greatest masters of the Russian vernacular. To translate his Moscow slang
into the equivalent dialect of New York would be merely to transfer
Broadway associations to the Ilyínka. A translator can only strive to
be colloquial and familiar, giving up the effort to render the varying
atmosphere of the different plays. And Ostróvsky's characters are as
natural as his language. Pig-headed merchants; apprentices, knavish or
honest as the case may be; young girls with a touch of poetry in their
natures, who sober down into kindly housewives; tyrannical serf-owners and
weak-willed sons of noble families: such is the material of which he builds
his entertaining, wholesome, mildly thoughtful dramas. Men and women live
and love, trade and cheat in Ostróvsky as they do in the world around us.
Now and then a murder or a suicide appears in his pages as it does in those
of the daily papers, but hardly more frequently. In him we can study the
life of Russia as he knew it, crude and coarse and at times cruel, yet full
of homely virtue and aspiration. Of his complex panorama the present volume
gives a brief glimpse.

[Footnote 1: Ostróvsky, it may be remarked, has been singularly neglected
by translators from the Russian. The only previous versions of complete
plays in English known to the present writer are "The Storm." by
Constance Garnett (London and Chicago, 1899, and since reprinted), and
"Incompatibility of Temper" and "A Domestic Picture" (in "The Humour of
Russia," by E.L. Voynich, London and New York, 1895).]




A PROTÉGÉE OF THE MISTRESS

SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE IN FOUR PICTURES