1 Slavic and East European Journal ,Vol. 32, No. 2 (1988), 187-97. **warning: diacritics deleted by pdf distiller!** Kevin Moss THE LAST WORD IN FICTION: ON SIGNIFICANT LIES IN BORIS GODUNOV In her excellent monograph on three transpositions of the Boris theme--in Karamzin, Pus} kin, and Musorgskij, Caryl Emerson remarks that in Pus} kin's Boris "events matter less than rumors about events and everyone with a story to tell is aware of the power of storytelling" (140). Far from presenting a final version of the historical facts, the play is a collage of versions, rumors, stories; no appeal can be made to any fixed value. As Emerson says, "Pushkin's plot, like the Boris tale at its base, is itself a samozvanets , a pretender that invites and engenders response without identifying any source of authority within itself" (103). The utterance and the language take center stage in Pus} kin's play, and the plot is less a drama of action than a dialogue among versions, a struggle between stories, each vying for the status of truth. A close analysis of the language of the play reveals that pretendership ( ), lies, and fiction percolate even onto the level of word and morpheme. The opening dialog between S } ujskij and Vorotynskij serves to introduce the title character Boris, but not as a hero: the audience hears that he has murdered the Tsarevich Dimitrij and that he is less noble than the speakers themselves. In his very first lines S } ujskij claims that Boris will take the throne with a false show of reluctance: (183) S } ujskij introduces the theme of pretending which will be associated in the first four scenes not with Grigorij/Dimitrij, but with Boris. Rassadin calls his chapter on Boris " " with exactly this in mind. The idea