The value of Ostrovsky's drama. Dramamaturgy of Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky and its meaning Essay on literature on the topic: The meaning of Ostrovsky's work for the ideological and aesthetic development of literature

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The life and work of A.N. Ostrovsky

The role of Ostrovsky in the history of the development of Russian drama 4

The life and work of A.N. Ostrovsky 5

Childhood and adolescence 5

First hobby for theater 6

Training and service 7

First hobby. First pieces 7

A falling out with my father. Ostrovsky's wedding 9

The beginning of the creative path 10

Traveling in Russia 12

"Thunderstorm" 14

Ostrovsky's second marriage 17

The best work of Ostrovsky - "Dowry" 19

Death of the Great Playwright 21

Genre originality of A.N. Ostrovsky. Significance in World Literature 22

Literature 24

The role of Ostrovsky in the history of the development of Russian drama

Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky ... This is an unusual phenomenon. It is difficult to overestimate his role in the history of the development of Russian drama, performing arts and the entire Russian culture. For the development of Russian drama, he did as much as Shakespeare in England, Lone de Vega in Spain, Moliere in France, Goldoni in Italy and Schiller in Germany.

Despite the harassment inflicted by the censorship, the theatrical literary committee and the directorate of the imperial theaters, despite criticism from reactionary circles, Ostrovsky's dramaturgy gained more and more sympathy both among democratic spectators and among artists.

Developing the best traditions of Russian dramatic art, using the experience of progressive foreign drama, tirelessly learning about the life of his native country, constantly communicating with the people, closely linking with the most progressive contemporary society, Ostrovsky became an outstanding representative of the life of his time, who embodied the dreams of Gogol, Belinsky and other progressive figures literature about the appearance and triumph of Russian characters on the national stage.

Ostrovsky's creative activity had a great influence on all further development of progressive Russian drama. It was from him that our best playwrights learned from him. It was to him that aspiring dramatic writers were drawn at one time.

The power of Ostrovsky's influence on contemporary writers' youth can be evidenced by a letter to the playwright poetess A.D. Mysovskaya. “Do you know how great was your influence on me? It was not love for art that made me understand and appreciate you: on the contrary, you taught me to love and respect art. I owe you alone that I resisted the temptation to enter the arena of pathetic literary mediocrity, did not chase after cheap laurels thrown by the hands of sweet and sour half-educated people. You and Nekrasov made me love thought and work, but Nekrasov gave me only the first impetus, but you gave me direction. Reading your works, I realized that rhyming is not poetry, but a set of phrases is not literature, and that only by working the mind and technique, the artist will be a real artist ”.

Ostrovsky had a powerful impact not only on the development of Russian drama, but also on the development of Russian theater. The colossal significance of Ostrovsky in the development of Russian theater is well emphasized in a poem dedicated to Ostrovsky and read in 1903 by M.N. Ermolova from the stage of the Maly Theater:

Life itself on the stage, truth blows from the stage,

And the bright sun caresses us and warms us ...

The living speech of simple, living people sounds,

On stage, not a "hero", not an angel, not a villain,

But just a man ... a happy actor

Hastens to quickly break the heavy shackles

Conventions and lies. Words and feelings are new

But in the recesses of the soul, the answer sounds to them, -

And all the lips whisper: blessed is the poet,

Torn off the decrepit, tinsel covers

And into the dark kingdom, who shed a bright light

The famous artist wrote about the same in 1924 in her memoirs: "Together with Ostrovsky, truth itself and life itself appeared on the stage ... The growth of original drama, full of responses to modernity, began ... They started talking about the poor, humiliated and insulted."

The realistic direction, muffled by the theatrical policy of the autocracy, continued and deepened by Ostrovsky, turned the theater on the path of close connection with reality. It alone gave the theater life as a national, Russian, folk theater.

“You have donated a whole library of works of art to literature, you have created your own special world for the stage. You alone completed the building, at the base of which you put the cornerstones Fonvizin, Griboyedov, Gogol. " This wonderful letter received, among other congratulations in the year of the thirty-fifth anniversary of his literary and theatrical activity, Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky from another great Russian writer - Goncharov.

But much earlier, about the very first work of the still young Ostrovsky, published in "Moskvityanin", a subtle connoisseur of the graceful and sensitive observer V.F. then this person has a huge talent. I consider three tragedies in Russia: "Minor", "Woe from Wit", "Inspector General". I put number four on “Bankrupt”. ”

From such a promising first assessment to Goncharov's jubilee letter, a full, hard-working life; labor, and led to such a logical interconnection of assessments, for talent first of all requires great work on oneself, and the playwright did not sin before God - he did not bury his talent in the ground. Having published his first work in 1847, Ostrovsky has since written 47 plays and translated more than twenty plays from European languages. And in total in the folk theater he created there are about a thousand characters.

Shortly before his death, in 1886, Alexander Nikolaevich received a letter from Leo Tolstoy, in which the genius prose writer admitted: “I know from experience how your things are read, obeyed and remembered by the people, and therefore I would like to help you have now, in fact, quickly become what you are undoubtedly - a nationwide writer in the broadest sense. "

The life and work of A.N. Ostrovsky

Childhood and adolescence

Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky was born in Moscow into a cultural, bureaucratic family on April 12 (March 31, old style), 1823. The family was rooted in the clergy: the father was the son of a priest, the mother was the daughter of a sexton. Moreover, my father, Nikolai Fedorovich, himself graduated from the Moscow Theological Academy. But he preferred the career of an official to the clergy's providence and succeeded in it, since he achieved both material independence, and position in society, and the rank of nobility. This was not a dry official, closed only in his service, but a well-educated person, as evidenced at least by his enthusiasm for books - the Ostrovskys' home library was very solid, which, by the way, played an important role in the self-education of the future playwright.

The family lived in those wonderful places in Moscow, which then found a true reflection in Ostrovsky's plays - first in Zamoskvorechye, at the Serpukhov Gate, in a house on Zhitnaya, bought by the late papa Nikolai Fedorovich at a cheap price, at auction. The house was warm, spacious, with a mezzanine, with outbuildings, with an outbuilding, and a shady garden. In 1831, the family suffered grief - after the birth of twin girls, Lyubov Ivanovna died (in total, she gave birth to eleven children, but only four survived). The arrival of a new person in the family (Nikolai Fedorovich married the Lutheran Baroness Emilia von Tessin by his second marriage), naturally, introduced some innovations of a European character to the house, which, however, benefited the children, the stepmother was more caring, helped the children in learning music, languages, formed a social circle. At first, both brothers and sister Natalya avoided the newly-minted mother. But Emilia Andreevna, good-natured, calm in character, with cares and love for the remaining orphans, attracted their children's hearts to herself, slowly achieving the replacement of the nickname “dear auntie” with “dear mamma”.

Now everything is different for the Ostrovskys. Emilia Andreevna patiently taught Natasha and the boys music, French and German, which she knew perfectly, decent manners, and social behavior. There were musical evenings in the house on Zhitnaya, even dancing to the piano. There were babysitters and wet nurses for the newborn babies, a governess. And now they ate at the Ostrovskys', as they say, in a noble style: on china and silver, with starch napkins.

Nikolai Fyodorovich liked all this very much. And having received the hereditary nobility at the rank achieved in the service, while he was previously listed as "from the clergy", he grew his daddy sideburns with a cutlet and now accepted the merchants only in the office, sitting at a large table littered with papers and puffy volumes from the code of laws of the Russian Empire.

First hobby for theater

Everything then pleased, everything occupied Alexander Ostrovsky: and merry parties; and conversations with friends; and books from papa's extensive library, where, of course, Pushkin, Gogol, articles by Belinsky and various comedies, dramas, tragedies in magazines and almanacs were read; and, of course, the theater with Mochalov and Shchepkin at the head.

Everything admired Ostrovsky in the theater then: not only the plays, the acting, but even the impatient, nervous noise of the audience before the start of the performance, the sparkling of oil lamps and candles. a wonderfully painted curtain, the very air of the theater hall - warm, fragrant, saturated with the smell of powder, make-up and strong perfume, with which the foyer and corridors were sprayed.

It was here, in the theater, in the gallery, that he met one remarkable young man, Dmitry Tarasenkov, one of the newfangled merchant sons, who were passionately fond of theatrical performances.

He was not small in stature, a broad-breasted, stout young man about five, six years older than Ostrovsky, with blond hair cut in a circle, with a sharp gaze of small gray eyes and a loud, truly deacon's voice. His powerful cry of "bravo", as he met and saw off the famous Mochalov from the stage, easily drowned out the applause of the stalls, boxes and balconies. In his black merchant's overcoat and blue Russian shirt with a slanting collar, in chrome, accordion boots, he strikingly resembled the good fellow of old peasant fairy tales.

They left the theater together. It turned out that both live not far from each other: Ostrovsky - on Zhitnaya, Tarasenkov - in Monetchiki. It also turned out that both of them compose plays for the theater from the life of the merchant class. Only Ostrovsky is still only trying on and sketching comedies with prose, while Tarasenkov writes five-act poetic dramas. And, finally, it turned out, thirdly, that both fathers, Tarasenkov and Ostrovsky, were resolutely against such hobbies, considering them empty self-indulgence, distracting their sons from serious pursuits.

However, papa Ostrovsky did not touch his son's stories or comedies, while the second guild merchant Andrei Tarasenkov not only burned all Dmitry's writings in the stove, but invariably rewarded his son for them with fierce blows of a stick.

From that first meeting in the theater, Dmitry Tarasenkov began to visit Zhitnaya Street more and more often, and with the Ostrovskys moving to their other possession - in Vorobino, on the banks of the Yauza, near the Silver Baths.

There, in the quiet of the garden pavilion, overgrown with hops and dodder, they used to read together for a long time not only modern Russian and foreign plays, but also tragedies and dramatic satire of ancient Russian authors ...

“My great dream is to become an actor,” Dmitry Tarasenkov once said to Ostrovsky. I dare it. I must. And you, Alexander Nikolaevich, will either soon hear something wonderful about me, or you will mourn my early death. I don’t want to live as I have lived up to now, sir. Away from all vain, all base! Farewell! Today at night I am leaving my native land, leaving this wild kingdom into an unknown world, to holy art, to my favorite theater, to the stage. Goodbye, friend, let's kiss on the path! "

Then, a year later, two years later, remembering this farewell in the garden, Ostrovsky caught himself in a strange feeling of some kind of awkwardness. Because, in essence, there was something in those seemingly sweet farewell words of Tarasenkov, not so much false, no, but as if invented, not entirely natural, perhaps, like that high-flown, ringing and strange declamation with which dramatic products are filled note our geniuses. like Nestor Kukolnik or Nikolai Polevoy.

Training and service

Alexander Ostrovsky received his primary education at the First Moscow Gymnasium, entering the third grade in 1835 and completing the course with honors in 1840.

After graduating from the gymnasium, at the insistence of his father, a wise and practical man, Alexander immediately entered Moscow University, at the Faculty of Law, although he himself wanted to be engaged mainly in literary work. After studying for two years, Ostrovsky left the university, having quarreled with Professor Nikita Krylov, but the time spent within its walls was not wasted, because it was used not only for studying the theory of law, but also for self-education, for students' hobbies for social life, for communication with teachers. Suffice it to say that K. Ushinsky became his closest student friend; he often visited the theater with A. Pisemsky. Lectures were given by P.G. Redkin, T.N. Granovsky, DL Kryukov ... Moreover, it was at this time that the name of Belinsky thundered, whose articles in Otechestvennye zapiski were read not only by students. Carried away by the theater and knowing the entire running repertoire, Ostrovsky all this time independently re-read such classics of drama as Gogol, Cornel, Racine, Shakespeare, Schiller, Voltaire. After leaving the university, Alexander Nikolaevich in 1843 decided to serve in the Conscientious Court. This happened again at the firm insistence of the father, who wanted a legal, respected and profitable career for his son. This also explains the transition in 1845 from the Conscientious Court (where cases were decided "according to conscience") to the Moscow Commercial Court: here the service - for four rubles a month - lasted five years, until January 10, 1851.

Having listened to his heart's content and seen enough in court, the clerical servant Alexander Ostrovsky returned from public service every day from one end of Moscow to the other - from Voskresenskaya Square or Mokhovaya Street to Yauza, to his Vorobino.

A blizzard crashed in his head. Then the characters of the stories and comedies invented by him were noisy, cursing and cursing each other - merchants and merchants, mischievous fellows from the stalls, quirky matchmakers, clerks, merchant daughters, or at all ready for a pile of rainbow banknotes, judicial solicitors ... To this unknown country called Zamoskvorechye, where those characters lived, was only slightly touched once by the great Gogol in The Marriage, and he, Ostrovsky, may be destined to tell everything about her thoroughly, in detail ... head fresh stories! What fierce bearded faces loom before our eyes! What a juicy and new language in literature!

Having reached the house on the Yauza and kissed the hand of mama and papa, he sat impatiently at the dinner table, ate what was supposed to be. And then he hurried up to his second floor, to his cramped cell with a bed, a table and a chair, in order to sketch two or three scenes for his long-conceived play "The Statement of Claim" (this is how Ostrovsky's first play "A Picture of a Family happiness").

First hobby. First plays

It was already late autumn 1846. City gardens, groves near Moscow turned yellow and flew around. The sky was dark. But it didn’t rain. It was dry and quiet. He walked slowly from Mokhovaya along his beloved Moscow streets, enjoying the autumn air filled with the smell of dead leaves, the rustle of carriages rushing past, the noise around the Iverskaya chapel of a crowd of pilgrims, beggars, holy fools, wanderers, wandering monks who collected alms "for the splendor of the temple", priests for some offenses set aside from the parish and now "staggering between the courtyard", hawkers of hot stuff and other goods, dashing fellows from the trade shops in Nikolskaya ...

When he finally reached the Ilyinsky Gate, he jumped on a carriage passing by and for three kopecks rode it for a while, and then again with a cheerful heart walked to his Nikolovorobinsky Lane.

Then youth and hopes that had not yet been offended and faith in friendship that had not yet been deceived gladdened his heart. And the first ardent love. This girl was a simple Kolomna bourgeois woman, a seamstress, a needlewoman. And they called her in a simple, sweet Russian name - Agafya.

In the summer they met at a walk in Sokolniki, at a theater booth. And since that time Agafya has often visited the white-stone capital (not only for her own and her sister Natalyushka's affairs), and now she is thinking of leaving Kolomna to settle in Moscow, not far from Sasha's dear friend, at Nikola's in Vorobino.

The sexton in the bell tower had already repulsed for four hours, when Ostrovsky finally approached the spacious father’s house near the church.

In the garden, in a wooden arbor, braided with already dried hop, Ostrovsky saw, even from the gate, brother Misha, a law student, conducting a lively conversation with someone.

Apparently, Misha was waiting for him, and when he noticed, he immediately notified his interlocutor. The latter turned round impulsively and, smiling, greeted the “friend of infancy” with a classic wave of the hand of the theatrical hero leaving the stage at the end of the monologue.

He was the merchant's son Tarasenkov, and now the tragic actor Dmitry Gorev, who played in theaters everywhere, from Novgorod to Novorossiysk (and not without success) in classical dramas, melodramas, even in the tragedies of Schiller and Shakespeare.

They hugged ...

Ostrovsky spoke about his new idea, about a multi-act comedy called "Bankrupt" and Tarasenkov offered to work together.

Ostrovsky pondered. Until now, he wrote everything - his story and comedy - alone, without comrades. However, where is the reason, where is the reason to refuse this dear person in cooperation? He is an actor, playwright, he knows and loves literature very well, and just like Ostrovsky himself, he hates lies and all kinds of tyranny ...

At first, of course, something did not go well, there were both disputes and disagreements. For some reason, Dmitry Andreevich, and for example, at all costs wanted to slip into the comedy another fiancé for Mamzel Lipochka - Nagrevalnikov. And Ostrovsky had to spend a lot of nerves to convince Tarasenkov of the utter uselessness of this worthless character. And how many obscene, obscure, or simply unknown words Gorev threw to the characters of the comedy - even the same merchant Bolshov, or his stupid wife Agrafena Kondratyevna, or matchmaker, or daughter of the merchant Olympiada!

And, of course, Dmitry Andreevich could not come to terms with Ostrovsky's habit of writing a play not at all from the beginning, not from its first picture, but as if randomly - now one thing, now another phenomenon, now from the first, now from the third, say, act.

The point was that Alexander Nikolayevich had been pondering the play for so long, knew and saw all of it in such minute details, that it was not difficult for him to snatch out of it that very part that seemed to him to be convex to all the others.

In the end, it all worked out, too. Having slightly argued with each other, we decided to start writing the comedy in the usual way - from the first act ... Gorev worked with Ostrovsky for four evenings. Alexander Nikolaevich dictated more and more, walking around his little cell to and fro, and Dmitry Andreyevich wrote it down.

However, of course, Gorev sometimes, grinning, would throw down very sensible remarks or suddenly suggest some really funny, incongruous, but juicy, truly merchant phrase. So they wrote together four small phenomena of the first act, and that was the end of their collaboration.

The first works of Ostrovsky were "The Legend of How the District Overseer Danced, or Only One Step From the Great to the Ridiculous" and "Notes of a Zamoskvoretsky Resident". However, both Alexander Nikolaevich and the researchers of his work consider the play "The Picture of Family Happiness" to be the true beginning of his creative biography. By the end of her life Ostrovsky will remember this about her: “The most memorable day for me in my life: February 14, 1847. From that day on, I began to consider myself a Russian writer, and without hesitation or hesitation I believed in my calling. ”

Yes, indeed, on that day the critic Apollon Grigoriev brought his young friend to the house of Professor S.P.Shevyrev, who was to read his play to the audience. He read well, talentedly, and the intrigue was exciting, so the first performance was a success. However, despite the juiciness of the work and the good reviews, it was just a test of myself.

A falling out with my father. Ostrovsky's wedding

Meanwhile, papa Nikolai Fyodorovich, having acquired four estates in various Volga provinces, finally looked favorably at Emilia Andreevna's tireless request: he gave up his service in the courts, his law practice and decided to move with his whole family for permanent residence to one of these estates - the village of Shchelykovo.

It was then, while waiting for the carriage, Ostrovsky's papa called into an already empty office and, sitting down on a soft chair left as unnecessary, said:

For a long time I wanted, Alexander, for a long time I wanted to precede you, or simply to express to you my displeasure at last. You dropped out of university; you serve in court without proper zeal; God knows who you know - clerks, innkeepers, bourgeois, other petty riffraff, not to mention all the gentlemen feuilletonists ... Actresses, actors - even so, although your writings do not comfort me at all: I see a lot of trouble , but little use! .. This, however, is your business. - not a baby! But think for yourself what manners you learned there, habits, words, expressions! After all, you do as you want, but from the nobility and son, I dare to think, a respectable lawyer - then remember ... Of course, Emilia Andreevna, for her delicacy, did not reproach you a single reproach - I think so? And he won't. Nevertheless, to put it bluntly, your manly habits and these acquaintances offend her! .. That is the first point. And the second point is as follows. I heard from many that you started an affair with some bourgeois woman, a seamstress, and her name is that way ... too much in Russian - Agafya. What a name, have mercy! However, this is not the point ... Worse is that she lives in the neighborhood, and, apparently, not without your consent, Alexander ... So this is what, remember: if you don’t leave all this, or, God forbid, you marry, or just bring that Agafya to you, - live then, as you know, but you won't get a dime from me, I stop everything once and for all ... I don't expect an answer, and keep quiet! What I said is said. You can go and get ready ... But wait, here's another thing. All your and Mikhail's little things and some furniture you need, I told the janitor, as we leave, to move to our other house, under the mountain. You will begin to live there as soon as you return from Shchelykov, on the mezzanine. That's enough for you. And Sergei will live with us for now ... Go!

Ostrovsky cannot and will never abandon Agafya ... Of course, it will not be sweet for him without his father's support, but there is nothing to do ...

Soon they were left with Agafya completely alone in this small house on the banks of the Yauza, near the Silver Baths. Because, not looking at papa’s anger, he finally transported “that Agafya” Ostrovsky and all her simple belongings to his mezzanine. And brother Misha, having decided to serve in the Department of State Control, immediately left first for Simbirsk, then for St. Petersburg.

The father's house was quite small, with five windows on the facade, for warmth and decency it was sheathed with boards painted in a dark brown color. And the house huddled at the very foot of the mountain, which rose steeply by its narrow lane to the church of St. Nicholas, set high on its top.

From the street, the house seemed to be one-story, but behind the gate, in the courtyard, there was also a second floor (in other words, a mezzanine with three rooms), which looked out onto the neighboring courtyard and onto the wasteland with the Silver Baths on the river bank.

The beginning of the creative path

Almost a year has passed since papa and his family moved to the village of Shchelykovo. And although Ostrovsky was often tormented by an insulting need, yet their three small rooms greeted him with sunshine and joy, and from afar he heard, climbing the dark, narrow staircase to the second floor, a quiet, glorious Russian song, which his blond, vociferous Ganya knew a lot. ... And in this very year, in need, pulled by the service and daily newspaper work, alarmed, like everyone around after the Petrashevsky case, and sudden arrests, and arbitrary censorship, and buzzing around the writers "flies" , it was in this difficult year that he finished the comedy "Bankrupt" ("Our people - we will be numbered"), which was not given to him for so long.

This play, completed in the winter of 1849, was read by the author in many houses: at A.F. Pisemsky, M.N. Katkov, then at M.P. to listen to "Bankrupt", Gogol came a second time (and then came to listen and again - this time at the house of E. P. Rostopchina).

The performance of the play in Pogodin's house had far-reaching consequences: “Our people - we will be numbered” appears. in the sixth issue of "Moskvityanin" for 1850, and since then once a year the playwright publishes his plays in this magazine and participates in the work of the editorial board until the publication was closed in 1856. Further printing of the play was prohibited, Nykolai's own resolution I g lasil "It was in vain printed, but forbid to play." The same play was the reason for the unofficial police surveillance of the playwright. And she (as well as the very participation in the work of "Moskvityanin") made him the center of polemics between Slavophiles and Westernizers. The author had to wait more than one decade for the production of this play on stage: in its original form, without the intervention of censorship, it appeared in the Moscow Pushkin Theater only on April 30, 1881.

The period of cooperation with Pogodin's “Moskvityanin” for Ostrovsky is both intense and difficult. At this time, he writes: in 1852 - “Do not sit in your sleigh”, in 1853 - “Poverty is not a vice”, in 1854 - “Do not live as you want” - plays of the Slavophil direction, which Despite conflicting reviews, everyone wished the national theater a new hero. So, the premiere of “Don't Sit in Your Sleigh” on January 14, 1853 at the Maly Theater delighted the audience, not least thanks to the language, the heroes, especially against the background of the rather monotonous and meager repertoire of that time (the works of Griboyedov, Gogol, Fonvizin were given extremely rarely; for example, “The Inspector General” was shown only three times during the whole season). A Russian folk character appeared on the stage, a person whose problems are close and ionic. As a result, the “Prince Skopin-Shuisky” Puppeteer, who had been making noise before, went once during the 1854/55 season, and “Poverty is not a vice” - 13 times. In addition, they played in performances of Nikulina-Kositskaya, Sadovsky, Schepkin, Martynov ...

What is the complexity of this period? In the struggle that unfolded around Ostrovsky, and in his own revision of some of his convictions " : 1) that I do not want to make myself not only enemies, but even displeasure; 2) that my direction is beginning to change; 3) that the outlook on life in my first comedy seems to me young and too harsh; 4) that it is better for the Russian person to rejoice seeing himself on the stage than to yearn. Correctors will be found without us. In order to have the right to correct people without offending, it is necessary to show them that you know good things behind them; This is what I am doing now, combining the high with the comic. The first sample was "Sleigh", the second I am finishing. "

Not everyone was happy with this. And if Apollo Grigoriev believed that the playwright in his new plays “sought to give not satire of tyranny, but a poetic depiction of the whole world with very diverse origins and buckthorns," then Chernyshevsky held a sharply opposite opinion, bending Ostrovsky to his side: “In the last two works Mr. Ostrovsky fell into a luscious embellishment of what cannot and should not be embellished. The works came out weak and fake ”; and immediately gave recommendations: they say, the playwright, “having thereby damaged his literary reputation, has not yet ruined his wonderful talent: it can still appear as fresh and strong as before, if Mr. Ostrovsky leaves the muddy path that led him to poverty not a vice ”.

At the same time, vile gossip spread across Moscow that “Bankrupt” or “Our people are numbered” was not Ostrovsky’s play at all, but, to put it simply, it was stolen by him from the actor Tarasenkov-Gorev. Say, he, Ostrovsky, is nothing more than a literary thief, which means he is a swindler of fraudsters, a man without honor and conscience! The actor Gorev is an unhappy victim of his trusting, noblest friendship ...

Three years ago, when these rumors spread, Alexander Nikolayevich still believed in the high, honest convictions of Dmitry Tarasenkov, in his decency, in his incorruptibility. Because a person who loved theater so selflessly, who read Shakespeare and Schiller with such excitement, this actor by vocation, this Hamlet, Othello, Ferdinand, Baron Meinau could not at least partially support those gossip poisoned by malice. But Gorev, however, was silent. Rumors crept and crept, rumors spread and spread, and Gorev was silent and silent ... Ostrovsky then wrote a friendly letter to Gorev, asking him to appear at last in print in order to put an end to this heinous gossip at once.

Alas! There was neither honor nor conscience in the soul of the drunken actor Tarasenkov-Gorev. In his answer full of insidiousness, he not only recognized himself as the author of the famous comedy "Our people - we will be numbered", but at the same time hinted at some other plays, allegedly transferred to Ostrovsky for preservation six or seven years ago. So now it turned out that all of Ostrovsky's works - with perhaps a small exception - were stolen by him or copied from the actor and playwright Tarasenkov-Gorev.

He did not answer Tarasenkov, but found the strength to sit down again to work on his next comedy. Because at that time he considered all the new plays he wrote to be the best refutation of Gorev's slander.

And in 1856, the Tarasenkov emerged from oblivion again, and all these Pravdovs, Alexandrovichs, Vl. Zotovs, “N. A." and others like them rushed again at him, at Ostrovsky, with the same abuse and with the same passion.

And it was not Gorev, of course, who was the Instigator. Here the dark force that once persecuted Fonvizin and Griboyedov, Pushkin and Gogol, and now persecutes Nekrasov and Saltykov-Shchedrin, arose on him.

He feels it, he understands. And that is why he wants to write his answer to the libelous note of the Moscow police leaflet.

Calmly now he outlined the history of his creation of the comedy "Our people - we will be numbered" and the insignificant participation of Dmitry Gorev-Tarasenkov in it, which had long been published and certified by him, Alexander Ostrovsky.

“Gentlemen, feuilletonists,” he finished his answer with icy calmness, “are carried away by their unbridledness to the point that they forget not only the laws of decency, but also those laws in our country that protect the personality and property of everyone. Do not think, gentlemen, that a writer who honestly serves the literary cause will allow you to play with your name with impunity! " And in the signature, Alexander Nikolaevich identified himself as the author of all nine plays written by him so far and has long been known to the reading public, including the comedy "Our people - we will be numbered."

But, of course, Ostrovsky's name was first of all known thanks to the comedy "Don't Get in Your Sleigh", staged by the Maly Theater; they wrote about her: “... from that day on, rhetoric, falsehood, gallomania began to gradually disappear from the Russian drama. The characters spoke on stage in the very language they really speak in life. A whole new world began to open up for the audience. "

Six months later, Poor Bride was staged at the same theater.

It cannot be said that the whole troupe unambiguously accepted Ostrovsky's plays. Yes, this is impossible in a creative team. After the performance “Poverty is not a vice,” Shchepkin declared that he did not recognize Ostrovsky's plays; several more actors joined him: Shchumsky, Samarin and others. But the young troupe understood and accepted the playwright immediately.

It was more difficult to conquer the St. Petersburg theater stage than the Moscow one, but it too soon succumbed to Ostrovsky's talent: in two decades, his plays were presented to the public about a thousand times. True, this did not bring him much wealth. The father, with whom Alexander Nikolaevich did not seek advice when choosing a wife for himself, refused to provide him material assistance; the playwright lived with his beloved wife and children in a damp mezzanine; besides, Pogodin's "Moskvityanin" paid humiliatingly little and irregularly: Ostrovsky begged for fifty rubles a month, bumping into the stinginess and stinginess of the publisher. Employees left the magazine for many reasons; Ostrovsky, in spite of everything, remained faithful to him to the end. His last work, which was published on the pages of "Moskvityanin", - "Don't live the way you want to." On the sixteenth book, in 1856, the magazine ceased to exist, and Ostrovsky began to work in Nekrasov's magazine Sovremennik.

Travel across Russia

At the same time, an event occurred that significantly changed Ostrovsky's views. The chairman of the Geographical Society, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, decided to organize an expedition with the participation of writers; the purpose of the expedition is to study and describe the life of the inhabitants of Russia who are engaged in navigation, about which to compose then sketches for the "Marine Sbornik" published by the ministry, covering the Urals, the Caspian, the Volga, the White Sea, the Azov Sea ... Ostrovsky in April 1856 began a journey along the Volga: Moscow - Tver - Gorodnya - Ostashkov - Rzhev - Staritsa - Kalyazin - Moscow.

This is how Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky was brought to the provincial city of Tver, to the merchant of the second guild, Barsukov, and then trouble overtook him.

Sitting on a rainy June morning, in a hotel room at the table and waiting for his heart to finally calm down, Ostrovsky, now rejoicing, now annoyed, went over in his soul one by one the events of recent months.

In that year, everything seemed to be successful. He already had his own man in Petersburg, with Nekrasov and Panaev. He has already stood on a par with famous writers who were the pride of Russian literature - next to Turgenev, Tolstoy, Grigorovich, Goncharov ... theatrical art.

And how many other friends and acquaintances he has in Moscow! It is impossible to count ... Even on a trip here, to the Upper Volga, he was accompanied by Guriy Nikolayevich Burlakov, a faithful companion (both a secretary and a scribe, and a voluntary intercessor on various travel matters), a silent, fair-haired, with glasses, still quite a young man. He joined Ostrovsky from Moscow itself and since he ardently worshiped the theater, then, in his words, he wanted to be "at the stirrup of one of the mighty knights of Melpomene (in ancient Greek mythology, the muse of tragedy, theater) Russian"

To this, wincing at such expressions, Alexander Nikolaevich immediately replied to Burlakov that, they say, he did not look like a knight at all, but that, of course, he was sincerely glad to be a kind friend-comrade on his long journey ...

So everything went well. With this sweet, cheerful companion, making his way to the sources of the beautiful Volga, he visited many coastal villages and cities of Tver, Rzhev, Gorodnya or once Vertyazin, with the remains of an ancient temple decorated with frescoes half-erased by time; the beautiful city of Torzhok along the steep banks of the Tvertsa; and further, farther and farther north - along the heaps of primitive boulders, through swamps and bushes, along bare hills, among the desolation and wildness - to the blue Lake Seliger, from where Ostashkov, almost drowned in the spring water, and the white walls of the monastery of the Nile hermit were clearly visible, sparkling behind a thin net of rain, like the fabulous city of Kitezh; and, finally, from Ostashkov - to the mouth of the Volga, to the chapel called Jordan, and a little further to the west, where our mighty Russian river flows out from under a fallen birch overgrown with mosses in a barely perceptible stream.

Ostrovsky's tenacious memory eagerly grabbed everything he saw, everything he heard in that spring and that summer of 1856, so that later, when the time comes, either in a comedy or in a drama, it all suddenly came to life, moved, spoke in its own language, boiled with passions ...

He was already sketching in his notebooks ... If only there was a little more time free from everyday necessities and, most importantly, more peace of mind, peace and light, it would be possible to write not just one, but four and more plays with good actors in roles. And about the woeful, truly terrible fate of a serf Russian girl, a landlord's pupil, nurtured at the whim of a lordly, and ruined at a whim. And a comedy could be written, long conceived on the basis of the bureaucratic antics that he once noticed in the service - "A profitable place": about the black lie of the Russian courts, about the old beast-thief and a bribe-taker, about the death of a young, unspoiled, but weak soul under the yoke of a vile everyday prose. And recently, on the way to Rzhev, in the village of Sitkovo, at night at the inn, where the gentlemen officers were drinking, he flashed an excellent plot for a play about the devilish power of gold, for the sake of which a man is ready for robbery, for murder, for any betrayal...

He was haunted by the image of a thunderstorm over the Volga. This dark expanse, torn apart by the flashing of lightning, the noise of the shower and thunder. These foamy shafts, as if in a rage, rush to the low sky littered with clouds. And anxiously crying seagulls. And the grinding of stones rolled by the waves on the shore.

Something every time arose, was born in his imagination from these impressions deeply sunk into sensitive memory and still awakening; they have long since dulled and overshadowed the insult, the insult, the ugly slander, washed his soul with the poetry of life and awakened an insatiable creative anxiety. Some vague images, scenes, scraps of speeches tormented him for a long time, for a long time they pushed his hand to the paper in order to capture them finally either in a fairy tale, or in a drama, or in a legend about the exuberant antiquity of these steep banks. After all, he will never forget now the poetic dreams and woeful everyday life that he experienced in his many months journey from the origins of the Volga nurse to Nizhny Novgorod. The charm of the Volga nature and the bitter poverty of the Volga artisans - barge haulers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors and boat craftsmen, their exhausting work for a half a week and the great lie of the rich - merchants, contractors, resellers, barge owners, making money on labor bondage.

Something really had to ripen in his heart, he felt it. He tried to tell in his essays for the "Marine collection" about the hard life of the people, about the merchant's lies, about the dull rumble of a thunderstorm approaching the Volga.

But there was such a truth there, such sadness in these essays that, having placed four chapters in the February issue for the fifty-ninth year, the gentlemen from the naval editorial office did not want to publish that seditious truth anymore.

And, of course, it’s not a matter of whether he was paid well or badly for his essays. This is not at all about this. Yes, he now does not need money: the Library for Reading recently published his drama Pupil, and in St. Petersburg he sold a two-volume collection of his works to the eminent publisher Count Kushelev-Bezborodko for four thousand silver. However, in fact, those deep impressions that continue to disturb his creative imagination cannot remain in vain! excited and what the high-ranking editors of Morskoy Sbornik did not deign to make public ...

“Thunderstorm"

Returning from the Literary Expedition, he writes to Nekrasov: “Dear sir Nikolai Alekseevich! I recently received your circular letter upon my departure from Moscow. I have the honor to inform you that I am preparing a whole series of plays under the general title "Nights on the Volga", of which I will deliver one to you personally at the end of October or at the beginning of November. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to do this winter, but two will certainly. Your humble servant A. Ostrovsky ”.

By this time, he had already linked his creative destiny with Sovremennik, a magazine that fought to attract Ostrovsky to its ranks, whom Nekrasov called “our, undoubtedly, the first dramatic writer. To a large extent, the transition to Sovremennik was also facilitated by acquaintance with Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Goncharov, Druzhinin, Panavim. In April 1856, Sovremennik prints a Picture of Family Happiness, then - An old friend is better than two new ones, met characters "and other plays. Readers are already accustomed to the fact that Nekrasov's magazines (first" Sovremennik ", and then" Notes of the Fatherland ") open their first winter issues with plays by Ostrovsky.

It was June 1859. Everything blossomed and smelled in the gardens outside the window in Nikolovorobinsky Lane. The herbs smelled, dodder and hops on the fences, rosehip and lilac bushes, jasmine flowers that had not yet opened were swelling.

Sitting, lost in thought, at the writing table, Alexander Nikolaevich gazed for a long time through the wide-open window. His right hand still held a sharply sharpened pencil, and the plump palm of his left continued, as an hour ago, to lie peacefully on the finely scribbled pages of the manuscript of the comedy he had not completed.

He recalled a humble young woman walking around with her unprepossessing husband under the cold, condemning and stern gaze of her mother-in-law somewhere on a Sunday festivities in Torzhok, Kalyazin or Tver. I remembered the dashing Volga guys and girls from the merchant class who ran out at night into the gardens over the dying Volga, and then, as often happened, hid with their betrothed from no one knows where from their own unwelcome house.

He himself knew from childhood and adolescence, living with papa in Zamoskvorechye, and then visiting familiar merchants in Yaroslavl, Kineshma, Kostroma, and more than once he heard from actresses and actors what it was like for a married woman to live in those rich, behind high fences and strong castles of merchant houses. They were slaves, slaves of a husband, father-in-law and mother-in-law, deprived of joy, will and happiness.

So this is the kind of drama ripening in his soul on the Volga, in one of the county towns of the prosperous Russian Empire ...

He pushed aside the manuscript of the unfinished old comedy and, taking a blank sheet of paper from a pile of paper, began to quickly sketch out the first, still fragmentary and unclear, plan for his new play, his tragedy from the cycle “Nights on the Volga” he had conceived. Nothing, however, satisfied him in these short sketches. He threw away sheet after sheet and again wrote now separate scenes and pieces of dialogues, then thoughts that suddenly came to mind about the characters, their characters, about the denouement and the beginning of the tragedy. There was no harmony, certainty, accuracy in these creative attempts - he saw, he felt. They were not warmed up by some single deep and warm thought, some one all-encompassing artistic image.

The time has passed past noon. Ostrovsky got up from his chair, threw a pencil on the table, put on his light summer cap and, having told Agafya, went out into the street.

For a long time he wandered along the Yauza, stopped here and there, looking at the fishermen sitting with fishing rods over the dark water, at the boats slowly sailing towards the city, at the blue desert sky overhead.

Dark water ... a steep bank over the Volga ... the whistle of lightning ... a thunderstorm ... Why does this image haunt him so? How is he connected with the drama in one of the Volga trading towns, which has long troubled him and worried? ..

Yes, in his drama cruel people tortured a beautiful, pure woman, proud, gentle and dreamy, and she threw herself into the Volga out of longing and sadness. It's like that! But thunderstorm, thunderstorm over the river, over the city ...

Ostrovsky suddenly stopped and stood for a long time on the bank of the Yauza, overgrown with hard grass, looking into the dim depth of its waters and nervously pinching his round reddish beard with his fingers. Some new, amazing thought, suddenly illuminating the whole tragedy with poetic light, was born in his confused brain. Thunderstorm! .. A thunderstorm over the Volga, over a wild abandoned city, of which there are many in Russia, over a woman reeling in fear, a heroine of a drama, over our whole life - a thunderstorm-killer, a thunderstorm - herald of future changes!

Then he rushed straight across the field and wastelands, as soon as possible to his mezzanine, to his study, to the table and paper.

Ostrovsky hastily ran into the office and, on a piece of paper that turned up under his arm, finally wrote down the title of the drama about the death of his longing for will, love and happiness of his recalcitrant Katerina - "The Thunderstorm". Here it is, a reason or a tragic reason for the denouement of the entire play has been found - the deathly fright of a woman, exhausted by the spirit, from a thunderstorm that suddenly burst out over the Volga. She, Katerina, brought up from childhood with a deep faith in God - the judge of man, should, of course, imagine that sparkling and thundering thunderstorm in the sky as a punishment from the Lord for her insolent disobedience, for her desire for will, for secret meetings with Boris. And that is why, in this spiritual confusion, she will publicly throw herself on her knees before her husband and mother-in-law in order to shout out her passionate repentance for everything that she considered and will consider to the end her joy and her sin. Rejected by everyone, ridiculed, alone, without finding support and a way out, Katerina will then rush from the high Volga bank into the whirlpool.

So much has been decided. But much remained unresolved.

Day after day he worked on the plan of his tragedy. Then he began with a dialogue of two old women, a passer-by and a city one, in order to tell the viewer in this way about the city, about its wild morals, about the family of the merchant-widow Kabanova, where the beautiful Katerina was married, about Tikhon, her husband, about the richest tyrant in the city Savel Prokofich Dick and other things that the viewer should know. So that the viewer feels and understands what kind of people live in that provincial Volga town and how the difficult drama and death of Katerina Kabanova, a young merchant, could have happened in it.

Then he came to the conclusion that it was necessary to develop the action of the first act not somewhere else, but only in the house of that tyrant Savel Prokofich. But this decision, like the previous one - with the dialogue of the old women, - after a while he gave up. Because neither in that nor in the other case did we get everyday naturalness, ease, there was no true truth in the development of the action, and after all, the play is nothing but a dramatized life.

And in fact, after all, a leisurely conversation on the street between two old women, a passer-by and a city, precisely about what the spectator sitting in the hall should definitely know, will not seem natural to him, but will seem deliberate, specially invented by a playwright. And then there will be nowhere to put them, these talkative old women. Because later they will not be able to play any role in his drama - they will talk and disappear.

As for the meeting of the main characters at Savel Prokofich the Diky, there is no natural way to bring them there. Truly wild, unfriendly and gloomy throughout the city, the well-known abuser Savel Prokofich; what kind of family gatherings or fun gatherings can he have in the house? Absolutely none.

That is why, after much deliberation, Alexander Nikolayevich decided that he would begin his play in a public garden on the steep bank of the Volga, where everyone can go - take a walk, breathe fresh air, look at the vastness beyond the river.

There, in the garden, the city old-timer, self-taught mechanic, Kuligin, the city's old-timer, a self-taught mechanic, to the recently arrived nephew of Savel Dikyi, Boris Grigorievich, will tell what the viewer should know. And there the viewer will hear the blatant truth about the characters of the tragedy: about Kabanikh, about Katerina Kabanova, about Tikhon, about Barbara, his sister, and others.

Now the play was structured in such a way that the viewer would forget that he was sitting in the theater, that in front of him were the scenery, the stage, not life, and the actors made up speak of their sufferings or joys in words composed by the author. Now Alexander Nikolayevich knew for sure that the audience would see the very reality in which they live from day to day. Only that reality will appear to them, illuminated by the author's lofty thought, his verdict, as if different, unexpected in its true, still unnoticed essence.

Alexander Nikolaevich never wrote so sweepingly and quickly, with such tremulous joy and deep emotion, as he now wrote to The Thunderstorm. Is it just another drama, "Parent", also about the death of a Russian woman, but a completely powerless, tortured fortress, was written sometime even faster - in Petersburg, with my brother, in two or three weeks, although I was almost thinking about her over two years.

So the summer passed, September flashed imperceptibly. And on October 9, in the morning, Ostrovsky finally put the last point in his new play.

None of the plays had such a success with the public and critics as The Thunderstorm. It was printed in the first issue of the Library for Reading, and the first performance took place on November 16, 1859 in Moscow. The play was played weekly, or even five times a month (as, for example, in December) when the hall was overcrowded; the roles were played by the audience's favorites - Rykalova, Sadovsky, Nikulina-Kositskaya, Vasiliev. And to this day this play is one of the famous plays in Ostrovsky's work; Wild, Kabanikha, Kuligin is hard to forget, Katerina - it is impossible, just as it is impossible to forget will, beauty, tragedy, love. Hearing the play in the reading of the author, Turgenev wrote to Fet the next day: "The most amazing, magnificent work of a Russian, powerful, completely mastered talent." Goncharov praised it no less highly: “Without fear of being accused of exaggeration, I can honestly say that there was no such work as a drama in our literature. She undoubtedly occupies and, probably for a long time, will occupy the first place in high classical beauties ”. Everyone became aware of Dobrolyubov's article dedicated to "The Thunderstorm". The dramatic success of the play was crowned with a large Uvarov Academic Prize to the author of 1,500 rubles.

He has now truly become famous, playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, and now all of Russia listens to his word. That is why, one must think, the censorship finally allowed on the stage his favorite comedy, which had been cursed more than once, which had once worn his heart - "Our people - we will be numbered."

However, this play appeared before the theatrical audience crippled, not the same as it had once been published in Moskvityanin, but with a hastily attached well-meaning end. Because the author had to three years ago, when publishing a collection of his works, albeit reluctantly, albeit with bitter pain in his soul, but nevertheless to bring to the stage (as they say, under the curtain) Mr. Podkhalyuzin “in the case of concealing the property of the bankrupt merchant Bolshov”.

In the same year, a two-volume edition of Ostrovsky's plays was published, which included eleven pieces. However, it was precisely the triumph of "The Thunderstorms" that made the playwright a truly popular writer. Moreover, he then continued to touch upon and develop this topic on another matter - in the plays “Not all the carnival for the cat”, “Truth is good, but happiness is better”, “Hard days” and others.

Sufficiently often in need himself, Alexander Nikolaevich at the end of 1859 came up with a proposal to create a "Society for aids to needy writers and scientists", which later became widely known under the name "Literary Fund". And he himself began to conduct public readings of plays in favor of this fund.

Ostrovsky's second marriage

But time does not stand still; everything runs, everything changes. And Ostrovsky's life changed. Several years ago he married Marya Vasilievna Bakhmetyeva, an actress of the Maly Theater, who was 2 2 years younger than the writer (and the romance lasted a long time: five years before the wedding, they had already had their first illegitimate son) - can hardly be called completely happy: Marya Vasilievna she herself was a nervous nature and did not really delve into her husband's experiences

Introduction

Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky ... This is an unusual phenomenon. The importance of Alexander Nikolaevich for the development of Russian drama and stage, his role in the achievements of all Russian culture are undeniable and enormous. Continuing the best traditions of Russian progressive and foreign drama, Ostrovsky wrote 47 original plays. Some are constantly on stage, filmed in films and on television, others are almost never staged. But in the minds of the public and the theater, there is a certain stereotype of perception in relation to what is called "Ostrovsky's play". Ostrovsky's plays have been written for all times, and it is not difficult for the audience to see our current problems and vices in it.

Relevance:It is difficult to overestimate its role in the history of the development of Russian drama, performing arts and the entire Russian culture. For the development of Russian drama, he did as much as Shakespeare in England, Lope de Vega in Spain, Moliere in France, Goldoni in Italy and Schiller in Germany.

Ostrovsky appeared in literature in very difficult conditions of the literary process, on his creative path there were favorable and unfavorable situations, but no matter what, he became an innovator and an outstanding master of dramatic art.

The influence of the dramatic masterpieces of A.N. Ostrovsky was not limited to the area of ​​the theatrical stage. It also applied to other types of art. The nationality characteristic of his plays, the musical and poetic element, the colorfulness and clarity of the large-scale characters, the deep vitality of the plots have aroused and are attracting the attention of the outstanding composers of our country.

Ostrovsky, being an outstanding playwright, a remarkable connoisseur of theatrical art, also showed himself as a public figure of a large scale. This was greatly facilitated by the fact that the playwright throughout his life was "on a par with the century."
Target:The influence of the drama of A.N. Ostrovsky in the creation of a national repertoire.
Task:Trace the creative path of A.N. Ostrovsky. Ideas, path and innovation of A.N. Ostrovsky. Show the significance of the theatrical reform A.N. Ostrovsky.

1. Russian dramaturgy and playwrights previous a.s. Ostrovsky

.1 Theater in Russia before A.N. Ostrovsky

The origins of Russian progressive drama, in the mainstream of which Ostrovsky's work arose. The national folk theater has a wide repertoire, consisting of buffoonery games, interludes, Petrushka's comedy adventures, booth jokes, "bear" comedies and dramatic works of a wide variety of genres.

The folk theater is characterized by a socially acute theme, freedom-loving, accusatory satirical and heroic-patriotic ideology, deep conflict, large, not rarely grotesque characters, clear, clear composition, colloquial language, skillfully using a variety of comic means: omissions, confusion, ambiguity homonyms, oxymors.

“By its nature and manner of playing, the folk theater is a theater of sharp and clear movements, sweeping gestures, extreme loud dialogue, a powerful song and daring dance - everything is heard and seen far away. By its very nature, the folk theater does not tolerate an unnoticeable gesture, words delivered in an undertone, everything that can easily be perceived in a theater hall with the audience completely silent. "

Continuing the traditions of oral folk drama, Russian written drama has made great strides. In the second half of the 18th century, in the presence of the overwhelming role of translated and imitative drama, writers of various directions appeared, striving to depict national mores, taking care of creating a nationally distinctive repertoire.

Among the plays of the first half of the 19th century, such masterpieces of realistic drama as Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, Fonvizin's Minor, Gogol's The Inspector General, and The Marriage are especially prominent.

Pointing to these works, V.G. Belinsky said that they "would do honor to any European literature." Most appreciating the comedies "Woe from Wit" and "The Inspector General", the critic believed that they could "enrich any European literature."

Outstanding realistic plays by Griboyedov, Fonvizin and Gogol clearly outlined the innovative tendencies of Russian drama. They consisted in a topical social theme, in a pronounced social and even socio-political pathos, in a departure from the traditional love-household plot that determines the entire development of an action, in a violation of the plot and compositional canons of comedy and drama of intrigue, in an attitude towards the development of typical and at the same time, individual characters closely related to the social environment.

These innovative tendencies, manifested in the best plays of progressive Russian drama, were beginning to be understood by writers and critics in theory. Thus, Gogol connects the emergence of Russian progressive drama with satire and sees the originality of comedy in its true community. He rightly noted that "such an expression ... has not yet been adopted by comedy among any of the peoples."

By the time A.N. Ostrovsky's Russian progressive drama already possessed world-class masterpieces. But these works were still extremely small in number, and therefore did not define the face of the then theatrical repertoire. A great loss for the development of progressive domestic drama was the fact that the plays of Lermontov and Turgenev, detained by the censors, could not appear in a timely manner.

The overwhelming number of works that filled the theatrical stage were translations and alterations of Western European plays, as well as stage experiences of domestic writers of a protective nature.

Theatrical repertoire was not created spontaneously, but under the active influence of the gendarme corps and the watchful eye of Nicholas I.

Preventing the emergence of accusatory and catherine plays, the theatrical policy of Nicholas I in every possible way patronized the production of purely entertaining, autocratic-patriotic dramatic works. This policy was unsuccessful.

After the defeat of the Decembrists, vaudeville came to the fore in the theatrical repertoire, which had long since lost its social acuteness and turned into a light, thoughtless, acutely effective comedy.

Most often, a one-act comedy was distinguished by an anecdotal plot, humorous, topical, and often frivolous couplets, pun language and cunning intrigue woven from funny, unexpected incidents. In Russia, vaudeville gained strength in the 10s of the XIX century. The first, albeit unsuccessful, vaudeville is considered "The Cossack the Poet" (1812) by A.A. Shakhovsky. A whole swarm of others followed him, especially after 1825.

Vaudeville enjoyed special love and patronage of Nicholas I. And his theatrical policy had its effect. Theater - in the 30-40s of the XIX century, became the kingdom of vaudeville, in which mainly attention was given to love situations. “Alas,” wrote Belinsky in 1842, “like bats in a beautiful building, vulgar comedies with gingerbread love and an inevitable wedding took possession of our stage! This is what we call a "plot". Looking at our comedies and vaudeville and taking them as an expression of reality, you will think that our society is only engaged, that love, only lives and breathes, that it! ".

The spread of vaudeville was also facilitated by the then system of benefit performances. For the benefit performance, which was a material reward, the artist often chose a narrowly entertaining play, calculated for box office success.

The theatrical stage was filled with flat, hastily stitched pieces, in which flirting, farcical scenes, anecdote, mistake, accident, unexpectedness, confusion, dressing up, hiding took the main place.

Under the influence of social struggle, vaudeville changed its content. By the nature of the plots, its development went from love-erotic to everyday life. But compositionally, he remained mostly standard, based on the primitive means of external comic. Describing the vaudeville of this time, one of the characters in Gogol's "Theatrical passing" aptly said: "Go only to the theater: every day you will see a play where one hid under a chair, and the other pulled him out by the leg."

The essence of the mass vaudeville of the 30-40s of the XIX century is revealed by the following titles: "Confusion", "Moved together, messed up and parted." Emphasizing the playful-frivolous properties of vaudeville, some authors began to call them vaudeville-farce, joke-vaudeville, etc.

Having consolidated the "unimportance" as the basis of the content, vaudeville became an effective means of distracting viewers from the fundamental issues and contradictions of reality. Teasing the audience with silly situations and incidents, the vaudeville "from evening to evening, from performance to performance, inoculated the viewer with the same ridiculous serum, which was supposed to protect him from the infection of unnecessary and unreliable thoughts." But the authorities tried to turn it into a direct glorification of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and serfdom.

Vaudeville, which took possession of the Russian stage in the second quarter of the 19th century, as a rule, was not domestic and original. For the most part, these were plays, as Belinsky put it, “forcibly dragged” from France and somehow adapted to Russian customs. We see a similar picture in other genres of drama of the 40s. Dramatic works that were considered original were largely disguised translations. In pursuit of a sharp word, for an effect, for a light and funny plot, the vaudeville-comedy play of the 1930s-40s was most often very far from depicting the true life of its time. People in reality, everyday characters, were most often absent from it. This was repeatedly pointed out by the then criticism. Concerning the content of the vaudeville, Belinsky wrote with displeasure: “The place of action is always in Russia, the characters are marked with Russian names; but here you will not recognize and see neither Russian life, nor Russian society, nor Russian people. " Pointing to the isolation of vaudeville in the second quarter of the 19th century from concrete reality, one of the later critics rightly noted that it would be a "stunning misunderstanding" to study Russian society from that time.

Vaudeville, developing, quite naturally showed the desire for the characteristic of language. But at the same time in it, the speech individualization of the characters was carried out purely outwardly - by stringing unusual, funny morphologically and phonetically distorted words, introducing incorrect expressions, ridiculous phrases, sayings, proverbs, national accents, etc.

In the middle of the 18th century, along with vaudeville, melodrama was very popular in the theatrical repertoire. Its formation as one of the leading dramatic types occurs at the end of the 18th century in the context of the preparation and implementation of Western European bourgeois revolutions. The moral and didactic essence of Western European melodrama of this period is determined mainly by common sense, practicality, didacticism, the moral code of the bourgeoisie, which is going to power and opposing its ethnic principles to the depravity of the feudal nobility.

Both vaudeville and melodrama were overwhelmingly far removed from life. Nevertheless, they were not merely negative phenomena. In some of them, not averse to satirical tendencies, progressive tendencies - liberal and democratic - made their way. The subsequent dramaturgy undoubtedly used the art of vaudevilists in the conduct of intrigue, external comic, sharply honed, graceful pun. She also did not pass by the achievements of melodramatists in the psychological depiction of the characters, in the emotionally intense development of the action.

While in the West melodrama historically preceded romantic drama, in Russia these genres emerged simultaneously. Moreover, most often they acted in relation to each other without sufficiently accurate accentuation of their features, merging, passing one into the other.

Belinsky sharply expressed many times about the rhetoric nature of romantic dramas that use melodramatic, pseudo-pathetic effects. “And if you,” he wrote, “want to take a closer look at the“ dramatic representations ”of our romanticism, you will see that they are kneaded according to the same recipes that were used to compose pseudo-classical dramas and comedies: the same hackneyed strings and violent denouements, that the same unnaturalness, the same "decorated nature", the same images without faces instead of characters, the same monotony, the same vulgarity and the same skill. "

Melodramas, romantic and sentimental, historical-patriotic dramas of the first half of the 19th century were predominantly false not only in their ideas, plots, characters, but also in language. Compared to the classicists, sentimentalists and romantics undoubtedly made a big step in the sense of democratizing the language. But this democratization, especially among sentimentalists, often did not go beyond the spoken language of the noble drawing room. The speech of the underprivileged strata of the population, the broad working masses, seemed to them too harsh.

Along with domestic conservative plays of the romantic genre at this time, translations that are close to them in spirit also penetrate widely on the theater stage: "romantic operas", "romantic comedies" are usually combined with ballet, "romantic performances." At this time, translations of the works of progressive playwrights of Western European romanticism, for example, Schiller and Hugo, were also very successful. But rethinking these plays, the translators reduced their work of "translation" to arousing sympathy from the audience for those who, experiencing the blows of life, retained in themselves a meek humility to fate.

In the spirit of progressive romanticism, Belinsky and Lermontov created their plays during these years, but not one of them was shown in the theater in the first half of the 19th century. The repertoire of the 40s does not satisfy not only leading criticism, but also artists and audiences. The remarkable artists of the 40s Mochalov, Shchepkin, Martynov, Sadovsky had to waste their energy on trifles, on playing in non-fiction one-day plays. But, admitting that in the 40s the plays “would be born in swarms like insects” and “there was nothing to see”, Belinsky, like many other progressive figures, did not look hopelessly at the future of the Russian theater. Not satisfied with the flat humor of vaudeville and the false pathos of melodrama, the progressive audience has long lived a dream that original realistic plays would become defining and leading in the theatrical repertoire. In the second half of the 40s, a mass theater visitor from noble and bourgeois circles began to share, to one degree or another, the dissatisfaction of the leading spectator with the repertoire. In the late 40s, many viewers, even in vaudeville, "looked for hints of reality." They were no longer satisfied with the melodramatic and vaudeville effects. They longed for the plays of life, they wanted to see ordinary people on the stage. The progressive viewer found an echo of his aspirations only in a few, rarely appearing productions of Russian (Fonvizin, Griboyedov, Gogol) and Western European (Shakespeare, Moliere, Schiller) dramatic classics. At the same time, any word associated with protest, free, the slightest hint of feelings and thoughts that disturbed him, acquired tenfold significance in the viewer's perception.

Gogol's principles, which were so clearly expressed in the practice of the "natural school", especially contributed to the assertion of realistic and national originality in the theater. Ostrovsky was the brightest exponent of these principles in the field of drama.

1.2 From early creativity to mature

OSTROVSKY Alexander Nikolaevich, Russian playwright.

Ostrovsky became addicted to reading as a child. In 1840, after graduating from the gymnasium, he was enrolled in the law faculty of Moscow University, but left in 1843. Then he entered the office of the Moscow Council of the Court, and later served in the Commercial Court (1845-1851). This experience played a significant role in the work of Ostrovsky.

He entered the literary field in the second half of the 1840s. as a follower of the Gogol tradition, focused on the creative principles of the natural school. At this time Ostrovsky created a prosaic essay "Notes of a Zamoskvoretsky Resident", the first comedies (the play "A Family Picture" was read by the author on February 14, 1847 in the circle of Professor SP Shevyrev and approved by him).

The satirical comedy "Bankrut" ("Our people - we will be numbered", 1849) brought wide popularity to the playwright. The plot (the false bankruptcy of the merchant Bolshov, the insidiousness and heartlessness of his family members - Lipochka's daughter and the clerk, and then Podkhalyuzin's son-in-law, who did not ransom his father's old man from the debt pit, Bolshov's later insight) were based on Ostrovsky's observations of the family litigation obtained during service in a conscientious court. The strengthened skill of Ostrovsky, a new word that sounded on the Russian stage, was reflected, in particular, in the combination of a spectacularly developing intrigue and vivid everyday-descriptive insertions (the speech of the matchmaker, the squabble of mother and daughter), inhibiting the action, but also giving a sense of the specifics of the life and customs of the merchant environment. A special role here was played by the unique, at the same time class, and individual psychological coloring of the characters' speech.

Already in "Bankrut" a cross-cutting theme of Ostrovsky's dramatic work was identified: the patriarchal, traditional way of life, as it was preserved in the merchant and bourgeois environment, and its gradual degeneration and collapse, as well as complex relationships into which a person enters with a gradually changing way of life.

Having created fifty plays in forty years of literary work (some of them co-authored), which became the repertoire basis of the Russian public, democratic theater, Ostrovsky at different stages of his career presented in different ways the main theme of his work. So, becoming in 1850 an employee of the journal Moskvityanin, known for its soil science direction (editor MP Pogodin, collaborators AA Grigoriev, T.I. tried to give the magazine a new direction - to focus on the ideas of national originality and originality, not of the peasantry (unlike the "old" Slavophiles), but of the patriarchal merchants. In his subsequent plays Do not sit in your sleigh, Poverty is not a vice, Do not live the way you want to ”(1852-1855), the playwright tried to reflect the poetry of folk life:“ To have the right to correct the people without offending him , you need to show him that you know good behind him; This is what I am doing now, combining the lofty with the comic, ”he wrote in the“ Muscovite ”period.

At the same time, the playwright became friends with the girl Agafya Ivanovna (who had four children from him), which led to a break in relations with his father. According to eyewitnesses, she was a kind, warm-hearted woman, to whom Ostrovsky owed much of his knowledge of Moscow life.

The "Muscovite" plays are characterized by a well-known utopianism in resolving conflicts between generations (in the comedy "Poverty is not a vice", 1854, a happy accident upsets the marriage imposed by a tyrant father and hateful for his daughter, arranges the marriage of a rich bride - Lyubov Gordeevna - with a poor clerk Mitya) ... But this feature of Ostrovsky's "Muscovite" drama does not negate the high realistic quality of the works of this circle. The image of Lyubim Tortsov, the drunken brother of the tyrant merchant Gordey Tortsov, in the play "Ardent Heart" (1868), written much later, turns out to be complex, dialectically connecting seemingly opposite qualities. At the same time, Lyubim is a herald of truth, a bearer of popular morality. He makes Gordey see his sight, having lost a sober outlook on life because of his own vanity, passion for false values.

In 1855, the playwright, dissatisfied with his position in the Moskvityanin (constant conflicts and scanty fees), left the magazine and became close to the editorial board of the Petersburg Sovremennik (N.A. Nekrasov considered Ostrovsky "undoubtedly the first dramatic writer"). In 1859, the first collected works of the playwright came out, bringing him both fame and human joy.

Subsequently, two trends in the coverage of the traditional way - critical, accusatory and poetic - were fully manifested and combined in Ostrovsky's tragedy "The Thunderstorm" (1859).

The work, written in the genre framework of a social and everyday drama, is simultaneously endowed with the tragic depth and historical significance of the conflict. The clash of two female characters - Katerina Kabanova and her mother-in-law Marfa Ignatievna (Kabanikha) - far exceeds in scale the conflict between generations, which is traditional for Ostrovsky's theater. The character of the main character (called by NA Dobrolyubov "a ray of light in the dark kingdom") is made up of several dominants: the ability to love, the desire for freedom, a sensitive, vulnerable conscience. Showing the naturalness, inner freedom of Katerina, the playwright at the same time emphasizes that she is, nevertheless, flesh of the flesh of the patriarchal way of life.

Living by traditional values, Katerina, having betrayed her husband, surrendering to her love for Boris, takes the path of breaking with these values ​​and is acutely aware of this. The drama of Katerina, who denounced herself in front of everyone and committed suicide, turns out to be endowed with the features of the tragedy of a whole historical order, which is gradually collapsing and receding into the past. The attitude of Marfa Kabanova, the main antagonist of Katerina, was also marked with the stamp of eschatologism, with a sense of the end. At the same time, Ostrovsky's play is deeply imbued with the experience of the “poetry of folk life” (A. Grigoriev), the song and folklore element, the feeling of natural beauty (features of the landscape are present in the remarks, appear in the characters' replicas).

The subsequent long period of the playwright's work (1861-1886) reveals the closeness of Ostrovsky's searches to the paths of development of the contemporary Russian novel - from the Golovlevs by M.Ye. Saltykov-Shchedrin to the psychological novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Powerful sounds in the comedies of the “post-reform” years are the theme of “big money”, greed, shameless careerism of the impoverished nobility, combined with a wealth of psychological characteristics of the characters, with the ever-increasing art of plot construction by the playwright. For example, Yegor Glumov, the "antihero" of the play "Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man" (1868), is somewhat reminiscent of Griboyedov's Molchalin. But this is Molchalin of a new era: Glumov's inventive mind and cynicism for the time being contribute to his dizzying career that had begun. These same qualities, the playwright hints, in the finale of the comedy will not let Glumov disappear even after his exposure. The theme of the redistribution of life's goods, the emergence of a new social and psychological type - a businessman ("Mad Money", 1869, Vasilkov), or even a predator-dealer from the nobility ("Wolves and Sheep", 1875, Berkutov) existed in Ostrovsky's work until the end of his writing path. In 1869 Ostrovsky remarried after the death of Agafya Ivanovna from tuberculosis. From his second marriage, the writer had five children.

The genre and compositional complex, full of literary allusions, hidden and direct quotes from Russian and foreign classical literature (Gogol, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere, Schiller), the comedy Les (1870) sums up the first decade of the reform. The play touches upon themes developed by Russian psychological prose - the gradual ruin of "noble nests", the spiritual decline of their owners, the stratification of the second estate and those moral collisions in which people find themselves involved in new historical and social conditions. In this social, everyday and moral chaos, the bearer of humanity and nobility turns out to be a man of art - a declassified nobleman and provincial actor Neschastlivtsev.

In addition to "folk tragedy" ("Thunderstorm"), satirical comedy ("Forest"), Ostrovsky at a later stage of his work also creates exemplary works in the genre of psychological drama ("Bride", 1878, "Talents and admirers", 1881, "Without guilty guilt ", 1884). The playwright in these plays expands and psychologically enriches the stage characters. Correlated with traditional stage roles and with commonly used dramatic moves, characters and situations turn out to be capable of changing in an unforeseen way, thereby demonstrating the ambiguity, inconsistency of a person's inner life, the unpredictability of every everyday situation. Paratov is not only a “fatal man”, the fatal beloved of Larisa Ogudalova, but also a man of a simple, rude everyday calculation; Karandyshev is not only a "little man" who tolerates cynical "masters of life", but also a person with immense, painful pride; Larissa is not only a heroine suffering from love, ideally different from her environment, but also under the influence of false ideals ("Dowry"). Equally psychologically ambiguous, the playwright resolved the character of Negina (Talents and Admirers): the young actress not only chooses the path of serving art, preferring it to love and personal happiness, but also agrees to the fate of a kept woman, that is, “practically reinforces” her choice. The fate of the famous artist Kruchinina (“Guilty Without Guilt”) intertwined both the ascent to the theatrical Olympus and the terrible personal drama. Thus, Ostrovsky follows the path correlated with the paths of contemporary Russian realistic prose - the path of ever deeper awareness of the complexity of the inner life of the individual, the paradoxical nature of his choice.

2. Ideas, themes and social characters in the dramatic works of A.N. Ostrovsky

.1 Creativity (Ostrovsky democracy)

In the second half of the 1950s, a number of major writers (Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Ostrovsky) concluded an agreement with the Sovremennik magazine on the preferential provision of their works to him. But soon this agreement was violated by all writers, except for Ostrovsky. This fact is one of the testimonies of the great ideological closeness of the playwright with the editorial board of a revolutionary-democratic journal.

After the closure of Sovremennik, Ostrovsky, consolidating his alliance with the revolutionary democrats, with Nekrasov and Saltykov-Shchedrin, published almost all of his plays in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski.

Ideologically maturing, the playwright reaches by the end of the 60s the heights of his democracy, alien to Westernism and Slavophilism. According to its ideological pathos, Ostrovsky's drama is the drama of peaceful democratic reformism, ardent propaganda of enlightenment and humanity, and the protection of working people.

Ostrovsky's democracy explains the organic connection of his work with oral folk poetry, the material of which he so wonderfully used in his artistic creations.

The playwright highly appreciates M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. He speaks of him "in the most enthusiastic way, declaring that he considers him not only an outstanding writer, with incomparable techniques of satire, but also a prophet in relation to the future."

Closely associated with Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin and other leaders of revolutionary peasant democracy, Ostrovsky, however, was not a revolutionary in his socio-political views. In his works, there are no calls for a revolutionary transformation of reality. That is why Dobrolyubov, completing his article "The Dark Kingdom", wrote: "We must confess: we did not find a way out of the" dark kingdom "in the works of Ostrovsky." But with the totality of his works, Ostrovsky gave fairly clear answers to questions about the transformation of reality from the standpoint of peaceful reformist democracy.

Ostrovsky's inherent democracy determined the enormous strength of his sharply satirical guises of the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy. In a number of cases, these guises rose to the most decisive criticism of the ruling classes.

The accusatory and satirical power of many of Ostrovsky's plays is such that they objectively serve the cause of the revolutionary transformation of reality, as Dobrolyubov spoke about: “The modern aspirations of Russian life in the most extensive proportions find their expression in Ostrovsky, as in a comic, from the negative side. Drawing us in a vivid picture of false relationships, with all their consequences, he serves through the very same as an echo of the aspirations that require a better arrangement. " Concluding this article, he said even more definitely: "Russian life and Russian power have been summoned by the artist in" The Storm "to a decisive cause."

In the most recent years, Ostrovsky has a tendency to improve, which manifests itself in the replacement of clear social characteristics with abstract moralizing ones, in the emergence of religious motives. For all that, the tendency for improvement does not violate the foundations of Ostrovsky's work: it manifests itself within the boundaries of his inherent democracy and realism.

Every writer is distinguished by his curiosity and observation. But Ostrovsky possessed these qualities to the highest degree. He watched everywhere: on the street, at a business meeting, in a friendly company.

2.2 The innovation of A.N. Ostrovsky

Ostrovsky's innovation manifested itself already in the subject matter. He abruptly turned the drama to life, to its everyday life. It was with his plays that the content of Russian drama became life as it is.

Developing a very wide range of topics of his time, Ostrovsky mainly used the material of the life and customs of the upper Volga region and Moscow in particular. But regardless of the place of action, Ostrovsky's plays reveal the essential features of the main social classes, estates and groups of Russian reality at a certain stage of their historical development. "Ostrovsky - rightly wrote Goncharov, - covered the whole life of the Moscow, that is, the Great Russian state."

Along with the coverage of the most important aspects of the life of the merchants, the drama of the 18th century did not pass by such private phenomena of merchant life as the passion for a dowry, which was prepared in monstrous proportions ("The Bride under the Veil, or the Bourgeois Wedding" by an unknown author 1789)

Expressing the socio-political demands and aesthetic tastes of the nobility, vaudeville and melodrama, which flooded the Russian theater in the first half of the 19th century, greatly muted the development of everyday drama and comedy, in particular drama and comedy with a merchant theme. The theater's keen interest in plays with a merchant theme became apparent only in the 30s.

If at the end of the 30s and at the very beginning of the 40s, the life of the merchant class in dramatic literature was still perceived as a new phenomenon in the theater, then in the second half of the 40s it already became a literary cliché.

Why did Ostrovsky turn from the very beginning to the merchant theme? Not only because the merchant life literally surrounded him: he met with the merchants in his father's house, at the service. On the streets of Zamoskvorechye, where he lived for many years.

In the conditions of the collapse of feudal-serf relations of the landlords, Russia was rapidly turning into capitalist Russia. The commercial and industrial bourgeoisie was rapidly advancing on the public scene. In the process of turning landlord Russia into capitalist Russia, Moscow becomes a commercial and industrial center. Already in 1832, most of the houses in it belonged to the "middle class", i.e. merchants and bourgeois. In 1845 Belinsky stated: “The core of the indigenous Moscow population is the merchant class. How many old noble houses have now passed into the ownership of the merchants! "

A significant part of Ostrovsky's historical plays are devoted to the events of the so-called "time of troubles". This is no coincidence. The stormy time of "turmoil", clearly marked by the national liberation struggle of the Russian people, clearly echoes the growing peasant movement of the 60s for their freedom, with the sharp struggle of reactionary and progressive forces that unfolded in these years in society, in journalism and literature.

Depicting the distant past, the playwright had in mind the present as well. Exposing the ulcers of the socio-political system and the ruling classes, he castigated the autocratic order of his day. Drawing in plays about the past images of people infinitely loyal to their homeland, reproducing the spiritual greatness and moral beauty of the common people, he thereby expressed sympathy for the working people of his era.

Ostrovsky's historical plays are an active expression of his democratic patriotism, an effective implementation of his struggle against the reactionary forces of our time, for its progressive aspirations.

Ostrovsky's historical plays, which appeared during the years of a fierce struggle between materialism, idealism, atheism and religion, revolutionary democracy and reaction, could not be raised on the shield. Ostrovsky's plays emphasized the importance of the religious principle, and the revolutionary democrats carried out irreconcilable atheistic propaganda.

In addition, leading critics perceived negatively the playwright's departure from modernity to the past. Ostrovsky's historical plays began to find a more or less objective assessment later. Their true ideological and artistic value begins to be realized only in Soviet criticism.

Ostrovsky, depicting the present and the past, was carried away by his dreams into the future. In 1873. He creates a wonderful play-fairy tale "Snow Maiden". This is a social utopia. The plot, the characters, and the setting are fabulous in it. Deeply different in form from the social and everyday plays of the playwright, it is organically included in the system of democratic, humanistic ideas of his work.

In the critical literature about "The Snow Maiden" it was rightly pointed out that Ostrovsky was painting here a "peasant kingdom", a "peasant community", once again emphasizing his democracy, his organic connection with Nekrasov, who idealized the peasantry.

It was with Ostrovsky that Russian theater in its modern understanding began: the writer created a theater school and a holistic concept of acting in the theater.

The essence of Ostrovsky's theater is the absence of extreme situations and opposition to the actor's gut. In the plays of Alexander Nikolaevich, ordinary situations are depicted with ordinary people, whose dramas go into everyday life and human psychology.

The main ideas of the theater reform:

· the theater should be built on conventions (there is a 4th wall that separates the audience from the actors);

· invariability of attitude to language: mastery of speech characteristics, expressing almost everything about the heroes;

· the rate is not for one actor;

· "People go to watch the game, not the play itself - you can read it."

Ostrovsky's theater demanded a new stage aesthetics, new actors. In accordance with this, Ostrovsky creates an acting ensemble, which includes such actors as Martynov, Sergei Vasiliev, Evgeny Samoilov, Prov Sadovsky.

Naturally, the innovations were met by opponents. It was, for example, Shchepkin. Ostrovsky's dramaturgy required the actor to be detached from his personality, which M.S. Shchepkin did not. For example, he left the dress rehearsal of The Storms, being very dissatisfied with the author of the play.

Ostrovsky's ideas were brought to their logical conclusion by Stanislavsky.

.3 Socio-ethical drama of Ostrovsky

Dobrolyubov said that Ostrovsky's "extremely fully exposed two kinds of relations - family relations and property relations." But these relations are always given to them in a broad social and moral frame.

Ostrovsky's dramaturgy is social and ethical. It poses and solves problems of morality and human behavior. Goncharov rightly drew attention to this: "Ostrovsky is usually called the writer of everyday life, morals, but this does not exclude the psychic side ... he does not have a single play where this or that purely human interest, feeling, life truth is not touched." The author of "The Thunderstorm" and "Dowry" has never been a narrow everyday life. Continuing the best traditions of Russian progressive drama, he organically fuses family and household, moral and household motives with deeply social or even socio-political in his plays.

At the heart of almost any of his plays is the mainstream, leading theme of great social resonance, which is revealed with the help of subordinate private themes, mainly everyday ones. Thus, his plays acquire thematically complex complexity and versatility. So, for example, the leading theme of the comedy "Our People - Numbered!" - unbridled predation, which led to a malicious bankruptcy, is carried out in an organic interweaving with subordinate private themes: education, relationships between elders and younger ones, fathers and children, conscience and honor, etc.

Shortly before the appearance of "The Thunderstorm" N.A. Dobrolyubov came out with the articles "The Dark Kingdom", in which he argued that Ostrovsky "possesses a deep understanding of Russian life and is great to depict sharply and vividly its most essential aspects."

The "thunderstorm" served as new proof of the validity of the positions expressed by the revolutionary-democratic critic. In The Thunderstorm, the playwright has shown with exceptional force the clash between old traditions and new trends, between oppressed and oppressed people, between the aspirations of oppressed people for the free manifestation of their spiritual needs, inclinations, interests and the social and family order that ruled under the conditions of pre-reform life.

Solving the urgent problem of illegitimate children, their social powerlessness, Ostrovsky in 1883 created the play “Guilty Without Guilt”. This problem was touched upon in the literature both before and after Ostrovsky. Democratic fiction paid particular attention to her. But in more than one work this theme was not sounded with such penetrating passion as in the play "Guilty Without Guilt." Confirming its relevance, a contemporary of the playwright wrote: "The question of the fate of the illegitimate is a question inherent in all classes."

In this play, the second problem is loudly heard - art. Ostrovsky skillfully, justifiably tied them into a single knot. He turned a mother looking for her child into an actress and unfolded all events in an artistic environment. Thus, two dissimilar problems merged into an organically inseparable life process.

The ways of creating a work of art are very diverse. A writer can start from a real fact that struck him or from a problem or idea that worried him, from oversaturation with life experience or from imagination. A.N. Ostrovsky, as a rule, started from specific phenomena of reality, but at the same time defended a certain idea. The playwright fully shared Gogol's judgments that “the play is governed by an idea, a thought. Without it, there is no unity in it. " Guided by this provision, on October 11, 1872, he wrote to his co-author N. Ya. Solovyov: "I worked on" Wild "all summer, but I thought for two years, I have not only not a single character or position, but not a single phrase that would not strictly follow from the idea ..."

The playwright has always been an opponent of the frontal didactics so characteristic of classicism, but at the same time he defended the need for complete clarity of the author's position. In his plays, one can always feel the author-citizen, the patriot of his country, the son of his people, the champion of social justice, acting now as a passionate defender, lawyer, now as a judge and prosecutor.

The social, ideological, ideological position of Ostrovsky is clearly revealed in the relationship to the various social classes and characters portrayed. Showing the merchants, Ostrovsky reveals his predatory egoism with particular completeness.

Along with selfishness, an essential property of the bourgeoisie depicted by Ostrovsky is acquisitiveness, accompanied by insatiable greed and shameless cheating. The acquisitive greed of this class is all-consuming. Relative feelings, friendship, honor, conscience are exchanged for money here. The glitter of gold overshadows all the usual concepts of morality and honesty in this environment. Here a wealthy mother marries her only daughter to an old man only because “hens don’t peck money” (“Family Picture”), and a rich father is looking for a groom for his, also his only daughter, thinking only so that he “ money was kept and less dowry broke "(" Our people - we will be numbered! ").

In the trading environment portrayed by Ostrovsky, no one takes into account other people's opinions, desires and interests, believing only their own will and personal arbitrariness as the basis of their activities.

An integral feature of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, portrayed by Ostrovsky, is hypocrisy. The merchants sought to hide their fraudulent nature under the guise of staunchness and piety. The religion of hypocrisy, professed by the merchants, became their essence.

Predatory egoism, acquisitive greed, narrow practicalism, a complete absence of spiritual demands, ignorance, tyranny, hypocrisy and hypocrisy - these are the leading moral and psychological features of the pre-reform commercial and industrial bourgeoisie portrayed by Ostrovsky, its essential properties.

Reproducing the pre-reform commercial and industrial bourgeoisie with its home-building way of life, Ostrovsky clearly showed that opposing forces were already growing in life, inexorably undermining its foundations. The ground under the feet of the tyrannical despots became more and more shaky, foreshadowing their inevitable end in the future.

The post-reform reality has changed a lot in the position of the merchants. The rapid development of industry, the growth of the domestic market, and the expansion of trade relations with abroad turned the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie not only into an economic, but also into a political force. The type of the old pre-reform merchant began to be replaced by a new one. He was replaced by a merchant of a different fold.

Responding to the new that the post-reform reality introduced into the life and customs of the merchants, Ostrovsky even more sharply puts in his plays the struggle of civilization with patriarchal, new phenomena with antiquity.

Following the changing course of events, the playwright, in a number of his plays, draws a new type of merchant that took shape after 1861. Acquiring a European gloss, this merchant hides his self-serving predatory nature under the external speciousness.

Painting representatives of the post-reform commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, Ostrovsky exposes their utilitarianism, shareholdings, spiritual poverty, absorption in the interests of hoarding and everyday comfort. "The bourgeoisie," we read in the Communist Manifesto, "tore off their touchingly sentimental veil from family relations and reduced them to purely monetary relations." We see a convincing confirmation of this position in family and household relations of both the pre-reform and, in particular, the post-reform Russian bourgeoisie, depicted by Ostrovsky.

Marriage and family relations are subordinated here to the interests of entrepreneurship and profit.

Civilization undoubtedly brought order to the technique of professional relations between the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, instilled in it a gloss of external culture. But the essence of the social practice of the pre-reform and post-reform bourgeoisie remained unchanged.

Comparing the bourgeoisie with the nobility, Ostrovsky gives preference to the bourgeoisie, but nowhere, except for three plays - "Don't get in your sleigh," "Poverty is not a vice," "Don't live as you want," does he idealize it as an estate. It is clear to Ostrovsky that the moral foundations of the representatives of the bourgeoisie are determined by the conditions of their environment, their social being, which is a private expression of the system, which is based on despotism, the power of wealth. The commercial and entrepreneurial activity of the bourgeoisie cannot serve as a source of spiritual growth of the human person, humanity and morality. The social practice of the bourgeoisie can only disfigure the human personality, instilling in it individualistic, antisocial properties. The bourgeoisie, historically replacing the nobility, is vicious in its essence. But it has turned into a force not only economic, but also political. While the merchants of Gogol feared the mayor like fire and lay at his feet, the merchants of Ostrovsky treat the mayor in a familiar manner.

Depicting the affairs and days of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, its old and young generation, the playwright showed a gallery of images full of individual originality, but, as a rule, without soul and heart, without shame and conscience, without pity and compassion.

The Russian bureaucracy of the second half of the 19th century, with its inherent properties of careerism, embezzlement, and bribery, was also subjected to harsh criticism of Ostrovsky. Expressing the interests of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, it was in fact the dominant social and political force. "The tsarist autocracy is," Lenin asserted, "the autocracy of officials."

The power of the bureaucracy, directed against the interests of the people, was uncontrolled. Representatives of the bureaucratic world Vyshnevsky ("Profitable Place"), Potrokhovs ("Labor Bread"), Gnevyshevs ("Rich Bride") and Benevolensky ("Poor Bride").

The concepts of justice and human dignity exist in the bureaucratic world in an egoistic, extremely vulgarized understanding.

Revealing the mechanics of bureaucratic omnipotence, Ostrovsky paints a picture of a terrible formalism that has brought to life such dark businessmen as Zakhar Zakharych ("Hangover in someone else's feast") and Mudrov ("Hard days").

It is quite natural that representatives of autocratic-bureaucratic omnipotence are stranglers of any free political thought.

Embezzling, bribery, perjury, whitewashing black and drowning a just cause in the paper stream of casuistic cunning, these people are morally devastated, everything human in them has been weathered, there is nothing cherished for them: conscience and honor were sold for profitable places, ranks, money.

Ostrovsky convincingly showed the organic fusion of the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy with the nobility and the bourgeoisie, the unity of their economic and socio-political interests.

Reproducing the heroes of the conservative bourgeois-bureaucratic life with their vulgarity and impenetrable ignorance, carnivorous greed and rudeness, the playwright creates a magnificent trilogy about Balzaminov.

Running into the future in his dreams, when he marries a rich bride, the hero of this trilogy says: “First, I would make myself a blue raincoat on a black velvet lining ... I would buy myself a gray horse and a racing droshky and ride along Zatsepa, mamma, and he himself ruled ... ".

Balsaminov is the personification of vulgar bourgeois-bureaucratic narrow-mindedness. This is a type of tremendous generalizing force.

But a significant part of the petty bureaucracy, being socially between a rock and a hard place, itself endured oppression from the autocratic-despotic system. Among the petty bureaucracy, there were many honest workers, who were bent and often fell under the unbearable burden of social injustice, hardship and want. Ostrovsky treated these workers with warm attention and sympathy. He dedicated a number of plays to the little people of the bureaucratic world, where they act as they really were: good and evil, smart and stupid, but both are destitute, deprived of the opportunity to reveal their best abilities.

They felt their social disadvantage more acutely, people more or less extraordinary felt their hopelessness more deeply. And therefore their life was mostly tragic.

Representatives of the working intelligentsia in Ostrovsky's portrayal are people of spiritual vigor and bright optimism, benevolence and humanism.

Fundamental directness, moral purity, firm belief in the truth of their deeds and the bright optimism of the working intelligentsia find warm support from Ostrovsky. Portraying representatives of the working intelligentsia as true patriots of their homeland, as bearers of light, designed to dispel the darkness of the dark kingdom based on the power of capital and privileges, arbitrariness and violence, the playwright puts his cherished thoughts into their speeches.

Ostrovsky's sympathies belonged not only to the working intelligentsia, but also to ordinary working people. He found them among the bourgeoisie - a motley, complex, contradictory class. By proprietary aspirations, the bourgeoisie adhere to the bourgeoisie, and by their labor essence - to the common people. Ostrovsky portrays from this class mostly working people, showing clear sympathy for them.

As a rule, ordinary people in Ostrovsky's plays are carriers of a natural mind, spiritual nobility, honesty, innocence, kindness, human dignity and heartfelt sincerity.

Showing the working people of the city, Ostrovsky penetrates with deep respect for their spiritual dignity and ardent sympathy for the plight. He acts as a direct and consistent defender of this social stratum.

Deepening the satirical tendencies of Russian drama, Ostrovsky acted as a ruthless denouncer of the exploiting classes and thus the autocratic system. The playwright portrayed a social system in which the value of a human person is determined only by its material wealth, in which poor workers experience heaviness and despair, and careerists and bribe-takers prosper and triumph. Thus, the playwright pointed out his injustice and depravity.

That is why in his comedies and dramas, all the goodies are predominantly in dramatic situations: they suffer, suffer and even die. Their happiness is accidental or imaginary.

Ostrovsky was on the side of this growing protest, seeing in it a sign of the times, an expression of a popular movement, the beginnings of something that was supposed to change all life in the interests of working people.

As one of the brightest representatives of Russian critical realism, Ostrovsky not only denied, but also asserted. Using all the possibilities of his skill, the playwright attacked those who oppressed the people and mutilated their souls. Permeating his work with democratic patriotism, he said: "As a Russian, I am ready to sacrifice everything I can for the fatherland."

Comparing Ostrovsky's plays with contemporary liberal accusatory novels and novellas, Dobrolyubov rightly wrote in his article "A Ray of Light in the Dark Kingdom": , whose voice is heard in all the phenomena of our life, whose satisfaction is a necessary condition for our further development. "

Conclusion

Western European drama of the 19th century, for the most part, reflected the feelings and thoughts of the bourgeoisie, which ruled in all spheres of life, praised its morality and heroes, and established the capitalist order. Ostrovsky expressed the mood, moral principles, ideas of the working strata of the country. And this determined that height of his ideological spirit, that strength of his public protest, that truthfulness in his depiction of the types of reality with which he stood out so vividly against the background of the entire world drama of his time.

Ostrovsky's creative activity had a powerful influence on the entire further development of progressive Russian drama. It was from him that our best playwrights learned from him. It was to him that aspiring dramatic writers were drawn at one time.

Ostrovsky had a tremendous impact on the further development of Russian drama and theatrical art. IN AND. Nemirovich-Danchenko and K.S. Stanislavsky, the founders of the Moscow Art Theater, strove to create "a folk theater with approximately the same tasks and plans as Ostrovsky dreamed of." The dramatic innovation of Chekhov and Gorky would have been impossible without them mastering the best traditions of their remarkable predecessor. Ostrovsky became an ally and ally of playwrights, directors, actors in their struggle for the nationality and high ideology of Soviet art.

Bibliography

Ostrovsky Drama Ethical Play

1.Andreev I.M. “The creative path of A.N. Ostrovsky "M., 1989

2.Zhuravleva A.I. “A.N. Ostrovsky - comedy "M., 1981

.Zhuravleva A.I., Nekrasov V.N. Theater A.N. Ostrovsky "M., 1986

.Kazakov N.Yu. “The life and work of A.N. Ostrovsky "M., 2003

.Kogan L.R. “Chronicle of the life and work of A.N. Ostrovsky "M., 1953

.Lakshin V. “Theater A.N. Ostrovsky "M., 1985

.Malygin A.A. “The art of drama by A.N. Ostrovsky "M., 2005

Internet resources:

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.Shchelykovo www. Shelykovo.ru

.# "justify">. # "justify">. http://www.noisette-software.com

Similar works to - The role of Ostrovsky in the creation of the national repertoire

Writing

Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky ... This is an unusual phenomenon. It is difficult to overestimate its role in the history of the development of Russian drama, performing arts and the entire Russian culture. For the development of Russian drama, he did as much as Shakespeare in England, Lone de Vega in Spain, Moliere in France, Goldoni in Italy and Schiller in Germany. Despite the harassment inflicted by the censorship, the theatrical literary committee and the directorate of the imperial theaters, despite criticism from reactionary circles, Ostrovsky's dramaturgy gained more and more sympathy both among democratic spectators and among artists.

Developing the best traditions of Russian dramatic art, using the experience of progressive foreign drama, tirelessly learning about the life of his native country, constantly communicating with the people, closely linking with the most progressive contemporary society, Ostrovsky became an outstanding representative of the life of his time, who embodied the dreams of Gogol, Belinsky and other progressive figures literature about the appearance and triumph of Russian characters on the national stage.
Ostrovsky's creative activity had a great influence on all further development of progressive Russian drama. It was from him that our best playwrights learned from him. It was to him that aspiring dramatic writers were drawn at one time.

The power of Ostrovsky's influence on contemporary writers' youth can be evidenced by a letter to the playwright poetess A.D. Mysovskaya. “Do you know how great was your influence on me? It was not love for art that made me understand and appreciate you: on the contrary, you taught me to love and respect art. I owe you alone that I resisted the temptation to enter the arena of pathetic literary mediocrity, did not chase after cheap laurels thrown by the hands of sweet and sour half-educated people. You and Nekrasov made me love thought and work, but Nekrasov gave me only the first impetus, but you gave me direction. Reading your works, I realized that rhyming is not poetry, but a set of phrases is not literature, and that only by working the mind and technique, the artist will be a real artist ”.
Ostrovsky had a powerful impact not only on the development of Russian drama, but also on the development of Russian theater. The colossal significance of Ostrovsky in the development of Russian theater is well emphasized in a poem dedicated to Ostrovsky and read in 1903 by M.N. Ermolova from the stage of the Maly Theater:

Life itself on the stage, truth blows from the stage,
And the bright sun caresses us and warms us ...
The living speech of simple, living people sounds,
On stage, not a "hero", not an angel, not a villain,
But just a man ... a happy actor
Hastens to quickly break the heavy shackles
Conventions and lies. Words and feelings are new

But in the recesses of the soul, the answer sounds to them, -
And all the lips whisper: blessed is the poet,
Torn off the decrepit, tinsel covers
And into the dark kingdom, who shed a bright light

The famous artist wrote about the same in 1924 in her memoirs: "Together with Ostrovsky, truth itself and life itself appeared on the stage ... The growth of original drama, full of responses to modernity, began ... They started talking about the poor, humiliated and insulted."

The realistic direction, muffled by the theatrical policy of the autocracy, continued and deepened by Ostrovsky, turned the theater on the path of close connection with reality. It alone gave the theater life as a national, Russian, folk theater.

“You have donated a whole library of works of art to literature, you have created your own special world for the stage. You alone completed the building, at the base of which you put the cornerstones Fonvizin, Griboyedov, Gogol. " This wonderful letter received, among other congratulations in the year of the thirty-fifth anniversary of his literary and theatrical activity, Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky from another great Russian writer - Goncharov.

But much earlier, about the very first work of the still young Ostrovsky, published in "Moskvityanin", a subtle connoisseur of the graceful and sensitive observer V.F. then this person has a huge talent. I consider three tragedies in Russia: "Minor", "Woe from Wit", "Inspector General". I put number four on “Bankrupt”. ”

From such a promising first assessment to Goncharov's jubilee letter, a full, hard-working life; labor, and led to such a logical interconnection of assessments, for talent first of all requires great work on oneself, and the playwright did not sin before God - he did not bury his talent in the ground. Having published his first work in 1847, Ostrovsky has since written 47 plays and translated more than twenty plays from European languages. And in total in the folk theater he created there are about a thousand characters.
Shortly before his death, in 1886, Alexander Nikolaevich received a letter from Leo Tolstoy, in which the genius prose writer admitted: “I know from experience how your things are read, obeyed and remembered by the people, and therefore I would like to help you have now, in fact, quickly become what you are undoubtedly - a nationwide writer in the broadest sense. "

Oct 30 2010

A completely new page in the history of Russian theater is associated with the name of A. N. Ostrovsky. This greatest Russian playwright was the first to set himself the task of democratizing the theater, and therefore he brings new themes to the stage, brings out new heroes and creates what can confidently be called the Russian national theater. Drama in Russia certainly had a rich tradition even before Ostrovsky. The viewer was familiar with numerous plays of the era of classicism, there was also a realistic tradition, represented by such outstanding works as "Woe from Wit", "The Inspector General" and "The Marriage" by Gogol.

But Ostrovsky enters literature precisely as a "natural school", and therefore the object of his research is not outstanding people, the way of life of the city. Ostrovsky makes the life of the Russian merchant a topic serious, "high", the writer clearly feels the influence of Belinsky, and therefore connects the progressive meaning of art with its nationality, and notes the importance of the accusatory orientation of literature. Defining the task of artistic creation, he says: "The public expects from art to endow it in a living, graceful form of its judgment over life, it expects to be united in full images of modern vices and shortcomings noticed in the century ..."

It is the "judgment of life" that becomes the defining artistic principle of Ostrovsky's work. In the comedies "Our People - Let's Be Numbered," the playwright ridicules the foundations of the life of the Russian merchants, showing that people are motivated, first of all, by a passion for profit. In the comedy "Poor Bride" the theme of property relations between people occupies a large place, an empty and vulgar nobleman appears. The playwright tries to show how the environment corrupts a person. The vices of his characters are almost always the result not of their personal qualities, but of the environment in which they live

The theme of "tyranny" occupies a special place in Ostrovsky. The writer displays images of people whose meaning of life is to suppress the personality of another person. Such are Samson the Big, Martha Kabanova, Dikoy. But the writer, of course, is not interested in the samoda itself: the moat. He explores the world in which his characters live. The heroes of the play "The Thunderstorm" belong to the patriarchal world, and their blood connection with it, their subconscious dependence on it is the hidden spring of the entire action of the play, the spring that forces the heroes to perform for the most part "puppet" movements. constantly emphasizes their lack of independence. The figurative system of the drama almost repeats the social and family model of the patriarchal world.

Family and family problems are placed at the center of the story, as at the center of the patriarchal community. The dominant feature of this small world is the eldest in the family, Marfa Ignatievna. Family members are grouped around her at various distances - a daughter, a son, a daughter-in-law and the almost disenfranchised inhabitants of the house: Glasha and Feklusha. The same "alignment of forces" organizes the entire life of the city: in the center - Dikoy (and not mentioned in the merchants of his level), on the periphery - people of less and less significant, who do not have money and social status.

Ostrovsky saw the fundamental incompatibility of the patriarchal world and normal life, the doom of a frozen ideology incapable of renewal. Resisting the impending innovations, supplanting it “all rapidly rushing life”, the patriarchal world generally refuses to notice this life, it creates a special mythologized space around itself, in which - the only one - its gloomy isolation, hostile to everything else, can be justified. Such a world crushes a person, and it does not matter who actually carries out this violence. According to Dobrolyubov, the tyrant “is powerless and insignificant in itself; it can be deceived, eliminated, thrown into a pit, finally ... But the fact is that tyranny does not disappear with its destruction. "

Of course, "tyranny" is not the only evil that Ostrovsky sees in contemporary society. The playwright ridicules the pettiness of the aspirations of many of his contemporaries. Let us recall Misha Balzaminov, who dreams in life only of a blue coat, "a gray horse and a racing droshky." This is how the theme of philistinism arises in the plays. The images of the nobles - Murzavetsky, Gurmyzhsky, Telyatevs - are marked with the deepest irony. The passionate dream of sincere human relationships, and not love built on calculation, is the most important feature of the play "The Dowry". Ostrovsky always stands for honest and noble relations between people in the family, society, and life in general.

Ostrovsky always considered theater to be a school of moral education in society, he understood the high responsibility of the artist. Therefore, he strove to portray the truth of life and sincerely wanted his art to be available to all people. And Russia will always admire the work of this genius playwright. It is no coincidence that the Maly Theater bears the name of A. N. Ostrovsky, a man who devoted his entire life to the Russian stage.

The playwright almost never posed in his work political and philosophical problems, facial expressions and gestures, through playing with the details of their costumes and everyday life. To enhance the comic effects, the playwright usually introduced secondary persons into the plot - relatives, servants, hangers-on, bystanders - and side circumstances of everyday life. Such is, for example, Khlynov's retinue and the gentleman with a mustache in "Ardent Heart", or Apollo Murzavetsky with his Tamerlane in the comedy "Wolves and Sheep", or the actor Schastlivtsev at Neschastlivtsev and Paratov in "Forest" and "Dowry", etc. The playwright continued to strive to reveal the characters of the heroes not only in the course of events, but also through the peculiarities of their everyday dialogues - “characterological” dialogues, aesthetically assimilated by him in “His people ...”.
Thus, in the new period of creativity, Ostrovsky appears as an established master with a complete system of dramatic art. His fame, his social and theatrical connections continue to grow and become more complex. The sheer abundance of plays created in the new period was the result of the ever-increasing demand for Ostrovsky's plays from magazines and theaters. During these years, the playwright not only worked tirelessly himself, but found the strength to help less gifted and novice writers, and sometimes actively participate with them in their work. Thus, in creative collaboration with Ostrovsky, a number of plays by N. Solovyov were written (the best of them are “The Marriage of Belugin” and “The Savage”), as well as by P. Nevezhin.
Constantly assisting the staging of his plays on the stages of the Moscow Maly and St. Petersburg Alexandria theaters, Ostrovsky was well aware of the state of theatrical affairs, which were mainly in the jurisdiction of the bureaucratic state apparatus, and was bitterly aware of their glaring shortcomings. He saw that he did not portray the noble and bourgeois intelligentsia in their ideological quests, as Herzen, Turgenev, and partly Goncharov did. In his plays, he showed the everyday social life of ordinary representatives of the merchants, officials, nobility, life, where in personal, in particular love, conflicts, clashes of family, money, property interests were manifested.
But the ideological and artistic awareness of these aspects of Russian life had a deep national-historical meaning for Ostrovsky. Through the everyday relationships of those people who were masters and masters of life, their general social state was revealed. Just as, according to Chernyshevsky's apt remarks, the cowardly behavior of a young liberal, the hero of Turgenev's story “Asya,” on a date with a girl was a “symptom of illness” of all noble liberalism, its political weakness, so domestic tyranny and predation of merchants, officials, nobles acted a symptom of a more terrible disease of their complete inability to at least in any way give their activities a nationwide progressive meaning.
This was quite natural and logical in the pre-reform period. Then the tyranny, arrogance, predation of the Voltovs, Vyshnevskys, Ulanbekovs was a manifestation of the “dark kingdom” of serfdom, already doomed to be scrapped. And Dobrolyubov correctly pointed out that although Ostrovsky's comedy “cannot provide a key to explaining many of the bitter phenomena portrayed in it,” nevertheless, “it can easily lead to many analogous considerations related to the way of life that does not directly concern”. And the critic explained this by the fact that the “types” of tyrants, deduced by Ostrovsky, “are not. rarely include not only exclusively merchant or bureaucratic, but also national (ie, national) features ”. In other words, the plays of Ostrovsky 1840-1860. indirectly exposed all the "dark kingdoms" of the autocratic-serf system.
In the post-reform decades, the situation has changed. Then “everything turned upside down” and the new, bourgeois order of Russian life began to gradually “fit in”. And the question of how exactly this new system was “arranged”, to what extent the new ruling class, the Russian bourgeoisie, could take part in the struggle to destroy the remnants of the “dark kingdom” of serfdom and the entire autocratic landlord system was of great national importance.
Almost twenty new plays by Ostrovsky on contemporary themes provided a clear negative answer to this fatal question. The playwright, as before, portrayed the world of private social and household, family and property relations. He himself was not clear about the general tendencies of their development, and his “lyre” sometimes uttered not quite “correct sounds” in this respect. But on the whole, Ostrovsky's plays had a certain objective orientation. They exposed both the remnants of the old "dark kingdom" of despotism, and the re-emerging "dark kingdom" of bourgeois predation, monetary excitement, the death of all moral values ​​in an atmosphere of universal sale and purchase. They showed that Russian businessmen and industrialists are not able to rise to the realization of the interests of national development, that some of them, such as Khlynov and Akhov, are only capable of indulging in rude pleasures, others, like Knurov and Berkutov, can only subordinate everything around to their predatory, “Wolfish” interests, while still others, such as Vasilkov or Frol Pribytkov, only hide the interests of profit by external decency and very narrow cultural needs. Ostrovsky's plays, in addition to the intentions and intentions of their author, objectively outlined a certain perspective of national development - the prospect of the inevitable destruction of all remnants of the old "dark kingdom" of autocratic feudal despotism, not only without the participation of the bourgeoisie, not only over its head, but together with the destruction of its own predatory "Dark kingdom".
The reality depicted in Ostrovsky's everyday plays was a form of life devoid of nationwide progressive content, and therefore easily revealed internal comic contradictions. Ostrovsky dedicated his outstanding dramatic talent to its disclosure. Relying on the tradition of Gogol's realistic comedies and stories, rebuilding it in accordance with the new aesthetic demands put forward by the "natural school" of the 1840s and formulated by Belinsky and Herzen, Ostrovsky traced the comic contradictions of the social and everyday life of the ruling strata of Russian society, delving into the "world details ”, examining thread after thread of the" web of daily relationships. " These were the main achievements of the new dramatic style created by Ostrovsky.

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