The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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.

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

88 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature