In an ambitious reinterpretation of the premier work of Russia's national poet, J. Douglas Clayton reads "Boris Godunov" as the expression of Alexander Pushkin's thinking about the Russian state, especially the Russian state of his own time (some two hundred years distant from the events of the play), and even his own place within that state. Here we see how the play marks a sharp break with the Decembrists and Pushkin's own youthful liberalism, signaling its author's emergence as a Russian conservative. "Boris Godunov, " Clayton argues, can be best understood as an ideologically conservative...

This book considers the hundred years of re-writes of Anton Chekhov's work, presenting a wide geographical landscape of Chekhovian influences in drama. The volume examines the elusive quality of Chekhov's dramatic universe as an intricate mechanism, an engine in which his enigmatic characters exist as the dramatic and psychological ciphers we have been de-coding for a century, and continue to do so. Examining the practice and the theory of dramatic adaptation both as intermedial transformation (from page to stage) and as intramedial mutation, from page to page, the book presents adaptation as...