Alexander Griboyedov wrote a single play, and it proved enough for immortality. Woe from Wit had dissolved into quotations before it was even published: the manuscript was copied out by hand and learned by heart. The line "And who are the judges?" entered the language for good.
He was born in 1795 in Moscow. A brilliant mind, several languages, a musician who composed waltzes. He served in the War of 1812, then as a diplomat. Woe from Wit was written mainly between 1820 and 1824, between postings.
The play was banned from the stage — too caustic about Moscow society, too much freethinking. Griboyedov did not live to see its first official production. In 1829 he was killed in Tehran, when a mob sacked the Russian embassy. He was thirty-three.
Pushkin wrote of him: "One of the most intelligent men in Russia." Quotations from Woe from Wit have lived in the Russian language for more than two hundred years — a rarity even among great plays.