[Download] "Afterword: The Fate of the Jubilee Pushkin on the Stalinist Musical-Dramatic Stage." by Pushkin Review # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Afterword: The Fate of the Jubilee Pushkin on the Stalinist Musical-Dramatic Stage.
- Author : Pushkin Review
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 173 KB
Description
Early in the Boris Godunov seminar, Leeore Schnairsohn (a second-year graduate student in Comparative Literature) commented in one of his critiques on the openness or "eternal present" implied in Pushkin's famous final stage direction, narod bezmolvstvuet. He had been struck by the ambivalence, or better multi-valence, of that silence. An aggressive prompt to cheer the new tsar had elicited no response. But perhaps that silence was the response: "the absence of a positive gesture leaves open the question not only of whether the people's silence is action or inaction, but also whether their gesture is fulfilled or still nascent." Schnairsohn took Belinsky's reading of Pushkin's mute closing gesture one step further, suggesting that one effect of such a sudden stoppage or bewildered silence is to "bring the audience's present moment in line with the drama's, because bezmolvstvovat' is precisely what the audience has been doing all along, and now suddenly it's the same silence, the same moment, on both sides of the curtain." In the final moments of the Princeton production, after the successful double murder high up on the scaffolding, this radical equalization of on-and off-stage audiences was achieved by turning the glare of searchlights directly into the hall from the back of the blood-red, bungee-filled stage. It was a Meyerholdian moment--although not, of course, unique to his modernist theater. From today's perspective, our knowledge of post-1936 events in Stalinist Russia lends this indictment a meaning it could not have had in its own time. Throughout the final public-square scenes, beginning with the ominous, wordless rhythmic chanting of the male chorus and reinforced by a pulsating orchestra, horror had been growing apace with powerlessness. When Tsar Boris, already two scenes dead, reappears in company costume as a bullying Guard on the Pretender's side, history begins to blend with symbols of arbitrary, interchangeable violence. And when Lily the Holy Fool reappears as a beggar asking the imprisoned Godunov children for alms, the logic behind these twenty-five scenes of multiple casting is driven home: the Boris Tale, like all reality in Pushkin's poetic shaping of it, deals in functions and parallel structures as much as in human beings. People are precise and unrepeatable as themselves; they believe they are free. But their fate moves only one way and the cumulative effect of their movements will reveal a magnificent pattern. Part of the shock of Pushkin's abrupt, non-sentimental endings--Book Eight of Evgenii Onegin as well as the final scene of Boris Godunov--is that the author simply "takes his leave" once the symmetry has been realized. He walks away, with the benumbed heroes, readers, and spectators on their knees and in the spotlight. They must do something: but what?