Alexander Ostrovsky - Biography

Biography

Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky was born on April 12, 1823, in the Zamoskvorechye region of Moscow, one of four children in the family of Nikolai Fyodorovich Ostrovsky, a lawyer who received religious education. Apparently, the latter's ancestors have come from the village called Ostrov in Nerekhta region of Kostroma governorate, hence the surname. Later Nikolai Ostrovsky became a high-ranked state official and as such in 1839 received the nobility title and the corresponding privileges. His first wife and Alexander's mother Lyubov Ivanovna Savvina came from a clergyman's family. For some time the family lived in a rented flat in Zamoskvorechye, in the house of deacon Maksimov. Then Nikolai Fyodorovich bought himself a plot of land in Monetchiki and built a house on it. In the early 1826 the family moved there.

Lyubov Ivanovna was giving birth to a child almost each year. Their first two children died, Alexander was the third (and the first one to survive), after him there were six more, of which three survived: sister Natalya, brothers Mikhail and Sergey. Alexander played mostly with Natalya and her girl friends who taught him such unmanly things as sewing and knitting. Nanny Avdotya Kutuzova certainly had a role in his upbringing. Ostrovsky insisted it was fairytales she's told him that formed the foundation for Snegurochka play. His first tutor was Sergey Gilyarov, a distant relative who appeared in their house in 1829. In 1831 when Ostrovsky was eight his mother died in labours and father had to take it upon himself bringing his children up. He saw little of them, spending most of his time in the offices, but on the other hand the family's wealth grew. In 1834 he sold the house in Monetchiki and bought two new houses on Zhitnaya street.

In 1836 Nikolai Fyodorovich married Baroness Emilia von Tessin, a noble woman of Russian and Swedish descent. She totally rearranged the patriarchal ways of their Zamoskvorechye house, making it look more like a nobility mansion. She also did a lot to provide her stepchildren with high quality education. Emilia Andreevna had four children of her own (four more died), one of whom, Pyotr Ostrovsky, later became a friend of Alexander. She played piano, knew several European languages and was trying to teach all of this to her children. It was due to her that Ostrovsky learned to read music and developed a good ear which later helped him a lot when he proved able to write down folk songs he heard while travelling and send them down to composers Chaikovsky, Kashperov and Serov.

In 1840 Ostrovsky graduated from the First Moscow Gymnasium and then studied law at the Moscow State University (1840–1843) where liberal views prevailed and many prominent scholars of the time lectured, incliding professors P.G.Redkin (whose main idea was that freedom of individual should be at the basis of law), T.N.Granovsky and Mikhail Pogodin. As a student Ostrovsky moved with his family to Yauza banks, to one of the houses owned by Ivan Tessin, Emilia's brother. Nikolai Ostrovsky bought there five houses and built three new ones. Alexander now found himself a proud owner of his own carriage to take him to the lectures. It was at this time that Ostrovsky started to write I(experimenting in different genres, writing poetry, sketches and only occasionally plays, none of which remained) and by the end of his second year became a theatre fan, spending many an evening in Moscow's Petrovsky theatre (as the Moscow Imperial Theatre then was known). On May 6, 1843 at the examination of the Roman law Ostrovsky got 1/5 from professor Krylov, left the law faculty and, on his father's insistence in September 1843 joined the Moscow Court of Consciousness as a clerk. In 1845 he was transferred to the Commercial Court where his father once worked and where cases related to bribery and corruption were most common. "If not for such a trouble that I've found myself in, there wouldn't have been A Profitable Position," Ostrovsky was later saying. In 1851 Ostrovsky he it to devote himself to literature and theater.