The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The eighteenth century 85

Revolution provided startling proof that ideas could result in the decapitation of monarchs. Catherine had Novikov arrested and incarcerated in Peter and Paul Fortress in 1792. He was freed only in 1796, after her death.

In an absolutist state, the balance between acceptable, self-improving mockery and the unacceptable censure of political realities is a fragile one. For the next two centuries, Russian culture and Russian prisons would be populated by writers, artists, stage directors, and composers who gambled and lost while negotiating this tightrope. The practice of comedy under Catherine the Great is a good test case, because the rules for its composition and the range of its character types were so uncomplicated - and also because the very idea of a secular literary establishment was still so fresh. The tense relationship that later became “Poet versus Tsar” was still Poet and Tsar for most high-culture literary forms. In certain ways, neoclassical comedy was just as conventionally structured and ideologically collaborationist as the solemn ode.

Russian playwrights imitated two popular French models: the comedie de caractere (a “comedy of character” focusing on a single eponymous universal vice, as in Moliere’s satires on the Miser or Misanthrope) and comedie de moeurs (a “comedy of manners” satirically portraying contemporary society). The gallery of fixed types for such comedies includes an obedient heroine and a virtuous (often clueless) hero, an obstacle to their union (venal or dimwitted false suitors, parents or guardians), corrupt officials, foolish pedants, witty and resourceful servants, confidantes, and a raisonneur [a “person of good sense” who expresses the moral views of the author]. Virtue must triumph, usually in some sort of public showdown. En route, these types do not so much interact - few events actually occur on the neoclassical comedic stage - as “inter-talk,” that is, expose themselves, scene after scene, through words, either in monologues (often becoming tirades) or dialogues (often dysfunctional). These verbal masks rarely become more complex as a result of any unexpected plot events; if they do, the audience perceives such change as superficial or untrustworthy.

Some Russian “manners” were relatively safe to address simply by mocking an isolated targeted vice. Such was Catherine II’s strategy in her comedy O! The Times! (1769), which ridicules religious hypocrisy, gossip, greed, and faking a knowledge of foreign languages. The Empress followed the convention of giving characters “speaking names” to announce their essence: “Khanzhakina” [Hypocrite], “Vestnikova” [Tattler], “Nepustov” [Not-Empty, Not-Shallow]. Satire could be quite vicious as long as the vice or injustice in question was resolved harmlessly. Because satire and “reform from above” were so intimately interwoven in neoclassical comedy, the limits of the permissible can be tested through three dramatic works that go somewhat against the grain of royal