Denis Fonvizin

• 1. Introduction

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  Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin wrote comedies so sharp that lines from them became Russian proverbs. That is a rare distinction in any literature. He was born in Moscow into a noble Orthodox family, the first of eight children, and he would go on to be counted among the founders of literary comedy in Russia. His two satirical plays are still staged today, more than two centuries after he wrote them.

  What made a man of comfortable means and noble lineage turn his pen against the very class he belonged to? And how did a playwright who spent much of his life traveling abroad for his health become the standard against which all Russian comedy was measured? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. Roots and Family Ties

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  The Fonvizin name had a foreign origin. An ancestor, Baron Berndt von Wiesen, had belonged to the Livonian Order, was captured during the Livonian War, and became a naturalized Russian citizen. His descendants gradually Russified, and it was Denis's father, Ivan Andreevich, who fixed the spelling as Fonvizin.

  Ivan Fonvizin himself had an interesting trajectory. He began as an army officer, moved into the Collegium of Accounting, and eventually reached the rank of State Councillor in 1783. Denis's mother, Ekaterina Vasilievna, came from distinguished stock on both sides. Through her father she belonged to the Smolensk Rurik branch; through her mother she was connected to the Grushetsky family. That made her a cousin-niece of Tsaritsa Agafya Grushetskaya, and an aunt to Alexander Dmitriev-Mamonov, who became famously a lover of Catherine the Great.

  Those connections to the court of Catherine the Great were not merely decorative. They shaped the world Denis Fonvizin moved in, and they mattered enormously for the kind of writing he would later dare to do.

• 3. Count Panin's Shadow

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  Denis Fonvizin received his education at the Imperial Moscow University, and he began writing and translating early. When he entered the civil service, he became secretary to Count Nikita Panin, one of the most powerful noblemen of Catherine the Great's reign.

  That position was more than a job. Panin's protection gave Fonvizin something most satirists of any era can only dream of: the freedom to write critical plays without fear of arrest. In a court where the wrong word could end a career or worse, that was an extraordinary shield. Fonvizin used it. In the late 1760s, working under this protection, he completed The Brigadier-General, the first of his two famous comedies.

  Fonvizin was always a dilettante rather than a professional author. He had means enough to write for pleasure and ambition rather than income, and that independence colored his work with a kind of fearlessness that professional writers dependent on patronage could rarely afford.

• 4. Letters from France

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  In 1777 and 1778, Fonvizin traveled abroad. The main purpose of the journey was not culture or diplomacy but medicine: the medical faculty of Montpellier was his principal destination.

  What he wrote about that trip became one of the finest prose works of his era. His Letters from France were described as one of the most elegant specimens of Russian prose from the period. They were also something more pointed: the most striking document of an anti-French nationalism that ran through the Russian elite of Catherine's time.

  The contradiction he captured was real and telling. Russia's educated class was thoroughly dependent on French literary tastes and French culture, yet many of its members harbored a deep suspicion of France itself. Fonvizin had watched that contradiction up close in Petersburg drawing rooms, and his letters gave it a shape and a voice that readers recognized immediately.

  He returned to Russia, and in 1782, four years after his French journey, his masterpiece appeared.

• 5. The Minor and Its Legacy

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  The Minor arrived in 1782, and it settled Fonvizin's place in Russian literature definitively. Critics and readers judged it his best work, and it classed him as the foremost of Russian playwrights at the time.

  The play's satire aimed at a specific target: a selfish, crude, uneducated country gentry. Its central character, Mitrofanushka, was portrayed as vulgar and brutally selfish. Even his devoted mother received nothing from him in return for her affection. That portrait of moral emptiness struck Russian audiences with particular force.

  The impact went beyond the stage. Several expressions from The Minor passed into the language as proverbs. Alexander Pushkin cited from the play regularly, or at least hinted at it by mentioning the characters' names. A play earns that kind of afterlife only when it has caught something true about the people who watch it.

  Fonvizin's principal artistic model was not Moliere, as might be expected, but the great Dano-Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg, whose works he had read in German and partly translated. That influence gave his comedies a particular texture. Both plays are written in prose rather than verse, and both adhere to the canons of classical comedy while using that framework to push social criticism to its limits.

  The Brigadier-General, though considered less serious than The Minor, was judged better constructed. Its satire aimed at the fashionable French semi-education that defined a certain type of social climber, the petits-maitres who adopted French surface manners without any of the genuine cultivation beneath them. Together the two plays remain the most popular Russian comedies written before Alexander Griboyedov's Woe from Wit.

• 6. Final Years

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  Fonvizin's last years were marked by constant illness. He traveled abroad repeatedly, seeking treatment, and he suffered continuously. He died in Saint Petersburg in 1792.

  He had lived long enough to see The Minor become a fixture of Russian theatrical life and to know that his words had entered the common language. The fact that a character's name from his play could be mentioned in passing by later writers, with the audience expected to understand the allusion, was evidence enough of what he had built. Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, the next great landmark in Russian comedy, was still decades away when Fonvizin died, which left his two plays as the undisputed standard for the form in the interim.