The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Foreign models were nevertheless assumed to be indispensable. Not only did the codes of neoclassicism advocate it, but Russia had no well-developed native traditionof genteel scripted comedy. “Going to the theatre” was not part of early modern Russia’s upper-class culture. When Muscovite envoys were posted to fifteenth-century Florence or Elizabethan London, they either did not see plays or poorly understood what they saw.4 In the early eighteenth century Peter the Great tried to create, under imported German management, a state-sponsored public theatre in Red Square. Ill-wishers sabotaged the construction, audiences had to be bribed to attend, and the plays were uniformly rendered in an archaic biblical style completely at odds with their content and with spectators’ interest (p. 48). Like the printing press under Ivan the Terrible, it would appear that theatre, too, was destined to be a “reform from above,” a Western craftiness foisted on the unwilling populace by a visionary autocrat – or tyrant.

The three empresses who succeeded Peter passionately loved masquerade and theatre. The most gifted of them, Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96), wrote plays herself on a variety of themes: satires on religious hypocrisy, adaptations of Shakespeare to Russian conditions, even folkloric opera libretti (including one on Baba Yaga and a bogatyr from the Novgorod bylina cycle). Catherine dismissed her dramas as “trifles.” But the Empress’s literary pastimes lent prestige to playwriting – as long as this activity entailed no political threat to her or her absolute power. The individual abuse could be targeted, but not the institution enabling that abuse. As astonished Russian poets noted in the nineteenth century, “abuses” were displayed on the public stage in the 1760s and 1770s with far more candor and outrage than in later eras, when the institutions in question (absolutist autocracy, serfdom) were no longer perceived as part of an ordained, immutable social order (pp. 123–24).5

Neoclassical comedy, Gallomania, cruelty: art instructs life

In 1769 Catherine II, in imitation of the Enlightenment, encouraged self-correcting domestic satire by personally sponsoring a satiric journal. The timing was delicate. Two years earlier the Empress had decreed that no enserfed peasant could lodge a complaint against his master (owner) – a momentous step in the transformation of serfdom into fully legalized slavery. This juxtaposition of a retrograde social policy with tolerance in the literary sphere was not lost on Catherine’s liberal-minded aristocratic critics. The most famous of the publisher-journalists, Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818), sparred with the Empress for two decades in his irreverent journal The Drone – until the French

The eighteenth century 85

Revolution provided startling proof that ideas could result in the decapitation of monarchs. Catherine had Novikov arrested and incarcerated in Peter and Paul Fortress in 1792. He was freed only in 1796, after her death.

In an absolutist state, the balance between acceptable, self-improving mockery and the unacceptable censure of political realities is a fragile one. For the next two centuries, Russian culture and Russian prisons would be populated by writers, artists, stage directors, and composers who gambled and lost while negotiating this tightrope. The practice of comedy under Catherine the Great is a good test case, because the rules for its composition and the range of its character types were so uncomplicated - and also because the very idea of a secular literary establishment was still so fresh. The tense relationship that later became “Poet versus Tsar” was still Poet and Tsar for most high-culture literary forms. In certain ways, neoclassical comedy was just as conventionally structured and ideologically collaborationist as the solemn ode.