Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin

• Born: April 3, 1745
• Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
• Died: December 1, 1792
• Place of death: St. Petersburg, Russia

Other Literary Forms

In addition to his dramatic works, Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin produced letters, essays, and translations.

Achievements

Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin’s The Minor was, at its premiere, recognized as the first authentically Russian comic masterpiece in drama, and the play has never left the repertoire. It satirizes the ignorance of Russian country nobility, presenting Fonvizin’s abiding convictions about a close connection between education, honest people, and good government. The playwright’s earlier The Brigadier was the first Russian comedy of note to include realistic depiction of character and dialogue while transforming the conventional masks of neoclassical French comedy into Russian images satirizing social ills. The play also exposed to scorn the Frenchified Russians, victims of the pervasive mania for the Gallic of the late eighteenth century—a favorite topic of other Russian writers of the time. Fonvizin’s active participation in Catherine’s civil service made his attacks on stupid and brutal serf-owners resonate to the policy of the empress. Both The Brigadier and The Minor pleased the court of Catherine II with their didactic purpose while entertaining the audience with slapstick and wit adapted to the Russian scene and character.

Fonvizin contributed to the formation of the literary language of his time. While attacking the superficial French copied by Russian nobility in their subservience to French culture, he nevertheless incorporated French constructions into Russian speech, in the mouths of the educated characters in his plays. The names of these characters themselves brought into the language words drawn from French philosophy and cultural ideals. Fonvizin’s language drew also from Church Slavic and from the diction of the court, and he contributed to an early dictionary of the Russian literary language, the Academy Dictionary. Quite apart from his impact on the literary language, Fonvizin contributed through his plays new words in Russian: A “Mitrofan” is still recognized in Russian as a lazy lout, and a “Prostakova” is still a word for a brutal shrew.

While Fonvizin’s influence on Russian drama and theater was direct and strong in the last years of the eighteenth century, his continuing influence is more general in form. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Alexander Pushkin admired Fonvizin but saw him as already a part of literary history. According to Charles A. Moser and K. V. Pigarev, the image of the man of intellect frustrated by the stupidity of the society that he tries to correct persists in Alexander Griboyedov’s Gore ot uma (wr. 1824, uncensored pr. 1831, pb. 1861; The Mischief of Being Clever, 1857) in the character of Chatsky. These critics see Nikolai Gogol’s setting and satiric approach to Russian small-town bureaucracy in Revizor (pr., pb. 1836; The Inspector General, 1892) as similar to Fonvizin’s attack on country nobility. Critic Alexander Slonimsky sees more than a casual parallel in the mixture of farce and pity in treatment of character by these two playwrights.

Fyodor Dostoevski’s rejection of the Western self-assurance of superiority mirrors Fonvizin’s attitude in questioning in his plays the Russian self-abasement before European culture. The nineteenth century critic especially beloved in the Soviet period, Vissarion Belinsky, praised the lifelike reality of Fonvizin’s work. Soviet critics of Fonvizin have emphasized the “critical realism” and the progressive tendency of his plays, as many nineteenth century critics focused on the satire of Francomania. The playwright elicited good biographies and critical works in the Soviet period. The interest in creating a new Soviet satire encouraged careful consideration of this indigenous Russian satirist.

Biography

Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin was born in 1745 into a family of middle nobility. His father, having retired from military service as a major, had a modest civil position in Moscow; Fonvizin’s mother was from an older noble family. The Fonvizin family had entered Russia from Germany during the mid-sixteenth century and was thoroughly Russian by the time of Catherine, when Denis lived; he had to learn German in school. Unlike many Russian nobles, he learned French only as a young adult.

When he was ten, Fonvizin was one of the first admitted to the newly opened Moscow University, apparently at a preparatory level required to produce students ready for university education. His education gave him a taste for literature and equipped him for the government service he was to enter when he found a patron. An early trip to St. Petersburg (1760) took him to the imperial theater, where he saw a play by the Danish dramatist Ludvig Holberg. The experience triggered his enduring interest in drama; in 1761, he published a translation of a selection of moral fables by Holberg. The didactic element was in Fonvizin’s work from the start. The writer improved his Russian literary style and his command of French and German with a variety of translation projects for university journals.

At seventeen, a common age for the sons of the nobility to enter service, Fonvizin got his first job in the civil service of the newly crowned Empress Catherine as a translator in the foreign office. Catherine’s court was at the time briefly in Moscow, but when it returned to St. Petersburg in 1763, Fonvizin followed. Provided with personal servants for the first time, he read the work of the satirist Antiokh Kantemir, whose work, though written earlier, was published only in 1762. Under this influence, Fonvizin decided to write a humorous letter to his three servants. “Poslaniye k slugam moim Shumilovu, Vanke i Petrushka” (1763-1764; epistle to my servants Shumilov, Vanke, and Petrushka) was the result and circulated widely among freethinkers in St. Petersburg. It contained some of the first realistic and satiric observation of ordinary reality that appeared later in the playwright’s major plays.

In October, 1763, Fonvizin obtained a patron in Ivan Perfilevich Yelagin, a supporter of Catherine and a man with literary and theatrical interests. In Yelagin’s service, Fonvizin found himself in competition with Vladimir Lukin, a playwright of considerable talent. Lukin pressed for a thoroughly national drama; he put on stage some realistic Russian characters—a pawnbroker, for example—but he never achieved realistic speech for them. No love was lost between the two writers, and the young Fonvizin meanwhile cultivated friends among actors and actresses, especially the famous Ivan Dmitrevskii, who played in Aleksandr Sumarokov’s tragedies. Fonvizin’s duties with Yelagin allowed him, during the 1760’s, to experiment with poetry and with further literary translations. He tried a verse translation of Voltaire’s Alzire (pr., pb. 1736; English translation, 1763) but did not publish it, discovering that though he wished to write tragedy, his natural talent was for wit and satire.

The young man saw at this time productions of the neoclassical tragedies and comedies of Sumarokov, and he saw numerous productions of the lightweight French comedies translated by young noblemen of the capital. Fonvizin also translated such a play, Sidnei, by Jean-Baptiste Gresset; he called his Russian version Korion. Though moved to a Russian setting, the characters kept their French names. The play was staged in November, 1764, at the court theater, without much success. A brief scene between the valet Andrei and a peasant messenger had the breath of reality about it, but it was otherwise still in the Sumarokov style.

Fonvizin’s life in fashionable St. Petersburg at this time gave him a world of observation that eventually found its way into his plays. His own upbringing had made Fonvizin dislike pretense, and he disliked the French-speaking Petersburg fops, with their blind adulation of French language and fashion and their contempt for anything Russian. Fonvizin, on the contrary, found much to admire in Russian life—for example, the intellectuals Mikhail V. Lamonosov and V. N. Titishchev. His father’s influence gave him a strong sense of duty to his country. Encouraged by the theatrical interests of his superior, Yelagin, he decided to satirize these fops in a comedy. He would add figures that had not yet appeared on any Russian stage, the crude and petty nobility who lived in small towns and on their own estates, people of little education who had served mindlessly in the rigidly disciplined military until they retired with perhaps the rank of brigadier. Their wives were a match for them, barely literate, not knowing anything beyond household management. Fonvizin would add judicial bribe-takers to the satire, of whom he knew much from his father’s experience as an honest judge among the dishonest. The comedy The Brigadier was the result. Fonvizin read the play at Yelagin’s house, and then in June, 1769, at Peterhof for the empress, who enjoyed the play. The twenty-four-year-old Fonvizin impressed everyone with the authenticity of his Russians on the stage.

It was at Peterhof that Fonvizin met Count Nikita I. Panin, head of Catherine’s foreign office and the man entrusted with the education of Paul, Catherine’s son, the heir apparent. Panin took this work with deep seriousness, hoping to mold the next tsar into an enlightened autocrat. He saw the relation of education to good government, and Fonvizin, in his work with Panin, added to his own already enthusiastic views on the importance of education. Panin chose Fonvizin as secretary, and the young man quickly became a close and valued associate.

One of the most powerful influences at Catherine’s court, Panin was, however, already past the time of his greatest power when Fonvizin joined him. Panin’s views on government coincided with and developed those that the young Fonvizin had been formulating, and the relationship with Panin colors all of Fonvizin’s political views thereafter. Panin thought, for example, that the power of an autocratic ruler should be limited by law and by the advice of the most notable courtiers. Fonvizin served with Panin for fourteen years.

With the outbreak of war with Turkey in 1768, Panin’s policies had come into doubt. As a result, Fonvizin, on beginning work with Panin, had no time for literature. The early 1770’s involved peace negotiations with Turkey and the partition of Poland. Paul, the tsar-to-be, fell ill in 1772; on his recovery Fonvizin wrote a discourse on his recovery, asserting that all Russia rejoiced. In 1773, year of the Pugachev Rebellion so ruthlessly put down by Catherine, Panin lost his position as tutor to Paul, now legally of age and married. Catherine, as exit honors, gave Panin many gifts, and Panin shared her largesse with his assistants. Fonvizin received an estate in Byelorussia with 1,180 serfs, making him financially secure for many years. He never apparently became an ideal estate owner, however, and the estate was woefully mismanaged for Fonvizin as absentee landlord. The Pugachev Rebellion nevertheless had a big effect on Fonvizin’s later work, influencing his darkest satire of the cruelty of landowners against peasants.

In 1774, Fonvizin married Ekaterina Ivanovna Khlopova, a former neighbor of the Fonvizins in Moscow. The couple lived well in St. Petersburg, began to collect art, and traveled abroad (1777-1778) for her health. They went to Germany and France, being entertained at Russian embassies but making a great effort to observe the local customs. In letters home, Fonvizin gave vivid accounts of his impressions. The letters provide, with real literary merit, his views on Europe. He was no blind admirer; he saw suffering and stupidity there as at home. His patriotism is apparent even when he is most impressed with the cultural achievements of the West.

Influenced by Panin, Fonvizin’s other writing of this period directed itself more toward politics than literature. Pokhvalnoye slovo Marku (eulogy of Marcus Aurelius) in 1777, for example, his translation of a work by Antoine Thomas on how a ruler should rule, anticipates ideas that Pravdin uses in The Minor.

In the fall of 1778, Fonvizin, home briefly in Moscow, began to write The Minor. Russian theater had developed richly in the years since the writer had seen his first play; there were now two theaters in St. Petersburg and a permanent theater with a Russian troupe in Moscow. Sentimental dramas were becoming popular, and they required a more natural acting style than had been used in the declamatory work of Sumarokov’s day. Comic operas, light musical plays with dancing such as those of Mikhail Matinskii, held the interest of the court audience with satiric images of merchants and others in everyday life—though no images of the nobility. Peasants onstage were ordinarily idealized; no one had as yet shown the crudity and cruelty of the provincial landowners.

The values Fonvizin had developed in Panin’s service gave him more ideas and characterizations for his play. In 1779 the playwright translated Ta-Gio (Ta-Hsueh: Or, That Great Learning Which Comprises Higher Chinese Philosophy, 1966), a Chinese Confucian classic. (Fonvizin used a translation into French as the basis for his own work.) Ta-Hsueh argues that virtue is the root of all good and that there is no difference between a sovereign and the most humble of his subjects in the pursuit of virtue. The theme is that promulgated by Starodum in the play, which Fonvizin finished in 1782, having retired from government service. He read the play aloud in St. Petersburg noble houses, and Dmitrevskii, the longtime actor friend of the playwright, staged it and acted the role of Starodum. The performance took place in a private theater and was very successful with the audience; nevertheless, a production in Moscow was delayed by the Moscow censor until May, 1783.

Panin died in 1783. His former student, Paul, on taking the throne, seemed a real despot, ignoring Panin’s enlightened instruction. Before his death, Panin, with Fonvizin’s help, wrote but did not finish a statement of the changes he thought needed to be made in Russia. Fonvizin hid the manuscript, and this rassuzhdeniye (discourse) or zaveshchaniye (testament) circulated from hand to hand for many years and was printed only after the Revolution of 1905. Fonvizin retired in the spring of 1783, three weeks after Panin’s death.

Ready to turn again to literature, Fonvizin began to contribute to the literary phenomenon of satiric literary journals, which began to appear in Moscow at this time. One was sponsored by Catherine herself; another, by N. I. Novikov, had already suffered censorship in 1770. A new journal, Sobesednik lyubitel’yei rossiiskogo slova (interlocutor of lovers of the Russian word), appeared. Fonvizin wrote for it witty Russian synonym studies with satiric thrusts. Catherine contributed to this journal anonymously. Aware of the imperial participation, Fonvizin had the idea to address a series of bold questions to the anonymous columnist. Catherine, as an enlightened despot, did not censor the questions but answered them in such a way as to preclude such questions in the future. Fonvizin wrote other satiric literary and linguistic papers during this period, including a bitter satire of flattery at the court, “Vseobshchaya pridvornaya grammatika” (1783-1784; “Universal Courtiers’s Grammar,” 1947). He also wrote an appreciative Sokrashchennoye opisaniye zhitiya grafa N. I. Panina (1784; a brief description of the life of Count N. I. Panin). The praise of his fallen hero was published anonymously, first in French in London and two years later in Russian.

The Fonvizins took a second trip abroad, this time to Italy, hoping to improve his health; he had long suffered from severe headaches. He needed money and planned to buy paintings and sell them on his return. This plan did not work out, and these years were full of financial as well as other troubles. His letters home again contained close observation of both the beauties and the deficiencies of Europe. He suffered a severe illness in Rome, recovered sufficiently to make the return trip, but in Moscow had a stroke that paralyzed his arm and leg and affected his speech. He never fully recovered. He made two further trips abroad for his health (1786-1787 and 1789). He attempted to start a new journal in 1788, but the police forbade its publication and it never appeared. He attempted a collection of his works, but that, too, was never realized. The Choice of a Tutor, another partially finished comedy, had little of his former strength. Aware that he was dying, he began a frank memoir, Chistoserdechnoye priznaniye v delakh moikh i pomyshleniyakh (1790-1792; a candid confession of my deeds and thoughts), but as he wrote, the work became a simple and vivid account of events and people who had meant much to him in his youth. The manuscript remained uncompleted, and Fonvizin died, only forty-seven years old, at the house of the poet G. R. Derzhavin on December 1, 1792.

Analysis

Only The Brigadier and The Minor deserve systematic analysis here; Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin’s main work in life as a diplomatic secretary in Catherine II’s foreign office and the polemical writing emerging from that experience contributed to the content of the plays but limited his dramatic output. Some mention can be made of the unfinished third play, The Choice of a Tutor.

Fonvizin’s plays were the first to present native Russian customs and speech successfully, a process that began in the eighteenth century to transform the common dramatic fare of the time, mainly French neoclassical drama. The transformation continued for a century. Earlier Russian dramatists in both tragedy and comedy had modeled their plays on neoclassical principles, often retaining French names for the characters, even when they had changed the setting to Russia.

The didactic impulse of eighteenth century comedy in France was very much a part of audience expectation and dramatic practice when Fonvizin wrote his plays. The characters were types—young lovers, the domineering father, the buffoon—deriving from earlier French drama and from still earlier Italian and Latin plays. The convention of the raisonneur, a wise character who comments on the implication of the dramatic events and states explicitly the message of the author, operated in these plays, too. Elements of the emerging sentimentalism found their way into the plays as well.

The Brigadier

The Brigadier, written when Fonvizin was twenty-four years old, manipulates a situation comedy for plot but breaks new ground in its conception of character and in the speech of its dramatis personae. The action and characters satirize the Francomania of the Russian petty nobility, the brutality of military life, the stupidity of people without any real education, and the shallowness of morality among the country gentry. The play begins in a conventional setting of the provincial nobility: The Brigadier and his wife have brought their son, Ivan, to visit the family of Sofya, the girl they have arranged for him to marry. They intend to set the date for the wedding, but the course of the action becomes clear in the second line, with Ivan’s response, in French, to this effort: “Hélas!” No wedding between the two will take place, but crudely hilarious love intrigues must run their course before that happy ending can occur.

The Brigadier pursues the Councilor’s wife, with whom he falls in love because she is so cultivated and intelligent compared with his own wife; and the Councilor pursues the Brigadier’s wife because he is so impressed by her household economy. Ivan, however, also pursues the Councilor’s wife rather than his intended fiancé, Sofya, because the Councilor’s wife speaks French—and rhapsodizes over anyone who has ever lived in Paris. (Ivan has just returned.) The Brigadier, caught in the act of pursuing the wife of his host, is shocked to discover that his son is his rival for the boy’s mother-in-law to be. In a roundly comic scene, the Councilor cannot make clear to the Brigadier’s wife his proposal to have an affair with her, partly because she is so thickheaded and partly because she is in fact virtuous and unable to imagine herself as an object of desire.

Unlikely as the emotions of these people are, they set in motion scenes that keep the laughter of the audience ringing. Meanwhile, the conventional love interest between the heroine Sofya and her goodhearted officer Dobrolyubov makes good progress when they interrupt a love scene between Ivan and the Councilor’s wife. Revelations all around resolve the dramatic problem; so many sins cancel each other out, and the visitors leave in shame—and disgust. Sofya’s match with Ivan is broken off and Dobrolyubov gets his girl, especially since the legal problems holding up his inheritance have been settled. The speed with which the play moves gives the audience no time to think about how unlikely the action is.

The revelation of character in this merry-go-round, however, transforms the comedy. These are no sophisticated French couples frivolously pursuing amours. In accounting for the appetites they raise in each other, Fonvizin cuts deep, satirizing their distinctively Russian failings.

The Brigadier has been brutalized by his military life. The Councilor says of him, “Sometimes he loves his horse more than his wife.” The rank of which he is so proud gives him control over his peasants, and his usual mode of communication is violent. He disciplines his wife with his fists, and that good lady recalls a Captain Gvozdilov’s wife beaten more often than she. Tenderhearted Sofya asks her to stop telling about the wife beating. She answers, “You don’t want to even hear about it, but what was it like for the Captain’s wife who had to bear it?” Dostoevski later used the name Gvozdilov to refer to this kind of brutality.

The Councilor, a retired bribe-taking judge, grieves for the good old days when children obeyed their parents, not so many people were literate, and cases could be settled according to how much the judge was paid. He is a man willing to sacrifice his daughter’s happiness for the property he expects to get from the marriage agreement. He loves the Brigadier’s wife because she is as stingy with the peasants they own as he is with his. When he discovers that his wife is untrue, he swears not that he will beat Ivan for tempting her but that he will sue him for his last kopek.

The Councilor’s idle, vacuous wife gets perhaps the worst of Fonvizin’s scorn for the Frenchified Russian. When her Ivanushka tells her his only unhappiness is that she is Russian, she agrees, “That, my angel, is pure perdition for me!” Fonvizin’s love of country underlies the contempt he pours on her. Ivan, as empty as she, is in fact a suitable mate for her; their pleasure in imitating the superficialities of French life is absurd to those, like Fonvizin, who have come to hate the Frenchified dandies of St. Petersburg who waste the proceeds of Russian labor on imported luxuries that are sent from France.

The force of the play lies especially in the language. First is the satire of the Russian use of French. Ivan and the Councilor’s wife speak an amusing pastiche of Russian and French; they know only the small coin of the language. Second is the mispronunciation and failure to understand French by the Brigadier, and the total rejection of it by the Brigadier’s wife. What the earliest audience of the play enjoyed most, however, was the richness of the Russian colloquial speech, tailored to the speaker, that the truly Russian characters speak. Russian proverbs abound; set phrases and pet turns of phrase mark the speaker. The Brigadier’s wife’s sympathetic, practical-minded innocence is caught perfectly in her language, for example. Fonvizin begins here the task of making natural Russian a dramatic language, a task to be mastered a century and a half later by Alexander Ostrovsky and, later still, by Anton Chekhov.

For all its excellence, The Brigadier nevertheless is psychologically shallow and unbelievable. These people would not in real life act the way they do onstage. Authentic members of the Russian lower nobility are caught in a trivial French plot, and they must be found inappropriate there, once the audience stops laughing. The positive characters lack shading to make them more believable. That is doubtless why The Brigadier has had fewer productions than the second work of its author, The Minor.

The Minor

The Minor catches eighteenth century Russian culture at its worst and best, in all its bestiality side by side with its commitment to enlightenment and the honor of an “honest man,” Fonvizin’s measure of what a human being should be. Fonvizin’s characters were designed to satirize the unenlightened country nobility and to encourage patriotism, the rule of law in the treatment of dependents, and the relation of education to virtue and the right use of authority, and their names have become part of the Russian language. For example, “Mitrofans” are ignorant boobies; “Skotinins” are men too swinelike to qualify as human; and “Prostakovas” are the virulent shrews who are nevertheless tender mothers, a lasting contradiction that appeals to the best and the beast in human beings everywhere.

The play is structurally very different from The Brigadier. The plot arises from actions that would become patterns in melodrama in the nineteenth century: the marrying off of an heiress, the return of a long-lost rich uncle, the maltreatment of an orphan, the timely arrival of the hero to save the heroine. The punishment of the villains comes about through the offices of a figure Gogol used later in The Inspector General, a government inspector secretly observing the action.

The ostensible main action is an eighteenth century cliché: arranging the marriage of the heroine. Barely motivated coincidence brings characters together at the moment they are needed. The whole is arranged with small care for conventional suspense because the inspector announces his presence (though not to the villains) in the first act, the hero gets the girl in a scene well before the end of the play, and the uncle makes his agency for good abundantly clear from the start.

All this matters little, however, because the real center of the action is the undoing of the villain, Prostakova, a domestic tyrant, a shrew, a brutal mistress—and the loving mother of her Mitrofanushka. This line of action has its ups and downs, but its movement nevertheless is not the focus of interest for Fonvizin because the dramatist interrupts the main action repeatedly with long conversations that in fact are his main interest. The interest in theme can best be understood in a discussion of the characters.

The characterizations are the source of this play’s greatness. The benighted ignorance and beastliness of Prostakova and her brother Skotinin come to symbolize the brutality of the unenlightened country nobility, the main subject of Fonvizin’s satire. Both characters, while hilarious caricatures of human beings, cut deeply with their merciless self-interest and inhumanity displayed toward those in their power. They make the audience laugh, but they represent Fonvizin’s didactic message more profoundly than the long and wise conversations between Starodum, Provdin, Milon, and Sofya, in which the message comes out directly.

Prostakova’s confident verbal and physical abuse of everyone around her except her beloved son and those from whom she hopes to benefit brands her as a villain. Yet as Starodum points out, she is motivated by the single-minded love for her son, and when he, too, deserts her at the end of the play, one cannot help but feel pity. Her name, meaning “simpleton,” allows for the contradiction. This ambiguity, and the very vigor of her personality, make her one of the great characters in Russian drama. Her husband is a mere postscript to her, a nonentity of a henpecked husband who has no opinion of his own, not even on whether his son’s new coat is too big or too small. Little sympathy can be wasted on him.

Her brother Skotinin, perhaps the grossest caricature, and certainly the grossest character, carries farthest Fonvizin’s attack on the beastliness of the unenlightened. Skotinin, whose name means “beastly,” is a monomaniac about hogs. As he says himself, “men and women try to show me how clever they are, but among my pigs I am the cleverest one.” He is interested in marrying Sofya solely to acquire more pigs. When it is suggested that he would not provide well for his wife, he indignantly makes clear that she would have as good a pen as any of his pigs.

Mitrofan (the name means “mother’s son”) is the petted darling of his profoundly ignorant mother; he becomes the symbol of the kind of human being that results from a pampered and unenlightened upbringing. Lazy, self-willed, and hostile to the education his mother has arranged for him, he has no principles, but lives solely for physical pleasures. He is greedy at table and, as the “minor”—a young man supposed to be studying to take on adult responsibility—he says, “I don’t want to study; I want to marry.”

Yeremeyevna, Mitrofan’s old nurse, is a potent symbol of the victimization the Skotinins and Prostakovs practice. Held in constant fear by physical punishment—she gets “five roubles a year and five slaps a day”—she is nevertheless fiercely loyal to her charge, her loyalty repaid with contemptuous abuse. Her dignity as a human being hangs in the mind long after the comedy is over.

The qualities of the three incompetent tutors—Kuteikin, Cipherkin, and Vralman—summarize what Fonvizin wishes to criticize in the miseducation of the country nobility. Cipherkin is perhaps the best of the three, an “honest man,” a retired soldier who has the barest knowledge of arithmetic; his knowledge is nevertheless far above Mitrofan’s capacity to learn. In Kuteikin, an unsuccessful seminarist, Fonvizin satirizes the demi-educated churchman. Pious Church Slavonicisms permeate Kuteikin’s speech, creating a comic effect onstage. His grasping nature and essential dishonesty are revealed when he pads his bill as Pravdin intends to pay him what the Prostakovs owe him. Vralman (liar) does Mitrofan’s and Prostakova’s will in frustrating the meager efforts of the other two tutors to educate Mitrofan, and he is a fraud, besides. A coachman in want of a job, he has convinced the Prostakovs that he is a learned and wise man. They are incompetent to recognize an authentic man of learning. As a teacher, he is a competent coachman, and Fonvizin allows him to return to his trade at the end of the play.

The positive characters voice the recommendations Fonvizin had to make to the court and responsible Russian nobility, the message based on his lifetime of service in government. In long, undramatic speeches, they simply stand and make the pleas for Russia’s inprovement that Fonvizin had formulated over the years, especially under Count Panin’s tutelage. Pravdin, the government inspector, brings the czar’s justice to the brutal landlord Prostakova, in the rule of law. Starodum (old wisdom) praises patriotic duty and personal virtue even above education, though he makes clear that the virtuous man will also be educated. Sofya is a somewhat sickeningly sweet young woman who looks to her admired uncle for guidance, as a good ward should. She is obedient, capable of true love, generous in spirit. To modern ears, her echoing of the sentiments her uncle expresses is mildly repellent, but her forgiving spirit toward the Prostakovs when she gets free of them is winning. Milon, the young noble officer who wins her love, is not a credible character but an instrument Fonvizin uses to state his views on civil and military valor, as distinguished from mere courage in service to the fatherland. While all these speeches may have held the interest of contemporaries, and they often state values in memorable ways, these representatives of Fonvizin’s ideals need strong acting to hold their own with the negative characters.

Fonvizin’s themes are clear: Children should be obedient, and they should be educated with an eye to encouraging their virtue. Parents and rulers should be responsible, loving, and just. Teachers should be competent. Men and women should marry for love and accept their responsibilities. Flattery should not be the means by which people should acquire wealth. Justice should be done by the rule of enlightened law. Generosity of spirit should pervade human relations, and education should enlighten the rule of law. True nobility is of character, not birth or wealth. The Minor is the fruit of all Fonvizin’s experience in Russian government and society, all that he wished to improve in a country he loved and deplored. It is a masterpiece not in its explicit messages, however, but in its richly comic caricatures of human evils as they appear in eighteenth century Russian guise.

The Choice of a Tutor

The Choice of a Tutor, a three-act comedy of which the second act is incomplete, is one of Fonvizin’s last works, written after his severe illness and partial paralysis. The play continues the dramatist’s exploration of the importance of education and the satire of efforts by ignorant Russians to secure proper education for their children. The satire also directs itself toward pride in lineage preferred to true nobility. Prince and Princess Slaboumov (weak-minded) seek a tutor to encourage in their child a sense of their own self-importance because of their lineage. The choice includes an honest retired Russian officer, but the parents choose instead a fraudulent Frenchman, in fact a fugitive medical orderly. The traditional inauthenticity of Russian tutors persists. Long discussions between a sound local marshal of the nobility and the retired officer assess the impact of the French Revolution and reject the possibility of the social equality it supposes. The play was produced a century after it was written, in St. Petersburg, on the occasion of the centenary of Fonvizin’s death.

Bibliography

Gleason, Walter. Introduction to The Political and Legal Writings of Denis Fonvizin. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis Publishers, 1985. In this introduction to some of Fonvizin’s prose works, Gleason describes the life of the Russian dramatist and his political and social views, which permeated his writings. Bibliography.

Kochetkova, Natal’ia Dmitrievna. “Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin.” In Early Modern Russian Writers, Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Vol. 150 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Marcus C. Levitt. Detroit, Mich.: The Gale Group, 1995. A concise overview of the life and works of Fonvizin.

Moser, Charles A. Denis Fonvizin. Boston: Twayne, 1979. A basic biography of Fonvizin that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index.

Moser, Charles A. Fonvizin, Russia, and Europe. Washington, D.C.: Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1978. An examination of Fonvizin and Russia and Europe during the time in which he lived. Bibliography.

Offord, Derek. “Beware the Garden of Earthly Delights: Fonvizin and Dostoevskii on Life in France.” The Slavonic and East European Review 78, no. 4 (October, 2000): 625-642. Offord takes the view that Fonvizin and Fyodor Dostoevski represent a continuous literary tradition and examines how each depicted France.