The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The eighteenth century 87

For Fonvizin’s audience in the 1770s, the “old-thought” of Starodum was still ratherrecent.StarodumidentifieshimselfasaproductofPeter theGreat’svigor-ous, masculine policies on universal service, economic progress, Western-style education, and enlightened patriotism so different – we are meant to infer – from the frivolous politics of bedroom and ballroom under the subsequent empresses. Starodum delivers his sermons on this energetic upright life as if from a pulpit. He does have interlocutors, but he rarely listens to or learns from them. His style and language belong to an enlightenment treatise, proclaiming on matters precious to Fonvizin: the proper education of youth (the lout Mitrofan being the negative example), the temptations of inherited wealth, one’s duty to the fatherland, the value of personal honor above rank and of service above favoritism, and the virtue of independent economic initiative. Starodum’s sojourn in Siberia prompts from him a paean to that region of Russia where “money is drawn from the earth itself,” a place – unlike the imperial court – that “rewards labor faithfully and generously” and does not require a man to “exchange his conscience for it” (Act III, ii).

Performances of The Minor in later centuries often abridged or omitted altogether these cumbersome monologues as smug and devoid of dramatic interest. Fonvizin’s negative portraits proved far more popular, enjoying a phenomenal afterlife in imitations, sequels, and adaptations. (Fonvizin was greatly beloved by Pushkin, who places a Skotinin, a Mr. Pig, among the guests at Tatyana’s nameday party in Eugene Onegin, Five, xxvi: 5–7.) But the sanctimonious moralizing of Starodum and Pravdin appealed powerfully to audiences of their own eighteenth century. This fact should not be forgotten. At the end of that century, through the efforts of Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), literate Russia met and fell in love with the Sentimentalist narrator, a direct descen-dent of this anti-ironic, Starodum-style hortatory voice but now motivated more by feelings than by reasonableness. Sentimentalism as a literary movement also preached the innate goodness of human nature, our natural desire to empathize, repent, and self-improve. As part of his mission, Karamzin took Gallomania – heretofore ridiculed in comedies and placed in the mouths of fools – and dignified it. Methodically and with great skill, he created a narrative style that was permeated by French influence, even by French turns of phrase, but integrated smoothly into the texture of Russian discourse. In his wake, Russian prose became fluent, eloquent, lofty, sincere – a vehicle for the fictions of gentlefolk and even (after 1803, when Karamzin set to work on Russia’s first history intended for a mass readership) a carrier of Russian national consciousness.

This shift from “Gallomania” to “Gallophilia” – from ridiculing French influence to loving it and relying on it – is one of the major watersheds preparing us