[In the following essay, Barran argues that The Minor is indebted to key ideas about politics, ethics, and social customs set forth in French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile.]

Many scholars of eighteenth-century Russian literature dismiss the possibility that Rousseau's ideas exerted any influence on the work of Denis Fonvizin.¹ They argue that Fonvizin rejected Rousseau's belief in man's primal innocence, along with the political ideal of popular sovereignty set forth in The Social Contract. While it may be true that Fonvizin disagreed with these beliefs, this does not mean that he rejected Rousseau's thought in its entirety. The innocent savage and the ideal democracy represent only the ahistorical beginning and end points of Rousseau's philosophy of man, and it is not necessary to accept Rousseau's speculations about human origins, or his vision of a pure democracy based on a social contract in order to endorse what he had to say about man in history. A close reading of Fonvizin's comedy The Minor (Nedorosl', 1782) reveals that whatever Fonvizin's attitude may have been towards Rousseau's Discourses and The Social Contract, he found much wisdom in the observations on contemporary politics, ethics, social customs and language that Rousseau set forth in Books IV and V of Emile.

Emile offered a corrective for the directions of Enlightenment thought which Fonvizin considered to be excessive. By the early 1770s, Fonvizin was already growing suspicious that the Enlightenment's emphasis on rationality, and its encouragement of learning for its own sake, rather than as a means to educate virtue, were undermining the moral character of Russian youth. He expressed such sentiments in a letter to Peter Panin, dated 6 April 1772:

In truth, gracious sir, it were better not to be educated at all than to be tutored in so perverse a fashion, as so many among us often are. We pay attention to the improvement of the intellect to the same extent that we neglect the betterment of the heart, failing to realize that a virtuous heart is the prime quality of a man, and that in it alone can one seek and find happiness in this life.²

Fonvizin's alarm that virtue was becoming a casualty of the Enlightenment's war on Ignorance increased when he made the acquaintance of several philosophes during his trip to Paris in 1778:

The D'Alemberts and Diderots are in their own way as much charlatans as those I see each day on the streets. Both deceive people for money, and the only difference between a charlatan and a philosphe is that the latter adds inconceivable vanity to his avarice.

(II, 481)

Fonvizin believed that a direct relationship exists between a writer's character and the ethical power of his writings. The lack of probity he personally observed among the philosophes robbed their works of whatever moral authority they may still have had in his estimation before his trip to Paris.

It was during his stay in Paris in 1778 that Fonvizin turned to Rousseau with a new enthusiasm, apparently realizing for the first time that Rousseau's writings expressed a disenchantment with the Enlightenment that was similar to his own.³Emile in particular, with its criticism of purely intellectual learning and insistence that virtue is the only proper goal of education, addressed the same faults in the Enlightenment approach to learning that troubled Fonvizin. Rousseau's reputed moral integrity added credibility to his works: although Fonvizin never met him, he was nonetheless convinced that Rousseau was “the most honorable and estimable of all the Messrs. Philosophes of the present age” (II, 452).

In the years that passed between Fonvizin's return from France and the completion of The Minor in 1782, Fonvizin assimilated Books IV and V of Emile to such an extent that many of Rousseau's arguments and recommendations reappear in Fonvizin's comedy in the moral pronouncements of the raisonneur Starodum. Fonvizin took no pains to conceal his debt to Rousseau, for there are several superficial similarities between Emile and The Minor that would suggest an association to the perspicacious reader: the names of the pairs of lovers are similar (Sofya-Sophie, Emile-Milon); Fonvizin's Sofya reads Fénelon's Traité de l'education des filles, the mention of which elicits Starodum's praise for Fénelon's famous Télémaque, which happens to be the very work that so captivates Rousseau's Sophie in Emile. There is also a similar arrangement of characters in each work, according to which a pair of young lovers is betrothed under the auspices of an older tutor figure. The deeper similarities which exist between the two works will be discussed in detail below: they focus on the proper role the virtuous citizen should play vis à vis a corrupt government, the disadvantages of parentally-arranged marriages, the importance of absolute sincerity in interpersonal communication, and the insistence that all people have free will when making moral choices, and bear full ethical responsibility for their actions.

Both Rousseau and Fonvizin faced the problem of defining the proper way of life for the citizen who lives under a corrupt government—of finding some middle stance between active state service and exile or rebellion. Both resolved this problem by defining a virtuous private manner of life which would quit the citizen of his patriotic obligations, but would not compromise his principles by requiring him to serve rulers and statesmen who are his moral inferiors. Emile was one of the first attempts to establish philosophically private life as a patriotically valid alternative to state service. Roger D. Masters writes:

The project of the Emile must be seen in this perspective, for it opens up a third practical alternative—private life in the family—and gives it a status that the nonphilosophic retreat from political life did not have in classic, and especially Platonic, philosophy. … In the name of a return to nature, Rousseau thus gives all men—not merely philosophers—a claim against political life when it ceases to be legitimate.⁴

Emile's contribution to the welfare of his state will be his virtuous life itself, lived far from the urban centers of government, and close to nature. As Emile's tutor tells him, “I do not exhort you to live in a town; on the contrary, one of the examples which the good should give to others is that of a patriarchal, rural life, the earliest life of man, the most peaceful, the most natural, and the most attractive to the uncorrupted heart.”⁵ This does not mean that Emile has the right to refuse an appeal from the state, should it need his services:

… the Romans sometimes left the plough to become consul. If the prince or the state calls you to the service of your country, leave all to fulfill the honorable duties of a citizen in the post assigned to you. If you find that duty onerous, there is a sure and honorable means of escaping from it; do your duty so honestly that it will not long be left in your hands. Moreover, you need not fear the difficulties of such a test; while there are men of our own time, they will not summon you to serve the state.

(Book V, p. 439)

Rousseau saw most European governments of his time as corrupt, and felt that the self-seekers who wielded power would not call someone as virtuous as Emile to state service—Emile would serve the state with disinterested patriotic zeal, making them look bad by contrast, and perhaps threatening their opportunities to profit from abuses of their power.

Fonvizin also sanctions the renunciation of service to a corrupt government, even though his critique of governmental injustice is not as radical as Rousseau's, and condemns only the abuses of unrestrained absolutism. In The Minor, Starodum asserts that an individual has the right to retire if he is “inwardly convinced that his service is of no direct usefulness to the fatherland” (II, 131).⁶ Starodum cites his own career as an example: after serving at the St. Petersburg court for several years, he decided that his services were of no benefit to the state, and that it would be better to “lead my life in my own home rather than in someone else's anteroom” (II, 132). He abandoned the capital, convinced that the presence of a man of his high principles at court was as useless as that of a doctor at the bedside of an incurably ill person: “The doctor won't help, and may get infected himself” (II, 133). It is clear from Starodum's terse observations that Fonvizin is working towards the same position as Rousseau outlined in Emile—a philosophical justification of the life of the private citizen, withdrawn from the workings of a corrupt government. Starodum's contribution to his fatherland in private life is only slightly different from that which Emile's tutor urges upon him: Fonvizin has Starodum work in Siberia, developing Russia's vast natural resources. Fonvizin applies Rousseau's argument by suggesting that Starodum's life away from the capital was not only more virtuous than his service, but also more natural; as Starodum tells it:

… I decided to leave for several years to that land where money is earned not in exchange for conscience, not in recompense for base servitude, and not by robbing the fatherland; where money is pressed from the earth itself, which, more just than people, knows no favoritism, but pays diligence alone. … But you know, for the whim of a single individual, all of Siberia may be too small. All, my friend, rests in the imagination. Follow nature and you'll never be poor. Follow popular opinions and you'll never be rich.

(I, 134)

In at least this one area there is a shared political view between Rousseau and Fonvizin: both give the individual the authority to protest governmental corruption and injustice by refusing his active participation. Many scholars have overlooked this similarity between Rousseau and Fonvizin because they erroneously consider Rousseau to be a revolutionary whose political thought was entirely unacceptable to Fonvizin. Rousseau does not advocate revolution as a way of achieving an ideal state, and in Emile at least, as evidenced by the passages quoted earlier, he is interested in reconciling free private life with the demands of government, illegitimate though it be, while the ideal state does not yet exist.⁷ To be sure, there are fundamental differences between the political views of Rousseau and Fonvizin: Rousseau questions the legitimacy of any government not founded upon a social contract and governed by the general will of its members, while Fonvizin seems to favor a constitutional monarchy and objects only to absolutism that is unrestrained by a codified body of laws.⁸ Both, however, see the retreat to private life as an alternative to two undesirable extremes—either serving a corrupt regime and thereby becoming an accomplice to its injustice, or opposing the state by revolution. The virtuous private life offers a citizen the possibility of remaining loyal to the ideal of his state while the state itself is being managed unjustly. Such an alternative must have appealed to Fonvizin at a time when he could not have countenanced the court favorites and despotism of Catherine II, yet when he would also have been repelled by the idea of rebellion or civil war, especially with the horrors of the Pugachev uprising still fresh in mind.

Consistent with their desire to offer private familial life as an alternative to state service, Rousseau and Fonvizin were concerned with making the family as stable an institution as possible, and for this reason condemned the practice of parentally-arranged marriages. They felt that conjugal love cements the family and keeps it virtuous, and that such love is more likely to endure in marriages where the partners have chosen one another. Parental choice of a spouse was all too often based on what a match could offer by way of economic betterment or social advancement, and rarely were the merits of the intended or the feelings between the pair taken into account.

Rousseau's advocacy of free marital choice is but one aspect of his overall contention that the virtuous life must be based on human emotions, and be consistent with the laws of nature. We read in Emile:

Husband and wife should choose each other. A mutual liking should be the first bond between them. They should follow the guidance of their own eyes and hearts; when they are married their first duty will be to love one another, and as love and hatred do not depend on ourselves, this duty brings another with it, and they must begin to love each other before marriage. That is the law of nature, and no power can abrogate it; those who have fettered it by so many legal restrictions have given heed rather to the outward show of order than to the happiness of marriage or the morals of the citizen.

(Book V, p. 363)

According to Rousseau, the affective bond is clearly the essential ingredient for a stable marriage. The affections are the most important considerations in the choice of a marriage partner, and only the prospective bride and groom can truly know them. Rousseau expresses his ideas on free marital choice in Book V of Emile by putting his opinions in the mouth of Sophie's father, who directly addresses her and declares her rights:

I propose a treaty between us which shows our esteem for you, and restores the order of nature between us. Parents choose a husband for their daughter and she is only consulted as a matter of form; that is the custom. We shall do just the opposite; you will choose, and we shall be consulted. Use your right, Sophy, use it freely and wisely. The husband suitable for you should be chosen by you not us. But it is for us to judge whether he is really suitable, or whether, without knowing it, you are only following your own [whims]. Birth, wealth, position, conventional opinions will count for nothing with us. Choose a good man whose person and character suit you; whatever he may be in other respects, we will accept him as our son-in-law. He will be rich enough if he has bodily strength, a good character, and family affection. His position will be good enough if it is ennobled by virtue.

(Book V, p. 364)

Rousseau's insistence that Sophie's choice of a husband need not and should not be based on considerations of social class or wealth is an aspect of his overall egalitarianism. Virtue, personal worthiness, nobility of sentiment—all the qualities needed in a partner to form a lasting marriage—cut across arbitrary social barriers, and are not dependent on the accidents of birth.

Fonvizin, it is true, gave a negative portrayal of parentally-arranged marriages as early as 1769, in his comedy The Brigadier. At that time, however, he seems to have been more interested in exploiting the institution's comedic possibilities, and limited himself to satirizing the possible abuses of the practice rather than condemning it altogether. His reappraisal of Rousseau's work in 1778, however, gave Fonvizin a larger awareness of the evils of arranged marriages and the desirability of free choice, so that in The Minor there is not only the usual satire of the greedy who hope to gain materially by arranging Sofya's marriage, but there is also a direct affirmation by Starodum that parents have no right to choose a partner for their children, and that marriages must be based on the partners' freedom of choice. Starodum not only voices the same ideas as did Sophie's father in Emile, but he also presents them in the same manner—by directly addressing Sofya and proclaiming her right to choose her own spouse:

I occupy the place of your father. Believe me, I know the rights of my position. They extend no farther than to avert an unfortunate inclination in the daughter, but the choice of a worthy man depends entirely on her heart. Be calm my friend! If your husband is worthy of you, whoever he may be, he will have a true friend in me. Marry whomever you wish.

(I, 139)

Starodum thus recapitulates several points which Rousseau had put in the mouth of Sophie's father in Emile: a) a daughter has the right to choose her own marriage partner; b) parents are authorized to intervene only when the child's choice is clearly disastrous; and c) parents, once the moral worth of the chosen partner is established, must accept him without reservations, regardless of his fortune and antecedents.

There is another statement of Starodum's derived from Rousseau, a recommendation that the choice of a spouse not be based on considerations of social class:

… in contemporary marriages the heart is rarely taken into consideration. What matters is how aristocratic, how rich is the man? How attractive, how rich is the bride? There is no concern with rectitude.

(I, 154)

Starodum concludes this passage with an observation that is worded very similarly to the speech of Sophie's father in Emile. Rousseau's way of stating it is that the suitor “will be rich enough if he has bodily strength, a good character, and family affection,” and that “his position will be good enough if it is enobled by virtue.” Fonvizin's words are similar enough to suggest a direct borrowing: “In the eyes of thinking people an honorable man without a high social rank is a most worthy personage, virtue supplants all other things, and nothing can substitute for virtue” (I, 154). The significance of such similarities in Fonvizin and Rousseau goes beyond whatever ideas each may have entertained concerning ideal marriages, and suggests that Fonvizin's belief in the fundamental worth of individuals regardless of their social position was reinforced by his reading of Rousseau's works.

Rousseau and Fonvizin should not be regarded as champions of individual liberties because of their advocacy of free marital choice, for their main concern was not simply in providing young people with a new freedom, but rather in fostering stable marriages that would result from free choices based on love. The freedom was seen as desirable not for its own sake, but rather for the enduring institution that would result from its exercise. What is revolutionary here is the turn to the feelings—romantic love, which was considered a destructive passion in the psychology behind neo-classicism, is now regarded as a foundation for the virtuous life. Affections and emotions have replaced tradition and parental wisdom as hopeful agents for the betterment of mankind.

Another area in which Fonvizin drew on Rousseau's works is his demand for absolute sincerity of speech, in all circumstances, and at all levels of society. Both Rousseau and Fonvizin wrote of high imperatives for speaking the truth, which only exceptional people can fulfill: Rousseau writes of the philosopher in exile, practicing “the painful task of telling men the truth” (Book V, p. 438). Fonvizin, throughout his writings, insists on the duty of the courtier and statesman to tell the absolute truth to the sovereign at all times, a responsibility that sometimes requires great courage: Milon in The Minor sees no difference “between the fearlessness of a soldier who places his life on the line in an assault, and the intrepidity of a statesman who speaks the truth to his superior, risking his rage” (I, 158). On a somewhat lower level, in the life of the virtuous private citizen as it was being outlined by Rousseau and Fonvizin, there exists no less of an ethical need for sincerity of discourse, in the form of complete frankness of speech among family and friends.

Starodum is the embodiment of sincerity in the private life. He is heralded as one whose “tongue has never said ‘yes’ when his soul felt ‘no’” (I, 124). Starodum defines himself, shortly after his entrance in Act III, in the following terms: “I speak without formalities (Bez chinov). When formalities begin, sincerity ends” (I, 129). Starodum goes so far as to reject the polite formulae of conversation as pernicious linguistic innovations; he condemns even the respectful second person plural, remembering the more virtuous times of Peter the Great when “a man was designated as ‘thou’ and not ‘you.’ In those days they still didn't know how to infect (zarazhat') people to such an extent that each thought of himself as several” (I, 129).

Fonvizin's insistence on sincerity of speech is anticipated in Emile (although it hardly needs to be stated that most of Rousseau's writings reflect a preoccupation with verbal sincerity). Sophie's conduct amid the polite society of Paris is described in Emile in the following terms:

She is unacquainted with the language of empty compliment, nor does she invent more elaborate compliments of her own; she does not say that she is generally obliged, that you do her too much honor, that you should not take so much trouble, etc. Still less does she try to make phrases of her own. She responds to an attention or a customary piece of politeness by a courtesy or a mere ‘Thank you’; but this phrase in her mouth is quite enough. If you do her a real service, she lets her heart speak, and its words are no empty compliment.

(Book V, p. 361)

Emile, too, is unconcerned with the verbal formulae which pass for politeness in refined society. “His address is neither shy nor conceited, but natural and sincere, he knows nothing of constraint or concealment, and he is just the same among a group of people as he is when he is alone” (Book IV, p. 301). Rousseau explains why he would have his ideal couple observe the most scrupulous frankness when conversing in company; he feels that “true politeness consists in showing our goodwill towards men; it shows its presence without any difficulty; those only who lack this goodwill are compelled to reduce the outward signs of it to an art” (Book IV, p. 303). Then, to reinforce his point, Rousseau quotes from Duclos' Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle:

The worst effect of artificial politeness is that it teaches us how to dispense with the virtues it imitates. If our educator teaches us kindness and humanity, we shall be polite, or we shall have no need of politeness.

(Book IV, p. 303)

Rousseau fears that the polite formulae of social conversation will become detached from the reality they are intended to represent. He worries that polite speech may ultimately become an independent sign system that would serve as a mere simulacrum of the benevolence which is supposed to be felt by the speaker. In all of his writings Rousseau exhibits a horror at deceptive appearances, a fear which originated in his childhood when he was beaten for an infraction he did not commit; circumstantial evidence made him appear to be the culprit, and the appearance of guilt was enough to condemn him.⁹ Rousseau's fear of cultivated politeness arose from this anxiety about the possible harm that can result from misleading appearances; he worried that language can be used to create a deceptive resemblance of feelings which simply are not present in the speaker, and he was even more alarmed at the possibility that this appearance of benevolence could be manipulated deliberately, even mastered as an art, in order to conceal malevolent impulses and actions. One knows where one stands with Emile and Sophie, and while their speech may seem blunt, they offer the reassurance that they express what they actually feel, that their sentiments can always be divined by their words, and that there is no barrier between what is thought and felt, and what is verbally expressed.

There is reason to think that Fonvizin's insistence on verbal sincerity originated in the same fear that agitated Rousseau, the fear that sincerity could become a practiced skill, that formulaic politeness could be used to conceal evil intentions. In his satirical “Universal Courtier's Grammar,” written in 1788, Fonvizin exaggerates the possibility that false politeness can be cultivated to conceal the greed and ambition of a corrupt statesman. His “Grammar” purports to teach the courtier how “to flatter cunningly with tongue and pen,” and to tell lies which will be “pleasant to the notables and useful to the flatterer” (II, 48). The “Grammar” subverts this promised power, however, by suggesting that the statesmen will ultimately be taken over by the very “language” they are attempting to master, for Fonvizin classifies the population of the court into grammatical categories by using a series of clever puns: courtiers are either “active” or “passive,” “vocalic” (having voice or influence) or “non-vocalic” (having no influence.) Fonvizin implies that the courtiers, by cultivating such duplicitous language, will be trapped in the correspondingly false power structures which their linguistic deceptions help to perpetuate. The same threat that false language can be used to cover evil machinations is presented on a humbler level in The Minor, illustrating Fonvizin's demand for absolute verbal sincerity on all levels of society. In Act III, Scene 5 of The Minor, Starodum is introduced to the Prostakovs, and his blunt frankness provides an evident contrast to the family's attempts at social ritual:

STARODUM
(not giving his hand to Mitrofan). This one is chasing after my hand to kiss it. It's apparent that they're preparing a great soul in him.
MRS. Prostakov.
Say, Mitrofanushka, ‘How dear sir can I not kiss your hand? You are my second father.’
MITROFAN.
How can I not kiss your dear hand, Uncle. You're my … (To his mother) Which father is he?
MRS. Prostakov.
Second.
MITROFAN.
Second? You're my second father, Uncle.
STARODUM.
I, sir, am neither father nor uncle to you.

(I, 137-38)

The humor of this scene does not lie in the fact that the Prostakovs are insincere, but that their insincerity is so inept. They have not mastered the art of using language to conceal their baser motives, and are ridiculous not because they embody a vice, but because they are so unskilled at concealing that vice. Behind this burlesque of a social ritual, however, lies a real danger: if the Prostakovs were any more adept at presenting an outward show of benevolence, had they cultivated the formulae of politeness to such an extent as to appear convincing, they may have succeeded in their designs to marry Sofya to Mitrofan in order to divert Starodum's wealth into their family.

Fonvizin agrees with Rousseau on the overall desirability of candor in speech, and rejects, as did Rousseau, formulaic politeness in social conversation. The coincidence of their views on these points offers a strong argument for Rousseau's influence on Fonvizin. While it is true that plain speaking was advocated, and hypocrisy and flattery condemned in other 18th-century Russian comedies (for example, Lukin's The Trinket Dealer (Shchepetil'nik), Fonvizin was the first to impute ideological importance to these qualities, to make sincerity a matter of political morality, as did Rousseau. It can be mentioned here, as well, that the reputed candor of Rousseau's Confessions impressed Fonvizin as deeply as anything else he heard about Rousseau in Paris in 1778. There is every reason to believe that Fonvizin drew on Rousseau's writings in formulating his own demands for verbal sincerity in The Minor.

The importance of candor to the overall thought of Rousseau and Fonvizin extends beyond the fear that insincerity could become a practiced skill. Insistence on sincerity is evidence of the importance both thinkers placed on the human emotions, which they considered to be far too significant in the ethical relations of people to be concealed or distorted in their expression. Moreover, the rejection of polite formulae in social exchanges carries an implicit negation of the distinctions of social class, since such formulae were cultivated as signals of deference among people of unequal rank. The blunt address advocated by Rousseau and Fonvizin is an expression of egalitarian sentiment, and a repudiation of the artificial stratifications each saw in his own society. Although Rousseau envisioned complete egalitarianism in The Social Contract and other works, whereas Fonvizin idealized a meritocracy such as functioned under Peter the Great, both hoped to reshape the social uses of language to the extent that it would convey only the real worth of an individual as perceived by the speaker, and not the spurious dignity attached to that individual by artificial distinctions of class.

Fonvizin is not usually considered to be one of the Russian literary sentimentalists, yet passages in The Minor show that he accepted many of the psychological and moral assumptions that characterized that literary trend, mainly the renewed faith in the ethical potential of human emotions. I have already shown that Fonvizin's call for free marital choice was based on a belief that romantic love provides the best foundation for a virtuous and lasting marriage. Fonvizin, again drawing support from Emile, takes his faith in the affections even further by insisting that the very ability to distinguish right from wrong is grounded not in reason, nor in divine guidance, but in human emotion.

Rousseau and Fonvizin were faced with the problem of reconciling their deterministic views of character formation with a need to preserve belief in individual ethical responsibility. The resolution of this dilemma lay in locating in the human psyche a moral indicator that would function independently, unaffected by the environmental influences that shape the individual. Their need to preserve free will, at least in its particular manifestation of free ethical choice, was a reaction against the extremists of the Enlightenment who claimed that the human character was entirely determined by environment, even in its moral inclinations. Helvetius, perhaps the most extreme determinist among the philosophes, claimed that the human character is educated by all the factors in its environment, even including those which our senses are too limited to detect:

Everyone, if I may put it this way, has for his preceptors the form of government under which he lives, his friends, his mistresses, the men by whom he is surrounded, his reading, and finally, chance, that is to say, an infinite number of events whose causes and connections our ignorance does not permit us to perceive.¹⁰

The positive result of such determinism is a belief in the malleability of human character, hence an unlimited faith in the power of education as an agent for social change. The danger represented by acceptance of extreme determinism is the ease with which it permits an individual to excuse his moral transgressions by arguing that his actions were prompted by forces beyond his control—that individual actions do not originate in free ethical choice but rather in the balance of whatever environmental influences have shaped, and are presently acting upon the perpetrator. The eighteenth-century view of man as a creature shaped by incalculable influences, therefore subject to innumerable variations in individual moral outlooks, disturbed anxious moralists like Rousseau and Fonvizin. Where a philosophe like Diderot was stimulated by the idea that good and evil are relative, varying from situation to situation and person to person, Rousseau and Fonvizin needed to believe that good and evil are unvarying and equally apparent to all.¹¹

In Emile, Rousseau outlines an affective moral psychology based on his views that reason is weak and develops late in the individual, whereas emotions are powerful and appear in a child soon after his birth, providing an immediate source of ethical awareness. Rousseau held that conscience, which develops from man's earliest emotions, is an infallible and direct ethical guide possessed by all. Emotions, in Rousseau's moral psychology, always reveal the good and evil alternatives in any ethical choice, and also prescribe the proper rules of conduct:

I do not derive these rules from the principles of the higher philosophy, I find them in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be right is right, what I feel to be wrong is wrong; conscience is the best casuist; and it is only when we haggle with conscience that we have recourse to the subtleties of argument.

(Book IV, p. 249)

Rousseau opposes conscience to the intellectual sophistry which can be used to construct excuses for transgressions: “There is therefore at the bottom of our hearts an innate principle of justice and virtue, by which, in spite of our maxims, we judge our own actions or those of others to be good or evil: and it is this principle that I call conscience” (Book IV, p. 252). The Rousseauan conscience is also a self-punishing faculty which inflicts an emotional remorse when its dictates are not followed:

Men speak of the voice of remorse, the secret punishment of hidden crimes, by which such are often brought to light. Alas! who does not know its unwelcome voice? We speak from experience, and we would gladly stifle this imperious feeling which causes us such agony. Let us obey the call of nature; we shall see that her yoke is easy and that when we give heed to her voice we find a joy in the answer of a good conscience.

(Book IV, p. 251)

Fonvizin, following Rousseau's cue, offers conscience as an innate affective faculty possessed by all, which can inflict remorse when its initial promptings are ignored. The strictures of drama forced him to compress into a few lines of dialogue what Rousseau developed at length in the “Savoyard Vicar” section of Book IV of Emile. Nonetheless, the essence of Rousseau's ethical psychology is expressed in The Minor in a catechetical exchange of questions and answers between Starodum and Sofya:

SOFYA.
Can each man be virtuous?
STARODUM.
Believe me, each can find in himself enough strength to be virtuous. It is necessary to wish it intently, then it will be easier to avoid doing those things for which the conscience gnaws us.
SOFYA.
Who forewarns a man, who will not permit him to do those things which would later torment his conscience?
STARODUM.
Who forewarns? That same conscience. Be aware that conscience always forewarns in the manner of a friend before it punishes like a judge.
SOFYA.
Therefore it is only fitting that each honest man be held in contempt when he does evil if fully aware of what he is doing.

(I, 151)

It is important to note that both Rousseau and Fonvizin stripped the concepts of free will and conscience of their religious associations. They detached their ethics from the prejudices and obscurantism of organized religion, thus revealing themselves to be in sympathy with the Enlightenment's war against the abuses of religion. The very fact that they labored to secularize these originally-religious concepts, however, rather than abandoning them altogether, shows that Rousseau and Fonvizin were not willing to oppose religion as radically as some of their Enlightenment counterparts, and that they wished to find a replacement for the ethical structures that crumbled when the philosophes, in their rage to enlighten, worked to destroy the old orders. By turning to the emotions as the most dependable and fundamental operations of the human psyche, and by grounding in them an innate aversion to evil, Rousseau and Fonvizin attempted to give free will and conscience a secular, and even a quasi-scientific foundation in order to counter the ethical threat posed by the absolute determinism of some of the philosophes.

Fonvizin took from Rousseau's writings only those things which appealed to him, disregarding the parts of Rousseau's philosophy which he did not need, or which did not appeal to him. Fonvizin certainly had to do violence to the whole of Rousseau's thought in order to extract those parts of it which appealed to him: he ignored the social contract and adapted Rousseau's ideas to his own vision of a Russian constitutional monarchy; he paid no attention to Rousseau's speculations about the origins and pre-social nature of man; and he does not seem to have endorsed Rousseau's critique of the arts and sciences. What Fonvizin did adapt from Rousseau's thought remains close to the original, however. He is clearly Rousseauan in The Minor when he affirms the fundamental worth of all men, when he deplores the artificial distinctions of class and social hierarchy that are not based on intrinsic merit, and when he attributes ethical validity to the emotions of the individual. By accepting Rousseau's rehabilitation of the emotions, and the ethics Rousseau based on the affective faculty of conscience, Fonvizin went further than most of his contemporary Russians in conferring authority on the subjective perceptions of the individual. While Rousseau and Fonvizin may have disagreed on the ultimate questions of man's prehistoric, pre-social nature, and the type of government that would ideally adapt to that nature, both were in fundamental agreement concerning the ways man should remain moral when governments are imperfect.

Notes

1. Yurii Lotman writes that Fonvizin was “profoundly alien to the very basis of Rousseau's conception,” in his essay “Russo i russkaya kul'tura XVIII veka,” in Epokha prosveshcheniya, ed. M. P. Alekseev (Leningrad, 1967), p. 250. David L. Ransel holds that the moral philosophy expressed in The Minor “had no truck with Rousseauan theories of inherent goodness in human nature,” in his The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 270. G. A. Gukovskii says that Rousseau's “revolutionary world-view” was alien to Fonvizin, but concedes that “even from Rousseau he took something,” in his article “Fonvizin,” in Istoriya russkoi literatury, IV (Moscow, 1947), p. 161. G. P. Makogonenko is an exception in that he recognizes the influence of Rousseau on Fonvizin's later prose, but he too overlooks the importance of Emile's ideas in the moral philosophy of The Minor.

2. Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin, Sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh. ed. G. P. Makogonenko (Moscow, 1959), II, 481. Subsequent references to this edition appear in the text.

3. The year 1778 witnessed a sudden but lasting change in Fonvizin's attitude toward Rousseau. This is attested not only by the passages in his correspondence, in which he writes poignantly about his reaction to the news of Rousseau's death, but also by the fact that before 1778 no references to Rousseau appear in his works, whereas Rousseau's name and works are mentioned frequently in the writings Fonvizin produced after 1778. See Fonvizin, II, 451-54, 478-79 for the passages in his correspondence in which he discusses Rousseau's death.

4. Roger D. Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 103.

5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1911), p. 438. Subsequent references to this work appear in the text.

6. Fonvizin refers to a moral right to retire from service. Since 1762, by edict of Peter III, the Russian gentry had the legal right to retire, no longer being bound by Peter the Great's laws requiring compulsory state service. For an interesting discussion of the revocation of Peter the Great's service requirements, see V. O. Klyuchevskii, “Nedorosl' Fonvizina: Opyt istoricheskogo ob'yasneniya uchebnoi p'esy,” in Vol. VIII of his Sochineniya (Moscow: 1959), pp. 263-87. See also Marc Raeff, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966), pp. 11-12.

7. Jindřich Veselý, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la Revolution,” Philologica pragensia 22, No. 4 (1979), 177-87. Veselý not only discusses the significance of revolution in Rousseau's own works, but also explains the adaptation of Rousseau's ideas by the ideologists of the French Revolution.

8. D. I. Fonvizin, “A Discourse on Permanent Laws of State,” in Marc Raeff, ed., Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966), pp. 96-105.

9. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et l'obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).

10. Quoted in Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Volume II. The Science of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 514.

11. Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 659-73.