Random
Found this in •The Literature of 18th-Century”
Introduction
respect. His first serious original effort as a dramatist, The Brigadier (1766), was a satirical comedy aimed particularly at the phenomenon of the "petimetr" (petit-maître), the Frenchified fop. But Fonvizin was careful to indicate thad Ivanushka's indifference to everything Russian and ecstatic admiration for everything French were the result of the fact that his socially ambitious parents entrusted his education to the hands of French tutors in preference to native Russians The blame, then, for the many Ivanushkas in the Russia of the time had to be placed at the doorstep of Russian society
itself.
How far this Gallophobic and xenophobic sentiment had progressed by the 1770's can easily be judged from Fonvizin's travel letters from his second trip to the West (1777-1778).
Wherever he traveled in the West, but especially in France, where he spent the most time, Fonvizin took keen delight in describing the negative aspects of the life he observed around him. Although on occasion he found some things praise-worthy, the comparisons he draws between French customs and institutions and Russian invariably work to the advantage of the latter. Fonvizin's purpose was plain enough: to present as black a picture of the West as possible, to show that conditions in Russia on the whole were as good as, and in certain respects better than, in France, that almost everything French was vastly overrated and that the Russians simply were fools to imitate the ways of a civilization no better than their own!
The mounting criticism of the total capitulation of Russian culture to France soon found reflection in Russian literature in the 1760's and 1770's. Satire was recognized as a particularly effective tool in the struggle to combat the invasion of French influences; as a result various forms of satirical writing flourished in the first two decades of Catherine's reign: verse satires, satirical comedies and, of course, the satirical journals in which the thoughtless aping of French ways was often held up to ridicule. The epic also reached its apogee during this period in the writings of Kheraskov, and it is not difficult to see such a work as the Rossiad (Rossiada, 1779; about Ivan the Terrible's conquest of Kazan'), his major epic poem, as a reflection of the rise of Russian national consciousness. At a time when Western (that is, French) influences were en fulfing Russian culture, stirring epics about great victories of Russian arms-apart from their literary