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."