Four Plays

Plays - A Protégée of the Mistress;
- Poverty Is No Crime; - Sin and
Sorrow Are Common to All; - It's
a Family Affair--We'll Settle It
Ourselves

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Title: Plays A Protégée of the Mistress; Poverty Is No Crime; Sin and
Sorrow Are Common to All; It's a Family Affair--We'll Settle It
Ourselves
Author: Alexander Ostrovsky
Release Date: January 15, 2004 [EBook #10722]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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PLAYS

BY
ALEXANDER OSTROVSKY
A PROTÉGÉE OF THE MISTRESS POVERTY IS NO CRIME SIN
AND SORROW ARE COMMON TO ALL IT'S A FAMILY
AFFAIR--WE'LL SETTLE IT OURSELVES

A TRANSLATION FROM THE RUSSIAN, EDITED BY
GEORGE RAPALL NOYES

1917

PREFATORY NOTE
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 style of
all the plays), Jane W. Robertson ("Poverty Is No Crime"), Minnie
Eline Sadicoff ("Sin and Sorrow Are Common to All"), John Laurence
Seymour ("It's a Family Affair--We'll Settle It Ourselves" and "A
Protégée of the Mistress"). The system of transliteration for Russian
names used in the book is with very small variations that recommended
for "popular" use by the School of Russian Studies in the University of
Liverpool.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
A PROTÉGÉE OF THE MISTRESS
POVERTY IS NO CRIME
SIN AND SORROW ARE COMMON TO ALL
IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR--WE'LL SETTLE IT OURSELVES

INTRODUCTION
ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH Ostróvsky (1823-86) is the great
Russian dramatist of the central decades of the nineteenth century, of
the years when the realistic school was all-powerful in Russian

literature, of the period when Turgénev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy
created a literature of prose fiction that has had no superior in the
world's history. His work in the drama takes its place beside theirs in
the novel. Obviously inferior as it is in certain ways, it yet sheds light
on an important side of Russian life that they left practically untouched.
Turgénev and Tolstoy were gentlemen by birth, and wrote of the
fortunes of the Russian nobility or of the peasants whose villages
bordered on the nobles' estates. Dostoyevsky, though not of this
landed-proprietor school, still dealt with the nobility, albeit with its
waifs and strays. None of these masters more than touched the Russian
merchants, that homespun moneyed class, crude and coarse, grasping
and mean, without the idealism of their educated neighbors in the cities
or the homely charm of the peasants from whom they themselves
sprang, yet gifted with a rough force and determination not often found
among the cultivated aristocracy. This was the field that Ostróvsky
made peculiarly his own.
With this merchant class Ostróvsky was familiar from his childhood.
Born in 1823, 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 the University of Moscow, he entered the civil
service in 1843 as an employee of the Court of Conscience in Moscow,
from which he transferred two years later to the Court of Commerce,
where he continued until he was discharged from the service in 1851.
Hence both by his home life and by his professional training he was
brought into contact with types such as Bolshóv and Rizpolozhensky in
"It's a Family Affair--We'll Settle It Ourselves."
As a boy of seventeen Ostróvsky had already developed a passion for
the theatre. His literary career began in the year 1847, when he read to
a group of Moscow men of letters his first experiments in dramatic
composition. In this same year he printed one scene of "A Family
Affair," which appeared in complete form three years later, in 1850,
and established its author's reputation as a dramatist of undoubted talent.
Unfortunately, by its mordant but true picture of commercial morals, it
aroused against him the most bitter feelings among the Moscow
merchants. Discussion of the play in the press was prohibited, and
representation of it on the stage was out of the question. It was
reprinted only in 1859, and then, at the instance of the censorship, in an

altered form, in which a police officer appears at the end of the play as
a _deus ex machina_, arrests Podkhalyúzin, and announces that he will
be sent to Siberia. In this