Russian Variations on the Picaresque

Nearly every study of nineteenth-century Russian prose notes at one point or another the Russian urge to deform patterns and undermine expectations set by Western European exemplars. This tendency actually pre-dates the nineteenth century, however, manifesting itself as early as the eighteenth. Although standard notions of eighteenth-century literature include the assumption that it was essentially derivative a pale copy of French or perhaps German models,1 careful study shows that even in this period, Russians were more than slavish imitators. The Russian short picaresque provides an excellent example of the early deformation of genre expectations and also offers illuminating insights into how Russians accommodated features of their native tradition to European genres. Picaresque works were quite popular in eighteenth-century Russia. M. Chulkov's The Mocker (Peresmeshnik, parts 1 and 2, 1766; parts 3 and 4, 1768; part 5, 1789) was but the first of many works inspired to varying degrees by the Western form. It was followed by his short novel The Comely Cook, or the Adventures of a Debauched Woman (Prigozhaia povarikha, ili pokhozhdenie razvratnoi zhenshchiny, 1770) and then by a stream of other picaresques whose tremendous popularity peaked with the publication of the first part of F. Bulgarin's Ivan Vyzhigin in 1825. Even after the first wave of picaresque had spent much of its force, its conventions continued to find resonance in a novel as seminal to the Russian tradition as Dead Souls

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