Zene, szó, dráma – színjátékok és szín(e)változások. A történelem szemantikája Puskin és Muszorgszkij művészi szkepszisében / Music, Word, Drama – Stagecraft and Transfigurations. The Semantics of History in the Artistic Skepticism of Pushkin and Musorgsky

This monograph offers a critical interpretation of Pushkin's “romantic tragedy”, Boris Godunov and Musorgsky's “national musical drama,” Khovanshchina. It focuses on the process as these plays move away from the traditional drama. With this in mind the author seeks to clarify the problems of historical drama. 

Through the close reading of the these historical plays, the place of the historical drama is sought in (pre-)modern European literature and music. The element roman in the definition of Boris Godunov given by Pushkin himself, “romantic tragedy,” points to the play moving out from the genre of drama toward the novel (in Russian, the French loanword roman means “novel”). 

Of the two Musorgsky operas Khovanshchina is being discussed in greater depth and detail, with only one chapter devoted to Boris Godunov. The reason for this “selective treatment” is that despite its “independence,” both thematical and philological, from the Pushkin drama, Musorgsky's Khovanshchina is tied more organically, in a more profound way to the Pushkin pre-text than his Boris Godunov opera which is based on Pushkin, yet differs substíntially from it in term of dramatic concept. 

The first part of the book contains Pushkin interpretations. After a thorough analysis of the dramatic irony which determines and drives the poetic structure of the Boris Godunov play and the rhetoric trope “hyperbaton” Pushkin extensively uses to represent this “irony-based poetic structure,” the concept of the “virtual stage” is introduced and developed. Lacking direct scenic conflict immanent to conventional drama, Pushkin has the two main heroes pass one by the other like voices in a fugue, without actually meeting each other, thus creating the contrapunctical dramaturgy of the processes monk–to–tsar versus tsar–to–monk. 

The chapters of the second part discuss Khovanshchina. Likewise Part I, an extensive discussion of the authorial irony opens the series of interpretations. The poetical tool of “composing by irony,” inherited by Musorgsky from Pushkin and re-applied by him in Khovanshchina, results in a musico-dramaturgical scene presenting two opposite processes passing one by the other: the gradual closure of the title character on the one hand, and the evolvement of another world, a different “universe,” on the other. 

Both the Pushkin and Musorgsky interpretations are preceded by a summary epitomizing the most relevant events of the historical period, informing the reader and helping him/her follow the interpretations. The book contains a bibliography of scholarship and musical scores, the disco- and cinematography along with a list of the author's works published in the subject.

This book intends to integrate the Russian dramatic chronicles, never before discussed in scholarship as one corpus, in a homogeneous concept of genre poetics. This concept is a result of the close-reading based interpretations of the two plays. Thus Pushkin's Boris Godunov, the “romantic tragedy,” and Musorgky’s Khovanshchina, the “national musical drama,” are both defined as representatives of the same genre, the “polyphonic historical drama.”