SOURCE: Reyfman, Irina. “Criticism, Parody, and Myth.” In Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the “New” Russian Literature, pp. 70-131. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990.

[In excerpt below, Reyfman discusses the use of parody in the critical discourse between Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, and Sumerokov. She goes on to examine the role parody played in the creation of myths about these authors.]

Two forces produced a distorted picture of literary life in the middle of the eighteenth century: the mythogenic spirit that underlay the cultural self-conceptions of the epoch, and the passion with which the participants in the literary process asserted their individual artistic principles as exclusively correct and therefore universal. The details of this distorted picture were worked out in fierce literary clashes over normative aesthetic principles. The myth of a new Russia, transfigured by Peter, provided the pattern for the formation of the distorted historical picture and ensured the survival of the distortion beyond the initial polemical heat.

Gukovsky's idea that the concept of the rationally determined aesthetic norm governed Russian literary life in the mid-eighteenth century explains the nature of the literary polemics to a considerable extent. However, his approach does not address the specifics of the critical methods employed by the eighteenth-century Russian writers. An analysis of these methods enables us to draw important conclusions about the ways in which the artistic principles of the period influenced the formation of the literary reputations of the participants in the polemics and, eventually, the formation of historical accounts of mid-eighteenth-century literary life.

The goal of an eternal and absolute artistic ideal denied a writer the right to artistic individuality. A tendency to judge a work of art according to a normative set of rules and to reject those works that did not follow the rules elicited very specific critical methods. It is possible to say that parody was the main critical method of the epoch.

The Russian eighteenth century was amazingly prolific in parodies, nor did parody occupy its usual marginal position. It was among the leading polemical genres and was the main weapon in every round of the literary polemics between Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, Sumarokov, and their allies. Every issue elicited scores of parodies. Sumarokov's school first attacked Lomonosov in the early 1750's with a parody of Lomonosov's tragedy in a humorous playbill, “From Russian Theater.” When Elagin's “Satire on a Fop and Coquettes,” directed against Lomonosov's group, intensified the polemical exchanges, four pieces in these exchanges were written as parodies. In another round of polemics, Lomonosov's “Hymn to the Beard” was parodied at least twice. In the 1760's Lomonosov parodied Sumarokov's fable “An Ass in a Lion's Skin” in his piece “A Pig in Fox's Skin.” In the 1750's and 1760's Sumarokov in turn parodied Lomonosov's and Vasilii Petrov's poetic principles in his Nonsense Odes and Trediakovsky's in his “Little Song,” “Song,” and “Sonnet Composed on Purpose in Bad Style.” The parodies of Trediakovsky's works also included Andrei Andreevich Nartov's “An Announcement” and the anonymous “Epitaph” (possibly written by Ivan Barkov).

In addition, eighteenth-century parody was aggressive and frequently intruded into other polemical genres, especially the epigram. For example, Trediakovsky's argument, in his A New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verse, in favor of a rule that prohibited the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes—

Such a mixing of verses would be as disgusting and hideous for us as if someone were to give in marriage the most admirable, the most tender European beauty, shining with the very bloom of youth, to a decrepit, black, ninety-year-old Arab

—was mocked in Lomonosov's epigram on behalf of Russian poetry, “On the Mixing of [masculine and feminine] Russian Verses” (1751-53?):

Stivilij uviryl, ctо muz mоj kud i slab,
Bissilin, pоdl i star, i dryklоj byl arap;
Sкazal, ctо u miny кrivyss trysutsy nоgi
I nit mni niкaкоj к supruzistvu dоrоgi.(1)

Shtivelii insisted that my husband was thin and weak, impotent, mean, and old and that he was a decrepit Arab; he said that my legs were bending and trembling and that there was no way for me to enjoy conjugal life.

Similarly, Lomonosov's epigram “Artful singers …” (1753) includes a parody of Trediakovsky's grammar and spelling, and the “Epigram on El[agin]” (1753; probably by Mikhail Sobakin) contains a parody of Elagin's “Satire on a Fop and Coquettes.”² The list of examples could be continued, but these suffice to illustrate my point.

Features of parody can also be found in comedy. Sumarokov, in Tresotinius, parodies Trediakovsky's linguistic theories and his style. He puts into Tresotinius's lips a parodical song written in “trochaic feet” (khoreicheskimi stopami)—a clear hint at Trediakovsky's metrical preferences. Another parodical character in this comedy, Bobembius, represents Lomonosov. The speech and views of Krititsiondius, a character in Sumarokov's comedy The Monsters, also parody Trediakovsky's aesthetic and linguistic conceptions.

Finally, parody regularly appeared in critical essays and theoretical statements. A. A. Morozov, in his introduction to a collection of Russian parodies, discusses some instances: a parody of Lomonosov's odes in “Conversations of the Dead” published in the May 1759 issue of The Diligent Bee and a parody of his tragedy Tamira and Selim in the essay “A Journey of Reason,” published in the magazine Useful Amusement (1760, part 1).³ Similarly, Lomonosov's criticism of Elagin's “Satire on a Fop and Coquettes” in his letter to Ivan Shuvalov of October 1753 was in fact a parody. Lomonosov pretended that he did not understand Elagin's metaphors:

I do not think that A[leksandr] P[etrovich] could possibly wish to be called “a son born from the goddess [who was born] of the brain,” that is, the grandchild of a brain, especially as there is no way such a thing could happen. … To call A. P. “Boileau's bosom companion” is unjust. If somebody had called Racine Boileau's bosom companion, he would hardly have tolerated it; it is amazing that A. P. can bear it.⁴

Taking the metaphors out of context, Lomonosov laid the device bare, thus demonstrating its absurdity and creating a parodical effect.

Prose paraphrases of poetic works—a critical method that was quite widespread in the middle of the eighteenth century—were also frequently done with a parodical effect in mind: “So here are all its [the ode's] bare contents: You have fought enough, we already have peace; and you, neighbors, surrender and rely on this hand that will overcome all enemies, as many as there may be. But why am I so daring as to want to glorify Elizabeth: She is incomparably glorified without my intervention.”⁵ Removed from the poetic structure, imagery and tropes displayed their conventional character and thus their ludicrousness in the eyes of the critic.

Finally, the criticism of the mid-eighteenth century was parodical in its frequent mockery of grammatical inaccuracies and individual spelling, its quibbles at misprints and other minor features of a work. All these can be found in Trediakovsky's criticism of Sumarokov's works in “Letter from Friend to Friend,” as well as in essays Sumarokov wrote throughout his life—“Critique of the Ode” (1747), “Response to Criticism” (1750), “On Orthography” (1771-73), “On Versification” (the 1770's), and many others.⁶

However, much more important than the inclusion of parodies in critical essays or the superficial similarities in modes was the fact that the criticism in the mid-eighteenth century had the same attitude toward the artistic text as parody had. Parody has no respect for authorial individuality; it does not hesitate to show a work's incongruity in comparison with its implied abstract ideal. Parody accomplishes this end by taking the most distinctive features of a work out of context and hyperbolizing them, thus creating a deliberately chaotic text. The same disregard for the author's individuality can be observed in eighteenth-century criticism. Eighteenth-century critics applied the norms as they understood them to the given work and rejected anything that went beyond those norms, no matter how appropriate it might be within the artistic system under analysis. In critical essays, however, the incongruity of a given work with the ideal was not demonstrated by creating a parallel parodical text, but was proved logically.

Thus, in his Nonsense Odes, Sumarokov parodied the highly metaphorical style of Lomonosov's odes. In his critical essays, he demonstrated the incongruity between Lomonosov's metaphorical usage and the norms of the language, common sense, and the laws of nature. Sumarokov took Lomonosov's images out of context, treated them as linguistic mistakes, explained what was wrong with Lomonosov's innovative usage, and reduced his imagery to pure logical absurdity. Trediakovsky employed a similar critical method. In discussing Sumarokov's version of the 143rd Psalm in his “Letter from Friend to Friend,” he logically proved that Sumarokov's metaphors were unacceptable from the point of view of linguistics and common sense.

The similarity between criticism and parody is especially striking when they turn upon the same phenomenon. For instance, in Gertrude's monologue in Hamlet, Sumarokov used a gallicism, ne tronuta (untouched, not affected): “And looked untouched upon my husband's death.”⁷ This neologism elicited objections from both Lomonosov and Trediakovsky. Lomonosov parodied it in the last line of an epigram:

Zinilsy Stil, stariк biz mоci,
Na Stilli, ctо v pytnadцats lit,
I ni dоzdavsiss pirvоj nоci
Zaкaslyviss, оstavil svit.
Tut Stilla bidnay vzdykala,
Ctо na supruzny smirts nitrоnuta vzirala.(8)

Stil, an old man without any strength, married Stella, who was fifteen, and having a fit of coughing, he left this world, unable to wait until the first night. Then poor Stella sighed, looking untouched upon her husband's death.

Trediakovsky analyzed this line from the normative linguistic point of view:

This touch of his, instead of move to pity, for the French toucher is so strange and ridiculous that it is impossible to express it in words. You can immediately feel the indecency of this word in our language because of the euphemism. In the tragedy Hamlet the author makes the woman named Gertrude say that she “looked untouched upon her husband's death.” Who among us will not understand this line in the following sense, namely, that Gertrude's husband died never knowing her in respect of marital right and conjugal duty? However, the author did not mean this: He wanted to show that she did not grieve a bit over his death.⁹

Sumarokov had in fact made a conscious attempt to introduce one of the meanings of the French verb toucher into the Russian language. He replaced “pitilessly” (bezzhalostno) with “untouched” in the fair copy of his tragedy just before sending it to the Academy of Sciences for publishing. He never corrected the usage despite Lomonosov's and Trediakovsky's mockery. Trediakovsky and Lomonosov chose to ignore his stand and saw in the usage only the author's sloppiness and inaccuracy. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Russian language had accepted the new meaning.¹⁰

Another common critical method in the middle of the eighteenth century was to rewrite—totally or partially—a criticized text. The original text was rejected for failing to meet the norm, and a new one, written in accordance with the rules, was suggested. Most frequently only one “wrong” line was replaced. For example, in “Critique of the Ode” Sumarokov proposed the elimination of the inversion in the line “The hunter where did not aim his bow” (Okhotnik gde ne metil lukom): “Where, according to grammatical rules, has to be put before the hunter, and thus we have to say: ‘Where did the hunter not aim his bow.’ But this is spoiled for the sake of meter alone.” In the same work he also suggested a change in another line of Lomonosov's ode. Instead of “Or have I now forgotten myself / And deviated from the way / that I had followed earlier?” he proposed: “Or, having now forgotten myself, / Have I deviated …”¹¹ When criticizing Sumarokov's ode in “Letter from Friend to Friend,” Trediakovsky likewise substituted his own lines, “Deeds that penetrate into the sky, / Into forests, and into proud waves,” for Sumarokov's, “Deeds that pierce the skies, / Forests, and proud waves.” In the same work he suggested two replacements for Sumarokov's line “Increase the age of this damsel,” which contained a metrical irregularity.¹²

Sometimes critics did not confine themselves to minor changes in an analyzed work and proposed new versions of whole stanzas. Trediakovsky suggested changes in emphasis and punctuation in the fifth stanza of Sumarokov's paraphrase of the 143rd Psalm. The critic concluded the alteration with a comment that is characteristic of his normative aesthetics: “Please judge now with all impartial fairness whose stanza is more grandiloquent.” Trediakovsky does not even attempt an investigation into the peculiarities of Sumarokov's artistic task (such as, in this case, the intonation, indicated by punctuation). Instead he judges the poem according to the vague and subjective notion of “grandiloquence,” which, nevertheless, he presents as a universally accepted criterion.¹³

The same lack of interest in artistic individuality underlay the literary competitions in which the writers frequently engaged. In these competitions, authors translating the same work or developing the same theme offered their “correct” versions in place of the less perfect artistic productions of their rivals. Criticism and artistic exploration overlapped. The authors did not simply put forth a new version but implied that all other versions were inferior. In the essay “Some Stanzas by Two Authors” (the 1770's), Sumarokov placed his stanzas beside Lomonosov's, not to allow the readers to enjoy different poetic approaches, but to enable them to see with their own eyes the superiority of his own artistic method. Similarly, Sumarokov, following Trediakovsky, attempted to translate Fénelon's Télémaque to assert his own excellence and thus discredit Trediakovsky's work. Sumarokov neither finished his translation nor published it. Apparently, the small fragment was sufficient to assure him of the superiority of his approach over Trediakovsky's.

Even the most peaceful of these competitions, the translation of the 143rd Psalm by Trediakovsky, Sumarokov, and Lomonosov—which, as Trediakovsky explained in the introduction to the publication of the three translations, was designed not as a contest but as a search for the correct theoretical decision—was based on the same rejection of the very idea of individuality. All three poems were good, Trediakovsky claimed, because they coincided in their treatment of the chosen theme: “Their only appreciable difference is in ardor and representation, but an amazing agreement in meaning is offered here, and from that it could be concluded that all good poets, no matter how differently they present their individual keenness and power of thought, however, arrive at one common point, and, thanks to that, do not depart from due center.” The good poet is the one who approaches the ideal (“point, center”); bad poets do not know “where their immobile point is, or the target at which they should aim.” The good poets reach similar decisions, and the bad ones “are further from each other in their difference than is proper.”¹⁴

As we see, the criticism of the mid-eighteenth century was mainly concerned with the fidelity of the criticized text to abstract aesthetic norms. Critics focused mostly on the analysis of artistic decisions that were unsuccessful from their point of view. When approaching a work, they admitted neither the existence of artistic norms different from their own nor the possibility of mistakes in their views on literature, language, and the universe.

The three critical methods discussed above—parody, criticism proper, and the replacement of the original text with a new one—were similar in their attitude toward an author's text. Ignoring its individuality and imposing on it the critic's own artistic criteria, they revealed the conventionality of the poetical devices of the criticized piece and thus destroyed it as an artistic unity. That is precisely what parody does to the parodied text. As Tuvia Shlonsky puts it, “The method of parody is to disrealize the norms which the original tries to realize, that is to say to reduce what is of normative status in the original to a convention or a mere device.”¹⁵ This end is achieved, as Tynianov points out, by “alteration of a literary work … as a system, [that is, by] transferring [it] into another system.”¹⁶ In other words, parody interprets the individual features of a parodied work according to artistic rules suggested by the parodist. Pretending not to understand this contradiction, the parodist attains a comical effect.

Eighteenth-century parodists applied this method with a vengeance. Fully confident that their rivals' artistic decisions could not be correct, they were straightforward in their disregard of the individuality of a parodied work (even perceiving this individuality as a negative feature) and in their desire to demonstrate the work's absurdity. So too with the critics of this period. Because they appraised a criticized work according to an abstract norm, critics could not comprehend it as an artistic unity. Therefore they considered it an absurdity, a violation of good taste, and a “confusion deserving of laughter and contempt.”¹⁷ A distortion of the artistic system of a criticized work produced a parodical effect.

To be sure, features of parody can be found in the criticism of all epochs, but only a strictly normative aesthetic mentality could generate criticism that was so close to parody in its approach and results. Lidiia Ginzburg, in her book On the Lyric, points out the methods in nineteenth-century criticism that were similar to those of eighteenth-century Classicism. Specifically, metaphors were frequently judged by normative principles—linguistic usage, logic, and common sense.¹⁸ There was, however, an important difference: The idea of one and only one perfect artistic decision had disappeared, and criticized authors could and frequently did use in their defense an argument about the “individuality” of their works. Thus, in the episode, analyzed by Ginzburg, P. A. Viazemsky, having exhausted all possible responses to Pushkin's criticism of one of his poems, finally retreated to this argument: “Get it into your head that this waterfall is nothing but a man churned up by a sudden passion. From this point of view, it seems that all the parts agree and all the expressions receive une arrière-pensée, which echoes everywhere.”¹⁹ Eighteenth-century writers never appealed to the special, individual point of view that would justify their artistic decisions, because only one possible point of view—that of reason—could be implied. Offended and enraged by their peers' criticism though they might be, eighteenth-century writers felt compelled to correct their alleged violations of the rules. The authority of the norm was above personal feelings and even authorial pride.²⁰

The same disregard for individuality can be detected in the critics' desire to rewrite an “incorrect” text. They saw such a text as a piece of nonsense, created out of stupidity or ignorance, which could be rearranged according to the rules and thus brought closer to the ideal. The author's plans and intentions were not taken into account. However, unlike criticism and parody, which preserved both conflicting artistic systems (the author's as well as the critic's or parodist's) for the reader, rewriting cast a criticized text aside and replaced it with a new one. The distortion of the criticized text did not occur before the reader's eyes, and a parodical effect was therefore lacking. Hereafter I will be interested in parodies and critical essays as texts that preserve the author's, albeit distorted, voice.

The exposition in parody of the conventional character of an individual artistic system turns the author's conventional style into his or her individual voice. As Tynianov says, “Instead of an author's persona [avtorskoe litso], an author's personality [avtorskaia lichnost'], with its everyday gestures, appears.”²¹ For eighteenth-century Russian literature this had enormous consequences. The literature of Russian Classicism was impersonal in principle. In an ode, tragedy, or fable the author was totally irrelevant. The author spoke on behalf of eternal truths, and no one was interested in an author's artistic and human individuality. The only relevant consideration was the work's conformity with the ideal. Criticism and parody eroded the abstract, supraindividual existence of a literary work. In the hands of the critic, a given work revealed a connection with a particular author's personality. It was always a negative personality, because the critic or parodist made an author responsible only for bad works: Good works belonged to eternity.

This phenomenon resulted in the appearance, in criticism and parodies, of certain images of literary opponents. Although some personal features allowed the reader to relate these images to particular people, they were in fact very far from lifelike. They were grotesque, parodical characters that critics offered as realistic portraits of their rivals. The symbolic names affixed to these images emphasized their grotesqueness. Thus, in parodies and satires Ivan Elagin was presented as Balaban (fool, blockhead) or Afrosin (from the Greek for “stupidity”). Trediakovsky appeared as Tresotinius (from the French très sot, “very stupid, foolish”), Tresotin, or simply Sotin. Sumarokov received the name Akolast (from the Greek for “wild, insolent”), and Lomonosov was known as Teleliui (fool, goof). The names all alluded to the stupidity, ignorance, and bad temper of their owners. Abstract as they were, these images gave the polemics of the mid-eighteenth century its well-known personal character.

The images of the three main participants in the literary polemics, Lomonosov, Sumarokov, and Trediakovsky, were naturally the most established and complete. However, each was developed to a different degree. Trediakovsky's parodical image was the most elaborate. It was first introduced by Sumarokov in his “Epistle on Poetry”: “And you, Shtivelius, can only talk nonsense.” Then the characters Tresotinius and Krititsiondius, two ridiculous pedants who held some of Trediakovsky's most cherished views, appeared in 1750, in Sumarokov's comedies Tresotinius and The Monsters. By the middle of the 1750's Trediakovsky was universally known as Shtivelius (or Shtivelii), Tresotinius (or Tresotin), and Sotin.

Trediakovsky's three hypostases shared certain comical features. They all adhered to idiosyncratic (“bad”) style, promoted unusual letters and odd spellings, and championed unpopular meters, first trochees and later the notorious “dactylo-trochees” (hexameters). All these traits can easily be traced to Trediakovsky's works. Parodists and critics picked them to represent Trediakovsky's literary position, exaggerated them, and included them in his parodical image.

Trediakovsky's allegedly bad style was the most ridiculed feature of his comical persona. As Lomonosov lamented in 1757, “For a long time your disgusting style has been a cause of laughter and grief for us.”²² More specifically, the poet was reproached for stylistic excesses, either frivolous colloquialisms or grave Slavonicisms. Sumarokov, in his essay “On Orthography,” provided a formula that, despite its obvious straightforwardness and polemical spirit, is still the most frequently quoted characterization of Trediakovsky's linguistic position: “Mr. Trediakovsky in his youth tried to spoil our orthography with the diction of the common people, according to which he arranged his orthography; and in old age [he tried to spoil it] with extreme Slavonicisms, which he made even more extreme.” In this passage Sumarokov quite correctly presents Trediakovsky's linguistic views diachronically: first “diction of the common people,” then “extreme Slavonicisms” (glubochaishaia Slavenshchizna). Popular belief, however, ascribed both views to Trediakovsky simultaneously, thus adding another flaw—namely, “mixing of styles,” or indiscriminate employment of conflicting stylistic elements—to the list of his stylistic failures. His usage, of course, was far from indiscriminate: In his choice of stylistic elements Trediakovsky followed well-defined principles, although the principles were different in the early and later years of his literary career. It is noteworthy that the young Trediakovsky actually promoted not common but “foppish” talk. Sumarokov refused to distinguish between the two: It was important for him that in the 1730's Trediakovsky's style was too colloquial for his taste and in the 1750's and 1760's, far too bookish.²³

Along with ridiculing Trediakovsky's colloquialisms and Slavonicisms, his contemporaries reproached the writer for the abuse of inversions. Trediakovsky's parodical doubles—Tresotinius of Tresotinius, Krititsiondius of The Monsters, and others—employed peculiar syntax in their poems: the word order was completely scrambled and the flow of phrases was frequently interrupted by sudden exclamations such as “oh!” and “ah!” Sumarokov's “Song,” a parody of Trediakovsky's poetry, is a good example:

Prоcs оt my usla svоbоda,
Mоj sbig s nij prоcs, о! i nrav.
Prоcs lybоvnay nivzgоda,
O lybiznyj vuds mоj zdrav.(24)

Freedom has abandoned me, and oh! my temper has fled with it too. Go away, love misfortune, O my dear, be well.

The second line is jumbled in the Russian original: The possessive pronoun moi (my) is separated from its noun, nrav (temper), by six words, the exclamation “oh!” and the conjunction “and” among others. In the fourth line the pronoun is not only in postposition but is also separated, by a verb, from the word that it defines.²⁵ Inversions and exclamations can both be found in abundance in Trediakovsky's works. In fact, especially in the 1750's, the poet used inversions even more intensively and elaborately than his parodists would reproduce. What was a carefully calculated device aimed at the creation of a high poetic style suitable, in Trediakovsky's opinion, for certain genres, Trediakovsky's critics tried to present as the uncontrolled interference of Latin syntax.

Trediakovsky's interest in questions of orthography and his advocacy of unusual spellings, which he introduced in his treatise Conversation on Orthography (1748), provided the scoffers with a wealth of material for mockery. The pedant Tresotinius, in Sumarokov's comedy, hilariously quarrels with everybody about the choice of letters for the Russian alphabet. Like Trediakovsky in his treatise on orthography, he insists that the letter s, zelo, is more suitable for the Russian alphabet than z, zemlia:

Tresotinius. Zapis'—here put an s.
A Solicitor. My good sir, those of us in offices do not use the s; now even in ABC books there is no s.
Tresotinius. I want, and I really want, to put an s and not a z.

In his work on orthography, Trediakovsky defends s because of its Latinized form and cites the fact that Peter the Great preferred it to z. Sumarokov, however, calls it by its Church Slavonic name, zelo, thus emphasizing its alleged archaic origin.²⁶

Lomonosov, in turn, made fun of Trediakovsky's orthography in epigrams. In “Artful singers …,” for example, he parodied Trediakovsky's spelling of masculine adjectives in the plural by Church Slavonic rules. To achieve a comical effect, Lomonosov applied these rules to everyday words:

Na ctо zi, Trisоtin, к nam tyniss I niкstati?
Naprasnо zlоbnyj sij ty pridpriyl sоvit,
Ctоv, lbsty tibi, коgda rоssijsкij prinyl svit
Svinyi vizgi vsi i diкii, i zlyi,
I istinyi ti, i lzivy, i кrivyi.

Wherefore, Trisotin, are you imposing [the ending] i on us inappropriately? You should not have taken that malicious advice, so that, flattering you, Russians accepted all pig squealings, both the wild and the vicious, and the true ones, and the false, and the wry.

Lomonosov presents the two last lines of the passage as a quotation from Trediakovsky. Traditional archaic spelling in this pseudoquotation comically contrasts with the vulgar and absurd contents, reinforcing the image of Trediakovsky as a bad stylist.²⁷

Another prominent feature of Trediakovsky's parodical image was a fondness for trochees. This detail reflected Trediakovsky's early views on syllabo-tonics: When he proposed his first syllabo-tonic verses in A New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verse in 1735, certain theoretical premises of his reform moved him to proclaim the superiority of the trochee over other feet.²⁸ In the early 1740's he changed his view and acknowledged the equality of all meters, but his reputation as the proponent of trochees had taken root. It was reinforced by his 1743 dispute with Lomonosov and Sumarokov about iambs and trochees. Trediakovsky's goal in this dispute was to assert the equality of the trochee, not its superiority, but the stereotype was set, and Trediakovsky came down in history as a poet with an unreasonable weakness for trochees.

In the late 1760's Trediakovsky's supposed love for trochees was overshadowed by another idiosyncrasy ascribed to him—a fondness for hexameters, or, as Trediakovsky himself called them, dactylo-trochees. This predilection was part of Trediakovsky's image as the creator of the unfortunate Tilemakhida. To restore the epic spirit of the classic plot, Trediakovsky rendered Fénelon's political novel into verse. He introduced a meter that he suggested was a Russian equivalent of the classical model and that he described as a combination of six trochaic and dactylic feet, with an occasional spondee. Later the meter proved to be an apt imitation of the original and was used, along with a similarly constructed pentameter, by Nikolai Gnedich and Vasilii Zhukovsky in their respective translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as in numerous nineteenth-century imitations of other classical forms. However, Trediakovsky was hardly ever commended for the development of this meter. On the contrary, it was generally acknowledged that the use of hexameters contributed to the spectacular failure of his attempt at an epic poem. Mockeries of the verse in Tilemakhida, together with mockeries of the poem's supposed soporific qualities and its gigantic size, became indispensable whenever Trediakovsky's name was mentioned. His skillful attempt to create a national equivalent of classical meter was perceived as a clumsy blunder, worthy only of laughter and sneering.²⁹

The name “pedant” consolidated all the details of Trediakovsky's comical image as it emerged in the literary polemics of the mid-eighteenth century. The notion of pedantry was a basic element of Trediakovsky's image at the very beginning of its formation. Shtivelius, the nickname Sumarokov suggested for Trediakovsky in his “Epistle on Poetry,” was borrowed from a German translation of L. H. Holberg's comedy Jacob von Tyboe eller den stortalende soldat (1725), in which it belonged to the ridiculous magister who unsuccessfully courted the young heroine. The pedant's name in the original was Magister Stygotius, but in German translation he was renamed Magister Stifelius, after the mathematician Michael Stifel (Stifelius), who had a reputation as a pedant because of his love for complicated operations with numbers and his unsuccessful prediction that the world would end in 1533.³⁰ In 1750 Sumarokov endowed another pedantic character with Trediakovsky's features. This was Tresotinius, in the comedy of the same name. Soon after that, Sumarokov wrote another comedy, The Monsters, in which Trediakovsky was impersonated by the pedant Krititsiondius.

Trediakovsky, in his criticism of Tresotinius in “Letter from Friend to Friend,” correctly pointed out that Sumarokov's first comedy borrowed certain features and situations from Molière's comedy Les femmes savantes (1672).³¹ The name Tresotinius itself was coined after the name of Trissotin, a character in the play. Like Molière's character, Tresotinius wants to marry the young heroine, but does not succeed. He writes poetry and reads his ridiculous creations to the ladies. The squabble between Sumarokov's Tresotinius and Bobembius resembles the quarrel between Molière's Trissotin and Vadius. The main plot of The Monsters follows Les femmes savantes even more closely. The relations between the young heroine's parents are similar. Her mother has the upper hand in the house, and the father is henpecked and even beaten by his wife. Like Molière's characters, they have chosen different bridegrooms for their daughter. Unlike Molière's Trissotin, Krititsiondius is not the main candidate for the heroine's hand in this play, but he intends to marry her nevertheless.

The plots were certainly not unique in European comedy. Trediakovsky himself named yet another play to which Sumarokov was indebted: Holberg's Jacob von Tyboe. In this play there is also a pedant among the heroine's unsuccessful suitors. The main dramatic situation in Tresotinius also resembles the one in Tartuffe. As in Molière's play, the conflict in Tresotinius revolves around the infatuation of the heroine's father with a pedant and hypocrite who wants to marry the reluctant heroine. Sumarokov, then, attempted to introduce into Russia a comedic plot that was widespread in Europe and that included a pedant among its popular characters. The comparisons to Molière or Holberg would not be particularly significant if Sumarokov had confined himself to the imitation of plots, which were archetypal.³²

However, Sumarokov not only imitated general situations popular in European comedy but tried to transplant onto Russian soil the forms and principles of literary infighting reflected in Molière's comedies. It is well known that Molière pictured two of his literary enemies in the characters Trissotin and Vadius: the poet Abbé Charles Cotin and the poet and scholar Gilles Ménage. Sumarokov reproduced this pair as Tresotinius and the rhetorician Bobembius, who corresponded to Sumarokov's literary opponents Trediakovsky and Lomonosov.³³ Trissotin's and Vadius's quarrel served as a model for Tresotinius's and Bobembius's heated dispute about whether the letter t should have one or three “legs.” Still, the subject of the dispute was taken from a Russian situation and reflected Lomonosov's and Trediakovsky's linguistic arguments.³⁴

Certain details facilitated the use of Trissotin's image to ridicule Trediakovsky. Thus, like Trediakovsky in his youth, Molière's character is a proponent of the linguistic theories of Claude Favre de Vaugelas, the “purifier” of the French language.³⁵ Like Trissotin, who writes poems that he himself considers specimens of elegant love poetry, Trediakovsky entered Russian literature as a proponent of the love theme. The pronounced eroticism of Tresotinius's song in Sumarokov's comedy (“Seeing your beauty, / I have become aroused”) refers both to Trediakovsky's sensual early poetry and Trissotin's dubious sonnet (Molière used an actual poem by Cotin). Trissotin's attempts at the role of ladies' man are reflected in Tresotinius's awkward efforts to talk gallantly to the young heroine, Klarisa. The reference here is also to Trediakovsky's linguistic views in the 1730's: Sumarokov's character, like the young Trediakovsky in his translation of Voyage à l'île d'Amour, uses elements of foppish talk, such as the overuse of the epithets sladkii and priiatnyi (“sweet” and “pleasant”) and the polite vy (plural “you”) instead of ty (singular “you”).

In The Monsters Sumarokov connected Trediakovsky with another notorious figure in French seventeenth-century literary history—Jean Chapelain. Poet, linguist, and founder of the Académie française, Chapelain was a highly esteemed figure of his time, but by the end of the seventeenth century, thanks to Boileau's severe criticism of his poem La Pucelle (1656), he became known as a paragon of pedantry and talentlessness.³⁶ In this capacity he appears in the opening lines of Sumarokov's “Epistle on Poetry.” In The Monsters, Chapelain's name serves to mock Krititsiondius, Trediakovsky's double. Sumarokov almost directly calls Trediakovsky “Chapelain”: Krititsiondius reproaches the author of Khorev and Tresotinius for calling “the wisest Mr. Chapelain … by the fictious name Tresotinius.” This is a clear mockery of Trediakovsky's “Letter from Friend to Friend,” in which he states several times that by Tresotinius Sumarokov meant “our mutual friend [i.e., Trediakovsky himself], indicating him, however, by an inexact name.”³⁷ Krititsiondius's eulogy of Chapelain actually makes fun of Trediakovsky: Krititsiondius praises Chapelain for his translation of Herodotus, which is an obvious substitution for Rollin's Histoire ancienne, translated by Trediakovsky. Finally, Sumarokov depicts Krititsiondius as a ridiculous epigone of Chapelain: “I made an addition to the book that Mr. Chapelain composed about the letter i, which, perhaps, is ridiculed by everyone; but posterity will have something else to say about it and will not believe that I was considered by my contemporaries to be a madman.”³⁸ The book attributed to Chapelain is, of course, Trediakovsky's Conversation on Orthography, in which, among other things, he discussed which letter was more suitable for the Russian alphabet, i or i.

Sumarokov had good grounds for endowing Trediakovsky with the name “the Russian Chapelain.” Upon his arrival in Russia from Paris, Trediakovsky obviously tried to play the same role as organizer of cultural life for which Chapelain was famous. He proposed the establishment of the Russian Assembly, a replica of the Académie française, which Chapelain had started with Cardinal Richelieu's patronage. In his contract with the Academy of Sciences and in his “Speech to the Russian Assembly,” Trediakovsky took upon himself the creation of a grammar and a dictionary, which were supposed to purify the Russian language exactly as Chapelain's grammar and dictionary had purified the French language. Finally, like Chapelain, who formulated the canon of the unities in “Les sentiments de l'Académie française sur ‘le Cid’” (1632), Trediakovsky took upon himself the introduction of classical literary rules into Russia. He attempted to fulfill these intentions in A New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verse and in the translations of Horace's De arte poetica and Boileau's L'art poétique. Trediakovsky's efforts in this direction, like Chapelain's, were not appreciated, bringing him yet more mockery as a pedant. Except in Sumarokov's comedy, the name of Chapelain was not used for Trediakovsky in the eighteenth century. The comparison resurfaced, however, in the nineteenth century, when the Innovators used it in their polemics with the Archaists and when Lazhechnikov included it into his ironic characterization of Trediakovsky in the novel The Ice House.³⁹

The images of the pedants Shtivelius and Tresotinius took better root, and these nicknames became Trediakovsky's usual appellations. They forced his contemporaries and his literary heirs to forget the young and enthusiastic Trediakovsky who had arrived in Russia from Paris eager to introduce new literary notions and genres to his compatriots: the précieux romance, love poetry in the libertine tradition, and a style modeled after the speech of “the most distinguished and skillful noble estate” (znatneishee i iskusneishee blagorodnykh soslovie).⁴⁰ Ironically, Trediakovsky's libertinism, his interest in the linguistic theories of Vaugelas, and his attempts to introduce vers de société were precisely what contributed, as an analysis of Sumarokov's Tresotinius suggests, to the identification of Trediakovsky with Trissotin and thus to the establishment of his image as a pedant.

Lomonosov's and Sumarokov's comical images never developed to such an extent. However, parodical characters in which contemporaries saw allusions to Lomonosov and Sumarokov can easily be found in the literary criticism and polemics of the middle of the eighteenth century.

Lomonosov was known for his high-flown, inflated, and obscure style, which Sumarokov parodied in his Nonsense Odes:

Privysi zvizd, luny i sоlnцa
          V vоstоrgi vоzlitay nyns,
          Iz gоrnik оblastij vziray
          Na pоlunоcnyj окian.(41)

Above the stars, the moon, and the sun, in raptures, now I ascend; from the celestial provinces I look down upon the northern ocean.

The turgidity of Lomonosov's style, as well as his other deficiencies, was often attributed to his inclination to strong drink. Thus, in the anonymous “Epistle from Vodka and Moonshine to L[omonosov],” the drinks complain that they are held responsible for the poet's high-flown style:

а nyni puklyi stiki tvоi citay,
Ni riфm, ni smyslu v nik nigdi ni оbritay
I razbiray vedоr tvоik sumburnyk оd,
Kricit vsyк, ctо tо nas—ni tvоj sij tuklyj
          plоd,
Ctо budtо my—ni ty stiki slagaiss,
Kоtоryk ty i sam sоvsim ni pоnimaiss,
Ctо ni pirmissкij zar v tibi uzi gоrit,
Nо vоdкa i vinо sim vedоrоm gоvоrit,
Ctо tоlsко ty tоgda i bridiss liss stikami,
Kaк kvatiss pоlnyj stоф nas pоlnymi ustami.

And now, reading your inflated poetry, not finding either rhymes or sense anywhere, and going over the nonsense of your muddled odes, everybody cries that this is our, not your, rotten fruit, that we, not you, write the poetry that you yourself do not understand at all, that it is not a Permessian fever that burns in you, but vodka and wine that speak through this nonsense, that you produce your delirious poetry only when you drink a whole bottle of us in great gulps.

Another sarcastic attack on this unfortunate habit was a poem by Trediakovsky written in the late 1750's: “Tsyganosov, when he sleeps off the Castilian waters. …” The poem alluded to a mistake (rather, a misprint) in the epithet “Castalian dew” in Lomonosov's Collection of Various Compositions in Verse and in Prose (1751) and attributed the mistake to the author's alcoholic intoxication.⁴²

The comical drunkard is portrayed as rude and arrogant:

On, znatnо, ctо tоgda sumin byl оt vina;
Brоsatssy z na lydij—strasts psyniцy vsigda.

He was then apparently drunk with wine; it is always the passion of a drunkard to attack people.

He is pictured as an upstart and braggart:

Dil slavоy svоik оn pоkvalylsy bоlsnо,
I taк uz gоvоril, ctо ni naslоss imu
Pоdоbnоgо vо vsim, ni rоvni pо vsimu.

He greatly boasted about the glory of his deeds, and it appeared from his talk that there was nobody who could be compared to him or who could be his equal.

Ignorant and stupid, he cannot be considered an original poet:

Taкоgо v nasi dni my vidim Tilijyy,
Ogrоmnоgо vraly i glupоgо kоluy,
Kоtоryj Gintira i mnоgik оbокral
I, mysli ik pisav, narоd nas udivlyl.

Such is the Teleliui that we see in our days, an enormous liar and a stupid flunky, who robbed Guenther and many others and, copying their thoughts, amazed our people.⁴³

References to Lomonosov's low origin, called “meanness” with all the insulting nuances of the word, completed Teleliui's portrait. Sumarokov described him as

                    v cinu urоda
          Iz sama pоdla rоda,
Kоtоrоgо pakats prоizvila prirоda.

a high-ranking freak of the meanest origin who was created by nature to plow.

In a word, Lomonosov was “Parnassian mud, a scribbler, and not a creator.”⁴⁴

Sumarokov appeared in the polemics as a malicious envier and boaster. Here is Lomonosov's scornful opinion of him, expressed in his letter to Ivan Shuvalov of January 19, 1761: “How you can deal with such a man, who speaks only in order to scold everyone, praises himself, and considers his poor rhyming more important than all human knowledge!”⁴⁵ Trediakovsky also found Sumarokov's alleged pretensions unjustified. Sumarokov, in his opinion, was nothing but a poor ignoramus: “I cannot refrain from offering you now, dear sir, irrefutable proof that the author's knowledge is so small that it could not be smaller.”⁴⁶ Rivals attributed Sumarokov's envy and malice to his evil nature, of which his physical defects (stuttering and a tic) were the clearest indications:

Ktо ryz, plisiv, migun, zaiкa i кartav,
Ni mоzit byti v tоm niкaк kоrоsij nrav.(47)

A redhead, a baldhead, a blinker, a stutterer, and a triller of r's simply cannot be of good disposition.

The verdict was a familiar one: Sumarokov was a plagiarist and a worthless versifier. Such was Lomonosov's passionate accusation, uttered in response to the praise (“génie créateur”) given to Sumarokov by Abbé Lefevre in his “Discours sur le progrés de beaux arts en Russie.” Lomonosov wrote with spite and indignation: “The génie créateur used all the best pieces from the French poets in his tragedies, but with lots of awful offenses against the Russian language, and disgustingly integrated them with his own thoughts.”⁴⁸

These rude and often unjust characterizations made up the collective image of the “inane rhymester” (nesmyslennyi rifmotvorets, in Sumarokov's words), which is how the literary opponents of the mid-eighteenth century saw one another. Such a stereotypic image was attached to a concrete literary figure by means of a few individual traits, such as Lomonosov's actual weakness for alcohol, Sumarokov's tic and stutter, and Trediakovsky's interest in trochees. The majority of the characteristics, however, recurred: boasting, plagiarism, stupidity, ignorance, lack of taste and talent.

The boundaries between conventional and individual traits were not fixed. For example, Lomonosov made an attempt to convert alcoholism, his own real-life trait, into a conventional trait in a literary rival's comical portrait. He tried to ascribe it to Trediakovsky in his poem “To Zubnitsky”:

Niкtо ni pоminaj nam pоdlоsti kоduls
I к psynstvu tvоimu pоtribnyk кrasоuls.

No one should remind us of the mean stilts and the bowls that are needed for your drinking.

The stilts and bowls were mentioned in Trediakovsky's epigram published in his A New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verse, but in real life Trediakovsky was no drunkard.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, Lomonosov at least partly succeeded, and accusations of drunkenness can be found in later portrayals of Trediakovsky. Lazhechnikov mentions it on several occasions in his novel (pp. 68, 73, 256). The legend of Trediakovsky's alcoholism was undoubtedly promoted by his daring translation of Boileau's “docte et sainte ivresse” (in his “Ode sur la prise de Namur,” 1694) as “sober intoxication,” trezvoe pianstvo, in his “Ode on the Surrender of the City of Gdansk” (1734; in the 1752 version Trediakovsky changed it to “strange intoxication,” strannoe pianstvo).

The value of these comical characterizations was not absolute, and a negative trait in such an image could be understood in a different context as a positive one, and vice versa. Thus, theory and practice did not agree on the question of imitations. Theory permitted and encouraged them, but as soon as criticism revealed an author's personal responsibility for “bad” work, imitation began to be seen as plagiarism—the attitude that prevails in literatures with a firm notion of authorship. Likewise, what literary opponents saw as shameless boasting could be, in the author's view, a sincere assertion of the objective value of an artistic position. In the context of normative aesthetics, straight-forward positive self-appraisals were justified and even necessary to promote correct artistic principles.

These self-appraisals, as well as dithyrambs by supporters, present another, contrasting outlook upon the literary activities of Trediakovsky, Sumarokov, and Lomonosov. They preserve the writers' lofty images, developed in the context of the same polemics. Instead of Balabans and Teleliuis (which had at least some individual features), these highly conventional images presented ideal Russian Pindars and Northern Racines. The names of outstanding ancient and modern writers were used in appellations, not for individual human beings, but for types. Even the difference between common nouns and proper names faded, and a surname became a title, designating not an individual but a class.⁵⁰

Of this nature was Sumarokov's praise for Lomonosov in his “Epistle on Poetry,” in which he compared him to Malherbe and Pindar. The poet was even more highly extolled in the poem by Nikolai Popovsky that accompanied Lomonosov's portrait in the first volume of his Collection of Various Compositions in Verse and in Prose (2nd ed., 1757-59):

Mоsкоvsкij zdiss Parnas izоbrazil vitiy,
Ctо cistyj slоg stikоv i prоzy vvil v Rоssiy.
Ctо v Rimi Tiцirоn i ctо Virgilij byl,
Tо оn оdin v svоim pоnytii vmistil,—
Otкryl natury kram bоgatym slоvоm rоssоv
Primir ik оstrоty v nauкak Lоmоnоsоv.(51)

The Moscow Parnassus has depicted here an orator, who introduced to Russia a pure style of poetry and prose. What Cicero and Virgil were for Rome, that he alone encompasses in himself. He opened the temple of Nature with the rich language of the Russians, Lomonosov is an example of their sharpness of mind in sciences.

Sumarokov also received his share of exaggerated praise. Thus, Elagin wrote to him in the “Satire on a Fop and Coquettes”:

Otкrytils tainstva lybоvnyy nam liry,
Tvоriц prislavnyy i pysnyy “Simiry,”
Iz mоzgu rоzdsijsy bоgini mudrоj syn,
Napirstniк Bоalоv, rоssijsкij nas Rasin,
Zasitniк istiny, gоnitils zlyk pоrокоv,
Blagij ucitils mоj, sкazi, о Sumarокоv!
Gdi riфmy ty biriss?(52)

He who discovered for us the mysteries of the love lyre, creator of the famous and splendid Semira, son of the wise goddess who was born from the brain, Boileau's bosom companion, our Russian Racine, proponent of truth, persecutor of vicious faults, my good teacher, tell me, O Sumarokov, where do you find your rhymes?

Trediakovsky's lofty image was subtle, but it did exist even after his early fame seemed to have betrayed him. In 1766 an anonymous supporter wrote a poem on Trediakovsky's portrait, which contained the following lines:

Stik nacavsigо stоpоj prizdi vsik v Rоssii,
Vzоr kudоzistvоm cirty pridstavlyyt sii:
On ists Tridiaкоvsкij, trudоlybnyj фilоlоg,
Kaк tо uviryit s mirоj i biz miry slоg
Pоcisti lisits igо strasts коls ni кipila,
Nо vоzdats imu vinок pravda priduspila.(53)

The features of the person who was the first in Russia to begin to use feet in poetry are presented for view through art: He is Trediakovsky, a diligent philologist, as is confirmed by measured and unmeasured styles [i.e., poetry and prose]. No matter how there seethed a desire to deprive him of the honor, the truth succeeded in rendering a crown to him.

The image of Trediakovsky the pioneer did not take root and was soon totally replaced in the literary consciousness of the epoch by Trediakovsky's parodical image. Moreover, Trediakovsky's positive qualities, such as diligence, and his achievements, such as the fact that he was (with Lomonosov) the first Russian professor to be appointed to the Academy of Sciences, were reclassified as comical and included in his parodical image. Radishchev called him “the indefatigable toiler Trediakovsky,” and Karamzin wrote with irony: “Trediakovsky's name will be known to our most remote descendants. Let us preserve his image and respect in him—diligence, learning, and nature's ill fortune.”⁵⁴ These features reinforced the central idea in Trediakovsky's comical portrait: pedantry.

For a long time both Lomonosov and Sumarokov had two contrasting images, one pejorative and one laudatory. Sometimes laudatory characteristics were applied to both, but the domains of priority were divided: Lyrics were considered Lomonosov's realm and dramaturgy Sumarokov's. But overall Sumarokov seemed to be the natural victor. Indeed, in the 1750's and 1760's, he was the recognized leader of a whole group of young poets, whereas Lomonosov was alone and, after his disciple and protégé Popovsky died in 1760, did not have followers. When Catherine the Great ascended the throne in 1762, Sumarokov, who had political ties with the empress's supporters, could expect—and initially received—her endorsement. Lomonosov, a recognized extoller of Elizabeth, fell into disfavor. His death went almost unnoticed. Semen Poroshin, the tutor of the young Grand Duke Paul, wrote down the boy's reaction to the news of Lomonosov's death in his diary: “I told him about Lomonosov's death. He said: ‘Why should we pity the fool, he only squandered government funds and accomplished nothing.’”⁵⁵ The boy's opinion apparently reflected the way Lomonosov was treated at Catherine the Great's court—despite her well-publicized visit to him in June 1764.

In the beginning of the 1770's, however, the situation began to change. Over Sumarokov's vigorous objections, an idealized image of Lomonosov swiftly replaced the previous parodical one. From this point on, virtually all the achievements of eighteenth-century Russian literature began to be attributed to Lomonosov. At the same time, certain undesirable features of his image were reinterpreted as favorable. Lomonosov's notorious rudeness became heroic strength, and his low origin was now cited to his advantage. Overshadowed by admiration, the parodical image of Lomonosov, formed in the polemics with his literary rivals, was practically forgotten.

The metamorphosis of Lomonosov's image was especially amazing given the atmosphere of sharp ideological disagreement within the literary circles of the last third of the eighteenth century. Politically independent men of letters who belonged to the nobility and gentry (Fonvizin, Novikov, and Radishchev, among others) disapproved of what they perceived to be the flattery of despots in Lomonosov's odes, whereas writers of lower social status (Vasilii Petrov or even, for that matter, Derzhavin), who tended to cooperate with the government, continued the Lomonosovian tradition of the laudatory ode. The ideological infighting failed to interfere with the canonization of Lomonosov's name. The independents eventually had to accept the high literary appraisals of Lomonosov.

Sumarokov's prestige, accordingly, began to diminish. Opinions about him in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were in general favorable, but reserved. His name, unlike Lomonosov's, rarely appeared with the epithet “great” and even less often with “divine” or “inimitable.” His position as the first Russian dramatist was generally recognized, although his abilities in this field were not always praised. Moreover, he was no longer given the first place in literature in general. Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth century even some of his admirers considered him Lomonosov's disciple. Radishchev wrote in his A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow: “A great man can give rise to a great man; and this is your triumphant crown. O Lomonosov, you brought forth Sumarokov.” Sumarokov's disciple Kheraskov expressed the same opinion, so insulting for Sumarokov: “At the time when this great man [Lomonosov] outlined the path to the dwelling of the muses and laid the cornerstone of our Parnassus, Mr. Sumarokov began to flourish.”⁵⁶ On the whole it can be said that in judging Sumarokov, the next literary generation was much more indulgent with him than with Trediakovsky, but more critical of him than of Lomonosov. As Karamzin wrote:

Sumarokov, having chosen for himself a vaster sphere, influenced the public even more strongly than Lomonosov. Like Voltaire, he wanted to be brilliant in many genres—and contemporaries called him our Racine, Molière, La Fontaine, Boileau. Posterity does not think so; but knowing the difficulty of first attempts and the impossibility of achieving perfection at once, it with pleasure finds many beauties in Sumarokov's works and does not want to judge his shortcomings severely.⁵⁷

Sumarokov was given a modest but revered place in the history of Russian literature, and his name was rarely mentioned out of historical context.

His comical image was not completely forgotten either and became secondary, like his lofty image. In his comical role Sumarokov usually appeared in anecdotes not alone but as Trediakovsky's sidekick. Trediakovsky and Sumarokov formed a comical pair, “Trissotin and Vadius,” as Belinsky called them on several occasions. Together they were frequently juxtaposed to the great Lomonosov. Ironically, in his comedy Tresotinius Sumarokov intended the role of Vadius for Lomonosov. Tradition, however, reserved this role for the author of the comedy himself. …

Unlike the culture hero, the mythological fool does not have a biography; he has behavior, which is always wrong. Accounts of his life consist mostly of anecdotes about his stupid, harmful, or treacherous actions. Therefore, despite obvious similarities to Lomonosov's life, the potentially heroic circumstances of Trediakovsky's biography—his passion for knowledge, which spurred him to flee to the centers of education, first Moscow and then Paris; his devotion to his vocation; his firmness in the face of misfortune; his persistence in his work for the glory of Russian literature—did not find their way into the myth of the “new” Russian literature. On the contrary, many of these circumstances were interpreted in a comical way, providing material for the anecdotes about Trediakovsky the fool.

Trediakovsky's most important feature as a mythological antihero was his ability to create bad and harmful rules and models for the newly emerging Russian literature—bad, that is, in the opinion of his contemporaries and literary descendants. The whole range of phenomena that lay outside the path shown to Russian literature by Lomonosov (such as ternary meters, unrhymed verse, and a heavy Slavonic style) was associated with his name. Authors who chose to stray from the path risked being scorned for their affinity to Trediakovsky. Anticipating mockery, Radishchev excluded his poem Creation of the World from the final version of A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow because of its metrical similarity to Trediakovsky's Tilemakhida. He chose to publish instead the ode “Liberty,” written in Lomonosovian iambic tetrameter. Mikhail Murav'ev, the author of the poem “Grove” (1777), the first Russian work, after Tilemakhida, written in hexameters, also felt uneasy because of the similarity of his work to Trediakovsky's epic poem. He wrote to Dmitrii Khvostov in the late 1770's:

I do not know yet whether you will approve of my bias toward the latter [“Grove”]. I chose for it a seldom-used meter that, nevertheless, has the right to exist in our language, as Lomonosov and Trediakovsky, the archons of the art, have decided. The latter has disgraced it by using it in Tilemakhida. But this learned man—who was remarkable proof that talents are allocated by nature—disfigured every kind of poetry that he touched. Maybe I have used it in vain. This is what is called the willfulness of an artist, if I may be supposed to have it.⁵⁸

Murav'ev named both Lomonosov and Trediakovsky “archons” (nachal' niki) of Russian literature but stressed Trediakovsky's negative role as the author who set a bad example. Murav'ev, however, was a brave man, and soon after that he used hexameters to translate the five opening lines of the Iliad. It was the first—and in the eighteenth century the only—Russian translation of Homer in hexameters.

If Murav'ev (like Radishchev later) tried to overcome what was, from his point of view, the negative influence of Trediakovsky's works, other authors considered the task impossible and rejected everything that had even the slightest relation to Trediakovsky's legacy. The translator and journalist Vasilii Podshivalov, in his “Letter to a Damsel F** About Versification,” published in the first issue of the magazine A Pleasant and Useful Pastime (1794-98), disapprovingly connected the anapestic meter with Trediakovsky's name: “It is not to be found anywhere but in Trediakovsky or other authors like him.” In the same essay unrhymed verse was condemned, and, what is important here, reference was made to Trediakovsky's opinion on this matter: “I will add that rhymes are considered empty rattles by those people who do not have a talent for poetry and [do not have] that energy that … provides quiet and pleasant moments in life.”⁵⁹ Indeed, in the 1750's and 1760's Trediakovsky consistently opposed the use of rhymes and repeatedly expressed his disapproval. Podshivalov referred to the passage in Trediakovsky's introduction to Tilemakhida, in which the poet called rhymes “a child's pipe” and “an adolescent's toy” and claimed that rhymed verses “jingle” with rhymes “as if to entertain infants.”⁶⁰

A special term, tred'iakovshchina, was even coined to label “nonaesthetic” phenomena. It occurred as early as 1789 in Nikolai L'vov's criticism of a poem by Vasilii Kapnist: “There are some awkward expressions, blunders that recall Trediakovsky [tred'iakovshchiny] and enjambements that the language does not allow.” Stepan Zhikharev testified in his memoirs that his hexameter poem received the same epithet from an audience in 1807.⁶¹ This caustic neologism demonstrates the mythological nature of Trediakovsky's comical image. For his contemporaries and literary descendants, the poet was an anti-demiurge, a mythological fool who, by his stupid or evil deeds, provided a paradigm for anti-poetry.

The image of Trediakovsky the anti-demiurge was endowed, in accordance with the mythological prototype, with chthonic features. His human nature was questioned. He was declared a non-Christian, and it was implied that he had relations with demons and the underworld.⁶² Sumarokov clearly hinted at Trediakovsky's “nonhuman,” diabolic nature in Tresotinius. In this comedy the character Bramarbas says about the poet's double: “He does not have human blood; he has Syrian and Chaldean blood.” On the one hand, this is a reference to Trediakovsky's allegedly fruitless learning (cf. Tresotinius's remark “I have the title of teacher of Arabic, Syrian, and Chaldean languages”).⁶³ On the other hand, however, both Syria and Chaldea (as well as Arabia, for that matter) were connected in Christian tradition with astrology and magic. In the Russian tradition Chaldeans were firmly associated with the biblical story about sending the young Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael into the fiery furnace for their refusal to worship the golden image. Two Chaldeans were part of a miracle play, “The Furnace Act” (“Peshchnoe deistvo”), which was performed in Russia in churches during Advent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From characters in a miracle play, the Chaldeans gradually developed into the personages of popular Yuletide festivals who for twelve days ran around in jesters' dress and performed all sorts of nasty pranks. They were considered pagans at that time and had to undergo the rite of baptism on the eve of Epiphany. Thus, Sumarokov's association of Trediakovsky with Chaldeans characterized him as a repository of fruitless learning, a malicious jester, a carrier of satanic knowledge, and a pagan.⁶⁴

Almost a hundred years after Sumarokov wrote Tresotinius, Lazhechnikov repeated the accusation of paganism and diabolism, calling Trediakovsky's poetry “nonhuman verse” (p. 255), meaning both “awful beyond human comprehension” and “alien to the human race, inhuman, diabolic.” The two features, non-Christianity and nonhumanity, were combined in the term nekhrest, “non-Christian,” which Lazhechnikov gave to his character: Trediakovsky acts both “nonhumanly” and “non-Christianly” when he “commits an outrage [rugaetsia]” upon the head of his dead enemy (p. 302).

An anonymous poem written in the late 1750's, in the context of the polemics about Lomonosov's anticlerical “Hymn to the Beard,” even suggested Trediakovsky's kinship with demons:

Ktо zazig?
Lziprоrок.
Iz кaкоgо lisu?
On оdin
Trisоtin
Sirdцim srоdin bisu.(65)

Who set the blaze? The false prophet. From which forest? Tresotin is the only one who in his heart is akin to a demon.

The appellation “false prophet,” which in the context of the polemics referred to Old Believers, at the same time emphasized Trediakovsky's role as a provider of bad examples.

In Khmel'nitsky's comedy Russian Faust, a character named Trediakovsky displays a deep interest in the supernatural. With his sidekick, Martyn Zadeka (a legendary person with a reputation as an astrologer, chiromancer, and soothsayer), he unsuccessfully tries to investigate allegations that Iakov Brius—a Russian statesman and a dilettante scientist whom tradition accused of being a black magician—engaged in sorcery and witchcraft.

Mikhail Dmitriev, in his satire “Twelve Sleepy Essays” (1839), presents Trediakovsky as the devil himself, tempting the journalist and scholar Mikhail Kachenovsky to sell his soul. Here is the portrait of Trediakovsky when he appears to collect his prey:

Glyds! коgti—кazday ruкa!
          Liцо—кaк rylо savкi!
Iz buкlij—vyrоsli rоga,
          I кlyк—iz bоrоdavкi!(66)

He [Kachenovsky] sees claws on each of his [Trediakovsky's] hands! His face looks like a cur's snout! From his locks, horns have grown, and a fang has grown from a wart.

Sometimes tradition explained Trediakovsky's alleged artistic failures by the fact that he was possessed by a demon. In Iakov Kniazhnin's poem “A Battle of Poets” (1765), Trediakovsky is in the power of a hideous creature, Desire to Write (pisat' Okhota). The monster forces the poet to write his horrid poems:

Tam Tridsyкоvsкij, sij pоzeii lybitils,
Dly riфmy razuma, rassudкa istribitils,
Na кuci кnig liza, ists prоsit, pits v stikak,
Prid nim cudоvisi о mnоgik gоlоvak,
Kоtоry аpоllоn satirami scitait,
Nо tsitnо pоgubits urоda оn zilait:
Gdi byla gоlоva, tam stо gоlоv rastit,
Ni кrоvs—cirnil pоtок v grudi igо ticit.
Onо, stо кnig dirza ruкоj sukоy,
Zmit Tridsyкоvsкоgо nоs коlкоy nоgоy
I nudit prilоzits vо riфmy gоry кnig
I vsy vsilinnuy vmistits v idinyj stik.(67)

There Trediakovsky, this lover of poetry, the destroyer of reason for the sake of rhyme, lying on a heap of books, asks in verse to eat and drink. Before him there is a monster with numerous heads, which Apollo considers satires; but in vain he wants to destroy the freak: Where a head has been, there a hundred heads appear; not blood, but a stream of ink flows in its chest. Holding a hundred thick books in its skinny hand, it presses Trediakovsky's nose with a prickly foot and forces him to put heaps of books into rhyme and to embrace the whole universe in one line.

In other instances Trediakovsky himself was pictured as a chthonic monster. In Pushkin's early poem “To Zhukovsky” (1816), Trediakovsky (along with Sumarokov) appears among the screaming monsters of the underworld, who represent the members of the Colloquium of Lovers of the Russian Word (Beseda liubitelei russkogo slova), a literary group against which the young Pushkin was engaged in a literary struggle:

                              nad mracnimi tоlpami
Vо tsmi dva prizraкa sкlоnilisy glavami.
Odin na grudy sil i prоzy i stikоv—
Tyzilyi plоdy pоlunоcnyk trudоv,
Usоpsik оd, pоem zabvinnyi mоgily!
S ulybкоj vnimlit vоj stоpоslоzitils kilyj:
Prid nim rastirzannyj stinait Tilimak;
Ziliznоi pirо sкrypit v igо pirstak
I tynit za sоbоj giкzamitry sukii,
Spоndii zistкii i daкtili tugii.(68)

Above the gloomy crowds, in darkness, two phantoms sit, bending their heads. One of them has sat on piles of prose and poems, the heavy fruits of midnight labors, the forgotten graves of deceased odes and poems! The puny versifier heeds the howl with a smile: Before him the mauled Telemachus groans; the iron pen scratches in his fingers and pulls after it dry hexameters, coarse spondees, and stiff dactyls.

As a chthonic creature, Trediakovsky appeared in stories about trips to the underworld—a genre popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Unlike Lomonosov, who was presented in such works as a forefather ruling from his grave the community created by his civilizing efforts, Trediakovsky was pictured as a monster of the underworld, a demon who tortured sinners for their bad behavior during life. This was his function in Bobrov's work “Incident in the Realm of Shadows.” In the conclusion of this work Lomonosov condemns a Westernizer, Galloruss, to the eternal reading and analyzing of Tilemakhida in the company of the Velche Furies (the Romantic equivalent of the avenging deities that was introduced by Bobrov): “Mercury takes him [Galloruss] to the cave of the Velche Furies, … gets a book in quarto, which is called Tilemakhida, and seats him with it between the two awful woman shades. The dismayed Galloruss, cursing the day of his new birth, his immortality, and his illusory fame, sits down on the frail turf bench and against his will opens the heavy book.”⁶⁹

Trediakovsky's alleged ties with the underworld and death were numerous and various, ranging from a mere mention of his grave, to insinuations that he had been condemned to hell for his bad poetry, to assertions that his works had deadly powers. Radishchev, in A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, spoke of Trediakovsky's grave, “covered with the moss of oblivion,” and suggested that someday future generations would “dig up” the poet from his grave and begin to enjoy his poetry. Nikolai Nikolev, on the contrary, did not anticipate the poet's resurrection: In his parody of Trediakovsky's poetry, “Ode 2: To the Most Wise Felitsa from the Old Russian Poet from the Realm of the Dead” (published in 1798), Nikolev depicted Trediakovsky as a sinner who had been condemned to hell for his writings: “And I, a great sinner, am wasting away in hell for my unusual passion for poetry.”⁷⁰ Lazhechnikov, who in his novel faithfully followed all the details of the myth about Trediakovsky the fool, used every opportunity to stress the poet's alleged connection with death. Thus, Lazhechnikov presents Trediakovsky's translation of Rollin's histories as a grave for the renowned historiographer: The volumes in Trediakovsky's bookshelves have “the epitaph: Rollin” (p. 255). In the same passage he suggests that Trediakovsky's translation of Fénelon's Télémaque is essentially a murder of its main character: “Ci gît [here is buried] the son of Odysseus, born on the island of Ithaca, cherished by Minerva and Fénelon, and slaughtered in Saint Petersburg by the professor of eloquence” (p. 255). In another passage Trediakovsky boasts that he can easily change an epithalamion into a poem on death: “What is there that we cannot do? Oh! ho, ho! And I venture to report to you that it is necessary only to force out some words, playful and frisky as little mountain goats, and to knock into their place [words that are] mournful and heavy as the black bullocks who laboriously tear the earth's womb with a plow” (p. 257). Trediakovsky's works, as presented by Lazhechnikov, are deadly too. Thus, Volynsky fears Tilemakhida “as if it were a stone brought to kill him with its weight” (p. 55).

Sometimes, however, Trediakovsky's works, especially Tilemakhida, induced sleep instead of death. The magazine All Sorts of Odds and Ends, published in 1769-70 under the auspices of Catherine the Great, was the first to add this feature to Trediakovsky's mythological image. Tilemakhida, the magazine suggested, was the best remedy for insomnia. Radishchev, whose purpose in the Memorial for a Dactylo-Trochaic Knight was to attack and, ultimately, to dissipate Trediakovsky's mythological image, used this detail in the context of his own game. His characters also recite Tilemakhida to induce sleep, but a special kind of sleep that is akin to a state of poetic inspiration.⁷¹

Since Hypnos and Thanatos are twins, the soporific qualities of Trediakovsky's poetry also allude to the chthonic nature of his image as a fool. Moreover, the ability to induce death and sleep are interchangeable in the myth, as is evident in the following appraisal of Trediakovsky's works by Vasilii Anastasevich in his poem “On Tilemakhida” (1811?): “I will admit that I often used to sleep over it [Trediakovsky's translation ofA Voyage to the Isle of Love] like a dead man.” The words used in the original, sypal mertvetski, “used to sleep like a dead man,” imply death as well as drunken sleep, since the word mertvetski, “like a dead man,” is employed almost exclusively in the expression mertvetski p'ian, “dead drunk.”⁷²

This association of the mythological Trediakovsky with the underworld explains the fact that the most widely known lines from Tilemakhida were the passages that depicted the monsters of the underworld, Death and Cerberus: “A putrid monster, bony, deaf, dumb, and blind” and “A stout monster, wild, huge, and with a three-throated maw.”⁷³ Generations of Russian writers, from Radishchev to Pushkin and Nikolai Polevoy, quoted these lines, laughed at them, referred to them as examples of the most typical “Trediakovskian” verses, and used them to tease their literary opponents.

By no means did Trediakovsky's supposed relations with demons, death, and the underworld, or the deadly powers of his works, make his mythological persona frightening. These were the features of his comical image as a mythological fool, and the mythological fool's demonic nature in no way interferes with the laughter he elicits. On the contrary, it promotes laughter, because laughing is the mythological way to cope with death and chaos—which the fool represents. The fool is ridiculed not only when he induces death but also when he himself dies or is beaten, disfigured, or insulted and especially when he is unsuccessful in undertakings that threaten the communal order. When lacking the mythological spirit, this laughter can be cruel, but in the context of mythological behavior it is a perfectly justified and benevolent reaction by the community to the fool's conduct. It celebrates the victory of life over death and secures the continuity of culture. It confirms the soundness of the rules and norms that the fool tries to destroy by his undertakings, and ensures that the contrary behavior that the fool tries to impose on the community will not find its way into communal practice. The very existence of fools and their ridicule is crucial for the preservation of the existing order and thus for the survival of the community.

In the myth about Trediakovsky the fool, the mockery of the poet reaches truly mythological proportions. His learnedness, his persistence, the peculiarities of his literary and linguistic positions, his style and verse—everything was derided regardless of its actual merits or faults. The mere reading of his works was said to elicit irrepressible laughter. Thus, Nikolai Ostolopov wrote in his Dictionary (1821) about Trediakovsky's tragedy, Deidamia (1750): “They also say that this sovereign [Catherine the Great] wanted to see Deidamia on stage; but the actors were unable to perform this tragic work, because they simply could not refrain from laughter.” Similarly, in the early version of the chapter “Tver” of his A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow Radishchev expressed concern that the use of dactyls might remind the reader of Tilemakhida and therefore induce laughter and interfere with his intentions.⁷⁴ Both Lazhechnikov and Nikolai Polevoy believed that the mere recitation of Trediakovsky's poetry or even mention of one of his notorious works, Deidamia for example, was a comical device powerful enough to elicit the reader's laughter.

In the case of Trediakovsky's works one might attempt to argue that the derision was justified by their poor quality. However, no such justification can be possibly found for the ridicule of the misfortunes that haunted Trediakovsky throughout his life. This personal aspect leaves little doubt about the mythological nature of the laughter. Outside the mythological context contemporaries and subsequent generations who laughed at Trediakovsky's ill luck would be branded extremely vicious people. However, ethical standards did not apply, since within the myth this seemingly cruel ridicule was actually directed not at Vasilii Kirillovich Trediakovsky who lived in Saint Petersburg on Vasilevskii Island and had a wife and a son, but at Trediakovsky the fool, at Tresotin, who messed up Russian literature with his ludicrous creations and thus threatened its future glory.

As I have already mentioned, Trediakovsky's literary descendants were amused by the beatings that Trediakovsky sustained from Artemii Volynsky and by “the most benevolent box on the ear” he allegedly received from Empress Anna. When discussed outside the mythological context, these events could elicit nothing but deep sympathy for Trediakovsky's sufferings. One example is Belinsky's review of Slavic Collection (1845), whose editor, N. V. Savel'ev-Rostislavich, discussed the Volynsky affair. In Savel'ev's interpretation, Trediakovsky was an evil agent of the West who partook in the destruction of Volynsky, an ardent Russian patriot. Trying to refute another powerful cultural conception, in this case, Slavophilism, Belinsky, who normally was one of the main supporters of the myth of the beginning of the “new” Russian literature, chose to treat Trediakovsky, not as a mythological personage, but as a person, and comical beatings immediately became torturous baiting: “Poor Trediakovsky! Up to now the scribblers have nagged you and could not gloat enough that in your person the dignity of a man of letters, a scholar, and a poet was beaten with slaps and sticks!”⁷⁵ However, compassion toward Trediakovsky's ill fortune was extremely rare. The beatings were almost universally remembered with laughter and fiendish delight. It is noteworthy that Lazhechnikov chose to modify the Volynsky episode in his novel in order to reduce the chances of eliciting pity toward Trediakovsky. He replaced the beatings with a description of a Yuletide masquerade at which Trediakovsky, like a commedia dell'arte character, is pushed, hit, and tickled by a crowd of maskers (pp. 61-62). In the context of the myth, upon which Lazhechnikov relied in his interpretation of Trediakovsky's life, beatings and masquerades were events of the same kind and could be used interchangeably.

This laughter and delight over the poet's misfortunes was in harmony with Trediakovsky's mythological image. From the very emergence of this image, Trediakovsky the fool was an object of contemplated or actual thrashings. In Sumarokov's Tresotinius, the braggart and bully Bramarbas threatens to beat Tresotinius, and another character, Erast, forbids this. These possible beatings are discussed at length:

Erast. No matter how Tresotinius scolds you, whether in verse or in prose, you will not pay him back either with a sword or with a stick.
Bramarbas. With neither.
Kimar. And with a broom or a poker?
Bramarbas. With neither.
Erast. Swear it.(76)

Tresotinius's double Krititsiondius, in the comedy The Monsters, is less fortunate: The servant Arlikin beats him for his attempt to kiss the maid Finetta. It is noteworthy that Krititsiondius himself explains the conventional nature of comical beatings. He teaches the stupid fop Diulizh about Molière's comedy Le médecin malgré lui (1666):

Diulizh. But is it not a misfortune when somebody is beaten?
Krititsiondius. There are special rules for that, and you should have laughed at what you were crying about.(77)

The boundary between the real Trediakovsky, who was brutally beaten by a powerful statesman, and a fictitious character with the same name, who sustained comical beatings of a clearly mythological nature, was frequently blurred, as in an anecdote published by Pushkin in 1828:

Trediakovsky once came to complain to Shuvalov about Sumarokov. “Your Excellency! Aleksandr Petrovich has hit me on my right cheek so hard that it still hurts.” “How so, fellow?” Shuvalov answered. “Your right cheek hurts, and you hold your left one.” “Ah, Your Excellency, you are right,” Trediakovsky answered and transferred his hand to the other side.

“It often happened that Trediakovsky got beaten up,” Pushkin concluded and related the story about Volynsky's attack.⁷⁸ A real-life humiliation, placed in the context of a comical theatrical brawl, lost its tragic aspect and revealed its comical potential.

Subsequent generations did not fail to ridicule Trediakovsky's less tragic misfortunes as well. Thus, it was considered extremely funny that Trediakovsky had to translate thirteen volumes of Rollin's Histoire ancienne and three volumes of his Histoire romaine twice, because the first translation was consumed in the fire that occurred in his house in 1747. Aleksandr Palitsyn attached the following note to a passage mocking Trediakovsky's diligence in his poem “An Epistle to Priveta” (1807): “Without poetic exaggeration but by precise account he wrote 100 books, including the first translation of Rollin, which burned up in a fire in his house.” Likewise, Bantysh-Kamensky, immediately after mocking Tilemakhida, comments ironically on this event: “Besides, Trediakovsky had the patience to translate Rollin's Ancient and Roman histories twice, because the first translation, in manuscript, was destroyed in a fire.” Belinsky referred to this event as the “barbaric twofold translation of Rollin.”⁷⁹

As in the above examples, derision for repeating the translation usually went together with mockery of Trediakovsky's diligence and prolificacy. Virtually every author who wrote about him mentioned ironically his productiveness as a writer and translator. Some of the examples have been already cited, and their number is easy to multiply: Sumarokov, Radishchev, Karamzin, Batiushkov, Palitsyn, Lazhechnikov, Bantysh-Kamensky, Pushkin, Belinsky—writers of all schools and opinions ridiculed Trediakovsky's diligence.

Sumarokov again was the first to incorporate this feature into the image of Trediakovsky the fool. His character Krititsiondius boasts: “On the song ‘Farewell, My Dear,’ I composed a critique in twelve volumes in folio. On the tragedy Khorev I put together six dozen epigrams, and some of them I even translated into Greek; against the gentlemen who performed Russian tragedies I wrote 99 satires in Syrian.”⁸⁰ This grotesque description of the poet's exaggerated prolificacy referred the reader to Trediakovsky's extensive criticism of Sumarokov's poetry in the essay “Letter from Friend to Friend.” Trediakovsky's prolificacy was also frequently described as absolutely barren, as in Palitsyn's “An Epistle to Priveta”:

Bisplоdnyj ctitils muz, stradaliц ik sоyza,
Primir ucinоsti, biz dara i biz vкusa;
Tirpinsy оbraziц, Rоlliniv uciniк,
Vоspоmniss, napisab nam sоtny tоlstyk кnig,
Pо trudоlybiy cudisnyj Tridsyкоvsкij.(81)

The sterile admirer of the muses, who suffers in union with them, an example of learnedness devoid of gift and taste, the model of patience, Rollin's disciple, be recalled, having written for us a hundred thick books, marvelously diligent Trediakovsky.

One example even combines a reference to Trediakovsky's excessive productivity with a hint at his ability to cause death, in this particular case, his own. Trediakovsky, a character in Nikolai Khmel'nitsky's comedy, encouraged by praise, promises to write himself to death (zapishus' do smerti).⁸² In these and similar characterizations Trediakovsky appears as a fool who, unable to recognize the ludicrous outcome of his actions, pursues his goal with absurd zeal until, to his audience's delight, it loses all sense. On the other hand, his diligence and prolificacy might also refer to the inability of the mythological fool to restrain his appetite for food and sex and to his power to stimulate fertility.

Descriptions of Trediakovsky's foolish zeal frequently appeared along with ridicule of his excessive learning. Thus, in Lazhechnikov's novel Trediakovsky tortures Volynsky with a lengthy learned conversation about poetry: “Then Vasilii Kirillovich started to talk, and talked so much about Homer, Virgil, Camões, about gods and goddesses, that the patience of the mere mortals was exhausted” (p. 57). The ironic mention of “mere mortals” reminds the reader of the “nonhuman” nature of Trediakovsky's learnedness. The mockery of Trediakovsky's title professor of eloquence, especially widespread in nineteenth-century characterizations of Trediakovsky, stressed the fact that his knowledge was as meaningless as his persistence. His diligence, together with his learning and professorship, were used to support his reputation as a pedant, which was formed in the literary clashes of the mid-eighteenth century and flourished in the early nineteenth century in the atmosphere of the Romantic contempt for uninspired labor. This aspect of Trediakovsky's image as a fool also has mythological roots.

As I pointed out earlier in this chapter, Sumarokov, who introduced the image of Trediakovsky the pedant, was following European models, particularly those of Holberg and Molière. Molière's and Holberg's pedantic characters, however, had originated in a cultural tradition with definite mythological roots—folk theater. Especially important in this respect was the commedia dell'arte, which gained popularity in Europe in the end of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth centuries. One of the prominent characters in the commedia dell'arte was the pedant Dottore, a scholar from Bologna. His main characteristics were a false learnedness, a love for lengthy monologues sprinkled with Latin quotations, and illogic. He was unsuccessful in all his undertakings and was ridiculed by other characters in the play. This personage influenced the image of pedants, popular in European comedy of the seventeenth century, and found its way into Sumarokov's plays.⁸³

Sumarokov, however, had the opportunity to become acquainted with commedia dell'arte directly. Beginning in 1733, Italian troupes performed in Saint Petersburg at Empress Anna's court, and Sumarokov, as a student at the Cadet School, participated closely in court life and was most certainly admitted to the performances, perhaps even participating in them. “Sumarokov's exposure to the Italian comedy of masks is indubitable; it is known that the students of the Cadet School participated in the performances of this troupe,” writes Berkov in his History of Russian Comedy of the Eighteenth Century.⁸⁴ The direct results of Sumarokov's familiarity with the Italian comedy are evident in The Monsters, where there appears a commedia dell'arte character, a servant by the name of Arlikin. But the influence of the folk theater can be detected in the comedies that Sumarokov wrote throughout his life. Sumarokov's younger contemporaries, for whom commedia dell'arte was a low folk genre, lying outside the boundaries of real art, criticized this feature of his comedic method.

Trediakovsky also noticed and ridiculed the folk background of Sumarokov's comedies. In his parody of Tresotinius, included in the “Letter from Friend to Friend,” he emphasized the elements of farce in Sumarokov's play. He even introduced features of skomorokh (the itinerant comedians in medieval Russia) talk into the speech of a character, Arkhisotolash (apparently, something like “Superjerk,” from French archi-, “supreme”; sot, “foolish”; and lâche, “mean, base”), who represented Sumarokov: “Be quiet, brutal brute, animal animal, gambler, smoker, pub goer, drunkard, mail carrier, purse snatcher, contractor of rough work!” Sumarokov's dependence on the principles of folk theater was the reason, in Trediakovsky's eyes, that Tresotinius deserved only “the momentary light of the marketplace, and after that eternal darkness.”⁸⁵

There is no doubt that Dottore's character was familiar to Sumarokov, since a Dottore was part of the troupe that performed at Empress Anna's court in 1733-35: Out of thirty “Italian comedies,” compiled by V. N. Peretts, only three do not have this character. There are also clear indications that Sumarokov was conscious of the existing tradition of deriding pedants. In his “Epistle on Poetry” he advised the writers of comedies:

Pridstavs latynsiкa na disputi igо,
Kоtоryj ni sоvrit biz “irgо” nicigо.

Present a Latinizer during the dispute, who cannot jabber away without saying “ergo.”

In his first comedies Sumarokov closely followed his own advice and presented virtually all the comical characters recommended in the epistle: the callous official, the incompetent judge, the fop, and, most important, the pedant. One of his “Latinizers,” Bobembius in Tresotinius, actually says “ergo.”⁸⁶

Introduced by Sumarokov and assimilated by the myth, the image of Trediakovsky the pedant borrowed many characteristic features from Dottore. Thus, Dottore often holds a small but very thick book. In many portrayals Trediakovsky is pictured with a very thick Tilemakhida, Deidamia, or Rollin's History. Such was the description of Trediakovsky in Konstantin Batiushkov's satirical poem “The Bard in the Colloquium of Lovers of the Russian Word” (1813):

Si Tridsyкоvsкij v pariкi
Zasalinnоm, s кudrymi,
S Tilimakidоy v ruкi,
S Rоllinim za plicami.(87)

This is Trediakovsky in a greasy toupée with curls, with Tilemakhida in his hand, with Rollin behind his back.

Lazhechnikov also stresses this feature: His Trediakovsky “carried a huge volume under his arm.” Nikolai Polevoy, in his comedy The First Performance, uses this detail to create a comical scene in which Trediakovsky is about to torture other characters in the play with the reading of his work: “He unbuttons his caftan and gets a huge notebook from under the skirt of his coat.” In a review of Polevoy's comedy, Belinsky dwells on this detail in order to stress the comical nature of Trediakovsky's persona in the play: “Exasperated, Trediakovsky leaves, having forgotten to take his dear five-pood [180-pound] child, the manuscript of Tilemakhida. … Trediakovsky comes and says that he left his little notebook [tetradka].”⁸⁸ Belinsky quotes Polevoy inaccurately here: In the play Trediakovsky forgets Deidamia and asks for his “small manuscript” (malen'kaia rukopis'). However, Belinsky's mistake was justified, since Tilemakhida is the true attribute of Trediakovsky the fool, whereas Deidamia appears in this function only occasionally.

A counterfeit scholar, the pedant Dottore is, nevertheless, a “member of all the Academies.” Similarly, Belinsky calls Trediakovsky a “professor of eloquence” and a “professor of poetical ingenuities,” and Lazhechnikov calls him an “employee of the Saint Petersburg Academy de science.”⁸⁹

Dottore's speech is abstruse, incomprehensible, and filled with garbled Latin quotations. I have already quoted references to Syrian, Chaldean, and Arabic, the languages that characterized Trediakovsky's fruitless learning and his association with the underworld. Numerous references to the inanity and incomprehensibility of his poetry add to this impression. The foolish pedant even seems to be proud of the fact that nobody can understand him. Thus, Tresotinius suggests that the unintelligibility of his song is its chief merit: “Not everyone will understand this song and its contents; here are such subtleties that they are concealed even from many learned men.” Nikolev makes his Trediakovsky characterize Tilemakhida as a work “that will not be understood by the wisdom of the vast world.” Lazhechnikov several times stresses the obscurity of Trediakovsky's works. He includes some Latin words and expressions in his speech and ascribes to him an unreasonable love of Greek and Latin. In Khmel'nitsky's comedy other characters are unable to comprehend Trediakovsky's speech, which is full of heavy Slavonicisms. Unintelligibility is one of Trediakovsky's inherent characteristics in the comedy: It is even evident from his horoscope, which predicts that the person born under the sign of Pisces (as Trediakovsky allegedly was) will be “cold, watery, and unintelligible” (studen, vodian i temnosloven).⁹⁰

Even Dottore's appearance seems to influence portrayals of Trediakovsky the pedant. Both Lazhechnikov and Mikhail Dmitriev mention a wart on Trediakovsky's left cheek, Lazhechnikov five times and Dmitriev twice. We do not know if Trediakovsky really had a wart (his portraits, however, do not show any blemishes on his skin); but whether Lazhechnikov and Dmitriev singled out this trait or invented it, they did so under the influence (conscious or unconscious) of the pedant's mask in commedia dell'arte. In addition, Lazhechnikov gave Trediakovsky a round plump face (“like a map of hemispheres”), whereas in portraits his face seems to be oval. A round face is a characteristic of fools. Dottore, although his cheeks are flaccid rather than plump, is obese as well.⁹¹

In Lazhechnikov's novel, the very principle of construction of Trediakovsky's image is similar to that in commedia dell'arte. As the spectator at a commedia dell'arte performance had to recognize personages by their established distinctive features, so too was the reader of the novel supposed to recognize Trediakovsky by his pedantic attributes: “smugness,” a wart, and Tilemakhida. The author appeals to the reader to use the clues and partake in the construction of the image: “Oh! by his self-satisfaction … by the wart on his cheek you would recognize immediately the future professor of eloquence Vasilii Kirillovich Trediakovsky” (p. 55). The reader does not even need the name to identify the familiar pedant: “Seeing the wart on the cheek, the stupid and ingratiating mug, and slavish manner, one could think that this fiend was …” (p. 302). The answer was clear to everyone: This fiend was Trediakovsky.

The mythological origin of Dottore's mask easily allowed its incorporation into the emerging image of Trediakovsky the fool. Dottore's immoderate talkativeness (corresponding to Trediakovsky's literary and scholarly prolificacy) paralleled certain characteristics of the mythological fool, such as greediness and immoderation in food and sex. His false learning, stupidity, and misapplied zeal (corresponding to Trediakovsky's alleged talentlessness, lack of real knowledge, and barren diligence) paralleled the fool's poor judgment and his inability to achieve his goals despite great effort. His love for incomprehensible expressions (corresponding to Trediakovsky's alleged proficiency in Latin, Arabic, and Chaldean, as well as to the incomprehensibility of his poetry) echoed the glossolalia characteristic of fools.

Trediakovsky's mythological persona borrowed from other traditions besides commedia dell'arte. The image of Trediakovsky the fool received attributes of the jester along with those of the pedant. Trediakovsky's “Chaldean” nature, ridiculed by Sumarokov in Tresotinius, characterized him not only as a servant of the devil but also as a jester, a skomorokh. In the late 1750's the anonymous poem known as “Satire of Trediakovsky by Mr. Lomonosov” pictured him in the company of two of Empress Anna's famous jesters, Balakirev and the Italian Pedrillo (Petril):

Kaк Pitril tiby кatal
I Balaкiriv gоnyl.
Vsi rivut tibi: “Kuraz,
Trisоtin, ugоdniк nas!”(92)

How Petril rolled you and Balakirev chased you. Everybody roars at you: “Go ahead, Tresotin, our pleaser!”

In Nikolev's parody of Trediakovsky, the poet, like a jester, expects laughter as a reward for his ode:

                              Iкatirina!
Vоt mni nagrada! … cty, ulybniss.

Catherine! Here is my reward! Smile while reading it.

Similarly, Nikolai Polevoy calls him the “hilarious” (umoritel'nyi) Trediakovsky, stressing his ability to amuse (as well as to kill, umorit') the reader with his poor poetry. Belinsky calls Trediakovsky a jester directly in his review of Nikolai Polevoy's comedy. He elaborates upon this subject in his review of another play by Nikolai Polevoy, “a dramatic tale,” Lomonosov; or, Life and Poetry. He writes: “At a grandees' ball, pictured by Mr. Polevoy's marvelous brush, Trediakovsky dances to the tune of his own stupid poems. It is a fact that even the grandees of old liked sometimes to amuse themselves with learned folk, who were usually hopeless drunkards and voluntary jesters.”⁹³ Because of the mythological spirit surviving in jesters and clowns, the jester's characteristics easily permeated the image of Trediakovsky the fool. Trediakovsky's association with Empress Anna's epoch (which was generally considered the epoch of jesters) and particularly his participation, although reluctant, in the famous wedding of jesters, facilitated this permeation.

Finally, Trediakovsky's mythological image could include characteristics of a folktale fool. In this role Trediakovsky appears in Pushkin's epigram, aimed at Mikhail Kachenovsky, the editor of the magazine Messenger of Europe (1802-30) and the alleged proponent of antiquated orthography:

Tam, gdi drivnij Kоcirgоvsкij
Nad Rоllinim оpоcil,
Dnij nоvijsik Tridsyкоvsкij
Kоldоval i vоrоzil:
Durins, к sоlnцu stav spinоy,
Pоd kоlоdnyj vistniк svоj
Prysкal mirtvоy vоdоy,
Prysкal Vziцu zivоj.(94)

Where the ancient Kochergovsky had expired over Rollin, the Trediakovsky of modern days was engaged in sorcery and wizardry: The fool, turning his back to the sun, sprinkled dead water under his cold Messenger and sprinkled living water on the letter izhitsa.

Kachenovsky (the Trediakovsky of modern days) displays contrary behavior, typical of fools: Performing a magical act on the grave of his ancestor, he turns his back to the sun and sprinkles his barely living Messenger with dead water and the hopelessly dead and outdated letter izhitsa with living water, whereas the correct actions in folktales are to sprinkle a dead person with the dead water in order to repair all damage and then to sprinkle this person with the living water in order to bring him or her to life. As I have already shown, contrary behavior (which led to the production of bad examples and antirules) was typical of the mythological Trediakovsky, hence his association with the folktale personage.

Such was Trediakovsky's mythological image. The mythologizing consciousness of the epoch used the features of anti-heroic mythological personages of different cultural traditions for constructing and maintaining the image. With its negative force this image helped to preserve and purify the emerging cosmos of the “new” Russian literature. It is important to remember, however, that just as there is always a trickster, a fool, or a scapegoat in a culture hero, the opposite is also true, and a trickster, a fool, or a scapegoat can reveal his heroic nature at any moment. Trediakovsky's image displays the features of a fool, a scapegoat, and even a trickster. But it always retains, however subtly, its heroic nature, which prevents the image from losing its mythological ambivalence and from deteriorating into total negativity and thus being obliterated from cultural memory. Positive appraisals of Trediakovsky's activities, while rare, persisted throughout the last decades of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries and served to remind the reading public about Trediakovsky's role as an initiator of the “new” Russian literature.

The ambivalence of Trediakovsky's mythological image is evident in such details as Murav'ev's epithet for him, nachal'nik (archon), his association with Chaldea, and the appellation ugodnik (a pleaser, an obsequious person) applied to him in the satirical poem cited above. Murav'ev implied with his characterization that Trediakovsky initiated all the bad things in Russian literature, but he nevertheless recognized Trediakovsky's precedence, negative though it was. The Chaldean language, in Russian tradition, was ascribed not only to the devil and his servants but also to “saintly fools,” iurodivye.⁹⁵ Russian ecclesiastical tradition used the word ugodnik, which literally means “the one who pleases” and has a definite negative meaning in some contexts, as an epithet for saints (sviatye ugodniki) in the sense that they please God with their holy life. This positive meaning of the word could not have been lost on the author of the poem about Trediakovsky the jester or on his audience. The choice of epithets (archon, Chaldean, and pleaser) demonstrates the dual, ambivalent nature (foolishness and potential heroism or holiness) of Trediakovsky's mythological image.

This ambivalence revealed itself in the fact that Lomonosov's and Trediakovsky's biographers, affected by the myth, sometimes confused the details of Trediakovsky's and Lomonosov's lives, especially details that had latent mythogenic properties. Petr Perevlessky, in his introduction to Trediakovsky's Selected Works, asserts that the poet, like Lomonosov, spent some time in the Academy Gymnasium in Saint Petersburg before going abroad. Even more remarkably, Bantysh-Kamensky in his Dictionary and Lazhechnikov in his novel erroneously indicate that Arkhangelsk, rather than Astrakhan, was Trediakovsky's place of birth. The two major cities, both situated at the outskirts (the very north and the very south) of Russia, both located near water (the White and Caspian seas), were easily mistaken one for the other, the more so in that each produced a prominent cultural figure of mythological significance.⁹⁶ The contrast between Lomonosov the hero and Trediakovsky the fool was by no means absolute, and they were similar enough for the exponents of the myth to mix them up occasionally.

With the two main slots in the myth of the beginning of the “new” Russian literature filled, Sumarokov was left with a secondary role as Lomonosov's disciple or, more frequently, as Trediakovsky's ally. Sumarokov's image as Lomonosov's enemy was also endowed with certain mythological features. Thus, Pushkin, in the poem “To Zhukovsky,” presented him along with Trediakovsky as a monster of the underworld, and Nikolai Polevoy in his comedy depicted the two as a pair of jesters. But these features occurred only sporadically and did not form a consistent and stable image.

The distribution of roles among the writers depended upon their personalities, certain circumstances of their lives, and the peculiarities of their literary positions. The promotion of Lomonosov and Trediakovsky to the leading roles in the myth was facilitated by their close association with the Petrine epoch and its mythological spirit. In many respects they were products of this epoch, in which, thanks to the Table of Ranks introduced by Peter I in 1722 and his encouragement of education, it was possible for a commoner to receive an education and achieve higher social status by means of his abilities. Their lives would have satisfied Peter's most idealistic dreams: Young men, aspiring to knowledge, go to school, then go abroad to complete their education, and return to work for the benefit of their fatherland. In this respect their lives resembled the plots of so-called tales of the Petrine epoch, such as “The Story of the Russian Seaman Vasilii Koriotsky,” “The Story of Aleksandr, a Russian Gentleman,” and “The Story of the Russian Merchant Ioan,” in which the main characters leave for foreign countries in search of, among other things, education. The stories themselves, on the one hand, reflected the reality of Peter's reign, when many young people went abroad for schooling as Trediakovsky and Lomonosov would do later, and, on the other hand, made use of an ancient plot based on the primordial notion that to become an adult, a young man has to depart temporarily from his community.

The ideas of Peter's reform inspired Trediakovsky and Lomonosov, and they saw themselves as carrying on Peter's deeds. For their contemporaries and for subsequent generations both Lomonosov and Trediakovsky were closely associated with Peter. As the author of the poem Peter the Great, Lomonosov was Peter's apologist, and as the author of laudatory odes, he was a panegyrist of his daughter, Elizabeth. When the myth had been established, he even became Peter's double in the realm of literature. Batiushkov wrote: “He did the same in the difficult field of literature as Peter the Great did in the civil field. … Lomonosov woke the language of a sleeping nation; he created oratory and poetry for it, he tried its power in all genres and prepared reliable tools for success for the talented people to come.” Belinsky agreed: “Lomonosov was the Peter the Great of Russian literature.” The same view was endorsed by Fedor Tiutchev in his poem written on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Lomonosov's death.⁹⁷ Trediakovsky, on the contrary, was connected with Peter in a comical way: The tsar allegedly foretold the poet's pitiful fate as a “perpetual toiler.” The fact that Trediakovsky wrote “Elegy on Peter the Great's Death” probably helped to associate chthonic qualities with Trediakovsky's works and personality.

Sumarokov's name was connected with the Petrine epoch far less strongly. He was younger than Trediakovsky and Lomonosov and by birth and education did not belong to the social classes most devoted to Peter's grandly conceived plans. As an ideologist for the gentry, he was alien to the national spirit of the Petrine reforms, so dear to Trediakovsky's and especially Lomonosov's hearts.

Even more important for the distribution of roles in the myth was the fact that the years of Trediakovsky's early activities and success fell during the reign of Empress Anna. In Russian tradition, she has the reputation of a monarch who strayed from the path shown by Peter the Great. The years of her reign stand in the Russian national consciousness as a dark decade, an epoch of merciless executions, tortures, denunciations, intrigues, and vengeance, brought upon Russia by Anna's German favorite, Ernst Johann Biron. Volynsky, according to this outlook, represented national opposition to Biron's regime and perished because he confronted Biron on behalf of Russian national dignity. In this confrontation Trediakovsky sided with the dark forces, inasmuch as he was an enemy of Volynsky and even cashed in on Volynsky's execution, receiving compensation for the beatings that he sustained from the former cabinet minister.

The association of Trediakovsky's name with Anna's reign was powerful. In 1856 Lazhechnikov defended his decision to include Trediakovsky among the characters of his The Ice House by the requirements of historical truth:

This is a different question: Did I have to put Trediakovsky in my historical novel? I did. My task was to draw correctly a picture of the epoch that I had undertaken to depict. Trediakovsky is its precious accessory: Without Trediakovsky the picture would be incomplete, one necessary face would be missing in the group of figures. He was as necessary for it as the jester Kul'kovsky, the housekeeper [barskaia barynia], the celebration of the goat's giving birth, the fools' wedding, and so on were necessary.⁹⁸

In Lazhechnikov's eyes, Trediakovsky the fool belonged to Anna's epoch, famous for its love for jesters and masquerades, follies and irrational behavior. This love, in turn, linked the epoch in popular consciousness with the recession from the cultural gains of Petrine reign and thus, with chaos and chthonic powers.

The association with Anna's reign endowed Trediakovsky's mythological image with two opposite but—in Russian cultural consciousness—equally harmful associations: with the foreign evil and with anti-Petrine forces. On the one hand, his allegedly having sided with the German party in the Volynsky affair reinforced the opinion about his affinity for the demonic West, provoked by his translation of the lecherous and “atheistic” Voyage à l'île d'Amour. On the other hand, Trediakovsky's later interest in Church Slavonic, which was perceived by his contemporaries as an attribute of pre-Petrine Russia, linked him in the eyes of his audience with the precultural chaotic world favored by the enemies of Peter I, who temporarily triumphed during Anna's reign. Trediakovsky's deep interest in classical and especially Russian antiquity, which was characteristic of his literary position from the 1750's, strengthened this association. His concern with national tradition came too early for the educated Russian public and, unlike the Romantic exploration of antiquity, was perceived not as a quest for national identity but as opposition to new and progressive trends—the opposition to westernization that was exemplified for Russians by Anna and her favorites. Trediakovsky was thus unacceptable both to the zealots of national tradition and to the enthusiasts of Russia's westernization.

Lomonosov, on the contrary, was connected with the reign of Elizabeth. In popular opinion it was Elizabeth, Peter's daughter, who returned the country to the right course, repairing the damage caused by Anna's disorganization and restricting foreign intervention in Russia's domestic affairs. Lomonosov thus represented the powers of order, progress, and national tradition.

Sumarokov did not have a place in this cultural scheme. His attempt, in the early 1760's, to become Catherine the Great's official panegyrist was unsuccessful. For his contemporaries and literary descendants, he was more a symbol of the nobility's independence than a laudator of any of the monarchs who reigned during his lifetime.

Lomonosov's and Trediakovsky's literary positions were also relevant in that they were assigned the leading roles in the myth. Both were poets of predominantly high genres, which, according to the aesthetics of their time, were associated with the idea of rational order and contrasted to the disarray of reality—one sees a parallel to the mythological opposition of cosmos and chaos. Trediakovsky's exaggeratedly high poetic intentions could easily be understood in a comical light. His bold literary experiments made such an interpretation even easier. Sumarokov, the poet of middle genres and moderate stylistic tastes, was neutral in this respect. His “middle” position—stressed in the passage from the magazine Infernal Mail quoted above, “a man of mediocre rank”—did not allow him to take either of the main roles in the myth.

The fact that Lomonosov's approach to the reform of Russian versification was more radical than Trediakovsky's was also significant in that he was subsequently endowed with the role of father of the “new” Russian literature. In his “Letter on the Rules of Russian Versification” Lomonosov proposed a pure, extreme form of syllabo-tonic verse, and his maximalist approach better marked the break with syllabic tradition than the more prudent approach suggested by Trediakovsky. Furthermore, Lomonosov abandoned the count of syllables, required by syllabic versification, and relied exclusively on the count of feet. Trediakovsky perceived the foot as a complex unit, consisting of a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables. The syllable remained an important factor in his syllabo-tonic verse, while Lomonosov was free of all associations with syllabics. Finally, Lomonosov extended the reform to verses of any length, whereas Trediakovsky initially confined it to thirteen- and eleven-syllable verses. Eventually both had to compromise, but Lomonosov's early full-stressed iambs, which suggested a radical split with syllabics, seemed in retrospect to mark the beginning of a new era in Russian poetry. Trediakovsky's early syllabo-tonics, however, retained too much resemblance to syllabics to be comprehended as a complete break with the old tradition of versification.

Sumarokov again participated in this controversy in a secondary role. Having begun his literary career as a follower of Trediakovsky's, he abandoned his teacher and accepted Lomonosov's principles of versification. The fact that he himself was an original poet, and that his participation in the development of Russian syllabo-tonics was most constructive and multifaceted, did not secure him an independent place in the myth.

For the myth, it was extremely important that Lomonosov's views not only were formulated in a more orderly way than Trediakovsky's but also were more rigid. Lomonosov's poetical system, as well as his aesthetic and linguistic views, formed early, in the first half of the 1740's, and remained virtually unchanged for more than twenty years, until his death. Trediakovsky's artistic and linguistic position, on the contrary, underwent several cardinal transformations. He never stopped looking for new ideas and forms, never ceased his quest for variety and perfection. The static monumentality of Lomonosov's ideas produced an impression of confidence and integrity and thus looked more valuable to the exponents of the myth than the dynamic and evolving views of Trediakovsky.⁹⁹ These features of Trediakovsky's aesthetic and linguistic conception invited the charges of eclecticism and incompetence. They confirmed Trediakovsky's alleged connection to chaos and disorder and reinforced his image as a mythological fool. The hero always remains himself, whereas the fool constantly changes his appearance and essence.

The personal qualities of the three writers also influenced the distribution of the mythological roles among them. The “heroic” features of Lomonosov's personality—his versatile abilities, physical strength, and passionate disposition—contributed to his characterization as the creator of Russian literature. These qualities made it easy to identify him as a culture hero. Notably, Staehlin chose to conclude his description of Lomonosov's life with the episode depicting Lomonosov's heroic fight with three seamen.

Trediakovsky's meek and humble personality, in contrast, facilitated the development of his comical image. Lomonosov beat people up; Trediakovsky received beatings. He was vulnerable to misfortunes and calamities: fires twice (in 1736 and 1747) destroyed all of his belongings, forcing him not only to retranslate thirteen volumes of Rollin's Histoire ancienne but also to write anew the Conversation on Orthography, a voluminous treatise that contained his most important linguistic views as they had been formed by the mid-1740's. Moreover, in December 1747 a fire at the Academy of Sciences destroyed part of the already published volume of Ancient History, and in March 1749 Trediakovsky's kitchen and stable, as well as some of his furniture, burned. His contemporaries felt the unusual cruelty of Trediakovsky's fate. On March 29, 1749, immediately after the fire in Trediakovsky's house, Schumacher, a chancellor at the Academy, wrote, with some irony, to his colleague Grigorii Teplov: “We have a German proverb: Wer gehaengt werden, der versaufft nicht [The one who is to be hanged will not drown]. I do not know what to say about Mr. Trediakovsky's fate, but it hounds him terribly.”¹⁰⁰

Sumarokov was not meek, but he was certainly no hero. He was a nervous, irritable, and vulnerable person who suffered from a stutter and a tic and amused, rather than scared, his contemporaries with his uncontrolled fits of anger. Staehlin records an anecdote that demonstrates Sumarokov's unheroic reputation among his contemporaries:

To his [Lomonosov's] splendid burial, which was attended by the Bishop of Saint Petersburg with the most eminent clergy, some senators, and other grandees, Sumarokov also came. Sitting near State Councilor Staehlin, who was among the escort, he pointed to the deceased lying in a coffin and said: “The fool has quieted down and cannot fuss any more!” Staehlin answered him: “I would not have advised you to tell him that when he was alive.” Lomonosov scared him so much that Sumarokov did not dare to open his mouth in his presence.¹⁰¹

Unlike Lomonosov, who rarely explained his position and who often had to be forced by his patron Ivan Shuvalov to enter into literary polemics, Sumarokov liked to expound and defend his views at length. All these features were less compatible with the idea of heroism than Lomonosov's brawling and drinking. They hardly qualified Sumarokov for the exalted role of the father of the “new” Russian literature.

Lomonosov himself was inclined to present his own deeds in heroic colors and to stress the features in his life proper for the biography of a hero. He compared himself to Hercules in the margins of Trediakovsky's A New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verse. Objecting to Trediakovsky's prohibition on the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, Lomonosov wrote, “Herculeum argumentum ex Arcadiae stabulo,” implying he had proved (or was about to prove) that the alternation was possible, exactly as Hercules had shown that it was feasible to cleanse the Augean stables, simply by doing it. On another occasion Lomonosov seized an opportunity to emphasize a feature in his biography typical of a hero: an unhappy childhood. This included cold and hunger, an unsupportive father, and an evil stepmother who allegedly interfered with the hero's vocation:

I … [had] a father who was of a kindly disposition but brought me up in utter ignorance, and an evil and envious stepmother who in every way tried to arouse my father's ire, pointing out to him that I always sat idly with a book. Therefore on many occasions I had to read and study what I could in secluded and empty places and endure cold and hunger, until I went away to the Spasskie schools.¹⁰²

At school he was no better off. His father reproached him for his departure, he suffered from extreme poverty, and on top of everything else, “small kids [his fellow students] shouted and pointed their fingers: ‘Look what a blockhead came at twenty years of age to study Latin!’”¹⁰³ This last feature—his late blooming—Lomonosov shared with many folk heroes, Ilia of Murom, a Russian folk hero, among others. Like Ilia, who remained paralyzed for the first thirty years of his life and then miraculously received health and strength, rose from his sickbed, and began a life of exploits, Lomonosov started late but swiftly overtook and surpassed his fellow students. I do not suggest that Lomonosov consciously ascribed to himself the role of a folk hero. He rather used for his accounts the patterns conveniently supplied to him by the heroic canon, familiar to him from folktales and bylinas, to which he was certainly exposed as a child.¹⁰⁴

Finally, Lomonosov's early death contributed to his valorization. The formation of a myth rarely takes place before the death of its main hero. Sumarokov lived another twelve years after Lomonosov's death, sincerely trying to convince contemporaries of the injustice of their views on his own and Lomonosov's place in the history of Russian literature. This activity dramatically diminished his chances of becoming the hero of a myth.

Once the mythological images of Lomonosov and Trediakovsky had been formed, they took on a life of their own and soon overshadowed the factual knowledge about them. These images became more true than the historical truth, more convincing than facts, and more stable than memories of actual past events. They continued to function in newly developing literary contexts, adapting to the needs of each new literary generation. Their mythological nature made them useful for the construction of new authorial identities, as well as for the condemnation of opponents. These images represented literary history but helped mold the literary present. The myth of the past determined the future of literature.

Notes

1. Trediakovsky, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, p. 383; Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8: 543. Shtivelii is Trediakovsky. Lomonosov first objected to Trediakovsky's prohibition in 1739, in his “Letter on the Rules of Russian Versification” (7: 16).

2. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8: 542; “Epigramma na El[agina],” in Poetry XVIII veka, 2: 386-87.

3. A. A. Morozov, “Russkaia stikhotvornaia parodiia,” in Russkaia stikhotvornaia parodiia, pp. 13, 15-17.

4. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10: 493-94. This piece of criticism, disguised as a private letter, was intended for public circulation (see comments in 8: 1020 and 10: 822). Serman published excerpts from a more complete eighteenth-century copy of this letter in his essay “Iz literaturnoi polemiki,” p. 101.

5. Trediakovsky, “Letter from Friend to Friend,” p. 472.

6. On these features of parody see Tynianov, “O parodii,” in his Poetika, pp. 297-98.

7. Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3: 76.

8. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8: 211.

9. Trediakovsky, “Letter from Friend to Friend,” pp. 476-77.

10. See Slovar' Akademii Rossiiskoi, 6: 784, definition 2. Interestingly, in his famous A Discourse on the Old and New Styles of the Russian Language (1803), the leader of the Archaist movement, Aleksandr Shishkov, chose precisely this verb to illustrate his assertion that the meanings of words in different languages cannot be absolutely identical despite the existence of an area with similar meaning (Shishkov, Sobranie sochinenii i perevodov, 2: 39-41). He certainly remembered the controversy, in his time revived by Karamzin's neologism touching (trogatel'nyi), since he quoted Lomonosov's epigram in a footnote on p. 123.

11. Sumarokov, Stikhotvoreniia, pp. 354, 350.

12. Trediakovsky, “Letter from Friend to Friend,” pp. 455-56, 470-71. The second “shortcoming” was actually a misprint in the first edition of Sumarokov's “Ode to Empress Elizabeth” (1743). Trediakovsky pretended (or actually thought) that the mistake reflected Sumarokov's poor ability as a poet, and proposed nonessential morphological alterations that restored the correct meter.

13. Trediakovsky, “Letter from Friend to Friend,” p. 446.

14. Kunik, ed., 2: 424.

15. Shlonsky, p. 797. The same idea can be found in Tynianov, “O parodii,” in his Poetika, p. 301, and “Dostoevsky i Gogol' (k teorii parodii),” in his Poetika, p. 201. Tynianov's point of view was developed in B. Begak, “Parodiia i ee priemy,” in Begak et al., pp. 51-65, esp. p. 54.

16. Tynianov, “O parodii,” in his Poetika, p. 294.

17. Trediakovsky, “Letter from Friend to Friend,” p. 473.

18. Ginzburg, pp. 32-38.

19. See Viazemsky's letter in Pushkin, Sochineniia v shestnadtsati tomakh, 13: 223.

20. For examples see Serman, Poeticheskii stil' Lomonosova, pp. 202-19.

21. Tynianov, “O parodii,” in his Poetika, p. 302.

22. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8: 630.

23. For the quoted passage see Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10: 14. On Trediakovsky and foppish culture see Uspensky, Iz istorii, pp. 134-55; Iu. M. Lotman, “‘Ezda.’”

24. Sumarokov, Stikhotvoreniia, p. 307.

25. The clumsiness of the diction is emphasized by the employment of one-syllable words throughout the second line. Their use could parody Lomonosov's initial attempt to write syllabo-tonic verses without pyrrhics—an attempt abandoned soon thereafter—and at the same time, it could ridicule Trediakovsky's and Lomonosov's long-standing dispute about one-syllable words. Trediakovsky, in his A New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verse, corollary 1, claimed that these words are always “long,” that is, stressed. Lomonosov disputed this in his “Letter on the Rules of Russian Versification” (in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7: 12). Finally, Trediakovsky agreed, in his revised Method for Composing Russian Verse (1752), chap. 1, paragraph 15, to consider one-syllable words “common” (obshchie) with respect to stress and to allow them therefore to take both strong and weak positions in a syllabo-tonic verse, but only as a poetic license that makes it easier to compose verses in Russian. Sumarokov continued the argument in the essay “On Versification”: “Mr. Trediakovsky, no matter how much he had heard from me about spondees, simply could not understand that a spondee in our languages is sometimes a trochee and sometimes an iamb, and believed, because of his failure to understand, that spondees become trochees and iambs solely through the writer's wish” (Stikhotvoreniia, p. 384).

26. Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 358. For Trediakovsky's defense of s see his Sochineniia, 3: 88-89.

27. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8: 542. For an analysis of another of Lomonosov's epigrams attacking Trediakovsky's orthography, “About the Doubtful Pronunciation of the Letter G in the Russian Language,” see Uspensky, “Foneticheskaia struktura.”

28. See Kholshevnikov.

29. On Trediakovsky's hexameter see Burgi, pp. 41-68; Gasparov, “Prodrom,” pp. 375-77. Bondi (pp. 79-81) considered Trediakovsky's hexameter to be the best in the Russian tradition.

30. See the commentary by M. I. Sukhomlinov in Lomonosov, Sochineniia, 2: 391-99.

31. Trediakovsky, “Letter from Friend to Friend,” p. 442; see more on this subject in Rulin, pp. 260-63; Rezanov, pp. 233-35.

32. For a typological classification of comedic plots and situations see Knutson.

33. The title “rhetorician” (Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 343) helps identify Lomonosov, who by 1750 was the author of two manuals on rhetoric, as a prototype of Bobembius. There is a third pedant in Tresotinius, by the name of Ksaksoksimendius. His main attribute is a heavy Slavonic style. It is believed that in this character Sumarokov parodied the academician S. P. Krasheninnikov, who was a translator, botanist, and ethnographer.

34. In his essay “On Orthography,” Sumarokov recorded Lomonosov's comment on the letters Φ and θ, which were used in Russian to represent the same sound, [f]. Lomonosov's argument resembles Bobembius's position in Tresotinius: “I asked Mr. Lomonosov why he had preserved Φ, but not θ; that he answered in the following way: ‘This letter stands with its hands on its hips, and therefore is more vigorous.’ This answer is jeering, and not serious,” concluded Sumarokov (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10: 9).

35. For an analysis of Vaugelas's influence on Trediakovsky see Uspensky, “Trediakovsky i istoriia russkogo literaturnogo iazyka,” in Venok Trediakovskomu, p. 40; Uspensky, “The Language Program,” pp. 255, 258, 269-70; Uspensky, Iz istorii, pp. 131-34.

36. On Chapelain and his reputation see Van Roosbroeck; Willey.

37. Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 297; Trediakovsky, “Letter from Friend to Friend,” p. 438.

38. Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 298.

39. “At dinner pages wait on him—an honor that makes him equal to Chapelle, if not Tasso” (Lazhechnikov, Ledianoi dom, p. 266). Lazhechnikov compared Trediakovsky to Claude Emmanuel Chapelle, a friend and collaborator of Boileau's. I believe that Lazhechnikov made a mistake and that he meant to compare Trediakovsky the author of Tilemakhida to Chapelain, the author of another notoriously bad epic poem, La Pucelle. The mention of Torquato Tasso, known for his Gerusalemme Liberata, supports this supposition. Chapelle never had a reputation as an epic poet. He was known as a brilliant polemicist—the reason his name was used as a nickname for Viazemsky. On the use of Chapelain's name in the polemics between the Innovators and the Archaists see Chapter 4.

40. Trediakovsky, Sochineniia, 1: 266.

41. Sumarokov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, p. 287.

42. Poety XVIII veka, 2: 399-400, 401. The expression polnymi ustami in the conclusion of the first poem could mean both “in great gulps” and “with your full lips”—a possible reference to Lomonosov's appearance. Tsyganosov is a comical modification of Lomonosov's name.

43. “Na Teleliuia,” in Poety XVIII veka, 2: 389 (author unknown); Trediakovsky, “Samokhval,” in ibid., p. 371; “Na Teleliuia,” in ibid., p. 388.

44. Sumarokov, “Osel vo l'vovoi kozhe,” in his Izbrannye proizvedeniia, p. 208; Trediakovsky, “Ne znaiu …,” in Poety XVIII veka, 2: 393.

45. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10: 545.

46. Trediakovsky, “Letter from Friend to Friend,” p. 483. For the demonstration of Trediakovsky's assertion see p. 484.

47. Trediakovsky, “Nadpis' na S[umarokova],” in Afanas'ev, p. 519n. Cf. also Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8: 659, and Trediakovsky, “Letter from Friend to Friend,” p. 459. On the mockery of Sumarokov's appearance and handicaps see Uspensky, “K istorii,” pp. 84-86.

48. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 9: 634.

49. Ibid., 8: 630. For Trediakovsky's epigram see his Izbrannye proizvedeniia, p. 416. Lomonosov ridiculed Trediakovsky's rhyme krasoul' / khodul' as early as 1739, in his “Letter on the Rules of Russian Versification” (Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7: 16).

50. Sumarokov's mocking name for Lomonosov, Firs Firsovich Homer, given to him after he published the first canto of the heroic poem Peter the Great, appeared as a reaction to these lofty “titles” (see Sumarokov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, p. 260).

51. N. Popovsky, “Nadpis' k portretu M. V. Lomonosova,” in Poety XVIII veka, 1: 114.

52. I. Elagin, “Epistola g. Elagina k g. Sumarokovu” [“Satira na petimetra i koketok”], in Poety XVIII veka, 2: 372.

53. Pekarsky, Istoriia, p. 232. The meter of the poem is an imitation of the “heroic verse” proposed by Trediakovsky in 1735.

54. Radishchev, 1: 352; Karamzin, Sochineniia, 1: 584.

55. Poroshin, p. 301.

56. Radishchev, 1: 389; M. M. Kheraskov, “Rassuzhdenie o rossiiskom stikhotvorstve,” in Berkov, ed., p. 293.

57. Karamzin, Sochineniia, 1: 592-93. Count Dmitrii Khvostov, whose literary views in general were very different from Karamzin's, expressed a very similar opinion; see Poety 1790-1810-kh godov, pp. 437-38 n. 2. …

58. From Murav'ev's letter to D. I. Khvostov, published in the commentary to the poem “Roshcha” in Murav'ev, p. 339.

59. [V. S. Podshivalov], “Pis'mo k devitse F** o rossiiskom stoposlozhenii,” in Priiatnoe i poleznoe preprovozhdenie vremeni, 1 (1794): 95-97.

60. Trediakovsky, Sochineniia, 2: xlviii.

61. See L'vov's letter of Dec. 23, 1789, in Pis'ma, p. 388. See Zhikharev's testimony in Zhikharev, pp. 352-53.

62. For a discussion of the fool's demonic nature and his association with death see Willeford, pp. 88-91.

63. Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 353, 344.

64. On the connotations that the Syrian language had in Orthodox Christian tradition see Uspensky, “Vopros.” On Chaldeans in Russian popular tradition see Faminitsyn, pp. 100-105.

65. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8: 827. In eighteenth-century collections the anonymous poem was attributed to Lomonosov, but his authorship is unlikely.

66. M. Dmitriev, “Dvenadtsat' sonnykh statei,” in Epigramma i satira, p. 302. The title parodies Zhukovsky's ballad “Twelve Sleeping Maidens,” a popular subject for parody in the first half of the nineteenth century.

67. Kniazhnin, “Boi stikhotvortsev,” in Poety XVIII veka, 2: 406-7.

68. Pushkin, Sochineniia v shestnadtsati tomakh, 1: 195.

69. Bobrov, “Proizshestvie v tsarstve tenei,” in Lotman and Uspensky, “Spory,” p. 280.

70. Radishchev, 1: 353; Nikolev, “Oda 2” in Mnimaia poeziia, p. 140.

71. See Vsiakaia vsiachina, sec. 3, p. 15; sec. 5, pp. 30-32; sec. 7, pp. 46-47. On Radishchev's reaction to this mockery see Chapter 5. It is noteworthy that Dmitriev's satire on Kachenovsky, in which Trediakovsky plays a major part, is called “Twelve Sleepy Essays.”

72. Poety 1790-1810-kh godov, p. 566. On the connection between sleep and death see Hillman.

73. Trediakovsky, Sochineniia, 2: 567, 576.

74. Ostolopov, 3: 342; Radishchev, 1: 431. Cf. Denis Fonvizin's mockery of Deidamia in his letter of Dec. 14, 1763, in Fonvizin, p. 328.

75. Belinsky, 9: 189-90.

76. Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 356.

77. Ibid., 5: 291.

78. Pushkin, Sochineniia v shestnadtsati tomakh, 11: 53.

79. Palitsyn, “Poslanie k Privete,” in Poety 1790-1810-kh godov, p. 778 n. 4; Bantysh-Kamensky, 5: 148; Belinsky, 10: 8.

80. Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 296.

81. Palitsyn, “Poslanie k Privete,” in Poety 1790-1810-kh godov, p. 748.

82. Khmel'nitsky, Russkii Faust, p. 136.

83. Sometimes the pedant could constitute a character separate from Dottore, but their characteristics were very similar; see Oreglia, p. 87.

84. Berkov, Istoriia, p. 13. For the commedia dell'arte plays familiar to Sumarokov see Peretts, ed. Trediakovsky was the main translator of these plays (L. V. Petrunina, “Trediakovsky kak perevodchik ital'ianskikh komedii,” in Venok Trediakovskomu, pp. 64-69).

85. Kunik, ed., 2: 499, 438.

86. Sumarokov, Izbrannye sochineniia, p. 121; Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 343.

87. Batiushkov, Sochineniia, p. 256.

88. Lazhechnikov, Ledianoi dom, p. 55; N. Polevoy, Pervoe predstavlenie Mel'nika—kolduna, obmanshchika i svata, in his Dramaticheskie sochineniia, 2: 68; Belinsky, 3: 288.

89. Oreglia, p. 84; Belinsky, passim; Lazhechnikov, Ledianoi dom, p. 40.

90. Sumarokov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5: 339-40; Nikolev, “Oda 2,” in Mnimaia poeziia, p. 143; Lazhechnikov, Ledianoi dom, pp. 12, 256; Khmel'nitsky, Russkii Faust, pp. 86-87, 125, 50.

91. Lazhechnikov, Ledianoi dom, pp. 41, 55, 255 (mentioned twice), 302; M. Dmitriev, “Dvenadtsat' sonnykh statei,” in Epigramma i satira, pp. 295, 302. On the fool's and Dottore's round faces see Willeford, pp. 10-11; Oreglia, p. 86.

92. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 8: 829.

93. Nikolev, “Oda 1,” in Mnimaia poeziia, p. 139; N. Polevoy, “Lomonosov,” p. 257; Belinsky, 3: 268, 7: 16.

94. Pushkin, Sochineniia v shestnadtsati tomakh, 3: 156. M. T. Kachenovsky (Kochergovsky, in Pushkin's poem) used a peculiar orthography in his magazine; for example, the letter izhitsa (upsilon) figured in words of Greek origin. This reminded Kachenovsky's contemporaries of Trediakovsky's ideas on orthography. For more on Kachenovsky and his alleged similarity to Trediakovsky see Chapter 5.

95. Likhachev and Panchenko, p. 125.

96. On the mythological meaning of water see Jung, pp. 46, 49-50.

97. Batiushkov, “Rech o vliianii legkoi poezii na iazyk,” in his Sochineniia, p. 362; Belinsky, 9: 674. See also Belinsky, 1: 42, 1: 43, 6: 600. For the analysis of Tiutchev's poem see Ospovat.

98. Lazhechnikov, “Znakomstvo moe s Pushkinym,” p. 179. Lazhechnikov lists the personages and episodes in his novel that he considers characteristic for the epoch in question.

99. Berkov shrewdly pointed out this crucial difference between Lomonosov's and Trediakovsky's views (Lomonosov, p. 41).

100. Pekarsky, Istoriia, p. 142.

101. Staehlin, “Traits and Anecdotes,” in Kunik, ed., 2: 403-4.

102. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10: 481-82. In the original, Lomonosov's sentence is ungrammatical, since it uses the participle having (imeiuchi) in place of a verb. Spasskie shkoly was another name for the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy.

103. Lomonosov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 10: 479.

104. On an unhappy childhood as a typical feature in the life of a hero see Nekliudov, p. 138; on late bloomers see Nekliudov, p. 137.

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