ABOUT THE SHOW
The American-Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation is pleased to commemorate the 210th anniversary of the birth of Russia’s national bard Alexander Pushkin with the staging of the world premiere in the English language of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies. Staged at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York in a brilliant new translation by poet Julian Henry Lowenfeld, the plays will be directed by Natalya Kolotova, acclaimed director of the Maly Dramatic Theatre of St. Petersburg.
Westerners are somewhat familiar with those works by Pushkin which were set to music by Tchaikovsky (principally the verse novel Eugene Onegin, and the brilliant short story The Queen of Spades). Yet Pushkin’s dramatic masterpiece, the Little Tragedies, is virtually unknown, although it “represents the absolute pinnacle of brilliance in all Russian dramatic art” according to D.S. Mirsky’s definitive History of Russian Literature (published in 1925). Concise, tightly drawn, and full of action, Pushkin’s Little Tragedies are virtual models of dramatic economy. At the same time they are profound dramatic explorations of the paradoxical nature of reality and human relationships, of the contradictions inherent in human nature, and of the perennial clash between concepts of morality and individual human passions.
In many ways they are the most “European” work of all of Russian literature (the plays are set respectively in France, Austria, Spain, and England, with no “Russian” characters at all, and none of cumbersome patronymics, digressions, pauses, and other longueurs frequently associated with Russian drama). Many of the characterizations are gripping; Dostoyevsky, for instance, considered the Baron’s monologue in The Knight-Miser the finest dramatic monologue ever written in any language, and called the Little Tragedies as a whole the most “universal” works of Russia’s “most universal genius.” They combine a Shakespearean grandeur with a more intimate, modern empathy; a Russian soulfulness and depth with a uniquely Pushkinian lightness and irony; and a vision of human fate as a curious dance between choice and chance. High dramatic conflict, humor, sheer poetry, and musicality make the work compelling.
Sadly, the Little Tragedies have yet to be staged in their entirety in the English language.
The primary barrier to staging has been the absence of a proper verse translation. Pushkin’s majestic lightness is not easily conveyed. Too often Pushkin’s Russian verses, so easy and magnificent in the original, come out even in good English translations with an incongruously comic effect derived from their being forced into verse by translators who are scholars first and foremost, and poets — if at all — a long way second. The results can sound like some Tin Pan Alley jingle — or at best W.S. Gilbert — but nothing remotely like Pushkin. Alternately, various other scholars, influenced above all by Nabokov, have chosen to translate Pushkin with bald, prosaic literality.
To grasp Pushkin one must hear his musicality. His genius in its sublimity is frequently and properly compared to Mozart’s: miraculous, prodigious feats of creativity, wrought with seemingly effortless, seamless grace, evocative power, warmth, wit, passion, sheer musicality, inventive rhythmic swing, and rhyming playfulness — and all imbued with a certain divine purity, a wisdom born of innocence, a childlike, direct, sweet, natural, vigorous, limpid, language — often, alas, all the more mysteriously difficult to translate for its simplicity and clarity.
If only everyone so felt the power
Of harmony! But no! For then indeed
The world could not exist. No one would think
To bother for the lowly needs of living;
We’d all just lose ourselves in free creation.
So we’re but few, we chosen happy idlers,
Who, of mere use neglectful and disdainful,
Are high priests of the One, the Beautiful.
These words, from Mozart’s last speech in Mozart and Salieri, one of the four short plays in blank verse that comprise the Little Tragedies, speak of the lonely relationship between a creative genius and the world around him, as well as the tension between art for utilitarian purposes and art for art’s sake. Pushkin was the Russian language’s high priest of the Pythagorean doctrine of the One, the Beautiful. The Pythagoreans, it is said, used to cure the sick with poetry, believing in the unique healing virtues of certain verses of the Odyssey and Iliad when read aloud in the proper way. Like Homer, Pushkin derived remarkable power and dramatic effect as much from the sound—as from the sense—of his words — their lilt, their swing, their magical incantation — as from their sense.
