Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook, or The Adventures of a Debauched Woman (Пригожая повариха, или Похождение развратной женщины, 1770) starts with the words “Part 1” and ends abruptly without ever giving us a second part, so many have reasonably assumed it was unfinished. But in 1988 Alexander Levitsky made a good case that this is wrong, and the work as we have it stands on its own, and furthermore everyone who sees social commentary in it is misinterpreting it.

The Comely Cook is narrated by Martona, a young widow who sets out “to assure financial security for herself” through a series of affairs with men that begin two weeks after her husband’s death at the Battle of Poltava (109). Soviet and Western scholars from Dmitrii Blagoi (“Chulkov’s novel deals with the bitter lot of a common person—the poor wife of a sergeant… who is forced to sell herself”) to John Garrard speak of Chulkov’s realism and “presumed ‘social concerns’” (99–100). But the novel isn’t plausibly situated in any real place and time. Russian place names are mentioned, but the characters’ names (Martona, Sveton, Akhal, Svidal, Oral) don’t sound Russian. Nor does the chronology hold together. If Martona’s husband died at a battle that took place in 1709, it’s odd that Chulkov has a clerk read an ode by Lomonosov that year, when Lomonosov wasn’t even born until 1711. The only way it works is if it isn’t in contemporary Russia or Peter’s Russia, but a “fictional Russia” connected not to Peter’s actual Russia but to the fictional “Petrine tales” (100–01).

Nitpicking digression: I’m convinced by Levitsky’s argument that a social reading of The Comely Cook misses the point, but he says “the only mention of what could be construed as society’s possible ‘guilt’ are the semi-pathetic utterances at the beginning of Martona’s narrative” (101), yet surely the best evidence for society’s guilt is three paragraphs in, when an “honest old woman” starts the recent widow on her path by bringing a “young and handsome man to cheer me up.”

Levitsky thinks Chulkov is moved by not sympathy for actual widows, but a desire to mock his pretentious neoclassicist contemporaries who would grudgingly allow novels inside the literary tent only if they were proper and useful and centered on “an authoritative, ‘sophisticated’ image of the author” (98). Chulkov “succeeded in combining serious attention to the narrative function of the ‘author’ with an understanding of literature as a form of entertainment, free from utilitarian aspects” (98).

As for the work being complete, it begins with Martona wanting financial independence, and at the end she achieves it, so “we may be reasonably certain that any ‘remainder’ or ‘Part II’ would have been a different story altogether, entitled perhaps The Comely Martona but certainly not Cook since the comely proprietress is no longer a cook, and no longer needs to be debauched” (110). The work’s structure also hints it is complete.

The text can be divided into two sections (not counting the “two mock dedications” and “mock apology in verse,” 102). The first part: “events directly affect Martona, she is almost always the object of direct discourse, and she makes continued use of proverbs” (107). Through her proverbs and not-so-edifying digressions, Chulkov mocks the figure of the serious, moralizing and intellectual author figure that his contemporaries idealized.

In the second part, there are fewer proverbs and Martona is less central, but there is a tighter structure than has been appreciated. Using theatrical terminology in the text, Chulkov sets up a tragedy with a comedy inside it and a story embedded in the comedy. Two men, Akhal and Svidal, want Martona, and Svidal tricks Akhal into fighting a duel with unloaded pistols, fakes his own death, and thereby gets Akhal to flee the scene. That’s the first part of the tragedy, which now goes to the back burner. Now a comedy starts, involving a servant poisoning Martona’s friend’s merchant husband to make him seem insane. In the middle of the comedy, a character explains events to the husband through an ostensibly fictional story that is clearly the husband’s own story. After the end of the comedy, the tragedy ends, with Akhal taking poison and willing his estate (bought with Martona’s money, which he had tricked her out of much earlier) to Martona. This nested ABCBA structure already suggests design (it’s not just an adventure story begun and ended whenever), but the parts are further connected: “poison is an element in all three episodes,” and in each “the central character seemingly loses his wits and is held forcibly on the bed” (108–09). The comedy and tragedy end with two similar women, Martona and her friend, receiving estates (109).

The irony is that Chulkov’s later champions praise him for the things he disavowed and explain his formal innovations away as unfortunate lapses (107). In his metaliterary mockery, he “concentrated on the very techniques by which the new prose fiction aspired to prove itself; and, while attacking them, he pioneered alternative techniques in the process” (104). His narrator’s speech is full of juxtapositions of high and low style, as well as “stylistically contrasted epithets” like “toothless Adonis,” “stout maiden,” and “gray-haired cupid” (104–05). The plot, meanwhile, is full of twists and reversals, and Martona “reacts to them by shifting from sad to happy moods just as rapidly as the events unfold—indeed, too rapidly for the reader to suspend his disbelief” (111). The rapid changes in verbal style, plot, and the narrator’s mood echo each other and can be seen as a series of returns to whatever mode one takes as dominant, just as the characters nearly all “return to each other at some point or other either physically or in their memories” (111).

There is even more in this article, including possible illustrated subtexts (“Martona’s story is told in easily visualized scenes that rather resemble those pictures in Hogarth’s classic The Harlot’s Progress,” with further similarities to Russian lubki, 106–07) and Chulkov’s tendency to play games with his readers and his “established history of failing to acknowledge his sources” (109–12). In that last connection, Levitsky speculates that The Comely Cook may prove to be “an adaptation of some Western literary model” (112). (The Comely Cook is often mentioned with Daniel Defoe’s 1722 Moll Flanders, which also has a first-person female narrator. John Garrard in 1970 [23n18] thought Chulkov probably hadn’t read it, and I think Levitsky is suggesting there could have been a much closer borrowing from a more obscure Western source. I’m waiting to read this interesting-looking 2015 article by Emma Lieber until I finish Moll Flanders.)

See Alexander Levitsky, “Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook: The Symmetry of a Hoax,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 21 (1988): 97–115. I like the format of the long-defunct RLT: in one issue they would publish (or even commission) translations of untranslated works from some corner of Russian literature—the eighteenth century here, women writers in 1974—then print a bunch of exceptionally readable articles analyzing that corner the next issue.