«Имей сердце, имей душу, и будешь человек во всякое время…» (к анализу комедии Д.И. Фонвизина «Недоросль»)

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to consider D.I. Fonvizin’s anthropological concept formed in his comedy “The Minor”. It was formed as the result of comprehension of the changes that the Russian nobility of the second half of the XVIIIth century manifested in their everyday behavior and which were mainly associated with forming the opportunities in private life and the life choice of a behavior strategy. The research methods used in the article are based both on the traditions of the cultural and historical study of the creative personality of the writer in the context of the Russian literature of the second half of the XVIIIth century – the Catherinian Era – and on the semiotic model of the poetics of everyday behavior of the Russian nobility, formed in the works of Yu.M. Lotman’s. The focus of the work is to identify the topic of private existence as a value guide for people of the second half of the XVIIIth century, which was made possible thanks to the “Manifesto on Freedom of the Nobility”, which methodologically must be taken into account not only in the process of compiling a real commentary on the play of D.I. Fonvizin’s, but also while analyzing the ideological structure of the play and the specifics of the characters portrayal. Each of them (primarily ideological heroes, madam Prostakova and Starodum), in one way or another, gives their assessment of the “Manifesto on Freedom of the Nobility”; their fate can be seen as the illustration of the main role models that appeared in the poetics of everyday behavior of the Russian nobility of the second half of the XVIII century. The main results of the study are related to the refinement of ideas about Fonvizin, a writer and thinker of his era, his views on the cultural changes of the Catherinian Era, the specifics of the aesthetic ideas of the writer, and the correlation of classic and pre-realistic trends in his work. The brief conclusions made in the article are that the comedy “The Minor” became an important step of the writer’s in comprehending the cultural and anthropological processes that were outlined in Russia during the Catherinian Era, eventually making the period of the late XVIII – early XIX centuries “The golden age” of cultural creativity of the Russian nobility.