30 The New York Review
traveling such a lot.
If everything with us is wrong,
where’s it right?Chatsky:
Where we are not.This is singsong, not wit.
Hulick faced a formidable task, and
her rendition is no more disappoint-
ing than others’. Sometimes it takes
one great poet to translate another,
the way Pope did The Iliad, Dryden
The Aeneid, and Seamus Heaney Beo-
wulf. At the very least, the translator
of Griboedov should be steeped in
Pope, Byron (especially Don Juan),
and, perhaps, Dorothy Parker’s light
verse. Rather than resort to elaborate
paraphrases to make every line rhyme
with some other, it might be better to
imitate those Shakespeare speeches in
which only the last couplet rhymes. ’Tis
not enough that rhyme and meter fit, if
readers cannot trace the play of wit.It was a pity that Griboedov did not
write his memoirs, Pushkin observed,
and he urged others not to leave the
dramatic story of Griboedov’s adven-
tures untold. And they have not. At
age twenty- three Griboedov became
involved in a scandalous four- person
duel over a famous ballerina. After
one man was killed when the first pair
of combatants fought, the second pair,
Griboedov and his enemy Alexander
Yakubovich, had to postpone their ex-
change. When they eventually resumed
it, Yakubovich wounded Griboedov
in his little finger, which, Yakubovich
hoped, would ruin Griboedov’s piano
playing.
As a result of the duel, Griboedov
was forbidden from living in Moscow
or St. Petersburg. He was given the
choice of continuing his foreign service
career either in Philadelphia or Per-
sia, and he chose the latter. Russia had
been fighting wars with Persia since the
seventeenth century, and the Treaty
of Gulistan, which concluded the war
that lasted from 1804 to 1813, had left
boundaries vague enough to precipi-
tate the war of 1826–1828. After that
war ended in a disastrous defeat for the
Persians, Griboedov was assigned to
draft the harsh Treaty of Turkmenchay,
which established borders still in force,
made Persia pay a huge indemnity, and
imposed other conditions that added
insult to injury.
In the course of his dealings with
the Persians, Griboedov made mur-
derous enemies, and he knew that
he would be risking his life if he ever
returned to Persia. So he was not en-
tirely happy when, in late 1828, the tsar
promoted him to the exalted rank of
minister plenipotentiary (in Persian,
vazir- mukhtar) and sent him back to
Persia to enforce the treaty terms with
no concessions whatever. Dawdling in
Georgia, where he married the sixteen-
year- old Princess Nina Chavchavadze,
he was at last ordered to proceed to
Tabriz, the diplomatic capital, and Teh-
ran, where the shah held court.
For the shah and his relatives, the
treaty’s repatriation provision, which
would have returned to Russia women
who had been forced into their harems,
proved especially offensive. Still worse,
one of the shah’s chief eunuchs, Yakub
Mirza, born in Armenia as Yakub Ma-
karian, claimed asylum in the Russian
embassy. Captured by Persians as ayoung man and castrated, he had risen
to a position of prominence. He man-
aged the ruler’s finances, which meant
the shah could not conceal any wealth
from the Russians after Mirza’s de-
fection, and, still more embarrassing,
Mirza was able to repeat the most in-
timate secrets of the shah’s household.
In a series of events eerily prescient
of 1979, mullahs incited mobs to sur-
round the Russian embassy. When
Griboedov refused to surrender Yakub
Mirza, they sacked the embassy and
murdered everyone in it, except one
person who happened to be wearing
Persian dress and prudently merged
with the crowd. Griboedov’s head was
put on a post and his body dragged
through the town for days until it was
at last dumped in a pit with countless
other hacked- up cor pses. When it came
time for the shah to return the body
to the Russians, it was so badly muti-
lated there was no telling which body
parts belonged to the vazir- mukhtar.
As accounts have it, they could prop-
erly identify only Griboedov’s finger—
in some versions because of a ring he
wore, in others because of the distinc-
tive wound left by the duel.In 1927–1928 Yuri Tynyanov, arguably
the greatest of the Russian Formalist
critics and a significant fiction writer,
published in serial form The Death of
Vazir - Mukhtar, a novel following Gri-
boedov through the last eleven months
of his life. By this point the Formalists
had abandoned their early idea that au-
thors have no relevance to a text, and
recognized that sometimes an author’s
biography (or legend) can become a “lit-
erary fact” in itself. They also became
fascinated by “the literature of fact,”
which sometimes referred to fiction
that was as factually accurate as possi-
ble and occasionally consisted entirely
of documentary material. Tynyanov’s
novel relies on meticulous scholarship.
It can almost be read as a straight biog-
raphy of Griboedov, except at moments
when the author fills in what obviously
could not be documented, such as a
character’s passing thoughts. “Liter-
ature differs from history,” Tynyanov
explained, “not through ‘invention,’
but through a greater, more intimate
understanding of people and events.”
The Death of Vazir- Mukhtar opens
with “the crack of breaking bones” as
the Decembrists, their revolt having
failed, begin to flee over the bodies
of their comrades. “The age itself was
being tortured,” Tynyanov remarks; “it
was ‘one big prison cell’ (as they said
in Peter’s day).” Peter the Great died
exactly a century before the revolt,
and more than one reader has sug-
gested that Tynyanov was inviting us
to contemplate the prison cell of Soviet
Russia a century later, when Tynyanov
himself was writing. The suggestion is
plausible because the novel’s narrator
is always sly and often ironic. He takes
special delight in describing the Rus-
sian obsession, bemoaned by Chatsky,
with everything European. Wryly ob-
serving that Karl Robert Nesselrode,
the man the tsar chose to direct for-
eign relations, was the “son of a Prus-
sian father and Jewish mother... born
on an English ship sailing to Lisbon,”
he points out that this Russian minis-
ter spoke no Russian. When the em-
peror appears at a concert, Tynyanov
explains, “there was... a call for the
anthem to be repeated—the Russiannational anthem, the one composed by
a German for the English king.”
Tynyanov grows still more irreverent
in his handling of Russian cultural tra-
dition, which, especially in the Soviet
period, always portrayed great writers
as spotless heroes. Tynyanov’s Griboe-
dov, by contrast, is complex and often
less than admirable, as Griboedov
himself is well aware. The high- minded
speeches in his play come back to haunt
him as the words of his conscience.
Time and again, Tynyanov describes
how Griboedov, in a determined quest
for what he calls “profit,” connives to
get official support for his plan to set
up a Russian equivalent to the British
East India Company. If it had been ap-
proved, the plan would not only have
enriched him, but also made him a
quasi monarch. He doesn’t seem both-
ered that thousands of people would
have perished or been enslaved if his
plan had succeeded.
In Russian literary mythology, Push-
kin above all was irreproachable, but
Tynyanov has Griboedov call him “the
supreme... weathercock of poetry.”
Tynyanov instead chooses as Griboe-
dov’s best friend the usual embodiment
of evil, Faddei Bulgarin, and then, de-
spite Bulgarin’s constant help and de-
votion, Griboedov has an affair with
Bulgarin’s wife. None of these blem-
ishes, however, diminishes Griboe-
dov’s genius as a satirist, integrity as a
diplomat, courage in refusing to deliver
up Yakub Mirza, or, when the mob in-
vades the embassy, heroism in slaying
a dozen crazed assailants. One senses
that Griboedov’s untimely death de-
prived us of masterpieces even greater
than Woe from Wit.
Much as Griboedov didn’t live to
finish his life’s work, Susan Causey,
the translator of The Death of Vazir-
Mukhtar, died in a road accident before
she could polish or publish her work,
and her husband, already gravely ill,
died soon after. Their friends worked
with their sons to recover the man-
uscript in the hope it could appear in
print. The Slavicist Tim Johnson com-
missioned Vera Tsareva- Brauner, a
lecturer at Cambridge, to edit it from
the perspective of a native speaker. So
edited, Causey’s version is not only the
first complete rendition of the novel,
but usually reads as if it were written in
English. Another fine rendition of The
Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, translated by
Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher
Rush, will soon be published by Co-
lumbia University Press, with a splen-
did introduction by Angela Brintlinger
and helpful supplementary material
identifying people and allusions unfa-
miliar to the nonspecialist. A brilliant
thinker and a splendid writer, Tynyanov
deserves to be better known. With his
works, at least, good translators will be
able to convey, as Causey does, what
makes his novel so important a contri-
bution to historical fiction.
Tynyanov had an eye for the perfect
story, like the one about how Push-
kin, traveling through the Caucasus,
encountered some Georgians leading
an oxcart. When he asked what was in
the cart, they answered, “Griboyed.”
Pushkin reflected, “I know of nothing
more enviable than the last years of his
stormy life.” He married the woman
he loved and “his death itself, over-
taking him in the midst of courageous,
unequal combat, had nothing terrible,
nothing agonizing for Griboedov. It
was instantaneous and beautiful.” QThe Einstein Forum and the Daimler and Benz Foundation are
pleased to announce the
Einstein Fellowship
to reward creative, interdisciplinary thinking by supporting
outstanding young thinkers who wish to work on a project in a
different field from that of their previous research.
The fellow will receive a stipend of EUR 10 000 and reimburse-
ment of travel expenses and will live and work in Einstein‘s own
summerhouse in Caputh, near Berlin, for five to six months in 2022.
For more information, visit: http://www.einsteinforum.de/fellowship
Applications should be received by May 15, 2021
and emailed to: [email protected]
Einstein Forum, Am Neuen Markt 7, 14467 Potsdam, Germany2021
New York
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