The Russian Émigré Critic Georgy Adamovich Once Observed That

Küchelbecker’s Trilogy, Izhorsky, As an Example of the Romantic Revival of the Medieval Mystery Play1 he Russian émigré critic Georgy Adamovich once observed that T 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. 62 Küchelbecker’s Trilogy, Izhorsky 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 literature 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). 63 I. Pushkin and Romanticism 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 documenting Küchelbecker’s role in the Decembrist uprising. 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 64 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 ordinary reader (and the ordinary 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 literature 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 drama was an especially stormy process. The universal popularity of Shake- speare helped break down the rules of the stage, but the most decisive 65 I. Pushkin and Romanticism 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 unacceptable for representation on the stage.

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