Early years Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky was born on 12 April 1823, in the
Zamoskvorechye region of
Moscow, to Nikolai Fyodorovich Ostrovsky, a lawyer who had received a seminary education. Nikolai's ancestors came from the village Ostrov in the Nerekhta region of the
Kostroma Governorate (north-east of Moscow), hence their surname. Later Nikolai Ostrovsky became a high-ranking state official and as such in 1839 received a
title of nobility with corresponding privileges. His first wife ( Alexander's mother), Lyubov Ivanovna Savvina, came from a clergyman's family. For some time the family lived in a rented flat in the Zamoskvorechye. Then Nikolai Fyodorovich bought a plot of land in
Monetchiki and built a house on it. In the early 1826 the family moved there. Alexander had three siblings, sister Natalya, and brothers Mikhail and Sergey. The former was his major companion in their childhood years, and from her and her girl-friends the boy learned such unmanly things as sewing and knitting. Nanny Avdotya Kutuzova played an important role in his upbringing too. Ostrovsky insisted that the fairy-tales she told him inspired one of his most popular plays,
The Snow Maiden. In 1831 Ostrovsky's mother died. In 1834 Nikolay Fyodorovich sold the Monetchiki house and bought two new ones, on Zhitnaya street. Two years later he married Baroness Emilia Andreyevna von Tessin, a noblewoman of Russian and Swedish descent. She rearranged the patriarchal ways of the Zamoskvorechye house, making it look more like a European mansion, and made sure that her stepchildren would receive high-quality education. Emilia Andreyevna had four children of her own, one of whom, Pyotr Ostrovsky, later became Alexander's good friend. She knew several European languages, played the piano and taught Alexander to read music. In 1840 Ostrovsky graduated from the First Moscow
Gymnasium and enrolled at
Moscow University to study law. His tutors there included such prominent scholars of the time as professors Pyotr Redkin,
Timofey Granovsky and
Mikhail Pogodin. Soon the family moved into the house on the
Yauza River owned by Ivan Tessin, Alexander's step-mother's brother. At this time Ostrovsky started to write poetry, sketches and occasionally plays (none of the latter have survived), and by the end of his second year he had become a theatre enthusiast, spending many an evening at the Moscow
Petrovsky Theatre. In May 1843 Ostrovsky failed the
Roman Law exams and left the university to join the Moscow as a
clerk. In 1845 his father had him transferred to the Moscow Commercial Court, which specialised mostly in cases related to bribery and corruption. "If not for such an unpleasant occasion there wouldn't have been such a play as
A Profitable Position," Ostrovsky noted later. In 1851 Ostrovsky made a decision to devote himself entirely to literature and theatre.
Literary career In the mid-1840s Ostrovsky wrote numerous sketches and scenes inspired by the activities of the Zamoskvorechye merchant community and made a draft for the play called
The Bankrupt. An extract from this comedy ("Scenes from the comedy
The Bankrupt") was published in the No.7, 1847, issue of
Moskovsky Gorodskoi Listok () as a collaboration with actor and a minor dramatist Dmitry Gorev who had co-written one scene of it. Also in
Listok appeared (as unsigned) "Pictures of Moscow Life" and "The Picture of a Family Happiness", two sets of scenes which were later published in
Sovremennik (No. 4, 1856) under the title
The Family Picture (Семейная картина). Ostrovsky regarded it as his first original work and the starting point of his literary career. On 14 February 1847 Ostrovsky made his public debut in the house of the university professor and literary critic
Stepan Shevyryov, with the readings from "The Pictures". The audience, which included
Aleksey Khomyakov and several members of the
Listok staff, responded positively: both Shevyryov and Khomyakov speaking of the emergence of a new major talent in Russian literature. On 27 August 1851,
The Picture of Family Happiness (which reportedly the approval of (among others)
Nikolai Gogol) was banned from being produced by Imperial Theatres. "Judging by these scenes what the Moscow merchants only do is cheat customers and drink while their wives are cheating on them", censor M. Gedeonov wrote. In December 1849
The Bankrupt was finished. Ostrovsky's first audience was his university friend
Alexey Pisemsky, who greeted it rapturously. The actor
Prov Sadovsky, who described the comedy as a 'revelation', started to recite fragments of it, notably in the
Countess Rostopchina's salon, frequented by the young authors like
Boris Almazov,
Nikolai Berg,
Lev Mei and
Yevgeny Edelson, Ostrovsky's friends from his university years. All of them soon accepted Mikhail Pogodin's invitation and joined
Moskvityanin to form there the so-called "youth faction".
Apollon Grigoriev, the informal leader of the team, started to actively promote Ostrovsky as a driving force of what he saw as the "new, authentic Russian literature". Censors gave their permission only after six months, but mangled the text in such a way that Ostrovsky lost all interest and asked the Maly inspector Alexey Verstovsky to forget about it and wait for the publication of the next play which he'd been working on already. The play had nothing to do with the radical ideas propagated by
Sovremennik, but by this time, according to Lakshin, Ostrovsky had developed a different approach to his art: "Would it be worthwhile to wage wars against bribe-takers when they are only part of the way of life where the corruption serves for a hidden mechanism? Wouldn't it be more intriguing to try and get under the skin of these people, learn how their special kind of morality works, expose the logic which helps them find excuses for themselves?" Ostrovsky totally rejected didacticism. "For a statement of truth to be effective and make people wiser, it has to be filtered through the soul of the highest quality, the soul of an artist," he argued. In London Ostrovsky visited
Alexander Hertzen, although this fact became known only years later through the memoirs of his companion and personal secretary
Ivan Gorbunov. In August 1862 he returned to Russia full of new ideas and by the end of the year finished
Sin and Sorrow Are Common to All (Грех да беда на кого не живёт). Published by the Dostoyevsky brothers-owned
Vremya magazine, it was a drama of strong characters, based on a real-life story related to the author by one of his merchant friends. In Autumn 1863 Ostrovsky finished
Difficult Days (Тяжёлые дни), a sequel to the
Hangover, telling the story of backward Russian provinces where ignorance rules. It was followed by
Jokers (Шутники, 1864) and
The Deep (Пучина, 1865), the latter concluding the Zamoskvorechye cycle. One of Ostrovsky's experimental pieces (more a novel than a play, fashioned after the recently translated
Thirty Years by
Victor Ducange), it suffered from heavy-handed censorial treatment and had little success on stage. After Nikolai Ostrovsky's death, Alexander with brother Mikhail bought the estate in 1867 from their stepmother. "At last I'll be able... to break free from the soul-rending theatre slavery which devoured the best years of my life," he wrote in a letter. He built a creamery, set up a garden, and even though soon it became clear that this new way of life won't make him any richer, it was here that Ostrovsky spent his happiest days, receiving guests and enjoying bouts of inspiration for new plays. He called Shchelykovo "the Kostroma Switzerland" and insisted that not even in Italy had he ever seen such beauty. Taking cues from his 'worst enemy'
operetta which came from France to conquer Petersburg and drive Ostrovsky's plays from theatre repertoires, he wrote "Ivan-tsarevich", an ironic fairytale, its Russian folklore plot mixed with modern parody and farce. The lack of finance forced Ostrovsky to cancel the project, but the idea was soon revived in
Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man, a pamphlet written in contemporary language but set in Moscow of the old times. came out, reflecting the author's interest in (and wariness of, too) the new emerging class of capitalist entrepreneurs, 'practical people', as they have become known in Russia. Ostrovsky himself was very impractical, even if he liked to pretend otherwise. "Publishers are crooks and they drink my blood," he used to say. "Nekrasov openly laughed at me and called me an altruist. He said no man of literature would sell their work as cheaply as I do," complained Ostrovsky in a letter. Nekrasov (who paid him 200 rubles per act which was considered a good price) tried to help Ostrovsky in the business of publishing. "But it just happened so that in the end [Ostrovsky] was always losing money... and was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy," Lakshin wrote. Each of his new plays was sent simultaneously to Maly Theatre and
Otechestvennye Zapiski. Occasionally the publication preceded the premiere: such was the case with
The Forest (Лес, 1871), the story of actors travelling from
Vologda to
Kerch which satirised the backwardness of the Russian province of the time.
Without a Dowry (Бесприданница, 1878) was based on a criminal case dealing with a murder from jealousy, which was going on in the Kineshma court where Ostrovsky had once worked and which he since then often visited. It went unnoticed and only in retrospect is regarded as a precursor to
Chekhov's similar line of work. Written especially for the young Alexandrinka actress
Maria Savina, it had more success in Petersburg than in Moscow. Revived by
Vera Komissarzhevskaya after the author's death, the play, according to Lakshin, "remains a timeless reminder of how deep the chasm between the two sides of success, the artistic and the public one, can be."
Last years In the autumn of 1883 Ostrovsky made a trip down to the
Caucasus. The lavish reception he received in
Georgia moved him to tears. Refreshed and full of new hopes, Ostrovsky came back and promptly finished
Guilty Without Fault (Без вины виноватые). Back home, though, he found himself in financial trouble again. "I am on the brink, there is no way out: Maria Vasilyevna is ill, all those worries have broken me totally, my heart falters and I often faint. None of the theatres pays me and I am in debt," he wrote to Fyodor Burdin. On 2 June Ostrovsky died in his home of
angina pectoris while at his desk translating
William Shakespeare's
Antony and Cleopatra. Alexander Ostrovsky was buried in the local cemetery in Nikolo-Berezhki. Only close relatives, a couple of old friends, dramatist Nikolai Kropachev and A.A. Maykov (his colleague in the Theatre department and
Apollon Maykov's nephew) were present. The ceremony was modest and humble. Brother Mikhail's plans to move the coffin to the Moscow
Novodevichye Cemetery remained unfulfilled. "Ostrovsky's life was hard, full of strife, inner suffering and hard work. But he lived it as he wrote about it, being loyal to simple ideals: native land, pure feelings, goodness in people and the source of both happiness and torment in his life, theatre," Lakshin wrote. ==Private life==