Ostrovsky, general characteristics of the playwright’s work. A.N

Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky was born on March 31 (April 12), 1823 in Moscow. His father, a graduate of the Moscow Theological Seminary, served in the Moscow City Court. He was engaged in private litigation practice in property and commercial matters. The mother from a family of the clergy, the daughter of a sexton and a malt baker, died when the future playwright was eight years old. Ostrovsky spends his childhood and early youth in Zamoskvorechye - a special corner of Moscow with its established merchant and bourgeois life. It was easier for him to follow Pushkin’s advice: “It’s not bad for us sometimes to listen to the Moscow malts. They speak an amazingly pure and correct language.” Grandmother Natalya Ivanovna lived with the Ostrovsky family and served as a bread maker in the parish. Nanny Avdotya Ivanovna Kutuzova was famous as a great master of telling fairy tales. His godfather is a titular councilor, his godmother is a court councillor. From them and from his father’s colleagues who were in the house, the future author of “A Profitable Place” could hear plenty of bureaucratic conversations. And since my father left the service and became a private attorney for trading companies, there have been no merchants in the house.

Alexander became addicted to reading as a child, receives a good education at home, knows Greek, Latin, French, German, and later English, Italian, and Spanish. When Alexander was thirteen years old, his father married a second time to the daughter of a Russified Swedish baron, who was not very involved in raising the children from her husband’s first marriage. With her arrival, the household way of life changes noticeably, official life is reshaped in a noble manner, the environment changes, new speeches are heard in the house. By this time, the future playwright had re-read almost his entire father’s library.

Here you can find the first editions of "Ruslan and Lyudmila", "Gypsy", "Woe from Wit" and many other exemplary works of Russian literature.

From 1835-1840 - Ostrovsky studies at the First Moscow Gymnasium. In 1840, after graduating from high school, he was enrolled in the law faculty of Moscow University. At the university, law student Ostrovsky was lucky enough to listen to lectures by such experts in history, law and literature as T.N. Granovsky, N.I. Krylov, M.P. Pogodin. Here, for the first time, the future author of “Minin” and “Voevoda” discovers the riches of Russian chronicles, the language appears before him in a historical perspective. But in 1843, Ostrovsky left the university, not wanting to retake the exam. At the same time he entered the office of the Moscow Conscientious Court, and later served in the Commercial Court (1845-1851). This experience played a significant role in Ostrovsky's work.

The second university is the Maly Theater. Having become addicted to the stage even in his high school years, Ostrovsky became a regular at the oldest Russian theater.

1847 - in the "Moscow City Leaflet" Ostrovsky publishes the first draft of the future comedy "Our People - We Will Be Numbered" under the title "The Insolvent Debtor", then the comedy "Picture of Family Happiness" (later "Family Picture") and the prose essay "Notes of a Zamoskvoretsky Resident" .

“The most memorable day for me in my life,” Ostrovsky recalled, “February 14, 1847... From that day on, I began to consider myself a Russian writer and, without doubt or hesitation, believed in my calling.”

Ostrovsky's comedy "Our People - Let's Be Numbered" (original title - "Bankrut", completed at the end of 1849) brings recognition to Ostrovsky. Even before publication, it became popular (in the reading of the author and P.M. Sadovsky), caused approving responses from N.V. Gogol, I.A. Goncharova, T.H. Granovsky and others.

“He started out in an extraordinary way...” testifies I.S. Turgenev. His first big play, “We Will Be Numbered as Our Own People,” made a huge impression. She was called the Russian "Tartuffe", the "Brigadier" of the 19th century, the merchant's "Woe from Wit", compared to the "Inspector General"; Yesterday, the still unknown name of Ostrovsky was placed next to the names of the greatest comedy writers - Moliere, Fonvizin, Griboedov, Gogol.

After the comedy "Our People - Let's Be Numbered," Ostrovsky releases one, and sometimes two or three, plays every year, thus writing 47 plays of various genres - from tragedy to dramatic episodes. In addition, there are also plays written together with other playwrights - S.A. Gedeonov, N.Ya. Solovyov, P.M. Nevezhin, as well as over 20 translated plays (C. Goldoni, N. Macchiaveli, M. Cervantes, Terence, etc.). In 1859, Ostrovsky translated "Getsira" by the ancient Roman playwright Terence, in which the theme of daughter-in-law and mother-in-law is important (compare with the play "The Thunderstorm").

Possessing an extraordinary social temperament, Ostrovsky spent his whole life actively fighting for the creation of a new type of realistic theater, for a truly artistic national repertoire, and for a new ethics of the actor. He created the Moscow artistic circle in 1865, founded and headed the society of Russian dramatic writers (1870), wrote numerous “Notes”, “Projects”, “Considerations” to various departments, proposing to take urgent measures to stop the decline of theatrical art. Ostrovsky's work had a decisive influence on the development of Russian drama and Russian theater. As a playwright and director, Ostrovsky contributed to the formation of a new school of realistic acting, the promotion of a galaxy of actors (especially in the Moscow Maly Theater: the Sadovsky family, S.V. Vasiliev, L.P. Kositskaya, later - G.N. Fedotova, M.N. Ermolova and etc.).

Ostrovsky's theatrical biography did not coincide with his literary biography at all. The audience became acquainted with his plays in a completely different order from the order in which they were written and published. Only six years after Ostrovsky began publishing, on January 14, 1853, the curtain rose on the first performance of the comedy “Don’t Get in Your Own Sleigh” at the Maly Theater. The play shown to the audience first was Ostrovsky's sixth completed play.

At the same time, the playwright entered into a civil marriage with the girl Agafya Ivanovna Ivanova (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.

In 1869, after the death of Agafya Ivanovna from tuberculosis, Ostrovsky entered into a new marriage with the Maly Theater actress Maria Vasilyeva. From his second marriage the writer had five children.

Corresponding Member of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1863)

Ostrovsky's literary views were formed under the influence of the aesthetics of V.G. Belinsky. For Ostrovsky, as for other writers who began in the 40s, an artist is a kind of researcher-“physiologist” who subjects various parts of the social organism to special study, opening up yet unexplored areas of life for his contemporaries. In the open field, these tendencies found expression in the genre of the so-called “physiological essay,” widespread in the literature of the 40s and 50s. Ostrovsky was one of the most convinced exponents of this trend. Many of his early works were written in the manner of a “physiological sketch” (sketches of Zamoskvoretsky life; dramatic sketches and “paintings”: “Family Picture”, “Morning of a Young Man”, “An Unexpected Case”; later, in 1857, “The characters did not agree” ).

In a more complex refraction, the features of this style were reflected in most of Ostrovsky’s other works: he studied the life of his era, observing it as if under a microscope, like an attentive researcher and experimenter. This is clearly shown by the diaries of his trips around Russia and especially the materials of a many-month trip (1865) along the upper Volga for the purpose of a comprehensive examination of the region.

Ostrovsky's published report on this trip and draft notes represent a kind of encyclopedia of information on the economy, population composition, customs, and morals of this region. At the same time, Ostrovsky does not cease to be an artist - after this trip, the Volga landscape as a poetic leitmotif is included in many of his plays, starting with “The Thunderstorm” and ending with “Dowry” and “Voevoda (Dream on the Volga).” In addition, the idea of ​​a cycle of plays called “Nights on the Volga” arises (partially realized).

“Guilty Without Guilt” is the last of Ostrovsky’s masterpieces. In August 1883, just at the time of working on this play, the playwright wrote to his brother: “The writer’s concern: there is a lot that has been started, there are good plots, but ... they are inconvenient, you need to choose something smaller. I’m already living out my life.” "When will I have time to speak out? And then go to my grave without doing everything that I could do?"

At the end of his life, Ostrovsky finally achieved material wealth (he received a lifetime pension of 3 thousand rubles), and in 1884 he took the position of head of the repertory department of Moscow theaters (the playwright dreamed of serving the theater all his life). But his health was undermined, his strength was exhausted.

Ostrovsky not only taught, he also studied. Ostrovsky’s numerous experiments in the field of translation of ancient, English, Spanish, Italian and French dramatic literature not only testified to his excellent acquaintance with the dramatic literature of all times and peoples, but were also rightly considered by researchers of his work as a kind of school of dramatic skill, which Ostrovsky studied throughout his life (he began in 1850 with a translation of Shakespeare's comedy "The Taming of the Shrew").

Death found him translating Shakespeare's tragedy "Antony and Cleopatra") on June 2 (14), 1886 in the Shchelykovo estate, Kostroma region, from a hereditary disease - angina pectoris. He went to his grave without having done everything he could have done, but he did an extraordinary amount.

After the death of the writer, the Moscow Duma established a reading room named after A.N. in Moscow. Ostrovsky. On May 27, 1929, in Moscow, on Teatralnaya Square in front of the Maly Theater, where his plays were staged, a monument to Ostrovsky was unveiled (sculptor N.A. Andreev, architect I.P. Mashkov).

A.N. Ostrovsky is listed in the Russian Divo Book of Records as “the most prolific playwright” (1993).

Ostrovsky's work can be divided into three periods: 1st - (1847-1860), 2nd - (1850-1875), 3rd - (1875-1886).

FIRST PERIOD

It includes plays reflecting the life of pre-reform Russia. At the beginning of this period, Ostrovsky actively collaborated as an editor and as a critic with the Moskvityanin magazine, publishing his plays in it. Starting as a continuer of Gogol’s accusatory tradition (“We’ll be our own people,” “Poor Bride,” “We didn’t get along”), then, partly under the influence of the main ideologist of the magazine “Moskvityanin” A.A. Grigoriev, in Ostrovsky’s plays the motifs of idealization of Russian patriarchy and the customs of antiquity begin to sound (“Don’t sit in your own sleigh” (1852), “Poverty is not a vice” (1853), “Don’t live the way you want” (1854). These sentiments muffle Ostrovsky's critical pathos.

Since 1856, Ostrovsky, a permanent contributor to the Sovremennik magazine, has become close to figures in democratic Russian journalism. During the years of social upsurge before the peasant reform of 1861, social criticism in his work intensified again, the drama of conflicts became more acute ("At Someone Else's Feast a Hangover" (1855), "A Profitable Place" (1856), "The Thunderstorm" (1859).

SECOND PERIOD

It includes plays reflecting life in Russia after the reform. Ostrovsky continued to write everyday comedies and dramas ("Hard Days", 1863, "Jokers", 1864, "The Abyss", 1865), - still highly talented, but more likely to consolidate already found motifs than to master new ones. At this time, Ostrovsky also turned to the problems of national history, to the patriotic theme. Based on the study of a wide range of sources, he creates a cycle of historical plays: “Kozma Zakharyich Minin - Sukhoruk” (1861; 2nd edition 1866), “Voevoda” (1864; 2nd edition 1885), “Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky" (1866), "Tushino" (1866). In addition, a series of satirical comedies was created (“Every Wise Man Has Enough Simplicity” (1868), “Warm Heart” (1868), “Mad Money” (1869), “Forest” (1870), “Wolves and Sheep "(1875). Standing apart among the plays of the second period is the dramatic poem in verse "The Snow Maiden" (1873) - a "spring fairy tale", according to the author's definition, created on the basis of folk tales, beliefs, and customs.

THIRD PERIOD

Almost all of Ostrovsky's dramatic works of the 70s and early 80s. published in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski. During this period, Ostrovsky created significant socio-psychological dramas and comedies about the tragic destinies of richly gifted, sensitive women in the world of cynicism and self-interest ("Dowry", 1878, "The Last Victim", 1878, "Talents and Admirers", 1882, etc.). Here the writer also develops new forms of stage expression, in some respects anticipating the plays of A.P. Chekhov: while maintaining the characteristic features of his dramaturgy, Ostrovsky strives to embody the “inner struggle” in “an intelligent, subtle comedy” (see “A.N. Ostrovsky in the memoirs of his contemporaries,” 1966, p. 294).

The playwright remained in the history of Russian literature not just “Columbus of Zamoskvorechye,” as literary criticism called him, but the creator of the Russian democratic theater, who applied the achievements of Russian psychological prose of the 19th century to theatrical practice. Ostrovsky is a rare example of stage longevity; his plays do not leave the stage - this is the sign of a truly popular writer.

Ostrovsky's dramaturgy encompasses all of Russia - its way of life, its customs, its history, its fairy tales, its poetry. It is even difficult for us to imagine how much poorer our idea of ​​Russia, of Russian people, of Russian nature, and even of ourselves would be, if the world of Ostrovsky’s creations did not exist for us.

Not with cold curiosity, but with pity and anger, we look at the life embodied in Ostrovsky’s plays. Sympathy for the disadvantaged and indignation against the “dark kingdom” - these are the feelings that the playwright experienced and which he invariably evokes in us. But especially close to us is the hope and faith that always lived in this wonderful artist. And we know that this hope is for us, this is faith in us.

18. Depiction of the life of the humiliated and insulted in F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment”

Raskolnikov's theory is organically connected with the living conditions that surround this poor student. The first pages of the novel immerse the reader in the wretched environment of the St. Petersburg slums, in one of the alleys of which Rodion Raskolnikov lives, struggles with poverty, creates a theory and commits murder. The author describes in great detail his miserable, stuffy closet, located right under the roof, more reminiscent of a closet than an apartment. This tiny cell, six steps long, with dusty yellow wallpaper peeling off the walls and a low, oppressive ceiling, recreates an atmosphere of crampedness and hopelessness, which is intensified by the description of a stuffy July day in St. Petersburg. The figure of a remarkably handsome young man, dressed in rags, strangely harmonizes with the disgusting and sad coloring of the craft quarter, with the unbearable stench from the taverns in which poor officials and shop workers whiled away their time. Everywhere there is cramped space, stuffiness, overcrowding of people forced to huddle in squalid apartments, which further aggravates the feeling of spiritual loneliness in the crowd. People are divided and angry, suspicious and distrustful. They lose the ability to pity and compassion, and this is clearly manifested in the reaction of visitors to the drinking establishment to the drunken confession of the poor official Marmeladov. In his story about his fate, the terrible life drama of a man who was crushed and crippled by a cruel world unfolds. The soul of a normal, intelligent, conscientious person cannot endure the daily humiliation of being a silent witness to the insult of his own wife, seeing hungry children, knowing that his daughter, a pure, honest girl, lives on a yellow ticket. Overwhelmed with suffering, Marmeladov demands nothing from his listeners except simple human participation. But his sincere, excited confession evokes only giggles and mocking curiosity, in which contempt clearly appears.

In general, it is through the example of the Marmeladov family that the theme of humiliated and insulted people, their numerous disasters in “this magnificent capital adorned with numerous monuments” is largely revealed. This is how the image of St. Petersburg appears in the novel, a cold, deathly city, indifferently looking at the grief and suffering of people. The magnificent panorama of the Russian capital further emphasizes the poverty and hopelessness of the situation of the inhabitants of the St. Petersburg slums. The strict, refined lines of the luxurious buildings set off the squalid, smoky rooms with holey sheets and a tattered sofa, in one of which the Marmeladov family huddles. The world of the humiliated and insulted in the novel is many-sided and diverse. The fate of Katerina Ivanovna, an extremely exhausted and tormented woman, trying to clean up a squalid apartment, not knowing how to feed her hungry children, is unlike the fate of her stepdaughter Sonya, who goes to work to help her family. The life of Raskolnikov’s sister, the beautiful Dunya, is dramatic, who is forced to endure bullying and undeserved shame, having the pride and pride of her brother. Everywhere there are crippled, broken destinies, the cause of which is constant, hopeless need, terrible living conditions, unworthy of man.

All these examples naturally lead to the conclusion that in this cruel world it is impossible to live according to the norms of universal morality. Poverty, lack of rights, and humiliation push people to violate Christian commandments. The hero of Dostoevsky's novel sooner or later faces a choice: to die or to live at the cost of deals with his conscience.

Ostrovsky's chronological table helps to highlight the main stages of the writer's life. This article provides information about Ostrovsky’s life and work by date in a convenient form. The biography of A. N. Ostrovsky, a famous Russian playwright, will be of interest to schoolchildren and anyone interested in Russian classical literature.

Ostrovsky made a unique contribution to theatrical art. The theater business occupies a place of honor in Ostrovsky's life. The periodization of his creative path reflects the dates of development of the Russian theater associated with the founding of the Artistic Circle. The works of Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky in the table are listed in chronological order. You can learn more about the playwright’s work in a special section.

1823, March 31– A.N. was born. Ostrovsky in Moscow in the family of an official of the Moscow departments of the Senate Nikolai Fedorovich Ostrovsky and his wife Lyubov Ivanovna.

1831 – Death of mother A.N. Ostrovsky.

1835 – Admission to the third grade of the 1st Moscow gymnasium.

1840 – Admission to the Faculty of Law of Moscow University.

assigned to serve in the Moscow Conscientious Court.

1847, February 14– Reading the play “The Picture of Family Happiness” by S.P. Shevyreva, first success.

1853, January 14– Premiere on the stage of the Maly Theater of the comedy “Don’t Get in Your Own Sleigh,” the first play by A. N. Ostrovsky staged in the theater.

1856 – Cooperation with the Sovremennik magazine.

1860, January– The play “The Thunderstorm” was first published in No. 1 of the “Library for Reading” magazine.

1865, March-April– The charter of the Moscow artistic circle was approved (A.N. Ostrovsky, V.F. Odoevsky, N.G. Rubinstein).

opening of the Artistic Circle.

1868, November– In issue No. 11 of the magazine “Otechestvennye zapiski” the comedy “Simplicity is Enough for Every Wise Man” was published.

1870, November– On the initiative of A. N. Ostrovsky, the Meeting of Russian Dramatic Writers was established in Moscow, which was later transformed into the Society of Russian Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers.

1874 – A. N. Ostrovsky was unanimously elected chairman of the Society of Russian Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers.

1879 – The drama “Dowry” was published in No. 5 of Otechestvennye Zapiski.

"Table talk about Pushkin."

1882, January– The comedy “Talents and Admirers” was published in No. 1 of Otechestvennye Zapiski.

1882, February– Honoring A. N. Ostrovsky on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of his creative activity.

1886, June 2– Death of A.N. Ostrovsky. He was buried in the cemetery in Nikolo-Berezhki near Shchelykovo.

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(1843 – 1886).

Alexander Nikolaevich “Ostrovsky is a “giant of theatrical literature” (Lunacharsky), he created the Russian theater, an entire repertoire on which many generations of actors were brought up, the traditions of stage art were strengthened and developed. His role in the history of the development of Russian drama and the entire national culture can hardly be overestimated. He did as much for the development of Russian drama as Shakespeare in England, Lope de Vega in Spain, Moliere in France, Goldoni in Italy and Schiller in Germany.

“History has reserved the title of great and brilliant only for those writers who knew how to write for the whole people, and only those works have survived the centuries that were truly popular at home; such works over time become understandable and valuable for other peoples, and finally, and for the whole world." These words of the great playwright Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky can be attributed to his own work.

Despite the oppression inflicted by the censorship, the theatrical and literary committee and the management of the imperial theaters, despite the criticism of reactionary circles, Ostrovsky's dramaturgy gained more and more sympathy every year among both 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 communicating with the most progressive contemporary public, Ostrovsky became an outstanding portrayer of the life of his time, embodying the dreams of Gogol, Belinsky and other progressive figures literature about the appearance and triumph of Russian characters on the Russian stage.

Ostrovsky's creative activity had a great influence on the entire further development of progressive Russian drama. It was from him that our best playwrights came and learned from him. It was to him that aspiring dramatic writers in their time gravitated.

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

Ostrovsky had a powerful impact not only on the development of domestic drama, but also on the development of Russian theater. The colossal importance 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:

On the stage life itself, from the stage the truth blows,

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

The living speech of ordinary, living people sounds,

On stage there is 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 there is an answer to them, -

And all lips whisper: blessed is the poet,

Tore off the shabby, tinsel covers

And shed a bright light into the dark kingdom

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

The realistic direction, muted by the theatrical policy of the autocracy, continued and deepened by Ostrovsky, turned the theater onto the path of close connection with reality. Only it gave life to the theater as a national, Russian, folk theater.

“You have donated a whole library of works of art to literature, and you have created your own special world for the stage. You alone completed the building, at the foundation of which Fonvizin, Griboyedov, Gogol laid the cornerstones.” This wonderful letter was received, among other congratulations, on the year of the thirty-fifth anniversary of literary and theatrical activity by 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 elegant and sensitive observer V. F. Odoevsky wrote: “If this is not a momentary flash, not a mushroom squeezed out of the ground by itself, cut by all kinds of rot, then this man has enormous talent. I think there are three tragedies in Rus': “The Minor”, ​​“Woe from Wit”, “The Inspector General”. On “Bankrupt” I put number four.”

From such a promising first assessment to Goncharov’s anniversary letter - a full life, rich in work; labor, and which led to such a logical relationship of assessments, because talent requires, first of all, great work on itself, 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 there are about a thousand characters in the folk theater he created.

Shortly before his death, in 1886, Alexander Nikolaevich received a letter from L.N. Tolstoy, in which the brilliant prose writer admitted: “I know from experience how people read, listen to and remember your works, and therefore I would like to help ensure that You have now quickly become in reality what you undoubtedly are - a writer of the entire people in the broadest sense.”

Even before Ostrovsky, progressive Russian drama had magnificent plays. Let’s remember Fonvizin’s “The Minor,” Griboyedov’s “Woe from Wit,” Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov,” Gogol’s “The Inspector General,” and Lermontov’s “Masquerade.” Each of these plays could enrich and decorate, as Belinsky rightly wrote, the literature of any Western European country.

But these plays were too few. And they did not determine the state of the theatrical repertoire. Figuratively speaking, they rose above the level of mass drama like lonely, rare mountains in an endless desert plain. The overwhelming majority of the plays that filled the theater stage of that time were translations of empty, frivolous vaudevilles and heartbreaking melodramas woven from horrors and crimes. Both vaudeville and melodrama, terribly far from life, were not even its shadow.

In the development of Russian drama and domestic theater, the appearance of A. N. Ostrovsky’s plays constituted an entire era. They sharply turned drama and theater towards life, towards its truth, towards what truly touched and worried people of the unprivileged segment of the population, working people. By creating “plays of life,” as Dobrolyubov called them, Ostrovsky acted as a fearless knight of truth, a tireless fighter against the dark kingdom of autocracy, a merciless denouncer of the ruling classes - the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the bureaucrats who faithfully served them.

But Ostrovsky did not limit himself to the role of a satirical exposer. He vividly and sympathetically portrayed victims of socio-political and family-domestic despotism, workers, lovers of truth, educators, warm-hearted Protestants against tyranny and violence.

The playwright not only made the positive heroes of his plays people of labor and progress, bearers of people's truth and wisdom, but also wrote in the name of the people and for the people.

Ostrovsky depicted in his plays the prose of life, ordinary people in everyday circumstances. Taking the universal human problems of evil and good, truth and injustice, beauty and ugliness as the content of his plays, Ostrovsky survived his time and entered our era as its contemporary.

The creative path of A.N. Ostrovsky lasted four decades. He wrote his first works in 1846, and his last in 1886.

During this time, he wrote 47 original plays and several plays in collaboration with Solovyov (“The Marriage of Balzaminov”, “Savage”, “It shines but does not warm”, etc.); made many translations from Italian, Spanish, French, English, Indian (Shakespeare, Goldoni, Lope de Vega - 22 plays). His plays have 728 roles, 180 acts; all of Rus' is represented. A variety of genres: comedies, dramas, dramatic chronicles, family scenes, tragedies, dramatic sketches are presented in his dramaturgy. He acts in his work as a romantic, everyday writer, tragedian and comedian.

Of course, any periodization is to some extent conditional, but in order to better navigate the entire diversity of Ostrovsky’s work, we will divide his work into several stages.

1846 – 1852 – the initial stage of creativity. The most important works written during this period: “Notes of a Zamoskvoretsky Resident”, the plays “Picture of Family Happiness”, “Our People – Let’s Be Numbered”, “Poor Bride”.

1853 – 1856 - the so-called “Slavophile” period: “Don’t get into your own sleigh.” “Poverty is not a vice,” “Don’t live the way you want.”

1856 – 1859 - rapprochement with the Sovremennik circle, return to realistic positions. The most important plays of this period: “A Profitable Place”, “The Pupil”, “At Someone Else’s Feast there is a Hangover”, “The Balzaminov Trilogy”, and, finally, created during the revolutionary situation, “The Thunderstorm”.

1861 – 1867 – deepening the study of national history, the result is the dramatic chronicles Kozma Zakharyich Minin-Sukhoruk, “Dmitry the Pretender” and “Vasily Shuisky”, “Tushino”, the drama “Vasilisa Melentyevna”, the comedy “The Voivode or the Dream on the Volga”.

1869 – 1884 – plays created during this period of creativity are dedicated to social and everyday relations that developed in Russian life after the reform of 1861. The most important plays of this period: “Every Wise Man Has Enough Simplicity”, “Warm Heart”, “Mad Money”, “Forest”, “Wolves and Sheep”, “The Last Sacrifice”, “Late Love”, “Talents and Admirers”, “ Guilty without guilt."

Ostrovsky's plays did not appear out of nowhere. Their appearance is directly related to the plays of Griboedov and Gogol, which absorbed everything valuable that the Russian comedy that preceded them achieved. Ostrovsky knew the old Russian comedy of the 18th century well, and specially studied the works of Kapnist, Fonvizin, and Plavilshchikov. On the other hand, there is the influence of the prose of the “natural school”.

Ostrovsky came to literature in the late 40s, when Gogol's dramaturgy was recognized as the greatest literary and social phenomenon. Turgenev wrote: “Gogol showed the way how our dramatic literature will go over time.” From the first steps of his activity, Ostrovsky recognized himself as a continuer of the traditions of Gogol, the “natural school”; he considered himself one of the authors of the “new direction in our literature.”

The years 1846 - 1859, when Ostrovsky worked on his first big comedy, “We Will Be Numbered Our Own People,” were the years of his formation as a realist writer.

The ideological and artistic program of Ostrovsky, the playwright, is clearly set out in his critical articles and reviews. Article “Mistake,” Mrs. Tour’s story” (“Moskvityanin”, 1850), unfinished article about Dickens’s novel “Dombey and Son” (1848), review of Menshikov’s comedy “Whims” (“Moskvityanin” 1850), “Note on the situation dramatic art in Russia at the present time" (1881), "Table talk about Pushkin" (1880).

Ostrovsky’s social and literary views are characterized by the following basic principles:

Firstly, he believes that drama should be a reflection of people's life, people's consciousness.

For Ostrovsky, the people are, first of all, the democratic masses, the lower classes, ordinary people.

Ostrovsky demanded that the writer study people's life, the problems that concern the people.

“In order to be a people’s writer,” he writes, “love for the homeland is not enough... you need to know your people well, get along with them, become akin to them.” The best school for talent is the study of one’s nationality.”

Secondly, Ostrovsky talks about the need for national identity for drama.

The nationality of literature and art is understood by Ostrovsky as an integral consequence of their nationality and democracy. “Only art that is national is national, for the true bearer of nationality is the popular, democratic mass.”

In “The Table Word about Pushkin” - an example of such a poet is Pushkin. Pushkin is a national poet, Pushkin is a national poet. Pushkin played a huge role in the development of Russian literature because he “gave the Russian writer the courage to be Russian.”

And finally, the third point is about the socially accusatory nature of literature. “The more popular the work, the more accusatory element it contains, because the “distinctive feature of the Russian people” is “aversion from everything that has been sharply defined,” an unwillingness to return to “old, already condemned forms” of life, the desire to “look for the best.”

The public expects art to expose the vices and shortcomings of society, to judge life.

Condemning these vices in his artistic images, the writer arouses disgust for them in the public, forces them to be better, more moral. Therefore, “the social, accusatory direction can be called moral and public,” Ostrovsky emphasizes. Speaking about the socially accusatory or moral-social direction, he means:

accusatory criticism of the dominant way of life; protection of positive moral principles, i.e. protecting the aspirations of ordinary people and their desire for social justice.

Thus, the term “moral-accusatory direction” in its objective meaning approaches the concept of critical realism.

Ostrovsky’s works, written by him in the late 40s and early 50s, “Picture of Family Happiness”, “Notes of a Zamoskvoretsky Resident”, “Our People – We Will Be Numbered”, “Poor Bride” are organically connected with the literature of the natural school.

“The Picture of Family Happiness” is largely in the nature of a dramatized essay: it is not divided into phenomena, there is no completion of the plot. Ostrovsky set himself the task of depicting the life of the merchants. The hero is interested in Ostrovsky solely as a representative of his class, his way of life, his way of thinking. Goes beyond the natural school. Ostrovsky reveals the close connection between the morality of his heroes and their social existence.

He places the family life of the merchants in direct connection with the monetary and material relations of this environment.

Ostrovsky completely condemns his heroes. His heroes express their views on family, marriage, education, as if demonstrating the wildness of these views.

This technique was common in satirical literature of the 40s - the technique of self-exposure.

The most significant work of Ostrovsky in the 40s. - the comedy “Our People - Let's Be Numbered” (1849) appeared, which was perceived by contemporaries as a major achievement of the natural school in drama.

“He began in an extraordinary way,” Turgenev writes about Ostrovsky.

The comedy immediately attracted the attention of the authorities. When the censorship submitted the play to the Tsar for consideration, Nicholas I wrote: “It was printed in vain! It’s forbidden to play, in any case.”

Ostrovsky's name was included in the list of unreliable persons, and the playwright was placed under secret police surveillance for five years. The “Case of the writer Ostrovsky” was opened.

Ostrovsky, like Gogol, criticizes the very foundations of relationships that dominate society. He is critical of contemporary social life and in this sense he is a follower of Gogol. And at the same time, Ostrovsky immediately identified himself as a writer and innovator. Comparing the works of the early stage of his creativity (1846 -1852) with the traditions of Gogol, we will trace what new things Ostrovsky brought to literature.

The action of Gogol’s “high comedy” takes place as if in the world of unreasonable reality - “The Inspector General”.

Gogol tested a person in his attitude to society, to civic duty - and showed - this is what these people are like. This is the center of vices. They don't think about society at all. They are guided in their behavior by narrowly selfish calculations and selfish interests.

Gogol does not focus on everyday life - laughter through tears. For him, the bureaucracy acts not as a social layer, but as a political force that determines the life of society as a whole.

Ostrovsky has something completely different - a thorough analysis of social life.

Like the heroes of the essays of the natural school, Ostrovsky’s heroes are ordinary, typical representatives of their social environment, which is shared by their ordinary everyday life, all its prejudices.

a) In the play “Our People – We Will Be Numbered,” Ostrovsky creates a typical biography of a merchant, talks about how capital is made.

Bolshov sold pies from a stall as a child, and then became one of the first rich people in Zamoskvorechye.

Podkhalyuzin made his capital by robbing the owner, and, finally, Tishka is an errand boy, but, however, already knows how to please the new owner.

Here are given, as it were, three stages of a merchant's career. Through their fate, Ostrovsky showed how capital is composed.

b) The peculiarity of Ostrovsky’s dramaturgy was that he showed this question - how capital is composed in a merchant environment - through consideration of intra-family, daily, ordinary relationships.

It was Ostrovsky who was the first in Russian drama to examine, thread by thread, the web of daily, everyday relationships. He was the first to introduce into the sphere of art all these little things of life, family secrets, small household affairs. A huge amount of space is occupied by seemingly meaningless everyday scenes. Much attention is paid to the poses, gestures of the characters, their manner of speaking, and their speech itself.

Ostrovsky's first plays seemed unusual to the reader, not stage-like, more like narrative rather than dramatic works.

The circle of Ostrovsky’s works, directly related to the natural school of the 40s, is closed with the play “The Poor Bride” (1852).

In it, Ostrovsky shows the same dependence of a person on economic and monetary relations. Several suitors seek the hand of Marya Andreevna, but the one who gets it does not have to make any effort to achieve the goal. The well-known economic law of a capitalist society works for him, where money decides everything. The image of Marya Andreevna begins in Ostrovsky’s work a new theme for him about the position of a poor girl in a society where everything is determined by commercial calculation. (“Forest”, “Nurse”, “Dowry”).

Thus, for the first time in Ostrovsky (unlike Gogol) not only a vice appears, but also a victim of vice. In addition to the masters of modern society, there appear those who oppose them - aspirations whose needs are in conflict with the laws and customs of this environment. This entailed new colors. Ostrovsky discovered new sides of his talent - dramatic satirism. “We will be our own people” - satirical.

Ostrovsky's artistic style in this play is even more different from Gogol's dramaturgy. The plot loses all its edge here. It is based on an ordinary case. The theme that was heard in Gogol’s “Marriage” and received satirical coverage - the transformation of marriage into buying and selling, here acquired a tragic sound.

But at the same time, it is a comedy in terms of its characters and situations. But if Gogol’s heroes evoke laughter and condemnation from the public, then in Ostrovsky the viewer saw their everyday life, felt deep sympathy for some, and condemned others.

The second stage in Ostrovsky’s activity (1853 – 1855) was marked by Slavophile influences.

First of all, this transition of Ostrovsky to Slavophile positions should be explained by the strengthening of the atmosphere, the reaction, which was established in the “gloomy seven years” of 1848 - 1855.

Where exactly did this influence appear, what ideas of the Slavophiles turned out to be close to Ostrovsky? First of all, Ostrovsky’s rapprochement with the so-called “young editorial staff” of Moskvityanin, whose behavior should be explained by their characteristic interest in Russian national life, folk art, and the historical past of the people, which was very close to Ostrovsky.

But Ostrovsky failed to discern in this interest the main conservative principle, which manifested itself in the existing social contradictions, in a hostile attitude towards the concept of historical progress, in admiration for everything patriarchal.

In fact, the Slavophiles acted as ideologists of the socially backward elements of the petty and middle bourgeoisie.

One of the most prominent ideologists of the “Young Editorial Board” of “Moskvityanin”, Apollon Grigoriev, argued that there is a single “national spirit” that forms the organic basis of people’s life. Capturing this national spirit is the most important thing for a writer.

Social contradictions, class struggle are historical layers that will be overcome and which do not violate the unity of the nation.

The writer must show the eternal moral principles of the people's character. The bearer of these eternal moral principles, the spirit of the people, is the “middle, industrial, merchant” class, because it was this class that preserved the patriarchy of the traditions of old Rus', preserved the faith, morals, and language of their fathers. This class has not been affected by the falsehood of civilization.

The official recognition of this doctrine of Ostrovsky is his letter in September 1853 to Pogodin (editor of Moskvityanin), in which Ostrovsky writes that he has now become a supporter of the “new direction,” the essence of which is to appeal to the positive principles of everyday life and national character.

The old view of things now seems to him “young and too cruel.” Exposing social vices does not seem to be the main task.

“There will be correctors even without us. In order to have the right to correct the people without offending them, you need to show them that you know the good in them” (September 1853), writes Ostrovsky.

A distinctive feature of Ostrovsky’s Russian people at this stage seems to be not its willingness to renounce outdated standards of life, but patriarchy, commitment to unchanging, fundamental conditions of life. Ostrovsky now wants to combine “the sublime with the comic” in his plays, understanding by the sublime the positive features of merchant life, and by the “comic” - everything that lies outside the merchant circle, but exerts its influence on it.

These new views of Ostrovsky found expression in three so-called “Slavophile” plays by Ostrovsky: “Don’t get on your own sleigh,” “Poverty is not a vice,” “Don’t live the way you want.”

All three Slavophile plays by Ostrovsky have one defining beginning - an attempt to idealize the patriarchal foundations of life and family morality of the merchants.

And in these plays Ostrovsky turns to family and everyday subjects. But behind them there are no longer economic and social relations.

Family and everyday relationships are interpreted in a purely moral sense - everything depends on the moral qualities of people, there are no material or monetary interests behind this. Ostrovsky is trying to find the possibility of resolving contradictions in moral terms, in the moral regeneration of heroes. (The moral enlightenment of Gordey Tortsov, the nobility of the soul of Borodkin and Rusakov). Tyranny is justified not so much by the existence of capital, economic relations, but by the personal characteristics of a person.

Ostrovsky depicts those aspects of merchant life in which, as it seems to him, the national, the so-called “national spirit” is concentrated. Therefore, he focuses on the poetic, bright sides of merchant life, introduces ritual and folklore motifs, showing the “folk-epic” beginning of the heroes’ lives to the detriment of their social certainty.

Ostrovsky emphasized in the plays of this period the closeness of his merchant heroes to the people, their social and everyday ties with the peasantry. They say about themselves that they are “simple” people, “ill-mannered”, that their fathers were peasants.

From an artistic point of view, these plays are clearly weaker than the previous ones. Their composition is deliberately simplified, the characters are less clear, and the endings are less justified.

The plays of this period are characterized by didacticism; they openly contrast light and dark principles, the characters are sharply divided into “good” and “evil,” and vice is punished at the denouement. The plays of the “Slavophile period” are characterized by open moralizing, sentimentality, and edification.

At the same time, it should be said that during this period Ostrovsky, in general, remained on a realistic position. According to Dobrolyubov, “the power of direct artistic feeling could not abandon the author here, and therefore particular situations and individual characters are distinguished by genuine truth.”

The significance of Ostrovsky’s plays written during this period lies primarily in the fact that they continue to ridicule and condemn tyranny in whatever forms it manifests itself / We love Tortsov /. (If Bolshov is a rude and straightforward type of tyrant, then Rusakov is softened and meek).

Dobrolyubov: “In Bolshov we saw a vigorous nature, subjected to the influence of merchant life, in Rusakov it seems to us: but this is how even honest and gentle natures turn out with him.”

Bolshov: “What am I and my father for if I don’t give orders?”

Rusakov: “I will not give it up for the one she loves, but for the one I love.”

The praise of patriarchal life is contradictorily combined in these plays with the formulation of pressing social issues, and the desire to create images that would embody national ideals (Rusakov, Borodkin), with sympathy for young people who bring new aspirations, opposition to everything patriarchal and old. (Mitya, Lyubov Gordeevna).

These plays expressed Ostrovsky's desire to find a bright, positive beginning in ordinary people.

This is how the theme of folk humanism arises, the breadth of nature of the common man, which is expressed in the ability to boldly and independently look at the environment and in the ability to sometimes sacrifice one’s own interests for the sake of others.

This theme was then heard in such central plays by Ostrovsky as “The Thunderstorm”, “Forest”, “Dowry”.

The idea of ​​​​creating a folk performance - a didactic performance - was not alien to Ostrovsky when he created “Poverty is not a vice” and “Don’t live the way you want.”

Ostrovsky sought to convey the ethical principles of the people, the aesthetic basis of their life, and to evoke a response from a democratic viewer to the poetry of their native life and national antiquity.

Ostrovsky was guided by the noble desire to “give the democratic viewer an initial cultural inoculation.” Another thing is the idealization of humility, obedience, and conservatism.

The assessment of Slavophil plays in the articles by Chernyshevsky “Poverty is not a vice” and Dobrolyubov “The Dark Kingdom” is interesting.

Chernyshevsky came up with his article in 1854, when Ostrovsky was close to the Slavophiles, and there was a danger of Ostrovsky moving away from realistic positions. Chernyshevsky calls Ostrovsky’s plays “Poverty is not a vice” and “Don’t sit in your own sleigh” “false,” but further continues: “Ostrovsky has not yet ruined his wonderful talent, he needs to return to the realistic direction.” “In truth, the power of talent, the wrong direction destroys even the strongest talent,” concludes Chernyshevsky.

Dobrolyubov's article was written in 1859, when Ostrovsky freed himself from Slavophile influences. It was pointless to recall previous misconceptions, and Dobrolyubov, limiting himself to a vague hint on this score, focuses on revealing the realistic beginning of these same plays.

The assessments of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov mutually complement each other and are an example of the principles of revolutionary-democratic criticism.

At the beginning of 1856, a new stage in Ostrovsky’s work began.

The playwright is getting closer to the editors of Sovremennik. This rapprochement coincides with the period of the rise of progressive social forces, with the maturation of a revolutionary situation.

He, as if following Nekrasov’s advice, returns to the path of studying social reality, the path of creating analytical plays that give pictures of modern life.

(In a review of the play “Don’t Live the Way You Want,” Nekrasov advised him, abandoning all preconceived ideas, to follow the path along which his own talent would lead: “to give free development to your talent” - the path of depicting real life).

Chernyshevsky emphasizes “Ostrovsky’s wonderful talent, strong talent. Dobrolyubov - “the power of artistic flair” of the playwright.

During this period, Ostrovsky created such significant plays as “The Pupil”, “Profitable Place”, the trilogy about Balzaminov and, finally, during the revolutionary situation - “The Thunderstorm”.

This period of Ostrovsky’s work is characterized, first of all, by an expansion of the scope of life phenomena and an expansion of themes.

Firstly, in the field of his research, which included the landowner, serf environment, Ostrovsky showed that the landowner Ulanbekova (“The Pupil”) mocks her victims just as cruelly as the illiterate, shady merchants.

Ostrovsky shows that in the landowner-noble environment, as in the merchant environment, the same struggle is going on between rich and poor, older and younger.

In addition, during the same period, Ostrovsky raised the topic of philistinism. Ostrovsky was the first Russian writer to notice and artistically discover the philistinism as a social group.

The playwright discovered in the philistinism a predominant and eclipsing all other interests interest in material things, what Gorky later defined as “a monstrously developed sense of property.”

In the trilogy about Balzaminov (“Holiday sleep - before lunch”, “Your own dogs are biting, don’t pester someone else’s”, “What you go for is what you will find”) /1857-1861/, Ostrovsky denounces the bourgeois way of existence, with its mentality and limitations , vulgarity, thirst for profit, absurd dreams.

The trilogy about Balzaminov reveals not just ignorance or narrow-mindedness, but some kind of intellectual wretchedness, the inferiority of the bourgeoisie. The image is built on the opposition of this mental inferiority, moral insignificance - and complacency, confidence in one’s right.

This trilogy contains elements of vaudeville, buffoonery, and features of external comedy. But internal comedy predominates in it, since the figure of Balzaminov is internally comic.

Ostrovsky showed that the kingdom of the philistines is the same dark kingdom of impenetrable vulgarity, savagery, which is aimed at one goal - profit.

The next play, “Profitable Place,” indicates Ostrovsky’s return to the path of “moral and accusatory” dramaturgy. During the same period, Ostrovsky was the discoverer of another dark kingdom - the kingdom of officials, the royal bureaucracy.

During the years of the abolition of serfdom, denunciation of bureaucratic orders had a special political meaning. Bureaucracy was the most complete expression of the autocratic-serf system. It embodied the exploitative and predatory essence of autocracy. This was no longer just everyday arbitrariness, but a violation of common interests in the name of the law. It is in connection with this play that Dobrolyubov expands the concept of “tyranny”, understanding by it autocracy in general.

“A Profitable Place” is reminiscent of N. Gogol’s comedy “The Inspector General” in terms of its themes. But if in The Inspector General the officials who commit lawlessness feel guilty and fear retribution, then Ostrovsky’s officials are imbued with the consciousness of their rightness and impunity. Bribery and abuse seem to them and those around them to be the norm.

Ostrovsky emphasized that the distortion of all moral norms in society is a law, and the law itself is something illusory. Both officials and the people dependent on them know that the laws are always on the side of the one who has power.

Thus, for the first time in literature, Ostrovsky shows officials as a kind of merchants of the law. (The official can turn the law the way he wants).

A new hero also came into Ostrovsky’s play - a young official, Zhadov, who had just graduated from university. The conflict between representatives of the old formation and Zhadov acquires the force of an irreconcilable contradiction:

a/ Ostrovsky was able to show the inconsistency of illusions about an honest official as a force capable of stopping the abuses of the administration.

b/ fight against “Yusovism” or compromise, betrayal of ideals - Zhadov was given no other choice.

Ostrovsky denounced the system, the living conditions that give rise to bribe-takers. The progressive significance of the comedy lies in the fact that in it the irreconcilable denial of the old world and “Yusovism” merged with the search for a new morality.

Zhadov is a weak person, he cannot stand the fight, he also goes to ask for a “lucrative position.”

Chernyshevsky believed that the play would have been even stronger if it had ended with the fourth act, i.e., with Zhadov’s cry of despair: “We’re going to uncle to ask for a lucrative position!” In the fifth, Zhadov faces the abyss that almost destroyed him morally. And, although Vyshimirsky’s end is not typical, there is an element of chance in Zhadov’s salvation, his words, his belief that “somewhere there are other, more persistent, worthy people” who will not compromise, will not reconcile, will not give in, talk about the prospect of further development of new social relations. Ostrovsky foresaw the coming social upsurge.

The rapid development of psychological realism, which we observe in the second half of the 19th century, also manifested itself in drama. The secret of Ostrovsky's dramatic writing lies not in the one-dimensional characteristics of human types, but in the desire to create full-blooded human characters, the internal contradictions and struggles of which serve as a powerful impulse for the dramatic movement. G.A. Tovstonogov spoke well about this feature of Ostrovsky’s creative style, referring in particular to Glumov from the comedy “Simplicity is Enough for Every Wise Man,” a far from ideal character: “Why is Glumov charming, although he commits a number of vile acts? After all, if "He is unsympathetic to us, then there is no performance. What makes him charming is his hatred of this world, and we internally justify his way of paying it off."

Interest in the human personality in all its states forced writers to seek means for their expression. In drama, the main such means was the stylistic individualization of the characters’ language, and the leading role in the development of this method belonged to Ostrovsky. In addition, Ostrovsky made an attempt to go further in psychologism, along the path of providing his characters with the maximum possible freedom within the framework of the author’s plan - the result of such an experiment was the image of Katerina in “The Thunderstorm”.

In The Thunderstorm, Ostrovsky rose to the level of depicting the tragic collision of living human feelings with the deadening Domostroevsky life.

Despite the variety of types of dramatic conflicts presented in Ostrovsky's early works, their poetics and their general atmosphere were determined, first of all, by the fact that tyranny was presented in them as a natural and inevitable phenomenon of life. Even the so-called “Slavophile” plays, with their search for bright and good principles, did not destroy or disturb the oppressive atmosphere of tyranny. The play “The Thunderstorm” is also characterized by this general coloring. And at the same time, there is a force in her that resolutely resists the terrible, deadening routine - this is the element of the people, expressed both in folk characters (Katerina, first of all, Kuligin and even Kudryash), and in Russian nature, which becomes an essential element of dramatic action .

The play “The Thunderstorm,” which posed complex questions of modern life and appeared in print and on stage just before the so-called “liberation” of the peasants, testified that Ostrovsky was free from any illusions regarding the paths of social development in Russia.

Even before publication, "The Thunderstorm" appeared on the Russian stage. The premiere took place on November 16, 1859 at the Maly Theater. The play featured magnificent actors: S. Vasiliev (Tikhon), P. Sadovsky (Dikoy), N. Rykalova (Kabanova), L. Nikulina-Kositskaya (Katerina), V. Lensky (Kudryash) and others. The production was directed by N. Ostrovsky himself. The premiere was a huge success, and subsequent performances were a triumph. A year after the brilliant premiere of "The Thunderstorm", the play was awarded the highest academic award - the Great Uvarov Prize.

In “The Thunderstorm,” the social system of Russia is sharply exposed, and the death of the main character is shown by the playwright as a direct consequence of her hopeless situation in the “dark kingdom.” The conflict in “The Thunderstorm” is built on the irreconcilable collision of the freedom-loving Katerina with the terrible world of wild and wild boars, with animal laws based on “cruelty, lies, mockery, and humiliation of the human person. Katerina went against tyranny and obscurantism, armed only with the power of her feelings, consciousness the right to life, to happiness and love. According to Dobrolyubov’s fair remark, she “feels the opportunity to satisfy the natural thirst of her soul and cannot continue to remain motionless: she strives for a new life, even if she has to die in this impulse.”

From childhood, Katerina was brought up in a unique environment, which developed in her romantic dreaminess, religiosity and a thirst for freedom. These character traits later determined the tragedy of her situation. Brought up in a religious spirit, she understands the “sinfulness” of her feelings for Boris, but cannot resist the natural attraction and gives herself entirely to this impulse.

Katerina speaks out not only against “Kabanov’s concepts of morality.” She openly protests against immutable religious dogmas that affirm the categorical inviolability of church marriage and condemn suicide as contrary to Christian teaching. Bearing in mind this fullness of Katerina’s protest, Dobrolyubov wrote: “This is the true strength of character, which in any case you can rely on! This is the height to which our national life reaches in its development, but to which very few in our literature were able to rise, and no one knew how to stay at it as well as Ostrovsky.”

Katerina does not want to put up with the deadening environment around her. “I don’t want to live here, I won’t, even if you cut me!” she says to Varvara. And she commits suicide. “Sad, bitter is such liberation,” Dobrolyubov noted, “but what to do when there is no other way out” The character of Katerina is complex and multifaceted. This complexity is most eloquently evidenced, perhaps, by the fact that many outstanding performers, starting from seemingly completely opposite dominant character traits of the main character, were never able to fully exhaust it. All these different the interpretations did not fully reveal the main thing in Katerina’s character: her love, to which she surrenders with all the spontaneity of her young nature. Her life experience is insignificant, most of all in her nature the sense of beauty, poetic perception of nature is developed. However, her character is given in movement, in development. Contemplation of nature alone, as we know from the play, is not enough for her. Other areas of application of spiritual forces are needed. Prayer, service, myths are also means of satisfying the poetic feeling of the main character.

Dobrolyubov wrote: “It’s not the rituals that occupy her in the church: she doesn’t even hear what they sing and read there; she has different music in her soul, different visions, for her the service ends imperceptibly, as if in one second. She is occupied by trees, strangely drawn on images, and she imagines a whole country of gardens, where all the trees are like this, and everything is blooming, fragrant, everything is full of heavenly singing. Otherwise, on a sunny day, she will see how “such a bright pillar is coming down from the dome, and smoke is moving in this pillar, like clouds,” and now she sees, “as if angels are flying and singing in this pillar.” Sometimes she will present herself - why shouldn’t she fly? And when she’s standing on a mountain, she’s drawn to fly: just like that, she’d run up, raise her arms, and fly...”

A new, yet unexplored sphere of manifestation of her spiritual powers was her love for Boris, which ultimately became the cause of her tragedy. “The passion of a nervous, passionate woman and the struggle with debt, the fall, repentance and difficult atonement for guilt - all this is filled with the liveliest dramatic interest, and is conducted with extraordinary art and knowledge of the heart,” I. A. Goncharov rightly noted.

How often the passion and spontaneity of Katerina’s nature are condemned, and her deep spiritual struggle is perceived as a manifestation of weakness. Meanwhile, in the memoirs of the artist E. B. Piunova-Schmidthof we find Ostrovsky’s curious story about his heroine: “Katerina,” Alexander Nikolaevich told me, “is a woman with a passionate nature and a strong character. She proved this with her love for Boris and suicide. Katerina, although overwhelmed by her environment, at the first opportunity gives herself over to her passion, saying before this: “Come what may, I will see Boris!” In front of the picture of hell, Katerina does not rage and scream, but only with her face and whole figure must depict mortal fear. In the scene of farewell to Boris, Katerina speaks quietly, like a patient, and only the last words: “My friend! My joy! Goodbye!" - pronounces as loudly as possible. Katerina's situation became hopeless. You can’t live in your husband’s house... There’s nowhere to go. To parents? Yes, at that time they would have tied her up and brought her to her husband. Katerina came to the conclusion that it was impossible to live as she lived before, and, having a strong will, she drowned herself...”

“Without fear of being accused of exaggeration,” wrote I. A. Goncharov, “I can say in all conscience that there was no such work as a drama in our literature. She undoubtedly occupies and will probably for a long time occupy first place in high classical beauties. No matter from which side it is taken, whether from the side of the creation plan, or the dramatic movement, or, finally, the characters, it is everywhere captured by the power of creativity, the subtlety of observation and the grace of decoration.” In “The Thunderstorm,” according to Goncharov, “a broad picture of national life and customs has settled down.”

Ostrovsky conceived The Thunderstorm as a comedy, and then called it a drama. N. A. Dobrolyubov spoke very carefully about the genre nature of “The Thunderstorm”. He wrote that “the mutual relations of tyranny and voicelessness are brought to the most tragic consequences.”

By the middle of the 19th century, Dobrolyubov’s definition of a “play of life” turned out to be more capacious than the traditional division of dramatic art, which was still experiencing the burden of classicist norms. In Russian drama, there was a process of bringing dramatic poetry closer to everyday reality, which naturally affected their genre nature. Ostrovsky, for example, wrote: “The history of Russian literature has two branches that have finally merged: one branch is grafted and is the offspring of a foreign, but well-rooted seed; it goes from Lomonosov through Sumarokov, Karamzin, Batyushkov, Zhukovsky and others. to Pushkin, where he begins to converge with another; the other - from Kantemir, through the comedies of the same Sumarokov, Fonvizin, Kapnist, Griboyedov to Gogol; both were completely merged in him; dualism is over. On the one hand: laudable odes, French tragedies, imitations of the ancients, the sensibility of the late 18th century, German romanticism, frantic youthful literature; and on the other: satires, comedies, comedies and “Dead Souls”, Russia seemed at the same time, in the person of its best writers, to live, period after period, the life of foreign literature and educate its own to universal significance.”

Comedy, thus, turned out to be closest to the everyday phenomena of Russian life; it responded sensitively to everything that worried the Russian public, and reproduced life in its dramatic and tragic manifestations. That is why Dobrolyubov so stubbornly clung to the definition of “play of life,” seeing in it not so much a conventional genre meaning, but the very principle of reproducing modern life in drama. Actually, Ostrovsky also spoke about the same principle: “Many conventional rules have disappeared, and some more will disappear. Now dramatic works are nothing more than dramatized life." This principle determined the development of dramatic genres throughout the subsequent decades of the 19th century. In terms of its genre, “The Thunderstorm” is a social and everyday tragedy.

A. I. Revyakin rightly notes that the main feature of the tragedy - “the depiction of irreconcilable life contradictions that determine the death of the main character, who is an outstanding person” - is evident in “The Thunderstorm”. The depiction of a national tragedy, of course, entailed new, original constructive forms of its implementation. Ostrovsky repeatedly spoke out against the inert, traditional manner of constructing dramatic works. “The Thunderstorm” was also innovative in this sense. He spoke about this, not without irony, in a letter to Turgenev dated June 14, 1874, in response to a proposal to publish “The Thunderstorm” in a French translation: “It doesn’t hurt to print “The Thunderstorm” in a good French translation, it can make an impression with its originality; but whether it should be put on stage is something to think about. I highly value the ability of the French to make plays and am afraid of offending their delicate taste with my terrible ineptitude. From the French point of view, the construction of the “Thunderstorm” is ugly, and I must admit that it is not very coherent at all. When I wrote “The Thunderstorm,” I was carried away by the finishing of the main roles and “treated the form with unforgivable frivolity, and at the same time I was in a hurry to be in time for the benefit performance of the late Vasiliev.”

A.I. Zhuravleva’s reasoning regarding the genre uniqueness of “The Thunderstorm” is interesting: “The problem of genre interpretation is the most important when analyzing this play. If we turn to the scientific-critical and theatrical traditions of interpretation of this play, we can identify two prevailing trends. One of them is dictated by the understanding of “The Thunderstorm” as a social and everyday drama; it attaches special importance to everyday life. The attention of the directors and, accordingly, the audience is distributed equally among all participants in the action, each person receives equal importance.”

Another interpretation is determined by the understanding of “The Thunderstorm” as a tragedy. Zhuravleva believes that such an interpretation is deeper and has “greater support in the text,” despite the fact that the interpretation of “The Thunderstorm” as a drama is based on the genre definition of Ostrovsky himself. The researcher rightly notes that “this definition is a tribute to tradition.” Indeed, the entire previous history of Russian drama did not provide examples of tragedy in which the heroes were private individuals, and not historical figures, even legendary ones. The “thunderstorm” remained a unique phenomenon in this regard. The key point for understanding the genre of a dramatic work in this case is not the “social status” of the characters, but, first of all, the nature of the conflict. If we understand Katerina’s death as the result of a collision with her mother-in-law, and see her as a victim of family oppression, then the scale of the heroes really looks too small for a tragedy. But if you see that Katerina’s fate was determined by the collision of two historical eras, then the tragic nature of the conflict seems quite natural.

A typical feature of a tragic structure is the feeling of catharsis experienced by the audience during the denouement. By death, the heroine is freed from both oppression and the internal contradictions tormenting her.

Thus, the social and everyday drama from the life of the merchant class develops into a tragedy. Through love and everyday conflict, Ostrovsky was able to show the epoch-making change taking place in the popular consciousness. The awakening sense of personality and a new attitude to the world, based not on individual expression of will, turned out to be in irreconcilable antagonism not only with the real, everyday reliable state of Ostrovsky’s contemporary patriarchal way of life, but also with the ideal idea of ​​morality inherent in the high heroine.

This transformation of drama into tragedy also occurred thanks to the triumph of the lyrical element in “The Thunderstorm.”

The symbolism of the play's title is important. First of all, the word “thunderstorm” has a direct meaning in its text. The title character is included by the playwright in the development of the action and directly participates in it as a natural phenomenon. The thunderstorm motif develops in the play from the first to the fourth act. At the same time, Ostrovsky also recreated the image of a thunderstorm as a landscape: dark clouds filled with moisture (“as if a cloud is curling in a ball”), we feel the stuffiness in the air, we hear the rumble of thunder, we freeze in front of the light of lightning.

The title of the play also has a figurative meaning. A thunderstorm rages in Katerina’s soul, manifests itself in the struggle of creative and destructive principles, the collision of bright and dark forebodings, good and sinful feelings. The scenes with Grokha seem to push forward the dramatic action of the play.

The thunderstorm in the play also takes on a symbolic meaning, expressing the idea of ​​the entire work as a whole. The appearance of people like Katerina and Kuligin in the dark kingdom is a thunderstorm over Kalinov. The thunderstorm in the play conveys the catastrophic nature of existence, the state of a world split in two. The diversity and versatility of the play's title becomes a kind of key to a deeper understanding of its essence.

“In Mr. Ostrovsky’s play, which bears the name “The Thunderstorm,” wrote A.D. Galakhov, “the action and atmosphere are tragic, although many places excite laughter.” “The Thunderstorm” combines not only the tragic and the comic, but, what is especially important, the epic and the lyrical. All this determines the originality of the composition of the play. V.E. Meyerhold wrote excellently about this: “The originality of the construction of “The Thunderstorm” is that Ostrovsky gives the highest point of tension in the fourth act (and not in the second scene of the second act), and the intensification noted in the script is not gradual (from the second act through the third to the fourth), but with a push, or rather, with two pushes; the first rise is indicated in the second act, in the scene of Katerina’s farewell to Tikhon (the rise is strong, but not yet very strong), and the second rise (very strong - this is the most sensitive shock) in the fourth act, at the moment of Katerina’s repentance.

Between these two acts (staged as if on the tops of two unequal, but sharply rising hills), the third act (with both scenes) lies, as it were, in a valley.”

It is not difficult to notice that the internal scheme of the construction of “The Thunderstorm”, subtly revealed by the director, is determined by the stages of development of Katerina’s character, the stages of development of her feelings for Boris.

A. Anastasyev notes that Ostrovsky’s play has its own, special destiny. For many decades, “The Thunderstorm” has not left the stage of Russian theaters; N. A. Nikulina-Kositskaya, S. V. Vasiliev, N. V. Rykalova, G. N. Fedotova, M. N. Ermolova became famous for playing the main roles. P. A. Strepetova, O. O. Sadovskaya, A. Koonen, V. N. Pashennaya. And at the same time, “theater historians have not witnessed complete, harmonious, outstanding performances.” The unsolved mystery of this great tragedy lies, according to the researcher, “in its multi-ideational nature, in the strongest fusion of undeniable, unconditional, concrete historical truth and poetic symbolism, in the organic combination of real action and deeply hidden lyrical principles.”

Usually, when they talk about the lyricism of “The Thunderstorm,” they mean, first of all, the system of worldview of the main character of the play that is lyrical in nature; they also talk about the Volga, which in its most general form is opposed to the “barn” way of life and which evokes Kuligin’s lyrical outpourings . But the playwright could not - due to the laws of the genre - include the Volga, the beautiful Volga landscapes, or nature in general, into the system of dramatic action. He showed only the way in which nature becomes an integral element of stage action. Nature here is not only an object of admiration and admiration, but also the main criterion for assessing all things, allowing one to see the irrationality and unnaturalness of modern life. “Did Ostrovsky write The Thunderstorm? Volga wrote “Thunderstorm”!” - exclaimed the famous theater expert and critic S. A. Yuryev.

“Every true everyday person is at the same time a true romantic,” the famous theater figure A. I. Yuzhin-Sumbatov would later say, referring to Ostrovsky. A romantic in the broad sense of the word, surprised by the correctness and severity of the laws of nature and the violation of these laws in public life. This is exactly what Ostrovsky discussed in one of his early diary entries after arriving in Kostroma: “And on the other side of the Volga, directly opposite the city, there are two villages; “One is especially picturesque, from which the most curly grove stretches all the way to the Volga; the sun at sunset somehow miraculously climbed into it, from the roots, and created many miracles.”

Starting from this landscape sketch, Ostrovsky reasoned:

“I was exhausted looking at this. Nature - you are a faithful lover, only terribly lustful; no matter how much I love you, you are still dissatisfied; unsatisfied passion boils in your gaze, and no matter how much you swear that you are unable to satisfy your desires, you do not get angry, you do not move away, but you look at everything with your passionate eyes, and these gazes full of expectation are execution and torment for a person.”

The lyricism of “The Thunderstorm,” so specific in form (Ap. Grigoriev subtly remarked about it: “... as if it was not a poet, but a whole people who created here...”), arose precisely on the basis of the closeness of the world of the hero and the author.

Orientation towards a healthy natural beginning became in the 50s and 60s the social and ethical principle not of Ostrovsky alone, but of all Russian literature: from Tolstoy and Nekrasov to Chekhov and Kuprin. Without this peculiar manifestation of the “author’s” voice in dramatic works, we cannot fully understand the psychologism of “The Poor Bride,” and the nature of the lyrical in “The Thunderstorm” and “Dowry,” and the poetics of the new drama of the late 19th century.

By the end of the sixties, Ostrovsky's work thematically expanded extremely. He shows how the new is mixed with the old: in the familiar images of his merchants we see polish and worldliness, education and “pleasant” manners. They are no longer stupid despots, but predatory acquirers, holding in their fist not only a family or a city, but entire provinces. A wide variety of people find themselves in conflict with them; their circle is infinitely wide. And the accusatory pathos of the plays is stronger. The best of them: “Warm Heart”, “Mad Money”, “Forest”, “Wolves and Sheep”, “The Last Victim”, “Dowry”, “Talents and Admirers”.

The shifts in Ostrovsky’s work during his last period are very clearly visible if we compare, for example, “Warm Heart” with “Thunderstorm”. Merchant Kuroslepov is a famous merchant in the city, but not as formidable as Dikoy, he is rather an eccentric, does not understand life and is busy with his dreams. His second wife, Matryona, is clearly having an affair with the clerk Narkis. They both rob the owner, and Narkis wants to become a merchant himself. No, the “dark kingdom” is no longer monolithic. The Domostroevsky way of life will no longer save the willfulness of Mayor Gradoboev. The unbridled carousings of the rich merchant Khlynov are symbols of wasted life, decay, and nonsense: Khlynov orders the streets to be watered with champagne.

Parasha is a girl with a “warm heart”. But if Katerina in “The Thunderstorm” turns out to be a victim of an unrequited husband and a weak-willed lover, then Parasha is aware of her powerful spiritual strength. She also wants to “fly up”. She loves and curses her lover’s weak character and indecisiveness: “What kind of guy is this, what kind of crybaby has forced himself on me... Apparently, I have to think about my own head.”

The development of Yulia Pavlovna Tugina’s love for the unworthy young reveler Dulchin in “The Last Victim” is shown with great tension. In Ostrovsky's later dramas there is a combination of action-packed situations with detailed psychological characteristics of the main characters. Great emphasis is placed on the vicissitudes of the torment they experience, in which the struggle of the hero or heroine with himself, with his own feelings, mistakes, and assumptions begins to occupy a large place.

In this regard, "Dowry" is typical. Here, perhaps for the first time, the author’s attention is focused on the very feeling of the heroine, who has escaped from the care of her mother and the ancient way of life. In this play, there is not a struggle between light and darkness, but the struggle of love itself for its rights and freedom. Larisa herself preferred Paratova to Karandysheva. The people around her cynically violated Larisa’s feelings. She was abused by a mother who wanted to “sell” her “dowryless” daughter for a moneyed man who was vainglorious that he would be the owner of such a treasure. Paratov abused her, deceiving her best hopes and considering Larisa’s love one of the fleeting joys. Both Knurov and Vozhevatov abused each other, playing a toss with each other.

We learn from the play “Wolves and Sheep” what cynics the landowners in post-reform Russia turned into, ready to resort to forgery, blackmail, and bribery for selfish purposes. The “wolves” are the landowner Murzavetskaya, the landowner Berkutov, and the “sheep” are the young rich widow Kupavina, the weak-willed elderly gentleman Lynyaev. Murzavetskaya wants to marry her dissolute nephew to Kupavina, “scaring” her with her late husband’s old bills. In fact, the bills were forged by the trusted attorney Chugunov, who also serves as Kupavina. Berkutov, a landowner and businessman, arrived from St. Petersburg, more vile than the local scoundrels. He instantly realized what was going on. He took Kupavina with her huge capital into his hands without talking about his feelings. Having deftly “scared” Murzavetskaya by exposing the forgery, he immediately concluded an alliance with her: it was important for him to win the election for leader of the nobility. He is the real “wolf”, everyone else next to him is “sheep”. At the same time, in the play there is no sharp division between scoundrels and innocents. There seems to be some kind of vile conspiracy between the “wolves” and the “sheep”. Everyone plays war with each other and at the same time easily makes peace and finds common benefit.

One of the best plays in Ostrovsky’s entire repertoire, apparently, is the play “Guilty Without Guilt.” It combines the motifs of many previous works. The actress Kruchinina, the main character, a woman of high spiritual culture, experienced a great tragedy in her life. She is kind and generous, warm-hearted and wise. At the pinnacle of goodness and suffering stands Kruchinina. If you like, she is a “ray of light” in the “dark kingdom”, she is the “last victim”, she is a “warm heart”, she is a “dowry”, there are “fans” around her, that is, predatory “wolves”, money-grubbers and cynics. Kruchinina, not yet assuming that Neznamov is her son, instructs him in life, reveals her unhardened heart: “I am more experienced than you and have lived more in the world; I know that there is a lot of nobility in people, a lot of love, selflessness, especially in women.”

This play is a panegyric to the Russian woman, the apotheosis of her nobility and self-sacrifice. This is also the apotheosis of the Russian actor, whose real soul Ostrovsky knew well.

Ostrovsky wrote for the theater. This is the peculiarity of his talent. The images and pictures of life he created are intended for the stage. That’s why the speech of Ostrovsky’s heroes is so important, that’s why his works sound so vivid. No wonder Innokenty Annensky called him an “auditory realist.” Without staging his works on stage, it was as if his works were not completed, which is why Ostrovsky took the ban on his plays by theater censorship so hard. (The comedy “We Will Be Numbered Our Own People” was allowed to be staged in the theater only ten years after Pogodin managed to publish it in the magazine.)

With a feeling of undisguised satisfaction, A. N. Ostrovsky wrote on November 3, 1878 to his friend, artist of the Alexandria Theater A. F. Burdin: “I have already read my play in Moscow five times, among the listeners there were people hostile to me, and that’s all.” unanimously recognized "The Dowry" as the best of all my works."

Ostrovsky lived with the “Dowry”, at times only on it, his fortieth thing in a row, he directed “his attention and strength”, wanting to “finish” it in the most careful way. In September 1878, he wrote to one of his acquaintances: “I am working on my play with all my might; it seems that it will not turn out badly.”

Already a day after the premiere, on November 12, Ostrovsky could, and undoubtedly did, learn from Russkiye Vedomosti how he managed to “tire the entire public, down to the most naive spectators.” For she - the audience - has clearly “outgrown” the spectacles that he offers her.

In the seventies, Ostrovsky's relationship with critics, theaters and audiences became increasingly complex. The period when he enjoyed universal recognition, which he won in the late fifties and early sixties, was replaced by another, increasingly growing in different circles of cooling towards the playwright.

Theatrical censorship was stricter than literary censorship. This is no accident. In its essence, theatrical art is democratic; it addresses the general public more directly than literature. Ostrovsky, in his “Note on the State of Dramatic Art in Russia at the Present Time” (1881), wrote that “dramatic poetry is closer to the people than other branches of literature. All other works are written for educated people, and dramas and comedies are written for the whole people; dramatic works "Writers must always remember this, they must be clear and strong. This closeness to the people does not in the least degrade dramatic poetry, but, on the contrary, doubles its strength and does not allow it to become vulgar and crushed." Ostrovsky talks in his “Note” about how the theatrical audience in Russia expanded after 1861. Ostrovsky writes about a new viewer, not experienced in art: “Fine literature is still boring and incomprehensible for him, music too, only the theater gives him complete pleasure, there he experiences everything that happens on stage like a child, sympathizes with good and recognizes evil, clearly presented." For a “fresh public,” Ostrovsky wrote, “a strong drama, major comedy, defiant, frank, loud laughter, hot, sincere feelings are required.” It is the theater, according to Ostrovsky, which has its roots in the folk farce, that has the ability to directly and strongly influence the souls of people. Two and a half decades later, Alexander Blok, speaking about poetry, will write that its essence lies in the main, “walking” truths, in the ability to convey them to the reader’s heart.

Ride along, mourning nags!

Actors, master your craft,

So that from the walking truth

Everyone felt pain and light!

("Balagan"; 1906)

The enormous importance that Ostrovsky attached to the theater, his thoughts about theatrical art, about the position of theater in Russia, about the fate of actors - all this was reflected in his plays.

In the life of Ostrovsky himself, the theater played a huge role. He took part in the production of his plays, worked with the actors, was friends with many of them, and corresponded with them. He put a lot of effort into defending the rights of actors, seeking the creation of a theater school and his own repertoire in Russia.

Ostrovsky knew well the inner, behind-the-scenes life of the theater, hidden from the eyes of the audience. Starting with "The Forest" (1871), Ostrovsky develops the theme of the theater, creates images of actors, depicts their fates - this play is followed by "Comedian of the 17th Century" (1873), "Talents and Admirers" (1881), "Guilty Without Guilt" ( 1883).

The theater as depicted by Ostrovsky lives according to the laws of the world that is familiar to the reader and viewer from his other plays. The way the destinies of artists develop is determined by morals, relationships, and circumstances of “general” life. Ostrovsky's ability to recreate an accurate, vivid picture of time is fully manifested in plays about actors. This is Moscow in the era of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich ("Comedian of the 17th Century"), a provincial city contemporary with Ostrovsky ("Talents and Admirers", "Guilty Without Guilt"), a noble estate ("Forest").

In the life of the Russian theater, which Ostrovsky knew so well, the actor was a forced person, repeatedly dependent. “Then it was the time of favorites, and all the managerial orders of the repertoire inspector consisted of instructions to the chief director to take every possible care when compiling the repertoire so that the favorites, who receive large payments for the performance, played every day and, if possible, in two theaters,” Ostrovsky wrote in “Note on draft rules for imperial theaters for dramatic works" (1883).

In Ostrovsky's portrayal, the actors could turn out to be almost beggars, like Neschastlivtsev and Schastlivtsev in "The Forest", humiliated, losing their human appearance due to drunkenness, like Robinson in "Dowry", like Shmaga in "Guilty Without Guilt", like Erast Gromilov in "Talents" and fans”, “We, artists, our place is at the buffet,” says Shmaga with challenge and evil irony.

Theatre, the life of provincial actresses in the late 70s, around the time when Ostrovsky wrote plays about actors, also showed M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin in the novel "The Golovlevs." Judushka’s nieces Lyubinka and Anninka become actresses, escaping Golovlev’s life, but end up in a den. They had neither talent nor training, they were not trained in acting, but all this was not required on the provincial stage. The life of the actors appears in Anninka’s memoirs as hell, as a nightmare: “Here is a scene with smoky, captured and slippery from damp scenery; here she herself is spinning on stage, just spinning, imagining that she is acting... Drunken and pugnacious nights; passers-by landowners hastily taking out green coins from skinny wallets; merchants holding hands, encouraging the “actors” almost with a whip in their hands.” And the life behind the scenes is ugly, and what is played out on stage is ugly: “...And the Duchess of Gerolstein, stunning with a hussar’s cap, and Cleretta Ango, in a wedding dress, with a slit in front right up to the waist, and Beautiful Helena, with a slit in the front, from behind and from all sides... Nothing but shamelessness and nakedness... that’s how life was spent!” This life drives Lyubinka to suicide.

The similarities between Shchedrin and Ostrovsky in their depiction of the provincial theater are natural - they both write about what they knew well, they write the truth. But Shchedrin is a merciless satirist, he thickens the colors so much that the image becomes grotesque, while Ostrovsky gives an objective picture of life, his “dark kingdom” is not hopeless - it was not for nothing that N. Dobrolyubov wrote about a “ray of light”.

This feature of Ostrovsky was noted by critics even when his first plays appeared. “...The ability to depict reality as it is - “mathematical fidelity to reality”, the absence of any exaggeration... All of this is not the distinctive features of Gogol’s poetry; all of these are the distinctive features of the new comedy,” wrote B. Almazov in the article “A Dream According to occasion of a comedy." Already in our time, literary critic A. Skaftymov in his work “Belinsky and the Drama of A.N. Ostrovsky” noted that “the most striking difference between the plays of Gogol and Ostrovsky is that Gogol does not have a victim of vice, while in Ostrovsky there is always a suffering victim vice... By portraying vice, Ostrovsky protects something from it, protects someone... Thus, the entire content of the play changes. The play is colored with suffering lyricism, enters into the development of fresh, morally pure or poetic feelings; the author’s efforts are directed towards that "to sharply highlight the inner legality, truth and poetry of true humanity, oppressed and expelled in an environment of prevailing self-interest and deception." Ostrovsky’s approach to depicting reality, different from Gogol’s, is explained, of course, by the originality of his talent, the “natural” properties of the artist, but also (this also should not be missed) by changing times: increased attention to the individual, to his rights, recognition of his value.

IN AND. Nemirovich-Danchenko in the book “The Birth of the Theater” writes about what makes Ostrovsky’s plays especially scenic: “an atmosphere of goodness,” “clear, firm sympathy on the side of the offended, to which the theater hall is always extremely sensitive.”

In plays about theater and actors, Ostrovsky certainly has the image of a true artist and a wonderful person. In real life, Ostrovsky knew many excellent people in the theatrical world, highly valued them, and respected them. L. Nikulina-Kositskaya, who brilliantly performed Katerina in “The Thunderstorm,” played a big role in his life. Ostrovsky was friends with the artist A. Martynov, had an unusually high regard for N. Rybakov, G. Fedotov and M. Ermolov played in his plays; P. Strepetova.

In the play “Guilty Without Guilt,” actress Elena Kruchinina says: “I know that people have a lot of nobility, a lot of love, selflessness.” And Otradina-Kruchinina herself belongs to such wonderful, noble people, she is a wonderful artist, smart, significant, sincere.

“Oh, don’t cry; they are not worth your tears. You are a white dove in a black flock of rooks, so they peck at you. Your whiteness, your purity is offensive to them,” Narokov says in “Talents and Admirers” to Sasha Negina.

The most striking image of a noble actor created by Ostrovsky is the tragedian Neschastlivtsev in “The Forest.” Ostrovsky portrays a “living” person, with a difficult fate, with a sad life story. Neschastlivtsev, who drinks heavily, cannot be called a “white dove.” But he changes throughout the play; the plot situation gives him the opportunity to fully reveal the best features of his nature. If at first Neschastlivtsev’s behavior reveals the posturing inherent in a provincial tragedian, an addiction to pompous declamation (at these moments he is funny); if, while playing the master, he finds himself in absurd situations, then, having realized what is happening on the Gurmyzhskaya estate, what rubbish his mistress is, he takes an ardent part in Aksyusha’s fate and shows excellent human qualities. It turns out that the role of a noble hero is organic for him, it is truly his role - and not only on stage, but also in life.

In his view, art and life are inextricably linked, the actor is not a pretender, not a pretender, his art is based on genuine feelings, genuine experiences, it should have nothing to do with pretense and lies in life. This is the meaning of the remark that Gurmyzhskaya throws at her and her entire company of Neschastlivtsev: “...We are artists, noble artists, and you are the comedians.”

The main comedian in the life performance that is played out in “The Forest” turns out to be Gurmyzhskaya. She chooses for herself the attractive, sympathetic role of a woman of strict moral rules, a generous philanthropist who devotes herself to good deeds (“Gentlemen, do I really live for myself? Everything I have, all my money belongs to the poor. I’m just a clerk with my money, but every poor, every unfortunate one is their master,” she inspires those around her). But all this is acting, a mask hiding her true face. Gurmyzhskaya is deceiving, pretending to be kind-hearted, she didn’t even think of doing anything for others, helping anyone: “Why did I get emotional! You play and play a role, and then you get carried away.” Gurmyzhskaya not only plays a role that is completely alien to her, she also forces others to play along with her, imposes on them roles that should present her in the most favorable light: Neschastlivtsev is assigned to play the role of a grateful nephew who loves her. Aksyusha is the role of the bride, Bulanov is Aksyusha’s groom. But Aksyusha refuses to put on a comedy for her: “I won’t marry him; so why this comedy?” Gurmyzhskaya, no longer hiding the fact that she is the director of the play being staged, rudely puts Aksyusha in her place: “Comedy! How dare you? Even if it’s a comedy, I’ll feed you and clothe you, and I’ll make you play a comedy.”

The comedian Schastlivtsev, who turned out to be more insightful than the tragedian Neschastlivtsev, who first took Gurmyzhskaya’s performance on faith, figured out the real situation before him, says to Neschastlivtsev: “The high school student is apparently smarter; he plays the role here better than yours... He’s the lover plays, and you are... a simpleton."

The viewer is presented with the real Gurmyzhskaya, without the protective pharisaical mask - a greedy, selfish, deceitful, depraved lady. The performance she performed pursued low, vile, dirty goals.

Many of Ostrovsky's plays present such a deceitful "theater" of life. Podkhalyuzin in Ostrovsky's first play "Our People - Let's Be Numbered" plays the role of the most devoted and faithful person to the owner and thus achieves his goal - having deceived Bolshov, he himself becomes the owner. Glumov in the comedy “Every Wise Man Has Enough Simplicity” builds a career for himself on a complex game, putting on one mask or another. Only chance prevented him from achieving his goal in the intrigue he started. In "Dowry" not only Robinson, entertaining Vozhevatov and Paratov, introduces himself as a lord. The funny and pathetic Karandyshev tries to look important. Having become Larisa’s fiancé, he “... raised his head so high that, just behold, he would bump into someone. Moreover, he put on glasses for some reason, but never wore them. He bows and barely nods,” says Vozhevatov. Everything that Karandyshev does is artificial, everything is for show: the pitiful horse he got, the carpet with cheap weapons on the wall, and the dinner he throws. Paratov is a man - calculating and soulless - plays the role of a hot, uncontrollably broad nature.

Theater in life, impressive masks are born from the desire to disguise, to hide something immoral, shameful, to pass off black as white. Behind such a performance there is usually calculation, hypocrisy, and self-interest.

Neznamov in the play “Guilty Without Guilt”, finding himself a victim of the intrigue started by Korinkina, and believing that Kruchinina was only pretending to be a kind and noble woman, says with bitterness: “Actress! actress! Just play on stage. There they pay money for good pretense.” "And to play in life over simple, gullible hearts, who do not need the game, who ask for the truth... we must be executed for this... we don’t need deception! Give us the truth, the pure truth!" The hero of the play here expresses a very important idea for Ostrovsky about the theater, about its role in life, about the nature and purpose of acting. Ostrovsky contrasts comedy and hypocrisy in life with art on stage full of truth and sincerity. Real theater and an artist’s inspired performance are always moral, bring goodness, and enlighten people.

Ostrovsky's plays about actors and theater, which accurately reflected the circumstances of Russian reality in the 70s and 80s of the last century, contain thoughts about art that are still alive today. These are thoughts about the difficult, sometimes tragic fate of a true artist, who, in realizing himself, spends and burns himself out, about the happiness of creativity he finds, about complete dedication, about the high mission of art, which affirms goodness and humanity. Ostrovsky himself expressed himself, revealed his soul in the plays he created, perhaps especially openly in plays about theater and actors. Much in them is consonant with what the poet of our century writes in wonderful verses:

When a line is dictated by a feeling,

It sends a slave to the stage,

And this is where the art ends,

And the soil and fate breathe.

(B. Pasternak " Oh, I wish I knew

that this happens...").

Entire generations of wonderful Russian artists grew up watching productions of Ostrovsky’s plays. In addition to the Sadovskys, there are also Martynov, Vasilyeva, Strepetova, Ermolova, Massalitinova, Gogoleva. The walls of the Maly Theater saw the living great playwright, and his traditions are still being multiplied on the stage.

Ostrovsky's dramatic mastery is the property of modern theater and the subject of close study. It is not at all outdated, despite the somewhat old-fashioned nature of many techniques. But this old-fashionedness is exactly the same as that of the theater of Shakespeare, Moliere, Gogol. These are old, genuine diamonds. Ostrovsky's plays contain limitless possibilities for stage performance and acting growth.

The main strength of the playwright is the all-conquering truth, the depth of typification. Dobrolyubov also noted that Ostrovsky depicts not just types of merchants and landowners, but also universal types. Before us are all the signs of the highest art, which is immortal.

The originality of Ostrovsky's dramaturgy and its innovation are especially clearly manifested in typification. If ideas, themes and plots reveal the originality and innovation of the content of Ostrovsky’s dramaturgy, then the principles of character typification also concern its artistic depiction and its form.

A. N. Ostrovsky, who continued and developed the realistic traditions of Western European and Russian drama, was attracted, as a rule, not by exceptional personalities, but by ordinary, ordinary social characters of greater or less typicality.

Almost every Ostrovsky character is unique. At the same time, the individual in his plays does not contradict the social.

By individualizing his characters, the playwright discovers the gift of the deepest penetration into their psychological world. Many episodes of Ostrovsky's plays are masterpieces of realistic depiction of human psychology.

“Ostrovsky,” Dobrolyubov rightly wrote, “knows how to look into the depths of a person’s soul, knows how to distinguish nature from all externally accepted deformities and growths; That’s why external oppression, the weight of the whole situation that oppresses a person, is felt in his works much more strongly than in many stories, terribly outrageous in content, but with the external, official side of the matter completely overshadowing the internal, human side.” In the ability to “notice nature, penetrate into the depths of a person’s soul, capture his feelings, regardless of the depiction of his external official relationships,” Dobrolyubov recognized one of the main and best properties of Ostrovsky’s talent.

In his work on characters, Ostrovsky constantly improved the techniques of his psychological mastery, expanding the range of colors used, complicating the coloring of images. In his very first work we have bright, but more or less one-line characters of the characters. Further works provide examples of a more in-depth and complicated disclosure of human images.

In Russian drama, the Ostrovsky school is quite naturally designated. It includes I. F. Gorbunov, A. Krasovsky, A. F. Pisemsky, A. A. Potekhin, I. E. Chernyshev, M. P. Sadovsky, N. Ya. Solovyov, P. M. Nevezhin, I. A. Kupchinsky. Studying from Ostrovsky, I. F. Gorbunov created wonderful scenes from the life of the bourgeois merchant and craftsman. Following Ostrovsky, A. A. Potekhin revealed in his plays the impoverishment of the nobility (“The Newest Oracle”), the predatory essence of the rich bourgeoisie (“The Guilty One”), bribery, the careerism of the bureaucracy (“Tinsel”), the spiritual beauty of the peasantry (“A Sheep’s Fur Coat - the human soul”), the emergence of new people of a democratic bent (“The Cut Off Chunk”). Potekhin’s first drama, “The Human Court is Not God,” which appeared in 1854, is reminiscent of Ostrovsky’s plays, written under the influence of Slavophilism. At the end of the 50s and at the very beginning of the 60s, the plays of I. E. Chernyshev, an artist of the Alexandrinsky Theater and a permanent contributor to the Iskra magazine, were very popular in Moscow, St. Petersburg and the provinces. These plays, written in a liberal-democratic spirit, clearly imitating Ostrovsky’s artistic style, impressed with the exclusivity of the main characters and the acute presentation of moral and everyday issues. For example, in the comedy “Groom from the Debt Branch” (1858) it was about a poor man trying to marry a wealthy landowner; in the comedy “Money Can’t Buy Happiness” (1859) a soulless predatory merchant was depicted; in the drama “Father of the Family” (1860) a tyrant landowner, and in the comedy “Spoiled Life” (1862) they depict an extremely honest, kind official, his naive wife and a dishonestly treacherous fool who violated their happiness.

Under the influence of Ostrovsky, such playwrights as A.I. Sumbatov-Yuzhin, Vl.I. were formed later, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Nemirovich-Danchenko, S. A. Naydenov, E. P. Karpov, P. P. Gnedich and many others.

Ostrovsky's unquestioned authority as the country's first playwright was recognized by all progressive literary figures. Highly appreciating Ostrovsky’s dramaturgy as “national”, listening to his advice, L. N. Tolstoy sent him the play “The First Distiller” in 1886. Calling Ostrovsky “the father of Russian drama,” the author of “War and Peace” asked him in an accompanying letter to read the play and express his “fatherly verdict” about it.

Ostrovsky's plays, the most progressive in dramaturgy of the second half of the 19th century, constitute a step forward in the development of world dramatic art, an independent and important chapter.

The enormous influence of Ostrovsky on the dramaturgy of Russian, Slavic and other peoples is undeniable. But his work is connected not only with the past. It actively lives in the present. In terms of his contribution to the theatrical repertoire, which is an expression of current life, the great playwright is our contemporary. Attention to his work does not decrease, but increases.

Ostrovsky will for a long time attract the minds and hearts of domestic and foreign viewers with the humanistic and optimistic pathos of his ideas, the deep and broad generalization of his heroes, good and evil, their universal human properties, and the uniqueness of his original dramatic skill.

Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky is a great Russian playwright, author of 47 original plays. In addition, he translated more than 20 literary works: from Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, and English.

Alexander Nikolaevich was born in Moscow into the family of a commoner official who lived in Zamoskvorechye, on Malaya Ordynka. This was an area where merchants had long settled. Merchant mansions with their blind fences, pictures of everyday life and the peculiar customs of the merchant world sank into the soul of the future playwright from early childhood.

After graduating from high school, Ostrovsky, on the advice of his father, entered the law faculty of Moscow University in 1840. But legal sciences were not his calling. In 1843, he left the university without completing the course of study, and decided to devote himself entirely to literary activity.

Not a single playwright showed pre-revolutionary life with such completeness as A. N. Ostrovsky. Representatives of the most diverse classes, people of different professions, origins, and upbringing pass before us in artistically truthful images of his comedies, dramas, scenes from life, and historical chronicles. The life, customs, characters of the townspeople, nobles, officials and mainly merchants - from “very important gentlemen”, rich bar and businessmen to the most insignificant and poor - are reflected with amazing breadth by A. N. Ostrovsky.

The plays were written not by an indifferent writer of everyday life, but by an angry denouncer of the world of the “dark kingdom”, where for the sake of profit a person is capable of anything, where the elders rule over the younger, the rich rule over the poor, where state power, the church and society in every possible way support the cruel morals that have developed over centuries.

Ostrovsky's works contributed to the development of public self-awareness. Their revolutionary influence was perfectly defined by Dobrolyubov; he wrote: “By painting us a vivid picture of false relationships with all their consequences, through this he serves as an echo of aspirations that require a better structure.” It was not without reason that the defenders of the existing system did everything in their power to prevent Ostrovsky’s plays from being performed on stage. His first one-act “Picture of Family Happiness” (1847) was immediately banned by theater censorship, and this play appeared only 8 years later. The first big four-act comedy “Our People - Let's Number” (1850) was not allowed on stage by Nicholas I himself, imposing a resolution: “It was printed in vain, it is forbidden to play in any case.” And the play, heavily altered at the request of the censor, was staged only in 1861. The Tsar demanded information about Ostrovsky’s lifestyle and thoughts and, having received the report, ordered: “Keep under supervision.” The secret office of the Moscow Governor-General opened the “Case of the writer Ostrovsky”, and secret gendarmerie surveillance was established over him. The obvious “unreliability” of the playwright, who was then serving in the Moscow Commercial Court, worried his superiors so much that Ostrovsky was forced to resign.

The comedy “Our People – Let’s Be Numbered”, which was not allowed on stage, created wide fame for the author. It is not difficult to explain the reasons for such a major success of the play. The faces of the tyrant owner Bolshov, his unrequited, stupidly submissive wife, his daughter Lipochka, distorted by an absurd education, and the rogue clerk Podkhalyuzin appear before us as if alive. “The Dark Kingdom” is how the great Russian critic N.A. Dobrolyubov described this musty, crude life based on despotism, ignorance, deception and arbitrariness. Together with the actors of the Moscow Maly Theater Prov Sadovsky and the great Mikhail Shchepkin, Ostrovsky read comedy in a variety of circles.

The enormous success of the play, which, in the words of N. A. Dobrolyubov, belonged “to Ostrovsky’s brightest and most consistent works” and captivated with “the truth of the image and the correct sense of reality,” made the guardians of the existing system wary. Almost every new play by Ostrovsky was banned by censorship or not approved for performance by the theater authorities.

Even such a wonderful drama as The Thunderstorm (1859) was met with hostility by the reactionary nobility and the press. But representatives of the democratic camp saw in “The Thunderstorm” a sharp protest against the feudal-serf system and fully appreciated it. The artistic integrity of the images, the depth of ideological content and the accusatory power of “The Thunderstorm” make it possible to recognize it as one of the most perfect works of Russian drama.

Ostrovsky is of great importance not only as a playwright, but also as the creator of Russian theater. “You brought a whole library of works of art as a gift to literature,” I. A. Goncharov wrote to Ostrovsky, “you created your own special world for the stage. You alone completed the building, the foundation of which was laid by the cornerstones of Fonvizin, Griboyedov, Gogol. But only after you, we Russians can proudly say: we have our own Russian national theater.” Ostrovsky's work constituted an entire era in the history of our theater. The name of Ostrovsky is especially strongly connected with the history of the Moscow Maly Theater. Almost all of Ostrovsky's plays during his lifetime were staged in this theater. They brought up several generations of artists who grew into wonderful masters of the Russian stage. Ostrovsky's plays played such a role in the history of the Maly Theater that it proudly calls itself the Ostrovsky House.

To play new roles, a whole galaxy of new actors had to appear and appeared, just as well as Ostrovsky, who knew Russian life. The national Russian school of realistic acting was established and developed on Ostrovsky's plays. Starting with Prov Sadovsky in Moscow and Alexander Martynov in St. Petersburg, several generations of metropolitan and provincial actors, right up to the present day, grew up playing roles in Ostrovsky’s plays. “Loyalty to reality, to the truth of life” – this is how Dobrolyubov spoke about Ostrovsky’s works – has become one of the essential features of our national performing arts.

Dobrolyubov pointed out another feature of Ostrovsky’s dramaturgy - “the accuracy and fidelity of the folk language.” No wonder Gorky called Ostrovsky “the sorcerer of language.” Each character of Ostrovsky speaks in a language typical of his class, profession, and upbringing. And the actor, creating this or that image, had to be able to use the necessary intonation, pronunciation and other speech means. Ostrovsky taught the actor to listen and hear how people speak in life.

The works of the great Russian playwright recreate not only his contemporary life. They also depict the years of Polish intervention at the beginning of the 17th century. (“Kozma Minin”, “Dmitry the Pretender and Vasily Shuisky”), and the legendary times of ancient Rus' (the spring fairy tale “The Snow Maiden”).

In the pre-revolutionary years, bourgeois spectators gradually began to lose interest in Ostrovsky's theater, considering it obsolete. On the Soviet stage, Ostrovsky's dramaturgy was revived with renewed vigor. His plays are also performed on foreign stages.

L. N. Tolstoy wrote to the playwright in 1886: “I know from experience how your works are read, listened to and remembered by the people, and therefore I would like to help you now quickly become in reality what you are, undoubtedly - a national writer - in the broadest sense."

After the Great October Socialist Revolution, the work of A. N. Ostrovsky became national.

Ostrovsky Alexander Nikolaevich (1823-1886). Born in Moscow, he grew up in a merchant environment. Father is a judge. O. himself graduated from high school, did not graduate from the law department of Moscow State University, and after (1843-1851) he served in the army, holding low positions. There are four periods in Ostrovsky’s creative development:

1) First period (1847-1851)- the time of the first literary experiments. Ostrovsky began quite in the spirit of the times - with narrative prose. In his essays on the life and customs of Zamoskvorechye, the debutant relied on Gogol’s traditions and the creative experience of the “natural school” of the 1840s. During these years, the first dramatic works were created, including the comedy “Bankrupt” ("Our people - we'll be numbered!»), which became the main work of the early period. (Published in the magazine “Moskvityanin” in 1850. The story of the merchant Samson Silych Bolshov, who decided to deceive his creditors and declare himself bankrupt, and as a result found himself deceived and sent to debtor’s prison by his unscrupulous daughter Lipochka and her husband, clerk Podkhalyuzin. The play was banned from production , the playwright was placed under police supervision.The work was seen in the world 12 years later (68 years)).

2) Second period (1852-1855) are called “Moskvityanin”, since during these years Ostrovsky became close to the young employees of the Moskvityanin magazine: A.A. Grigoriev, T.I. Filippov, B.N. Almazov and E.N. Edelson. The playwright supported the ideological program of the “young editorial staff”, which sought to make the magazine an organ of a new trend of social thought - "soilism". During this period, only three plays were written: “Don’t get on your own sleigh,” "Poverty is not a vice" and “Don’t live the way you want.”

3) Third period (1856-1860) marked by Ostrovsky's refusal to search for positive principles in the life of the patriarchal merchants (this was typical for plays written in the first half of the 1850s). The playwright, who was sensitive to changes in the social and ideological life of Russia, became close to the figures of the common democracy - the employees of the Sovremennik magazine. The creative outcome of this period was the plays “At Someone Else’s Feast, a Hangover”, “Profitable Place” and “Thunderstorm”,“the most decisive”, as defined by N.A. Dobrolyubov, is Ostrovsky’s work.

4) Fourth period (1861-1886)- the longest period of creative activity. The genre range has expanded, the poetics of his works have become more diverse. Over the course of twenty years, plays have been created that can be divided into several genre and thematic groups: 1) comedies from merchant life (“Maslenitsa is not for everyone”, “The truth is good, but happiness is better”, “The heart is not a stone”), 2) satirical comedy (“Simplicity is enough for every wise man”,“Warm Heart”, “Mad Money”, “Wolves and Sheep”, “Forest”), 3) plays that Ostrovsky himself called “pictures of Moscow life” and “scenes from the life of the outback”: they are united by the theme of “little people” ( “An old friend is better than two new ones”, “Hard Days”, “Jokers” and the trilogy about Balzaminov), 4) historical chronicle plays (“Kozma Zakharyich Minin-Sukhoruk”, “Tushino”, etc.), and finally 5 ) psychological dramas (“Dowry”, “The Last Victim”, etc.). The fairy-tale play “The Snow Maiden” stands apart.

10. "Thunderstorm". Drama or tragedy (TRAGEDY!).

The unity of “Thunderstorm” is not complete (i.e. classicism is violated = this means it’s not a drama):

1. Time is not 24 hours, but 10 days. 2. Places – change constantly. 3. Action – Ekaterina + Feklusha, and not 1 character. In addition, the main character is from a low class, and for classicism, heroes are gods, demigods, kings, etc.

Construction scheme tragedy complied with: 1. The presence of a tragic hero; 2. Hero of the highest class; 3. The presence of a tragic conflict (a conflict that cannot be resolved peacefully = Euripides “God from the Machine”); 4. catharsis (purification of both the hero and the viewer) - occurs in Tikhon, Varvara (runs away with Kudryash), Kulibin (changes).

In "The Thunderstorm" - 2 conflicts - this is INNOVATION IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE.

- External. Katya is a ray of light in the good kingdom; kingdom - personified by Feklusha.

- Internal. Catherine is a believer and she sinned = doomed. BUT! She cannot help but sin, because... 1. she doesn’t love her husband, she doesn’t need him. 2. cannot help but love (stay alone); all this leads her to SUICIDE.

RESULT: TRAGEDY: 1. hero. 2. conflict. 3. catharsis.

11. Life and work of Goncharov.

One novel to choose from: “Oblomov”, “Cliff”, “An Ordinary Story”. Know the essence of his travels.

Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov (1812–1891), was born into a merchant family with 4 children. Education in a private boarding school - introduction to the books of Western European and Russian authors, study of French. language. 1823 – Moscow State University, Faculty of Philology.

After university, service in the office of the Simbirsk governor, then moving to St. Petersburg - translator at the Ministry of Finance. Goncharov’s first creative experiments - poetry, anti-romantic story "Dashing pain" and story "Lucky Mistake"– were published in a handwritten journal. In 1842 he wrote essay “Ivan Savich Podzhabrin”, published only six years after its creation. In 1847, the novel “Ordinary History” was published in the Sovremennik magazine. The novel is based on the collision of two central characters - Aduev the uncle and Aduev the nephew, personifying sober practicality and enthusiastic idealism. Each of the characters is psychologically close to the writer and represents different projections of his spiritual world. "Ordinary History" received the approval of V. G. Belinsky(in the article “A Look at Russian Literature of 1847”), whose assessment was the subject of special pride for Goncharov throughout his life. Leaders of the democratic trend in literature of that time welcomed the novel for the deep artistic research it contained and a sharp denial of romance in its diverse forms. Aduev writes poetry, but his romanticism is lifeless, which his uncle, Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev, mockingly states. In explaining the reasons why the life of Aduev Jr. turns out to be meaningless and useless, Goncharov anticipates the main idea of ​​the novel "Oblomov". The empty, enthusiastic rantings of the hero appear as a consequence of his lordly upbringing. Goncharov began work on this novel back in the 40s. In 1849 in the almanac "Literary Collection with Illustrations" at the Sovremennik magazine, "Oblomov's Dream" was published. An episode of an unfinished novel." But before G. finishes the novel, many more events will happen. In October 1852 of the year G Oncharov became a participant in a trip around the world on a sailing warship - the frigate "Pallada" - as the secretary of the head of the expedition, Vice Admiral Putyatin. It was equipped to inspect Russian possessions in North America - Alaska, which at that time belonged to Russia, as well as to establish political and trade relations with Japan. Cycle of travel essays “Frigate “Pallada””(1855-1857) - a kind of “writer’s diary” ». During the trip, he kept careful notes, describing in them everything he saw in Europe, Africa and Asia. Records = true portrayal of life. The sailor-traveler is simultaneously in “his” world of the ship and in the “alien” world of geographical space. He returned and entered the service of the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee (provided assistance to Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter, Pisemsky’s A Thousand Souls, etc.). In 1859, the novel “Oblomov” was published (10 years passed after the chapter was published in the magazine). Immediately Art. Dobrolyubova “What is Oblomovism?”

Goncharov's last novel "Cliff" published in 1869, presents a new version of Oblomovism in the image of the main character - Boris Raisky. Conceived in 1849 as a novel about the complex relationship between the artist and society, but the writer changed his plan: the center of the novel was the fate of revolutionary youth, represented in the image of the “nihilist” Mark Volokhov. The novel "The Precipice" received mixed reviews from critics. Many questioned the author's talent and denied him the right to judge modern youth. Further, Goncharov rarely published.

1871 - literary critical article "A million torments" dedicated to the stage production of Griboyedov’s comedy “Woe from Wit”. After “Notes on Belinsky’s personality,” article "Hamlet", feature article "Literary evening" and newspaper feuilletons. The result of Goncharov’s creative activity in the 70s. is considered a critical work about his own work entitled " Better late than never". In recent years he lived alone, worked quite a lot, but before his death he burned everything.