Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky (Russian: Александр Николаевич Островский; 12 April [O.S. 31 March] 1823 – 14 June [O.S. 2 June] 1886) was a Russian playwright, generally considered the greatest representative of the Russian realistic period. The author of 47 original plays, Ostrovsky "almost single-handedly created a Russian national repertoire." His dramas are among the most widely read and frequently performed stage pieces in Russia.
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 Court of Consciousness 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.
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 (Russian: Московский городской листок, lit. 'Moscow City Paper') 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".
The so-called "Ostrovsky circle" united many of his non-literary friends too, among them actor Prov Sadovsky, musician and folklorist Terty Filippov, merchant Ivan Shanin, shoe-maker Sergey Volkov, teacher Dyakov and Ioasaf Zheleznov, a Cossack from the Urals, all attracted by the idea of Russian national revival (narodnost). It was then that Ostrovsky, initially a Westernizer, started to drift towards the Slavophiles. In the Rostopchina Salon he first met the young Ivan Turgenev and the veteran Russian mason Yury Bartenev. By this time Ostrovsky was living with Agafya Ivanova, his civil wife, whom he first met and became close to in the late 1840s.
Finally approved by censors, The Bankrupt appeared in the March issue of Moskvityanin under the new title It's a Family Affair-We'll Settle It Ourselves (Свои люди – сочтёмся!). The play, portraying the rude, ignorant and smug merchants of Moscow, made Ostrovsky instantly famous in the city. It was promptly banned from being produced by Imperial Theatres (the ban would be lifted in ten years) and even prompted Russian secret police to put the author under close surveillance. Ostrovsky tried his hand as a Shakespeare translator, but his 1852 version of The Taming of the Shrew (Russian: Укрощение злой жены, lit. 'The Taming of an Evil Wife') was banned as well: the censor Nordstrom found more than one hundred "rude" words and phrases in it and declared the translation "true to the spirit of the original, quite indecent and totally unacceptable for the Russian theatre". Ostrovsky found solace in work for Moskvityanin and made a debut there as a critic, providing a positive review of The Muff by Aleksey Pisemsky.
Ostrovsky's second play was the one-act piece The Young Man's Morning (Утро молодого человека, 1850), partly based upon his early play The Legal Case (Исковое прошение; another act of the latter would later be developed into The Picture of Family Happiness). The follow-up, a psychological piece in the style of Alfred de Musset called The Surprise Case (Неожиданный случай, 1850), appeared in the Kometa almanac. Mikhail Pogodin was unimpressed and Sovremennik's Ivan Panaev responded with a caustic review, parodying what he saw as its characters' vapid, insubstantial dialogues. Ostrovsky's second full-length play, The Poor Bride (Бедная невеста), appeared in the No.4, 1852 issue of Moskvityanin. 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.