Drama A. Main features. Artistic features of playwright A.N. Ostrovsky

03.04.2019

Born on March 31 (April 12), 1823 in Moscow, he grew up in a merchant environment. His mother died when he was 8 years old. And the father married again. There were four children in the family.

Ostrovsky was educated at home. His father had a large library, where little Alexander first began to read Russian literature. However, the father wanted to give his son a legal education. In 1835, Ostrovsky began his studies at the gymnasium, and then entered Moscow University at the Faculty of Law. Due to his interests in theater and literature, he never completed his studies at the university (1843), after which he worked as a scribe in court at the insistence of his father. Ostrovsky served in the courts until 1851.

Ostrovsky's creativity

In 1849, Ostrovsky’s work “Our People – Let’s Be Numbered!” was written, which brought him literary fame; he was highly appreciated by Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Goncharov. Then, despite censorship, many of his plays and books were published. For Ostrovsky, writings are a way to truthfully depict the life of the people. The plays “The Thunderstorm”, “Dowry”, “Forest” are among his most important works. Ostrovsky's play "Dowry", like other psychological dramas, describes characters in a non-standard way, inner world, the torment of heroes.

Since 1856, the writer has been participating in the publication of the Sovremennik magazine.

Ostrovsky Theater

In the biography of Alexander Ostrovsky, theater takes pride of place.
Ostrovsky founded the Artistic Circle in 1866, thanks to which many talented people appeared in the theater circle.

Together with the Artistic Circle, he significantly reformed and developed the Russian theater.

Ostrovsky's house was often visited famous people, among whom I. A. Goncharov, D. V. Grigorovich, Ivan Turgenev, A. F. Pisemsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, P. M. Sadovsky, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Leo Tolstoy, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, M. N. Ermolova and other.

In a brief biography of Ostrovsky, it is worth mentioning the emergence in 1874 of the Society of Russian Dramatic Writers and Opera Composers, where Ostrovsky was chairman. With his innovations, he achieved improvement in the lives of theater actors. Since 1885, Ostrovsky headed the theater school and was the head of the repertoire of Moscow theaters.

Writer's personal life

It cannot be said that Ostrovsky’s personal life was successful. The playwright lived with a woman from a simple family, Agafya, who had no education, but was the first to read his works. She supported him in everything. All their children died in early age. Ostrovsky lived with her for about twenty years. And in 1869 he married the artist Maria Vasilyevna Bakhmetyeva, who bore him six children.

Last years of life

Until the end of his life, Ostrovsky experienced financial difficulties. Hard work greatly depleted the body, and the writer’s health increasingly failed. Ostrovsky dreamed of reviving a theater school in which it would be possible to teach professional acting, however, the death of the writer prevented the implementation of long-conceived plans.

Ostrovsky died on June 2(14), 1886 on his estate. The writer was buried next to his father, in the village of Nikolo-Berezhki, Kostroma province.

Chronological table

Other biography options

Since childhood, Ostrovsky knew Greek, German and French, and at a later age he also learned English, Spanish and Italian. All his life he translated plays into different languages, thus improving his skills and knowledge.
The writer’s creative path spans 40 years of successful work on literary and dramatic works. His activities influenced an entire era of theater in Russia. For his works, the writer was awarded the Uvarov Prize in 1863.
Ostrovsky is the founder of modern theatrical art, whose followers were such outstanding personalities as Konstantin Stanislavsky and Mikhail Bulgakov.
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Ostrovsky drama dowry psychological

Ostrovsky's services to Russian drama and to the national theater are enormous. For almost forty years creative activity A.N. Ostrovsky created a rich repertoire: about fifty original plays, several plays written in collaboration. He was also involved in translations and adaptations of plays by other authors. At one time, greeting the playwright on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of his career, I.A. Goncharov wrote: “You brought a whole library of works of art as a gift to literature, you created your own special world for the stage. You alone completed the building, the foundation of which was laid by Fonvizin, Griboyedov, Gogol. But only after you, we Russians can proudly say: “We have our own Russian, national theater. It should rightly be called “Ostrovsky Theater” Zhuravlev A.I., Nekrasov V.N. Theater A.N. Ostrovsky. - M.: Art, 1986, p. 8..

The talent of Ostrovsky, who continued the best traditions of classical Russian drama, affirming the drama of social characters and morals, deep and broad generalization, had a decisive influence on the subsequent development of progressive Russian drama. To a greater or lesser extent, both L. Tolstoy and Chekhov learned from him and came from him. It is precisely with that line of Russian psychological dramaturgy, which Ostrovsky so magnificently represented, that Gorky’s dramaturgy is also connected. Modern authors are learning and will continue to study Ostrovsky’s dramatic skills for a long time.

It would be fair to note that 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 towered 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 vaudevilles and melodramas, terribly far from real life, especially from the real Russian reality, were not even its shadow.

Rapid development psychological realism, which we observe in the second half of the 19th century, also manifested itself in drama. Interest in 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”. Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky considered the beginning of his literary journey to be 1847, when he read the play “ Family picture"in the house of the professor and writer SP. Shevyreva. His next play, “Our People – Let’s Be Numbered!” (original title “Bankrupt”) made his name known throughout reading Russia. Since the early 50s. he actively collaborates in the journal of the historian M.P. Pogodin “Moskvityanin” and soon, together with A.A. Grigoriev, L.A. Me and others formed the “young editorial board” of “Moskvityanin”, which tried to make the magazine an organ of a new trend of social thought, close to Slavophilism and anticipating pochvenism. The magazine promoted realistic art, interest in folk life and folklore, Russian history, especially the history of the unprivileged classes.

Ostrovsky came to literature as the creator of a nationally distinctive theatrical style, based in poetics on folklore tradition. This turned out to be possible because he began with the depiction of the patriarchal strata of the Russian people, who preserved the pre-Petrine, almost non-Europeanized family, everyday and cultural way of life. This was still a “pre-personal” environment; to depict it, the poetics of folklore could be used as widely as possible with its extreme generality, with stable types, as if immediately recognizable to listeners and spectators, and even with a repeating main plot situation - the struggle of lovers for their happiness. On this basis, Ostrovsky’s type of folk psychological comedy was created. Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries / Comp. B.S. Bugrov, M.M. Golubkov. - M.: Aspect Press, 2000, p. 202..

It is important to understand what predetermined the presence of psychological drama in the work of Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky. First of all, in our opinion, by the fact that he initially created his works for the theater, for stage implementation. The performance was for Ostrovsky the most complete form of publishing a play. Only during stage performance does the author’s dramatic invention receive a completely finished form and produce exactly that psychological impact, the achievement of which the author set himself the goal of Kotikov P.B. The voice of the viewer - a contemporary. (F.A. Koni about A.N. Ostrovsky)//Literature at school. - 1998. - No. 3. - pp. 18-22..

In addition, in Ostrovsky’s era, the theater audience was more democratic, more “variegated” in its social and educational level than readers. According to Ostrovsky’s fair opinion, to perceive fiction you need a certain level of education and the habit of serious reading. The viewer can go to the theater simply for entertainment, and it is up to the theater and the playwright to make the performance both a pleasure and a moral lesson. In other words, a theatrical performance should have the maximum psychological impact on the viewer.

The focus on the stage existence of drama also determines the author’s special attention to psychological characteristics each character: both main and secondary characters.

The psychologism of the description of nature predetermined the future scenery of the scene.

A.N. Ostrovsky assigned a significant role to the title of each of his works, also focusing on further stage production, which in general was not typical for Russian literature of the era of realism. The fact is that the viewer perceives the play at once; he cannot, like the reader, stop and think, or return to the beginning. Therefore, he must immediately be psychologically tuned by the author to this or that type of spectacle that he is about to see. The text of the play, as is known, begins with a poster, that is, a title, a definition of the genre and a list of characters. Already the poster, thus, told the viewer about the content and “how it will end,” and often also about the author’s position: who the author sympathizes with, how he evaluates the outcome of the dramatic action. Traditional genres in this sense were the most defined and clear. Comedy means that for the characters with whom the author and the viewer sympathize, everything will end well (the meaning of this well-being can, of course, be very different, sometimes at odds with public perception) Zhuravleva A.I. Plays by A.N. Ostrovsky on the theater stage//Literature at school. - 1998. - No. 5. - pp. 12-16..

But as the life depicted in the play became more complex, it became increasingly difficult to give a clear genre definition. And often refusing the name “comedy”, Ostrovsky calls the genre “scenes” or “pictures”. “Scenes” - this genre appeared in Ostrovsky in his youth. Then it was associated with the poetics of the “natural school” and was something like a dramatized essay depicting characteristic types in the plot, which is a separate episode, a picture from the life of the characters. In the “scenes” and “pictures” of the 1860s and 1870s we see something different. Here we have a fully developed plot, a consistent unfolding of dramatic action leading to a denouement that completely exhausts the dramatic conflict. The line between “scenes” and comedy is not always easy to determine during this period. Perhaps we can point out two reasons for Ostrovsky’s refusal to traditionally genre definition. In some cases, it seems to the playwright that the funny incident discussed in the play is not typical and “large-scale” enough for deep generalization and important moral conclusions - and this is exactly how Ostrovsky understood the essence of comedy (for example, “It’s not all Maslenitsa for the cat”). In other cases, in the lives of the heroes there was too much sad and difficult, although the ending turned out to be prosperous (“Abyss”, “ Late love") Zhuravleva A.I. Plays by A.N. Ostrovsky on the theater stage//Literature at school. - 1998. - No. 5. - pp. 12-16..

In the plays of the 1860-1870s, there was a gradual accumulation of drama and the formation of a hero necessary for the genre of drama in the narrow sense of the word. This hero, first of all, must have a developed personal consciousness. As long as he does not internally, spiritually feel opposed to the environment, does not separate himself from it at all, he can evoke sympathy, but cannot yet become the hero of a drama, which requires an active, effective struggle of the hero with circumstances. The formation of personal moral dignity and the extra-class value of a person in the minds of poor workers and the urban masses attracts the keen interest of Ostrovsky. The rise of the sense of individuality caused by the reform, which captured fairly wide layers Russian population, provides material and provides the basis for drama. In the artistic world of Ostrovsky, with his bright comedic gift, a conflict of a dramatic nature often continues to be resolved in a dramatic structure. “Truth is good, but happiness is better” turns out to be a comedy literally standing on the threshold of drama: the next “big play”, which is discussed in the letter quoted above, is “Dowry.” Having initially conceived “scenes” to which he did not attach much importance, Ostrovsky, in the course of his work, felt the importance of characters and conflict. And I think the point here is primarily in the hero - Platon Zybkin.

A friend of Ostrovsky's youth, a wonderful poet and critic A.A. Grigoriev saw “one of the highest inspirations” of Ostrovsky in Chatsky. He also called Chatsky “the only heroic figure in our literature” (1862). At first glance, the critic's remark may surprise: it is very different worlds portrayed by Griboyedov and Ostrovsky. However, at a deeper level, the unconditional correctness of Grigoriev’s judgment is revealed.

Griboyedov created in Russian drama the type of “high hero,” that is, a hero who, through a direct word lyrically close to the author, reveals the truth, evaluates the events occurring in the play and influences their course. He was a personal hero who had independence and resisted circumstances. In this regard, Griboedov's discovery influenced the entire further course of Russian literature of the 19th century and, of course, Ostrovsky.

The focus on a broad viewer, immediate in his perceptions and impressions, determined the pronounced originality of Ostrovsky’s dramaturgy. He was convinced that the public audience in dramas and tragedies needed “a deep sigh throughout the entire theater, they needed unfeigned warm tears, hot speeches that would pour straight into the soul.”

In light of these requirements, the playwright wrote plays of great ideological and emotional intensity, comic or dramatic, plays that “captivate the soul, making you forget time and place.” When creating plays, Ostrovsky proceeded mainly from the traditions of folk drama, from the requirements of strong drama and great comedy. “Russian authors want to try their hand,” he declared, “in front of a fresh audience, whose nerves are not very pliable, which requires strong drama, great comedy, causing frank, loud laughter, hot, sincere feelings, lively and strong characters."

Famous theater critic F.A. Kony, famous for his open-mindedness and courage, immediately appreciated high quality works by Ostrovsky. Koni considered one of the advantages of a dramatic work to be the simplicity of the content, and he saw this simplicity, elevated to artistry, in Ostrovsky’s comedies in the depiction of faces. Koni wrote, in particular, about the play “The Muscovites”: “The playwright made me fall in love with the characters he created. made me fall in love with Rusakov, Borodkin, and Dunya, despite their characteristic external clumsiness, because he was able to reveal their inner human side, which could not but affect the humanity of the audience.” Koni A.F. For the play “Muscovites” // Repertoire and pantheon of the Russian stage. - 1853. - No. 4. - P. 34//See. Kotikova P.B. The voice of the viewer - a contemporary. (F.A. Koni about A.N. Ostrovsky)//Literature at school. - 1998. - No. 3. - pp. 18-22..

Also A.F. Koni noted the fact that before Ostrovsky, “even contrasts (psychological) are not allowed in Russian comedy: all faces are on the same block - all, without exception, are scoundrels and fools.” Koni A.F. What is the Russian nationality? // Repertoire and pantheon of the Russian stage. - 1853. - No. 4. - P. 3//See. Kotikova P.B. The voice of the viewer - a contemporary. (F.A. Koni about A.N. Ostrovsky)//Literature at school. - 1998. - No. 3. - pp. 18-22..

We can thus say that already in Ostrovsky’s time critics noted the presence in his dramatic works subtle psychologism that can influence the audience’s perception of the characters in plays.

It should be noted that in his comedies and dramas Ostrovsky did not limit himself to the role of a satirical accuser. 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. These heroes of his were in dark kingdom autocracy with “light rays” that heralded the inevitable victory of justice Lakshin V.Ya. Ostrovsky Theater. - M.: Art, 1985, p. 28..

Punishing those in power, the “oppressors”, tyrants with a terrible judgment, sympathizing with the disadvantaged, drawing heroes worthy of imitation, Ostrovsky turned drama and theater into a school of social morals.

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. But he elevated this prose of life into the framework of artistic types of enormous generalization.

1. A. N. Ostrovsky is one of the most prominent representatives of Russian realistic theater. He created his own special style, which can be called “Ostrovsky’s theater.” Some other playwrights also belong to this school, for example A.V. Sukhovo-Kobylin. Ostrovsky's life was closely connected with the theater: for many years he fruitfully collaborated with the Maly Theater. His name is important not only for the literary, but also for the theatrical tradition. 2. Ostrovsky’s favorite genre is comedy. “According to my concepts of grace, considering comedy the best form for achieving moral goals and recognizing in myself the ability to perceive life primarily in this form, I had to write a comedy or write nothing” (Ostrovsky about his first comedy, “Bankrupt”, aka “Our people - we will be numbered”). The comedic element is invariably present in those plays by Ostrovsky that are not comedies. In Ostrovsky's plays, the funny is organically combined with the sublime, the grotesque with pathos, crude comedy with high civic rhetoric.3. Most of Ostrovsky’s plays depict the patriarchal Russian world: merchants, Zamoskvoretskoe (“Bankrupt”) and provincial (“Thunderstorm”, “Dowry”), officials (“Profitable Place”), landowners (“Forest”), actors (“Forest”, "Talents and fans"). Sometimes the theme of the play became historical (“Kuzma Minin”) or even mythological (“Snow Maiden”) plots.4. The patriarchal world is revealed, as a rule, from two perspectives: social-topical and folklore-mythological. Ostrovsky’s early plays show with great sympathy the life of the provincial merchants, who retained the features of pre-Petrine “antiquity”, a non-Europeanized way of life and way of life. Later plays depict new trends in social life (e.g. the growing power of the power of money) and the crisis of the patriarchal world is captured, the theme of “tyrants” and “victims” appears more often. A striking example of such a tendency is the play “The Thunderstorm”, where the folklore-mythological, idealized view of the patriarchal world (“You live in the promised land”) belongs to the caricatured, grotesque character - Feklusha.5. The plots of Ostrovsky’s plays, as a rule, have a simple structure, situations (for example: young people are looking for their happiness) and some functions of the characters, something like a role (for example: a parent preventing the young from reuniting), are preserved from play to play (Kabanikha in “The Thunderstorm” ", Gurmyzhskaya in the comedy "Forest"). 6. Ostrovsky combines the apparent simplicity of the language, the influence of popular popular theater and folklore in general (proverbs in the titles of many plays and the “proverbial” sound of the characters’ remarks) with a subtle play of psychological and cultural subtexts. 7. In many of Ostrovsky’s plays, a separate city (often provincial) is depicted as a certain specific, closed and self-sufficient place, the image of which is mythologized and at the same time is the embodiment of Russia. This tradition goes back to Pushkin (the village of Goryukhino), Gogol (Dikanka, Mirgorod, St. Petersburg) and has many other examples in Russian literature. A similar role can be played not by a city, but by a village or a closed, isolated part of the city. Such are the cities of Kalinov in “The Thunderstorm”, Bryakhimov in “Dowry”, the village of Penki in “The Forest”, Zamoskvorechye in Ostrovsky’s early comedies.8. In many of Ostrovsky’s plays, complex and multifaceted symbolic images (“thunderstorm”, “forest” and “road through the forest”, “wolves and sheep” in the plays of the same name) and cross-cutting motifs (“sin”, “judgment” in “Thunderstorm”, the motive of “theater” in “Forest”). Often such images and motifs are already indicated in the titles of plays. 9. In Ostrovsky’s plays, the dialogues of the characters, created with great poetic skill (verbal individualization of the characters’ images), are of particular importance. 10. The traditions of classicism in Ostrovsky’s plays are manifested in a certain orientation towards didacticism, aphoristic statements of the characters, and the presence of an ideological hero-reasoner expressing the author’s line.

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Department of Education and Science of the Lipetsk Region

GOB POU "Lipetsk College of Municipal Economy and Industrial Technologies"

Rabstract

Life and artistic originality of the playsA.N.Ostrovsky

Completed by D.R. Nikitin

“You have donated a whole library of artistic works to literature, you have created your own special world for the stage... I greet you as the immortal creator of an endless array of poetic creations, from “The Snow Maiden”, “The Voivode’s Dream” to “Talents and Admirers” inclusive, where we see with our own eyes and we hear the primordial, true Russian life in countless vital images, with its true appearance, style and speech"

With these words I.A. Goncharov turned to Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky in 1882 - on the day of his thirty-fifth anniversary literary activity great Russian playwright.

Russian dramaturgy and Russian theater from the 30-40s of the 19th century they experienced acute crisis. Despite the fact that in the first half of the 19th century many dramatic works were created (plays by A.S. Griboyedov, A.S. Pushkin, M.Yu. Lermontov, N.V. Gogol), the state of affairs on the Russian dramatic stage continued to remain deplorable. Many works of these named playwrights were persecuted by censors and appeared on the stage many years after their creation.

The appeal of Russian theater workers to Western European drama did not help the situation either. The works of the classics of world drama were not yet well known to the Russian public, and there were often no satisfactory translations of their works. That is why the situation of the Russian drama theater caused concern among writers.

Ostrovsky noted: “Dramatic poetry is closer to the people than all other branches of literature. All other works are written for educated people, and dramas and comedies are written for the whole people... This closeness to the people does not in the least degrade drama, but, on the contrary, multiplies its strength and does not lets it become vulgar and crushed."

He began to write plays, knowing the capital’s theater very well: its repertoire, the composition of the troupe, and acting abilities. This was the time of almost undivided power of melodrama and vaudeville. Gogol aptly said about the properties of that melodrama that it “lies in the most shameless way.” The essence of a soulless, flat and vulgar vaudeville is clearly revealed by the title of one of them, shown at the Maly Theater in 1855: “We came together, got mixed up and parted.”

Ostrovsky created his plays in conscious opposition to the invented world of protective-romantic melodrama and the flat mockery of naturalistic pseudo-realistic vaudeville. His plays radically updated the theatrical repertoire, introduced a democratic principle into it and sharply turned artists towards the burning dilemmas of reality, towards realism.

Ostrovsky's poetic world is only diverse. The researchers were able to count and reveal that in 47 plays - 728 (not counting minor and episodic) good roles for actors of various talents; that all his plays represent a vast canvas about Russian life in 180 acts, the scene of which is Rus' - in its most important turning points over two and a half centuries; that in Ostrovsky’s works people of “various ranks” and morals are represented - and in a wide variety of current manifestations. He created dramatic chronicles, family scenes, disasters, pictures of metropolitan life, and dramatic sketches. His talent is multidimensional - he is a romantic, an everyday writer, a tragedian, and a comedian...

Ostrovsky does not withstand a one-dimensional, one-dimensional approach, therefore behind the brilliant satirical manifestation of talent we see the depth of mental analysis, behind the accurately reproduced everyday viscous life we see narrow lyricism and romance.

Ostrovsky was most concerned about ensuring that all the faces were relevant and psychologically reliable. Without this, they could lose their artistic confidence. He noted: “We are now trying to portray our standards and types, taken from life, as realistically and truthfully as possible, down to the smallest everyday details, and most importantly, we consider the first condition of artistry in the depiction of a given type to be the correct rendering of its type of expression, i.e. language and even the way of speaking, which determines the very tone of the role. Now the stage production (scenery, costumes, makeup) is in place. everyday plays has made great strides and has come a long way in gradually getting closer to the truth.”

The playwright tirelessly repeated that life is richer than all the artist’s fantasies, that a real painter does not compose anything, but strives to understand the complex intricacies of reality. “The playwright does not compose plots,” Ostrovsky said, “all our plots are taken. They are given by life, history, the story of a friend, sometimes a newspaper article. The playwright should not invent what happened; his job is to write how it happened or could have happened. Here is all his work When he calls attention to this side, living people will appear and speak themselves.”

But the depiction of life, based on a clear reproduction of the real, should not be limited only to mechanical reproduction. "Naturality is not the main quality; the main advantage is expressiveness, expression." Therefore, we can safely talk about an integral system of actual, mental and sensory authenticity in the plays of the great playwright. Ostrovsky play playwright

History has left stage interpretations of Ostrovsky's plays that differ in their level. There were undeniable creative fortunes, and there were outright misfortunes caused by this. That the directors forgot about the main thing - about actual (and, as it should be, sensory) authenticity. And this main thing was sometimes revealed in some ordinary and, at first glance, insignificant detail. A relevant example is Katerina's age. And in truth, it matters how old the main character is? One of the greatest figures of the Russian theater, Babochkin, wrote in this regard: “If Katerina is even 30 years old from the stage, then the play will take on a new and unnecessary meaning for us. It is necessary to correctly find her age at 17-18 years old. According to Dobrolyubov, the play catches Katerina at the moment of transition from adolescence to maturity. This is absolutely true and necessary.”

Ostrovsky’s creativity is closely connected with the principles of the “natural school”, which affirms “nature” as the starting point in artistic creativity. It is no coincidence that Dobrolyubov called Ostrovsky’s plays “plays of life.” They seemed to the critic to be a new word in drama; he wrote that Ostrovsky’s plays “are not comedies of intrigue and not actually comedies of manners, but something new that can be given the title “plays of life,” if it were not very broad and therefore not entirely accurate ". Speaking about the uniqueness of Ostrovsky’s dramatic action, Dobrolyubov noted: “We want to say that in his foreground there is always a general life situation that does not depend on any of the characters.”

This “general situation of life” is found in Ostrovsky’s plays in the most daily, ordinary facts of life, in the small configurations of the human soul. Speaking about “the life of this dark kingdom,” which became the main object of depiction in the playwright’s plays, Dobrolyubov noted that “endless enmity reigns between its inhabitants. Everything here is at war.”

To define and artistically reproduce this ongoing war, completely new ways of studying it were required; it was necessary, in the words of Herzen, to introduce the use of the microscope into the moral world. In “Notes of a Zamoskvoretsky Inhabitant” and in “Pictures of Domestic Happiness,” the Ostrovskys for the first time gave a true picture of the “dark kingdom.”

But the faithful portrayal of the life and characters of Zamoskvorechye went beyond the boundaries of only a “physiological” description; the writer did not limit himself only to a faithful external picture of everyday life. He strives to find positive principles in Russian reality, which was initially reflected in the sympathetic portrayal of a “small” person. So, in “Notes of a Zamoskvoretsky Inhabitant,” the downtrodden clerk Ivan Erofeevich sought: “Show me. How bitter I am, how unfortunate I am! Show me in all my outrageousness, and tell them that I am the same person as they are, that I have kind heart, warm soul."

Ostrovsky acted as a continuer of the humanistic tradition Russian literature. Right behind Belinsky Higher artistic aspect Ostrovsky considered realism and nationalism to be artistic. Which are unimaginable both without a sober, critical attitude towards reality, and without the affirmation of a positive popular principle. “The more elegant the work,” the playwright wrote, “the more popular it is, the more of this accusatory element it contains.”

Ostrovsky believed that a writer should not only become close to the people by studying their language, way of life and characters, but also should acquire new theories of art. All this affected Ostrovsky’s views on drama, which, of all types of literature, is closest to the broad democratic strata of the population. Ostrovsky considered comedy a more effective form and recognized in himself the ability to reproduce life in to a greater extent in this form. Meanwhile, Ostrovsky the comedian continued the satirical line of Russian drama, starting with the comedies of the 18th century and ending with the comedies of Griboedov and Gogol.

Due to his closeness to the people, many contemporaries attributed Ostrovsky to the Slavophile camp. But Ostrovsky only for a short time shared common Slavophile opinions, expressed in the idealization of patriarchal forms of Russian life. Ostrovsky later revealed his attitude towards Slavophilism as a specific public phenomenon in a letter to Nekrasov: “You and I are the only two true folk poets, we are the only two who know him, we know how to adore him and feel his needs with our hearts without armchair Westernism and childish Slavophilism. The Slavophiles have done for themselves as tree peasants, and they console themselves with them. You can do all sorts of experiments with the pupae; they don’t require eating.”

Nevertheless, elements of Slavophile aesthetics had some positive impact on Ostrovsky’s work. The playwright awoke an unchanging enthusiasm for folk life, for oral poetry, for folk speech. He tried to find positive principles in Russian life, tried to highlight the good in the character of Russian people. He wrote that “to have the right to correct people, you need to show him that you know him to be good.”

He found reflections of the Russian state character in the past - in turning points in the history of the Russian Federation. The first plans on a historical theme date back to the end of the 40s. It was a comedy "Lisa Patrikeevna", which was based on actions from the era of Boris Godunov. The play remained unfinished, but the very fact of young Ostrovsky’s appeal to history indicated that the playwright made an attempt to find in history the answer to modern problems.

A historical play, in Ostrovsky's opinion, has an undeniable advantage over the most honest historical works. If the historian’s task is to convey “what was,” then “the dramatic poet indicates how it was, taking the viewer to the very place of the action and making him a participant in the action,” noted the playwright in “Note on the State of Dramatic Art in Russian Federation at the current time" (1881).

This expression expresses the very essence of the playwright’s historical and artistic thinking. This position was reflected more clearly in the dramatic chronicle "Kozma Zakharyich Minin, Sukhoruk", built on painstaking research historical monuments, chronicles, folk legends and traditions. In the true poetic picture of the distant past, Ostrovsky was able to find genuine heroes who were ignored by the official historical science and were considered only “material of the past.”

Ostrovsky portrays people as the main driving force history as the main force for the liberation of the homeland. One of the representatives of the people is the zemstvo leader of Nizhny Posad, Kozma Zakharyich Minin, Sukhoruk, who organized the people’s militia. Ostrovsky sees the great significance of the era of unrest in the fact that “the people awakened... the dawn of liberation here in Nizhny spread across all of Russia.” Underline decisive role people in historical events and the portrayal of Minin as a truly state hero caused the rejection of Ostrovsky's dramatic chronicle by official circles and criticism. The patriotic ideas of the dramatic chronicle sounded very modern. The critic Shcherbin wrote, for example, that Ostrovsky’s dramatic chronicle practically does not reflect the spirit of those times, that there are practically no morals in it, that main character seems like a man who has read a lot about the modern poet Nekrasov. Other critics, on the contrary, wanted to create in Minin a predecessor of the zemstvos. “...Now everyone is seized with veche frenzy,” Ostrovsky wrote, “and they want to create a demagogue in Minin. Nothing happened, and I don’t agree to lie.”

Refuting the countless criticisms that Ostrovsky was an ordinary copyist of life, a very impartial “poet without a standard” (as Dostoevsky said), Kholodov writes that “the playwright, obviously, had his own point of view. But this was the position of the playwright, in other words an artist who, by the very nature of his chosen form of art, reveals his attitude to life not specifically, but mediocrely, in the most impartial form." Researchers have demonstrated impressively different forms of expression of the author's "voice", the author's consciousness in Ostrovsky's plays. In most cases, it is not found openly, but in the very principles of organizing material in plays.

The originality of the dramatic action in Ostrovsky's plays determined the interaction different parts in the structure of the whole, namely the extraordinary function of the end, which is always structurally significant: it not so much completes the development of an actual dramatic collision, but rather reveals the author’s awareness of life. Disputes about Ostrovsky, about the connection between the epic and dramatic principles in his works, in one way or another, also affect the dilemma of the end, the functions of which in Ostrovsky’s plays were interpreted differently by critics. Some thought so. That Ostrovsky's ending usually puts the action in slow motion. Thus, a critic of “Russian Notes” wrote that in “The Poor Wife” the end is the 4th act, and not the 5th, which is needed “to determine morals that were not determined in the first 4 acts,” and turns out to be unnecessary for the development of the act , because “the action is already over.” And in this discrepancy, the discrepancy between the “scope of the act” and the definition of morals, the critic saw a violation of the simple laws of dramatic art.

Other critics believed that the end in Ostrovsky's plays in most cases coincides with the denouement and does not slow down the rhythm of the action in the least. To prove this thesis, they usually referred to Dobrolyubov, who noted “the decisive necessity of the fatal end that Katerina has in The Thunderstorm.” But the “fatal end” of the heroine and the end of the work are far from coinciding concepts. Famous expression Pisemsky regarding the last act of “The Poor Wife” (“The last act is written with Shakespeare’s brush”) also cannot serve as the basis for identifying the end and the denouement, because Pisemsky is not talking about architectonics, but about pictures of life, colorfully reproduced by the artist and subsequent in his plays "one after another, like paintings in a panorama."

The action in a dramatic work, which has temporal and spatial limits, is specifically related to the interaction of the initial and final conflict situations; it moves within these boundaries, but is not limited by them. Unlike epic works, the past and future in drama appear in a special form: the prehistory of the heroes in their own specific form cannot be introduced into the structure of the drama (it can only be given in the stories of the heroes themselves), and their next fate only appears in the most general form in the finishing scenes and paintings.

In Ostrovsky’s dramatic works, one can observe how the temporal sequence and concentration of an act are broken: the creator directly points to significant periods of time separating one act from another. But such temporary breaks are found in most cases in Ostrovsky’s chronicles, which pursue the goal of an epic rather than a dramatic playback of life. In dramas and comedies, time intervals between acts help to identify those facets of the characters' morals that can only be revealed in new, changed situations. Broken by a significant time interval, the acts of a dramatic work acquire relative independence and are included in the overall structure of the work as individual steps in a continuously developing action and movement of morals. In some of Ostrovsky's plays ("The Jokers", "Dark Days", "Sin and Failure Live on No One", "In a Lively Place", "The Voivode", "The Abyss", etc.) the isolation of a relatively independent structure of acts is achieved, namely, the fact that in each of them a special list of characters is given.

But even with such a structure of the work, the end cannot be infinitely distant from the climax and denouement; in this case, its organic connection with the main conflict will be disrupted, and the end will gain independence without being properly subordinated to the action of the dramatic work. A more appropriate example of such a structural organization of material is the play "The Abyss", last act which was presented to Chekhov in the form of a “whole play.”

The secret of Ostrovsky's dramatic writing lies not in the one-dimensional properties of human types, but in the desire to create full-blooded human morals, the internal contradictions and struggles of which serve as a massive impulse for the dramatic movement. Tovstonogov perfectly spoke about this feature of Ostrovsky’s creative manner, meaning, namely, Glumov from the comedy “Simplicity is Enough for Every Wise Man,” a character far from flawless: “Why is Glumov charming, although he commits a number of bad actions? After all, if he is unsympathetic to us , then there is no performance. What makes it charming is its hatred of this world, and we internally justify its method of paying it back."

Striving for a comprehensive disclosure of morals, Ostrovsky seems to turn them into different facets, noting the different psychological states of the characters in new “turns” of the action. This feature of Ostrovsky’s dramaturgy was noted by Dobrolyubov, who saw in the 5th act of “The Thunderstorm” the apotheosis of Katerina’s character. The development of Katerina’s sensory state can be conditionally divided into several steps: childhood and all life before marriage - a state of harmony; her zeal for real happiness and love, her spiritual struggle; the time of meetings with Boris is a struggle with the color of feverish happiness; a harbinger of a thunderstorm, a thunderstorm, the apogee of a desperate struggle and death.

The movement of character from the initial conflict situation to the final one, passing through a number of precisely designated mental stages, determined in The Thunderstorm the similarity in the external structure of the first and last acts. Both have a similar beginning - they open with the poetic outpourings of Kuligin. Actions in both acts take place at a similar time of day - in the evening. But the changes in the alignment of opposing forces that led Katerina to a fatal end. They were emphasized by the fact that the action in the first act took place in the moderate glow of the sunset sun, in the last - in the oppressive atmosphere of deepening twilight. The end of the topics created a sense of closure. The incompleteness of the very process of life and the movement of morals, because after the death of Katerina, i.e. after the resolution of the central conflict of the drama, a certain new, albeit weakly expressed, shift in the consciousness of the heroes was discovered (in the words of Tikhon, for example), containing the potential for further conflicts.

And in "The Poor Wife" the end outside represents a certain independent part. The denouement in “The Poor Wife” is not that Marya Andreevna gave her consent to the marriage with Benevolensky, but that she did not give up her own consent. This is the key to solving the difficulty of the end, the function of which can only be realized taking into account the general structure of Ostrovsky’s plays, which become “plays of life.” Speaking of Ostrovsky's endings, we can say that an excellent scene contains more ideas than the whole drama can offer events.

In Ostrovsky's plays, the setting of a certain artistic problem is preserved, which is proven and illustrated by living scenes and paintings. "Not a single act is ready for me until it is written last word of the last act,” the playwright noted, thereby affirming the internal subordination of all the scenes and paintings, scattered at first glance, to the general idea of the work, not limited by the framework of the “tight circle of personal life.”

The faces in Ostrovsky's plays are not based on the principle of “one against the other,” but on the principle of “each against any.” Hence - not only the epic calm of the development of the act and the panoramic coverage of current phenomena, but also the multi-conflict nature of his plays - as a typical reflection of the complexity of human relationships and the impossibility of reducing them to a single clash. The internal drama of life, internal tension gradually became the main object of the image.

The “steep endings” in Ostrovsky’s plays, being structurally located far from the ends, did not eliminate the “longitudes,” as Nekrasov believed, but, on the contrary, contributed to the epic flow of the action, which lasted even after one of his cycles ended. After the climactic tension and denouement, the dramatic action at the end of Ostrovsky's plays seems to be gaining strength again, striving for some new climactic elevations. The action does not end in a denouement, although the final conflict situation undergoes significant changes in comparison with the initial one. From the outside, the end appears open, and the function of the last act is not reduced to an epilogue. The external and internal openness of the end will then become one of the distinctive structural features of psychic drama.

The external and internal openness of the end was later especially clearly reflected in the dramatic works of Chekhov, who did not give ready-made formulas and conclusions. He consciously focused on the “perspective of thoughts” evoked by his work. Due to its own difficulty it corresponded to its character modern reality, so that it leads far, forces the viewer to renounce all “formulas”, re-evaluate and reconsider almost everything that seemed decided.

“Just as in life we are better aware of people if we see the environment in which they live,” Ostrovsky wrote, “so on stage, a truthful environment immediately acquaints us with the position of the characters and makes the derived types more vivid and understandable for the audience.” In everyday life, in the external environment, Ostrovsky looks for additional mental supports to reveal the morals of the characters. This principle of revealing morals brought about more and more new scenes and paintings, so that a feeling of their redundancy was immediately created. But, on the one hand, their purposeful selection made the author’s point of view accessible to the viewer, on the other hand, it emphasized the continuity of the movement of life.

And because new scenes and pictures were introduced even after the denouement of the dramatic conflict had arrived, they themselves provided the opportunity for new turns of action, potentially containing future conflicts and clashes. What happened to Marya Andreevna at the end of “The Poor Wife” can be considered the psychological and situational plot of the drama “The Thunderstorm”. Marya Andreevna marries a hateful man. A difficult life awaits her, because her ideas about her future life are catastrophically inconsistent with Benevolevsky’s dreams. In the drama "The Thunderstorm" the entire backstory of Katerina's marriage is left outside the play and is only outlined in the most general terms in the memoirs of the heroine herself. The creator does not repeat this picture at one point. But in “The Thunderstorm” we see a typical analysis of the consequences of the ending situation of “The Poor Wife.” This conclusion into new areas of analysis is greatly facilitated by the 5th act of “The Poor Wife,” which not only contained the prerequisites for future clashes, but also pointedly outlined them. The structural form of the end in Ostrovsky, which consequently turned out to be unacceptable for some critics, aroused the admiration of others for this very reason. What seemed like a “whole play” capable of living an independent life.

And this connection, the correlation of the conflicting final situations of some works and the initial conflicting situations of others, combined according to the principle of a diptych, allows you to feel life in its continuous epic flow. Ostrovsky turned to such mental turns that, at each moment of their manifestation, thousands of invisible threads were connected together with other similar or close moments. With all this, it turned out to be completely unimportant. That the situational cohesion of the works contradicted the chronological principle. Each new work by Ostrovsky seemed to grow on the basis of what was previously done and at the same time added something, clarified something in this previously done.

This is one of the main features of Ostrovsky’s work. To make sure of this again, let’s take a closer look at the drama “Sin and failure live on no one.” The initial situation in this play is comparable to the final situation in the play "Rich Wives". At the end of the last one, major notes sound: Tsyplunov has found his beloved. He dreams about it. That he will live “cheerfully and joyfully” with Belesova; in Valentina’s beautiful features he sees “childish purity and clarity.” This is exactly where it all began for another hero, Krasnov (“Sin and failure do not live on anyone”), who not only dreamed, but also strived to live “cheerfully and joyfully” with Tatyana. Once again, the initial situation is left outside the play, and the viewer can only guess about it. The play itself begins with “ready-made moments”; it unravels a knot that is typologically comparable to the final outline in the play “Rich Wives.”

The characters in different works by Ostrovsky are psychologically comparable to each other. Chambinago wrote that Ostrovsky subtly and exquisitely refines his own style “according to the mental categories of the characters”: “For each character, male and female, a special language is forged. to conclude that its owner, as a type, is an upcoming development or variation of a type already developed in other plays. This technique opens up inquisitive abilities to understand the mental categories conceived by the creator.” Chambinago's observations on this feature of Ostrovsky's style are directly related not only to the repetition of types in different plays Ostrovsky, and as a result - to a certain situational repetition. Calling the mental analysis in “The Poor Wife” “wrongly narrow,” I.S. Turgenev condemns Ostrovsky's manner of "getting into the soul of each of the faces he made." But Ostrovsky, apparently, had a different idea. He realized that the ability to “climb into the soul” of each of the characters in a chosen mental situation was far from being exhausted, and many years later he would repeat it in “The Dowry.”

Ostrovsky does not limit himself to depicting morality in the only probable situation; he refers to these mores repeatedly. This is facilitated by repeated pictures (for example, thunderstorm scenes in the comedy “The Joker” and in the drama “The Thunderstorm”) and the repeated names and surnames of the characters.

Thus, the funny trilogy about Balzaminov is a three-part construction of similar situations related to Balzaminov’s attempts to find his wife. In the play "Blank Days" we again meet "familiar strangers" - Tit Titych Bruskov, his wife Nastasya Pankratievna, son Andrei Titych, maid Lusha, who first appeared in the comedy "At Someone Else's Feast, a Hangover." We also recognize lawyer Dosuzhev, whom we already met in the play “A Profitable Place.” It is also curious that these individuals in different plays appear in similar roles and act in similar situations. The situational and characterological similarity of Ostrovsky’s different works allows us to talk about the similarity of endings: as a result, the beneficial influence of virtuous characters such as the teacher Ivanov (“At Someone Else’s Feast is a Hangover”), the lawyer Dosuzhev (“Dark Days”), Tit Titych Bruskov not only does not resist, and even contributes to the accomplishment of a good deed - the marriage of the offspring to his beloved girl.

In such endings it is easy to discern a hidden lesson: this is how it should be. The “random and visible unreasonableness of endings” in Ostrovsky’s comedies depended on the material that became the object of the image. “Where can we get rationality when it is not in life itself, as depicted by the creator?” - Dobrolyubov noted.

But this was not and could not be the case in reality, and this became the basis for the dramatic action and the final decision in plays of a catastrophic rather than funny coloring. In the drama "Dowry", for example, this was clearly heard in the final words of the heroine: "It's me myself... I don't complain about anyone, I don't take offense at anyone."

Considering the endings in Ostrovsky's plays, Markov pays increased attention to their stage effectiveness. But from the logic of the researcher’s reasoning it is clear that under stage showiness he intended only bright, external spectacular means of finishing scenes and paintings. A very significant feature of endings in Ostrovsky's plays remains unaccounted for. The playwright makes his works, taking into account the nature of their perception by the viewer. In this way, the dramatic action seems to be transferred to its new high-quality state. The role of translators, “transformers” of a dramatic act, usually makes ends meet, which determines their extraordinary stage effectiveness.

Very often in research papers they say that Ostrovsky anticipated Chekhov’s dramatic technique in almost everything. But this conversation often does not go beyond general statements and premises. However, it is enough to give certain examples of how this provision acquires extraordinary weight. Speaking about polyphony in Chekhov, they usually give an example from the first act of “3 Sisters” about how the Prozorov sisters’ dreams of Moscow are interrupted by the remarks of Chebutykin and Tuzenbach: “The hell with it!” and “Naturally, nonsense!” But we find a similar structure of dramatic dialogue with approximately the same multifunctional and psychological-emotional load much earlier - in Ostrovsky’s “Poor Wife.” Marya Andreevna Nezabudkina is trying to come to terms with her own fate, she hopes that she can make a decent person out of Benevolevsky: “I thought and thought... but do you understand what I came up with?.. it seemed to me that I would then marry him in order to improve him, to make him a decent person." Although here she expresses hesitation: “Isn’t this stupid, Platon Makarych? It’s nothing, huh? Platon Makarych, isn’t it? After all, these are children’s dreams?” The creeping hesitation does not leave her, although she tries to convince herself otherwise. “It seems to me that I will be happy...” she says to her mother, and this phrase is like a spell. But the phrase-incantation is interrupted by a “voice from the crowd”: “The other one, mother, is headstrong, loves to be pleased. This phrase transfers the attention and feelings of the audience to a completely different emotional and semantic sphere.

Ostrovsky was well aware that in modern world life is made up of inconspicuous events and facts that are inconspicuous from the outside. With this awareness of life, Ostrovsky anticipated the dramaturgy of Chekhov, in which everything externally spectacular and significant is fundamentally excluded. In Ostrovsky, the depiction of everyday life becomes the fundamental basis on which dramatic action is built.

The contradiction between the natural law of life and the inexorable law of everyday life, which disfigures the human soul, determines the dramatic action, from which different types of final solutions emerged - from comically comforting to hopelessly tragic. At the end, the deepest socio-psychological analysis of life lasted; at the ends, as if in focal points, all the rays, all the results of observations, converged, finding consolidation in the didactic form of proverbs and sayings.

The depiction of a separate option, in its own meaning and essence, went beyond the boundaries of the personal and acquired character philosophical understanding life. And if it is impossible to fully accept Komissarzhevsky’s idea that Ostrovsky’s life is “brought to the mark,” then with the statement that each image of the playwright “acquires the deepest, eternal, symbolic meaning", it is possible and necessary to agree. Such, for example, is the fate of the merchant wife Katerina, whose love is catastrophically incompatible with the existing principles of life. But even the defenders of Domostroevsky concepts cannot feel relaxed, because the very foundations of this life are collapsing - the life in which " the living envy the dead." Ostrovsky reproduced Russian life in such a state when "everything was turned upside down." In this atmosphere of general decay, only dreamers like Kuligin or teachers Korpelov could still hope to find at least an abstract formula for universal happiness and truth.

Ostrovsky "weaves the golden threads of romanticism into the grayish fabric of everyday life, creating from this combination an amazingly artistic and truthful whole - a realistic drama."

The irreconcilable contradiction between natural law and the laws of everyday life is revealed at various characterological levels - in the poetic parable “The Snow Maiden”, in the comedy “Forest”, in the chronicle “Tushino”, in the social dramas “Dowry”, “The Thunderstorm”, etc. Depending on this, the content and character of the end changes. Central characters intensely do not accept the laws of everyday life. Often, not being exponents of a positive principle, they still look for some new solutions, although not always where they should be found. In their own denial of the established law, they run, sometimes unconsciously, beyond the boundaries of what is permissible, crossing the fatal line of simple rules of human society.

Thus, Krasnov (“Sin and failure lives on anyone”), in affirming his own happiness, his own truth, decisively breaks out of the closed sphere of established life. He stands up for his truth right to the disastrous end.

So, let’s briefly list the features of Ostrovsky’s plays:

All Ostrovsky's plays are deeply realistic. They truly reflect life Russian people mid-19th century, also a history of troubled times.

All of Ostrovsky's plays grew on the basis of what was previously made and were combined according to the principle of a diptych.

The characters in different works by Ostrovsky are psychologically comparable to each other. Ostrovsky does not limit himself to depicting morals in the only probable situation; he refers to these mores repeatedly.

Ostrovsky is the creator of the genre of mental drama. In his plays one can observe not only the external conflict, but also the internal one.

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