Friedrich Schiller's "Dmitry": The Executed Elephant

A long time ago on a famous writer's estate far, far away, I opened two attractive Russian hardback books I had just bought in Moscow. One was The Aviator by Evgenii Vodolazkin, a lyrical, elegiac, richly evocative and thoroughly enjoyable novel which would inspire me to write several articles and reviews about its author in the years to come. The other was Yuri Buida's The Fifth Kingdom, which could hardly have been more different - although also a historical novel of sorts, it was told by multiple narrators, set in the early seventeenth century, and bulging at the seams with homunculi, flying demons, and conspiracy theories. It was so exotic, it made Vodolazkin's fairy-tale of Stalinist cryogenics seem downright tame. I was hooked by the searing opening lines: 

They hanged the child on Monday and the executioner on Thursday; on Saturday, they put the elephant to death.

A snowstorm was whirling and night was drawing in; thus, when the elephant appeared between the Serpukhovsky Gates, observers did not understand at once the sort of monster that was approaching, a vast, dark figure, encircled by riders with torches and foot soldiers with spears and halberds. When the elephant drew closer, they could see that its spine and ears were heaped with snow, that tears had frozen in the folds under its eyes, and that its left tusk was broken off. Its trunk lay calmly on the shoulder of the Arab who was leading the beast towards an enclosure built on waste ground, not far from the cemetery where they buried unknown drunkards.

I resolved to translate The Fifth Kingdom if I could, but it took me several years to get around to the task; and just as my publisher and I thought we had secured funding in spring 2022, the main source of grants for literary translation from Russian, the Institut Perevoda, became ethically untouchable because of its status as a Russian government-supported institution. Putin had effectively slammed down the window on translating contemporary Russian novelists, as on so much else.

I put The Fifth Kingdom aside. But last week in London I found its characters coming to life again in my head, as I watched a performance of Peter Oswald's remarkable re-(co-?)writing of Friedrich Schiller's unfinished play Dmitry, or Demetrius (Schiller had barely finished writing the first act when he died in 1805). The play was set two hundred years earlier, during the Time of Troubles when Russia, weakened by famine and near-anarchy, was at the mercy of the powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; also a time when, until the Tsar's line of succession was firmly re-established under Mikhail I, the first of the Romanov Tsars, a series of pretenders to the throne known as False Dmitrys kept popping up, with Polish support. Each pretender claimed to be Dmitry Ivanovich, Ivan the Terrible's youngest son. Although the real Dmitry had died at a tender age, possibly murdered by assassins hired by Boris Godunov, more likely of natural causes, this did not stop vast numbers of people from believing that he might have survived in hiding, under a false name, until the time was ripe for him to emerge and claim his throne. Schiller follows the historical storyline closely, and I didn't notice the join with Oswald's reconstruction of the second and final act of the play: Dmitry's rise to the throne, apparently by divine intervention, which is tragically undercut by the loss of "his" mother's support and the subsequent desertion of his Cossack allies (both the historical and the fictional false Dmitry actually occupied the throne of Moscow during 1605-6, until his murder by boyars).

At first, I was inclined to be underwhelmed by the production. The opening scene in the Sejm, where the Polish nobles debate whether or not to support Dmitry's claim to the Russian throne, was lively but unconvincing. Tom Byrne's Dmitry radiated a Zelensky vibe, all heartfelt and determined in army surplus camo. Aurora Dawson-Hunte as the Polish princess Marina Mnishek, daughter of Dmitry's main patron and his future wife, spoke her dullish lines with verve but lacked chemistry with her betrothed. However, the unpronounceable Polish Cardinal (James Garnon) displayed such Machiavellian flair, whether twirling in Satanic-red clerical regalia or reliving his military career in natty fatigues, that I was soon hypnotized by his Jesuitical scheming. And once the dynamic at the heart of the play - the tragic love of a mother for her son - was fully developed, I was lost, sobbing and blowing my trunk in a truly embarrassing way. Ivan IV's widow, Maria Nagaya played by Poppy Miller, mesmerized me with her hesitations and her commitments. Like her historical counterpart, the fictional Maria legitimizes her son by 'recognizing' him: there's a tense scene at the end of Act 1 where Maria meets the adult Dmitry for the first time. He burbles greetings and confessions to her, half-monarch, half-puppydog, entirely terrified of her reaction - since until that point, he  genuinely believed himself to be Dmitry. And she doesn't spare him: after a gruelling silence, she says, 'I recognize you. I recognize you... Your name was Yuri. You were Dmitry's little friend'. Before the shattering news has fully sunk in, Maria agrees to recognize the pretender publicly as her son - if only in order to revenge her true child's death (said sprog shown in the 1899 portrait below by Mikhail Nesterov, looking suitably saintly). The circumstances under which this pact disintegrates make up the play's action-packed second half.

Schiller, and Oswald, made me appreciate the Time of Troubles - and Buida's take on it in The Fifth Kingdom - in a new way. Observing the Cardinal's machinations, noting the growing resentment of the Cossacks and the dowager Queen, I could see how it was possible for the Romanov party to represent the pretenders' minions as an army of monsters and homunculi. I thought I spotted some intertextuality. I also wondered, not very originally, whether Dostoevsky was always anti-Catholic or whether his reading of Schiller made him so - certainly, between Dmitry's Cardinal and Don Carlos' Grand Inquisitor, Catholic clergy don't get a very good rep in these plays. You don't have to enjoy Dmitry with your historian's hat on, however. You can enjoy it as a melodrama, as a parable of the instability of identity, or as a comment on contemporary Russian political ambition (which is perhaps too obviously played up by the choice of certain uniforms and in the final lines, delivered by Romanov). 

You can catch Dmitry until 5 Nov at London's Marylebone Theatre (in the Steiner House, interestingly enough). But first, here's a little more from The Fifth Kingdom on Dmitry, Maria Mnishek, and that poor elephant:

The sky darkened, and the gloom sank into people’s hearts, suddenly reminding them that a whirlwind just like this had struck Moscow when the Pretender Dmitri had first entered the city last year. It was an evil sign, a malum omen…

Then abruptly, just as suddenly as it had risen, the wind dropped; a silence began, and in the middle of the deserted street the snow-white elephant appeared. People could not believe their eyes; they thought they were dreaming. The elephant might have been borne in on the wind. He reared up on his hind legs, tossed his trunk in the air and trumpeted and trumpeted, and people took this as a sign of the eye of God, like a voice summoning them to rejoicing and love. And then the elephant lowered himself in his stately way onto his knees and offered Marina Mnishek a cup of wine, using his trunk like a hand to hold it…

Slight, flat-chested, with thin lips and tiny teeth in a greedy, callous, vulpine face set on a blueish, childish neck, which barely supported the weight of her tall horsehair coiffure, clenched in a corset of Spanish steel, scared, confused, and ill-tempered, Marina stared in horror at the snow-white beast. It knelt and gazed at her with its childlike eyes.

And beside her, Tsar Dmitri also paused – a short man, broad-shouldered, beardless and smooth-cheeked, with two monstrous warts on his face, tiny eyes and no neck, his hands like the paws of a bear.

Everyone waited.

The silence stretched.

And suddenly Dmitri shook himself, sighed with relief, took the cup from the elephant and yelled in a high, quivering voice,

“Glory! Glory!”

Abruptly a cannon fired, and then another; horns sounded, a flute cut through the din, the Turkish drums rumbled, and all of a sudden the elephant began to dance. He flung his trunk high, curled it into a ring and snorted; he stood on his hind legs and trumpeted; he shifted from foot to foot and stretched his pig-like maw wide, as if smiling; he rose on his hind legs and spun, and spun. People gasped; cheerful again, they began to stir and chatter…

“Glory!” Dmitri yelled once more.

“Glory!” one of the archers took up the cry.

“Glory!” the crowd shouted joyously. “Glory!”

And once again the blue of the sky filled with dust, and again the gentle tinkle of bells sounded, and again Marina was the greatest beauty in the world, rouged and splendid, like Lady Luck herself, and Dmitri was a giant, a handsome hero, a mighty ruler, a knight, sovereign and conqueror of tongues and hearts…

Translation: mine, from Yuri Buida, The Fifth Kingdom (Piatoe tsarstvo), 2018