memorandum to Catherine on the education of Alexander I.59 The Stoic calm of the Roman emperor was seen as a model for the Russian aristocrat's efforts to master passion with reason. As Sumarokov put it:
The man of reason
Moves on through time with tolerance,
The happiness of true wisdom is not moved to rapture
And does not groan with sorrows.60
The stoicism of Seneca also gained a following through such books as The Moral Cures of the Christianized Seneca, which promised to 'correct human morals and instill true health' with the 'true wisdom' of Stoic philosophy.61 This concept of 'true wisdom' (premudrosf) was at variance with the ethos of Catherine's court even when advanced by scrupulously loyal monarchists like Sumarokov. Like the concept of natural law that was simultaneously being introduced into the philosophy curriculum of Moscow University, 'true wisdom' seemed to propose a standard of truth above that of the monarch's will. Unsystematic Voltairianism, with its ideal of a cultivated earthly life and urbane scepticism, was more to Catherine's liking. Rather than Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, she wanted her courtiers to read Tatishchev's Honorable Mirror of Youth. By 1767 this manual had undergone five editions, with its homely reminders (often reinforced with proverbs) not to repeat the same story incessantly, pick teeth with a knife, or keep spurs on while dancing. In such a world, morality tended to be Epicurean rather than Stoic. The starting point was self-interest rather than higher reality:
Rational egoism necessarily includes in itself love toward God and one's neighbor. Man will love independently because one needs the love of others for one's own happiness.62
Earthy satire was even more important than Stoic uplift in giving dramatic expression to aristocratic discontent with Voltairianism. Catherine wrote a number of plays satirizing the aristocracy, and helped give birth to a new and potentially subversive genre which was first mastered by Denis
Fonvizin. If Catherine's pretensions as a writer far exceeded her accomplishments, exactly the opposite is true of Fonvizin. He was a diffident, self-effacing aristocrat who became incurably ill in his late thirties, yet lived to complete in The Adolescent one of Russia's first original masterpieces of secular literature and 'first drama of social satire.'
The Adolescent challenged the prevailing pseudo-classical literary style and gave an altogether new direction to Russian writing. It anticipates in some ways the distinctively Russian theatrical tradition of 'laughter through tears' which was to lead through Gogol to Chekhov. Nearly twenty years in the making, it also stands as the first of those life projects which were to drain away the talents of so many sensitive artists of the late imperial period.
The Adolescent is a short, deceptively simple prose comedy on a contemporary theme-exactly the opposite of the ponderous rhymed tragedies in mythological settings then in favor. It is one of the ironies of Catherine's reign that Fonvizin, who developed to perfection the satirical form which Catherine introduced, was the secretary to Count Panin, the man who had originally led the fight to limit her autocratic power. Frustrated in their efforts to curb imperial absolutism, her opponents now turned to satire. It was an indication of things to come; for Catherine's successors were to be limited more by ideological disaffection than political restraint. Dramatic satire became in the nineteenth-and indeed in the post-Stalin twentieth century--the vehicle for a distinctively Russian form of passionate, if seemingly passive, communal protest against tyranny. As an acute German observer of the 1860's noted: 'Political opposition in Russia takes the form of satire.'63 The Adolescent was the first Russian drama to be translated and performed in the West; and it has remained the only eighteenth-century Russian drama still regularly performed in the USSR.
Fonvizin was a cosmopolitan eighteenth-century figure. His German ancestry is revealed in his name (derived from von Wiesen), and his plays betray the influence of the Danish social satirist, Ludvig Holberg (whose plays he read and translated from the German), and of the Italian commedia dell'arte (whose traditions were filtering in through the Italian personnel imported for the operatic theater). His real model was, however, France, and its pre- Revolutionary satirical theater in which-as he put it in a letter from Paris-'you forget that a comedy is being played and it seems that you are seeing direct history.'64
The Adolescent comes close to being 'direct history' and thus anticipates much of nineteenth-century Russian literature. The play deals with the key problem of the Russian Enlightenment itself: the education of the aristocracy. Part of it depicts the conventional education for virtue and
responsibility of an aristocratic couple preparing for marriage. But most of the play and all of its interest centers on the education of 'the adolescent,' a brutish, sixteen-year-old provincial aristocrat, Mitrofan, by an unforgettable galaxy of characters 'in the village of the Prostakovs' (literally, 'Simpletons'). Three fraudulent teachers, a worthless father, a pig-loving uncle, and a gross, doting mother, all hover around the sulking Mitrofan and contribute to his mis-education. Those who preach the gospel of aristocratic virtue are made to appear boring and faintly ludicrous in a world where unvarnished barbarism is still the norm.
Thus, Fonvizin turns Catherine's world upside down in a way he never had as part of Panin's political opposition-and in a way he may not entirely have intended. Western education does not lead to the grail of enlightenment in adolescent Russia. At the end of the adventure, there is no 'thorn-less rose that does not sting,' but only a sea of brambles. The last line of the play is: 'Here are the worthy fruits of an evil nature.' Perhaps human nature is not perfectible after all. Perhaps there is no point in cultivating one's garden, as Voltaire advised, because nothing but poisoned fruit will grow.
But such splenetic thoughts were to come later. Fonvizin's perspective is still one of life-affirming laughter. He shared the breadth of interests that was typical of the Russian Enlightenment, and the sense of confidence and pride that comes from being a privileged member of a rising power. For deeper disaffection one must look to three other figures who deliberately set out to find radically new answers to the problems of the day: Gregory Skovoroda, Alexander Radishchev, and Nicholas Novikov. They were probably the most brilliant men of the late eighteenth century in Russia; and the depth and variety of their searchings illustrate the true seriousness of the alienation of the intellectuals under Catherine. The only common feature of their divergent careers is the intensity with which they all rejected the dilettantism and imitativeness of court culture and the finality with which their own new ideas and activities were, in turn, rejected by Catherine.
Skovoroda represented the most complete rejection of Catherine's ethos with his ascetic indifference to things of this world and his search for the hidden mysteries of 'true wisdom.' Of Cossack descent, Skovoroda studied at the Kiev Academy and attracted imperial attention in the 1740's as a vocalist in the baroque choirs of Kiev. A brilliant teacher at the Academy, he soon turned to seminary teaching and then left for a life of lonely wandering and reading, relieved only by endless philosophical dialogues and a few close friendships.
He taught for brief periods in all of the great centers of theological education in eighteenth-century Russia: Kiev, St. Petersburg, Kharkov, and
the Moscow Academy in the Monastery of St. Sergius. He concluded that happiness lay only in full inner knowledge of oneself, which in turn required a highly personal and mystical link with God. He wandered throughout
