THE TSAR’S RED PENCIL:

NICHOLAS I AND CENSORSHIP OF PUSHKIN’S BORIS GODUNOV

Chester Dunning, Texas A&M University

When Alexander Pushkin’s much anticipated Boris Godunov appeared in print in January

1831, it was met with disappointment and puzzlement by many of Pushkin’s friends. Their

initial judgment was that the play was a flop, a harsh view confirmed by a majority of critics of

later generations.1 It is often forgotten, however, that one of Pushkin’s contemporaries was

extremely pleased by the published version of Boris Godunov. Tsar Nicholas I read it “with

great pleasure” and liked Boris Godunov much better than Pushkin’s original Comedy about Tsar

Boris and Grishka Otrepiev, written in 1824-25.2 And why not? The 1831 edition of the play

(which deleted three scenes and many lines of dialogue and altered the play’s ending) was much

less politically incorrect, and it more closely reflected the tsar’s aesthetic and historical views.

To what extent was the published version of Boris Godunov a product of Pushkin’s own artistic

vision, and to what extent did it reflect Nicholas I’s input and chronic fear of rebellion? Was the

tsar personally involved in censoring Pushkin’s play? Answering these questions will highlight

the underappreciated impact of censorship on Pushkin’s Boris Godunov.

The transformation of Pushkin’s Comedy, which received rave reviews when read aloud

to his friends soon after the poet’s triumphant return to Moscow in 1826, into the problematic

published version was a long-neglected research topic that began to receive serious scholarly

attention only in the late twentieth century. The text of Komediia o tsare Borise i o Grishke

Otrep’eve, known to many Russian readers before 1917, was never published in the Soviet

Union and was essentially forgotten.3 In 1993 Sergei Fomichev published a limited edition of
Komediia and called for more study of the original version of Pushkin’s play. An article by

Chester Dunning contending that Pushkin’s Comedy was more historically accurate and

aesthetically appealing than the 1831 Boris Godunov appeared in The Russian Review in 2001.

That in turn led to a collaborative research project sponsored by The National Endowment for

the Humanities which resulted in the publication in 2006 of The Uncensored Boris Godunov:

The Case for Pushkin’s Original Comedy. In that book, Sergei Fomichev published a more

accurate transcription of Komediia than the one found in his 1993 edition, and Antony Wood

published the first English translation of the play.

Since 2006 Pushkin’s Comedy continues to be rehabilitated. In April 2007 the world

premiere performance of the play was staged at Princeton University, and the event was

enthusiastically covered by major American, European and Russian media.4 Also in 2007,

Sergei Fomichev and others published a lavish edition of Boris Godunov which, to the surprise

of some readers, turned out to be the text of Komediia with commentary by Lidiia Lotman and

Mariia Virolainen. In 2008, as part of David Bethea’s ambitious series of the annotated works of

Pushkin, Mariia Virolainen and Alexander Dolinin republished A. F. Smirdin’s 1835 edition of

Boris Godunov with the complete text of Komediia in the notes. Finally, the Institute of Russian

Literature (Pushkinskii Dom) of the Russian Academy of Sciences is currently in the process of

publishing a new definitive edition of Pushkin’s works, and – due in part to the scholarship of

The Uncensored Boris Godunov team – the full text of Pushkin’s Komediia will be included for

the first time as an appendix to Boris Godunov – not as snippets, glosses, restored inserts, but the

entire integral text. That is a major step forward for the long neglected Comedy, which has

traditionally been ignored or dismissed as a rough draft much improved by the maturation of
Pushkin’s historical imagination and aesthetic sensibilities. Pushkinskii Dom’s new edition of

Boris Godunov will bring us closer to establishing the canonical text of the play, but it also

promises to bring into sharp focus unresolved problems related to that elusive task.

The co-authors of The Uncensored Boris Godunov argued persuasively, in the opinion of

many reviewers, that Pushkin’s original Comedy should share canonical status with Boris

Godunov. Pushkin fully intended to publish his subversive Comedy, which he regarded as his

magnum opus.5 The play as originally written is revolutionary in form, politically daring, and

well structured – complete with the cathartic ending prescribed by Aristotle and Shakespeare. It

takes potshots at autocracy and dares to touch on the taboo topic of serfdom, presents the

despised pretender Dmitry in a sympathetic light as he was indeed portrayed by foreign – not

Russian – eyewitnesses, and engages in a spirited dialogue with Nicholas Karamzin’s semi-

official History of the Russian State about the Time of Troubles (UBG 51-93; Karamzin, vols.

10-11). Pushkin was well aware that publishing such a controversial play would be extremely

difficult, and he of course knew that he would have to make concessions to the censors. The

possibility that he rethought and improved some details of the play as time went on also cannot

be ruled out. But that does not mean the version that appeared in 1831 represents Pushkin’s

mature artistic and historical vision. It was Tsar Nicholas, not Pushkin, who preferred the 1831

Boris Godunov – which was, in my considered opinion, more the product of censorship, fear, and

political correctness at the imperial court than it was the product of free artistic revision.

According to Sergei Fomichev and Lidiia Lotman, Pushkin’s Comedy has equal value to

Boris Godunov; therefore, both deserve canonical status (UBG xi, 43-44, 154, 234). I am not so

sure. I am convinced of the merits of Pushkin’s Comedy but remain skeptical of arguments in
favor of one or another version of Boris Godunov as the best representation of authorial intent.

While there is growing agreement that Pushkin’s Comedy is worthy of study on its own merits as

the “Ur-text” of the play (Clayton 2007), there is still much confusion about which version of

Boris Godunov deserves to be called canonical. The 1831 edition of the play was never regarded

by Pushkin as superior to his unpublished Comedy. Censorship forced Pushkin to alter his play.

While it is understandable that Russian critics did not draw attention to that awkward fact during

1I wish to thank Caryl Emerson and the anonymous reviewers for many useful suggestions for

improvement of this article, and I wish to thank Sergei Fomichev for cheerfully double-checking

dozens of marks and corrections found on the two earliest manuscripts of Pushkin’s Komediia.

?. Kireevskii 2: 42-47; Belinskii 250-95; Filonov 57-58; “O ‘Borise Godunove’” 445-55;

Vinokur “Kommentarii” 436-59; Brown 3: 105-11; Gorodetskii Tragediia 84-108; Emerson

“Pretenders” 257-60; Greenleaf 157-59; Ronen 5, 9-14; Sandler Distant Pleasures 9, 11-12, 77-

79, 108-09, 136-37; Pushkin Boris Godunov: Tragediia [hereafter cited as BG] 348-51, 490-525.

2. Annenkov Pushkin 255-57; Pushkin Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [hereafter cited as PSS] 14:

146; idem Letters 454; Binyon 351.

3. Chester Dunning with Caryl Emerson, Sergei Fomichev, Lidiia Lotman, and Antony Wood,

The Uncensored Boris Godunov: The Case for Pushkin’s Original Comedy, with Annotated Text

and Translation [hereafter cited as UBG], 30-31; Pushkin Sochineniia i pis’ma 3: v, 239-61,

264-354, 629-40.

4. The world premiere performance of Pushkin’s Comedy took place at the Berlind Theater in

Princeton, 12 April 2007. It was the result of collaboration between Princeton University
the 1830s, it is curious that this prejudice has established itself so firmly in Pushkin scholarship

and has endured by inertia in later centuries and regimes. Efforts to fathom Pushkin’s artistic

intentions continue to minimize the impact of censorship on Boris Godunov and, in the process,

ignore the elephant – or tsar – in the room.6

In their dramatic Kremlin encounter in 1826, Tsar Nicholas declared that he would

personally act as Pushkin’s censor (Tsiavlovskii 50). The young poet naïvely assumed the tsar’s

pledge would allow him to publish his Comedy about Tsar Boris and Grishka Otrepiev –

completed on the eve of the Decembrist Rebellion – without going through regular censorship

(Pushkin 1967, 313; idem 1937-59, 13: 305; Binyon 242-44). But a negative report on the play

faculty, staff, and students, RGALI (The Russian State Archive of Literature and Art), and the

Glinka Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow. Simon Morrison and Caryl Emerson were the

project managers, and Tim Vasen directed the play. The actors and musicians were all

undergraduate students of Princeton University, and the sets were designed and built by graduate

students of the Princeton School of Architecture. This premiere for the first time reconnected

concepts from Vsevolod Meyerhold’s production of the play – planned, partially rehearsed, but

never realized for the 1937 Pushkin Centennial – with the incidental music commissioned for it

by Sergei Prokofiev.

5. PSS 14: 56, 118, 139, 150; idem Letters 371, 398, 434, 449, 458; Tsiavlovskii and Tarkhova

Letopis’ [hereafter cited as TL] 2: 89; 3: 253, 284; Vinokur Stat’i 83; Emerson “Pretenders” 257.

6. UBG 37-43; Slater 420-27; Horowitz 434-39; Sandler “Introduction”283; Emerson “Pushkin”

653-72; Larionova 279-302.

was produced, one ostensibly written by Nicholas himself.7 Pushkin was not allowed to publish

his play and was even warned to stop reading it to his friends.8 Most scholars who studied this

episode have concluded that the man who actually wrote the tsar’s report was Pushkin’s literary

arch-rival, the odious police spy Faddei Bulgarin.9 That titillating identification, however, has

resulted in scholarly indifference to the tsar’s own personal role in censoring Pushkin’s Comedy

and even the suggestion that Nicholas did not bother to read the play.10 Although seldom noted

by scholars, two of Pushkin’s friends who tried to help him publish his play and personally

handled the original manuscripts of his Comedy, Vasily Zhukovsky and Pyotr Pletnev, declared

that Nicholas himself not only read the original manuscript written in Pushkin’s own hand

(Pushkinskii Dom, Rukopisnyi otdel, fond 244, opis’ 1, No. 891 [hereafter cited as PD 891]) but

also marked it up; according to Pletnev, the tsar indicated with a “red pencil” several passages

that were unacceptable.11 Bulgarin ghost-wrote the tsar’s report, but it was produced in response

to Nicholas’s reading of the play and his red pencil. Nicholas also suggested that Pushkin

convert his play into a novel in the manner of Walter Scott, a remark that is always noted and

quoted (Pushkin 1937-59, 13: 313; Binyon 254). In the aftermath of the Decembrist Rebellion,

the tsar was anxious to have Pushkin as “an adornment to his reign,” but he was also deeply

ambivalent about the brilliant poet and did not trust him. Agents of Nicholas’s chief of

gendarmes, Alexander Benckendorff, continued to spy upon and generally torment Pushkin

(UBG 95-98; Binyon 242-44).

Not surprisingly, Pushkin was shocked and annoyed at being denied permission to

publish his beloved Comedy; so in 1829 he tried again.12 This time he and his close friend and

co-editor Vasily Zhukovsky bowed to the censors – but only slightly. A few modest changes
were made in response to Nicholas’s objections, but much of the tsar’s report was ignored.

Pushkin’s Comedy remained politically charged and still contained many “dangerous” elements.

Perhaps to annoy the censors, Pushkin offered to replace a vulgar expression uttered by Captain

Margeret – a line the playwright acknowledged was unacceptable to the censors – with a less

vulgar but equally unacceptable line that praised the pretender Dmitry (Pushkin 1937-59, 7: 74,

297; UBG 103). Pushkin was well aware, of course, that Dmitry was loathed by most Russians

and especially by Tsar Nicholas (Balashov 213). Not surprisingly, in January 1830,

Benckendorff informed Pushkin that the tsar was disappointed by the changes made in the

Comedy and regarded them as “too trivial.” Once again Pushkin was denied permission to

publish his play.13 In spite of Benckendorff’s description of the changes as trivial, some scholars

have claimed that Zhukovsky made substantial changes before submitting the play for

publication in 1829 (Vinokur 1935a, 428; Larionova 279-302). As will be discussed below,

careful study reveals that to be a hasty conclusion. Pushkin’s friend Pyotr Pletnev formally

submitted the “revised” version of Komediia to the censors on 20 July 1829. His very diplomatic

statement to the authorities that Zhukovsky had “corrected and improved” Pushkin’s play in

response to the tsar’s concerns expressed in 1826 has been taken too literally by some scholars as

proof that Zhukovsky (or Pushkin himself) heavily edited the play before 1830. Unfortunately, it

has also been rashly assumed that all pencil marks on the manuscript of Komediia submitted to

the censors in 1829 (Pushkinskii Dom, Rukopisnyi otdel, fond 244, opis’ 1, No. 892 [hereafter

cited as PD 892]) were made by Zhukovsky (or Pushkin) and that these pencil marks predate that

submission.14 There is, in fact, no way to tell who marked up the manuscript or when; it could

easily have been marked up by more than one person on more than one occasion. To assert that
Zhukovsky was a heavy-handed editor as early as 1829 minimizes the role of censorship in the

publication of the play, and to my mind that is a mistake.

Not long after Pushkin’s request to publish the Comedy was denied for the second time,

Nicholas apparently had a change of heart. Bulgarin’s increasingly vicious published attacks on

the reputation of Zhukovsky so angered the tsar that Bulgarin was briefly arrested and, in April

1830, Pushkin was finally granted permission to publish his play (UBG 110-13; TL 3: 187;

Vyskochkov 543). If Nicholas had not intervened to protect Zhukovsky’s reputation and if

Zhukovsky had not persistently interceded on Pushkin’s behalf, there is no reason to believe the

tsar would have given the green light to print Pushkin’s play. Without Zhukovsky’s help it is

unlikely that Boris Godunov would have been published during Nicholas’s reign. That is one of

the main reasons why Pushkin originally planned to dedicate Boris Godunov to Zhukovsky.15 It

is important to remember that gaining permission to publish the play was a sort of accidental

collateral benefit, a byproduct of the tsar’s protection of Zhukovsky from scurrilous, unwarranted

attacks. The fate of Pushkin’s Comedy provides another example of cultural policy by proizvol

[arbitrariness] and why it is so difficult to reconstruct the process of creating artworks in

authoritarian systems – because tyrants don’t even follow their own rules but are often swayed

instead by nonsense, neuroses and weird dependencies.

When Pushkin finally received permission to publish his Comedy, he was informed that

he would no longer be required to revise it in response to the tsar’s report, that he could publish

15. UBG 112, 115-16; Pushkin Letters 430, 433-34; idem Sochineniia i pis’ma 3: 256, 260-61;

PSS 14: 80, 117-18; TL 3: 186-87, 219, 225; Gorodetskii Tragediia 77-79, 82; Binyon 333, 350-

51.
the play as he “felt proper” on “his own responsibility” (Pushkin 1937-59, 14: 81-82; TL 3: 183-

84). An exultant Pushkin wrote that he was being allowed to publish his play “in all its pristine

beauty.” Unfortunately, that statement and similar ones misled some of Pushkin’s friends at the

time and many scholars since then.16 Just as he had done in 1826, Pushkin prematurely

concluded that he was being given permission to publish his play exactly as he had written it,

without changes. What actually happened next is so complex and murky that scholars and critics

may be forgiven for failing to straighten it out. Before Pushkin’s play went to press, news

reached Russia of the July Revolution and the beginning of the Polish Rebellion of 1830-31,

which truly frightened the tsar. The atmosphere at court immediately hardened, and censorship

was even more rigorously enforced by a paranoid government. Both Nicholas and Benckendorff

feared a peasant rebellion inside Russia (UBG 114-17). Under those circumstances there was no

way Pushkin’s Comedy – with its sassy narod and impertinent recruits, its references to serfdom,

and its tolerance for alternative tsars and things Polish – could find its way into print. The

publication of an acceptable version of the play required significant changes in the original

Comedy, changes that for too long have been regarded as the product of Pushkin’s aesthetic

development.17 All evidence indicates that they were the result of censorship.

Pushkin’s play was published at the very end of 1830 and went on sale in January 1831.

Boris Godunov differed from Pushkin’s Comedy in many ways: It was – at the very last moment,

after the volume had already been bound – dedicated to Karamzin; it had a new title, and it

received a new ending (“The people remain silent.”). Boris Godunov had also been purged of

three scenes and many other lines of text. As a result, the play no longer portrayed Dmitry in a

sympathetic light and instead hewed more or less to Karamzin’s politically safe view of the Time
of Troubles.18 Boris Godunov lacked the dramatic structure and internal consistency of the

Comedy. No wonder Pushkin’s friends were disappointed. They accused him of slavishly

following Karamzin and of having published a meaningless drama, nothing but a string of

disconnected scenes.19 Of course the political atmosphere of Russia had changed from 1826; the

effect of reading an “old” play whose scenes had been leaked into print over several years was

very different than the charismatic poet reading it aloud, quasi-clandestinely, to his friends; and

we must not forget that Pushkin post-1830 did not have the status or popular acclaim in Russian

culture that he had enjoyed during the 1820s. In 1826 he was still a rebel; in 1831 he was

already being referred to by younger writers as a member of the “aristocratic party,” almost a

relic – a survivor from that time when Russian literature was run by the salon. Pushkin himself

expected a negative reaction to the published version of his play, which he called an

“anachronism” ( Pushkin 1937-59, 11: 141; idem 1967, 449, 452; TL 3: 284). Nevertheless,

some of Pushkin’s friends were disappointed with the 1831 Boris Godunov precisely because it

was not his daring, well-structured Comedy. During the 1830s dramas about the Time of

Troubles and Tsar Dmitry were written by Aleksei Khomiakov, Mikhail Pogodin and Egor

Rozen, all of whom had been strongly influenced by Pushkin’s original play. Each of their

dramas “entered into its own eerie dialogue with Pushkin”– not with the 1831 Boris Godunov but

with Pushkin’s Comedy.20 In fact, far from fading away, appreciation for the Comedy grew in the

years following the death of Tsar Nicholas as the uncensored version of the play made its way

into print. Modest Musorgskii, for example, revised his opera Boris Godunov in part to bring it

into alignment with Pushkin’s Comedy (UBG 20-21, 28-29, 125, 158-59).

It is not known how Pushkin’s Comedy evolved into Boris Godunov. Was the play
heavily censored, and if so, by whom? Pushkin had acknowledged as early as 1826 that some

changes would be necessary to get the play into print.21 Did Pushkin and Zhukovsky anticipate

and to some extent pre-empt the censors? We do not know. We know only that Pushkin was not

directly involved in the final editing of the play for publication; he left that task in the capable

hands of Zhukovsky (TL 3: 219, 225; Gorodetskii 1969,77-79, 82). For his part, Zhukovsky did

not plan to significantly alter Pushkin’s Comedy but was forced by circumstances to make

revisions. Zhukovsky was never given a free hand to publish whatever version of the play

Pushkin desired. It is very likely that Zhukovsky was the author of many of the changes in Boris

Godunov, but of this we cannot be certain (Alekseev 174; Pushkin 1903-06, 3: 256, 760-61). It

is often forgotten that after he edited the play for publication – responding to or anticipating

some of the censors’ demands – Zhukovsky was forced to submit Boris Godunov to regular

censorship (Tomashevskii 509). Even though Pushkin’s play had been (at least temporarily)

released from the changes demanded in the tsar’s report, it was still subject to ordinary

censorship – like all books published in the Russian Empire. Not surprisingly, Benckendorff

handled the final cleansing of the play. He saw to it that Boris Godunov was published by a

reliable press, the Ministry of Education, which also conveniently housed the censorship office.22

Pushkin later complained to Benckendorff about being singled out for what amounted to double

censorship (Wolff 325). We simply do not know which changes in Boris Godunov were the

results of Zhukovsky’s pen, which were the results of Pushkin’s sporadic input, and which were

the results of censorship.

By August 1830 Zhukovsky and Pushkin certainly realized that changes in the Comedy

were necessary. By then, both poets were locked in mortal combat with Bulgarin, who was
relentlessly attacking Pushkin’s reputation and shamelessly trying to assume the deceased

Karamzin’s role as Russia’s leading man of letters. Under those circumstances, it is not difficult

to imagine Pushkin and Zhukovsky coming up with a clever strategy. By deleting three scenes

and making other adjustments to the text of the Comedy, it was possible to distance the

playwright from Dmitry and the Poles and to turn the original play – which challenged Karamzin

– into something vaguely but in its broad contours congruent with Karamzin’s interpretation of

the Time of Troubles. Nevertheless, however it came about, the decision to alter the play was

definitely not the result of any change of heart about Dmitry on Pushkin’s part. Instead, it was

born out of anger and desperation. Pushkin was under siege by Bulgarin, and Benckendorff was

also working behind the scenes to ruin him. Altering the Comedy proved to be a brilliant

strategy to defeat Bulgarin and prevent him, or his gifted protégé Nikolai Ustrialov, from

assuming Karamzin’s mantle. It was definitely not a coincidence that, shortly after the

publication of Boris Godunov, Tsar Nicholas bestowed that great honor on Pushkin (Annenkov

1998, 255-57; UBG 104-14, 116-17). Since the Comedy was unpublishable in increasingly

reactionary Russia, the decision to alter it was probably not terribly difficult, paralyzing or

agonizing – no Russian writer could afford that luxury – it was just disappointing. The defeat of

Bulgarin, on the other hand, was a matter of literary life or death. It is important to remember,

however, that by allowing his play to be compromised Pushkin managed to score a political

victory, not an aesthetic one. Such a brilliant maneuver would not likely have been the product

of ordinary censorship. (I am convinced, for example, that Pushkin himself was the unhappy

author of Boris Godunov’s silent ending.)23 But it is also possible that Nicholas demanded

deletion of positive references to Dmitry or that a censor insisted on or made those changes
himself. Even if cleansing was done by the censors, the overall impact of the resulting holes in

the play would have been quickly recognized by Zhukovsky and Pushkin. Whoever was

responsible for the changes, Pushkin made a virtue out of necessity by embracing them as part of

his struggle against Bulgarin.

During the process of editing the play for publication, Zhukovsky or the censors did some

serious damage. By eliminating entire scenes and lines that presented Dmitry in a favorable

light, the editor or censor damaged the play aesthetically and inadvertently created confusion

concerning such things as the motivation of the monk Grigorii Otrepiev, the poor health of Boris

Godunov, and the attitude of the Russian people toward Dmitry.24 Some of those problems may

have been inevitable, but others appear to be the result of hasty trimming. For example,

switching the order of two scenes – the Holy Fool scene (“Square in front of the Cathedral,

Moscow”) and “A Plain near Novgorod-Seversky”– makes no theatrical sense; and leaving a

positive reference to Dmitry in the Holy Fool scene was probably an oversight – as was retention

of Margeret’s vulgar expression in the scene “A Plain near Novgorod-Seversky.” Would such a

fine poet as Zhukovsky have been so sloppy?

According to Soviet-era Pushkinists, it was indeed Zhukovsky who made almost all the

changes in Boris Godunov. Ever since Grigorii Vinokur systematically studied the play during

the Stalin era, Zhukovsky has invariably been identified as the person responsible for the

differences between the Comedy and Boris Godunov, and those changes have almost always

been described as the result of the refinement of Pushkin’s aesthetic sensibilities. 25 But was

Zhukovsky responsible for editing out passages that offended Nicholas? That is not an easy

question to answer. Let me provide one concrete example. Recently, Ekaterina Larionova
updated and revised Vinokur’s influential scholarship on the creation of Boris Godunov

(Larionova 279-301). She agreed with him that most changes were due to Pushkin’s revisions

for aesthetic reasons and not to censorship. But she reiterated Vinokur’s conclusion that one

scene, “Maiden’s Field. Novodevichy Convent,” had been deleted from Boris Godunov due to

tsarist censorship. Without providing any meaningful evidence, Vinokur and Larionova declared

that Pushkin himself (or perhaps Zhukovsky) preferred to omit the scene rather than to

bowdlerize it to satisfy the censors (Vinokur 1935a, 428; Larionova 285-89, 295). At least in this

one instance scholars admitted to censorship pressure resulting in changes in Boris Godunov.

Vinokur and Larionova both declared that Pushkin scored a significant victory over the

censors because Boris Godunov retained a passage marked for exclusion, a reference to the

restoration of St. George’s Day (made by Afanasii Pushkin in the scene “Moscow. Shuisky’s

House”) suggesting that Dmitry’s supporters would fight against serfdom. (Starting in 1497, the

ancient right of Russian peasants to leave the land they worked was restricted to a two-week

period around November 26, St. George’s Day. By 1592 the St. George’s Day privilege of

peasant departure was “temporarily” suspended. It was never renewed, thereby dooming most

Russian peasants to serfdom.) However that obscure historical reference managed to elude the

censors, its retention was indeed a minor victory for Pushkin (Vinokur 1999, 90; UBG 68-69,

120). The survival of that controversial line surprised some of Pushkin’s contemporaries, and the

topic itself remained virtually off limits for the rest of Nicholas’s reign (Kireevskii 2: 45-46;

UBG 75-76). How to explain this victory over the censors? Vinokur and Larionova both saw it

as evidence that Boris Godunov was not heavily censored.26 It seems more likely that the

reference was simply slipped past the censors. Not all cops are always at the top of their game.
The poet-historian Pushkin knew all about St. George’s Day, but most educated Russians in the

nineteenth century had no clue about the holiday’s significance two hundred years earlier.

Based largely on Vinokur’s scholarship, the text of the play currently considered

canonical is essentially the 1831 edition of Boris Godunov with the “Maiden’s Field” scene

restored. Larionova recently affirmed that Vinokur’s reconstruction of the “critical text” of the

play is about as close as we can get to Pushkin’s intention.27 Larionova also echoed Vinokur’s

judgment that, apart from the omission of the “Maiden’s Field” scene, virtually all changes in

Boris Godunov were strictly voluntary and the result of Pushkin’s own maturing artistic vision.

Astonishingly, both scholars regarded the impact of those many changes as “comparatively

insignificant” (Vinokur 1999, 87-90; Larionova 279-302). Neither one recognized that the

overall effect of the changes amounted to an about-face in Pushkin’s attitude toward Karamzin’s

conservative views of history. Instead, they accepted the flawed but commonly held view that

Pushkin was less interested in historical facts than he was in aesthetic effect, and that the two

considerations were somehow in principle hostile to one another. They also adhered to the faulty

assumption that Pushkin had always more or less accepted Karamzin’s interpretation of the Time

of Troubles.28

Why Vinokur and Larionova insisted that other changes in Boris Godunov were

voluntary is unclear. For example, it was obvious that tsarist officials would not allow the

publication of the Evil Monk (or “Monastery Wall”) scene. If Zhukovsky did not remove it, the

censors certainly would. In fact, some poets Pushkin respected, including Adam Mickiewicz,

advised him to get rid of that scene with its kooky meter. But how can we explain the decision by

Soviet-era scholars to restore the Maiden’s Field scene but not the Evil Monk scene? Wouldn’t
Stalin have approved of the cynical, anti-tsarist and anti-clerical message of that scene? Why

would Pushkin scholars in the twentieth century be reluctant to restore that scene to the canonical

text of Boris Godunov? And why didn’t they seriously consider restoring any of the positive

references to Dmitry such as Khrushchov’s speech in the scene “Cracow. Wisniowiecki’s

House”? That particular omission created such serious problems in grasping Pushkin’s intent

that at least one scholar argued in favor of restoring it to the canonical text.29 Why didn’t they

restore “Maryna’s Dressing Room” scene or the Comedy’s powerful ending? The rationale for

restoring one scene to the canonical text but not other scenes and lines omitted from Boris

Godunov is not obvious and not consistent. And once set into motion, by some sort of academic

inertia the problem was not revisited.

In attempting to establish the canonical text of Boris Godunov, it appears that many

scholars let their own feelings about the pretender Dmitry (and perhaps Poland) interfere with the

task of determining Pushkin’s intentions. Since Tsar Nicholas, Stalin, and many Russians

despised Dmitry, it should not surprise us that some scholars projected those feelings onto

Pushkin (Vinokur 1935a, 486; UBG 31-34, 36). Nevertheless, there is no evidence that Pushkin

ever changed his mind about Dmitry in the years between penning his Comedy and the

publication of Boris Godunov. He admired Tsar Dmitry.30

The problem of establishing Pushkin’s intentions has been complicated by the postulation

of the existence of a now-lost manuscript used to produce the 1831 Boris Godunov. As noted

earlier, Vinokur and Larionova concluded that Zhukovsky made significant changes before

submitting Pushkin’s Comedy to the censors in 1829; that led them to postulate the existence of a

30. Pushkin Letters 365-66, 396 n10; UBG 64, 67-69, 78-79; BG 346-47.
third manuscript of the play. They asserted that the lost manuscript would show us that most of

the changes found in Boris Godunov were approved by Pushkin and may even have been written

by him (Vinokur 1935a, 427-28; Larionova 284-87, 292, 294-95). There are serious problems

with the lost manuscript theory. It lacks supporting evidence, ignores the impact of censorship,

and simply serves to project onto Pushkin the fantasies and prejudices of his readers and critics.

Careful examination of the documents reveals that Vinokur and Larionova drew hasty

conclusions about the relationship of the two surviving manuscripts of the Comedy – the original

in Pushkin’s own hand (PD 891) and a clerk’s copy made in 1826 (PD 892) – to the published

text of Boris Godunov. They argued that those two manuscripts could not have been the direct

sources of the published version of Boris Godunov because of discrepancies between them and

the 1831 edition and because Boris Godunov’s famous ending (“The people remain silent.”) is

not found in either manuscript (Vinokur 1935a, 428-31; Larionova 282-96). With the publication

of Sergei Fomichev’s careful transcription of Pushkin’s original manuscript of the Comedy,

however, it is now possible to see that Vinokur and Larionova drew faulty conclusions based

upon assumed orthographic variants in the lost third manuscript of the play.

In arguing for the existence of a third manuscript of Komediia, Larionova (289-90)

focused on a spelling mistake in the 1831 Boris Godunov (in the scene “Moscow. Shuisky’s

House.”). In referring to Tsar Ivan the Terrible, Afanasy Pushkin utters the words “Chto na polu

krovavom.” Larionova correctly noted that the phrase should be “Chto na kolu krovavom,” but

drew the wrong conclusion about the origin of the misspelled word. Fomichev’s transcription of

Pushkin’s original manuscript (PD 891) shows that it has the correct spelling, “Chto na kolu

krovavom” (UBG, 324-25). Larionova also discussed (289) what turns out to be a non-existent
spelling error in the original manuscript of Pushkin’s Comedy (in the scene “Patriarch’s Palace”).

According to the faulty transcription of PD 891 used by Vinokur and Larionova, the Patriarch

utters the words “o pobege d’iaku Smirnovu ali d’iaku Efim’evu.” As Fomichev has shown,

however, Pushkin’s original spelling was actually correct: “o pobege d’iaku Smirnovu ili d’iaku

Efim’evu.” Finally, Larionova declared (291-92) that much of the Holy Fool scene is illegible in

the original manuscript. In fact, although some of Pushkin’s corrections in ink are difficult to

read, Fomichev was able to transcribe the entire scene from PD 891.

7. The censor’s report (“Zamechaniia na ‘Komediiu o Tsare Borise i Grishke Otrep’eve’”) is

preserved in the archive of The Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom) of the Russian

Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg; see Pushkinskii Dom, Rukopisnyi otdel, fond 244 (A. S.

Pushkin fond) [hereafter cited as PD], opis’ 16, No. 10, listy 10-17, Third Section censor’s report

on Komediia, 1826. See also Lemke 607-14; TL 2: 211-13, 424.

8. Barsukov 2: 58; TL 2: 396, 464; Lemke 473; Binyon 253; UBG 99-102.

9. Vinokur “Kto byl tsenzorom” 203-14; idem Stat’i 88-89; Monas 117-20, 205-11; BG 212-16;

Gorodetskii “Kto zhe byl tsenzorom” 117-18; TL 2: 276; 3: 130; UBG 104-5.

10. See, for example, Vinokur “Kto byl tsenzorom” 203; Monas 206; Gorodetskii Tragediia, 66;

and Pushkin Boris Godunov (2007) 195, 202. Cf. TL 2: 210; Lemke 474; and

Zenger 533-34.

11. PD, opis’ 16, No. 10, list 90, letter of P. A. Pletnev to P. Ia. Fon-Fok, 20 June 1829; Vinokur

“Kommentarii” 425; BG 350-51; Nikitenko Dnevnik 1: 198; idem Diary 71; TL 2: 238.
 There is no need to postulate the existence of a lost manuscript of Pushkin’s Comedy

unless the goal is to give Pushkin credit for the changes found in Boris Godunov. The 1831

edition of Boris Godunov could easily have been composed by someone using the surviving

manuscripts of the Comedy. It is worth noting that Pushkin’s original manuscript (PD 891) has,

in addition to Nicholas’s red pencil lines, many other small marks next to passages that were

changed during publication. Not surprisingly, since Vinokur and Larionova were convinced that

12. PSS 13: 317; Pushkin Letters 338; TL 2: 223; Monas 206; UBG 101-03.

13. Dela III-go otdeleniia 92-93, 99; Lemke 494; TL 3: 89, 101, 132-33, 142; PSS 14: 56, 58-59;

Pushkin Letters 371-72; Gorodetskii Tragediia 77-79.

14. Dela III-go otdeleniia 90; Pushkin Sochineniia i pis’ma 3: 256; TL 3: 26, 79; Gorodetskii

Tragediia 77-79; Vinokur “Kommentarii” 425-28; Larionova 282-86, 294-96.

16. UBG 113-14; Pushkin Letters 411-13; PSS 14: 88-89; TL 3: 195; Vinokur Stat’i 90;

Larionova 294-95.

17. See, for example, Vinokur “Kommentarii” 430-31; Ronen 7-8, 14-16, 117-19, 121-29, 132;

and Clayton Dimitry’s Shade.

19. Kireevskii 2: 42-45; Katenin 101-02;“O ‘Borise Godunove’” 445-55; Brown 3:105;

Barsukov 3: 244; Pushkin Sochineniia i pis’ma 3: 257-60; Filonov 57-58; Gorodetskii Tragediia

84-108; Alekseev 173, 176-77, 180.

18. UBG 115-16, 118-22; Pushkin Letters 430, 433-34; PSS 14: 117-18; Gorodetskii Tragediia

82, 109; Binyon 350-51.

Zhukovsky had heavily edited the play in 1829, they concluded that the red pencil marks must

have been made by Zhukovsky or even by Pushkin (Vinokur 1935a, 425; Larionova 294-95).

That contention conveniently ignores the testimony of Pushkin’s friends who claimed that

Nicholas personally marked up the original manuscript of the Comedy.31

Was Zhukovsky responsible for the changes in Boris Godunov that disappointed the

20. Emerson “Pretenders,” 263-68; Khomiakov 12, 19, 578 n103; Annenkov Vospominaniia, 3:

453-54; Rosen 249-59; Pogodin Istoriia v litsakh o Dimitrie Samozvantse; idem “Smert’ tsaria

Borisa Feodorovicha Godunova” 247-78; idem Istoriia v litsakh o tsare Borise Fedoroviche

Godunove.

21. PSS 13: 308; 14: 46-48; Pushkin Letters 334, 365-67; TL 2: 207, 211; 3: 79; Vinokur

“Kommentarii” 409; UBG 102-03.

22. UBG 117-18; TL 3: 251; Dela III-go otdeleniia 96; Lemke 503; Annenkov Vospominaniia,

453.

23. Pushkin’s Comedy ends with the narod cheering the accession of Tsar Dmitry. That

historically accurate cheer was changed to the narod’s famous silence at the end of Boris

Godunov. There is still a lively debate about the meaning of that silent ending and who was

responsible for it. Pushkin’s archenemy, Faddei Bulgarin, boldly accused Pushkin of borrowing

it from his novel, Dimitrii Samozvanets, which ends with the narod’s sullen silence at the

accession of Vasily Shuisky, the usurper who followed Tsar Dmitry to the throne. That

accusation irritated Pushkin because Bulgarin had shamelessly plagiarized Pushkin’s

unpublished Comedy in writing his novel. It seems likely that the poet finally got one up on the
critics? Restoring the issue of censorship undermines, and properly, that long-held conclusion.

It was Tsar Nicholas, after all, who preferred Boris Godunov to the Comedy and was in the

strongest position to influence the final form of the published play. Did Nicholas personally

censor Boris Godunov? There is no way to know for sure, but the changes that were made

turned the play into something akin to the tsar’s own version of the Time of Troubles. In a very

real sense the 1831 edition of Boris Godunov was the tsar’s text of the play. Antony Wood

notorious Bulgarin by stealing the best line from an otherwise dull novel – in effect, tormenting

his tormentor by plagiarizing the plagiarist. But what, if anything, did Pushkin mean by that

politically correct silence? Elsewhere he wrote of his own silent acceptance of the tsar’s refusal

to allow him to publish his Comedy. Pushkin was also a good student of old chronicles and tales

of the Time of Troubles; in several of those sources the “silence” of the Russian people in

response to the tyrannical behavior of Boris Godunov was harshly condemned as guilty silence –

as complicity. Pushkin may have been implying that the silence of the narod represented

Pushkin’s own stilled voice – now tamed, now safe for the likes of Nicholas I and the censors,

but (obscurely) speaking to his audience and saying: This is not right, and we should not all

remain silent. See UBG 121-22; Pushkin Letters 408; and Rowland 260, 274-75.

24. UBG 118-21; Tomashevskii 509-10; Greenleaf 383 n43; Brown 3: 113; Briggs 244 n14.

25. Vinokur Stat’i 89-90; idem “Kommentarii” 427-28; Gorodetskii Tragediia 69-71, 77-83.

26. Vinokur “Kommentarii” 430-31; BG 348-49, 352-57; Gorodetskii Tragediia 161-62;

Balashov 212-18.

27. Larionova 280, 299-302; Tomashevskii 509; Gorodetskii Tragediia, 82-83.

observed that the three scenes deleted from the play were experimental in form, differing

significantly from the blank verse of all other scenes. He speculated that someone with neo-

classical taste purged them from the play (UBG 120). That does not sound like Zhukovsky, but

the description fits Tsar Nicholas. Other minor alterations in Boris Godunov also bring the tsar

to mind – for example, reducing the number of times the holy fool is called Nikolka and referring

to Russian Orthodox Christianity as a “northern” church instead of Pushkin’s original term

(“eastern”) in the scene “Cracow. Wisniowiecki’s House” (UBG 344-45, 481-82).

Although it is usually overlooked, Zhukovsky himself weighed in on this issue. He was

generally opposed to censoring Pushkin’s writings and, after Pushkin’s death, successfully

prevented Nicholas and the censors from additional cleansing of the poet’s previously published

works.32 Zhukovsky also managed to quietly publish two scenes cut from Boris Godunov

(Pushkin 1838-41, 9: 193-99). Alexander Nikitenko, Pushkin’s last official censor, wrote in his

diary that Zhukovsky was unhappy about the censorship of Boris Godunov. Nikitenko described

a visit to Zhukovsky’s home in 1837 during which he was shown the original manuscript of

Pushkin’s Comedy (PD 891).33 Nikitenko wrote the following: “I visited Zhukovsky. He

showed me Pushkin’s manuscript of Boris Godunov with the passages censored by the emperor.

He had cut out a great deal. That is why the published version of Godunov appears incomplete

and why there appear to be so many gaps, causing some critics to say that this play is only a

collection of fragments” (Nikitenko 1955,1: 198; idem 1975, 71). According to Zhukovsky, it

28. Vinokur Stat’i 92-100; Filonov 1, 54-58, 88-89, 145; Pushkin Boris Godunov (2007) 195,

204.

29. Briggs 244 n14; UBG 68, 215-16; PSS 7: 265-69.

was Tsar Nicholas who was personally responsible for the version of Boris Godunov that

disappointed the critics.

As has become clear, I believe the original Comedy should be elevated to canonical

status. But which, if any, version of Boris Godunov deserves that label? The 1831 edition was

definitely the product of censorship. Should it therefore be rejected in favor of the hybrid

version currently considered canonical? That conclusion by Vinokur has recently been

reaffirmed by Larionova (300-02). Nevertheless, it is impossible for me to agree with them

because of their highly selective approach to restoring censored lines and scenes to the play. As

Sergei Fomichev observed, the so-called canonical text of Boris Godunov is a play Pushkin

never saw, never read, and never intended to publish.34 Pushkin was at least familiar with the

1831 edition of Boris Godunov and took credit for it, however he felt about the compromised

text. As one of the published works of Pushkin, it certainly deserves to be studied as an

important document. Nevertheless, we also need to acknowledge that it was essentially the tsar’s

version of the play. When Nicholas declared in 1826 that he would be Pushkin’s censor, he was

telling the truth. The text of Boris Godunov was censored, multiple times, under pressure, out of

its author’s control. It is not the text Pushkin freely chose to publish. What version would

Pushkin have published if there had been no censorship imposed on him? Certainly not the 1831

Boris Godunov. That denatured play was the result of a tactical maneuver, not an aesthetic

epiphany. Pushkin tried repeatedly to publish his well-received Comedy about Tsar Boris and

Grishka Otrepiev. If Nicholas had not prevented it, Pushkin would undoubtedly have published

the Comedy in 1827. That magnificent Ur-text is the only version of Boris Godunov we can

honestly say truly represents authorial intention, to the extent that such an ephemeral concept can
ever be grasped.

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