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A review by jasonfurman
Woe from Wit: A Verse Comedy in Four Acts by Alexander Griboedov
4.0
In December I was browsing in the McNally Jackson bookstore in New York City. One of my favorite things about the bookstore is they organize the fiction by country/region. I was looking through the Russian section, as I've done many times before, expecting that I had already read just about everything in it when this cover jumped out at me. I loved the title Woe from Wit and it was advertised as a verse comedy, a genre I love (having read all of the Richard Wilbur Moliere translations, many of them multiple times). I bought it but only just got around to reading it. And I read it with no preconceptions: I didn't read the intro or the back cover so I didn't have a confident idea of when it was written or any of the other context (I read all of that afterwards).
I was drawn in from the very beginning with the witty rhyming lines in aabb and abab format. It started out as what I thought would be a light comedy of romantic misunderstandings: the mistress of the house is in love with someone but he's in love with the maid, the father is a bit of a buffoon, and then another suitor enters the mix. But when that happens it shifts, it is still light and comic but the new character (Alexandr Chatsky) is a Russian returning to Moscow to find it changed, he is witty and biting about the army and much of the society as well. Eventually there is a splendid scene set at a ball where the mistress starts a rumor that Chatsky is mad and roughly a dozen characters, really not much more than extras, amplify and distort it. The final act wraps up with some more romantic mishaps bringing it to a sort of joyful or at least amusing conclusion.
I was drawn in from the very beginning with the witty rhyming lines in aabb and abab format. It started out as what I thought would be a light comedy of romantic misunderstandings: the mistress of the house is in love with someone but he's in love with the maid, the father is a bit of a buffoon, and then another suitor enters the mix. But when that happens it shifts, it is still light and comic but the new character (Alexandr Chatsky) is a Russian returning to Moscow to find it changed, he is witty and biting about the army and much of the society as well. Eventually there is a splendid scene set at a ball where the mistress starts a rumor that Chatsky is mad and roughly a dozen characters, really not much more than extras, amplify and distort it. The final act wraps up with some more romantic mishaps bringing it to a sort of joyful or at least amusing conclusion.