The Minor (Fonvizin play)

The Minor
The Minor
	Title page of the first published edition (1783)
Original title	Недоросль
Written by	Denis Fonvizin
Date premiered	5 October [O.S. 24 September] 1782, Saint Petersburg
Original language	Russian
Genre	Comedy, play

The Minor (Russian: Недоросль; also translated as the The Infant and The Young Hopeful), is a 1782 play by Denis Fonvizin.^[1] It is often regarded as one of the greatest pre-19th-century Russian plays.^[2]

On watching it, Prince Grigory Potemkin is purported to have said: "die, Denis: you won't write anything better!", a popular Russian phrase.^[3]

References

^ Gogol, Nikolaĭ (1994). Ehre, Milton; Gottschalk, Fruma (eds.). Gogol: Plays and Selected Writings. European Drama Classics. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. p. xvi. ISBN 978-0-8101-1159-2. Fonvizin's The Minor (1782), besides being the best eighteenth-century Russian comedy, is exemplary of the tangle of elements that went into the genre and which Gogol was finally to unravel. It is a play with two faces: on the one side, a crisp satire of the boorishness and brutality of the worst segment of the Russian provincial gentry; on the other, a tiresome lecture on the virtues of enlightenment and aristocratic honor.
^ Briggs, A.D.P. (1998). Cornwell, Neil (ed.). Reference Guide to Russian Literature. New York: Routledge. pp. 305–306. doi:10.4324/9781315073873. ISBN 978-1-315-07387-3. More successful in every way was Fonvizin's masterpiece, The Minor (also translated as The Infant, The Young Hopeful, etc) (1782), which has no close rival for the title of Russia's finest pre-19th-century play.
^ As quoted in Chekhov, Anton. Ионыч [Ionych] (in Russian). Footnote 4. «Умри, Денис, лучше не напишешь» — фраза, будто бы сказанная князем Г. А. Потемкиным после первого представления комедии Д. И. Фонвизина «Недоросль» (1782). ["Die, Denis, you won't write anything better" is a phrase allegedly said by Prince Grigory Potemkin after the first performance of Denis Fonvizin's comedy The Minor (1782).]{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)

External links

English translation of the play by F. D. Reeve in the volume Nineteenth-century Russian Plays (New York, 1976), on the Internet Archive
Full text of the play in Russian on the Russian Virtual Library (Rvb.ru)

[1] Gogol, Nikolaĭ (1994). Ehre, Milton; Gottschalk, Fruma (eds.). Gogol: Plays and Selected Writings. European Drama Classics. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. p. xvi. ISBN 978-0-8101-1159-2. Fonvizin's The Minor (1782), besides being the best eighteenth-century Russian comedy, is exemplary of the tangle of elements that went into the genre and which Gogol was finally to unravel. It is a play with two faces: on the one side, a crisp satire of the boorishness and brutality of the worst segment of the Russian provincial gentry; on the other, a tiresome lecture on the virtues of enlightenment and aristocratic honor.

[2] Briggs, A.D.P. (1998). Cornwell, Neil (ed.). Reference Guide to Russian Literature. New York: Routledge. pp. 305–306. doi:10.4324/9781315073873. ISBN 978-1-315-07387-3. More successful in every way was Fonvizin's masterpiece, The Minor (also translated as The Infant, The Young Hopeful, etc) (1782), which has no close rival for the title of Russia's finest pre-19th-century play.

[3] As quoted in Chekhov, Anton. Ионыч [Ionych] (in Russian). Footnote 4. «Умри, Денис, лучше не напишешь» — фраза, будто бы сказанная князем Г. А. Потемкиным после первого представления комедии Д. И. Фонвизина «Недоросль» (1782). ["Die, Denis, you won't write anything better" is a phrase allegedly said by Prince Grigory Potemkin after the first performance of Denis Fonvizin's comedy The Minor (1782).]{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)

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