Terrible. The play is constructed on the model of Shakespeare's
chronicle plays, but in a still more disjointed fashion, without a
definite beginning or end: when Mussorgsky made an opera out of it,
the action was concentrated into definite acts; for, as it stands, it
is not a play, but a series of scenes. Pushkin had not the power of
conceiving and executing a drama which should move round one idea to
an inevitable close. He had not the gift of dramatic architectonics,
and still less that of stage carpentry. On the other hand, the scenes,
whether they be tragic and poetical, or scenes of common life, are as
vivid as any in Shakespeare; the characters are all alive, and they
speak a language which is at the same time ancient, living, and
convincing.

In saying that Pushkin lacks the gift of stage architectonics and
stage carpentry, it is not merely meant that he lacked the gift of
arranging acts that would suit the stage, or that of imagining stage
effects. His whole play is not conceived as a drama; a subject from
which a drama might be written is taken, but the drama is left
unwritten. We see Boris Godunov on the throne, which he has unlawfully
usurped; we know he feels remorse; he tells us so in monologues; we
see his soul stripped before us, bound upon a wheel of fire, and we
watch the wheel revolve; and that is all the moral and spiritual
action that the part contains; he is static and not dynamic, he never
has to make up his mind; his will never has to encounter the shock of
another will during the whole play. Neither does the chronicle centre
round the Pretender. It is true that we see the idea of impersonating
the Tsarevitch dawning in his mind; and it is also true that in one
scene with his Polish love, Marina, we see him dynamically moving in a
dramatic situation. She loves him because she thinks he is the son of
an anointed King. He loves her too much to deceive her, and tells her
the truth. She then says she will have nothing of him; and then he
rises from defeat and shame to the height of the situation, becomes
great, and, not unlike Browning's Sludge, says: "Although I am an
impostor, I am born to be a King all the same; I am one of Nature's
Kings; and I defy you to oust me from the situation. Tell every one
what I have told you. Nobody will believe you." And Marina is
conquered once more by his conduct and bearing.

This scene is sheer drama; it is the conflict of two wills and two
souls. But there the