SOURCE: "Paradoxes of the Popular Mind in Pushkin's Boris Godunov," in The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 64, No. 1, January, 1986, pp. 25-39.

In the following essay, Serman focuses on the central importance of The Pretender, the false Tsarevich Dmitry, to Boris Godunov—a drama he sees as a folk-historical tragedy concerned with the changing consciousness of the Russian people.

One of the many constant problems for Soviet Pushkin scholars has been, who is the central character in Pushkin's Boris Godunov? Indeed, is there a central hero at all? Most of those who have written on Pushkin's tragedy in the Soviet Union have found it more convenient to avoid confronting this question al-together and substitute for it another, more 'sociologized' approach. For example S. M. Bondi wrote in 1975: 'The fact that the central hero of Pushkin's tragedy is not Boris Godunov and his crime and not Grigory Otrep'yev and...