The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

92 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

intent. Evidence from his other work suggests that The Comely Cook mocks not human folly – that comfortable target of neoclassical satire – but the humans gullible enough to think that folly can be eradicated by writing didactically about it. Chulkov’s novel is prefaced by a mock dedication to a mock patron and an elaborate apology declaring everything (including his own book and its feeble author) perishable and mutable. The message of the preface is indeed debunking, but it is cast in the high style of the tragedian Sumarokov. Satire on all didactic literature, with its moral prescripts and self-righteous poet-practitioners, is woven into the events of the second half of the novel, where Martona is less a manipulator of others and more a witness.10

The novel hints early at its irreverent anti-literary end. One of Martona’s lovers, an illiterate copy clerk, tells her of a neoclassical ode that turned up in their office; the chief secretary assured them it was “some sort of delirium, not worth copying” (p. 38). In a later episode, Martona befriends a merchant’s wife who “writes novels with introductions in verse” (somewhat like Chulkov’s own novel)andfanciesherself acritic. “Sobusy wasshe at versifying,” Martona notes, “she very seldom slept with her husband” (p. 58). This female friend presided over a literary salon, where nothing was natural or healthy: a decrepit old man seduces a thirteen-year-old girl, a young swain courts a toothless wealthy old crone, and in the midst of this “licentious brothel” a “short little poet,” sweating profusely, “kept shouting verses from a tragedy he had composed” (p. 59). This fraudulent salon, which eerily prefigures the grotesque “Literary Feˆte” in Dostoevsky’s 1870 novel Demons, is the portal to a series of other literary and real-life fakes, played out by Martona’s lovers and servants as literal performances.

These performances are themselves parodies of the literary genres they pretend to be. The merchant’s wife decides to get rid of her husband. On commission, Martona’s servant concocts a poison that induces temporary insanity in the victim (the servant calls his harmless handiwork a “comedy”); he then proceeds to expose the wife’s perfidious intent to the whole salon in a skazka [fairy tale]. Finally there is a fake tragedy, the staged suicide-by-poisoning of one lover following the presumed death of his rival in a faked duel. During this parade of malfunctioning genres, Martona herself does little except watch – and make sure that no one actually causes the death of anyone else. She stands for the amoral rights of life to its own preservation. As she confesses to this discredited crew, “even corrupt women are left with some sense of reason” (p. 50, trans. adjusted). The novel breaks off abruptly in the middle of one dramatic (and possibly faked) deathbed scene. Opinions vary on whether Chulkov intended this episode to be the novel’s formal end. Either way, the truncated series of episodes in our possession suggests that a central message of the author – either