Alexander Ostrovsky

(1823–1886)

A Family Affair by Alexander Ostrovsky, adapted by Nick Dear

Theatr Clwyd, 1996

The Maly Theatre in Moscow is sometimes referred to as the House of Ostrovsky. It was here that most of his plays were first performed, and his bust now stands in its foyer to indicate his position as virtual founder of the Russian repertoire, just as Molière’s presides over the Comédie Française in Paris. Towards the end of his life, revered by the public and with nearly fifty plays to his credit, Ostrovsky was appointed artistic director of all the Imperial theatres in Moscow – quite an achievement for a man whose first play was banned for thirteen years, and whose dramatic aspirations were to cost him the support of his family and condemn him to years of near-starvation.

The Merchants Revolt

He was born Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky on 31 March 1823 in the merchants’ district on the south side of the Moskva River. His father was an official of the Moscow Senate and a lawyer; in other words, he had a position to keep up. But the young Alexander showed little concern for the niceties of social convention. While studying law at the university he argued with his professor, did badly in his exams, and was forced to leave off his studies to take up the post of clerk in the Commercial Courts. The job was not congenial but fortunately in 1846 he met Prov Sadovsky, one of the leading actors of the day, who encouraged him to write. The one-act plays A Picture of Family Happiness and The Bankrupt were published the following year.

It was an enlarged version of this latter play, now going under the title We’ll Settle It Amongst Ourselves, that was the cause of Ostrovsky’s first run-in with the censor. Sadovsky and his equally eminent colleague Schepkin had given a reading of the play at the home of MP Pogodin, the leading light of Moscow’s underground literary life, who subsequently agreed to publish the text in his magazine Moskvityanin. It painted an uncompromising portrait of Moscow’s blatantly self-serving merchant class who, recognising a devastatingly accurate and potentially damaging satire when they saw one, immediately brought the matter to the attention of the Tsar. Nicholas I, aware of their economic value to his throne, acted swiftly. The censor’s report makes no bones about the establishment position: “All the characters are out-and-out villains. The dialogue is obscene. The entire play is an insult to the Russian merchant class.” The playwright was ordered to attend a lecture delivered by the Minister of Education on the dramatist’s duty to show virtue rewarded. In addition he was placed under police surveillance and forced to resign his job. If it had not been for Pogodin coming to his recue with the offer of an editorial position on his paper, Ostrovsky might well have gone under.

How could a mere play have caused such a furore? Mainly because the merchant classes had been a law unto themselves for generations and were appalled at the spectacle of this upstart from their own ranks (as they saw it) turning against them. In the rigid power structure that characterised Russian society at the time, the merchants, backed by the Tsar, were wealthy, greedy, thoroughly unscrupulous, and to all intents and purposes a law unto themselves. Ostrovsky had seen all this from an early age without being taken in. Following the early death of his mother he spent more time in merchants’ houses than in his own. He had mixed with their children at the grammar school, and at the Commercial Court came into intimate contact with the thoroughgoing cynicism of the merchant community’s attitude to their fellow citizens. The rest of the Civil Service were implicated too, through bribery, corruption and sleaze in all its forms, and it was this wholesale dishonesty on an almost theatrical scale that informed Ostrovsky’s satirical response.

A Russian Writer

But while his good deed in a naughty world did little to advance his career, his reputation was made virtually overnight. By dint of numerous private readings of We’ll Settle It… (also since translated as A Family Affair), Ostrovsky soon came to be regarded as one of the best young dramatists in the country without ever having had a play produced on stage. When A Family Affair was eventually passed by the censor, it was only with the addition of an absurd happy ending in which a policeman arrives like a deus ex machina to right the wrongs the court has allowed. Even in the new liberal age of Nicholas’s son Alexander it seems it was more important to pretend that justice was seen to be done rather than to ensure it really was.

Meanwhile, the playwright had turned his pen to other things. The Poor Bride in 1853 was his first play to be produced and that same year he himself acted in Don’t Ride in Other People’s Sledges. That title sounds like a translation, and indeed the various translations there have been of other (though by no means all) of his works over the years indicates why Ostrovsky is seen as essentially a Russian writer – that is, one who is revered within his own country but a lot less well known outside it. For one thing his use of language is frequently impenetrable even to a native audience. The dialect of the environment he was brought up in is distanced not only linguistically but also in time from present day usage. The Russian spoken by the Muscovite merchant class, tenaciously medieval in tone, was the final stronghold of their individualism, peculiar to that class alone, in that society, at that place and time.

Another obstacle to the whole-hearted acceptance of his work has been the nature of his characters. Ostrovsky was one of the greatest social realists any theatrical tradition has produced. There are no heroes or villains in his plays, just people whose temperaments and personalities are forged by circumstances just as yours or mine are, and this is the way they behave. The action you see is only what you might expect to occur when such individuals interact with each other. By the same token there are no star parts in Ostrovsky, any more than there are any two-dimensional characters stuck in simply for the purposes of the plot. As the playwright’s contemporary critic Skabitchevsky wrote, “One scene follows another, all seeming so commonplace, so everyday, yet out of them a drama is imperceptibly coming into being. You could swear that you are not watching a comedy but that life itself is being unrolled before your eyes, as if the author had simply taken away one wall of a room and showed you what was going on in such and such a house…”

Conquering the Masses

Over the forty years of his creative life, Ostrovksy had further battles with the censor: A Lucrative Post (1857) and The Ward (1859), for example, were both banned outright. But as his fame and popularity increased he was able to sustain such setbacks while winning even greater favour among his audiences through those plays of his which were produced. Sheer popularity became a kind of protective wall which not even the Tsar and his battalions of truckling lapdogs could – or dared – knock down.

In the 1860s Ostrovsky embarked on a series of history plays which, although well enough received, he soon abandoned to return to the realistic contemporary comedies which had made his name. In later years he would vary this diet again with works dealing with the position of women in Russian society: the best of these is deemed to be The Dowerless Girl (1878), which many have seen as a precursor to Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Other plays proved the inspiration to composers – Snegurochka, a fairy play in blank verse, was based on an ancient legend and used by Rimsky-Korsakov for the libretto of his opera The Snow Maiden, while one of Ostrovsky’s most famous plays, The Storm (1859), a study in religious intolerance, provided the basis of Janáček’s Katya Kabanova.

The Storm was first seen in translation in New York in 1900, but was not premiered in England until 1929. The Forest (1871), Ostrovsky’s most universally acclaimed play and his most complex, only received its British premiere in 1981. However, other more accessible pieces like Wolves and Sheep (1875) and Even a Wise Man Can Stumble (1868), now more commonly known as Too Clever By Half, have been seen far more frequently outside their country of origin.

Thoughout his life, Ostrovsky was as supportive of his colleagues as they were of him. In his mid-twenties he had married the actress Agafya Ivanovna – one of the actions that led to his father dropping him in disgust – and when she died in 1867 he bought his father’s estate on the Volga and turned it into a retreat for his theatrical friends. Three years later he founded and became first president of the Society of Russian Playwrights and Composers, and four years before he died he began campaigning for the setting up of a National Theatre for Russia.

Death and Glory

In 1884 the establishment he had fought with for so long finally got round to honouring him when Alexander III granted him a life pension. Perhaps such a reward could no longer be withheld in the face of public opinion. Perhaps it was simply a cynical pat on the back to an old man for whom nobody in power had ever had much time. Either way, the state didn’t need to pay it for long. Alexander Ostrovsky, “the Balzac of the Muscovite merchant”, whose own human comedy had discomfited the few as much as it had delighted the many, died on 2 June 1886. He was sixty-three.