corresponds with the true condition of Russian society? Take history,
think of our life, look about you, everywhere you will find justification
of our words. This is not the place to launch out into historical
investigation; it is enough to point out that our history up to the most
recent times has not fostered among us the development of a respect for
equity, has not created any solid guarantees for personal rights, and has
left a wide field to arbitrary tyranny and caprice." This criticism of
Dobroliubov's was written in 1860, the date of the play; but we have only
to look back at the internal history of Russia for the last thirty years
to see that it too "has not created any solid guarantees for personal
rights, and has left a wide field to arbitrary tyranny and caprice." And
here is Ostrovsky's peculiar merit, that he has in his various dramas
penetrated deeper than any other of the great Russian authors into one of
the most fundamental qualities of the Russian nature--its innate tendency
to arbitrary power, oppression, despotism. Nobody has drawn so powerfully,
so truly, so incisively as he, the type of the 'samodour' or 'bully,' a
type that plays a leading part in every strata of Russian life. From
Turgenev we learn more of the reverse side of the Russian character, its
lack of will, tendency to weakness, dreaminess and passivity: and it is
this aspect that the English find it so hard to understand, when they
compare the characters in the great Russian novels with their own idea of
Russia's formidable power. The people and the nation do not seem to
correspond. But the riddle may be read in the coexistence of Russia's
internal weakness and misery along with her huge force, and the immense
role she fills as a civilising power. In "The Storm" we have all the
contradictory elements: a life strongly organised, yet weak within;
strength and passivity, despotism and fatalism side by side.

The author of "The Storm," Alexander Ostrovsky (born in Moscow 1823, died
1886), is acknowledged to be the greatest of the Russian dramatists. He