The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The eighteenth century 89

Prokofiev allots an intoxicating, dreamlike time-space separated from the surrounding action. These slightly off-balance waltzes can be seen (or heard) as visitations from the Sentimentalist tradition, and they condition the emotionally vulnerable Natasha to its dangerous fantasies.7

Soon after Fonvizin’s Brigadier, the playwright Yakov Knyazhnin (1742–91) composed a two-act libretto, in prose with inserted arias, on the theme of Gallomania. It bore the odd title Misfortune from a Coach. Although comic libretti were often sung to any popular tunes of the day, in this case the court composer Vasily Pashkevich (1742–97) composed the music. The opera premiered before the Empress herself, in 1779. It was an immediate hit. Its plot type is the “peasant opera” made famous throughout Europe by Rousseau (upgraded to the manor house in such masterpieces as Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro): two rustic or lowborn lovers are prevented from marrying by some villain of higher rank – a jealous bailiff, uncooperative parents, philandering masters. The cleverness of servants (or slaves) outwits the obtuse power of their superiors. It would seem that this plot, once Russified, could only strike at the heart of serfdom. But the opera did not deliver that message, even though the abuse was no laughing matter.

Whatwas the“misfortune” caused by acoach? Two Gallomaniac landowners, the Filyulins (Mr. and Mrs. Ninny) desire to buy the latest fashionable coach from Paris. To get the necessary funds, they decide to sell some serfs to the army (a life or death sentence: the standard term of service was twenty-five years). Since the bailiff wants the peasant heroine Anyuta for himself, he selects her lover Lukyan as one of the serf recruits. Lukyan is promptly shackled and led away. The situation is saved only when, for a sizable bribe, the Filyulins’ household jester Afanasy (labeled in the libretto simply “Shut,” Jester) suggests to the two threatened serfs, who know a few foreign words, that they babble a bit in French in front of their masters. The Filyulins are delighted. Peasants who can utter French words must be creatures who know how to love. Keep these two serfs at home, the Filyulins conclude, let them marry, and Lukyan will be our coachman! The strangeness and Russianness of this little comic opera lies not in the reunification of the lovers – that end-point is mandatory for the genre – and not even in the capriciousness of the masters, but in the Shut.

This inserted Jester is a morally blank, unsentimental, folk-comic type. He sings two arias that owe little to the ethos of enlightened self-improvement – or even to the ethos of enlightened despotism – and much to the cynical, pragmatic, resigned ethics of a Russian secular fool. In his first-act aria, the Jester chides the two desperate lovers for not knowing how to joke. “Why be sad and why go moan?” he sings. “It’s best to spit, spit on everything in the