matter ends. The kaleidoscope is shaken, and we
are shown a series of different patterns, in which the heroine plays
no part at all, and in which the hero only makes a momentary
appearance. The fact is there is neither hero nor heroine in the play.
It is not a play, but a chronicle; and it would be foolish to blame
Pushkin for not accomplishing what he never attempted. As a chronicle,
a series of detached scenes, it is supremely successful. There are
certain scenes which attain to sublimity: for instance, that in the
cell of the monastery, where the monk is finishing his chronicle; and
the monologue in which Boris speaks his remorse, and his dying speech
to his son. The verse in these scenes is sealed with the mark of that
God-gifted ease and high seriousness, which belong only to the
inspired great. They are Shakespearean, not because they imitate
Shakespeare, but because they attain to heights of imaginative truth
to which Shakespeare rises more often than any other poet; and the
language in these scenes has a simplicity, an inevitableness, an
absence of all conscious effort and of all visible art and artifice, a
closeness of utterance combined with a width of suggestion which
belong only to the greatest artists, to the Greeks, to Shakespeare, to
Dante.

_Boris Godunov_ was not published until January 1, 1831, and passed,
with one exception, absolutely unnoticed by the critics. Like so many
great works, it came before its time; and it was not until years
afterwards that the merits of this masterpiece were understood and
appreciated.

In 1826 Pushkin's banishment to the country came to an end; in that
year he was allowed to go to Moscow, and in 1827 to St. Petersburg. In
1826 his poems appeared in one volume, and the second canto of
_Onegin_ (the first had appeared in 1825). In 1827 _The Gypsies_, and
the third canto of _Onegin_; in 1828 the fourth, fifth, and sixth
cantos of _Onegin_; in 1829 _Graf Nulin_, an admirably told _Conte_
such as Maupassant might have written, of a deceived husband and a
wife who, finding herself in the situation of Lucretia, gives the
would-be Tarquin a box on the ears, but succeeds, nevertheless, in
being unfaithful with some one else--the _Cottage of Kolomna_ is
another story in the same vein--and in the same year _Poltava_.

This poem was written in one month, in St. Petersburg. The subject is
Mazepa, with whom the daughter of his hereditary enemy, Kochubey, whom
he afterwards tortu