SOURCE: "A. N. Ostrovsky's The Thunderstorm: The Dramatization of Conceptual Ambivalence," in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 84, No. 1, January, 1989, pp. 99-110.

In this essay, Peace closely examines the language of The Thunderstorm and concludes that the ambivalence of certain words mirrors the ambiguities of the society depicted in the play.

Aleksandr Ostrovsky's play Groza (The Thunderstorm, 1859) is a classic of the Russian theatre. In its open-air settings, its exploitation of mood at the expense of plot, its use of guitar and song, of quotation and poetic symbol, as well as in the dramatic use of the pause¹ it seems an obvious forerunner of the theatre of Chekhov. Yet the springs of Ostrovsky's drama are different. It is not merely that his material is more clearly ethnographical; the tragedy itself derives directly from the idiosyncrasies of the society he depicts. The play's dramatic tensions are generated by cultural ambiguities...