“One scene follows another, and all of them are so commonplace, such an everyday matter!—and yet, out of them, a terrible drama has quite imperceptibly grown into being. You could affirm that it is not a comedy being played before you, but life itself unrolled before your eyes—as if the author had simply opened a wall and shown you what is going on inside this or that house.” In these just words one of our critics, Skabitchévskiy, has described Ostróvskiy’s work.
In his dramas Ostróvskiy introduced an immense variety of characters taken from all classes of Russian life; but he once for all abandoned the old romantic division of human types into “good” and “bad” ones. In real life these two divisions are blended together and merge into another; and while even now an English dramatic author cannot conceive a drama without “the villain,” Ostróvskiy never felt the need of introducing that conventional personage. Nor did he feel the need of resorting to the conventional rules of “dramatic conflict.” To quote once more from the same critic:
“There is no possibility of bringing his comedies under some general principle, such as a struggle of duty against inclination, or a collision of passions which calls forth a fatal result, or an antagonism between good and evil, or between progress and ignorance. His comedies represent the most varied human relations. Just as we find it in life, men stand in these comedies in different obligatory relations towards each other, which relations have, of course, their origin in the past; and when these men have been brought together, conflicts necessarily arise between them, out of these very relations. As to the outcome of the conflict, it is, as a rule quite unforeseen, and often depends, as usually happens in real life, upon mere accidents.”
Like Ibsen, Ostróvskiy sometimes will not even undertake to say how the drama will end.
And finally, Ostróvskiy, notwithstanding the pessimism of all his contemporaries—the writers of the forties—was not a pessimist. Even amidst the most terrible conflicts depicted in his dramas he retained the sense of the joy of life and of the unavoidable fatality of many of the miseries of life. He never recoiled before painting the darker aspects of the human turmoil, and he has given a most repulsive collection of family-despots from the old merchant class, followed by a collection of still more repulsive types from the class of industrial “promoters.” But in one way or another he managed either to show that there are better influences at work, or, at least, to suggest the possible triumph of some better element. He thus avoided falling into the pessimism which characterised his contemporaries, and he had nothing of the hysterical turn of mind which we find in some of his modern followers. Even at moments when, in some one of his dramas, life all round wears the gloomiest aspect (as, for instance, in Sin and Misfortune may visit everyone, which is a page from peasant life as realistically dark, but better suited for the stage, than Tolstóy’s Power of Darkness), even then a gleam of hope appears, at least, in the contemplation of nature, if nothing else remains to redeem the gloominess of human folly.
And yet, there is one thing—and a very important one—which stands in the way of Ostróvskiy’s occupying in international dramatic literature the high position to which his powerful dramatic talent entitled him, and being recognised as one of the great dramatists of our century. The dramatic conflicts which we find in his dramas are all of the simpler sort. There are none of the more tragical problems and entanglements which the complicated nature of the educated man of our own times and the different aspects of the great social questions are giving birth to in the conflicts arising now in every stratum and class of society. But it must also be said that the dramatist who can treat these modern problems of life in the same masterly way in which the Moscow writer has treated the simpler problems which he saw in his own surroundings, is yet to come.
HISTORICAL DRAMAS—A. K. TOLSTÓY.
At a later period of his life Ostróvskiy turned to historical drama, which he wrote in excellent blank verse. But, like Shakespeare’s plays from English history, and Púshkin’s Borís Godunóff, they have more the character of dramatised chronicles than of dramas properly speaking. They belong too much to the domain of the epic, and the dramatic interest is too often sacrificed to the desire of introducing historical colouring.
The same is true, though in a lesser degree, of the historical dramas of Count Alexéi Konstantínovitch Tolstóy (1817-1875). A. K. Tolstóy was above all a poet; but he also wrote a historical novel from the times of John the Terrible, Prince Serébryanyi, which had a very great success, partly because in it for the first time censorship had permitted fiction to deal with the half-mad Tsar who played the part of the Louis XI. of the Russian Monarchy, but especially on account of its real qualities as a historical novel. He also tried his talent in a dramatic poem, Don Juan, much inferior, however, to Púshkin’s drama dealing with the same subject; but his main work was a trilogy of three tragedies from the times of John the Terrible and the imposter Demetrius: The Death of John the Terrible, The Tsar Theódor Ivánovitch, and Borís Godunóff.
These three tragedies have a considerable value; in each the situation of the hero is really highly dramatic, and treated in a most impressive way, while the settings in the palaces of the old Moscow Tsars are extremely decorative and impressive in their sumptuous originality. But in all three tragedies the development of the dramatic element suffers from the intrusion of the epical descriptive element, and the characters are either not quite correct historically (Borís Godunóff is deprived of his rougher traits in favour of a certain quiet idealism which was a personal feature of the author), or they do not represent that entireness of character which we are accustomed to find in Shakespeare’s dramas. Of course, the tragedies of Tolstóy’s are extremely far from the romanticism of the dramas of Victor Hugo; they are, all things considered, realistic dramas; but in the framing of the human characters some romanticism is felt still, and this is especially evident in the construction of the character of John the Terrible.