(Gennady, an impoverished actor and romantic innocent, arr...)
Gennady, an impoverished actor and romantic innocent, arrives at the country estate of his aunt, pretending to be rich and hoping for peace and comfort. Instead, he finds himself caught up in a network of intrigue where forbidden love, spying, treachery, lust, rapacious greed and financial double-dealings are rife.
(The tone of Poverty Is No Crime (1854), written only four...)
The tone of Poverty Is No Crime (1854), written only four years after A Family Affair, is in sharp contrast with that of its predecessor. In the earlier play Ostrovsky had adopted a satiric tone that proved him a worthy disciple of Gogol, the great founder of Russian realism. Not one lovable character appears in that gloomy picture of merchant life in Moscow; even the old mother repels us by her stupidity more than she attracts us by her kindliness. No ray of light penetrates the "realm of darkness" -- to borrow a famous phrase from a Russian critic -- conjured up before us by the young dramatist. In Poverty Is No Crime we see the other side of the medal. Ostrovsky had now been affected by the Slavophile school of writers and thinkers, who found in the traditions of Russian society treasures of kindliness and love that they contrasted with the superficial glitter of Western civilization. Life in Russia is varied as elsewhere, and Ostrovsky could change his tone without doing violence to realistic truth. The tradesmen had not wholly lost the patriarchal charm of their peasant fathers. A poor apprentice is the hero of Poverty Is No Crime, and a wealthy manufacturer the villain of the piece. Good-heartedness is the touchstone by which Ostrovsky tries character, and this may be hidden beneath even a drunken and degraded exterior. The scapegrace, Lyubim Tortsov, has a sound Russian soul, and at the end of the play rouses his hard, grasping brother, who has been infatuated by a passion for aping foreign fashions, to his native Russian worth. Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-1886) was an early Russian Realist whose work led to the founding of the Moscow Arts Theatre and to the career of Stanislavsky. He has been acknowledged to be the greatest of the Russian dramatists.
It's a Family Affair-We'll Settle It Ourselves: A Comedy in Four Acts
(Born in 1823, he was the son of a lawyer doing business a...)
Born in 1823, he was the son of a lawyer doing business among the Moscow tradesmen. With this merchant class Ostrovsky was familiar from his childhood. After finishing his course at the gymnasium and spending three years at the University of Moscow, he entered the civil service in 1843 as an employee of the Court of Conscience in Moscow, from which he transferred two years later to the Court of Commerce, where he continued until he was discharged from the service in 1851. Hence both by his home life and by his professional training he was brought into contact with types such as Bolshov and Rizpolozhensky in It's a Family Affair: We'll Settle It Ourselves. As a boy of seventeen Ostrovsky had already developed a passion for the theatre. His literary career began in the year 1847, when he read to a group of Moscow men of letters his first experiments in dramatic composition. In this same year he printed one scene of A Family Affair, which appeared in complete form three years later, in 1850, and established its author?s reputation as a dramatist of undoubted talent. Unfortunately, by its mordant but true picture of commercial morals, it aroused against him the most bitter feelings among the Moscow merchants. Discussion of the play in the press was prohibited, and representation of it on the stage was out of the question. It was reprinted only in 1859, and then, at the instance of the censorship, in an altered form, in which a police officer appears at the end of the play as a deus ex machina, arrests Podkhalyuzin, and announces that he will be sent to Siberia. In this mangled version the play was acted in 1861; in its original text it did not appear on the stage until 1881. Besides all this, the drama was the cause of the dismissal of Ostrovsky from the civil service, in 1851. The whole episode illustrates the difficulties under which the great writers of Russia have constantly labored under a despotic government. Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-1886) was an early Russian Realist whose work led to the founding of the Moscow Arts Theatre and to the career of Stanislavsky. He has been acknowledged to be the greatest of the Russian dramatists.
(One of Ostrovsky's most poetical works, The Storm is set ...)
One of Ostrovsky's most poetical works, The Storm is set in Kalinov, a provincial town on the banks of the Upper Volga. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, Katerína is tormented by her widowed mother-in-law, Marfa Kabanova. Katerína seeks solace in an affair with a similarly toermented young lover, and the confession of this affair to her husband leads ultimately to tragedy. The Storm was a great success on its first performance the Maly Theatre, Moscow, in November 1859, and continues to be critically regarded as one of Ostrovsky's best plays. It inspired Janácek's opera Katia Kabanova.
Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky was a Russian playwright, generally considered the greatest representative of the Russian realistic period. The author of 47 original plays, Ostrovsky almost single-handedly created a Russian national repertoire.
Background
Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky was born on the 12th of April 1823, in the Zamoskvorechye region of Moscow, to Nikolai Fyodorovich Ostrovsky, a lawyer who received religious education. Apparently, Nikolai's ancestors came from the village Ostrov in the Nerekhta region of Kostroma governorate, hence the surname.
According to another theory the Ostrovskys were of Polish and Belorussian origins, but since all the Kostroma archives perished in the fire in the late 19th century, this question remained unsettled.
Later Nikolai Ostrovsky became a high-ranked state official and as such in 1839 received a nobility title with the corresponding privileges.
Education
In 1840 Ostrovsky graduated from the First Moscow Gymnasium and enrolled into Moscow University to study law, where among his tutors were such prominent scholars of the time as professors Pyotr Redkin, Timofey Granovsky and Mikhail Pogodin.
Career
In mid-1840s Ostrovsky wrote numerous sketches and scenes inspired by the Zamoskvorechye merchants community's life and made a draft for the play called The Bankrupt.
Also in Listok appeared (as unsigned) "Pictures of Moscow Life" and "The Picture of a Family Happiness", two sets of scenes which were later published by Sovremennik (No. 4, 1856) under the title The Family Picture. Ostrovsky regarded it as his first original work and the starting point of his literary career. On 27 August 1851, The Picture of Family Happiness was banned from being produced by Imperial Theatres. In December 1849 The Bankrupt was finished.
In his "Slavophile period" Ostrovsky set out to explore with a circle of friends ("Ostrovsky circle"), what was good and unique about Russians.
Finally approved by censors, The Bankrupt appeared in the March issue of Moskvityanin under the new title It's a Family Affair-We'll Settle It Ourselves. Ostrovsky's second play was the one-act piece The Young Man's Morning. The melodramatic Stay in Your Own Sled, less daring than Family Affair and not as ambitious as The Poor Bride, was published in Moskvityanin and became the first Ostrovsky's play to make it on to the Maly Theatre stage.
Ostrovsky, assigned a section of the Volga, traveled there in 1856 and 1857.
He noted on index cards hundreds of unfamiliar words and expressions with examples of usage.
As he traveled, he observed how the steamship and other innovations were undercutting ancient patterns of courtship and family organization and overturning assumptions about the world.
In 1858 Not of the Same Ilk, originally a novelette, came out. Subtitled "The Picture of the Moscow Life" and telling the story of an impoverished nobleman who marries a rich merchant woman only to be horrified by her stinginess, it was not of Ostrovsky's best. By far more significant was his next one, A Protégée of the Mistress (1859), continuing the 'degradation of the nobility' theme and written during his three weeks' visit to Saint Petersburg in 1858.
In 1859 Count Grigory Kushelyov-Bezborodko published the first edition of The Works by A. N. Ostrovsky in two volumes. His best-known play, The Storm (1859) was premiered on 16 November 1859.
In 1861 Ostrovsky finished Whatever You Look for, You'll Find, the final part of the Balzaminov trilogy (praised among others by Dostoyevsky), and the historical drama in verse, Kozma Zakharyich Minin-Sukhoruk, which took him six years to write.
In the spring of 1862 Ostrovsky went abroad to visit Germany, Austria, Italy, France and England, and returned with the acute feeling of the contrast between the two different time planes that Russia and Europe were living on.
By 1867, Ostrovsky had fallen into depression, feeling worthless and lonely. Things changed when Nekrasov became the head of Otechestvennye Zapiski. Ostrovsky was warmly welcomed in and debuted there in November 1868 with Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man.
In the autumn of 1883 Ostrovsky made a trip down to the Caucasus. Refreshed and full of new hopes, Ostrovsky came back and promptly finished Guilty Without Fault. In the early 1884 Ostrovsky was finally granted a personal pension from the Court, something he had requested 15 years earlier and had been refused.
Achievements
Ostrovskiy enjoyed the patronage of Alexander III, and received a pension of 3000 roubles a year. With the help of Moscow capitalists he established in that city a model theatre and school of dramatic art, of which he became the first director. He also founded the Society of Russian Dramatic Art and Opera Composers.
Appalled by the deep crisis the Russian theatre found itself in the 1870s, Ostrovsky worked out a profound plan for its radical reform. His driven idea was making the theatre the home of a thinking man.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Ostrovsky is a talented man, but his plays for me are unbearable. I come to the theatre to rest from my hard work expecting to be amused, but Ostrovsky's plays leave me depressed and distraught." - Tsar Alexander II complained.
Connections
In the early 1860s Ostrovsky met Maria Vasilyevna Vasilyeva, the Maly Theater actress whom he became close with in 1864. On New Year's Eve she gave birth to a child, Alexander. In August 1866 Mikhail was born, in the end of 1867, a daughter, Maria. On 12 February 1869, Ostrovsky and Vasilyeva married.
