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34 The Arzamas Society of Obscure Men (1815–18), or simply “Arzamas,” as it is usually called, has been the subject of so much excellent scholarship that it requires little introduction.1 In short, though, Arzamas was a jocular, familiar literary society , which sprang out of the foreign policy and literary language debates of the early nineteenth century. It was conceived in large part as a polemical counterpoint to a stuffy, official literary society called the Colloquium of Amateurs of the Russian Word (Beseda liubitelei russkogo slova), commonly called “Beseda,” and its membership included the day’s leading literary lights – Zhukovskii, Batiushkov, Viazemskii – and other prominent defenders of Karamzin’s literary and linguistic programs. Their meetings were flesh-and-blood parodies of Beseda and other learned societies and academies, as well as various religious rituals. From this parodic root grew a massively complex symbolic system, one still only partially described. Though Arzamas was short-lived (October 1815–April 1818), the social bonds forged and strengthened in Arzamas persisted for decades in a loose association of writers and statesmen known as “the Arzamasian brotherhood.”2 And, true to its origins as a vehicle for furthering the “modernization” of Russia, Arzamas had a massive impact on the evolution of Russian literature and culture. In an 1826 denunciation, the publisher and author Faddei Bulgarin described Arzamas to the gendarmes as the product of “injured pride.”3 It arose, he said, because Zhukovskii and his friends were catching hell in the plays of the Beseda favorite, Aleksandr Shakhovskoi, and others. They had no recourse in the press because publishing articles on the productions of Imperial theaters was banned from 1815 until new censorship regulations came into force in 1828.4 As such, they were forced to form an underground alliance to fend off the attacks, an alliance that Bulgarin viewed as insidious and, ultimately, detrimental. He went so far as to blame the Decembrist Uprising, in part, on the pernicious influence of Arzamas. His account is, of course, only partly correct. Theater was one of the peripheral concerns of Arzamas, not its raison d’être. But it is true that Arzamas formed for lack of a fitting forum in society and state. Yet, reading the voluminous scholarship on Arzamas, one often comes away with the impression that Arzamas took the shape it did because that is how the Arzamasians wanted it. In fact, though, Bulgarin was right: it was not whimsy but struggle that led to the formation of Arzamas. And the hilarity and levity of its proceedings and texts – so-called Arzamasian laughter (arzamasskii smekh) – were sufficiently mysterious as to arouse the suspicions of people like Bulgarin. The shalost’ was the lingua franca of Arzamas. All the Arzamasian protocols, 2 Arzamas Rudeness Arzamas 35 speeches, and most of their letters rely on a strange conglomeration of subtexts, which could be known and decoded only by Arzamasians and which, as such, took on a special, domestic meaning for them alone. This Arzamasian code language was so impenetrably dense to their contemporaries, in fact, that Zhukovskii was sometimes at great pains to explain emphatically that it was harmless. At one point, he wrote to the authorities, “No one would believe it possible to gather once a week with the sole purpose of reciting galimatias. Phrases which have no meaning for an outsider might seem mysterious, having their own key, which was known only to the members.”5 The poems of Zhukovskii and Batiushkov were perhaps the most important source for this strange language, particularly Zhukovskii’s ballads, which supplied the nicknames and much of the original iconography of Arzamas. Vasilii Pushkin’s poetry was also important. It was the source of many Arzamasian catch phrases, such as “real talent everywhere finds protectors!”6 The Arzamasians, and Zhukovskii in particular, also developed a whole set of stylistic conventions, which appropriates and exaggerates all those features of Beseda’s stiff officialese that they most loathed. Fittingly, they deemed this language “galimatias” – and all protocols or any other linguistic trappings of formality were to be written in it.7 Arzamas also developed a whole code language based in a system of noms de clef and caricature of their own invention. In this language, critics of the language politics of Karamzin and Dmitrii Dashkov were designated “Chaldeans” (because they resided in Babylon ) or “Schismatics” (because, like the Old Believers, they favored the archaic). Beseda members were given Arzamasian nicknames: Admiral Shishkov, for example , was known as “Meshkov” (Mr. Sack...

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