Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky was born in Moscow on April 12, 1823. AS the son of a merchant-turned-lawyer, Ostrovsky grew up in the new Moscow of the rising middle class. Ostrovsky would later use this new bourgeoisie as the main backdrop for his plays, portraying them as petty, scheming, shrewd, and above all greedy. Although he entered the University of Moscow to study law in 1840, his real passion was theatre. Nonetheless, he continued his studies for three years until in 1843 he was forced to leave after a dispute with university authorities. He spent the next eight years as a clerk in the Moscow domestic and commercial courts. His time working at the courts allowed him to see the rougher, seamier sides of human affairs, and especially the attitudes of the Moscow merchant class. And so with this experience in hand he began to write.
Ostrovsky published his first and only non-dramatic work, Notes of a Resident of the Far Side of the Moscow River, in 1847. This was followed two years later, at the age of 26, by considerable attention and controversy when two scenes from his comedy It’s a Family Affair – We’ll Settle It Ourselves were published in a Moscow newspaper. Originally titled The Bankrupt, the play comments on “the corrupted soul” of the merchant class. The nobility and business class vehemently denounced the play and its writer, and Czar Nicholas I not only banned all productions of the play, but also forbid any discussion of it in the press. Ostrovsky as a result found himself placed under constant police surveillance and was forced to resign from the commercial court. Still, he wrote. The play was first produced ten years later, after Ostrovsky gave in to the censor’s demands for changes and deletions. The Veronezhsky Cadet Corps, on behalf of the Literary Fund, first produced it
in 1860, followed by a production at the Maly Theatre in 1861.
Although Ostrovsky was furious at having to alter his play to suit the censor, he did find a way around one of the changes that actually ended up reinforcing the play’s cynical attitude. The censor had changed the end so that a police officer would come in to arrest Lazar, the cunning merchant’s assistant. In the first production, the actor playing Lazar, Sadovsky, slipped in his own change without adding a word to the script. He shoved a bribe into the officer’s hand and got away scot-free. As a side note: it took thirty two years, until 1881, and the help of Ostrovsky’s brother, a high-ranking government minister, to stage the original 1849 version of A Family Affair. At the premiere performance the theatre was packed despite the fact that the Imperial Theater managers had artificially raised the ticket prices.
Ostrovsky left his job at the Commercial Courts in 1851 to devote himself entirely to writing. From 1853, the year he completed his fifth play, The Poor Bride, every following year saw a new Ostrovsky play produced. Over a span of forty years, Ostrovsky wrote more than fifty plays, in addition to translating into Russian Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goldoni, and other classical Western authors.
Along with playwriting, Ostrovsky was on the staff of The Muscovite, a journal which promoted a Russian (and pan-Slavic) national literature and which had a tremendous influence on Russian literature at the time. After The Muscovite folded in 1856, Ostrovsky embarked on a “literary expedition” traveling through Russia, in particular the Volga region. This experience deeply affected the writer and his popularity quickly grew in the years following. The impressions he formed on this journey can be seen in several of his most important works, notably The Thunderstorm, written in 1859. Although Ostrovsky’s plays were huge successes for the theatre managers, the hostility of the government’s Imperial Theatre administrators kept Ostrovsky himself from partaking in the success, and despite his critical and popular triumphs, he remained poor nearly to the end of his life.
“Usually Ostrovsky directed the staging of his plays,” recounted Nadezhda Rykalove, an actress at the Maly Theatre. “He would gather the company together and read the play to them. He was an excellent reader and acted out all the parts. When he was finished nothing remained to be explained. Every actor knew just what he was supposed to do.” “Ostrovsky’s forte was performing the women’s roles. He was unmatched at playing matchmakers and merchants’ wives,” another actor recalled.
Ostrovsky, ever the proponent of greater access to the arts for all in Russia, founded the Artistic Society of Moscow in 1865, renamed the Society of Russian Playwrights in 1870, to push for a national theatre that catered to audiences of all classes. Ostrovsky wrote to Alexander III in 1881 with a plea to establish the theatre: “Drama is written not only for the cultured classes, but for all people!” Thanks to Ostrovsky, the next year the Imperial Theatres relinquished their monopoly and a private theatre was founded in Moscow, eventually leading to the establishment in 1897 of the Moscow Art Theatre.
Ostrovsky’s career peaked in 1885 when he was appointed head of the Moscow Imperial Theatres and the Moscow Theatrical School. Now with the power and opportunity to do so, he prepared to democratize Russian theatre, only to die too soon on June 14, 1886, in Slykovo.
Ostrovsky occupies a central, perhaps the central, position in the history of Russian drama; his work laid the foundation for an approach to theatre based on truth and realism, which is why many critics and scholars consider him the “father of modern drama.” Unfortunately, Ostrovsky was ahead of his time, a time when Chekhov and Gorky were introducing and popularizing Russian drama for the West.
Although he is still extremely popular in Russia, Ostrovsky is relatively unknown in the West. Due to his highly idiomatic writing, his plays have been difficult to translate and export. Further complicating matters are his very Russian writing tendencies, which rely heavily on references and characterizations unique to the Russia of the nineteenth century.
This production of A Handsome Man is its very first ever in English. The play was translated by Erika Warmbrunn thanks in part to a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, and adapted by Scott Alan Evans and Greg McFadden at TACT.
