Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov as Epic Theatre

Abstract

According to Pavel Annenkov, his first biographer, Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) considered the historical drama in verse known as Boris Godunov his finest work (n.d. cited in Clayton, 2004, p. 3). In what follows, I shall argue that the play should be viewed in the context of the evolution of world theatre, and that it can be seen as standing in a direct line between Shakespeare’s history plays and Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre. Since it was rarely staged in the nineteenth century and hardly known outside Russia, its influence has been rather indirect, mostly through Mussorgsky’s operatic version, titled Boris Godunov (premiere 1874). In its evocation of sixteenth-century Muscovy, the opera clearly influenced Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible (1945–58), especially in the depiction of the Polish court. As such Pushkin’s text can be said to have played a muffled role in how Russia sees its history. Part of the problem with staging the play is its genre as the play is not a typical romantic historical tragedy. When viewed in the context of epic theatre, though, and especially when compared with Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1938–41), it appears rather as a precursor to the German dramatist’s work and a profoundly modern and original response to the challenges posed by the evolution of dramatic genre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It can thus be argued that the fate of the play rested not in its intrinsic qualities, but in the shortcomings of Russian theatre.