Russia's Munchausens

The Legendary Baron Celebrates 300 Years

Fantastic stories from “the most truthful man in the world” about a wolf pulling a sled, a stag growing a cherry tree between his antlers after being shot with a pit, an eight-legged rabbit, and a horse tied to the top of a belltower, are the stuff of childhood in Russia. The improbable adventures of the legendary Baron von Munchausen have inspired more than six hundred books, as well as countless plays and films.

Interestingly, this wildly popular product of fiction had a very real prototype – Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen (1720-1797), from the German Electorate of Hanover. For more than a decade, he served in Russia, where he first arrived as part of the entourage of Duke Anthony Ulrich II of Brunswick. Münchhausen took part in the 1735–1739 Russo-Turkish War and distinguished himself during the 1737 capture of the Ottoman fortress at Ochakov. Official records attest that he was a brave and resourceful officer. In 1750, Münchhausen retired with the rank of captain to his native town of Bodenwerder. An exemplary family man and exceptional host, he was renowned for the food, drink, and amazing tales with which he entertained his guests. His storytelling prowess drew visitors from across Germany.

His rise to fame was helped along by various writers who had scant regard for accuracy. Taking advantage of the Baron’s reputation for stretching the truth, they stretched it even further, attributing to him all sorts of incredible feats far beyond what Münchhausen himself was concocting. The Baron’s international renown was achieved with the 1785 publication in London of Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. This book, written by fellow Hanoverian Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737-1794), was an overnight sensation and sold out of bookstores in a week. As literary scholars discovered, the tales represented Raspe’s creative reworkings of comic tales in a number of genres, from sources as diverse as Ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, and Germany past and present.

In 1786, a German version was published in Göttingen (although the title page claimed it was published in London). This edition represented a free translation and expansion of Raspe’s work by the professor and poet Gottried August Bürger (1747–1794). The fictional Munchausen narrating these tall tales took them to yet more stellar heights.

While Baron Munchausen may have put Germany on the map as the motherland of the tall tale, in fact Russian culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century had its own proud gallery of spinners of lies or creators of marvelous stories, depending on your viewpoint. The line between the unscrupulous liar and inspired inventor is a fine one and at times faded from view altogether.

The unbelievable can be found in the folklore of each of Earth’s many cultures. And Russian folk traditions feature a special genre known as nebyvalshchiny – an untranslatable word suggestive of big and grand things that never existed. The buffoonery of the nebyvalshchina drew its power from comic absurdities:

A bear flies high across the sky,
Holds a cow in his claws as he flies high...
There’s a sow in the tree and she’s woven a nest,
Having woven a nest, now with piglets she’s blessed.

Медведь летит по поднебесью,
В когтях же он несет коровушку...
На дубу свинья да гнездо свила,
Гнездо свила да детей вывела.

Folk storytellers made little effort toward credibility. A sixteenth-century tale, for example, would have us believe that a peasant managed to escape being swallowed up by an eddy by grabbing onto the tail of a giant bear. A foreign visitor to Russia was told that, along the Dnieper, travelers’ words freeze in winter only to thaw in the springtime. Someone else claimed with utter seriousness to have a wonder-working plant whose seeds could generate a sizeable lamb. Stranger still, these and similar yarns were often believed by foreigners.

So, Russia’s penchant for the tall tale made it fertile ground for the Munchausen stories, and the equally free translation into Russian of Bürger’s free translation from English was enormously popular there. By the early nineteenth century it had gone through at least five editions. The translator, the well-known satirist, mimic, and parodist Nikolai Osipov, used a folk saying as the translation’s title: Don’t Listen If You Don’t Want To, But Don’t Stop Me from Lying. Much as the translator tried to give the book a foreign flavor, Osipov’s native realia shone through. In addition to typical Russian clothing and sleds, the book was replete with stereotypically backward and brutal rural gentry and quarrelsome coachmen who have to stop at every drinking establishment along the way and demand to be treated to vodka. One of its characters, a child of the gentry, raised among serfs and hunting dogs, is depicted reflecting:

The more I frolicked with the borzois and the pointers, the more I teased and beat the peasant children, the more delicious treats I got from mother, and father became more affectionate by the hour. I was nine years old, and at that age I thought that a nobleman must be a very different creature from other people... Every thought with which I grew up and arrived at the present boiled down to this idea. I always had money jingling in my pocket while others had not a kopek; I threw my fists about, while others had to bear my blows patiently; I ordered, and others had to obey. I grew angry, and everyone else trembled.

One illustration included in the book that portrayed an undeniably Russian landscape and toponyms bore a caption that might be translated as “Boasters Brook, Fibberette Village.” Osipov also contributed chapters of his own fabrication: “He Rides Horseback Across the Sea,” “He Hangs His Hat and Gloves on a Sunbeam,” “He Almost Drowned in His Own Sweat,” “The Writer Started Speaking Before He Was Born,” “After Eating Eggs, He Spits Out Live Chicks,” and so forth. The word “lie” (lozh) and its various derivatives are sprinkled throughout the text as a tongue-in-cheek reminder that not every word therein was true. The book also included a chapter with the noteworthy title: “The Unmasking of Lies by the Authors of This Book.” Here, the protagonist addresses the “readering public” with the shocking news that the inventors of the incredible adventures being attributed to him were not actually telling the truth. At the same time, however, the exposer of these untruths is clearly himself an inveterate liar and laments at having “such a puffed up lie inside me, I don’t know how to get it out.”

In 1818, right after the fifth edition of this book was released, a comedy in verse with the same title came out, this one produced by the eminent humorist, Alexander Shakhovskoy (1777-1846). Shakhovskoy’s anti-hero is the incorrigible liar Zarnitskin, a man utterly devoid of redeeming qualities. The story’s premise is that Zarnitskin has returned after an eight-year absence, during which he has supposedly been engaged in spectacular feats of heroism and amazing foreign travels. He has now taken up residence with his Uncle Mezetsky and Aunt Khandrina at their estate outside Moscow. Zarnitskin makes the most improbable boasts and is dazzled by his own self-importance, claiming to have earned himself “a lifetime’s worth of glory.” The comic unmasking of his lies constitutes the work’s basic conceit. At the book’s conclusion however, it turns out that Zarnitskin is not only a liar, but a swindler and a crook: when he runs out of money, he begins to spread rumors that his aunt has died and that he is her sole heir. Under this pretext, he borrows a vast sum and then tries to parlay this capital into an engagement to a wealthy bride, the Countess Lidina, who had been engaged to Zarnitskin’s uncle. His deceptions ultimately catch up to him and Uncle Mezetsky pronounces the grave verdict:

If you tell but one lie, you must leave, to be clear:
Don’t you dare show your face anymore around here

Когда ж хоть раз солжешь, то должен в тот же час
В коляску сесть, скакать и не казать нам глаз.

In addition to clearly following Osipov’s example, Shakhovskoy also apparently drew inspiration from a real-life contemporary. Most scholars agree that Zarnitskin was based on none other than Pavel Svinyin (1788–1839), a writer, ethnographer, diplomat, and publisher of the journal Notes of the Fatherland. Several months before Shakhovskoy’s comedy was written, Svinyin returned from abroad and related unbelievable stories about his time in Europe and North America and about a series of military exploits he supposedly performed. Svinyin was repeatedly accused of describing places he had never been, thereby earning the title of “the Russian Munchausen.” The stories he told were widely repeated.

The twentieth-century literary scholar Abram Gozenpud found direct parallels between what Svinyin’s books describe from his time in foreign lands and what Zarnitskin supposedly lived through. For example, Zarnitskin claimed to have performed all sorts of wondrous feats of bravery while serving in the navy. Svinyin’s 1818 Memoir of the Navy recounts how Turkish shells and bullets bounced right off him and how, after he fell off a ship into the sea, despite being dragged to the bottom by his wet clothing, he somehow managed to escape drowning. Offering an eyewitness account of the death of General Moreau, Svinyin wrote: “The shell that took off his right leg went through his horse, took out the calf of his left leg, and smashed his knee” (from Svinyin’s 1815 A Scenic Trip Across North America).* Zarnitskin also tells a story about a bomb that hit his horse and about grape shot that flew right into his mouth. Svinyin claimed to have hobnobbed with all the outstanding public figures of his day, including at the salon of Juliette Récamier in Paris – as did Zarnitskin. These are just a few of the similarities between Svinyin’s accounts and experiences attributed to Zarnitskin.

Svinyin’s contemporaries thought that his stories lacked flair and considered him a mediocre liar. Alexander Pushkin himself satirized Svinyin in a literary tidbit titled “A Little Liar.”

Pavlusha was a tidy, kind and industrious boy, but he had one vice. He was unable to put three words together without lying. On his saint’s day, his father gave him a wooden rocking-horse. Pavlusha insisted that the horse had belonged to Charles XII and was the very one on which he had galloped away from the Battle of Poltava. Pavlusha insisted that his parents’ kitchen boy was an astronomer, that their postboy was a historian, and that their poultry man Proshka could write poetry better than Lomonosov. At first, all the other boys believed him, but soon they figured things out, and nobody wanted to believe him, even when he happened to be telling the truth.

When Nikolai Gogol asked Pushkin to suggest a subject to write about, Pushkin made him the “gift” of a walking-talking subject – Svinyin, describing his character and his travels through Bessarabia in a way that ultimately inspired Gogol’s Inspector General. So perhaps Svinyin’s most wondrous achievement of all was serving as the prototype for Khlestakov.

 Another great fabulist of that period was the Georgian Prince Dmitry Tsitsianov (1747-1835), a legendary jester and speechifier who had settled in Moscow and was renowned there as a generous host. Unlike Svinyin, Tsitsianov was perceived as an inspired fabricator. The poet Pyotr Vyazemsky detected poetry in his stories and considered him “more expressive than certified poets.” Pushkin remarked on the playfulness of his depictions, and the memoirist Alexander Bulgakov was in raptures over Tsitsianov’s “unique eloquence.”

Interestingly, the prince passed himself off as the author of Don’t Listen If You Don’t Want To, But Don’t Stop Me from Lying (which he could get away with, since it had been published anonymously). This was obviously a hoax, but it does appear that Tsitsianov copied the book’s storytelling template, and the plots of at least two stories he used to tell were directly lifted from that book. Written accounts of two such plagiarized stories have survived. The first, by Vyazemsky, goes as follows:

Walking down the street in a bitter frost, [Tsitsianov] is approached by a beggar, all in tatters. The beggar asks him for alms. The prince reaches into his pocket – alas, he has no money. He takes off his fur coat, gives it to the beggar, and continues on his way. When he stops at an intersection, he feels that someone has tapped him on the shoulder. He turns around. The Lord of Sabaoth is standing in front of him and says: “Listen, prince, you’ve committed a great number of sins, but this one deed of yours atones for many of them: believe me, I’ll never forget it!”

The other anecdote was recorded by Alexandra
Smirnova-Rosset.

Among [Tsitsianov’s] other inventions, he had a story about how he was once chased by a rabid dog and lightly bitten on the calf. The following day his valet came running in and said, “Your Excellency, be so good as to come to your dressing room and see what is happening there.”

“Can you imagine? My tail-coat had turned rabid and was jumping about.”

But Tsitsianov’s taletelling could also be strikingly original. In his 1995 book Literary Anecdotes of the Pushkin Era, Yefim Kurganov described Tsitsianov as “manifesting the personality of a ‘Russian Munchhausen,’ with the wit, passion, temperament, and the tendency toward exaggeration and paradox typical of the Caucasus.” Among the stories Tsitsianov told, a whole cycle of anecdotes full of Caucasian flavor and characteristic Georgian braggadocio stand out. One such story, recorded by the historian Pyotr Bartenev, has Tsitsianov calmly claiming that in Georgia it’s very profitable to manufacture cloth, since the sheep are born multicolored and you don’t have to die the threads. “When the sun rises,” the prince concluded, “these herds of colorful sheep present a delightful picture.” The wonders of Tsitsianov’s native land served as the point of departure for one of his most unrestrained flights of fancy, in which he takes the fairly quotidian topic of apiculture as material for an impressive feat of literary invention. According to one account included in Kurganov’s book:

It happened that at one gathering, a landowner reputed to preside over a thriving agricultural enterprise was telling about the huge income he derived from bee farming...

“I certainly believe you,” Tsitsianov interjected, “But I shall be so bold as to assure you that the bee farming we have in Georgia cannot be matched by any other place in the world.”

“Why is that, Your Excellency?”

“I’ll tell you why; it could be no other way. Our flowers containing honey juices grow there like nettle does here, and our bees are almost as big as sparrows. And it is noteworthy that, when they fly, instead of buzzing, they sing like birds.”

“And what are their hives like, Your Excellency?” the amazed bee farmer inquired.

“Their hives?” Tsitsianov replied. “They are like everywhere else.”

“How can such enormous bees fly into ordinary hives?”

At that point Tsitsianov realized that, by taking his story a bit too far, he had set his own trap, one out of which it would be difficult to extricate himself. Without a moment’s hesitation he replied: “Here people don’t have the slightest understanding of our land... You think that everywhere things are the same as in Russia? No, my good man! In our Georgia, there’s no place for excuses: the bees must find a way!”

One of his fabrications took on new life generations later. Another account from Kurganov’s book goes as follows: “During a heavy downpour the prince stopped by to visit a friend. ‘Did you come by carriage?’ the friend inquired. ‘No, I came by foot.’ ‘So how did you keep from getting wet?’ ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘I am very skilled at making my way between the raindrops.’” In Soviet times, the exact same story was told with the prominent Soviet statesman Anastas Mikoyan as its protagonist. This anecdote fit with the popular conception of this top party official as someone always able to come through the perils of Soviet politics unscathed.

One sign of how appealing Tsitsianov’s fabrications were for his listeners is the number of other taletellers who shamelessly passed his stories off as their own. The late-nineteenth-century historian of Russian humor, Mikhail Pylyev, has written about a retired colonel by the name Tobyev who regaled St. Petersburg with his stories in the 1820s and ’30s. He also claimed to be able to walk through a rainstorm without getting wet. When people asked him how that was possible, he nonchalantly responded: “I wield my cane so skillfully, knocking the raindrops away, that not a single one lands on my clothing.” Among the Tsitsianov-inspired stories Tobyev told was one about a coat the size of his hand. This story was also an opportunity to mention that he had once been the favorite of the all-powerful Prince Potyomkin. To please His Serenity, the colonel had once raced off to distant Siberia to obtain this amazingly compact garment, driving 100 horses, which enabled him to traverse 3,000 versts in six days – in other words, traveling at the speed of a modern-day train.

Another retired colonel, the Ukrainian nobleman Pavel Tamara, actually did serve as Potyomkin’s adjutant. A veteran of the “times of Ochakov and the conquest of Crimea,” Tamara valorized that era – the days of his youth – as the pinnacle of Russia’s glory. In his telling, Tamara enhanced Russia’s actual military achievements with truly impressive feats of mendacious artistry. Not everyone accepted his tales at face value, and “to lie like Tamara” became a catchphrase. Tamara paid the naysayers no heed, however, and continued telling his improbable tales unperturbed.

We know of one instance when a guest of the colonel’s dinner table started to rhapsodize over a complex surgical procedure performed by a skilled doctor. “What’s so surprising about that?” Tamara interrupted. “Now, in our day, surgeons did better than that.” He went on to tell a gruesome story about how Potyomkin had sent him out to the battlefield after an engagement against the Turks in the hopes of finding survivors. All around were mountains of corpses, but then he suddenly heard a weak voice calling out to him. He rode toward the voice – and was stunned. The voice was coming from a severed head! He bent down to take a closer look and recognized his acquaintance, the junior officer Kuznetsov. The head wept as it implored: “Take pity, Pavel Stepanovich. Have them find my body and ask that the doctor reattach my head to it.” A month later, as Tamara told it, he happened to be in an infirmary when he again encountered Kuznetsov. He was healthy and in one piece, albeit in a foul mood. “Oh, Pavel Stepanovich, what a misfortune has befallen me,” he bitterly lamented. “There’s been a mix-up with my head: in their haste, they retrieved not my body, but a Turkish one, and sewed my head onto it! So now what do we have? My head is Russian but I have the belly of a Turk! How is a Christian supposed to live with a Muslim torso!?” Tamara’s guests were unable to suppress snickers, but he earnestly reproached them: “So you see how surgery was back then! And you’re amazed at what they do today! You haven’t seen anything!”

Our final fabricator was “an inspired and ingenious poet” when it came to storytelling. That is how Pyotr Vyazemsky once described the Polish Count Vikenty Krasinsky (1782-1858), an associate of Napoleon I who later served as Adjutant General to Emperor Alexander I. Vyazemsky went on to write in his 1825 Old Notebook: “His speech was lively and entertaining. Evidently, he himself enjoyed his improvisations. Some liars are scrupulous and timid; they stammer and blush when they lie. That’s no good. As they say, you have to have the courage of your convictions. You also have to have the courage of your lies. Only then will they succeed and captivate.

Krasinsky “captivated” his audiences with rather disturbing stories, primarily of a gloomy, apocalyptic nature. One was about two women, old friends who had not seen one another for a long time when they happened to cross paths while riding along the street: “They were both in carriages. One of them, failing to notice that the glass was raised, flung herself toward it and broke the glass with her head in such a way that it cut right through her throat and her head rolled along the roadway toward the very carriage of her dear friend.”

On another occasion, he told a story about a man whose corpse was placed in a coffin and carried out to a crypt to await transport to the family cemetery. “Sometime later, the coffin opened. How could that happen? The dead man’s hair and beard had grown so that they forced open the coffin’s cover.”

Once Krasinsky got a bit carried away describing his heroic military feats and became so entangled in a web of improbable details that he could not figure out how to escape. He turned to his adjutant, Vylezhinsky, for help, as he conveniently happened to be there. “I’m afraid I cannot be of help,” Vylezhinsky replied. “You, count, have perhaps forgotten that I was killed at the battle’s very beginning.”

Alexandra Smirnova-Rosset recalled how Krasinsky once told his companions about a magnolia with 60,000 blossoms. “Who counted them?” someone inquired. “That task was assigned to an entire regiment, and it stood near the tree for twenty-four hours!” he replied utterly unperturbed.

As we look back from the 300th anniversary of the birth of the real Baron Münchhausen, it is fitting to note that, as a land of inspired spinners of improbable tales, Russia has never been outdone by Germany.