Two centuries of the Russian classics

2686-7494

IWL RAS

https://doi.org/10.22455/2686-7494-2025-7-4-74-89

Research Article

Articles

The Issue of Historiosophical Subtext in A. S. Griboyedov’s Comedy Woe from Wit

Yudakhin

Artem A.

red@rusklassika.ru

25 12 2025

7 4 74 89

A. S. Griboyedov Woe from Wit Peter’s reforms Russia West Eurocentrism historiosophy Messianism

2026

This article analyzes the historiosophical subtext of A. S. Griboyedov’s comedy Woe from Wit, which explores the reforms of Peter the Great and their consequences. The idea of conflict, embedded in the work’s plot, has not only a local dimension (the fate of Chatsky and his entourage) but also a global one: the juxtaposition of Russia and the West. A conceptual decipherment of the comedy’s “text within a text” — Chatsky’s speech at the end of Act III — allows for a more profound understanding of the fundamental contradictions that gave rise to Peter the Great’s reforms. Secularization, the desacralization of public life and everyday life, the rejection of the Russian messianic historical paradigm, the Eurocentrism of the elites, and, as a result, the division of Russian society into an educated, Europeanized “society” and an illiterate, Orthodox “people” — all these aspects are retrospectively explored in the comedy. The tragic discrepancy between the external forms and internal content of life in the post-reform Russian Empire, designated by O. Spengler as a “historical pseudomorphosis,” constitutes one of the main semantic dimensions of the immortal work of the Russian poet.

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