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Chatsky
The disillusioned truth-telling hero of Griboyedov's comedy Woe from Wit, a byword for the isolated intellectual at odds with a shallow society; invoked as a type the district's 'present-day Chatskys' fail to live up to.
Reading notes
- Ivanov §366 I played at being Chatsky
Chatsky is the disillusioned truth-telling hero of Alexander Griboyedov's verse comedy "Woe from Wit" (1823/1825), a byword for the isolated moral idealist who denounces a shallow society to its face and is dismissed as mad for his trouble. Count Shabelsky claims to have once "played at being Chatsky" himself in his own youth, denouncing scoundrels -- but claims to have done so with more tact than Dr. Lvov, whom he is in the same breath accusing of the same role played clumsily. The comparison is barbed in both directions: Shabelsky flatters his own past self while damning Lvov's present one.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 8 February 1889. Moscow. §4 Chatsky
The disillusioned hero of Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit," cited alongside Khlestakov for the same purpose.