Thus Ostrovsky’s strength lies in a sedate, rather commonplace realism.  One of the most national of authors, he loses much in translation.[1] His style is racy, smacking of the street or the counting-house; he is one of the 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 Ilyinka.  A translator can only strive to be colloquial and familiar, giving up the effort to render the varying atmosphere of the different plays.  And Ostrovsky’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 Ostrovsky 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:  Ostrovsky, 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 PROTEGEE OF THE MISTRESS

SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE IN FOUR PICTURES

CHARACTERS

Madam ULANBEKOV,[1] an old woman of nearly sixty, tall, thin, with a large nose, and thick, black eyebrows; of an Eastern type of face, with a small mustache.  She is powdered and rouged, and dressed richly in black.  She is owner of two thousand serfs.

[Footnote 1:  The name hints at a Circassian origin and a tyrannical disposition.  Ostrovsky frequently gives to the persons in his plays names that suggest their characteristics.]

Leonid, her son, eighteen years old, very handsome, resembling his mother slightly.  Wears summer dress.  Is studying in Petersburg.

Vasilisa Peregrinovna, a toady of madam ULANBEKOV’S, an old maid of forty.  Scanty hair, parted slantingly, combed high, and held by a large comb.  She is continually smiling with a wily expression, and she suffers from toothache; about her throat is a yellow shawl fastened by a brooch.

Potapych, the old steward.  Tie and vest, white; coat black.  Has an air of importance.