The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

86 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

patronage. Two are comedies. One (both blacker and more tuneful) is the libretto for a comic opera.

Denis Fonvizin (1745-92) was a translator, statesman, and liberal political philosopher as well as the author of Russia’s two best eighteenth-century comedies, The Brigadier (1769) and The Minor (1781).6 (The Russian title of the latter is Nedorosl', the technical term for an adolescent who had not yet passed the basic literacy examinations qualifying him for obligatory state service - an intensely unpopular Petrine reform, because a young man could not marry until the state exam was passed.) While writing The Brigadier, Fonvizin was working as secretary to Ivan Elagin, director of the Russian Imperial Theatres. By the time of his second play, however, Fonvizin was thoroughly disillusioned with Catherine’s rule. He had entered the employ of Count Nikita Panin, leader of the aristocratic opposition. Unusual for his era and station, Fonvizin advocated broadening the notion of state service to include not only the military but also commercial and mercantile activity undertaken by the noble class. He was certainly no radical, however, and The Minor is a rather obedient comedy. It broke new ground not in its politics but in its realistic portrayals: of an obsequious, ignorant German tutor and his two serf assistants (one an honest ex-soldier, the other a dishonest rogue), a provincial matriarch as violent as she is obtuse, and a setting immediately recognizable as Russia - however universal the vices exposed.

The plot delivers no surprises. Indeed, the “speaking names” attached to the characters at once reveal their virtues and vices. The virtuous ward Sofya [Wisdom] is separated from her beloved Milon [Dear One] by the machinations of her repulsive host family with its two false suitors: the loutish sixteen-year-old “minor” Mitrofan [Greek, “mama’s boy”] and his uncle Skotinin [Mr. Pig or Brute]. The true lovers are duly united in the end, thanks to the device of the heroine’s uncle, Starodum [Old-Thought], who returns from Siberia in the nick of time to provide a dowry for his niece, join up with the righteous government inspector Pravdin [Mr. Truthful], and expose the evil-doing of the play’s villain, the abusive serfowner and doting mother Prostakova [Mrs. Simpleton]. In the final act, Prostakova fails in her na¨ıve attempt to kidnap Sofya for her worthless son. Her wealth is confiscated by official decree, at which point even Mitrofan casts her out. All these threats and moral cleansings happen in the most improbably well-timed way. Defeated villains immediately collapse into craven beggars. Neither the fate of the lovers nor the exposure of the tyrant - both foregone conclusions - provides the moral infrastructure. That function is filled by the sermons of the old-fashioned moralist Starodum, one of the play’s two raisonneurs, who directs his maxims not to the fools on stage but to the audience.