Prophetic Stammering in V. V. Kapnist's Iabeda (1798)

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Prophetic Stammering in V. V. Kapnist's Iabeda (1798)Author(s): Charles ByrdSource: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 541-553Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/309829 .

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ARTICLES

PROPHETIC STAMMERING IN V. V. KAPNIST'S IABEDA (1798)

Charles Byrd, Washington University

V. V. Kapnist's verse comedy labeda [Chicanery] includes one of Russian neoclassicism's most unusual verbal curiosities: a character who stammers in perfectly rhymed, iambic hexameter. On one hand, the nonsensical repetition of the stutterer's initial syllables violates the rules formulated for high comedy by Nicholas Boileau in L'Art poetique, to which Kapnist's play largely adheres and according to which the characters "converse no- bly" [badinent noblement] (108). On the other hand, the metrical consis- tency and rhymes of Radbyn's stuttering accommodate it to neoclassical decorum. Thus the character's nineteen brief stammering interventions are marked with a certain aesthetic tension. They call attention to themselves, inviting more interpretative interest than would otherwise be accorded the occasional comments of a minor character.

To put the matter in terms of twentieth-century structural linguistics, Radbyn's lines resound with a peculiar doubling of what Roman Jakobson defined as the "poetic function," which "projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination" and according to which "equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the se- quence" (71). This is, most specifically, a formulation of the laws of versifi- cation. While any speaker is likely to select a word equivalent in meaning to the topic of his or her intended message, only a versifier must also combine this choice with other words identical in syllabic length or metrical stress pattern.1 The phonetic equivalences of Radbyn's stammer are two- fold: first, his word choices must fit the iambs and rhymes of the comedy's verse-system as a whole; secondly, his utterances conform to the principles of alliteration and assonance characteristic of stutterers. In the language of

SEEJ, Vol. 41, No. 4 (1997): p. 541-p. 553 541



542 Slavic and East European Journal

poetics, the reiterative patterning of Radbyn's stammer can be classified as a kind of internal consonance or even rhyme.

Radbyn may, of course, be dismissed as a stock dolt and his stammering explained as ingenious comic device. The name itself is silly, suggesting the phrase "rad by" [I'd be glad to]. Following Henri Bergson's vitalist theory of the comic, which posits that laughter results from a certain "mechanical inelasticity just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptabil- ity and the living pliableness of a human being" (10), one may say that Radbyn is funny because his speech is twice mechanized: by his seemingly uncontrollable compulsion to repeat; and by the insertion of his syllables into the mechanical system of rhymed, metrically regular couplets. Yet when we trouble to decipher the stuttered lines and envision their theatrical performance, we find that many are ironically prophetic, the inverse of the casuistic legal chicanery which gives labeda its compelling title. The comedy is thoroughly dominated by loquacious pettifoggery. In such a world, Radbyn's minimal speech and halting stutter alone can be privileged with clairvoyance. As one of the other minor characters ironically states, "The truth doesn't need a lot of words" [Da na istinu ne nado mnogo slov] (I: 388).2 Radbyn's linguistically awkward moments of perspicacity transcend the no less mechanically compulsive mendaciousness of the more melliflu- ous liars among whom he lives, and whom it is his privilege to expose.

The linking of staggering speech to prophetic insight is pedigreed by lengthy traditions identified and analyzed by Biblical scholar Herbert Marks ("On Prophetic Stammering"), whose work has much to offer students of East Slavic literature and culture. The Old Testament is full of references: Moses's "slow tongue" and "uncircumcised lips"; Isaiah's "un- clean lips" and burnt mouth (Marks 64); Jeremiah's professed inability to speak, dramatically rendered in the Russian Vulgate: "I ia skazal: a a a gospodi! Ia, kak ditia, ne ymeiu govorit'" [And I said: ah ah ah Lord! I, like a child, am unable to speak] (qtd. Panchenko 97).3 Ezekiel undergoes periodic mutism; his tongue is fastened to the roof of his mouth. The motif of the prophetic stutter is part of a larger trope of paradoxically truthful obfuscation which appears in the Classical Roman tradition: the "obscuris vera involvens" of Vergil's sybil, "the difficult ornament universally associated with prophesy" (Marks 63). It is the specific Biblical topus which is reformulated in the stuttering prescribed by St. Isaac of Ninevah: 'While though liest prostrate before God in prayer . . . stammer as one from the country, and speak not before him with knowledge" (341). Isaac's mystical treatises were widely read in medieval Russian monasteries (Arseniev 40).

The model of inspired stammering was reinvigorated by the interest of the Romantic poets in prophetic calling. Pushkin alludes to the motif of impediment in his well-known lyric, "The Prophet" [Prorok], when the speaker claims that a six-winged Seraph "pressed up to his lips and tore out



Prophetic Stammering in V. V. Kapnist's labeda (1798) 543

his sinful tongue": "I on k ustam moim prinik / I vyrval grshnyi moi iazyk" (III: 30). Pushkin's lines are readily perceived as alluding to Isaiah VI (Tomashevskii II, 437), in which an angel removes the prophet's iniquity by touching his lips with a burning coal. Isaiah later prophesizes with explicit lucidity, having received "the tongue of a teacher" from God (50: 4). By contrast, Pushkin's poem emphasizes the prophet's loss of this crucial ar- ticulatory mechanism. Instead of obtaining the gift a tongue, he has a ser- pent's stinger [zhalo] inserted into his mouth. Pushkin neither describes any eventual eloquence on the part of the prophet nor allows him a single utterance save that of the poem itself.

In the twentieth century, the tradition of prophetic stammering has been sublimated in psychoanalysis's privileging of disjunctive, nonsensical or broken speech, the infamous "Freudian slip":

Impediment, failure, split. In a spoken or written sentence, something stumbles. Freud is attracted by these phenomena, and it is there that he seeks the unconscious. (Lacan 25)

In his "symptomatology of slips of the tongue," Freud was careful to recognize a theoretical distinction between speech-blunders caused by the phonological influences of "another component of the same speech-by an anticipatory sound, that is, or a perseveration," and those brought about by influences from "outside" a particular word, sentence, or context, aris- ing instead from "elements which are not intended to be uttered and of whose excitation we only learn precisely because of the disturbance" (56). Yet in his collections of speech-errors Freud could "find hardly one" in which he "should be obliged to trace the disturbance of speech simply and solely to what Wundt calls 'contact effect of sounds' " (61).4 In subsequent treatment of "the stammering and stuttering caused by embarrassment," Freud contends that "inner conflict" is betrayed to us through the linguistic blunder (58). One might object that Radbyn's stammer is a fixed psy- cholingual handicap, far removed from the prevarications of the unconscious investigated by psychoanalysis. Yet as an object of Kapnist's drama- turgical virtuosity, Radbyn's utterances are contaminated with a variety of culturally determined associations as well as meanings based strictly upon the context of the comedy itself.

In Russia, the impediment of speech is readily associable with holy foolishness [iurodstvo]:

The Russian iurodvye [holy fools] were thoroughly inarticulate. Of the several dozen who have been venerated as saints, and of the hundreds of others who received unofficial recognition in their villages and towns, only a few made coherent statements about anything ... Often iurodovye suffered from speech impediments which prevented them from speaking at all, and in such cases they only uttered incoherent cries.... (Thompson 18) Their utterances are unintelligible, but always succinct, cries, interjections, or aphoristic phrases. (Panchenko 95)




What has been identified as the culturally distinctive behavioral and linguistic "holy fool code" (Thompson 16) is further characterized by periodic "glossolalia" [speaking in tongues], "kosnoiazychnoe bormotanie" [tongue- tied mumbling] and moments of "detskoe nemotstvovanie" [childlike mutism] (Panchenko 96). One of the most important Byzantine holy fools is said in a Russian vita, "The Life of Saint Andrew," to mutter incoherently, "like one who is possessed" (qtd. Murav 27). Mikhail Klopskii, a "fool in Christ" is unable to utter his name when asked by the abbot Theodosius (Zenkovsky 302). Panchenko has catalogued a number of examples: Daniil Vikulin was remembered for senseless repetition of "a" sounds like Jere- miah; Andrei Tsaregradskii is characterized by "slovesa mutna" [obscure language]; Arsenii of Novgorod confesses to pronouncing his "a's" as "i's"; the "Life of Vasilii the Blessed" contains senseless babble, interpreted as unintelligible conversation with the angels (96-102). As in the Old Testa- ment, in the lives of the holy fools the prophetic stammer is often figured through cryptic repetition of words and awkward syntax. Although the Rus- sian holy fool occasionally foretells the future, the dominant prophetic mode is that of castigation in the Jeremiadic tradition, what is usually referred to as "oblichenie" [denunciation] the analogue in public space to literary satire. It is this function of the holy fool which Pushkin emphasizes in Boris Godunov, when his version of the type accuses Boris of having arranged the murder of the tsarevich Dmitrii. In accord with tradition, Pushkin's holy fool intro- duces himself with what might be considered a vestige of the prophetic stammer, lexical repetition: "Dai, dai, dai kopeechku" [Give, give, give a kopeck] (VII: 77). The crude reiteration decorates the speaker with the authority of traditionally stuttered, prophetic clairvoyance.

To be sure, Kapnist's Radbyn cannot be regarded as a theatricalized holy fool in anything like the straightforward historical sense of Pushkin's charac- terization in Boris Godunov. One presumes that Kapnist's stutterer wears no iron shirt, but instead, dresses fashionably. Radbyn's literacy and social role of juryman are incompatible with the tradition of the foolish, ascetic illiterate. Such a homeless vagrant as the Saints' lives and later Pushkin present would have to be perfumed beyond recognition prior to inclusion in the self-consciously westernized world of the neoclassical Russian enlighten- ment envisioned by Peter the Great. Peter took measures to suppress the iurodovye and their many begging imitators. Specific edicts of 1722, 1723, and 1725 abolished the distinction between "holy" and "ordinary fools," forbade fools to marry, and required relatives to care for the mentally ill rather than allowing them to wander the streets; anyone could report fools to the authorities and advocate curbing their presence (Thompson 29). Under Peter's influence, the official Orthodox Church intensified its disap- proval of holy foolishness (Thompson 29). Yet Peter failed to eradicate the popular tradition,5 and was even known himself to have regularly consulted a certain holy fool, Faddei of Petrozavodsk, to have remembered him on his




death-bed, and to have ordered a pension for him (Gorainoff 131). During later decades of the eighteenth century, St. Petersburg itself was the home of the holy fool Ksenia, whose tomb later came to be associated with miracles, including the healing of Tsar Alexander III. One may assume that holy fools continued to be associated with unclear speech, since Leo Tolstoy, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, emphasized this quality in his descrip- tion of the type: the holy fool Grisha's speech is "devoid of sense and incoherent" (26); "though incoherent, his words were touching" (27). In the hy- phens of Tolstoy's attempt at transcription, Grisha's moanings verge directly on the tradition of spiritually inspired stammering: "O-oh, what a pity! 0- oh, sad!" [O-okh zhalko! o-okh bol'no] (27). In a retrospective apostrophe, the narrator attributes the fool's incoherence in speech to his spiritual authority: "O truly Christian Grisha! Your faith was so strong that you felt the nearness of God; your love was so great that the words poured from your lips of themselves-you did not measure them with your reason" (44).

Although the later significance of holy fools testifies to their persistent influence in eighteenth-century Russian popular culture, it is doubtful that Kapnist could realistically have hoped to present the character-type directly on the Saint Petersburg stage. Although labeda was shut down in 1798 after its first four performances,6 Kapnist had haggled for years to ensure produc- tion, and must therefore have believed his attempts to evade censorship were viable. One may wonder, then, if Kapnist deliberately sanitized his stammerer so that he would not immediately be identified with the street saints perceived by Petersburg Europeanizers and official eighteenth- century ecclesiasts as backward vestiges of Russia's superstitious past. Yet even if Radbyn the character cannot be considered an unadulterated holy fool, his stuttering echoes a discursive tradition. His convulsive assonance is paradoxically legitimized by association with the denunciatory heritage of holy foolishness.

Radbyn's first lines occur at a name-day party for the corrupt, bribe- taking President of the local Civil Court, Krivosudov. Several members of the chamber pay their respects to the aging judge with formulaic wishes of good health and happiness: "Khoziainu poklon; schastlivy, dolgi dni" [A bow to the host; a happy, long life]; "Zhelaiu zdravstvovat'; userdno pozdravliaiu" [I wish to celebrate your health; I heartfully congratulate you]; "Zdorovy s prazdnikom" [Health to you on the holiday] (I: 333); "Ia schastiia vam zhelaiiu" [I wish you happiness] (I: 334). Radbyn, by contrast, is capable of only broken flattery: "I-I ia po-po zdra-zdra zdra- zdravliaiu vas" [And-And I con-con gra-gra-gratulate you] (I: 334). There is considerable dramatic irony in this cacaphonous interruption of verbal ritual, for the audience or reader knows that Krivosudov deserves no congratulation. He is recognized as an evil betrayer, previously compared to Judas Iscariot (I: 291). The breaking of the congratulation identifies Radbyn with this knowledge.




Radbyn's next stammering statements at the name-day party occur within a complex, ironic context of false-sermonizing. The stuttering is entwined with the repartee of several other characters:

KpHBoynoB: PonIHCb, KpecTHcb, )KeHHcb, yMpH, rpemH HJIH KaHicI, A KomeJIbKOM 3a BCe C HHM [c IIOnoM] HaIICTo KBHTacIcI. FapojIbKHH: la nuTaeT OH ce6a OT OITapa. XBaTaHKo: MbI X H3 HacyiHnoro JIImb CJIyKHiM y qapa. Pan6bIH: Ho npa-npaB-npaBo OH He 6e3 npH-npH-mH-qHHbi ByJIb6yJbKHH: 1pyraa nponoBenb! ATyeB: A TyT He XmH KOHHHHbI. Pan6bIH: Jo-Ro-no-BonrH-JHT H-H HHo-HorZa Hac npa-npa-npaBao0o nao-no-ao cTbIia. (I: 335)

Krivosudov: Be born, be baptized, marry, die, sin or confess, And with your purse you'll settle up with him [the priest]. Parol'kin: Indeed he feeds himself from the altar. Khvataiko: For our daily bread we serve the tsar alone. Radbyn: But it's tr-tr-true he's not without rea-rea-son-son Bul'bul'kin: Another homily! Atuev: Don't expect an end to it. Radbyn: So-so-some-t-t-times the-the tr-truth is plain And le-le-leads-u-us to gr-gr-gr-great shame.

Bul'bui'kin had been ironically referring to a series of Khvataiko's remarks as "homilies" [propovedi]. This inversion is part of a larger, pseudo- religious cult of bribery in the comedy. The bribe-takers are faithful to Khvataiko's repeated creed, "Chto vziato to sviato" [That which is taken, i.e. a bribe, is holy] (I: 359; 402), and they sing the simple virtues of bribery:

BepH, 6ojiibmoi TyT HeT HayKH; BepH, ITO TOJIbKO MOAKHO B3ITb. Ha ITO xe npHBeImeHbI K HaM pyKH, KaK He Ha TO, ,TO 6paTb? (I: 358) Take [a bribe], there's no great science here; Take, whatever you may grab. What are hands hung on us for, If not to take?

"Brat', brat', brat' i drat' " [Take, take, take ... and fight] (353) goes the choral refrain. Introducing the concept of shame, Radbyn's lone voice op- poses the bribe-takers' comic swagger. His aphoristic reminder that the legal clerks may themselves be humiliated by the very justice they seek to pervert is ironically prophetic of the play's conclusion. The stammering remark anticipates both the eventual jailing of the conniving Pravolov for miscon- duct in previous lawsuits and the ensuing denigration of the entire court.



Prophetic Stammering in V. V. Kapnist's Iabeda (1798) 547

Other stammering interventions interrupt card games at the name-day party in Krivolov's house. At one point, Radbyn exposes cheating. After Khvataiko has, on the sly, been sneaking glances at his opponents' cards, Radbyn cries at him: "Chto ty, ty, kar-kar-kar .." [Why are you, you, car-car-car] (I: 353). In the holy fool code, physical gesture often domi- nates speech (Panchenko 102), and one imagines that Radbyn points directly at Khvataiko while muttering his denunciation. Khvataiko, forcing Radbyn's mouth shut, completes the line: "Nu! I polno zhe ty karkat'!" [Well, that's enough of your cawing] (I: 353). This slapstick assault on the stammerer's mouth reinforces the cogency of the accusation, already deco- rated and legitimized by archaic associations of stammering and clairvoyance. "It's only a card-game," one might object. And yet, cheating in the game serves as an allegorical figure for the corruption of the legal system as a whole. The card-playing occurs in the same physical space as discussion of lawsuits. Kapnist uses an interesting pretext to ensure the unity of space prescribed by Boileau for neoclassical comedy: before the time of the play, the courthouse burned down, forcing trials to be held in Krivosudov's home, the place of drunken orgy and gambling. The exposure of cheating here thus figures a larger exposure of vice in the Jeremiadic tradition. Radbyn's "kar-kar-kar" obviously refers to "karty," but is also phonetically connotative of "kara," the "punishment" Khvataiko deserves.

Ludic and lawyerly corruption were previously enmeshed when, in the middle of the game, Pravolov explained the legalistic trick of the whole comedy. In order to cheat Priamikov of his inheritance, a large estate, and seize it for himself, Pravolov intends to adduce evidence from the will of Priamikov's father. In this document, the estate is allegedly ceded not to "Bogdan," Priamikov's son, but to a certain "Fedot Priamikov." By faking certification of Fedot's death, Pravolov will demonstrate that Bogdan, the current resident, has occupied the estate illegally. The whole situation plays humorously upon the folk saying "Fedot, da ne tot" [Fedot, but not that one] which has the following colloquial meanings: "he's (it's etc.) not the real thing; he (it etc.) seems to . .. , but not really; he (it etc.) is kind of . . , but not really; he (it etc.) is sort of . . , but not quite; there's . . . and there's ... (there are . .. , and there are ... ); you musn't go by the label" (Lubensky 748). For all the complexity of his fabrications, Pravolov's scheme seems merely to echo the simple point of an ordinary idiom. Another dimension of Pravalov's chicanery is exposed by Radbyn moments later when he interrupts the game with a bungled question: "Ra-razve Bo-Bogdan ne ne Fe-Fe-Fedot?" [Is-is Bo-Bogdan not Fe-Fe-Fedot?] (I: 347). Again the stutterer is gifted with insight; he alone among the characters recognizes the identity of Bogdan and Fedot. Bogdan is merely a Russian calque of the Greek name "Theodetes," meaning "given of God." "Fedot" is a Russian transliteration of the same name. The familiarity with Greek on which the




irony of Radbyn's question depends indicates his attainment of secret knowledge unavailable to the other conniving legal schemers. They obviously have no feel for the language of the New Testament and its emphasis of the value of the spirit of the law above the letter.

While other characters are bound by rules of eloquence and ritual eti- quette, Radbyn's stammer continues to voice his independence. As the guests depart from the name-day party, they flatter their host with well- wishing. But Radbyn's stutter, as at his moment of arrival, violates the sycophantic protocols of departure. He mutters, "Pora-ra nas s dvora" [It's ti-time for us to leave] (I: 364). The following morning when the drunkards of the previous evening return to Krivosudov's house for the hearing of suits, Bul'bul'kin and Parol'kin complain of hangovers, forcing an apology from the host:

KpHBocyjroB: Her! Her! 5 yrom,ai sac npaBo rloxoBaTo; H yXKHH no3a6bIm. ByInb6yJIbKlH: )a MO)KHO 6bIno eCTb? fIpH BHHaX a3aKmX yx yXKHa He B IeCT. PaI6bIH: BonJI-Ho Ke BaM He n-no-Ino-sB-Ho-Ho-BaTbcI: I5 BaM ro-ro-BopHJI nopa-pa y6HpaTbCs. (I: 384)

Krivosudov: No! No! It's true I hosted you quite poorly; And forgot supper. Bul'bul'kin: You mean we could have eaten? It would dishonor such wines to have supper with them. Radbyn: You're free not to su-sub-submit: I to-to-told you more than once it was ti-time to go.

Radbyn scolds Bul'bul'kin for having stayed too long at the party on the host's insistence. The lines contain a play on words. Preaching the freedom not to submit to wine, Radbyn selects the verb, "povinovat'sia," which ironically contains the sound of the word for wine, "vino." These sounds could be emphasized in theatrical performance. Such paronomasia typifies the language of holy fools, such as Prokopiu Ustiuzhkii, and the hom- onymity of wine and guilt, "vino" and "vina" has long been played upon in Russian folk belief (Panchenko 107).

Radbyn's complex mockery of Bul'bu'kin's drunkenness continues to- wards the play's end. When Bul'bul'kin suggests that everyone drink, other characters exclaim "What nonsense!" [Ek vzdory]; "What trash!" [Drebeden']; and "What confusion!" [Sumbur] (I: 391). For once, Rad- byn's response is longer than that of his fellows: "Ni my-my-mysli net; ni smy-my-mysla tut" [There's no tho-tho-thought; there's no sen-sen-sense in this] (I: 391). What may be taken as a simple reaction to Bul'bul'kin's proposal may also be understood as a general denunciation of social and intellectual chaos in the comedy as whole. After the unexpected announce-




ment that Pravolov is under arrest has been read aloud, Bul'bul'kin admits-in what may be taken in either a figurative or literal sense-to feeling inebriated: "Mne kazhetsia, ia pian" [It seems to me I'm drunk] (I: 397). Radbyn then completes the unfinished hexameter: "Ek-ek-ek- eko divo!" [Ho-ho-ho-how surprising] (I: 397). The exclamation may be read in two immediate contexts. First, it expresses shock over Pravolov's arrest. Secondly, it may be taken as a bluntly sarcastic reference to Bul'bul'kin's preceding confession: it is not at all surprising that Bul'bul'kin, an inveterate drunk whose very name sounds like wine pour- ing out of a bottle, would feel tipsy in a literal sense at this or any other point in the comedy. We are encouraged to contemplate still further the sounds of Radbyn's utterance, for he repeats them again just ten lines later: "Ek-eko divo!" [Ho-how surprising], again in direct reference to details of Pravolov's arrest being read aloud (I: 397). The stammering required in performance may make it extremely difficult for actor and listener alike to distinguish the phonologically proximate unvoiced velar stop [k] from the velar fricative [kh], which yields a highly ironic paronomasia: "Ekh-ekho divo!" [The echo is miraculous]. Pronounced and understood in this way, the exclamation champions the fundamentally echoic nature of prophetic stammering, distinctly audible in Radbyn's repetition of his own previous line. The association of "divo" with divine miracle is supported a moment later when Radbyn once again expresses his sur- prise: "Vvek ek-ek-ekogo ne zhdal ia chu-chu-chuda!" [Never would I have expected su-su-such a mir-mir-miracle] (I: 398). In use of the evoca- tive term "chudo," suggestive of Biblical miracle, Radbyn is shown to recognize the miraculous restoration of justice and triumph of moral order which Pravolov's arrest represents. While other corrupt jurymen see in this news only the failure of their own self-interested fraud, Radbyn is blessed with consciousness of its larger allegorical meaning.

In conclusion, Radbyn's stammering should be taken not only as an object of ridicule, but also as its agent. The association of his stuttering with the ancient tradition of oblichenie suggests new ways of looking at Kapnist's play as a whole and some initial consideration of stammering in later Russian culture. The presence of prophetic stuttering in labeda ampli- fies the play's allegorical resonances, calling attention to Biblical allusions which might otherwise pass unnoticed: Judas (I: 291, 324); Sodom (I: 367); the river Jordan (I: 382). Khvaitaiko and Bul'bul'kin refer to Adam in a complex pair of references at the gaming table:

KpHBOcyAoB: BOT mTpa( 3a TO, 'TO Tbi HxeIIb npoTHB 3aKOHa: H B 3anpeieHHYIO Hrpy ... XBaTaHKO: j[a BHJIHO HaM B Hee HrpaTb cy0b6a, c nopbI TOI, KaK ARaM




B Hee HacjiejlHoe Bce npoHrpaJI HMeHbe. Byjib6yjibKMH: Xa, Xa, Xa, 3KOi B3A0op! KaKoe 3aKjIioeHee! BOT B MHeHHmX TBOHX Bceraa nono6HbIiR B3o0P TbI npernjaraemb HaM, noHTeHHbIi npOKypop! Hy, OT Koro, CKa)KI, HacjieHme AlaMy? XsaTaiKO: J,a OT Koro-HH6yAb, a Hano6Ho x ... IIaponIbKHH: Tb)y! naMy I5 cJiymaa Barn B3op, KaK oJIyx, npoaeBaJ.

Krivosudov: Look, there's a fine for going against the rules, And into a forbidden game ... Xvataiko: Yes, it's obvious to us That fate has been playing it, ever since the time when Adam Gambled away all of his inheritance. Bul'bul'kin: Ha, ha, ha, what nonsense! What a conclusion! You always propound similar nonsense In your opinions, honorable procurator! Well, tell, from whom did Adam receive his inheritance? Kvataiko: Certainly from someone, necessarily ... Parol'kin: Bah! the queen, Listening to your nonsense, I yawned through it like an oaf.

Near blasphemy, Khvataiko trivializes the story of Adam's ejection from paradise by comparing it to a mere gambling penalty. Confronted by Bul'bul'kin's irreverent question, Khvataiko does not directly acknowledge God's creation of Eden and thus seems painfully ignorant of the Book of Genesis. The impression of rampant impiety is reinforced by Parol'kin's interjection. In keeping with his name, which sounds close to "parole," a type of card game, he is so obsessed with playing that he seems to mishear "Adam" as "dama" [the queen]. After continued discussion of the plan to cheat Priamikov of his estate, "Adam" is heard once more-again emphasized by positioning at line's end-in Radbyn's stammer:

XBaTaiiKO: BeJIHKHii TYT cKaqOK, XOTb JIHHHIS npHMa! Paa6siH: OT rIps-IIpAMHKO-KoBa ao-Ao Aaa-aMa? IapojibKHH: HacHay, HaKOHeg, MHe sbImrpaaa aaMa.

(I: 346)

Khvataiko: That's a big jump, but the line is straight! Radbyn: From Pria-Priamiko-kov to-to Ada-am? Parol'kin: Finally the queen managed to win for me.

Parol'kin's repeated comic confusion of "dama" and "Adam" muffles paronomasic reference to hell [ad] consistent with both the assonance and the syntax [do ada] of Radbyn's stammer. One may wonder whether the sounds are meant to suggest the perverse attempts of Khvataiko and his cronies to lead Priamikov into the metaphoric hell of sustained legal casuistry.




The present study would suggest that the principles of civil satire which dominate labeda should not be taken to exclude the possibility of broader symbolic readings. Dmitry Merezhkovsky has shown that Gogol was capable of mixing a poetics of the Devil into the very banality of comedic dis- course, and Kapnist's ingenuity should not be denied such potentially en- riching dimensions of interpretation. Like Gogol's Inspector General, labeda is deeply preoccupied with the theme of judgement on a variety of ironic levels. In a preface appended to the text of the play, Kapnist explicitly offers his text for the "judgement of its readers" [jugement des lecteurs] (285). This suggests an unflattering metaphorical parallel between the judgements of the audience or readership and those of the despicable procurator and jurymen within the play.7 Radbyn's previously cited apho- rism, "Do-do-do-vodi-dit i-i ino-nogda / Nas pra-prav-pravdoiu do-do-do styda" [Some-some-some-ti-times the tr-truth / Leads us-us-us to shame] (I: 335) thus possess an ironic universal relevance. More generally, Radbyn's stammering contributes to the theme of judging as a source of sustained dramatic irony in the play as a whole, since stammering prophets have traditionally warned of apocalypse and of the coming judgement-day.

The claim that stammering can decorate language with prophetic authority may enrich further interpretation of the incantational Russian modern- ists. The futurist poet Velemir Khlebnikov has already been called "a sort of holy fool" [svoego roda iurodovyi] and the pseudonym "AAAA" with which he signed the experimental works, "A Simple Tale" [Prostaia povest'] and "The Youth Amir" [Iunosha Iamir] has been compared to the stammering "a-a-a" of Jeremiah and the fool Daniil Akulin (Panchenko 97). Like Gertrude Stein's poems and Lucky's "qua qua qua" speech in. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot,8 Daniil Kharms's utterances may be understood as crafted stammerings, for example, the work that begins "doch', docheri, docherei docheri Pe" [daughter, daughters, of the daughters, of the daughter of Pe] (II: 36). My suggestion that the prophetic authority associated with stammering can ironically embrace even the most bluntly comic uses of language would invite particular reconsideration of Kharm's absurd comedy, Elizaveta Barn. Like Kapnist's labeda, this play may be read and performed primarily as the denunciation of a legal system gone awry. The denunciatory compulsion to stammer is explicitly indicated by Kharms in his stage directions: "Pyotr Nikolaevich (to Ivan Ivanovich, stammering): Look what you're doing" (226). The addressee is compelled by the speaker to become aware of a misguided action; the stammer here, as so often, may be understood as a prophetic call to consciousness.

It is worth considering, finally, the importance of stuttering in Andrei Siniavsky's Kroshka Tsores [Little Jinx]. Published under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, this work ironically incorporates "Siniavsky" as the name of its main character, a luckless dwarf who stammers uncontrollably in child-




hood and dreams that his speech should "resound and flow unimpeded" (4). Cited directly no less than five times in the first chapter, the child's vocal spluttering is a traditional mark of spiritual innocence and prestige, the perfect introductory ornament of the author's moral and political allego- ries. As soon as "Siniavsky" agrees to relinquish love, in effect, "selling" himself "to the devil," his stutter vanishes (5). The incident has been aptly read as "a condemnation of Soviet literature fallen under the sway of the 'classicist' aesthetic of Socialist Realism" (Nepomnyashchy 251). The restoration of the narrator's stammer which concludes Kroshka Tsores might be interpreted, then, as an expression of the dissident's irrepressible veracity. It may be expected in the post-Soviet era that Russian authors will continue to draw upon the traditional prestige of prophetic stammering as a figure for stubborn truthfulness in the face of social hypocrisy.

NOTES

1 According to Jakobson, all metrical texts, including advertising jingles, mnemonic lines, and versified laws "make use of the poetic function without, however, assigning to this function the coercing, determining role it carries in poetry. Thus verse actually exceeds the limits of poetry, but at the same time verse always implies the poetic function" (72).

2 Unless otherwise specified in the Works Cited, translations are my own. In attempting English renditions of Kapnist's couplets, I have tried for lexical accuracy rather than approximation of meter and rhyme.

3 I have given my own translation of the verse as cited by Panchenko, since the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible in English does not attempt directly to transcribe Jeremiah's stutter.

4 Freud cites the formulation from Wilhelm Max Wundt's monumental Volkerpsychologie [Folk Psychology], vol. I, pt. I (Leipzig, 1900) 371. Wundt (1832-1920) was a German physiologist and psychologist.

5 Thompson 31-32. The twentieth-century Russian author Boris Pilniak seems to identify holy foolishness with eighteenth-century culture in his retrospective homage to eighteenth- century Russian furniture making, the short story, "Mahogany," which opens with an invocation of traditional street-culture: "Paupers, soothsayers, beggars, mendicant chant- ers, lazars, wanderers from holy place to holy place, male and female, cripples, bogus saints, blind psalm singers, prophets, idiots of both sexes, fools in Christ-these names, so close in meaning, of the double-ring sugar cakes of the everyday life of Holy Russia, paupers on the face of Holy Russia, wandering psalm singers, Christ's cripples, fools in Christ of Holy Russia-these sugar cakes have adorned everyday life from Russia's very beginnings, from the time of the first Tsar Ivans, the everyday life of Russia's thousand years ..." (63). Metaphorical attribution of a decorative function to holy foolishness, which "adorned" Holy Russia, does not prevent Pilniak's narrator from later referring to the prophetic capacities of "fools in Christ, through the mouths of whom Truth makes itself known to men" (105).

6 Copies printed in 1798 were promptly seized and not released for sale until 1804. 7 A similar twinning of audience and actors appears in the exclamation of Gogol's mayor to

the crowd: "What are you laughing at? You're laughing at yourselves?" (IV: 94). 8 Treated by Marks 65-66.




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Documents

Prophetic Stammering in V. V. Kapnist's Iabeda (1798)