The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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

90 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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

The eighteenth century 91