T
he Russian émigré critic Georgy Adamovich once observed that the normal state of a flourishing literature is civil war. In periods when literary life is vigorously active, when various different factions are springing up and clashing with one another and a struggle is raging over the desired direction of literary development and over which stream literature will choose to follow—at such times conditions really are remi-niscent of warfare. In the history of Russian literature the Romantic age was like that. In periods of decline or stagnation, when literature stops moving forward, literary battles that renew and invigorate verbal art are only the stuff of dreams. However, the impassioned aggressiveness that literary battles sometimes exhibit also has its destructive side: interesting literary phenomena fully worthy of attention are victimized. Writers of a defeated literary school are simply read out of the literature in question, and the history of literature is thus obscured and distorted. Subsequent generations of literary scholars and critics can manage only with difficulty (and sometimes not manage at all) to recapture a true perception of the historical process.For example, as Sergei Aksakov and Yury Tynyanov pointed out, each in his own period, the victory of the Romantic movement in Russian literature led to the exclusion from the history of literature of the large and important school of neoclassic verse drama of the beginning of the nineteenth century, from which in subsequent decades only Aleksandr Griboedov’s Gore ot uma (Woe from wit) remained on the surface, like the summit of an enormous iceberg (as Tynyanov put it). From works
1 Translated by Hugh McLean. Originally published as “Trilogiia Kiukhel’bekera Izhor-skii kak primer romanticheskogo vozrozhdeniia srednevekovoi misterii,” in American Contributions to the Seventh International Congress of Slavists, Warsaw, August 21–27, 1973, vol. 2, ed. Victor Terras (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 307–20.
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by the same Tynyanov most literary scholars knew that Aleksandr Sha-khov skoi’s comedy Lipetskie vody (The Lipetsk spa) contains a lampoon of Vasily Zhukovsky, which aroused the anger of the “Karamzinians” or
“innovators,” who then tried to cause the play to flop. However, to this very day it has not been noticed that this comedy, produced in 1815, is written in the literary language of the Pushkin era, whereas Pushkin himself, in poems from 1815, was still writing in the language and style of the Karamzinian poets. Few have noticed the fact that in light and supposedly “content-free” comedies adapted from the French by Sha-khov skoi’s ally Nikolai Khmelnitsky in 1817, when Pushkin was only beginning Ruslan and Lyudmila, you already hear the verse and language of Count Nulin and The Little House at Kolomna (two comic poems by Pushkin written much later, in 1825 and 1830, respectively). It is seldom pointed out that it is in the writings of the comic dramatists of the sec-ond decade of the nineteenth century, and to a greater degree than in the fables of their literary associate Ivan Krylov or, as is usually stated, in the work of Pushkin’s immediate predecessors, Zhukovsky and Ba-tyush kov, that the literary language of the Pushkin era, which became the literary language of the whole nineteenth century, was developed. These facts cannot detract from Pushkin’s standing as a linguistic innovator.
They would be common knowledge if the neoclassical comic dramatists of Sha khov skoi’s school had not been expelled from the history of litera-ture by the victory of the Romantics. The superb editions of the authors of this school published in the series “Biblioteka poeta, bol’shaia seriia”
(Poet’s Library, large scale) in the 1960s2 struck many literary scholars both in the West and, I am sure, in the Soviet Union, and made them take thought.
However, the victorious Romantics were themselves pushed aside a mere fifteen years later under the pressure of new currents then develop-ing. Here too there again were victims: it is enough to mention Evgeny Baratynsky, who with great sensitivity was “resurrected” and reintro-duced into literature by Sergei Andreevsky in the 1890s, or one of the most remarkable Romantic prose writers, Vladimir Odoevsky, who has
2 E.g., V. A. Ozerov, Tragedii i stikhotvoreniia (1960); A. A. Sha khov skoi, Komedii;
stikhotvoreniia (1961); Stikhotvornaia komediia kontsa XVIII–nachala XIX v. (1964);
P. A. Katenin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (1965).
still not been given the recognition he deserves for his contributions to Russian literature, despite the numerous studies and new editions of his works published in the early twentieth century and in the Soviet period.
One of the principal losses suffered by Russian literature as a result of the battles leading to the demise of Romanticism was and remains Wilhelm Kar lo vich Küchelbecker.
To speak of Küchelbecker as a forgotten or little-known writer a half century after the publication of Tynyanov’s famous biographical novel would seem paradoxical. Beginning in 1925, the year Kiukhlia came out, thanks to the labors of Tynyanov and others, Küchelbecker’s diaries were published (1929), as were collections of his lyric poetry, longer poems, and dramatic works, including the capacious two-volume “Biblioteka poeta” edition edited by Nina Korolyova in 1967. Soviet literary scholars and historians have carried out substantial, painstaking work in study-ing and documentstudy-ing Küchelbecker’s role in the Decembrist uprisstudy-ing. Of the poet’s dramatic works, the luckiest in the critical literature has been the tragedy Argiviane (The Argives), an exceedingly interesting effort to produce a truly classical ancient Greek tragedy rather than a neoclassical tragedy with a Greek plot according to the French model, which had been followed in Russian literature since the middle of the eighteenth century.
However, the authors of studies of Argiviane were usually interested ex-clusively in the political content of this tragedy, leaving aside its literary features—for example, the striking similarity of this work by Küchelbecker to analogous efforts to revive ancient Greek tragedy, complete with cho-ruses and traditional ancient strophic forms, undertaken at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Symbolist poets Vyacheslav Ivanov and Innokenty Annensky.
All the same, despite the great, necessary work carried out during recent decades to bring to light and publish Küchelbecker’s literary work and resurrect his human image, for most literary scholars he remains an interesting and attractive historical personality, a phenomenon of literary history, but not a living, beloved poet and dramatist.
For this there are valid reasons. Küchelbecker is not an easy poet.
In comparison with the language of his great contemporaries, Pushkin, Baratynsky, and Lermontov, Küchelbecker’s language, deliberately com-plex, frequently archaized, may seem tiresome and heavy. Moreover, he is an exceptionally uneven poet; not all his work is equally successful, and
Küchelbecker’s Trilogy, Izhorsky
whereas in some of his works readers who make their way through the difficulties of style and syntax are rewarded with suddenly revealed deep thought and incomparable poetic mastery, in other works by the same Küchelbecker behind the poetic verbal thickets are hidden only well-worn commonplaces of Russian and Western European Romanticism and nothing more.
However, the basic reason for the lack of attention paid by the ordi-nary reader (and the ordiordi-nary literary scholar, too) to Küchelbecker as a poet lies in the fact that his talent was most fully and at the same time most vividly displayed in works in large, extended forms. It is hard to imagine what Pushkin’s literary reputation would have been if, with re-gard to Ruslan and Lyudmila, Boris Godunov, and Evgeny Onegin, from the moment they were written there had been a conspiracy of silence on the part of the critics. Despite all Pushkin’s genius, critical assessment and interpretations for the reader of these three, his biggest works, which began the moment they appeared and have continued to this very day, have undoubtedly played a tremendous role in making them popular. If you take the works that occupy a similar place in Küchelbecker’s corpus, his two most successful narratives in verse, Agasfer (The wandering Jew) and Sirota (Orphan), and the three-part mystery play, Izhorsky, we must admit that neither the critics nor the literary scholars have done anything to bring these outstanding works to the ordinary reader or even to the world of literary scholars. The present article is an attempt to correct this situation at least with respect to Izhorsky.
Izhorsky is not only Küchelbecker’s greatest achievement as a poet, but a work of exceptional interest with respect to genre, form, and the variety of literary currents and influences evoked in it, and also because of the extremely instructive story of the publication of its text.
In its genre markings Izhorsky is the only example in Russian litera-ture of a Romantic mystery play, a genre that played a prominent role in the literatures of Western countries during the age of Romanticism. The Romantic poets were attracted by the mixture of genres and stylistic levels not permitted in the poetics of the preceding classicism. The conventions and artificial limitations of classicism had been observed in the dramatic genres with especial strictness, and therefore liberation from them in dra-ma was an especially stormy process. The universal popularity of Shake-speare helped break down the rules of the stage, but the most decisive
example was Goethe’s Faust. Invoking in this work the medieval tradition of mystery and miracle plays, which permitted the combination on the stage of everyday life with the world of the mystical and supernatural, Goethe liberated the Romantic drama from any worries about what is ac-ceptable or unacac-ceptable for representation on the stage. The example of Faust made possible such fundamental achievements of Romantic drama as Byron’s Manfred, Cain, and Heaven and Earth, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Mic kie wicz’s Dziady (Forefathers), and Zygmunt Krasiński’s Nie-boska komedia (Undivine comedy). These revived the genre mark-ings of the medieval mysteries and were not necessarily designed for stage production.
Alongside the imposing genre of mysteries, in Izhorsky Küchelbecker made use of the more intimate medieval genre of the miracle play, as Goethe had in Faust. In miracle plays the plot usually consisted of a strug-gle between good and bad supernatural forces for the soul of a sinner, which of course ended with the victory of the good ones. This species of miracle play had survived in various literatures after the Middle Ages—for example, in the Fastnachsspielen of Hans Sachs and the religious dramas of Calderón, mentioned by Küchelbecker in the preface to the first edition of Izhorsky as models he had used for his mystery play. In Russian literature, superb examples of miracle plays of this kind had existed at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century in the school dramas O pokaianii greshnogo cheloveka (About the repentance of a sinner) and Uspenskaia drama (The drama of the Assumption) by St. Dmitry of Rostov, a writer who had aroused Küchelbecker’s interest. Küchelbecker transposed (into modern Russian) St. Dmitry’s spiritual fables and devoted to him one of the last poems he wrote before his death.
Although in its genre and structure Izhorsky is a Romantic variant of a mystery or miracle play, the central figure in this imposing literary structure is a character from a Romantic poet’s own time. Lev Petrovich Izhorsky should not be regarded as a Russian variant of Faust.3 Even less valid would it be to regard him as the “one thousand and first parody of Childe Harold,” as Vissarion Belinsky did. Both Goethe’s Faust and Byron’s Manfred are basically tragedies of knowledge, or more accurately,
3 Cf. Dnevnik V. K. Kiukhel’bekera (Leningrad, 1929), 198, n. 1, and Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 59, 431, n. 8.
Küchelbecker’s Trilogy, Izhorsky
tragedies illustrating the inadequacy of a purely Romantic approach to the problems of life. The chief source of the dissatisfaction and rebellion of the Byronic hero, both in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and in Manfred, lies in the incestuous love of the hero for his sister, forbidden by soci-ety. This same plot forms the basis of Karamzin’s “Ostrov Borngol’m”
(Bornholm Island) and of Chateaubriand’s René, which played, as is widely acknowledged, an enormous role in the development of Roman-ticism. This whole plot theme is entirely lacking in Izhorsky. The hero of Izhorsky suffers neither from Onegin’s spleen nor Pechorin’s jaundice.
If one insists on indicating literary precedents, Küchelbecker’s protago-nist is closest of all to the disillusioned, emotionally paralyzed heroes of the prose writers of early French Romanticism, Étienne Sénancour’s Obermann and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe.4 Pushkin’s phrase “rano chuv stva v nem ostyli” (feelings in him turned cold early) could apply to Izhorsky as it does to Adolphe, but where in Pushkin Onegin is bored and melancholy, Izhorsky is troubled by the lack of emotional warmth which could facilitate the communion he longs for with other people.
The conflict in Izhorsky’s soul between his incapacity to feel and his need for normal human relations delivers him into the power of the de-mons who, without his knowing it, he encounters in the very first scene of the mystery play.
In this crucial first scene of the play (quite impossible to produce with the stage facilities of that time, but quite feasible to film with the aid of helicopters), the action unfolds simultaneously in a troika gallop-ing along the road to Tsarskoe Selo and in the air above that troika. In Küchelbecker’s conception this stratification should correspond to the simultaneous representation of heaven, earth, and hell in the art of the Middle Ages. The three chief demons who appear in this scene and into whose power the poet delivers his hero during the first two parts of the trilogy constitute a most interesting and original discovery on
4 Which played, as Anna Akhmatova showed, a significant role in the conception of Pushkin’s Onegin (Anna Akhmatova, “‘Adol’f’ Benzhamena Konstana v tvorchestve Pushkina,” in Pushkin: Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii [Moscow and Leningrad:
Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1936]: 91–114). Küchelbecker met Constant in Paris in 1820 and at his invitation gave lectures on the Russian language and Russian literature in the club Athénée, which Constant headed. See also Iurii Tynianov, “Frantsuzskie otnosheniia V. K. Kiukhel’bekera,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vols. 33/34, 331–78.
becker’s part. Up to that time Russian writers had accepted literary adap-tations of images taken from Old Slavic mythology or from Russian folk fairy tales. Küchelbecker boldly introduces into his mystery play beings from the everyday peasant folklore of his own time. The chief demons in Izhorsky are Kikimora, Shishimora,5 and a being with which nurses and mamas had long frightened little children, Buka. Deriving these images from the sphere of everyday peasant folklore anticipated, like much in Izhorsky, developments in Russian literature of the twentieth century, in particular the use of similar material in the 1907 volume Posolon’ (Follow the sun) by Aleksei Remizov, a great connoisseur of Russian folklore, or Velimir Khlebnikov’s drama Snezhimochka, where friendly coexistence is depicted between simple peasants, elemental spirits, goblins, and speak-ing animals, as in the historical scenes of Izhorsky.
Izhorsky’s three chief demons are three different hypostases of cos-mic evil (which again has parallels in the twentieth century, reminding us of the three-headed dragon, represented by three different actors, in the play Drakon [The dragon] by Evgeny Shvarts). The youngest demon, the jolly jokester Kikimora, represents Romantic freedom bordering on playful amorality; he is like a Dostoevskian devil equipped with the slo-gan “all is permitted.” Kikimora’s opponent, the more dignified Shishi-mora, personifies evil in its more traditional aspect. Under his influence in the second part of the trilogy Lev Izhorsky engages in an inhuman and cruel game with the fates of other people, the murder of his only sincere friend, and the betrayal of a woman who loves him. Finally Buka, Kikimora and Shishimora’s boss, represents cold, calculating evil, subject to logic, legality, and discipline. Externally the opposite of Kikimora, he is actually his reverse side, and the two of them together lead the hero to ruin. Besides their ethical and metaphysical role in the mystery play, Kikimora and Buka also bear a literary-critical burden. Buka, shown in the form of a huge ape in the costume and wig of the age of Louis XIV, personifies the rigid and inexorable laws in the poetics of neoclassicism which Küchelbecker, formerly an archaist and classicist, now rejects. But equally unacceptable to him is the literary attitude of the extreme
5 In the twentieth century Kikimora and Shishimora were regarded as beings of the female sex (for example, in the program of Anatoly Lyadov’s symphonic poem Kiki-mora), but in Küchelbecker’s time they were male, as is also clear in Vladimir Dal’s dictionary.
Küchelbecker’s Trilogy, Izhorsky
mantics who deny and reject the literary forms represented by Kikimora.
This is shown with especial clarity in the second scene of the second act of the third part, where Küchelbecker puts himself on the stage (“the study of a very poorly endowed poet,” where nedostatochnyi may be understood both in the sense of the poverty of the exiled poet and the modesty of his literary talent). Kikimora offers the author of Izhorsky guaranteed success if he will imitate the formulas of the ultra-Romantic school (this scene contains an unambiguous attack on Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time):
Diary chefs d’oeuvre: like a skillful anatomist, Our phrase-monger lays out his cadaver—
And cooks from it a black, Spartan soup, A nasty soup perhaps, but devilishly tasty.
However, the exiled poet rejects this offer and prefers to go his own way in the hope that posterity will judge him as he deserves.
Both the fantastic and the everyday scenes in Izhorsky are strikingly varied and many-layered. In addition to the Russian peasant folklore (which includes river nymphs [rusalki], a werewolf, and the peasant magi-cian Vavila, from the last act of the first part), the play contains elemental spirits which go back to the tradition of Western European alchemists (the fire demon, Salamander), and, following the example of the second part of Faust, characters from Shakespeare’s fantasy comedies, Titania and Ariel. In Izhorsky’s realistic scenes we see representatives of Petersburg high society, of provincial landowners (Izhorsky’s neighbors, somewhat reminiscent of Evgeny Onegin’s neighbors and certain characters from Dubrovsky), and also of the lower strata of the Russian population of that time: Izhorsky’s peasant serfs, the family of a Black Sea fisherman (Izhorsky’s conversation with the old fisherman at the beginning of the third part is possibly inspired by a similar conversation in Byron’s Man-fred between the hero and an Alpine hunter who has rescued him), a stationmaster full of his own dignity, and in the third part Greek rebels and their Turkish oppressors. Among the characters of Izhorsky space was found for an extended characterization of Princess Lidiya, the heroine of the first two parts of the mystery play, who in the course of the action is transformed, under the influence of her humiliations and suffering, from
a flighty society belle into a self-sacrificing, deeply feeling woman (in this she unexpectedly reminds us of another Lidiya, the heroine of the first two parts of the three-part drama by Sukhovo-Kobylin, in whom just such a
a flighty society belle into a self-sacrificing, deeply feeling woman (in this she unexpectedly reminds us of another Lidiya, the heroine of the first two parts of the three-part drama by Sukhovo-Kobylin, in whom just such a