Short answers, pulled from the story.
Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin was an 18th-century Russian playwright and one of the founders of literary comedy in Russia. His two satirical comedies, The Brigadier-General and The Minor, are considered the most popular Russian plays written before Alexander Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, and both are still staged today.
The Minor is a satirical comedy directed against the selfish and crude uneducated country gentry of Fonvizin's era. Its central character, Mitrofanushka, is portrayed as vulgar and brutally selfish, returning nothing to even his devoted mother. Several expressions from the play entered the Russian language as proverbs, and Alexander Pushkin regularly cited from it.
Fonvizin served as secretary to Count Nikita Panin, one of the most powerful noblemen of Catherine the Great's reign. Panin's protection allowed Fonvizin to write critical plays without fear of arrest.
Fonvizin's principal model was not Moliere but the Dano-Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg, whose works he read in German and partly translated. Both of Fonvizin's comedies are written in prose and follow the canons of classical comedy.
The Letters from France were written after Fonvizin traveled to France in 1777-78, primarily to seek treatment at the medical faculty of Montpellier. The letters were described as one of the most elegant specimens of Russian prose from the period and are notable for documenting the anti-French nationalism that coexisted with Russian elite dependence on French literary culture.
Denis Fonvizin died in Saint Petersburg in 1792. His final years were marked by constant suffering and repeated travel abroad in search of medical treatment.