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In act 4 Sophie and Chatsky, un-
aware of each other’s presence, both
eavesdrop on Molchalin’s attempt
to seduce Liza, the maid. When Liza
reminds Molchalin that he is in love
with her mistress, he deems his at-
tentions to Sophie to have been sheer
pretense, just a way to get ahead by
winning the favor of his boss’s daugh-
ter. As both eavesdroppers reveal
themselves, Sophie threatens to ruin
Molchalin by telling her powerful
father what he has done to her, un-
less he departs at once. No sooner
does he leave than Famusov rushes
in and, finding Sophie with Chatsky,
concludes he is her secret lover and
banishes her to the provinces (“to the
country, to the back woods, to your
auntie, to Saratov”).
At last Chatsky recognizes that So-
phie has preferred Molchalin all along.
“I looked, I saw, and did not believe”
that she could love such a nonentity.
But perhaps, he reflects, that is how
this vile world is made: “Who foresees
dame Fortune’s spin?/She scourges
men with soul:/On earth Molchalins
always win!” (Molchaliny blazhenst-
vuyut na svete!) Like Malvolio at the
end of Twelfth Night, like Gulliver in
his letter to his cousin Sympson, and,
above all, like Alceste at the end of
Molière’s The Misanthrope, Chatsky
condemns all humanity and vows to
hide from other people:
On daughter and father
And on the idiot lover
And on the whole world I’ll pour
out my bile and vexation....
I’ll search the world
For some little refuge for insulted
feeling.
My carriage! Call my carriage!Beginning with the radical critic Vis-
sarion Belinsky, Russians have had a
tendency to interpret literary works
politically, often arbitrarily and some-
times detecting opinions the exact
opposite of those the author actually
held. When Vladimir Nemirovich-
Danchenko, the cofounder of the Mos-
cow Art Theatre, staged Woe from Wit
in 1906, he complained that “most ac-
tors play Chatsky... as a fighter for civil
rights”: “They seem to perform not the
play, but those political essays that it
has engendered, which is the most
anti artistic approach imaginable.”
Alexander Herzen regarded Chatsky
as a Decembrist at heart, while oth-
ers discovered in him class- conscious
hostility to aristocrats, principled op-
position to serfdom, and partiality for
the whole agenda of desired reforms.
They turned a misanthrope into a
radical.
In 1951 Militsa Nechkina published
the second edition of Griboedov and
the Decembrists, which, the late scholar
Simon Karlinsky wrote, “came to be
seen as the embodiment of the offi-
cial party line on the play and its cre-
ator”: Griboedov, Nechkina asserted,
was a Decembrist revolutionary and
so was Chatsky. Griboedov was cer-
tainly aware of the secret societies that
would eventually organize the revolt.
In Woe from Wit, Repetilov, a garru-
lous fool, tries unsuccessfully to per-
suade Chatsky to join these hopelessly
quixotic radicals. “A hundred sec-
ond lieutenants,” Griboedov once re-
marked, “cannot transform the whole
governing structure of Russia.” Hear-
ing some of them quarrel heatedly over
political programs, he called them
fools.
After the Decembrist revolt, Gri-
boedov was imprisoned and inter-
rogated for months. The suspicious
tsar at last accepted his investigators’
conclusion that Griboedov was com-
pletely innocent. He was not only re-
leased but promoted, to the rank of
collegiate counsellor, seventh class
(equivalent to lieutenant colonel in
the military). Griboedov had several
friends among the Decembrists, and
he tried to ease the sufferings of those
the tsar had punished. But he was
also close friends with people on the
other side, especially the conservative
Bulgarin.
Faced with this evidence, propo-
nents of the Decembrist theory havedetected revolutionary sentiments in
the play itself. All the play’s socially
prominent Russians are repulsive, but
that is how satire works, and many sat-
irists—think of Swift and Pope—have
been politically conservative. In Woe
from Wit, Chatsky gets upset when
the ladies claim that “there’s no better
place on earth” than France (as Karlin-
sky observed, Griboedov rarely misses
a chance to indulge in misogyny), and
he implores God to “extirpate this un-
clean spirit” of mindless adulation of
anything French. Older Russian think-
ing was much better, he declares, and
Russians made a bad bargain when
they “exchanged for some new fashion/
Our manners, and language and holy
antiquity.” These are not the senti-
ments of a radical.
Some critics point to the play’s pas-
sages about serfdom. In a famous
monologue, Chatsky condemns one
landowner who sold off the serf who
saved his life and another landowner
who took children from their parents
so they could be cupids in theatricals
until they, too, were sold off one by
one to pay debts. A particularly nau-
seating character parades her Blackslave girl, whose skin color fascinates
and disgusts her. But nowhere does
Griboedov suggest that the problem
is serfdom, as opposed to the abuse of
serfs. Griboedov himself had received
a regular income from his mother, who
was so famously abusive to her serfs
that she provoked an uprising that had
to be put down by armed force. In the
play Chatsky owns some three hun-
dred serfs and never suggests concerns
about that arrangement. If anything,
the inclination to discover the source
of evil in human nature, as Dosto-
evsky did, runs counter to the radi-
cals’ inclination to blame changeable
institutions.
Another traditional, and better-
grounded, view identifies Chatsky as
the first “superfluous man” in Russian
literature, a type that includes Push-kin’s Eugene Onegin, Lermontov’s
Pechorin (in A Hero of Our Time), the
hero of Turgenev’s Diary of a Superflu-
ous Man, Goncharov’s Oblomov, and
(perhaps) Dostoevsky’s man from un-
derground. These men—there seem to
have been no superfluous women—are
“superfluous” (lishnie) because they
can find no useful occupation, a con-
dition sometimes attributed to Russian
social conditions and at other times to
the characteristically Russian existen-
tial sense of the absurdity and point-
lessness of all activity.
Karlinsky correctly pointed out the
influence of Molière’s The Misanthrope
on Griboedov’s play. Reading the two
comedies side by side, one is struck by
how similar Chatsky’s sentiments are
to Alceste’s, how the speeches of one
recall those of the other, and how much
the plays’ endings resemble each other.
Like Molière’s masterpiece, Woe from
Wit is a satire on misanthropy, but not
a simple one. No less than Molière,
Griboedov understands all the reasons
that an intelligent person, contem-
plating the human race, might utterly
condemn it. People are indeed hope-
lessly vicious, he seems to conclude,but one must still learn to engage
with them and mitigate evil so far as
possible. Griboedov, after all, was a
diplomat.What makes Griboedov’s drama
great is its cleverness, its wit, and its
linguistic play. Virtually every charac-
ter is given well- turned aphorisms. The
first question any good translator of a
masterpiece should ask is: How can I
best convey what makes this work so
brilliant? A comedy has to be funny.
Pointed witticisms cannot be rendered
by lengthy paraphrases that express
more or less the same literal meaning.
For example, as legend has it, when
rumors circulated that Mark Twain
had died in Europe, he cabled: “The
reports of my death have been greatly
exaggerated.” Imagine a translator
rendering this as: “Those who have
reported me as being no longer among
the living have been mistaken.” One
might call this a translation in the sense
that it paraphrases the literal meaning
of the original, but it misses the whole
point. It isn’t funny.
No one has succeeded in conveying
what makes Griboedov’s play so quot-
able, and perhaps no one ever will, but
that should be the goal. So far as pos-
sible, the rendition must sparkle with
w itty, quotable lines. Unfortunately,
Betsy Hulick, like her predecessors
Sir Bernard Pares, A. S. Vagapov, and
Alan Shaw, chose to prioritize the
rhyming of the play’s verse. To do so,
she resorts to long paraphrases. At
times I could not tell how her lines
corresponded to those in the original,
which is why, in the passages cited
above, I did not use her version but
my own translations. She strains for
rhyme, but not in the same pattern
as the original, so that, let us say, the
concluding word in her translation of
a couplet echoes not the previous line
but some earlier one. One recognizes
verse, but there is no snap of wit.
Hulick does produce some effective
lines: “The world that eats an honest
man alive/is well content to let Molcha-
lins thrive”; “And if the need arose to
bow and scrape/he’d gladly bend him-
self to any shape.” On the whole, how-
ever, it remains hard to see what makes
this play, above all, quotable. In act 1,
Liza says, “Sin is no harm, but rumor is
bad” (or perhaps: “No harm in sin, but
only in the rumor”), a line that became
proverbial. Hulick gives us: “It doesn’t
matter if the wrong you’ve done/is bur-
ied in oblivion:/It only matters if it’s
talked about.” One line becomes three.
It is hard to imagine anyone quoting
this version. At times the comic effect
depends on the last full line of one
speaker rhyming with the first words of
the next. Here is my translation of an
exchange from act 1:Sophie:
To run down Moscow! Your
worldliness is rot.
Where’s it better?Chatsky:
Where we are not.Hulick dilutes the effect by rhyming
the last line not with the previous one
but the one before that:Sophie:
I see. Moscow isn’t worth a song.
That’s what comes fromRussian^State^ Library,^ Moscow/GettyImagesA scene from Alexander Griboedov’s Woe from Wit; illustration by Dmitri Kardovsky, 1913