The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

90 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

world, / It’s all in knowing how to dance to someone else’s tune / The trick’s to be a jester and a rogue.”8 In the second act, the Jester urges the fettered Lukyan simply to die at the first opportunity, because: “It’s really the best way; you can’t imagine how bad this world is.”And finally – after the Gallomaniacruse works– he delivers another aria on Lukyan in his new role: “What joy it is, / What sweetness to the heart” to have a coachman who “Instead of shouting ‘Here we come!’ / will shout in French! / . . . and no one on the street will understand!” In the closing scene, the Jester gathers the grateful peasants around himself: “What were you crying about? Where the shut Afanasy is, there you have to laugh; you see, there’s nothing in the world worth worrying about.” And then the Jester introduces the refrain that all sing in ensemble: “A trifle destroyed you, / But a trifle saved you too.”

Like Melancholy Jacques in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, Knyazhnin’s Jester is a mournful realist, surprised at nothing. For him too, “All the world’s a stage” – a world worthy of wry commentary, perhaps, but run by caprice and resistant to moral correction. This pragmatic amoral type was certainly familiar to the Russian eighteenth century. But it was not borrowed from Elizabethan drama. At this time, Shakespeare was still being read in edited French prose versions, tamed and cleansed. A truer, more durable inspiration for Knyazh-nin’s Jester might be the Muscovite rogue Frol Skobeyev. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Frol’s ribald type of story had blended with Russian adaptations of foreign adventure tales, simplified in the illustrated woodcut book [lubok] or written up for commercial presses serving the newly literate population of Russian towns. One example must suffice of this new bestselling “vulgar prose”: The Comely Cook [Prigozhaia povarikha], or the Adventures of a Debauched Woman (1770), by Mikhail Chulkov (1734–92). Chulkov was the most gifted of Russia’s enterprising, pen-pushing pioneer novelists and the antipode of the values and patronage system of the aristocratic court. Unlike Russian neoclassical comedy, The Comely Cook left little, if any, legacy in subsequent centuries; it was reprinted in 1890 and then only sporadically during the Soviet period. Thus it did not become part of Russian literary tradition, only part of her literary reality. This fate is appropriate to the artifact, however. Literary fame, canonical status, and the neoclassical pretension that art can reform the manners and morals of life were themselves one satirical target of Chulkov’s picaresque novel.

Chulkov’s Martona: life instructs art

Mikhail Chulkov was of non-noble birth, an actor, journalist, and low-level bureaucrat who announced openly that his “pen was for sale.” His activity