SOURCE: Barratt, Andrew. “Working with Deconstruction: Fonvizin's The Minor Revisited.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1994): 1-15.

In the following essay, Barratt deconstructs The Minor, examining the “marginalized” aspects of the play—notably the use of coincidence and the subplot concerning the love of the characters Milon and Sof'ia—to show how the play undermines its ostensible philosophy that champions Enlightenment ideals.

Several years ago—rather more years than I care to remember, in fact—Patrick Waddington sent me a letter in which, among other things, he chided me gently, but nonetheless seriously, for what he felt to be an unseemly interest in ‘trendy’ modern Russian authors (I was, as I recall, working on Bulgakov at the time). For some reason, these words came back to me when I was asked to contribute to this festschrift and they fed a determination, on this occasion at least, to turn my attention...