Word: pushkins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lermontov himself comes into direct conflict with the Czar and must choose whether to run off or to stay for a fixed duel which will make it obvious that he is being killed by the Czar, thus following in Pushkin's footsteps...
Mikhail Lermontov, the central character, is ten years younger than Pushkin and a great admirer of his. Like much but not all that is in the play, these facts correspond to historical reality. Both men are major figures in Russian literature and lived in the first part of the nineteenth century. The first part of the play shows Pushkin's involvement with the Decembrist uprising of 1825, an attempted revolution in which the intellectuals tried to gain more control by placing their own candidate for Czar on the throne rather than Nicholas I, and Lermontov's "radicalization" or at least...
...part of the play is a masquerade, a play within a play, in which Lermontov, the young girl he wants to marry, the older woman who is his mistress, and her husband, become the characters of a story that Lermontov writes partly as an escape from his sorrow over Pushkin's death, which he attributes, with some justice, to the evil of the court. This story is taken from the novel by Lermontov from which the title of the play comes...
Shea concentrates on and sometimes interprets certain elements in the lives of Pushkin and Lermontov that stress their roles as political actors and as outsiders to the system. Pushkin was the descendent of a Negro slave to the Czar and was dark himself, a fact not commonly known. In this play, he is portrayed by a black actor, mainly to stress his sense of difference and his antipathy toward the Czar. In Lermontov's life, too, the political acts are highlighted: his eulogy to Pushkin at Pushkin's funeral (based on the real Lermontov's poem), dangerous because Pushkin...
...theme of Don Juan is also used throughout the play to good purpose in emphasizing the estrangement of the two artists from the rest of society. In the first part, Pushkin and his wife attend Don Giovanni. Pushkin admires Mozart because he, too, was a natural genius, and he admires the Don Juan theme because its hero is a man who "did not take things as they are." Pushkin's most famous poem, Eugene Onegin, is a treatment of that subject, and it is partly on this poem and partly on Byron's Don Juan that Lermontov bases the story...