Also known as Alexander Griboyedov. Born: Moscow, Russia, 15 January 1795. Education: Educated at the University of Moscow, 1806-08, graduated in law; education interrupted by Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, 1812. Military Service: Joined the Moscow hussars (General Kologryvov’s reserve), 1812, but saw no military action; discharged, 1816. Family: Married daughter of the poet Prince Aleksandr Chavchavadze in 1828. Career: Joined Ministry of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg, 1816: diplomatic secretary to Russian legation in Persia, 1818, and to General A.P. Ermolov, 1821-23, both in Tiflis; diplomat in Tehran, 1819-21; returned to Georgia, 1825; arrested and imprisoned for four months on suspicion of involvement in the Decembrist uprising, 1825; returned to Caucasus after release, 1826; prepared the text of the Treaty of Turkmenchai, concluding the Russo-Persian war, 1826; Russian Minister to Persia, 1828. Died: Killed during the storming of the Russian embassy, Tehran, by a mob of insurgents, 11 February 1829.
Publications
Collections
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works]. 1911-17.
Sochineniia v stikhakh [Works], edited by I.N. Medvedeva. 1967.
Izbrannoe [Selections], edited by S.A. Fomicheva. 1978.
Plays
Molodye suprugi [The Young Married Couple], from a play by Creuze de Lesser (produced 1815). 1815.
Student [Student], with Pavel A. Katenin (produced 1904). 1817.
Svoia sem’ia; ili, Zamuzhniaia nevesta [All in the Family; or, The Married Fiancee], with Aleksandr Shakovskoi and Nikolai Khmel’nitskii (produced 1818).
Pritvornaia nevernost’ [False Infidelity], with A.A. Gendre, from a play by Nicolas Barthe (produced 1818). 1818.
Proba intermedy [Test of an Interlude] (produced 1819). In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1911-17.
Kto brat, kto sestra; ili, Obman za obmanom [Who's the Brother, Who's the Sister; or, Deception for Deception], with Prince Peter Viazemskii and others (libretto; produced 1824).
Gore ot uma [Woes of Wit] (produced 1825; complete version produced 1831). 1825 (partial version); 1833 (censored version); 1861 (uncensored version); edited by D.P. Costello, 1951; translated as Intelligence Comes to Grief, in Anthology of Russian Literature, 2, edited by Leo Wiener, 1902; as The Misfortune of Being Clever, translated by S.W. Pring, 1914; as The Mischief of Being Clever, translated by Bernard Pares, 1925; as Wit Works Woe, in Masterpieces of Russian Drama, 1, edited by G.R. Noyes, 1933; as Chatsky, translated by Joshua Cooper, in Four Russian Plays, 1972, reprinted as The Government Inspector and Other Plays, 1990; as Woes of Wit: A Comedy in Four Acts, translated by Alan Shaw, 1992; as Distress from Cleverness: A Four-Act Comedy in Verse, translated by Beatrice Yusem, 1993.
Critical Studies:
”The Murder of Griboedov” by D.P. Costello, in Oxford Slavonic Papers, 1958; Griboedov et la vie litteraire de son temps by Jean Bonamour, 1965; The Murder of Griboedov: New Materials by Evelyn J. Harden, 1979; Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran: Alexander Griboyedov and Imperial Russia’s Mission to the Shah of Persia by Laurence Kelly, 2002.
Aleksandr Griboedov’s first dramatic production was a one-act comedy in alexandrines, Molodye suprugi [The Young Married Couple], adapted from Creuze de Lesser’s Le Secret du menage, and produced in September 1815. A second play was Student, a three-act comedy in prose, written in 1817 in conjunction with Pavel A. Katenin, which satirized and parodied such older writers as Nikolai Karamzin (1766-1824), Vasilii Zhukovskii (1783-1852), and Konstantin Batiushkov (1787-1855). A third comedy, first produced in January 1818, Svoia sem’ia; ili, Zamuzhniaia nevesta [All in the Family; or, The Married Fiancee], was written in collaboration with the two most celebrated comic writers of his day, Aleksandr Shakovskoi and Nikolai Khmel’nitskii. It is, however, for his masterpiece Gore ot uma (Woes of Wit), a classically structured four-act comedy in free iambic verse, that Griboedov has won one of the most illustrious places in all Russian literature.
Woes of Wit is a tour de force of supple versification, brilliantly aphoristic repartee, and abundant topical allusion that also affords an unrivalled portrait of Moscow high society in about 1820. The verse form of the play, free iambs with arbitrary rhyme patterning, recalls strongly the form of the Russian fable, which in turn reflected the influence of Lafontaine. Adopted for a few plays in the early 19th century, free iambs were rarely used after Woes of Wit. In Griboedov’s play they ranged from one to 13 syllables with nearly half the lines alexandrines.
Woes of Wit’s repartee, in part reminiscent of Moliere, depends both on sparkling colloquial language and virtuosic timing. After first hearing the play, Pushkin remarked that ”half the lines are bound to become proverbs,” and it has indeed become the most quoted literary work in the Russian language. For contemporaries an additional quality was provided by the pithy topical references in which this comedy abounds, ranging from the Russian order of battle in 1813 to serf theatres, Carbonarism, freemasonry, and new educational ideas. In this respect Woes of Wit recalls the allusory and referential nature of Pushkin’s almost contemporaneous novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. It was the topical allusions, with their generally liberal tenor, which meant the play could not be published in full until 1861, the year serfdom was abolished, although a censored version was first published in 1833. In the meantime some 40,000 manuscript copies are said to have circulated throughout Russia.
The Moscow aristocratic society in Woes of Wit is depicted as hospitable, relaxed, venial, superficially cultured, and, above all, politically conservative in the years preceding the Decembrist Uprising. Into it comes the alienated but undoubtedly heroic central protagonist Chatskii, ”straight from the boat into a ball,” and it is the inevitable clash between on the one hand the clever, eloquent, tactless, and intolerant hero, who once loved the daughter of the house, and on the other the sleepily unprepared Muscovite society that lends the play its tension. Chatskii’s qualities, positive and negative alike, have proved to be universal, and he has easily outlived contemporary literary heroes like Lermontov’s Pechorin or, indeed, Onegin. His bewildered beloved Sofiia and her genial but nervous and cautious father Famusov (Mr. Rumours), her ambitious lickspittle suitor Molchalin (Mr. Silent), and arch-gossip and intriguer Repetilov (Mr. Reptilian Repeater), and the mindless soldier Skalozub (Mr. Teeth-barer) are all very convincingly characterized, while Sofiia’s maid Liza is the only character to begin to match Chatskii’s quick aphoristic wit.
Modern audiences, for whom the ubiquitous topical references are bound to be at least partially obscure, find the play’s most enduring qualities to be the wittily portrayed clash of cultures between impetuous liberal youth and somnolent conservative society, but above all the use of richly colloquial syntax and vocabulary in conjunction with verse of the highest sophistication. Such qualities ensure that Griboedov’s masterpiece will last as long as the Russian language itself.
