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Revolution provided startling proof that ideas could result in the decapitation of monarchs. Catherine had Novikov arrested and incarcerated in Peter and Paul Fortress in 1792. He was freed only in 1796, after her death.
In an absolutist state, the balance between acceptable, self-improving mockery and the unacceptable censure of political realities is a fragile one. For the next two centuries, Russian culture and Russian prisons would be populated by writers, artists, stage directors, and composers who gambled and lost while negotiating this tightrope. The practice of comedy under Catherine the Great is a good test case, because the rules for its composition and the range of its character types were so uncomplicated - and also because the very idea of a secular literary establishment was still so fresh. The tense relationship that later became “Poet versus Tsar” was still Poet and Tsar for most high-culture literary forms. In certain ways, neoclassical comedy was just as conventionally structured and ideologically collaborationist as the solemn ode.
Russian playwrights imitated two popular French models: the comedie de caractere (a “comedy of character” focusing on a single eponymous universal vice, as in Moliere’s satires on the Miser or Misanthrope) and comedie de moeurs (a “comedy of manners” satirically portraying contemporary society). The gallery of fixed types for such comedies includes an obedient heroine and a virtuous (often clueless) hero, an obstacle to their union (venal or dimwitted false suitors, parents or guardians), corrupt officials, foolish pedants, witty and resourceful servants, confidantes, and a raisonneur [a “person of good sense” who expresses the moral views of the author]. Virtue must triumph, usually in some sort of public showdown. En route, these types do not so much interact - few events actually occur on the neoclassical comedic stage - as “inter-talk,” that is, expose themselves, scene after scene, through words, either in monologues (often becoming tirades) or dialogues (often dysfunctional). These verbal masks rarely become more complex as a result of any unexpected plot events; if they do, the audience perceives such change as superficial or untrustworthy.
Some Russian “manners” were relatively safe to address simply by mocking an isolated targeted vice. Such was Catherine II’s strategy in her comedy O! The Times! (1769), which ridicules religious hypocrisy, gossip, greed, and faking a knowledge of foreign languages. The Empress followed the convention of giving characters “speaking names” to announce their essence: “Khanzhakina” [Hypocrite], “Vestnikova” [Tattler], “Nepustov” [Not-Empty, Not-Shallow]. Satire could be quite vicious as long as the vice or injustice in question was resolved harmlessly. Because satire and “reform from above” were so intimately interwoven in neoclassical comedy, the limits of the permissible can be tested through three dramatic works that go somewhat against the grain of royal
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patronage. Two are comedies. One (both blacker and more tuneful) is the libretto for a comic opera.
Denis Fonvizin (1745-92) was a translator, statesman, and liberal political philosopher as well as the author of Russia’s two best eighteenth-century comedies, The Brigadier (1769) and The Minor (1781).6 (The Russian title of the latter is Nedorosl', the technical term for an adolescent who had not yet passed the basic literacy examinations qualifying him for obligatory state service - an intensely unpopular Petrine reform, because a young man could not marry until the state exam was passed.) While writing The Brigadier, Fonvizin was working as secretary to Ivan Elagin, director of the Russian Imperial Theatres. By the time of his second play, however, Fonvizin was thoroughly disillusioned with Catherine’s rule. He had entered the employ of Count Nikita Panin, leader of the aristocratic opposition. Unusual for his era and station, Fonvizin advocated broadening the notion of state service to include not only the military but also commercial and mercantile activity undertaken by the noble class. He was certainly no radical, however, and The Minor is a rather obedient comedy. It broke new ground not in its politics but in its realistic portrayals: of an obsequious, ignorant German tutor and his two serf assistants (one an honest ex-soldier, the other a dishonest rogue), a provincial matriarch as violent as she is obtuse, and a setting immediately recognizable as Russia - however universal the vices exposed.
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??ve 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.
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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
