Aleksandr Ostrovsky: founding father of Russian theatre

Aleksandr Ostrovsky

Founding father of Russian theatre

SOMETIME in the autumn of 1849, inthe famous Moscow literary salon of Countess Rostopchin, an elegant, fair-haired man of twenty-six read his play Bankrot ("The Bankrupt') to an audience of distinguished literary figures including the great Nikolai Gogol. More readings of this work, which had opened the doors of Moscow's salons to its author, were soon delighting the eventing patrons of the city's cafes and taverns, but the imperial theatres remained immune to the enthusiasm felt by the new playwright's first admirers. Tsar Nicolas I banned the play and had its author, Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky (1823-1886) watched by the police. His sixth play was the first to be staged and all its successors had problems with the censor.

The author of some fifty plays, Ostrovskyis the creator of the Russian "comedy of manners' and the founder of the repertory of the Russian theatre. He was born and grew up in the Zamoskvorechye commercial district of Moscow, away from the city's major thoroughfares. Destined by his father for a career in commerce, the young Ostrovsky's first employment was with the Moscow civil court. His youthful observations of different types of merchants and the setting in which they lived were to provide him with material for most of his plays.

In face of obstinate, ignorant, despoticmoney-grubbers respectful of the established order, conformists such as Podkhaliuzin, Bolshov and Kabanikha, he sets figures on a par with such great characters of the European drama as Hamlet, Karl Moor or Laurencia, the creations of Shakespeare, Schiller and Lope de Vega.

In Dokhodnoe Mesto (1857, "A ProfitablePost'), Zhadov champions those who go "against social customs and conditions . . . The struggle is arduous and often fatal, but the glory for those who win through and the gratitude of later generations is all the greater . . .. Without them lies and evil would have proliferated to hide the sun's light from men'. In Les (1871; The Forest, 1926), the tragedian Neschaslivtsev proclaims that "honour is boundless', and Parasha, in Gorzhacheiya serdce (1869, "A Yearning Heart'), asserts for all to hear, "You can take away all I have but I shall never give up my freedom. . . . For my freedom I would go to the scaffold.'

The tragic end of Ostrovsky's finest charactersalways springs from their rectitude, their purity, their nobility of spirit, their moral integrity and their conviction that love is the ultimate meaning of life. In this respect Ostrovsky echoes the preoccupations of Dostoyevsky, for whom beauty will save the world, or the law of love and the vocation of goodness dear to Tolstoy.

Ostrovsky wished "to put the people onthe right path without harming them'. Because of the logic of the plot, people who make their mark in life through hypocrisy and duplicity often triumph in his plays. But the real victors are losers like Katerina, who is incapable of living dishonestly and throws herself into the Volga, or Larissa, the girl without a dowry whose fine talent has been brought to nothing by the vulgarity of life and who murmurs "Thank you' to Karandychev, her murderer and saviour, before she dies. Ostrovsky wants a person who rebels against oppression and arbitrariness, a free spirit, to become the "law of life'.

It should thus come as no surprise thatcircles close to the court of the Tsar, suspicious of culture and the theatre and apprehensive of new ideas, stopped at nothing to prevent Ostrovsky's heroes from being portrayed in the theatre, even though they might admit that Ostrovsky himself was not without talent. It was said contemptuously of his plays that they "stank of sheepskin'.

Nevertheless, under the pressure of publicopinion, Ostrovsky was elected a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences in 1863. Shortly before, on the new ceiling of St. Petersburg's Maryinsky theatre, his portrait had been added to those of the classics of Russian satire, Fonvizin, Griboyedov and Gogol.

"The existence of a national theatre is thesign that a nation has reached its majority,' wrote Ostrovsky, "just like that of academies, universities and museums.' In addition to his creative work as a dramatist, he gave many years of his life to other activities connected with the theatre. Moscow's "Little Theatre' (or "Maly') where he staged many of his plays, was dubbed "the Ostrovsky house'. And only six months before his death he was appointed director of the repertory of Moscow's imperial theatres where in face of considerable obstruction he nevertheless succeeded in introducing reforms. His influence on the history of the theatre was in every respect enormous.

Ostrovsky's horizons broadened as theyears went by and came to include other social classes as well as the merchants. In the 1870s he created a new type of character, the cold, ambitious bourgeois, the Russian equivalent of Balzac's Rastignac. Ostrovsky analyses certain forms of Russian behaviour and patterns of thought with such originality and authenticity that this "Russianness' slowed down the introduction of his work to other countries. In France, for example, the first performance of Groza (1859; The Storm, 1898) possibly his masterpiece, did not take place until 1889.

Around the middle of the nineteenth centurythe Russian novel of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev conquered Western Europe, but Ostrovsky's plays remained unknown there because of the exceptional translation difficulties involved. In the East too, interest in his plays only began to appear much later. In adapted form, his work enjoyed a certain success in China in the 1920s, but did not achieve world fame until the 1960s and 1970s, when plays by Ostrovsky were performed in over forty theatres in Delhi, London, New York, Paris, Milan, Hamburg, Basle and elsewhere. Since then their author's literary reputation and stature have continued to grow.

In Ostrovsky's own country, the greatestdirectors of the twentieth century have been attracted to his work. Konstantin Stanislavsky staged Snegurochka ("The Snow Maiden', 1872) a poetic masterpiece made famous by Rimski-Korsakov's operatic adaptation of it, and "A Yearning Heart'. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, author and drama teacher who founded the Moscow Art Theatre with Stanislavsky, staged Na vsyakogo mudretsa dovolno prostoty (1868; Even a Wise Man Stumbles, 1944), and the great Vsevolod Meyerhold presented The Forest and "A Profitable Post'. Two other avent-garde directors, Aleksandr Tairov and Yuri Zavadsky, staged respectively Bese viny vinovatye ("The Innocent Guilty') and Bespridannitsa (1879; "The Girl without a Dowry'). Musical adaptations and experimental versions have also been performed in the present decade.

Some of Ostrovsky's plays have also beenadapted for the cinema and television. Among them are Yakov Protazanov's version of The Poor Bride, Vladimir Petrov's The Storm, and, more recently, Eldar Riazanov's Gestoki romanse ("The Cruel Romance'), which was a great success with the public.

All these productions have made knowna new Ostrovsky who signs a hymn to love and fidelity.

A man of wide culture, Ostrovsky didmuch to bring to the Russian stage dramatists from other literatures. Among the works he translated into Russian are the Asinaria of Plautus, Terence's Hecyra, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Antony and Cleopatra, Machiavelli's The Mandrake, and works by Seneca and Cervantes.

With Nikolai Rubinstein, director of theMoscow Conservatory, and the actor Piotr Sadovsky, Ostrovsky created in 1865 the "Artistic Circle'--the first society of artists in Russia--whose members included actors, writers, musicians and painters. Impressed by the teachings of the Russian physiologist and naturalist Ivan Sechenov, he worked out a theory of acting based on the idea of reciprocal conditioning between the actor and his environment.

In the last years of his life, Ostrovskyspent much of his time on his estate at Chtchelykovo, in the region of Kostroma, which became for him what Boldino was for Pushkin, Yasnaya Polyana for Tolstoy, and Bougival for Turgenev. In this country retreat he wrote more than a dozen of his finest plays. And it was there, in June 1886, in his house built high on a hill in the midst of the countryside he loved, where even the storms seemed more beautiful than elsewhere, that Ostrovsky passed away. Borne by peasants on long pieces of drapery embroidered with traditional motifs, escorted by faithful friends, Ostrovsky's coffin was carried through the places from which he had drawn inspiration to the cemetery of Nikolo Berezhki.

Today the house at Chtchelykovo is anOstrovsky Museum, a place of pilgrimage. Nothing--neither the setting nor the welcome --has changed. The visitor almost expects to see the master of the house appear in the clothes he loved to wear in the country --Russian shirt, wide trousers and high boots, short grey doublet and wide-brimmed hat--ready to sit down at his work table.

Photo: "You alone have completed the edificewhose foundations were laid by Fonvizin, Griboyedov and Gogol. It is because of you alone that we Russians can proudly say that we have our national theatre. In all justice, it should be called the Ostrovsky theatre.' This tribute to Aleksandr N. Ostrovsky was made by the writer Ivan A. Goncharov, seated at extreme left of this photo taken in the editorial offices of the magazine Sovremennik. Seated with him (left to right) are Ivan S. Turgenev, Aleksandr V. Druzhinin, and Ostrovsky. Standing behind them are Leo N. Tolstoy and Dimitri V. Grigorovich.

Photo: Scene from a production of The Forest atMoscow's Maly Theatre where this and other plays by Ostrovsky still have an honoured place in the repertoire. The Forest, written in 1871, describes the decline of the Russian aristocracy and the rise of a new class of merchants, who buy up the large estates at rock bottom prices and ruthlessly clear their forests.

Photo: With his general's uniform, narrowmindedoutlook and generally decrepit appearance, Krutinsky, a character in Ostrovsky's comedy Even a Wise Man Stumbles, symbolizes the decadent institutions of the old Russia. Above, Krutinsky played in a 1910 production by the great actor and director Konstantin Stanislavsky.

Photo: The actress Alice Koonen as Katerina in a1924 production of Ostrovsky's The Storm (1859). In this interpretation of the play as a "peasant tragedy' Katerina is the personification of pride and purity, ready to lay down her life for the right to be free.

COPYRIGHT 1986 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group