FIRST EDITION OF PUSHKIN'S FAVORITE TEXT, AND THE RAREST OF HIS FIRST EDITIONS (Smirnov-Sokol'skii).

This copy is complete with Pushkin's preface and dedication to Karamzin , “whose genius inspired this play.” Boris Godunov, written while Pushkin was in exile on his estate, is the first Russian tragedy with a political theme. Pushkin wrote it under the influence of Shakespeare, having realized that “Russia had no truly national drama, but only an imitation of the French neoclassical school, and that it could be created only by returning to Russian themes and Russian folklore, and by making the Russian language a literary instrument fit for the rank of the French and German languages for which it had so often been discarded in his own country. ... In other respects, too, it was revolutionary: it was divided into scenes and episodes, it mixed poetry with prose, and it made use of Russian colloquial speech” ( Oxford Companion to the Theatre , p. 651).
Written in 1824 and first published here in 1831, Boris Godunov is more than a historical drama: the "Time of Troubles," as the great dynastic crisis that engulfed Russia at the beginning of the 17th century was called, and the tragedy of Tsar Boris Godunov, which stands out against that era, are the prototype of the crises that, to this day, will shake Russia. Pushkin's drama, like Mussorgsky's opera of the same name, is the emblem of a national destiny, relived by Pushkin with Shakespearean power.

Kilgour 884; Smirnov-Sokol'skii Pushkin 25.