Biographies) are enormous: closely aligned in his work with the activities of his great teachers Pushkin, Griboedov and Gogol, Ostrovsky also said his word, strong and intelligent. A realist in his writing style and artistic worldview, he gave Russian literature an unusually large variety of pictures and types, snatched from Russian life.
Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky. Educational video
“Reading his works, you are directly amazed by the immense breadth of Russian life, the abundance and diversity of types, characters and positions. As if in a kaleidoscope, Russian people of every possible mental make-up pass before our eyes - here are tyrant merchants, with their downtrodden children and household members, - here are landowners and landowners - from broad Russian natures, wasting their lives, to predatory hoarders, from complacent, pure in heart, to the callous, not knowing any moral restraint, they are replaced by the bureaucratic world, with all its various representatives, starting from the highest steps of the bureaucratic ladder and ending with those who have lost the image and likeness of God, petty drunkards, quarrelsome, - the product of pre-reform courts, then they go simply baseless people, honestly and dishonestly getting by from day to day - all kinds of businessmen, teachers, hangers-on and hangers-on, provincial actors and actresses with the whole world around them.. And along with this passes the distant historical and legendary past of Russia, in the form artistic paintings the life of the Volga daredevils of the 17th century, the formidable Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, the Time of Troubles with the frivolous Dmitry, the cunning Shuisky, the great Nizhny Novgorod Minin, the military boyars and the people of that era,” writes the pre-revolutionary critic Alexandrovsky.
Ostrovsky is one of the most prominent national Russian writers. Having studied to the depths the most conservative layers of Russian life, he was able to consider in this life the good and evil remnants of antiquity. He introduced us more fully than other Russian writers to the psychology and worldview of the Russian person.
Composition
The playwright almost never included political and philosophical problems, facial expressions and gestures, through playing out the details of their costumes and household furnishings. To enhance comic effects the playwright usually introduced minor persons into the plot - relatives, servants, hangers-on, random passers-by - and incidental circumstances of everyday life. Such, for example, are Khlynov’s retinue and the gentleman with a mustache in “Warm Heart,” or Apollo Murzavetsky with his Tamerlane in the comedy “Wolves and Sheep,” or the actor Schastlivtsev with Neschastlivtsev and Paratov in “The Forest” and “Dowry,” etc. The playwright continued to strive to reveal the characters’ characters not only in the course of events, but no less through the peculiarities of their everyday dialogues - “characterological” dialogues, which he aesthetically mastered in “His People...”.
Thus, in the new period of creativity, Ostrovsky emerges as an established master, possessing a complete system of dramatic art. His fame and his social and theatrical connections continue to grow and become more complex. The sheer abundance of plays created in the new period was the result of an ever-increasing demand for Ostrovsky's plays from magazines and theaters. During these years, the playwright not only worked tirelessly, but found the strength to help less gifted and beginning writers, and sometimes actively participate with them in their work. Thus, in the creative collaboration with Ostrovsky, a number of plays were written by N. Solovyov (the best of them are “The Marriage of Belugin” and “Savage”), as well as by P. Nevezhin.
Constantly promoting the production of his plays on the stages of the Moscow Maly and St. Petersburg Alexandria theaters, Ostrovsky was well aware of the state of theatrical affairs, which were mainly under the jurisdiction of the bureaucratic state apparatus, and was bitterly aware of their glaring shortcomings. He saw that he did not depict the noble and bourgeois intelligentsia in their ideological quests, as Herzen, Turgenev, and partly Goncharov did. In his plays, he showed the everyday social life of ordinary representatives of the merchants, bureaucrats, and nobility, life where personal, particularly love, conflicts revealed clashes of family, monetary, and property interests.
But Ostrovsky’s ideological and artistic awareness of these aspects of Russian life had a deep national-historical meaning. Through everyday relations those people who were masters and masters of life, their general social condition was revealed. Just as, according to Chernyshevsky’s apt remark, the cowardly behavior of the young liberal, the hero of Turgenev’s story “Asya,” on a date with a girl was a “symptom of the disease” of all noble liberalism, its political weakness, so the everyday tyranny and predation of merchants, officials, and nobles appeared symptom more terrible disease their complete inability to at least in any way attach national progressive significance to their activities.
This was quite natural and natural in pre-reform period. Then the tyranny, arrogance, and predation of the Voltovs, Vyshnevskys, and Ulanbekovs were a manifestation of the “dark kingdom” of serfdom, already doomed to be scrapped. And Dobrolyubov correctly pointed out that although Ostrovsky’s comedy “cannot provide the key to explaining many of the bitter phenomena depicted in it,” nevertheless, “it can easily lead to many analogous considerations related to everyday life that does not directly concern.” And the critic explained this by the fact that the “types” of tyrants derived by Ostrovsky “often contain not only exclusively merchant or bureaucratic, but also national (i.e., national) features.” In other words, Ostrovsky's plays of 1840-1860. indirectly exposed all the “dark kingdoms” of the autocratic-serf system.
In the post-reform decades, the situation changed. Then “everything turned upside down” and a new, bourgeois system of Russian life gradually began to “fit in.” And the question of how exactly this new system “fit in,” and to what extent the new ruling class, the Russian bourgeoisie, could take part in the struggle for the destruction of the remnants of the “dark kingdom” of serfdom and the entire autocratic landowner system.
Almost twenty new plays by Ostrovsky on modern themes gave a clear negative answer to this fatal question. The playwright, as before, depicted the world of private social, household, family and property relations. Not everything was clear to him himself. general trends their development, and his “lyre” sometimes made not quite the “right sounds” in this regard. But in general, Ostrovsky's plays contained a certain objective orientation. They exposed both the remnants of the old “dark kingdom” of despotism and the newly emerging “dark kingdom” of bourgeois predation, money rush, and the death of all moral values in an atmosphere of general buying and selling. They showed that Russian businessmen and industrialists are not capable of rising to the level of awareness of the interests of the common people. national development that some of them, such as Khlynov and Akhov, are only capable of indulging in crude pleasures, others, like Knurov and Berkutov, can only subordinate everything around to their predatory, “wolfish” interests, and still others, such as Vasilkov or Frol Profits and profit interests are only covered up by external decency and very narrow cultural demands. Ostrovsky's plays, in addition to the plans and intentions of their author, objectively outlined a certain perspective of national development - the prospect of the inevitable destruction of all remnants of the old "dark kingdom" of autocratic-serf despotism, not only without the participation of the bourgeoisie, not only over its head, but along with the destruction of its own predatory "dark kingdom"
The reality depicted in everyday plays Ostrovsky, was a form of life devoid of nationally progressive content, and therefore easily revealed internal comic inconsistency. Ostrovsky dedicated his outstanding dramatic talent to its disclosure. Based on the tradition of Gogol's realistic comedies and stories, rebuilding it in accordance with the new aesthetic demands put forward by the “natural school” of the 1840s and formulated by Belinsky and Herzen, Ostrovsky traced the comic inconsistency of the social and everyday life of the ruling strata of Russian society, delving into the “world details,” looking thread by thread at the “web of daily relationships.” This was the main achievement of the new dramatic style created by Ostrovsky.
Completely connected with the name of A. N. Ostrovsky new page in history Russian theater. This greatest Russian playwright was the first to set himself the task of democratizing the theater, and therefore he brings new themes to the stage, brings out new heroes and creates what can confidently be called the Russian national theater.
Dramaturgy in Russia, of course, had a rich tradition even before Ostrovsky. The audience was familiar with numerous plays from the era of classicism; there was also a realistic tradition, represented by such outstanding works, like “Woe from Wit”, “The Inspector General” and “Marriage” by Gogol. But Ostrovsky enters literature precisely as a writer." natural school“, and therefore the object of his research becomes the life of undistinguished people, the life of the city. Ostrovsky makes the life of the Russian merchants the theme of a serious, “high” comedy; the writer is clearly influenced by Belinsky, and therefore connects the progressive significance of art with its nationality, and notes the importance of the accusatory orientation of literature. Defining the task of artistic creativity, he says: “The public expects from art to invest in a living, elegant form its judgment on life, awaits connection in full images modern vices and shortcomings noticed in the century..."
It is the “trial of life” that becomes decisive artistic principle Ostrovsky's creativity. In the comedy “Our People - Let's Be Numbered,” the playwright ridicules the basics of life of the Russian merchants, showing that people are driven, first of all, by a passion for profit. In the comedy "Poor Bride" great place The theme of property relations between people is occupied, the image of an empty and vulgar nobleman appears. the playwright is trying to show how the environment corrupts a person. The vices of his characters are almost always a consequence not of their personal qualities, but of the environment in which people live.
The theme of “tyranny” occupies a special place in Ostrovsky’s work. The writer brings out images of people whose meaning of life is to suppress the personality of another person. Such are Samson Bolshov, Marfa Kabanova, Dikoy. But the writer, of course, is not interested in the personality of the tyrants themselves. He explores the world in which his heroes live. The heroes of the play “The Thunderstorm” belong to the patriarchal world, and their blood connection with it, their subconscious dependence on it is the hidden spring of the entire action of the play, the spring that forces the heroes to perform mostly “puppet” movements. The author constantly emphasizes their lack of independence. Image system drama almost repeats the social and family model of the patriarchal world. At the center of the narrative, as well as at the center of the patriarchal community, the family and family problems. The dominant of this small world is the eldest in the family, Marfa Ignatievna. Around her, family members are grouped at various distances - daughter, son, daughter-in-law and the almost powerless inhabitants of the house: Glasha and Feklusha. The same “alignment of forces” organizes the entire life of the city: in the center - the wild (and merchants of his level not mentioned in the play), on the periphery - persons of less and less significance, without money and social status. Ostrovsky saw the fundamental incompatibility of the patriarchal world and normal life, the doom of a frozen ideology incapable of renewal. Resisting the impending innovations, displacing it with “all rapidly rushing life,” the patriarchal world generally refuses to notice this life, it creates around itself a special mythologized space in which - the only one - its gloomy, hostile isolation to everything else can be justified. Such a world crushes the individual, and it does not matter who actually carries out this violence. According to Dobrolyubov, the tyrant “is powerless and insignificant in itself; he can be deceived, eliminated, thrown into a hole, finally... But the fact is that with his destruction, tyranny does not disappear.”
Of course, “tyranny” is not the only evil that Ostrovsky sees in his contemporary society. The playwright ridicules the pettiness of the aspirations of many of his contemporaries. Let us remember Misha Balzaminov, who dreams in life only of a blue raincoat, “a gray horse and a racing droshky.” This is how the theme of philistinism arises in plays. The images of the nobles Murzavetsky, Gurmyzhsky, Telyatev are marked with the deepest irony. A passionate dream of sincere human relationships, and not love built on calculation, is the most important feature of the image of Larisa from the play “Dowry”. Ostrovsky always advocates honest and noble relationships between people in the family, society, and life in general.
Ostrovsky always considered theater as a school for educating morals in society, and understood the high responsibility of the artist. Therefore, he strove to depict the truth of life and sincerely wanted his art to be accessible to all people. And Russia will always admire the work of this brilliant playwright. It is no coincidence that the Maly Theater bears the name of A. N. Ostrovsky, a man who devoted his entire life to the Russian stage.
The role of A.N. Ostrovsky in the creation of Russian theater
What is the merit of A.N. Ostrovsky? Why, according to I.A. Goncharov, only after Ostrovsky we could say that we have our own Russian national theater? (Refer to the lesson epigraph)
Yes, there were “The Minor”, “Woe from Wit”, “The Inspector General”, there were plays by Turgenev, A.K. Tolstoy, Sukhovo-Kobylin, but there were not enough of them! Most of the theaters' repertoire consisted of empty vaudevilles and translated melodramas. With the advent of Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky, who devoted all his talent exclusively to drama, the repertoire of theaters changed qualitatively. He alone wrote as many plays as all the Russian classics combined did not write: about fifty! Every season for more than thirty years, theaters received a new play, or even two! Now there was something to play!
Arose new school acting, new theatrical aesthetics, the Ostrovsky Theater appeared, which became the property of all Russian culture!
What determined Ostrovsky’s attention to the theater? The playwright himself answered this question like this: “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 - for the whole people...". Writing for the people, awakening their consciousness, shaping their taste is a responsible task. And Ostrovsky took her seriously. If there is no exemplary theater, the common public may mistake operettas and melodramas, which irritate curiosity and sensitivity, for real art.”
So, let us note the main services of A.N Ostrovsky to the Russian theater.
1) Ostrovsky created the theater repertoire. He wrote 47 original plays and 7 plays in collaboration with young authors. Twenty plays were translated by Ostrovsky from Italian, English, and French.
2) No less important is the genre diversity of his dramaturgy: these are “scenes and pictures” from Moscow life, dramatic chronicles, dramas, comedies, the spring fairy tale “The Snow Maiden”.
3) In his plays, the playwright depicted various classes, characters, professions, he created 547 characters, from the king to the tavern servant, with their inherent characters, habits, and unique speech.
4) Ostrovsky’s plays cover a huge historical period: from the XVII to the XΙX centuries.
5) The action of the plays takes place in landowners' estates, inns and on the banks of the Volga. On the boulevards and on the streets of county towns.
6) Ostrovsky’s heroes - and this is the main thing - are living characters with their own characteristics, manners, with their own destiny, with a living language unique to this hero.
A century and a half has passed since the first play was staged (January 1853; “Don’t Get in Your Own Sleigh”), and the playwright’s name remains on theater posters; performances are performed on many stages around the world.
Interest in Ostrovsky is especially acute in troubled times when a person is looking for answers to the most important questions life: what is happening to us? Why? what are we like? Perhaps it is precisely at such times that a person lacks emotions, passions, and a sense of fullness of life. And we still need what Ostrovsky wrote about: “And a deep sigh for the whole theater, and unfeigned warm tears, hot speeches that would pour straight into the soul.”
The literary life of Russia was stirred up when Ostrovsky's first plays entered it: first in reading, then in magazine publications and, finally, on the stage. Perhaps the largest and most profound critical legacy dedicated to his dramaturgy was left by Ap.A. Grigoriev, a friend and admirer of the writer’s work, and N.A. Dobrolyubov. Dobrolyubov’s article “A Ray of Light in dark kingdom” about the drama “The Thunderstorm” has become well-known and textbook.
Let us turn to the estimates of Ap.A. Grigorieva. An extended article entitled “After Ostrovsky’s “The Thunderstorm”. Letters to Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev” (1860), largely contradicts Dobrolyubov’s opinion and polemicizes with him. The disagreement was fundamental: two critics held different understanding nationalities in literature. Grigoriev considered nationality not so much a reflection in artistic creativity The lives of the working masses, like Dobrolyubov, are as much an expression of the general spirit of the people, regardless of position and class. From Grigoriev’s point of view, Dobrolyubov reduces the complex issues of Ostrovsky’s plays to denouncing tyranny and in general “ dark kingdom”, and the playwright is assigned only the role of a satirist-accuser. But not the “evil humor of a satirist”, but the “naive truth of a folk poet” - this is the strength of Ostrovsky’s talent, as Grigoriev sees it. Grigoriev calls Ostrovsky “a poet who plays in all modes folk life" “The name for this writer, for such a great writer, despite his shortcomings, is not a satirist, but a people’s poet” - this is the main thesis of Ap.A. Grigoriev in polemics with N.A. Dobrolyubov.
The third position, which does not coincide with the two mentioned, was held by D.I. Pisarev. In the article “Motives of Russian Drama” (1864), he completely denies everything positive and bright that A.A. Grigoriev and N.A. Dobrolyubov was seen in the image of Katerina in “The Thunderstorm”. The “realist” Pisarev has a different view: Russian life “does not contain any inclinations of independent renewal,” and only people like V.G. can bring light into it. Belinsky, the type that appeared in the image of Bazarov in “Fathers and Sons” by I.S. Turgenev. Darkness art world Ostrovsky is hopeless.
Finally, let us dwell on the position of the playwright and public figure A.N. Ostrovsky in the context of the struggle in Russian literature between the ideological currents of Russian social thought - Slavophilism and Westernism. The time of Ostrovsky's collaboration with the magazine "Moskvityanin" M.P. Pogodin is often associated with his Slavophile views. But the writer was much broader than these positions. Someone caught a statement from this period, when from his Zamoskvorechye he looked at the Kremlin on the opposite bank and said: “Why were these pagodas built here?” (it would seem clearly “Western”) also did not in any way reflect his true aspirations. Ostrovsky was neither a Westerner nor a Slavophile. The playwright’s powerful, original, folk talent blossomed during the period of formation and rise of Russian realistic art. The genius of P.I. awakened Tchaikovsky; arose at the turn of the 1850-1860s XIX century creative community of Russian composers " Mighty bunch"; Russian realistic painting flourished: they created I.E. Repin, V.G. Perov, I. N. Kramskoy and others major artists- this is how intense life was in full swing for the rich in talents of fine art and musical art second half XIX centuries. The portrait of A. N. Ostrovsky belongs to the brush of V. G. Perov, N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov creates an opera based on the fairy tale “The Snow Maiden”. A.N. Ostrovsky entered the world of Russian art naturally and fully.
As for the theater itself, the playwright himself, assessing artistic life 1840s - the time of his first literary quests, speaks of a great variety of ideological movements and artistic interests, many circles, but notes that everyone was united by a common, craze for theater. Writers of the 1840s who belonged to the natural school, everyday life writers and essayists (the first collection of the natural school was called “Physiology of St. Petersburg,” 1844-1845) included an article by V.G. in the second part. Belinsky "Alexandrinsky Theater". The theater was perceived as a place where classes of society collided “to get a good look at each other.” And this theater was waiting for a playwright of such caliber, which manifested itself in A.N. Ostrovsky. The significance of Ostrovsky’s work for Russian literature is extremely great: he truly was the successor of the Gogol tradition and the founder of a new, national Russian theater, without which the emergence of A.P.’s dramaturgy would have been impossible. Chekhov. Second half XIX century V European literature did not produce a single playwright comparable in scale to A. N. Ostrovsky. The development of European literature proceeded differently. French romanticism V. Hugo, Georges Sand, critical realism Stendhal, P. Merimee, O. de Balzac, then the work of G. Flaubert, the English critical realism of C. Dickens, W. Thackeray, C. Bronte paved the way not for drama, but for epic, first of all, for the novel, and (not so noticeably) lyrics. The issues, characters, plots, depiction of Russian character and Russian life in Ostrovsky’s plays are so nationally unique, so understandable and in tune with the Russian reader and viewer that the playwright did not have such an impact on the world literary process, like Chekhov later. And in many ways the reason for this was the language of Ostrovsky’s plays: it turned out to be impossible to translate them, preserving the essence of the original, to convey that special and special thing with which he fascinates the viewer.
Source (abbreviated): Michalskaya, A.K. Literature: A basic level of: Grade 10. At 2 p.m. Part 1: study. allowance / A.K. Mikhalskaya, O.N. Zaitseva. - M.: Bustard, 2018
