German Vernunft, Verstand and Russian 'um': Aleksandr Griboedov's loose translation of Goethe's "Vorspiel auf dem Theater" as "Griboedov's central aesthetic statement"

Besides the famous comedy Gore ot uma, Aleksandr Griboedov's mature works (early 1820 - January 30, 1829) include an opera-vaudeville, numerous drama drafts, some poems, epigrams and articles, dozens of letters and a fragment translation from Goethe's Faust dating back to Gore ot uma period of 1822-1824. Though Griboedov translated primarily from French comedians, by translating Goethe he addressed German culture to involve it in the conceptual field of Gore ot uma. Griboedov paid attention to Goethe's Faust even before it was translated into Russian, which was obviously due to his personal interest. He highly appreciated Goethe, as is evident from his close friends' memoirs. As Griboedov's translation from Faust was loose and incomplete, it acquired a new conceptual meaning and independence from the original plot to become his drama statement. The plot of the translated fragment is rather close to the original, yet it contains specific modifications connected with the motif of um, with the latter appearing regardless of Goethe's text. Griboedov interprets the central debate of Vorspiels characters about theatre in his own way. In the Russian translation the Director sees theater viewers as an indiscriminate and silly crowd that craves for entertainment, rather than high ideas. The Director is opposed by the Poet described by Goethe in a romantic way. Griboedov, however, makes the Poet sound ironical: the Poet is critical of the theatre crowd attracted by fickle splendour, while art is eternal. Griboedov ends the whole debate about theatre, poet and crowd with the the Poet's last cue that no poet must write in order to please the crowd. In his opinion, the poet accumulates the divine power and creativity, so um as rationality, as it is understood by the Director, is unacceptable. It can also be assumed that in his translation of Goethe's Prologue Griboedov enters into a dialogue with Aleksandr Pushkin's The Conversation of the Bookseller with the Poet (1824) published as an introduction to the first chapter of Eugene Onegin. Both Pushkin and Griboedov set a complex question related to deontology of creation: Is a creative personality free or not? In both cases the answer leads to a compromise. Hence, the translated fragment from Goethe's Faust becomes Griboedov's original statement about dramatic art, which makes this translation interesting for understanding mature Griboedov's writing, rather than in its relation to Goethe's tragedy.

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