Totally different is "The Hobbledehoy" ("Nedorosl," 1782), which is even more celebrated, and was written towards the close of a long career in the service, filled with varied and trying experiences--part of which arose from the difficulties of the author's own noble character in contact with a different type of men and from his attacks on abuses of all sorts--after a profound study of life in the middle and higher classes of Russian court and diplomatic circles. The difference between "The Brigadier" and "The Hobbledehoy" is so great that they must be read in the order of their production if the full value of the impression created by the earlier play is to be appreciated. "The Hobbledehoy" was wholly unlike anything which had been seen hitherto in Russian literature. Had the authorities permitted Von Vizin to print his collection of satires, he would have stood at the head of that branch of literature in that epoch; as it was, this fine comedy contains the fullest expression of his dissatisfaction at the established order of things in general. The merits of the play rest upon its queer characters from life, who are startlingly real, and represent the genuine aims and ideas of the time. The contrasting set of characters, whom he introduced as the exponents of his ideals, do not express any aims and ideas which then existed, but merely what he personally would have liked to see. Katherine II., with whose comedies Von Vizin's have much in common, always tried to offset her disagreeable real characters by honorable, sensible types, also drawn from real life as ideals. But Von Vizin's ideal characters are almost hostile in their bearing towards his characters drawn from real life. Altogether, Von Vizin must be regarded as the first independent, artistic writer in Russia, and therefore epoch-making, just as Feofan Prokopovitch must be rated as the first Russian secular writer, and Sumarokoff as the first Russian literary man and publicist in the modern meaning of the words. It is worth noting (because of a tendency to that sort of thing in later Russian writers down to the present day) that towards the end of his life a stroke of paralysis, in 1785, and other unfortunate circumstances, threw Von Vizin into a gloomy religious state of mind, under the influence of which he judged himself and his works with extreme severity, and condemned them with excessive harshness.