After divers vicissitudes of service, he wrote "The Brigadier," which he was promptly asked to read before royalty and in society.

It won for him great reputation with people who were capable of appreciating the first play which was genuinely Russian in something more than externals.

It jeers at ignorance coated over with an extremely thin veneer of pretentious foreign culture.

The types in "The Brigadier" (written about 1747) had long been floating about in literature, and as it were, awaiting a skillful pen which should present them in full relief to the contemporary public.

Von Vizin set forth these types on the stage in a clearer, more vivid manner than all previous writers who had dealt with them, as we have seen, in satires and dramas, from Kantemir to Katherine II.