The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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 Feˆte” 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.