[A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections by Isabel Florence Hapgood]@TWC D-Link book
A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections

CHAPTER VII
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The merits of the play rest upon its queer characters from life, who are startlingly real, and represent the genuine aims and ideas of the time.

The contrasting set of characters, whom he introduced as the exponents of his ideals, do not express any aims and ideas which then existed, but merely what he personally would have liked to see.
Katherine II., with whose comedies Von Vizin's have much in common, always tried to offset her disagreeable real characters by honorable, sensible types, also drawn from real life as ideals.

But Von Vizin's ideal characters are almost hostile in their bearing towards his characters drawn from real life.

Altogether, Von Vizin must be regarded as the first independent, artistic writer in Russia, and therefore epoch-making, just as Feofan Prokopovitch must be rated as the first Russian secular writer, and Sumarokoff as the first Russian literary man and publicist in the modern meaning of the words.

It is worth noting (because of a tendency to that sort of thing in later Russian writers down to the present day) that towards the end of his life a stroke of paralysis, in 1785, and other unfortunate circumstances, threw Von Vizin into a gloomy religious state of mind, under the influence of which he judged himself and his works with extreme severity, and condemned them with excessive harshness.
The general outline of "The Hobbledehoy" is as follows: Mrs.Prostakoff (Simpleton), a managing woman, of ungovernable temper, has an only child, Mitrofan (the Hobbledehoy), aged sixteen.


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