«ANECDOTE ABOUT TWO RUSSIAN WRITERS»

Abstract

The article examines an obscure comedy by O. I. Senkovsky Fansu, or the Cheating Maid, which is a reworking of a play by а Chinese author Zheng Guang-tzu, Tchao-Mei’-Hiang (The Clever Confidante), published in the French translation in 1835. The analysis is focused on the literary and polemical plot of the work, introduced by Senkovsky into the source text. The article offers additional arguments in favor of the assumption made by V. A. Kaverin, that the prototypes of the two characters of the comedy, Phu-Lalin and Mi-Lashun, are F. V. Bulgarin and N. A. Polevoy, and suggests that this additional plot was based on an episode of plagiarism, with Bulgarin using fragments of A. S. Pushkin’s tragedy Boris Godunov in his novel Dimitri The Impostor (1829); the tragedy was written in 1825, but published only in 1830, while Bulgarin got access to the manuscript thanks to his connections at the Third Department.