SOURCE: Patterson, David. “Fonvizin's Nedorosl' as a Russian Representative of the genre sérieux.” Comparative Literature Studies XIV, no. 3 (September 1977): 196-204.

In the following essay, Patterson examines the aspects of the genre sérieux, or serious comedy, in Fonvizin's The Minor, arguing that the play is a distinctly Russian example of the form as it is preoccupied with the dusha, or soul, and uses the situation of Russian serfdom to explore the choice between virtue and power.

Although Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin was hardly a follower of the eighteenth-century French philosophes, he does seem to have fallen under the sway of some of their innovations in dramatic theory. One such innovator was Denis Diderot who, in 1773, set out from The Hague for St. Petersburg, where he met Fonvizin. We know that Diderot's two plays, Le Fils naturel (1757) and Le Père de famille (1758), were well received in Russia, and...