RRP: £35
BINDING: Paperback
ISBN: 5-85080-027-3
RRP: £48
BINDING: Hardback
PUBLISHED: 1998
ISBN:
PAGES: 160
Large format: 338 x 260mm
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Alexander Pushkin
The Return of Pushkin's Rusalka
Bilingual critical edition with a translation from the Russian by D. M. Thomas; edited with two essays by Vladimir Retsepter
with facsimile reproduction of Pushkin’s manuscript and interpretative original drawings by Mihail Chemiakin
Pushkin’s last verse drama Rusalka (1832) was long taken to be a near-complete fragment. But in the mid-1970s the Russian actor-director Vladimir Retsepter established that Pushkin later revised and completed the work. With a breathtakingly bold change in the order of scenes and excision of several lines, Pushkin turned a blood revenge tale from folk and operatic tradition into a more original and modern moral drama, which is now accepted in Russia as of equal status with the previously accepted text.
In his accompanying essays V. Retsepter gives an absorbing account of Pushkin's revisions, of this work's first publication in haste shortly after his death, and of his own battle with the Soviet and post-Soviet literary establishments to accept Pushkin's revisions in the absence of a fair copy.
Vladimir Retsepter is Artistic Director of the Pushkin State Theatre Centre, St Petersburg, which organises productions of Pushkin's dramas and publishes monographs on newly researched aspects of Pushkin's oeuvre.
[KEEP THE 2 REVIEW QUOTES AS THEY ARE; AND KEEP THE BIOG ON PUSHKIN AS LIGHTLY SUBBED IN PROOF]
Vladimir Retsepter is Artistic Director of the Pushkin State Theatre Centre, St Petersburg, founded in 1992 with the aims of encouraging the performance of Pushkin’s drama both in Russia and abroad, organising Pushkin festivals, and developing a series of monographs and editions, the Pushkin Premiere series, in which The Return of Pushkin’s ‘Rusalka’ was published in 1998.
‘A sensational, performable extension of Pushkin’s dramatic oeuvre – Pushkin’s answer to Shakespeare.’ – British East-West Journal
‘A welcome addition to the small library of translations which give the reader an insight into the world of Russia’s greatest poet.’ – Diana Myers, Times Higher Education Supplement
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN (1799–1837) encountered more obstacles to the realisation of his ideas in drama than in any other genre. Only one of his six completed verse dramas, the Little Tragedy Mozart and Salieri, was performed during his lifetime; the planned performance of another Little Tragedy, The Miserly Knight, was banned because the authorities feared public unrest in the immediate aftermath of his death. His first and only full-length play, Boris Godunov, was not published until six years after its composition, and then, so as to be politically acceptable, in the distorted form which has been largely retained to this day. Boris Godunov (1825), the Little Tragedies (1830) and Rusalka (1832–34) represent three stages in the evolution of Pushkin’s handling of blank verse and his conception of drama.