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Chapter 9
- University of Wisconsin Press
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in FurshtadtAlley, near Liteiny Street, stood a small, greenish two-story house with a modest exterior.A visitor who went through the gates and ascended the dark, narrow, dirty stairway from the courtyard arrived in the apartment of Aleksandr Semyonovich Shishkov, the house’s owner, a vice-admiral and member of the Council of theAdmiralty and the RussianAcademy.If one then passed from the entryway into the dining room and, stopping at the closed doors, peeked through the keyhole (as people sometimes did in order to find out whetherAleksandr Semyonovich was at home), it was possible to see a small, dusty study with unwashed windows, heaped with books and papers—and almost always to find the host himself there. He was fifty-odd years old, of medium height and wiry build, with shaggy gray-gold hair sticking up. His desiccated, cold face, with its prominent black brows, was strikingly pale.At home he wore a striped silk dressing gown over his bare chest and worn slipper boots.When heading out he put on a rather shabby uniform. One could immediately see in him a man possessed by an idea. His absentmindedness was legendary; his disinterestedness, industry, and helplessness in everyday life were boundless. His wife was both his nanny and his commander. Her name was Darya Alekseevna, like Derzhavin’s wife, but by birth she was Dutch, a commoner, the daughter of a shipmaster brought to Russia by Peter. Aleksandr Semyonovich was quite afraid of her, although he had no sins other than his absentmindedness. He had three passions: dry Kiev jam, rolling big and little balls from candle wax,and Slavic roots.In his study he usually devoted himself to all three simultaneously. The roots were directly connected to his idée fixe. Shishkov was a fanatic of what was beginning to be called the “Russian tendency.” Given his cast of mind, Shishkov should have hated the entire post-Petrine epoch.But since this had not 9 yet occurred to him, he considered even the Catherinian era to be representative of the salutary Russian olden days.The full force of his hatred fell on the gallomania of the recent ten or possibly fifteen years. He was indignant at the political spirit brought from France,grumbled at the young administrators with non-Russian educations, and revolted against French fashions and customs— especially against the general use of French language in conversation. Indeed, it was an affront to both sense and sensibility that the Russian people had often completely forgotten not only how to write but to speak in Russian; there were even those who saw a luster and sign of a refined education in this. Shishkov, however, experienced his deepest despair not from the use of the French language but from damage done to the Russian language. He could not come to terms with the fact that young writers had begun to introduce foreign words and locutions.To a certain extent he was right here as well, but to his chagrin he was as bad a philologist as he was an historian, being unable to distinguish the development of language from littering, or growth from damage. The root of all his delusion lay in his sad certainty that the Church Slavonic language was the same as Russian,and that the difference between them was merely that religious books were written in Church Slavonic,whereas secular ones were written in Russian. He imagined that Karamzin was if not the source then the embodiment of all literary evils (and moral and social ones for good measure).The pleasant, modest , yet opinionated young man who had once shown up at Derzhavin’s table was now a famous author.1 Moscow youth swore by him. Derzhavin may have torn the seals from the eyes and ears of the Russian Muse, but Karamzin had carefully removed the seal from her heart. Perhaps he was less gifted, but the work he did was great.Through Karamzin Russian literature learned to weep. He himself had already abandoned fiction and had turned to history.The sovereign was his patron, and this increased Shishkov’s suffering.As an old soldier, he firmly believed that literature could and should be directed from above; he considered the voices of generals and senators to be far from last in literary affairs. What must it have been like for him to see that the sovereign himself was encouraging depravity and sedition? In he had taken aim at his...