Tragedy in the Balkans: Pushkin's Critique of Romantic Ideology in «The Gypsies»

Maksim Hanukai

Among the many colorful escapades that Pushkin is said to have taken part in during his famed Southern exile were the several weeks that he spent among a nomadic gypsy tribe in Moldavia. According to an oral account passed on to her nephew by Pushkin's Kishinev acquaintance Ekaterina Zakhar´evna Stamo (née Ralli), the twenty-two-year-old poet was accompanying Stamo's brother Konstantin on a visit to Dolna when he met and fell madly in love with a beautiful gypsy girl named Zemfira. The daughter of the respected tribe elder (buli-basha), Zemfira was a tall girl with large black eyes and long undulating braids who dressed like a man, wore colorful trousers (sharovary), and smoked a pipe. Pushkin was so enchanted by Zemfira's beauty that he asked Konstantin if he could stay with the tribe. And so he settled there for several weeks, during which time he and Zemfira could be seen strolling together in the woods, holding each other's hands, and, unable to speak the same tongue, communicating by pantomime. This idyll came to an abrupt end when Pushkin began to suspect Zemfira of infidelity. Waking up one morning to learn that Zemfira had run off with a young gypsy, Pushkin followed her to the next village, but, unable to find her, decided to return alone to Kishinev. It was several years later that he received a letter from Konstantin informing him of Zemfira's brutal murder at the hands of her new lover. The tragic episode inspired Pushkin to write his great narrative poem The Gypsies (1824).[1]

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

Caryl Emerson

Learning literature through theater is a bottomless source of excitement—and one reason, surely, is the sense of urgency imposed by performance. With novels, art exhibits, architectural monuments, even movies, the reader or spectator is boss. The story (as well as interesting theories that might explain the story) can be “paused,” bookmarked, contemplated, revisited at will. But live music and live theater depend for their communication on the uninterrupted forward thrust of a concept. Polemical or ideologically-driven theater, so familiar to twentieth-century Eastern Europe, can begin with an idea or desired effect and then strap both set and cast to it. But a pragmatic approach to stage work is more often the rule. The concept works itself out intuitively during rehearsals, as a creation-in-process by those skilled practitioners in the temporal arts we call actors, musicians, dancers, projectionists, all the while being nourished here and there by a directorial hint or hunch. The ensemble succeeds (more or less well) on opening night, is tuned up throughout the run, and often it is only after the show is struck that principles emerge with the contours of a formal theory. Such was my experience co-managing, with Simon Morrison, Princeton University’s production of a dramatic adaptation of Eugene Onegin in February 2012.

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Eugene Onegin: A Scenic Projection

This translation of Krzhizhanovsky’s Eugene Onegin, which appears here courtesy of James E. Falen, has an instructive and at times excruciating prehistory.

The Russian archival typescript had been known to theater directors since the 1990s, but its circulation was limited. Krzhizhanovsky’s work for the stage survived in roughly a dozen items. The editor of his collected works (2002–11), Vadim Perel´muter, included in volume 5 (on theater) only two original plays and one pantomime: there was no room for adapta­tions. So the play appeared first in English, as part of a Prokofiev volume published in 2008 (Simon Morrison, ed., Sergey Prokofiev and His World), in my “free verse” version with the composer’s markings. It was a good-faith attempt to communicate the play to an American ear and to accom­modate—or so I thought at the time—the comfort zone of American actors.

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«Eugene Onegin»: Program, Personnel, Stills from the Production

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin in the New Soviet State: Pavel Sakulin and the Pushkin Edition of 1931-36

Brian Horowitz*

In 1927, when deciding to publish a new, full edition of Alexander Pushkin’s works, the first in Soviet times, Vladimir Narbut, the chief of the Soviet Publishing House, chose as the project editor Pavel Sakulin (1868–1930), a well-known professor of Russian literature. Sakulin was given the task of arranging a twelve-volume edition containing all of Pushkin’s published works, his unpublished manuscripts and variants, and producing new secondary scholarship about the poet. To attain these goals, Sakulin enlisted the finest Pushkin scholars in the country. An older intellectual and hardly a dogmatic Bolshevik, Sakulin emphasized ideological plurality, encouraging diversity in the scholars’ approach to Pushkin.[1]

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Cursing at the Whirlwind: The Old Testament Landscape of «The Bronze Horseman»

Kathleen Scollins

Just over a century ago, Valery Briusov identified three emerging trends in the scholarly response to Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, corresponding roughly to the poem’s three dominant ideological planes: the social, the political, and the religious.[1] As David Bethea observes, the poem’s religious angle received scant critical consideration in the subsequent decades, particularly post-1917; the past several years, however, have restored some balance to the critical reception, as a new generation of scholars has begun to address the poem’s rich metaphysical contexts. In 1990, Igor Nemirovsky argued that the basic organization of TheBronze Horseman around sacred events and themes (the creation of the world; the Lord’s wrath; punishment by flood) reveals the Bible as a major creative framework upon which Pushkin modeled the world of his Petersburg tale.[2] Certainly, as more than one Pushkin scholar has observed, the Prologue to The Bronze Horseman stages a cosmogonic drama, featuring Peter the Great as the city’s mythic Creator, coaxing worlds out of words and wringing cosmos from a boggy chaos.[3] Numerous critics have cast the passage as an overtly biblical drama, starring Peter as more than just any old demiurge: urban theorist Marshall Berman calls the Prologue “a kind of Petersburg Book of Genesis, beginning in the mind of the city’s creator-God,” and Gary Rosenshield reads the step-by-step genesis outlined in the Prologue as a metaphoric deification.[4] Without doubt, Peter’s biblical pedigree has been well established in the critical literature; but what of his mortal counterpart, Evgeny: did Pushkin’s poor hero also have a scriptural forerunner?

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