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Plays By: Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky (1823-1886) |
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BY ALEXANDER OSTROVSKY
A PROTÉGÉE OF THE MISTRESS
POVERTY IS NO CRIME
SIN AND SORROW ARE COMMON TO ALL
IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR WE'LL SETTLE IT OURSELVES A TRANSLATION FROM THE RUSSIAN, EDITED BY GEORGE RAPALL NOYES 1917
PREFATORY NOTE
The following persons have co operated in preparing the present volume:
Leonard Bacon (verses in "Poverty Is No Crime"), Florence Noyes
(suggestions on the style of all the plays), George Rapall Noyes
(introduction, revision of the translation, and suggestions on the style
of all the plays), Jane W. Robertson ("Poverty Is No Crime"), Minnie Eline
Sadicoff ("Sin and Sorrow Are Common to All"), John Laurence Seymour
("It's a Family Affair We'll Settle It Ourselves" and "A Protégée of the
Mistress"). The system of transliteration for Russian names used in the
book is with very small variations that recommended for "popular" use by
the School of Russian Studies in the University of Liverpool.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION A PROTÉGÉE OF THE MISTRESS POVERTY IS NO CRIME SIN AND SORROW ARE COMMON TO ALL IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR WE'LL SETTLE IT OURSELVES INTRODUCTION
ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH Ostróvsky (1823 86) is the great Russian dramatist
of the central decades of the nineteenth century, of the years when the
realistic school was all powerful in Russian literature, of the period when
Turgénev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy created a literature of prose fiction
that has had no superior in the world's history. His work in the drama
takes its place beside theirs in the novel. Obviously inferior as it is in
certain ways, it yet sheds light on an important side of Russian life that
they left practically untouched. Turgénev and Tolstoy were gentlemen by
birth, and wrote of the fortunes of the Russian nobility or of the peasants
whose villages bordered on the nobles' estates. Dostoyevsky, though not of
this landed proprietor school, still dealt with the nobility, albeit with
its waifs and strays. None of these masters more than touched the Russian
merchants, that homespun moneyed class, crude and coarse, grasping and
mean, without the idealism of their educated neighbors in the cities or the
homely charm of the peasants from whom they themselves sprang, yet gifted
with a rough force and determination not often found among the cultivated
aristocracy. This was the field that Ostróvsky made peculiarly his own. With this merchant class Ostróvsky was familiar from his childhood. Born in
1823, he was the son of a lawyer doing business among the Moscow tradesmen.
After finishing his course at the gymnasium and spending three years at the
University of Moscow, he entered the civil service in 1843 as an employee
of the Court of Conscience in Moscow, from which he transferred two years
later to the Court of Commerce, where he continued until he was discharged
from the service in 1851. Hence both by his home life and by his
professional training he was brought into contact with types such as
Bolshóv and Rizpolozhensky in "It's a Family Affair We'll Settle It
Ourselves." As a boy of seventeen Ostróvsky had already developed a passion for the
theatre. His literary career began in the year 1847, when he read to
a group of Moscow men of letters his first experiments in dramatic
composition. In this same year he printed one scene of "A Family Affair,"
which appeared in complete form three years later, in 1850, and established
its author's reputation as a dramatist of undoubted talent. Unfortunately,
by its mordant but true picture of commercial morals, it aroused against
him the most bitter feelings among the Moscow merchants. Discussion of the
play in the press was prohibited, and representation of it on the stage
was out of the question. It was reprinted only in 1859, and then, at the
instance of the censorship, in an altered form, in which a police
officer appears at the end of the play as a deus ex machina , arrests
Podkhalyúzin, and announces that he will be sent to Siberia... Continue reading book >>
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