Boris Godunov

The test is subtraction, and the play half resists it. Its spine is a set of hinges: Shuisky’s cynicism over a staged election; Pimen’s cell, where Grigory hears the murdered tsarevich’s age and is born as a pretender; Boris’s monologue, “Достиг я высшей власти”
(I have attained the highest power), where the guilt is spoken; the inn, where the pretender crosses the border; the holy fool’s refusal, the death of Boris and the people’s silence. Take any of these out and the play falls. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the play is episodic by design and some scenes are thin links: the forest, Sevsk, the Kraków scene of courtiers and a poet. The love plot at the fountain is its own small drama, permitted rather than compelled. Boris is offstage for long stretches; the play is about the throne, not the man, and that is design, but it loosens the necessity of each part.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure is statable: legitimacy in Muscovy rests on opinion, and opinion rests on a dead child. Boris rules well and is hated; the pretender has nothing but a name, and the name is enough. Gavrila Pushkin, the author’s own ancestor, tells Basmanov in substance that armies do not win, the opinion of the people does. Conscience runs underneath: “И мальчики кровавые в глазах”
(and bloody boys before the eyes). The play never says whether Boris did the murder, and does not need to, since the guilt works whether or not the deed was done. The last stage direction, “Народ безмолвствует”
(The people are silent), is the disclosure itself: a people who are the source of legitimacy and are never its masters. This is a meaning, not a mood, and Russian history has kept testing it. What holds it below the highest is that it is drawn in outline, not in full.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The play rises often, but its register is cold and laconic by choice. Pimen’s night scene is the first height: the old monk writes by lamplight, “Ещё одно, последнее сказанье, / И летопись окончена моя”
(One more, last tale, and my chronicle is done), and his calm makes the murder he tells of at Uglich more terrible. Boris’s monologue of the burdened conscience is a second, and his cry “Ох, тяжела ты, шапка Мономаха!”
(Oh, heavy art thou, cap of Monomakh!) is of it. The holy fool before the cathedral is a third: “Нельзя молиться за царя Ирода, Богородица не велит”
(One may not pray for Tsar Herod; the Mother of God forbids it). The final silence is the fourth and highest, reached by subtraction. What holds it in the low eights: between the heights there is brisk statecraft and court comedy that never tries to rise, and Pushkin refuses rhetoric where Schiller or Shakespeare would swell. The heights are real and recur, but they are few and spare.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The myth is built, not merely evoked. The murdered child is the load-bearing figure: he never appears, yet a living man takes his name, and the name is stronger than the tsar. “Тень Грозного меня усыновила”
(The shade of the Terrible adopted me), says the pretender, and the line makes him a ghost’s son. Around this core the play builds Russian archetypes into its structure: the usurper haunted by the child, whom the holy fool calls Herod, joining Boris to the massacre of the innocents; Pimen the chronicler, a figure of Russia’s memory who has entered the culture’s image of itself; the yurodivy, who alone may speak truth to the throne; the people as a chorus that ends in silence. The plot runs on the pretender myth. What holds it short of the top: the archetypes are sketched in a few strokes, and the deepest of them, the holy fool and the chronicler, hold single scenes rather than the whole.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Russian tragedy in 1825 was French classical: Sumarokov, then Ozerov, in rhymed alexandrines, with the unities and an elevated register throughout. Pushkin threw all of it out at once. He set seven years and more than a dozen places against the unities of time and place; put unrhymed pentameter in place of the alexandrine; set prose, tavern songs, Latin, Polish courtiers and French and German mercenaries beside a chronicle Slavonic; made the people a protagonist; and ended on a stage direction instead of a speech. The stake was real: the play waited five years for print, and the theatres could not or would not stage it for decades. Pushkin knew what he had risked and called it his best. What holds it off the top is that Shakespeare had already made the swerve in another language; the wager was to bring it into Russian, where it was new.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The form is montage: short scenes in many places with no act structure, and that form is what the play knows. Power here is not held in one room but spread across monastery, tavern, border, Polish court, battlefield and square, and only a form that jumps between them can show that the throne is made in all of them, so that the inn and the cell decide what the Kremlin cannot. The mixed verse and prose carries the play’s social order: the tsar and the boyars speak pentameter, the tavern and the soldiers prose, and Pushkin breaks the rule at will. The close shows the form at work: a stage direction stands where a cheer is expected, and one line of form changes what the play knows. What holds it here: the montage also gives the loose links charged under The Inevitable, and at times the play moves by the chronicle’s sequence rather than by the form’s necessity.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence, not promise: two centuries of return have not exhausted it. The ending has been argued over since it was printed, whether the silence is terror, judgement, refusal or inertia. Whether Boris is guilty is left open, and it is reopened in every generation. Russian criticism from Belinsky onward has asked whether the play is a tragedy at all, or a history with no hero. Each age has reread it for its own state, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov in the 1870s among them, and the verse yields on return line by line. What holds it below the deepest wells: its brevity and its sketched figures leave less to discover than Eugene Onegin or the great histories of Shakespeare, and much of its return has been driven by the question of how to stage it rather than by new depths in the text.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is Russian drama and Russian literature of the 1820s and 1830s. The force is high: the play is the first great Russian historical drama and founded the form in the language, and it changed what a Russian play could hold, the people, the chronicle, prose beside verse, and history understood as opinion. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Mussorgsky’s opera took Pushkin’s scenes and lines into its libretto and carried them to the world stage; Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s dramatic trilogy of the 1860s, The Death of Ivan the Terrible, Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich and Tsar Boris, is written in its wake; and “Народ безмолвствует”
(The people are silent) passed into the Russian language as a phrase. What holds it here: outside Russia the play’s own reach is slight and most of its world presence is the opera’s, and its reach as a stage play has been weak, so delayed and indirect influence is credited and discounted.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival of the text, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Written in 1825 and printed in 1831, the play has lasted about two centuries, at the edge between the desk’s two longest spans. Form: the text survives whole, and the manuscript variants are known and published. Presence: read without a break in Russia, taught in schools and universities, printed in every edition of Pushkin, translated into the major languages, and staged in Russia repeatedly since the 1860s. Fabric: the Time of Troubles was already two centuries past when Pushkin wrote, and the subject, legitimacy and the people’s silence, has outlived the empire that censored it. What holds it at the usual figure for two centuries and no higher: it is read far more than it is staged, and outside Russia it lives mostly through Mussorgsky and is largely an academic text.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Pushkin’s Russian. The verse is his, and his command of the Russian line is the summit of the language: exact, unemphatic and memorable without strain, so that the lines quoted on this page are proverbs in Russian. The range of register is a feat of making. Pimen speaks a chronicle Slavonic; Boris the measured pentameter of a ruler, breaking into hallucination; Varlaam’s tavern prose is coarse and comic; the Polish court speaks in gallantry; Margeret and Rosen swear in French and German on the battlefield; the holy fool speaks in a child’s sing-song. Each voice is struck in a few lines. Grigory’s escape at the inn, with the guards misreading the warrant, is a perfectly turned comic scene. What holds it a step from the top is the stagecraft: some scenes are mere links, the Polish love scene is long for what it carries, and the play’s difficulty in the theatre is partly its own making.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Varlaam’s drunken song at the border inn and Boris’s dying counsel to his son. They obey one law, the play’s one physics, power made and unmade by what people say and believe. The monks at the inn are agents of rumour as the boyars are in the Kremlin; the holy fool’s taunt and Shuisky’s intrigues are one force in two registers. Even Marina’s ambition is a form of power by opinion, since she will love the pretender only as tsar. What holds it here is the Polish scenes: at the fountain Marina plays a game of ambition and romance nearer in tone to romantic comedy, and the pretender’s sudden confession of his true name to her pulls the play toward a love drama it does not otherwise want. The range is wide and the law holds across most of it; that one region obeys it loosely.

Score: 8.4 / 10

In a short play a remarkable amount is held together. The state, in the election, the council and the war. The church, in the patriarch, the monastery, Pimen’s chronicle and the holy fool. The family: Boris with Fyodor and Xenia, the father who teaches his son to rule, the daughter mourning her bridegroom. The conscience of one man, and the people as a political body. Foreign powers, through Poland, the Jesuits and the mercenaries. History in two senses, the events of the Time of Troubles and the writing of history in Pimen’s cell, so that the play holds its own historiography. These are integrated, not listed: the chronicle produces the pretender, the pretender moves the Poles, and the Poles move the army, the boyars and the crowd. What holds it here is brevity: each order is touched in one or two scenes and none is built out, so the play holds less than the great novels and the longest Shakespeare.

Score: 8.3 / 10