Russian literature. A short introduction

Design by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky for Stanislavsky’s production of Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades. Not only writers but artists of all kinds have been able to take familiarity with Pushkin’s work for granted in their audiences. It was quite natural for Eisenstein, in his 1943 book The Film Sense, to explain his theories about creative inter-cutting in cinema (‘montage’) in terms of analogies with Pushkin’s poetry. And the fact that film directors, composers, and playwrights could rely on detailed knowledge of Pushkin’s plots (or, at any rate, those of his most famous works), much as their British counterparts could in the cases of Shakespeare, Dickens, or Jane Austen, lent them a high degree of freedom when adapting these in new forms. Musorg-sky’s tormented yet regal Boris Godunov is quite different from Pushkin’s ambitious, guilt-ridden version of the character; Tchaikovsky’s version of Queen of Spades dispenses with the ironic ending of the original story (in which Liza ends up purging her own humiliation as a ward by taking a ward of her own), inserting instead a scene in which Liza does away with herself, in suitably operatic style, by leaping into a canal. At the same time, these outrageous reinterpretations sometimes exposed motifs lying below the surface in the original text. Thus, Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades play ed on the demonic theme that was kept at one remove by humour and irony in Pushkin. The oversized proportions and looming patterns of Dobuzhinsky’s design for the final act are in tune with the composer’s intentions.