[In the following essay, Gershkovich discusses Griboedov's position within the Russian Romantic tradition and claims that in the character of Chatsky, Griboedov created the first true individual in Russian literature.]

I

The fate of Romantic drama in Russia took shape in an unusual manner. Its highest achievements, Gore ot Uma (Woe from Wit) and Boris Godunov, inspired by the new Romantic poetics, were not classified as Romantic plays in Russian criticism even though Griboedov spoke of his comedy as a “stage poem,” and Pushkin of his Boris as a “true Romantic tragedy.”² On the other hand, standard literary history, without any particular regret, assigned artistically weaker plays such as the pathetic tragedies of Ryleyev and Küchelbecker and the pseudo-patriotic melodramas of N. Kukolnik and N. Polevoy, to the Romantic School. Such a view has suited the purpose of “official” twentieth-century criticism to prove the immutable realistic nature of Russian art, its originality and separateness from the Western literary process.³ The impression was created that the ideas of Romanticism, having come from the West, were pathogenic for Russia, did not deeply affect Russian drama, and did not strike root in Russian soil in a pure form. As anomalies of “secondary” poets, these ideas supposedly did not apply to the “shaft-horses” of Russian literature, from Griboedov to Gogol, pulling the main cart of national drama.

But the development of Russian drama from Griboedov to Chekhov, and even further to M. Bulgakov, cannot be adequately understood without taking account of the beneficial influence of Romanticism. First, it is important to establish what the Russians understood about Romanticism. The closest understanding was formulated by the leader of Russian critical thought, V. Belinsky (1811-48), who from a philosophical viewpoint looked at Romanticism as one natural characteristic not only of art but of the human spirit, as “the concealed life of the heart,”—“where the human being is, there also is Romanticism.”⁴ From a historical/literary vantage, he found Romanticism among ancient Greeks (Euripides), in the East, and the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century, however, it had been born completely transformed as “an organic unity of all the moments of the Romanticism which had been developed in the history of humanity.”⁵ On this basis, Belinsky considered that “Romanticism is not the property or belonging of any one country or epoch: it is an eternal side of nature and of the human spirit—it didn't die after the Middle Ages, but rather only underwent a transformation.”⁶

Analyzing the newest Romanticism from an aesthetic point of view, Belinsky calls it, “a war with a deathly imitation of the assertive form” of Classicism and “a striving for freedom and originality of form.”⁷ In another place (in an article about Griboedov) he sums up his idea even more succinctly: “Classical art has a complete and harmonious balance between idea and form, and Romantic (art) placed idea over form.”⁸ Finally, Belinsky adheres to the opinion that Russian experience, in contrast to that of the West which vainly tried to revive the Romanticism of the Middle Ages artificially, represents an organic process of development. Russia “did not have her own Middle Ages,” and therefore, her literature could not possess an original Romanticism. However, since “without Romanticism poetry is the same as a body without a soul,” when Russia joined the life of Europe, and felt the influence of the intellectual movements which were arising, Russian literature was not able not to give birth to Romanticism. This occurred, however, without those complexes of anachronisms which the West had experienced. Of all the Western Romanticists, Belinsky especially singled out Byron, who, like Prometheus, inflicted the mortal blow on this useless attempt to revive the old and became the herald of the new Romanticism, Romanticism which was also close to Russian aspirations.⁹

Belinsky was essentially correct in seeing that Russian Romanticism, especially in the area of drama, although born out of the battle with Classicism, did inherit much from the preceding literary schools, selecting building-materials from them. In this sense it is possible to understand Belinsky's ironic observation about “the Romantic classics” of Russian literature (he referred here to second-rate artists such as N. Kukolnik and N. Polevoy) which, in essence, are representative of the “eclectic reconciliation of Classicism with Romanticism, in which a little something is held over from Classicism and something is taken from Romanticism.”¹⁰ This is an old song with new words, that is, Classical absurdities in new Romantic clothing take place when the poet, calling himself a Romantic and an opponent of Classicism, as if it were a criminal offense, is actually continuing to look on the subject from without and not from within. Therefore, says Belinsky, it only seems to the poet that he is nimbly running forward, while he is actually turning in the same place, going around himself in circles. In contrast, because Belinsky considered Griboedov and Pushkin authentic representatives of the new Romantic direction in Russian drama and poetry, he explored the nature of Romanticism in large theoretical essays devoted to their work.

In the 1820s Russian drama took a striking leap. At the beginning of the century it was still in imitative apprenticeship to Western classicist modes, with rudiments of the Enlightenment and Sentimentalism. In the genre of tragedy, the pompous V. A. Ozerov (1769-1816) was still in complete favor, with subjects taken from Greek, Roman, medieval Western, and Russian history (Oedipus in Athens, 1804, Fingal, 1805, and Dimitry Donskoy, 1807). In enlightened comedy, the mocking fabulist I. Krylov (1768-1844) wrote the edifying Fashionable Store (1806) and Lessons for the Daughters (1807). In vaudeville, the light-minded M. N. Zagoskin (1789-1852) enjoyed success by showing The Provincial in the Capital (1817) and in reverse, the metropolitan resident in a village in Bagatonov, or the Surprise to Himself (1821). Comedies of manners, usually remakes of French plays, were written by the “anti-sentimentalists,” N. A. Zhander, N. I. Khmelnitsky, and A. A. Shakhovskoy. These were all close friends of Griboedov who, at the beginning, was often a co-author of these playwrights.

Russian drama was just barely unfurling its sticky light-green leaves. Suddenly, in the atmosphere of the Pre-Decembrist storm it was as if an electric spark discharged: Gore ot Uma (1823-24) and Boris Godunov (1825)—unsurpassed examples of Russian comedy and tragedy up until that time—appeared on the scene one right after the other. Unexpected and innovative in design, deeply national in their character, humanist in content, they immediately raised Russian drama to an unprecedented artistic and public level, placing it in European ranks alongside the best of world Romantic drama. Attentive Western observers immediately took note, and thus the first complete edition of Gore ot Uma appeared not in Russian but in a German translation by Karl von Knorring in Revel in 1831, while the first deeply objective, scholarly analysis of Boris Godunov was done by the German scholar Varnhagen von Ense. “We will be still more surprised at the dramatic strength of the genius Pushkin, if we take into consideration the slender means by which the poet reached his goals,” he wrote in 1843 from Leipzig.¹¹ He valued Gore ot Uma highly as did the first English translator and populizer, Nicholas Benardaky who in 1857 wrote that Griboedov's talent was “more closely akin to Juvenal than to Molière,” and that the character Chatsky, with his biting irony, is a result of heart and sensitivity and not cold calculation.¹² More recently, although still stipulating some measure of Classicism, I. Sotér has reaffirmed the connection of Gore ot Uma, along with early Pushkin, to the flowering of Romanticism in Russia; and the same view has been put forth by J. Bonamour in his fundamental work on Griboedov.¹³

It was more difficult for Russian Romantic drama to gain recognition in its homeland. It was forbidden and distorted by the censors. None of the authors of the above-mentioned plays ever did see their works on stage, and Griboedov and Lermontov did not even live to see their work published. The critics brought humiliating fire down upon them, having become acquainted with them through notes passing from hand to hand. Nevertheless, they became known to the public and exerted a deep and growing influence on all of Russian culture, still important in our time. In the Soviet era, the officially sanctioned approach to art narrowed the understanding of Romanticism to such an extent that not only the early Pushkin, all of Griboedov, and the early Gogol did not fit in, but even Lermontov's Masquerade—a work Romantic to the core. In the two-volume History of Romanticism in Russian Literature (1979), Gore ot Uma is not even referred to, as if Griboedov never existed.¹⁴ On the other hand, it examines in detail young Belinsky's scholarly composition Dmitry Kalinin which is of marginal significance.

The swift development of Russian drama at the beginning of the nineteenth century began in an atmosphere of spiritual ascent in Russian culture after the victory over Napoleon in 1812. It was accompanied by the crossing and interlacings of the most heterogenous artistic currents. Russian drama, thanks to its backwardness in relation to the West's development, in a short ten years transversed a path on which Western European theater spent a century. Thus the accelerated development of a national culture let to the birth of works of mixed stylistic form. “Classicist by form, drama inscribes a sentimental spirit; sentimental poetry assimilates Romantic motifs; the Enlightenment grows into revolutionary Romanticism; sentimentalism yields realistic fruit. It is not difficult for a historian of literature and drama to become entangled in this mixture of artistic ideas and tendencies. It [the mixture] came into existence because […] the Russian artistic idea, trying on the one hand to remain in national traditions, at the same time hurried to master all the newness which had arisen in the West […],”¹⁵ the Soviet theoretician, Anikst, has justifiably written.

This process was also rather typical for other Eastern European countries which were experiencing their own national renaissance. The interdependency of various artistic styles was inherent in Polish, Hungarian, and Czech drama of the age of Romanticism.¹⁶ Far from being eclectic, this mixture of styles in all its specificity contained an inner logic; it paralleled the search for a national drama, answering to the spirit and needs of its people.

II

Gore ot Uma clearly reflected this search. Its author, Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov (1795-1829), was one of the mysterious figures of Russian and world literature. He stepped into history as a literary man focused single-mindedly on one idea, a creator of one masterpiece. Griboedov's life and work exhibit the fate of a fiery dreamer in “a country of eternal snows,” who having established his remarkable abilities by serving falsely chosen goals, recognizes this too late.¹⁷ An individualist by nature, Griboedov's lofty poetic spirit was interwoven with contradictions. Hating slavery more than anything, especially slavery of the spirit (“According to my times and taste / I hate the word slave”), Griboedov, perhaps more than other poets of his time, was a slave of the society in which he lived. He “made a career,” despite his inner convictions and dream to “be independent of people,” and despised himself for this, having a foreboding that it would end badly. Thus into Russian literature was born the type of the implacable Chatsky—the first Romantic hero of Russian drama—no doubt based on the author himself.

Griboedov was a descendant of an old, noble family, rich, and one of the most educated people in Russia and Europe at the beginning of the new age, having studied with Göttingen Professors I. T. Booulet, B. Ion, and Schletzer Junior. He spoke many European languages fluently, reading and translating Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller. He knew Latin and Greek, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. Graduating with ease simultaneously in philology, law, physics and mathematics from Moscow University, he was awarded the title of Doctor of Law. He was an excellent pianist and a composer of sentimental romances. He participated in the War of 1812 against Napoleon. He was a member of the Freemason Lodges in Moscow and Saint Petersburg; mixed in higher circles, had friendships with Decembrists; was involved in the uprising of 1825, but was pardoned by the Tsar; was acquainted with the disgraced Pushkin and close to the gendarme informer Fadey Bulgarin, to whom fell the trouble of publishing Gore ot Uma. And finally, Griboedov became an official of “the diplomatic unit” of the Russian colonial army in Transcaucasia and progressed as a specialist in the assimilation of subjected territories of the Eastern peoples. He became a bearer of the Order of Lev and of the Sun, second degree, and of Saint Ann with diamonds. Subsequently, by royal decree, he was named state advisor and Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Russian Empire in Persia, where he was killed by Shi'ite fanatics in Teheran during the destruction of the Russian embassy on January 30, 1829, at thirty-four years of age.

The discord between dream and reality, subjective desires and objective circumstances, in the final analysis, between word and deed, became the main theme of Griboedov's creative work. His lyrical “I” continually strives to overcome this contradiction in the only sphere where it is still possible to be relatively independent of outer circumstances—in the sphere of art. His work wonderfully illustrates the idea of Madame de Staël, whose works were well known in Russian: “In our days, a poet must forfeit both his hopes and faith to intelligence; only then can his philosophical mind make a large impression […] In the age in which we live, melancholia represents the authentic source of talent.”¹⁸ Griboedov's poetic credo was expressed in the free translation of the “Prologue in the Theater” from the first part of Goethe's Faust. He took up this translation immediately upon the completion of Gore ot Uma in 1824, or even possibly while still working on the play. In any case, Griboedov's exposition of Goethe appeared as an aesthetic prologue in the almanac Arctic Star in 1825, long before the publication of his comedy.

The relationship of Griboedov to Goethe is known to us through his conversation with the Decembrist A. Bestuzhev.¹⁹ Goethe's dramatic poem drew Griboedov's attention to the idea of the inevitability of compromise, not only in life but in art as well, and to the age-old conflict between high poetic intention and the earthbound needs of “the masses,” in the form of didactic discussion between the sober-minded Theater Director and the immeasurably ardent Poet. Griboedov, however, changes the outcome completely in Chatsky's accusatory speeches:

No, no, his Poet rejects the Director's reason,
Go away, go look for others to serve you.

Characteristically, Griboedov also enriches Goethe's theatrical crowd with new personages, with an openly Russian character:

Here villains gaze around in the darkness
To lie in wait for a word and ruin with a denunciation.

(G. 356-60)

Pushkin was more honest and consistent on this score. Literally during the same days that Griboedov was working on the “Prologue,” Pushkin turned to the same Goethean theme of the “poet” and “the multitudes”—evidence of how acute this problem was in Russian literature—and wrote his famous “Conversation between the Bookseller and the Poet” along with the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, in which the distinctive preface not unlike Goethe's appeared (1825). He solves the worrisome problem of the relationship of art and life through open compromise between the Bookseller and the Poet, in the words of the Bookseller:

Pоzvоlsti prоstо vam sкazats:
Ni prоdaitsy vdоknоvinsi,
Nо mоznо ruкоpiss prоdats.(20)
(Let me simply say to you:
Inspiration is not sold
But to sell a manuscript
possible.)

In response to this mercenary declaration, Pushkin's Poet, in contrast to Griboedov's Poet, does not explode with righteous indignation, but rather answers completely reasonably and accommodatingly, in low prose—as if emphasizing the reality of what is going on: “Vy sоvirsinnо pravy. Vоt vam mоy ruкоpiss. Uslоvimsy.” (You are absolutely correct. Here you are—my manuscript. Let's settle it.) This dual relationship of creative work is the key theme of Russian Romantic drama. The difference in the positions of Griboedov and Pushkin, on the surface, nonetheless turns out to be purely outward, declarative. Actually through all of his writing, Griboedov confirmed Pushkin's concept of Russian art—the inevitability of compromise between the high calling of the artist, as the Romantics understood him, and lowly Russian everyday reality.

III

The project Gore ot Uma was conceived by Griboedov at the turning point of his life, after the scandalous duel of 1818 when he abandoned Moscow with a train of high-society aspersions behind him. His hasty exit from Moscow with the Russian diplomatic mission to Persia was more like an escape from a society which he thoroughly knew, loved, and hated. He left for the East against his will, with an evil foreboding. Henceforth, his life would be made up of continual “leavings,” and “crossings.”²¹ Yet the reason for his break from Moscow society was rooted more deeply. The results of the Patriotic War of 1812, in which Griboedov took part first-hand, were disappointing in the end. The unusual rise of patriotism, especially among the noble army officers, who had become accustomed to Western freedom, changed to general apathy. “The expectations, that the fall of slavery follows in answer to the exploits of the people, were not realized.”²² In 1812, heroes were replaced by people indifferent to everything, except their own careers. A “female regime” was established; “wives” acquired power, and this reverberated throughout the whole societal organism. Former gallant commanders became ladies' pages at balls. In this deathly pause during the last years of the “liberal” Alexander I's reign, the sole rational word heard in the worldly drawing room was: “аk! bоzi mоj! ctо stanit gоvоrits / Knyginy Marsy аliкsivna!” (Oh my God! What is the Princess going to say!)²³ This ironic remark by Famusov concluded Griboedov's comedy. Not only did it contain the comedy's main idea, the mainspring of the plot; it is reasonable to suggest that Gore ot Uma as the author first conceived it, grew out of this kernel. Two incomplete drafts of letters by Griboedov to unknown people have survived written in November 1820 from Tavriz. In one of them, marked 1:00 a.m., Griboedov writes about a dream he had which resembles, just like two peas in a pod, the atmosphere of Famusov's Moscow in Acts III and IV of Gore ot Uma. The hero of this dream was Griboedov himself, who finds himself at a ball and is made to vow that he will write “something or other.” Even the remark with which Griboedov's acquaintances meet him is given in detailed description. Unmistakably the actors of his future comedy, meeting Chatsky upon entering the hall, repeat this remark nearly word for word.²⁴

We can understand Griboedov's method as a dramatist modifying his Romanticism to accord with the Realism of the day if we distinguish the original version of Gore ot Uma, which apparently pleased the Romantic Küchelbecker so much, from the final edition. The author himself unequivocally pointed out this difference in his notes as he was preparing it for publication in 1824-25:

The first inscription of this stage poem, as it was born inside of me, was much greater and of higher meaning than now, in the vain apparel in which I was compelled to clothe it. The childish pleasure of listening to my poems in the theater […] forced me to spoil my creation, as much as possible […]. And besides, there are so many customs and conditions, not in the least connected with the aesthetic side of creation, with which it is necessary to conform […]. There is a genre of theory (on which many pride themselves) that art is to please her [the public], that is, to create stupidity.

(G. 400)

From this acknowledgement it obviously follows that in its original conception, the comedy was a “purely” Romantic drama. The compromise with ruling tastes or deliberate “ruining” of the play lasted a few years, right up to the summer of 1824 when Griboedov wrote to his closest friend, S. I. Begichev:

I am cutting it down, changing the whole business to rubbish, so that in many places my dramatic pictures' bright colors have completely faded. I get angry and put back that which I have just crossed out so that it seems, that for my work there is no end […].

(G. 498)

Begichev was asked not to share the first version with anyone but to burn it if he thought it was necessary; for “it is as imperfect as it is impure,” wrote Griboedov. The author aimed at achieving a plot of maximum transparency and simplicity (at the last minute he put in the domestic scene, “Sofia with a Candle”) and unifying the poem. In June 1824 he already was writing to Begichev, “I have changed more than 80 lines; now it is as smooth as glass.”

But Griboedov had little success in “ruining” his comedy, no matter how hard he tried. His aspiration “to conform” to the customs and conventions of the public of those times, “not connected with the aesthetic side of creation,” even became strangely useful to the play. Having been freed from the grip of Classicist rules, Griboedov was inspired as he worked, and the further he got the more he was satisfied with what he was doing: “an alive, quick thing, recalling the final version of the comedy, the verses poured out in sparks.” In the same letter to Begichev, he reports on the success of the readings of the comedy in Petersburg (“Eight readings, no I miscounted—twelve […] I pound, make noise, there is no end to delight, curiosity”) and admits that “in many places he improvises and experiences passion for a new invention, a new theory, a change of place and occupation, people and unusual pursuits.” (G. 498-99)

The main reproach against Griboedov which was presented by his friend Katenin, was precisely his abandonment of rules, in favor of the game of imagination: “Talent rather than art.” Griboedov answered his friend's criticism, completely in the spirit of Romanticism, “The most complimentary praise [is that] Art exists only to be subordinate to talent […].” Griboedov clearly rejected the Classicist era:

The one […] who had more ability to please with schoolish requirements, conditions, habits, grandmotherly traditions, than with one's own creative strength—is not an artist—let him throw away his palette and brush, his knife or pen—out the window.

(G. 511)

Nevertheless, he opted for the path of compromise: “I know that any craft has its ruses.” As an experienced diplomat, he attached great meaning to these ruses, calling them in Latin, nudae difficiles (difficult trifles). Now his task was a combination of Romantic design and Realistic analysis unusual for Russian literature. “There is no action in it!” an exasperated critic raged indignantly. “The scenes are strung together arbitrarily,” said even well-wishing friends—professionals. Griboedov did not dispute all this; he did not strive for obvious scene connections according to the rules of French drama, but to excite curiosity.²⁵

The reproach that Gore ot Uma lacked action was answered by the like-minded Küchelbecker:

I will not begin to insist that this is unjust, although it would not be difficult to prove that there is more action or movement in this comedy [i.e., inner action, movement of the soul in the hero's development], than in the majority of those comedies in which all the entertainment is built into the plot. In Gore ot Uma, precisely the whole plot is made up of the opposition of Chatsky to the other characters […].²⁶

Later, Küchelbecker gives a shining formula of the inner, heartfelt conflict of Romantic drama:

Take Chatsky, the given characteristics; they are considered together and show what kind of meeting there will be, without fail, of these antipodes—and only. This is very simple, but in all this simplicity is newness, bravery, greater than that poetic consideration which they didn't understand.²⁷

Griboedov actually preserved two of the Classical unities: time and place. The evolution of his hero, from the moment when he arrives at his beloved's after a three-year separation, and up until the final break from her and the escape from Moscow, fits strictly into twenty-four hours, from morning to midnight. The place of action is as strictly bounded in the drawing room of the rich Moscovite, Famusov. But the absence of unity of action, the creation of an exceptionally Romantic hero and the new kind of dramatic conflict veer from Classicism. The play's action, beginning with a trivial lover's intrigue, shifts grounds in the third act, when his beloved's fiasco becomes evident to Chatsky. The main action commences, for which the play really was written—the single-handed combat of Chatsky against society, hateful to him with its stagnation and hypocrisy.

This seeming inner contraction in the play evoked surprise and censure in many contemporaries.²⁸ What especially annoyed Belinsky was Chatsky's reasonableness and coldness in expressing living sentiments: when the hero finds out the bitter truth, that he is not loved, instead of leaving quietly, he begins “to rage against all of society” and uses the time “to read a few homilies.” About what happens later in the play Belinsky did not even care to write, for him the play was already exhausted with the love intrigue, “And so, the comedy has no wholeness, since it has no idea.” Nonetheless, Belinsky grasped at the significant negative definition: “The opposition of an intelligent and deep person against the society in which he lives” cannot form the positive idea of Russian drama. If the Famusovs were hated by Chatsky, why should they meet together? Let them look for their own circle, reasons the great critic and comes to an odd conclusion: “Society is always righter and higher than the private person, and the private individual is real and not a phantom only to the degree that he is expressed by society.”²⁹ On this basis Belinsky announces further that because Chatsky as a personality expresses no one besides himself, he is foolish, like “an image without a face,” like a “‘phantom,’ like something imaginary and unreal.”³⁰ Here we have arrived at the core of the play itself—at the problem of the Romantic hero in Russian drama, and the theme of the Russian treatment of individualism. Chatsky is antitheatical not only according to the utilitarian view of Belinsky, but even to the ideas of Decembrist aesthetics, to which Griboedov was close at one time.

IV

The idea of the free individual was common to Russian and Western European literature of the 1820s. The vogue for Byron in Russia was as great as in the West. However, the Russian ideal of the person under an authoritarian regime did not really accord with the understanding of the personality's value which had been developed in the generally more liberal West. It has been noted long ago, that the process of the individual's development in Russia took place under conditions completely different from those in the West.³¹ In Russia, from the time of Peter, and with a few interruptions during the intervals of liberalism under Alexander I and Alexander II, social development was accompanied by far-reaching enslavement of personality, by an attack on its sovereignty, by the subordination of the private person to public or state interests. The famous Russian historian S. M. Solov'ev said that Nicholas I wanted to behead all those who rose above the average—to make them all equal.

It is significant that the Decembrists, though having supported personal freedom, also demonstrated the destructiveness of the philosophy of individualism. Their ideal was “a saintly offering of oneself for the common good of the people,” and the higher manifestation of personal freedom was in service to the commonweal.³² During the same years and months that Griboedov was creating his character Chatsky in Tiflis, completely different requirements for the ideal Russian hero were heard in bitter arguments about the meaning of art in Saint Petersburg. On June 13, 1821, in the main headquarters of literary free thought, in the unrestricted society of amateurs of Russian literature, the Romantic poet N. Gnedich delivered a famous speech in which he rejected the ideal person as put forward in German and English Romanticism.³³ Having Byron in mind, Gnedich condemned the individualistic character of his poetry and philosophy:

Shunning, like a cold wall, the society of those who are like-minded, a person sees himself—a cheerless spectacle!—alone in the world and the world for him alone.³⁴

He argued further that individualism destroys the person, implants disdain towards society, leads to egotism and spiritual emptiness of the soul. This was said at the time when Byron, having been torn from English society and having given free rein to his individualism, joined the Italian Carbonari movement and participated in the liberation battle of the Greek peoples.

In contrast, Griboedov was basing on Byron not only the features of his hero Chatsky's world outlook, but also the main conflict in the plot, Sofia's invention of Chatsky's craziness.³⁵

The Decembrist theory, finding expression in the dramas of Ryleev, Küchelbecker, and others, in essence, controverted European Romanticism with its cult of inner, individual, “egotistic” life. Taken to the extreme, this theory, as the American historian of Russian culture, Richard Pipes, justly observed, began to work against itself:

The quarrel […] was not over aesthetics but over the freedom of the creative artist—and, ultimately, that of every human being—to be himself. The radical intelligentsia […] began to develop a service mentality of its own. The belief that literature and art […] had a primary responsibility to society became axiomatic in Russian left-wing circles.³⁶

One long-range result was the lifelessness of literature, its subordination to openly propagandistic goals.

Griboedov's different road for Russian literature turned out to be impracticable under Russian conditions. The image of Chatsky is the first and—alas!—right up to the present the only effective and consistent portrait of individualism in Russian literature on a European scale. It is an image not so much of a hero as of a Romantic anti-hero in Russian life, not the rule, but an exception. Proud, smart, caustic, open, unprotected, detesting lies and hypocrisy, Chatsky finds himself in a state of war with everyone. He has no allies; he is “a lone soldier in the field,” and hence much closer to the Romantic hero of Western literature than even to the Russian Onegin and Pechorin. Goncharov has written about Chatsky that he was a full head higher than those who also had once shone as a fashionable idea, though like a stylish suit. But “Onegin and Pechorin turned out to be unfit for the matter, for the active role, although both vaguely understood that all around them had been reduced to ashes.”³⁷ Despising the emptiness of life, the festive lordliness, these “progressive personalities,” as Goncharov judges, yielded to it. Their general dissatisfaction did not keep them from playing the dandy, “to shine,” to flirt, and Pechorin, in addition, to be wretched in his laziness and melancholy. Despising both society and themselves in society, they adapted to life in it. In this resided both their Russianness and their typicalness.

Chatsky, in contrast, does not wish to be reconciled with anything, does not wish to pretend, does not wish to look “like everyone else.” The only time that he does pretend in the play—in the scene of the resolute explanation with Sofia (III.i), he considers it his duty to play a part—“Just for this once I am going to pretend.” Chatsky appears happy, energetic, witty, self-confident, deeply sensitive, open to the whole world, similar to Hamlet before the meeting with the ghost of his father. He craves activity; he is full of optimistic hopes. He jokes, entertains. His enthusiasm, lifting the soul a little, his rare gift of eloquence a result of constant work on his ideas and spiritual development. And if such “related souls” in society are, in fact, non-existent? If each of your jokes is met as a flaw? If your mockery of peoples obvious defects, of stupidity, self-conceit, emptiness, and laziness is assessed as “a snake's bite?” If your indignation at human baseness, cajolery, hypocrisy meets society's response, “Oh my God, is he a Carbonaro?” If you are deceived by a loved woman and want to have it out with her and she lets a rumor out that “you are not in your right senses” which is snatched up by everyone? And then they are already shunning you like they would a madman? Then how should you act?

Having drunk the cup of agony to the bottom, not finding in a single soul, the “sympathy of the living,” at first, Chatsky more and more loses self-control. Disappointingly, it turns out that there are too many antagonists—the whole Moscow world. He feels that the battle in isolation has exhausted him. But, he doesn't give up. Experiencing “a million agonies,” squeezing his chest, he becomes jaundiced, nagging, immeasurably irritable and, boiling with rage, continues to expose the lie, flinging himself on everyone and everything indiscriminately, passing a merciless sentence on Moscow before abandoning her forever:

I've no more dreams, the scales have fallen from my eyes.
Now it would do no harm to take them all in turn—
Daughter and father,
And the brainless lover,
And the whole world, and pour upon them
All of my bitterness, all my frustration.
Who was I with? Where did Fate cast me up?
Tormentors, all of them; Cursing and persecuting,
[…]
You all with one accord declared that I was mad—
And you were right! A man could go through fire unharmed,
If he could spend a single day with you,
Breathe the same air as you.
And keep his reason.
Out, out from Moscow! Now, no more I'll ride this way;
I am off, I'm running, I'm not looking back,
I've gone to search the world,
To find some niche where outraged sense can shelter!—
My carriage! Get my carriage!(38)

In Chatsky's last monologue we find, in essence, a model for the whole play. The monologue actually brings to mind a gryphon—that fantastic winged being with a lion's body and eagle's head—with which Griboedov compared his comedy, emphasizing two beginnings in it, the real and ideal, from which latter alone appears a “wonderful, ideal nature, higher than is visible to us.”³⁹ From another perspective, in the monologue is reflected a completely realistic, even emphatically common everyday background, upon recognition of which occurs “the sobering” of the hero—he finds a concrete world of sinister old women and men, grown decrepit over made-up things, nonsense, in the poisoned air of the Moscow beau monde.

Griboedov's picture of Moscow is dominated by the Romantic image of Chatsky's coach, the real emblem of the daily life of the city's nobility, and simultaneously, the symbol of the wandering, searching, eternal dissatisfaction of the suffering and staggering hero. Chatsky's coach, as theatrical metaphor, suggests rushing off somewhere, not finding one's destiny in Russia. Not in vain was this image of Griboedov's snatched up afterwards with such lyrical strength by N. V. Gogol. In the final part of the first volume of Dead Souls, he transforms the kibitka (a hooded cart) of his arch-Realistic hero Chichikov into an unexpected Romantic symbol of all of Russian life:

Eh, thou troika, thou that art a bird! Who conceived thee? Methinks it is only among a spirited fold that thou couldst have come into being […] Whither art thou soaring away to, then, Russia? Give me thy answer! But Russia gives none […] all things on earth fly past and, eyeing it askance, all the other peoples and nations stand aside and give it the right of way.⁴⁰

Notes

1. This essay was begun in Moscow and completed in Boston. The author is grateful to Tracy Rich for translating the original Russian draft into English. The first English version has been revised by Gerald Gillespie. Unless otherwise noted, emphasis in quotations have been added.

2. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenie v Desvati Tomakh (Complete Collection of Compositions in 10 volumes) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), VII, 52. Pushkin also called Boris Godunov a Romantic tragedy in a letter to P. A. Vyazensky (X, 146) and in other places in his correspondence.

3. This point of view finds even more complete expression in the works of the official commentator of Russian classics in the Soviet period, Academician D. D. Blagoy. During more than half a century, from the 1920s to the 1980s he tried to “round off” and at the same time to distort the authentic picture of Russian literature's contradictory development which characterizes his two-volume composite work, Ot Kantemira do Nashikh Dney (From Kantemir to Our Days) (Moscow: Hudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1979).

4. V. G. Belinsky, Sobranie Sochinenie v Trekh Tomakh (Collection of Compositions in Three Volumes) (Moscow: OGIZ, 1948), III, 217. The Soviet editor considers it necessary to add the following commentary here: “However, the social essence of Romanticism slips away from Belinsky; therefore, the design of Romanticism's development carries a still too formal-logical character. However, with all the inadequacies thrown at us, Belinsky's concept […] was the first attempt to examine Romanticism in a historical context as a whole complex of problems interconnected by a deep inner unity” (III, 872). See also the valuable research of Donald Fanger in Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967).

5. Belinsky, II, 232.

6. Belinsky, II, 245.

7. Belinsky, II, 176.

8. Belinsky, I, 461 and 466.

9. Belinsky, III, 255-236

10. Belinsky, I, 463.

11. K. A. Varnhagen von Ense, Denkwürdigkeiten und vermischte Schriften, (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1843), V, 592-635.

12. A. S. Griboedov, Gore ot Ouma, trans. by Nicholas Benardaky (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1857), pp. i-iv. Further references to this edition are enclosed in the text in parentheses after the symbol G.

13. István Sotér, “A romantika Elötörténete és Korszákolása,” in Az Europa Romantika (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), pp. 79-80. Jean Bonamour, A. S. Griboedov et la vie littéraire de son temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965).

14. A. S. Kurilov, ed. in chief, Istoria Romantizam v Russkoi Literature (History of Romanticism in Russian Literature) (Moscow: Nauka, 1979). Prepared by the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

15. A. Anikst, Istoria Uchenii o Drame. Teoria Drami v Rossii ot Pushkina do Chekhova (History of Studies on Drama. Theory of Drama in Russia from Pushkin to Chekhov) (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), p. 10. See also the brilliant essay of Roman Jakobson, “Pushkin in a Realistic Light,” in Pushkin and His Sculptural Myth (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975), p. 63.

16. A. A. Gershkovich, “Teatr i natsional'naya Kul'tura (k postanovke problemi)” (Theater and National Culture [Relating to the Statement of the Problem]), in Teatr v National'noy Kul'ture Stan Tsentral'noy i Ugovostochnoy Evropi XVIII-XIX vv (Theater in the National Culture of Central and South-Eastern European Countries of the XVIII-XIX centuries) (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), pp. 7-25. Also in French: “Le Théâtre Est-Européen à la charnière des Lumières et du Romantisme,” Neohelicon, 3, Nos. 3-4 (1975), 51-67.

17. Near the end of his life he confessed to his closest friend, Begichev (in a letter dated December 9, 1826, from Tiflis), “Will I ever not be dependent on people? Dependency on family, secondly on service, thirdly on life's goals which I created for myself, and perhaps I will defy fate. Poetry! I love her without memory, passionately, but is love alone enough to bring fame to oneself? […] Who of us respects singers sincerely inspired, in that land where dignity is valued in direct relationships to the number of medals and enslaved serfs. It's torture to be a fiery dreamer in a land of eternal snows.” V. Orlov, ed., Griboedov: Sochinenia (Griboedov: Compositions) (Leningrad: Hudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1940), p. 534.

18. Literaturnie Manifesti Zapadnoevropeyskikh Romantikov (Literary Manifestos of Western European Romantics) (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), p. 382. From the original French of de Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800). Concerning sources of de Staël's literary theory, see R. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: The Romantic Age (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), p. 220.

19. A. Bestuzhev (Marlinsky), Znakomstvo moë s Grivoedovim (My Acquaintance with Griboedov) (Otechestvennie Zapiski, 1860), CXXXII, 635. “You called them both (Goethe and Byron) great, and in relation just to them this is fair, but between the two of them all superiority in greatness must be assigned to Goethe—who with his own idea explains all of humanity; Byron, with all sorts of diverse thoughts, a single person.”

20. Pushkin, II, 179.

21. In 1820, describing his life in the East, he noted that “and here my wits are in shock.” Speaking ironically of Moscow life, he grieved over it with all the passion of a Romantic nature (“Gone is happiness, I am not writing poetry […],”) and he called his departure “political banishment.” Griboedov, p. 481.

22. U. Tinyanov, Pushkin i ego Sovremenniki (Pushkin and His Contemporaries) (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), p. 359.

23. Orlov, ed., p. 133. Of several English translations, we prefer that by Joshua Cooper in his book, Four Russian Plays (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 210.

24. In the dream: “Is that really you, Alexander Sergeevich? How you've changed! It's impossible to recognize you.” Griboedov, pp. 487-88. In the play (III.v): “Ah, Alexander Andreich, is it you?—Is it possible three years have changed me as much?” Griboedov, p. 86.

    Three years is exactly the time period which separates Griboedov's departure/escape from Moscow and the beginning of work on the play. His friend, a witness to the creation of Gore ot Uma and its first audience, the Romantic poet Küchelbecker, came to Tiflis from Western Europe. He left evidence that Griboedov read him “each separate scene immediately after it had been written.” V. K. Küchelbecker, “Dnevnik, 1833” (Diary, 1833), in Puteshestive, Dnevnik, Stat'i (Travels, Diary, Articles) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979), p. 227. He certifies, in addition, that the poet did not intend to write simple portraits, as the contemporary critics thought: “His wonderful soul,” writes Küchelbecker, “was higher than such trifles.” However, he takes note of the critics, “qui se sent galeux qu'il se gratte.” Küchelbecker, 227-28. The French saying which Küchelbecker uses means “The cat knows whose meat he ate.” Küchelbecker here defends Griboedov from the unjust attacks of the critics on Gore ot Uma in conjunction with the publication of a short excerpt in the almanac Russkaya Taliya in 1825. He suggested that M. Dmitriev, the writer of the criticisms, be tried in a court of honor for “the perfidious praises to the lucky portrait” in Griboedov's comedy, which Küchelbecker considered a conscious distortion of the author's intention.

25. The more “outside” of the West that the events are, as he explained his principles, the more they entice curiosity: “I write for those like myself—when by the first scene I am already guessing the tenth, I am filled with yawns and then I run from the theater.” (G. 498)

26. Küchelbecker, p. 228.

27. Küchelbecker, p. 228.

28. Even Pushkin, the admired master of convoluted love intrigues, was sorry that “the whole comedy did not revolve around it; it seems Griboedov didn't want it—his will.” (Pushkin, X, 97.) Belinsky expressed it still more categorically. Chatsky for him was, in general, “a silly character” as a ‘lover.’ All the words expressing his feelings for Sofia are so ordinary, in order not to utter banalities!” (Belinsky, I, 508.) It is necessary to admit Belinsky had a point.

29. Belinsky, I, 508.

30. Belinsky, I, 515.

31. Recently the Hungarian scholar Erzsebet Köves offered an interesting comparison between the Western and Russian paths of development in the first half of the nineteenth century in his book Kelet és Nyugat (Budapest: Magvetö, 1983).

32. Cf. passim Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977); ch. 1, pp. 20-30 in Adam B. Ulam, In the Name of the People (New York: Viking Press, 1977); James H. Billington, The Ikon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).

33. Russian Romantics of the Decembrist doctrine placed the problem of the Romantic hero in antiquity and far from the contemporary Slavic/historical material on the abstract/heroic plane, rejecting “the useless” Byronesque individualism. “It is more necessary to overmeasure, that is, to exaggerate the greatness of a person than to belittle him,” demanded the same N. Gnedich, inviting Russian literature to exhibit “a saintly offering of the self for the good of the people.” Dekabristi i Ikh Vremya (Decembrists and Their Time) (Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka, 1951), p. 134. Serious Soviet scholars, e.g., G. P. Makogonenko and E. N. Kupreyanova, with their valuable book National'noe Soveobrazie Russkoy Literaturi (National Distinctiveness of Russian Literature) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976), expound on Gnedich's view but without giving it its full value.

34. Gnedich, pp. 133-34.

35. Based on the story of Lord Byron, which was making itself heard in the West and in Russia. Byron was blamed for his wife's mental illness, which served as a reason for his break from society and his running away from England. “As he himself says, he had to fight alone against all,” wrote the Russian press in the 1820s. Sin Otechestva (Son of the Fatherland), 1822, no. 21, p. 24. For more details on Byron and Griboedov, see U. Tinyanov's article “Suzhet Gore ot Uma” (The Plot of Gore ot Uma) in Pushkin i ego Sovremenniki, pp. 347-379.

36. Pipes, pp. 279-80. In Russian translation: Rossia pri Starom Rezhime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 374-75.

37. I. A. Goncharov, Million Terzanii (Kriticheskii Etud) (A Million Agonies—A Critical Study), cited from Gore ot Uma (Moscow: Pravda, 1980), p. 110.

38. Griboedov, p. 147. In the first edition of Gore ot Uma, this second to last line was different: “Where there is a cosy corner both for reason and sense.” In our view it expresses the main idea of the comedy more exactly (which in its original version was titled “Gore Umu” (Tragedy to the Reason). The accepted, smoothed over version, “Where for the insulted one there is a corner for sense,” puts the accent on the lover's intrigue and relates, in our opinion, to the corrections in the text which in Griboedov's own words, “spoiled” the comedy and made it poorer. Here the remarks of the American translator J. Cooper are appropriate. In the latest edition of his translation (Four Russian Plays […], p. 213), he suggests to compare this line with the words of Alceste in Molière's Le Misanthrope (V.iv): “Et chercher sur la terre un endroit écarté Où d'estre homme d'honneur on ait la libérté.” Although Cooper (who titled his translation of “Gore ot Uma,” Chatsky) follows the Russian text exactly, his remark that Chatsky, like Alceste, promotes consideration of “reason” strengthens our supposition.

39. I am citing from the innovative work of I. Medvedev, A. S. Griboedov: Gore ot Uma, (Moscow: Hudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1971), p. 71, which presents a rare analysis of the elements of Romanticism in Griboedov's work. The author comes to the conclusion, in this work, that in Gore ot Uma, developing a new poetics, “Griboedov masterfully carried out […] the inner fused unification of two styles: Romantic and Classical” (p. 68).

40. Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. B. Guerney, introd. by René Wellek (New York: Rinehart, 1948), pp. 303-4.