STEPHANIE SANDLER

Solitude and Soliloquy in Boris Godunov

Praise for Puškin has become a central fact of Russian literary life. Readers admire Puškin’s elegant lucidity and return to his poems, plays, and stories in expectation of renewed pleasure and deep satisfaction. Puškin’s status as Russia’s national poet takes on a daily meaning in this capacity to create a continuing community of readers. Yet some Puškin texts participate uneasily in a tradition where to read Puškin is to fall imperceptibly under his spell. Among the most problematic is the 1825 drama Boris Godunov. The play makes difficult the notion of a community of readers for, as I shall explore in this paper, Boris Godunov exudes a sense of inexpressible solitude.

Critics have never been quite sure what to do with Boris Godunov. At least since Belinskij, most energy has been spent among Puškinists trying to explain why the play was not a popular success and writing commentaries that translate archaic words and track down historical references; there have also been comparative studies, most notably on the Shakespearean elements of Boris Godunov (Arxangel’skij 1930; Bayley 1971: 165-85; Gorodeckij 1969; Alekseev 1984: 253-92; and Verxovskij 1937). Each approach has diverted attention away from the text itself: those who seek to explain its failure consider the audience, the construction of stages, the changing political climate; those who write commentaries position themselves as prior to any act of interpretation by doing the work which should make reading easier. My goal is neither to annotate nor to defend Boris Godunov, but instead to see how it anticipates these approaches. The play’s incomprehensibility, its need for scholarly apparatuses or for comparative studies that seek analogies in other texts—these are effects of its strategies to keep readers at their distance. It is the play’s guarantee that Boris Godunov will, as a text, have a worldly existence as solitary as that of its central characters and, as I shall suggest at the conclusion of this essay, of Puškin himself at the time he composed the play.

Yet Boris Godunov has found its readers, some of them quite certain as to what, if not how, the play means. A standard and influential interpretation among Soviet scholars holds that the play shows Puškin’s incipient historical realism, particularly an appreciation for the power of Russia’s common folk to change history (Filonov 1899; Gorodeckij 1953). Because of the kind of observations that this interpretation has stressed, a certain avoidance of the play again occurs: more attention is paid to one stage direction, the much-discussed conclusion, where the people (the narod) do not hail their new tsar, than to what is said in the preceding twenty-three scenes.¹ During the last ten years, Boris Godunov has attracted a less canonical set of readers, some concerned to explain the play’s structure (Frejdin 1979), its use of point of view (Poljakov 1978), its generic innovations (Emerson 1986; Nepomnjaščij 1983), its psychological and historical complexity (Aranovskaja 1984; Konick 1982; Rassadin 1977). Although these groupings simplify the rich interpretations of quite diverse scholars, all of whom have brought great intelligence to the play, my intention in pointing to their work is to indicate still another curiosity in the play’s reception: modern readers have been drawn to Boris Godunov. Some have sensed how its silences have left them so much to say; others have been challenged to make sense of the play because they have felt palpably its resistances to interpretation. Here, indeed, is my concern, which I propose to read in the play’s scenes of misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Boris Godunov exudes solitude, I suggest, by showing us characters who cannot mean what they say and who thus speak so as to shield their thoughts and feelings from curious listeners.

I turn to Boris Godunov in order to ask what kind of audience it imagines for itself, to see how the idea of an audience (or its disappearance) motivates the play’s rhetorical and dramatic strategies. My task is to discover how Puškin’s representation of particular kinds of listeners transforms the idea of dramatic speech in Boris Godunov, both its conversations and its soliloquies. The play is profoundly lyrical, both in its desire to find a language that lets characters bespeak their deepest emotions and in its capacity to transmit to its audience the feelings and attitudes of its author. As a genre, drama arouses expectations of connections among characters on the stage and between spectacle and audience. In Boris Godunov, Puškin presents unsuccessful and isolated characters and produces a dramatic structure where conflicts do not lead to confrontation and where the very anxiety about audience is itself an indicator of generic bewilderment. Caryl Emerson (1985) has written beautifully about later plays that “undo” Puškin ‘s Boris Godunov, yet the lesson of the play is that it undoes itself. The play does not ignore conventions of connection and community in drama; it shows, repeatedly, their impossibility. As I discuss the rhetorical work of discontinuity in Boris Godunov, my purpose is to understand how the play creates a sense that we are as alone when we read it as Puškin was when he wrote it.²

Boris Godunov offers guidance to readers in a manner so deft that one might confuse help with intentional bewilderment. This is neither accident nor error, for the assistance emerges in warnings about false signs, false rulers, and true rhetoric. In the opening scenes, one character busily observes another but draws conclusions that are proven wrong; others extravagantly announce their success in penetrating a ruse even as their own words bespeak guile. These exchanges offer readers information, not about the play’s events (the speakers are maddeningly elliptical) but about how to read characters’ ellipses. There are two lessons: read rhetoric when reference fails, and acknowledge incomprehension rather than feigning understanding.

Consider the talk of two boyar princes, Vorotynskij and Šujskij. In the first scenes, they trade information about what they do not see and cannot yet know. They read the blank spaces around them quite differently: Vorotynskij believes that Boris is reluctant to rule, while Šuiskij insists that the ritual of refusing the throne is a ruse. If told that Boris irrevocably refuses the throne, Šujskij will say: “Skazu, cto ponaprasnu / Lilasja krov’ careviča-mladenca; / Čto esli tak, Dimitrij mog by žit’ ” (PSS VII: 6; “I will say that the blood / Of the infant Tsarevich was spilled in vain; / That if that is so, then Dimitrij could have lived”). Šujskij thus introduces the play’s recurrent interest in the death of the Tsarevich: his refusal to provide further information will define the structure of that recurrence. “Kto podkupal naprasno Čepčugova? / Kto podoslal oboix Bitjagovskix / S Kačalovym?” (PSS VII: 6; “Who bribed Chepchugov in vain? / Who sent both Bitjagovskijs/ With Kachalov?”). Here the rhetorical signs are crucial: by creating a chain of rhetorical questions, Šujskij gains the usual advantage of this trope, intensified attention from his listener. Moreover, Šujskij’s rhetorical questions turn the issue. They fail to respond to Vorotynskij’s direct question (did Boris kill the Tsarevich?), instead substituting more names into a scene where the issue had been only Boris. A short list of proper names swells to fill the gap left by Šujskij’s evasion of Vorotynskij’s question, yet it is not just a case of fullness covering over emptiness.

“Empty,” to be sure, is a crucial epithet in Boris Godunov. The play’s first sentence includes the phrase “Moskva pusta” (PSS VII: 5; “Moscow is empty”), so that Boris Godunov opens with two boyar princes discussing the fact that there is no dramatic spectacle, only their own speculation about an unseen event of momentous political consequence. The stage has had to be emptied in order for the performance to begin. Moscow’s throne, too, is empty; what is more, the new tsar will be threatened by a pretender whose appearance implies that a grave is empty. The specter of emptiness haunts Boris Godunov and will sometimes force it toward a false sense of plenitude: scenically, when the stage is filled with masses of the Russian people, and rhetorically, in exchanges which are overdetermined because characters have emptied their words of any finite meaning except that which signifies facade.

Such is the case when Šujskij speaks to Vorotynskij about the death of the Tsarevich, only to find that he must undo his allegations against Boris once Boris is named tsar. Šujskij again diverts Vorotynskij from the topic of Dimitrij’s death, this time by claiming that he was only pretending to say slanderous things about the Tsar: “A vpročem ja zlosloviem pritvornym / Togda želal tebja liš’ ispytat’, / Vernej uznat’ tvoj tajnyj obraz myslej” (PSS VII: 16; “But in any case I, with made-up slander / Was merely trying to test you, / To know more surely your secret mode of thought”). Penetrating the pretenses of others becomes a necessary form of acquiring power in Boris Godunov, and penetration occurs through various forms of denial and passivity: to cite one further instance, retracting what one has just said when it proves troublesome or ineffective is also chosen by Dimitrij when he makes love to Marina near the fountain (scene 15).

Although Šujskij and Vorotynskij seem to teach nothing beyond how not to read events, their evasions and self-corrections are quite instructive. One learns from reading their rhetoric (the lists, the rhetorical questions, the use of epithets) and from comparing them to the play’s other exemplary on-stage audiences. Most memorable among these are the Russian people who, in the fourth scene, await Boris’s emergence as tsar with an extraordinarily comic sense of their own marginality.³ The people try to cry and bow on command, acting the part of audience, but Puškin lets their pretense show through: they grope for an onion to help along their tears, or throw down a baby as if it were a stage prop to make it cry with them. The profound realism of these spectators is brought briefly to the foreground when one of them mutters, just before the cheers for Boris close the scene, “A kak nam znat’? to vedajut bojare, / Ne nam četa” (PSS VII: 13; “How should we know? that’s for the boyars to know, / We’re no match for such a task”).

In the Novodevičij Monastery scene, the narod comment on their own exclusion from the arenas of power even as they pretend to cheer Boris’s ascension to the throne. Because the stage shows us listeners creating their own commentary, while the rise of Boris to power occurs offstage, what Puškin does in the opening of Boris Godunov is to dramatize not Boris’s drama but the process of trying to “figure out,” as the people call it, the drama. We watch mostly those who watch. Audiences and listeners have immense influence not on what takes place in the arenas of public consequence but on how these events come to have meaning. The audience has a hermeneutic function, one could say, which means that the listeners, depending on how they listen and then on how they retell each other what they have heard, control how an event takes on meaning. When we see and hear Boris, in scene 3, the presence of an audience requires his posture of openness, even as his words reveal great falseness.

Boris speaks his first lines with an openness meant to disarm: “Ty, otče patriarx, vy vse, bojare, / Obnažena moja duša pred vami” (PSS VII: 15; “You, father patriarch, all of you, boyar princes, / My soul is bared before you”). The two lines emphasize both the importance of Boris’s listeners and his need to have them believe his sincerity. Yet the investiture serves largely to make Boris’s legitimacy seem false from the start. His slowness to accept the throne has been discredited by Prince Šujskij (“Boris ešče pomorščitsja nemnogo, / Čto p’janica pred čarkoju vina” [PSS VII: 5; “Boris will wrinkle his brow a bit, / Like a drunkard before a chalice of wine”]); his accession to power was also described allusively as a transgression (directly in Šujskij’s tales about the dead Tsarevich, indirectly when Šujskij predicts that Boris will take power—“peresagnet” [PSS VII: 7; “he will step across”], a word in which one hears “perestupit,” “he will transgress”). Words intended by Boris to bolster his claims to authenticity forewarn disaster and death. Boris’s milieu is, from the beginning, sepulchral. He goes to the coffins of past tsars to pray, a living ruler seeking an authority endowed by the dead: “Teper’ pojdem, poklonimsja grobam / Počijuščix vlastitelej Rossii” (PSS VII: 15; “Now let us go and bow before the coffins / Of the deceased rulers of Russia”). All tsars in the Rjurik dynasty would have paid homage to the tombs of their predecessors, but their deference would have signified dynastic continuity. Boris disrupts the legitimate transfer of power from father to son. His desire to derive legitimacy from the dead will be grotesquely literalized in scene five, where the monk Grigorij first hears of the dead Tsarevich, whom he decides to impersonate. Indeed, the ghost of the dead Dimitrij already haunts the coronation scene, where Boris cannot pledge to work for his people without being drawn to a tomb. For Boris, these coffins are yet powerful signifiers, and he vainly invokes their fullness of meaning as if he could incorporate it.⁴

The investiture scene, though its falseness comes partly from its status as a public ritual, prepares for Boris’s two soliloquies by establishing that the only self Boris has to reveal is one driven by fear of its own inauthenticity. Soliloquies are rare in Boris Godunov. In a play in which the dramatis personae engage in elaborate acts of pretense, the actors demand an onstage audience for whom they consciously perform, and the readers or viewers benefit from that internal audience as it guides them in deciphering the actors’ ambiguous behavior and speech. What is remarkable about Boris’s first soliloquy (“Dostig ja vysšej vlasti” [“I have attained the highest power”]), as well as his second, shorter one, is that he provides his own audience.

Boris begins the first soliloquy by a kind of clearing away of all distractions, which works much like the emptying of the stage that begins Boris Godunov. The speech opens with a recognition of emotional emptiness: achieved glory yields no pleasure. One thus expects a moment of introspection, an exploration of why, after six years of rule, Boris still feels like a failure. The morbid tone of the speech and its omnipresent allusions to death more than answer that question, but a sense persists that Boris is using language to conceal rather than to reveal.

One source is the intrusion of an audience into this private moment. Boris’s long lament about his failed attempts to win his subjects’ love and loyalty sounds like someone seeking pity from his listener.

Boris catalogues the protective gestures that he has made toward the Russian people, but they see in him a source of harm. The narod, as audience, demonstrates here its great interpretive powers, even when they are absent. Boris confirms the decisiveness of their judgments as the morbidity for which he condemns the people infects his own language. As the soliloquy continues, Boris finds his conscience eating away at itself, poisoning his body with the death that seems to be everywhere around him. He twists that which is life-affirming into morbidity and failure, especially in the second half of the soliloquy when he turns from popular adulation to the love of his family. The family would seem a less vexed topic for Boris to explore, but nothing is new as he turns to his family’s failures. The metaphors do not change. Death comes like a “storm,” thus recalling in a more aggressive way the clapping sound (as of waves against a shore, “plesk”) made by the people in the first half of the speech. The crowd itself does not disappear, as its rumors get repeated for more evidence that Boris is forever blamed.

Does the evocation of an audience diminish Boris’s courage in naming the causes for his discontent? Boris’s evasiveness is eloquent enough an answer. The “spot” on his conscience is represented as only that, a threat so grave that it cannot be named (as were the more preposterous crimes, that Boris “hastened Feodor’s demise,” poisoned his sister, killed his future son-in-law). The dead Tsarevich is armed with a name too terrible to utter, as Boris will later say to his son (PSS VII: 89). Boris even has trouble settling upon a satisfactory metaphor to represent the death of the Tsarevich figuratively. It is, serially, a “spot,” a “plague,” a soul on fire, a poison-flooded heart, ears pounded by hammers. This rhetorical display dizzies Boris until bloody children, a near-representation of the dead Dimitrij but, as if to continue the lines’ excesses, a multiplicity of children, loom before his eyes.

Boris seems to revel in the horror of his life, but the play reveals in him a sense of interiority that “discovers itself as too monstrous to be revealed.”⁵ The syntax in the end of the soliloquy contains a revealing clue as to how Puškin creates in Boris a character who wants to flee his own oppressive sense of self. Boris now refers to himself in the accusative case for the first time, and then repeatedly, as if literalizing the etymological hint of accusation in the name for this grammatical category ( vinitel’nyi). The accusations intensify a sense of guilt, but with them responsibility becomes easier to evade. Rather than sentences that place Boris as the agent of his actions, the play gives us sentences where things are done to him. He is the victim of the dead little boys’ dizzying appearance rather than the possible cause of their death.

As the judgment of the narod was disruptive in the first half of the speech, so self-judgment is Boris’s fear in the end. At the conclusion of the speech he stops beginning his sentences with “I” and avoids self-reference altogether.⁶ In the last line, he talks about conscience as if it could be anyone else’s, and increases the distance between himself and his words when he feels pity for “him” who has an unclean conscience. From first person, through sentences where he is the victim of others’ actions, to impersonal constructions, Boris finally brings himself around to a selfconceptualization which divorces its pathos from any admission of selfreference. The shift to a third-person outcry about pity makes us hear that last line (“Da, žalok tot, v kom sovest’ nečista” [“Yes, piteous is he whose conscience is unclean”]) either as Boris talking about someone else or as if someone else were speaking about Boris. What Puškin has done, then, in Boris’s first soliloquy, is to take apart the conventions of dramatic soliloquy: the actor speaks, but as if about someone else. He is alone, but overcome by his thoughts of an audience. Rather than revealing himself to himself, he has performed a spectacle of his desire to flee from the self he is too frightened to confront.

In Boris’s second soliloquy, the final line of which is “Ox, tjažela ty, šapka Monomaxa!” (PSS VII: 49; “Oh, you are heavy, crown of Monomax!”), there is less opportunity for evasiveness. Boris has just heard that a young man claiming to be Dimitrij has appeared in Poland, and he is terrified. The final line would immediately seem much less a distancing summation than an impersonal conclusion about an unclean conscience.

Boris gazes inward and momentarily finds a peculiar satisfaction in the sure knowing of what he beholds. He is, indeed, as badly off as he had previously feared. Earlier dreams of murdered children are now interpreted as foreshadowing. Paradoxically, Boris is relieved that his apprehensions were justified, even though the satisfaction of knowing that nightmares were not causeless brings a heightened sense of anxiety about Dimitrij.

As soon as Boris looks beyond himself, however, all certainty vanishes. Questions overpower the exclamations of the first six lines. Boris mixes rhetorical with genuine questions, so confused is he in stance. He cannot distinguish syntactically between what he wants to know (who is he? why am I afraid?) and what he wishes to persuade himself to believe (that Dimitrij, because “shade” or “sound,” cannot possibly deny Boris his right to rule). How can Boris believe that he understands anything at all? Boris’s speech turns back upon itself in a way which once again denies him any authentic power as a speaker. He claims to understand the significance of his recurring dream, but he denounces as void of significance the very event that has enabled his apparent comprehension. As in the first soliloquy’s avoidance of the death in Uglič, the Tsar cannot here name the pretender. Dimitrij, the enemy, is an empty name, a shade, a sound and a ghost. “Ghost” and “shade” recall the ubiquitous dead child. Dimitrij is also a “terrible adversary” (groznyi supostat), where the word “terrible” repeats the epithet for Ivan the “Terrible,” as if Dimitrij were himself of royal lineage.

The “empty name” and the “sound” define the False Dimitrij (as opposed to the dead child) as someone who has no identifiable origin or name, as a mystery devoid of knowable significance. Both words (“empty name” and “sound”) are empty shells, ghostlike in their own linguistic vagueness, suggestions of Boris’s vain belief that Dimitrij the Pretender has no personality which will win him followers, only the magnet of a rumored identity. There is little space in this play to consider seriously the possibility that the name “Dimitrij” is empty:⁷ Everyone, especially Boris, has burdened the name with emotional overtones. It is not the “sapka” (“crown”) that is oppressive by the end of the speech, it is the unspeakable name, so that the absence of a specific referent in the opening line, “Ux, tjazelo!” (“Oh, this is oppressive!”), seems in retrospect particularly ominous.

Boris reacts to these various forms of oppressiveness by reasserting an imaginary power over them. He stresses his ability to pretend, to hide his emotions, as part of his strategy. “Ne okažu ja straxa” (“I will show no fear”), he resolves, saying not that he will feel no fear but that he will not show it. The appearance of the pretender is treated as an emotional, not political, crisis, and it is emotional authenticity which Boris reaches for desperately in this scene.

Were there an achievement of emotional intensity here, it would need to be felt in the famous last line, “Oh, you are heavy, crown of Monomax!” Despite its lexicon of weightedness, the exclamation rhetorically seeks an elevated conclusion for the soliloquy. What makes the line so memorable, perhaps, is that it feels both natural and incredibly staged. The line is an effective mechanism of repression by its very tropes. The “crown” lets Boris refer to his imperial power without really naming it in a way that reminds us of his many ways of not naming Dimitrij. The expression “crown of Monomax” already hints at the unmentionable name, since the reference to Vladimir Monomax is also an invocation of the Rjurik dynasty, of which Dimitrij was the last descendant. The “crown” is also significant. Boris refers to Dimitrij’s threat as “tearing the porphyry” from him, a more striking usage of almost the same metonymy where costumes stand in for the power they signify. Boris can invoke his power only via articles of clothing, themselves bodily coverings which impersonally signify sovereign might.

When it is heard at last, the epithet “heavy” is also reduced in force by the very echoes that have given it resonance in the play. It recurs a fateful third time: Boris is oppressed by the news of Dimitrij’s appearance (I.i); he feels his blood sinking weightily within him (I.3); and he finally exclaims that the symbol of his rulership, his cap, weighs heavily on him (I.14).⁸ Elsewhere in the play, the adjective finds several revealing contexts. The monk Pimen uses it with reference to the press of public duties which force tsars to withdraw into monastic seclusion (PSS VII: 20). Pimen’s words suggest that where responsibilities become oppressive, they soon end, a possibility which changes the exclamation (“Oh, you are heavy, Crown of Monomax!” from a sigh of exhaustion amid renewed determination into a proleptic vision that Boris’s reign will shortly collapse. Perhaps more damning, though, is Boris’s investiture speech, where he exclaims, “Skol’ tjažela objazannost’ moja!” (PSS VII: 15; “How heavy is my obligation!”). The sincerity of that speech was undercut by Šujskij’s imputations, and, what is more, rulership is a much-sought-after and very new burden which scarcely could have begun to weigh on the just-named tsar. One wonders, as a result, if the second complaint about feeling oppressed is similarly uttered for dramatic effect. Perhaps not, since the ruling tsar now has cause for complaint, but the complaints are not heard here; they are figured as things as light as a shade or an empty name.

All of which suggests that when Boris tries to bring everything down to a sense of heaviness, we are inclined to disbelieve him, even though his assessment could be made plausible were the speech a different speech. As elsewhere in the play, the audience is at once drawn in by expectations of insight and put off by the inevitable language of self-deception. In its very gesture of summation, distance is imposed in this final line, and what is heard is an attempt at mastery rather than a release of emotion. Boris is frequently aphoristic. Earlier he has told his son that habit is the soul of sovereignty (PSS VII: 90), and Boris, enclosed in his own patterns, eagerly connects habit with might. Epigrammatic discourse presents itself as its own end, and covers a desire for control over a situation which inherently escapes summary.⁹ Boris’s introspection remains insular, emptied out of any sense of discovery or even disclosure. We read that well-known final line as if it were an exhalation of breath, a natural release of pent-up emotion. A physicality normally avoided in the play is nearly suggested in the speech’s emphasis on breath, yet breath is an image which by its very insubstantiality does not add to Boris’s might. Boris wishes to blow Dimitrij away in one breath, and he begins the speech by hoping to catch his breath. The desires are in both instances paradoxically expressed; both seek to stifle the rhythm of life despite the suggested “breath” of air.

There is one other bodily detail that subverts Boris’s claims to authority and, at the same time, could tell us what it is that makes Boris feel the crown so heavy on his head. To assure Boris that the child Dimitrij died, Šujskij has just described his peaceful face. Boris then mentions his own face as reddened by the blood of emotion. When Boris speaks of the blood rushing to his own face, he appropriates the image of blood normally reserved for the dead child that his adversary now claims to incarnate. The dead child’s face leads to Boris’s face, then to the crown heavy on his head: the itinerary of description in this speech brings the Tsar ever closer to identifying with his apparent past victim and imminent adversary.

Such a reading of this soliloquy is dizzying, since nothing could be more threatening to Boris’s sense of self-identity than for a listener to find in his words the suggestion that he is somehow like Dimitrij. Others have suggested that Boris, too, is a pretender, thus undermining any possible sense of authority available to him in the play (Rassadin 1977; Nepomniascij 1983: 226-31; Emerson 1986: 99-105). Named in the play’s title, the character so obviously framed as the play’s hero, Boris seems finally uncomfortable in the limelight. He is at his best when he talks to himself (or when he seems to, as in the farewell scene with his son), yet in the two soliloquies, Boris uses his words as much to hide from as to probe the self he claims to seek. Split into actor and audience, Boris wants to run from the self who would listen, but, as he himself says, there’s nowhere to go. Listening carefully to his words, watching him consider the possibility of running away from himself, we as the play’s readers gain insight not into Boris’s character but into why the play as a whole is so uncomfortable to read. The hero would gladly escape from the text, which contains him oppressively and yet cannot provide him with satisfying means of selfdiscovery and self-expression. What we see in Boris, then, we come to recognize as characteristic of the play in its entirety. He is a character painfully compressed into roles that he pretends to play while the drama continually faces him with a self-demanding recognition for its personal authenticity. The character is, then, an allegory for the play, which, in its loneliness, seems only to have itself as an audience. There is a further allegory to be read here, that of Puškin’s act of authorship.

Puškin’s attitudes toward his audience were in turmoil at the time that Boris Godunov was written. Biographers have noted the extreme isolation of Puškin’s months of exile in Mixajlovskoe (Lotman 1981: 128), and Puškin’s letters amply confirm their judgment. Yet the play’s lessons about solitary acts of speech cannot be ignored: even distant audiences have powers over how one speaks, and even when alone one inevitably speaks before an audience.

The imagination of an audience for Boris Godunov was for Puškin problematic and filled with change. A self-consciously innovative work intended to reform the state of Russian theater, Boris Godunov could not but feature the sense of an audience learning new lessons about art from its performances.¹⁰ More narrowly, the play might have had personal implications for Puškin’s daily life, living as he was in political disfavor. Žukovskij predicted that the play would bring about an end to Puškin’s long exile: “Write Godunov and things like it: they will open the doors of freedom” (PSS XIII: 271).¹¹ Puškin is alternately eager to believe such predictions (PSS XIII: 237) and sanguine about the unlikelihood that Boris Godunov will bring him public recognition. His rueful comments about his political honesty sticking out of the play like the Holy Fool’s ears are well known (PSS XIII: 239-40).

One can conclude, then, that Puškin could not, finally, believe that his play would please an imperial audience. By 1830 he seems to have given up on reaching popular audiences as well. His drafted prefaces for Boris Godunov predict its failure, but they re-imagine the play as a success by recalling yet another possible audience. “Written by me in strict isolation, far from society’s coldness, the fruit of constant labor, this tragedy has given me everything that a writer is permitted to enjoy: a living and inspired sense of occupation, an inner conviction that I have applied all my forces, and, finally, the approval of a small number of chosen people” (PSS XI: 140). There is only one more paragraph in this drafted preface, and it ends with the words “solitary labor.”

Puškin thus makes of Boris Godunov one long soliloquy, a speech act where the most palpable hearer is the speaker himself, encouraged by thoughts of other hearers (a small circle of friends) but aware that the most intense relationship at hand is between the speaker and his words. Even in 1825 Puškin had foreseen how much he was writing for himself alone: “My tragedy is finished; I reread it aloud to myself and clapped my hands and cried, good for you, Puškin, good for you, you son of a bitch!” (PSS XIII: 239). In this letter to Vjazemskij, Puškin, alone, reads the play for his own pleasure, and claps his hands as if in applause, thus acting out the role of audience. In that single stroke, several apparently separate strands of meaning in Boris Godunov come together. Puškin is like the boyars or the narod, both focused on the spectacle before him and aware that his own solitary performance is already part of the play; he is like Boris as well, not in the discoveries about self and pretense but in his position as a speaker, strangely alone all the while that imagined audiences impinge upon his words. The speeches written for himself alone will, inevitably, be taken up by others who will see themselves as the play’s momentary audience. In its silences and evasions, the play offers readers extraordinary freedom: by showing how actors’ speeches make and unmake meanings, Boris Godunov invites conclusions not only about history, personality, theater, and pretense, but also about the workings of language itself. Boris Godunov may well be a Puškin text that does little to foster a community of readers, but it permits solitary and creative readings that take us a long way toward seeing how complex are all acts of speaking, writing, and listening.