Produced by Keren Vergon, Lazar Liveanu and PG Distributed Proofreaders
1917
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 styleof all the plays), Jane W. Robertson ("Poverty Is No Crime"), Minnie ElineSadicoff ("Sin and Sorrow Are Common to All"), John Laurence Seymour("It's a Family Affair—We'll Settle It Ourselves" and "A Protégée of theMistress"). The system of transliteration for Russian names used in thebook is with very small variations that recommended for "popular" use bythe School of Russian Studies in the University of Liverpool.
ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH Ostróvsky (1823-86) is the great Russian dramatistof the central decades of the nineteenth century, of the years when therealistic school was all-powerful in Russian literature, of the period whenTurgénev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy created a literature of prose fictionthat has had no superior in the world's history. His work in the dramatakes its place beside theirs in the novel. Obviously inferior as it is incertain ways, it yet sheds light on an important side of Russian life thatthey left practically untouched. Turgénev and Tolstoy were gentlemen bybirth, and wrote of the fortunes of the Russian nobility or of the peasantswhose villages bordered on the nobles' estates. Dostoyevsky, though not ofthis landed-proprietor school, still dealt with the nobility, albeit withits waifs and strays. None of these masters more than touched the Russianmerchants, that homespun moneyed class, crude and coarse, grasping andmean, without the idealism of their educated neighbors in the cities or thehomely charm of the peasants from whom they themselves sprang, yet giftedwith a rough force and determination not often found among the cultivatedaristocracy. This was the field that Ostróvsky made peculiarly his own.
With this merchant class Ostróvsky was familiar from his childhood. Born in1823, 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 theUniversity of Moscow, he entered the civil service in 1843 as an employeeof the Court of Conscience in Moscow, from which he transferred two yearslater to the Court of Commerce, where he continued until he was dischargedfrom the service in 1851. Hence both by his home life and by hisprofessional training he was brought into contact with types such asBolshóv and Rizpolozhensky in "It's a Family Affair—We'll Settle ItOurselves."
As a boy of seventeen Ostróvsky had already developed a passion for thetheatre. His literary career began in the year 1847, when he rea