Four years Pushkin’s senior, Leopold von Ranke began his career as an obscure Prussian schoolmaster and ended it with an uncontested reputation as the nineteenth century’s most distinguished historian. Published in 1824, Ranke’s first book, Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples, led to his appointment as a supernumerary professor at the University of Berlin in the following year. Since 1825 also marked Pushkin’s first sustained engagement with a historical subject - his tragedy, Boris Godunov - let us begin by comparing these two great contemporaries. Although it is tempting to regard them as polar opposites in their approach to the past, Pushkin and Ranke each deserve a place on the spectrum of European historical writing prompted by the political demands and philosophical insecurities of the French Revolutionary era. As Goethe declared, 'Anyone who has lived through the revolution feels impelled towards history. He sees the past in the present and contemplates it with fresh eyes.'

Ranke lived to the age of ninety, by which time he had published some forty-five volumes of formidable historical scholarship: nine more were to follow by 1890. Though Pushkin devoted much of the last decade of his short life to work on historical subjects, he completed but a single History of Pugachev, finished at Boldino in the autumn of 1833 and published a year later. Many of his most significant ideas about the past were expressed in a variety of fictional genres that Ranke would have dismissed as inherently inauthentic. Inspired partly by Shakespeare, Boris Godunov was written in the shadow of Nikolai Karamzin’s incomplete History of the Russian State (twelve volumes, 1818-29).