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for Pushkin. We return to Karamzin’s achievement at the end of this chapter, for his Sentimentalism proved exceptionally durable on the Russian literary landscape, holding its own against irony and existential despair well into the twentieth century. But first we must sample the ridicule itself. Two targets were beloved by eighteenth- century satirists. One was the favorite of court playwrights: the French language as worshipped, parroted, and fractured by Russians. The other, embedded in crude prose, was more subversive, for it included among the targets of its parody the aristocratic court with its neoclassical genres and “acceptable” comedy.
Gallomaniaisnowhere more perfectly exposed thaninFonvizin’s 1769 comedy of manners, The Brigadier. In a series of static tableaus, the two virtuous colorless lovers, Sofya [again, Wisdom] and Dobroliubov [Mr. Lover-of-Good], stand obediently off to the side, waiting for the fools to self-destruct. Chief among these fools is Ivanushka the Brigadier’s son, called several times a durak [fool] to his face. He has been to Paris, despises all Russians, and sprinkles his pompous speech with French words or with Russian verbs built on French constructions, to the mystification of his parents and the amusement of the audience. This Ivan-durak is betrothed to Sofya but, offended at the thought of living with someone who does not know French, courts Sofya’s silly young Frenchified stepmother instead (meanwhile, the Brigadier also courts the stepmother, and the Brigadier’s dimwitted wife is courted by Sofya’s father, a pious councillor). What fuels this comedy of multiple false suitors and utterly inept seductions is the fact that no one understands anyone else. Or rather, when they do manage to communicate, it is only to slander or snipe at one another. Malicious spousal relations are one startling aspect of this sort of comedy, contrasting oddly with the inevitable “happy marriage between lovers” hovering just beyond the final act and definitive for the comedic genre.
Well into the nineteenth century, Gallomania retained its moral resonance. The great successor to these satiric playwrights is the Gallophobic (and quatra-lingual) Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, for whom speaking French in contexts where “Russian words would do” is an index not only of frivolity but of moral depravity. Characters of irrepressible spontaneity and intuitive ethical judgment, like Natasha Rostova, have stiff or artificial French. He?le`ne Kuragina-Bezukhova, foul seductress, feels at home only in the French-speaking salon. When, in the early 1940s, Sergei Prokofiev turned Tolstoy’s novel into a sprawling opera, his librettist intensified this inherent Tolstoyan equation of moral corruption with “speaking (or living) a foreign language” through the simplified diction appropriate to a libretto, especially one composed in the suspicious and xenophobic Stalinist era. Natasha’s illicit romance is musically propelled by the genre of the waltz, with its Viennese and French associations, to which
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Prokofiev allots an intoxicating, dreamlike time-space separated from the surrounding action. These slightly off-balance waltzes can be seen (or heard) as visitations from the Sentimentalist tradition, and they condition the emotionally vulnerable Natasha to its dangerous fantasies.7
Soon after Fonvizin’s Brigadier, the playwright Yakov Knyazhnin (1742–91) composed a two-act libretto, in prose with inserted arias, on the theme of Gallomania. It bore the odd title Misfortune from a Coach. Although comic libretti were often sung to any popular tunes of the day, in this case the court composer Vasily Pashkevich (1742–97) composed the music. The opera premiered before the Empress herself, in 1779. It was an immediate hit. Its plot type is the “peasant opera” made famous throughout Europe by Rousseau (upgraded to the manor house in such masterpieces as Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro): two rustic or lowborn lovers are prevented from marrying by some villain of higher rank – a jealous bailiff, uncooperative parents, philandering masters. The cleverness of servants (or slaves) outwits the obtuse power of their superiors. It would seem that this plot, once Russified, could only strike at the heart of serfdom. But the opera did not deliver that message, even though the abuse was no laughing matter.
Whatwas the“misfortune” caused by acoach? Two Gallomaniac landowners, the Filyulins (Mr. and Mrs. Ninny) desire to buy the latest fashionable coach from Paris. To get the necessary funds, they decide to sell some serfs to the army (a life or death sentence: the standard term of service was twenty-five years). Since the bailiff wants the peasant heroine Anyuta for himself, he selects her lover Lukyan as one of the serf recruits. Lukyan is promptly shackled and led away. The situation is saved only when, for a sizable bribe, the Filyulins’ household jester Afanasy (labeled in the libretto simply “Shut,” Jester) suggests to the two threatened serfs, who know a few foreign words, that they babble a bit in French in front of their masters. The Filyulins are delighted. Peasants who can utter French words must be creatures who know how to love. Keep these two serfs at home, the Filyulins conclude, let them marry, and Lukyan will be our coachman! The strangeness and Russianness of this little comic opera lies not in the reunification of the lovers – that end-point is mandatory for the genre – and not even in the capriciousness of the masters, but in the Shut.
This inserted Jester is a morally blank, unsentimental, folk-comic type. He sings two arias that owe little to the ethos of enlightened self-improvement – or even to the ethos of enlightened despotism – and much to the cynical, pragmatic, resigned ethics of a Russian secular fool. In his first-act aria, the Jester chides the two desperate lovers for not knowing how to joke. “Why be sad and why go moan?” he sings. “It’s best to spit, spit on everything in the
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world, / It’s all in knowing how to dance to someone else’s tune / The trick’s to be a jester and a rogue.”8 In the second act, the Jester urges the fettered Lukyan simply to die at the first opportunity, because: “It’s really the best way; you can’t imagine how bad this world is.”And finally – after the Gallomaniacruse works– he delivers another aria on Lukyan in his new role: “What joy it is, / What sweetness to the heart” to have a coachman who “Instead of shouting ‘Here we come!’ / will shout in French! / . . . and no one on the street will understand!” In the closing scene, the Jester gathers the grateful peasants around himself: “What were you crying about? Where the shut Afanasy is, there you have to laugh; you see, there’s nothing in the world worth worrying about.” And then the Jester introduces the refrain that all sing in ensemble: “A trifle destroyed you, / But a trifle saved you too.”
Like Melancholy Jacques in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, Knyazhnin’s Jester is a mournful realist, surprised at nothing. For him too, “All the world’s a stage” – a world worthy of wry commentary, perhaps, but run by caprice and resistant to moral correction. This pragmatic amoral type was certainly familiar to the Russian eighteenth century. But it was not borrowed from Elizabethan drama. At this time, Shakespeare was still being read in edited French prose versions, tamed and cleansed. A truer, more durable inspiration for Knyazh-nin’s Jester might be the Muscovite rogue Frol Skobeyev. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Frol’s ribald type of story had blended with Russian adaptations of foreign adventure tales, simplified in the illustrated woodcut book [lubok] or written up for commercial presses serving the newly literate population of Russian towns. One example must suffice of this new bestselling “vulgar prose”: The Comely Cook [Prigozhaia povarikha], or the Adventures of a Debauched Woman (1770), by Mikhail Chulkov (1734–92). Chulkov was the most gifted of Russia’s enterprising, pen-pushing pioneer novelists and the antipode of the values and patronage system of the aristocratic court. Unlike Russian neoclassical comedy, The Comely Cook left little, if any, legacy in subsequent centuries; it was reprinted in 1890 and then only sporadically during the Soviet period. Thus it did not become part of Russian literary tradition, only part of her literary reality. This fate is appropriate to the artifact, however. Literary fame, canonical status, and the neoclassical pretension that art can reform the manners and morals of life were themselves one satirical target of Chulkov’s picaresque novel.
Chulkov’s Martona: life instructs art
Mikhail Chulkov was of non-noble birth, an actor, journalist, and low-level bureaucrat who announced openly that his “pen was for sale.” His activity
