SOURCE: "Boris Godunov: The Expectations of an Audience," in Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile, Stanford University Press, 1989, 263 p.

In the following essay, Sandler offers an interpretation of Boris Godunov that finds dramatic success and unity in its rhetoric of loneliness and separation.

 They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game
Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes
And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last.
Night after night this message returns.
—John Ashbery, "Soonest Mended" 

What makes it profoundly difficult to write about Boris Godunov (1825) is the sense that one is reading the play alone, that no one who has written about this play has been able to read with the kind of sustained attention it demands.¹ There is no already existing "we" that a writer can suggest to her audience, no "we...