The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The eighteenth century 93

Martona herself, or whatever higher storytelling voice stands behind her – was premised on the fact that authors have nothing to “teach.” Life’s experience teaches. Chulkov’s heroine, like every picaresque protagonist, is not a reader but a survivor.

Chulkov’s Martona might have an even more potent (and more politically charged) rags-to-riches prototype than was earlier suspected. Recent research has suggested that Martona is modeled not only on a French clothes-mender who became a successful courtesanbutalso on Peter theGreat’swidow,Empress Catherine I, who, with the help of former lovers and allies, ruled Russia precariously from 1725 to her death in 1727.11 The woman who married Peter I was a commoner, perhaps even a servant, in a Lutheran household. She is believed to have lost her first husband at the Battle of Poltava at the age of eighteen. Her first name was Marta; she was an excellent housekeeper and cook. Tsar Peter was only the most powerful in a series of increasingly distinguished lovers, and he was also the most constant. If this hypothesis about Martona/Marta-Catherine I is correct, then The Comely Cook is not only Russia’s first picaresque novel, but possibly also the first Russian roman-a`-clef (a novel in which actual persons appear under fictitious names). As befits Chulkov, it is a carnivalized roman-a`-clef that travesties its lofty imperial subject.

Neoclassical comedy and the picaresque novel, enriched in the early nineteenth century by an explosion of interest in vaudeville, provide an essential backdrop to Pushkin’s short stories, the dramas and narrative epics of Gogol, and Dos-toevsky’s great novels. These masterworks are most comic precisely at those points where stock characters or scenarios from eighteenth-century satire are recycled in the context of contemporary (and often more frightening) Russian reality. As we shall see in Chapter 5, Pushkin’s Tales of the Late Ivan Petro-vich Belkin (1830) are still cast in the neoclassical comedic mold of harmony, balance, wit, and good will. In Gogol’s 1836 Government Inspector, the darker side of comedy comes to the surface. An unknown fop arrives at a provincial town and, faking every step of the way, terrifies the local bureaucracy into revealing and even intensifying its own corruption. (If the exposure of venality was Pravdin’s straightforward mission in The Minor, Gogol’s nineteenth-century “inspector” Khlestakov is now himself a fake.) In Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), a traveling salesman-rogue on the road must keep moving if he is to avoid exposure and disgrace – for clients and lovers with something to conceal must not meet one another, as Martona ruefully knows. In Dostoevsky’s Demons, a young and pernicious dandy with a smattering of foreign education courts a silly self-important governor’s wife in full view of her browbeaten spouse (a situation straight out of Fonvizin). Had she been alive to watch these