Introduction to Dramatic Works of D. I. Fonvizin
[In the following essay, Kantor offers an outline of Fonvizin's life and literary career and examines the playwright's major writings, focusing especially on The Brigadier and The Minor. Kantor considers these plays flawed masterpieces notable for their bold characterization and daring attempts at presenting an ideological message against Catherine the Great's abusive regime.]
LIFE
Laughter may be contagious but with the change of environment and time, it frequently ceases to infect. The humorous virulence of the many Russian comedies of the eighteenth century proved less than infectious and often stopped with the final curtain. However two comedies of this period, The Brigadier (Brigadir, 1769), and The Minor (Nedorosl', 1781), have demonstrated a striking vitality, a comic spirit that has continued to appeal to Russian audiences even down to our times. Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin (1743?-1792), the author of these plays, clearly transcended the spacial and temporal limits of comedy, and, in commenting upon the foibles and vices of his contemporaries, pinned the eighteenth-century nobleman upon the wall in all his grotesquerie and for all time.
Despite his popularity and distinction very little is known of Fonvizin, even the date of his birth is in doubt, given variously as 1743, 1744, or 1745.1 But he was born—and in Moscow to a family of Germanic origin, whose ancestors entered Russia in the sixteenth century to distinguish themselves in the military services. The author's father, Ivan Andreevich, attained the rank of major before transferring to civilian service and eventually retiring as a councilor of state. Of modest means, the family could not afford tutors, the status symbols of the upper nobility; instead, the young child was taught to read and write by his father—learning to recite the religious services performed in the home—and by one of the family serfs. What is distinct about these pedagogues of Fonvizin's early years is the fact that they were Russian, that he was forced to become acquainted with Church Slavic by reading ecclesiastic books and to learn his native culture and customs. Contrary to other, more highly placed Russian youths, Russian was his native language not French, and the Russian ways and traditions take precedence over the European.
In 1755, Fonvizin's father enrolled his son in the Gymnasium of the University of Moscow, which had just opened, in the hope that he might give his son the opportunity to learn a foreign language and receive a more complete education. Unfortunately, the University Gymnasium was still in a formative stage when the young Fonvizin entered. Many of the faculty chairs were vacant and there was a shortage of books, administrators, and qualified teachers. In his memoires, A Candid Confession of My Deeds and Thoughts (Chistoserdechnoe priznanie v delakh moikh i pomyshleniiakh, 1791?), Fonvizin criticizes his schooling quite objectively and truthfully: “… we studied in a very disorderly fashion. On the one hand, because of our childish laziness, but, on the other, because of the neglect and drunkenness of the teachers.” After a year the quality of the education improved, qualified teachers were hired, foreign professors were invited to fill the chairs, and a University Press was opened. This improvement undoubtedly affected the future playwright; he worked more zealously and several times made a list of outstanding students and received scholarship awards in 1756, 1759 and 1761.
In 1760, Fonvizin traveled to Petersburg with the director of Moscow University, to be paraded before the dignitaries of “Peter's City,” a witness, I suppose, of the accomplishments of the system. Here he attended the theater “for the first time in (my) life,” as he tells us in A Candid Confession and was most impressed by the performance of a rather silly comedy of double disguise by Holberg called Henrich and Pernille. Obviously, the young product of Moscow's educational accomplishments chose to disregard his own participation and performance in the University Theater, which had been established in 1757. The munificence of the Petersburg court and the magnificence of the national theater, his meeting with Lomonosov and such important figures of the contemporary Russian theater as F. G. Volkov and I. A. Dmitrevskii, undoubtedly left vivid traces on his keen and observing mind. He was particularly struck by the brilliance, magnetism and affectivity of the professional theater. The young Muscovite had even found himself locked in the magic of its grip and had laughed without restraint at Ia. D. Shumskii's witty performance in Holberg's comedy. Never before had he been so captivated, so enthralled. The amateur performances at the University Theater were mere trifles in comparison. The stage opened up a new world before him and to write for it became his dream. He began looking upon playwrights with deference and seeking out actors as his friends. However, Fonvizin left Petersburg with mixed feelings: He was elated by the theater and his friendship with Russia's leading actor, Dmitrevskii, but hurt by the thought that he did not know French, without which he would not be able to participate fully in the grand world of Petersburg society or savor some of the finest fruits of European drama. Up to this time, Fonvizin had concentrated on Latin and German but now, on his return to Moscow, he began to study French.
In all, Fonvizin spent seven years at the Gymnasium and the University but it was only in his last two years that he began his career as a writer, by accepting a commission to translate Holberg's fables, for which the University book-seller promises him fifty rubles—but in merchandise. Ludvig Holberg, the father of Danish prose and drama, enjoyed considerable popularity in eighteenth-century Europe. His moral fables, however, are the weaker of his works; written in prose (the author considering verse an affected form for the fable), refined and delicate in nature, they satirize pedantism, false piety, scholastic metaphysics and theological disputes. Nevertheless, they provide Fonvizin ample opportunity for developing a propensity for satire. From the German translation, he adapts and translates 183 (of 225) fables, which are published in the summer of 1761. A second edition was published in 1765 containing the remaining 42 fables, and a third edition, in 1787. The book-seller sounds remarkably modern, for, as Fonvizin tells us in A Candid Confession, he paid for the translation with books of a seductive nature and of obscene plates, which “corrupted (Fonvizin's) imagination and aroused (his) soul.”
Evidently Fonvizin combatted this corruption and arousal by turning to homiletic literature, for in the same year he translated a moral tale, “Jupiter the Just” (“Pravosudnyi Iupiter”), which appeared in the University's weekly periodical. A minor tale, condemning man's constant recourse to God and advocating the restraint of human desires, it is nevertheless important for the carefully reasoned arguments and obvious moral didacticism which later are to figure in Fonvizin's own comedies.
In addition to his translations,2 Fonvizin in the early sixties wrote a number of satiric works, which according to his memoires, earned him the sobriquet of the “dangerous urchin.” Unfortunately, only one of these works has reached us, a satiric fable, “The Preacher Fox” (“Lisitsa-Kaznodei”), which can be related to the political and social events of that period. While it does tell us something of the acuity and directness of Fonvizin's mind, which helps explain the epithet of “dangerous,” it says nothing about the “urchin” appellation. “The Preacher Fox” tells of the convocation of all the animals at the funeral of the Emperor Lion and of the eulogy read by the Fox. The perepetia of the fable occurs when the upstart Mole exposes the Lion as a beast and the eulogy as a sham. Apparently, this fable was motivated by the events following the death of Empress Elizabeth in 1761, when several writers published laudatory odes to her successor Peter III. Unfortunately for these contemporaries, Peter reigned only a short time and, in a court revolt, Catherine II, his wife, came to the throne. She immediately denounced Peter and, one of the consequences was that new odes had to be written in praise of the new occupant of the throne. Fonvizin's fable, both a parody and satire, deals with a most dangerous topic in a direct and telling way, and it is not surprising that it remained unpublished until 1787.
In September 1762, the Court moved to Moscow for Catherine's coronation. Prince A. M. Golitsyn, a vice-chancellor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was in the entourage; the following month, Fonvizin requested his release from the University and the Guards in order to enter government service, and, after a short delay, was appointed translator of Latin, German and French in Golitsyn's office with the rank of titular councilor (roughly equivalent to lieutenant in the military service). After the coronation festivities, which last almost a year, the Court returned to Petersburg, only this time, with Fonvizin in tow, followed, it must be noted, by a personal servant and a footman and a groom, undoubtedly he was still potentially “dangerous” but hardly the “urchin.”
Soon after his appointment he was sent abroad on a minor diplomatic mission—the presentation of the ribbon of St. Catherine to the Duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin—which he handled tactfully. The young man was not only witty, sharp-of-tongue, but direct and honest in his opinions. Even in the Court of Catherine, this was respected by some individuals. In all Fonvizin spent less than a year in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, distinguishing himself as a translator and making some important friends: M. I. Vorontsov in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the brothers Fedor and Grigorii Orlov (a favorite of Catherine's) and I. P. Elagin, at the Court. Fonvizin, because of his literary training, by order of Catherine, was transferred in 1763 into the service of Elagin, a minister in the Empress' Cabinet. A poet, a translator and head of a circle of writers and translators, I. P. Elagin contributed substantially to the development of the Russian drama, eventually becoming the director of the Russian national theater (1766-1779).
As a secretary to Elagin, the budding playwright found himself in an environment where his interest in literature and the theater was encouraged. The translators associated with his new mentor were adept at reworking foreign plays so as to reflect a Russian reality and a Russian morality. In 1763, Fonvizin published The Love of Carite and Polydorus (Liubov' Karity i Polidor), a translation from Abbé Jean Jacques Barthélemy's novel Les Amours de Carite et de Polydore, a pseudo-classical adaptation from the Greek Minotaur legend. But in the following year, under the influence of Elagin and his group, Fonvizin reworked Jean Baptiste Gresset's comedy in verse, Sidney, which, under its new title Korion, became a staple of the Russian repertory theater. Fonvizin, an obedient student of Elagin's theories, moves the action of Gresset's comedy to Russia (near Moscow), Russianizes one of the names (the servant's, Andrei; the two heroes', Korion and Menandr are borrowed from classical comedy) and inserts some local color. However Korion is subsequent attacked, despite its initial success, for being basically alien to Russian life. Yet the reworking of Gresset's sentimental drama does salvage comedy from the sentiment and drama by poking fun at the suffering of the hero. Throughout the play, Fonvizin intensifies the sharp humor of each situation, and, in keeping with the traditions of the newer bourgeois comedies, celebrates the virtues of the lower classes, in this case, through the character of the peasant servant Andrei.
Fonvizin's reworking of Sidney is shortly followed by his first attempts at writing an original comedy. For it is now, in the latter half of the sixties, that he writes two comedies: the unfinished, so-called “early variant” of The Minor, and The Brigadier. These plays will be discussed in detail in the section devoted to Fonvizin's original dramatic works.
While in Petersburg, Fonvizin made the acquaintance of Prince F. A. Kozlovskii, a poet, a confirmed Voltarian and host to a circle of freethinkers made up primarily of former students from Moscow University. Kozlovskii and most of the others (including, by the way, N. I. Novikov, the outstanding satirical journalist and leading figure in the Russian Enlightenment) had strong atheistic leanings, a reputation which Fonvizin acquired soon after joining their number. The circle's favorite pastime, as Fonvizin later writes in A Candid Confession, consisted of “blasphemy and sacrilege.” It is this atmosphere that inspires his famous Epistle to My Servants Shumilov, Van'ka and Petrushka (Poslanie k slugam moim Shumilovu, Van'ke i Petrushke, 1763-1766). This “epistle” is in the form of a philosophical conversation between the master and his peasant servants; the latter, keen observers of the world, query the former as to “why the world was created” and receive the skeptical and hopeless reply, “I myself do not know.” For the first time in Russian literature, Fonvizin draws a vivid sketch of Russian peasant-servants, who are portrayed as individuals capable of thought and reason, indeed, perhaps even more so than their master. It is probably this iconoclastic portrait of the lower classes that accounts for the work's popularity throughout the remainder of this century; indeed, in the opinion of a contemporary Soviet scholar, D. D. Blagoi, its influence can even be seen in two works of A. S. Pushkin, “Fonvizin's Shadow” (Ten' Fonvizina, 1815) and The Captain's Daughter (Kapitanskaia dochka, 1836).3
There exist also two fragments of satires which are generally believed to belong to this period. One, Epistle to Iamshchikov (Poslanie Iamshchikovu), ridicules a talentless, ignorant but self-satisfied officer-poet who, as his name suggests (iamshchik=coachman), is more suited for something else; the other, To My Mind (K umu moemu), touches upon the theme of Gallomania, a theme which Fonvizin develops in The Brigadier.
Service under Elagin in the Empress' Cabinet had certain advantages for Fonvizin, but it also caused some insufferable problems. He was not the only secretary to the minister, the other was V. I. Lukin, an indefatigable adaptor of foreign plays into Russian. Their personalities differed in the extreme: Lukin was proud, quick to take umbrage at any slight, and of irritable temper; Fonvizin was amiable, loved to joke, and delighted in his caustic wit—often at others' expense. Whatever the cause of conflict, a real animosity occurred and, in A Candid Confession, Fonvizin refers to it somewhat insensitively, “Perhaps it is my physiognomy or my not altogether modest comment on (Lukin's) pen, that evoked Lukin's hatred of me.” Lukin repaid him by doing everything possible to discredit and harm Fonvizin. To add to these personal difficulties, Fonvizin had become disenchanted by the end of 1768 with Catherine's brand of enlightened absolutism. In 1767 the Empress issued a decree forbidding peasants to lodge complaints against their masters and in 1768, she dismissed the Legislative Commission, which was supposed to draw up a new code of laws. Her liberal policies proved to be a sham in Fonvizin's eyes; he no longer wished to remain in the Cabinet and requested a transfer back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Indirectly, his first original comedy, The Brigadier, helped him to fulfill this request. Count Nikita Ivanovich Panin, the head of the Ministry and tutor to the future Emperor, Paul, heard of the play and invited Fonvizin to read it to his charge. Favorably impressed by the play but especially impressed by the playwright, he invited Fonvizin to become his secretary in December of 1769.
Panin was the leading figure in an anti-government group of liberal noblemen, and Fonvizin, as one of his assistants, found himself in the midst of a maelstrom of political activity and intrigue. These noblemen sought to limit the monarch's powers and, hopefully, to overthrow Catherine in favor of her son, Grand Duke Paul, when he reached the age of eighteen in 1772. The political discussions and activities crystallized Fonvizin's own views and he becomes a willing collaborator and personal friend of the minister and, especially, of his brother, General Peter Ivanovich Panin. Fonvizin takes an active part in the ensuing battle, devoting all his future work, in word and spirit, to the cause—the struggle against despotism. He does not wish to serve a Russian despot, but a Russian government (aristocratic, to be sure) which has the interests of its subjects in mind, a truly enlightened monarchy, remains his ideal.
The ideas and philosophy of this struggle against despotism were not new to Fonvizin. In the mid-sixties he had translated several works, which in their essence either contradicted Catherine's ideas or portended a restriction upon her power. For example, in 1766, he translated the Abbé Coyer's work, La Noblesse commerçante (Torguiushchee dvorianstvo protivupolozhennoe dvorianstvu voennomu), which seeks to controvert Montesquieu's idea that the nobility's principal occupation is the military by advocating the commercial engagement of the nobility. This sharply conflicted with Catherine's views as expressed in her so-called “Mandate” (Nakaz) of 1767, which, by and large, is a reworking of Montesquieu's ideas. Another tract, “On Governments” (“O pravitel'stvakh”) was compiled by Fonvizin at the same time from the works of the German political economist, Johann Justi. Justi sets down a series of principles which must guide a ruler, carefully pointing out that the distinction between a despot and a wise ruler lies in the abuse of power on the part of the former. And finally, there is the anonymously published pamphlet, “A Brief Exposition on the Freedom of the French Nobility and on the Benefit of the Third Estate” (“Kratkoe iz”iasnenie o vol'nosti frantsuzskogo dvorianstva i o pol'ze tret'ego china”), in which Fonvizin advocates some rather daring things, e.g., complete freedom for the nobility, emancipation of the third estate, and some freedom for the peasantry. These interests and beliefs, as witnessed by his translations and writings, are eloquent testimony to Fonvizin's liberalism at that time and, certainly, proper credentials for a secretary of Count Nikita Panin.
When Peter III was toppled by a court revolt in 1762, the throne legally belonged to his son, Paul. In Panin's view, Catherine was the regent until the son came of age. However with the aid of the Orlovs and in complete disregard of Paul's right to succession, Catherine seized the throne. She was apprehensive of the child and tried to keep him out of public sight. Paul's cause, however, had been taken up by the Panins and a like-minded group of noblemen. This opposition received support from several satirical magazines of the period,4 which attempted to expose, if not explode, the myth of Catherine's enlightened monarchy. If they did not succeed entirely they at least kept alive a certain sympathy for the Grand Duke, an idea that dominates Fonvizin's first work written under Nikita Panin's influence, his “Oration on the Recovery of His Imperial Highness, Sovereign Prince and Grand Duke Paul Petrovich” (“Slovo na vyzdorovlenie Ego Imperatorskogo Vysochestva, gosudaria tsesarevicha i velikogo kniazia Pavla Petrovicha”).
The ceaseless intrigues of the Orlovs against Panin, the deepening rift between Paul and Catherine, and the Grand Duke's illness in the summer of 1771—with the attendant rumor that he had been poisoned—provide the background to the writing of the “Oration.” Fonvizin chose the propitious moment of Paul's recovery to disseminate Panin's ideas and to rally public support for the Grand Duke. Addressed to all Russians, the “Oration” begins by glorifying Paul's virtues and by extolling his tutor. Under the guise of lavish compliments to Catherine, Fonvizin makes it clear that Paul possesses the true qualities of a sovereign: he is enlightened, well-educated, and desirous of making his subjects happy. He concludes by apostrophizing Paul and admonishing him “to love Russia, be just, merciful and sensitive to the people's misfortunes.” Many of the sentiments expressed in the “Oration” will be repeated by Starodum in The Minor and, unfortunately, in the same tone and style. The “Oration” was published as a separate pamphlet in 1771 and later republished in Novikov's journal, The Painter (Zhivopisets).
As the day of Paul's coming of age (September 20, 1772) approached, Fonvizin's “Oration” assumed greater relevancy. Fearful of a revolt in her son's favor, Catherine sought to avert the danger of a public celebration by postponing it for a year in order to find a bride for Paul. Catherine is eminently successful and the following September Paul celebrates his wedding instead of his coming of age. Paul gains a bride and loses a tutor for Panin's position is cancelled. In victory Catherine is very gracious. Not only is Panin retained as head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but he is rewarded handsomely for his former service to Paul, receiving land and nine thousand serfs. Panin in turn rewards his secretaries generously. Fonvizin receives an estate in the Vitebsk region (Belorussia) and 1180 serfs, a rather odd gift to an exponent of greater freedom for the serfs.
As secretary to Panin, Fonvizin was kept quite busy in maintaining the huge correspondence with various Russian diplomats abroad. Nevertheless in 1774 he found time to help a young widow, Ekaterina Ivanovna Klopova, conduct a lawsuit, and while he lost her lawsuit, he did win her heart. They were married at the end of that year.
This failure of Panin to replace Catherine did not dampen Fonvizin's ardor for the struggle—but he moved the site of battle to the field of literature. He carefully selects a work which corresponds ideologically to the contemporary political situation in Russia, viz. Antoine Thomas' Eloge de Marc-Aurèle, translates and publishes it in 1777 under the title Eulogy to Marcus Aurelius (Slovo pokhval'noe Marku Avreliiu). In February, 1778, while Fonvizin is abroad, a very favorable review of it appears in the Saint Petersburg Herald (Sankt-Peterburgskii vestnik) signed with the initial “F.” The reviewer leaves nothing up to the reader's imagination as regards the correct interpretation of this work. He openly says that the translator was attracted to Thomas' work not only because it expounds a program of enlightened absolutism, but also because it indirectly exposes Catherine's government. Catherine had declared herself an enlightened monarch, a disciple of Montesquieu and Voltaire. However, by comparing the government and legislature of a truly enlightened monarch, Marcus Aurelius (as depicted by Thomas), with Catherine's government, the inescapable conclusion is: the promises of the Russian monarch are false. Who “F” is cannot be said with absolute certainty; there is a touch of Fonvizin humor in the reviewer's concluding remarks: “Finally we should mention that this book is printed very accurately and with considerable typographic beauty which in truth does not make a bad work good, but which can make a good work a special pleasure to read.”5
In the summer of 1777 Fonvizin leaves for Europe, traveling through Poland, Germany, Southern France and then to Paris on “official business,” returning to Russia in the autumn of 1778. In Paris, he met Benjamin Franklin which gave rise to rumors that he had been dispatched on some secret political mission, but, unfortunately for lovers of mystery and intrigue, there seems to be no proof to this at all. The truth is always more prosaic for there seems reason to believe that Panin had hastened his departure because of Fonvizin's wisecracks about Potemkin, the all-powerful favorite of Catherine since 1774.
Fonvizin arrived in Montpellier three months after leaving Petersburg. The details of this trip are known primarily from his letters to his sister, Fedosiia, and to Peter Panin. These two sets of correspondence are significantly different: the letters to Fedosiia are informal, loosely constructed, jocular and freely combine French with Russian; those to Peter Panin are formal, well-planned, sober and written in highly polished prose.6 In the latter correspondence, Fonvizin strives quite conscientiously to use the spoken language of the educated Russian and to avoid Slavonicisms, which, when they do appear, are not in an elevated context as tradition had dictated. His phrases are frequently concise, with a tendency toward aphoristic expressiveness. Compound-complex sentences are avoided and the Latin word-order, where the verb is (uncharacteristic of Russian) stuck on at the end of the sentence, disappears entirely. Fonvizin develops an individual style and is not in the least concerned with norms and genres, a vestige of Lomonosov's theory of style. These letters are a valuable contribution to the development of Russian prose, and a worthy forerunner to Karamzin's renowned Letters of a Russian Traveler (Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika).
The content of these letters is most remarkable. In a detailed and, for the most part, level-headed commentary on French life and culture, Fonvizin reveals himself to be a most penetrating and acute observer. He seems to have become familiar with the multifaceted face of French society, the clergy, the judicial system, the politics, the morals, the educational system, and so on, at least to the extent of rational criticism. It must be admitted that, like Rousseau, one of his favorite authors, his commentaries are generally negative, reflecting the same Gallophobia found in The Brigadier:
In a word, comparing one thing to another here, I make bold to confess to Your Excellency in all sincerity that if any of our young countrymen possessed of sound judgment grow indignant when they see abuse and disorder in Russia and begin in their hearts to become alienated from it, then there is no surer means of restoring to them their due love of country then to send them as quickly as possible to France …
In Montpellier, Fonvizin and his wife occupied themselves with various studies and participated in the social life of the local gentry. He took private lessons in jurisprudence and studied philosophy, while she took French lessons and studied piano. In February of 1778, they depart for Paris, where Fonvizin is thrown into a whirlwind of activity: He attends a course in experimental physics and classes in philosophy; he himself gives lectures on Russian and Russia before scholarly and literary societies; he attends the theater regularly and sees all the sights.
Much to his regret, he did not meet his favorite author, Rousseau, for whom he had a special regard. The citizen of Geneva had rejected Catherine's offer of a pension and an extraordinary allowance to come to Russia. Fonvizin admired his independence of character and for months had tried to arrange a meeting with him. As fate would have it, Rousseau died (July 2, 1778) shortly after agreeing to meet Fonvizin. Before leaving for home, Fonvizin became acquainted with a portion of Rousseau's final work Confessions, which, some years later, would influence his own Candid Confessions.
The Fonvizins settle down in their home on Galernaia Street (present-day Krasnaia Street) upon returning to Petersburg. Its comfortable and cultured atmosphere was a pleasant relief to the frantic months of travel. The heavy mahogany furniture seemed to insist upon tranquility and the golden-framed mirrors, diffusing the glow of candles on walls decorated with paintings and etchings, repeated this insistence. On these walls were hung the portraits of thirty of France's best actors whose performances won the lasting admiration of our playwright. There were numerous cabinets filled with books, a chest of drawers for papers and a stand for folios. One room was especially set aside as a study. In it stood a large writing table trimmed with fine green broadcloth, and several leather armchairs. Settling down in this peaceful and secure environment, Fonvizin began his labors on his dramatic masterpiece, The Minor, and his most important political treatise, “Discourse on Indispensable Laws of State” (“Rassuzhdenie o nepremennykh gosudarstvennykh zakonakh”), works which ultimately disturbed the peace of his contemporaries and rattled their security.
Fonvizin completed The Minor in 1781 but it is not performed until September 1782, and only after the intercession of Nikita Panin. The reasons for the difficulties with the authorities are obvious, the play is a direct attack upon the ignorance of the Russian landowning class and certain segments of the upper nobility. I will discuss the play in detail below. The “Discourse,” which seems to be the product of the endless political discussions with the Panins, was completed in 1782. At this time, direct action in favor of Paul had to be abandoned. Catherine, frightened by the Pugachev Rebellion, had abandoned all pretense to enlightened absolutism: She consolidated her power by granting the nobility even greater privileges in return for their support. Corruption reached an unprecedented level, and Potemkin's power became unrivaled. If the Panins were ever in doubt of the need for legal reforms, the despotic reaction to the peasant uprising justified this need and re-emphasized its urgency. One thing was clear to them: only Catherine's death would bring the throne to Paul. But Nikita Panin, who was in poor health and approaching seventy, did not expect to see this day. A decision was reached to compile jointly a draft of fundamental laws for the future Emperor. It was imperative to formulate at once certain guidelines for Paul, to outline “indispensable” legal reforms and thereby pave the way for a constitution. Peter Panin was entrusted with the task of transmitting this political document to Paul the moment he ascended the throne. As conceived by the Panins and Fonvizin, this document was to consist of two parts: 1) a preamble, 2) the fundamental laws of state. Fonvizin agreed to write the preamble, known today as the “Discourse on Indispensable Laws of State.”7
It is a powerful accusatory exposé of the unchecked tyranny, which had permeated every branch of State government, and of the favoritism which was exemplified by Potemkin. In essence, Fonvizin restated the political tenets of the Panin group and, through this restatement, his own political philosophy. The ideas he had advanced in the sixties and seventies are repeated once more: The monarch and the subjects are not two mutually independent powers, but, rather, the monarch is entrusted with power by fundamental laws, which he cannot abrogate, and he has the right to reign only as long as he carries out these laws for the welfare of his subjects. When he violates his duties, he must be removed; his subjects have inviolable rights which cannot be infringed.
The second part of this project was never fully carried out. In March 1783, Nikita Panin's untimely death deprived the group of its leading spirit. Fonvizin then turned his preamble over to Peter Panin who continued his brother's work but only completed a sketch of the fundamental laws of state. This material found its way back to Fonvizin after the death of Peter Panin (1789). Fearing its discovery, he entrusted it to the wife of the attorney general of Petersburg, Puzyrevskii, who gave it to Paul after Catherine's death (1796). Unfortunately, Paul embodied all the evils the Panins had seen in Catherine, he was partially deranged and totally despotic. He ignored the document completely. However, Fonvizin's “Discourse” was not written entirely in vain, for it eventually came into the hands of the Decembrists, who reworked and adapted it to their own needs.
Nikita Panin was forced to retire from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the beginning of 1782. Faced with the loss of his protector, Fonvizin submitted a petition for retirement soon afterward and Catherine accepted it with alacrity. Fonvizin now devoted his energies to publicistic-satiric writings, which allowed him to attack Catherine's regime immediately and directly. He was provided a forum for his views through a quirk of fate which he must have enjoyed. In 1782, he was invited to contribute to the journal, The Companion of Lovers of the Russian Word (Sobesednik liubitelei rossiiskogo slova), which appeared in May 1783, under the nominal editorship of Princess E. R. Dashkova, but inspired and guided by Catherine, whose renewed interest in literature was in considerable measure due to the successful and very popular publishing activities of Novikov in Moscow. In 1779, Novikov assumed control of the Moscow University Printing House and began publishing a series of journals, Morning Light (Utrennyi svet, 1779), Moscow Monthly Publication (Moskovskoe ezhemesiachnoe izdanie, 1781), Evening Light (Vecherniaia zaria; 1782), all of which enjoyed considerable success and had considerable influence. In founding The Companion, Catherine hoped to create a circle of influential writers, whom she could control and, through them, direct Russian literature along a proper course. In addition to Fonvizin, invitations were extended to some of the outstanding writers of that time, e.g., I. P. Bogdanovich, V. V. Kapnist, M. M. Kheraskov, Ia. B. Kniazhnin, among others. Catherine erred in all regards and within several months found herself embroiled in polemics.
A substantial part of the journal's space was alloted to Catherine's own work: she published anonymously her “Notes Concerning Russian History” (Zapiski kasatel'no rossiiskoi istorii) and a series of mild topical satires under the general heading of “Facts and Fictions” (Byli i nebylitsy). Fonvizin accepted the invitation and published several works in this journal: An Experimental Dictionary of Russian Synonyms (Opyt rossiiskogo soslovnika), which is a linguistic-literary work that defines, often ironically in reference to the nobility, 105 synonyms and gives satiric examples of usage; A Petition to the Russian Minerva from Russian Writers (Chelobitnaia rossiiskoi Minerve ot rossiiskikh pisatelei) and Sermon Delivered on Whitmonday by Father Vasilii in the Village P (Pouchenie, govorennoe v dukhov den' iereem Vasiliem v sele P), all of which are within the limits of “permissible” satire. The Petition, occasioned by the persecution of the poet G. R. Derzhavin, appeals to the goddess of the city and protectress of civilized life, Minerva (Catherine), for protection against the crude interference of governmental magnates. The Sermon, written in colloquial Russian, satirizes the ignorance of the provincial clergy while berating drunkenness and praising temperance.
The first two numbers of The Companion were marked by a remarkable show of harmony between editors and contributors. However, lightning flashed across the pages of number III (July) and the gathering storm broke in the following number. The journal had received a letter and manuscript, anonymous and untitled, which took Catherine's policies to task and lay bare the social and political evils of Russian life. Fonvizin was, of course, the villain. Taking advantage of Catherine's toying once more with liberalism, he wrote in the letter, “The editors of (The Companion) are not afraid to open the doors to truth, therefore I submit for publication ‘Several Questions Capable of Arousing the Special Consideration of Intelligent and Honorable People’ (‘Neskol'ko voprosov mogushchikh vozbudit' v umnykh i chestnykh liudei osoblivoe vnimanie’).”8 The “several questions” pertain to the inefficiency, secrecy, inequities, and stupidities of Catherine's regime; they are more accusatory than querying since the answers that might be forthcoming would be completely incriminating.
Catherine's first impulse was to reject “Several Questions” but then she decided to publish them along with her answers, anonymously, of course. She was barely able to conceal her anger. In the following number, apparently not satisfied with her replies, she vents her anger with open threats placed in the mouth of an old man from “Facts and Fictions”:
Greenhorns! You don't know what I know; in our time nobody liked questions; unpleasant circumstances were connected with them just in thought alone. Such turns of phrase seem out of place to us; facetious answers to such questions are not from our day, then everybody would tuck their tails between their legs and run away from them. … In former times nobody dared to lie with impunity, especially not in print.
Despite this veiled threat from Catherine, Fonvizin continued to write satirical pieces directed against her regime.9 They seem to grow progressively more impertinent and caustic, culminating in the extremely abrasive satire, “A Universal Court Grammar” (“Vseobshchaia pridvornaia grammatika”), which attacks the Court, its sycophants, and Catherine herself. In the form of a textbook, the work is full of innuendos about Catherine's personal life.10 Catherine herself refused to allow the publication of this work, and, shortly thereafter, Fonvizin was banned from the pages of The Companion. The journal soon folded and Fonvizin felt that he had gained a victory. Pyrrhic unfortunately, for the Empress had pronounced his literary death sentence and not a single new line of his would be published under his name for the remainder of his life.
After Nikita Panin's death, Fonvizin attempted to memorialize him in a brief biographical study. As with much of Fonvizin's work, the tendentiousness of the author soon won out: Panin is eulogized as the exemplary government functionary and valiant patriot, waging unceasing war with the diplomatic enemies abroad and with the domestic enemies at home. It, too, is a tract directed against Catherine's despotic regime and the Court favorites. Fonvizin could not hope to publish this Life of Count N. I. Panin (Zhizn' grafa N. I. Panina) in Russian so he did the next best thing: he translated it into French, and it appeared anonymously under the title Précis historique de la vie du comte de N. I. Panin in 1784.
In July 1784, Fonvizin and his wife left Russia for Italy, on what turned out to be an extended business trip. He had always been interested in antiques and art, and, with the curtailment of his literary endeavors, his avocation became a vocation. Forming a partnership with a Petersburg merchant and selling his own collection of paintings and books (valued at over fifty-two thousand rubles), he set out for Europe looking for various objects of art, purchasing originals when possible and ordering copies when not. An enthusiastic sightseer, Fonvizin visited numerous museums, churches and historical sights, and also frequented the theater and concerts. But his literary interests were not forsaken. He kept a journal on art (unfortunately it has been lost) and memorialized the details of the trip and his impressions in lengthy, elaborate letters to his sister, Fedosiia, and Peter Panin. In style and literary significance, these letters are similar to those from France: He is again the hypercritical commentator and, with few exceptions, displeased and condemnatory to that which he observed. Italy is wealthy in art, architecture, and music but poor in spirit and lacking in morality. Eventually and somewhat reluctantly he concludes that the French, whom he had so criticized in his earlier correspondence, “conduct themselves much more honestly …” than the Italians.
For many years Fonvizin had been suffering from painful headaches. Early in February of 1785 he suffered his first stroke, a relatively minor one which caused numbness in his left arm and leg and left him very weak. After convalescing for over a month, he was able to go on excursions to the outskirts of Rome. In April, the Fonvizins started on their return trip home, visiting Bologna again, Parma, Milan, Venice, and then Vienna. Here he learned of the seriousness of his illness, was put on a strict diet, prohibited from reading or writing and advised to go to Baden in order to take warm sulphur baths. After a prolonged stay in Baden, the Fonvizins departed for Moscow, arriving in August. At the end of the month, he suffered a massive stroke which left him totally paralyzed.
Fonvizin never fully recovered from the effects of the last stroke and in July 1786 he left for Karlsbad, Austria with his wife to take a mineral water cure. While abroad his novella, Callisthenes (Kallisfen) was published11 and it remains an interesting commentary on his relations with Catherine. This is a tale of the persecution of the philosopher, Callisthenes, by Alexander the Great, who, intoxicated by power and flattery, violates the guides of reason and virtue. Callisthenes, much as Fonvizin in his own life, demonstrates courage and philosophical fortitude in opposing the excesses of autocratic tyranny.
Upon his return from Karlsbad, Fonvizin republished some of his earlier translations and began preparations for the publication of a new journal, A Friend of Honorable People or Starodum (Drug chestnykh liudei ili Starodum). The initial material, completed in the spring of 1788, contains an interesting piece entitled “A Conversation at Princess Khaldina's Home” (“Razgovor u kniagini Khaldinoi”), which proves to be a reworked satiric scene from the unfinished early comedy, A Good Mentor (Dobryi nastavnik). In it, Fonvizin once more returns to a favorite theme: The nobility's moral and spiritual corruption occasioned by Catherine's autocratic policies This journal was prohibited by the censors.
Undaunted by this setback, Fonvizin projected a new collection of his works and then, a new journal. It was a most unpropitious time for new, liberal ventures. The first tremors of the cataclysm of the French Revolution had already reached Russia and Catherine's repressive last years had begun; despotism began to stiffle the liberal voices. The new projects of Fonvizin were banned by the censor, the printing house of the University of Moscow was shut down, and various other journals and books were proscribed.
Worn out by the struggle with the censors and in a weakened state of health, Fonvizin journeyed to Latvia in the summer of 1789 to undergo another cure—the application of eel skins and animal entrails to his paralyzed limbs. All that can be said is that the cure, at least, did not kill him, but he returned in no better condition than he left. At this time he finishes his last play, The Selection of a Tutor (Vybor guvernera), which contains his comments upon the French Revolution.
Failing health and a premonition of his imminent end brought on a religiously repentant state of mind. On the occasion of Potemkin's death in May 1791, Fonvizin wrote his “Discourse on the Vain Life of Man” (“Rassuzhdenie o suetnoi zhizni chelovecheskoi”), which, in its condemnation of all his former literary works as sinful, brings Tolstoy to mind. In the same mood, he began his final work, A Candid Confession of My Deeds and Thoughts. While inspired by Rousseau's Confessions, the first part of which Fonvizin had become acquainted with before leaving Paris in 1778, Fonvizin's does not in any way follow Jean Jacques' example. The great Frenchman's work was much too one-sided, dealing not with the “worldly” man but with the “private” one, revealed in great detail. From the outset, what Fonvizin has in mind is a “confession” in the Christian sense. He wishes to reveal the secrets of his heart and confess his thoughts and deeds. However as the narrative develops, two distinct figures emerge: Fonvizin the man and Fonvizin the author. Whereas the man confesses and is repentant, the author reminisces. The resultant narrative is at times lively and humorous, at times moralistic and satiric. Unfortunately, A Candid Confession was never completed, or, if it was completed, the final version is not extant. It breaks off with events of the late sixties, i.e., after the success of his first original comedy, The Brigadier.
Up until the very last moments of his life, Fonvizin breathed literature. On November 30, 1792, G. R. Derzhavin, the great Russian poet, arranged a meeting in his home between Fonvizin and Ivan Ivanovich Dmitriev, a poet of the sentimental school. Unable to walk without assistance, Fonvizin arrived accompanied by two young officers and carrying his last comedy. The evening was spent reading it. He returned home early, seems to have retired without difficulty, and, again without difficulty, died during the night. He was buried in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevskii Monastery in St. Petersburg. He was a man of high ideals, ceaselessly involved in their realization. He was a man of limited ideas, constantly repeated in his literature. But he never reckoned with the toll this struggle for the ideals and ideas entailed and, perhaps, an excerpt from his own writings will supply a fitting epitaph: “A poor life, hard work and a sudden death—that is what distinguishes the poet from other creatures.”
WRITINGS
The appearance of the sentimental drama in Russia coincides in time with the emergence of national awareness in the theater, and it is connected primarily with two men, Elagin, and his secretary, Lukin. Lukin was the first to attack Sumarokov, the exponent and theoretician of French classical ideas in Russian literature, for the classical inflexibility of his tragedies and for the non-Russian quality of his comedies, which, in Lukin's words, were “taken unsuccessfully from foreign writers and dragged into our language almost by force.” It was not the idea of “borrowing” that disturbed Lukin, but the application of the borrowed material. He scornfully criticizes Sumarokov's arbitrary mixture of Russian and foreign elements, in the outlandish names given to many characters, their foreign customs and manners. Instead, Lukin advocates borrowing “successfully.” He did not suggest that Russian playwrights try to create original comedies because he did not believe the time had come; Russian dramatists should rework and adapt the foreign models to Russian settings and manners. Such dramas were to deal with Russian society; anything alien was to be eliminated. In setting forth these ideas, Lukin simply follows in the tradition of Elagin, the mentor of this circle of translators and adaptors, who, already in the fifties, applied this method in journalism to his translation of a collection of essays.12
It is not known exactly when Fonvizin began The Brigadier, however its completion, the final version, can be dated between the end of 1768 and April 1769. Fonvizin's two previous excursions into the world of dramaturgy were, in a manner of speaking, under the aegis of Voltaire and Gresset. Alzira and Korion were more tests of his ability to translate, in the former case, and adapt, in the latter, than a test of his own creative talents. While Elagin, El'chaninov and Lukin were apparently satisfied to remain imitators, albeit good ones, Fonvizin was not. The creative urge swelled in him and had to find an outlet. Earlier in the sixties, Fonvizin began a comedy that contained certain elements which later will be developed in The Brigadier, and others which will receive full treatment in The Minor. This unfinished comedy, consisting of two complete acts (both very short) and a portion of a third, is the so-called “early variant” of The Minor.13
Compared with either The Brigadier or The Minor, this “early variant” is very primitive and episodic. Fonvizin at this point lacked not only the playwright's necessary technical skill and artistry but also a fundamental knowledge of stage conventions. The acts are not connected and there is a lack of coordination in the action. The first act is especially weak and brings to mind the comic skits from the intermedia of the Petrine period with its slapstick and crude humor. The hero, Ivanushka, shows the same disrespect for his parents (Aksen and Ulita) as his namesake in The Brigadier, and the same lack of ability to learn and the same gross appetites as Mitrofanushka in The Minor. As a contrast to this ignorant provincial family, Fonvizin focuses on their neighbor, Dobromyslov (Goodthought) and his accomplished son, Milovid (Nicelooking), who represent education and rationality.
The comedy has no plot. It deals with the theme of education, or, more accurately, the systems of education in the Russia of that time. In Ivanushka's family, Fonvizin satirizes the narrow, patriarchal way of life and abysmal ignorance of a provincial petty-nobility which send those “Ivanushkas” out into the world. And in Dobromyslov's family, he portrays the cultured nobility and the influence of a correct education, which allows its recipient to play a proper role in society and to serve his country well.14
The “early variant” of The Minor is in an incomplete and rough-hewn form. However, its theme, the characters, the colloquial language and the comic devices reappear in later comedies, reworked, polished and channeled to definite ends. This educational theme is essential to all of Fonvizin's future comedies. The characters of Aksen, Ulita, Ivanushka, Dobromyslov and Milovid develop into the vivid personalities of the Brigadier, his wife, Mitrofanushka, Starodum and Milon. The colloquial language and the devices of comic confusion of words (e.g., Ulita confuses kloby = clubs with klopy = bedbugs) and puns will be exploited fully in The Brigadier and form an integral part of that comedy. Despite the obvious failure of this variant, it proved an instructive experiment. It was not only Fonvizin's first attempt at writing a comedy, but at the same time, the first effort at creating an original Russian comedy in prose. It is not until the end of this decade, and after considerable more experimentation, that Fonvizin succeeds in this regard with the completion of The Brigadier.
The enormous significance of this play lies in the fact that at almost the very inception of Russian comedy it introduced the “comic” theme which came to dominate not only its century but ages to come. In this, and all his plays, Fonvizin attempts to depict in a variety of ways the noxious influence of a rotten environment upon the individual, his family, and his society. The social and political pressures of the traditional old-Russian patriarchal system, in which authority reigned unchallenged and the strong dominated the weak, created a general ignorance and a local depravity. Fonvizin does not investigate this theme in all its depth or complexity. One feels that his recoiling anger and sharp distaste for these characters and their actions was too acutely felt for him to treat them with any rational detachment. Rather than this, he introduces a variety of characters—bitter distorted figures that recall the prints of Hogarth—to illustrate the ignorance and depravity resulting from such a social system.
Of all the characters in this, Fonvizin's first original play, the Brigadier's wife is most sharply etched. She is much the opposite of the female protagonists in the comedies of Molière and Holberg, who subordinate the male and impose their will on all matters concerning the organization and conduct of the household. Tyrannized by her husband, she lives in mortal fear of him (IV, 2). A simple, uneducated woman, given forcibly in marriage to a man she had never seen or loved, she finds herself in the hands of a cruel tyrant, suffering the trials and meager existence of an army wife, struggling with basic need and forced to economize and count kopecks. A result of this interaction between the tyrant and the tyrannized is that she, too, becomes miserly, calculating and petty, and all carried to the extreme. Always on guard against being cheated out of half a kopeck, the center of her universe becomes her housekeeping books and, in her son's words, “… she'd gladly suffer through spotted fever for a ruble” (I, 3). Except for her interests, limited to her storehouse and livestock, all else remains remote and incomprehensible. Consequently, she fails to discern the Councilor's intention, or to understand Ivanushka, even when he is speaking Russian, convinced, naively, of the inaccessible wisdom of his words. Of graver consequences is her scornful attitude toward education, a “Grammar” costs money regardless of “whether you learn it or not” (I, 1). This attitude is extended to Ivanushka whom she pampered and protected. Though she is endowed with these attributes, the Brigadier's wife is not an entirely negative character. We may laugh at her but at the same time she evokes sympathy because she is in some ways a tragic figure. She suffers hardships and is victimized by a cruel husband, yet she accepts her lot without complaining and finds, besides, enough compassion in herself to sympathize with the fate of other officers' wives (IV, 1).
The Brigadier is the embodiment of the martinet, a crude, untutored disciplinarian—nurtured on military regulations and the articles of war—who prefers fists and sticks to words and reason. He has an air of self-importance, so inflated that he refuses to allow the thought that the Lord is unaware of the Table of Ranks and the number of hairs on his venerable head (I, 1). His harsh military ways are so deeply ingrained that he does not brook contradiction and treats his family like a squad of privates. Owing to an innate coarseness developed and sharpened by years of military service and subordination, the Brigadier invariably asserts his authority by barking threats of corporal punishment, which he is prepared to visit upon friend, family and foe alike. This coarseness, combined with ignorance, forms a distinctly dehumanized character, of whom the Councilor justly remarks, “he loves his horse more than his wife” (II, 2). In many respects he is a forerunner to Skotinin in The Minor and Schelchkov (Rapper), the ex-officer-landowner described in the Narrative of a Feigned Deaf-Mute.
As part of the nobility, the Brigadier and his wife are morally obliged to educate their son. Incapable of appreciating or understanding the value of a proper education, they follow, foolishly, the dictates of fashion and seek to provide a “fashionable” education, i.e., a French one. The social pressures create a curious disease of the period, one which might be diagnosed as “terminal Gallomania;” viz., a home education (administered infectiously by an illiterate Frenchman), a complementary trip to France (total exposure) and home again (incurably afflicted). Ivanushka suffers from this illness. His image embodies this universal type—one infatuated with everything foreign and contemptuous of everything native—and the attendant vices. Consequently he is ashamed of being a Russian but consoles himself with the thought that his “spirit belongs to the crown of France” (III, 1). By providing their son with this “fashionable” education, Ivanushka's parents are, ironically, instrumental in exposing him to an equally dangerous infection; namely, freedom of thought, which is a far more formidable threat to their closed, authoritative world. Ivanushka has a slight case of this also. He flouts parental authority by defying his father and the right of the parents' to dispose of their childrens' lives. But Ivanushka remains a fool, ridiculed for indiscriminately accepting all the superficialities and externals of his French semi-education. As with the Brigadier's wife, Fonvizin mixes serious elements into this character. During the last act, Ivanushka undergoes an abrupt and unmotivated change, sharply at variance with the personality previously portrayed: “… A young man is like wax. If, malheureusement, I had fallen into the hands of a Russian who loved his people, perhaps I wouldn't be like I am” (V, 2). In my opinion, this is less Ivanushka's conclusion and more Fonvizin's. Ever the moralist and indictor of the evils of that society, he could not pass by in silence but had to underline the moral lesson for the audience.
In many respects the Councilor's wife is the female counterpart to Ivanushka. She is a product of the same system of education; she was taught the art of coquetry, introduced to “pleasant novels,” and provided rudimentary lessons in French. But, also, a product of the social system, she is basically antagonistic toward education: for “studies” are a waste of time and the pages of a Grammar useful only for curlpapers. Apart from her toilette, she has no other interests. Perhaps, one, the art of coquetry, possible to those who lack any firm moral standard. She despises her neighbors' conjugal bliss and is willing to deceive her husband with or without encouragement.
In creating these characters, Fonvizin infers the formative traits from external influences, i.e., environment, education, etc., but in creating Sophia it is not at all clear what formative influences he had in mind. Her educational background is not touched upon, and her environment is no different from Ivanushka's: the daughter of an ignorant hypocrite, extortioner and miserly pettifogger, and stepdaughter of an ignorant, immoral coquette. Obviously she is meant to exemplify virtue, but an abstract, unreal virtue. This is clear from the virtuous “legal” love between her and Dobroliubov, which, strangely, is almost at the expense of morality for it is colder, paler and more boring than the tender and emotional “illicit” love of the other protagonists. Moreover, to illustrate her character, Fonvizin uses a device which will be featured extensively in The Minor, namely, the dissecting of abstract terms to depict the concrete. Thus, in analyzing the concepts of “innocence” and “guilt” (II, 1), Sophia attempts to refute her father's equivocal interpretations.
Dobroliubov is also contrasted with the negative, immoral figures and is an exponent of common sense. In some ways he resembles a raisonneur, whose principal function is to express the author's own ideas on a variety of subjects. However his role is very weakly developed in The Brigadier and he is clearly a character of secondary importance (e.g., compare Dobroliubov to Starodum and Pravdin in The Minor, or Seum and Nelstetsov in The Selection of a Tutor). In essence both Sophia and Dobroliubov are passive objects, whose mutual love is hardly more than a pretext for involving other characters in a series of comic scenes. There speech is unmarked, i.e., it is the literary language devoid of any stylization. Indeed, they bring to mind the conventional lovers typical in commedia dell'arte and French comedy.
There is also a degree of conventionality in the Councilor's role, who, like the father in Renaissance comedy, insists that his daughter marry the man of his choice. The similarity ends here for he seeks not the material and moral well being of his daughter but his own immoral ends. If Sophia marries Ivanushka the Councilor figures that he “could more often as a relative see (his) beloved inlaw” (II, 2), the Brigadier's wife. But he, too, is a product of a corrupt environment and abysmal ignorance; a corrupt judge, bribetaker, extortioner and unscrupulous hypocrite, he views everything through the prism of his own plastic morality. In his eyes the court and decrees are simply tools for self-aggrandizement, and the Lord is forbearing. Thus, he steals during the day, prays at night, and passes off his lechery as piety. Fonvizin criticizes the corruption of the courts through the Councilor, whose question, “How can you decide a case for nothing, just on your salary?” (III, 5), indicates the attitude pervading the entire judicial system. Bribery in one form or another was the oil that kept the machine working. The decree on extortion, referred to by the Councilor's wife, reduced the “oil” and, as a result, the judicial machine ground to a halt. The Councilor could not make a go of it in this comparatively “honest” system and is forced to retire.
With the exception of the name Dobroliubov (Lover of good), Fonvizin in The Brigadier, does not make use of the “speaking-name” device—a name derived either from a figure's dominant vice or virtue—which helps the spectators recognize the character and identify his function. Instead, he characterizes his comic figures through dialogue or, more precisely, through dialogue between negative characters in which each discloses his particular vice. Comic effects are often achieved in these dialogues by ridiculous failures to understand. Hence, the Brigadier cannot understand the Frenchified twaddle of Ivanushka, the Brigadier's wife does not understand the Councilor's advances because his language is a stilted admixture of Church Slavonicisms and officialise, and the Councilor's wife pretends not to understand the Brigadier's amorous intention because it is couched in terms of a military assault. He does not attempt to characterize through action.
The circumstances in which Fonvizin chose to place his characters limited the possibilities of creating and developing masterful images of a Gallomaniac or a martinet or a hypocrite, as well as the possibilities of treating extensively any concomitant themes. It is not surprising, therefore, that the play lacks not only action but also a central figure and a unifying theme. In its place we find a narrow but fairly balanced and proportionate treatment of all the personified vices and themes.
The Brigadier is a comedy of manners. This type of comedy concerns itself basically with the manners and conventions of an artificial, “elegant” society. It reflects the manners and outlook of this special group. Here the characters are types rather than individualized personalities, and the satire is directed against the follies and deficiences of these typical characters. One of the distinguishing characteristics of this type of comedy is its emphasis on illicit love duels (cf. Elizabethan and French comedies of manners).
Fonvizin's characters are, as it were, variants of one social classification. He shows separate vices, not individuals: martinetism (the Brigadier), extortion, chicanery and hypocrisy (the Councilor), and Gallomania (Ivanushka and the Councilor's wife). These vices are personified in verbal masks—the Brigadier's military jargon, the Councilor's chancery idiom and Slavonicisms, and Ivanushka's and the Councilor's wife's Frenchified phraseology. Here the probable loss of human semblance is due to corporate generalizations. Thus, vices in all their variety replace the individual. Fonvizin is not interested in reforming manners or in promoting social amenity, instead he satirizes serious human failings and strives to reform morals and promote fundamental character reform. For example, such deficiencies as represented by the principal characters' hostile attitude toward education (I, 1), or as represented by the Councilor who attempts to seduce the Brigadier's wife with the aid of biblical allusions (II, 3), or the hardships and suffering of army wives in the hands of their crude husbands (IV, 1), and so on. The seriousness of the author's intent is further emphasized by the play's relatively formal, sober and decorous tone.
To a great extent, genre not only dictates the treatment of comic characterization but it determines also the structure of the plot. For a comedy of manners, dialogue and satire are more important than plot. Dialogue for the most part replaces action. Fonvizin's entire comedy is made up almost exclusively of conversations in which declarations of love are confessed, viz., Ivanushka and the Councilor's wife, the Councilor and the Brigadier's wife, the Brigadier and the Councilor's wife, and Dobroliubov and Sophia. The plot in fact consists of this very series of love confessions which in turn form a series of comic scenes. Fonvizin constructs his plot from these entanglements of the negative characters and contrasts them with the virtuous love of Sophia and Dobroliubov. However, because of his desire to be witty and excite laughter, our playwright chose to ignore the plot's incoherency. Although symmetrically developed throughout the comedy, which, as a consequence, is highly amusing, the plot, nevertheless, is artificial and fails to unite the acts. As a result, the play disintegrates into a series of separate scenes featuring alternately different sets of characters. In keeping with his role of preacher and moralizer, Fonvizin places more importance on the edification of the play than on the structure.
The Brigadier observes the neo-classical rule of the unities (with the possible exception of action) and contains the standard five acts. The comedy's “action” takes place in the provinces, the peculiar flavor and typicalness of which Fonvizin captures through setting (room furnished in country style), dress, mannerisms (telling fortunes with cards to reveal one's love) and colloquial speech. Fonvizin also makes wide use of puns (intercourse, II, 3, m'en moque, III, 1, matadors, IV, 4, etc.) which point up the ignorance of his provincials.
The question of the originality of this play is still an issue among literary critics. A number of eminent critics have pointed to Ludvig Holberg's comedy, Jean de France or Hans Frandsen as the model for The Brigadier. Others, in defending the originality of the play, have disputed the influence of this play upon it, but, unfortunately, have not clearly substantiated their arguments.15 I would like to take up this problem since, it seems to me, it circumscribes the nature of Fonvizin's contribution to Russian comedy and defines the question of his “originality.”
To summarize Holberg's comedy very briefly: After spending several weeks with his servant (Peer-Pierre) in Paris, where he develops an insane love for everything French and disdain for anything Danish, Jean (Hans Frandsen) returns home to his betrothed (Elsebeth) who is in love with another (Antonius). Goaded into utterly fantastic displays of his peculiar foible by the lovers' disguised servants (Marthe-Madame la Flèche and Espen-d'Espang), whose motives, ostensibly, are to unite their masters, Jean makes a complete fool of himself. He loses his fiancée, is duped by Marthe-Madame la Flèche, and leaves Denmark.
A closer look at these comedies reveals that we are dealing in essence not only with two different types, but with essential compositional differences of dramatic structure, plot structure, treatment of theme and characters and methods of characterization. Holberg's Jean de France is a comedy of humors (or character) in which comic interest is derived principally from the exhibition of humorous characters; i.e., individuals whose conduct is governed entirely by a single characteristic of humor. This humor or highly exaggerated trait of character determines their disposition and supplies the motive for their actions. Thus, Jean runs the risk of losing all human semblance. Holberg allows the hero's obsession to assume the force of monomania by stretching his characterization far beyond normalcy (cf. III, 1; IV, 4, 5). In order to illustrate and establish his dramatic characters, Holberg's plot stresses action, the primary function of which is to exhibit various aspects of an individual's servitude to a single characteristic. The plot, therefore, is resolved by an elaborate intrigue in which disguised conventional servants à la commedia dell'arte devise a series of tricks, ostensibly to bring the virtuous lovers together, but which create situations displaying the folly of the “hero” to the fullest extent. Holberg's dramatic structure provided action and focused attention on his characters.
One of the results of making action an organic part of character portrayal is that the comedy rapidly assumes certain aspects of a farce, i.e., exaggerated and fantastic action, gross incongruities, coarse wit and a type of horseplay, which is unrelated to the play's dramatic purpose and meant primarily to excite laughter. These elements of farce create the informal, playful and ribald tone of Jean de France. Indeed, the comedy's hero, Jean, is a palpable bundle of Frenchified affections the embodiment of which is animated, much in the manner of a puppet, solely for purposes of spirited amusement. Not once is this “puppet” marred by a disharmonious thought, action, or even gesture. His antics increase in scope and intensity and finally drive him out of his humor. In a word, he is totally grotesque, a consummate image of his peculiar folly which, like a cartoon villain, has but one development—violent comic expulsion.
In the framework of Holberg's comedy there is no room for the treatment of characters who do not goad the hero into ludicrous displays of his mania. Consequently all of his characters are, in a sense, foils to Jean. The image of the central figure develops in two stages, from a static verbal description, given by one of the servants, to dynamic action in which this image is re-enforced. In this way, Holberg focuses and holds the audience's attention on a single comic hero, Jean, and a single theme, Gallomania.
Summing up briefly, it can be said that 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. 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. Holberg's play, on the contrary, does not focus on this aspect at all. It seems to me that the arguments advanced for the influence of Jean de France on The Brigadier were based primarily on extrinsic considerations and simply disregard some rather essential determinative criteria. Moreover, a borrowed theme per se, if this is indeed the case, is insufficient verification of influence. Any attempt to establish the extent, if any, of indirect influence, becomes, because of the very nature of the problem, an academic question.
In his criticism of The Brigadier, Viazemskii, the poet and critic, writes: “When reading Fonvizin, one often feels his shortcomings, but if one were to read what was written in comedy before or after him, one is amazed at his superiority.”16 His most influential predecessor was Sumarokov, whose comedies (twelve in all) were patterned on foreign models. Sumarokov touches upon themes and character types which were to become targets for satire throughout the latter half of this century. He satirized Gallomania, foppery, hypocrisy, bribery, the coarseness and ignorance of the petty gentry; he criticized bureaucracy, injustice, pseudo-learning, cruelty to serfs, greediness, etc. He was not, however, a particularly gifted comic writer and failed in one especially vital aspect of the genre, to provoke laughter. There is a monotonous sameness in his comedies and an exaggerated emphasis on moralizing, which turned his positive characters into caricatures without human configuration. Indeed, Sumarokov was not in the least concerned with verisimilitude in his comedies. For the most part his characters had either bizarre foreign names, e.g., in The Monsters (Chudovishchi), Barmas, Gudima, Intimena, or French ones, DuLiege. His heroes embody various vices but in a context of a superficially developed theme. The plots are primitive and highly circumscribed and the intrigues, weak and very conventional. In the hands of a more talented playwright, Sumarokov's themes, figures, even methods (he was the first to attempt to give characters individualized speech characteristics) sprang to life and assumed a vivid artistic form.
At the same time as Sumarokov was working on his theories of tragedy and comedy, i.e., his Epistle on Versification (Epistola o stikhotvorstve), a work inspired by the renowned manifesto of classical poetry, Boileau's L'Art poétique, new literary trends were flourishing in Europe—the sentimental drama or “tearful comedy” (comédie larmoyante) and the bourgeois drama or “serious comedy” (comédie sérieuse). The sentimental and/or bourgeois drama, a genre that freely mixed elements from tragedy and comedy, had originated in the English theater as a reaction to the tone and licentiousness of Restoration comedy. The Conscious Lovers (1722) by Richard Steele is the classic example of this type. The French stage was also influenced by the new drama of Steele and his followers. For example George Lillo's “domestic” (bourgeois) drama, George Barnwell, or The London Merchant (1731) and Edward Moore's The Gamester (1753) were translated and performed in Paris in 1748 and 1762. These comedies were weakly constructed and lacked humor; the middle-class heroes were either monumentally good or monumentally bad; plots were twisted to allow the triumph of virtue. But the playwrights found the audience responding enthusiastically even if tearfully to their evocation of emotions. The Russian adaptors of these dramas utilized the French versions which quite faithfully included all the sentimental elements while quite rigorously excluding the harshly realistic ones, and, as a consequence, France is the primary source for the ideas and models of the sentimental and bourgeois drama. In 1764, Lillo's drama is adapted from French into Russian under the title A London Merchant, or The Adventures of George Barnwell (Londonskii kupets, ili Prikliucheniia Georga Varnevalia). The following year Diderot's comedies Le Fils naturel (Pobochnyi syn) and Le Père de Famille (Chadoliubivyi otets) were translated. Other examples, some original, some adaptations, and some merely translations, of this genre follow in the seventies and eighties.17 In 1765, Lukin writes the first Russian sentimental comedy, The Prodigal Reformed by Love (Mot, liubov'iu ispravlennyi), in imitation of Destouches. However, the Russian version of the sentimental drama never attains the ideological and artistic level of its European counterpart and remains basically alien to Russian life.
By no stretch of the imagination can Fonvizin's comedy, The Brigadier, be considered a masterpiece of dramatic composition. It lacks action, the content is farfetched, there is little character development, and so forth. Nevertheless, The Brigadier is a valuable contribution to Russian dramaturgy, for it is the first successful depiction—completely free of foreign overtones—of Russian morals and manners. As a microcosm of Russian society, it has an air of freedom and an originality which captures the spirit of the time. For the first time on the Russian stage all the character types are clearly Russian, even their colloquial language accents this illusion. Fonvizin had taken a giant step forward in this regard. Lukin and his circle were primarily concerned with the external aspects of Russian life and, thus, changed place and personal names, clothing and speech patterns to suggest the Russian environment. Fonvizin, however, bases his depictions on ideas, patterns of thought, the complex interrelations peculiar to Russians and Russia alone to create his characters; they represent and are drawn from the “internal aspects” of the national character and in this sense the play marks the beginning of a purely national comedy, the first link in the chain leading to Gogol, Turgenev, Ostrovsky and Chekhov.
Approximately fifteen years separate The Minor from The Brigadier. Momentous years—for the literary artist unswervingly yielded to the political moralist. Rather than concentrate on his literary craft, labor to develop his artistic talent, and perfect his prose style, Fonvizin immersed himself in the political ferment of the era. His mind matured under the influence of new political and social concepts and an ideology crystallized; this particular synthesis was given expression in his own political treatises, letters, satirical articles, publicistic works and tales. But it is in comedy, specifically, The Minor and, later The Selection of a Tutor, that Fonvizin's views received expanded treatment. The theater seemed to him to be the ideal medium for airing, in dramatic form, his personal observations and thoughts on topical issues.
While ideology took precedence over artistic form, The Minor is not devoid of any artistic merit. The distinct Russian flavor, the remarkable satiric power, and creative depiction of certain indelible character types, all make it a landmark of eighteenth-century Russian comedy. Nevertheless it suffers considerably as a work of dramatic art because, in essence, Fonvizin was not concerned with dramatic creation but with moral sermons in the form of comedy. Given the essential purpose, it is not surprising that the many shortcomings of The Brigadier are repeated in The Minor: there is a marked lack of dramatic action, scenes are connected in an arbitrary manner, there are numerous contrived and highly improbable coincidences, a distinct artificiality of plot and denouement, and so on. These defects would not have bothered Fonvizin, so long as his message came through loud and clear for the theater was Fonvizin's pulpit, and comedy was his sermon. Like Diderot, Fonvizin was, above all a preacher of his own gospel, a sermonizer, who believed that the stage was a sanctuary for discussing the most important moral questions. A substantial portion of The Minor is devoted to these types of discussions, and, indeed, the play can be divided into two almost entirely independent levels, which, for purposes of analysis, will be referred to as: 1) the ideological-abstract; and 2) the demonstrative-dramatic. These levels of philosophizing never come into direct conflict with one another, but, in a complementary fashion, the latter functions as a graphic demonstration of the former.
Ideologically The Minor reflects the main stream of eighteenth-century thought, whose social and political aspects were, in part, shaped by the French Enlightenment. This is clearly illustrated if we take one of the comedy's ideological focal points, the concept of honor, and trace its derivation. Although Fonvizin does not follow one source exclusively, nevertheless, he seems to draw the basic distinction of meaning and essential methodology from Montesquieu, Duclos and Girard. In his famous and highly influential work, L'Esprit des lois, Montesquieu advances the concept that the principle of monarchial rule consists of honor. The nobility, the mainstay of the monarchy, supports this principle and fulfills the sovereign's will, becoming the custodian of this monarchial principle and embodying those qualities which add to the glory of the state. Honor, thus, becomes a basic and specific attribute of the nobility. But, as I have indicated above, Montesquieu sees the chief responsibility of the nobility in national military service, an idea which Fonvizin finds repugnant. However, he completely agrees with Montesquieu's concept of honor, utilizing it as the moral basis for the role of the nobility, for its obligations to the state, society and itself, and for determining personal qualities.
Whereas this particular concept was probably inspired by Montesquieu, it seems Fonvizin drew on the works of Charles Duclos, Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle and Abbé Gabriel Girard's Les Synonymes Français (which utilizes Duclos' work for the interpretation of the words probité, vertu and honneur), for the methodology employed in treating this and other concepts. Fonvizin employs a methodological device, an “anatomy of words” as Viazemskii termed it, to develop the dialogues between his positive characters, where words are dissected, analyzed and arranged in a hierarchy of moral priorities. The central and most important set of words are probity, virtue and honor. Fonvizin isolates and elevates honor as the essential concept of morality and as the fulcrum of all other virtues. Since his primary concern is to create a perception of man's highest quality, Fonvizin ignores the logical differentiation and distribution of the concepts involved and admits a logical incongruity. The specific concept, honor, is confused with the generic, virtue. For this reason, as Galakhov, a historian of Russian literature, points out, honor is never viewed as an aspect, an equal or subordinate of virtue or probity, but as something which towers above them.18 This interpretation reflects Fonvizin's own way of thought, to which he remained faithful in a number of works of the eighties, e.g., The Minor, An Experimental Dictionary of Russian Synonyms, The Life of Count N. I. Panin and Callisthenes, among others. As a result, honor in these later pages is an ideal of human moral perfection. Hence, the exemplary man is an honorable man. This concept is expounded by and embodied in Starodum who self-consciously refers to himself as “a friend of honorable people” (IV, 6). It is an indivisible quality which combines in itself other positive qualities and predominates even over intellect:
Why should one be proud of the mind … A mind if it is only a mind is a mere trifle. We see … bad fathers, bad citizens with extremely keen minds. Probity gives the mind real value. Without it an intelligent man is a monster … It is easy to pardon an intelligent man if he lacks some quality of mind. One can never pardon an honorable man if he lacks some quality of heart. He must have them all. The merit of a heart is indivisible. An honorable man must be a completely honorable man.
(IV, 2)
Consequently, this epithet is extended to Sophia in whom Starodum sees “the heart of an honorable person” (IV, 2), and Milon, toward whom, sight unseen, he is favorably disposed because his “sincere friend,” Milon's uncle, is “an honorable and worthy man” (IV, 4). Indeed, what could be more appropriate for both than the eponymous friend and uncle, Count Honorable (Chestan)!
This “cult of the honorable man” is so central to Fonvizin's Weltanschauung that, even after The Minor, it is continually re-introduced. Not only does he retain his hero and bestow this very title on his ill-fated journal, Starodum, or A Friend of Honorable People, but he creates a mirror image of Starodum in the hero of his “Greek tale,” Callisthenes. Both have a number of identical views, e.g., on the monarch, court, and courtiers, and share the same outstanding personal quality, honor. Thus, at the end of his tale, Fonvizin can refer to Callisthenes as “an honorable man.” In all of the above works the “honorable man” was a figment of fiction, an idealized image of moral perfection. However in the Life of Count N. I. Panin, Fonvizin transmutes it into a concrete example, but without success. This work assumes the form of a Vita and the author, like a devoted hagiographer, repeats many of the topoi of this genre and idealizes his hero. Upon Panin, therefore, is conferred the cognomen which epitomizes his life—“the honorable man.”
A number of other words from Girard's collection serve as material for conversation in the dialogues between Starodum, Pravdin and Sophia, e.g., station, rank/eminence, ignoble/base, animal/beast. The best example of the “anatomy-of-words” device is seen in the dissection of the synonyms valorous/brave19 in the scene between Starodum and Milon (IV, 6) where the former “tests” the latter's morality.
Fonvizin freely borrows from foreign sources some of the conversational material which he reweaves into the fabric of his own work. Starodum's speeches in particular make up, as it were, a literary mosaic with regards to their origins. His conversation with Pravdin about court life (III, 1) is borrowed partially from Charles Dufresny's Amusement sérieux et comiques, and partially from Jean La Bruyère's Caractères. His statement to Sophia whom he finds reading Fénelon's treatise on the education of young ladies:
I fear the present-day wise men on your account. I had the opportunity to read everything of theirs which has been translated into Russian. They, it's true, zealously root out prejudices, but at the same time they turn virtue from its roots …
(IV, 2)
paraphrases a thought expressed in the chapter on “sur l'éducation et sur les préjuges” from Duclos' work. Mrs. Prostakov's famous ridicule of geography (IV, 8) is taken from Voltaire's tale, Jeannot et Colin, and the conversation about “history” in the same scene can be traced to a similar scene in Destouches' comedy, La fausse Agnès ou le poète campagnard. However these borrowings or imitations should not cast any doubt on the originality of Fonvizin's comedy. Separate details do not determine the overall character of a work. Following an accepted and common literary practice of the era, Fonvizin mixes into a unique whole the best native and foreign ingredients, all of which provide fertile mixture for developing the underlying idea of his comedy—the necessary moral improvement of the nobility—and treating its principal theme, education.
Education was one of the central concerns of the men of the Enlightenment, in Russia as well as in Europe. In general, they looked upon education in most pragmatic terms, i.e., its purpose in all spheres of influence was to produce useful citizens. Since the theater was considered one of those spheres, it was to become a “national school” with dramatists as its teachers. Fonvizin, a representative exponent of the Russian Enlightenment, accepted this responsibility of the dramatist and of the theater, and, in this acceptance, the reader (and spectator) gains a measure of insight into the intense moral didacticism of his plays.
There is a certain sameness to Fonvizin's preachments from the proscenium, occasioned by his singular devotion to one obsessive theme: the efficacy of a proper education. It would have a good influence on the sovereign and serf, the noble and ignoble. For Fonvizin, a correct education did not mean simply the acquisition of knowledge or the cultivation of the intellect but something far more complex, the inculcation of virtue and the elevation of the soul. He firmly believed that the proper education of the citizenry and the monarch could and must transform the tenor of social and family life as represented by the Prostakovs and Skotinins, and, conversely, an improper education would only give rise to vices. Fonvizin handles this idea on two levels: 1) the abstract, where, like the shutter on a camera, the positive characters, headed by Starodum, regulate the light and perspective of this idea and produce an ideal picture; and 2) the dramatic, where it is realized in the actions of the negative characters, headed by Mrs. Prostakov, who parade the consequences of a faulty education. Indeed it is their ignorance that breeds evils. Ignorance is like a contagion which is noxious in itself but on the sickbed of serfdom grows malignant, infects morality and eventually kills or dehumanizes. Hence, the characteristics of Mrs. Prostakov and Skotinin and the system of Mitrofanushka's education have to be examined in the light of Fonvizin's view that ignorance is the immediate source of both personal and social vices, just as the reasons for their ignorance and wickedness have to be sought in the light of Starodum's statement: “It (education) must be a pledge of the state's welfare” (V, 1). In essence, all of Fonvizin's themes evolve out of his principal one. This educational pledge alone provides sufficient scope for criticizing the ignorant stratum of the nobility, the abuses of serfdom, the monarch, and glorifying the age of Peter the Great.
To dramatize the abysmal ignorance of certain sections of the nobility, Fonvizin takes aim at a particularly coarse serf-owning family. Mrs. Prostakov, née Skotinin, exemplifying all the deplorable results of a faulty education and an unwholesome environment, stands dead-center in his target. Her character was developed in and determined by the parental atmosphere in which she grew up and was “educated.” As opposed to Starodum whose father gave him an old-fashioned education which stressed honor (III, 1; IV, 6), Mrs. Prostakov had no formal education:
They (her parents) taught us nothing. Good-hearted people used to come to my sire, plead and plead so's he'd just send my little brother to school. What was the use … He used to start shouting: I'll curse the child who'll learn anything from those heathens, and he is not a Skotinin who'll want to learn anything …
(III, 5)
Her parents were not concerned with the proper education of their children, nor with the children themselves, who were left without the slightest supervision, and, as a result, sixteen of Mrs. Prostakov's brothers and sisters die. Like her father, she is illiterate, and like him, unscrupulous and miserly (IV, 8).
Unfortunately, the sins of the parents are visited upon their children. Lacking moral concepts, Mrs. Prostakov cannot possibly comprehend the educational needs of her son. What is worse, her undisciplined love causes her to indulge Mitrofanushka and intervene incessantly in his “home education.” Unable to understand the value or purpose of this training, she, nevertheless, hires tutors to fulfill her social obligation and, then, interferes in their teaching. In Mrs. Prostakov's view, her son's studies are either stupid (mathematics) or do not befit a nobleman (geography) or, “… that which Mitrofanushka don't know is, of course, nonsense” (IV, 8). Her ingrained hostility toward education is also reflected in her choice and treatment of her son's “educators.” She retains a former coachman, Vralman, as chief tutor, a man who could not teach anything and whose profound ignorance prevented Mitrofanushka from possibly learning something from his other uneducated peasant-teachers, Kuteikin and Tsyfirkin. However, Vralman had one particular virtue—he did free her son from studying so as not to coerce the sixteen-year old “child.” He, thus, gains Mrs. Prostakov's favor and respect, while the others, because they actually try to teach Mitrofanushka something, are abused.
In trying to protect her son from education, she allows the spectators to understand her basic hostility toward it. Mrs. Prostakov conceives it as a form of punishment visited upon youth (I, 6), just as she sees service to the country as punishment visited upon adulthood (IV, 8). She expresses this latter idea to Starodum, who does not attempt to refute it, for, it seems to me, an obvious reason. Starodum personifies an ideal and, as such, cannot carry on philosophical discourses on social obligations and responsibilities with the coarse and grotesque Mrs. Prostakov. The refutation might be lost in the buffoonery of such a dramatic confrontation and, consequently, Starodum counters her views in long tirades delivered directly to the other positive characters and the audience.
But it is the negative characters who dramatically portray the evils of a lack of education. The Prostakov household is in an unimaginably chaotic state. Reason and scruples have been replaced by oppression and abuse. Gross ignorance when coupled with the arbitrary power given the nobility over their serfs, serve to dehumanize both masters and slaves. On the one side you have inhuman monsters, beasts, on the other, helpless creatures. Mrs. Prostakov and Skotinin exemplify the perversion of this arbitrary power, and the former's exclamation, if “a nobleman is not free to flog a servant whenever he wishes, then why were we given the decree on the freedom of the nobility? …” (V, 4), has been accepted as the drama's essential idea by some critics. That the nobility are entirely free to work their will on the subordinate class, is considered by V. O. Kliuchevskii, an eminent historian, to be the major critique made by this drama. All that precedes is prologue, all that follows is epilogue.20 Although Mrs. Prostakov obviously has only a distorted idea of a nobleman's rights and absolutely no idea of what this decree is about, her remark “unwittingly” censures the government in its implication. She, evidently, is aware of the fact that the government supports the nobility and that the law is on her side, and, therefore, in her mind the government and the law justify her transgressions. But for Fonvizin the moralist, this must be clearly condemned and, consequently, he makes it obvious in the denouement that the Prostakovs are not worthy of belonging to the nobility. Fitting the punishment to the crime, their estate is confiscated.
From their privileged position, the Prostakovs and Skotinin look upon the serfs as inferior creatures worthy only of disdain, objects placed at their disposal to satisfy their basest whims. In one of the most successful devices of the drama, the landlords are cast in the image of their coarse ideas, their human images are effaced and become zoomorphic. A zoological relation exists between master and slave and, even, master and master. Indeed, the family's zoogenic characteristic—Skot (Beast) and Priplod (Breeding stock)—resounds in a number of variations throughout the entire comedy.21
Despite the very obvious attack upon serfdom and the farcical representation of its exponents, Fonvizin enters certain reservations. When Starodum says, “… it is unlawful to oppress (one's) fellow man with slavery …” (V, 1), by “oppression” is understood the abuse of a serf-owner's power. Fonvizin sees the evils of serfdom primarily in the inhumanity of Mrs. Prostakov rather than in the very essence, indeed, the institution itself. It is not a cry for the abolition of serfdom, as some researchers seem to think, nor is it a condemnation of it per se; it is a plea for more humane treatment of serfs which could be achieved through an enlightened nobility guided by an enlightened monarch. However, Catherine is not an enlightened monarch; on the contrary, she is an immoral despot who inspires the Prostakovs and, hence, promulgates the abuses of serfdom. This view echoes the convictions of the Panin group, and is aired in Starodum's pronouncements which directly and indirectly attack Catherine. It should be borne in mind that Fonvizin's “Discourse,” as well as in other works, holds the monarch responsible for the vices of his subjects and the abuses in his country:
He (the monarch) must know that the nation, by sacrificing a part of its natural freedom, entrusted its well being into his care, his justice, his merit; that he answers for the behavior of those to whom he entrusts the governing of affairs and that, consequently, their crimes become his crimes … He has to answer to the State not only for the evil which he commits, but for the good which he does not do. Each sufferance is his fault, each brutality is his fault, for he has to know that to indulge vice is to approve evil …
Consequently, when Starodum and Pravdin discuss the great monarch, his wisdom, and duties (V, 1), the implied criticism of Catherine is quite apparent since, obviously, this “great monarch” is not she. This critical view of Catherine puts Starodum's allegory about the court (III, 1) into proper perspective. What Fonvizin could not say directly was that the “court,” which Starodum metaphorically describes as someone incurably sick and infecting those with whom he comes into direct contact, is none other than Catherine herself.
The condemnation of Catherine and her society helps Fonvizin to postulate a “new” social ideal, cast not in the future but in the past. He turns to the age of Peter the Great and identifies his hero, appropriately named Starodum (Oldthought), with the great founder of the modern Russian state. Openly disavowing Catherine, who declared herself a follower of Peter and repeatedly emphasized the continuity and organic connection between her epoch and his, Fonvizin makes a sharp distinction between the two. Starodum's opening remarks (III, 1) play on the theme of “then” as opposed to “now,” “Then they still did not know how to corrupt men to such an extent that every man would consider himself the worth of many men. And nowadays many men are not worth one …” etc. In a way, however, Starodum contradicts what to this writer seems to be the basic contrast between the two sets of characters, viz., 1) embodiments of the old, benighted way of life; and 2) personifications of new, enlightened ideas. Fonvizin disapproved the frivolous assimilation by “educated” Russians of Western manners and Western vices; this led him, as if in compensation, to justify and even idealize Russia's past.
This moral and social philosophizing severely impedes the building of characterization. The Starodums and Milons, and to a lesser extent, the Prostakovs and Skotinins personify abstract moral and social concepts rather than human beings caught in the web of life. The comedy lacks a cohesive plot and, of necessity, degenerates into separate scenes arbitrarily connected. The plot, which can be defined as a struggle for the hand—and the money the hand controls—of Sophia, does not relate to any of the comedy's major themes (e.g., education, abuses of serfdom, etc.) and, as a result, seems to be superimposed. Consequently, the characters are not treated in depth, and their actions do not arise, organically, from the complications of plot. This schematism prompted Belinskii, one of the foremost Russian critics, to remark, “Its (The Minor) characters are either fools or intelligent people … ; the former are caricatures drawn with considerable talent, the latter are raisonneurs who bore you with their maxims.”22
Yet this schematism of characters serves Fonvizin's particular concerns: writing satire and moralizing. He is able to achieve both by placing fools opposite intelligent people, i.e., characters of the old caste opposite, for the most part, people of the new. Starodum, Pravdin, Sophia and Milon are, to be sure, very pale figures. They set the comedy's moral tone, illustrate the ideal moral life, and propagate the author's own ideas on honor, the duties of a nobleman, a wise monarch, education, and so forth. To varying degress they are all raisonneurs, who seem to exchange moral lessons with each other. Kliuchevskii aptly describes Sophia as a “freshly prepared doll of morality who still smells of the rawness of her pedagogic workshop.”23 Sophia is Fonvizin's ideal young lady. The dialogues between her and Starodum often follow a question-answer format which are designed partially to test her morality and partially to supply Starodum with subject matter to discuss. She speaks cleverly and acts virtuously; she emerges from these verbal encounters as an honorable, noble, sensitive, intelligent figure. Milon is the male carbon copy of Sophia and he, like Sophia, is also subjected to a similar dialogue-test with Starodum to establish his qualities. Fonvizin's endorsement of him as his ideal of a well-educated, honorable young man is registered, as can be expected, by Starodum's evaluation of him, “In your education I see … virtue adorned by an enlightened mind” (IV, 6).
Although Milon is a languishing lover, on the ideological plane he assumes greater importance. He represents the model product of a proper education whose aims are probity and the elevation of the virtuous soul (V, 1). Milon embodies these ideas of truthfulness and morality and demonstrates them in action. And, since Fonvizin draws his major characters in contrasting pairs, he also functions as a standard by which his opposite, Mitrofanushka, can be measured. Obviously the same can be said of Sophia vis-à-vis Mrs. Prostakov.
This propensity for satire and moralizing helps explain the incoherency of the play's action. Of the forty scenes, less than one third are integrally connected with the main plot. And the major reason for this peculiar statistic is the author's disproportionate concern with his acrimonious message. In order to illustrate it so that the Prostakovs of the audience would understand, he had to introduce many relatively static figures, raisonneurs. Sophia, Milon, Pravadin—who is otherwise an almost entirely superfluous character thrust on the scene by force and made the agent through which Mrs. Prostakov is punished—and Starodum fulfill this function and personify the author's ideal positive heroes.
Of these characters, the chief raisonneur and ideological hero of Fonvizin's drama is, of course, Starodum, who comments on what takes place in the course of the drama, expresses what the spectators should feel and concludes the performance with his moral lesson. He is abstract, vague, involved in the realm of ideas with little flesh and blood. In his abstraction and rectitude, he has been compared to the chorus of an ancient Greek tragedy, whose intonative sermonizing served the same function, but, for the most part, in finer poetry. But it is not the will of the Greek Gods that is here intoned, but the will of Fonvizin himself. All his pet subjects would eventually find their way into his dramas, indeed, there is no distance between the author and his creation. Just as Fonvizin himself played the role of Starodum in one performance of the play, so every succeeding actor, cast in the same role, echoed Fonvizin's essential ideas and belief.
The central figure is clearly Mrs. Prostakov who alone shapes the entire dramatic action. She is the consummate image of a coarse and rapacious “noble-woman,” who, through her own moral depravity and diabolical temper, brings misfortune to her entire household. She gives free rein to her tongue and hands, and demands unquestioning obedience both from her social inferiors and equals. She despises education and abhors science. She has turned her husband into a cringing flunky and her son into an egoistic bully. A perversion of all the matriarchal ideals, she lives in lonely splendor in this house and so dominates the household that all others become depersonalized in her presence. When Skotinin, Mr. Prostakov, and Mitrofanushka are asked to identify themselves by Starodum, they reply, “my sister's brother … my wife's husband … momma'a boy” (III, 5). Obviously, this coordination of all vices in one personality resembles a caricature, but nevertheless, she appears to the spectators as a repulsive, frightening social phenomenon not uncommon to “real” life. As the gravity of her vices increases, the comic elements in the play decrease. She stands on the border between comedy and tragedy. Although a negative figure, at times, even an inhumane monster, she nevertheless communicates a maternal pathos, maternal feelings, a bit of humanity in the welter of cruelty, and, consequently, she evokes our compassion. The moment this occurs, she herself becomes a victim. Disgraced, disenfranchised and divested of her power, she turns to her son as her last and only consolation, but only to be rebuffed. The monster is forgotten; her wickedness, even her disdain of the ideal heroes who rush to her aid slip our memory; she is now a frail human being, a tragic figure, victimized by her environment. Who is to blame then for the Mrs. Prostakovs? Fonvizin's answer is unequivocal; it is an interrelated series of faults: the old way of life, the negative environment, ignorance, immorality, serfdom, the decrees, abuses,the government, the monarch.
Of the remaining “dramatic” characters, Mr. Prostakov is quite superfluous. He passes like a shadow from one act to another but does not participate in the action or is he in any way connected with it. He is a tool in the hands of his wife, just as Pravdin is a tool in the hands of higher authorities. Skotinin, on the other hand, is the male counterpart of Mrs. Prostakov. He was “educated” in the same environment as she and is therefore equally coarse, cruel and ignorant. Mrs. Prostakov has, at least, some vestige of humanity, while he is totally porcine, a caricature.
This is not completely true of Mitrofanushka. He is both the cause of Mrs. Prostakov's excessive zeal and the culmination of her despotism. At the age of sixteen, he is already generously endowed with all the negative qualities the noxious environment and the nefarious example of his mother could provide. The only things that interest him are food and dovecotes; in all other respects, “… he has already achieved the final degree of his accomplishments and he will go no further” (II, 2). However as Sophia and Milon before him, Mitrofanushka is also subjected to an examination-dialogue by Starodum and Pravdin, and, contrary to the previous examinations, it is an ideological antithesis, the express purpose of which is to underscore Mitrofanushka's ignorance. He exemplifies his mother's ideals, has the same disdain for education, and the same attitude toward duty. He is just as coarse as she in his treatment of the serfs (cf. to Eremeevna, II, 4; to Tsyfirkin, III, 6) and reveals the same monstrous signs of tyranny (V, 3). In Mitrofanushka, however, Mrs. Prostakov had sown the seeds of her own destruction. In creating an immoral, egoistic bully, she has destroyed the firm ground of mutual devotion. His “love” for her is the love of an egoist, expressed only by the blind satisfaction of his whims. And at the moment when she cries for his love to sustain her, he rudely abandons her.
The other secondary characters, Kuteikin, Tsyfirkin and, especially Vralman, are simply caricatures. Kuteikin and Tsyfirkin represent the quality of eighteenth-century Russian domestic “education,” which was usually handled by either ignorant clergymen, whose educational tools were the prayer-book and psalter, or peasants with some common sense. Both are strongly reminiscent in a way of characters from folk satires: witty soldiers who made dupes out of their masters by proving to be more intelligent than they, and greedy clerics (“priestlings”) who were parodied and ridiculed for their foolishness. No less a part of their folk origin is the scuffling they engage in with Vralman, their “educational” rival (cf. III, 9). Vralman parodies the fashionable foreign “tutor.” A sham educator, he passes off his ignorance as knowledge by cloaking it in his heavy foreign accent. Trishka, “the tailor in spite of himself,” is an episodic figure. He appears only briefly in the opening scenes and seems to set the stage for developing the idea that the abuses of serfdom are in part caused by giving landowners unlimited power over their serfs. Although he had sewn Mitrofanushka's coat quite well, Mrs. Prostakov peevishly criticizes his work simply to exercise her power. In Eremeevna, Mitrofanushka's elderly nurse, Fonvizin attempts to show how bondage destroys man's dignity. Eremeevna is not only a slave in social status, she has also become a slave in spirit. She has a dog-like attachment toward Mitrofanushka, for whom she is constantly beaten and abused. No matter how she tries to please her masters, her reward is always the same: humiliation, and she becomes a pitiful figure despite her personal shortcomings. But she has distinct human dimensions which was a rather democratic view of a serf for that time.
Given Fonvizin's tendentiousness, it is not surprising that the majority of the principal characters in The Minor, are, in many respects, ideational developments of character types from The Brigadier. Mr. Prostakov is a male Brigadier's wife, Skotinin is the Brigadier carried to a logical conclusion, Mitrofanushka is very similar to Ivanushka, and so forth. The only entirely new creation is Mrs. Prostakov. Furthermore, like the characters in The Brigadier, those in The Minor are, for the most part, given individual speech characteristics. The negative characters, speak a colloquial language, i.e., one which is marked by sub-standard words, expressions, turns of speech and numerous particles, proverbs and sayings. Mrs. Prostakov's speech is especially coarse and liberally sprinkled with terms of abuse which are expressed in curt, imperious phrases. Mitrofanushka's speech is similar to his mother's, while Skotinin's is primitive and very laconic and, as opposed to Mrs. Prostakov whose speech at times shows what the critic K. V. Pigarev terms “a gloss of worldliness,” i.e., occasional Gallicisms, is completely devoid of Gallicisms. The positive characters speak the literary language. It is logically well-rounded speech, marked by bookish phrases and Gallicisms, and a lack of folk proverbs and sayings. Whereas an abundance of Gallicisms is found in Pravdin's speech, Starodum's is smooth, well-polished and bookish, marked by a number of aphorisms which he infers from his own experiences. The language of both Milon and Sophia is not individualized. The language of the secondary characters is stylized and individualized, i.e., Kuteikin's speech is marked by Slavonicisms and biblical quotes, whereas Tsyfirkin's is marked by army slang and military terms, and Vralman's is highly distorted and corrupted “Russian.” Eremeevna speaks the folk language, which is elliptic, substandard, and very colloquial.
The Minor, like The Brigadier, contains the standard five acts and follows, more or less, the principles of neo-classicism in its observance of the unities of time, place and action. The latter unity is somewhat marred in The Minor by extraneous scenes, those which do not contribute to the struggle for the hand of Sophia, e.g., the opening scene with Trishka or the scuffling of the teachers. On the other hand, the strict observance of the other unities creates artificial concurrences and improbable coincidences. If we examine the unity of time, the one most frequently observed, we see the incongruities imposed on the author. Starodum, for example, has been missing for several years but suddenly, his letter arrives, to be followed, within several minutes, by the old moralist himself.
Unlike The Brigadier, The Minor is not entirely a comedy. Indeed, it repeatedly violates one of the basic canons of classical comedy, the mixture in one work of elements from both comedy and tragedy. There are more serious, bitterly satiric elements in The Minor than humorous ones. It seems in this work Fonvizin was influenced by the sentimental drama as represented in the works of Diderot, Mercier and Sedaine. The influence of this genre can be seen in his introduction of numerous didactic elements; his preponderant concern with moralizing; the numerous ideal heroes, raisonneurs who personify civil virtues; the dramatic treatment of Mrs. Prostakov; tragic character(s); and even a tragic situation, the kidnap-attempt of Sophia. It need hardly be mentioned that the entire final scene of the play is as if lifted out of a sentimental drama. Hence, there are two confluent literary currents feeding The Minor which, as such, constitutes a mixed genre, perhaps, as Gukovskii has suggested, half-comedy, half-drama.
In Fonvizin's unfinished plays, A Good Mentor and The Selection of a Tutor, he returns to the problem which occupied a central place in his major works, the education, or more precisely, the faulty education of young noblemen. A very short fragment exists of the first of these comedies, A Good Mentor. The content of this fragment has absolutely nothing in common with its title, but it does have some relation to its reworked epistolary variant, “A Conversation at Princess Khaldina's Home,” where mention is made of Sorvantsov's ignorant, “empty-headed” French tutor, Chevalier Kakadu, who taught him nothing but “a hatred for (his) country, disdain for everything Russian and a love for the French.” This is a direct echo of Ivanushka's French coachman (Brig., V, 2) who, like Kakadu, was responsible for corrupting a young nobleman, and forerunner to Pelikan in The Selection of a Tutor (III, 7). However A Good Mentor echoes one of the central ideas in The Minor, the improper understanding of the word duty. It seems clear from Sorvantsov's biography, that his parents' false sense of duty—each year they bribed the regimental commander so as to gain rank for their son—was not wasted on him. This distorted sense of duty, coupled with ignorance and vanity, determine his one ambition: to ride around with a team of six horses. Fonvizin's treatment of him is at once condemnatory and accusatory. As a judge, Sorvantsov (Devil-may-care) is heedless and indifferent; as a serf-owner, he is inhumane.
Fonvizin's last comedy, The Selection of a Tutor, is dramatically weak and cannot be compared favorably with either The Brigadier, or The Minor, or even “A Conversation at Princess Khaldina's Home.” To a considerable degree the author seems to be imitating himself, but doing so quite badly. The impression one gains is of a very rough initial draft, perhaps serving as a basis in part for The Brigadier, in part for The Minor. It lacks the wit of these plays while it shares their shortcomings. The comedy is entirely static; it has neither action nor live personages. From a moral and ideological standpoint, Fonvizin adheres faithfully to his previous position. Of interest, however, are his views on the French Revolution delivered through his raisonneurs, Seum and Nelstetsov. What becomes indisputably clear, contrary to the opinion of a number of contemporary critics, is that Fonvizin is not and probably never was a “revolutionary” democrat, nor was he for the “immediate” (if at any time at all) abolition of serfdom. He firmly believed in a distinct separation of social classes, that “… one part of the subjects will always have to sacrifice for another” (III, 5), and, although enlightened, was still somewhat of a bourgeois nobleman.
Fonvizin was never able to integrate his ideology into his drama, nor was he able to master the complexities of his craft. Despite these deficiencies, his plays, especially his masterpieces, The Brigadier and The Minor, are cornerstones of the vast edifice of the Russian national comedy, and their themes, techniques, characters and dramatic devices were used constructively by several generations of Russian playwrights. Sumarokov, his most famous predecessor, had found inspiration in foreign sources, Racine, Molière, Voltaire; Fonvizin, steeped in the Russian tradition and culture, looked homeward for his inspiration and, if he did not find “angels,” he found native devils to set before his audience. Mitrofanushka became a synonym for the doltish nobleman created by the serf system and he reappeared in a variety of other names but all related to Fonvizin's prototype.24 It is the same with the caricature of the serf tutors and nannies who, despite their various guises in the plays of other writers, are unmistakenly Fonvizin originals. More important than this imitation of character, was the imitation of central purpose of Fonvizin: the success of a play lies in the transmission of the playwright's ideological message. He stood at a bloody point of conflict with a vicious system and waged incessant war. The play was his weapon and the ignorance and abuses of Catherine's regime, its target. It is the tendentiousness, the social responsibility that is inherited by later, and greater writers. The Griboyedovs, Gogols, Ostrovskys of the nineteenth century took up the gage and continued the struggle. Gorky, attempting to summarize the contribution of Fonvizin to Russian literature, singled out his social idealism which permeates almost everything he wrote, and concluded that Fonzivin opened the road that led through “Pushkin, Shchedrin, Lermontov, Pisemsky, Sleptsov, G. Uspenskii—up to Chekhov.”25
Notes
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The epitaph on Fonvizin's grave reads: “… born April 3, 1745, died December 1, 1792, he lived 48 years, 7 months, 28 days.” By subtracting 48 from the year of his death, which is certain, his year of birth would be 1744. However several scholars, A. N. Pypin and P. N. Berkov, argue that this inscription is inaccurate and, on the basis of certain statement in A Candid Confession, date his year of birth as 1743.
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Two important translations belong to this period of Fonvizin's life. The first is Abbé Terrasson's voluminous political-didactic novel Séthos, which Fonvizin translated from the German under the title, Heroic Virtue, or The Life of Seth, The Egyptian Emperor (Geroiskaia dobrodetel' ili zhizn' Sifa, tsaria Egipetskogo). It is published in four volumes, the first in 1762, the remaining numbers in 1763, 1764 and 1768. Ideologically, Terrasson's work was probably written in imitation of Fénelon's Télémaque and John Barclay's Argenis. It treats the theme of political morality, a bold and novel theme at that time and one which was especially attractive to the French philosophers. The second work is a translation in verse of Voltaire's tragedy, Alzire, ou les Américains. The great Frenchman's anti-clerical work, Alzira or The Americans (Al'zira ili amerikantsy), is completed in 1762-63 and becomes widely known through manuscripts circulating in Petersburg. Fonvizin's translation is not a success; his lines are heavy, there are unnecessary Slavonicisms, imperfect rhymes, an abundance of verbal rhymes and some rather elementary errors. It becomes the object of a satiric epistle written by A. S. Khvostov which ridicules Fonvizin's abilities as a poet and translator of French. It is published for the first time in 1888.
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D. D. Blagoi, Istoriia russkoi literatury XVIII veka (History of XVIII Century Russian Literature), (Moscow, 1946), p. 230.
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The opposition received ideological support from Novikov's journal, The Drone (Truten'). Ironically, this journal owed its appearance to Catherine herself. In January 1769, she published the first Russian satirical journal Hodgepodge (Vsiakaia Vsiachina), and invited other writers to follow her example for the sake of bringing the Enlightenment to Russia. The Drone immediately entered into a polemic with Hodgepodge. Novikov's views were echoed in other satirical journals, et. al., F. Emin's Miscellany (Smes'), which proliferate in great number. By 1775, they are all prohibited.
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G. P. Makogonenko, Denis Fonvizin (Moscow-Leningrad, 1961), p. 172-174.
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The reason for this difference is quite clear. From the outset the letters to Peter Panin were intended for publication as a separate work. Fonvizin's plans for his ill-fated collected works (1788) included an item entitled, Notes from a First Journey (Zapiski pervogo puteshestviia). This “first journey” is his trip to France, while the “notes” seem to be his letters to Peter Panin. They remain unpublished until after Fonvizin's death.
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This “Discourse” is also known inaccurately as “Discourse on the Destruction in Russia of Every Form of State Government and on the Resultant Instable Position Both of the Empire and the Rulers Themselves” (“Rassuzhdenie o istrebivsheisia v Rossii sovsem vsiakoi formy gosudarstvennogo pravleniia i ot togo o zyblemom sostoianii kak imperii, tak i samikh gosudarei”) and Panin's Testament (Zaveshchanie Panina).
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It should be noted that this work is also known by the title under which Catherine published it, viz., “Questions to the Author of ‘Facts and Fictions’” (Voprosy sochiniteliu “Bylei i nebylits”).
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“Several Questions” were followed by “To the Author of ‘Facts and Fictions’ from the author of ‘Questions’” (K g. sochiniteliu “Bylei i nebylits” ot sochinitelia “Voprosov”), which in its deceptively respectful and disarmingly repentant tone achieved its principal aim—revealing to the reading public who the real author of “Facts and Fictions” was; and The Narrative of a Feigned Deaf-Mute (Povestvovanie mnimogo glukhogo i nemogo). Though rather contrived, the hero (narrator) pretends to be a deaf-mute so that people would have no fear of revealing their true selves before such an innocuous witness; The Narrative is an interesting work, which, in a way, brings N. V. Gogol's famous Dead Souls to mind. Fonvizin uses the “deaf-mute's” travels around Russia as a pretext for satirizing different types of provincial landowners and exposing their ignorance and barbarity. Here we find variations of Skotinin and Mrs. Prostakov, e.g., the retired major Shchelchkov (Rapper), a huge, stupid, drunken brute whose favorite pastime is standing the strongest of his peasants on their knees and rapping them on the brow, etc.
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For example:
Q. What kind of people usually make up the court?
A. Voiced and Voiceless.
Q. How many Voiced are there at Court?
A. Usually few: three, four, seldom five. [This is a direct allusion to Catherine's favorites.]
Q. What kind of division of word are observed at Court?
A. Usually the words are: monosyllabic, disyllabic, trisyllabic and polysyllabic. Monosyllabic: yes, serf, lord; disyllabic: power, favor, fallen [This is an unequivocal innuendo about the stages in the turnover of Catherine's “nocturnal Emperors”]; trisyllabic: merciful, bestowal, gratify; polysyllabic: Excellency.
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There are differences of opinion as to when this novella was written. Some investigators believe Fonvizin wrote Callisthenes during the seventies, while others say in the spring of 1786, i.e. after the initial effects of the paralysis had worn off to some degree. Whenever, it does not become well known because it appeared amid scholarly discourses in the academic journal, New Monthly Works (Novye ezhemesiachnye sochineniia).
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Following this method, Lukin prepares Constancy Rewarded (Nagrazhdennoe postoianstvo) from Campistron's L'amante amant, The Twaddler (Pustomelia) from Boissy's Le Babillard, The Trinket Vendor (Shchepetil'nik) from the French translation, Boutique de bijoutier, of Dodsley's Toy-Shop; El'chaninov prepares Virtue Rewarded (Nagrazhdennaia dobrodetel') from Voltaire's L'Écossaise; Fonvizin prepares Korion from Gresset's Sidney; and Elagin prepares Jean de Mole or A Russian Frenchman (Zhan de Mole ili Russkii frantsuz) from Holberg's Jean de France or Hans Frandsen.
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This manuscript was first mentioned in P. N. Polevoi's Istoriia russkoi slovesnosti s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei (History of Russian Literature from Antiquity to Our Times), (St. Petersburg, 1900), II, p. 128. Most investigators believe that it is Fonvizin's work, but attempts to date it has brought about different conclusions. G. A. Gukovskii, Russkaia literatura XVIII veka (Russian Literature of the XVIII Century), (Moscow, 1939), p. 325; and P. N. Berkov, “Teatr Fonvizina i russkaia kul'tura” (Fonvizin's Theater and Russian Culture), Russkie klassiki i teatr (Russian Classics and the Theater), (Moscow-Leningrad, 1947), p. 7, set the date as 1764. V. N. Vsevolodskii-Gerngross, Fonvizin-Dramaturg (Fonvizin The Dramatist), (Moscow, 1960), p. 20, sets the date as 1762. On the other hand, K. V. Pigarev, Tvorchestvo Fonvizina (Fonvizin's Works), (Moscow, 1954), p. 281-284, does not believe that the so-called “early variant” of The Minor was written by Fonvizin, but that this is the work of some imitator who wrote it after the appearance of The Minor in the eighties.
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Somewhat immodestly, Fonvizin's paragon seems to be modeled on himself. There are a number of “coincidences” in the biographies of Milovid and the author. To name a few: Both complete their education at approximately the same age (17), study similar curricula, are promoted in the military service as result of outstanding scholarship, enjoy the pleasures of Petersburg society after graduation and frequent circles of intelligent people. Beside these, there are other parallels with Fonvizin's life. By acquainting oneself with A Candid Confession, it is possible to infer that Dobromyslov is based on the author's father, Fedul on Shumilov, and Mit'ka on his namesake, a family servant.
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In support of influence see, A. N. Veselovskii, Zapadnoe vliianie v novoi russkoi literature (Western Influence on New Russian Literature), (Moscow, 1883), p. 50, 72-75; N. S. Tikhonravov, Materialy dlia polnogo sobraniia sochinenii D. I. Fonvizina (Material For a Complete Collection of the Works of D. I. Fonvizin), (St. Petersburg, 1894), p. vi-vii; B. Varneke, Istoriia russkogo teatra XVII-XIX vekov (History of the Russian Theater from XVII-XIX Centuries), (Moscow-Leningrad, 1939), p. 116; A. Stender-Petersen, “Holberg og den Komedie i det 18de arhundrede” (Holberg and Comedy of the Eighteenth Century), Holberg Aarbog (The Holberg Yearbook), (Copenhagen, 1923), p. 100-151; Ibid., 1924, p. 142-187; Ibid., 1925, p. 93-112; and D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature (New York, 1958), p. 55. A lack of influence is cited declaratively in the works of G. A. Gukovskii, op.cit., p. 353 and D. Blagoi, Fonvizin (Moscow, 1945), p. 75, et. al., without any corroborative comparative analysis.
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Prince P. Viazemskii, Fon-Vizin (St. Petersburg, 1848), p. 204.
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Beaumarchais' Eugénie (Evgeniia) is published and staged in Moscow in 1770. Later works by Mercier (Jenneval, 1778, Le Faux ami, 1779, Le Déserteur, 1784), Saurin (Béverlei, 1778), and Lessing (Miss Sara Sampson, 1788, Emilia Galotti, 1789) are translated.
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A. Galakhov, “Ideal nravstvennogo dostoinstva cheloveka po poniatii Fonvizina” (The Ideal of Man's Moral Quality in Fonvizin's Conception), V. Pokrovskii, Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin, Ego zhizn' i tvorchestva (Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin, His Life and Works), (Moscow, 1905), p. 68-72.
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According to Gukovskii, op.cit., p. 353, the discussion of these two synonyms was not borrowed from Girard but from Turpin de Crissé's Essai sur l'art de la guerre.
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V. O. Kliuchevskii, “Nedorosl' Fonvizina. Opyt istoricheskogo ob''iasneniia uchebnoi p'esy” (Fonvizin's The Minor. An Attempt at an Historical Explanation of an Educational Play), P. E. Shames, ed., Fonvizin v russkoi kritike (Fonvizin in Russian Criticism), (Moscow, 1958), p. 123.
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For example Mrs. Prostakov's image is variously associated with a dog; she yelps, and is a bitch who will not give up her puppies (III, 3), while Skotinin's is associated with pigs; he loves only pigs, and does not need a wife but a “good pig” (II, 3), etc. Indeed he traces the antiquity of his family line back to the sixth day of creation (IV, 7), the day, according to the Bible (“Genesis”), on which God created cattle.
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As quoted in P. E. Shames, ed., op.cit., p. 81.
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V. O. Kliuchevskii, op.cit., p. 118.
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For example, Kropotov's Fomushka, Granny's Boy (Fomushka, babushkin vnuchek, 1785); Kop'ev's The Misanthrope Converted (Obrashchennyi mizantrop, 1794); and Gorochaninov's Mitrofanushka in Retirement (Mitrofanushka v otstavke, 1800).
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As quoted in P. E. Shames, ed., op.cit., p. 100.
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Fonvizin and Holberg: A Comparison of The Brigadier and Jean de France
Fonvizin's Nedorosl' as a Russian Representative of the genre sérieux.
