False Dmitriy I - Portrayals in Literature

Portrayals in Literature

  • The False Dmitriy's story was dramatized by Schiller (in Demetrius), Sumarokov, Pushkin, Khomyakov, by Modest Mussorgsky in the opera Boris Godunov and by Antonín Dvořák in his opera Dimitrij. In the Pushkin tragedy and the Mussorgsky opera, Otrepyev is a young monk who decides to impersonate the Tsarevitch when he hears they would have been the same age had the child lived.
  • Rainer Maria Rilke recounts the overthrow of the False Dimitriy in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke's only longer prose work.
  • Harold Lamb fictionalizes the demise of the False Dimitriy in "The Wolf Master", in which the claimant survives his assassination through trickery, and flees East, pursued by a Cossack he has betrayed.

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