My translation of Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri first appeared in the Russian Language Journal in 1984. It has been performed once, in a staged reading at the Performance Network in Ann Arbor.
There are many published translations of this work, including one by Nabokov. None, however, seemed to me quite stageworthy, though many would argue that Pushkin never intended it for the stage in any case. That may be so, but it is a text of perennial appeal to Russian actors nonetheless, and it is easy to see why. Like so much of Pushkin's work, it is a marvel of compression: there is more dramatic meat in its ten minutes than in all three dreary hours of its bloated imitator, Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. Pushkin is the Mozart of poets (the Salieris and Shaffers being legion), and nowhere did he show better his Mozartean knack for combining a light touch with profundity.
In a normal theatre the play is much too short to put on alone, which raises the question of what can or should share the bill with it. Since it is one of four "Little Tragedies" that Pushkin wrote, none of which runs longer than fifteen or twenty minutes, the obvious solution is to present some or all of them together. Alternatively, one might want to pair it with another short work on a similar subject, and it was with this in mind that I wrote my own (prose) playlet Bird on White. This dates from around 1992, and has not yet been performed. It would be presumptuous of me to try to characterize it in relation to Pushkin's, except as a sort of variation on his theme of genius and mediocrity, transposed to an American setting.