The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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.