Moscow-born Alexander Griboyedov had studied at the…

Moscow-born Alexander Griboyedov had studied at the Moscow University from 1810 to 1812 and obtained a commission in a hussar regiment, but resigned it in 1816.

Entering the civil service in 1817, he had been appointed secretary of the Russian legation in Persia in the following year, and was transferred to Georgia.

Griboyedov had commenced writing early and, in 1816, had produced on the stage at St. Petersburg a comedy in verse called The Young Spouses, which had been followed by other works of the same kind.

But neither these nor the essays and verses that he wrote would have been long remembered but for the immense success gained by his comedy in verse Woe from Wit, a satire upon Russian aristocratic society.

As a high official depicted in the play styles it, this work is "a pasquinade on Moscow.” The play's merits are in its accurate representation of certain social and official types, such as Famusov, the lover of old abuses, the hater of reforms; his secretary, Molchalin, servile fawner upon all in office; and the aristocratic young liberal and Anglomaniac, Repetilov.

In contrast with these is the hero of the piece, Chatsky, the ironic satirist, just returned from the west of Europe, who exposes and ridicules the weaknesses of the rest, his words echoing that outcry of the young generation of 1820 which reached its climax in the military insurrection of 1825, and was then sternly silenced by Nicholas I.

Although rooted in the classical French comedy of Molière, the characters are as much individuals as types, and the interplay between society and individual is a sparkling dialectical give-and-take.

Griboyedov had spent the summer of 1823 in Russia, completed his play, and taken it to St. Petersburg, where the censors had rejected it.

Many copies were made and privately circulated, but Griboyedov will never see it published.

(The first edition will be printed in 1833, four years after his death.

Only once is he to see it on the stage, when the officers of the garrison at Yerevan perform it.)

Sent from Georgia to St. Petersburg with the Turkmanchay Treaty of 1828 and brilliantly received there, Griboyedov considers devoting himself to literature, and commences a romantic drama, A Georgian Night (’Gruzinskaya noch').

Several months after his wedding to the 16-year-old daughter of his friend Prince Chavchavadze, Griboyedov is suddenly sent to Persia as Minister Plenipotentiary.

Meanwhile, Russia, seeing a chance for territorial expansion, comes to the aid of Greece by declaring another war on the Ottoman Empire on April 26, 1828, this time in support of the rebellious Greeks and other Balkan Christian “brethren” but, as always, with an eye to liberating Constantinople from Turkish rule and controlling the Dardanelles Straits.

Britain views the Russo-Turkish War with suspicion, aware that Russia’s professed altruism in protecting the Ottoman Empire’s Orthodox Christians masks an ancient hunger for a warm-water port.