SOURCE: Moser, Charles A. “The Brigadier” and “The Minor.” In Denis Fonvizin, pp. 49-67; 68-85. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.

[In the following excerpts from his full-length study of Fonvizin's life and career, Moser offers detailed analyses of the author's greatest works, discussing the plays' background, place in Russian literature, and major themes.]

THE BRIGADIER

I. BACKGROUND OF A PLAY

The Brigadier was a genuine milestone in the development of the original Russian comedy. It also signaled the maturing of Fonvizin as a literary artist, indicating that the twenty-four-year-old author had discovered the genre which best suited him. Through that genre he would exercise lasting influence on the history of Russian literature.

The play's plot is constructed upon interlocking marital triangles involving two families. The first family is that of the Brigadier and the Brigadier's wife (Brigadirsha), whose son Ivanushka has been betrothed to Sofya, the daughter of the Counsellor (Sovetnik) and stepdaughter of the Counsellor's second wife (Sovetnitsa). As the play opens, these characters have gathered to make the final arrangements for the marriage at the bride's home, where all the action takes place.

Sofya has no desire at all to marry the blockhead Ivanushka, a caricature of the petit maître whose one wish is to transform himself into a Frenchman. Sofya's affections are pledged instead to Dobrolyubov, whose name signifies “lover of the good.” In the end it is their marriage which is arranged, and not that of Sofya and Ivanushka.

The plot is complicated by the fact that each husband in the play—the Brigadier and the Counsellor—is smitten with passion for the other's wife, and makes unreciprocated advances to her. But the wives fail to respond, though for quite different reasons. The Brigadier's wife does not succumb to the Counsellor's blandishments because she believes in adhering to her marriage vows, but also because she is simply too dense to grasp what her suitor desires. The Counsellor's wife, on the other hand, is sufficiently worldly-wise to realize that the Brigadier is courting her, but she has in the meantime become enamored of Ivanushka, since she too lives and breathes only for things French.

The plot, then, consists in the tangling and untangling of these roughly symmetrical love intrigues. All is eventually sorted out, husband remains with wife, and the way is clear for Sofya and Dobrolyubov to be joined in matrimony.

Our knowledge of the circumstances under which The Brigadier was written and first presented to the public is spotty. Some scholars have argued that Fonvizin began work on the comedy as early as 1766, but the general consensus of scholarly opinion now is that it was written at the very end of the decade, most probably in 1768 and 1769, while Fonvizin was residing with his family in Moscow.¹ In the contemporary documentation we first learn of it from a letter to Elagin, which Fonvizin's editor dates no more precisely than 1769 (II, 401-402). At the time the letter was sent the play was evidently complete, for Fonvizin spoke of bringing it with him should he be required to return to St. Petersburg immediately. He was understandably nervous over his first substantial original literary effort, and hoped that his superior and literary senior would serve as a prepublication critic. Shortly before, he said, he had read a satire directed against the author of some witless comedy, and Fonvizin, satirist though he was himself, did not care to be subjected to the same treatment. Fonvizin commented that he was not among those with such an exaggerated idea of their literary talent as to account themselves a Russian Molière, or even a Russian Destouches (II, 402). He surely hoped that Elagin, the head of the state theaters, would assist him in staging the work. So far as we know, however, Elagin was entirely uncooperative: he apparently gave Fonvizin no counsel in advance of publication and did not help him with the play's staging. Indeed, it is not even known when the play received its premiere performance.

As things turned out, the high officials who promoted the play were not those with literary pretensions, like Elagin, but rather men without them—Catherine's favorite, Grigory Orlov, and Nikita Panin. Upon returning to St. Petersburg, presumably in the early summer of 1769, Fonvizin gave readings of the play, quite successfully, as he thought. When word of the new comedy reached Orlov's ears, the favorite asked him to bring it along if he were going to be in Peterhof, the royal residence near St. Petersburg, in late June or early July. Fonvizin of course did so, and soon had the opportunity to read the play to the Empress herself. Catherine complimented him on his work, and he departed quite pleased (II, 97).

After this reading and others, his play became the talk of the Court at Peterhof. That led in turn to his first close contact with Nikita Panin, when the latter asked him to give a reading for the Grand Duke Paul and his associates, which he did a few days later in St. Petersburg. He recalled in his autobiography that he realized the first objective of his play had been achieved when his hearers burst into “uproarious laughter” a few moments after he began; and his more serious objective was reached afterwards, when Panin praised his work glowingly, characterizing it in a sentence which has remained attached to it ever since: “This is the first comedy ever written about our social mores” (II, 97-99). Panin then invited Fonvizin to give a reading at his own home, and he entered the literary and intellectual circle surrounding the Grand Duke. For Fonvizin, the path to political advancement lay through literature.

Thereafter Fonvizin was asked to read his comedy in one aristocratic salon after another, and his play became the talk of the capital (II, 99-100). He could hardly have hoped that The Brigadier would produce a more striking impact upon high society than it did in fact. Even more important, the play immediately became a minor classic, as the Soviet scholar Dmitry Blagoy points out: characters from the play cropped up in the satirical journals of immediately succeeding years, and quotations from it entered the living language in the form of sayings and proverbs.² No beginning author could have asked for a more lasting and resounding success.

II. SATIRE AND THE NEOCLASSICAL COMEDY

To be sure, some nineteenth-century critics found it difficult to accept The Brigadier as a legitimate work of art. Something was missing, they felt, something to do with the relationship between satire and comedy. The leading Russian critic of the nineteenth century, Vissarion Belinsky, was among these: he drew the issue very sharply when he wrote that both The Brigadier and The Minor were “the fruit of an attempt by Russian satire to become comedy.”³ Writing at almost the same time, a less prominent critic, Stepan Dudyshkin, made the same point in the course of a lengthy review of a new edition of Fonvizin's works: “And so The Brigadier is not a comedy either in its action or in its characters; it is something closer to a satire on society, and therefore not an artistic work.”⁴ A proper understanding of the play, then, requires that we examine its position at the intersection of the satirical tradition in Russian literature, on the one hand, with the tradition of the Neoclassical comedy on the other.

Nearly all historians of Russian literature would agree that Fonvizin was the outstanding satirist of his day, and would link his name with Kantemir's as the two leading eighteenth-century Russian satirists. This does not mean that there were not noticeable satirical elements in the work of many lesser writers, as well as in the writing of such prominent figures with roots in the Neoclassical tradition as Lomonosov, Derzhavin, and especially Sumarokov. The satirical tradition was very strong in the Russia of the eighteenth century, and the targets of the satirists' scorn remained remarkably constant throughout that period. They included: the ignorance of the ordinary man and the official alike, and their unwillingness to enlighten themselves; greed, and the grasping for preferment; the problem of true nobility as deriving from the nobility of the individual soul or the prominence of one's ancestors; relationships between the sexes, especially within marriage; injustice and corruption at the middle and lower levels of the bureaucracy; and, in the latter half of the century, Gallomania, the fashionable craze for everything French. These and related questions attracted the creators of the Russian satirical tradition who derided phenomena of actual reality in the name of a higher ideal.

There were always those who cast doubt upon the utility of satirical writing. One such was Mikhail Kheraskov, who in 1760 wrote a programmatic poem, “K satiricheskoi muze” (To the Muse of Satire), arguing that there was no point in attempting to eliminate social evils through satirical works since no one would admit that there were any shortcomings in contemporary society, and therefore people were not susceptible to reform. Could a writer hope to eliminate, say, drunkenness by his pen, he asked? Of course not. “We have no faults,” he concluded sarcastically, and it was unrealistic to assume that any substantial social improvements could be effected through literature.⁵ For a time even Fonvizin seems to have entertained the argument that satire accomplishes no good purpose: the burden of his fragment To My Mind is precisely that the task of reforming “fools” in society is beyond the capacity of any writer, for a “fool will remain a fool forever.” Moreover, by what authority does the satirical writer arrogate to himself the right to preach to others (I, 216)? But a born satirist like Fonvizin could not indefinitely deny his own nature.

At the inception of the satirical journals of 1769, two leading figures in that movement—Nikolay Novikov and Catherine herself—debated the nature of satire. At least in theory, Novikov defended the idea of satire directed against particular individuals recognizable to the reading audience, whereas Catherine held that satire should be general, directed against common vices, on the grounds that most faults were really the result of moral weakness rather than conscious evil intent. From the strictly literary point of view, Catherine was correct. Novikov was too much of a journalist, one who wanted to “expose” current abuses. Works attacking particular individuals rarely retain any interest for general readers a century later, since they lack any direct knowledge of the persons attacked. One of the accusations brought against Sumarokov's comedies was that he used them to even scores with his literary and intellectual rivals.⁶ Although he made no explicit statements on this subject, Fonvizin adhered to Catherine's view of satire, for it is impossible to identify any well-known prototypes for his leading comic characters, although some have attempted to do so. To be sure, in his autobiography he mentions having used the dim-witted mother of the Moscow girl whom he briefly courted as the model for the Brigadier's wife (II, 89), but he clearly regarded her as an instance of a general type, and not anyone whom a theater audience would know. He no doubt would have been distressed if she had recognized herself in his fictional creation.

It is helpful to distinguish between the uses of humor and the uses of satire in the comedy. The humorist writes purely for the sake of entertainment, whereas the satirist seeks to correct social mores through the power of laughter. We may surmise that the distinguished men who heard Fonvizin read The Brigadier at the Grand Duke's table were there primarily to be entertained, and it was the satirist's task to blend satire with humor, preferably almost unnoticeably. Beyond that, the satirist had to tread carefully, for some abuses are so central to a culture as not to lend themselves to satirical treatment. They must be dealt with seriously if they are dealt with at all, and a satirical treatment of them will lead to rejection of the entire work in which it is included.⁷

One of the most succinct statements from a Russian hand on the social importance of Neoclassical comedy was published quite late, in 1820, by Alexander Shakhovskoy (1777-1846), a prolific though now-forgotten playwright of the early nineteenth century. Comedy's task, he wrote then, is to take up where the laws leave off, to punish vice and raise moral standards. It may be true that comedies do not convert misers, but neither do laws. Miserly individuals do not enjoy being tagged with literary catch phrases, and many of the types satirized in Fonvizin's Minor, he wrote, are no longer with us. This socially beneficial action of comedy explains why wise rulers have always supported the theater from ancient times.⁸ This latter point of Shakhovskoy's is buttressed by the fact that even Catherine—who certainly had the option of employing legislation if she wished—chose to combat certain social evils by writing satire herself.

If such nineteenth-century critics as Belinsky and Dudyshkin believed that Fonvizin had failed to weld satire and humor into an artistic comedy in The Brigadier, the theater-going public of the eighteenth century and critics of the twentieth felt otherwise. Though The Brigadier has its artistic weaknesses, and the author is not always in control of it, it stands as a skillful blend of humor and satire, in the best Fonvizinian style.

The Brigadier also has close connections with the Neoclassical tradition of comedy-writing, as well as Neoclassical satire.

Fonvizin's plotting of the play probably derived more from the Neoclassical farce than the Neoclassical comedy. This can be seen in the intermeshing marital triangles, and most especially in the repeated slapstick of the interruptions which intervene each time one of the male characters is on the point of pressing his illegitimate suit with the object of his affections. A Soviet student of eighteenth-century Russian literature, Grigory Gukovsky, has written that the structure of The Brigadier recalls the Sumarokovian Neoclassical farce, with its “gallery of comic personalities.”⁹ Another Soviet specialist, L. G. Barag, has fruitfully applied that insight by commenting that Fonvizin and his Western contemporaries developed the Molière tradition, achieving a new and organic synthesis of “elements of drama, comedy, and farce.”¹⁰ This interpretation of both Fonvizin's classic plays enables us to deal with their purely humorous aspects (the entertainment of farce), the moral guidance which they offered (the cleansing action of satire), and the near-tragic elements which critics have detected in such a figure as the Brigadier's wife (the drama). The Brigadier was neither pure entertainment nor pure didacticism, but a combination of the two, and with a dramatic element added.

In addition, Fonvizin did measure society against an ideal, and in the best Neoclassical tradition offered examples of that ideal. In fact, this is probably the most significant traditional element of the Neoclassical comedy which he retains, for his positive heroes Sofya and Dobrolyubov are indeed rather schematic, as the canons of Neoclassicism require. As Gukovsky phrases it in a formulation which is too sweeping for Fonvizin's comedy as a whole, but which does apply to his positive characters, “Fonvizin most often constructs his characters, not according to a rule of individual personality, but according to a previously conceived and limited scheme of moral and social norms.”¹¹ Sofya and Dobrolyubov exist in order to demonstrate what is possible in a world in which virtue triumphs.

Another element of the Neoclassical tradition worth mention here is that of borrowing from literary predecessors. Even in modern literatures the line between direct borrowing and working within a tradition or current fashion may be a fine one, and we do well to remember that originality was not sought in medieval literature: since literature was so closely allied to Christian theology, an author was well advised not to be very original, for otherwise he could be accused of heresy. Fonvizin's work still retains some linkages with that Old Russian tradition (his tribute on the occasion of Grand Duke Paul's recovery, for instance, or the biography of Panin, reminiscent of Old Russian lives of the saints), and certainly he was within the Neoclassical tradition, which came near to approving of borrowing. Writing some fifty years later, when a great change had occurred in attitudes toward literary borrowings, Vyazemsky accused his subject several times of plagiarism (though not in The Brigadier), which he considered a very serious charge. Almost certainly a careful investigation of contemporary dramatic works would discover parallels with Fonvizin's first original play, and Strycek has demonstrated that Fonvizin lifted almost verbatim a passage in the conversation between the Brigadier and his son Ivanushka at the beginning of the third act from a play by Johann Christophe Gottsched.¹² It is significant, though, that this borrowing is connected with the highly stereotyped figure of the Gallomane, as is another play from which Fonvizin has been accused of borrowing, Holberg's Jean de France. Fonvizin never dealt with the question of his borrowings explicitly, but if he had, he might well have answered as did Shakovskoy in 1820 on the same subject. Shakhovskoy began by restating the Neoclassical tenet that art should deal with that which is common to all people at all times in all places:

Art … is not something which is conditional, depending on circumstances and fashion. … It is derived from the intellectual Nature of man, based on the lofty truths of morality and social justice, and therefore precise, unchanging, eternal.

From this it follows, Shakhovskoy continued, that writers should be prepared to take good things wherever they find them. Molière himself borrowed; I in turn borrowed from him; and I hope that in the future someone may borrow from me as well.¹³ The Neoclassical approach did not go so far as to justify utter plagiarism, of course, but writers within the Neoclassical tradition were ready to countenance a much larger element of borrowing than was Vyazemsky in the nineteenth century, or we are today—although even in the twentieth century, when a writer develops a formula or plot which strikes a responsive chord among readers, hosts of literary imitators ring changes on that formula as quickly as possible.

III. THE CHARACTERS

If we classify the personages of The Brigadier according to the degree of their abstraction, we see that, in addition to Sofya and Dobrolyubov, the Counsellor, the Counsellor's wife, and Ivanushka are primarily stock figures of Neoclassical comedy adapted to Russian conditions. The Counsellor recalls Molière's Tartuffe, the religious hypocrite who lusts after another man's wife while exuding a fog of ecclesiastical verbiage. Ivanushka is a nearly perfect specimen of the Russian Gallomane, who despises his backward parents who understand only Russian, and speaks a horrendous mixture of French and Russian. The Counselor's wife is a mixture of the giddy female spendthrift and the fashionable devotee of all things French, an aspect of her character which explains her attraction to Ivanushka, although he is considerably her junior. It is significant that the older generation have no proper names, even first names. They are defined solely by their stations in life, as the Brigadier, the Counselor's wife, and so forth. The representatives of the younger generation do bear proper names, but they are the most ordinary ones imaginable, and Dobrolyubov's name falls into the Neoclassical tradition of “speaking names,” or names which define the essence of the character who bears them.

If most of the characters in The Brigadier are still clearly rooted in an internationalist Neoclassicism, the two most memorable ones are visibly joined to the Russian milieu in which they have their being. The Brigadier and the Brigadier's wife are expressions of Russian byt, or milieu. There is some disagreement over which of these two is the more remarkable. Nikita Panin immediately singled out the Brigadier's wife as the play's most vital and full-blooded creation: she was “everybody's relative,” he said, and every Russian knew someone like her (II, 98-99). Thus it is understandable that, according to indirect evidence, the play may at one time have been entitled Brigadir i brigadirsha (The Brigadier and the Brigadier's Wife).¹⁴ And yet Fonvizin in the end stubbornly called the play The Brigadier, and created the Brigadier as the only character lacking any important elements of caricature, the one with the greatest modicum of common sense, the one who usually recognizes the idiocy of those around him.

If the Brigadier and his wife were linked with native Russian culture, so was the ambiance of the play's action. The stage directions are detailed, calling for a room “decorated in rural fashion” and prescribing the initial activities and the dress of each of the major characters, who are all brought together for the important first scene. In his study of eighteenth-century Russian comedy, David Welsh claims that earlier plays had been quite featureless in their settings, and that therefore “its setting alone made Brigadir a startling novelty to the audiences of the 1760s and 1770s.”¹⁵ That may be true, but much of the play's interest was located in its “gallery of types,” as several critics have commented.

To be sure, Sofya and Dobrolyubov are of interest, not as individualized characters, but rather in the context of the overall theme of the play, which will be discussed below. Consequently they are only very pale members of the “portrait gallery.”

The Brigadier's wife, on the other hand, is a much more enthralling character, although she is so unintelligent that she cannot be psychologically very complex. She has the misfortune of being married to a man who enjoys denigrating her better qualities, who belittles her so that she has almost become a henpecked wife. In the very first scene of the first act, when the Counsellor comments that his daughter may be “losing her mind” a bit just before her imminent wedding, the Brigadier replies:

Oh, that will pass. My wife was walking around for about ten days out of her head before our marriage, and now she's been living with me for about thirty years afterwards in such perfect mental health that nobody could tell that she had ever been more intelligent.

(I, 49)

His wife returns a weak rejoinder to her overbearing husband, but he has by now become quite accustomed to expressing his contempt for her. Late in the fourth act he unwittingly insults the Counsellor by assuring him that his wife would never betray him; and moreover, he scoffs, “The idiot hasn't yet been born who would ever get the notion of paying court to my wife” (I, 92). He rephrases that thought in several different ways, much to the Counsellor's rising disgust.

The reader need not rely merely upon the Brigadier's word for his wife's stupidity, for it is illustrated several times during the play. On a minor occasion, she cannot follow the rules of a new and more complicated game of cards which the others sit down to play. In her day card games were simpler, she says, and she did not have to command an entire specialized vocabulary in order to participate (I, 87). Her native denseness plays an important part in the humorous scene in which the Counsellor declares his love for her and attempts to seduce her. She would have been slow enough to comprehend even if her suitor had been more direct in his approach, for she believes in the traditional verities of marriage (her husband is right about that); but when in addition the Counsellor couches his intimations in indirect and elevated ecclesiastical language, the Brigadier's wife fails utterly to comprehend what is transpiring. In scene three of Act Two, when the Counsellor is finally alone with the Brigadier's wife, he approaches from a distance by bewailing his sins and complaining of the drastic steps he would have to take if he genuinely wished to be rid of them—which he does not. When the Brigadier's wife questions him about these “sins,” he explains:

COUNCELLOR:
… Every man is composed of body and spirit. The spirit indeed may be willing, but the flesh is weak. And then there is no sin which cannot be purified through repentance … (Tenderly) Let us sin and then repent.
BRIGADIER'S wife:
How can we not sin, uncle! God alone is without sin.
COUNSELLOR:
True, dear woman. And you yourself confess now that you have known this sin.
BRIGADIER'S wife:
I always make my confession, uncle, the first week of Lent. But tell me, what need have you of my sins?
COUNSELLOR:
I have exactly the same need of your sins as I do of salvation. I wish your sins and mine to be one and the same so that nothing can dissolve the conjunction of our bodies and souls.
BRIGADIER'S wife:
What on earth do you mean by conjunction, uncle? I don't understand church language any better than I do French.

(I, 65)

The Counsellor is thus frustrated by the incomprehension of the Brigadier's wife, who realizes what has occurred when her son and the Counsellor's wife explain it to her. Then she can only with difficulty be restrained from causing a scandal by denouncing the Counsellor to her husband (I, 66-67).

The Brigadier also blames his wife for having botched the job of raising their son. Every time he wanted to subject his son to some military discipline, the Brigadier says, the mother always objected: “What do you want to do with the poor infant?” (I, 75). And now we see the results of that indulgence: “His idiot mother,” the Brigadier declares, “and my wife, is the reason he became a rake, and even a French rake, the more's the pity” (I, 90). The Brigadier will, in short, accept no responsibility for what his son has become.

The Brigadier does not restrict his hostility toward his wife to verbal abuse; he sometimes mistreats her physically as well. At the very beginning of the fourth act she comes in to complain to Sofya and Dobrolyubov, to solicit their solace and perhaps protection. Knowing her husband's “terrible temper,” she fears again falling victim to it. Though she suffers greatly from her husband's brutality, she tells Sofya, other military wives had even greater trials to bear. Such was the case with the beautiful young wife of a certain captain Gvozdilov, she recalls, who, in drunken fits, constantly beat her within an inch of her life. The tender-minded Sofya cries out in horror and asks to hear no more, to which the Brigadier's wife replies: “Ah, my dear girl, you can't even stand to hear about it! What do you think it was like for the captain's wife?” (I, 84-85). And here the Brigadier's wife, for all her muddle-headedness, does move within the realm of tragedy. Nearly 100 years later Fedor Dostoevsky would single out this dialogue as a masterly dramatic vignette, and pay tribute to Fonvizin's artistic tact in giving the final word to the Brigadier's wife instead of to the “well brought up Sofya with her hothouse sensitivity.” “This is an astounding piece of repartee … of Fonvizin's,” the novelist declared, “and he never wrote anything more appropriate, more humane, and … more despairing.”¹⁶

Probably the most complex and most intelligent character of the play is the Brigadier. He is also the most consistently developed, as the radical nineteenth-century critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky wrote in a youthful essay otherwise quite hostile to Fonvizin's play.¹⁷ Certainly he is the work's most “realistic” creation.

The Brigadier is not a particularly positive character. A military man, he is rough, rather crude, and given to physical violence: at one point in the play he nearly comes to blows with his son. He is on several occasions accused of being crude to his son—especially by the Counsellor's wife—and to his wife, by the Counsellor, who rationalizes his own lecherous coveting of his neighbor's wife by arguing that the Brigadier “sometimes doesn't love his wife as much as he does his horse” (I, 64). In addition to being crude and straightforward, the Brigadier is also something of a cynic, and his contempt for both his wife and son blinds him to the reality of what is occurring under his nose. In the opening scene of Act Three, for instance, he upbraids Ivanushka for his Gallomania, and makes a critical comment which his son misinterprets as a compliment. His father thereupon explodes: “You're a real blockhead, aren't you? Here I call you an idiot and you think I'm flattering you: what a jackass you are!” (I, 72). Precisely this disregard for his son makes it difficult for him to comprehend that the Counsellor's wife really prefers Ivanushka to him, even though she clearly demonstrates her preference to him both in word and deed. When he finally realizes the true situation, he expresses his disillusion through cynicism about women, as when he remarks to the Counsellor that “women usually maintain their chastity with worthwhile men, but very rarely with playboys” (I, 93). Here he has himself in mind as a worthwhile man, and his son as the playboy.

Still, the Brigadier is not averse to coveting his neighbor's wife, either, and makes his declaration to the Counsellor's wife in another rather comic scene. Just as the Counsellor utilizes ecclesiastical terminology, so the Brigadier resorts to military vocabulary in pressing his case. Facing her charms is more frightening to him than moving forward on the battlefield, he declares: “Your eyes are more terrifying to me than any bullets, shell, and shrapnel. Their first volley pierced my heart through and through, but before they plug me, I'll surrender as your prisoner of war” (I, 80). Like the Brigadier's wife, the Counsellor's wife at least pretends not to understand her unwanted suitor's intentions, and puts him off.

Slowly the Brigadier realizes the true state of affairs, and during the climactic scene when all the intertwining intrigues are exposed, it is in his mouth that Fonvizin places his favorite phrase, “honest man.” “Ivan, have the carriage brought around,” he orders. “Wife, let us this very minute leave a house where I, an honest man, almost became a ne'er-do-well” (I, 102). His decisive action scarcely redeems him entirely, but it does point to a certain rough honesty in him which was nearly eclipsed in the hypocritical atmosphere of the Counsellor's home.

The fount of that hypocrisy is the Counsellor. His wife says of him (we might note generally that each of the four spouses analyzes his partner reasonably accurately): “My freak is a terrible hypocrite: he never misses either morning or evening services, and thinks … God is so complacent as to forgive him during an evening service for what he has stolen during the day” (I, 55). Sometimes the Counsellor attempts to deceive even himself by his moral rationalizations. He was forced into retirement from government service upon the passage of strict legislation against bribery, and at one point he complains to his daughter about the new order of things under which one must be found guilty before paying a penalty: in God's eyes, he argues, all have sinned, and in his day as a judge “the guilty used to pay for his guilt and the innocent for his innocence … and so everyone was satisfied” (I, 61).

On the other hand, occasionally the Counsellor does understand the essentials of Christian ethics sufficiently to comprehend his offenses. In a monologue in the second scene of Act Two, he bewails his sins in attempting to seduce another man's wife, and also in using his paternal authority to compel his daughter to marry against her wishes, so that he himself may enjoy ready access to the Brigadier's wife. He bewails his sins but nevertheless acts in a way he knows to be wrong, so that he is the most actively evil character in the play.

Sofya sets out the essence of her father's character correctly when—after Dobrolyubov has won his suit and become a man of means—she says that her father's permission for their marriage will depend upon whether his greed overcomes his love (I, 83). Consequently, it is appropriate that at the end the Counsellor should be the person whose evil plans have been most thoroughly thwarted, and it is to him that the play's concluding moral message is given: “They say it's difficult to live with a conscience: but now I've discovered myself that the worst thing in the world is to live without one” (I, 103). The Counsellor stands exposed as the hypocrite who presents a facade of morality to the world while actually living an unworthy life.

There is little to be said about either Ivanushka or the Counsellor's wife as personalities. Ivanushka has inherited his mother's lack of wit, although he is shrewd enough to camouflage that failing with fashionable phrases. The Counsellor's wife is a spendthrift who loves taking three hours of a morning at her toilet and dreams of receiving hats in the latest fashion from Moscow from time to time (I, 55-56). This addlepated pair are the embodiment of Gallomania, which is one of the play's principal themes.

IV. STRUCTURE AND THEMES

The superficial observer might consider The Brigadier primarily an assault upon Gallomania, and with some justification. The stock characters of Ivanushka and the Counsellor's wife are simultaneously vivid and flat, and so quite memorable; the passages dealing with Gallomania are both comical and scattered throughout the play, so that they easily imprint themselves upon the memory. However, Marvin Kantor, after making a detailed comparison of The Brigadier with Holberg's Jean de France, concludes correctly that Fonvizin's play must not be pigeonholed in such cavalier fashion:

Holberg's comedy is what might be termed a “monolithic” satire, i.e., a satire which is uniformly singular throughout: one theme, one hero, one target, etc. [Gallomania]. Fonvizin's work, in complete contrast, is what might be termed a “composite” satire, i.e., a satire which is manifoldly plural throughout: several themes, several heroes, several targets, etc. As a result, his play is a generalized picture of the social morals and manners of Russia's noble society of the time.¹⁸

The Gallomania of Ivanushka and the Counsellor's wife is introduced quite early, in the first scene of the first act, when Ivanushka comments that he would much prefer a wife with whom he could speak only French (I, 48). Ivanushka and the Counsellor's wife both employ French constantly, inserting whole phrases and sentences into their Russian as well as French grammatical calques, or utilizing individual words in some Russian transformation, much to the discomfort of the others, who know no French. The attachment of the Gallomane to France is not just linguistic, but also cultural, in the bad sense: the Russian Gallomanes have adopted, not the worthwhile elements of French culture, but its fashionable idiocies. For example, the primary love scene between Ivanushka and the Counsellor's wife is conducted in the language of cards and card-playing, in Fonvizin's view something of a cultural plague imported from France along with most of its terminology. When the Counsellor's wife tells Ivan of his father's advances, he proposes to challenge his father to a duel. When his beloved demurs, he replies:

Et pourquoi non? I read in an excellent book, what was the title … le nom m'est echappé … yes, in the book Les Sottises du temps, that a son in Paris once challenged his father to a duel … or am I such a swine as not to imitate what has happened even once in Paris?

(I, 70)

Shortly thereafter, during a dispute with his father, Ivanushka proudly declares that his body may have been born in Russia, but his spirit belongs to the French crown (I, 72). This remark points to a vital corollary of the Gallomane's love for France, that is, his hatred for Russia. Ivan's chief ambition is to abandon his native land and become an inhabitant of France. He complains bitterly that it is impossible for a Russian ever to forget completely the fact of his birth (I, 78). Toward the end of the play, in a passage which some critics have considered out of character, Ivanushka remarks that he has come to hate all things Russian because he was educated by a “French coachman.” “A young person is like wax,” he says. “If, malheureusement, I had had a Russian who loved his own country as a tutor, perhaps I would not be what I am” (I, 98). It is this denationalization which Fonvizin finds most reprehensible in the superficial admirers of France. In his travel writings of a decade later he would argue that it was perfectly possible to absorb the positive aspects of French culture without at the same time negating one's native culture. But the superficial Gallomanes were simply ridiculous, and Fonvizin made them the butt of his memorable satire.

Ivanushka's remark about his denationalized upbringing points to yet another important theme within the play, that of the education of the young. This theme was central to Russian satire throughout the century, beginning in Peter's time, when the state set about educating the young by compulsion if necessary; Fonvizin would develop it in more detail in The Minor.

The Russian word involved here is vospitanie, or general upbringing, a term with different connotations than obrazovanie, or education in the more strictly intellectual sense. The members of the older generation in The Brigadier are indifferent, even hostile, to purely intellectual training. In the play's very first scene the Counsellor urges Ivanushka to apply himself to reading. When the young man asks what he should read, each older person proposes things from his limited and practical experience: the Brigadier suggests military regulations; the Counsellor, laws and decrees; the Brigadier's wife, account books; and the Counsellor's wife, romantic novels (I, 48-49). When it comes to such impractical things as the study of grammar, all four members of the older generation agree that they have lived their lives perfectly well without any knowledge of grammar whatever (I, 52-53).

More essential than intellectual discipline is the moral training of the young. Here the Brigadier and his wife have failed abysmally, although—quite inconsistently—the Counsellor and his wife are blessed with an absolutely ideal daughter. Nothing can convince the Brigadier's wife that her son is anything but highly intelligent; she is overprotective, and spoils him at every turn, as her husband rightly complains. In return, unfortunately, she receives nothing but contempt; her son is even bitter about the fact that his parents are still alive. The case of Ivanushka and his progenitors stimulates Dobrolyubov to generalize about the large number of children who do their parents “dishonor,” and to explain, without elaborating, that the cause of all this is vospitanie (I, 90). In a sense, then, Fonvizin blames the older generation for the shortcomings of the younger generation: had the former raised them properly, the latter would not have turned out so badly.

And that is linked to the most basic theme of the play, which is the ideal of the family and family relationships, most especially between husband and wife, but also between parents and children. The families of the older generation caricature that ideal, while the prospective family of Sofya and Dobrolyubov upholds it. The kernel of this notion is articulated in the concluding scene of the first act, when Sofya and Dobrolyubov discuss the complicated situation which has come into being by this time. Sofya remarks that everyone seems to be in love except the Brigadier's wife, to which Dobrolyubov replies: “That's true, but the difference is that their love is ridiculous and shameful and does them dishonor, while our love is based upon honorable intentions and is such that everyone should desire our happiness” (I, 59-60). The idea is sententiously phrased, but the meaning is clear. The love of Sofya and Dobrolyubov and their conception of the family are contrasted in every possible way with those of the negative characters in the play.

First of all, marriage should be based upon mutual love, and not upon other considerations, such as money in the case of the Counsellor, or prestige, as in the case of the Brigadier. Initially it appears that Dobrolyubov may lose all he has, since his estate is tied up in a lawsuit, but Sofya assures him that his financial status will not affect her love for him (I, 60). He ends up quite well off, however, and that does not affect her feeling for him either. In the second place, parents should not arrange marriages against the wishes of their children. The Counsellor unjustly seeks to exert his parental authority over his daughter, who resists strongly but who might possibly have married according to his instructions and against her inclination (I, 62-63). Ivan's mother also pressures him to go through with the marriage even though he has not chosen his bride, as she recalls how things were in the old days: when she married, she says, “we had never even heard of each other. I never said a word to him before the wedding, and I only began to talk with him a wee bit a couple of weeks after the wedding” (I, 96). But it is precisely the example of his parents' relationship which has altogether soured Ivanushka on the idea of marriage, or so he claims. The proper marriage, as the play demonstrates, is made when each partner freely chooses the other, and both receive the free agreement of their parents.

Within marriage, relations between husband and wife should be guided by mutual love and respect. This principle is totally ignored by the Counsellor's wife, who regularly terms her husband a “freak” (urod); by the Brigadier, who constantly belittles his wife; and by the Counsellor, who detests his wife's flightiness. To be sure, the Counsellor understands in theory what a good marriage should be: his wife says he believes that “husband and wife comprise one person” (I, 97), and he extends the notion of family unity to different generations when he tells Sofya that “a father and his children should think alike” (I, 61). He also upholds the traditional idea of the husband as general head of the family, with the wife subordinate. When Sofya objects that Ivanushka has “not the least respect” for her, he replies: “What sort of respect do you want from him? It seems to me that you should respect him, and not he you. He will be your head, and not you his” (I, 62). Such formulations as these make it plain that the Counsellor uses the traditional concepts of the family merely to justify his own domestic despotism over his wife and daughter.

In the final accounting the victory goes to the traditional concept of the family, but a concept now infused with moral content and cleansed from false historical accretions. Dobrolyubov and Sofya marry according to their mutual affection, with parental approval. Husband and wife will be one flesh, and the husband the final authority in the family, but he will always consult his wife on any matter of mutual concern. Husband and wife will be faithful to each other (at one point Ivanushka is upset to hear that Sofya would be a “constant” wife, for that would be totally unfashionable [I, 56-67]), conjoined by a true and spiritual love as contrasted with the animal lust which drives the older generation to its infidelities.

Although some critics have thought otherwise, The Brigadier is rather skillfully constructed, except for the fourth act, which wanders and seems to have been written largely to flesh out the obligatory Neoclassical five acts. The first scene of Act One brings all the characters with the exception of Dobrolyubov together immediately, and establishes many of the interrelationships between them. The act ends with the conversation between Sofya and Dobrolyubov which sets the stage for the ultimate fulfillment of their love. Each remaining act begins with a dialogue between two major characters which explores their mutual relationships: Act Two starts with the Counsellor and his daughter; Act Three, with the Brigadier and his son; Act Four, briefly, with Sofya and Dobrolyubov; and Act Five, with Ivan and his mother. In the second and third acts the man who begins by admonishing his son or daughter then makes advances to another man's wife, while the relationship between Ivanushka and the Counsellor's wife is dealt with in each of the first three acts. The fourth act serves as a transition to Act Five, in which all the chief characters are gradually brought together—as they were at the beginning of the first act—and the denouement ensues.

The Brigadier exerted a considerable impact upon its times. A blend of farce, comedy, and drama, it amused audiences with a substantial element of straight slapstick and humor, especially in the relations of Ivanushka with the Counsellor's wife. It also dealt with serious contemporary questions, particularly those of the ideal of the family, the upbringing of the young, and Gallomania. Not limiting itself to criticism, it sketched a positive ideal in the figures of Sofya and Dobrolyubov. Its language, especially in the dialogue of the Brigadier's wife with its many elements of folk speech, was new, humorous, and interesting.

The Brigadier has its faults, which some critics have even overemphasized. Chernyshevsky wrote that he did a little counting, and out of every eleven pages found only one good one as opposed to ten poor or mediocre ones.¹⁹ But such critics apply an illegitimate yardstick to the play, for they have the experience of the first half of the nineteenth century behind them. Critics like Nikita Panin, though amateurs, were still well acquainted with the state of Russian comedy before 1769, and therefore were “not surprised that this comedy had had such success” (II, 99). Now, more than two centuries later, the play retains most of its vitality.

THE MINOR

I. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

Nedorosl' (The Minor) is the work which brought Fonvizin literary immortality. It is virtually the only eighteenth-century play included in the repertory of contemporary theaters in the Soviet Union; indeed, it may be regarded as the classic work of eighteenth-century Russian literature in the sense that the nonspecialist Russian is more likely to have read it than any other work of that period. In the Soviet Union of today, it is frequently reprinted, though nearly always with an appropriate essay interpreting it as a work of Critical Realism laying bare the social injustices rampant in Russia at the height of Catherine's reign. To some degree the play does sustain such an interpretation.

Its major characters divide into two groups, positive and negative. The negative characters include the Prostakov family (the name is derived from the word for “simpleton”). The leading figure in the family is the petty domestic tyrant Mrs. Prostakova, who terrifies her family and servants by her obstreperous temper. The rest of the family consists of her henpecked husband, Mr. Prostakov; her dullard son Mitrofan, whose name indicates by its Greek roots that he is created in the likeness of his mother; and her coarse brother Skotinin, who prefers the company of swine to that of humans.

Mitrofan is the nedorosl' of the title: a young man who has not yet reached his majority of fifteen years. Rather strict legislation promulgated by Peter the Great early in the century had forbidden young noblemen to marry until they had completed their education and were no longer “minors.” Like so many noble boys of the period, Mitrofan was educated at home, in this case by three tutors: Tsyfirkin, a retired soldier who attempts to teach his charge mathematics; Kuteykin, a seminary student engaged to give instruction in theology, philosophy, grammar, and related subjects; and Vralman, a German who speaks heavily accented Russian and is totally without qualifications as a tutor since he had previously been a coachman. But Mitrofan is incapable of benefiting even from such teachers as these, and says, in one of the play's most famous phrases, “I don't want to study, I want to get married.” Thereon hangs the plot.

The young lady at the center of the play's marital intrigues is the Prostakovs' ward, Sofya, whom Mrs. Prostakova initially plans to marry off to her brother Skotinin. Just before that engagement is fixed, however, Sofya receives a letter from her uncle, Starodum, long thought dead but now in Moscow, announcing his impending visit to the Prostakov estate. Starodum also informs Sofya that she will be his heir, and that piece of information abruptly alters Mrs. Prostakova's attitude toward her. She now decides that Sofya should go to Mitrofan rather than to her brother.

Sofya—who is obviously out of place in the Prostakov household—serves as the link between the negative group of characters and the positive ones, headed by Starodum and by Pravdin (his name derives from pravda, “justice”), who represents governmental authority. Another important positive figure is Sofya's beloved Milon, an officer who conveniently arrives in the town commanding a detachment of soldiers and initially unaware of Sofya's whereabouts. Both Milon and Sofya wish to be joined in marriage, and obtain Starodum's assent to their marriage after a time.

Prostakova, realizing that the projected marriage between Mitrofan and Sofya is about to fall through, plots to abduct Sofya and force her into the marriage. Milon foils the plot, and retribution visits the Prostakov family: when Mrs. Prostakova sets out to punish the servants who had bungled the abduction, Pravdin produces a decree depriving her of all her authority and property in the name of the state, on the grounds that she has consistently abused her serfs. At the end even her son turns against her, and she is stripped of everything she had thought important. “Such are the appropriate fruits of immorality,” says Starodum in the play's concluding sentence, pointing to the despairing woman.

We know considerably less about the composition of The Minor than we do about The Brigadier. One hotly disputed question about its genesis has to do with a manuscript first published only in 1933 (and included in an appendix to Makogonenko's 1959 edition of Fonvizin), generally known as the “early” Minor. A number of Fonvizin specialists, including most recently Strycek, accept this work as Fonvizin's and believe it to have been written probably in the mid-1760s.²⁰ Other scholars deny that this work is a preliminary version of The Minor. The Soviet specialist A. P. Mogilyansky, for instance, after exhaustively investigating the manuscripts of the “Early Version,” concludes they were written in the middle or later 1770s, probably by someone associated with the circle of Denis Fonvizin's brother Pavel.²¹ In a special appendix to his study of Fonvizin, K. V. Pigarev maintains that the “Early Version” was written as an imitation of The Minor very soon after it appeared on stage or in print.²² The fact that the plays bear the same title means there must be some connection between them. However, the two plays have entirely different casts of characters, with quite different names; the aesthetic worth of the “Early Version” is very low indeed. Consequently, Pigarev's hypothesis seems most nearly correct. The “Early Version” is so helpless as literature that it is difficult to believe it could have been written by Fonvizin even at a very early age; and if Mogilyansky is correct in asserting that the manuscript could not have been produced before the middle 1770s, then Fonvizin's authorship is virtually excluded. The “Early Version” was most probably produced by some anonymous and quite untalented individual as one of the first of the play's numerous imitations.

The first concrete information about the work's composition at our disposal is found in an unpublished letter of July 11, 1779, which reports Fonvizin to be “writing a comedy with great success.”²³ Beyond this we know very little about the writer's progress on the play until its completion in January or February of 1782 and its premiere performance in St. Petersburg on September 24 of that year.²⁴ Although the play was released anonymously—as were most of the other original literary works Fonvizin issued, for some reason—the theater-going public knew very well who had created it. The early nineteenth-century literary historian Metropolitan Evgeny Bolkhovitinov—who was not always especially accurate in recording dates and places—noted that Potemkin had summoned Fonvizin after its first staging and uttered the famous sentence: “You should die now, Denis, or never write anything else: your name will be immortal because of this one play.” The quote may be apocryphal, for Pavel Berkov points out that Potemkin could not have attended the St. Petersburg premiere of 1782; but he adds that perhaps Potemkin made the comment at an earlier reading of the play, and even assisted in having it staged.²⁵ However that may be, the phrase Umri Denis (You should die now, Denis) has attached itself to The Minor, and to Fonvizin, in literary folklore. Certainly it accurately, if a bit hyperbolically, gauged the work's importance for the Russian theater and for Fonvizin's career.

Having The Minor staged in Moscow was a matter of some difficulty. Immediately after the St. Petersburg premiere the author wrote a letter in French (II, 496-97) to Michael Maddox, an itinerant English showman who had come to Russia in 1776 and by 1780 established a Moscow theater, which burned down in 1806.²⁶ The Moscow censor must have hindered the play's staging there. Fonvizin was anxious to see his play performed in his native city, but also quite worried that he would be identified as its author: he enjoined Maddox not to let the manuscript out of his possession, since he “did not yet want to give it any publicity.”

Fonvizin's hopes for a Moscow premiere were fulfilled on May 18, 1783. Soon The Minor was setting the pace for the Russian theater of its day. An indication of this was the relative rapidity with which it began to be translated into foreign languages. While in Austria for his health in 1787, Fonvizin described a pleasant May morning spent listening to a reading of the German translation of his play in the company of some attractive German ladies that must have been a tonic for him in his enfeebled condition (II, 570). Scholars were unable to locate this particular translation for many years, until in 1958 one discovered a copy in the Lenin Library in Moscow. Entitled Das Muttersöhnchen, the translation was published in Leipzig and Vienna in 1787 (Vralman, incidentally, had been transformed into a Frenchman).²⁷ Subsequently the work was translated into numerous European languages.

The impact of The Minor upon the literature of its time may be measured in other ways as well. In a major study of Russian comedy of the eighteenth century, perhaps the greatest prerevolutionary specialist on Russian literature of that period, Vasily Sipovsky, divided the considerable number of plays written between 1785 and 1800 into three major categories. The first of these comprised imitations of The Minor, sometimes with the same characters.²⁸ The Soviet scholar L. G. Barag has done the rather dreary work of perusing an entire series of now-forgotten plays of the period which were based on The Minor. He traces, for example, a descendant of Starodum in the character of Pravomysl from Nikolay Emin's Mnimyi mudrets (The Imaginary Philosopher) of 1787, and identifies a sequel to Fonvizin's play in the anonymous Mitrofanushkiny imeniny (Mitrofan's Nameday) of 1807.²⁹ These and many other imitations demonstrate that The Minor created a certain literary school, even though Fonvizin himself engendered few direct imitators. The literary quality of the “school” was very low and none of the plays has survived as anything more than an obscure footnote to literary history, but their very existence demonstrates that The Minor cut a swath through the Russian theater for a quarter-century or more. That is an impressive achievement for any single literary work.

There were those who thought the play severely distorted reality. In his study of Fonvizin Pigarev cites two early nineteenth-century articles whose authors protested that such “eccentrics” as the ones Fonvizin depicted in his play had never existed in real life.³⁰ This raises the ultimately unresolvable question of the “realism” of a literary work and the “typicality” of its characters, a question the more difficult to settle at a remove of two centuries. If some indignant critics of that day wrote that the monstrously negative characters of the play never could have existed, more modern ones tend to believe that such idealized figures as Starodum and Pravdin could have had no basis in contemporary reality. Yet others argue that both groups were drawn from life and were completely realistic. Vyazemsky, for instance, recognized the element of caricature in Fonvizin's art and attempted to salvage his “Realism” in an ingenious manner. “The portrait painter,” he wrote, “idealizes his original slightly for an artistic purpose; the master caricaturist idealizes his original in a humorous and distorted way; but they both are faithful to the truth,”³¹ that is, they both remain linked to reality. One may speculate how far a writer might stray from reality under such a formula, but any writer clearly requires some such flexibility.

As it happens, Fonvizin himself is of aid in considering the problem of typicality. Although we know of no particular prototypes for the heroes of The Minor, in years following the play's publication Fonvizin encountered one or two actually existing persons who confirmed the precision of his artistic intuition. He records the most striking instance of this in his journal for May 24, 1786, when, on their way to Austria, the Fonvizins lodged in a provincial Russian town with a certain couple who were “genuine Prostakovs” (II, 565). Fonvizin even had some things to say about the most blatantly caricatured personage of his play, Skotinin, that adept of swinishness. In late 1784 Fonvizin and his wife arrived in a small Italian town, where they took the best available accommodations. They were poor enough, though. “In our room,” he wrote, “… there was dreadful filth and dirt, worse than there ever would be in my Skotinin's pigsties, of course” (II, 537). The almost affectionate manner in which Skotinin's creator refers to him is revealing, and fits with the information that in early 1784 Fonvizin played the role of Skotinin at least once when the play was staged.³² Such a jocular attitude indicates that Fonvizin would hardly have shared the opinion of some later critics that his comic figures were moral monstrosities capable of inspiring the deepest revulsion in the beholder. For Fonvizin they were relatively harmless, though undesirable; in the Russian nineteenth-century tradition they occupied the same place as, say, some of Charles Dickens's characters in the English literary tradition of a later period.

If this is so, we must regard with considerable skepticism the interpretation placed upon The Minor by the influential historian Vasily Klyuchevsky in an article devoted entirely to the play.³³ Klyuchevsky worries about recommending The Minor as reading for young people, for, he says, the “humorous” characters are not funny, and the virtuous ones are not lifelike. “All these,” he maintains, “are the false notes, not of a comedy, but of the way of life depicted in it. This comedy is an incomparable mirror.” According to Klyuchevsky, The Minor is a grim portrait of the Russian life of its time, and not at all the humorous entertainment piece of the standard literary textbooks. If Klyuchevsky was correct in berating—as he did—those who ignored the play's social significance, he committed an equivalent error in failing to recognize the literary, and specifically comic, elements of the play.

Despite his exaggerations, Klyuchevsky does point up an important consideration in the analysis of The Minor, one present embryonically in The Brigadier. That is the tragic, or serious, element in a work which is formally a comedy. Pigarev is correct in saying the play “provokes, not simple, merry laughter, but bitter laughter which causes one to meditate deeply.”³⁴ Pavel Berkov urges that Mitrofan's role—certainly primarily a humorous one—should be played by an actor with “a grotesque, and not burlesque conception of this image,” and not as farce.³⁵ The distinction between grotesque and burlesque is important here, for a burlesque lacks any deeper implications, whereas a grotesque points through bitter laughter to an ultimately serious reality. Vyazemsky had something of this sort in mind when he commented that, in the personage of Mrs. Prostakova, The Minor contains within itself the potential of tragedy.³⁶ Vyazemsky's sympathies tended to lie with the gentry class and Berkov's with the common people, which is why the latter once wrote that the servant Eremeevna—Mitrofan's nurse, who suffers unconscionably at Mrs. Prostakova's hands—was a “complete and classical type of an enslaved serf woman, uncomplaining, attached and devoted to those who torture her, and therefore a deeply tragic type.”³⁷

The tragic potentialities of The Minor—whether in Mrs. Prostakova, Mitrofan, or Eremeevna—are scarcely realized, however, or are realized only for fleeting moments. Consequently the play may be most appropriately defined either as a “tearful comedy” (sleznaia komediia),³⁸ or else as an instance of the so-called genre sérieux, or serious comedy, as the American investigator David Patterson has recently suggested.³⁹ Patterson points out that as early as 1757 Denis Diderot had begun formulating the notion of the genre sérieux, which combined “nuances from both comedy and tragedy,” and in his De la poésie dramatique (1758) spoke of the “serious comedy, which has as its object virtue and the duties of man.” A persuasive argument can be made that The Minor fits clearly into this category: though fundamentally a comedy, it has serious objectives in mind.

II. THE NEGATIVE CHARACTERS

In The Brigadier the positive and negative characters are partially interconnected by blood, since the positive Sofya is the daughter of the wholly negative Counsellor. In The Minor Fonvizin carefully separates the positive from the negative characters, with Sofya as the chief point of contact between them. As a consequence, at the play's conclusion he can portray the opposition between good and evil very starkly.

The dominant figure of the negative camp in The Minor is Mrs. Prostakova: her son at one point defines himself as “my mother's son” and her husband at the same point as “my wife's husband” (I, 137), while Skotinin derives his standing in the play from his relationship to Mrs. Prostakova. She is the work's “evil fury,” the person seemingly dominating the miniature world that was the Russian landed estate of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the landowner could handle things very much as he wished, without interference from the local or central governmental authorities. In large measure the estate was an independent economic entity which could manage indefinitely almost entirely cut off from the outside world. It is on such semi-independent estates that some of the greatest Russian literature is set, from the plays of Fonvizin to the novels of Ivan Turgenev.

Mrs. Prostakova brutalizes first of all her serfs, over whom she believes she has absolute power. She commonly addresses them as “swine” (skot), and exercises her power arbitrarily, as the first scene of the play makes clear. Here the tailor Trishka has been instructed to sew Mitrofan a coat, with which his mistress finds fault simply for the sake of finding fault, so as to make life miserable for Trishka. She claims that the coat is too tight, her husband thinks it too loose, and it seems to Skotinin to have been sewn quite properly, much to his sister's disgust. In the same manner Prostakova lords it over Eremeevna, paying her, as the house servant puts it, “five rubles a year and five slaps a day” (I, 128). On another occasion Prostakova flies into a rage when she learns that one of her servant girls is not only ill, but running a high fever and raving. “Raving, the beast!” she screams. “As if she were a noblewoman!” (I, 136).

Mrs. Prostakova is a quintessential bully, ready to lord it over her inferiors and equally prepared to grovel before her superiors. In the midst of the third act, upon first recognizing the newly arrived Starodum, she nearly loses her head:

What, is that you, our uncle!? Our precious guest! Oh, I'm an absolute idiot! Is this any way to greet our own father in whom we all hope, our only father, like a piece of dust in the eye? Uncle, please forgive me, I'm a fool. I just can't come to my senses. …

(I, 136)

Starodum is properly contemptuous of this exercise in self-abasement for ulterior motives, and precisely this trait of her character triggers her downfall. For, once her scandalous abduction attempt has failed and she realizes she may lose a great deal, Mrs. Prostakova falls to her knees before all those whom she has offended in the most abject manner imaginable. She first seeks forgiveness of Sofya, who generously grants it, and then turns to Starodum, confessing that she is a “human being and no angel.” Though initially Starodum is reluctant to excuse her, he soon yields to his better nature. But the word “forgive” has no sooner left his mouth than Prostakova springs to her feet, vowing vengeance upon her subordinates. At this point—rather as in the biblical story of the servant cast into debtors prison when, after his lord had forgiven him his debt, he would not do the same for those indebted to him—Pravdin intervenes with the full authority of the state, to complete Prostakova's humiliation.

Mrs. Prostakova's vices are sometimes distortions of potential virtues. Her own inhumanity to her servants she manages to interpret as flowing from her determination to manage the estate properly: “I simply work from dawn to dusk, wearing myself out swearing and beating people up; that's all that keeps the place going!” (I, 124). Another possible virtue transformed into a vice is her devotion to her unworthy son: “My only care and my only joy is Mitrofanushka,” she says to the assembled guests on one occasion (I, 125). When she grew up, no attention at all was paid to education, but she prides herself on having provided her son with one regular tutor, Vralman, and two supplementary teachers. The distortion enters when she insists on overprotecting him. When he displays his ignorance, she excuses him by claiming he has overexerted himself, or that what he does not know is not worth knowing. Consequently she ends by raising an utter moral monster, created in her own image, and therefore without the slightest sense of obligation to her for what she has done for him. It is he who delivers the final blow to her shattered pride when, after she has lost her estate, he crudely rebuffs her as she turns to him for consolation (I, 177). Like his mother, Mitrofan is the epitome of pure selfishness, and in him Prostakova reaps the fruits of her misguided maternal love. Thus it is that attitudes and actions which might have been to her credit are instead twisted into instruments of her destruction.

Still, despite her evil personality, Prostakova is the play's most memorable character, the most individualized, the one who summarizes the meaning of the work for the ordinary reader.

Hardly less vivid than Prostakova is Skotinin. The Soviet scholar L. I. Kulakova remarks that the power of Prostakova's image lies precisely in the fact of her relative ordinariness: she was not a sadistic torturer of her serfs, like certain historical female landowners of the eighteenth century, but rather a “quite usual sort of woman landowner.”⁴⁰ Though it is possible to make a plausible argument supporting this view, it is difficult to perceive Skotinin as anything other than a caricature. He is a former military man, so unintelligent that he had never risen very high in the ranks: as he says of himself, “If I once get something into my head, you can't get it out of there with a nail” (I, 120). One source of the play's conflict is the fact that Skotinin believes Sofya has been promised to him, and he does not appreciate competing with his nephew for her hand. But Skotinin desires Sofya, not for herself, but for the sake of her estates, on which there are a number of pigs, for Skotinin desires nothing more than pigs. In a brief speech to his sister with obvious applications beyond its literal meaning, Skotinin says: “I love pigs, my dear sister, and in our county we have such huge pigs that there's not a single one wouldn't be taller than any of us by a head if it stood up on its hind legs” (I, 112). When he learns of Sofya's inheritance, Skotinin's enthusiasm waxes: with her money he can “buy up all the pigs in this wide world” (I, 121). Some of his further remarks make it plain that swine are closer to his heart than any wife could be.

As the play progresses, Skotinin sees that his prize is slipping from his grasp, and his native greed engenders desperation. At one point he threatens his nephew with physical harm and even death if he persists in his suit (I, 122); at another he and his sister nearly fall to a hair-pulling fistfight over the cancellation of his marriage plans (I, 135). Here the situation becomes quite farcical, and the scene on stage is designed primarily for the audience's entertainment.

The crude Skotinin is basically a comic character, although he also exhibits in extreme form the source of the negative characteristics of Prostakova and of Mitrofan: on one occasion Skotinin comments that Mitrofan also likes pigs, and the long-suffering Prostakov agrees that there is a point of resemblance there (I, 112).

Mr. Prostakov plays a relatively unimportant role in The Minor. In one of his aspects he is the typical repressed husband: in scene three of Act One, when the sewing of Mitrofan's jacket is a point of dispute, Prostakova consistently berates and belittles her timid husband. A short time later Mitrofan enters to comment upon a bad dream he had just had in which he saw his mother beating his father: he sympathized with his mother since such belaboring was an exhausting task (I, 110). Prostakova defends her treatment of her husband on the grounds of his remarkable stupidity. “Sometimes he just falls into a trance, as we say around here,” she comments to Milon. “Sometimes he'll stand in one place for a solid hour with his eyes bugging out. … And then when the trance passes, uncle, he'll start talking such rubbish, uncle, that you'd ask the Lord to send a trance down on him again” (I, 123-24). Prostakov is probably not so much stupid as terrorized by his wife, for some of his asides indicate that he understands what is transpiring rather well. But he also knows what his wife demands of him, and for the sake of domestic peace he resolves to comply with those demands.

III. THE POSITIVE CHARACTERS

By any purely statistical reading of The Minor, the positive characters occupy at least as important a place in the action as the negative ones. They are much more abstract and less individualized, however, and their language is smoothly literary, not nearly so rich in local dialect and slang. If a quotation from one of them has entered the language, it is entirely on a literary level, and not as a popular saying or proverb of sorts. In the twentieth century the positive characters tend to be either overlooked or explained away.

Such was not the situation in Fonvizin's day. In the “Letter to Starodum,” the first piece designed for publication in the periodical Fonvizin hoped to issue in 1788, Fonvizin says that he “owes the success of his comedy The Minor to your person,” and declares that the theater-going public even now listens to Starodum's extensive dialogues with Milon, Pravdin, and Sofya “with pleasure” (II, 40). That the positive characters should have been to such a degree responsible for the play's popularity is difficult for us to understand now. Perhaps the situation derived from the desire of the general public to hear the existing regime criticized on the stage, which would explain the censor's delaying its staging in Fonvizin's native Moscow. But the positive characters are the chief articulators of the author's positive prescriptions for society, just as the Prostakov family bears his negative critique of society. Fonvizin's constructive proposals for society's reformation moved on two levels: the (positive) internal conversion of the individual spirit to the good, and the (negative) power of the state to prevent abuses of individual power through direct intervention. The positive characters exhibit very little humor, if we except an occasional note of sarcasm directed at some folly committed by the Prostakovs. They are entirely serious in demeanor and speech, and that emphasizes the dichotomy within the play, since the humor and light entertainment are supplied by the negative characters.

As a result of this division, as Marvin Kantor has pointed out, Starodum does not seek to combat Prostakova with argumentation, since “the refutation might be lost in the buffoonery of such a dramatic confrontation.”⁴¹ There simply is, and can be, no mutual meeting of minds between the two groups of characters. The audience receives thorough guidance as to which it should prefer, but in the end the dispute between the philosophies of the two groups is resolved by the exercise of power.

Occasionally a critic writing on Fonvizin has sought to grapple with the problem of the play's positive characters. Prominent among them was Grigory Gukovsky, who in an interesting though not entirely persuasive article of 1946 formulated a rationale for approaching these characters in a new spirit.⁴² Gukovsky urged theatrical producers and directors to look upon the positive characters not as pale abstractions, but as “live people,” engaged in a fierce struggle both to determine Sofya's personal fate and to attain ultimate influence within the social order. Starodum, Gukovsky holds, is a “powerful individual” who speaks sharply, quickly, energetically, constantly interrupting his interlocutor; he is an “impulsive, heated man.” Sofya, he argues, is a “pure and healthy image, full of feminine passion,” and Milon is an “enthusiast,” an eighteenth-century forerunner of Alexander Griboedov's great creation Chatsky (Woe from Wit). In early performances of The Minor, Gukovsky believes, these characters were presented vigorously, not as goody-goodies; only if the play is interpreted in this way can the plot's full drama be evoked.

If there did exist a tradition of playing Starodum and his allies as vigorous characters, it had surely faded by the time Vyazemsky wrote his study of Fonvizin, for he suggests that Starodum's role should be divided into two facets: the active participant in the play's plot, and the raisonneur, or exponent of moral values, “something like the chorus in an ancient tragedy.” In this latter capacity, Vyazemsky decreed, Starodum was incurably boring.⁴³ As we have seen, audiences of the 1780s did not feel quite this way: Starodum appealed to them most in his function as raisonneur. As David Welsh writes in his study of the Russian comedy, his speeches comprise nearly 20 percent of the play's total dialogue,⁴⁴ and Fonvizin must have believed himself justified in devoting so much attention in the play to Starodum's views.

Starodum dominates both the action and the moral atmosphere of the play. The ground is prepared for his appearance in the first act, when his letter arrives and casts the Prostakov household into confusion: Prostakova at first refuses to believe he could still be alive, since she has been praying for his soul for several years (I, 113). Before long, however, she must accept the incontrovertible evidence of his continued existence. Further information about him is provided in the second act, for example by Pravdin, who knows him both personally and by reputation. “What some people call gloominess and coarseness in him,” he remarks to Sofya, “is simply his directness. His tongue has never said ‘yes’ when his soul felt ‘no’” (I, 124). Starodum actually appears at the Prostakov estate only at the beginning of Act Three.

Starodum bears one of the most outstanding “speaking names” in eighteenth-century Russian literature. Composed of the words for “old” and “thought,” it points to the man's adherence to the tested, traditional verities. His experience of life, controlled by his ethical sense, has enabled him to formulate a number of generalized “rules” of morality, which he is ever ready to present for the edification of others. Immediately upon arriving he begins to talk about his background, and says he regards “rank” as something of no importance. Although he could not have been born earlier than toward the end of Peter's reign, he was educated by his father, who had been a military man at the Court of Peter the Great. Courtiers of that period, he says, were trained in military discipline and integrity, and a proper education set Starodum himself upon the right path (I, 129).

Starodum does not adhere to customs and traditions solely because they are old. Fonvizin makes this clear in a passage in which Mrs. Prostakova—who is also, after all, of Starodum's generation—remarks that she too was brought up in the old ways, when learning was at a total discount. Her father, she recalls, used to say, “May he be no Skotinin who ever wants to learn anything” (I, 140). She proudly contrasts her son's situation with her own. Apparently the older Prostakov generation is illiterate, since no one wishes to read Starodum's letter aloud when it arrives: that task is left for Pravdin, as Mrs. Prostakova waxes indignant that girls in the contemporary age are capable of receiving and reading letters (I, 113): things were not so in her day. Thus the contrast between the two groups of characters in The Minor is defined not by generations, for there are positive and negative characters in both generations, but by ethical criteria. Moral virtue is the gauge by which all is to be measured, whether new or old. The lack of such virtue is all too apparent in the Prostakov family.

In Starodum's view, the important facet of upbringing is not the training of the intellect, but the inculcation of moral values. Ideally, one should be trained both intellectually and morally, but if one must choose, it is better to be virtuous and ignorant than intellectually brilliant and morally vicious. As it happens, Fonvizin usually endows his morally virtuous characters with both intelligence and this world's goods.

The entire problem of virtue, and that of social justice, is central to The Minor. It is important to realize, however, that the struggle between the forces of evil and those of virtue is not an equal one, but that the latter are superior all along. After the Prostakov environment has been sketched in all its ghastliness in the first act, we learn from a conversation between Pravdin and Milon at the very beginning of the second that the Prostakov tyranny is almost certainly doomed. Pravdin tells Milon that he has been assigned the responsibility of investigating local estates for the purpose of taking action against landowners who mistreat their serfs. The governor of the province, he says, thinks of nothing but aiding “suffering humanity,” so that the “safety of the inhabitants” under his authority is assured (I, 117). Pravdin has already spent three days with the Prostakovs, interpreted the situation correctly, and prepared the ground for action. “I hope,” he says, “soon to put an end to the wife's malice and the husband's stupidity. I have already informed our chief about all the barbaric things being done here, and I have no doubt measures will be taken to eliminate them” (I, 118).

The fact that the Prostakovs will be punished for their misdeeds is thus made clear to the spectator—though not to the Prostakovs—as soon as this can reasonably be done. The spectator knows that the Prostakovs are in effect dancing along a precipice. They believe they possess the power to treat their serfs as they wish, but in fact they do not: they are ultimately powerless. When Pravdin confronts Mrs. Prostakova in the final act, she falls back upon the legal freedoms of the gentry, referring to the legislation of 1762 which buttressed the rights of the nobility over their serfs. But Pravdin responds firmly that “no one is free to tyrannize over others,” and thereupon announces that her estates have been taken into trusteeship, for she has proven an “inhumane master, whose vices cannot be tolerated in a well-ordered state” (I, 172). Once this action is taken, Prostakova has no recourse in the law. The state at the highest level possesses absolute power which it exercises to enforce the rule of virtue. Consequently, there can be no question of virtue's eventual triumph. The play's interest lies largely in watching the Prostakovs wind the rope ever more ingeniously around their own necks.

The power of the state to enforce the requirements of virtue, incidentally, was not something Fonvizin concocted out of thin air, for the Russian autocracy did indeed intervene on certain occasions to end abuses of power by individual landowners. An instance of this with which Fonvizin must have been familiar involved Fedor Dmitriev-Mamonov (1727-1805), a relative of his on his mother's side and a very minor literary figure. In 1778 the Sovereign began to receive reports that he was tyrannizing over his serfs, and consequently in March of 1779 she ordered that his estates be taken into trusteeship.⁴⁵ This provided an obvious precedent for Pravdin's action.

At one point Starodum suggests that it is within the power of the state so to structure itself and society as to reward virtue in a material sense, and thus make it self-enforcing, in an instructive anticipation of a scheme set forth in 1863 by the radical critic Nikolay Chernyshevsky in his novel What Is to Be Done? Chernyshevsky thought society could eventually be arranged in such a way that it would be in people's self-interest to adhere to the good. So also in The Minor, after delivering a tirade against flatterers, Starodum responds to Pravdin's query as to how people can be made good:

That is within the power of the Tsar. As soon as people realize that they cannot make a career without virtue; that it is impossible either through flattery or money to acquire that which is given only for merit; that individuals are selected for positions, and positions not purloined by individuals—then everyone will find it to his advantage to be virtuous, and everyone will become good.

(I, 168)

The only problem is how to restructure society so that it is to everyone's material advantage to be virtuous—in a word, to establish a state which functions as if it were itself virtuous—and all the individuals within it will become virtuous. The answer obviously is complex, but Fonvizin clearly implied that at the highest levels some progress toward it had been made. Not only does Pravdin resolve the situation in The Minor through the authority of the government; in The Brigadier as well Dobrolyubov wins his court case by bypassing the lower courts and bringing his complaint to the attention of the highest authorities, who then issue “strict instructions” in his favor (I, 81). As we have already noted, the Sofyas of both plays end up materially well rewarded for their virtue, the earlier one because her fiancé wins his lawsuit, the later one because she inherits her uncle's income. In a small way the positive characters at the end of The Minor illustrate how a social order should function in order to reward virtue. Mitrofan's two outside instructors are dismissed at the play's conclusion. Kuteykin presents an outrageous bill for his services, a bill in which he has included everything he can think of—and under ordinary circumstances, no doubt, he would receive most or all of what he requested. Tsyfirkin, however, seeks nothing, on the ground that his charge has learned nothing. Kuteykin is thoroughly put to shame and obtains no compensation at all, whereas Milon, Starodum, and Pravdin all voluntarily grant Tsyfirkin sums of money “because of his good heart” (I, 174-76). In the ideal society, we understand, honesty and goodness would be materially rewarded in some such manner, while avarice and effrontery would gain nothing.

Finally, an important subtheme in The Minor is that of the education of the young. In Mitrofan's case this is little better than a farce. As was the custom with young men of his social class, he is educated at home by a tutor, Vralman, who scarcely knows any more than his charge. Worse than that, he makes common cause with Mrs. Prostakova in sheltering him from such education as his other two teachers, Kuteykin and Tsyfirkin, seek to impart to him. Vralman argues that formal education is of no use to a member of the nobility, and thus undermines the efforts of his two colleagues.

The three tutors are utilized principally for comic effect, especially in such slapstick scenes as the final scene of Act Three, in which the two outside teachers almost give Vralman a drubbing. But in addition the two scenes in which Mitrofan is examined are entirely farcical. In the first such scene (scene seven of Act Three) Mitrofan is preparing for the outside examiners. When Tsyfirkin asks him to divide 300 rubles among three people. Mrs. Prostakova interrupts to object that under the conditions of the problem he should never agree to share the money at all. When Mitrofan is asked to add 10 and 10 and has difficulty in adding 1 and 1, his mother excuses and defends him, as does Vralman.

The important examination is conducted by Pravdin and Starodum, in scene eight of Act Four. Mitrofan turns out to have only the most distorted notion of grammar, and his mother comes to his defense by arguing that a nobleman has no need of learning: it is quite feasible to extort money from your subordinates and exploit your serfs without the slightest knowledge of grammar. As for history, Mitrofan knows even less of that, and when he is asked about geography he breaks into a cold sweat, since he does not know what it is. When Starodum explains that geography is useful for knowing where one wishes to go, Mrs. Prostakova replies in a famous passage:

Why, what are coachmen for? That's their business. This is no science for the gentry. A member of the gentry just says: take me there, and he'll be taken wherever he wants. Believe me, uncle, anything Mitrofanushka doesn't know is obviously nonsense.

(I, 163)

And with that we have the final word of the Prostakovs of this world on the training of the intellect: anything they do not know is not worth knowing. Learning is for the inferior classes; it is unworthy of the attention of a member of the nobility.

The intertwined themes of true nobility and education are central to the unfinished short comedy on which Fonvizin was evidently working at his death, The Selection of a Tutor. In this play Prince Slaboumov (Weakminded) and his wife, members of the highest hereditary nobility, seeking a tutor for their spoiled son, must choose between an honest Russian, Nelstetsov, and a Frenchman, Pelikanov, whose chief academic qualifications are his skill at pulling teeth and removing corns and his eagerness to address his employers as votre altesse. During his interview with the prince and his wife, Nelstetsov declares his intention of educating their son as a nobleman should be educated, without any particular allowance for his noble birth. Nelstetsov will seek to inculcate in his pupil the moral virtues, showing him that “since he is of noble birth, he should have a noble soul as well” (I, 195-96). On the intellectual level, he plans to instruct the boy first in the fundamentals of the Russian Orthodox faith, then in Latin (I, 198).

When Pelikanov arrives, he turns out to be an undesirable individual who has already been driven from another district of the country for having “corrupted the hearts and heads of young noblemen.” Like Vralman, he is exposed for what he truly is, and put to shame.

Although the plot is not fully resolved, at the play's end it appears that the prince and his emptyheaded wife will decline to engage Nelstetsov as a tutor, since they are guided in their actions by “ignorant pride,” and an entirely false concept of the meaning of nobility.

Education was of great importance to Russian culture, as Fonvizin saw it, but virtue was even more so. Thus The Minor is at bottom about a conflict between moral virtue and moral vice, embodied in two groups of characters. Since that conflict is a serious one, its resolution—the revocation of Mrs. Prostakova's authority—can evoke no more than bitter laughter. The training of the intellect is secondary to this, and may be treated humorously, even as farce, for all that it is likewise a social good. As Starodum remarks, “the chief purpose of all human knowledge” must be virtue (I, 168). If Fonvizin sought, in the Neoclassical manner, to combine the pleasant with the useful, to instruct while amusing, then he attempted to guide his contemporaries along the paths of moral and social virtue. That was the political significance of his play. In the course of attaining his objective, however, he created a literary work which helped mold the image which Russians held of themselves and whose personages have since assumed a life of their own in a fashion characteristic of classic works of a national literature.

Notes

1. That is K. V. Pigarev's considered opinion, for instance: K. V. Pigarev Tvorchestvo Fonvizina (Moscow, 1954), p. 91.

2. D. Blagoi, D. I. Fonvizin (Moscow, 1945), p. 81.

3. V. G. Belinskii, “Sochineniia Aleksandra Pushkina. Stat'ia pervaia,” in V. G. Belinskii, Estetika i literaturnaia kritika v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1959), II, 149. It should also be noted that Belinsky had a low opinion of Molière.

4. [S. S. Dudyshkin], Review of Fonvizin's Sochineniia in the Smirdin edition of 1846, Otechestvennye zapiski, No. 9, 1847, otd. V, p. 42.

5. M. M. Kheraskov, “K satiricheskoi muze,” Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Leningrad, 1961), pp. 103-105.

6. See N. S. Tikhonravov, “D. I. Fon-Vizin,” in Sochineniia N. S. Tikhonravova (Moscow, 1898), vol. III, part 1, p. 103.

7. This is one of several good points made in David J. Welsh's useful Russian Comedy 1765-1823 (The Hague and Paris, 1966), pp. 32-33.

8. A. Shakhovskoi, “Predislovie k Polubarskim zateiam,” Syn Otechestva, vol. 61, 1820, pp. 11-26.

9. Grigorii Gukovskii, “Vokrug Radishcheva,” in Gukovskii, Ocherki po istorii russkoi literatury i obshschestvennoi mysli XVIII veka (Leningrad, 1938), p. 185.

10. L. G. Barag, “Komediia Fonvizina ‘Nedorosl'’ i russkaia literatura kontsa XVIII veka,” in Problemy realizma v russkoi literature XVIII veka: Sbornik statei (Moscow-Leningrad, 1940), p. 110.

11. Gukovskii, op cit., p. 182.

12. A. Strycek, Denis Fonvizina (Paris, 1976), pp. 153-54.

13. Shakhovskoi, op cit., pp. 24-25.

14. Novikov referred to it thus in his Opyt istoricheskogo slovaria o rossiiskikh pisateliakh of 1772: see, e.g., the partial publication in A. D. Orishin, ed., Khrestomatiia kriticheskikh materialov po russkoi literature XVIII veka (Lvov, 1959), p. 118.

15. Welsh, Russian Comedy, p. 104.

16. Zimnie zametki o letnikh vpechatleniiakh (1863), in F. M. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1956), IV, 77-78.

17. See “O Brigadire Fonvizina,” in N. G. Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 15-i tomakh (Moscow, 1949), II, 798-99, 801.

18. Marvin Kantor, “Writings,” in Marvin Kantor, ed., Dramatic Works of D. I. Fonvizin (Frankfurt/Main, 1974), p. 32. See also Kantor's “Fonvizin and Holberg: A Comparison of The Brigadier and Jean de France,” Canadian Slavic Studies, VII, 4 (1973): 475-84.

19. Chernyshevskii, op. cit., pp. 804-805.

20. See, for example, Strycek, pp. 370-71.

21. A. P. Mogilianskii, “K voprosu o tak nazyvaemom ‘rannem’ Nedorosle,” XVIII vek, No. 4 (1959): 415-21.

22. See “Prilozhenie II. O tak nazyvaemoi rannei redaktsii Nedoroslia,” in Pigarev, pp. 281-84.

23. Quoted in Pigarev, p. 151.

24. For a fragmentary stage history of the play, see the article by B. Varneke, “Nedorosl' na stsene,” in Iu. E. Ozarovskii, ed., P'esy khudozhestvennogo repertuara i postanovka ikh na stsene. Vypusk I. Nedorosl' (St. Petersburg, 1901), pp. 140-47.

25. P. N. Berkov, “Teatr Fonvizina i russkaia kul'tura,” in Russkie klassiki i teatr (Moscow-Leningrad, 1947), pp. 86-87.

26. For information on Maddox, see K. A. Papmehl, Freedom of Expression in Eighteenth Century Russia (The Hague, 1971), p. 105n.

27. E. Kheksel'shnaider, “O pervom nemetskom perevode Nedoroslia Fonvizina,” XVIII vek, No. 4 (1959): 334-38.

28. V. V. Sipovskii, “Iz istorii russkoi komedii XVIII veka,” in Akademiia nauk, Izvestiia Otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti, XXII, 1 (1917): 205-74.

29. L. G. Barag, “Komediia Fonvizina Nedorosl' i russkaia literatura kontsa XVIII veka,” in Problemy realizma v russkoi literature XVIII veka: Sbornik statei (Moscow-Leningrad, 1940), pp. 113-20.

30. Pigarev, p. 211.

31. P. A. Viazemskii, Fon-vizin (St. Petersburg, 1880), p. 133. In this particular instance Vyazemsky was speaking of The Brigadier, but the sentiment applies equally well to The Minor.

32. L. I. Kulakova, Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin (Moscow-Leningrad, 1966), p. 108. Kulakova does not indicate the source of her information.

33. V. O. Kliuchevskii, “Nedorosl' Fonvizina (Opyt istoricheskogo ob”iasneniia uchebnoi p'esy),” in Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1959), VIII, 263-87.

34. Pigarev, p. 197.

35. Berkov, “Teatr Fonvizina i russkaia kul'tura,” p. 77.

36. Viazemskii, p. 136.

37. Berkov, “Teatr Fonvizina i russkaia kul'tura,” p. 75.

38. See I. Zhdanov's article on Fonvizin in the Russkii biograficheskii slovar' (St. Petersburg, 1901), XXI, 184.

39. David Patterson, “Fonvizin's Nedorosl' as a Russian Representative of the Genre sérieux,” Comparative Literature Studies, XIV, 3 (September 1977): 196-204.

40. Kulakova, Fonvizin, pp. 96-97.

41. Marvin Kantor, “Writings,” in Dramatic Works of D. I. Fonvizin (Frankfurt/Main, 1974), p. 38.

42. G. Gukovskii, “Problemy stsenicheskogo voploshcheniia Nedoroslia Fonvizina,” in Teatral'nyi al'manakh: Sbornik statei i materialov, No. 1 (1946): 153-70.

43. Viazemskii, p. 139.

44. Welsh, Russian Comedy, p. 67. Welsh presents a good summary of the tradition of the raisonneur here, pp. 66-69.

45. See Dmitri Strémooukhoff, “Autour du Nedorosl' de Fonvizin,” Revue des études slaves, No. 38, 1961, pp. 189-91. A small selection of Dmitriev-Mamonov's writings has been published in Poety XVIII veka, second edition (Leningrad, 1972), I, 429-50.

Edition Cited

Quotations of Fonvizin's works are from Sobranie sochinenii, ed. G. P. Makogonenko (Moscow, 1959).