Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin

• Born: September 17, 1817
• Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
• Died: March 11, 1903
• Place of death: Beaulieu, France

Other Literary Forms

Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin is best known for his drama.

Achievements

Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin can be considered one of the greatest Russian dramatists of the nineteenth century and is generally ranked with such luminaries of the theater as Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Griboyedov, and Alexander Ostrovsky. His three plays, which treat related events, constitute the sum of his literary output. They are distinguished for their sharp delineation of character, their dynamic plots, and their witty, racy style. As with his predecessor Griboyedov, many lines from Sukhovo-Kobylin’s plays have become aphorisms in modern Russian.

Sukhovo-Kobylin was strongly influenced by Gogol, with whom he was in fact acquainted, and his buffoonery and the names of his characters, particularly in The Death of Tarelkin, are reminiscent of Gogol’s writing. The other great influence on his work was that of the French theater. He visited France frequently and was friends with a number of French actors and actresses, as well as with Alexandre Dumas, fils. Sukhovo-Kobylin was particularly drawn to the pièce bien faite (the “well-made play”), a style of comedy characterized by an intricate plot based on an intrigue, which was brought to perfection by such writers as the popular Eugène Scribe, the younger Dumas, Émile Augier, and Victorien Sardou. He also frequented the small boulevard theaters of Paris and was exposed to the rapid onstage character transformations of the great comics Marie Bouffe and Pierre Levassor. The impact of the boulevard theater is especially marked in The Death of Tarelkin.

In his introduction to the English translation of Sukhovo-Kobylin’s plays, The Trilogy of Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin, Harold B. Segel notes that the standard subjects for French comedies of manners during the period when Sukhovo-Kobylin was writing the first part of the trilogy were related to money. Gambling, swindling, speculation, and the impecunious nobleman who wanted to make a match with an heiress were the most common themes. Scribe’s literary heirs combined the structure of the well-made play with social comedy in plays that aptly described the situation prevailing in France at the time of the Second Empire. Like his French counterparts, Sukhovo-Kobylin united the well-made play with social comedy, satirizing the socially ambitious nouveaux riche from the provinces. His adroitness at blending the traditions of the French with the Absurd elements of Gogol and applying the result to contemporary social conditions is a mark of his mastery as a playwright.

Biography

Alexander Vasilievich Sukhovo-Kobylin was born in Moscow, Russia, on an estate belonging to his family, on September 17, 1817. His father, Vasily, was a colonel who had fought in the War of 1812 and was a well-read and a religious man. His mother, Marya, from the aristocratic Shepelev family, turned her Moscow home into a salon to which scholars, artists, and writers were drawn. She was a cultivated woman who was particularly interested in French philosophical literature, some of which she translated into Russian. All of her children achieved at least a modest degree of success; Alexander’s older sister Elizaveta was a well-known author in the later 1800’s (writing under the pen name of Evgeniya Tur), and his younger sister was a landscape painter of note.

Sukhovo-Kobylin excelled in philosophical studies at Moscow University, obtaining a gold medal for excellence in 1838. He was especially interested in the study of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but he dropped his preoccupation with philosophy when he plunged into society life during the late 1830’s and early 1840’s. While on a visit to Paris, Sukhovo-Kobylin met Louise Simon-Dimanche and brought her back to Russia as his mistress. His subsequent passion for Countess Naryshkina altered his relationship with Louise, but before she was able to return to France, she was found brutally murdered on November 9, 1850. It was this murder and Sukhovo-Kobylin’s resultant involvement in the legal machinations of the case that provided him with the impetus to write his three great plays.

Although there were no signs of violence at Simon-Dimanche’s apartment, blood was found on the staircase of the private quarters of the house that Sukhovo-Kobylin shared with his parents, and he was arrested. Four of his house serfs, who had originally claimed to know nothing about the crime, confessed that it was they who had murdered her and cited her difficult personality as the reason for their action, but they retracted this statement after their conviction. According to Nina Brodiansky in a 1946 essay on Sukhovo-Kobylin, Efim Egorov, who was Simon-Dimanche’s coachman and the principal culprit in the affair, claimed that his confession had been obtained by police torture and by a bribe tendered by Sukhovo-Kobylin himself. Sukhovo-Kobylin was arrested for a second time in 1854 and was imprisoned for four months. As a result of family appeals and petitions to the grand duchess and to the new empress, the latter herself intervened. Sukhovo-Kobylin was acquitted of the crime, although many considered him guilty. Because his private papers were almost entirely destroyed in a fire on his estate in 1899, the details will always remain a mystery, and controversy has continued to surround the case.

Sukhovo-Kobylin’s life drastically changed as a result of the murder and the subsequent interminable investigation and harassment, and he withdrew from society to devote himself again to the study of philosophy. His experiences became the material from which he wrote his three plays. In them, he expressed his bitter vision of an evil and corrupt bureaucracy and his belief that an accident of fate can condemn the good while the evil triumph, a dark view of life reminiscent of Gogol.

Sukhovo-Kobylin was married twice, both times to foreigners. His later life was marked by financial difficulties resulting from his having given enormous sums as bribes to secure his freedom. He died in Beaulieu on the French Riviera in 1903 at the age of eighty-five, having finally tasted international recognition when The Death of Tarelkin was performed in French in Paris in 1902.

Analysis

The importance of Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin is twofold. His genius for blending disparate components of the well-made play with Gogolian characters and stylistic elements, puppet theater, and techniques of the French boulevard theaters enabled him to write plays unique not only for their time and place but also in European theater generally. They are modern even today. Second, Sukhovo-Kobylin, by coupling absurd plot and stylistic elements with the depiction of evil, causes the audience to see life as a nightmare in which chance plays a major role, a vision not so far, as Segel observes, from the haunting realm of Franz Kafka. In his depiction of the virtuous man victimized by the machinery of a corrupt state, and in his conception of corruption as essentially meaningless and absurd (as in The Death of Tarelkin), Sukhovo-Kobylin anticipates the banality and evil of twentieth century totalitarian systems. Thus, he was a philosophical forerunner as well as a theatrical one.

Krechinsky’s Wedding

Krechinsky’s Wedding, written in 1854 and first performed in 1855, is the first play of the trilogy that constitutes Sukhovo-Kobylin’s entire œuvre. In this play, the author draws on the French comédies-vaudevilles (vaudeville comedies), with which he had become familiar in Paris, as well as on native Russian traditions. The impact of Gogol’s Revizor (pr., pb. 1836; The Inspector General, 1836), with its satire and buffoonery, is particularly marked. There is also a resemblance to Griboyedov’s Gore ot uma (wr. 1824, uncensored pr. 1831, censored pb. 1833, uncensored pb. 1861; The Mischief of Being Clever, 1857) in the plot structure and characters, with the major difference from this latter work being that the action centers on a negative rather than a positive character.

The plot, according to Brodiansky’s short study, was based on an anecdote the author had heard in Moscow, but the play acquired an intricate symbolism that went far beyond the original tale. Set in Moscow, Krechinsky’s Wedding has six major characters. The Muromsky family consists of Muromsky himself, a wealthy landowner who is unaffected and honest; his eligible daughter Lidochka, who has fallen in love with the society dandy Krechinsky; and Muromsky’s sister-in-law Atuyeva, who adores the mannerisms of the seemingly sophisticated Muscovites. The other characters are Vladimir Nelkin, the Muromskys’ unaffected country neighbor; Mikhail Krechinsky, a man-about-town; and Krechinsky’s cohort, the cardsharp Ivan Raspluev.

The plot revolves around the attempt of Krechinsky, a gambler constantly in debt, to obtain Lidochka’s hand in marriage and gain access to her estate. Atuyeva and Lidochka are taken in by Krechinsky’s cosmopolitan veneer and his ability to speak some French. Muromsky, on the other hand, is suspicious of Krechinsky, preferring the simple honesty of Nelkin. He is eventually won over by Lidochka’s choice, partly because Krechinsky presents him with a prize bullock, waxes eloquent about life in the country, and speaks of his fictitious estates.

Krechinsky suddenly discovers that he must pay his gambling debts at his club or be publicly disgraced. In an attempt to raise a large sum overnight, he sends Raspluev to ask Lidochka for the loan of her diamond pin, supposedly the object of a wager with a Prince Belsky. Krechinsky takes the pin to the pawnbroker Bek, but at the last minute, he substitutes a virtually identical pin with an imitation stone. He returns the authentic jewel to Lidochka that evening while she is visiting him with her family.

Nelkin, in love with Lidochka, is dubious about Krechinsky’s sincerity and financial worth, and he is amazed when the real pin is produced. The pawnbroker Bek, who has discovered Krechinsky’s substitution, comes in with the police after Nelkin has been thrown out and while the Muromskys are leaving. Just as Krechinsky is about to be arrested, Lidochka, in a effort to save him, runs to Bek with the real pin and says that the substitution was a mistake. The Muromskys now leave, but not before Lidochka herself has been implicated in the swindle. It is this last section that connects Krechinsky’s Wedding with the second play in the trilogy, The Case.

In her essay about Sukhovo-Kobylin, Brodiansky asserts that he maintains the unities of time and action, although not that of place. Such devices as the use of the bell, the presence of a bullock on the stage, Raspluev’s addressing the audience, and Krechinsky’s deft substitution of the pin with the paste jewel for the genuine article are all in the tradition of the boulevard theaters of Paris. The two principal characters, Krechinsky and Raspluev, are braggarts and scoundrels who bear a marked resemblance to Gogol’s characters in The Inspector General. Raspluev in particular seems to be the adherent of no special moral code, and he enjoys swindling other people simply to amuse himself. The fact that the Muromskys are accidentally ensnared in the trap of these two scoundrels underlines Sukhovo-Kobylin’s thesis that the innocent are the victims of the guilty.

The Case

The Case, originally entitled “Lidochka,” was published in a very limited edition in 1861; because of the disapproval of the censor, however, it was not staged until 1882, and then only in a cut, censored version, and only after Sukhovo-Kobylin had renamed it Otzhitoye vremya (bygone times) to remove all references to contemporary Russia. The Case attained great success when staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold in 1917, the original version being used in this uncensored production.

The Case is set in St. Petersburg, where the Muromskys are living in order to fight the case that has developed out of Lidochka’s unfortunate remark, “It’s a mistake,” uttered when giving the authentic diamond pin to Bek. This statement, occasioned by her fear that Krechinsky would be arrested, has caused suspicion to focus on her as well, for she and her former fiancé are now viewed in official circles as having perpetrated a fraud against her father and as having had a love affair. Krechinsky has sent Muromsky a letter advising him to pay whatever bribes are necessary to bring the case to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion. Krechinsky seems genuinely sorry for the trouble that he has brought on the family, but Muromsky, inexperienced in such matters, has refused up to this point to pay bribes in order to exonerate Lidochka.

The action of The Case has now become centered on the amount of the bribe that Muromsky must pay, how he can raise this sum of money, and what the state of the case will be after the funds have been extracted from him. In order to determine Muromsky’s financial worth, Kandid Tarelkin has been sent into their home. While ostensibly a friend who purports to use his influence on their behalf, Tarelkin is actually anticipating the gain of a tidy sum once the bribe has been given. Muromsky’s estate steward, who is aware of Tarelkin’s true motives, has suggested that the latter be bribed to arrange a meeting between the departmental director of affairs, Varravin, and Muromsky. When Varravin asks for an enormous amount to settle the case, the shocked Muromsky then asks Tarelkin to set up another interview, this time with the head of the department himself, referred to in the cast of characters as “An Important Person.”

In order to procure as much money as possible from Muromsky, Tarelkin arranges for the meeting to take place in the morning, when the “Important Person” is at his worst and is bound to demand the largest possible sum. Having failed with the higher official, Muromsky tries to buy a settlement by paying off Varravin. Varravin has hit on a scheme to avoid sharing money with Tarelkin: He accuses Muromsky of attempting to bribe him and ostentatiously gives his money back, having first extracted all but a few thousand rubles. Unable to withstand this final blow, Muromsky succumbs to a stroke. The “Very Important Person” arrives and is advised that Muromsky is actually drunk, whereupon the poor man is placed in a carriage and dies on the way home. When Tarelkin attempts to get his “share” of the bribe money, he is told falsely that Varravin has refused it. Tarelkin himself ends up with nothing.

In contrast to the French orientation of Krechinsky’s Wedding, that of The Case is almost exclusively Russian. It is part of the St. Petersburg tradition in Russian literature, a tradition that is traceable to Medniy vsadnik (1841; The Bronze Horseman, 1936) by Alexander Pushkin. Like Pushkin’s poem, The Case also addresses the issue of the little man versus the state, and, in both works, the state wins. There is an air of unreality in The Case reminiscent of the mood in such classic “Petersburg” works as Gogol’s tales “Shinel” (“The Overcoat”) and “Nos” (“The Nose”) and Fyodor Dostoevski’s “White Nights.” Muromsky cannot believe that his beloved daughter has been caught in such an unrelenting trap, nor that the machinery of the government bureaucracy is so corrupt. It is not simply stress that causes his death; it is primarily the horror of the evil and degradation to which he has been subjected. Muromsky in fact attains a higher stature in this play than in the preceding one, for here both he and Lidochka symbolize the good of the ordinary person against the evil of the system.

Varravin and the Muromskys’ estate steward, Razuvaev, emerge as central characters. Varravin stands for the wicked government that has the blood of the common citizen—Muromsky—on its hands. Razuvaev is an “Old Believer,” close to the Russian rural traditions so beloved by such writers as Leo Tolstoy and untainted by the Western European patina that defiled a potentially good man, Krechinsky. That Varravin wins in the end is inevitable, given Sukhovo-Kobylin’s own negative experiences with the system and considering the abyss into which he believed he had fallen.

The resemblance to Gogol does not end with the choice of the setting. Like his predecessor, Sukhovo-Kobylin gave his characters symbolic rather than real names (“A Very Important Person,” “An Important Person,” “Varravin”). Several minor figures (Chibisov-Ibisov, Gerts-Sherts-Shmerts) have rhyming names similar to Bobchinsky-Dobchinsky in The Inspector General. As with Gogol, the use of rhyming names for some characters and of titles rather than names for others creates an air of absurd unreality that is linked with the insubstantiality of the Petersburg setting and that forces the reader to see the triumph of evil as the only actuality.

The Death of Tarelkin

The Death of Tarelkin unites the absurd elements of Gogol’s stories and plays with aspects of the French boulevard theaters and with Russian puppet theater to produce a work unique in Russian drama. Begun in 1857 but not completed until 1869, the play ran into problems with the censors and was performed for the first time in 1900. According to Segel, the entire trilogy was staged on three successive evenings in 1901. The Death of Tarelkin was then banned from performance until 1917, when Meyerhold presented it in its original version. Meyerhold produced it again in 1922, with constructivist sets and costumes designed by the brilliant avant-garde artist Varvara Stepanova.

The Death of Tarelkin centers on the rivalry among three villains introduced in the earlier plays, Raspluev from Krechinsky’s Wedding, and Varravin and Tarelkin from The Case. Tarelkin, who was unable to procure any of Muromsky’s bribe money in The Case, has been haunted by creditors. He decides to steal incriminating documents from Varravin in order to blackmail him later, and he attempts to escape punishment and evade his creditors by assuming the identity of the recently deceased bureaucrat Sila Kopylov. Sukhovo-Kobylin’s genius for creating a dynamic plot is evident at the very beginning of the first act, when the action gets off to a fast start as Tarelkin orders his cook Mavrusha to arrange rotten fish around a wax dummy representing a corpse. He removes and hides his false teeth and toupee and passes himself off as Kopylov when his fellow clerks, accompanied by Varravin, arrive for the funeral. Although Varravin is suspicious, Tarelkin’s trick succeeds. All the clerks are forced to pay for the funeral of their destitute colleague, and in a hilarious scene, each takes money for this purpose from the pockets of the others.

Raspluev, who has become a police officer and has been left to stand guard over the bureaucrat’s coffin, has developed from the cardsharp and coward of Krechinsky’s Wedding into a bully. Tarelkin carelessly believes that danger is behind him and invites Raspluev for a drink. This celebration is interrupted by a visit from the corpulent laundress Lyudmilla Brandakhlystova, who claims that Kopylov (impersonated by Tarelkin) is the father of her horde of children. Her visit is followed by one from Varravin, who, now disguised as Captain Polutatarinov (“Half-Tatar”), still hopes to discover the whereabouts of his stolen documents. He delivers an insulting description of Tarelkin to Raspluev, who immediately recognizes the missing man in the so-called Kopylov. The disclosure of Tarelkin’s toupee and dentures, coupled with the unearthing of Kopylov’s passport containing evidence of his recent demise, provides incontrovertible evidence that the supposed Kopylov is in fact Tarelkin.

Tarelkin is tied up and garroted to force him to confess to his true identity and reveal the location of Varravin’s papers. Polutatarinov now invents the tale that Tarelkin is actually a vampire. Varravin then reappears in his true guise and tells Inspector Okh that Tarelkin must not have any water, for water gives vampires inordinate strength. Tarelkin confesses readily to being a vampire and, in a reference to The Case, Tarelkin admits to having killed Muromsky by “sucking him dry.” This is the only somber note in The Death of Tarelkin, and it serves as a reminder of the author’s own persecution at the hands of the government.

The Death of Tarelkin not only combines Gogol’s employment of absurd names (“Half-Tatar”) with incredible situations (the wax dummy surrounded by rotten fish) but also is a precursor of the grotesque satire characterizing the Surrealist theater that flourished at the turn of the twentieth century. Sukhovo-Kobylin’s wordplay and use of noncommunicative language (as in Raspluev’s questioning of Lyudmilla) also foreshadow the Theater of the Absurd.

Bibliography

Adrianow, Gennadij Y. Anthroponyms: Their Symbolism as a Literary Devise in the Trilogy of A. V. Sukhovo-Kobylin, “The Pictures of the Past.” Northfield, Vt.: Norwich University Press, 1979. The author examines the types of names given to characters in Sukhovo-Kobylin’s trilogy.

Borowitz, Albert. Eternal Suspect: The Tragedy of Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990. This work, part of a true crime series, looks at Sukhovo-Kobylin’s role as murder suspect.

Fortune, Richard. Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin. Boston: Twayne, 1982. A basic treatment of the writer, examining his life and plays.

Segel, Harold B. Introduction to “The Death of Tarelkin” and Other Plays: The Trilogy of Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin. 2d ed. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995. The introduction provides a biography of Sukhovo-Kobylin as well as critical analysis of his works.