The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The eighteenth century 91

as author and literary adaptor coincided with a controversy over the writing of novels that erupted in the 1760s. Was prose fiction serious literary art? Could novels and tales edify – or only entertain, distract, titillate, thus mocking the edifiers and self-improvers? In 1759, Sumarokov, then the director of the Russian Imperial Theatres, weighed in with the opinion that novels, unless elevated by dignity and usefulness, could cause readers a great deal of harm. Chulkov’s eventual response to this lofty neoclassicist position was an omnibus narrative titled The Mocker, or Slavonic Folktales [Peresmeshnik, ili slavenskie skazki], a motley collection of chivalric romances, fantastic wondertales, pagan myths, and the occasional realistic account of abuses of serfdom transposed to the ninth century. Chulkov published his first novel proper, The Comely Cook, anonymously in 1770. In it he continued his earlier “undignified” and “useless” agenda, now integrated by a first-person voice and the thread of a single biography.

The heroine, with the unRussian name Martona, was probably modeled on Fougeretde Monbron’s “roman libertin”Margot laravaudeuse [Margot theOld-Clothes-Mender], a French rags-to-riches courtesan novel published twenty years earlier, in 1750. Martona begins her story as a beautiful, plucky nineteen-year-old, widowed after the Battle of Poltava (1709) and left without means. The battle reference is misleading, however, for the novel is not historical. Cast in the abstract chronotope of adventure tales and the picaresque, it is unified only by the appetites and adventures of its heroine. “I think that many of our sisters will accuse me of immodesty,” Martona begins, “but since this vice is by and large natural to women . . . I shall indulge in it willingly.”9 For the first half of the novel, Martona moves from lover to lover, improving her position, re-pricing her services, surviving the occasional setback with aplomb (being beaten up by a wife, betrayed by a cad, thrown in prison by a jealous heir) and justifying her unscrupulousness – mostly robbing her clients – with pithy folk sayings. (If Fonvizin’s Starodum spoke in Enlightenment maxims, then Chulkov’s Martona, to justify her behavior, rattles off folk proverbs. The sinister culmination of such self-validation through proverbial wisdom comes with Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 peasant drama, The Power of Darkness.) At one point Martona is forced to work as a cook. Most of the time, however, her lovers provide for her handsomely. Her most profitable position is with a lieutenant-colonel in his seventies, into whose wealthy house she smuggles a young admirer dressed as her older sister (a Frol Skobeyev motif). Before she can abscond with this new lover, however, he disappears with their mutually purloined wealth and she must return, humbled and penitent, to her “toothless Adonis,” who is so delighted at her reappearance that on his deathbed he forgives her all.

Is the self-serving voice behind such a story in any position to mock the immoral behavior of others? Probably not, but such was hardly Chulkov’s