Alexander Ostrovsky

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Alexander Ostrovsky : biography

1823 – 1886

Also in 1869 Money to Burn (Beshenye dengi) came out, reflecting the author’s interest (and wariness too) felt towards the new emerging class of capitalist entrepreneurs, ‘practical people’, as they became known. Ostrovsky himself was very impractical man, even if he liked to pretend to otherwise. "All these publishers are crooks and they drink my blood," he used to say. "Nekrasov openly laughed at me and called me an altruist. He said no man of literature would sell their work as cheap as I do," complained Ostrovsky in a letter. Nekrasov (who paid him a lot – 200 rubles per act which was considered a good price) tried to help Ostrovsky in the business of publishing. "But it just happened so that in the end [Ostrovsky] was always losing money… and was constantly on the verge of bancrypcy," Lakshin wrote. Each of his new plays was sent simultaneously to Maly Theater and Otechestvennye zapiski. Occasionally the publication preceded the premier: such was the case with The Forest (1871), the story of actors travelling from Vologda to Kerch (Ostrovsky heard from one of theatre entrepreneurs) satirising the backwardness of the Russian province of the time.

Now visiting Petersburg regularly, Ostrovsky was enjoying the parties Nekrasov staged in a fashion of Sovremennik happenings, but for all the thrills of meeting people like Gleb Uspensky and Nikolai Mikhailovsky, in the capital he felt clumsy and often made the impression of arrogant man which he was not. For some reason plays which had success in Moscow were flopping in Petersburg, like The Ardent Heart did, due to the poor quality of the Alexandrinsky theater stage production. In January 1872 Alexander II unexpectedly visited the theatre to watch It’s Not All Shrovetide for the Cat (Ne vsyo kotu maslennitsa, 1871) and showed little enthusiasm. Gedeonov’s efforts to make sure Ostrovsky should be granted the personal pension in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of his literary career, came to nothing. The Tsar refused to sing the document and there was no official commemoration of the date at all. The jubilee premier of the play The False Dmitry and Vassily Shuisky (first published in 1866) on the Mariinsky stage on February 17, 1872 failed to meet expectations. "Costumes shocked everybody with their ruggedness, decorations looked as if they were brought from Berg’s puppet show and everything reeked of negligence towards Russian theater and Russian talents", Grazhdanin reviewer wrote. The ceremony held behind the stage was a low profile affair with only theater actors and director Alexander Yablochkin present. Disappointed, Ostrovsky returned to Moscow where indeed he’s always been revered as a veteran dramatist and the head of the Russian drama authors society. Here the celebration was lavish and prolonged, involving a tour through all the best restaurants. "Ostrovsky for Moscow has become what the Pope means for Rome," Ivan Goncharov wrote.

1872 also saw the release of The 17th Century Comic (Komik semnadtsatovo stoletiya), written for the 200th anniversary of the Russian theater. The play was soon forgotten but decades later Marina Tsvetayeva praised it as "exemplary in language". A year later one of Ostrovsky’s most unusual plays, The Snow Maiden (Snegurochka) came out, based on the myth of Berendey kingdom with its noble tsar, who was a poet and an artist. Lev Tolstoy and Nekrasov both loathed the experiment (so it had to be published in Vestnik Evropy) and the Moscow premier drew lukewarm response. But the musical community was ecstatic and it took just three weeks for Pyotr Chaikovsky to write the music for the stage production, and later Rimsky-Korsakov created an opera, keeping most of the original text in the libretto.

1874-1880

In the early 1870s Ostrovsky started to experiment more in plays. Most of them had little success on stage and all were more or less disliked by critics. "The Impotence of Creative Thought", the title of Nikolai Shelgunov’s article in the democratic Delo magazine, reflected the general mood. While in the old days Ostrovsky was criticised for being too epic and paying little attention to form, Late Love (1873) and Wolves and Sheep (1875), with their perfect inner mechanism of action and technical gloss, were slagged as too "French-like in structure". "I am at a loss, being scolded from all sides for my work which I’ve been totally honest in", Ostrovsky complained to Nekrasov in a letter dated March 8, 1874.