Few can boast the same weighty contribution to the development of the Russian theater as the great playwright Alexander Ostrovsky. This amazing man had a strong personality and amazing talent, which brought him great fame during his lifetime. His plays and in our days are regularly put on the stage of Russian theaters.
Ostrovsky had thirteen brothers and sisters, but half of them died in childhood. The future playwright was the eldest child in the family. At the age of eight young Alexander lost his mother. His father remarried, and his stepmother surrounded his children with genuine care. On his father’s insistence, Ostrovsky went to the gymnasium to study for a lawyer, but was forced to stop his studies after failing the Roman law exam. For more than twenty years, the playwright cohabited a civil marriage with the peasant Agafya, as he could not marry her because of the public condemnation of such a union. For a long time Ostrovsky had problems with censorship – he simply did not want to publish his plays.
In many plays of Ostrovsky, court officials are shown in a rather unattractive light. This is a reflection of the personal experience of the playwright, who, on his father’s order, had to work in court for some time. Ostrovsky’s work was first published in 1847. The comedy “The Insolvent Debtor”, subsequently revised and dubbed “His People, We Are Numbered,” was recognized by Gogol, but it also caused the ban on further playwright’s publications. Ostrovsky spoke seven languages, not counting Russian, including Latin and ancient Greek. It was the great playwright who, through his translations, introduced many people to the work of Shakespeare. The main third-party passion Ostrovsky throughout life was fishing.
Contemporaries recalled that any, even the mildest criticism, the playwright perceived extremely painful and sometimes even aggressive. Creative activity Ostrovsky lasted more than forty years. The theater school founded by Ostrovsky was further improved by Bulgakov. In total, 49 plays were written by the great playwright. Ostrovsky died of a heart attack right at work, while writing his 50th play in a row.
