Alexander Ostrovsky - Private Life

Private Life

In the mid-1840s, Ostrovsky was an attractive young man ("pale, tall and lean", with "soft blonde hair opening up a tall forehead", as a biographer describes him), impressionable and romantically inclined. In the late 1847 he met Agafia Ivanovna, a lower middle-class 24 year old woman who lived in the Yauza neighborhood, and became close to her. No photograph of the woman remained and even her surname was unknown (sister's name was Natalya Ivanovna Belenkova, but whether that was her husband's second name was not known too). According to biographer Lakshin, there was a strong possibility that he parents were ex-serfs, then most certainly her surname would be Ivanova.

Ostrovsky's first ever visit to Schelykovo was inspired by his father who hoped to make the son forget about Agafia Ivanovna. Yet in the summer of 1849 Ostrovsky refused to go to the estate and, while the family was away, took Agafia into the house as his civil wife. Marriage was out of question and Agafia (Gasha, as she was known) never demanded that. Ostrovsky apparently wasn't regarding this union as a lasting one, but it proved otherwise and Gasha stayed with him until her death in 1867. Poorly educated, but exceptionally talented and intelligent woman, she had deep knowledge of lower classes' life and certainly exerted some influence upon the dramatist.

While writing The Storm Ostrovsky spent time nearby Moscow, in villages Davydkovo and Ivankovo, places of actors' gatherings. It was there that he became close to Lyubov Nikulina-Kositskaya, whom they were friends with from the times of Sledge. For several years in Ostrovsky-Kositskaya relations there's been coldness caused by the Gorev incident. Then she wrote him a letter asking for a benefice play and he gave her the role of Nadya in The Protégée. The new director of Imperial theatres Saburov disapproved of this (having nothing against the play as such) then it was banned altogether and Kositskaya has got nothing. But in the Autumn of 1859 Ostrovsky was working on The Storm having Kositskaya in mind as Katerina (although, as Lakshin noted, there was as much of Varvara in her volatile, impulsive and mostly light-hearted persona). Now, in 1859, they fell in love. Only Kositskaya's letters remained, but from the follows he was madly in love, promising to "elevate" her "up a pedestal", she, although responsive, still much more guarded, having all kinds of reservations, and reminding her lover of his duties towards his civil wife. After two years of uncertainty which caused great anguish (to Agafia Ivanovna in particular, whose behaviour though was most dignified which caused Ostrovsky's friends treat her with even more respect and admiration) Ostrovsky proposed and Kositskaya refused. It transpired that by the time she's been in love with her young fan Sokolov, a flamboyant merchant's son whi first squandered his own money, then started spending hers. This doomed romance was so painful and humiliating to Ostrovsky that for the rest of his life he was trying to keep his romance firmly shut off his memory.

In the early 1860s Ostrovsky met Maria Vasilievna Vasilieva, the Maly Theater actress whom he became close with (judging by hints in letters addressed to a friend, Burdin) in 1864. In the New Year Eve Maria Vasilievna gave birth to a child, Alexander. On August 1866 the second boy was born, Mikhail. In the end of 1867 daughter Maria was born. On February 12, 1869, Ostrovsky and Vasilieva were married, in church. Boasting impressive looks in her youth, his wife quickly revealed her character, being passionate, jealous and very demanding.