SOURCE: Gershkovich, Alexander. “Russian Romantic Drama: The Case of Griboedov.”¹ In Romantic Drama, edited by Gerald Gillespie, pp. 273-85. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1994.

In the following essay, Gershkovich discusses Griboedov's position within the Russian Romantic tradition and claims that in the character of Chatsky, Griboedov created the first true individual in Russian literature.

I

The fate of Romantic drama in Russia took shape in an unusual manner. Its highest achievements, Gore ot Uma (Woe from Wit) and Boris Godunov, inspired by the new Romantic poetics, were not classified as Romantic plays in Russian criticism even though Griboedov spoke of his comedy as a “stage poem,” and Pushkin of his Boris as a “true Romantic tragedy.”² On the other hand, standard literary history, without any particular regret, assigned artistically weaker plays such as the pathetic tragedies of Ryleyev and Küchelbecker and the pseudo-patriotic melodramas of N. Kukolnik and N...