The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

48 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

of responsiveness, and the fact that they live off the land. If they prosper, it is because their human surroundings are corrupt, greedy, foolish, selfish – or simply amoral. Rogues are survivors; they live by symbiosis and take on the color of the terrain. There is something of Ivan the Fool in them, rooted in the immediate present, although rogues are far more energetic andentrepreneurial. Often we cannot help feeling gratified at a rogue’s success. A villain, in contrast, creates victims.

Consider the most famous Muscovite exemplar, “Frol Skobeyev the Rogue,” set in the 1680s. Frol is a poor solicitor. He wants to marry Annushka the stolnik’s daughter (a stolnik is a high-ranking court official who served the tsar at table). So he bribes Annushka’s nurse to let him attend her sleepover party dressedas a girl. He ends upin bed with Annushka, who, at first shocked, rapidly develops a liking for her seducer and their mutual sport. By means of various minor blackmails the couple manages to elope. The parents are scandalized; the tsar is alerted; Frol confesses his heinous deed to his in-laws with a shrug. The incensed parents ban their daughter and son-in-law from their house. The daughter fakes illness to win over her parents, at which point the parents send an icontoheal herbecause “apparently God himself haswilled that such arogue be our daughter’s husband”; and Frol, without effort or apology, ends up the heir to all the stolnik’s estates.16 Are we to condemn Frol Skobeyev, or secretly admire him? Both at once, perhaps. Much in our answer depends on context, tone, and the rogue’s own capacity for moral growth. These can vary widely. One study of early Russian rogue tales identifies four career trajectories: the rogue repentant, rewarded, punished, and “unresolved.”17 With their ability both to titillate and to admonish, rogue tales proved immensely popular. In the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol became godfather to the greatest rogues’ gallery on Russian soil.

Gogol’s swaggering tricksters had sprawling progeny in the twentieth century, all with fanatic cult followings. This colorful family includes the Jewish gangster-hero Benya Krik in the Odessa tales of Isaak Babel; the free, illegal, comic spirit of Ilf and Petrov’s Ostap Bender, conman and impostor of the early Soviet years; the justice-bearing troublemakers Koroviev and Behemoth from the Devil’s entourage in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Two things must be noted about this class of rogue. First, in keeping with the traditional Russian virtues of hospitality, generosity, communality, circulation of wealth – and also their inverse, Russian intolerance for profit-making schemes and hoarding of any sort – the Gogolian rogue is overwhelmingly a mercenary one. The tests that he puts to others, and the tests that the narrative puts to him, concern proper and improper uses of money. Pavel Chichikov, the conman in Dead Souls who buys up and then tries to mortgage deceased serfs, is shallow and