Kelly Laurence, Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

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Griboyedov’s first call after leaving the army must have been to see his

mother and sister in Moscow. At the end of 1815 his father had died.

Quite apart from any natural sorrow Griboyedov may have felt, there

were family matters to be discussed. The Major had left large debts,

most of them to his wife, and his three small estates were heavily

encumbered. The widow’s first consideration was to safeguard the modest

dowry of her daughter, Mariya, and with the consent of Alexander, who

agreed to stand down in his sister’s interest, the whole inheritance was

ceded to her, on condition that she assumed her father’s liabilities.

Mariya, in due course, married a local landowner, M.S. Durnovo, like

her a talented amateur musician.

Alexander, in the long run, could expect to inherit property from his

mother, who still owned several estates, but meanwhile had no means

of his own beyond what allowance she could give him. Anastasiya

Fyodorovna, though willing to scheme and pull strings for her family,

was chronically short of ready money; Alexander would always be worse

off than most of his contemporaries of a similar background.

Having dealt with his affairs in Moscow, where the old patriarchal

way of life was beginning to re-assert itself after the trauma of the war,

Griboyedov must have been eager to set out for St Petersburg. Moscow

might be rising from the ashes, with broad new streets and fine classical

buildings, but little else had changed. ‘In my view,’ says Skalozoop in

Woe from Wit, ‘the fire did much to improve it’.

III

Literary

Beginnings:

St Petersburg

Literary Beginnings: St Petersburg

Famusov: Don’t remind me, everyone’s gone raving

Ever since about new roads and paving,

Houses and everything in the modern mould.

Chatsky: New houses, but the prejudices are old;

Neither years will destroy them, nor fashions

nor fires! What confidence that inspires!

After four years of independence, the old cocoon of Moscow friendships

and relationships must have seemed unbearably restrictive. St

Petersburg, the capital of the empire, offered far wider social and

intellectual horizons. He hoped eventually to join the Foreign Ministry,

but in the meantime, despite the disapproval of his mother, he was

determined to try his chances at a literary career.

It was one of the paradoxes of Russian literary life in the early nine-

teenth century that almost all its practitioners were aristocrats. Some,

like Griboyedov, belonged by birth rather than wealth to the ranks of the

nobility. But the results were the same; few of them expected to make a

living by their writing, though the theatre, and to some extent journalism,

offered the best chance of doing so. Censorship, particularly in the

theatre, was a further problem. Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit never passed

the censors in his lifetime, but was copied and handed round in manu-

script – an early form of samizdat.

‘One shouldn’t judge Russian writers by the same criteria as foreign

ones,’ wrote Pushkin.

There they write for money, and here (except for me) they write from

vanity. There they earn their living by writing poetry and here Count

Khvostov [who published all his works at his own expense] ruined

himself by doing so. There if you have nothing to eat, you write a book;

here if you have nothing to eat, you enter the government service and

don’t write.

It was a dilemma which Griboyedov would soon have to face. For the

moment, however, he was bent on enjoying his new surroundings. In a

letter to Beguichov, dated 9 November 1816,

he urges him to hurry

up and join him in St Petersburg, where he has taken a splendid flat on

the Catherine Canal. He sings the praises of the Shuster Club, an

offshoot of the St Petersburg English Club to which, by special dispen-

sation, ladies are admitted. He is to go there in a party with Vassily

Sheremet’yev, a golden youth from the Chevalier Guards regiment, and

his delectable mistress, Avdotiya Istomina, the leading ballerina of

the day. He himself, he admits, has had to forswear the fair sex for a

time, and is in the hands of a pharmacist who prescribes grey sarsa-

parilla (a homeopathic treatment for venereal infections). He ends his

letter with the naive declaration, ‘How much porter there is to drink

here and how cheap!’

Griboyedov was twenty-one when he arrived in St Petersburg, a slight,

bespectacled young man lacking the heroic aura of his contemporaries

who had fought in the 1812 campaigns, but already armed with some-

thing of a literary reputation. His two articles from Brest-Litovsk, though

published in a Moscow paper, had attracted notice in St Petersburg.

More importantly, his adaptation of a fashionable French comedy, Le

Secret du Ménage by Creuzé de Lesser, had been performed there at the

Maly Theatre the previous year. Written as a curtain-raiser for a benefit

performance for the young dancer and actress Nimfodora Semyonova, it

had starred her elder sister, Yekaterina Semyonova, St Petersburg’s

leading actress, and had been repeated successfully both in Moscow

and the capital.

The play tells the story of a newly married wife who pretends to have

an intrigue in order to influence a lawsuit in her husband’s favour. Her

husband, who has been planning a real affair, is first jealous, then won

over by his wife’s ingenuity. It was an amusing but not altogether

successful attempt to graft a light-hearted French view of morality onto

the sterner, more oriental values of a Russian household. An almost

harem-like seclusion was still to be found in certain Muscovite homes.

Even in St Petersburg, too much of the spirit of The Marriage of Figaro

could lead to trouble, as Pushkin’s fatal duel, fought later over his wife,

would demonstrate.

The Newly Weds, as the Russian play was called, had been written

and produced with the encouragement of Prince Shakhovskoy, a play-

wright himself and a leading figure in the theatrical world of St

Petersburg.

Griboyedov had first met Shakhovskoy in 1813, when he

was bringing recruits from his home region of Ostseisky to Warsaw. Since

then, Shakhovskoy had returned to his peacetime occupations. Now in

his thirties, a cherubic figure with twinkling eyes and a high domed

forehead fringed with scanty curls, he was Director of all the repertoire

in the imperial theatres, and had just written a highly successful

comedy, The Lipetsk Spa, himself. His so-called garret, not far from

Theatre Square, was a meeting place for actors and actresses, rakish

officers, learned academics (the Prince was a member of the St

Petersburg Academy) and writers of all descriptions. The star of the

salon was the poet I.A. Krylov, whose fables, drawn from Russian folk-

lore, had earned him the title of the Russian La Fontaine. Other leading

figures included the playwrights Katenin, Zhandr and Khmel’nitsky,

and later the young Pushkin; Pushkin would recall a reading by Katenin

at the garret as one of the happiest evenings of his life.

Refreshments at the garret gatherings were modest, ‘at very best a

cup of tea’, but the Prince’s geniality and enthusiasm for all things the-

atrical made up for it. A first-class actor himself – ‘had he not been a

Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

prince,’ wrote a friend, ‘we would have had our own Talma or Garrick’ –

he loved to bring on and encourage new talent. He also took great

trouble in finding suitably rich and honourable protectors for young

actresses emerging into the corrupt world of St Petersburg. Rumour had

it that he sometimes took a commission for such placings, but this was

never proved.

Years later, at a dinner following the jubilee performance of Woe from

Wit, an elderly actress, who had been taken there as a girl by Semyonova,

entertained the company with her reminiscences of Griboyedov at these

garret evenings. Griboyedov, she said, ‘would gather us young actresses

together and would begin to tell us some extraordinary long fantasy; we

would shriek and scream and giggle’. He was especially inventive,

apparently, in making up party games. In one of them, called ‘The Monk

and the Nine Virgins’,

the girls had to line up, and singly enter a

darkened room where the Monk, played by Griboyedov, wrapped in a

capacious shawl, would wait to hear their confessions. Once Shakhovskoy,

disguising himself in a scarf, joined the queue:

We all awaited his return from the dark room with excitement. ‘What a

monk! What a spiritual confessor!’ Shakhovskoy exclaimed on emerging.

When the holy father came out from his confessional, we all quizzed him

as to whose kisses had been the most enchanting. ‘The fifth,’ said

Griboyedov, ‘though the little hussy regrettably did not make a proper

confession of her sins …’ The joke was that the fifth was Shakhovskoy.

For all the pranks that took place there, the garret was a serious literary

centre and Griboyedov learnt much of his craft as a playwright from

its genial host.

The American critic Simon Karlinsky, in his book on

nineteenth-century Russian drama, goes so far as to suggest that

Woe from Wit would not have been possible without the example of

Shakhovskoy’s The Lipetsk Spa.

St Petersburg at the time was riven by

the debate between the so-called archaists and romanticists.

Shakhovskoy

was an archaist or conservative by temperament, disliking the excesses

of romantic sentiment, which he mocked in many of his plays.

Paradoxically, however, he was an innovator in his attitude to language.

The Lipetsk Spa is regarded as a turning-point in the transition from the

artificial literary usages of eighteenth-century Russian comedy to a more

natural and colloquial style and as such was enormously influential on

Griboyedov and his successors.

Woe from Wit, Griboyedov’s masterpiece, was still six years ahead,

but his next theatrical enterprise, The Married Fiancée, first performed

in 1817, was written in collaboration with Shakhovskoy. In his intro-

duction to the play, Shakhovskoy explained the circumstances in which

it was written:

Literary Beginnings: St Petersburg

Wishing to compose a new comedy for the benefit performance of Miss

Valberg (who adorned The Lipetsk Spa with her enchanting talent), I

selected a subject in which she could show her varied talents and

I strove to connect the episodic scenes with a simple plot as best I

could. There was a short time left before the day set for the benefit

performance, and for fear of not keeping my promise, I asked Alexander

Griboyedov and Nikolai Khmel’nitsky to help me out. Out of the friend-

ship which they bore me, they agreed; the first wrote the entire beginning

of the second act …and the second wrote the third act scene in which

Biriulkin gives Natasha an examination. Both gratitude and justice require

that I make this known, so as not to usurp other people’s property.

The Married Fiancée was Shakhovskoy’s most successful play, a

sparkling comedy centred on the wiles of the penniless young ward of

an aristocratic family who has secretly married an orphan, and who

must win the approval of his relations if he is to inherit under his

parents’ will. Griboyedov’s contribution shows how much he had

advanced from the more mannered style of The Newly Weds, and

displayed a verve and fluency that, according to Karlinsky, he could

only have learned from his collaborators.

As well as his contribution to The Married Fiancée, Griboyedov had

collaborated with his new friend Pavel Katenin

on a comedy called

The Student. Katenin was a confirmed archaist, and the play poked fun

at the romantics and sentimentalists, as typified by the court poet

Zhukovsky. Perhaps for this reason, it did not pass the censors, though

it was widely read in the drawing-rooms of St Petersburg. Its theme

was the defeat of a newcomer from the country, full of romance and

idealistic daydreams, by the implacable realities of money and power.

Zvezdov (Mr Star), its cynical anti-hero, is the original wheeler and

dealer, an influential senior civil servant whose surface geniality

conceals a scheming heart. Benevol’sky, the hopeless young Candide,

was said to be a portrait of the critic and playwright Mikhail Zagoskin.

He thinks and speaks in clichés: girls are ‘celestial creatures’, the sky

is ‘the blue firmament’. As foils to his artificial commonplaces, the

servants use a naturally vigorous Russian which must have sounded a

radical note to the ears of its fashionable audience. The satire is further

sharpened by the contrast between the hero’s naivety and the cheerful

hypocrisy of the Zvezdovs.

In caricaturing Zagoskin as the country bumpkin of the title,

Griboyedov had a personal axe to grind: Zagoskin had written a mildly

critical review of The Newly Weds in the Northern Observer. Not content

with lampooning him in The Student, he also attacked Zagoskin,

together with the editor Nikolai Grech, who had reviewed his play

unfavourably, in a skit called The Puppet Theatre. The title referred to a

Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

Literary Beginnings: St Petersburg

popular Punch and Judy show much frequented by the common people

in their morning strolls:

See here your Zagoskin the Observer and the Son of the Fatherland, his

competitor,

One of them writes rubbish,

The other analyses it,

And between the two it is not easy,

To decide which is the greatest fool.

He was accused of indulging in personal abuse; undeterred, he hired

copyists to produce copies of the pamphlet, which his friends distributed

all round St Petersburg. Zagoskin, a gentle, inoffensive figure, was deeply

wounded by this unprovoked vendetta; Grech, who was made of tougher

fibre, simply laughed at the whole affair.

Katenin had had his own troubles with reviewers the previous

autumn, when his translation of Bürger’s famous ballad ‘Leonore’ had

been attacked for its excessive earthiness and realism. An earlier but

more insipid version by Zhukovsky had softened and romanticised

the harshness of the German original. In a review for Son of the

Fatherland,

which in many ways expressed his own artistic credo,

Griboyedov had ridiculed Zhukovsky’s prudery and flowery paraphrases,

praising Katenin’s version for the directness and simplicity of its

language, which derived from the everyday rhythms of popular speech

rather than the poetic conventions of the past.

Such literary battles were commonplace in the capital, which in the

years immediately following the war was effervescent with creativity and

new ideas. Shakhovskoy’s garret,

where Griboyedov was soon accepted

as a star, was only one of a number of salons which a young man of

letters would have known. Grech, as editor of Son of the Fatherland, was

an influential figure whose drawing-room welcomed all shades of literary

opinion. So too did that of O.I. Senkovsky,

the editor of The Reader’s

Library, a well-known orientalist who received his guests wearing eastern

costume, and puffing scented tobacco from a Persian kalyan. The group

surrounding Admiral Shishkov,

the Conversation Club of the Friends

of the Russian Language, were arch-conservatives in literature, deter-

mined to defend the traditional forms of literary Russian against foreign

encroachments and linguistic innovations.

Their opponents, in the

lighter-hearted Arzamas Club, stood up against the ancients for modern

idioms and a simpler, more colloquial style; their meetings, where the

members (including the young Pushkin) wore red caps and consumed a

jellied goose for supper, were little more than excuses for carousing.

On a more serious level, but still allowing for a plentiful consumption

of champagne, was the Green Lamp Society. Founded in 1818 by the

millionaire Alexander Vsevolozhsky, an old friend of Griboyedov’s from

Moscow University, its members were mostly army officers, brilliant

young roués who had earned their spurs in 1812, and, ‘lost among the

braid and frogging’, a few select civilians. They met once a fortnight in

a large room lit by a green lamp, symbol of hope; all the members wore

a special ring, with a lamp engraved on the stone. Here Pushkin read

his latest poems, there were talks on Russian history, discussions of the

theatre, and rowdy late-night suppers with ladies of the town. Here too,

since members were bound to secrecy about the society’s proceedings,

the social and political questions of the day were freely discussed. For

those who had campaigned across Europe, the evidence that civilised

societies could exist without the twin evils of serfdom and autocracy

was clear. Aristocratic liberalism was the fashion. The Green Lamp,

though too frivolous to be a centre of conspiracy, was at least a place

where revolutionary ideas were aired.

Griboyedov would leave St Petersburg soon after the Green Lamp

was founded, but some of his theatrical sketches would have their first

readings there, and many of its members were close friends. Its real

significance in his life was as a forerunner of those secret societies in

which the Decembrist movement took shape, and in which, through his

friendships and acquaintances, he was indirectly involved.

Of similar significance was Griboyedov’s enrolment in the

Freemasons

soon after his arrival in St Petersburg. Probably nowhere

else in Europe did Freemasonry play so important a part in the develop-

ment of the cultural life of three or four generations as it did in Russia.

It first reached the country in the early years of Catherine the Great,

and was rapidly taken up by the aristocracy. Orthodox theology provided

no strong alternative in a written form of sufficient emotional depth or

intellectual rigour to satisfy an increasingly literate and demanding

public. One need look no further than War and Peace, and the tortured

doubts of Pierre Bezukhov, to learn of the spiritual solace which Free-

masonry could provide.

By 1816, when Griboyedov joined, some of the

earlier intensity had disappeared; the gossipy writer F.F. Vigel’ described

the Masonic lodges as nothing more than clubs or inns, to which a

certain secretiveness and a few minor difficulties in joining gave curiosity

value. Later historians, however, see the Masonic lodges, with their

exclusiveness and secrecy, as natural precursors to the secret societies

in which the Decembrist manifestos were prepared.

Amongst the members of Les Amis Réunis, the lodge which Griboyedov

joined in 1816, were P.I. Pestel’, M.I. Muravyov-Apostol and I.A.

Dolgorukov, all leading future Decembrists, though the Masons them-

selves had no direct concern with politics. In the same year, however,

Pestel’ became a founder-member of the small and dedicated Union of

Salvation, with an active programme of reform, including the elimination

Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran

of serfdom and the end of the autocracy. It was followed in 1817 by the

founding of the Union of Welfare in Moscow, and its linking body the

Military Society, one branch of which was directed by Griboyedov’s

theatrical collaborator Katenin. Stepan Beguichov was another member.

Griboyedov could not have failed to have known their views, but he

made no attempt to join them. He may have found the Masons’ secret

rituals and search for spiritual enlightenment an acceptable substitute

for his friends’ political idealism, which in any case was alien to his

sceptical nature and personal situation at the time.

Literary Beginnings: St Petersburg

During his stay in St Petersburg, Griboyedov had become a significant

figure on the literary scene, attracting attention not only by his writing,

but by the sparkle of his personality and conversation. He was witty,

high-spirited, almost always jolly and good-humoured; friends would

recall his gentle manners and the modest, tentative smile with which

he would begin a conversation. He could also be proud and touchy on

occasion, quick to take offence and with a bitingly sarcastic tongue. But

the roll-call of his friendships, with some of the most brilliant members

of his generation, point to a likeable and attractive character, and those

who knew him best, like Beguichov, always insisted on his sincerity and

underlying seriousness.

Behind the dazzle of his literary life, however, lay a darker reality.

Although he was too fastidious for the drinking and debauchery of his

wilder friends, he had expensive tastes: new books, a piano, visits to the

opera and theatre, were necessities of life to him. He was already living

well beyond his means and was in debt to several of his friends. His

mother did what she could to help, but her own affairs, according to

Beguichov, had become ‘confused and dissipated’. While Griboyedov’s

contemporaries preached liberal values and the emancipation of the

serfs, she had recently embarked on an unsavoury property speculation

in which she had behaved so tyrannically towards the peasants involved

that they had been driven to mutiny against her.

The story began in 1816, when she had purchased an estate near

Kostroma, with 780 ‘souls’. She had borrowed heavily to make the

The Duel

purchase, and was eager to make a quick return. She accordingly raised

the peasants’ quit-rent (obrok, or payment in cash rather than services)

to four times its previous level, and hugely increased payments in kind.

She backed up her demands with threats. Those who refused would be

sent to a distillery or cotton mill, or compulsory labour at the plough;

unmarried girls faced forced marriages and removal to Moscow. The

peasants, stunned at the exorbitance of her demands, appealed for

justice to the Tsar; their luckless spokesman (or khodok) was later

sentenced to be flogged and exiled to Siberia. Meanwhile, a committee

of provincial landowners was called in to arbitrate, but although they

suggested a somewhat lower figure, it was far above the local average

and the peasants still refused to pay. They continued to sue for justice

from the Tsar, but their messengers were intercepted and arrested as

runaways by the widow’s agents before they reached St Petersburg. In

the end, at Griboyedova’s insistence, the military was called in: the

ringleaders were placed in irons and taken off to jail, the rest were

forced into submission. The widow was victorious, but the affair had

seriously besmirched her reputation; she sold the estate soon after.

These events, outrageous even in the context of the time, were taking

place while Griboyedov was living in St Petersburg, dependent on his

mother for an allowance. They were well known to his Moscow contem-

poraries. The Decembrist Yakushkin, a childhood friend from Khmelita,

writes in his memoirs of the ‘wickedness’ of Griboyedov’s mother in laying

unbearable burdens on her serfs and in calling in the military.

In his

few surviving letters of this period, Griboyedov makes no reference to

the affair. His mother was self-willed and despotic, and would probably

have paid no attention to his protests.

But it may well have been to lessen his financial dependence on her

that in the summer of 1817 he applied to join the Collegium (Ministry)

of Foreign Affairs. At least as a civil servant he would have an income,

regardless of her speculations; he had probably seen enough of journalism

and the theatre to realise the problems of making a living by his pen.

Griboyedov’s application was accepted on 9 June 1817, on the same

day as two other young men whose names are familiar from Russian

history, and whose paths in various ways were to cross his over the next

few years: they were the Decembrist Wilhelm Küchelbecker (later nick-

named ‘Kukliya’) and Alexander Pushkin, then barely eighteen.

Thanks

to Griboyedov’s outstanding academic record, he was not made to serve

an apprenticeship period in the archives, but reported to the Ministry

straight away. It was an imposing building on the English Embankment,

once a baroque gem by Quarenghi, but now transformed into a stern,

office-like, classical building, well suited to ambassadors and the state

bureaucracy. Founded by Peter the Great, the Collegium of Foreign

The Duel