Woe from Wit
Fonvizin's reputation rests almost entirely on his two comedies, which are beyond doubt the most popular Russian plays before Aleksander Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit". They are both in prose and adhere to the canons of classical comedy. Fonvizin's principal model, however, was not Molière, but the great Dano-Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg, whom he read in German, and some of whose plays he had translated.