Peaceful goddess! Oft the singer
Sees thee in his ecstasy,
On the rock he loves to linger,
Sleepless,—then he meets with thee.
—From Sir John Bowring’s Specimens of the Russian Poets, Part II.
Vasíli Vasílevich Kapníst. (1757-1824.)
Kapníst, the son of a brigadier, entered the army as a corporal in 1771, and was made a commissioned officer in 1775, but he soon retired to his native village of Obúkhovka in the Government of Kíev, which he later described in the manner of Horace. He was elected a Representative of the Nobility of his district, later (upon his return to St. Petersburg), became a member of the Academy, and rose to many other honours. He early distinguished himself by translations and imitations of Horace, in which he devoted a closer attention to perfect form than any of his contemporaries, so that, but for a somewhat antiquated language, he is read with pleasure even at the present time. His chief reputation with his contemporaries was earned by the comedy The Pettifoggery, which had a phenomenal success, and was only superseded by Griboyédov’s Intelligence Comes to Grief and Gógol’s The Revizór. Like all the great comedies of Russia, The Pettifoggery deals with the negative sides of social life, and lays bare the corruption of officialdom. The plot of the play is as follows: Pettifog devises a plan by which he is to get hold of the property of Squareman. The latter is named in his certificate of birth Theodotos; his father left his estate to this Theodotos, but he naming himself Deodatus (Bogdán), Pettifog argues before the judges that Deodatus is another unlawful holder of that estate, and that it ought to revert to himself, as a distant relative of the deceased man. To make his case sure he bribes the judges, Gurgle, Snare, Gladly and Wordy, and the Procurator Grab and Secretary Talon, and sues for the hand of Sophia, the daughter of the Presiding Judge Casetwister. All, however, ends well, for Pettifog is denounced to the Senate and put in gaol, and the judges are turned over to the criminal court, while Squareman marries Sophia, his old sweetheart. The verses at the end of Act III., Scene 6, “Take, you’ll learn the art with ease,” went like wild-fire through all Russia, and became the byword for the large host of bribers.
Sir John Bowring has translated his On Julia’s Death, also reprinted in F. R. Grahame’s The Progress of Science, Art and Literature in Russia.