York: Routledge, 1989], 17). 32 Evan Horowitz, “Narrative Accidents and Literary Miracles,” Philosophy and Literature 35 (2011): 66. Peter Sinnot fires back, criticizing Horowitz for “a gross misunderstanding of the nature of historical events as well as a misunderstanding of historically oriented c­ riticism”

Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry

rather than a strict methodology or theory, attacks new historicism for its denigration of form, implying that critics are faced with the stark choice of privileging either form or history.33 Renate Lachmann, revisiting the insights of the Russian formalists, similarly overstates her case, suggesting that the relationship between an old and a new text is necessarily parodic.34 There is, however, a more nuanced position. Dominick LaCapra has called for the development of theoretical approaches “that are historically informed and critically alert to the interpretations of specific artifacts without being either narrowly historicist . . . or formalist.”35 In a similar spirit, Stephen Cohen has drawn attention to literary theory’s repeated oscillations between the poles of form and history and urged critics to overcome these extremes by synthesizing formalism and historicism into what he has christened “historical formalism.”36 Exploring “the complexity of the mutual implication of literary form and history,”37 historical formalism is less a method than a critical commitment to offer equal consideration to “literature’s formal individuation and its historical situation in order to illuminate at once text, form, and history.”38 Cohen recognizes literary texts as the products of historical circumstances, while at the same time granting them ideological significance as specifically literary representations.39 Thus, historical formalism squares the critical circle by detecting “the stealthy motions of history in the forms of a cultural artefact, rather than just in its raw content.”40 In analyzing the Dmitry tradition, I consider fiction’s forms as well as its content (trauma, understood synchronically as well as diachronically). Literary form, like literary trauma, can be studied either dynamically— in its historical evolution—or statically—as frozen at a given point in that (“Morality, Historical Narrative, and Problems in the New Formalism,” Philosophy and Literature 37 [2013]: 257). 33 Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (2007): 558–59. 34 Renate Lachmann, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism, trans. Roy Sellars and Anthony Wall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 36. 35 Dominick LaCapra, History, Politics, and the Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 7. 36 Stephen Cohen, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, ed. Stephen Cohen (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 1–3. 37 Robert Hampson, Conrad’s Secrets (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 25. 38 Cohen, Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, 3. 39 Stephen Cohen, “Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism,” in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 32. 40 Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others (London: Verso, 2003), 4.

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evolution. At various stages in the development of the modern fictional Dmitry ­tradition, texts have been realized in one of two different genres: either as plays or as novels. Along with documenting and explaining the processes of recurrence and transference at work in the content of each cluster of Dmitry texts, I also focus on them with regards to genre. How did genre choice change over time? Was it largely predetermined—that is, was an author responding directly to a previous text written in the same genre—or did he write during a period that favored one genre over another?41 Did each author’s choice articulate in some discernible way with his approach to his raw material? To contemporary issues? If so, how? In this introductory chapter, it suffices to offer a few generalizations concerning dramatic and novelistic discourse. Both genres share in the meanings circulating at the time of their composition, of course,42 and both operate with an authorially imagined and constructed plot: unlike history, plays and novels “articulate a meaning for human suffering that does not emerge from the random mess of events.”43 But plays provide a less mediated articulation: in Thornton Wilder’s lucid formulation, “A play is what takes place. A novel is what one person tells us took place.”44 Plays occur in the present tense, whereas novels occur in the past; additionally, plays come to their audiences directly through the words of their characters, without an intervening narrator. Thus, drama can be viewed as a “reduced form” because it does not utilize the full range of levels and modes of mediation.45 Conversely, drama can also be viewed as a fuller form because it speaks not only through language but also through gestures and facial expressions as well as through objects located onstage: “In performance, characters . . . utilize duration and presence to create a complex perceptual web which . . . allows the spectator a freedom of response quite different from and more inclusive than that offered by the printed text.”46 41 Throughout Writing the Time of Troubles, I will refer to Dmitry authors as “he.” To the best of my knowledge, no female writers have tackled Dmitry fiction. 42 Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 5. 43 Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedy: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 53. 44 Thornton Wilder, The Collected Plays of Thornton Wilder, ed. A. Tappan Wilder (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998), 2:271. 45 Peter Hühn and Roy Summer, “Narration in Poetry and Drama,” in The Living Handbook of Poetry and Drama, http://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index/php/Narration_in_ Poetry_and_Drama. 46 Marvin Carlson, “Psychic Polyphony,” in Modern Theories of Drama, ed. George W. Brandt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 292. As Anthony Swift has noted, “the theater’s potent mix

Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry

Moreover, drama’s relative lack of mediation leads to a greater degree of dialogicity: drama allows its characters both to speak and to listen, to consider and to reconsider, much more actively and nimbly than prose does.47 Prose, by contrast offers its narrator much greater scope for evaluating the wisdom and/or morality of characters’ actions. In part, Dmitry authors chose to write either novels or plays based on extrinsic factors: on the one hand, they took their fellow authors’ as well as their audiences’ expectations into consideration; on the other, they faced a variety of restrictions, particularly under Nicholas I—in 1837 the emperor ruled that only pre-Romanov tsars could be shown on stage.48 However, Dmitry authors also were alive to factors inherent to the genres they chose. In The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Hayden White elaborates a theory of historiographical narration that he partially extends to fiction. In comparing annals, chronicles, and “history proper,” he asserts that only history proper treats events within a structure and order of meaning that transcends mere sequentiality. Only history proper, in other words, achieves true narrativity.49 Following Hegel, White suggests that narrative representation always entails a conflict between desire and law, from which he concludes that “narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized ‘history,’ has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.”50 Unlike “proper” historians, annalists lack “the capacity to substitute meanings for one another in chains of semantic metonymies that would transform [their] list of events into a discourse about the events considered as a totality evolving in time.”51 Chronicles fall midway between history proper and annals: they approach but do not fully achieve narrativity because they lack closure; they break off in medias res, in the chronicler’s own

47

48 49 50 51

of visual impressions and spoken words was believed to have a greater impact than mere printed words” (“Russia,” in The Frightful Stage: Political Censorship of the Theater in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Robert Justin Goldstein [New York: Berghahn, 2009]), 131. Hühn and Summer point out that drama provides at least a limited degree of mediation through “selection, segmentation, combination, and focus of the scenes” (“Narration in Poetry and Drama”). On drama versus prose, see Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, 2002), 125. Occasional exceptions were made for historical dramas with strong patriotic content (Swift, “Russia,” 138). Hayden V. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 5. Ibid., 10–11. Ibid., 16.

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present, leaving their content unresolved. In White’s view, however, annals and chronicles are not failed, inferior anticipations of historical discourse but, rather, alternatives to it.52 Building on White’s insights into narration, law, and legitimacy, I would suggest that historical drama occupies a position vis-à-vis the novel somewhat analogous to the one that chronicles enjoy vis-à-vis history proper, which is to say that drama offers an alternative mode of representing conflict.53 As has already been noted, in the absence of an authoritative narrator, drama can be less objective in drawing overarching conclusions than the novel. Occurring in the present, drama must rely on its audience’s experience to supply a distanced perspective. Its confrontation with systems of law and legitimacy is therefore inherently dialogic. Although drama, unlike the chronicle, ultimately achieves a type of closure, throughout its performance it offers the opportunity for powerful voices, which exist within a perpetual present tense, to challenge one another. In Writing the Time of Troubles I move chronologically through the text clusters identified above. I read the earliest play or novel in each cluster, on the one hand, as a kind of ur-text with which the writers of subsequent texts enter into dialogue and, on the other, as a discursive artifact participating in a multigeneric conversation about current Russian affairs. I also read diachronically, placing each cluster into conversation with previous Dmitry fiction. Chapter 1 is prefatory, offering a reading of one short, protofictive seventeenth-century tale, The Story of Grishka Otrepev, as well as of the earliest extant saints’ life written about the child Dmitry. It touches on what I refer to as the “raw material” of the Dmitry tradition and shows that late medieval Russians had not yet teased out discrete fictional and nonfictional functions from within the generalized discourse of many of their narrative genres. Chapter 2 addresses the long eighteenth century. Chapter 3 covers the particularly rich cluster of 52 Ibid., 5–6. 53 Although many critics have argued that drama does not constitute a subcategory of “narrative,” others have contended the opposite. Explicit arguments in favor of considering drama under the aegis of narrative have been made, for example, by Brian Richardson, “Drama and Narrative,” in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. David Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 142–55, as well as by Manfred Jahn, “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama,” New Literary History 32 (2001): 659–79. Jahn believes that “plays have a narrative world (a ‘diegesis’), which is not distinct in principle from any other narrative world” (674). Hanna Scolnicov implies much the same in her introduction to Reading Plays: Interpretation and Reception, ed. Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–7.

Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry

Dmitry texts produced in the 1820s and 1830s, while Chapter 4 deals with two plays written in response to the Era of Great Reforms. Chapter 5 looks at imperial Russia’s final Dmitry cluster. Mindful that not all readers will be versed in Russian history and politics, I contextualize cultural transference at the beginning of each chapter through a brief summary of the most apposite political issues of the day. Additionally, I lay the groundwork for the chapter’s discussion of recurrence by offering a few initial words about pertinent developments in the era’s historiography.

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CHAPTER 1

Prelude Russia is a country with an unpredictable past. —popular aphorism

D

mitry and the Time of Troubles preoccupied more than a few late medieval and early modern Russians. Seeking to make sense of past and present tribulations, men of letters documented its upheavals in chronicles, hagiographies, official court pronouncements, and tales, but since reliable facts were hard to come by, they based much of what they wrote on rumor and hearsay. Interests of state also came into play, further bending and twisting their accounts of the Troubles’ actors and events. As a result, early Dmitry texts were tendentious: while purporting to narrate what had really happened, they in fact recounted what might or should have happened, making them, in some cases, factual in intent and, in others, propagandistic. Modern readers could be forgiven for mistaking this amalgam for protofiction. Seventeenth-century readers and authors, however, would not have registered any interpretive disjuncture: authors claimed—and in many cases believed—that they were telling “a” truth, if not “the” truth, and their readers almost certainly took them at their word. Since early modern Russian belles lettres had not yet developed an autonomous fictive function, readers were no more capable of teasing out fiction from nonfiction than were authors. An “untruthful” text would have been deemed a deliberate falsification. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian writers may have known the texts I examine in this chapter, the Tulupov Life of St. Dmitry (which I read in tandem with an associated Tale) and The Story of Grishka Otrepev. Some of them may also have mined either one or both for raw material for their own Dmitry stories. However, I have not chosen these texts because of their prospective influence on subsequent dramas and novels. Nor do I believe that either is a more excellent example of its kind than are other texts written in the same period. Rather, the Tulupov Life of St. Dmitry and The Story of Grishka Otrepev

2

Writing the Time of Troubles

illustrate the prehistory of the belletristic Dmitry tradition, a moment in the evolution of Russian letters before the phenomenon of transference—at least as I have defined it—came into being. Nonetheless, these and other ­surviving early seventeenth-century texts offer abundant evidence of the mixing of what we would today consider to be multiple discursive spheres. Dating to a time and place in which the boundaries between fiction, historiography, and hagiography were porous, these texts represent their authors’ syncretic attempts both to document a past trauma and to overcome that trauma in the present, thereby stabilizing a new social order. Viewed from a formal perspective, the Tulupov Life’s narrative mode is largely hagiographical, while The Story of Grishka Otrepev’s is partly protofictive and partly protohistoriographical, but each of these texts clearly—and often quite overtly—enunciates a particular political tendency. Thus, while belonging to their own formal discursive spheres, they also incorporate extrinsic elements, original to other spheres. Judged by premodern standards, this generic spillover is unremarkable: indeed, scholars continue to dispute how— or even if—Old Russia demarcated boundaries among and between genres. However, later generations of Russian writers would have read texts like the Tulupov Life of St. Dmitry and The Story of Grishka Otrepev through the critical lenses of their own times. Unanchored from their authors’ intents and judged by modern standards, these texts could be seen as early, unsophisticated instances of the process of transference. While seventeenth-century Russians would not have understood them in this way, their importance to this study lies in how subsequent generations may have read them.

The Seventeenth Century and Text Types Positing the existence of different types of seventeenth-century discourse and suggesting that each of them filtered historical reality in its own way presupposes the existence of a system or, better perhaps, a protosystem of genres. Although a comprehensive examination of late medieval discursive types cannot be undertaken in this chapter, the use of terms such as “fiction,” “prefiction,” “protofiction,” “hagiography,” and “historiography” requires explanation. Did seventeenth-century Russians shape texts in ways that corresponded to differentiated text types? Did some of them show a preference for elements of what we today would term fiction, while others leaned more toward historiography or hagiography? If they did recognize generic difference but nevertheless mixed what we today would consider disparate types, did the

Prelude   CHAPTER 1

resulting texts adhere primarily to one of the types and only secondarily to the other? The answers to these questions allow us not only to differentiate The Story of Grishka Otrepev and the Tulupov Life from subsequent Dmitry fictions but also to speculate as to why they and similar texts might have appealed to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors. In delineating fictional from historiographical discourse, Dorrit Cohn has suggested that a fictional narrative consists of “a series of statements that deal with a causally related sequence of events that concern human (or human-like) beings,” in which “expository or descriptive language is subordinated to narrative language.”1 Additionally, fiction creates a world that is nonreferential, so that allusions to the real world need not be accurate; the fictional work creates the world it refers to by the very act of referring to it.2 The fictional world is “unverifiable and complete,” whereas the world of historiography is “verifiable and incomplete.”3 This suggests that if a text is predominantly fictional yet intermixes both fictional and historical content, then historical detail must be employed in aid of verisimilitude rather than of veracity. Historical content must be subordinated to fictive intent. Cohn’s formulation is particularly helpful when charting the divergent evolutionary paths taken by early modern Russian fiction and historiography, but it does not sufficiently demarcate fiction from hagiography, which also deals with human events and creates a different world from the real, observable one in which we live. How can the unverifiable and complete world of faith be distinguished from the equally unverifiable and complete world of fiction? How, to quote Julia Reinhard Lupton, can hagiography be documented “undergoing the passion of secularization”?4 Thomas Pratsch has pointed to several features of hagiography that he associates with “fiction,” using the word in its broad, general sense of “falsehood.” Paradoxically, two of the formal features he identifies as indicators of “hagiographical fictiveness” are quite helpful in separating hagiography from fictional literature. First, Pratsch points to hagiography’s reliance on pious topoi, or commonplaces.5 Widely applied to  1 Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 12.   2 Ibid., 13.   3 Ibid., 16.  4 Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlife of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), xxi.  5 Thomas Pratsch, “Exploring the Jungle: Hagiographical Literature between Fact and Fiction,” in Fifty Years of Prosopography: The Later Roman Empire, Byzantium, and Beyond, ed. Averil Cameron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 62–64.

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any number of saints, in any number of lives, topoi serve to generalize rather than to particularize and, thus, to create an idealized vision corresponding to the next world rather than to this one. Second, Pratsch notes that hagiography has a “distribution of information”: that is, it has a quadripartite structure of prologue, narration, miracles, and epilogue.6 Miracles, which generally do not constitute a discrete structural component in fictional texts, point once again in the direction of a higher, otherworldly reality. As emblems of divine intercession, they testify to sacred power rather than human agency. For the purposes of elucidating the development of seventeenth-century Russian genres, then, I will consider a work fictional if it creates an imagined world whose primary focus is human rather than divine. Additionally, interrelated events within this world must take place in a series that is seen to be complete and whole with regards to both shape and content. A fully fictional text must be true to the constructed world of human activity that it creates. Prefictional works, by contrast, envision the world they present, whether earthly or divine, as real. Moreover, their constituent parts may or may not be consonant with each other: elements extraneous to the central storyline may appear with little or no internal motivation. Protofictional works occupy points on a continuum extending between fiction and prefiction and exhibit an intermediary degree of creative imagination and shaping. Hagiography, by contrast, focuses on the divine. Like fiction, it creates a whole and complete world. Furthermore, its accounts of miracles attempt to convince audiences that this world is verifiable. Nonetheless, the very need to supply miracles suggests a different standard of verification. Historiography, by contrast with fiction and—up to a certain point—hagiography, rests on “facts.” However, as Iu. M. Lotman has argued, historical facts represent interpretive constructs. Historians derive them from the texts they read, each of which “is always created by someone and for some purpose, and events are presented in the text in encoded form.”7 Arriving at historical facts requires extracting nontextual reality from a text and events from a story about them. Additionally, it demands that attention be paid to all those events that have not been included in the text.8 Finally, interpreting historical facts entails reconstructing the spectrum of interpretations that contemporary receivers of a given text would have proposed. Teasing out facts from early Dmitry texts is a   6 Ibid., 66–68.   7 Iu. M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 217.   8 Ibid., 218.

Prelude   CHAPTER 1

vexed proposition: every author, whether Russian or foreign, was e­ motionally and politically embroiled in seventeenth-century Russia’s turbulence, and every one sedulously selected the events he described. Audiences were equally partisan. Did seventeenth-century Russia know texts that were either primarily fictional, primarily historiographical, or primarily hagiographical? Given the great proliferation of texts and text types that appeared at this time, the answer is almost certainly “yes.” Early in the century, however, such texts constituted the exception rather than the rule. The vast majority of written works, the Tulupov Life and The Story of Grishka Otrepev among them, were bricolages, mixtures of what today’s readers would recognize as diverse text types. What is important for the development of the Dmitry tradition is the discursive spheres they draw from and their choice of specific elements constituent to each sphere.

Dmitry as Saint: The Tulupov Life One of Vasily Shuisky’s first orders of business on seizing the throne was to discredit his predecessor and prove that the real Dmitry had perished in 1591. Having recovered what he claimed to be the child’s remains, he briefly displayed them in Moscow, where the miracles they purportedly worked served as a pretext for canonizing the child martyr. The canonization proceedings, in turn, occasioned the composition of a Life.9 Although Prince Semyon Shakhovskoy, Ioann Milyutin, and Dmitry Rostovsky would all subsequently write, copy, or sponsor hagiographies,10 the earliest extant Life dates to either 1606 or 1607 and was entered into German Tulupov’s Menology.11   9 Information on the stages of the canonization can be found in E. E. Golubinskii, Istoriia kanonizatsii sviatykh v russkoi tserkvi (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1903), 12. For a treatment of its significance, see Ann M. Kleimola, “The Canonization of Tsarevich Dmitrii: A Kinship of Interests,” Russian History 25 (1998): 107–17. 10 Ia. G. Solodkin, “Zhitie Dimitriia Uglichskogo,” in Slovar´ knizhnikov i knizhnosti drevnei Rusi: XVII v. (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1998), 338–41. 11 “Zhitie Tsarevicha Dimitriia Ioannovicha, vnesennoe v minei Germana Tulupova” (The Life of Tsarevich Dmitry Ioannovich, Entered into German Tulupov’s Menology) (RIB, 877–98). Tulupov was a monk in the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery and did not write the Life himself. He copied out saints’ lives by order of Archimandrite Dionisii in the eighteenth year of the reign of Mikhail Romanov, many years after the Dmitry Life was first written (Filaret [Archbishop of Kharkov], “Izsledovanie o smerti tsarevicha Dmitriia,” ChOIDR [ January–March 1858]: 3). E.  N. Kusheva believes that the Tulupov Life was written in 1606 on the occasion of the recovery of Dmitry’s relics or else very shortly thereafter, in 1607 (“Iz istorii publitsistiki Smutnogo vremeni XVII veka,” Uchenye zapiski Saratovskogo

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The Tulupov Life was, first and foremost, an expression of political expedience. Vasily Shuisky was beset by troubles on all sides.12 He badly needed a respite from the depredations of ever-new usurpers, a desideratum that his various gramoty—documents dealing with the real as well as the putatively false Dmitry—were meant to secure. The gramoty presented the official, secular face of Shuisky’s campaign in letters. However, in the intensely religious atmosphere of the early seventeenth century, secular pronouncements were not enough. Isaiah Gruber has argued that the late medieval Russian Church and state “represented a seamless whole, inseparable as two sides of a single fabric.”13 By themselves, Shuisky’s statements would have seemed incomplete; ecclesiastical support was essential if his assurances were to ring true. Accordingly, the Church declared the child Dmitry a passion-sufferer (strastoterpets) and instituted observances of his birth, death, and translation.14 The purpose of the contemporaneous Tulupov Life was less to celebrate Dmitry’s life than to affirm his death.15 The sacred authorities would have had good reason for wanting to expunge the memory of a miraculously reappeared Dmitry. Tsar Dmitry had come to the throne with Polish help and shortly thereafter married Marina Mniszek, the daughter of a Polish Catholic magnate. After the wedding, rumors proliferated that Orthodox worship was about to be supplanted by the Roman rite. The fear that Dmitry—as well as the series of pretenders who came after him—might mandate such a change gave the Orthodox Church very strong motivation to declare him a usurper. And the best way to unmask a false Dmitry was to focus attention on the birth and—more germanely—the death of a “true” one. g­ osudarstvennogo universiteta: Pedagogicheskii fakul´tet [1926]: 21–97). Platonov believes that an earlier life was written but that the Church rejected it because it had such a strong political tendency. In his view, the Tulupov Life was written in July 1607 (Platonov cites a manuscript in which this date is explicitly mentioned as the time of composition [Drevnerusskiia skazaniia i povesti o smutnom vremeni XVII veka kak istoricheskii istochnik (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. S. Balasheva, 1888), 42]). Parts of the Life were taken from the Tale of 1606 (see V. S. Ikonnikov, Novyia izsledovaniia po istorii smutnago vremeni Moskovskago gosudarstva [Kiev: I. N. Kushnerev, 1889], 14). 12 For a detailed study of the civil war launched against Shuisky, see Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War. 13 Isaiah Gruber, Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the Time of Troubles (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2012), 28. 14 Golubinskii, Istoriia kanonizatsii, 121. 15 L. E. Morozova suggests an early date for the Life’s composition: “It would appear that the first part of the Life . . . was written in hurried anticipation of the translation of the tsarevich’s relics to Moscow in order to inform the public of the circumstances of his demise and the miracles worked by his relics” (Smuta nachala XVII v. glazami sovremennikov [Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 2000], 121).

Prelude   CHAPTER 1

The Tulupov Life does just that. It underscores the child’s royal lineage and legitimacy and dwells on Godunov’s determination to see him dead. At slightly under a thousand words, the Life is notable for its brevity. By the time of its composition, numerous rumors were rife concerning the royal boy’s demise; the Life’s author, however, uses none of them, providing instead a skeletal account of the fortunes of the Moscow throne embellished with ­quotations and pious platitudes. At the level of narrative incident, the Life’s unknown author makes terse references to: Dmitry’s birth; Ivan’s death; Boris Godunov’s persecution and subsequent murder of the child; the body’s removal to the Church of the Transfiguration in Uglich and its miracle-­working properties; Tsar Fyodor’s death; and Godunov’s usurpation of the throne. The Life’s factual content thus leans toward annalistic history, confining itself to a series of chronologically arranged secular events, none of which is seen as more important than any other. Significantly, however, the author describes the murder somewhat less laconically: “Suddenly, the saintly child came out to play, as is a child’s wont, and like merciless and cunning wolves those youths fell on the saint; one of them pulled out a knife and hurriedly stabbed the saint in the neck and slit his throat.”16 In fairness, the sparsity of information concerning the soon-to-be-saint elsewhere in the Life was only to be expected: Dmitry lived in exile, largely if not wholly forgotten by the world, and he died very young, well before he could have performed either holy or doughty deeds. Not only the Life but also the many rumors concerning the boy tended to focus more on the manner of his death than on his life. The paucity of circumstantial information concerning young Dmitry presented obvious challenges for his hagiographer. In the absence of material on which to base a Life, the author relied on a number of standard topoi, interspersing his meager facts with pious promises of heaven’s glory and the soul’s immortality. However, he also looked to external sources, citing three spiritual authorities: St. Gregory of Nyssa; an unspecified prophet; and St. Athanasius of Alexandria. Gregory appears early in the Life, offering the assurance that, if we are so unfortunate as to be driven from this earth, we will nevertheless find an eternal abode in heaven. The prophet is quoted slightly later, warning that evildoers will get their just deserts. The excerpt from Athanasius, in which the saint affirms the body’s perishability but the soul’s immortality, follows shortly thereafter. These three references are important less for understanding the Life’s content than for determining its author’s intent. 16 Tulupov Life, 881.

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The author inserts Gregory of Nyssa’s words concerning heaven as h­ umankind’s ultimate refuge immediately after noting that Boris Godunov had banished Dmitry to Uglich. The shared theme of exile thus links the murdered boy and all good Christians. Dmitry’s removal from Moscow to Uglich becomes a specific instance of humanity’s more general removal from earthly life to life ­everlasting, thereby sacralizing a real-life story. At the same time, the author foreshadows Dmitry’s demise: even before his death, his immortality is already in view. St. Athanasius’s words follow directly on the report of Dmitry’s death and confirm the pertinence of St. Gregory’s sentiments: Dmitry now survives as a soul in heaven rather than as a body on earth. Between these assurances of immortality the prophet promises retribution against lawbreakers, and the author notes that Uglich’s townsfolk avenged Dmitry by killing his murderers. Dmitry is not merely dead but also requited. Sacred authority, adduced with threefold emphasis, has raised the child above the realm of human affairs. His earthly story has come to an end, and any claim for the existence of an adult, corporeal Dmitry must be a lie. By juxtaposing sacred authority with the profane workings of history, the Life’s author creates a gap between the text’s content and its intent. Its content concerns the secular world inhabited by a royal child. Its intent, however, is quite different: by transforming the corporeal Dmitry into a soul enjoying the bliss of heaven, the Life discredits (False) Dmitry’s claims of having survived Boris Godunov’s assassination attempt. While superficially about Dmitry as a child, the Life of St. Dmitry has a deeper significance in its refutation of Dmitry as a man. On the basis of content, it approaches historiography; on the basis of intent, it qualifies as political rhetoric. Content and authorial intent alone cannot determine a text’s significance, however. Both content and intent are concretely realized in narrative forms, which also constitute textual meaning. While the content and intent of the Tulupov Life evoke historiography and political rhetoric, its form identifies it as hagiography: it has a rudimentary but nonetheless discernable quadripartite structure; it is replete with topoi; and its characters are repeatedly referred to by reverential epithets (“the Christ-loving tsar,” “the pious tsarevich,” “the blessed martyr,” etc.). This one, highly concise text thus accommodates features of three types of discourse. A somewhat longer text, The Tale of the Recovery and Translation from the City of Uglich to the Most Distinguished Capital City of Moscow of the Most Honorable and Miraculous Relics of Dmitry, the Pious Tsarevich and PassionSufferer for Christ,17 is frequently found together with the Tulupov Life and 17 Povest´ o obretenii i o prinesenii chestnykh i mnogochudesnykh moshchei blagovernago tsarevicha i strastoterptsa Khrista Dimitriia ot grada Uglecha, v preimenityi tsarstvuiushchii grad Moskvu, in the Tulupov Life.

Prelude   CHAPTER 1

was probably composed simultaneously with it.18 The Tale picks up where the Life leaves off, introducing a new cast of characters as well as a new set of events, but it nevertheless recalls the Life in a number of ways. From the formal perspective, it too features hagiography’s quadripartite structure: its prologue relates the events leading up to the recovery of Dmitry’s relics; its main narrative describes the recovery itself; a third part describes the miracles worked by Dmitry’s relics; and its closing encomium to the Russian lands functions as an epilogue. Also like the Life, the Tale’s content is primarily historiographical: its author relates secular occurrences such as Grishka Otrepev’s depredations against Russia, his ignominious death, and Vasily Shuisky’s ascent to the throne. Indeed, the Tale marks an advance over the Life in this regard, for it not only mentions events but also explores the motivations for them, forging a chain of cause-and-effect relationships: the Russian people, for example, initially support Dmitry because they have been deceived by the devil. As in the Life, political intent is clearly evident—the Tale’s author repeatedly lauds Vasily Shuisky as the savior of the Russian people and defender of the Russian faith. Unlike the Life, the Tale features rudimentary dialogue. Shuisky’s desire to acquire Dmitry’s body is rendered in direct discourse, as are his advisers’ enthusiastic endorsements of his plan to send a delegation to Uglich. Additionally, the Tale’s author contributes an affective layer to his story, describing the joy Shuisky feels when Dmitry’s uncorrupted body arrives in Moscow. Likewise, the people of Uglich burst into tears when the tsarevich’s coffin is opened, while the people of Moscow rejoice. Although modern audiences might associate both dialogue and emotional affect with fiction, the use of these devices in the Tale is limited and unsophisticated: they prefigure fictional form but are insufficiently developed to fully actualize it. Nonetheless, they add to the Tale’s discursive hybridity and multiply the levels on which it can be read. It is impossible to say today how, or even whether, seventeenth-century readers reacted to the multilayeredness of the Tulupov Life and its accompanying Tale. As noted, Old Russian texts frequently incorporated elements from what modern readers would consider more than one discursive sphere. Indeed, six centuries before the composition of Dmitry’s Life, at the dawning of East Slavic letters, texts devoted to Boris and Gleb—princes who, like Dmitry, were regarded as passion-sufferers—already incorporated multiple narrative intents. On the one hand, they emphasized the princes’ piety, paving the way for their canonization. On the other, they constructed a secular story that justified their 18 Platonov, Drevnerusskiia skazaniia i povesti, 41.

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brother Svyatopolk’s banishment from Kiev and Yaroslav’s seizure of the throne. This would not be the last time that hagiographical texts served to smooth over political rivalries. Read against the background of other Old Russian hagiographies, the early Dmitry lives were hardly unusual. What does make the Life and the Tale unusual are the existential questions they seek to answer. The Time of Troubles marked a historical watershed: the Rurikid dynasty, which had ruled the Russian lands from time immemorial, had come to an end; and the Orthodox Church, which had acted in symphony with it, was perceived as being endangered by an expansionist Roman Catholicism. The life and death of a small boy who had hitherto attracted little attention became emblematic of both the end of an old order and the confused beginnings of a new one. Vasily Shuisky, who years earlier had headed the investigatory commission that reported Dmitry’s death by a self-inflicted wound, now had to rewrite history. The Life absolved little Dmitry of the sin of accidental suicide and made him into a martyr. Together with the Tale of the Recovery and Translation, it justified and reified his canonization while simultaneously serving to lay the Rurikid dynasty to rest and open the door to a successor. These two texts were meant to ensure a triumphant transition from the reigns of two villains, Boris Godunov and Grishka Otrepev, to the reign of a true Russian prince, Vasily Shuisky. Their authors intended to nullify the period’s liminality by making the real Dmitry knowable and known and then closing his career. Conveniently, the Life and the Tale also shifted the mantle of defender of the Orthodox faith from the pious Dmitry’s shoulders onto the ostensibly pious Shuisky’s. Through a narrative sleight of hand, Shuisky became Dmitry’s true successor. The multigeneric Life and Tale attempted to square as many circles—political, historical, and religious—as possible. Freedom from tight generic constraints allowed their authors to fashion a past that opportunely put one dynasty to bed while simultaneously suggesting its replaceability with an essentially new one.

History as Antihagiography: The Story of Grishka Otrepev At or around the time of the composition of the Tulupov Life, the more narratively sophisticated Story of Grishka Otrepev (Skazanie o Grishke Otrep´eve) appeared. Written close to the time of Tsar Dmitry’s death,19 it makes secular claims to historical accuracy as well as sacred ones to congruence with divine 19 Morozova suggests that the composition of the Skazanie dates to between May 17 and June 3, 1606 (Smuta nachala XVII v. glazami sovremennikov, 98).

Prelude   CHAPTER 1

providence. Certain of its revelations echo charges made against (False) Dmitry in Vasily Shuisky’s gramoty, while others accord well with the Tulupov Life of St. Dmitry. The Story of Grishka Otrepev constitutes another important initial stage in the Dmitry tradition because, along with incorporating a good deal of nonliterary material broached in other types of documents, it also evidences features of protofiction. The potential to read it in this way is largely a function of the Story’s protagonist—an adult Dmitry/Otrepev offers an imaginative author much more scope for narrative complexity than does a child saint. Indeed, the Story largely ignores the child Dmitry: the most it will commit to is that “The Lord Dmitry Ivanovich was murdered in Uglich on the fifteenth day of May, 1591, by Nikita Kachalov and Danilka Bityagovsky, and his remains were placed in the Cathedral of the all-merciful Savior there.”20 Rather than attempting to spark narrative interest with a meager recitation of events from fifteen years earlier, its anonymous author focuses on 1603, when “a monk named Grishka Otrepev departed the Russian realm for the Lithuanian land and, entering that land, shed his monkish appearance and dressed himself in secular clothes and became a fugitive. And by means of the devil’s teachings and heretical willfulness and demonic intrigues, he began to call himself Tsarevich Dmitry Ivanovich of Moscow.”21 Otrepev’s initial advance toward leadership is framed as a retreat from Russia. The Story offers a fairly circumstantial account of Otrepev’s gambit. Its author presents his protagonist as a renegade defrocked monk who seeks asylum in Poland and, once he is safely outside the confines of Russia, declares himself to be Tsarevich Dmitry, miraculously preserved from death. The would-be Dmitry gains the Polish king’s support and agrees to convert to Catholicism, effectively refashioning himself into a non-Russian. The king notifies the pope of this propitious development, and the pope, in turn, rejoices in the opportunity to introduce the Roman faith into Orthodox lands. Otrepev’s insolence reaches a perilous pitch with the arrival of his Polish fiancée, Marina Mniszek, but fortunately the Russian people come to their senses and realize that their tsar is not, after all, the true son of Ivan IV. They declare him an apostate usurper and, with the Shuisky princes at their head, strangle him and burn his body in the portable wooden fortress he had built on the Kotel River.22 20 “Skazanie o Grishke Otrep´eve” (Story of Grishka Otrepev), RIB, 717; hereafter, Story. 21 Ibid., 718. 22 The Story’s author leaves out details concerning the desecration of Dmitry’s body and its initial burial and retrieval. The fortress, however, was real. “On May 28, Dmitrii’s corpse was taken to the small Kotel River just outside Moscow and placed inside a mobile wooden

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L. E. Morozova has proposed Mikhail Tatishchev, a Shuisky supporter, as the Story’s author.23 Whether or not this identification can be sustained, the Story’s author was hardly a dispassionate observer. But he couched his account in terms that readers might be forgiven for construing as factual and left it open-ended, since the country’s new dynasty was still only in the process of emerging. The Story’s content gives the appearance of being historiographical or, perhaps better, chronical-like. While the Story of Grishka Otrepev is one of the more colorful accounts of the seventeenth century’s opening years, it is unquestionably a highly ­selective and biased one. For example, the author regularly emphasizes the suffering and bravery of the preeminently Russian Vasily Shuisky. Indeed, Prince Vasily and his close relatives are, in the author’s view, almost the only honorable men living in Russia. What is not emphasized is Tsar Dmitry’s—or, in the Story’s terms, Grishka Otrepev’s—political achievements. Although Tatishchev frequently bewails Dmitry’s sympathy for Catholicism, he never offers a sense of how the man actually governed. Instead, he is at pains to emphasize that Dmitry’s sponsors are foreigners and that Dmitry himself has willingly cast off his Orthodox religion and Russian habits of mind in order to embrace customs that are variously identified as Lithuanian, Polish, Hungarian, Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist-Jesuit. This makes matters quite clear: Russia’s misfortunes are the result of a failure of Russianness. As with the Tulupov Life of St. Dmitry, there is an overt political message: Russians must discard their illusions concerning the charismatic but clearly deceptive Otrepev and embrace a loyal and Orthodox tsar, Vasily Shuisky. The Story incorporates belletristic devices to a much greater degree than the Tulupov Life. The author’s chief goals are to amend the sorry state of Russian affairs by countering the damage Godunov and Otrepev have done; to reinstate Orthodox values; and to restore order. To this end, he utilizes devices that belong more to the literary than to the historiographical sphere. Many of the Story’s most vivid moments, for example, uncannily echo earlier moments. One person substitutes for another, or a seemingly distinctive action duplicates an earlier one. In Tsar Dmitry’s own words, “Boris Godunov fortress that, months earlier, had been constructed on Tsar Dmitrii’s orders. Because of the frightening images painted on it the Russians had nicknamed the contraption the ‘monster from hell,’ Dmitrii’s body, therefore, was burned in ‘hell,’ and his ashes were scattered” (Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War, 245). 23 Morozova, Smuta nachala XVII v. glazami sovremennikov, 100–102. This attribution has not been universally accepted.

Prelude   CHAPTER 1

­ urdered not me but a different youth in my place.”24 Similarly, it later tranm spires that Dmitry’s father-in-law, Jerzy Mniszek, is a renegade defrocked monk “just like Grishka Otrepev”25—another echo or substitution. When Dmitry faces assassination in the Zaporozhe region, he makes off for Putivl, mimicking his much earlier escape from Uglich. The young Fyodor Godunov’s demise duplicates Tsarevich Dmitry’s: “The innocent blood of Tsarevich Dmitry Ivanovich avenged itself on Boris’s son.”26 Conveniently continuing this parallel, Fyodor’s mother, like Dmitry’s, is named Maria, and all his kin, like the Nagoys, go off to prison and exile. As Tsar Dmitry’s power and influence begin to wane, various resistance groups in the provinces coalesce against him, just as they did three years earlier against Godunov. Vasily Shuisky rallies these groups with the help of his brother who is named—like the dead tsarevich—Dmitry Ivanovich. When Tsar Dmitry is killed—in mid-May, like the original Tsarevich Dmitry— Moscow’s bells begin to toll, as Uglich’s did in 1591. Likewise, street fighting breaks out and a large number of people are killed, as happened fifteen years earlier in Uglich. These parallel sets of events are neither figments of the author’s artistic imagination nor creatively manipulated fantasies. They are not the stuff of consciously invented fiction. Quite to the contrary, most of them are historically attested. Nor is it the author’s doing that Shuisky’s brother was named Dmitry Ivanovich and Fyodor Godunov’s mother was Maria. It is, however, very much the case that a principle of selection is at work in the Story of Grishka Otrepev: the author chooses to emphasize particular people and things while downplaying others. As a result, the echoes of 1591 resound insistently throughout the years 1603–1606, thereby assuring a certain justice for the vanished House of Rurik. Tsarevich Dmitry’s death is, if not reversed, then at least avenged by Fyodor Godunov’s. Grishka Otrepev, the apostate monk, ultimately finds his flawed support in another equally compromised apostate, Jerzy Mniszek. Otrepev’s initial lie regarding his escape from Uglich temporarily becomes truth when he escapes to Putivl but then turns on him, as all lies must, when he attempts to outrun his killers in Moscow. And most important, in the aftermath of the pretender’s death, the Poles, who humiliated Moscow in 1606, suffer, just as the child Dmitry’s murderers and their supporters did in 1591.

24 Story, 718–19. 25 Ibid., 722. 26 Ibid., 731.

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The Story’s author thus ultimately undoes its tragedy by avenging Tsarevich Dmitry’s death with Fyodor Godunov’s and Grishka Otrepev’s as well as by replacing the Polish Otrepev with the Russian Shuisky. If nothing else is learned about Ivan IV’s dead son, it at least becomes clear that his death demands a reckoning. Consequently, the secular, political balance is righted— at least within the Story of Grishka Otrepev. As Grishka burns in his wooden fortress, the machine that has come to emblemize his many machinations consumes him. This pleasing result can be achieved only through conscious narrative shaping. The Story has a beginning, during which the Russian lands enjoy a proper, stable existence; a middle, during which complications arise and stability vanishes; and an end, during which the status quo ante is restored. If the Story is read in the way its title suggests—as an account of Grishka Otrepev— rather than as an explication of a particular period in Russian history, then it has a closed rather than an open ending. This aligns it more with fiction than with historiography. The Story also has a sacred dimension, however. Having resolved his ­secular plot, the author uncharacteristically pronounces very unsecular words of anathema: And the thrice-accursed and wicked and apostate heretic Grishka, with all his scheming designs and cunning and unlawful usages, and with all his cunning wizardries, with his thrice-accursed astrology, with his dark, evil designs, and with all his counselors and musketeers and unlawful heretics, and with his seers and thrice-accursed well-wishers—be they accursed! Be they accursed! Be they accursed, by the universal conclave and by sinful me, in this century and in centuries to come, from ages unto ages. Amen.27

Grishka Otrepev, the man who sought to banish Tsarevich Dmitry by appropriating his earthly destiny, is consigned to an otherworldly hell. Ultimately the Story intertwines sacred history with secular. By striving to anticipate and remake both types of history, Otrepev turns himself into one of Russia’s consummate villains. He is false because his actions and his friends are representatives of the Other, the foreign, the Catholic, and the western. Standing on the wrong side of a liminal threshold, he is an agent of innovation and thus, in the Story’s terms, of destruction. Otrepev is, and remains, accursed, 27 Ibid., 754.

Prelude   CHAPTER 1

together with the world he has tried to bring into being. Had the author been less engaged in Vasily Shuisky’s cause, he might have situated his protagonist on the other side of the liminal border and accorded him an invigorating, ­dialogic purpose, for, as Irina Reyfman has suggested, “The creation myth may have another important character: The antihero, who represents chaos and sets antirules in the newly created world.”28 In the event, however, the author chooses to deprecate Otrepev’s imaginative and constructive antirules. Obviously, by making his protagonist a villain, the Story’s author denies him the status of saint. Less obviously, this denial fails to accord with the Story’s formal structure. The tale of Otrepev’s deeds is labeled a “story” (skazanie), not a life, but it has a hagiographical structure. Like the Tulupov Life, the Story opens with a prologue, in this case a recitation of deaths (Ivan IV, Fyodor, and Dmitry) as well as Boris Godunov’s usurpatory machinations. Its main body consists of an extended narrative of Otrepev’s march to power. In place of hagiography’s recitation of miracles worked by the saint, the Story lists Otrepev’s depredations: the pretender elevates a drunken heretic to the patriarchate; he encourages scandalous western music; and he invites his Polish supporters to worship in Orthodox cathedrals. After enumerating these infamous deeds, Tatishchev recommences his main narrative, closing after Moscow’s townsfolk have undone Otrepev’s damage. The Story’s final segment is, as noted above, an anathema called down on its eponymous villain. The Story’s quadripartite structure suggests that it might profitably be read as an anti-life, whether or not such was its author’s intention. While the Story and the Life both open similarly, with laconic descriptions of Tsarevich Dmitry’s forebears, the Story quickly replaces the Life’s hero with his diabolical counterpart. This frees its author to reverse the positive values ascribed to the Life’s protagonist in the remaining three portions of his text: in the Story’s second part, an iniquitous, impious pretender replaces the god-fearing, pious tsarevich; in its third, depredations against the Orthodox way of life replace the blessings conferred on the Russian people by Dmitry’s miracles; and in its fourth, the anathema pronounced against its protagonist replaces the Life’s paean of praise for the Russian lands. As an anti-life, the Story attempts to redeem a disruptive period in history just as surely as do the Life and its companion Tale, but the Life elevates the notional Dmitry to heaven, while the Story condemns the deracinated Otrepev 28 Irina Reyfman, Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the “New” Russian Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 11.

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to hell. However, the gap between Dmitry as saint and Otrepev as villain must be filled. In between the otherworldly spheres of heaven and hell lies the practical world of human affairs, a liminal space into which the Life and the Tale’s Vasily Shuisky has inserted himself. He is a defender of the Orthodox faith but not a saint; a hard-headed ruler but not a villain. He makes good the loss occasioned by Dmitry’s death as well as the damage generated by Otrepev’s life. Ironically, however, the trauma that the Life, the Tale, and the Story attempt to mediate narratively was never resolved historically.

Seventeenth-Century Narrativity We cannot enter into the minds of seventeenth-century Russian readers and writers: since the era provided neither formal literary criticism nor autobiographical accounts of the reading experience, we can only infer the principles that governed narrative construction from the surviving narratives themselves. However, if we take seriously Hayden White’s conviction that annals and chronicles represent wholly appropriate formal instantiations of particular worldviews rather than ignorant, unskilled approximations of modern historiography, then we might conclude by analogy that the premodern Life of St. Dmitry, its accompanying Tale, and The Story of Grishka Otrepev represent well-considered worldviews, framed in the narrative forms deemed most congenial to them. All three works express what we today would consider a political message. All three utilize a hagiographical macrostructure to convey that message, formulating it in terms of secular events that unfold in chronological—that is, historical—order.29 Additionally, the Tale and the Story each contain a number of rudimentary formal devices that would today be considered literary. To modern readers, the resulting texts might appear to be generic hodgepodges, characterized by narrative gaps and unsuccessful syntheses of incongruous elements. However, these texts indicate that early seventeenth-century Russians blurred the boundaries between church and state not only in regard to worldview but also in relation to narrativity. They would not have recognized a disjuncture between political intent, hagiographical 29 Daniel Rowland has observed a similar disjuncture between intent and content in ­seventeenth-century Time of Troubles texts, albeit in a rather different context: “In most of these tales [about the Time of Troubles] a tension exists between theoretical statements about the pious nature and autocratic power of the tsar, on the one hand, and, on the other, the actual reportage of events, reportage that is often explicitly critical of the rulers ­concerned” (“Did Muscovite Ideology Place Limits?,” 131–32).

Prelude   CHAPTER 1

s­ tructure, and historiographical explication. All three were interrelated facets of one seamless cognitive/narrative sphere. The traumatic events related in the Life, the Tale, and the Story occurred in close proximity to the time in which they were written. To their authors as well as their immediate audiences they were real and verifiable: that is, the stuff of what we today consider history. Yet these terrifying events were also ongoing and therefore invited political intervention. Faced with continuing disruption, readers and writers sought textual closure as a means of narratively overcoming their trauma. The most proximate, harmonious, and shapely form to hand was hagiography. Protofiction, while it might have answered a formal need for closure, was nevertheless foreign to the early seventeenth-century mentality. Thus, if they were noticed at all, the protofictional devices I have identified in two of my texts probably passed unremarked by seventeenth-century r­ eaders. It would be remiss today, however, not to recognize them as unintended ­harbingers of the direction that subsequent Dmitry texts would take. The ­imagined world of hagiography would soon yield to that of fiction.

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CHAPTER 2

Two Visions of Tyranny: The Late Eighteenth Century The Russian government is an absolute monarchy moderated by assassination. —Astolphe de Custine

R

ussia experienced the eighteenth century as a revelation, a prodigious leap  forward into novel cultural territory. To be sure, the country’s enserfed peasants continued to live in much the same way as they had in the past, but members of its privileged elite underwent a dizzying evolution. They became, almost overnight, inhabitants of a new empire that recognized and, indeed, sedulously emulated many aspects of western European manners and mores. This transformation occasioned a commensurate adjustment to their understanding of the place and purpose of the written text. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Russian history could be readily distinguished from Russian literature, and literature had bedecked itself in hitherto unheard-of garb, including verse forms like the ode and the elegy and dramatic ones like the comedy and the tragedy.1 Sadly, in their rush to adopt western literary forms, many educated eighteenth-century Russians ignored or even rejected their own homegrown heritage. Newly exposed to the charms of European art, they deemed little in their past worthy of comparison. But history’s hold was strong and, in time, Russian writers—tragedians in particular—began to look back to past events that had brought them to the present. Of particular interest were those moments of disruption in history during which Russia’s fate had moved in unexpected directions. In 1769 Alexander Sumarokov selected the Time of   1 Ironically, although contemporaries regarded the eighteenth century as modern, the nineteenth century saw it as archaic. Luba Golburt has defined it as simultaneously “supremely significant” and “no longer capable of signifying” (The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014], 5).

Two Visions of Tyranny: The Late Eighteenth Century   CHAPTER 2

Troubles as one such moment, and in 1770 he completed a tragedy about it, Dmitry the Pretender. The play enjoyed huge popularity and appeared regularly on Russian stages throughout the last decades of the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century. With Dmitry the Pretender, Sumarokov became the first Russian playwright to tap into the rich vein of material that has inspired authors to this day. Others did not emulate his example immediately, however. The next play using the Dmitry material was Vasily Narezhny’s identically titled Dmitry the Pretender, which was not published until 1804. While technically dating to the nineteenth century, Narezhny’s tragedy was in dialogue with Sumarokov’s even as it reflected a yet older aesthetic.

(Mis)governing an Empire during Russia’s Long Eighteenth Century Old Russia’s historical development differed from much of contemporary Europe’s in significant ways. By the seventeenth century, certain disparities between east and west had become quite evident—most saliently, Russia was a closed and nearly static country with no European-style civil society. A genuine system of social estates was unknown in Muscovy, while serfdom, which had already begun to weaken in the west by the time of the Renaissance, came into legal force in Russia only in 1649. Russia’s movement toward modernization was thus tentative and limited.2 Indeed, by the end of the seventeenth century, the country endured a “crisis of traditionalism.”3 Although Peter the Great’s (r. 1682–1725) crusade to westernize and modernize Muscovy transformed it into a formidable empire, it did relatively little to promote the development of independent social estates. On the one hand, Peter’s reforms left serfdom untouched; on the other, they compelled each member of the nobility to enter into lifelong military or state service (Peter III finally released the nobles in 1762, thirty-seven years after Peter the Great’s death, and Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861).4 However, one major change for the upper classes came with Peter’s abolition of the Old Russian system of social precedence: in 1722, he abandoned the Muscovite practice of  2 Kamenskii, Russian Empire in the Eighteenth Century, 118.   3 Ibid., 37.   4 Liah Greenfeld has identified the Russian nobility’s dependence on service as a major factor differentiating it from its western European counterpart, which was land-based (Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992], 204).

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conferring status based on birth and instituted a new “Table of Ranks,” which rewarded service and personal merit. Peter also subjected the monarchy itself to previously undreamt-of innovations. Having accused his oldest son Alexey of treason, subjected him to trial by the Senate, and seen him die under torture in 1718, Peter enacted the 1722 “Right of the Monarch to Determine His Successor” (Pravda voli monarshei vo opredelenii naslednika derzhavy svoei), which entitled each Russian autocrat to designate the person next in line for the throne. Henceforth, an heir apparent who failed to give satisfaction could be written out of the succession and replaced by whomever the reigning monarch chose. With a single stroke, Peter abolished Russia’s monarchy by right of birth, unintentionally destabilizing the monarchy itself. Additionally, he created what Richard Wortman has termed a “cadence,” opening his reign by mandating radical change and discrediting his predecessor and then calling for a completely new vision. This cadence characterized each successive reign with the exception of Nicholas II’s.5 Peter’s notion that men and women should be judged by merit alone profoundly unsettled traditionalists. Equally unsettling was his openness to western Europeans and western ideas. Peter restructured his government along western lines and invited western experts to live and work in Russia. He mandated that the upper classes abandon Russian dress and attend western-style balls and receptions. Indeed, by the end of Peter’s reign, westernization had taken such firm hold that many Russians suspected their emperor of valuing the service of foreigners over that of his fellow countrymen. The scions of ancient families watched with ill-concealed resentment as Peter rewarded foreign advisers with posts they themselves coveted, and churchmen stood by helplessly as he subjected Russian Orthodoxy to a western-inspired reorganization. Some feared that Peter had discredited old moral values and norms without having created adequate replacements.6 Under Peter’s eighteenth-century successors, dynastic instability and government by foreigners became engrained in the national fabric. Having relegated to himself the prerogative to name his successor, Peter died without exercising it; his second wife, the Livonian-born washerwoman Catherine I, came to the throne on the heels of a palace cabal. When she died in 1727, Peter’s twelve-year-old grandson, Peter II, succeeded her but died three years   5 Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, 2000), vol. 1: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I, 3.  6 Kamenskii, Russian Empire in the Eighteenth Century, 97.

Two Visions of Tyranny: The Late Eighteenth Century   CHAPTER 2

later. From 1730 to 1740, Peter’s niece, Anna, duchess of Courland, reigned. She, in turn, bequeathed the throne to her infant nephew, Ivan VI, who was only one-quarter Russian. Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter by Catherine, overthrew Ivan in 1741 and ruled until her death in 1762. Elizabeth chose her nephew Peter III as successor. He, like his cousin Ivan, was only one-quarter Russian; he was also overthrown within half a year. Peter III’s German-born wife, Catherine II (“the Great”), usurped the throne from Peter after a coup in which he was assassinated. Finally, Catherine’s son, Paul, came to the throne after her death in 1796—in the unlikely case that he was truly Peter’s son, he was one-eighth Russian; if he was the son of Catherine’s lover, Sergey Saltykov, he was one-half. Paul abolished Peter the Great’s law of succession and reestablished male primogeniture; the change did not serve him well, however, as he was assassinated in 1801, presumably with the foreknowledge and unspoken complicity of his oldest son, Alexander, who then took the throne. Of Russia’s nine eighteenth-century emperors and empresses, only Peter the Great and Anna were wholly Russian by birth, and even their credentials as “real” Russians were tarnished. Peter traveled to the west, adopted western ways, invited numerous westerners to Russia, and initiated a policy of marrying members of the Russian royal family to German princes and princesses. Anna installed her Baltic German favorite, Biren (Ernst Johann Bühren), in her St. Petersburg palace and effectively handed the reins of state over to him. When she seized the throne, Empress Elizabeth justified her usurpation by claiming to have saved Russia from the hegemony of foreigners,7 but both she and Catherine the Great regularly took advice from their personal circles of western favorites. Peter III and Paul were viewed as the ultimate westerners: each of them alienated the Russian public and brought about his own downfall by endeavoring to remake Russia in the image of Prussia. Thus, although the eighteenth century saw a gradual emancipation of Russia’s nobility, it also experienced a steady increase in the influence of foreigners, which led some in time to support a “national” opposition to the Petrine reforms.8 The patent immorality of several of the eighteenth-century successions also exacted a price. Peter the Great instituted his new law of succession   7 E. V. Anisimov, Five Empresses: Court Life in Eighteenth-Century Russia, trans. Kathleen Carroll (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 141–42.  8 Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 4. Richard Wortman, however, maintains that Russian emperors actively embraced their foreign origins, which elevated their sources of authority (“The Invention of Tradition and the Representation of Russian Monarchy,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 28 [2006]: 653).

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after overseeing the execution of his son; and Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, Catherine the Great, and Alexander I all came to power on the heels of palace coups. Beginning with Catherine I, successive monarchs frequently secured the intervention of elite guards regiments in order to seize the throne. The merits of their respective reigns notwithstanding, many eighteenth-century Russian monarchs had recourse to strained explanations or subterfuges in order to paper over the inconvenient truths accompanying their successions. Apologists for Peter the Great claimed that he had sacrificed his much-loved (!) son Alexey to interests of state.9 They invoked one of Peter’s favorite watchwords, “duty,” to justify the disobedient young man’s death. Elizabeth took refuge in secrecy, ordering that all documents referring to Ivan VI be removed from the archives and destroyed;10 she then imprisoned the unfortunate child emperor in the Shlisselburg Fortress, where no one was allowed to speak his name. Both Peter III and Catherine the Great feared Ivan’s claim to the throne and, accordingly, reaffirmed Elizabeth’s directive confining him to his prison tower. Ultimately, Ivan’s guards assassinated him in 1764 during an unsuccessful attempt to free him; his death required no elaborate justification, though, for the simple reason that it was never announced. This was, of course, Catherine’s second act of regicide, since she had colluded in the deposition and murder of her husband two years earlier. To be sure, Peter III had been unpopular, but carefully framed justifications for his death were deemed necessary. Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, Catherine’s confidante, co-conspirator, and propagandist, penned both sacred and secular apologias. First she decried the sufferings of the Church “under a sovereign such as Peter.”11 Then she employed an argument worthy of Peter the Great himself: “But enough on the subject of a prince, unfortunate because placed on a pedestal high above his natural level. He was not wicked, but his incompetence and lack of education, as well as inclination and natural bent, all combined to make of him a good Prussian corporal and not the Sovereign of a great Empire.”12 Although the assessment may be largely true, it offers d­ ubious ethical grounds for assassination. Finally, Emperor Paul’s untimely demise,  9 Riasanovsky, Image of Peter the Great, 51. On this heading, see also Kamenskii, who writes that Peter “offended all norms of Christian morality, thereby underlining the amorality of the policy he was pursuing” and creating a police state to which the human personality was subordinated (Russian Empire in the Eighteenth Century, 106–7). 10 Anisimov, Five Empresses, 163. 11 Ekaterina Dashkova, The Memoirs of a Russian Princess, trans. and ed. Kyril Fitzlyon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 68. 12 Ibid., 81.

Two Visions of Tyranny: The Late Eighteenth Century   CHAPTER 2

rather than eliciting similarly true but problematical explanations, occasioned a return to state secrecy: the palace officially announced that the emperor had died of natural causes and forbade any further discussion.13 The whirlwind sequence of palace coups gave birth to an invented tradition in which “the representation of Russian monarchy appears as a succession of apparent ruptures producing an illusion of constant renewal, prodigies of transformation effected by the irresistible power of the monarch’s will.”14 In the absence of legally sanctioned political discourse about the royal succession, educated eighteenth-century Russians turned to art. The foremost playwright of the age, Alexander Sumarokov, was keenly interested in questions of good governance. Rather than clothing his thoughts in political discourse, he took an indirect path, borrowing the events of the Time of Troubles in his drame à clef, Dmitry the Pretender, in order to comment on royal succession. Vasily Narezhny, his younger, less celebrated compatriot, followed his lead a quarter-century later, recycling seventeenth-century historical material as commentary on the politics of his own day. In time, nineteenth-century playwrights and novelists would follow suit. Both Sumarokov and Narezhny were very much children of their era, however; they used the Dmitry material typologically, bending and refashioning seventeenth-century usurpations into direct antecedents of contemporary events.

Russia’s First Historians Assess the Institution of Monarchy Russian historiography emerged as a recognizable field of inquiry in the 1720s under the sponsorship of Peter the Great. Cynthia Hyla Whittaker has identified forty-seven authors who penned histories of Russia over the ensuing eighty years, all of whom were amateurs.15 George Vernadsky, in his history of Russian historiography, devotes at least as much attention to their contributions to their principal professions as to their work as historians.16 All forty-seven were

13 Roderick E. McGrew, Paul I of Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3. More than a century would pass before it became possible to openly discuss the assassination. 14 Wortman, “Invention of Tradition,” 652. 15 Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, “The Idea of Autocracy among Eighteenth-Century Russian Historians,” in Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 19. 16 George Vernadsky, Russian Historiography: A History, ed. Sergei Pushkarev and trans. Nickolas Lupinin (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1978), 1–45.

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confirmed monarchists, although their biases and preferences vis-à-vis the ­characteristics of the ideal monarch varied.17 History books began to appear regularly in 1755, albeit in relatively small print runs.18 Some of them enjoyed a degree of popularity, but no single eighteenth-century text exercised the influence on contemporary belles lettres that Nikolay Karamzin’s much celebrated History of the Russian State would wield fifty years later. Certain titles were better known than others, of course, but none stood out as the authoritative voice of the era. Accordingly, I do not propose one particular writer’s treatment of Russia’s past as more determinative in fashioning the lineaments of the eighteenth-century Dmitry/Godunov literary tradition than any other’s but briefly summarize general trends in the period’s historiography instead. The earliest secular histories of Russia focus on the person of the monarch and evidence a strongly didactic component—contemporary readers and rulers alike were expected to extract and digest from them an understanding of the art of good governance.19 Whittaker has distinguished three tendencies, or schools of thinking, within this broadly promonarchist body of writing. The first, the “dynastic,” equated Russia’s past with the past of its two ruling dynasties. In interpreting the Time of Troubles, members of the dynastic school recognized the non-Rurikid Boris Godunov as a usurper but considered Vasily Shuisky a Rurikid and, therefore, a legitimate monarch. Vasily Tatishchev was the primary exponent of the second, or “empirical,” school of historiography. In his view, monarchy was a rational, natural, and absolute form of government. The greatest monarchs were those who were most able to accrue and exercise undiluted power—a good tsar was a strong tsar. At the same time, however, Tatishchev viewed monarchy as a contractual relationship between ruler and ruled—a good tsar fulfilled his duties to his people. A third, “nondespotic” school emerged in the 1760s, during the reign of Catherine the Great. Its adherents also considered monarchy the most appropriate form of government for Russia but, unlike their predecessors, believed that the monarch’s power derived from his/her willingness to consult regularly with advisers.20 Nondespotic historians adjudged rulers as despots, regardless 17 Whittaker, “Idea of Autocracy,” 17–18. 18 Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, Russian Monarchy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 119. 19 Ibid., 119–20. 20 Ibid., 119–36.

Two Visions of Tyranny: The Late Eighteenth Century   CHAPTER 2

of the merits of their policies or accomplishments, if they, like Peter III, coveted and abused unlimited personal power. In the nondespotic view, Boris Godunov was elected after consultation with a duly constituted assembly and was, therefore, no despot.21 As we shall see, all three schools of historical thought resonate in one or the other of the eighteenth century’s two Dmitry plays. Sumarokov concerns himself, first and foremost, with the dangers of despotism. In his Dmitry the Pretender, he writes the legitimate, nondespotic, and therefore boring Boris Godunov completely out of the historical record. He even refuses to cast him in the role of Xenya Godunova’s father, awarding her an altogether different lineage. However, Sumarokov discerns an apposite—and highly interesting— model of despotism in the person of False Dmitry and dedicates his play to uncovering and analyzing the iniquities of the pretender-tsar’s tyrannies. Vasily Narezhny, by contrast, appears to have felt some degree of affinity with all three eighteenth-century schools of historical thought. His version of Dmitry the Pretender, like Sumarokov’s, harshly criticizes Dmitry as a willful tyrant yet sympathizes with him as the product of an unfortunate birth. Here Narezhny reprises the older “dynastic” notion that each man inevitably becomes the person he was born to be. Additionally, Narezhny’s Dmitry evokes and infringes against a paramount value of the empirical school when he breaks a covenant. In paying court to two women he barely knows, he betrays a third (his wife), thereby showing himself incapable of honoring even the most basic social contract—matrimony. The pretender emerges from Narezhny’s pen as a slightly lumpy synthesis of three related but different historical philosophies. By entangling literature with historiography (even if not always with actual history) both Sumarokov and Narezhny set a pattern that would recur throughout the nineteenth century, disappear in the twentieth, and resurface in the twenty-first. The eighteenth century’s small inaugural cluster of dramatic texts concerning Russia’s Time of Troubles would evolve over time into a deep and powerful phenomenon.

Alexander Sumarokov’s Dmitry the Pretender : The Right of the Tragedian to Determine His Monarch Modern Russian literature was born, in tandem with the Russian Empire, in the eighteenth century, and its luminaries plied their art with a careful eye to 21 Whittaker, “Idea of Autocracy,” 35.

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the twinned authorities of western aesthetics and Russian politics, each of which they generally lauded but sometimes railed against. Alexander Petrovich Sumarokov (1717–1777), the first in a long succession of playwrights to author a tragedy called Dmitry the Pretender (Dimitrii samozvanets; composed 1769– 1770, first staged 1771), came of age under Empress Elizabeth and continued to pursue his literary calling throughout the first half of Catherine the Great’s reign. Hailing from a gentry family, he was educated at the St. Petersburg Cadet Corps and became Russia’s first fulltime gentleman writer. Sumarokov composed in a variety of genres, including the ode, epistle, eclogue, elegy, comedy, song, and, most successfully, tragedy. In total, he completed nine tragedies: the first of them, Khorev, dates to 1747; and the last, Mstislav, appeared in 1774.22 Over the long span of his career, Sumarokov consistently regarded himself as an adherent to neoclassicism, but even though the French dramatists he revered specified antiquity as the most appropriate setting for tragedy, he broke with tradition and situated five of his plays in medieval Kiev, Novgorod, and Moscow.23 Regardless of setting, however, he focused on a genuinely neoclassical theme in all nine tragedies—the gap between the conduct of ideal and real rulers.24 Although all critics recognize Sumarokov as the founding father of Russian drama, they differ concerning the aesthetic merits of his oeuvre as a whole. Simon Karlinsky, for example, dismisses Sumarokov as a “minor literary talent.” Marcus C. Levitt applauds him for his “unique contribution and vital connection to the literary life of [his] day,” which is not the same, of course, as saying that he is a great writer. Harold B. Segel recognizes him as “the first Russian writer truly to express the philosophy and ideals of the Enlightenment.” Iu. V. Stennik considers him the chief Russian theoretician and exponent of neoclassicism,25 which is, again, not quite the same as saying that his work 22 For a summary of Sumarokov’s life, see Marcus C. Levitt, “Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Early Modern Russian Writers, Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1995), 370–81. 23 Iu. V. Stennik, “Istoriograficheskie aspekty soderzhaniia russkoi dramaturgii XVIII v. (zhanr tragedii),” XVIII vek 19 (1995): 70. 24 Kirill Ospovat describes Sumarokov’s practice as “an idiom of political allegory and allusion, which simultaneously expressed and masked the concerns of court society and the tensions permeating its social existence” (Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia [Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2016], xi). Stennik phrases this as the tension in Sumarokov between the notion of an ideal monarch and the reality of specific monarchs who have defaulted on their duties (“Sumarokov,” in Istoriia russkoi literatury, ed. D. S. Likhachev and G. P. Makogonenko [Leningrad: Akademiia nauk SSSR 1980], 1:548). 25 Simon Karlinsky, Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 73; Marcus C. Levitt, preface to his Early Modern

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is memorable. Views of Dmitry the Pretender, Sumarokov’s penultimate and most famous play are more consistently positive. Scholars routinely single it out as Sumarokov’s finest tragedy.26 Pointing to its canonical five acts as well as its artful observance of the classical unities, they consider it an exemplar of Russian neoclassicism.27 Curiously, though, Dmitry the Pretender, alone of all Sumarokov’s tragedies, rests on specific concrete events in Russian history, thereby partially undercutting its claim to classical purity. Sumarokov’s treatment of his material is idiosyncratic. In Dmitry the Pretender, six characters take the stage: Dmitry himself; Prince Vasily Shuisky; Shuisky’s daughter, Xenya; Xenya’s suitor, Prince Georgy of Galich; Parmen, Dmitry’s confidant; and the unnamed captain of Dmitry’s guard. Sumarokov thus distorts history, as Xenya is Boris Godunov’s daughter, not Vasily Shuisky’s; he also seems to have created Georgy and Parmen from whole cloth. Dmitry the Pretender’s dramatis personae thus constitute a cross-section of fact and ­fiction.28 The play’s plot is similarly caught between history and fantasy. It takes place in Moscow’s kremlin on the final day of Dmitry’s life, when, ­according to the historical record, the tsar had only just happily wed Marina Mniszek; in the created world of Sumarokov’s play, however, the wedding and its attendant joys already belong to the past. Sumarokov’s Dmitry enters the first scene of Act 1 not to celebrate his triumphs and pleasures but, rather, to enunciate his as yet unrealized desires: he intends both to subjugate his country to Poland and thereby force it into the Roman Catholic fold and to poison Marina and marry Xenya.29 From the play’s opening until the final scene of

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Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 3; Harold B. Segel, The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia (New York: Dutton, 1967), 1:58; Stennik, “Sumarokov,” 542. See, for example, Amanda Ewington, A Voltaire for Russia: A. P. Sumarokov’s Journey from Poet-Critic to Russian Philosophe (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 148. “The pattern of a Sumarokov tragedy is almost invariable: the first act of the five is largely devoted to exposition and the setting forth of the conflict; the second sharpens the conflict; the third represents the culmination of the dramatic content of the play; the fourth prepares the denouement, which is always short, and occurs in the fifth act” (William Edward Brown, A History of Eighteenth-Century Russian Literature [Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980], 125). As Stennik has pointed out, this mixture of historically attested and fictional characters was not new in Russian drama, having already been recognized by Feofan Prokopovich (“Istoriograficheskie aspekty,” 74). Joachim Klein claims that all Sumarokov’s tragedies are structured around two themes: love and the figure of the monarch, with the love theme taking the upper hand (“Liebe und Politik in Sumarokovs Tragödien,” Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie 60 [2002]: 105). Compare this with Stennik’s view that the love plot is merely secondary (“O khudozhestennoi strukture tragedii A. P. Sumarokova,” XVIII vek 5 [1962]: 284).

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Act 5, when Dmitry commits suicide, its action never really progresses beyond this initial gambit; it remains mired in its title character’s despairing recognition of the insurmountable difficulties attendant on realizing his purposes.30 Meditations on the excellence of just rule and the evils of tyranny lie at the play’s core, beginning with its first scene, in which Parmen urges Dmitry to temper his behavior and behave solicitously toward his people: “Even though your nature draws you toward evil, overcome it and be a father to your nation!”31 Dmitry, however, insists that his sole allegiance is to Pope Clement VIII; as far as he is concerned, the unhappier the Russian people are, the more secure his own grip on the throne will be. Two scenes later, Parmen reveals that Dmitry’s subjects have now denounced him as a pretender. He again tries to point out Dmitry’s missteps, which have turned the people against him: “If you hadn’t ruled Russia in such evil fashion, the people wouldn’t have cared whether you were Dmitry or not.”32 In subsequent scenes, Xenya and Prince Georgy intertwine their distinctly stilted declarations of love with heartfelt yearnings for a good monarch who will rule humbly and bring peace and prosperity to his people, revealing their courtship to be little more than an excuse for additional philosophizing. Parmen enunciates the golden rule of sovereignty yet again in Act 3, lest the audience somehow miss the point about good and bad tsars. Speaking of Dmitry, he declares, “Let him be Otrepev! If he rules worthily, then he’s worthy of rule.”33 It goes without saying that neither Parmen nor Shuisky believes he has ruled worthily. Shortly after yet another defense of a monarchy based on merit rather than birth, Prince Georgy underscores Russia’s need for autocracy, opining that countries whose governance rests in the hands of the nobility always fare poorly. But he hedges his declaration with a plea to Dmitry to rule generously. Dmitry pointedly refuses: “It’s not my part to benefit the people but, rather, theirs to benefit me!”34 He expresses similar sentiments in a number of soliloquies, in which he admits to his own evil nature but repents nothing. As he ­confesses more than once, his whole desire is to profit at others’ expense. 30 This inertness is characteristic of Sumarokov’s tragedies. Stennik correlates it to Sumarokov’s failure to craft a strong plot intrigue (“Sumarokov,” 545). 31 A. P. Sumarokov, Dimitrii samozvanets, in A. P. Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v stikhakh i proze (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1787), 4:70. 32 Ibid., 76. 33 Ibid., 93. Levitt sees this as the crux of the play: “The play balances between a staunch defense of the hierarchical and autocratic principle, on the one hand, and legitimacy based on merit rather than birth, on the other” (“Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov,” 379). 34 Sumarokov, Dimitrii samozvanets, 101.

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Indeed, he tells Xenya and Prince Georgy that the best state of affairs obtains when the monarch is wealthy, the state poor, and the people unhappy. His final words in the play magnify these sentiments in loathsome fashion: “I wish the whole world would perish together with me!”35 Most of Dmitry the Pretender’s speeches concerning just rule have an abstract, programmatic character. They provide a great deal of theorizing together with an inversely meager amount of concrete detail. The few exceptions come in the play’s first scene. Parmen, having chided Dmitry for his foul temper, accuses him of bathing Muscovy in blood. He particularly criticizes Dmitry for selling his patrimony to the Poles and Catholics. Reminding his friend that Protestant Europe has already rejected the Catholic Church and urging him to do the same, Parmen complains that Pope Clement considers himself God’s equal. In Parmen’s view, God must be found through reason, not authority. Dmitry angrily defends the use of power and maintains his right to see his own will be done; Russia must submit to the Catholic Church. Then, in a completely unexpected and unmotivated turn of topic, the angry autocrat demands another, very different submission: Xenya must yield herself to him. Referring to himself in the third person, he announces, “And if this [i.e., Moscow’s subjugation to the Poles] does not come to pass, Dmitry will be robbed of all his peace. It has caused me untold pangs of conscience. But equally tormenting is my love for Xenya.”36 Given that classical tragedies generally include a love intrigue, it might seem reasonable to read Dmitry’s demands as a tyrannical thwarting of Xenya’s yearning for Georgy. After all, Dmitry arrests and imprisons Georgy when he learns of their love, and Georgy protects Xenya from her unhinged monarch by throwing himself at him in the play’s final scene. This could easily be seen as the tragic ending to Xenya and Georgy’s amour. However, Dmitry the Pretender’s intrigue of love and death is unlike the romantic triangles that Sumarokov created in his earlier tragedies, which, as Mary Ellen Franke has argued, function to underscore the protagonists’ conflict between love and duty. In Dmitry the Pretender, by contrast, Xenya owes Dmitry no duty: since Dmitry is an unjust, tyrannical ruler, he does not deserve his people’s obedience.37 35 Ibid., 126. 36 Ibid., 73. 37 Mary Ellen Franke, “A. P. Sumarokov’s ‘Dmitrij Samozvanec’: Imitation or Innovation?” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1993), 171. Klein also notes the difference between Sumarokov’s treatment of the love intrigue in Dmitry the Pretender and his other tragedies (“Liebe und Politik,” 105).

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Although it might follow that the love intrigue is undermotivated, Sumarokov drops a tantalizing hint as to its possible function. In Act 1, Scene 5, when Dmitry declares his love directly to Xenya, Shuisky reminds him that he already has a wife. Dmitry responds, “Her credo is the Catholic one; I need a pious Russian.”38 Here Dmitry shows that he has realized that he has lost his people’s regard for two reasons: he has behaved tyrannically toward them, and he has betrayed them to the Poles and the pope. Having renounced his own Russian identity, Dmitry seeks a veneer of Russianness through marriage to Xenya, even as he continues to conspire against the Russians with his Catholic allies. The tyrant Dmitry has no intention of yielding to Parmen’s blandishments to abandon his despotic cruelties; rather, he hopes to bluff his way back into his people’s graces by sham-redressing his cultural and religious apostasy. Dmitry the Pretender is a play themed almost exclusively on tyranny, which makes it unique: while Sumarokov’s tragedies often explore misrule, they ­generally treat other topics as well. Walter Benjamin has termed slightly earlier German plays that dwell on the figure of the tyrant Trauerspiele, rather than tragedies.39 The Trauerspiel is preclassical, a product of the baroque,40 and is structured around martyrs and tyrants: “In the baroque the tyrant and the martyr are but the two faces of the monarch.” Such plays showcase the ­antithesis between the autocrat’s power and his capacity for rule.41 Dmitry the Pretender diverges from Benjamin’s paradigm by distributing the ­characteristics of tyranny and martyrdom across two characters, Dmitry and Georgy, rather than conferring them on one, but in his modeling of these split characters, Sumarokov mimics the German baroque Trauerspiel very well. Dmitry, the indecisive tyrant, “holds the course of history in his hand like a scepter,”42 while Georgy, the martyr, restores “order in [a] state of e­ mergency.”43 Other characters likewise fit the Trauerspiel pattern: Xenya fills the slot of Benjamin’s 38 Sumarokov, Dimitrii samozvanets, 78. 39 The Trauerspiel should not be confused with the later bürgerliches Trauerspiel, which Sumarokov explicitly criticized. For a treatment of the bürgerliches Trauerspiel and its arrival on Russian soil, see Karlinsky, Russian Drama, 103. 40 In this connection, Kirill Ospovat notes, “German baroque drama, read and performed in eighteenth-century Russia, seems to have been much more closely related to Sumarokov’s plays than critics usually assume” (Terror and Pity, xii). However, his primary focus is on Sumarokov’s early tragedies, Khorev and Hamlet, not on Dmitry the Pretender. 41 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osburn (London: Verso, 1998), 69–70. 42 Ibid., 65. 43 Ibid., 74.

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“chaste ­princess,”44 while Parmen and Shuisky play the roles of the indispensable intriguers, whose close relations with the tyrant allow them to witness his deeds as well as weave murderous plots against him.45 As representations of history rather than myth,46 of emotion rather than action,47 both Dmitry the Pretender and the Trauerspiel portray the mundane and the corporeal rather than the transcendent associated with neoclassicism.48 We will probably never know whether Sumarokov consciously borrowed features of the Trauerspiel while composing Dmitry the Pretender. Even if the play’s content accords well with the baroque, its form (five acts; unities of time, place, and action; economy of means) is certainly neoclassical, lending credence to Sumarokov’s self-identification as a classicist. We do know, however, that Sumarokov acquired a good working knowledge of German at the Cadet Corps and that many of his letters to Gerhard Friedrich Müller were composed in German. Additionally, as Marcus C. Levitt has shown, among the budding playwright’s early borrowings from the Library of the Academy of Sciences were three editions of the works of Paul Fleming,49 one of Germany’s foremost baroque poets, a member of Adam Olearius’s seventeenth-­century expedition to Russia, and a self-declared successor to Martin Opitz, an ­outstanding exponent of the Trauerspiel. While mere familiarity with the German baroque is insufficient to argue that Sumarokov consciously appropriated its plotline, it is nevertheless suggestive. Sumarokov was alive to other nonclassical influences as well. As Levitt has documented, Sumarokov borrowed the 1685 fourth folio edition of 44 Ibid. 45 George Steiner, “Introduction,” in Benjamin, Origins of German Tragic Drama, 18. 46 Ibid., 16. 47 Benjamin, Origins of German Tragic Drama, 99. W. Gareth Jones has argued that the tone of Russian classicism is “emotionally cool,” which is certainly not the case for Dmitry the Pretender (“A Trojan Horse within the Walls of Classicism: Russian Classicism and the National Specific,” in Russian Literature and the Age of Catherine the Great, ed. Anthony G. Cross [Oxford: Meeuws, 1976], 103). 48 Steiner, “Introduction,” 16. Ospovat has also noted Sumarokov’s equivocal adherence to classical models: “German baroque drama, read and performed in eighteenth-century Russia, seems to have been much more closely related to Sumarokov’s plays than critics usually assume” (Terror and Pity, xii). 49 Marcus C. Levitt, “Sumarokov—chitatel´ Peterburgskoi biblioteki Akademii nauk,” XVIII vek 19 (1995): 49. See also M. D. Khmyrov, who claims that Sumarokov’s German was strong enough to enable him to compose texts in it (“Ocherk zhizni Sumarokova v sviazi s ego literaturnoi deiatel´nostiiu,” in Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov: Ego zhizn´ i sochineniia, ed. V. Pokrovskii [Moscow, 1911; reprint Oxford: Meeuws, 1976], 20).

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Shakespeare’s works from the Academy of Sciences,50 and although there is no evidence that he read English, he may have had a friend translate it for him. He consulted Pierre Antoine de Laplace’s 1745 translations of several of Shakespeare’s plays and in 1748 published an adaptation of Hamlet. In April 1767 he asked Müller to send him historical materials dating from the reign of Mikhail Romanov or earlier, and in February 1770 he wrote to Grigory Kozitsky that he was working on “a tragedy that will make Shakespeare known to Russia, although I intend to chop it all into pieces” (no ia ee izodrat´ nameren).51 The reference is, of course, to Dmitry the Pretender, which he staged a year later. Historical fictions and dramas like Dmitry the Pretender mediate two different orders of time, the moment of the work’s action and the moment of its composition. Sumarokov, who lived through Elizabeth’s mercurial reign as well as Peter III’s more consistently harsh one, cultivated an abiding interest in tyranny,52 an interest that owed more to his own eighteenth-century realities than to the Time of Troubles.53 The seventeenth century, in which Dmitry the Pretender is set, offered Sumarokov an example of an era when the Russian throne was hotly contested. The stakes could hardly have been higher: would Russia retain its national identity and sovereignty? Would rule by a competent foreigner supersede rule by a less competent Russian? Similar questions arose again during the eighteenth century. With Dmitry the Pretender, Sumarokov

50 Levitt, “Sumarokov—chitatel´,” 53. 51 V. P. Stepanov, “A. P. Sumarokov,” in Pis´ma russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, ed. G. P. Makogonenko (Leningrad: Nauka, 1980), 133. Joachim Klein, by contrast, reads Dmitry the Pretender as an answer to Sumarokov’s protégé A. A. Rzhevskii and his drama of usurpation, The False Smerdis ( Joachim Klein, Puti kul´turnogo importa: Trudy po russkoi literature XVIII v. [Moscow: Litres, 2005], 379). At the time of the completion and the first staging of Dmitry the Pretender, Sumarokov had presumably not yet read Jacques Margeret, who knew Dmitry and was one of the few contemporaries who continued to maintain even after his death that he was truly Ivan’s youngest son. Sumarokov wrote to Müller in March 1770 asking to borrow his copy of the Frenchman’s account of his years in Russia (Pis´ma, 133). He thus relied in all likelihood on tendentious arguments against Dmitry’s legitimacy. 52 Walter Gleason, “Sumarokov’s Political Ideals: A Reappraisal of His Role as a Critic of Catherine II’s Policies,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 18 (1976): 416. 53 K. A. Smolina argues that notions of governance in eighteenth-century tragedies are tied directly and exclusively to the image of the monarch (Russkaia tragediia: XVIII vek. Evoliutsiia zhanra [Moscow: Nasledie, 2001], 61). V. A. Bochkarev, by contrast, suggests that Dmitry the Pretender offers its audience a vision of noble “patriots” who, acting as one with the Russian lower classes, unite to overthrow the tyrant (Russkaia istoricheskaia dramaturgiia XVII–XVIII vv. [Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1988], 129). His view, however, is not borne out by the actual text.

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reprised the seventeenth century in order to pass judgment on eighteenthcentury trauma. It is likely that one of Sumarokov’s literary interlocutors for Dmitry the Pretender was Shakespeare’s Richard III.54 Sumarokov understands tyranny much as Shakespeare does, even if he explicates it much more simply: both Shakespeare’s Richard and Sumarokov’s Dmitry step over countless bodies to achieve their dynastic ambitions; both openly flout their obligations to their countries; both tire very quickly of their wives and woo virtuous women who despise them. However, Sumarokov structures his play very differently from Shakespeare’s. In the first instance, he offers many fewer characters and settings, hewing to the neoclassical unities. Additionally, unlike Shakespeare, he creates a protagonist who openly avows his evil intentions. Although Richard admits his wickedness to himself, he sedulously hides it from everyone else, allowing Shakespeare to dwell at length on each character’s realization of the truth. Dmitry, by contrast, makes no bones about his corrosive desires, enabling Sumarokov to dispense with Richard III’s many scenes of recognition. Here, as elsewhere, Sumarokov privileges neoclassical brevity and clarity over subtlety and complexity. Although most of Sumarokov’s written remarks regarding Dmitry the Pretender focus on its delayed staging, he nevertheless also addresses other, more substantive matters (albeit in highly circuitous fashion) in his two polemical prefaces to the play. In the first, he notes disapprovingly that in his copy of the Augsburg artist Kilian Lucas’s portrait of Dmitry, the pretender is shown in mirror image, with his warts placed on the wrong sides of his face. He follows up this seemingly random observation with a second one: the portrait’s caption identifies its subject as the Muscovite sovereign. Sumarokov ascribes this “misattribution” to Pope Clement’s machinations against Orthodoxy. In his second preface, Sumarokov shifts his focus from the politics of portraiture to literary matters—specifically, to the fashionable comédie larmoyante, which he decries as an inadmissible generic omnibus. Although Sumarokov’s diatribes against papal conspiracies and literary genres might seem to aim at very different targets—history and politics in 54 Richard III was an early favorite in Russia. It was one of five plays included in Laplace’s initial volume of Shakespeare translations into French, which was well known in Russia. Sumarokov also knew Voltaire’s translations, a brief treatment of which is provided by T. E. Lawrenson in “Voltaire, Translator of Shakespeare,” Western Canadian Studies in Languages and Literature (1970): 28–32. Richard III was translated into Russian quite early as Zhizn´ i smert´ Richarda III, korolia aglinskago: Tragediia gospodina Shakespera (St. Petersburg, 1787).

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the first case and aesthetics in the second—both prefaces actually conduce to the same question: how should proper tragedies be written? The piece about Dmitry’s portrait speaks to content, which for Sumarokov is a matter of truthful representation. In his view, the reading public has, at various times and places, taken a reversed, false view of monarchy, promoting a westernized lackey as tsar. He implies that it is the playwright’s duty to set the record straight. In his second preface, Sumarokov enunciates his views on dramatic form, speaking to the finer points of genre: playwrights must avoid abstruseness by eschewing admixtures of disparate worldviews. Thus, the tie that binds both prefaces is Sumarokov’s condemnation of ambiguity and equivocation. Later, within the text of Dmitry the Pretender, Sumarokov approaches the question of content and form from a different angle. With his final words (“I wish the whole world would perish together with me!”), Dmitry admits that he will never possess Xenya. His self-absorbed, bathetic outburst uncannily echoes Richard’s words to Lady Anne in Act 1, Scene 2, of Richard III: “Your beauty, which did haunt me in my sleep / To undertake the death of all the world / So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.” Dmitry’s and Richard’s exclamations disclose the essence of tyranny—a categorical deprecation of others. For Sumarokov’s villain as for Shakespeare’s, human beings merely embody cravings and are valued only insofar as they gratify ungovernable passions: the slaughter of the entire human race is but the price a tyrant pays to indulge his desires. While Sumarokov shares Shakespeare’s insight into the nature of tyranny, he nevertheless believes that dramatic investigations of its workings must take a non-Shakespearean form. Shakespeare opens his play with Richard’s proclamation of destructive desire, but Sumarokov closes his with Dmitry’s. Shakespeare’s approach is deductive: having formulated his animus against humanity into a programmatic statement, Richard proceeds to commit a series of concrete perfidies that validate his statement. Sumarokov’s Dmitry, by contrast, proceeds inductively, committing a series of heinous acts that are only later summed up in his wish that the whole world might die. Sumarokov thus reverses the logical order of his play by inverting Shakespeare’s mode of reasoning. While he agrees with Shakespeare’s approach to the “what” of drama, he differs regarding its “how.” In Dmitry the Pretender, he lays out his points clearly and concisely, awaiting the play’s conclusion to generalize. Since Dmitry’s last words follow logically from his many vile deeds, there is neither ambiguity nor subtlety concerning the play’s message.

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As noted earlier, Dmitry the Pretender wreaks a degree of havoc on the historical record, yet there is method in its madness. By transforming Xenya into Shuisky’s daughter, for example, Sumarokov achieves economy of means. In the world of the play, Xenya can turn to Shuisky for advice; there is no need to resort to flashbacks in which Xenya might wonder what her actual father, Boris Godunov, would have advised her to do. Thus, the classical unity of time is maintained. More important, however, is the thematic level, where Xenya figures as the Russian royal princess Dmitry needs in order to strengthen his dynastic credentials. Accordingly, she provides essential plot points for the themes of national sovereignty and Orthodoxy. The historically unattested Parmen, too, fulfills crucial functions. First and foremost, he serves as the play’s primary spokesperson for Sumarokov’s view of the good ruler. Through his respectful but forceful criticisms of Dmitry, he enunciates tyranny’s antithesis—evenhanded governance in the interests of the governed. Additionally, he mediates the stark moral binaries embodied by Xenya and Prince Georgy, on the one hand, and Dmitry, on the other. Parmen speaks to both sides, counseling each to moderate its passions and accept reality. Sumarokov recrafts history in his treatment of his better-known ­characters by highlighting and even exaggerating essential aspects of their biographies. Vasily Shuisky, one of the Time of Troubles’ most consummate hypocrites, emerges as a better man at Sumarokov’s hand than at history’s. Sumarokov’s Shuisky is both a patriot and a realist, and when he lies to Dmitry (and counsels Xenya and Georgy to do likewise), it is only because he realizes that Dmitry’s end is near. He is a survivor, not a schemer, and he sees no point in splitting ­ethical hairs when murder is in the air. Dmitry, by contrast, suffers serious damage under Sumarokov’s pen. The historical Dmitry may have been unwise in allying himself so closely to his Polish benefactors, but there is no reason to believe that he meant, like Sumarokov’s Dmitry, to murder the entire population of Moscow and distribute Russia’s wealth to his Catholic allies. Nor is there any evidence that he planned to murder his new bride—this little ­contrivance on Sumarokov’s part merely shows that the consummately evil Dmitry stands ready to deceive Russians and Poles alike. Within the created world of Dmitry the Pretender, however, Sumarokov needs Dmitry’s fictionalized evil in order to focus on recent times rather than to editorialize on the historical past. In portraying a ruler who hands his country over to foreign dominion, pays no heed to the good of his people, and threatens to set aside his wife, Sumarokov paints a portrait not of False Dmitry

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but rather of Peter III, who traumatized his compatriots by handing recently conquered territory back to Prussia, who disaffected his nobles by abolishing their monopoly on trade, and who threatened to divorce his wife in favor of a mistress.55 By inscribing Peter III into Dmitry’s story, Sumarokov, in effect, rewrites seventeenth-century history to create a “counterhistory,” a species of ­narrative that can be conceived of only in the modern period, when “facts gain their meaning and even their very factuality from the context in which they are embedded, a context reconstructed solely by the historian, whose narrative makes and shapes the fact.”56 Counterhistories recognize that the “real” consists only of what we choose to make relevant, what we construct and manipulate. They function polemically, allowing us to exploit our adversaries’ “most trusted sources against their grain.”57 Sumarokov does precisely this, turning the notion of rule by birth, which lay at the heart of seventeenth-century texts about the Troubles, on its head. At the same time, however, he preserves the seventeenth-century’s insistence that the true ruler must be Russian. Paradoxically, then, by extolling the meritorious, Russian ruler, regardless of the accident of his/her birth, Sumarokov exalts Catherine the Great, Russia’s quintessential enlightened despot.58 Although the identification of the German-born Catherine with Russianness might seem counterintuitive, it was very real in eighteenth-century Russia, at least among the nobility. Catherine herself carefully cultivated it: she 55 As T. V. Moskvina has pointed out, Sumarokov’s Dmitry the Pretender presents the conflict between the tyrant and the rest of the world; unlike seventeenth-century accounts, it never dwells on regicide: Dmitry destroys only himself (“Smutnoe vremia v russkoi dramaturgii ot Sumarokova do Ostrovskogo,” in Sumarokovskie chteniia: Iubileinye torzhestva k 275-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia A. P. Sumarokova, ed. G. A. Lapkina [St. Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii gosudarstvennyi institut teatra, muzyki i kinematografii im. N. K. Cherkasova, 1993], 73). Accordingly, Sumarokov’s play more closely resembles accounts of eighteenth-century usurpations than the Time of Troubles. 56 Amos Funkenstein, “History, Counterhistory, and Narrative,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 68. 57 Ibid., 68–69. 58 In his 1949 monograph on Sumarokov, P. N. Berkov comes to precisely the opposite conclusion. He argues that, by the time he was writing Dmitry the Pretender, Sumarokov had badly fallen out with Catherine over the question of their discordant views on monarchy. Berkov claims that Dmitry the Pretender’s sharp criticism of tyranny was actually aimed at Catherine (Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov, 1717–1777 [Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1949], 47–56). Berkov’s views seem excessive and are almost certainly a function of the political climate in which he was writing.

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confirmed the privileges Peter III had granted to the nobility; she reversed his unpopular pro-Prussian foreign policy; and she studied the language and the habits of the people she ruled. These tactics effectively cast her as an enlightened monarch while simultaneously defusing criticism of her as a foreigner.59 Richard Wortman has argued that “the animating myth of Russian monarchy from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries associated the ruler and the elite with foreign images of political power.”60 This aura of foreignness served to create an unbridgeable separation between ruler and ruled. Under eighteenth-century Russia’s empresses, the myth took the form of a recognition of the court as a semblance of the west. The monarch was not expected to actually be western but, rather, to appear western.61 Iu. M. Lotman concurs: “What was needed was to assimilate forms of European daily life while retaining an external ‘alien’ Russian attitude toward them. A Russian was not supposed to become a foreigner; he was merely supposed to act like one.”62 Catherine achieved the desired semblance of foreignness by championing the rule of law: at the very outset of her reign, in her Accession Manifesto, she contrasted herself with Peter III, who had allegedly abused his power in despotic and unrestrained fashion.63 Yet by tempering the virtues of her natal European culture with Orthodox spirituality,64 Catherine paradoxically showed herself to be Russian—much more Russian than Peter. In Wortman’s formulation, she cultivated a “scenario of love,” uniting herself with the nobility and promising to act in their interests.65 She thereby provided the model of an ideal Russian autocrat, which Sumarokov would contrast with his wicked protagonist in

59 On this, see Rogger, National Consciousness, 42. 60 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 1:5. 61 Ibid., 86. 62 Iu. M. Lotman, “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture,” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 70. 63 Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, “The Reforming Tsar: The Redefinition of Autocratic Duty in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Slavic Review 51 (1992): 93. 64 V. M. Zhivov has traced the development of a “state myth” beginning with the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich in which the sacralized Russian autocrat was seen to enable a synthesis of the otherwise dissimilar traditions of Orthodox spirituality and just rule (“Gosudarstvennyi mif v epokhu Prosveshcheniia v Rossii kontsa XVIII v.,” in Vek prosveshcheniia: Rossiia i Frantsiia, ed. D. Iu. Molok [Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi muzei izobrazitel´nykh iskusstv im. A. S. Pushkina, 1989], 147). Catherine was always careful to observe the external proprieties of Orthodox ­worship and to present herself as an Orthodox monarch. 65 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 1:111.

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Dmitry the Pretender.66 Sumarokov’s countermonarch would be an exemplar of solicitude toward her/his Russian subjects but also, and above all, a capable, meritorious ruler in the Petrine mold. The pretender autocrat, by contrast, would be purely evil, someone who would betray his subjects to foreigners. Dmitry the Pretender offers only a vague approximation of seventeenthcentury accounts of the pretender’s rise and fall: its cast of characters owes little if anything to earlier, protoliterary tales and stories, and its denigration of Dmitry largely rests on imaginatively constructed pseudodeeds. Similarly, the play’s genre finds no precedent in late medieval literary practice. The seventeenth-century literature Sumarokov read while preparing to write his tragedy provided him, at most, with the lineaments of setting: as Stennik has noted, Sumarokov approached his historical topic quite ahistorically.67 Accordingly, although Dmitry the Pretender is the earliest modern text in the Dmitry tradition, it does not provide a good example of diachronic recurrence. Sumarokov’s Dmitry, however, does provide strong evidence for the process of transference. Sumarokov was well aware of eighteenth-century Russia’s political discourse, and, as my analysis of Dmitry the Pretender has suggested, he utilized it to good effect. Constructed as a vehicle to showcase Catherine’s notions of good governance, Dmitry the Pretender is a static drame à clef. Sumarokov uncritically embraces Catherine’s scenario of love, challenging neither his characters nor his audience through dynamic dialogue. Rather than robustly contesting others’ ideas, his villain remains wedded to his villainy and his virtuous characters to their virtues. Regardless of whether Sumarokov sincerely subscribed to Catherine’s dynastic scenario or merely embraced it as an expedient, the result remains the same—a dramatic enactment of praise for Catherine’s notions of law and justice. It goes without saying that Sumarokov participated in his era’s literary as well as its political discourse. In late eighteenth-century Russia, belletrists debated the relevance of various forms of western drama for current practice: neoclassicism was in active dialogue with the already outmoded German Trauerspiel as well as with the still older Shakespearean tradition. Even though Dmitry the Pretender’s content largely mirrored present political realities, Sumarokov appears to have looked backward with regards to form, fleshing out his neoclassical scaffolding with the Trauerspiel’s baroque aesthetics. 66 Indeed, with Catherine’s accession to the throne, Sumarokov became a kind of court poet (Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater [DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003], 14). 67 Stennik, “Sumarokov,” 551.

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He was, by contrast, considerably less open to Shakespeare. Even though he implicitly recognized the bard’s powerful example, Sumarokov was loath to follow it. Since Dmitry’s final speech accords so well with Richard III’s early one, we must presume that Sumarokov was evoking Shakespeare’s great play, even if only to reject it. Since Sumarokov’s contemporaries continued to actively debate the merits of earlier western models of composition, however, it follows that his own quest for form signifies a serious engagement in the literary debates of his times rather than a return to the past.

Vasily Narezhny’s Dmitry the Pretender: Retribution Lurking in the Shadows In 1804 the young Vasily Trofimovich Narezhny (1780–1825) published a tragedy under the same title as Sumarokov’s—Dmitry the Pretender. He had written the play while a student at Moscow University and would see it staged for the first and, as far as we know, only time in 1809. After leaving university, Narezhny pursued a singularly ill-starred career in letters: “Peculiarities of fate, as much as critical biases in favor of major writers, help to account for [the] lack of recognition for Narezhnyi’s artistic achievement.”68 His work was old-fashioned and better suited to the tastes of eighteenth-century ­audiences.69 Moreover, his novel, A Russian Gil Blas, or the Adventures of Prince Gavrila Simonovich Chistyakov, fell afoul of the Russian censorship: the first three parts, published in 1814, were almost immediately confiscated, while the remaining parts were banned altogether.70 Sadly, Narezhny’s ill fortune has continued to plague him to the present day. His oeuvre is still insufficiently known and underappreciated among critics as well as readers,71 but none of his works has been as consistently overlooked as Dmitry the Pretender.72 68 Ronald D. LeBlanc, “Vasilii Trofimovich Narezhnyi,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol. Prose (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1999), 215. 69 Ibid. 70 It was only in 1938 that a full edition of the novel was finally printed. For its publication history, see Ronald D. LeBlanc, The Russianization of “Gil Blas”: A Study in Literary Appropriation (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1986), 86. 71 Ronald D. LeBlanc has done much to redress this situation, having championed Narezhny’s work in a number of scholarly studies. 72 Even N. A. Belozerskaia, an early Narezhny scholar and enthusiast, discounts Dmitry the Pretender, considering it a talentless knock-off of Schiller’s Räuber. She suggests that Narezhny wrote the play because tragedy was a fashionable genre in early nineteenth-century Russia, and

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In its broad strokes, Narezhny’s forgotten tragedy follows Sumarokov’s in configuring its cast of primary characters. Vasily Shuisky is still, superficially at least, the righteous counterbalance to Dmitry; Dmitry is still bored by his wife and attracted to Xenya; Xenya still loves Prince Georgy; Dmitry’s closest adviser still plays him false; and Dmitry still dies at the end of Act 5. In other ways, however, Narezhny’s play differs markedly from Sumarokov’s. With its extraordinarily complex plotting and sixteen named characters (as well as an unspecified number of messengers, musicians, and Moscow citizens), Narezhny’s Dmitry eschews Sumarokov’s economy of means. Its repeated invocations of earlier times—culminating in a macabre disinterment of Boris Godunov—negates unity of time. Shifting locales make unity of place untenable, while unity of action is observed entirely in the breach. Secondary plotlines multiply like rabbits: Grishka Otrepev’s father makes an anxiety-fraught appearance, foreboding further trouble to come; Marina Mniszek (now rechristened “Marianna”) summons up the glories of Poland, distracting from problems nearer to hand; the family of a murdered nobleman, Tutchev, seeks redress; Dmitry’s confidant, Basmanov, treacherously lusts after Marianna; and Dmitry himself is unable to choose between Xenya and Tutchev’s daughter— all before Act 2 ever begins. Additionally, more than one character cries out to God, wondering what Russia has done to deserve its unhappy fate and praying for divine intervention. While one might account for the vast differences between the world of this play and Sumarokov’s by citing Narezhny’s youth and inexperience and arguing that the aspiring man of letters is simply not yet in full control of his material, the play should not be dismissed out of hand. Narezhny’s Dmitry the Pretender points in two very fruitful directions: on the one hand, backward, before Sumarokov, to the world of the baroque pure and simple and, on the other, forward to the emergent Russian novel in the age of Pushkin (discussed in Chapter 3).73 The baroque arrived in the East Slavic lands via Ukraine and Belarus in the seventeenth century. Its Russian instantiations were idiosyncratic and, as in the case of Sumarokov, often admixed with other styles.74 By the last third of the eighteenth century, however, the Russian movement had largely run Narezhny had not yet discovered that his true talent lay in narrative prose (V. T. Narezhnyi: Istoriko-literaturnyi ocherk [St. Petersburg: L. F. Panteleev, 1896], Part 2, 60; Part 1, 5–6). 73 P. V. Mykhed points to Narezhny’s religious, nonsecularized way of seeing the world as particularly telling in this regard (“V. T. Narizhnii i barokko,” Radian´ske literaturoznavstvo [1979]: 74–83). 74 On this question, see B. Uspenskii and V. Zhivov, “Zur Spezifik des Barock in Russland: Das Verfahren der Äquivokation in der russischen Poesie des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Slavische Barockliteratur II, ed. Hans Steffen (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1983), 26.

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its course. The baroque’s duration in Ukraine, Narezhny’s birthplace, was more protracted. There aspects of the style lingered well into the nineteenth century.75 As Dmytro Chyzhevs´kyi, one of the Slavic baroque’s foremost scholars, has described it, the baroque regarded as the highest task of art, not the awakening of calm aesthetic or religious feeling, but the strongest affect, excitation, shock. The seeking to excite man thus, to disquiet him, to shock him, was closely related to the principal stylistic traits of Baroque poetry: its preference for hyperbola, for the strange, the grotesque, for paradox and oxymoron, its inclination to antithesis, and seemingly, the predisposition to great forms.76

Baroque writers were given to “all-embracing forms,” to “elaborate and heavy ornamentation of detail,”77 and to elevating the world of the private to emblematic status.78 They yearned for permanence,79 even as they clothed themselves in mystification and deception.80 They intuited eternal verities lurking just beyond the horizon of the transitory, illusory accidents of everyday life. Narezhny’s Dmitry the Pretender fully exemplifies these baroque qualities: with the exception of Act 5, each act has a minimum of fourteen scenes, most of which are crammed to overflowing with thrills, chills, and paradox, and almost all of which last considerably longer than corresponding scenes in Sumarokov’s play. Indeed, Dmitry the Pretender’s length was the feature that most struck the poet Gavrila Derzhavin. In an October 1804 letter to Platon Beketov, he wrote: “I’m much obliged to you for procuring for me the tragedy by Mr. Narezhny, an author I hadn’t known until now. The play astonished me by its sheer bulk, but I ultimately managed get through it.”81 75 See, most saliently, Gavriel Shapiro, Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). 76 Dmytro Chyzhevs´kyi, Outline of Comparative Slavic Literatures (Boston: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1952), 58. 77 Dmytro Chyzhevs´kyi, “Das Barock in der russischen Literatur,” in Slavische Barockliteratur I (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1970), 14. 78 Andreas Angyal, Die slavische Barockwelt (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1961), 23. 79 Richard Alewyn, “Erzählformen des deutschen Barock,” in Formkräfte der deutschen Dichtung vom Barock bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Hans Steffen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1963), 31. 80 A. Rogov, “Problemy slavianskogo barokko,” in Slavianskoe barokko: Istoriko-kul´turnye problemy epokhi, ed. A. Rogov (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 8. 81 Stepanov, Pis´ma, 396.

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Narezhny’s “sheer bulk” is a function of his ambition. Dmitry the Pretender represents a quest for a cosmic understanding of justice: Narezhny wants to believe that meaning and value can be derived from each chaotic event in Russian history. Indeed, as the play’s ever-new side plots unfold, the workings of providence begin to emerge. At the broadest, most general level—where Russia’s fate will be decided—it becomes clear, in a staggering contravention of “real” history, that Grishka Otrepev’s father murdered the child Dmitry on Boris Godunov’s orders. Now, disguised as a beggar, the old man has come to Moscow, where False Dmitry recognizes, arrests, and sentences him to death. Meanwhile, Xenya, restored to her rightful identity as Boris Godunov’s daughter, takes counsel from Maria Nagaya, now known as the nun Marfa. The two agree that Godunov’s recent death has counterbalanced his murder of little Dmitry, so they can be friends and co-conspirators (Xenya quite astonishingly also makes common cause with Marianna). In Act 3, Dmitry’s counselors, Basmanov and Ignaty, show their true colors; thoroughly false to their monarch, they release his beggar father from prison in hopes he will stir up a popular revolt against the pretender. By play’s end, Vasily Shuisky has captured False Dmitry. Quite shamelessly, however, he pretends not to know what to do with his prisoner, claiming that only a tsar can condemn another tsar. Moscow’s citizens gather around Boris Godunov’s coffin and offer Shuisky the crown, thereby resolving his faux dilemma. While Shuisky dithers, bemoaning the untidiness of having to step over another man’s corpse to ascend the throne, False Dmitry’s father puts an end to the painful scene by taking a sword, running his son through, and then swallowing poison. Narezhny packs a great deal of contrivance as well as mystery and emotion into his play. In effect, he sets out to uncover Russian history by lifting veils that, in certain instances at least, he himself has dropped. All his characters appear, in one sense or another, under false cover: False Dmitry masquerades as the true tsar; his father conceals his identity under a beggar’s rags; both indulge in repeated excesses of grief before fulfilling their destinies. Narezhny’s Xenya, who is utterly blameless in Sumarokov’s tragedy, turns out to have suppressed her father’s crimes so as not to be tarred by his sins; when the truth finally comes out, she tears at viewers’ emotions. Maria Nagaya—like Shuisky, one of the Troubles’ great survivors—becomes the bathetic Marfa, covered in a nun’s habit. Basmanov and Ignaty, scoundrels of the first water, pretend to support False Dmitry even though both fully intend to reap rich benefits from his overthrow. Shuisky feigns a becoming modesty but quickly

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convinces the crowd to offer him the crown. The dead Boris Godunov, who forged the first link in this long chain of dissimulation, presides, as it were, over the tragedy’s final scene from his coffin, a specter who derives his reality from the chaos he has unleashed. Only after scenes of dramatic recognition, which expose all concealed identities and reveal that each person who has caused suffering is now suffering him/herself, can Russia’s tragedy end. Arguably, however, the great moment of reconciliation has not yet arrived by play’s end, since not all Dmitry the Pretender’s disguises have been penetrated. Like Boris Godunov, Vasily Shuisky dissimulates by availing himself of the humility topos, hiding his ambition from his people if not from the play’s audience. Feigning reticence to take the throne, he nevertheless accepts his elevation quickly enough when it is offered. Unwilling to dirty his hands by disposing of a contender named Dmitry, he leaves the task to Otrepev père—just as Narezhny’s fictive Godunov did. Narezhny’s ambitious Shuisky has unwittingly replayed Godunov’s actions and replicated his sins. His ongoing deceptions preclude a final resolution of the nation’s woes and foredoom Russia to a new wave of misfortune. Confident in his success and seemingly unaware of the fate awaiting him, Shuisky stands by placidly as the old beggar dies in the last scene. He closes Narezhny’s tragedy with a smarmy yet prophetic proclamation to the Russian people: “If even one of you should ever innocently shed a bitter tear because of me, may death take me as it has taken him!”82 Whereas Sumarokov focuses on issues of tyranny and good governance, Narezhny creates a tyrant without focusing on tyranny per se. Rather, his Dmitry is more introspective than Sumarokov’s, a man who occasionally pulls back from his cruelties in order to ponder whys and wherefores. Alone in his chambers, for example, Narezhny’s Dmitry recalls his past: “As a child, I dreamed. As a young man, I was carried off into fields of pleasure by my imagination. I spent myself in delight and reposed in its embrace. But then I came to manhood. Where were the flowers? Where the temples of my imagination? A terrible judgment now keens my dirge like an affrighting owl.”83 This speech suggests that dreams of glory, foolish but nevertheless akin to those of other young men, have led the youthful Otrepev astray. Step by ineluctable step, the dream of usurpation has beguiled him. Six scenes later, Dmitry bemoans a similar vision of dreams gone askew: “that canker of imagination that ­insinuated 82 V. T. Narezhnyi, Dimitrii samozvanets: Tragediia v piati deistviiakh (Moscow: Tipografiia N. Stepanova, 1830), 207. 83 Ibid., 121.

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its way into my heart with my mother’s milk.”84 Albeit a tyrant, Dmitry is also a dreamer of breathtaking dreams. If tyranny is not Narezhny’s central focus, what is? The multiplicity of lives that intersect Dmitry’s and the multiple types of culpability associated with them require a reading that includes but also transcends the eponymous villain. The play’s marked propensity for resurrecting people and events from the past must also be considered. Finally, the fates of Dmitry the Pretender’s dramatis personae must enter into any reading. Narezhny’s childless Marfa, for example, longs to end her life in a convent, but so does Xenya Godunova. Since seventeenth-century tales tell us Xenya was forced into nun’s garb, this choice would have surprised Narezhny’s audience. Both Otrepevs, as already noted, perish in the play’s final scene. All indications are that Narezhny’s tragedy intends to convey a rather reductive, old-fashioned message, one that resounds in certain books of the Old Testament only to be repudiated in others: “the Lord . . . visit[s] the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.”85 Or, as Otrepev père rephrases it in Act 5: “Murderers! The children of your children and their grandchildren will labor beneath the burden of a curse. Henceforth the bonds of servitude will be their portion!”86 Under the force of this curse, Grishka Otrepev’s otherwise unexceptional dreams turn to ill-gotten gain and lead him to a sterile death—an inevitable repercussion of his father’s guilt for Dmitry’s murder. Xenya loses her lover and, with him, her life’s joy, because her father ordered Dmitry’s murder. In both cases, the lives of the gifted and hopeful progeny of noble Russian clans trickle away like water into sand; childless and alone, Dmitry and Xenya go to meet their ultimate dooms. Henceforth there will be no more Otrepevs, no more Godunovs. Narezhny knew that there would be no more Shuiskys either, since Prince Vasily would outlive his daughters and die a monk in Polish captivity. Scripture speaks of punishment as diachronic—sins revisited on succeeding generations in the unfolding of time. As we have seen, Narezhny shares this view. However, he also believes in synchrony. Many of his characters have doubles, shadowy twins who live side by side with them in the same moment of created time. Basmanov, False Dmitry’s bootlicker and confidant, for example, has his own treacherous toady, Ignaty. Xenya, who is alone at court now 84 Ibid., 139. 85 Numbers 14:17. 86 Narezhnyi, Dimitrii samozvanets, 187.

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that her parents have died, has a double in Liza Tutcheva, whose father is dead and mother has been exiled to Solovki. While Xenya is much the more interesting character, both she and Liza suffer equally from False Dmitry’s louche attentions. Vasily Shuisky’s brother Mikhail makes a cameo appearance in which he does nothing; his presence merely amplifies the actions of his more enterprising sibling. Narezhny offers two captains of the guard to Sumarokov’s one, and two ladies of the court who attend Marianna. Even False Dmitry, the great usurper, finds a ghoulish double in Boris Godunov, whose dead body lies on the square in the scene where Dmitry dies. In Narezhny’s baroque game of mirrors, which mystifies and intensifies reality, the playwright demonstrates the interrelatedness of all human behavior. Each action ripples outward, affecting two individuals rather than one, causing identical effects on the doubled characters. Once this doubling is recognized, the impression of plenitude—of many, many characters, and many, many plots—collapses on itself, yielding to one master plotline of adversity and loss. Sumarokov’s Dmitry the Pretender leaves its audience in a happy moment. Russian patriots have overthrown a tyrant, and the future sparkles with ­promise. Narezhny, by contrast, parts with his viewers in a darker place. Much blood has been shed, and many secrets revealed, but tragedy still lurks, just offstage. In the absence of Sumarokov’s tendentious but edifying monologues about good government, no obvious lesson has been learned. Sumarokov’s ­characters are open and honest; regardless of whether they are good, bad, or merely pragmatic, they know exactly who they are and never hesitate to acknowledge their own natures. Narezhny’s heroes and villains, by contrast, conceal their identities until forced to disclose them. Since no one is who s/he claims to be and since everyone is replicable, it is impossible to judge who among these contending characters is fit to rule. History, as it unfolds through Narezhny’s characters, is cloaked in shadow, deceit, and obscurity. Since it cannot be overcome, it cannot advance. The play itself, by contrast, moves forward through scenes of recognition: the vicious characters’ pretenses are unveiled; and the ominous changes they have tried to impose are obstructed. Relentless retribution replaces Sumarokov’s sanguine expectations. What might explain these differences between Sumarokov’s and Narezhny’s tragedies? Less is known about Narezhny’s personal circumstances and temperament than about Sumarokov’s, and the Narezhny of Dmitry the Pretender is still a very young man. Given the sketchiness of biographical information, we must have recourse to historical context. Narezhny was born six years after the Pugachev Rebellion, a ruinous insurrection centered on Russia’s

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Volga region. Emilyan Pugachev, the leader of the rebellion and a former officer in the Russian army, quickly became the most successful of the dozens of Russian pretenders who claimed to be Peter III.87 Although this rebellion was shorter-lived and better contained than the Troubles, it nevertheless resembled seventeenth-century events through its promotion of a pretender (or double) as Russia’s “true” sovereign. Catherine, Pugachev’s great enemy, quickly discerned this similarity, overtly likening eighteenth-century imposters to the seventeenth-century Dmitry.88 Like most aspirants to political greatness, Pugachev enunciated a doctrine of good government. By defending the rights of the disenfranchised peasantry and small-scale farmers, he capitalized on discontent among the lower strata of Russia’s military servicemen and raised an army that at one time controlled most of the territory between the Volga and the Urals. The rebellion was defeated in late 1774, and Pugachev was executed shortly thereafter, but memories of the suffering inflicted by the rebels persisted. Narezhny came to manhood during a time when rumors of usurpation (Catherine) and royal imposture (Pugachev) were still vividly alive in the Russian imagination. Narezhny’s Dmitry the Pretender does not reductively superimpose the Pugachev Rebellion onto the Time of Troubles. Rather, the rebellion serves as the backdrop to a re-energized interest in the pretender phenomenon; the events of contemporary history cede pride of place to the past. Narezhny focuses proportionately more of his attention on the period he describes (the seventeenth century) and on the monarch (False Dmitry) than does Sumarokov. For his part, Sumarokov concentrates more heavily on the eighteenth century. His monologues lauding good government are obvious anachronisms; they enunciate eighteenth-century statecraft and sensibilities that would never have been dreamt of, much less propounded, during the Time of Troubles. Narezhny, by contrast, places his viewers squarely in the seventeenth century. Narezhny makes late medieval events relevant to his own day, however, even if to a lesser degree than Sumarokov. Most likely inspired by the Pugachev Rebellion (a relatively recent episode of royal imposture), Narezhny’s t­ ragedy 87 John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 167. 88 Speaking to the British press, Catherine offered the view that “This is not a suitable period of time for the revival of counterfeit Demetriuses; nor could they now set capital cities in flames, lay nations waste, and wade through torrents of blood as heretofore” (quoted in ibid., 168).

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highlights the persistence of retributive justice, thereby illuminating the complex and multigenerational usurpation that was still playing itself out in recent times—Catherine’s overthrow of Peter III, Pugachev’s response, and Alexander’s overthrow of Paul. In history’s game of echoes and doubles, Peter III’s brief reign set off more than its share of reverberations, inspiring his son Paul to reinvigorate policies earlier repudiated by Catherine. The degree to which Paul should truly be considered a reincarnation of his father has been disputed,89 but Paul himself seems to have had little doubt—he did everything in his power to foster the identification, famously recalling to court those who had remained loyal to his father, Peter, and breaking off hostilities with Prussia, just as Peter had done when he ascended the throne. Paul seemed to represent a reanimation of Peter III’s spirit—a true double. As proof of his devotion to his father, Paul disinterred Peter’s remains from his tomb in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery and reburied them in the Peter and Paul Cathedral among his Romanov forbearers. He thereby affirmed Peter’s royalty and right to rule, simultaneously confirming his own royal succession by virtue of his birth. It would not have occurred to him that by ritually and juridically reinvigorating primogeniture he was simultaneously opening himself up to a moral inheritance—retribution for Peter’s usurpation. As noted earlier, Peter III had concurred in holding Ivan VI, an anointed monarch whose claim to the throne preexisted his own, in the Shlisselburg Fortress. Rumormongers whispered that he had considered disinheriting Paul and naming Ivan his successor but changed his mind and abandoned Ivan to his destiny. Catherine, Paul’s mother, issued orders to kill the unhappy Ivan if anyone attempted to free him. Paul thus inherited a double burden of guilt—for his father’s complicity in holding Ivan captive, and for his mother’s in murdering both Ivan and Peter and usurping the throne. Seen from this perspective, Paul’s assassination, which was carried out under the metaphorical shadow of his father’s disinterred coffin, resembles Dmitry’s execution in Narezhny’s tragedy, which takes place in the literal shadow of Godunov’s coffin: both deaths result from past events originating with transgressive fathers. Narezhny’s Dmitry thus recombines various plotlines and images from Peter III’s and Paul’s unhappy story in order to conceal a message that the censors would not have countenanced: children will be held accountable for their parents’ sins. Paul, whose dreams of a throne were quashed 89 For a summary of the historiography regarding Paul, see McGrew, Paul I of Russia, 6–14.

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first by a mother who refused to vacate it and then by assassins, finds his literary representation in Narezhny’s Dmitry, whose earlier dreams of a throne had also led to an ignominious death. In this reading, Narezhny’s Dmitry the Pretender becomes a response to but not a copy of Sumarokov’s tragedy. Narezhny would have recalled Sumarokov while writing his own tragedy—after all, he had only Sumarokov to model himself on, since the Time of Troubles had not yet become a set piece for Russian tragedies.90 Moreover, it is clear that Narezhny’s characters (minus their doubles) as well as a number of his plot details (Dmitry’s passion for Xenya, Shuisky’s assurances to Xenya that he will treat her like a daughter, the amour between Xenya and Georgy, etc.) were borrowed from Sumarokov. Still, Narezhny’s play is not a Trauerspiel. Dmitry’s tyranny functions as background material; it never rises to the level of primary theme. The play does, however, create a counterhistory. Seventeenth-century writers advance royal birth as the critical factor in identifying a monarch, and Sumarokov offers a Petrine antithesis to this in the form of personal merit. Narezhny supplies a synthesis—a ruler is known by her/his birth, but s/he must also behave justly; autocrats who fail this second test perish together with their descendants.

The One vs. the Many The root causes of usurpation in the seventeenth century differed significantly from those in the eighteenth, and each century’s literature of royal pretense reflects the differences. With Tsar Fyodor’s death in 1598, the senior Muscovite line of the House of Rurik came to an end: there were, quite simply, no ­remaining royal candidates for the throne. In a world in which birth determined rank, a tsar who died leaving neither children nor siblings passed on a legacy of chaos. In the eighteenth century, by contrast, personal choice—cloaked, to be sure, in the rhetoric of merit—came to be recognized as a criterion for rule and led to the opposite problem—a surfeit of candidates for the throne. Although the causes of dynastic instability varied across the two centuries, the effects were similar: royal pretense and usurpation. Seventeenth-century men of letters set out to remedy their misfortunes by explaining how the old dynasty had come to its catastrophic end. After having documented the tragedy to the best 90 In the letter from Derzhavin to Beketov referenced above, Derzhavin notes that there are now, in 1804, three tragedies called Dmitry the Pretender—Sumarokov’s, Narezhny’s, and Beloselsky’s. The third play is presumed to have been written by Alexander BeloselskyBelozersky, but it has not come down to us (Stepanov, “Sumarokov,” 396, 397n3).

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of their abilities, they then undertook the task of determining who, among a pool of pedigreed hopefuls, was the sole man qualified to rule. In defending their candidates, they crafted quasi-literary, polemical, monological interpretations of the Troubles. Given their conviction that there was only one proper choice, they shaped their literature tendentiously, privileging narrators’ voices over characters’ and limiting the potential for contestation. Prose was the traditional, but also the most appropriate, medium in which to present the winners and losers in this royal contest. Eighteenth-century writers, by contrast, recognized a plethora of aspirants to the throne. The question that presented itself most insistently to them was how to choose among the many? How to aid their audiences in making proper choices? Writers of the day would have been alive to the possibilities offered by drama, a form in which many voices had the opportunity to state their cases. The authors’ guiding hands could still be felt—some characters emerged from their pens as villains of the darkest hue, while others overflowed with moral probity—but each participant in the drama, whether good or bad, was allowed to stake his/her claim. Tragedy was one of the most popular literary genres of the day, so it comes as no surprise that it replaced prose treatments of the Dmitry material. It was also uniquely suited to representing post-Petrine Russia’s new world of ideological contestation. By comparison with the best of the nineteenth century’s Time of Troubles playwrights, Sumarokov and Narezhny provide dogmatic plots. Their recognition scenes condemn the protagonists’ behavior out of hand: royal pretense is the foundational lie that engenders a chain of further lies; subverting dynastic succession subverts history itself. Their notions of closure are largely r­ etributive. Given the cultural context, it is hardly surprising that these two eighteenthcentury initiators of the modern tradition created a literature of irreconcilable conflict and summary justice. On the one hand, seventeenth-century stories provided starkly monologic content. On the other, the borrowed Trauerspiel form offered a model that lost much of its nuance and dialogicity against the background of invented Russian dynastic traditions. Contemporary political events supported historians’ advocacy of just but punitive monarchs. All of this would change, however, within a quarter of a century.

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CHAPTER 3

Verbal Self-Fashioning: The Early Nineteenth Century Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles that direct them. —Napoleon Bonaparte

T

he late 1820s and early 1830s produced a dense cluster of works themed on Dmitry and the Time of Troubles: Alexander Pushkin’s 1825 Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepev (published in 1831 as Boris Godunov); Faddey Bulgarin’s 1830 novel, Dmitry the Pretender; Alexey Khomyakov’s 1833 tragedy, Dmitry the Pretender; and Mikhail Pogodin’s 1835 dramatic ­chronicle in prose, Historical Portrait of Dmitry the Pretender. Less than twenty-five years separated Narezhny’s Dmitry the Pretender from Pushkin’s Comedy, but these were years of invasion, political discord, and sweeping cultural change. Russian belletrists created distinctive literary works in both verse and prose, while historians, like their western European colleagues, recovered long-forgotten documents and developed new methodologies for studying the past. In particular, the 1819 publication of the Investigatory Report on the Death of Tsarevich Dmitry Ivanovich, which had previously languished unread in the archives, drew renewed attention to Dmitry’s contested fate. At a moment when usurpation had again become germane to ­contemporary concerns, the Report offered historians and poets alike a hitherto overlooked late ­sixteenth-century entrée into the origins of dynastic instability. For Russians, the galvanizing event of the nineteenth century’s first two decades was Napoleon’s capture of Moscow. The Russian army eventually gained the upper hand over the French, driving them from Russian soil and pursuing them to Paris. In the west, Russian officers discovered a much freer society, and as their admiration for its more accommodating way of life

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grew, so did their disdain for Tsar Alexander’s post-1812 ­conservativism.1 By late 1825 the confrontation of their hopes for a more liberal future with the ­realities of Russian absolutism would lead to the failed Decembrist uprising, creating a second defining moment. In the same years that Russians were making history on European battlefields, they were also reading and writing it at home. With the publication of Nikolay Karamzin’s deeply researched and engrossing History of the Russian State (Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo), Russia’s past became the pursuit of professionals but also the province of educated citizens. Karamzin offered a dramatic account of Russia’s history that both satisfied and provoked his readers, raising as many questions as it answered. Similarly, the 1820s and 1830s marked a crossroads in the world of Russian literature. Until the ­nineteenth century, both history and literature had “sought to interpret experience for the purpose of guiding and elevating man,”2 and both were ­recognized as branches of the same intellectual tree. As the century progressed, h­ owever, history increasingly claimed the space of the “real,” while literature captured the “ideal.” In this period of transition, poets became makers of meanings rather than revealers of existing truths.3 To be sure, history still retained some of its earlier literary lineaments: in Andrew Wachtel’s words, ­“precisely when in western Europe the split between history and literature was being codified, Karamzin provided Russia with a work that could be read as both.”4 Karamzin’s History performed a crucial function in the romantic era, when his fellow countrymen believed that Russia’s present could best be understood by locating it

  1 Hubertus F. Jahn makes a similar point when he writes that young Russian officers “soon chased Napoleon all the way back to France. On their way, they were welcomed into the salons of Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, and many other cities, where they picked up the latest philosophical ideas and political theories of Western Europe.” Once they returned home, “the contrasts could not have been more imposing” (“‘Us’: Russians on Russianness,” in National Identity in Russian Culture, ed. Simon Franklin and Emma Widdis [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 59).  2 Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: ‘The Pastime of Past Time,’” in Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 105. Jurij Striedter makes the point that the link between history and literature was particularly close in early nineteenth-century Russia (“Poetic Genre and the Sense of History in Pushkin,” New Literary History 8 [1977]: 295).  3 Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 229.  4 Wachtel, Obsession with History, 48.

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in the past.5 In analogous fashion, literature cultivated its ties to history in the form of the historical novel.6 Russia’s Time of Troubles plays and novels provide excellent examples of early nineteenth-century generic crossovers: as Caryl Emerson has noted, “The story of Boris Godunov, closely tied to problems of national identity, has proved curiously central in the Russian attempt to achieve specifically Russian forms of art.”7 Distinguished by a heightened sense of patriotism and heavily influenced by romanticism,8 the authors of works about Godunov, Grishka Otrepev, and Vasily Shuisky focused on the relationship between tsar and people, mining the seventeenth century for material relevant to their own times.9

Reconsidering the Tsar: Napoleon and the Decembrists After the Napoleonic Wars, Russia became Europe’s most powerful state, outgrowing its geopolitical status as an awkward stepchild of western Europe. This new international standing had important implications for Russian culture. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, Russians had played a game of cultural catch-up, absorbing and sometimes sedulously imitating French and German aesthetic practices. In the post-Napoleonic years, their enthusiasm for all things foreign slackened. Encouraged by recent successes on the battlefield, men of letters aspired to prominence in the cultural sphere as well. Increasingly, they invoked samobytnost´,10 a concept difficult to capture in a single English word but signifying national originality and robust cultural maturity. In the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat, Alexander regarded his army’s triumph as a confirmation of Russia’s unique mission among the nations,11 an interpretation that, in many of his courtiers’ eyes, also implied the indispensability of a Russian autocrat as ultimate commander. The opinion was not universal: Napoleon rejected the relevance of a specifically Russian autocrat,  5 Marc Raeff, “Aleksei Khomiakov (1804–1860),” in A. S. Khomiakov: Poet, Philosopher, Theologian ( Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2004), 15.   6 György Lukács, The Historical Novel (Boston: Beacon, 1963), 19.  7 Emerson, Boris Godunov, 9.  8 Alessandra Tosi, Waiting for Pushkin: Fiction in the Age of Alexander I (1801–1825) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 31.   9 Ervin Brody, “Pushkin’s Boris Godunov,” 860. 10 Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 68. 11 Ibid., 72.

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while the Decembrist rebels would soon reject autocracy pure and simple. Educated Russians in general—and writers in particular—were well aware of the implication of such views, and talk of change was in the air. The Corsican adventurer’s and the Russian patriots’ very different attempts to unseat the autocracy invited writers to consider and evaluate the idiosyncrasies of Russia’s historical development—to plumb the past for uniquely national explanations of current realities. Disagreements regarding the precise nature of Russia’s samobytnost´ split public opinion, and influential sectors of society segmented into conservative and liberal camps. Karamzin, for example, responded to France’s Jacobin terror by endorsing “enlightened conservatism,” thereby acknowledging the necessity for absolutism.12 Liberals, by contrast, espoused either a diminution or an outright abrogation of autocratic power;13 in the absence of a genuine civil society, the more radical of them established revolutionary societies.14 After Alexander’s death in December 1825, the clandestine Northern and Southern Societies, both of which advocated the adoption of a constitution, staged an ill-planned and unsuccessful rebellion against the new emperor, Nicholas I. Members of both societies evinced a keen interest in history and idealized what they referred to as “ancient Russian liberties.”15 Their approach integrated an older intellectual movement (eighteenth-century rationalism) with a contemporary one (romanticism),16 thereby reconfirming the relevance of an 12 Ibid., 54–56. 13 The split between liberals and conservatives often ran down the middle of families. Fyodor Glinka, for example, sympathized with the aspirations of the Decembrists, while his brother Sergey was a conservative. Both, however, shared a passionate desire to be freed from Napoleon’s tyranny, and both believed in Russian exceptionalism. On this question, see Franklin A. Walker, “Reaction and Radicalism in the Russia of Alexander I: The Case of the Brothers Glinka,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 21 (1979): 501. 14 Marc Raeff, “At the Origins of a Russian National Consciousness: Eighteenth-Century Roots and Napoleonic Wars,” History Teacher 25 (1991): 15. Elsewhere, Raeff points out that it was precisely the misapprehension of the degree of contrast between the liberalism of Alexander’s early years and the conservatism of his later ones that provoked a shocked response from the left: “[In the early years], any discussion, consideration or implementation of even the most modest reform was not only well received, but was interpreted in a much more liberal sense than was justified either by the government’s actual deeds or its intentions. This misunderstanding explains the disappointment experienced by the members of the progressive elite and the resulting opposition to Alexander in the last decade of his reign” (Imperial Russia 1682–1825: The Coming of Age of Modern Russia [New York: Knopf, 1972], 30). 15 Walicki, History of Russian Thought, 67. 16 Ibid., 71.

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idealized past to a quotidian present—in which respect they resembled the stance taken by authors of historical dramas and novels.17

Nikolay Karamzin: The Art of History Nineteenth-century Russian culture owes an inestimable debt to the belletrist and historian Nikolay Mikhaylovich Karamzin (1766–1826), who both broadened and deepened his readers’ intellectual horizons. Karamzin popularized literary prose through his short stories. His Letters of a Russian Traveler (Pis´ma russkogo puteshestvennika) inaugurated an aesthetic movement, Russian sentimentalism, and introduced a crisp, lucid writing style that eschewed heavy Church Slavonicisms. As editor of the Moscow Journal (Moskovskii zhurnal) and Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), he cultivated taste and discernment among Russia’s educated public; as Alexander I’s official historian, he authored the History of the Russian State, presaging a new chapter in Russian historiography and powerfully influencing future generations of intellectuals and writers.18 In the History’s final two volumes, which described Tsarevich Dmitry’s death in Uglich, Tsar Fyodor’s death, Boris Godunov’s reign, and False Dmitry’s rise and fall, Karamzin focused heavily on affective description, making his heroes live in readers’ minds by blurring the boundaries between historiography and literature. Recognizing that the History’s most­ 17 Ludmilla A. Trigos traces the development of a Decembrist “myth” in Russian literature in The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 18 Iu. M. Lotman goes so far as to call Karamzin “Russian history’s Columbus” (“Kolumb russkoi istorii,” in Karamzin [St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1997], 565–87). For Karamzin’s biography, see Tanya Page, “Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich,” in Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 215–17; and Gitta Hammarberg, “Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Early Modern Russian Writers, Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1995), 135–50. For Karamzin’s place within Russian historiography, see Vernadsky, Russian Historiography. On Karamzin’s artistic prose, see Gitta Hammarberg, From the Idyll to the Novel: Karamzin’s Sentimentalist Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); I. Z. Serman, Literaturnoe delo Karamzina (Moscow: RGGU, 2005); and Henry M. Nebel, “Introduction,” in Selected Prose of N. M. Karamzin, trans. Henry M. Nebel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969). On the question of Karamzin’s polemics regarding the Russian literary language, see Iu. N. Tynianov, Arkhaisty i novatory (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929); on his impact on both history and literature, see A. G. Cross, N. M. Karamzin: A Study of His Literary Career (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), who asserts: “His history was an event both in Russian literature and Russian historiography, admired for its erudition and disposition and accumulation of materials but equally for its style, its dramatic relation of incidents, and vividness of characterization” (225).

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discriminating readers might prefer a more scholarly treatment, he also supplied extensive notes laying out his primary source materials.19 Karamzin attributed the Time of Troubles to Boris Godunov’s dark designs:20 the ambitious boyar “suffered a spiritual hunger and desired what he did not have.” Recognizing that the innocent Dmitry barred his way to the throne, “this grasping power-seeker” determined to murder the child.21 After Tsar Fyodor’s death, Karamzin’s consummate hypocrite and villain acceded to the desires of the Russian people and accepted the title of tsar. “Thus,” Karamzin mourned, “passed from the throne the renowned Varangian dynasty to whom Russia owes its name, its greatness, and its very being.”22 Karamzin recognized a second great villain in Grishka Otrepev, who, as he confidently asserted, began his career as a rebellious and unhappy retainer in the Romanov household. After describing Otrepev’s battles, his triumphant entry into Moscow, and his murder of the young Fyodor Godunov, Karamzin turned to the matter of retributive justice: “Boris’s shadow, replete with frightful memories, cast a pall over Fyodor [Godunov’s] reign”; “thus did God wreak his vengeance on the murderer of the real Dmitry.”23 The appearance of the History’s tenth and eleventh volumes in 1824 was particularly timely for Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), who was living in exile on his family’s estate near Pskov. Although isolated from friends and fellow writers, Pushkin used his enforced solitude to good effect, gathering background material for a historical drama. At first, he hesitated over his choice of subject matter, but after reading Karamzin, he resolved to theme his play on the Time of Troubles.24 19 In Caryl Emerson’s words, Karamzin’s treatment of Boris Godunov and the Troubles was “a romantic history, but one with a scholarly apparatus that Schlözer and his school would (and indeed did) admire” (Boris Godunov, 29). Wachtel believes that the History’s notes, or primechaniia, imply the incompleteness of its main narrative and call the possibility of a single telos into question (Obsession with History, 58). 20 Emerson notes Karamzin’s 1802 essay in which he praised Godunov—presumably by analogy with Alexander I—as an effective leader. In the wake of the Napoleonic invasion, however, the historian reversed his assessment, treating Godunov, like Napoleon, as a usurper (Boris Godunov, 59). 21 Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo (Moscow: Kniga, 1989), 10:74. 22 Ibid., 127. 23 Ibid., 107, 120. 24 Chester S. L. Dunning, “The Exiled Poet-Historian and the Creation of His Comedy,” in The Uncensored “Boris Godunov”: The Case for Pushkin’s Original “Comedy,” ed. Chester S. L. Dunning and Caryl Emerson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 60. This article makes an excellent case for paying greater attention to Pushkin as a historian.

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Alexander Pushkin’s Comedy of Twofold Usurpation In November 1825 Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin completed his Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepev (Komediia o tsare Borise i o Grishke Otrep´eve). Although he had high hopes for its staging, circumstances were singularly unpropitious—Alexander I died within a month, and Pushkin, who numbered several Decembrist rebels among his friends, fell under suspicion of participation in their revolt. Fortunately, by September 1826 he was cleared of direct involvement in—if not lively sympathy with—the plot. An audience with Nicholas I left the poet hopeful regarding the direction his play might soon be taking, but his optimism quickly faded. Operatives within the Third Section, Nicholas’s recently constituted secret police, impugned the Comedy as unsuitable for presentation, and the tsar forbade its publication.25 Pushkin ultimately bowed to necessity, cutting the scenes that had caused the most offense. Retitled Boris Godunov and designated a tragedy, it appeared in print in early 1831 but was not staged until 1870.26 In the west as in Russia, Pushkin’s play is more often read than performed, but regardless of medium, audiences almost always encounter it in censored form—that is, as Boris Godunov. Chester Dunning has challenged this convention, advocating the “inclusion of Pushkin’s Comedy in the canon of his works.” The more famous tragic reworking, as Dunning avers, “was the product of many different pressures on Pushkin—few of them artistic.”27 Pushkin’s Third Section censor was almost certainly Faddey Bulgarin, the 25 Count Alexander Benckendorff, head of the Third Section, commissioned a report on the Comedy—almost certainly from Faddey Bulgarin—which denigrated it as no more than “excerpts from the tenth and eleventh volumes of Karamzin’s History of the Russian State reworked into dialogue and scenes.” Further, “its literary merit is considerably less than we had hoped” (cited in M. A. Tsialovskii and N. A. Tarkhova, Letopis´ zhizni i tvorchestva Aleksandra Pushkina [Moscow: Slovo, 1999], 670). Benckendorff then appended his own assessment: “The play isn’t suitable for the stage, but it could be published if a few changes were undertaken.” Nicholas reviewed the manuscript and Benckendorff ’s report and offered the opinion that Pushkin should rework the play into a novella or novel à la Walter Scott (Tsialovskii and Tarkhova, Letopis´ zhizni i tvorchestva Aleksandra Pushkina, 672). 26 This brief summary follows Chester S. L. Dunning, who traces the tangled tale of Pushkin’s battle to publish and stage the Comedy in “The Tragic Fate of Pushkin’s Comedy,” in The Uncensored “Boris Godunov”: The Case for Pushkin’s Original “Comedy,” ed. Chester S. L. Dunning and Caryl Emerson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 94–135. 27 Chester S. L. Dunning, “The Problem of Boris Godunov,” in The Uncensored “Boris Godunov”: The Case for Pushkin’s Original “Comedy,” ed. Chester S. L. Dunning and Caryl Emerson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 44.

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self-interested author of a competing Time of Troubles novel, Dmitry the Pretender, and Pushkin angrily accused his rival of delaying publication and cribbing parts of Dmitry from the Comedy. Since Khomyakov and Pogodin, the other two Dmitry authors discussed in this chapter, also experienced Pushkin’s Time of Troubles play in uncensored form,28 and since Pushkin himself waged a prolonged campaign to see it published in its original version, I base my discussion of 1820s and 1830s Dmitry fiction on the text of the Comedy.29 It would be difficult to overestimate the Comedy’s departure from Sumarokov’s and Narezhny’s versions of Dmitry the Pretender. Pushkin’s treatments of time, space, character, and action all bespeak an entirely new conception of the material. Opening in 1598, six years earlier than its eighteenth-century predecessors, the Comedy closes in 1605, a year before Sumarokov’s and Narezhny’s tragedies. Its action takes place in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine—in private homes, public squares, and on the battlefield—and over thirty characters speak, all in their own individualized voices. Unlike Sumarokov’s and Narezhny’s characters, very few of Pushkin’s creations condemn the excesses of tyranny; almost all focus instead on the mystery of identity and the potential for it to be usurped. Is Dmitry a dead child, a grown man, an innocent victim, a disingenuous scoundrel? Might he be all of these? Is Russia’s true ruler a newly resurrected tsarevich, an aging tsar, a clever boy, a scheming boyar? When identity is usurped, where does the usurpation begin and where does it end? Pushkin creates a wholly new seventeenth century and presents it through wholly new means. Freed from the constraints imposed by both the classical unities and the eighteenth century’s preoccupation with tyranny, he explores the shadows Old Russia cast over subsequent history, eschewing finalizing interpretations of his characters and reductive solutions to intractable problems. Pushkin himself expressed his views on drama in a number of essays that speak, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, to his play’s innovative nature. In “On Classical Tragedy,” he writes that tragedy is the 28 Both attended Pushkin’s October 12, 1826, reading at D. V. Venevitinov’s house (Tsialovskii and Tarkhova, Letopis´ zhizni i tvorchestva Aleksandra Pushkina, 662). On November 21, A. F. Voeikov wrote to V. M. Perevoshchikov characterizing the Comedy as “a drama the likes of which Rus has never seen.” He added that Pushkin had promised two new tragedies about Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky, an undertaking that, unhappily, never came to fruition (Tsialovskii and Tarkhova, Letopis´ zhizni i tvorchestva Aleksandra Pushkina, 663). 29 The Russian text of Pushkin’s Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepev as well as an English translation by Anthony Wood can be found in Dunning and Emerson, Uncensored “Boris Godunov.” All citations will be to the Wood translation.

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least verisimilar mode of composition because “the viewer must, for the most part, disregard time, place, and language. He must compel his imagination into accord with a particular mode of speech, with verse, with invention.”30 In 1828, in an unpublished commentary on the Comedy, he claims: “I ordered my Tragedy according to the system of our Father Shakespeare, and having sacrificed two of the classical unities on his altar, have barely kept to the third.”31 Elsewhere, he compares popular poets with their court competitors, praising Shakespeare at Racine’s expense:32 artists like Shakespeare recognize their loftiness vis-à-vis their audiences and write honestly, while court flatterers suspect their own inferiority and indulge in bombast.33 In other countries, Pushkin maintains, national theater is born in the public square and only later moves to the court, whereas in Russia the opposite pertains, creating a momentum of servility and uniformity.34 Here Pushkin is surely indicting Sumarokov, whom he inveighs against in “On the National Spirit in Literature”: “What is there of the popular spirit in a Xenya who, in the middle of Dmitry’s war camp, expostulates in iambic hexameters with her confidante on the virtues of parental authority?”35 For Pushkin, true drama empowers its characters to speak in the language most suitable to their emotions and callings; it articulates the passions of the public square robustly and impartially. Pushkin’s contemporaries were quick to acknowledge the Comedy’s novelty and unconventionality. Alexander Turgenev opined that the play was “less a tragedy than a kind of historico-dramatic painting in the spirit of Shakespeare . . . a chronicle portrait . . . sublime and exceptional,”36 and Evgeny Baratynsky hailed it as “a marvelous work, the harbinger of a new literary epoch.”37 Others, while recognizing the Comedy’s radically innovative conception, were less enthusiastic: Nikolay Nadezhdin adjudged its dual focus on Dmitry and 30 Pushkin, “O tragedii,” in A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols. (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1949), 7:37–38. 31 Cited in Tatiana Wolf, ed. and trans., Pushkin on Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 221. 32 The word Pushkin uses here, which I have given as “popular” (narodnyi), is notoriously difficult to translate. It signifies an amalgam of “national,” “folk,” “popular,” and “native.” 33 Pushkin, “O narodnoi drame i drame ‘Marfa Posadnitsa,’” in Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7:213–14. 34 Ibid., 215–16. 35 Pushkin, “O narodnosti v literature,” in Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7:39. 36 November 18, 1826, letter from Alexander Turgenev to Nikolay Turgenev (quoted in Tsialovskii and Tarkhova, Letopis´ zhizni i tvorchestva Aleksandra Pushkina, 662). 37 October 20, 1826, letter from Evgeny Baratynskii to Alexander Mukhanov (quoted in ibid., 651).

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Godunov a major flaw, while Pavel Katenin condemned its Dmitry as bland and indolent.38 Against the backdrop of previous dramatic depictions of Dmitry, Pushkin’s critics might be forgiven for expecting his Comedy to present its pretender hero in a frozen, overly directive way. Instead, he offers a dynamic, self-fashioning protagonist, an active creator of stories in which he himself plays the leading role. In his first appearance in Scene 5, Dmitry has already begun to hone these talents, albeit not to the degree he will soon achieve. Observing the chronicler-monk Pimen at work, he speculates regarding his subject matter: the Mongol invasion, Ivan the Terrible, ancient Novgorod? These are the same topics Pushkin himself mulled over before beginning the Comedy, and by evoking them, Dmitry usurps his creator’s role and turns himself into a surrogate artist/writer, an identity reinforced when the frail Pimen tasks him with completing the chronicle. Pimen views his request in a dispassionate light: In those hours free From spiritual discipline, you must describe Unvarnished all you witness in this life: The conduct of our rulers, war and peace, The prodigies and portents of the heaven, The holy miracles of the saints.39

Dmitry, by contrast, will soon craft self-directed, transformative stories in which he sheds his monastic robes and becomes a man of action. Already in Scene 5 he narrates the dream from which he has just awakened: “I dreamed I climbed a tower, and from a height saw Moscow all before me . . . the people swarmed and pointed fingers up at me and laughed; I grew ashamed, afraid—I fell headlong.”40 This, of course, is a sweeping vision of the future—a future beyond the plot of Pushkin’s play—in which Dmitry will achieve the ultimate power only to plummet to defeat.

38 On this, see I. Z. Serman, “Pushkin i russkaia istoricheskaia drama 1830-kh godov,” in Pushkin: Issledovanie i materialy (Leningrad: Nauka, 1969), 6:119–20. For a summary of Boris Godunov criticism published during Pushkin’s lifetime, see B. P. Gorodetskii, Tragediia A. S. Pushkina “Boris Godunov”: Kommentarii (Leningrad: Prosveshchenie, 1969), 84–99. 39 Pushkin, Comedy, 283. 40 Ibid., 277.

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As the Comedy progresses, Dmitry continues to exercise his imaginative skills as master of the word in ways that create his master-of-action reality. In Scene 6, he wonders, How would it be if our Tsarevich suddenly rose from the grave, And he cried to us: “Where are you, lads? Where are my faithful ­followers? Join me against Boris, help me against the criminal, Capture that adversary of mine, and bring him here before me!”41

By scene’s end, having fully internalized these imaginings, he will declare: “I am Dmitry, the Tsarevich.” In a subsequent scene that similarly links creative storytelling with practical action, guards arrive at a tavern near the Lithuanian border and discover Dmitry and his companions dining. The guards carry papers describing a dangerous runaway—Dmitry himself—but since they and Dmitry’s companions are barely literate, Dmitry reads the document aloud, cunningly transforming its portrait of himself into that of his fellow fugitive, Varlaam. Although Varlaam soon disabuses the guards of their mistake, Dmitry’s verbal chicanery facilitates his own escape, showing again how words act on reality. Several scenes later, he forthrightly praises the pragmatic fruits of creative fantasy,42 declaring to a Cracow poet, “I believe in bards’ prophecies . . . blest is the deed that, in foretelling, they have glorified!”43 Besides allowing for Dmitry’s inspired evolution from monk to adventurer, the Comedy’s expanded timescape facilitates another significant i­nnovation vis-à-vis Sumarokov’s and Narezhny’s eighteenth-century tragedies—the inclusion of a second eponymous protagonist, Boris Godunov, whose rise to power can be accommodated in the same play with Dmitry’s only by setting aside the classical unities. In the Comedy’s first scene, Godunov, like Dmitry, is introduced as a storyteller, the backseat author of the Investigatory Report: Shuisky, who now admits that he falsified much of what he put into the Report, 41 Ibid., 287. 42 Dmitry’s verbal playfulness aligns him with the early nineteenth century “liberalists,” who, Iu. M. Lotman claims, “wished to make life into a holiday.” By comparison, their Decembrist contemporaries “wished to make it ‘service’” (“The Decembrist in Everyday Life: Everyday Behavior as a Historical-Psychological Category,” in The Semiotics of Russian Culture, ed. Ann Shukman and trans. C. R. Pike [Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 1984], 71–123). 43 Pushkin, Comedy, 355.

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complains lamely, “All I could do before him was repeat / The absurdities he whispered in my ear.”44 Significantly, Godunov, the creator of whispered fictions about the child Dmitry, does not appear in this scene himself: Pushkin introduces him as the object of Shuisky’s discourse rather than as acting subject. Shuisky’s collocutor, Vorotynsky, also takes advantage of Godunov’s absence to objectify him, describing him as a Tatar upstart who has no business seeking sovereign power. Godunov has yet to appear by the end of the play’s second scene, in which a group of sympathetic commoners talk about him, praising him as a puissant but modest man who eschews the limelight. One scene later, their praise turns into exaltation, as they declare, “We have a tsar! Tsar Boris! Long live Boris!”45 But Godunov does not appear in the flesh until Scene 4, and even then, he does not define himself but exhorts sacred and secular authorities to approve and abet his rule. Scene 5 reverts to the Comedy’s previous practice of showing others creating images of Godunov: Pimen, who was in Uglich during the investigation of Dmitry’s death, condemns the ambitious boyar as the instigator of the murder plot. And as he paints an oral picture of Godunov for Dmitry/Otrepev, the monk simultaneously pens a chronicle about him, providing a written objectification as well. Thus, in the Comedy’s first seven scenes, others regularly speak about Godunov, while he himself speaks only once. As the play progresses, Godunov finds his voice, speaking more frequently and at greater length, but he seems to realize that he has lost control of his own image. In Scene 8, he complains that his people have overlooked his good intentions, blaming him instead for their misfortunes. No matter how he strives, he cannot overturn the unhappy persona others have crafted for him: “whoever dies,/ I am the secret murderer . . . Always I am blamed!”46 As Godunov becomes ever more deeply mired in the past, he finds it ever more difficult to act. His soliloquies dwell on the many wrong turns that cannot now be remedied. Even news of a pretender, which briefly recalls him to the present, ultimately leads him to recollect the Uglich tragedy: instead of addressing the developing danger, Godunov enjoins Shuisky to confirm Dmitry’s long-ago death. Accused of murder by a holy fool, he recoils and does nothing; confronted by his own imminent death, he shrinks into himself. 44 Ibid., 253. 45 Ibid., 267. 46 Ibid., 295.

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In his final appearance, he speaks to young Fyodor Godunov of his own past and Fyodor’s present. But rather than providing his son with a bold plan for the future, he outlines a cautious, unresisting course of action: Fyodor should avoid self-delusion; he should be guided by advisers; he should preserve his innocence. The ailing tsar speaks at length but to little effect. Thus, although Godunov achieves a robust communicative presence by Scene 8, it is very different from Dmitry’s, which is constructive and forward-looking. However—unlike Sumarokov, who manifestly favors one of his protagonists (Shuisky) over the other (Dmitry), and Narezhny, who prefers Prince Georgy—Pushkin privileges neither Godunov nor Dmitry. Within the Comedy, both are usurpers, and both will ultimately harvest the fruits of their royal pretense. This impartiality is hardly accidental for, when discussing historical fiction, Pushkin singles out Shakespeare, Goethe, and Scott for particular praise as writers who were “free from slavish partiality toward kings and heroes.”47 Elsewhere, he criticizes French drama as journalistic, maintaining that his own play, by contrast, expresses no political opinions.48 I. Z. Serman has suggested in this connection that the poet saw dramatic potential in Dmitry precisely because the pretender had, in his view, no political agenda.49 In place of Sumarokov and Narezhny’s political “partiality toward kings and heroes,” Pushkin’s Comedy offers history. M. Virolainen believes that Pushkin’s dramas are all directed toward history,50 a view espoused as well by Jurij Striedter, who has suggested that, for Pushkin, “the charm of what is remote in time lies in the freedom of scope it allows the imagination of both the poet and his audience, while the use of historical material forces the poet to abide by certain facts.”51 Historical content entails an invigorating tension between freedom and discipline. Moreover, “if a poet approaches history in this way, as a series of prescribed events and conflicts of historical characters whose motives unfold in fictitious dialogues, drama will be the most suitable genre for him.”52

47 Pushkin, “O romanakh Val´tera Skotta,” in Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7:535. 48 Wolf, Pushkin on Literature, 223. 49 Serman, Pushkin i istoricheskaia drama, 125. 50 M. Virolainen, “Dramaturgiia Pushkina,” in The Pushkin Handbook, ed. David M. Bethea (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 193. 51 Striedter, “Poetic Genre and the Sense of History in Pushkin,” 295. 52 Ibid., 297.

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Boris Gasparov has indicated that historical subject matter held a specific mythical significance for Pushkin. He traces a Russian apocalyptic mindset to Moscow’s sixteenth-century collision with Catholicism and Islam and tracks its development through the rise and fall of False Dmitry, the seventeenth century’s religious upheavals, the Petrine reforms, and the Pugachev Rebellion. He further suggests that two nineteenth-century journals, The Russian Messenger (Russkii vestnik) and Son of the Fatherland (Syn otechestva), took the lead in assimilating Napoleon’s invasion into this chain of apocalyptic events.53 The French emperor’s gambit fused ideas that had previously been considered independently of one another: the Time of Troubles, the advent of the Antichrist, and the end of the world.54 As Gasparov demonstrates, by the early 1820s Pushkin interpreted these moments in Russian history as pillars of the Russian world order.55 Writing in the wake of Napoleon, Pushkin interprets the apocalyptic force of Napoleon’s arrogated sovereignty as a new incarnation of an older historical pattern. Svetlana Evdokimova has argued that Pushkin frames his doubled heroes as representatives of two competing explanations for historical transformation—determinacy and indeterminacy: Godunov believes that the past inevitably dictates the present, while Dmitry embraces the power of accident (sluchainost´). In Evdokimova’s view, neither perspective offers the enterprising wolves in tsars’ clothing a realistic prospect of success.56 David M. Bethea, looking less to each man’s philosophy and more to his acts, sees both as products of similar forces. Although Godunov may believe in an ineluctable, causal sequence of events, his rise to power unfolds through a series of accidental turning points and moments of rupture. Bethea argues that, for Pushkin, accident motivates two types of historical development, that initiated from above and that from below.57 Thus, Dmitry, the quintessential parvenu, 53 Boris Gasparov, Poeticheskii iazyk Pushkina kak fakt istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999), 82–85. 54 Ibid., 107. 55 Ibid., 302. 56 Svetlana Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 56. 57 David M. Bethea, “Pushkin as Historical Thinker,” in The Pushkin Handbook, ed. David M. Bethea (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 270–72. Striedter makes a similar point in somewhat different words: “If a poet approaches history . . . as a series of prescribed events and conflicts of historical characters whose motives unfold in fictitious dialogues, drama will be the most suitable genre for him to work in, since it presents, in dialogue, well-defined characters in well-defined situations and conflicts” (“Poetic Genre and the Sense of History in Pushkin,” 297).

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and Godunov, the consummate insider, are equally creatures of the chances that have come to them, making them, in Emerson’s words, “trapped and tormented tsars.”58 Once they lose the support of the accident-averse middle layer of society, they have nowhere to go. The Comedy is structured around a series of prophetic repetitions that conduce to a deep-seated similarity between the two usurpers. In its final scene, Mosalsky announces that Fyodor Godunov and his mother are dead and orders the crowd to cheer, “Long live Tsar Dmitry Ivanovich!”59 The 1831 Boris Godunov famously follows this with the stage direction, “The crowd is silent” (Narod bezmolvstvuet), but the 1825 Comedy ends with the crowd cheering lustily.60 This moment of acclamation ominously echoes an earlier one offered by an earlier crowd—“Tsar Boris! Long live Boris!”—thereby conjoining Dmitry’s and Godunov’s ostensibly differentiated life trajectories and suggesting that Dmitry, who initially garners popular support (like Godunov) will later lose it (like Godunov).61 The same scene also echoes Scene 5, in which Pimen claims to have heard Dmitry’s nurse scream as the child was murdered. In the Comedy’s last moments, the Kremlin crowd similarly hears a woman screaming as Fyodor Godunov, the last scion of his house, is murdered offstage. The repeated aural warnings of royal death underscore the fact that both Godunov and Dmitry have anchored their ascents to the throne in regicide and intimate that Dmitry’s sins have foredoomed his future just as surely as have Godunov’s. A third textual parallel supports the same perilously freighted message. Scene 21—the last in which Dmitry speaks—opens with the pretender mourning the death of his horse: “My poor, poor horse! How gallantly he galloped today.”62 His lament points externally to one of the Comedy’s prime intertexts, Shakespeare’s Richard III, but also internally to Scene 22, in which the ­metaphor of a horse and its rider signifies the people and their ruler. By likening the horseless Dmitry to Richard, whose want of a mount preceded his death (“A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!”), the scene activates the 58 Emerson, Boris Godunov, 14. 59 Pushkin, Comedy, 451. 60 It seems clear that Pushkin intended the crowd to cheer sincerely, since their acclamation is prefigured in Scene 24, where the people, uninfluenced by nobles, proclaim: “Long live Tsar Dimitry!” (ibid., 447). 61 Ibid., 267. The Comedy’s treatment of nemesis links Pushkin’s play to Schiller’s unfinished Demetrius, which Pushkin almost certainly knew. 62 Pushkin, Comedy, 421.

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themes of infanticide, regicide, and usurpation, assimilating the child Dmitry’s death to the death of a ruling bloodline. The second, internal linkage connects the adult Dmitry’s dead horse with Godunov’s premonition that his people (a horse) will overthrow him (a horseman): the figuratively dehorsed Godunov fears that he will be rejected by his own people (as he indeed is), prefiguring the literally dehorsed Otrepev’s fate as well.63 How does Pushkin introduce two very different protagonists into one text and yet persuade his audience that both the creature of chance and the disciple of discipline will come to the same fate? In Emerson’s reading, the Comedy’s accommodation of both determinism and accident is tied to its mixture of tragedy and comedy. Tragedy requires highborn heroes, who fail in their struggle against forces they do not understand,64 while “comic heroes in all genres . . . have the right to be inept as historical agents, indifferent to destiny, addicted to simple pleasures, cynical toward the workings of justice.”65 It follows that the tragic Godunov believes he is doing a tsar’s work by aiding his people in a time of need. He learns too late that the people have implicated him in their miseries and rejected his overtures because they crave the benefactions of a “true” tsar: “Living power is hateful to the mob / Their love is given only to the dead.”66 The comic Dmitry, by contrast, thinks less but stumbles at least as much: beguiled by the haughty Marina, he neglects his strategic planning; threatened by imminent disaster on the battlefield, he pauses to mourn his horse; entranced by his own dreams, he fails to realize that his illicit bid for the throne will transform the dream of Scene 5 into reality. In the short term, Godunov may be wrong for thinking that history holds pattern and meaning, while Dmitry may be right for thinking it does not. In the long term, however, both are doomed. The serendipity that brings each of the Comedy’s ­protagonists to the throne inevitably entails its obverse—mishap. Fate i­nitially favors the ambitious boyar, depriving Tsar Fyodor of children and ­leaving his throne vacant, but plague and famine soon follow, ­ blighting Godunov’s plans. 63 Brian R. Hamnet believes that one of the play’s primary foci is the nature of political power (The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Representations of Reality in History and Fiction [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 250). 64 Emerson, “Tragedy, Comedy, Carnival, and History on Stage,” in The Uncensored “Boris Godunov”: The Case for Pushkin’s Original “Comedy,” ed. Chester S. L. Dunning and Caryl Emerson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 170. 65 Ibid., 158. 66 Pushkin, Comedy, 295.

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A happy chance similarly favors the equally ambitious young monk Otrepev, bringing him together with a witness to the Uglich tragedy and inspiring him to become Dmitry, but soon the accident of his love for Marina will transform him back into Otrepev. In each case, happenstance has created a desire that will ultimately founder against legal norms. Godunov, who has literally taken a royal life, is wracked by pangs of conscience, which weaken him to the point of death: “For neither power nor life can gladden me / I feel the thunder and the woe of heaven.”67 Dmitry, who has figuratively taken the same life, will soon be usurped by another usurper, as Pushkin insinuates in Scene 10 when Shuisky declares: “No doubt of it, the man is an imposter.”68 Pushkin’s open ending encourages his audience to remember Shuisky’s own impending usurpation and downfall, suggesting a pattern of repetition that will overleap the Comedy’s bounds and enter history. The Comedy, written in the wake of pan-European dynastic disruptions and dislocations, employs the prism of identity to focus on the institution of the monarchy. Wortman has argued that while the French Revolution remodeled many of Europe’s monarchies and devolved sacrality from the emperor onto the people, Russia’s emperors continued to cultivate the image of superhuman, Petrine monarchs.69 At the end of Alexander’s reign, however, a revolutionary myth displaced the monarchical one, and “the advanced members of the nobility, not the monarch, undertook the act of cathartic violence that would draw a sharp line between the past and the present,”70 driving a wedge between the Russian people and their “great men.” In his last years, Alexander undertook frequent trips to the provinces, “trying to learn about his subjects and to be in touch with the empire.”71 His attempts to show himself in a more human light suggest that he sensed the imminence of “cathartic violence” and hoped to avert it. This realization transformed the early 1820s into a transitional moment when previous understandings of monarchy loosened and the potential for novel solutions arose. At stake was whether post-Petrine culture would “lose its plot”—whether its dynastic scenario would remain the same, revert to a seventeenth-century model of usurpation, or mutate into something new altogether.

67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 325. 69 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 1:169. 70 Ibid., 239. 71 Ibid.

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Alexander’s fear that sovereignty might slip into his subjects’ hands, which Pushkin clearly sensed, can be understood as an instantiation of Kliger and Maslov’s “socio-political demand” for “earlier manifestations of verbal creativity.” But although the Comedy was written on the heels of one moment of cathartic violence and lost plot—Napoleon’s invasion—and on the brink of another—the Decembrists’ Revolt—it neither directly reflected the one nor foretold the other. Subtly subsuming recurrence into transference, it partook in the political discourse of its times, rejecting reductive solutions. Unlike his two predecessors in the Dmitry tradition, Pushkin refused to advocate one side of the liminal equation over the other, exploring instead the endless complexities of an earlier moment of contestation between monarchs and their subjects. He created a tension between what he showed—Godunov and Dmitry’s sovereign ambitions—and what he foretold—the ensuing anarchy—which allowed him to fuse three types of history into one: Godunov’s story, which had structure, order, and narrative closure like history proper; Dmitry’s, which had structure and order but only hinted at closure, like a chronicle; and the people’s, which had order without structure or closure, like annals.

Faddey Bulgarin’s Crusade against Anarchy In 1831 the publicist and man of letters Nikolay Grech praised Faddey Venediktovich Bulgarin (1789–1859) on the pages of Son of the Fatherland as an author “who has more intelligence and talent in his pinky finger than many of his critics have in their heads.” Pushkin, who was understood to be one of Grech’s empty heads, responded in the September issue of Telescope (Teleskop) with “A Few Words concerning Mr. Bulgarin’s Pinky and Related Matters,” in which he opined that “rank bestows neither honesty on a rogue nor wit on a fool nor gifts on a contentious scribbler . . . commoners [raznochintsy] who have been raised to the ranks of the nobility may become respectable writers only if they are gifted, educated, and honest men, not impudent buffoons.”72 The broadside surprised no one, given the very considerable gap between Pushkin’s and Bulgarin’s artistic sensibilities and temperaments. Bulgarin was a difficult man whose background and political views made him an easy target for invective. A Pole whose father was exiled to Siberia after the 1794 uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, Bulgarin studied at St. Petersburg’s Cadet Corps but later fought against Russia in Napoleon’s Polish 72 Pushkin, “Neskol´ko slov o mizintse g. Bulgarina i o prochem,” in Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7:259.

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Legion. Amnestied after war’s end, he eventually returned to St. Petersburg, where he presided with Grech over Son of the Fatherland. Throughout his long career, he edited journals and newspapers and wrote several novels, including the bestsellers Ivan Vyzhigin and Dmitry the Pretender. By the 1840s his popularity had waned, and he died deeply embittered.73 It has long been known that Bulgarin cooperated with Nicholas I’s Third Section. The collaboration arose, in part, in consequence of personal politics: Bulgarin renounced his youthful republican sentiments after the Decembrist Revolt and became a convinced conservative. Moreover, although Bulgarin played no part in the Polish insurrection of 1830–1831, he probably felt that his nationality and lifelong adherence to Roman Catholicism cast his loyalty to Russia in doubt. He was, however, a natural adaptor and must have seen his service to the Third Section as one more link in the long chain of accommodations he was destined to forge throughout his life.74 A. I. Reitblat regards him as a real-life picaro, a compromiser who bumped along in uneasy harmony with his surroundings.75 It is only appropriate, then, that his first great belletristic success came with the 1829 picaresque novel, Ivan Vyzhigin, whose peripatetic title character endures endless misadventures but finally achieves a degree of respectability.76 The novel’s first printing sold out within days to an audience comprising members of the aristocracy as well as the merchantry.77 Buoyed by the twin successes of Karamzin’s History and his own Ivan Vyzhigin, Bulgarin turned his hand to historical fiction. In the fall of 1829, he began to publish the first chapters of Dmitry the Pretender (Dimitrii

73 For a more detailed biography, see Ronald LeBlanc, “Faddei Venediktovich Bulgarin,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol. Prose (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1999), 87–100. My brief biographical sketch here is based on LeBlanc. 74 A. I. Reitblat has attempted to soften the moral censure implied by Bulgarin’s collaboration, pointing to the large number of other contemporary writers who also cooperated with the Third Section (“Russkie pisateli i III otdelenie,” http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/1999/40/ reitbl.html). Reitblat has published all of Bulgarin’s known communication with the Third Section in Vidok Figliarin: Pis´ma i zapiski F. V. Bulgarina v III otdelenie (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998). 75 Reitblat, Vidok Figliarin, 6. 76 Although Ivan Vyzhigin, with its happy-ever-after ending, does not closely resemble the original Spanish picaresque novel, reward is a popular closure strategy for Russian picaresques. On this, see Marcia A. Morris, The Literature of Roguery in Seventeenth- and EighteenthCentury Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000). 77 Reitblat, “F. V. Bulgarin i ego chitateli,” in Chtenie v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia biblioteka SSSR im. V.I. Lenina, Otdel issledovaniia chteniia, propagandy knigi i rekomendatel´noi bibliografii, 1992), 58.

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s­ amozvanets) in Son of the Fatherland.78 Hoping that Dmitry the Pretender would preempt Mikhail Zagoskin’s Yury Miloslavsky, or Russians in the Year 1612 as Russia’s first historical novel, Bulgarin set himself a hectic pace. Nevertheless, by the time he completed Dmitry, Zagoskin had already published. More painful still, the critics reviewed his novel badly. Even so, it was hugely successful, necessitating a second printing almost as soon as it appeared.79 While indisputably a historical novel, Dmitry is nevertheless sui generis: Bulgarin distances himself from obvious generic exemplars by jettisoning Walter Scott’s love intrigue and partiality for fictional characters.80 Instead, he adopts the episodic plot structure that had served him so well in Ivan Vyzhigin, fleshing it out with characters lifted from histories and chronicles. He cleaves more to Karamzin than to Scott,81 staking out his own historical-literary territory by adopting unconventional—and only occasionally effective—formal structures. Unlike Pushkin, Bulgarin fails to paint psychologically penetrating portraits of his characters, and even Mariia Lazutkina—in many respects a Bulgarin apologist—has disparaged his Dmitry as static and unengaging.82 In lieu of individuals, Bulgarin focuses on communities, offering multifaceted, ­ethnographical descriptions of eastern Europe’s many and varied peoples. Harry E. Shaw has argued that the historical novel should be defined by the milieu it represents rather than by compositional technique or affective force,83 and while this may not be generalizable to all examples of the historical genre, it certainly applies to Dmitry the Pretender. Bulgarin prefaces his Dmitry with programmatic pronouncements, promising a high degree of historical verisimilitude. He emphasizes his upperclass seventeenth-century characters’ alterity vis-à-vis their n­ ineteenth-­century descendants, insisting that yesterday’s nobles bear little if any resemblance to 78 This was not Bulgarin’s first foray into the genre. In 1824 he published Marina Mniszek, Wife of Dmitry the Pretender (Marina Mnishek, supruga Dimitriia samozvantsa), which was a critical failure. 79 Ungurianu, Plotting History, 23–29. 80 Ibid., 113–14. 81 Bulgarin’s impassioned claims to have followed Karamzin much more closely than Pushkin did should be read in this light. It is not only a matter of who interpreted history in the same way Karamzin had but, rather, of whose text read more like Karamzin’s. 82 Mariia Lazutkina, Samozvanets Lzhedmitrii I mezhdu A. S. Pushkinym i F. V. Bulgarinym: Opyt sravnitel´nogo analiza khudozhestvennogo obraza Lzhedmitriia I v tragedii “Boris Godunov” i romane “Dimitrii samozvanets” (Moscow: Sputnik, 2002), 38. 83 Harry E. Shaw, Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 20.

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today’s. He claims the lower classes are essentially the same in all centuries, however, since peasant society is incapable of meaningful change. Thus, even before the novel proper has begun, Bulgarin has prescribed the workings of transference to his highborn protagonists, who are free to change under the influence of the multiple discourses of their times. By contrast, a static, unvarying recurrence is the fate of his plebeians. Given that Dmitry the Pretender reserves its most vivid description for commoners, recurrence overbalances transference to become the novel’s defining process. Novelists often attempt to deceive their readers with their prefaces, creating a gap between presumptive authorial intent and actual achievement and thereby challenging their audiences to read against the grain. Bulgarin, however, means his preface to be taken at face value. Copious footnotes attest to his use of Russian, Polish, and western European source materials, demonstrating his erudition but imperiling his work’s artistic quality. Detail overrides meaning, with descriptions of banquets devolving into mind-numbing lists of guests and enumerations of delicacies. Portrayals of warships become catalogues of particulars that only the most dedicated aficionado of maritime history would appreciate, while renderings of clothing itemize each stitch of embroidery, every possible accessory—all in quest of historical authenticity. Similarly, Bulgarin’s characters convey a strong sense of their surrounding world’s realia. His peripatetic Dmitry’s wanderings offer an entrée into myriad variegated, dangerous, and ebullient milieux in which character groupings serve as microcosms of seventeenth-century Muscovy’s dysfunctional political system: brigands subvert their fellows in hopes of gaining ascendancy within their band; Polish magnates scheme for personal advantage; and Ukrainians cower in the cracks and interstices where Russian, Polish, and Swedish interests overlap and conflict. All these characters speak their own unique languages and argots, behave according to their own carefully delineated rules, and cherish their own particular dreams for the future. In fairness, Bulgarin must be admired, if not for his economy of means, then at least for his powers of description. Unfortunately, these same characters are largely untutored and, accordingly, misguided, and none of them can rise above their own narrow visions of the good life. False Dmitry, by contrast, is intelligent, educated, and charismatic and, quickly intuiting what each man wants, pledges to supply it. He easily wins supporters as he journeys westward from Moscow to Cracow. Cloaked in mystery, he presents himself variously as Ivanitsky, an orphaned Polish nobleman; Dmitry, the heir to the Russian throne; and Grishka Otrepev, an Orthodox monk. Acting different parts designed to appeal to his different interlocutors, he figures as lover, fighter, and scholar. Ominously, however, it never becomes clear which of these identities—if any—is true. Returning east to

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capture Moscow, Dmitry encounters each of the bands of Cossacks, robbers, and brigands he met earlier. Now, his would-be supporters remind him of promises made, and it becomes increasingly obvious that each of them cherishes personal goals that cannot be merged into one greater vision of the common good. The closer the army comes to Moscow, the more racked it becomes by internal dissent. Each of Dmitry’s allies wants something that the would-be tsar has already offered to another. The world of Dmitry the Pretender is suspended between doomed rulers and disorganized masses. Bulgarin’s Godunov has come to the throne through blood that he has shed, not inherited. Dmitry, by contrast, may be royal since he has Tsarevich Dmitry’s diamond baptismal cross, yet he fails to deliver on his promises. Bulgarin shows even less enthusiasm for the masses. No one among them rises above his own petty concerns; no one sees the damage that factionalism has wrought. The commonweal has evaporated; a sense of hopelessness prevails. Who will save Russia? Certainly not Godunov, who has been consigned to his grave by novel’s end; not Dmitry, who lies naked and dishonored; not the invading Poles, who can barely govern themselves. Against all odds, however, Bulgarin means to provide a savior, however unanticipated. In Dmitry the Pretender’s closing chapter, the narrator abandons his storyline to proclaim: “For the sake of the Church, as for the sake of the nation, may God preserve the Romanovs! ‘Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, o Lord. Lord hear my voice’!”84 Deliverance appears like a bolt from the blue, even though the future Romanov tsar, the nineyear-old Mikhail, has never even appeared in the novel’s pages. Although Bulgarin had managed to bring Ivan Vyzhigin to successful closure, he presumably realized that Dmitry the Pretender’s entire final chapter was untenable. Written and typeset in the form of dramatic dialogue, it dispenses with the conventions of even that most flexible of genres, the novel, by evading prose narrative for fully seven pages. Its final lines—taken from Psalm 130—create an even more jarring generic juxtaposition. The resulting chaos is the more surprising in light of Bulgarin’s critique of Pushkin’s Time of Troubles play: Mikhail Gronas has argued that Bulgarin authored an anonymous 1831 pamphlet that sharply attacked Boris Godunov for, among other things, its weak adherence to generic conventions and its lack of coherent structure.85 Yet Bulgarin had his reasons, however ill-considered, for closing Dmitry the Pretender as he did. 84 Bulgarin, Dimitrii samozvanets, 510. 85 Mikhail Gronas, “Who Was the Author of the First Book (or Rather Booklet) on Pushkin?,” Pushkin Review 11 (2008): 1–31. Additionally, in a review of a German translation of Boris Godunov in the Northern Bee (Severnaia pchela), Bulgarin hinted that Pushkin had relied on Schiller’s Robbers as well as Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake and Byron’s Mazepa (Tsialovskii and Tarkhova, Letopis´ zhizni i tvorchestva Aleksandra Pushkina, 3:414).

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Across Dmitry the Pretender’s hundreds of pages, an omniscient narrator has navigated its mounting turmoil, relating the painful events he experiences in a pessimistic tone; for him to suddenly reverse course by prognosticating a bright Romanov future would be hopelessly out of character. Bulgarin thus attempts to reconcile his narrator’s sedulously created reality with his own need for a transcendently providential ending by simply dispensing with the narrator and resorting to dramatic dialogue. Unfortunately, this does not explain how or why the Romanovs will save Russia, necessitating recourse to scripture. Psalm 130, one of the seven penitential psalms, expresses humanity’s fallibility in the face of temptation, its remorse for its sins, and its trust in the forgiveness of a merciful God. By substituting the first line of the psalm for the final lines of his novel, Bulgarin inscribes the Time of Troubles into a cosmic quest for salvation: God will ultimately save Russia because its people have not only acknowledged the iniquity of embracing Godunov and False Dmitry but also repented after recognizing the “chosenness” of the Romanovs. The psalm constitutes both a moment of revelation for the characters within the fiction and an apotheosis of the Romanovs for readers outside its created world, uniting them in a transcendent experience of grace and mercy. Unfortunately, it also constitutes an act of generic legerdemain that badly mars the novel. A second, complementary reading is also possible. Dmitry the Pretender is distinguished throughout by such a pronounced degree of dialogue that, as M. G. Al´tshuller has pointed out, it resembles drama.86 This, of course, recalls Pushkin, whose Comedy was very much on Bulgarin’s mind as he was working on his own Dmitry text. As noted earlier, the Comedy ends with the crowd’s cry, “Long live Tsar Dmitry Ivanovich!” The people, who have long since forgotten their similarly vociferous enthusiasm for Boris Godunov, have no way of knowing that Dmitry will be dead within the year. The audience, which does, is free to dwell on lessons learned as well as warnings ignored; it draws its own conclusions. By replacing Dmitry the Pretender’s novelistic discourse with dramatic dialogue, Bulgarin unexpectedly evokes the Comedy in his final pages. He also undercuts his own borrowing by predicting the providential advent of the Romanov dynasty, thereby closing the door Pushkin left open—an act of ideological warfare. Bulgarin sees the Romanovs as the saviors of Russia’s troubled seventeenth century just as they are of his own troubled nineteenth. This peculiar closure strategy vitiates Dmitry the Pretender’s finely crafted and heterogeneous descriptive passages and precludes positive critical reception. 86 M. G. Al´tshuller, Epokha Val´tera Skotta v Rossii (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 1996), 112.

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In many ways, the first five hundred pages of Dmitry the Pretender fit the description of the historical novel. György Lukács connects the rise of the ­historical novel with the post-Napoleonic period, when Europeans understood history as a universal, “uninterrupted process of changes.”87 Brian R. Hamnet adds that the historical novel “integrate[s], seamlessly, if possible, reality and imagination.” It searches for roots, origins, and causes and thereby enables the creation of national identities.88 Facilitating multiple realities, it releases its readers from static notions of time.89 Bulgarin’s insistence on overdocumentation occasionally crimps his reader’s imagination, but for the most part, his novel seems to do what it is supposed to. By novel’s end, however, the multiplicity and variety of its imagined worlds have come to threaten Russia’s stability and legality. Reading backward from his own times—in which official Russia completely rejected Napoleon’s experiment and traumatically terminated the Decembrists’ hopes—Bulgarin imposes a contemporary system of political values on a bygone era, reversing the flow of history by mandating the Romanov present as a solution for the Time of Troubles’ past. This retrospective identification of past trauma with the present precludes the possibility of historical change. Bulgarin’s Dmitry the Pretender freezes Russia’s past in a perpetual present.

Dramatic Responses: Alexey Khomyakov and Mikhail Pogodin Pushkin’s play and Bulgarin’s novel offered a study in contrasts, but their choices left large expanses of territory unexplored. The sheer scope of the material boded well for novelistic treatment, but its potential for heightened emotionality begged for further dramatic development. It is therefore unsurprising that two very different authors took up the challenge and reimagined the Dmitry story, bending it to their idiosyncratic philosophical and political purposes. Alexey Stepanovich Khomyakov (1804–1860), one of the founding fathers of the Slavophile movement, attended an early reading of the Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepev, and Pushkin’s unconventional stage adaptation of the Dmitry material provoked him to respond in kind.90 In 1833 87 Lukács, Historical Novel, 19–23. 88 Hamnet, Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1–4. 89 Ibid., 26. 90 On Khomyakov’s desire to respond to Pushkin, see V. A. Koshelev, “Khomiakov i graf A. K. Tolstoi: Russkaia i istoricheskaia mifologiia v literaturnom osmyslenii,” Russkaia ­literatura (2004): 92. For treatments of his life and views, see V. A. Koshelev, Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov: Zhizneopisanie v dokumentakh, v rassuzhdeniiakh i v razyskaniiakh (Moscow:

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he published a historical tragedy in verse titled Dmitry the Pretender,91 which dispenses with Boris Godunov and returns to the eighteenth-century tradition of focusing on Dmitry. Also in eighteenth-century fashion, Khomyakov observes the classical unities: his action takes place in a limited number of venues clustered in or around the center of Moscow; and although his plot is more complex than Sumarokov’s, he subordinates his action to a single overarching theme—Dmitry’s tragic inability to disentangle his dreams from reality. Moreover, Khomyakov’s timeframe is broader than Sumarokov’s, encompassing the period between Dmitry’s triumphant entry into Moscow and his death, even if it is relatively narrow by comparison with Pushkin’s or Bulgarin’s. While the tragedy’s structure is decidedly neoclassical, its protagonist is surprisingly romantic. Endowed with unsurpassed physical strength and personal charm, he not only believes in Russia’s brilliant future but also envisions himself as the benevolent ruler of Europe and its Muslim borderlands. A man of outsized gifts and ambitions,92 Dmitry nevertheless fits easily into the tragedy’s neoclassical structure: as a mythic hero, he is as much a creature of antiquity as of modernity. Khomyakov’s Dmitry is generous and never doubts that his subjects are as well. Always willing to listen to others, he easily falls victim to their desires. Marina, Vasily Shuisky, and his Polish confederates all take advantage of his readiness to please: Dmitry fatally believes in those who injure him. He is also impetuous and inclined to act according to his own wishes. Tragically, then, Dmitry is plagued by an appealing but incompatible combination of conflicting urges that move him to act yet paralyze him. Decades before Turgenev’s famous delineation of Russian literary heroes as Don Quixotes and Hamlets, Khomyakov’s protagonist perishes because he is both. This Dmitry is on a collision course: Moscow’s boyars, merchants, priests, and guards all have too little information, motivating them to act from narrow self-interest, while Dmitry, who commands all the facts, is too ill-disciplined to integrate them. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2000); and Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 179–237. 91 Khomyakov’s first historical tragedy, Ermak, had appeared a year earlier, in 1832. 92 Caryl Emerson also considers Khomyakov’s Dmitry romantic but for somewhat different reasons from mine; as she points out, he listens to no one but himself and thereby condemns himself to lose everything he has striven for (“Pretenders to History: Four Plays for Undoing Pushkin’s Boris Godunov,” Slavic Review 44 [1985]: 267). I believe that Dmitry’s problem is actually a different one; he listens to everyone and, when faced with too many disparate opinions, he falls back on his own inclinations, which are invariably generous but which his enemies construe as soft.

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Swamped by impressions, advice, and interpretations, he attempts to pursue his personal diversions—chiefly, his infatuation with Marina—and at the same time comprehend a vast and diverse country. It never occurs to him that the demands of love and duty might be in conflict. Interestingly, Dmitry’s court fool—who is both ubiquitous and nameless—hears and understands everything. He drops gnomic hints to his fellow characters concerning trouble to come, but they rarely heed him, repeating previous mistakes by mindlessly proclaiming the sacred destiny of one incapable ruler after another. Despite the fool’s realization that Moscow’s misfortunes will continue after Dmitry’s overthrow, Dmitry the Pretender closes, like Pushkin’s Comedy, with the crowd’s acclamation of Vasily Shuisky. This suggests that, for Khomyakov, wisdom comes not only from courtiers or kings but also from those, like the fool, who both attend to their surroundings and make an effort to understand and control them. Knowledge and action must reinforce one another. Unfortunately, this crucial insight evades Dmitry, who might have made a better ruler if only he had listened to both the great and the good—his devoted adviser Pyotr Basmanov—and the humble and the wise— his crafty court “fool.”93 The 1830–1831 Polish insurrection, which came after Pushkin’s Comedy and before Khomyakov’s Dmitry the Pretender, contributes to Khomyakov’s play: “Khomyakov’s tragedy was written under the influence of the Polish uprising . . . [which] led him to replace Pushkin’s internal political conflict with Russia’s struggle against Poland, whose essence, Khomyakov believed, lay in irreconcilable religious sensibilities.”94 Accordingly, Khomyakov’s seventeenth-century Poles are politically and religiously motivated fanatics and schemers.95 A second watershed is the Decembrist Revolt. Lotman characterizes the Decembrists as courageous, energetic, and enterprising—in short, as singularly able to vary their behavioral style according to situational 93 Here it may be that we see in embryonic form the roots of a concept Khomyakov later elaborated as sobornost´, a spiritual harmony or symphony of voices and beliefs constituent to the Orthodox Church. Koshelev has argued persuasively that by 1831–1832 Khomyakov was already an exponent of Slavophile ideas (“Pushkin i Khomiakov o Petre Velikom,” in A. S. Khomiakov: Poet, Philosopher, Theologian ( Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2004), 145–58. For Khomyakov’s development of sobornost´, see S. S. Khoruzhii, “Bogoslovie sobornosti i bogoslovie lichnosti: Simfoniia dvukh putei pravoslavnogo liubomudriia,” in A. S. Khomiakov: Poet, Philosopher, Theologian ( Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Seminary Press, 2004), 38–65. 94 Serman, Pushkin i istoricheskaia drama, 131–32. 95 Emerson also makes this connection in “Pretenders to History,” 266.

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context. Psychologically unprepared for the baseness of authoritarian rulers, they believed that they were accountable only to history.96 Khomyakov’s Dmitry mimics the Decembrists in both his behavioral versatility and his sense of historical accountability. Khomyakov treats him sympathetically and respectfully, always referring to him simply as Dmitry rather than Grishka or “False” Dmitry, but he nevertheless punishes him for the nebulousness and impracticality of his vision.97 Like the Decembrists, Dmitry forfeits his future. Even so, Dmitry the Pretender is less a paean of praise to a static, conservative Russia than a warning about missed opportunities. History is dynamic. It will either move forward in linear, progressive fashion or fall backward on itself, charting a downward-spiraling coil. Khomyakov knows that seventeenthcentury Russia did not evade its death spiral, but he believes that the d­ isturbances of the first quarter of his own century have been, by contrast, safely quelled. His play, however, serves as a warning: since both the internal and the external disruptions of an earlier era reappear in similar incarnations in a later one, it behooves his audience to be on guard. While Dmitry the Pretender enjoyed a degree of critical success in its day—Serman indicates that many members of the reading public preferred it to Pushkin’s Boris Godunov98—it subsequently fell into relative obscurity. Although Pyotr Viazemsky opined in a letter to Ivan Dmitriev that Dmitry the Pretender was “of a kind with Pushkin’s tragedy only more lyrical,”99 other opinions were less kind. Osip Senkovsky indicted the play for its characters’ lack of passion, while Vissarion Belinsky considered it an example of “pseudoclassical tragedy,” which he traced to Narezhny.100 Later generations of viewers seem to have shared similar views: Dmitry the Pretender’s conservative content paired with its neoclassical form ultimately made it appear outdated and naive by comparison with Pushkin’s revolutionary Comedy. In 1835, two years after Khomyakov’s Dmitry the Pretender, Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin published his Historical Portrait of Dmitry the Pretender   96 Lotman, “Decembrist in Daily Life.”   97 Here I part ways with M. Iu. Karusheva, who believes that the play presents Dmitrii’s tragic rebuff of the people’s life spirit (dukh zhizni) and his resultant overthrow (Slavianofil´skaia drama [Arkhangelsk: Primorskii mezhdunarodnyi pedagogicheskii universitet, 1995], 104).   98 Serman, Pushkin i istoricheskaia drama 1830-kh godov, 129.   99 Quoted in ibid. 100 Quoted in Karusheva, Slavianofil´skaia drama, 116, 14.

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(Istoriia v litsakh o Dimitrii samozvantse).101 Pogodin (1800–1875) was a man of many parts—historian, paleographer, journalist, translator, and belletrist—and he cultivated a deep interest in pre-Petrine Russia. A Slavophile like Khomyakov, he inclined toward a philosophy of Russian exceptionalism.102 A professor of history at Moscow University, he was fascinated by the mystery of the child Dmitry’s death in Uglich.103 Pogodin’s Historical Portrait is a drama organized around settings rather than formal acts; dedicated to Pushkin, it opens where the Comedy closes.104 It is, however, only partly imaginative, since it frequently recapitulates the events of the era it depicts by telling rather than showing the audience what has transpired. Indeed, Pogodin readily admits that one of his chief motivations for writing the piece is to elucidate historical events and offer his own personal interpretation of them.105 His Portrait thus functions more as a pendant to his 1829 scholarly article on Tsarevich Dmitry than as a true drama.106 Like Sumarokov and Khomyakov, Pogodin restricts his character set and hones in on a limited number of central themes. Unsurprisingly, the first of these is the iniquity of the Poles, which Bulgarin and Khomyakov had already handled with greater artistry and nuance before him. The second—the pretender’s petty, childlike behavior—comes as more of a surprise, given Pushkin’s 101 Pogodin initially planned to write a trilogy, the third part of which was to deal with Vasily Shuisky (K. Iu. Rogov, “Pogodin, Mikhail Petrovich,” in Russkie pisateli, 1800–1917 [Moscow: Bol´shaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1999], 4:665). 102 A. A. Shirianets, Russkii khranitel´: Konservatizm M. P. Pogodina (Moscow: Russkii mir, 2008), examines Pogodin’s Slavophile views. 103 M. P. Pogodin, “Ob uchastii Godunova v ubienii Tsarevicha Dmitriia,” Moskovskii vestnik (1829), 3:90–126. For Pogodin’s biography, see Rogov, “Pogodin, Mikhail Petrovich,” 661–72; and Dan Ungurianu, “Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Literature in the Age of Pushkin and Gogol. Prose (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1999), 264–71. 104 Forty years after hearing Pushkin read from the Comedy, Pogodin remembered most vividly the scene featuring Pimen. However, his memoirs dwell less on the substance of the scene than on Pushkin’s bearing as he read it (M. P. Pogodin, “Iz vospominanii o Pushkine,” http://az.lib.ru/p/pogodin_m_p/text_1864_pushkin.shtml). 105 This seems appropriate, given that the “historical portrait” is, in Rogov’s words, a generic halfway house between scholarly history and literature (“Pogodin, Mikhail Petrovich,” 665). 106 Even Osip Senkovsky, who was closer to the Bulgarin camp than to Pushkin’s, criticized the play as inartistic: “The historian is true to his calling; the poet is nowhere to be seen.” Quoted in Serman, Pushkin i istoricheskaia drama, 133–34. Less surprisingly, Belinsky offered a sharply negative review in 1835 in Speech (Molva) (see N. V. Gogol´, Kommentarii k pis´mam [Moscow: Direkt-Mediia, 2014], 140).

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much more generous treatment. Pogodin’s approach is reductive. His pretender is less arbitrary than Sumarokov’s or Narezhny’s great villains but also less charming than Pushkin’s, Bulgarin’s, or Khomyakov’s portrayals. A ­talentless, colorless composite, he is a self-absorbed bore who could never, in historical reality, have captured either Russia’s imagination or its crown.107 Thus, the Historical Portrait of Dmitry the Pretender adds nothing to readers’ understanding of the Time of Troubles, nor does it offer new insight into how the seventeenth century might be assimilated to the nineteenth. At play’s end, it is more than a little depressing to hear the people’s by now predictable cry, “Long live our blessed tsar, Vasily Ivanovich!”108

Ringing the Changes on Dmitry: Challenges and Responses Herbert Lindenberger has claimed that public stories—which, as a rule, provide the stuff of historical dramas—change their meanings from one era to the next;109 accordingly, authors anticipate their audience’s knowledge of what has transpired between the time of the play’s action and the time of its composition.110 This paradigm seems apt for the multiple realizations of Russia’s Time of Troubles. In early nineteenth-century Russia, audiences were small but well-informed consumers of drama. It thus makes sense that Russian authors would rely on their audiences’ knowledge of what had transpired in “real” life in the time that had passed since the composition of previous plays. Lotman maintains that the line dividing art from everyday behavior was expunged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and art offered not an imitation of life but, rather, a model for life to imitate.111 Theater, in particular, became disproportionately important, and “the epoch as a whole was 107 Vatsuro calls Pogodin’s Dmitry “silly, negligent, egotistical, and boastful” (“Istoricheskaia tragediia i romanticheskaia drama 1830-kh godov,” in Istoriia russkoi dramaturgii XVII– pervaia polovina XIX veka, ed. Iu. K. Gerasimov and L. M. Lotman [Leningrad: Nauka, 1982], 342). 108 M. P. Pogodin, Istoriia v litsakh o Dimitrii Samozvantse (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1835), 183. 109 Herbert Lindenberger, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 2. 110 Ibid., 6. 111 Iu. M. Lotman, “The Theater and Theatricality as Components of Early Nineteenth-Century Culture,” in The Semiotics of Russian Culture, ed. Ann Shukman and trans. Judith Armstrong (Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 1984), 145.

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­theatricalized.”112 Thus, politics informed theater and theater informed politics in an ever-evolving circular dynamic. When Sumarokov produced the first dramatization of the Godunov/ Dmitry material, he manipulated his subject matter in order to fashion it into a facsimile of contemporary life. His Dmitry owes little to seventeenth-­century historical sources but a great deal indeed to eighteenth-century r­ealities. Narezhny, in this respect at least, followed suit, creating art from life rather than life from art. Both men willingly exaggerated their seventeenth-century protagonists’ villainies in order to draw attention to acts of eighteenth-century royal malfeasance that could not be openly discussed. In their defense, they had few historical sources to aid them; the well-articulated False Dmitry of Karamzin’s History was yet to appear. Pushkin’s purpose was very different. The events that intervened between the completion of his Comedy and Narezhny’s play were a matter of public knowledge and open conversation; there was no call to critique them through opaque fictions. The Russia of Pushkin’s time was not an open society in today’s understanding, but it was a place where topics like dynastic legitimacy and the influence of the west on indigenous politics and culture could be debated. Pushkin’s task then, was not to reveal concealed truths but to reexamine acknowledged ones. Lindenberger has suggested that a historical play is experienced at three different levels: the historical material it enacts; the theatrical conventions it applies to its material; and its historical continuity with the present.113 With his Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepev, Pushkin revolutionizes Russian practice at all three levels. Armed with both the text and the footnotes of Karamzin’s History, he reads deeply in scores of sources and offers a plausible, if not restrictively factual, rendering of the past. Unlike Karamzin, who must intersperse his accounts of Godunov and Dmitry’s conflict with other information—the conduct of foreign affairs at the time, the fates of other historical actors—Pushkin focuses heavily on his two protagonists, exploring their psychologies. But like Karamzin, he takes an expansive view of history and spreads his action out. He also makes clear that Dmitry, the protagonist of Sumarokov’s and Narezhny’s tragedies, is best understood in comparison and contrast with Godunov. In addition to attending to the historical record in unprecedented ways, Pushkin breaks new ground at Lindenberger’s second level, that of ­theatrical 112 Ibid., 147. 113 Lindenberger, Historical Drama, 10.

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convention. By removing the traditional scaffolding of five acts, he frees himself to range across time and space and shift his attention back and forth between his two protagonists. This, in turn, allows him to elaborate on parallels that a traditional drama might be hard-pressed to accommodate. Again, he imitates Karamzin. Moreover, by presenting not just the facts of history but also their context, Pushkin lays the ground for a new tradition that focuses on the beginnings as well as the ends of reigns and adds layers of nuance to characters who had previously been portrayed monologically. His dramatic scenes of recognition are similarly nuanced: although Dmitry enters the play filled with ambition, he constantly juggles identities, defying easy definition and embracing both authenticity and pretense. Godunov is equally difficult to pin down. His initial dynastic gambit marks him as an agent of change, but his subsequent paralysis ties him to continuity. Pushkin leaves his Comedy (and to a slightly lesser extent, Boris Godunov) open-ended, with Sumarokov’s and Narezhny’s final scenes of retribution hinted at but unrealized. He thereby aligns Dmitry’s past with his own present. Having parted from his pretender at a moment of triumph, he conveys the impression that all things are still possible: even if the omens forebode that Dmitry will end his bid for power as ingloriously as Godunov, that end is not yet. This speaks to the Russia of Pushkin’s present, for which the possibility of a positive outcome of recent traumatic events is real. By leaving his ending open, Pushkin shows that, while history often seems to be tilted toward repetition, it is never wholly subjected to it. Pushkin’s epigones reject most—and, in some instances, all—his innovations. Bulgarin, for example, borrows and even expands on Pushkin’s embrace of history. Even when his heavy-handed approach threatens the ­artistic integrity of his novel, Bulgarin hews to a densely documented r­e-­creation of events. To do so, however, he jettisons the dramatic form at which his final chapter hints.114 He likewise rejects the nondirective relationship that Pushkin posits between past and present. The past of Bulgarin’s novel, which predicates a triumphalist vision of the advent of the Romanov dynasty, actually reaches out to encircle and dictate the nineteenth-century present. Pogodin does Bulgarin one worse, utilizing dramatic conventions but ­diluting the ­experimental form of Pushkin’s Comedy. He neither challenges nor ­provokes his audience, offering 114 This may have suited Bulgarin for more reasons than one; as Lindenberger has pointed out, drama is distinguished by a greater heroic impulse than the novel (Historical Drama, 56), and Bulgarin was at pains not to create heroes out of either Godunov or Otrepev.

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predictable content predictably packaged and supplying an older, closed, and retributive ending. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt offer a concise formulation of the pleasures and challenges attendant on authors’ endeavors to implicate history in art: That both the literary work and the anthropological (or historical) ­anecdote are texts, that both are fictions in the sense of things made, that both are shaped by the imagination and by the available resources of narration and description helped make it possible to conjoin them; their ineradicable differences—that neither is purpose-built for the other, that they make sharply different claims upon the actual, that they are ­incommensurable and virtually impossible to foveate simultaneously— made the conjunction powerful and compelling.115

Pushkin embraces the pleasures associated with conjoining two complementary types of narrative but is, at the same time, alive to the challenges the procedure implies. No other writer in the 1830s can match his understanding or duplicate his desire. Although Khomyakov’s Dmitry the Pretender is both more challenging and better written than Pogodin’s, it still represents a conservative step away from Pushkin. Both dramatists compose their plays after The Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepev, but they are archaists, followers as much of Sumarokov as of Pushkin. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the novel will become an accepted and even privileged genre, but early nineteenth-century authors prefer to treat their material dramatically. By the early nineteenth century, Dmitry dramas had accrued a number of set pieces: prophecies uttered by fools (whether holy or not); self-contradictory and superstitious proclamations generated by the faceless masses; wrenching soliloquies by Dmitry’s “mother”; enthusiastic cries of “Long live X!” in the opening and closing scenes of each play. Each of these elements has great audience appeal, and each is potentially dialogic and dramatic. Drama is an ideal framework into which to insert these set pieces and is, moreover, an excellent vehicle for showcasing the dangerous divisions that led to the Troubles. Even Bulgarin, who opts for the novelistic form, operates with a surfeit of dialogue.

115 Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 31.

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Additionally, a reluctance to examine Dmitry and Godunov in the same work seems to have militated against the novel’s inherent breadth and scope. Again, Pushkin constitutes an exception. He allots roughly equal space to each of his protagonists even as he manages to create a coherent plot. Bulgarin, who, with the benefit of the novel’s broader format, should have been able to plumb both men’s characters, nevertheless ends up giving Godunov short shrift. It is simply too difficult for most writers to juxtapose Godunov, the transgressor whom the Russian people “elected” to the throne, with Dmitry, the transgressor who stole the throne. Moreover, in most of the plays Dmitry either rapes or thuggishly harries the beautiful and virtuous Xenya, which makes him appear much worse than Godunov, who, for all his faults, is generally portrayed as a decent family man. Dmitry—the pretender, usurper, and rapist—can be portrayed as an unalloyed villain—much more the stuff of tragedy than of prose fiction. Is one of these two villains more culpable than the other? Is one more attractive? Most authors seem to have avoided answering these questions, but once they decided to cast Dmitry as their villain, the compactness and immediacy of drama became an attractive option.116 Curiously, however, the era’s various Dmitry texts seem to want to have it both generic ways: its one Dmitry novel sometimes begs to be spoken aloud, while its dramas sometimes demand to be read. As noted earlier, Pushkin’s great Time of Troubles play has rarely been performed on stage; indeed, it has often been considered unstageable—it is almost always read rather than acted. In a related vein, Belinsky viewed Khomyakov’s Dmitry as lacking in drama, while Fyodor Batyushkov found it more suitable for reading than staging.117 Bulgarin, in reverse fashion, increasingly inclined toward dramatic form as he neared his novel’s end. This inclination to lessen the formal gaps between written/novelistic and spoken/dramatic discourse can be partly accounted for by romanticism’s expanded focus on prose forms as well as by its loosening of prescriptive genre constrictions. But, at least in Khomyakov’s case, romantic considerations still yield to neoclassical ones, complicating matters and necessitating additional explanation. Karamzin’s example undoubtedly contributes to this eroding of generic borders. Pogodin and Khomyakov differed substantively from Pushkin and 116 Striedter suggests that drama’s presentation of past history is quite different from the historical novel’s. In the novel, the presence of the narrator provides epic distance, while drama provides the immediacy of the scenic present (“Poetic Genre and the Sense of History in Pushkin,” 298–99). 117 Karusheva, Slavianofil´skaia drama, 117–18.

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Bulgarin with respect to Karamzin’s views, deprecating his focus on Russia’s rulers rather than its people.118 Karamzin’s manner of writing, however, was a different matter. The great historian offered abundant examples of blurred boundaries—most saliently, between history and literature—and his prose was filled with dramatic affect. Tsars and pretenders leapt from his pages into readers’ imaginations, infusing historical narrative with drama. I believe that the early nineteenth century’s Dmitry authors attempted similar generic sleights of hand, inflecting drama with the more pronounced narrativity of prose and, in Bulgarin’s case, prose with the greater affect of drama. In this respect, each of the era’s Dmitry works is quite different from Sumarokov’s, even if less so from Narezhny’s. Finally, these works converge by virtue of their shared scaffoldings of mystery. Did Godunov really order Dmitry’s death? If so, might Dmitry have survived the murderous plot? Would Dmitry truly have sold his countrymen to the Polish Jesuits? Lindenberger considers mystery a key ingredient in historical drama: “The attitude toward history most favorable to the historical ­dramatist . . . is one which leaves several explanations open at once.”119 In the best of the Time of Troubles plays, one or more of history’s perplexing questions remains unanswered, leaving the audience free to contemplate alternative scenarios. Not one of Russia’s early nineteenth-century authors advocates a “democratic” solution to Russia’s dilemmas, however. The townsfolk and brigands who populate their pages may be inherently interesting characters (in the cases of Pushkin and Bulgarin, for example), or mere background figures (as with the other playwrights of the period), but they are neither informed nor forward-looking enough to see beyond their own interests. Their seemingly passive and automatic acceptance of new aspirants to the throne is deceptive; it masks a deep-seated cynical absorption in their own personal advantage. The common man is woefully unfit to determine his nation’s fate. His sole concern is for how he might hoodwink the next tsar. Neither is rule by an aristocratic oligarchy a viable choice. In the rare instances of well-intentioned advisers, who unselfishly come to Dmitry’s aid despite his determination to ignore them, authors favor a mixed model of 118 For a summary of Pogodin’s response to Karamzin, see Hans Rothe, “Karamzin and His Heritage: History of a Legend,” in Essays on Karamzin: Russian Man-of-Letters, Political Thinker, Historian, 1766–1826, ed. Joel L. Black (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975), 152–57. On Khomyakov, see Karusheva, Slavianofil´skaia drama, 101. 119 Lindenberger, Historical Drama, 132.

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g­ overnance based on a social contract between the ruler and the upper classes. Conversely, and more frequently, Dmitry’s advisers turn out to be at least as self-interested as the pretender himself. In this case, the main consideration is the person of the autocrat—if he is to provide better leadership than his boyars, he must be a wise and benevolent man. The weaknesses displayed by Boris Godunov, False Dmitry, and Vasily Shuisky are very real but ultimately historical accidents. In Bulgarin’s created world, they will soon be swept away by a providentially gifted representative of the House of Romanov. Sumarokov and Narezhny, writing in the eighteenth century, concern themselves primarily with the dangers of tyranny. Rather than demonizing Ivan IV, however, they imitate their seventeenth-century forebears by indicting Dmitry, which allows them to differentiate despotism from rule by birth and to site despots squarely in the context of usurpation. Both Sumarokov and Narezhny hold monarchy blameless but condemn usurpers. By contrast, 1830s authors have watched both Napoleon and the Decembrists attempt to replace Russia’s monarchy. For them, the presenting problem is not tyranny but legitimacy. The 1820s and 1830s literary incarnations of Dmitry audition for the role of good ruler, offering a tantalizing dream of participatory government. Pushkin, Bulgarin, and Khomyakov all, in one way or another, paint him as a man who, unlike Godunov, lives among others. However, his very approachableness—at least for Bulgarin and Khomyakov—spells his downfall. Dmitry tries to be all things to all men and, of course, fails: Bulgarin’s usurper succumbs to the divergent demands of the lower classes, while Khomyakov’s yields to his courtiers. The soon-to-be tsar of Pushkin’s Comedy, by contrast, exits the stage triumphant. Unfortunately, retribution lurks just beyond the confines of the text, encoded in the crowd’s cry of “Long live Tsar Dmitry Ivanovich!” Early nineteenth-century Russian writers’ fascination with the Dmitry material betrays a preoccupation with the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. In an age of intense social ferment, each of the writers who took up Dmitry surveyed the alternatives to the reigning autocracy with deep misgivings. The questions they asked and the answers they proposed were many and varied, and yet their ultimate conclusions were surprisingly similar: there was no viable alternative to autocracy.

CHAPTER 4

Two Visions of Reform: 1866 The law’s like a cart shaft; it goes where you turn it. —Russian saying

A

new cluster of Dmitry fiction emerged in 1866, when Alexander Ostrovsky staged his Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky (Dmitrii samozvanets i Vasilii Shuiskii) in Moscow and Nikolay Chaev mounted yet another play titled Dmitry the Pretender (Dimitrii samozvanets) in St. Petersburg. Additionally, Nikolay Kostomarov enriched historiography with his account of Muscovy’s Time of Troubles, 1604–1613 (Smutnoe vremia Moskovskogo gosudarstva, 1604–1613), which offered fresh perspectives on Dmitry’s much-contested life.

The Crimean War, Judicial Reform, and the 1863–1864 Polish Uprising Like earlier Time of Troubles texts, Ostrovsky’s and Chaev’s plays probe correspondences between past and present tribulations—in this case, the social disruptions occasioned by unexpected military failure. At the outbreak of hostilities in Crimea in 1853, Russia’s imperial court had heightened popular expectations by framing the conflict as both a new instantiation of the empire’s victory over Napoleon and a glorious chapter in the age-old battle between Orthodox Russia, the Islamic east, and the Catholic west.1 Accustomed to battlefield successes, Russians were dumbfounded by their stunning defeat in 1856. As Olga Maiorova has shown, the court commonly used commemorations of military victories to resolve problems of national identity.2 Since it had   1 Olga E. Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 29–31.   2 Ibid., 96.

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portentously interpreted the Crimean conflict as a quest for legitimate order,3 defeat thus conduced to a sense of shame, national disorder, and lost existential grounding. The army’s abysmal performance in the Crimean War convinced even Alexander II that, for Russia to maintain its place as a great power, vital military and civil institutions would have to be reformed.4 In 1861 Alexander signed the Emancipation Manifesto, which freed Russia’s serfs and triggered a series of ancillary enactments—most saliently, the November 1864 Judicial Reform Act. Previously, serf owners had exercised justice over their peasants while the government had tried members of other classes in its inquisitorial courts. Now Alexander’s newly created state institutions aimed to curb highhandedness and corruption. The reforms mandated open trials, juries, and oral advocacy. For the first time in its history, Russia acquired an independent judiciary.5 Initially, the judicial reforms enjoyed widespread support. By throwing courtrooms open to the public, they demystified the administration of justice; by creating juries, they decreased arbitrary judgments and sentences; by replacing the unpredictable inquisitorial system with an adversarial one, they safeguarded defendants’ rights. Whereas the older, traditional system had allowed despotic authority to go unchecked, the new one was supposed to create an active, engaged citizenry.6 Early on, however, radicals denounced the reforms’ presupposition of a legality that did not yet exist in Russia.7 Many liberals and conservatives soon voiced their own critiques. Liberals expected juries to serve as models for citizen involvement in other politicized spheres of Russian life. When new avenues for participatory democracy failed to materialize, some among them faulted the jury system. Conservatives, by contrast, believed that the courts undercut ­autocratic

  3 Ibid., 34.   4 For an in-depth treatment of the Great Reforms, see W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990).  5 On the judicial reform, see Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). See also Alexander K. Afanas´ev, “Jurors and Jury Trials in Imperial Russia, 1866–1885,” trans. Willard Sunderland, in Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881, ed. Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 214–30.  6 Wortman, Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 245.   7 The radical intelligentsia was resolutely antilegal, believing that the fate of the individual should be subsumed to that of the whole (Laura Engelstein, “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” American Historical Review 98 [1993]: 346–47).

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prerogatives by issuing judgments that closely approximated legislation.8 Convinced that juries would undermine their powers,9 provincial governors shared the conservatives’ unease. Meanwhile, state prosecutors feared a rather different problem—Russian jurors’ pronounced predilection for heeding the dictates of Christian morality rather than secular legality. Since trials took place “within the larger cultural framework shared by most Russians, the Orthodox Christianity that urged forgiveness and mercy,”10 Russian juries repeatedly handed down acquittals, even when defendants freely confessed their guilt. Nineteenth-century Russian responses to the Judicial Reform Act map onto two sets of oppositions: legality (zakonnost´) vs. arbitrariness (proizvol) and law (zakon) vs. justice (pravosudie). Kevin M. F. Platt defines zakonnost´ as the rule of law, the guarantee of universally protected rights. Proizvol, by contrast, signifies a “tendency to view any position of authority as one of ­complete and unlimited power over subordinates.”11 The Judicial Reform Act’s avowed goal was to replace arbitrariness with legality, but as with all complex legislation, it sometimes missed its mark. On the one hand, periods of political reaction introduced ambiguity into legal proceedings.12 On the other, law instituted from above, however well-intentioned, is always a form of ­“correct arbitrariness,”13 an individual rather than consensual application of legality. Moreover, many Russians suspected that reform was instituted “not to instill a legal culture in the population at large but to increase the effectiveness of the law as a force of social control.”14 Thus, while the Judicial   8 In Wortman’s words, “For the Russian autocracy to accept an independent judiciary required that it betray its essence and cease to be the Russian autocracy” (Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 285). Wortman also noted: “Both judges and lawyers entertained legal concepts quite different from those prevalent in the autocracy: they regarded the law not as the product of the monarch’s will, but as the creation of legal experts and professionals, educated in the law and trained in the courts” (“The Great Reforms and the New Courts,” in Dostoevsky in Context, ed. Deborah A. Martinsen and Olga Maiorova [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015], 18).  9 Wortman, Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 275. 10 Louise McReynolds, Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 9. 11 Platt, History in a Grotesque Key, 71. Platt looks at a set of texts different from mine with an eye toward elucidating one particular outcome of the reforms (“the dream of re-creating Russian society by revolutionary means” [118]) rather than fictive writers’ evaluation of the reforms themselves. On the question of zakonnost´ and proizvol, see also Lincoln, Great Reforms, 52. 12 Platt, History in a Grotesque Key, 67. 13 Ibid., 118. 14 Harriet Murav, Russia’s Legal Fictions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 57.

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Reform Act made significant inroads against arbitrariness, its implementation was uneven and problematic.15 The second opposition, law vs. justice, proved equally difficult to navigate. Prior to the Judicial Reform Act, much of the country lived by customary law, which was highly localized, consensual, and embedded in the practice of everyday life.16 Postreform law, by contrast, offered “a mechanistic commitment to clear, codified rules and legal processes.”17 Russians associated customary law with moral righteousness and postreform law with calculating objectivity.18 Although western European legal systems also set legality and ethics at variance from time to time, their overarching evolution moved in the direction of “a perfect equilibrium of law and morality.”19 Russia, however, was different: in the popular mind, the Judicial Reform Act never closed the gap between law and justice.20 By the late eighteenth century, Russian authors noted the breach and began to examine the plight of individual human beings haplessly suspended between legality/arbitrariness and law/justice,21 a tendency that would sharpen and intensify by the mid-nineteenth. As we shall see, Ostrovsky’s and Chaev’s Dmitry plays exemplify literary transference, fabricating anachronistic, seventeenth-century Russian jury trials in order to debate the perils and promises of nineteenth-century legal reform. Additionally, however, both pieces model cultural recurrence, maligning Dmitry’s seventeenth-century Polish supporters in ways that speak to subsequent conflicts with Poland in general and the 1863 uprising in particular.

15 On this question, see Girish Bhat, “The Rule of Zakon: The Criminal Cassation Department and Legality in Late Imperial Russia, 1866–94,” Russian Review 72 (2013): 622–46. 16 Joan Neuberger, “Popular Legal Cultures: The St. Petersburg Mirovoi sud,” in Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881, ed. Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 231. 17 Bhat, “Rule of Zakon,” 624. 18 Naomi Olson, “The Problem of the Law: Nikolai Gogol and Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2015), 3. 19 Theodore Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 17. 20 For a legal scholar’s view of this persistent gap, see Jessica Wilson, “Russia’s Cultural Aversion to the Rule of Law,” Columbia Journal of East European Law 2 (2008): 195–232. 21 For studies of Russian literature and the law ranging from the literature of Kievan Rus through the present day, see Platt, History in a Grotesque Key; Gary Rosenshield, Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, the Jury Trial, and the Law (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); Murav, Russia’s Legal Fictions; Amy D. Ronner, Dostoevsky and the Law (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2015); and Olson, “Problem of the Law.”

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The 1863 Polish Uprising began as a protest against military conscription that spread eastward into Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, ultimately threatening Russia proper. Alexander brutally crushed the insurgents, provoking western Europe’s condemnation and sparking the growth of a defensive ethnic particularism in Russia.22 The Slavophiles reacted in predictably angry fashion to what they interpreted as Polish aggression,23 and even Alexander Herzen, a Westernizer who generally sympathized with Poland, condemned the uprising as a Catholic affront to Russian Orthodoxy.24 The conservative Moscow press, overtly likening the events of 1863 to the Polish invasion of Muscovy during the Time of Troubles,25 almost certainly played a role in galvanizing Ostrovsky and Chaev to pen historical dramas showcasing scheming, unscrupulous Poles.

Nikolay Kostomarov: A Populist Historian’s Approach Nikolay Ivanovich Kostomarov (1817–1885), the son of a Russian nobleman and a Ukrainian serf, believed that Russia’s common people constituted its national core.26 Determined to incorporate their lives into his studies of the past yet constrained by a paucity of written sources, Kostomarov filled 22 L. R. Lewitter documents the strong sympathy for the Poles that arose in Great Britain at the time of the insurrection in “The Polish Cause as Seen in Great Britain, 1830–1863,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 28 (1995): 35–61. On the response to the uprising, see Andrzej Walicki, “The Slavophile Thinkers and the Polish Question in 1863,” in Polish Encounters, Russian Identity, ed. David L. Ransel and Bożena Shallcross (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 89. 23 Nikolay Strakhov sited the cause of the uprising in the Poles’ cultural superiority vis-à-vis the Russians, setting off an avalanche of criticism (cited in Walicki, “Slavophile Thinkers,” 94). Yury Samarin considered the uprising “a sharp wedge driven by Latinism into the very heart of the Slavic world” (quoted in Walicki, “Slavophile Thinkers,” 92). Pogodin, whose views on Poland changed over time, interpreted the failure of the uprising as proof that Poland was destined to be tied to Russia permanently ( Joseph L. Black, “M. P. Pogodin: A Russian Nationalist Historian and the ‘Problem’ of Poland,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 1 [1973]: 60–69). 24 Ibid., 94. 25 Olga E. Maiorova, “War as Peace: The Trope of War in Russian Nationalist Discourse during the Polish Uprising of 1863,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6 (2005): 514. 26 Kostomarov was not the first to believe that the people should be Russian historians’ primary focus. In his many monographs Mikhail Pogodin, the son of a freed serf, largely focused on the people in Russian history, thereby challenging Karamzin’s focus on grand princes and tsars.

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in historical lacunae with ethnographical insights. He was particularly fascinated by the Time of Troubles and devoted several monographs to it, including Heroes of the Time of Troubles (Geroi smutnago vremeni), Pretenders and Prophets (Samozvantsy i proroki), and Muscovy’s Time of Troubles. The last of these was initially published in Herald of Europe almost simultaneously with Chaev’s and Ostrovsky’s plays, testifying to a rich, multidisciplinary interest in early modern Russian history. Although Muscovy’s Time of Troubles ultimately belongs to a different discursive sphere from the plays, it reads very much like a work of fiction, easily drawing its readers into its dramatic narrative. Kostomarov reads deeply and widely in primary sources and interrogates earlier historians’ assumptions. Focusing almost exclusively on Dmitry, he notes a rumor that the child tsarevich was spirited away by well-wishers en route to Uglich and raised elsewhere, while another child was reared—and murdered—in Uglich in his stead. Kostomarov passes the story on without comment, leaving the question of his hero’s identity open.27 He makes clear, however, that his Dmitry is neither Pushkin’s erudite renegade monk nor Khomyakov’s traitor to the Russian faith; rather, he is a masterful man of action. This more open-ended approach to the problem of Dmitry’s identity is characteristic of the post-Pushkinian period. Although Kostomarov draws no explicit parallels between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, he faults Dmitry for sacrificing his people’s welfare to his infatuation with Marina Mniszek, signaling his engagement in mid-nineteenth-century Russia’s debate over zakonnost´ and proizvol.

Alexander Ostrovsky: Autocracy and Self-Interest In 1866 Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky’s (1823–1886) Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky opened in Moscow. By this juncture—the halfway point in a remarkable forty-year-long career in the theater—Ostrovsky had established himself as Russia’s foremost playwright. He had earned the prestigious Uvarov Prize and been elected to the Academy of Sciences. Ultimately, he would complete almost fifty plays. 27 Thomas Prymak, “Mykola Kostomarov as a Historian,” in Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 340. It is interesting that Friedrich Schiller also mooted Dmitry’s possible legitimacy in his unfinished Demetrius, which was not staged until 1857. Pushkin hewed closely to Karamzin in this regard, but later Russian writers were increasingly willing to reconsider.

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As a young man, Ostrovsky enrolled in Moscow University’s Law Faculty. He dropped his studies after espousing the theater but supported himself for a time with a position as court clerk. He was thus well positioned to judge the workings of Russia’s legal system. In 1856 he embarked on an extended voyage of discovery along the Volga, over the course of which he developed a keen interest in local history and social mores. Fascinated by what he had seen during his travels, he began to write folkloric and historical plays in which he reevaluated received notions of the nation’s past and posited new commonalities between bygone days and his own nineteenth century.28 Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky is the third of Ostrovsky’s five historical dramas.29 As its subtitle suggests (A Dramatic Chronicle in Two Parts), the play’s structure is somewhat unconventional: Ostrovsky divides it into two sections, which he further subdivides into scenes. Ostrovsky graphs this divide along a temporal axis—Part 1 deals with June and July 1605, while Part 2 covers April and May 1606. As a result, Ostrovsky is able to juxtapose the nation’s optimism vis-à-vis Tsarevich Dmitry’s early triumphs with its pessimism one short year later in the face of Tsar Dmitry’s riotous living and forfeiture of his “patrimony.” In Part 1 of Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky, Dmitry is a mercurial but honorable figure who represents the introspective thinker, charismatic leader, and wise statesman; by Part 2, however, he has abandoned this complex persona and embraced a radically simplified one—the lovelorn dupe. The play’s second eponymous hero,30 Dmitry’s archrival Shuisky, is, by contrast, an overwhelmingly static figure: in both halves of the play he is a duplicitous and manipulative schemer. If Dmitry’s descent from Part 1 into foolishness in Part 2 serves as a cautionary illustration of tyranny in the process of becoming, then Shuisky’s unyielding sameness in both parts freezes despotism into an enduring state of being. In the contest between Dmitry—a protean, 28 Oddly, there is relatively little English-language Ostrovsky criticism. Marjorie L. Hoover’s Alexander Ostrovsky (Boston: Twayne, 1981) offers a brief biography and focuses on a limited number of plays. For a biography in Russian, see L. M. Lotman, “Ostrovskii, Aleksandr Nikolaevich,” in Russkie pisateli, 1800–1917: Biograficheskii slovar´ (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1999), 4:465–73. 29 Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky was Ostrovsky’s own personal favorite among his historical plays (see S. I. Kormilov, “Printsip istorizma v istoricheskikh dramakh A. N. Ostrovskogo,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, Seriia 9: Filologiia 2 (1981): 9. 30 A. A. Chumachenko rather astonishingly considers the play’s unnamed, politically progressive baker to be its true hero, thereby confusing ideological fitness with dramatic stature (“Geroi istoricheskoi dramaturgii A. N. Ostrovskogo,” Filologicheskie nauki 6 [1986]: 26).

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erratic, but also humane leader—and Shuisky, an unswervingly self-absorbed careerist, Shuisky wins and the nation loses. The Dmitry of Ostrovsky’s Part 1 figures as a just but merciful judge. When his chief adviser, Fyodor Basmanov, brings him irrefutable evidence that Vasily Shuisky has been plotting against him, Dmitry convenes a jury to hear the evidence rather than rushing to judgment by himself. Perplexed by the novelty of their task, his jurors attempt to decide matters as they believe Dmitry’s “father,” Ivan the Terrible, would have: hewing to time-honored practice, they decree death for Shuisky and exile for his kin. Although Prince Vasily Golitsyn, one of the play’s more vocal boyars, approves the ruling—“The people are foolish, muddle-headed, and ungovernable, but they’ve made a just decision”—he nevertheless laments Dmitry’s democratic approach to justice. “It’s not the people’s business to sit in judgment on the boyars,” he says.31 Like a good reformer, Dmitry confirms the jury’s verdict but commutes its death sentence to exile and loss of privileges. Throughout the remainder of the play’s first part, Dmitry’s friends and foes berate him for having delegated the power to judge to his inferiors; Dmitry himself defends the wisdom of his decision. The trial scene forms the centerpiece of Part 1 and allows Ostrovsky to probe one of his play’s central themes—whether it is better to cleave to a customary, autocratic mode of rule or embrace a new way of governing. Shuisky, the spokesman for the majority of Moscow’s boyars and churchmen, supports the old ways: in his view, Dmitry has introduced an unwarranted degree of innovation. Shuisky, however, fails to mention his own intention to seize the throne, which is every bit as novel as Dmitry’s court. Shuisky’s ostensible embrace of the past is thus a red herring. The issue he hones in on, however—the viability (or lack thereof) of a new, improved form of governance—is very real. Ostrovsky frames Shuisky’s trial by jury anachronistically, of course, and his Dmitry defends it on equally anachronistic grounds—it will guarantee impartiality, since Dmitry’s personal prejudices will play no part in determining Shuisky’s guilt.32 Here the seventeenth-century Dmitry subscribes to the 31 A. N. Ostrovskii, Dmitrii samozvanets i Vasilii Shuiskii, in A. N. Ostrovskii, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1960), 5:62. McReynolds has noted the sense of incredulity that the new juries provoked among certain sectors of the upper classes: “Even more remarkable . . . was the reality that yesterday’s serfs could decode the fates of their former masters” (Murder Most Russian, 8). 32 It is curious that Ostrovsky was often censured for writing his plays too objectively. Contemporary critics expected him to stake out an ideological position and defend

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nineteenth-century concept of legality or zakonnost´. Unfortunately, the play’s jurors are creatures of arbitrariness, or proizvol, incapable of sharing Dmitry’s lofty understanding of justice: they proclaim with one unthinking voice, “God has ordered us to execute traitors.”33 Even Dmitry’s more sharp-witted supporters inveigh against his newfangled notions; Basmanov declares of Dmitry: “he’s a good tsar, but he’s young and overtrusting. He’s toying with the crown of Monomakh, and with his head, and with us all.”34 Like the unsophisticated members of the jury, Basmanov is moved by considerations of expedience, a more calculating variant of arbitrariness. As the play progresses, he continues to give Dmitry practical, down-to-earth advice, and Dmitry continues to ignore it. Ultimately, the unheeding tsar will pay for this naiveté with his life.35 Part 1 of Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky is, of course, only one of many nineteenth-century fictional representations of trial by jury: Dostoevsky famously pokes holes in the institution of the jury trial in The Brothers Karamazov, while Tolstoy employs a badly mismanaged trial to devastating effect in the opening pages of Resurrection. Other examples could be adduced. Ostrovsky, however, takes on the institution of trial by jury a mere two years after the Judicial Reform Act. His critique of procedures is perforce tentative and prospective. Additionally, he must remember that the events he portrays are supposed to have taken place in the early seventeenth century; he therefore offers only an approximation of a true jury trial. Dmitry himself selects the jurors and blithely alters their sentence to suit his own purposes; Shuisky speaks in his own defense, but no professional legal counsel advises him.36 Does Ostrovsky mean for his audience to applaud Dmitry’s innovation or condemn it as hypocrisy, an instance of proizvol dressed up to look like zakonnost´? The answer lies in Part 2. it, but Ostrovsky insisted on his right to present life the way he found it (L. M. Lotman, “Dramaturgiia Ostrovskogo v svete problem sovremennoi kul´tury: Voprosy i razdumiia,” Russkaia literatura 4 [1987]: 117). Public opinion varied quite substantially in 1866 regarding the validity of judgments issued by the sovereign as compared with judgments reached by the judiciary (Wortman, Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 2). 33 Ostrovskii, Dmitrii samozvanets i Vasilii Shuiskii, 53. 34 Ibid., 65. 35 The historical Dmitry did in fact try Shuisky publicly, if not by jury. He acted as prosecutor and called for the death sentence but, chastised by the patriarch, commuted the sentence to exile (Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War, 207). 36 As Wortman has pointed out, the defendant in a prereform trial was allowed no defense. He had right to appeal the verdict, but only after a sentence had been determined (Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 238).

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Part 2 takes up Dmitry’s saga several days before his death, when the hapless tsar has become wholly incapable of reconciling his angry boyars to his arrogant Polish allies and ambitious wife. In the midst of a dizzying deluge of discontent, Shuisky plots treason while Dmitry toys with plans for a war against the Crimean Tatars. A previously unimportant character, the chancellery secretary Osipov, now appears. Egged on by Shuisky, he publicly unmasks Dmitry: “Verily, you are no tsar at all but merely a defrocked monk!”37 An enraged Dmitry responds, “You, Osipov, desire your own death, and in truth you have deserved it. Go, then, to your execution!” Once Dmitry’s temper has cooled, he pauses to reconsider, “Should I pardon him or not?”38 Dmitry ultimately decides that the wretched secretary is unworthy of mercy and condemns him to his fate. In Part 1 of Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky, Ostrovsky insistently probes the puzzle of Dmitry’s merciful, self-endangering treatment of Shuisky but withholds the key to its decoding. In Part 2, he introduces the lowly Osipov in order to dilute Dmitry’s gloss of zakonnost´ with a dose of proizvol: under the good-natured tsar’s veneer of liberality lies a core of despotism,39 the autocrat’s Achilles’ heel. Once Osipov has unmasked Dmitry, there is no further possibility of trial by jury; Dmitry acts alone and arbitrarily. In Ostrovsky’s created world, autocrats whose star is in the ascendant can afford to toy with democratic notions of legality, but when their subjects threaten them, they invariably revert to despotic type. Whereas domestic reform constitutes the core of Ostrovsky’s Part 1, international intrigue assumes center stage in Part 2. Tatishchev condemns Dmitry’s Polish-inspired Jesuit academies as well as his intention to ameliorate living conditions for Muscovy’s Muslims, Jews, and Catholics. Mstislavsky refuses to serve in Dmitry’s proposed Crimean campaign, and Shuisky denounces it as an unwarranted propitiation of both the pope and the Polish king. Paying scant heed to any of his boyars, Dmitry squanders resources needed to fight one enemy—Crimea’s Tatars—on rich presents for another—the Poles. Thus, Dmitry’s eagerness to humor Catholics becomes inextricably intertwined with his desire to attack Muslims, transforming both western and eastern neighbors into determinants of his (and Muscovy’s) demise. As in 37 Ostrovskii, Dmitrii samozvanets i Vasilii Shuiskii, 98. 38 Ibid., 98–99. 39 In this respect, Ostrovsky anticipated future developments. As McReynolds has shown, Russia’s tsars continued to place themselves above the legal code even after the official introduction of the Great Reforms (Murder Most Russian, 7).

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Part 1, Ostrovsky deploys his characters as seventeenth-century spokesmen for nineteenth-century concerns. When Shuisky expatiates on the rashness of attacking the Crimean Tatars, he alerts theatergoers to the play’s polemics vis-à-vis the Crimean War: the fictional Dmitry’s folly allows Ostrovsky to censure the real Nicholas I’s pursuit of southern conquest without casting doubt on his own patriotism. The fictional Dmitry’s fatal flaw is an excess of unreciprocated attachment: he idolizes Marina, who spurns him; he trusts Shuisky, who is the play’s most duplicitous political actor; he fetes the Poles, who scorn his hospitality and offend his subjects. By contrast, Vasily Shuisky, the play’s other eponymous hero, displays a deficit of attachment. Endowed with an infinite capacity for loathing, he hates Catholics and despises Cossacks. He sacrifices the idealistic Osipov in order to further his own ambitions and disregards his fellow boyars, seizing the throne without consultation or forewarning. Yet he reserves his deepest loathing for Dmitry, expending all his energy in Part 2 of Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky in pushing the hapless tsar into his coffin. The play’s final scene comprises a verbal standoff in which Shuisky’s great hatred comes to a boil. Dmitry and Shuisky hurl insults at one another until Shuisky resolves the impasse by revealing that Maria Nagaya has repudiated Dmitry. Dmitry demands to be taken to Red Square, where the people can judge both him and Shuisky: “Are you fearful of baring your soul before the people? I’ll tell them everything! And let them see how much more honest I am than you, you ingrate, you perjurer!” Shuisky responds equally venomously: “It’s too late to judge between us. I’ve already condemned you! Make an end of him, lads!”40 As the play comes full circle, the heroes’ fortunes have been reversed. Shuisky now sits in judgment on Dmitry, while Dmitry, true to his former self, demands an impartial judge. Shuisky, of course, refuses to grant Dmitry the privilege that Dmitry once extended to him. Dmitry exits the play fighting bravely, sword in hand, while Shuisky slinks off to steal Russia’s crown. Ostrovsky consigns the play’s final words to Prince Golitsyn, who uses them to condemn the new usurper: “From head to toe he’s no better than a mutineer . . . He mounts the throne on no man’s authority but his own. But he’s not fated to reign! Only a man freely chosen by the people can successfully mount a vacant throne.”41 Thus, Shuisky is doubly condemned for his proizvol, once by Dmitry and once by Golitsyn. The occasionally greathearted 40 Ostrovskii, Dmitrii samozvanets i Vasilii Shuiskii, 153. 41 Ibid., 155.

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Dmitry, by contrast, abandons his recently acquired arbitrariness and reverts to his erstwhile zakonnost´. Ostrovsky’s division of Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky into two parts is a masterstroke, allowing his audience to track two seemingly different careers and uncover their similarities in the enactments and reversals of identical patterns. Part 1 chronicles Dmitry’s meteoric rise at the expense of Shuisky, just as Part 2 chronicles Shuisky’s rise at the expense of Dmitry. The play’s two-act format encourages the audience to think in terms of binaries: the seventeenth century vs. the nineteenth; legality vs. arbitrariness; and law vs. justice. Since the play’s seventeenth-century wars and intrigues prefigure Ostrovsky’s nineteenth-century reality, there can be no talk of progress—1860s Russia has merely assimilated a recurring political pattern. Moreover, if the domestic debate between legality and judicial arbitrariness is equally applicable to the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, then Russia has experienced, at most, a semblance of change. Given that the rule of law, anachronistically interpolated into seventeenth-century Muscovy, precludes justice, it follows that legal reform will prove equally ineffective in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. Prince Golitsyn’s condemnation of Shuisky at play’s end signals that men and women who take the throne arbitrarily, relying on unrestricted power, will come to grief. Well-intentioned rulers may initiate reforms in good faith, but as experience shows, they invariably revert to self-will as soon as their status is threatened. Autocratic ambition trumps the commonweal. Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky is not, however, a blanket ­condemnation of Alexander II and his reforms. As Richard Wortman points out, Alexander’s was the first untroubled accession to the throne since the mid-seventeenth century.42 Whereas previous emperors symbolically ­celebrated the bond between themselves and their elites, Alexander emphasized an “affectionate” link between himself and his commoners.43 After the first assassination attempt against him, Alexander would withdraw from the scenario of popular benefactor,44 but at the time of Ostrovsky’s writing, he was still committed to reform. Rather than framing Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky as a condemnation, Ostrovsky uses it to sound a warning. By transposing the politics of judicial reform into literature, he testifies to the potential for even “democratic” rulers to succumb to autocratic a­ rbitrariness; 42 Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2: From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II, 19. 43 Ibid., 13. 44 Ibid., 92.

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by recognizing Russia’s international conflicts as recurring traumas, he condemns his country’s fatal predilection for bottomless entanglements.

Nikolay Chaev: Judgment by the Crowd Nikolay Alexandrovich Chaev (1824–1914) graduated from the Law Faculty of Moscow University and served as director of the Kremlin Armory for many years. Concurrently, he frequented theatrical circles, authored a number of historical dramas, and after Alexander Ostrovsky’s death became director of repertoire for Moscow’s theaters. Chaev published his Dmitry the Pretender in 1865 in Dostoevsky’s journal The Epoch (Epokha). He hoped to stage his play before Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky but found it blocked in Moscow, where Ostrovsky had already preempted him. He ultimately mounted Dmitry the Pretender to critical acclaim in St. Petersburg in early 1866. M. A. Milovzorova, one of the few critics who has written about Chaev, claims that Chaev and Ostrovsky worked in complementary fashion: Ostrovsky cultivated “sociopsychology” and Chaev “historical archeologism.”45 Milovzorova overstates the case. She correctly identifies each man’s distinctive philosophical approach, but her generalization ignores the ways the two overlap. The plays’ macrostructures are strikingly similar, for example, suggesting that one writer borrowed from the other, that both collaborated, or that mutual friends promoted cross-pollination. Like Ostrovsky’s Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky, Chaev’s Dmitry the Pretender opens in the spring of 1605, just as Dmitry is entering Moscow, and closes, after a gap of one year, with his assassination. Both authors employ identical chronology to cover similar ground: Chaev’s first two acts, like Ostrovsky’s Part 1, show Moscow’s crowds welcoming Dmitry, Shuisky plotting, and Dmitry bringing him to trial. Both plays then track Dmitry’s growing whimsicality and shrinking popularity. Both playwrights highlight Shuisky’s incarceration, release, and subsequent ingratitude, and both emphasize the same ancillary themes: Russian antipathy to the Poles; war with the Muslim south; and Dmitry’s financial woes and insecurity on the throne. The plays differ as well, of course. Chaev’s Dmitry enters Act 1 a cynical, unpleasant man by comparison with Ostrovsky’s frank and openhearted hero. Chaev also handles minor characters differently. A multiplicity of Polish 45 M. A. Milovzorova, “A. N. Ostrovskii i N. A. Chaev: Dvizhenie stilia,” Vestnik gumanitarnogo fakul´teta IGKhTU: 186–87.

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courtiers, Russian boyars, and Moscow artisans all jostle against one another in unmanageable numbers,46 showcasing Muscovy’s heterogeneity—a vivid example of Milovzorova’s “historical archeologism” as well as Kostomarov’s ethnographic approach to history. But Chaev’s repeated recourse to the opinions of secondary, and even tertiary, characters lends his play a distinct air of chaos. His opening scenes are tumultuous: Moscow’s humble folk eagerly anticipate Dmitry’s advent, but Simeon Bekbulatovich, a princely descendant of Muscovy’s erstwhile Mongol overlords, feverishly incites Vasily Shuisky to reject him. The merchant Konev similarly eggs the strangely reluctant Shuisky on by sharing the monk Pimen’s revelation that Dmitry is really Grishka Otrepev. The inclusion of so many minor characters and so many opinions is alternately confusing and enlightening. On the one hand, the true nature of Dmitry and Shuisky’s conflict becomes muddled. On the other, even though the additional conspirators weaken Shuisky’s role as intriguer in chief they also testify to the broad base of anti-Dmitry sentiment. Popular opinion takes the upper hand. By emphasizing Dmitry’s harshness as well as his opponents’ ubiquity, Chaev anticipates his protagonist’s overthrow at play’s end more realistically than does Ostrovsky. Chaev’s and Ostrovsky’s approaches to Shuisky’s trial especially underscore the differences between their plays. Chaev’s Dmitry insists that his boyar jurors investigate the charges against Shuisky and judge him entirely on their own; he himself takes no part. The boyars closely question Shuisky, who openly admits to having spoken against Dmitry. When asked to betray his fellow conspirators, he lies, insisting that he schemed alone, which suggests that he is acting the hero by leaving others to manage a coup. The jury has no choice but to declare him guilty and invoke the death sentence. Chaev’s Dmitry then pardons Shuisky at his Polish allies’ behest—not because he is as merciful as Ostrovsky’s. His boyar jurors have acted legalistically, observing proper procedure and coming to a reasoned verdict; Dmitry, by contrast, acts from expedience, pardoning a criminal in order to advance his own dynastic goals. Chaev’s differentiated allocation of motives to judge and jurors directly contradicts Ostrovsky’s. As we shall shortly see, however, this does not mean that Chaev has faith in trial by jury. 46 L. M. Lotman criticizes Chaev harshly for combining a “slavish” love of historical detail (which presumably encompasses, among other things, his use of too many characters) with a “lack of understanding of the general import of historical events” in Dmitry the Pretender (A. N. Ostrovskii i russkaia dramaturgiia ego vremeni, 273).

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In characteristically effusive fashion, Chaev packs the last three acts of his play with surfeit characters: Moscow’s streets teem with German mercenaries and Polish nobles and priests; its dwellings crawl with informants and boyar conspirators. Verbal brawls erupt among confederates and adversaries alike. At stake are both Dmitry’s plans to march on Crimea and his Polish allies’ schemes to convert Russia to Catholicism. Interestingly, however, the plans themselves are less striking than the verbal pandemonium that breaks out around them—the play’s many characters each voice an opinion in his/her own highly individualized idiom: Chaev’s humble folk use street argot; his Germans speak German; his Poles, a nightmarish admixture of Russian, Polish, and Latin. This scenario, in which no one understands anyone else, highlights division over unity and language over action. Words matter: the play disproportionally revolves around ceremonies and the words employed to perform them. Dmitry fumes at length over the Polish envoys’ ostensible misformulation of his title; the envoys rebuke Dmitry for speaking about their king’s health without standing to attention; Marina accuses Dmitry of unrefined, insulting speech, unfit for a crowned autocrat; a Catholic priest gains Dmitry’s support for delivering a sermon in Latin in an Orthodox church. In the end, the use and the abuse of words culminate in an intolerable linguistic affront: a wedding guest proposes that Russians learn Polish in order to communicate properly. An elderly Russian soldier unwittingly confirms the relevance of words to the collapse of Muscovite society’s order and structure, citing a popular aphorism: “A word’s not a sparrow, once it flies away you won’t catch it again.” By play’s end, everyone has loosed too many irretrievable words: each of the rumors circulating about Dmitry, whether initiated by artisan or aristocrat, whether relayed in colloquialisms or a pidgin approximation of formal Russian, has assumed the force of evidence and contributed to a judgment against the doomed tsar. Chaev gives the final word to the Nagoys, who use it to denounce Dmitry as an imposter. Ironically, Chaev’s pretender, alone among the play’s many characters, has run out of words and fails to demand a trial. He dies as a result. In Chaev’s Dmitry the Pretender, judgment, which is embodied in a jumble of oral arguments, descends into arbitrariness. In Act 2, the legality of Shuisky’s trial is already equivocal: several bystanders who prefer condemnation by autocratic fiat denounce the trial as an unnecessary innovation. The trial proceeds, but other problems arise: Dmitry delegates the right to judge to his boyars but then undercuts their judgment by listening instead to his Polish guests, effectively transferring the administration of justice from Shuisky’s peers to

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outsiders. It is only a matter of time before the mob seizes the prerogative to judge. Has justice been done in Dmitry the Pretender? Almost certainly not. Chaev’s Dmitry is an unsavory pretender, but the motley crowd that arbitrarily judges him—boyars, merchants, and townsfolk—is no better. Each calculates his own advantage and acts accordingly. Who among them would rule more justly than Dmitry? When faced with the alternatives, Chaev is pessimistic: the empire’s people—metonymized by their colorful but incomprehensible vernaculars—are disorderly and unfit to govern. While Ostrovsky specifically suspects autocrats of arbitrariness, Chaev suspects everyone.

Mid-Century Dmitrys in Context Ostrovsky and Chaev draw from previous authors in fruitful but also inconsistent and circuitous ways. Like Sumarokov and Narezhny, they structure their plays around Dmitry, the people’s choice for tsar, and Vasily Shuisky, the aristocracy’s candidate. By replacing Boris Godunov, the wily compromiser and protagonist of so much 1830s Dmitry fiction, with Shuisky, they heighten audience expectations for sharply defined conflict. At the same time, however, these new incarnations of eighteenth-century protagonists are more nuanced than their originals: Ostrovsky’s and Chaev’s Dmitrys are less despicable, their Shuiskys less admirable than Sumarokov’s and Narezhny’s. While this reflects the nineteenth century’s growing movement toward realism, it paradoxically keeps faith with the eighteenth century as well. By humanizing their protagonists, the mid-century authors deflect audience attention from characters per se toward the content of their conflicts. Sumarokov and Narezhny write plays about tyranny, the evils of which are presumably self-evident to their audiences. Ostrovsky and Chaev examine legal reform, the merits of which might seem equally self-evident. In fact, however, both Ostrovsky and Chaev fear that, best intentions notwithstanding, legal reform may degenerate into forms of tyranny. Both see the nature of the peril as more important than the men who embody it. By shifting attention from personalities onto issues, Ostrovsky and Chaev delineate the conflict itself—justice vs. tyranny—in ways that resonate with nineteenth-century realities. Plato regarded tyranny as the opposite of justice, as disharmony and disease,47 while Aristotle defined it as a monarchy that concerned itself 47 Roger Boesche, Theories of Tyranny: From Plato to Arendt (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 28.

Two Visions of Reform: 1866   CHAPTER 4

solely with the interests of the monarch.48 Chaev hews more closely to Plato, interpolating his fictional version of a jury trial into a seventeenth-century multiethnic mayhem. As long as his Dmitry retains a semblance of control over his heterodox subjects, law—if not necessarily justice—will probably prevail. Once ungoverned, however, individual interests replace autocratic authority, causing both law and justice to founder—even Dmitry recognizes the futility of demanding a trial. Ostrovsky, by contrast, fears Aristotle’s vision of ­autocrat-centered tyranny. Dmitry, who enters the play as a purportedly just ruler, offers a fair trial to Shuisky but then denies one to Osipov; Shuisky, unsurprisingly, also denies one to Dmitry. In Ostrovsky’s world, the autocrat is always free to exercise self-will. Despite the fact that the nineteenth-century reforms they transfer into their seventeenth-century plays appear both just and permanent, Ostrovsky and Chaev are chary of reform. Theodore Ziolkowski argues, “What many masterpieces of world literature mirror are not simply the workings of the law, but, more compellingly, the moments of crisis when society discovers that its laws have become problematic.”49 Mid-century Dmitry authors, like their eighteenth-century forebears, find themselves at such a crossroads: the old ways are untenable, the new ones untested. Both Ostrovsky and Chaev suggest that, given past precedent, their fellow citizens would be ill advised to fully trust in legality. Beyond using Shuisky as a foil to Dmitry, Ostrovsky and Chaev imitate Sumarokov and Narezhny in another essential way—by foregrounding onesided romantic liaisons. As we have seen, in earlier dramas Dmitry plays the villain who lusts after the innocent Xenya. In the mid-century plays, by contrast, Marina acts as the malefactor who uses Dmitry to pursue her selfish ends. Replacing the righteous Xenya with the calculating Marina attests again to Ostrovsky’s and Chaev’s inclination for realism—as noted in Chapter 2, the “real” Xenya was not Shuisky’s daughter nor was she Dmitry’s primary love ­interest— but it also advances plot considerations: in this case, the ­introduction of international intrigue. Ostrovsky’s and Chaev’s Marinas are two-­dimensional characters, transparently greedy women who model the ethnically Other as morally repugnant. Accompanied to Moscow by entourages of haughty, ill-­ behaved Poles, they drain Dmitry’s treasury, thereby motivating Russia’s boyars to resist Dmitry’s proposed war against Crimea. Ostrovsky and Chaev replace the eighteenth-century’s love intrigue, in which Dmitry features as predator, with 48 Ibid., 50. 49 Ziolkowski, Mirror of Justice, x.

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this updated version in order to expand the scope of their social commentary: while the eighteenth-century Dmitry’s lusts threaten the dreams of one young woman and her lover, those of his mid-nineteenth-century successor imperil all Muscovy. The substitution of Marina for Xenya allows Ostrovsky and Chaev to push Russia’s international entanglements to the forefront of their plays, elaborating on what might otherwise remain purely personal, household conflicts. While Ostrovsky and Chaev borrow their princely protagonists and heartless lovers from the eighteenth century, they take their plays’ disjunctive temporal structures from Pushkin. Like Pushkin, Ostrovsky and Chaev believe that history repeats itself: both mid-century writers portray transgressive reigns that, crumbling from within, create serendipitous openings for new transgressors. The temporal break that occurs partway through each play showcases process within repetition, opening a window onto the progress of Muscovy’s rapidly deteriorating social climate while avoiding an examination of its finer details. While Pushkin casts Godunov as Muscovy’s failing monarch and Dmitry as his successor, Ostrovsky and Chaev move forward several years, making Dmitry their doomed tsar and Shuisky his prospective replacement. Regardless of who replaces whom, though, all three writers are much more interested than Sumarokov, Narezhny, or Khomyakov in how dynastic beginnings presage dynastic endings, suggesting a greater awareness of and attention to the p­ henomenon of recurrence in Russian history. Ostrovsky also mimics Pushkin by probing the mystery of Dmitry the man. Sundry characters challenge Dmitry’s identity, asserting that he is the Antichrist, a cunning rogue, and/or a mindless tool of the Poles. Dmitry himself is conflicted, recalling childhood friends’ and benefactors’ assurances that he is, indeed, Dmitry while simultaneously remembering the effort needed to convince his “mother” of this fact. Like Kostomarov’s peripatetic Dmitry, he is in search of his identity. Perhaps, he muses, he really is someone else? But if so, then who? Ostrovsky’s Dmitry is ungrounded, unsure whether he was born to rule. In this regard, Chaev parts ways with Ostrovsky and Kostomarov, likening his hero to Sumarokov’s and Karamzin’s: his Dmitry is a straightforward cheat, a pretender pure and simple. For both Ostrovsky and Chaev, trying to run with Sumarokov’s hare and hunt with Pushkin’s hounds exacts an aesthetic price. Although they enter into dialogue with Sumarokov by probing the potential for autocratic arbitrariness—the precursor to tyranny—they compromise his tight artistic

Two Visions of Reform: 1866   CHAPTER 4

focus by humanizing their protagonists and diluting their venomous a­ ntagonism. Unfortunately, they also fall short of Pushkin’s achievement. Pushkin’s Comedy is a study of personalities exposed to the temptations of absolute authority: it leaps from the early days of Godunov’s reign to the run-up to Dmitry’s in order to juxtapose the acquisition of power with its loss. By contrast, Ostrovsky and Chaev explore Dmitry’s judicial reforms but, after jumping a year into the future, shift their focus inexplicably to his boyars’ denunciations of the religiously and ethnically Other. The two foci fail to mesh; the plays become logically as well as temporally disjointed. Ostrovsky’s and Chaev’s ambitions outrun the limitations imposed by their genre: they rush to address too many concerns. The best dramatists winnow their material and limit their themes, while Ostrovsky and Chaev attempt to fit an inappropriately complex world into plays. Novelists, by contrast, can easily introduce and harmonize a broader selection of issues. In the same years that Ostrovsky and Chaev produced their plays, Russian novelists succeeded brilliantly in integrating treatments of legality and justice with other political concerns. War and Peace, for example, comfortably accommodates a host of plots and themes—including the disintegration of law in times of disorder. Egged on by Moscow’s governor, Russian “patriots” murder a suspected collaborator; endeavoring to pacify the occupied city, French gendarmes execute random prisoners; retreating back to France, desperate soldiers shoot captives who can no longer march. None of these examples of judicial malfeasance clashes with or dilutes the force of the many other points Tolstoy makes throughout the novel. Similarly, Dostoevsky’s 1866 Crime and Punishment is thematically capacious—asking what it means to judge, who has the right to judge, and how judgment should be accomplished—while deftly raising a score of other issues. Ostrovsky’s Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky and Chaev’s Dmitry the Pretender are enjoyable, serviceable, but unduly ambitious plays. Both playwrights transfer an assortment of contemporary political issues into the dramatic arena with insufficient regard for their lack of logical linkages. That neither Ostrovsky nor Chaev succeeds in fashioning a coherent vision of Russian life suggests that their plays suffer from an imbalance between transference and recurrence. As we have seen, historical drama mediates two orders of time: the time it represents and the time in which it is composed. When a play dwells too insistently on the latter, as do Ostrovsky’s and Chaev’s, it sacrifices generic integrity. If playwrights hope

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to ­convincingly model historical events as dark portents of the future, then their vision of history must be solid enough to cast a shadow. Ostrovsky’s and Chaev’s ­seventeenth century occupies the middle ground between a shimmer and a shadow. The nineteenth century’s next Dmitry cluster comprises one play and several novels. Each attempts to create a new artistic vision of Dmitry—as well as of Russia—by striking a new balance between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

CHAPTER 5

Contingent Self-Fashioning: The Fin de Siècle One heard “revolution-evolution.” And then again, “revolution-evolution.” They were neither gilded, nor even silvered, but just poor coppered youth who . . . paraded a lot of words on “social revolution.” And then again, “social evolution.” —Andrey Bely

T

he closing decades of the nineteenth century afforded fiction on the Time of Troubles an Indian summer: thereafter, Dmitry disappeared from Russian novels and plays for a century, resurfacing only after the fall of the Soviet Union. This chapter examines Daniil Mordovtsev’s 1879 False Dmitry: A Historical Novel of the Time of Troubles (Lzhedimitrii: Istoricheskii roman iz smutnago vremeni); Vasily Avenarius’s 1890–1893 novelistic trilogy for young readers, In Service to the Tsarevich (Za tsarevicha); Nikolay Alekseev’s 1899 The False Tsarevich (Lzhetsarevich); and Alexey Suvorin’s 1902 historical drama, Tsar Dmitry the Pretender and Tsarevna Xenya (Tsar´ Dmitry samozvanets i tsarevna Kseniia). The three novels emphasize their heroes’ (mis)adventures more heavily than the moral, psychological, and political issues central to earlier clusters; the sole play focuses on Dmitry’s love intrigues and similarly downplays other aspects of public and private life.

Russia’s Fin de Siècle In April 1881, a month and a half after his father’s assassination, Alexander III sought to reassure the Russian people that the country “had survived great trouble [smuty] many times.”1 This invocation of smuta was neither the fin de siècle’s first nor last. According to Richard Wortman, “From the late 1870s the word smuta appears frequently in the writings of tsarist officials.” In 1885,   1 Alexander’s manifesto of April 29, 1881, quoted in Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 2:202.

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for example, the counterreformer A. D. Pazukhin asserted in The Russian Messenger: “We must acknowledge that the current situation in Russia is troubled [smutnoe] and volatile.”2 Blithely smoothing over distinctions between public and private ethics, he equated government control with family values and anarchistic thought with capitalistic greed. In Pazukhin’s archconservative view, the decline of authority and the increase of disorder in late ­nineteenth-century Russia were the lethal fruits of Alexander II’s reforms, which had unleashed a “conceptual Time of Troubles” (smuta v umakh).3 Two decades later, Nicholas II referenced the seventeenth century’s upheavals in more noxious fashion, opining that Jewish cliques were working “to sow disorder [smuta]” throughout the empire.4 Unsurprisingly, the deployment of the Time of Troubles as a setting for Russian historical fiction increased proportionally to the frequency of its use as a trope in public discourse. The 1880s and 1890s were an era of social, political, and cultural ­contestation during which modernists challenged realists and ­constitutional liberals locked horns with reactionary nationalists. During these years, Alexander III and Nicholas II cultivated a new dynastic scenario, rejecting Alexander II’s “affection” in lieu of a spiritual and moral bond with the Russian people.5 Departing from previous practice, Alexander III presented himself as the embodiment of authentic Russianness: he dressed like a Russian bogatyr´ (legendary hero), commissioned churches designed in the Russian style, and, privileging Russian practice over western innovation, elevated administrative authority at the expense of legality.6 In a similar spirit, Nicholas II donned seventeenth-century garb for ceremonial occasions and served authentically Russian dishes at banquets. Both emperors presented themselves as ardent Orthodox believers. Alexander and Nicholas were acutely aware of the educated elite’s demands for change but decried them as indices of disloyalty. Increasingly, both father and son avoided intellectual contact with Russia’s liberals as well   2 A. D. Pazukhin, “Sovremennoe sostoianie Rossii i soslovnyi vopros,” Russkii vestnik 175 (1885): 5.   3 Ibid., 5–8; Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 2:524.   4 Quoted in Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalev, “Nicholas and Alexandra, an Intellectual Portrait,” in The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalev, documents trans. Elizabeth Tucker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 23.  5 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 2:187.   6 Ibid., 263.

Contingent Self-Fashioning: The Fin de Siècle   CHAPTER 5

as physical contact with its urban masses.7 As Wortman has shown, Alexander and Nicholas shunned their own capital, St. Petersburg. Alexander repudiated it as a place defiled—a site where the Russian people had murdered their anointed tsar. He regarded it as no longer safe and removed to a suburban ­palace.8 Nicholas inherited his father’s prejudice and considered St. Petersburg the scene “of the emperors’ mortality not their immortality, recalling their tragedies rather than their triumphs.”9 He much preferred Moscow, which for him “symbolized pure autocracy, free from the constraints that had accompanied the development of a bureaucracy and educated public opinion. To him, the old capital represented a historical alternative to the institutions and officials that thwarted his will in [St. Petersburg].”10 Nicholas reshaped Moscow into a mental construct—a compliant medieval city bearing little resemblance to either past or present reality. In reimagining and readopting Russia’s first capital, he appropriated his father’s paradigm of rule, which assimilated the present day to the seventeenth century, a time “when the tsar ruled in union and harmony with the Russian land.” Thus, “the distance between the ruler and the ruled [became] the distance between him and the manifestations of the fallen present that encumbered his power.”11 By privileging the seventeenth century over the nineteenth, Nicholas jettisoned several of nineteenth-century Russia’s core institutions, including its intelligentsia and its recent record of reform; he created, in effect, “a timeless heritage, untouched by historical change.”12 The practical consequence of abandoning St. Petersburg was to uncouple the ruler from his government: “In a monarchy, the locus of the monarch is the political center. In early   7 In Steinberg and Khrustalev’s words, “When political dissent challenged his traditional faith, as it increasingly did, Nicholas intensified the nationalism of his political myth” (“Nicholas and Alexandra,” 22).   8 Richard Wortman, “Moscow and Petersburg: The Problem of the Political Center in Tsarist Russia,” in Richard Wortman, Russian Monarchy: Representation and Rule. Collected Articles (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 175.   9 Ibid., 178. 10 Ibid., 189. 11 Richard Wortman, “The Tsar and Empire: Representation of the Monarchy and Symbolic Integration in Imperial Russia,” in Richard Wortman, Russian Monarchy: Representation and Rule. Collected Articles (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 271. 12 Ibid., 271. Steinberg and Khrustalev suggest of Nicholas that “the further away from him that large numbers of educated Russians and other dissenting groups seemed to move, the stronger grew his faith in the sacred bonds that united him with ordinary Russians, and the stronger grew his insistence on these bonds as the only definition of Russian nationhood” (“Nicholas and Alexandra,” 19).

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twentieth-century Russia, there were two such loci, betraying the autocrat’s own ambivalence about the heritage, nature, and goals of the state.”13 In certain fundamental, albeit limited, ways the fin de siècle was nevertheless a period of progress.14 Russia was rapidly evolving into a modern state and, autocratic resistance notwithstanding, “the logic of modernization created the need for uniform laws.” Members of the urban professional classes—university professors and politicians like Pavel Milyukov—emerged as proponents of liberal laws,15 and many of Russia’s aristocratic zemstvo activists, anxious to secure de jure recognition of their positions, supported a constitution. As the gap widened between autocratic intentions and popular dreams, conflict seemed inevitable. Reactions to this novel state of affairs were many and varied. Robert A. Maguire has argued that the final imperial decades were pervaded by a sense of “profound and deepening crisis. People no longer believed in such nineteenth-century verities as progress and reason. Life looked shoddy and homogenized.”16 The postreform search for individual consciousness “conflicted with the lingering attraction to collective forms of identity: the yearning to blend with the narod or with a new national community.”17 In the political arena, there was a noticeable uptick in interest in constitutional liberalism but also in Marxism. At the same time, however, many of Russia’s most gifted thinkers retreated from politics, preferring to dedicate their energies to aesthetics and religion. The 1890s and 1900s have been described as an “era of small deeds.”18 On the one hand, the Great Reforms had proved less transformative than hoped; on the other, the Populists’ call to rebellion had failed to engage Russia’s peasants. Despondency set in. Literature negotiated this dreary situation in a 13 Wortman, “Moscow and Petersburg,” 198. 14 Mark D. Steinberg captures the fin de siècle’s ambiguity, calling it “an era of possibility and crisis” (Petersburg Fin de Siècle: The Darkening Landscape of Modern Times, 1905–1917 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011], 1). 15 James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage, 1970), 448. 16 Robert A. Maguire, “Macrocosm or Microcosm: The Symbolists on Russia,” Review of National Literatures 3 (1971): 127. 17 Samuel D. Kassow, James L. West, and Edith W. Clowes, “Introduction,” in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, edited by Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 9. 18 Billington, Icon and the Axe, 436.

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variety of ways. While acknowledging the failure of radical attempts to bring enlightenment to the Russian village, for example, many members of the liberal intelligentsia discerned incremental improvements in the lives of the common people: levels of education were increasing and literacy rates rising, prompting activists to search for the most suitable types of reading materials for unsophisticated audiences. Although both church and government held strong views on the issue, neither provided attractive options. Ultimately, a “private,” “unofficial” approach prevailed: individual members of the intelligentsia enlisted imaginative literature as a bridge between themselves and the lower classes.19 Leo Tolstoy, among others, also embraced this approach but worried about its economic implications: in characteristically resolute fashion, he undertook to publish inexpensive editions of the classics. Yet other members of the educated elite inclined toward a literature of nostalgic nationalism.20 More cerebral approaches to engaging the fin de siècle’s conundrums also flourished. At the same time that Tolstoy’s Posrednik Publishing House was issuing large print runs for the common man, other intellectuals were pioneering a more exotic approach to literature. Symbolism, a highly aestheticized, mystical movement, challenged the realistic school. Vladimir Solovyov, its intellectual forefather among Russian thinkers, taught that all life strove toward a unity that could be achieved through the agency of Sophia, divine wisdom. In Solovyov’s view, the material world was merely a reflection of a more vital, ideal world; the artist’s task was to penetrate everyday realia, life’s outward signs, in order to uncover inner significations. In Maguire’s words, “It is not by way of realistic representation that the Symbolists . . . contributed to the literary delineation of an image of Russia. They were interested in the idea or the essence of the nation and believed that it could manifest itself through symbolic rather than realistic treatment of homely and familiar details.”21 However, the Symbolists’ dazzling works in verse and prose, far from closing the gap between Russia’s highly educated minority and its majority, widened it further. The advent of Symbolism coincided with another development in Russian literature, a rapid and unprecedented upsurge in interest in the ­historical novel: the 1890s and 1900s saw the publication of nearly 350 titles ranging

19 On these developments, see Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917, rev. ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 295–352. 20 Kassow, West, and Clowes, “Introduction,” 9. 21 Maguire, “Macrocosm or Microcosm,” 147.

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from pulp fiction to high modernism.22 Dan Ungurianu has demonstrated their ­heterogeneity by comparison with the historical novels of earlier periods, attributing it to the broader phenomenon of fin-de-siècle cultural diversity.23 Throughout the 1890s Russian culture became progressively more heterogeneous. Connections between tsar and nation loosened, while the cultural divide between the upper and lower classes persisted. The emergence of Symbolist art created new fault lines between the highly educated and the merely literate. The literature of the Troubles also partook of the fractured and unsettled nature of the times, in some instances showcasing the era’s high hopes for literature’s pedagogical function, in others its dark pessimism, and in yet others the nation’s failure to coalesce into a cultural consensus. Even the factors that unite the cluster, like the elements of proliferation and decentering, undermine a sense of cohesiveness: these works seethe with extraneous facts and characters, their plots move away from Dmitry as the center of the action and attention.

Documenting the Facts: Sergey Platonov Sergey Fyodorovich Platonov (1860–1933) was one of Russia’s most prominent historians of the Time of Troubles; his work has retained its scholarly value to this day. Throughout the late imperial and early Soviet years, he published a steady stream of books and articles about the period, providing his readers with carefully reasoned interpretations. His relevance for the final chapter of this study rests on his early monographs, which appeared during the waning years of the nineteenth century. Platonov was the descendent of Kaluga peasants who, having worked their way up from serfdom, settled in Moscow, a city whose culture and history Platonov deeply revered even though he lived and worked in St. Petersburg for much of his life. Platonov enrolled at St. Petersburg University in 1878 and studied under one of the period’s most distinguished historians, Konstantin Bestuzhev-Ryumin. The St. Petersburg historical school placed h­ eavy ­emphasis

22 Ungurianu, Plotting History, 259. Among the modernists, Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Valery Bryusov famously wrote historical novels. 23 “In terms of general poetics, the main peculiarity of the turn-of-the-century historical novel lies in the coexistence of several paradigms, which is different from the largely monoparadigmatic situation of the previous periods. Once again developments in the genre parallel those on the broader literary and cultural scene” (Ungurianu, Plotting History, 158).

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on the study of original sources,24 and Platonov quickly acted to make previously unpublished primary materials available. He likewise absorbed the school’s signature epistemological insight—that a historian must move not from general ideas to facts but, rather, from facts to general ideas.25 Platonov published his master’s thesis, Old Russian Stories and Tales about the Seventeenth-Century Time of Troubles as Historical Sources (Drevnerusskie skazaniia i povesti o Smutnom vremeni XVII veka, kak istoricheskii istochnik), shortly after defending it. Exemplifying the methods of St. Petersburg source criticism, the book marked Platonov as a first-rate researcher and earned him high praise from his mentors as well as from Vassily Kliuchevsky, the doyen of the rival Moscow school of historiography.26 In Old Russian Stories and Tales, Platonov examined little-known documents dating to the Troubles and the subsequent reign of Tsar Mikhail Romanov. His doctoral thesis, Studies in the History of the Troubles in the Muscovite State in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ocherki po istorii Smuty v Moskovskom gosudarstve XVI–XVII vv.), was similarly well received and has been republished numerous times, most recently in 1995. Throughout his scholarly career, Platonov kept his eye firmly on Russia’s seventeenth century, positing it, rather than Peter the Great’s reforms, as the seedbed of the modern period. In his quest to expand access to early modern primary sources, he edited and published numerous Old Russian documents but also pursued psychological insights into the leading actors of the period: his biographies of Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov, and Peter the Great have become classics. Moreover, not content to view Old Russia in isolation, Platonov ultimately broadened his scope to include Moscow’s foreign relations. In studies like Muscovy and the West in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Moskva i zapad v XVI–XVII vv.), he expanded scholars’ understanding of the external factors that bore on decisions made by Moscow’s rulers. Platonov’s early works offered novelists and playwrights of the fin de siècle a steady supply of detailed information concerning the Time of Troubles. 24 A. E. Presniakov, a prominent member of the Petersburg school, defined its objective as: “scholarly realism, manifested above all in a direct, concrete relationship to facts and sources, without regard for the historiographical tradition.” Quoted in B. V. Anan´ich and V. M. Paneiakh, “O peterburgskoi istoricheskoi shkole i ee sud´be,” Otechestvennaia istoriia (2000): 105. 25 Iu. K. Ivanov, “O formirovanii vzgliadov S. F. Platonova (80-e gody XIX veka),” Vestnik LGU: Istoriia, iazyk i literatura (1983): 92–93. 26 Ibid., 93.

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Daniil Mordovtsev: Romancing the Time of Troubles Daniil Lukich Mordovtsev (1830–1905) published his False Dmitry: A Historical Novel of the Time of Troubles in 1879. Appearing thirteen years after the previous cluster’s two plays and eleven before the fin de siècle’s next Dmitry novel, it is a transitional piece, reflecting Kostomarov’s approach to Russian history as much as Platonov’s. Indeed, Mordovtsev and Kostomarov had much in common. Mordovtsev was born to a priest’s daughter and the steward of a Ukrainian estate in Don Cossack territory: his first language was Ukrainian, and he retained a warm affection for his natal land, its language, and its people even while residing in later years in Russia. Like Kostomarov, Mordovtsev was a gifted student of modern and ancient languages and earned a gold medal in ­philology and history from St. Petersburg University. After graduation, he moved to Saratov, where he began a career in the civil service and simultaneously committed himself to a life of writing history and fiction. Like Kostomarov, who was arrested for participation in a secret society, Mordovtsev fell out of favor with the authorities—in this case, over a monograph, On the Eve of Freedom (Nakanune voli, 1872), in which Mordovtsev documented the lives of the Saratov region’s serfs. Midway through its serialized publication, the authorities banned the study and ordered its author to resign his government position. In 1873, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he assumed a new post and recommenced his historical studies. Although Mordovtsev had written novels on topical, contemporary issues in the late 1860s, he aligned his fiction more closely with his historical studies throughout the 1870s. He ultimately composed more than thirty historical novels and tales. Mordovtsev believed in historical fiction’s pedagogical function: in his view, it served to popularize history and provide a platform for political views. As a democrat and man of the people, he advocated local self-­determination: he used his novels to censure the government’s relentless centralizing ­tendencies.27 In False Dmitry, Mordovtsev probes the mystery of Dmitry’s identity, concluding, like Kostomarov, that no one—not even Dmitry himself— knew who he really was: he gives the man who reigned as Dmitry the benefit of the doubt, accepting that he may truly have been Ivan the Terrible’s 27 My biographical sketch of Mordovtsev is based on Dan Ungurianu, “Daniil Lukich Mordovtsev,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Novelists in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (Detroit: Gale Group, 2001), 214–20. See also N. G. Il´inskaia, “Mordovtsev, Daniil Lukich,” in Russkie pisateli, 1800–1917 (Moscow: Bol´shaia rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1999), 4:126–30.

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­youngest son.28 By novel’s end, readers are more than half convinced he was.29 False Dmitry, its title notwithstanding, is sincerely sympathetic to its chief protagonist; indeed, Mordovtsev paints a more favorable portrait of Dmitry than any earlier author in the tradition, including Pushkin. Mordovtsev’s Dmitry is ambitious, energetic, loving, and unusually introspective. He is also trusting to a fault. Having asked his supporters to believe in him, he reciprocates by believing in them too. This is his fatal mistake, for by trusting Vasily Shuisky he seals his fate. At novel’s end, although Dmitry himself remains personally popular in many quarters, there is a good deal of grumbling in the streets against marauding Poles and Catholic priests. Vasily Shuisky, the novel’s perennial conspirator and prevaricator, deflects this emerging discontent onto Dmitry, effecting his downfall. The novel closes with Shuisky’s lackeys abusing the erstwhile tsar’s corpse in appalling fashion. Mordovtsev offers no follow-up; he parts with his audience on a note of dull, throbbing emptiness. By taking Dmitry’s claims seriously, Mordovtsev brings Kostomarov’s ­historical insights to bear on fiction and diverts his novel from its fictive path: he tends to become so engrossed in historical and ethnographical minutiae that he loses sight of the bigger picture. Mordovtsev, like Bulgarin and Chaev— but also like Kostomarov—loves details. Ultimately, as he loses track of the ­questions he sets out to answer, he adopts an episodic plot structure that eclipses his initial purpose. He dedicates page after page of False Dmitry to ­painstaking descriptions of landscapes, banquets, and royal processions and devotes much energy to reproducing dialogue in an array of languages and speech registers: Ukrainian competes with Russian and Polish, peasant vernacular with high-flown court speech, fairytale stylization with everyday communication. Mordovtsev aims to reproduce a historically accurate and objective picture of the past, saturating his novel with trivia intended to convey an impression of verisimilitude. As a result, the particular overwhelms the general, and the sheer bulk of False Dmitry’s accumulating information precludes the construction of knowledge. The reader searches each chapter for meaning but finds it only rarely and with difficulty. Similarly, Mordovtsev overpresents and overpsychologizes his protagonists. He sympathizes with all his major characters, creating elaborate backstories for each of them. Even Vasily Shuisky, the novel’s villain, pulls at 28 This is in keeping with a characteristic of the postreform era, the increase in self-doubt and lost self-assurance (Kassow, West, and Clowes, “Introduction,” 8–9). 29 In this regard, Mordovtsev concurs with Kostomarov and anticipates the recent work of Chester Dunning.

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Mordovtsev’s heartstrings: apparently, he has suffered grievously all his life from unrequited love for Boris Godunov’s wife. As a result, Shuisky seeks to avenge himself first on Godunov and then on Dmitry. Almost all the other major characters experience similar heartbreaks—each cares much more for an absent lover than for a present one, and each finds it impossible to disentangle love from duty. The experience of these characters’ private pain makes it difficult to condemn their public behavior; its ubiquity makes it impossible to ignore. Whether intentionally or not, Mordovtsev subsumes Dmitry’s personal plight into other characters’ predicaments, thereby vitiating it. The novel’s circuitous structure of internal conflict leads to a lack of coherence and meaning: it becomes nearly impossible to determine its lines of ideological contestation. As a transitional work, False Dmitry employs the compositional diffuseness typical of fin-de-siècle Smuta novels to reflect the thematics of 1866. False Dmitry’s final pages provide muted echoes of the judicial reforms that featured so saliently in Ostrovsky and Chaev: as Dmitry’s short reign nears its end, Basmanov pleads with him to arrest those who have plotted against him. Dmitry refuses: “Let them judge themselves . . . hand the guilty over to judgment by their peers.”30 Similarly, he declines to punish his mutinous troops, preferring to leave them to sort out their loyalties among themselves. Further evoking Ostrovsky and Chaev, False Dmitry briefly meditates on the merits of a Crimean war. The novel’s narrator alternately celebrates Dmitry’s plan to strengthen ties with the west by routing the Turks and laments his failure to carry the plan through, likening the soon-to-be-deposed tsar’s nascent westernizing agenda to Peter the Great’s. Unfortunately, neither Dmitry’s judicial predilections nor his Crimean enthusiasms move the novel forward. Neither becomes a topic for extended debate or is ever raised more than once. Each exists, like the novel’s other thematic digressions, merely as testimony to its author’s careful research into Russia’s seventeenth-century past. Indeed, Mordovtsev’s method of composition approximates historiography—rather as Kostomarov’s Muscovy’s Time of Troubles sometimes borders on fiction. Yet while Mordovtsev’s colorful, romanticized version of the seventeenth century documents the past, it also looks to the future, anticipating Alexander III’s and Nicholas II’s idealized visions of Muscovy. Mordovtsev, the champion of the people, focuses so intensely on details that he fails to divine the larger reality they convey—the 30 D. L. Mordovtsev, Lzhedimitrii: Istoricheskii roman iz smutnago vremeni (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva putei soobshcheniia, 1879), 293.

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triumph of a xenophobic, authoritarian Russia.31 In redressing Ostrovsky’s and Chaev’s overbalance of cultural transference, Mordovtsev leans too far in the opposite direction, creating an overly historicized and deterministic image of Russia.

Vasily Avenarius: Decentering Dmitry Vasily Petrovich Avenarius (1839–1923) was born in Tsarskoe Selo, the son of a Lutheran minister who taught at the Imperial Alexander Lyceum. A gifted and precocious student, he studied chemistry at St. Petersburg University, but his true avocation lay in literature, and while pursuing a chemistry degree he also published a volume of verse. On graduation, he assumed a post at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which supplied limited stimulus to his rich imagination but necessary financial resources for his writing. Avenarius, a convinced conservative, fervently opposed the revolutionary movements of the 1860s. His 1867 Pestilence (Povetrie) denounced the era’s nihilists and “faux-realists” for their materialism and provoked a furor among Russia’s radicals. In the wake of the controversy, Avenarius shifted focus, renouncing topical art and concentrating instead on children’s literature, a field in which he cultivated a variety of subgenres and secured critical acclaim. His 1875 Heroes of Kievan Rus (Kniga o Kievskikh bogatyriakh), a series of adaptations of byliny or traditional sagas, earned him high praise, and his original fairy tales and novellas about Russian authors and composers were similarly well received. Additionally, Avenarius wrote several historical novels for young people. His trilogy, In Service to the Tsarevich consists of two novels, The Three Crowns (Tri ventsa) and Onward to Moscow! (Na Moskvu!), and one novella, The Ataman’s Son (Syn atamana). All three transpose the Dmitry material into a highly accessible and entertaining form.32 Avenarius and Mordovtsev were contemporaries, knew each other well, and shared certain convictions. Each trusted in literature’s potential to bring 31 V. S. Momot draws a number of connections between Mordovtsev’s 1860s novels and the politics of the day, but he provides no serious discussion of his historical novels (“D. L. Mordovtsev v russkoi kritike,” Filologicheskie nauki 4 [1981]: 23–27). 32 For Avenarius’s biography, see M. O. Chudakova, “Avenarius, Vasilii Petrovich,” in Russkie pisateli, 1800–1917: Biograficheskii slovar´ (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1989), 1:16–17. The turn of the century saw a significant uptick in writing for young readers and was a propitious time for children’s authors. On this question, see Lora D’Anne Wheeler, “Children in Transition: Popular Children’s Magazines in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia, 1900–1932” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2001), 11–15.

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history alive, and each painted sympathetic portraits of the man who claimed to be Dmitry. That said, Mordovtsev’s novel echoes, even if only faintly, the broader concerns of the era of the Great Reforms, and its politics are liberal. Avenarius’s trilogy, by contrast, breathes a different spirit. Like False Dmitry, it creates a world in which social classes intermingle and a primitive form of democracy appears to take hold. The result, however, is chaos. Far from illustrating the merits of governance from the ground up, Avenarius shows that the people are utterly incapable of dispassionate decision making. To make his point, however, he expends a great deal of narrative attention on these same people, and, accordingly, neglects Dmitry. Avenarius organizes the many short chapters of his first novel, The Three Crowns, under three subheadings, “The Crown Royal,” “The Crown of Thorns,” and “The Wedding Crown,” which, taken together, form a kind of trilogy within a trilogy and reflect the overarching movement of the greater project of In Service to the Tsarevich. Each of these headings speaks either to a promise unfulfilled or a misfortune endured, and each anticipates Dmitry’s failed hopes: the “Crown Royal” documents the inception of his dynastic dream; the “Crown of Thorns” dwells on the difficulties attendant on its realization; and the “Wedding Crown” associates its failure with marriage to Marina Mniszek. All three parts take place in Europe’s borderlands, where east meets west: Orthodox believers mingle with Catholics; Russians and Ukrainians mix with Poles; and public and private identities are fluid and slippery. This liminal geography might appear to signify a potential for negotiation and compromise—or even a peaceful melding of two otherwise antipathetic worlds—but The Three Crowns shuns concessions in favor of mutual hostilities. Avenarius’s Dmitry is an essentially well-intentioned man who strives but fails to mediate his supporters’ antagonisms: the novel’s Polish Catholics and Russian Orthodox believers confront each other in anger; its families disintegrate in discord. Heroic deeds, performed in the wrong place, come to naught. Character sets devolve into hostile factions: the novel’s two evil Jesuits accost its virtuous Orthodox priests; the Russian Prince Mikhail Andreevich Kurbsky and the Polish Pan Tarlo vie for the love of Marusia Birkina, just as the Russian Tsarevich Dmitry and the Polish Prince Osmolsky court Marina Mniszek. Avenarius sums up this polarized universe by citing Matthew 6:24, “No man can serve two masters; he will hate the one and love the other.”33 A stark 33 V. P. Avenarius, Tri ventsa (Moscow: Kniga po trebovaniiu, n.d.), 89.

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division of people, places, and values weakens Dmitry’s cause and ultimately destroys him. Curiously, Avenarius cedes the role of The Three Crowns’ primary protagonist to Prince Kurbsky: from start to finish, his novel focuses much more heavily on Kurbsky’s adventures than on Dmitry’s, and, indeed, in the trilogy’s final volume Avenarius belatedly designates Kurbsky its “chief hero.”34 Dmitry, by contrast, is less an autonomous actor than a structural prop around which the other characters organize their ambitions. In focusing on Kurbsky, Avenarius does not entirely dispense with Dmitry, however. By positing numerous similarities between the two men, he intentionally inscribes Kurbsky into the Dmitry tradition and makes him Dmitry’s alter ego: Avenarius’s Kurbsky, like Dmitry, loses his father early; Kurbsky and Dmitry both live in exile under assumed identities; Kurbsky cherishes the vision of a triumphant march on Moscow and, like Dmitry, has the power and charisma to convince others of it. The irony, of course, is that the historical Kurbsky’s father became the historical Dmitry’s “father’s” most implacable foe. Here, however, Avenarius sets history aside in order to sustain his comparison. Each family’s reversals of fortunes leave their scions in similar situations: both Kurbsky and Dmitry have fled Russia for a country and a religious faith that they ought, by rights, to disdain; both, mindful of their debt to Poland, nevertheless pledge Russia their deepest allegiance. The Three Crowns’ heroine, Marusia Birkina, is also intermittently assimilated to someone else’s fate. At the novel’s outset, the Orthodox Marusia is the Catholic Marina Mniszek’s closest intimate. Paralleling Kurbsky’s imitation of his lord, Marusia imitates her lady, setting her marital sights on Kurbsky just as Marina has set hers on Dmitry. The first half of the novel thus creates a pleasing symmetry. Yet Avenarius shies away from an unduly simple correspondence; midway through the novel Marusia falls from Marina’s favor and leaves her service to pursue her own fortunes. The broken relationship presages a similar falling out between Kurbsky and Dmitry: by novel’s end, the tsarevich will deeply wound his closest friend by converting to Catholicism. With this apostasy, he will also forfeit the right to be the novel’s true hero. The trilogy’s second part, the novella The Ataman’s Son, dispenses with Dmitry altogether, focusing on Prince Kurbsky’s fortunes as he traverses the steppes in quest of Cossack support for Dmitry’s cause. In the absence of Dmitry, The Ataman’s Son abandons The Three Crowns’ predilection for 34 V. P. Avenarius, Na Moskvu (Moscow: Kniga po trebovaniiu, n.d.), 492.

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d­ oubling its main characters and focuses instead on the gap between appearance and reality, the most significant example of which occurs when Grishuk, the novella’s titular protagonist, confesses to being Grusha, the ataman’s daughter dressed in male attire. In episode after episode, Avenarius presents similar situations in which characters don and shed disguises in response to the dangers of everyday life. No one is ever who s/he appears to be. The Ataman’s Son is the segment of the trilogy that most clearly reads like children’s literature, since it shows that virtue always triumphs over vice: here literature’s pedagogical function is in the ascendant. The novella advocates a tough, no-nonsense masculinity but also mercy and compassion, and Prince Kurbsky, the exemplary hero of the earlier Three Crowns, earns additional admiration. However, The Ataman’s Son conveys a subtler message as well. Whereas the action of The Three Crowns takes place in areas where Catholicism has made significant inroads into Orthodoxy, The Ataman’s Son transpires in present-day Ukraine, which Avenarius portrays as the homeland of honest, sincere, Orthodox believers. Although many of The Ataman’s Son’s Orthodox denizens disguise themselves, they do so for virtuous reasons, unlike its devious Catholics. Orthodox Cossacks are rude and judgmental but also quick to admit their errors, unlike The Three Crowns’ harsh, unforgiving Jesuits. Loyal Russians like Kurbsky, who must dissemble their pasts in Poland, travel freely under their own flag in Ukraine. Creature comforts may be thin on the ground, but morality is everywhere apparent. Thus, as the trilogy’s characters move gradually eastward, the Russians’ and Poles’ conflicting codes of behavior and identities emerge more fully, emphasizing cultural binaries ever more clearly. In Onward to Moscow! they become quite stark indeed. Onward to Moscow!, the final segment of Avenarius’s trilogy, opens with Dmitry’s siege of Novgorod-Seversk. The reentry of the tsarevich and his Polish allies into the story brings a renewal of intrigue and cupidity. Pan Tarlo, Marusia’s unsuccessful suitor from The Three Crowns, reappears, filled with malice against his rival, Kurbsky. Baltser Zidek, the Mniszek family’s jester, also has scores to settle. Kurbsky manages to hold his own against these two vicious men but then falls victim to the scheming of the novel’s two Jesuits, Fr. Lovich and Fr. Serakovsky, who fabricate a charge of treason against him. Dmitry, who has previously been an openhearted, generous man, hesitates to trust his best friend when faced with the Jesuits’ blandishments. Beholden to the Jesuits for military and monetary support, the tsarevich has already betrayed Orthodoxy; he now contemplates selling out his friend.

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In the meantime, Kurbsky is fighting for his life and Marusia is trapped inside the besieged city. In a series of improbable misadventures worthy of a Greek novel, the lovers lose each other, fall into despair, and reunite. As Kurbsky’s private drama plays itself out, Dmitry ascends his throne and Marina arrives in Moscow. Against the background of Muscovite probity, Marina emerges as a monster. Dmitry, however, remains inexplicably drawn to her and again betrays his friend Kurbsky, whom the Jesuits have arrested on yet another trumped-up charge of treason. The Kremlin’s executioner tortures Kurbsky horribly, but Marusia manages to extricate him, flee Moscow, and survive Dmitry’s downfall. In Onward to Moscow! Avenarius complicates the mystery of Dmitry’s identity. Kurbsky’s credentials and beliefs are adamantine; Dmitry’s less so. While Kurbsky continues to accept Dmitry as Ivan’s son, Dmitry himself is less sure. Fedot, a sexton from Uglich, initially “recognizes” the tsarevich but later, adducing neither evidence nor logic, accuses him of being Dmitry’s look-alike childhood friend. Dmitry dissolves into hysterics, wondering whether Fedot might not be right—what if he really is his friend and not himself? His doubts eventually lead him to lament, “Dare I still believe in myself?”35 While he quickly recollects himself, proclaiming, “I won’t allow myself to be played with!”36 he is nevertheless shaken. In the trilogy’s previous scenes, Avenarius’s Dmitry has attempted to construct himself through childhood memories, but when confronted by Fedot’s equivocal testimony in Onward to Moscow! he falters. His attempt at self-fashioning is dangerously undermined by contingency: the accidental encounter with Fedot imperils his certainty. If the trilogy’s first two parts see imposters uncovered and masqueraders unmasked, then its third leaves the ultimate mystery—Dmitry’s identity—unresolved. Avenarius opts not to explore Dmitry’s many complications and contradictions. Instead, he almost always focuses on a morally purer man who regrets Godunov’s death even though he despises him, disparages the Cossacks’ bloodlust even though he himself has recruited them to Dmitry’s cause, and upholds another’s honor even at risk of his own life. Prince Kurbsky is much simpler and more clear-minded than Dmitry: he never agonizes over a decision. Even so, the parallels between Kurbsky and Dmitry persuade ­readers to ally themselves with Dmitry through association: Dmitry’s decisions may be wrong, but Kurbsky, whose own decisions are always unimpeachably correct, supports him. Thus, while Avenarius never directly argues that Dmitry 35 Ibid., 427. 36 Ibid., 428.

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was right, neither does he easily abandon him to his detractors. At novel’s end, Kurbsky, who has been brutally tortured in prison, vividly reflects and resurrects the beaten Dmitry. As Dmitry’s better angel, he perpetuates the ill-fated tsar’s finer traits, allowing Avenarius to credit Dmitry’s quest but also to remain true to history. This associative sleight of hand obliquely conjures a hypothetical future in which Dmitry, like Kurbsky, would have prospered. In Service to the Tsarevich is a conservative work, even if it wears its politics lightly. Its engagement with Kurbsky’s inner, ethical life focuses its young readers’ attention on personal merit rather than political programs. Indeed, even though Avenarius mentions a number of Dmitry’s reforms in passing, he fails to credit them, arguing that if individuals behaved according to the dictates of their consciences, society’s problems would take care of themselves. Avenarius thus removes the Dmitry story from the heady context of national politics and resituates it in the cozy domesticity of hearth and home, consonant with the late nineteenth-century conservatism he espouses. Like Mordovtsev’s False Dmitry, Avenarius’s In Service to the Tsarevich is structured around character and incident. Although it insistently queries identity—who, or what, lurks under a disguise? to what degree are we organic, self-fashioning people, to what degree artificial constructs?—it comes to no conclusions. Avenarius’s reluctance to answer his own questions is consistent with other fin-de-siècle Dmitry authors’ predilection for ambiguity and aligns him more with Mordovtsev than Bulgarin, whose eleventh-hour Romanov triumphalism supplies a purposive, if maladroit, closure to his Dmitry novel. Like Bulgarin and Mordovtsev, Avenarius adopts an episodic structure, but with a difference: Mordovtsev and Bulgarin entrap themselves in gratuitous ethnographic detail, reveling uncritically in the wealth of new “factual” information provided by the historians of their day. Avenarius, by contrast, integrates historical material more subtly and coherently, offering a literary analogy to Platonov’s inductive employment of particulars as stepping stones toward generalizations: the trilogy’s carefully staged scenes of transformation and recognition prepare readers for a final revelation of the truth. In the end, however, Avenarius disappoints, shying away from the disclosures he has seemed to promise and parting with his trilogy as if it were an open-ended chronicle.

Nikolay Alekseev: Russia’s Troubles in a Gothic Key Nikolay Nikolaevich Alekseev was born in 1871. A member of the St. Petersburg gentry, he studied law at St. Petersburg University, worked as a tutor, and wrote

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historical fiction—all while enduring grinding poverty. His literary labors barely earned him his daily bread, and broken by hardship, he committed suicide in 1905.37 The world of Alekseev’s 1899 False Tsarevich is unsurprisingly grim: no one exits the novel fulfilled; no one enhances the commonweal; no hopeful lesson is learned. Alekseev focuses on the ultimate futility of all human effort. His cynicism notwithstanding, Alekseev draws his many characters in loving detail, delineating one of them, Bely-Turenin, much more elaborately than his eponymous hero Dmitry. Thus, the Dmitry of The False Tsarevich becomes, like Avenarius’s protagonist, peripheral to the novel named for him. Like Avenarius’s Dmitry, he functions as the occasion for other, better fleshedout characters to act more than as a center of narrative interest in his own right. Unlike Avenarius’s Dmitry, however, Alekseev’s knows and occasionally even admits he is a pretender: indeed, he confesses to being that very defrocked monk, Grigory Otrepev, that Boris Godunov asserted him to be. The False Tsarevich is divided into two unequal parts, the first and longer of which transpires in Lithuania and Poland. It introduces multiple characters and side plots, almost all of which involve young people whose marriage plans founder. They all face similar obstacles: either two men court the same woman, resulting in fisticuffs, or one lover is Orthodox while the other is Catholic, resulting in social censure. While the lovers themselves willingly set religious differences aside, a Roman Catholic priest invariably intervenes, ordering the bridegroom detained or immuring the bride in a convent. This produces more than a whiff of Gothic sulfur.38 As Neil Cornwell writes, the Gothic will normally involve dynastic disorders, set at some temporal and spatial distance and in a castle or manorial locale; defence, or usurpation, of an inheritance will threaten (and not infrequently inflict) violence upon ­hapless (usually female) victims amid a supernatural ambiance. Often (but not always) the heroine will be saved, the villain unmasked and the

37 For the little that is known of Alekseev’s life, see T. P. Agapkina, “Alekseev, Nikolai Nikolaevich,” in Russkie pisateli, 1800–1917: Biograficheskii slovar´ (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1989), 1:47. 38 The conflict between Orthodoxy and Catholicism finds analogies in the Gothic as it developed in Great Britain. On this question, see Diane Long Hoeveler, “Anti-Catholicism and the Gothic Imaginary: The Historical and Literary Contexts,” Religion in the Age of the Enlightenment 3 (2012): 1–31.

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Although the Russian Gothic enjoyed its heyday a half-century before Alekseev wrote The False Tsarevich, it staged a comeback during the fin de siècle, especially among the Symbolists,40 and Alekseev makes effective use of its conventions: dark forests and isolated valleys conceal convent prisons; a vampire-poisoner poses as a nightmarish sexual partner; cousin lusts incestuously after cousin; an unrequited lover takes leave of her senses and wanders through the wilderness wearing a crown of wildflowers. The resulting cauldron of emotion almost entirely diverts attention from Grigory, the young dreamer of a thousand dreams. Alekseev ascribes great charisma to his would-be Dmitry as well as to Marina, but his claims ring hollow: neither protagonist seems convincing. We are told that countless women desire Dmitry, and countless men lust after Marina, but it is hard to understand why—the aspiring tsar and tsaritsa are strangely bloodless. The novel’s other characters are much more credible: Alekseev’s long-suffering women evoke deep sympathy, his defiant men great admiration. As in Avenarius’s trilogy, they meet and interact largely as a result of their affiliations with Dmitry. Part 1 of Alekseev’s False Tsarevich focuses heavily on amorous relationships. Here specific aspects of history fade into the background, superseded by romantic conflicts more typical of the late nineteenth century than of the early seventeenth: in contravention of late medieval Russian custom, young men and women make their own marital choices, and romantic triangles spring up like mushrooms. The novel’s world is uneasy, pervaded by sexual anxiety and uncertainty, neo-Gothic markers of failed confidence. Victoria Margree and Bryony Randall have documented the rise of neo-Gothic literature in Great Britain in the 1890s, the decade during which The False Tsarevich was written. They describe Britain’s citizens as “intensely aware of themselves as being modern” and yet unconvinced that “the future would bring continued enlightenment and improvement.” Britons of the 1890s suspected that progress might be more ambiguous and uncertain than they had 39 Neil Cornwell, “Russian Gothic: An Introduction,” in The Gothic-Fantastic in NineteenthCentury Russian Literature, ed. Neil Cornwell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 7. 40 Although V. E. Vatsuro, Russia’s expert on the native Gothic tradition, does not deal with novels of the fin de siècle in his magisterial Goticheskii roman v Rossii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002), western scholars, including Neil Cornwell (“Russian Gothic”) and Muireann Maguire (Red Spectres: Russian Gothic Tales from the Twentieth Century [New York: Overlook, 2013]), move well beyond the early nineteenth century in their Gothic explorations.

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hitherto believed: “suspended between supernatural and scientific ­explanations of the world,”41 they were alive to phenomena that science could not explain. In Part 1 of The False Tsarevich, Alekseev’s characters, ­ anachronistically inserted into the seventeenth century, share this late Victorian apprehension of a world uneasily suspended over an abyss of inexplicable phenomena. They attempt to live their lives intelligently and pursue rational objectives, but terrifying, mysterious forces continually menace them. Only in the novel’s second half do they attempt—unsuccessfully—to dispel this evil. Part 2 of The False Tsarevich moves spatially eastward, toward Dmitry’s goal, and temporally backward, into the realm of the seventeenth century that seems so strangely absent in Part 1. Even as Part 2 reconnects with the Time of Troubles, however, it introduces a host of Moscow denizens who are much more embroiled in the timeless politics of romance and familial discord than in good governance: a nobleman’s son covets his brother’s fiancée, while the affianced brother prefers a monastery to marriage; their parents seem to truly care about neither of them. A father leaves home to join Boris Godunov’s siege of Novgorod-Seversk, while his son fights for Dmitry. For a time, at least, concrete conflict supplants Gothic obscurity; the novel’s personal relationships are badly out of joint, and no one can set them right. The logical mediator in these contentions should be Dmitry, but unfortunately, he too is out of joint. A visionary who hopes to transform Russia into a great empire, he squanders his energy in flourishes and banquets—which is to say, in vain pursuits. In the waning days of his reign, Bely-Turenin tries to convince him that he has lost his way: “You have remained half-Cossack, half-servant,”42 suggesting that Dmitry has indulged his wild enthusiasms and his yearnings for the good life at the expense of the hard work he should have done. Unsurprisingly, his reign quickly collapses. Late in the day, Bely-Turenin emerges as the novel’s much-abused but true hero: severely crippled and dispirited, he exits The False Tsarevich an embittered, emotionless philanthropist. Given that he is by far the novel’s most morally engaged character, his unhappy fate presages even worse misfortune for others. The best his fellow characters can hope for is disappointment; the worst, ignominious death—the ill-fated Dmitry, whose numerous missteps 41 Victoria Margree and Bryony Randall, “Fin-de-siècle Gothic,” in The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Andrews Smith and William Hughes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 217–18. 42 N. N. Alekseev, Lzhetsarevich, in Tainy istorii v romanakh, povestiakh i dokumentakh: Vek XVII (Moscow: TERRA, 1998), 229.

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and mishaps vitiate his ambitions, perishes mired in the confusion he has done so much to create. With Dmitry’s downfall, Alekseev forecloses the possibility of either stability or progress. As Alekseev’s Moscow slips into chaos, seventeenth-century history once again retreats from the narrative. Alekseev documents neither the public disorder, arrogant Poles, nor boyar intrigues constituent to Dmitry fiction; even Marina is absent from the radically foreshortened story of Dmitry’s year on the throne. Instead, Alekseev looks to darker forces, attributing the onset of the Time of Troubles to an unfathomable upwelling of atavistic personalities. He reinforces this point by reprising the vampire of Part 1, a ghastly, Gothic monster who tears at his enemies’ throats with his teeth. Neither faith nor logic can prevail against this darkness. Clearly, Alekseev’s False Tsarevich responds less directly to late nineteenth-century political discourse than to a period style in which “a vocabulary of sickness and crisis was used to define public life.”43 For Alekseev, disintegration is all: “good” and “bad” characters perish alike, and those who survive like Bely-Turenin do so equivocally. Alekseev makes little effort to supplement earlier interpretations of the Dmitry material, creating instead a sensationalist novel undergirded by adventure, romance, and mystery. By decoupling his fictive world from any specific historical period, he universalizes his message. The False Tsarevich stresses Russia’s timeless struggle against unknowable forces, rather than seventeenth-or even nineteenth-century heroism. Its world is drained of energy; its Dmitry, a creature of ostensible personal charm but little practical initiative, embodies heroic dreams of a better world but also the futility of attempting to achieve them. This Dmitry—and Russia—are doomed by forces only dimly intuited. In The False Tsarevich, Alekseev creates a very different ambience from Mordovtsev and Avenarius and, indeed, from any previous writer in the Dmitry tradition: for Alekseev, atmosphere eclipses incident and fate foredooms valor. Although he follows Avenarius by distancing his eponymous protagonist from the role of hero, he does so in a very different spirit: unlike Avenarius’s Prince Kurbsky, Alekseev’s hero-surrogate, Bely-Turenin, exits the novel spiritually drained. Knowing that irrationality has triumphed in Russia, he no longer struggles to build a better future.

43 Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle, 1.

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Alexey Suvorin: The Twilight of a Tradition Aleksey Sergeevich Suvorin (1834–1912) was born in a peasant village in Voronezh Province to a destitute father whose service in the Napoleonic Wars had earned him a promotion to the hereditary nobility.44 The young Suvorin entered the Mikhailovsky Voronezh Corps, a provincial military academy, and later transferred to the Regiment of the Nobility in St. Petersburg, where he first encountered the world of literature and literary criticism. In 1853, following a brief military career, he returned to Voronezh as a teacher and occasional contributor to a local literary almanac. Advocating progressive ideas in general and the need for mass education in particular, Suvorin caught the attention of intellectuals in the two capitals and was able to place a number of pieces in the liberal Russian Speech (Russkaia rech´). In 1861 he became a secretary on its editorial board. By 1862 Suvorin was earning his living with his pen. Significantly, one of his first commissions was for a history of the Time of Troubles for the Moscow Society for the Dissemination of Useful Books, which encouraged popular literacy. In 1863 he moved to St. Petersburg, where he worked on the editorial staff of the St. Petersburg News (Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti) and cultivated the feuilleton. Throughout the 1860s and early 1870s he remained a champion of the Great Reforms, briefly earning undeserved notoriety as a nihilist. In 1876 he bought the liberal New Times (Novoe vremia). Quite unexpectedly, he then made a philosophical about-face, espousing conservative Populism and Pan-Slavism; thereafter, his erstwhile allies would deride him as a reactionary. Once Suvorin had consolidated his position at the New Times, he began to invest heavily in the theater and publishing worlds, purchasing a printing press in 1877 and a theater company in 1895. In 1906 he published a collection of his own essays on the Time of Troubles, Critical Essays on Dmitry the Pretender (O Dmitrii samozvantse: Kriticheskie ocherki), in which he summarized his views on a topic that had engrossed him for much of his career.45 44 I have based my brief biography of Suvorin on the account supplied by Effie Ambler in Russian Journalism and Politics, 1861–1881 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972). 45 The essays in Critical Essays on Dmitry the Pretender critiqued the views of different historians. In each of them, Suvorin admitted that the truth concerning “Dmitry’s” identity would probably never be known, but he nevertheless championed the view that False Dmitry was really the true tsarevich. In a bow toward his own recent play, he assured readers that the Troubles material would continue to provide subject matter for poets and playwrights (O Dmitrii samozvantse: Kriticheskie ocherki [St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A. S. Suvorina, 1906], vii).

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Additionally, he wrote a number of plays and short stories, contributing to the belletristic Dmitry tradition with Tsar Dmitry the Pretender and Tsarevna Xenya, which he staged in St. Petersburg in 1902. In Tsar Dmitry the Pretender and Tsarevna Xenya, Suvorin set himself the twinned goals of showing that Dmitry truly believed himself to be Ivan the Terrible’s son and that he passionately loved Xenya Godunova. In his preface to the play’s 1905 edition, Suvorin indicated that its origins lay in a lifelong fascination with the historical person of Dmitry.46 Indeed, his later Critical Essays on Dmitry the Pretender would reveal an ongoing engagement with both Russian and western Time of Trouble source materials. Having become convinced of Dmitry’s legitimacy, Suvorin hoped Tsar Dmitry and Tsarevna Xenya would persuade his audience as well. Given this intent, Suvorin might be expected to structure Tsar Dmitry and Tsarevna Xenya around moments of revelation and disclosure, and such moments do in fact occur. However, additional factors intervene, leaving the play without a unifying structural focus. The hero’s love intrigue, for example, bears little logical connection to his quest for the throne but nevertheless generates at least as much dialogue as the question of his identity, undercutting unity of action. Moreover, Suvorin’s fascination with historical accuracy sporadically gets the better of him, yielding long passages in which politics and battlefields impinge on the imagined fiction à la Mordovtsev. Additionally, the perfidy of Moscow’s boyars consumes numerous scenes, creating a third, distracting, dramatic conflict. In consequence, Tsar Dmitry and Tsarevna Xenya becomes a dramaturgical omnibus. Suvorin’s dramatis personae—almost fifty named characters as well as an assortment of unnamed extras—overwhelms viewers as well. Many minor characters signally fail to earn their place in the script, delivering no more than one or two lines before exiting the stage for good. More weighty personages appear in inexplicably random fashion: Maria and Fyodor Godunov occupy a good deal of space in Act 1, for example, but then die, having achieved nothing that would justify their inclusion in the play. Perhaps Suvorin’s surfeit of personnel reflects a misplaced allegiance to historical accuracy; perhaps his grip on dramatic convention is loose; perhaps he consciously intends to decenter his play. Regardless of motivation, however, his inclusion of so many characters creates a centrifugal force that destabilizes the play. 46 A. S. Suvorin, Tsar´ Dmitrii samozvanets i tsarevna Kseniia (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A. S. Suvorina, 1905).

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Language is similarly heterogeneous. Suvorin’s characters speak at length in unrhymed verse, only to suddenly switch to prose. Occasionally one form predominates for an entire act, but as often as not the two alternate. Songs and laments, offered by the play’s folksier characters, appear at regular intervals. And yet Suvorin endows all his characters, regardless of social class, with an almost identical speech register. This uniformity of diction rings strangely flat against the play’s mélange of poetry, prose, and song, adding stylistic discontinuity to a work already destabilized by thematic uncertainty. Equally problematically, Suvorin treats his play’s structural divisions inconsistently, creating three long acts unbroken by scenes, but also two—Acts 2 and 5—subdivided into “pictures,” or kartiny (two pictures for Act 2 and three more for Act 5), producing an inconsistent, asymmetrical structure. Even if the decision to subdivide certain acts reflects Suvorin’s sense that they are too long, this merely refers the play’s disproportionality back a stage in its aesthetic conception. Why not write additional, shorter acts? What does Suvorin hope to convey with Tsar Dmitry and Tsarevna Xenya, and how does its unusual structure help transmit his message? Of prime i­mportance to Suvorin is his chief article of faith—that Dmitry believes in his royal lineage. In Act 4, Dmitry asks Xenya—with more than a hint of bathos—how she would feel if she had spent her entire life concealing her identity and simultaneously broadcasting it to the entire world. His claim that these dueling imperatives have driven him to distraction proves prophetic, since the tension of living the lie concurrently with the truth ­ultimately undoes him: his late-life reversion to his birth name has been too long delayed and cannot annul his ­thirteen-year-long fabrication. Dmitry’s mother, the nun Marfa, belatedly vouches for him to his captors: “You would have done better to ask [who he was] while he was still alive. Now he belongs to God,”47 implying that in life he belonged to her. Moreover, Xenya also comes to believe: at play’s end, Boris Godunov comes to her in a dream to assure her that Dmitry was truly Ivan’s son. In addition to defending Dmitry’s birthright, Suvorin spins a complicated love story. Dmitry falls in love with Xenya at first sight—her beauty bewitches and her modesty confounds him, but he refuses to marry her unless she endorses his mission as Russia’s trueborn tsar. The nobleman Ryapolovsky also loves Xenya, and although he knows that Dmitry has dishonored her, he is willing to take her as he finds her. By contrast, Marina Mniszek, who appears 47 Ibid., 202.

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in the play’s final act, loves with destructive self-absorption; she cannot forgive Dmitry’s infatuation with Xenya. As in The False Tsarevich, no true union of souls is possible. Dmitry and Marina’s destructive love leads only to anger and disharmony; Dmitry’s frenzied passion for Xenya founders on his need to placate his Polish allies; Ryapolovsky and Xenya’s idealized love remains unconsummated since Xenya enters a convent. Equally unpromising are relations among Moscow’s boyars. Dmitry’s closest advisers are doubly faithless, doubly duplicitous: caring only for themselves, they first desert the Godunovs—even after Fyodor Godunov has shown them great kindness—and then turn against Dmitry. Whether or not Suvorin consciously envisioned Tsar Dmitry and Tsarevna Xenya as a noncohering work of art, the play’s variously disjointed bits and pieces mirror the disjointed fates of its unhappy protagonists. Tsar Dmitry and Tsarevna Xenya offers, in the first instance, a story about individual human beings’ fates. Condemned to live in a world in which problems have no solutions, the play’s protagonists find no way out, no moral center around which to rally. It is tempting to imagine that Suvorin, like Alekseev, matched his vision of Russia’s disordered, early seventeenth-century characters to his understanding of late nineteenth-century circumstances, in which order and consensus had become increasingly rare.

Laying Dmitry to Rest It has been one of my central contentions throughout this book that Dmitry texts appear in coherent clusters: in the eighteenth century as well as in 1866, each cluster’s texts are noticeably similar, featuring nearly identical character sets, themes, and formal structures. In the early nineteenth century, by contrast, the texts self-consciously differ, reflecting a polemical dialogue among authors acutely aware of their antecedents: in this instance, difference is marked, a signpost pointing to previous texts almost as vividly as similarity would. The fin-de-siècle cluster constitutes a partial exception to both these alternatives. Its belletrists work largely independently of one another: some aspects of one author’s text may recall those of another’s, but resemblances are limited and unsystematic, conducing to a low degree of textual coherence across the cluster. The cluster’s heterogeneity can be traced in part to philosophical differences among its authors: although late nineteenth-century Russian conservatives believed that democratic tendencies had reanimated the Smuta’s originating trauma, liberals, radicals, and thinkers of less clearly defined p­ olitical

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persuasions disagreed either with the proposition itself or with the factors adduced to support it. Each belletristic author in the fin de siècle’s Dmitry cluster replicates his own vision of trauma in his Time of Troubles fiction. Mordovtsev, who glories in the empire’s geographic and ethnic diversity, represents the dangers of late nineteenth-century Russia’s tightening nationalist-absolutist ideology. His Vasily Shuisky’s remarkable capacity to bend mutually antagonistic peoples to his own self-serving ends dooms Muscovy’s chance for democracy. Avenarius, by contrast, fears a dilution of Orthodox exceptionalism. His created world cowers in the face of the same diverse social elements Mordovtsev applauds—most particularly, Catholics. Alekseev documents the very personal trauma suffered by each of his tormented characters, thematizing the era’s pervasive self-doubt: The False Tsarevich generalizes this trauma only in summative fashion—individual small traumas coalesce into a mass of small, contiguous traumas rather than a shared, national laceration. Suvorin conveys the futility of attempting to align personal relations with national aspirations: both Dmitry’s mother and his mistress arrive too late to testify to his legitimacy and save him. A second factor loosening the bonds among this cluster’s texts is the era’s fascination with “facts.” As we have seen, historians like Platonov advocated gathering data before arriving at generalizations and, to this end, performed yeoman’s service in publishing documents relating to the Time of Troubles: historical “facts” had never been thicker on the ground. Mordovtsev, Avenarius, and Alekseev all make abundant—even overabundant—use of the i­nformation available to them, conferring a sense of material plenitude on their novels and straining the bounds of their genre. Alekseev reins in the i­ mpending structural chaos more adeptly than Mordovtsev and Avenarius, but even The False Tsarevich is compositionally diffuse. In all three novels, character and place are more effective as structural elements than as thematic ones: as a result, causal ties weaken, leaving the characters at the mercy of serendipity. The texts are episodic and their characters’ fates contingent, reliant on chance encounters and alliances. Since each author selects different “facts,” each novel veers off in its own direction, converging with the others only in its final c­ hapters when Dmitry is murdered. Late nineteenth-century Dmitry texts, unlike their predecessors, appeal to different audiences. Mordovtsev writes for the middle layers of Russia’s reading public—consumers of entertaining, exotic, and mildly titillating historical novels. While Mordovtsev rarely condescends to his audience, neither does he challenge it. Avenarius, by contrast, speaks to young readers, playing on their

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susceptibility to the attractions of nostalgic nationalism. His patriotic trilogy maps closely with the imperial court’s predilection for the “traditional” Russia in which humble but incorruptible men and women freely offer their loyalty to altruistic leaders. Alekseev writes for more sophisticated readers. His implied reader can penetrate The False Tsarevich’s Gothic thrills and chills and grasp the fragility of a Russia whose tsar has retreated from his government. Following the Symbolists, Alekseev probes history, searching for the essence of his nation but finding only turmoil. Similarly, Suvorin seeks to appeal to a more educated audience. Tsar Dmitry the Pretender and Tsarevna Xenya reprises neoclassicism’s conflict between love and duty but also the early nineteenth century’s spirit of formal innovation and daring. While Suvorin fails to subsume these very different moments in Russian dramaturgy into the aesthetics of his own era, his attempt implies an audience capable of recognizing the effort. The final Time of Troubles cluster is a generic as well as a thematic outlier: before Mordovtsev’s False Dmitry only Bulgarin had written a Dmitry novel. In many ways drama is a more suitable medium than the novel for Dmitry fiction: its many voices provide scope for Dmitry’s defenders’ as well as his detractors’ views without entangling a narrator in them. As we have seen, Dmitry’s promise as well as his peril have frequently been treated as analogous with contemporary concerns; the stage offers a public forum to air them. A novel’s narrator, by contrast, must make choices, privileging one character and one view over another. Additionally, s/he speaks to one reader at a time, precluding the more immediate and open reception of the theater. However, late nineteenthcentury Dmitry novels’ deployment of many characters, many languages and speech registers, and many surrogate heroes overrides narrative mediation, allowing broad scope for polyphony and contestation. Indeed, the period’s tendency to endlessly multiply characters is so strong that it bleeds into its one drama and badly destabilizes it. In addition to their prodigal deployment of characters, the four texts share a similar approach to developing their eponymous heroes. Each of their Dmitrys hides under one or more masks. If a particular text’s Dmitry truly believes he is royal, then he dons alternate identities in times and places where honesty is dangerous. Conversely, if he knows he is false, then he covers his imposture with a perdurable mask. Moreover, both Avenarius’s and Alekseev’s Dmitrys engage in another type of masquerade, ceding scenes that they might otherwise dominate to their surrogates. Prince Kurbsky and Bely-Turenin are full-person masks and perform the doughty deeds expected of the titular hero. Mark D. Steinberg has identified masks as characteristic features of

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Russia’s modernist landscape. As tangible manifestations of the fin de siècle’s uncertainty and instability, masks portend both transformation and transgression. While liberating for sophisticated urbanites, they deeply unsettled more naive Russians.48 The Dmitry of fin-de-siècle fiction has less control than his predecessors over his masks. Emulating Russia’s real-life autocrats, he tries to have it both ways, donning the mask of servant of the Russian people but also that of seeker of private pleasures. The first mask promises transformation, the second transgression. Late nineteenth-century men of letters’ fascination with seventeenth-­ century subject matter aligns them not only with their Russian contemporaries, who intuited a new Smuta, but also with western writers, who also gazed retrospectively into the past. In his study of Victorian-era historical novels in Great Britain, Andrew Sanders argues that the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed “change on an unprecedented scale, in society and politics as much as in science and invention.” As a result, “a good deal of its art and thought looked back, sometimes nostalgically, to traditions and to alternative forms.”49 Rather than striving for strict historical accuracy, Victorian artists and writers approached the past as a seedbed for cultural myths and atmosphere. Late imperial Russia was very different from Victorian Britain, of course, but the cause-and-effect relationship between rapid, large-scale change and n­ ostalgia pertains to it equally well. In the last decades of Russia’s nineteenth century, as industrialization took hold, pastoral values began to fade and artists looked to bygone days in compensation, embracing their highly personalized and subjective visions of medieval life. Patrons of the arts were no less susceptible to the tug of the past: seeking to transform the past into the building blocks of the future, for example, the wealthy Mamontov family sponsored the construction of a church in the style of medieval Novgorod on their Abramtsevo estate in 1880. In 1901 Princess Maria Tenisheva promoted a similar project at Flenovo, and in the years between 1904 and 1906 art historians restored Andrey Rublev’s magnificent Old Testament Trinity.50 The nineteenth century’s final cluster of Time 48 Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle, 86. 49 Andrew Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel, 1840–1880 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979), 1. 50 On the establishment of the Abramtsevo art colony, see Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 9–14. On Princess Tenisheva’s colony, see Katia Dianina, When Art Makes News: Writing Culture and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013). On the rediscovery of medieval icons, see Jefferson J. A. Gatrall’s introduction to Alter Icons: The Russian

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of Troubles texts should be read in the context of a pan-national celebration of cultural heritage as well as in their more local frame of reference. The yearning to reanimate a semimythical past did not last. Soviet Russia’s official culture focused on meeting the challenges of a utilitarian future rather than on aligning the nation’s present to its past. This ideological sea change spelled the obsolescence of historical fiction about Dmitry.

Icon and Modernity, ed. Jefferson J. A. Gatrall and Douglas M. Greenfield (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 1–25.

Dmitry: Re-resurrections and Conclusions You can’t die more than once. Nor less. —Russian saying It’s no more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection. —Voltaire

S

ince 2005 Russia has celebrated a new holiday, the Day of National Unity. Falling on November 4, it fulfills an explicit function—commemorating the 1612 recapture of Moscow from the Poles—as well as an implicit one—distracting attention from November 7, the Soviet-era observance of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Day of National Unity is intended to reassure Russia’s citizens that the country has put times of trouble—be they of seventeenth- or twentieth-century origin—behind it. Not everyone is convinced. A reader in an undated posting to “Pravoslavie i mir,” a website dealing with Orthodoxy and contemporary society, fears that “a new smuta is threatening Russia” and urges Russian Orthodox authorities to be on guard. A 2013 posting to “Voprosik,” a site specializing in stories about Russian nationalism and featuring a blog for “red-hot articles and veracious stories” (blog krichashchikh statei i pravdivykh istorii), references the deflation of 2008 in terms of a “prelude to a Time of Troubles.”1 Other examples could be cited. Like their eighteenthand nineteenth-century forebears, these commentators have chosen to read contemporary society through an early seventeenth-century lens. Against this background of renewed interest in the Time of Troubles, Lyudmila Taymasova and Boris Akunin have each authored a Dmitry text. The two are   1 “Pravoslavie i mir,” http://pravmir.ru/vopros-otvet/rossii-grozit-novaya-smuta; “Voprosik,” http://voprosik.net/novaya-smuta-21-veka.

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radically different one from the other and offer, at best, a partial example of early twenty-first-century developments. Mindful of the inadvisability of deriving conclusions from still-evolving trends, I discuss each text briefly, without speculating on the nature of a new, twenty-first-century Dmitry cluster.

Lyudmila Taymasova: History in a Fantastical Key The historian Lyudmila Taymasova’s 2006 Tragedy in Uglich (Tragediia v Ugliche), purports to reveal what “really” happened to the child Dmitry in 1591—to pin down the past “objectively.” Taymasova assumes that late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century accounts of the Troubles all contain objective elements of “truth,” and her methods and goals are naive. She is nevertheless a careful reader: like her predecessor, Suvorin, she meticulously assesses each legend and document, pointing out inconsistencies and weaknesses in its argument. Also like Suvorin, however, she judges the credibility of each story unevenly and subjectively, bending it to fit a preconceived theory. Tragedy in Uglich employs the language and methodology of history and marshals a host of primary and secondary sources, including chronicles, official government documents, and scholarly monographs and articles. Unfortunately, the intricate story Taymasova weaves relies on untoward leaps of imagination, many of which are introduced by the wistful suggestion that “it’s entirely pos­ sible” or “it’s entirely believable”: she struggles heroically to bring the many ­disparate pieces of her story into accord. When convenient, she dismisses ­previous historiography altogether, querying, “but is it really so?” Tragedy in Uglich relies on a type of logic more typically associated with fantasy fiction. Its geographic boundaries are either permeable or nonexistent: provincial events transpire in the capital; Dmitry’s Uglich merges with Godunov’s Moscow; both courts lack ontological specificity. Taymasova counters this collapse of distinctions with an inverse process in which people and spaces multiply: Grisha Otrepev turns out to be two distinctly different young men, one from Uglich, the other from Galich; a veritable army of young boys, each of whom either is Dmitry or becomes confused with him, comprises an epileptic Estonian, an unattested joint heir to the unattested joint throne of Poland and Russia, an unsupervised Tsarevich Dmitry running loose in Moscow’s streets, and the two aforementioned Otrepev boys. Unfortunately for these youngsters, Taymasova’s theory requires nearly universal extermination: boys burn to death, die from seizures, explode inside a cannon, or simply disappear, making Russia’s history even more tragic than previously suspected.

Dmitry: Re-resurrections and Conclusions

Taymasova believes quite simply that the written word conveys a stable and usable reality and that there is a time and a place for everything. She credits all her mutually contradicting sources as truthful, which requires her to imagine reality as an impossibly complicated series of catastrophes. In her patchwork universe, everything has a place but nothing has a meaning. This suggests a simultaneous acceptance of the fin de siècle’s detail-laden approach to Dmitry’s life and an intervention against it: while Taymasova hews to her predecessors’ embrace of “facts,” she rejects their diminution of Dmitry. She wants both a fully fleshed Time of Troubles, replete with active secondary characters, and a “great man,” a superhero who triumphs over every possible contingency. The result is neither fish nor fowl, neither historiography nor literature, nor even something in between.

Boris Akunin’s Time of Troubles: Russia’s Past or Future? In 2005 Boris Akunin published A Children’s Book (Detskaia kniga), a novel chronicling the misadventures of twelve-year-old Lastik Fandorin, the great-grandson of Akunin’s famous fictional detective Erast Fandorin. Lastik is recruited by a mysterious professor to crawl through a series of “chronoholes” in search of the paradise apple, a sixty-four-carat diamond that has precipitated epidemics and wars ever since Adam and Eve first succumbed to its allure. Now Lastik seeks it in order to avert future misfortunes. After a series of misadventures in 1914, Lastik enters a chronohole that takes him to 1605. Moscow in 1605 is seething with unrest: Boris Godunov, who has made common cause with his old enemy, Vasily Shuisky, is tsar, but a young man named Otrepev has recently appeared in Poland claiming to be Dmitry, the miraculously preserved heir to the throne. Shuisky now seeks a young boy’s corpse to pass off as a long-dead and mummified Dmitry. Needless to say, the one he finds is Lastik, who is pretending to be dead. Godunov leans over to study Lastik more closely and tickles his nose with his beard, whereupon Lastik sneezes. The superstitious Godunov has a stroke and bequeaths Lastik his throne with his last dying breath. Lastik, however, joins forces with Otrepev, a Komsomol boy, who has also arrived in 1605 by accident. Ultimately, Otrepev is assassinated, and Lastik flees through a chronohole to a future in which humanity has nearly been destroyed. One of the few remaining beings in this brave new world helps him return to his own era.2   2 From this summary, it should be evident that A Children’s Book is, at least in part, a historical novel. Rosalind Marsh has chronicled the great increase in popularity of historical fiction

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Like Tragedy in Uglich, A Children’s Book multiplies heroes and spaces, offering three distinct Dmitrys: the real (but unfortunately dead) one, Lastik, and Otrepev. These Dmitrys hail from Uglich . . . or Moscow . . . or Kiev. Time is similarly destabilized: Lastik’s Moscow coexists simultaneously in 1605, 1914, 2005, and an unspecified date in the near future. Identities multiply and blur: Lastik appears in the guise of a gypsy boy, a circus performer, a surrogate detective, the tsarevich, and the angel Erastiil; the professor resembles Lastik’s circus master, Diavolo Diavolini, and Marina Mniszek’s Irish fortuneteller, Edward Kelly.3 He also bears an uncanny resemblance to both Andrew Ketterley,4 the evil magician who sends children off to other times and places in C. S. Lewis’s Magician’s Nephew,5 and Woland, Mikhail Bulgakov’s great performer of magic transformations in The Master and Margarita.6 Are these men really one man, a shapeshifter created by Boris Akunin, or are they many men, three Akunin

in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period. Her analysis, while quite helpful in explaining the period in question, is restricted to fictive works that examine late tsarist and Sovietera events. See her History and Literature in Contemporary Russia (New York: New York University Press, 1995).   3 The real Edward Kelly (1555–1597) was a British alchemist and medium who died in a Czech prison.   4 Andrew Ketterley, the magician in The Magician’s Nephew, is described as “very tall and very thin,” with “a clean-shaven face with a sharp nose and extremely bright eyes and a great tousled mop of gray hair” (C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew [New York: Macmillan, 1986], 10). Professor van Dorn, the magician in A Children’s Book, is also described as tall and thin with gray hair. Ketterley sends his young neighbor Polly and his nephew off to explore the Other. They have rings that transport them through ponds, which serve as portals to this other world. The children free a witch from an enchantment, and, through her, evil is loosed on the world. In another world altogether, however, Aslan the good lion fights against the principle of evil. Over the course of seven volumes of the Narnia tales, the balance between good and evil shifts, sometimes in one direction, sometimes in the other, just as in A Children’s Book. Unlike in Akunin, the Other is figured as a spatial rather than temporal difference.  5 The Chronicles of Narnia were translated into Russian as Khroniki Narnii in the 1980s by N. Trauberg but did not appear in print until the early 1990s (N. N. Mamaeva, “Khristianstvo i “Khroniki Narnii’ K. S. L´iuisa,” Izvestiia Ural´skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta: Gumanitarnye nauki. Seriia 2 [1999], http://www.bestreferat.ru/referat-395464.html). The Chronicles have been popular in Russia. A quick web search reveals that at least fourteen Russian editions have been printed since 1991; both a web text and audio versions on CDs are available, and individual volumes can be downloaded. The Magician’s Nephew has been translated as Plemiannik charodeia.   6 For a fuller discussion of A Children’s Book’s intertexts, see Marcia A. Morris, “Boris Akunin’s Children’s Book: Russian Adventures in Anglo-American Intertextuality,” Journal of Children’s Literature Studies 6 (2009): 88–105.

Dmitry: Re-resurrections and Conclusions

characters plus their various literary forebears, the creations of other writers in other times and places? Human identity, to be sure, is slippery. The quiddity of space is similarly problematic. A Children’s Book offers various places that are really one place but that, nevertheless, have their own characteristic identities. Each version of Moscow is identified sensually through its specific sights, sounds, and smells and is mediated by chronoholes—the most liminal of all spaces. Akunin erases boundaries, reversing Taymasova’s quest by asking whether there is a fixed place for anyone or anything. His heroes and villains (or is it just one hero, just one villain?) become archetypes, ever-evolving but essentially identical incarnations of themselves. If identity is fractured and discontinuous, then Lastik is not one boy but several, and Moscow is not one space but at least four. Accordingly, the world becomes a place in which every possible “fact” exhibits its own discrete truth and occupies its own particular space. In this case, many different protagonists haunt many different spaces. Nothing is shared; nothing is learned; there is no meaning. The Lastik of 1605 vanishes, abandoning Moscow to the Time of Troubles; his 1914 incarnation also vanishes, leaving Russia on the brink of World War I; the postapocalyptic Lastik of 2006 returns to his 2005 life without having averted the impending disaster. On the one hand, Akunin posits that phenomena appearing to be plural and varied are actually single and identical, suggesting that life may be simpler than it seems. On the other hand, he also submits that phenomena appearing to be unified and harmonious are really shattered and heterogeneous, suggesting that life is more complex than it seems. By complicating conventional views that history has both structure and meaning, he confirms the postmodernist insight that historical reality is malleable and alternate histories possible.7 Akunin purposely leaves the choice between wholeness and heterogeneity open, closing the novel ambiguously “So what is to be done? Someone has to save the world . . . To be continued.”8 The original seventeenth-century mystery concerning “Dmitry’s” identity only deepens under his scrutiny. History has been so destabilized that it can no longer be pinned down: its relevance to the present, which Soviet ideology had accounted for quite doctrinairely, is doubtful. For Akunin, the Time of Troubles may be either a recurring phenomenon, threatening Russia with yet another instantiation of its destructive   7 Elizabeth Wesseling, Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1991), 113–17.   8 Boris Akunin, Detskaia kniga (Moscow: OLMA, 2005) 541.

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force or an individual instance from which Russia, like Lastik, can cautiously walk away.

Times of Trouble in Russian Literature Dmitry haunts Russian culture: the man who intervened in history at a moment of high tension and drama challenged foundational notions of sovereignty, governance, and identity in ways that are still relevant today. For centuries, literature has been one of the modes of discourse most frequently deployed to answer his challenge; since transpositions of politics into literature have become commonplace across cultures, Russian attempts to understand Dmitry imaginatively are unsurprising. What does surprise, however, is their frequency and recurrence. Great historical dramatists and novelists in non-Russian traditions have responded similarly to analogous challenges in their own cultures: Shakespeare’s history plays debate the politics of sovereignty and identity at least as insistently as Dmitry fiction.9 The histories can be read from two perspectives: either as products of their arrangement in the posthumous First Folio—as “an integrated compilation of elements designed to compose a grand historical narrative”—or as individual plays written in no premeditated order—as “a discrete collection of dramatic exercises, differing radically one from another in form and style, and linked to one another only by the contingency of common contents.”10 If we privilege the first view, then Shakespeare treats his material more capaciously than Dmitry authors, following moments of historical trauma from their inception through to their closure. If the second, then he worries his material, addressing a problem over and over again from different perspectives without necessarily coming to a unifying conclusion. Again, this is different from Russian practice. In both readings, moreover, subsequent British authors failed to revisit the material Shakespeare presents with the frequency of Dmitry authors. The history plays exist as products of one man’s unique vision; the Dmitry fictions as recurrent examples of many men’s shared preoccupation. Germany’s foremost exponent of the historical drama, Friedrich Schiller, also explores moments of great national trauma, most appositely in his   9 Thomas P. Anderson proposes that politics enter Shakespeare’s plays in relation to sovereign power in “flash moments,” recreating a political past (Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016], 3). 10 Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 8.

Dmitry: Re-resurrections and Conclusions

Wallenstein trilogy. Although he is considered more “German” than his great contemporary Goethe,11 he nevertheless remains focused on “strict dramatic form”; in his plays, “aesthetic considerations take precedence . . . over political ones . . . [he] is too much a child of the Enlightenment, with its rational universalism and cosmopolitanism, to be able to forge a read community with the seventeenth century, or to think in national terms.”12 Schiller’s other historical plays, like his Demetrius, are sited outside Germany and explore themes common to many times and places:13 thus, culturally specific transference is weaker than in Russian Dmitry texts. The singularity of the Russian Dmitry tradition lies in its periodic reapprehensions of contemporary trauma as incarnations of an exemplary ur-trauma. As historians’ understandings of Russia have evolved over time, so too have belletrists’ responses to them. The raw Dmitry material, which is tightly temporally bounded by comparison with the successive royal reigns depicted in Shakespeare’s tetralogies or Schiller’s Thirty Years War, nevertheless remains both rich and ambiguous, open to infinite permutations. Each writer in the tradition has confronted similar sets of questions. Whose trauma does the Time of Troubles represent? Dmitry’s? His contemporaries’? All Russia’s? Is this trauma characteristically Russian? Do “great men” like Boris Godunov, Dmitry, or Vasily Shuisky make history, or do the people? Is novelty necessarily destructive? Is imagination always constructive? Beginning with Pushkin, more than one author has approached these questions ambivalently. Dmitry plays and novels all focus on the initial, late medieval side of the liminal crisis they depict, presenting the state of affairs pertaining before disaster strikes. Authors handle the crisis itself—Dmitry’s assassination and Shuisky’s usurpation of the throne—briefly, if at all, and ignore Russia’s postcrisis resurrection a­ ltogether.14 Russian audiences know the “facts” of the concluding, early modern phase of the liminal crisis, but authors allow them to mold this information into productive knowledge according to their own personal convictions. Thus, even though authors in the earlier Dmitry clusters wholeheartedly condemn their 11 Kathy Saranpa, Schiller’s “Wallenstein,” “Maria Stuart”, and “Die Jungfrau von Orleans”: The Critical Legacy (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 3. 12 Alan Menhennet, The Historical Experience in German Drama: From Gryphius to Brecht (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 68–69. 13 Demetrius explores the universal theme of “a man whose finest qualities are exploited for political ends by those who want to profit from the changing times” (Lesley Sharpe, Schiller and Historical Character: Presentation and Interpretation in the Historiographical Works and in the Historical Dramas [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982], 177). 14 Bulgarin’s apotheosis of the Romanovs constitutes a partial exception to this rule.

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protagonist, they, like their more charitably minded successors, leave construction of the overarching meaning of the Troubles to their readers and viewers. Each new Dmitry cluster has imagined its equivocal hero more generously than its predecessor: the seventeenth century’s diabolical miscreant yields to the eighteenth century’s tyrant; the early nineteenth-century’s adventurer-usurper metamorphoses into the mid-century’s well-intentioned reformer; and the late nineteenth-century Dmitry stands poised on the threshold of dynastic legitimacy. The deracinated upstart has attained a pedigree. Each cluster’s vision of Dmitry tracks loosely with its era’s historiography—authors take their cue from the newly discovered primary and secondary sources at their disposal. Equally important, however, are the politics of their day: as the appeal of democratic solutions to Russia’s political conundrums grows, so too does sympathy for the man who gained the throne through popular support. This is not to say that each Dmitry text always portrays its hero more liberally than its predecessor. Individual authors bring their own political views and artistic talents to bear on their material and are free to disregard their text’s most proximate model in favor of an earlier one—as occurs particularly frequently in the less accomplished plays of the 1830s. The decision in favor of either literary archaism or innovation has ramifications for form as much as for content: the authors of stridently anti-Dmitry plays observe the neoclassical unities more narrowly than those of neutral or pro-Dmitry plays and novels. The more tightly an author hews to prescriptive generic rules, the more fiercely he condemns Dmitry, the parvenu who broke prescriptive social rules. Conversely, the more generically expansive an author is, the more likely he is to afford his hero the benefit of the doubt, a trend that reaches its zenith in the fin de siècle’s outsized, episodic novels. As I have noted more than once, Dmitry plays and novels, like all historical fiction, feature two moments in time, the time of the action depicted and the time of composition: I have tied the first to historical recurrence and the second to cultural transference. While all Dmitry texts exhibit both phenomena, each balances them differently, resulting in alternating waves of more vs. less well-balanced texts. The seventeenth-century works I have examined mix recurrence and transference fairly consistently: the replication of recent disturbances is key to laying the old dynasty to rest, but the establishment of a new one is equally important. By contrast, the eighteenthcentury and 1866 clusters each produce a pair of closely related plays that engage vigorously with the most pressing political issues of their times. Written in eras of reform, they bend their representation of Time of Troubles to conform it to

Dmitry: Re-resurrections and Conclusions

contemporary society. In these plays, the future is full of promise, unfolding by grace of a royal restoration (in the person of the eighteenth century’s nontyrannical Vasily Shuisky) or a liberal political agenda (the reforming Dmitry of 1866). The early nineteenth-century and fin-de-siècle plays and novels, like the seventeenth-century’s texts, expend roughly equal amounts of energy on historical representation and contemporary relevance. Originating in decades of quashed liberalism, they explore moments of past despair, searching for—but not quite finding—hope for their own blighted present. Dmitry’s capacity to epitomize either legitimacy or falsehood, heroism or villainy, patriotism or treachery aligns him with all times of trouble: he is Russia’s quintessential scapegoat—but also its perdurable savior. Dmitry will continue to haunt Russian literature for as long as authors transpose political issues into literary discourse: his early twenty-first-century re-resurrection in Boris Akunin’s Children’s Book is unsurprising if delightful. But is A Children’s Book a harbinger of other Dmitry fiction to come? Akunin’s earlier-cited prognostication for the planet’s future applies equally to Dmitry’s literary fortunes: “So what is to be done? Someone has to save the world . . . To be continued.” Literary Dmitrys are bound to continue, to appear at need ready to meet every contingency.

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155

Index A

Abramtsevo, 131 Afanas’ev, Alexander K., 86n5 Agapkina, T. P., 121n37 Akunin, Boris, vii, 133–137, 141 Children’s Book, vii, 135–137, 141 Al’tshuller, M. G., 72 Alekseev, Nikolay, 105, 120–124, 128–130 False Tsarevich, The, 105, 120–124, 129–130 Alexander I, 21–22, 47, 51–56, 66–67, Alexander II, 19, 86, 89, 96, 106 Alexander III, 105–107, 114 Alexander Nevsky Monastery, 47 Alexander, John T., xiin4, 46n87–88 Alexey (Tsarevich), 20–22 Ambler, Effie, 125n44 Anan’ich, B. V., 111n24 Anderson, Thomas P., 138n9 Anisimov, E. V., 21n7, 22n10 Anna, 21–22 Annals, xxv-xxvi, 7, 16, 67 Antihagiography 15–16 Apocalypse 63 Arbitrariness vs. legality, 87–88, 92–94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102 Avenarius, Vasily, 105, 115–122, 124, 129–130 Ataman’s Son, 115, 117–118 Heroes of Kievan Rus, 115 In Service for the Tsarevich, 105, 116, 120 Onward to Moscow!, 115, 118–119 Pestilence, 115 Three Crowns, The, 115–118

B

Balaev, Michelle, xx Baratynsky, Evgeny, 58 Baroque, 30–31, 38, 40–41, 45

Basmanov, Pyotr, xii, 75 Batyushkov, Fyodor, 82 Beketov, Platon, 41, 48n90 Belarus, 40, 89 Belinsky, Vissarion, 76, 77n106, 82 Belozerskaia, N, A., 39n72 Belsey, Catherine, xxivn42 Bely, Andrey, 105 Benjamin, Walter, 30, 31n47 Benckendorff, Alexander, 56n25 Berkov, P. N., 36n58 Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Konstantin, 110 Bethea, David M., 63 Bhat, Girish, 88n15, 88n17 Biren, 21 Bochkarev, V. A., 32n53 Boesche, Roger, 100n47 Brody, Erwin C., ixn1, 52n9 Brooks, Jeffrey, 109n19 Brown, William Edward, 27n27 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 136 Master and Margarita, The, 136 Bulgarin, Faddey, 50, 56, 56n25, 67–74, 77–78, 80–84, 113, 120, 130, 139n14 Dmitry the Pretender, 50, 68–73, 80, 82, 130 Ivan Vyzhigin, 68–69, 71 Bushnell, Rebecca, xxivn43 Bühren, Ernst Johann, see Biren Byron, George Gordon, 71n85 Mazepa, 71n85

C

Campbell, Joseph, xx Carlson, Marvin, xxivn46 Catherine I, 20, 22 Catherine II (the Great), 21–22, 24, 26, 32n52, 36–38, 46–47 Accession Manifesto, 37

Index Catholicism, antipathy toward, xiii, 6, 10–12, 14, 27, 29, 35, 63, 68, 85, 89, 94–95, 97, 99, 113, 116, 118, 121, 129 Cavell, Stanley, xxiin30 Chaev, Nikolay, vii, 85, 88–90, 97–104, 113–115 Dmitry the Pretender, 85, 88, 97–104 Chronicle history, xxv-xxvi, 1, 12, 16, 67, 120 Chudakova, M. O., 115n32 Chumachenko, A. A., 91n30 Chyzhevs’kyi, Dmytro, 41 Classical unities 27, 35, 40, 57, 58, 60, 74, 140 Cohen, Stephen, xxiii Cohn, Dorrit, 3 Constitutional liberalism, 106, 108 Cornwell, Neil, 121, 122n39–40 Cossacks, 71, 95, 118–119 Counterhistory, 36, 48 Crimea, Crimean, 85, 94, 99, 101, 114 Crimean Tatars, 94–95 Crimean War, 85–86, 95 Cross, A. G., 54n18 Custine, de, Astolphe, 18

D

Dashkova, Ekaterina, 22 Day of National Unity, 133 Derzhavin, Gavrila, 41, 48n90 Decembrist (revolt), 51–53, 54n17, 56, 60n42, 67–68, 73, 75–76, 84 Dianina, Katia, 131n50 Dionisii, Archimandrite, 5n11 Dmitriev, Ivan, 76 Dmitry, Dmitry the Pretender, False Dmitry, passim Otrepev, Grigory (Grishka), xii, xxvi, 1–5, 9–17, 28, 40, 42–44, 50–66, 70, 98, 121, 134–136 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 93 Brothers Karamazov, The, 93 Doubling, as literary device, 12–13, 44–45, 47, 63, 117–118, 134, 136–137 Dramatic discourse, xxiv-xxv, 49, 72, 81–82 Drame à clef, 23, 38 Dunning, Chester S. L., xiiin5, 6n12, 12n22, 55n24, 56, 93n35, 113n29

E

Eagleton, Terry, xxiiin40 Elizabeth (Empress), 21–22, 26, 32 Emancipation Manifesto (1861), 86 Emerson, Caryl, xivn6, xvii, 52, 55n19, 64–65, 74n92, 75n95 Engelstein, Laura, 86n7

Episodic structure, 69, 113, 120, 129, 140 Epoch, The, 97 Era of palace coups, xiii, 22 Evdokimova, Svetlana, 63

F

Fantasy fiction 134 Fictional discourse, 3–5, 9, 14 Filaret (Archbishop of Kharkov), 5n11 Fin de siècle, xviii, 105–110, 111, 112, 114, 120, 122, 128–129, 131, 135, 141 First False Dmitry, xii Fleming, Paul, 31 Foreignness, as criterion for rule, 37 France, 51, 53, 103 Franke, Mary Ellen, 29 French, 26, 50, 52, 62–63, 66, 103 Funkenstein, Amos, 36n56–57 Fyodor Ioannovich, xi-xiii, 7, 15, 48, 54–55, 65

G

Gallagher, Catherine, xxiin29, 81 Gasiorowska, Xenia, xivn6 Gasparov, Boris, 63 German, Germany, 21, 30–31, 36, 52, 71n85, 99, 138–139 Gibbs, Alan, xx Gleason, Walter, 32n52 Glinka, Fyodor, 53n13 Godunov, Boris, viii, xi-xvii, xix, 7–15, 24–27, 35, 40–47, 50–57, 59–66, 71–72, 74–76, 79–84, 100–103, 111, 114, 121–128, 135, 139 Godunov, Fyodor, xii, 13–14, 55, 62, 64, 126, 128 Godunova, Xenia, xii, 25, 27, 35, 44, 82, 126 Goethe, 62, 139 Golburt, Luba, 18n1 Gorodetskii, B. P., 59n38 Gossman, Lionel, 51n3 Gothic (neo-Gothic), 120–124, 130 Gray, Camilla, 131n50 Great Britain, 89n22, 121n38, 122, 131 Grech, Nikolay, 67–68 Greenblatt, Stephen, xxi-xxii, 81 Greenfeld, Liah, 19n4 Gronas, Mikhail, 71 Gruber, Isaiah, 6

H

Hagiography, 1–4, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16–17 Hammarberg, Gitta, 54n18 Hamnet, Brian R., 65n63, 73

157

158

Index Hampson, Robert, xxiiin37, Herzen, Alexander, 89 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xxv Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), 54 Historical discourse, 3–5, 83, 114 Historical drama, 78–80, 83, 103, 138 Historical fiction, xvii, 18–19, 27, 52, 54, 62–63, 68–70, 81, 109–110 Historical formalism, xxiii Historiography, xviii-xix, 140 Early nineteenth-century, 51–52, 54–55 Early Russian literature, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14 Eighteenth-century schools of, 23–25 Fin de siècle, 110–111 Mid nineteenth century, 85, 89–90 “History proper,” xxv-xxvi, 67 Hoeveler, Diane Long, 121n38 Holderness, Graham, 138n10 Hoover, Marjorie L., 91n28 Horowitz, Evan, xxii House of Rurik, xii, 13, 48 Hühn, Peter, xxivn45, xxvn47 Hutcheon, Linda, 51n2

I

Investigatory Report on the Death of Tsarevich Dmitry Ivanovich of 1591 (Sledstvennoe delo o ubienii tsarevicha Dimitriia Ioannovicha 1591 goda), xix, 50, 60 Islam, antipathy toward, 85, 94, 97 Ivan IV, The Terrible, ix, xi, xiv-xvi, 7, 11, 14–15, 32n51, 59, 84, 92, 112, 119, 126–127 Ivan, VI, 21–22, 47 Ivanov, Iu. K., 111n25–26

J

Jahn, Hubertus, F., 51n1 Jahn, Manfred, xxvin53 Jameson, Frederic, xxii Jones, W. Gareth, 31n47 Judicial Reform Act (1864), 86–88, 92–93, 100–101, 114

K

Kamenskii, Aleksandr B., xviii, 19n2–3, 20n6, 22n9 Karamzin, Nikolay, xviii, 24, 51–56, 68–69, 79–80, 83, 89n26, 90n27, 102 History of the Russian State, xviii, 24, 51, 54–55, 56n25, 68, 79 Letters of a Russian Traveler, 54–55

Karlinsky, Simon, 26, 30n30 Karusheva, M. Iu., 76n97, 76n100, 82n117, 83n118 Katenin, Pavel, 59 Khmyrov, M. D., 31n49 Khomyakov, Alexey, 50, 57, 73–78, 81–84, 90, 102 Dmitry the Pretender, 50, 73–76, 81–82 Ermak, 74n91 Khoruzhii, S. S., 75n93 Khrustalev, Vladimir, M., 106n4, 107n7, 107n12 Kiev, 10, 26, 136 Kievan Rus, 88n21, 115 Kipling, Rudyard, ix Kleimola, Ann M., 5n9 Klein, Joachim, 27n29, 29n37, 32n51 Kliger, Ilya, xxi, 67 Kliuchevsky, Vassily, 111 Kormilov, S. I., 91n29 Kościuszko, Tadeusz, 67 Koshelev, V. A., 73n90, 75n93 Kostomarov, Nikolay, 85, 89–90, 98, 102, 112–114 Heroes of the Time of Troubles, 90 Muskovy’s Time of Troubles, 1604–1613, 85, 90, 114 Pretenders and Prophets, 90 Kozitsky, Grigory, 32 Kusheva, E. N., 5n11

L

LaCapra, Dominick, xxiii Lachmann, Renate, xxiii Laplace de, Pierre Antoine, 32, 33n54 Law vs. justice 87–88, 103 Lawrenson, T. E., 33n54 Lazutkina, Mariia, 69 LeBlanc, Ronald D., 39n68–71, 68n73 Levinson, Marjorie, xxii, xxiiin33 Levitt, Marcus, C., 26, 28n33, 31, 32n50 Lewis, C. S., 136 Chronicles of Narnia, The, 136n5 Magician’s Nephew, 136 Lewitter, L. R., 89n22 Liminality xvi-xvii, xx, 10, 14–15, 67, 116, 137, 139 Lincoln, W. Bruce, 86n4, 87n11 Lindenberger, Herbert, 78–79, 80n114, 83 Literacy rates, xiii, 109–110 Lithuania, 11–12, 60, 89, 121 Lotman, Iu. M., xvin7, 4, 37, 54n18, 60n42, 75, 78 Lotman, L. M., 91n28, 93n32, 98n46

Index Lukács, György, 52n6, 73 Lucas, Kilian, 33 Lupton, Julia Reinhart, 3

M

Maguire, Muireann, 122n40 Maguire, Robert, A., 108–109 Maiorova, Olga E., 85, 89n25 Margree, Victoria, 122, 123n41 Margeret, Jacques, 32n51 Marsh, Rosalinda, 135n2 Martinsen, Deborah, vii, 87n8 Marxism, 108 Masks and modernism, 130–131 Maslov, Boris, xxi, 67 McGrew, 23n13, 47n89 McReynolds, Louise, 87n10, 92n31, 94n39 Menhennet, Alan, 139n12 Milovzorova, M. A., 97–98 Milyukov, Pavel, 108 Milyutin, Ioann, 5 Minin, Kuzma, xiii Mniszek, Jerzy, 13 Mniszek, Marina, xii, 6, 11, 27, 40, 65–66, 69n78, 74–75, 90, 99, 101, 116–119, 124, 127–128, 136 Momot, V. S., 115n31 Monarchy 66, 84, 107–108 Montrose, Louis A., xxiin31 Mordovtsev, Daniil, 105, 112–116, 120, 124, 126, 129–130 False Dmitry: A Historical Novel of the Times of Troubles, 105, 112–115, 120, 130 On the Eve of Freedom, 112 Morozova, L.E., 6n15, 10n19, 12 Moscow, ix, xi-xii, 5–9, 13–15, 26–29, 35, 42, 50, 55, 59, 63, 70–71, 74–75, 85, 90, 97, 101, 107, 110–111, 117–119, 123–124, 133–137 Boyars, xii, 74, 92–94, 98–101, 126, 128 Press, 89 Society for the Dissemination of Useful Books, 125 University, 39, 77, 91, 97 Moscow Journal, 54 Moskvina, T. V., 36n55 Murav, Harriet, 87n14, 88n21 Müller, Gerhard Friedrich, 31 Mukherji, Subha, xviin12 Mykhed, P. V., 40n73

N

Nadezhdin, Nikolay, 58

Nagaya, Maria, xi, 42, 95 Napoleon Bonaparte, 50, 51n1, 52–53, 55n20, 63, 67, 73, 84–85 Napoleonic Wars, xiii, 50–52, 63, 73, 85, 125 Narezhny, Vasily, 19, 23, 25, 39–50, 57, 60, 62, 76, 78–80, 83–84, 100–102 Dmitry the Pretender, 19, 25, 39–50, 57, 79–80 A Russian Gil Blas, or the Adventures of Prince Gavrila Simonovich Chistyakov, 39 Nebel, Henry, M., 54n18 Neoclassicism, 26–27, 29, 31, 38–39, 74, 76, 82, 130 Neo-Gothic literature 121–123, 130 New formalism xxii-xxiii New historicism xxi-xxii New Times, 125 Nicholas I, xxv, 53, 56, 68, 95 Nicholas II, 20, 106–107, 114 Neuberger, Joan, 88n16 Northern Bee (Severnaia pchela), 71n85 Novelistic discourse xxiv-xxv, 82 Novgorod, 26, 59, 131 Novgorod-Seversk, 118, 123

O

Old Testament, 44, 131 Olearius, Adam, 31 Olson, Naomi, 88n18, 21 Opitz, Martin, 31 Oprichnina, xiii Orthodox (Y), x, xvi, 6, 10–12, 15–16, 20, 33, 35, 37, 70, 87, 106, 118, 121, 129, 133 Believers, 106, 116, 118 Church, xiii, 6, 10, 75n93, 99 Religion, 12 Russia, 85, 89 Ospovat, Kirill, 26n24, 30n40, 31n48 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 85, 88–98, 100–104, 114–115 Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky, 85, 90–98, 103

P

Page, Tanya, 54n18 Pan-Slavism, 125 Paneiakh, V. M., 111n24 Passion-sufferers, 6, 9 Paul I, 21–23, 47 Pazukhin, A. D., 106 Perevoshchikov, V. M., 57n28 Peter and Paul Cathedral, 47

159

160

Index Peter III, 19, 21–22, 25, 32, 36–37, 46–47 Peter the Great, x, xiv-xvi, 19–23, 111, 114 Picaresque, 68 Plato, 100–101 Platonov, Sergey F., 6n11, 9n18, 110–112, 120, 129 Platt, Kevin M. F., xivn6, xvii, 87–88 Pogodin, Mikhail, xviii, 50, 57, 73, 76–78, 80–83, 89n23, 89n26, Historical Portrait of Dmitry the Pretender, 50, 76–78 Poles, Polish, xii, 6, 12–15, 29–30, 35, 44, 67–68, 70–71, 74–77, 83, 94–95, 97–99, 101–102, 113, 116, 124, 128, 133 Poland, xii, xvi, 11, 27, 40, 57, 75, 89, 117–118, 121, 134–135 Polish insurrection of 1830–31, 68, 75 of 1863, 85–89 Populism, 89, 108, 125 Postapocalyse, 137 Pozharsky, Dmitry, xiii Pratsch, Thomas, 3–4 Presniakov, A. E., 111n24 Prokopovich, Feofan, 27n28 Protofiction, 1, 2, 4–5, 11, 17 Prefiction, xxi, 2, 4 Prussia, Prussian, 21–22, 36–37, 47 Prymak, Thomas, 90n27 Pskov, 55 Pugachev, Emelyan, 46–47 Pugachev Rebellion, 45–47, 63 Pushkin, Alexander, xviii, 50, 55–67, 69, 71–84, 90, 102–103, 113, 139 Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepev, 50, 56–67,72, 75–77, 79–81, 84, 103 Boris Godunov, 50, 55–67, 76, 79 Putivl, 13

R

Racine, Jean 58 Raeff, Marc, 52n5, 53n13 Randall, Bryony, 122, 123n41 Recurrence in literature xviii, xxi-xxii, xxiv, xxvii, 38, 67, 70, 88, 102, 103, 138, 140–141 Reforms Under Boris Godunov, xi Under Dmitry, xii Under Alexander II, (The “Great Reforms”) xxvii, 19, 86–88, 96, 101, 106, 107, 108, 116, 125 Under Peter I, x, 19–20, 21, 63, 111

Reitblat, A. I., 68 Retribution (for usurpation), 44–45, 47–49, 80–81, 84 Reyfman, Irina, 15 Riasanovsky, N. V., xivn6, 22n9 Richardson, Brian, xxvin53 Rogger, Hans, 21n8, 37n59 Rogov, A., 41n80 Rogov, K. Iu., 77n101, 77n103,105 Romanov, Mikhail (Tsar), xiii, 5n11, 32, 111 Romanovs (dynasty), xiv, xvi, 47, 71–73, 80, 84 Romanticism 52, 53–54, 82 Ronner, Amy D., vii, 88n21 Rosenshield, Gary, 88n21 Rostovsky, Dmitry, 5 Rothe, Hans, 83n118 Rowland, Daniel, xn2, 16n29 Royal succession, system of 20–23, 28, 47, 49 Rublev, Andrey, 131 Rurikid dynasty, xi, xvi, 10, 24 Russian Messenger, The (Russkii vestnik), 63, 106 Russianness, as criterion for rule, 12, 36–38 Russian Speech (Russkaia Rech’), 125 Rzhevskii, A. A., 32n51

S

Saltykov, Sergey, 21 Samarin, Yury, 89n23 Samobytnost’, 52–53 Sanders, Andrew, 131 Saranpa, Kathy, 139n11 Schiller, Friedrich, 39n72, 64n61, 71n85, 90n27, 138, 139 Demetrius, 64n61, 90n27, 139 Robbers, 39n72, 71n85 Wallenstein, 139 Schlözer, August Ludvig von, 55n19 Scolnicov, Hanna, xxvin53 Scott, Walter, 56n25, 62, 69, 71n85 Lady of the Lake, 71n85 Segel, Harold B., 26 Senkovsky, Osip, 76, 77n106 Serman, I. Z., 54n18, 59n38, 62, 75n94, 76, 77n106 Shakespeare, William, xxin24, xxiin30, 32–34, 38–39, 58, 62, 64, 138, 139 Hamlet, 32 Richard III, 33–34, 39, 64–65 Shakhovskoy, Semyon, 5 Shapiro, Gavriel, 41n75 Sharpe, Lesley, 139n13 Shaw, Harry E., 69

Index Shaw, J. Thomas, viii Shirianets, A. A., 77n102 Shuisky, Vasily, xii, xiv-xv, 5–6, 9–16, 24, 27–28, 35, 40–44, 48, 52, 57n28, 60–62, 66, 74–75, 84–85, 90–102, 113–114, 129, 135, 139, 141 Siberia, 67 Sigismund of Poland, xii Silverstone, Catherine, xxin24 Simeon Bekbulatovich, xv, 98 Shlisselburg Fortress, 22, 47 Sinnot, Peter, xxiin32 Slavophile movement, 73 ideas, 75n93 Slavophiles, 73, 77, 89 Smolina, K. A., 32n53 Smuta, xiii, 105–106, 114, 128, 131, 133 also see Time of Troubles Sobornost’, 75n93 Socio-political demand xxi, 66 Solodkin, Ia., G., 5n10 Solovki, 45 Solovyov, Vladimir, 109 Son of the Fatherland (Syn otechestva), 63, 69 St. Petersburg Cadet Corps, 26, 31, 67 St. Petersburg News (Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti), 125 Steinberg, Mark D., 106n4, 107n7, 107n12, 108n14, 1124n43, 130 Stennik, Iu. V., 26–27, 27n28–29, 28n30, 38 Stepanov, V. P., 32n51, 41n81, 48n90 Story of Grishka Otrepev, The, xxvi, 1–5, 10–17 Strakhov, Nikolay, 89n23 Striedter, Jurij, 51n2, 62, 63n57, 82n116 Sumarokov, Alexander, 18–19, 23, 26–43, 45–46, 48–49, 57–62, 74, 77–81, 83–84, 100–102 Dmitry the Pretender, 26–39, 45 Khorev, 26 Mstislav, 26 Summer, Roy, xxivn45, xxvn47 Suvorin, Alexey, 105, 125–130, 134 Tsar Dmitry the Pretender and Tsarevna Xenya, 105, 126–130 Svyatopolk, 10 Symbolism, 109–110, 122, 130

T

Tarkhova, N. A., 56n25, 57n28, 58n36, 71n85 Tatishchev, Mikhail, 12, 15

Tatishchev, Vasily, 24 Taymasova, Lyudmila, 133–135, 137 Tragedy in Uglich, 134–135 Telescope, 67 Tenisheva, Maria, 131 Text clusters, xviii, xxiv, xxvi, xxvii, 25, 50, 85, 104, 105, 110, 112, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 139, 140 Third Section (Tret’e otdelenie), 56–57, 68 Thomassen, Bjørn , xvi Time of Troubles, xiii, xvi, 10, 32, 36, 46, 48, 55, 63, 73, 83, 89, 90, 105–106, 110, 123–124, 125–126, 133–134, 140 Tolstoy, Leo, 93, 103, 109 Resurrection, 93 Tosi, Alessandra, 52n8 Transference in literature, xviii, xxi, xxii, xxiv, xxvii, 2, 38, 67, 70, 88, 103, 115, 139–141 Trauerspiel, 30–31, 38, 48–49 Trauma, x, xvi, xx-xxi, xxiii, 2, 16–17, 33, 73, 80, 97, 128–129, 138–139 Trigos, Ludmilla, A., 54n17 Tsialovskii, M. A., 56n25, 57n28, 58n36, 71n85 Tulupov, German, 1–12, 15 Life of St. Dmitry, 1–12, 15 Turgenev, Alexander, 58 Turgenev, Ivan, 74 Tynianov, Iu. N., 54n18 Tyranny 25, 28–35, 43–45, 48, 57, 84, 91, 94, 100–102, 140'

U

Uglich, xi, 7–9, 11, 13, 54, 61, 66, 77, 90, 119, 134, 136 Ukraine, 40–41, 57, 89, 118 Ungurianu, Dan, xvii, 69n79, 77n103, 110, 112n27 Urals, 46 Uspenskii, B. A., xvin7, 40n74 Usurpation 6, 7, 11, 15, 21, 23–24, 43, 46–50, 57, 59, 62, 64–66, 82, 84, 95, 121, 139, 140

V

Van der Merwe, Chris N., xvi, xx Vatsuro, V. E., 78n107, 122n40 Venevitinov, D. V., 57n28 Vernadsky, George, 23, 54n18 Veselovskii, Aleksandr, xxi Viazemsky, Pyotr, 76 Vickroy, Laurie, xxin24

161

162

Index Viljoen, Hein, xvi, xx Virolainen, M., 62 Voeikov, A. F., 57n28 Volga, 46, 91 Voltaire, 33n54, 133

W

Wachtel, Andrew Baruch, xvii-xviii, 51, 55n19 Walicki, Andrzej, 52n10, 53n15–16, 74n90, 89n22–23 Walker, Franklin, A., 53n13 Wesseling, Elizabeth, 137n7 Wheeler, Lora D’Anne, 115n32 White, Hayden V., xxv-xxvi, 16 Whittaker, Cynthia Hyla, 23–24, 25n21, 37n63 Wilder, Thornton, xxiv Wilson, Jessica, 88n20

Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling, 38n66 Władysław, xii Wolf, Tatiana, 58n31, 62n48 Wood, Anthony, 57n29 Wortman, Richard, 20, 21n8, 23n14, 37, 66, 86n5–6, 87n8–9, 93n32, 93n36, 96, 105–107, 108n13

Y

Yaroslav, 10

Z

Zagoskin, Mikhail, 69 Yury Miloslavsky, or Russians in the Year 1612, 69 Zhivov, V. M., 37n64, 40n74 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 88n19, 101