The Icon and the Axe

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