Kelly Laurence, Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

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His rendering of David

Is more frightful than Goliath …

Vyazemsky, thanks to his wealth and great position, could afford to

ignore the sniping of Pisarev’s clique. Griboyedov was more exposed.

The attacks on his contribution to the operetta were a cover for more

serious literary jealousies. Since his return from Persia, he had been

regarded as something of a celebrity, aureoled in his fame as a diplomat,

a fascinating conversationalist, a many gifted writer and musician.

Above all, he was becoming known as the author of a brilliant new play,

already famous while still in manuscript. At first known only to a

chosen few, the news of it got out, apparently, when the musical

amateur, Count Vyel’gorsky, whilst leafing through the scores on his

sister’s piano, came on some pages of the play in Griboyedov’s hand.

‘Griboyedov,’ noted Beguichov, ‘was extremely careless and insouciant,

writing wherever the fancy took him, and never making any effort to

arrange his papers.’

Griboyedov’s sister tried to evade his enquiries

by dismissing them as ‘Alexander’s follies’, but the count was not to be

put off, and carried them off despite her. The ‘follies’, in fact, were part

of Woe from Wit, and before long extracts from the new play were

beginning to circulate round Moscow. Griboyedov, meanwhile, began to

give readings from it amongst his friends, while at the same time con-

tinuing to make changes to the text.

Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

To reach a wider public it was necessary that the play should pass the

censors, and in order to ease its way with the authorities involved,

Griboyedov decided to take it to St Petersburg himself. Yermolov had

obligingly extended his leave, even agreeing to a request that he should

be allowed to travel abroad on grounds of ill health. His first hope was

that, after a brief stay in the capital to launch his play, he would travel

to France and Italy, returning to Tiflis via Constantinople and the Black

Sea coast of Georgia. But he had reckoned without the censors, whose

delays and obstructions would keep him in St Petersburg for nearly a year.

He arrived there in June,

having been delayed by heavy snowdrifts

on the way, and made his first headquarters in Demuth’s Hotel.

Situated on the corner of the Nevsky Prospekt and the Moika Canal,

Demuth’s was one of the best-known hotels of the day, much frequented

by literary figures,

and remarkably good value. Griboyedov, as usual,

was in financial difficulties; he had borrowed from Beguichov, and had

pawned his Persian Order of the Lion and the Sun in order to raise money.

But he was received in St Petersburg as a hero, and almost immediately

began to publicise his play. The censors could delay publication, but

they could not prevent him from showing the manuscript around, or

‘scattering its sparks’, as he expressed it, in private readings to his friends.

In this way, the play became known to most of literary and theatrical

St Petersburg.

Writing to Beguichov in July, Griboyedov described

how he had already given 12 readings to audiences including Krylov,

Khmel’nitsky, Shakhovskoy, the actor Karatygin and the publishers

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Woe from Wit

Grech and Bulgarin: ‘Each caused a sensation, exaltation, curiosity,

wonder and delight – there is no end to it!’

Amongst the early enthusiasts for Woe from Wit was a young Guards

officer, Alexander Bestuzhev

(best known under his pen-name Marlinsky

as one of the most popular novelists of the 1830s, a kind of Russian

Walter Scott). Then in his early twenties, he had long avoided meeting

Griboyedov because of his role in the Sheremet’yev duel – whether this was

due to stories spread by Yakubovich that, as Zavadovsky’s second, he

had prevented him from seeking a reconciliation with Sheremet’yev is

impossible to tell. But he had begun to change his views when they met

by chance at the bedside of a sick friend, where Griboyedov’s genuine

sympathy for the invalid had been apparent, and had swung round

completely when Bulgarin allowed him to read some extracts from the play.

He devoured them eagerly, warming to the hero Chatsky’s invective, and

deciding there and then that ‘whoever had penned these verses was a

noble and honourable being’. Taking his hat, he rushed round to see

Griboyedov, and to ask to make his acquaintance properly. He would have

done so long before, he told him, but had been warned against him because

of Sheremet’yev’s death. ‘All these slanders,’ he told him, ‘melt away before

the verses of your comedy. The heart which composed them could never

be cold or indifferent.’ The two men shook hands. ‘I am delighted,’ said

Griboyedov, ‘this is how friendships should be made between people who

understand each other.’

Bestuzhev asked him for a full copy of his

manuscript, but Griboyedov had none at hand, and asked him instead to

dinner with a mutual friend, where he was to give a reading the next day.

‘I was there punctually at six,’ wrote Bestuzhev. ‘Griboyedov was an

excellent reader. He could give variety to every character and shade,

every felicitous expression. I was in ecstasy … From then on we were no

longer strangers to each other.’ The relationship developed rapidly. First

and foremost, wrote Bestuzhev, was the similarity of their characters.

Neither could stand the bland superficiality of meaningless social din-

ners, obsessed with the values of rank, or the glittering formal evenings

where so-called grand society showed itself off. Both were blazingly sin-

cere and intolerant of hypocrisy. Griboyedov’s satire on the follies and

foibles of polite society, thought Bestuzhev, was ‘wonderful … a superb

breath of fresh air’.

As a co-editor of the literary journal the Northern Star, Bestuzhev was

in the thick of the literary debates of the day. He had contributed to the

nationalist movement with a passionately argued essay entitled ‘The

Antiquity and Superiority of the Russian Language over other Languages’.

He was also an avowed romantic, and thus a fanatical admirer of Byron,

about whom Griboyedov remained cooler. But both shared a love for

Shakespeare – one of Griboyedov’s projects at this time was a translation

Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

of Romeo and Juliet,

which failed because his collaborator, Zhandr, did

not know English: ‘I would be working from the original,’ wrote

Griboyedov, ‘and he from a bad translation; cutting up Shakespeare is

a bold undertaking … In any case I prefer to write a tragedy of my own,

and shall certainly do so once I have left here.’

Despite Yermolov’s good nature in extending his leave, Griboyedov

knew that his time in St Petersburg was limited. This made his

frustrations with the censors still harder to bear. He had begun his

negotiations with high hopes. He called several times on Admiral

Shishkov, the head of literary censorship at the Ministry of Education,

and on Lanskoy, the Minister of the Interior, in charge of licensing

theatrical performances, who assured him politely that the matter was

being studied. But as the summer turned into the autumn, with no

decision from the censors, he grew increasingly desperate. After a

meeting with Baron von Fock, head of chancery in the Ministry of

the Interior, he was driven to such fury by his intransigence that he

rushed back to the flat he was sharing with Vladimir Odoyevsky’s

cousin Alexander and tore up every scrap of his writing in sight.

His irritability and frustration could be taken out on others. ‘There

is something wild and farouche about his egotism,’ noted Vyazemsky.

‘He flies off the handle at the slightest provocation.’ On one particular

occasion, described by the actor Karatygin, he pulverised a fellow guest

at a lunch party given by Khmel’nitsky before a reading from his play:

Lunch was luxurious, cheerful and noisy; suddenly over coffee and

cigars, Griboyedov placed the manuscript of his comedy on a chair.

Everyone moved their chairs nearer in order not to miss a word. One of

the guests, a certain Vassily Mikhailovich Fyodorov, the author of a play

called Lisa, a nice, rather simple man with pretensions to wit … leant

forward and seized the manuscript, which was written in rather sprawling

writing, while Griboyedov was smoking his cigar. Waving it about, he

cried with a naive, good-natured smile, ‘Oh, how heavy it is is – it’s

worth as much as my Lisa.

Griboyedov glared at him from under his glasses and said through

his teeth, ‘I do not write rubbish [or ‘vulgarisms’, or ‘commonplaces’, in

Russian, poshlosti]’. This unexpected reply naturally took Fyodorov

aback, and trying to show that he took it all as a joke, he smiled and

hastened to add, ‘Nobody doubts that, Alexander Sergeyevich; not only

did I not wish to offend you but I can honestly say that I am the first to

laugh at my own work’. ‘You may laugh at your own work as much as

you wish,’ said Griboyedov, ‘but I will let no-one ridicule mine.’ ‘You must

understand I was not speaking of the quality of our respective plays but

only of the number of sheets.’ ‘The quality of my comedy you cannot yet

know, but the quality of your plays has long been known to everyone.’

‘Really, you’ve no call to say that; I repeat, I had no wish to offend you.’

Woe from Wit

‘Oh, I’m quite sure you spoke without thinking [said Griboyedov], and

as for offending me I am afraid that is something you will never do.’

Their host, who was on the very edge of his chair while listening to this

barbed exchange, attempted to pour oil on troubled waters. He took

Fyodorov by the shoulders, and said to him with a laugh, ‘As a punish-

ment we’ll have to put you in the back row of the stalls.’

Griboyedov, who had been walking up and down the drawing room

smoking his cigar, said to Khmel’nitsky, ‘You may put him wherever you

wish, but I will not read my play in his presence’.

The wretched Fyodorov seized his hat and as he left had a last word

with Griboyedov to explain that he was leaving in order not to embarrass

his host any more. Griboyedov coldly wished him a safe journey.

It is a revealing episode, if only to show how touchy and thin-skinned

Griboyedov had become. In November 1824, however, he had a glimmer

of encouragement. Thanks to the efforts of his would-be publisher,

Bulgarin, and the excision of some so-called doubtful passages, the

Ministry of Education agreed to the publication of four scenes from the

first act and the whole of the third act in the literary almanac, the

Russian Thalia.

The extracts would be published in January 1825. At

the same time, Karatygin, at the risk of his career, persuaded Bok, the

director of the Imperial Theatrical School, to stage a performance of the

authorised fragments by his pupils, with Karatygin in the main role. ‘In

a week they all knew their parts,’ wrote Karatygin.

Griboyedov came to the rehearsals and threw himself into teaching us,

his applause bearing witness to his joy at seeing his play performed in

our childish theatre …We were finally ready for the first night, but alas!

all our hopes and negotiations collapsed like a bubble. At the very last

rehearsal Bok appeared, bearing the dreaded firman of Count

Miloradovich [the Military Governor of St Petersburg, responsible for

public order in the theatre], advising us … that the play was not

approved for acting by the censors, even in a school … and letting it be

known that our imprudence might well lead to our being locked up in

the Peter and Paul fortress. We set off to tell Griboyedov who was deeply

saddened by the news.

Griboyedov’s play was not to receive a stage performance till 1831, two

years after his death, and then only in a much truncated form. (It would

not be played in its entirety until the 1860s.) Meanwhile, however, his

friends had taken the law into their own hands. Appalled at Griboyedov’s

carelessness about his manuscripts, some of them so heavily corrected

as to be almost indecipherable, his fellow playwright Zhandr had begged

him to let him take copies of the play. ‘With the utmost insouciance’,

Griboyedov agreed, and at Zhandr’s initiative a whole chancery of clerks

and copyists were set to work.

Young officers on leave would join the

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group, taking their copies with them when they left for the provinces.

The process snowballed, copies were copied and re-copied, until by

1830, according to Bulgarin, there was scarcely a small town in Russia,

or a literary household, which did not have a handwritten version of

the play.

One estimate puts the number of manuscripts of the play in

circulation at 40,000, a form of samizdat unequalled until Soviet times.

In defiance of the censorship, Woe from Wit had become public property.

One of Griboyedov’s earliest readers in the provinces was Pushkin,

in exile since 1820 for writing supposedly subversive verses, and now

under house arrest at his family estate, Mikhailovskoye. The arrival of

his friend, Ivan Pushchin, bearing a copy of Woe from Wit, on a snowy

morning in January 1825, was a red-letter day for the exiled poet. In a

letter to Bestuzhev shortly after, Pushkin gave his reactions to the play

in what is probably the best known of all critiques of Woe from Wit. We

shall return to his comments in more detail later; suffice it to say at

this stage that he made the prediction that half the lines in the play

would become proverbs. No prophecy could have been truer. Scores of

quotations have acquired the status of popular sayings. They have been

used by innumerable writers, from Pushkin himself to Pasternak and

Nabokov, sometimes, as with Shakespeare, becoming so much a part of

everyday speech that their actual origin is forgotten. Professor Karlinsky,

in the chapter on Griboyedov in his Russian Drama, calculates that, line

for line, Woe from Wit is the most quoted work in Russian literature.

It is strange that a play so familiar to Russian audiences should be

so comparatively little known in other countries. In one way this is

because of the extreme complexity and difficulty of the language. To

quote Karlinsky,

A blend of uproarious humour and hauntingly subtle verbal music in

the original Russian, [Woe from Wit] is the ultimate proof that the art of

literature is on its basic level the art of words. Griboyedov’s art is

addressed to those who can understand his words instantly in all their

finest shadings and ambiguities. Some knowledge of Russian is no

help at all: students at Western universities who know enough of the

language to read Turgenev and Akhmatova in the original shrug their

shoulders at lines and passages that make native speakers gasp in awed

wonder or slap their thighs in mirth. Nor has there yet been a translation

into any language that can convey to people in other countries why this

play is such a miracle of wit and verbal precision.

Even the title of the play, Gore ot Uma in Russian, is virtually untrans-

latable. English versions vary: The Misfortune of Being Clever, ’Tis Folly

to be Wise, Brains Hurt, or Woe From Wit. Anthony Burgess, in his

translation of the play, gave up the struggle and simply called it by the

name of its hero, Chatsky. There is a good argument for doing so.

Woe from Wit

Chatsky is one of the great parts in the Russian theatre, comparable to

playing Hamlet for a Russian actor. As with Hamlet, his character is

open to a variety of interpretations. At first sight there is a resemblance to

Alceste, the hero of Molière’s Le Misanthrope.

Like Alceste, Chatsky is

a young man at odds with the hypocrisy of the society in which he lives.

For Griboyedov, Molière had always been the greatest of satirists, whose

comedies had provided an essential safety valve in the autocratic France

of Louis XIV. Chatsky shares Alceste’s brutal honesty, but he is moodier,

wittier, more romantic and uncertain than his French ancestor. And

although, as in Le Misanthrope, the action of the play takes place in 24

hours, Griboyedov’s verse, in rhyming lines of varying length, is more

flexible than the French alexandrine, and its framework is looser and

less confined. In the third act, 23 characters are crammed onto stage in

a grotesque Gogolian extravaganza unthinkable in the classical theatre.

There is a sense of limitless horizons outside the stifling world of

Moscow, of the vast open spaces through which Chatsky has travelled,

More than seven hundred leagues without a moment’s rest,

Stumbling on through wind and storms, like a man possessed.

The story of Woe from Wit is relatively simple; the drama is far more one

of character, of discovery and self-discovery, than of plot. Chatsky, a

young nobleman, steeped in post-Napoleonic ennui, returns to Moscow

after an absence of three years to find that his beloved Sophie has fallen

in love with her father’s secretary, the toadying Molchalin. He is further

disillusioned by the ignorance, smugness and corruption of Moscow

society, epitomised above all by Sophie’s father, Famusov, a venal

bureaucrat whose surface joviality conceals an underlying menace:

at the end of the last act, he threatens his servant with forced labour

in Siberia.

The action takes place in Famusov’s house. The scene opens at

daybreak, to the sound of a flute and piano off stage. Liza, the maid, is

yawning outside Sophie’s room, where Sophie and Molchalin have stayed

up all night, supposedly to play duets. Famusov comes in and almost

catches them, but is fobbed off by Sophie’s story of a romantic dream

from which she has just awoken, full of ‘devils and love, flowers and

fear’.

He goes off suspiciously with Molchalin, leaving the maid and

mistress to laugh at their narrow escape. Sophie sings Molchalin’s praises,

but Liza reminds her of Chatsky, and his tears when they said goodbye.

It was true that they had loved one another since childhood, says

Sophie, but this had not prevented him from leaving her; even before he

left Moscow, his visits to their household had become less frequent:

Oh, if you love someone with a love that’s true,

Why go off seeking learning and disappear into the blue?

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Chatsky’s return, to throw himself at Sophie’s feet, leaves the question

open. Does he truly love her, or does he love the idealised image he has

made of her? He cannot believe that Sophie could prefer an unworthy

figure like Molchalin, but his jibes against her favourite only serve to

turn Sophie against him. It is she who in the third act starts the rumour

that Chatsky is mad. The story spreads like wildfire round a ballroom

crowded with characteristic Moscow types: the Blimpish Colonel

Skalozoop, the rascally Zagoretsky, the hen-pecked Platon Mikhailovich,

the prince and princess with six twittering daughters, the elderly

countess with a granddaughter in tow. Even Repetilov,

the club-room

radical, with his talk of secret meetings, ‘parliament, jury service,

Byron’,

is eventually convinced his friend is insane.

By the end of the play, Chatsky, discredited, calumniated, and cut

to the heart by Sophie’s betrayal, can only shake the dust of Moscow

from his feet. Sophie, equally disillusioned, finds that Molchalin’s love

for her is no more than a sycophantic ruse; it is Liza, the pertly pretty

maid, that he prefers. The final scene reveals the truth to both her and

Chatsky. Sophie, creeping downstairs to meet Molchalin, overhears him

making advances to Liza; he had only gone along with Sophie to please

his boss’s daughter, and is secretly terrified that Famusov will find out.

Sophie steps forward to denounce him, threatening to tell her father the

whole story, unless he leaves the house immediately. Her humiliation is

complete when she finds that Chatsky, who has been hidden behind a

pillar, has overheard everything. Molchalin cravenly hides in his room,

but Chatsky has scarcely time to express his scorn and wounded

feelings before Famusov, who has been disturbed by the noise, bursts

in with a crowd of servants. Instantly jumping to the conclusion that

Chatsky has been his daughter’s secret lover, he threatens her with

banishment to the country, and orders him to leave the house. Chatsky

is only too ready to do so, but not before he has delivered a final diatribe

against Sophie, her father and the iniquities of Moscow in general:

The people I’ve been with! What a place I’ve been thrown to by fate!

A tormenting crowd that curses and pursues!

Treacherous in love, implacable in hate,

Raconteurs who endlessly narrate,

Incoherent clever fellows, simpletons full of guile,

Malignant old crones,

Old men aging in their bones,

Obsessed with nonsense and crumbling all the while –

Like a chorus you’ve all proclaimed me mad.

You’re right, anyone who spends a day among your kind

And so much as sniffs an air so bad

And still retains his balance of mind

Could pass through fire and still not burn –

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Woe from Wit

I’ve had it with Moscow, I’ll never return.

I’ll fly from here with never a backwards glance,

I’ll search on earth to see if there’s a chance

Of finding a corner where outraged feeling can go to ground!

He rushes out, calling for his carriage, leaving Famusov to wring his

hands at the prospect of social disaster:

Well! You see! He’s really off his head!

Seriously he’s mad, all those stupid things he said!

Sycophant! Father-in-law! And about Moscow what severity!

And you’ve decided to be the death of me!

My life’s in such a sorry way,

Oh God! What will Princess Mariya Alexeyevna say!

Let us return to Pushkin’s reactions to the play. In his letter to

Bestuzhev already mentioned,

he jotted down his first impressions:

One must judge a dramatic writer by the laws which he acknowledges

for himself. Consequently I do not condemn the plot, the exciting force

or the proprieties in Griboyedov’s comedy. His aim is in the characters

and the sharp picture of manners he gives. In this respect Famusov and

Skalozoop are superb. Sophie is not sketched clearly; she is not exactly

a whore, nor exactly a Moscow female cousin. Molchalin is not glaringly

base enough; couldn’t he have been made a coward too? … Les propos

de bal, gossip, Repetilov’s tale about the club, Zagoretsky, who is known

by all as an inveterate scoundrel and yet received everywhere – here are

the traits of a truly comic genius. Now a question. In the comedy Woe

from Wit, who is the most intelligent character? The answer: Griboyedov.

And do you know who Chatsky is? A fiery, noble and fine fellow who has

spent some time with a very intelligent man (namely Griboyedov) and

has become steeped in his ideas, witticisms, satirical observations.

Everything he says is very intelligent. But to whom does he say all this.

To Famusov? To Skalozoop? To Moscow grandmothers at a ball? To

Molchalin? That is unpardonable. The first mark of an intelligent man

is to know at first glance whom he is dealing with and not to cast pearls

before Repetilovs and the like …

In this last comment, Pushkin touches the most questionable aspect of

the play. Why does Chatsky, unlike Griboyedov, whose friends were

among the best and brightest of his generation, waste his anger on such

unworthy targets? The answer is perhaps that Chatsky is not

Griboyedov, that he is a man possessed by two overriding passions, his

detestation of hypocrisy and his love for Sophie. Borne along by his own

feelings, he cares less with whom he speaks than about expressing what

he feels, and his eloquence and conviction carry his audience with him.

Even Pushkin admitted that he had suspended his judgement until

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102

afterwards: ‘While I was listening to his comedy I was not criticising;

I was revelling in it’.

We have no record of Griboyedov’s reaction to Pushkin’s comments,

though Pushkin had asked Bestuzhev to show them to him, ‘written

directly, without any beating about the bush, as to a real master’. But

in a letter to Katenin, his former collaborator on The Student, and

one of the few men whose literary judgement he respected, he gave a

revealing summary of the play.

‘I got your letter yesterday,’ he wrote in

January 1825,

and locked myself up with it all day, remembering those good old days

we spent together. Your critique is absolutely wicked and unjust, all the

same its candour brought me real pleasure … You find the chief weak-

ness lies in the plot. It seems to me that it is very clear and simple in its

aim and execution. A young girl, herself not stupid, prefers a fool to a

clever man …And this person, it is clear is in opposition to the society

round him. Nobody understands him, no one makes allowances for him,

for which he stands a little higher than the rest. At first he is cheerful,

and this is a mistake. He is always making jokes, and showing up the

eccentricities of his old acquaintances. What can you do about it? His

humorous sallies are relatively mild until he is driven mad, but as they

have not the slightest trace of nobility in their characters, they talk

about him as follows. ‘He is not a human being, he is a snake’ [Sophie],

and later when their vanity is piqued by his remarks, ‘He likes to belittle

people and makes caustic comments – he is envious, he is proud and

evil’. He cannot endure baseness and mean tricks: ‘Oh, my God he’s one

of the Carbonari!’ Someone, out of malice invents the story that he had

gone mad. Nobody believes it and everyone repeats it. The general ill will

towards him, and the absence of that girl’s love, which was the only

reason why he came to Moscow, explains everything to him. Then he

spits in her face and everybody else’s, and that’s how it was.

Griboyedov went on to answer specific criticisms.

‘The scenes are connected arbitrarily’: just as in nature, events occur in

random order, whether small or important. The more unexpectedly they

follow each the more they arouse our curiosity. I write for those who feel

like me, and when in the first scene I can guess what will happen in the

tenth, I begin to yawn and flee the theatre. ‘The characters are portraits’:

I may not have the talent of Molière,

but at least I am truer to nature

than he is. Portraits and only portraits deserve a place in tragedy or

comedy …I loathe caricatures – you will not find one in my picture. This

is the essence of my poetic art …

It is this ability to breathe life into his characters, so that they exist not

as types, but as genuine individuals, that is one of the miracles of the

play. Even before extracts were published in the papers, those who had

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