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as author and literary adaptor coincided with a controversy over the writing of novels that erupted in the 1760s. Was prose fiction serious literary art? Could novels and tales edify – or only entertain, distract, titillate, thus mocking the edifiers and self-improvers? In 1759, Sumarokov, then the director of the Russian Imperial Theatres, weighed in with the opinion that novels, unless elevated by dignity and usefulness, could cause readers a great deal of harm. Chulkov’s eventual response to this lofty neoclassicist position was an omnibus narrative titled The Mocker, or Slavonic Folktales [Peresmeshnik, ili slavenskie skazki], a motley collection of chivalric romances, fantastic wondertales, pagan myths, and the occasional realistic account of abuses of serfdom transposed to the ninth century. Chulkov published his first novel proper, The Comely Cook, anonymously in 1770. In it he continued his earlier “undignified” and “useless” agenda, now integrated by a first-person voice and the thread of a single biography.
The heroine, with the unRussian name Martona, was probably modeled on Fougeretde Monbron’s “roman libertin”Margot laravaudeuse [Margot theOld-Clothes- Mender], a French rags-to-riches courtesan novel published twenty years earlier, in 1750. Martona begins her story as a beautiful, plucky nineteen-year-old, widowed after the Battle of Poltava (1709) and left without means. The battle reference is misleading, however, for the novel is not historical. Cast in the abstract chronotope of adventure tales and the picaresque, it is unified only by the appetites and adventures of its heroine. “I think that many of our sisters will accuse me of immodesty,” Martona begins, “but since this vice is by and large natural to women . . . I shall indulge in it willingly.”9 For the first half of the novel, Martona moves from lover to lover, improving her position, re-pricing her services, surviving the occasional setback with aplomb (being beaten up by a wife, betrayed by a cad, thrown in prison by a jealous heir) and justifying her unscrupulousness – mostly robbing her clients – with pithy folk sayings. (If Fonvizin’s Starodum spoke in Enlightenment maxims, then Chulkov’s Martona, to justify her behavior, rattles off folk proverbs. The sinister culmination of such self-validation through proverbial wisdom comes with Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 peasant drama, The Power of Darkness.) At one point Martona is forced to work as a cook. Most of the time, however, her lovers provide for her handsomely. Her most profitable position is with a lieutenant-colonel in his seventies, into whose wealthy house she smuggles a young admirer dressed as her older sister (a Frol Skobeyev motif). Before she can abscond with this new lover, however, he disappears with their mutually purloined wealth and she must return, humbled and penitent, to her “toothless Adonis,” who is so delighted at her reappearance that on his deathbed he forgives her all.
Is the self-serving voice behind such a story in any position to mock the immoral behavior of others? Probably not, but such was hardly Chulkov’s
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intent. Evidence from his other work suggests that The Comely Cook mocks not human folly – that comfortable target of neoclassical satire – but the humans gullible enough to think that folly can be eradicated by writing didactically about it. Chulkov’s novel is prefaced by a mock dedication to a mock patron and an elaborate apology declaring everything (including his own book and its feeble author) perishable and mutable. The message of the preface is indeed debunking, but it is cast in the high style of the tragedian Sumarokov. Satire on all didactic literature, with its moral prescripts and self-righteous poet-practitioners, is woven into the events of the second half of the novel, where Martona is less a manipulator of others and more a witness.10
The novel hints early at its irreverent anti-literary end. One of Martona’s lovers, an illiterate copy clerk, tells her of a neoclassical ode that turned up in their office; the chief secretary assured them it was “some sort of delirium, not worth copying” (p. 38). In a later episode, Martona befriends a merchant’s wife who “writes novels with introductions in verse” (somewhat like Chulkov’s own novel)andfanciesherself acritic. “Sobusy wasshe at versifying,” Martona notes, “she very seldom slept with her husband” (p. 58). This female friend presided over a literary salon, where nothing was natural or healthy: a decrepit old man seduces a thirteen-year-old girl, a young swain courts a toothless wealthy old crone, and in the midst of this “licentious brothel” a “short little poet,” sweating profusely, “kept shouting verses from a tragedy he had composed” (p. 59). This fraudulent salon, which eerily prefigures the grotesque “Literary Fe?te” in Dostoevsky’s 1870 novel Demons, is the portal to a series of other literary and real-life fakes, played out by Martona’s lovers and servants as literal performances.
These performances are themselves parodies of the literary genres they pretend to be. The merchant’s wife decides to get rid of her husband. On commission, Martona’s servant concocts a poison that induces temporary insanity in the victim (the servant calls his harmless handiwork a “comedy”); he then proceeds to expose the wife’s perfidious intent to the whole salon in a skazka [fairy tale]. Finally there is a fake tragedy, the staged suicide-by-poisoning of one lover following the presumed death of his rival in a faked duel. During this parade of malfunctioning genres, Martona herself does little except watch – and make sure that no one actually causes the death of anyone else. She stands for the amoral rights of life to its own preservation. As she confesses to this discredited crew, “even corrupt women are left with some sense of reason” (p. 50, trans. adjusted). The novel breaks off abruptly in the middle of one dramatic (and possibly faked) deathbed scene. Opinions vary on whether Chulkov intended this episode to be the novel’s formal end. Either way, the truncated series of episodes in our possession suggests that a central message of the author – either
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Martona herself, or whatever higher storytelling voice stands behind her – was premised on the fact that authors have nothing to “teach.” Life’s experience teaches. Chulkov’s heroine, like every picaresque protagonist, is not a reader but a survivor.
Chulkov’s Martona might have an even more potent (and more politically charged) rags-to-riches prototype than was earlier suspected. Recent research has suggested that Martona is modeled not only on a French clothes-mender who became a successful courtesanbutalso on Peter theGreat’swidow,Empress Catherine I, who, with the help of former lovers and allies, ruled Russia precariously from 1725 to her death in 1727.11 The woman who married Peter I was a commoner, perhaps even a servant, in a Lutheran household. She is believed to have lost her first husband at the Battle of Poltava at the age of eighteen. Her first name was Marta; she was an excellent housekeeper and cook. Tsar Peter was only the most powerful in a series of increasingly distinguished lovers, and he was also the most constant. If this hypothesis about Martona/Marta-Catherine I is correct, then The Comely Cook is not only Russia’s first picaresque novel, but possibly also the first Russian roman-a`-clef (a novel in which actual persons appear under fictitious names). As befits Chulkov, it is a carnivalized roman-a`-clef that travesties its lofty imperial subject.
Neoclassical comedy and the picaresque novel, enriched in the early nineteenth century by an explosion of interest in vaudeville, provide an essential backdrop to Pushkin’s short stories, the dramas and narrative epics of Gogol, and Dos-toevsky’s great novels. These masterworks are most comic precisely at those points where stock characters or scenarios from eighteenth-century satire are recycled in the context of contemporary (and often more frightening) Russian reality. As we shall see in Chapter 5, Pushkin’s Tales of the Late Ivan Petro-vich Belkin (1830) are still cast in the neoclassical comedic mold of harmony, balance, wit, and good will. In Gogol’s 1836 Government Inspector, the darker side of comedy comes to the surface. An unknown fop arrives at a provincial town and, faking every step of the way, terrifies the local bureaucracy into revealing and even intensifying its own corruption. (If the exposure of venality was Pravdin’s straightforward mission in The Minor, Gogol’s nineteenth-century “inspector” Khlestakov is now himself a fake.) In Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), a traveling salesman-rogue on the road must keep moving if he is to avoid exposure and disgrace – for clients and lovers with something to conceal must not meet one another, as Martona ruefully knows. In Dostoevsky’s Demons, a young and pernicious
