Александр Островский: өмір және шығармашылығы

Russian playwright (1823–1886)

Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky (Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Остро́вский; 12 April 1823 [O. S. 31 March 1823] 14 June 1886 [O. S. 2 June 1886]) was a Russian playwright, generally considered the greatest representative of the Russian realistic period. His dramas are among the most widely read and frequently performed stage pieces in Russia. Later Nikolai Ostrovsky became a high ranking state official and as such in 1839 received a nobility title with the corresponding privileges. His first wife and Alexander's mother, Lyubov Ivanovna Savvina, came from a clergyman's family. For some time the family lived in a rented flat in Zamoskvorechye. Then Nikolai Fyodorovich bought a plot of land in Monetchiki and built a house on it. In the early 1826 the family moved there. Alexander had three siblings, sister Natalya, and brothers Mikhail and Sergey. The former was his major companion in their childhood years, and it was from her and her girl friends that the boy learned such unmanly things as sewing and knitting. Nanny Avdotya Kutuzova played an important role in his upbringing too. Ostrovsky insisted it was the fairy tales she told him that inspired his The Snow Maiden, one of his most popular plays. In 1831 Ostrovsky's mother died. In 1834 Nikolay Fyodorovich sold the Monetchiki house, bought two new ones, on Zhitnaya street, and two years later married Baroness Emilia Andreyevna von Tessin, a noblewoman of Russian and Swedish descent. She rearranged the patriarchal ways of their Zamoskvorechye house, making it look more like a European mansion and made sure their stepchildren would receive high quality education. Emilia Andreyevna had four children of her own, one of whom, Pyotr Ostrovsky, later became Alexander's good friend. She knew several European languages, played the piano and taught Alexander to read music. In 1840 Ostrovsky graduated from the First Moscow Gymnasium and enrolled into Moscow University to study law, where among his tutors were such prominent scholars of the time as professors Pyotr Redkin, Timofey Granovsky and Mikhail Pogodin. Soon the family moved into the house on Yauza River, owned by Ivan Tessin, his step mother's brother. It was then that Ostrovsky started to write poetry, sketches and occasionally plays (none of the latter survived) and by the end of his second year became a theatre enthusiast, spending many an evening at the Moscow Petrovsky Theatre. In May 1843 Ostrovsky failed the Roman Law exams and left the university to join the Moscow Court of Consciousness as a clerk. In 1845 he was transferred to the Commercial Court which specialised mostly in cases related to bribery and corruption. "If not for such an unpleasant occasion there wouldn't have been such a play as A Profitable Position," Ostrovsky noted later. In 1851 Ostrovsky made a decision to devote himself entirely to literature and theatre.

In mid 1840s Ostrovsky wrote numerous sketches and scenes inspired by the Zamoskvorechye merchants community's life and made a draft for the play called The Bankrupt. An extract from this comedy ("Scenes from the comedy The Bankrupt") was published in the No.7, 1847, issue of Moskovsky Gorodskoi Listok (Moscow City Paper) as a collaboration with actor and a minor dramatist Dmitry Gorev who had co written one scene of it. Also in Listok appeared (as unsigned) "Pictures of Moscow Life" and "The Picture of a Family Happiness", two sets of scenes which were later published by Sovremennik (No. 4, 1856) under the title The Family Picture (Семейная картина). Ostrovsky regarded it as his first original work and the starting point of his literary career. On 14 February 1847 Ostrovsky made his public debut in the house of the university professor and literary critic Stepan Shevyryov, with the readings from "The Pictures". The audience which included Aleksey Khomyakov and several members of the Listok staff responded positively, both Shevyryov and Khomyakov speaking of the emergence of a new major talent in Russian literature. On 27 August 1851, The Picture of Family Happiness (which had been reportedly approved, among others, by Nikolai Gogol) was banned from being produced by Imperial Theatres. "Judging by these scenes what the Moscow merchants only do is cheat customers and drink while their wives are cheating on them," censor M. Gedeonov wrote. In December 1849 The Bankrupt was finished. Ostrovsky's first audience was his university friend Alexey Pisemsky, who greeted it rapturously. The actor Prov Sadovsky, who described the comedy as a 'revelation', started to recite fragments of it, notably in the Countess Rostopchina's salon, frequented by the young authors like Boris Almazov, Nikolai Berg, Lev Mei and Yevgeny Edelson, Ostrovsky's friends from his University years. All of them soon accepted Mikhail Pogodin's invitation and joined Moskvityanin to form there the so called 'youth faction'. Apollon Grigoriev, the informal leader of the team, started to actively promote Ostrovsky as a driving force of what he saw as the "new, authentic Russian literature." Censors gave their permission only after six months, but mangled the text in such a way that Ostrovsky lost all interest and asked the Maly inspector Alexey Verstovsky to forget about it and wait for the publication of the next play which he'd been working on already. The play had nothing to do with the radical ideas propagated by Sovremennik, but by this time, according to Lakshin, Ostrovsky had developed a different approach to his art: "Would it be worthwhile to wage wars against bribe takers when they are only part of the way of life where the corruption serves for a hidden mechanism? Wouldn't it be more intriguing to try and get under the skin of these people, learn how their special kind of morality works, expose the logic which helps them find excuses for themselves?" Ostrovsky totally rejected didacticism. "For a statement of truth to be effective and make people wiser, it has to be filtered through the soul of the highest quality, the soul of an artist," he argued. In London Ostrovsky visited Alexander Hertzen, although this fact became known only years later through the memoirs of his companion and personal secretary Ivan Gorbunov. In August 1862 he returned to Russia full of new ideas and by the end of the year finished Sin and Sorrow Are Common to All (Грех да беда на кого не живёт). Published by the Dostoyevsky brothers owned Vremya magazine, it was a drama of strong characters, based on a real life story related to the author by one of his merchant friends. In Autumn 1863 Ostrovsky finished Difficult Days (Тяжёлые дни), a sequel to the Hangover, telling the story of backward Russian provinces where ignorance rules. It was followed by Jokers (Шутники, 1864) and The Deep (Пучина, 1865), the latter concluding the Zamoskvorechye cycle. One of Ostrovsky's experimental pieces (more a novel than a play, fashioned after the recently translated Thirty Years by Victor Ducange), it suffered from heavy handed censorial treatment and had little success on stage. After Nikolai Ostrovsky's death, Alexander with brother Mikhail bought the estate in 1867 from their stepmother. "At last I'll be able to break free from the soul rending theatre slavery which devoured the best years of my life," he wrote in a letter. He built a creamery, set up a garden, and even though soon it became clear that this new way of life won't make him any richer, it was here that Ostrovsky spent his happiest days, receiving guests and enjoying bouts of inspiration for new plays. He called Shchelykovo "the Kostroma Switzerland" and insisted that not even in Italy had he ever seen such beauty. Taking cues from his 'worst enemy' operetta which came from France to conquer Petersburg and drive Ostrovsky's plays from theatre repertoires, he wrote "Ivan tsarevich", an ironic fairytale, its Russian folklore plot mixed with modern parody and farce. The lack of finance forced Ostrovsky to cancel the project, but the idea was soon revived in Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man, a pamphlet written in contemporary language but set in Moscow of the old times. came out, reflecting the author's interest in (and wariness of, too) the new emerging class of capitalist entrepreneurs, 'practical people', as they have become known in Russia. Ostrovsky himself was very impractical, even if he liked to pretend otherwise. "Publishers are crooks and they drink my blood," he used to say. "Nekrasov openly laughed at me and called me an altruist. He said no man of literature would sell their work as cheaply as I do," complained Ostrovsky in a letter. Nekrasov (who paid him 200 rubles per act which was considered a good price) tried to help Ostrovsky in the business of publishing. "But it just happened so that in the end [Ostrovsky] was always losing money and was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy," Lakshin wrote. Each of his new plays was sent simultaneously to Maly Theatre and Otechestvennye Zapiski. Occasionally the publication preceded the premiere: such was the case with The Forest (Лес, 1871), the story of actors travelling from Vologda to Kerch which satirised the backwardness of the Russian province of the time. Without a Dowry (Бесприданница, 1878) was based on a criminal case dealing with a murder from jealousy, which was going on in the Kineshma court where Ostrovsky had once worked and which he since then often visited. It went unnoticed and only in retrospect is regarded as a precursor to Chekhov's similar line of work. Written especially for the young Alexandrinka actress Maria Savina, it had more success in Petersburg than in Moscow. Revived by Vera Komissarzhevskaya after the author's death, the play, according to Lakshin, "remains a timeless reminder of how deep the chasm between the two sides of success, the artistic and the public one, can be."

In the autumn of 1883 Ostrovsky made a trip down to the Caucasus. The lavish reception he received in Georgia moved him to tears. Refreshed and full of new hopes, Ostrovsky came back and promptly finished Guilty Without Fault (Без вины виноватые). Back home, though, he found himself in financial trouble again. "I am on the brink, there is no way out: Maria Vasilyevna is ill, all those worries have broken me totally, my heart falters and I often faint. None of the theatres pays me and I am in debt," he wrote to Fyodor Burdin. On 2 June Ostrovsky died in his home of angina pectoris while at his desk translating William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Alexander Ostrovsky was buried in the local cemetery in Nikolo Berezhki. Only close relatives, a couple of old friends, dramatist Nikolai Kropachev and A. A. Maykov (his colleague in the Theatre department and Apollon Maykov's nephew) were present. The ceremony was modest and humble. Brother Mikhail's plans to move the coffin to the Moscow Novodevichye Cemetery remained unfulfilled. "Ostrovsky's life was hard, full of strife, inner suffering and hard work. But he lived it as he wrote about it, being loyal to simple ideals: native land, pure feelings, goodness in people and the source of both happiness and torment in his life, theatre," Lakshin wrote. Marriage was out of question and Gasha (as she was known) never demanded that. Ostrovsky apparently wasn't expecting this relationship to be a lasting one, but it proved otherwise and Gasha stayed with him until her death in 1867. Poorly educated, but talented and intelligent woman, she had deep knowledge of the lower classes' life and certainly exerted some influence upon the dramatist. In the Autumn of 1859, while working upon The Storm Ostrovsky spent some time in Davydkovo and Ivankovo nearby Moscow, the two places of actors' gatherings. It was there that he became romantically involved with the actress Lyubov Nikulina Kositskaya, whom he apparently had in mind as Katerina. Judging by the extant Kositskaya's letters, Ostrovsky was madly in love, promising to 'elevate' her 'upon a pedestal'; she expressed reservations, reminding her lover of his duties towards his civil partner. After two years of uncertainty Ostrovsky proposed, and Kositskaya rejected him. By this time she has been in love with her young follower Sokolov, a flamboyant merchant's son who first squandered his own money, then started spending hers. This whole affair proved to be a painful and humiliating experience to Ostrovsky. Ostrovsky wrote 47 original plays featuring 728 characters, "a real word of its own where some figures might seem similar, but no two of them are the same," according to Y. Kholodov. "Ostrovsky's world was exceptionally diverse, as was his set of formats: he's written dramas, historical chronicles, scenes of Moscow life, a spring fairytale and a dramatic etude His legacy could be seen as one endless play set on one stage, that of Russia of the last three centuries," the critic continued. Ostrovsky was regarded as a master of language. Back in 1859 Nikolai Dobrolyubov (in his Realm of Darkness essay) remarked that many phrases he coined were being eagerly adopted by people and became folk sayings, part of common people talk. "Nobody has had such glorious, tasteful and clear Russian language before Ostrovsky," Turgenev wrote. Most of Ostrovsky's letters disappeared. In Shchelykovo the huge bulk of documents has been destroyed through negligence. The first academic works dealing with Ostrovsky and his legacy started to appear only in the Soviet times, via scholars N. Kashin, N. Dolgov, A. Revyakin, A. Lotman, E. Kholodov and V. Lakshin. Many gaps remain, unconfirmed dates and uncorroborated facts in his biography, according to the latter. Unlike those of his contemporaries Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, Ostrovsky's works are little known outside of Russian speaking countries. The two that are fairly well known in the West became so mostly because they were adapted for operas: Katya Kabanova (based on The Storm), and "The Snow Maiden" by Rimsky Korsakov. Ostrovsky wrote mostly of the conservative "old Russia", the traditional Russian society—of the everyday life of merchants and poor city dwellers—the subjects that seemed to attract little interest in the West. The Ostrovsky Institute was founded in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1945, which grew into the Uzbekistan State Institute of Arts and Culture. The Ostrovsky Leningrad Theatre Institute was founded in Leningrad, and merged with the Leningrad Institute of Art History in 1961 to become the Leningrad Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography, now the St Petersburg Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography.