''The Minor'' (or Young ignoramus, Недоросль), is a 1782 play by

Denis Fonvizin Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin (russian: Денис Иванович Фонвизин; —) was a playwright and writer of the Russian Enlightenment, one of the founders of literary comedy in Russia. His main works are two satirical comedies, one of th ...

. Milton Ehre ''Gogol: Plays and Selected Writings'' 1980 - p xvi 0810111594 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.

References

1782 plays {{DEFAULTSORT:Minor, The