The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The difficulty of orienting oneself in this unmonitored polyglot sea was one reason why the Russian upper classes, by the second half of the eighteenth century, arranged matters so that their children learned to speak French from infancy, relying upon that language for all “civilized” society interactions. The wealthy families had multilingual teams of nannies and tutors on their estates (consider Tolstoy in the nineteenth century, Nabokov in the twentieth); the poorer nobles and gentry could generally afford only one miserable, underpaid, often ignorant immigrant from France, Polonized Ukraine or the German states. It is no surprise that some of the best neoclassical comedy in the eighteenth century was language comedy. Foreign language fakery, mutually incomprehensible dialogue, and linguistic snobbishness (primarily “Gallomania,” a frenzy or mania for all things French) will be a focus for the first half of this chapter.

Our exemplary genres are limited to two irreverent literary experiments, one dramatic and one prosaic, followed by one end-of-the-century response to them that transformed this irreverence into respect. The first genre, Russian prose comedy, was especially adept at ridiculing Gallomania; the second, Russia’s primitive picaresque novel, broadened the ridicule to include, among many other targets, literary pretense and high court poets. Triumphant over both these satiric projects was Sentimentalism, which took French influence seriously, even piously, and integrated it into a new prose style that swept up the Russian readership. All three genres – prose comedy, the picaresque, and Sentimentalist prose – enjoy a vigorous afterlife in the nineteenth century.

The eighteenth century 83

All three parody that problematic eighteenth-century mandate, “pursuit of national identity by means of imitation.” To remind us of that mandate and as backdrop to this circuitous assimilation of European forms, one mid-century Russian tragedy will suffice.

When Aleksandr Sumarokov (1717–77), codifier of Russian neoclassicism and a prolific tragedian, published his Russian-language Hamlet in 1748, he was proud of the fact that its plot did not resemble Shakespeare’s nihilistic and decadent one. In Sumarokov’s version of the play, Polonius is not a bumbling counselor but the masterminding villain, Ophelia is being forced to marry the usurper Claudius, and Hamlet arrives as leader of a popular mutiny just in time to rescue his beloved from that invidious marriage. The end of the play is edifying as well as happy: Polonius commits suicide, thus releasing his daughter from the need to choose between wicked father and virtuous lover. But some trace of that tension was necessary, as a tribute to the mandatory neoclassical conflict between love and honor, the passions conquered by reason. Russian tragedians were expected to portray a victory of virtue over vice. Not only pity and fear but also “admiration” was a crucial source of tragic emotion.2 In tragedy, with its abstract characters, heightened rhetoric, and familiar plots distanced in time and space, “Russianness” (and in this case, Shakespeare-ness too) mattered little.

The chronotope of comedy was different. Self-improvement was the goal here as well, but upright behavior or abstract edification was insufficient for it. In 1747, in his so-called “Second Epistle,” Sumarokov addressed this question. Comedy, he wrote, should “correct manners by mockery; to amuse and bring [moral] benefit is its basic law.” Satire should cut along the same lines, only deeper: its task was to “censure vices” and ridicule “passions, follies, wit-lessness.” Sumarokov’s own twelve verse comedies were poor instantiations of this ideal, however, remaining trivial, weakly plotted caricatures (often of Sumarokov’s personal enemies) that only rarely rise above farce. His failure here is significant. Tragedy addresses the lofty and eternal, whereas “manners” remain a local affair. And how could Russian manners – and Russian follies – be attacked effectively in a comedy adapted from an alien culture? A favorite source for themes and character types was Voltaire. But what in the specifically Russian landscape could speak to the creations of this skeptic and secular humanist? As another prolific author of Russian comedies, Vladimir Lukin (1737–94), put the problem in his preface to two adaptations from the French prepared for the 1764–65 Petersburg season: our spectators receive little benefit from “comedies based on foreign manners,” especially if the European settings and names remain unchanged, because Russian audiences “assume it is the foreigners being laughed at, not them.”3

84 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature