Russian life that
they left practically untouched. Turgenev and Tolstoy were gentlemen by
birth, and wrote of the fortunes of the Russian nobility or of the peasants
whose villages bordered on the nobles' estates. Dostoyevsky, though not of
this landed-proprietor school, still dealt with the nobility, albeit with
its waifs and strays. None of these masters more than touched the Russian
merchants, that homespun moneyed class, crude and coarse, grasping and
mean, without the idealism of their educated neighbors in the cities or the
homely charm of the peasants from whom they themselves sprang, yet gifted
with a rough force and determination not often found among the cultivated
aristocracy. This was the field that Ostrovsky made peculiarly his own.

With this merchant class Ostrovsky was familiar from his childhood. Born in
1823, he was the son of a lawyer doing business among the Moscow tradesmen.
After finishing his course at the gymnasium and spending three years at the
University of Moscow, he entered the civil service in 1843 as an employee
of the Court of Conscience in Moscow, from which he transferred two years
later to the Court of Commerce, where he continued until he was discharged
from the service in 1851. Hence both by his home life and by his
professional training he was brought into contact with types such as
Bolshov and Rizpolozhensky in "It's a Family Affair--We'll Settle It
Ourselves."

As a boy of seventeen Ostrovsky had already developed a passion for the
theatre. His literary career began in the year 1847, when he read to
a group of Moscow men of letters his first experiments in dramatic
composition. In this same year he printed one scene of "A Family Affair,"
which appeared in complete form three years later, in 1850, and established
its author's reputation as a dramatist of undoubted talent. Unfortunately,
by its mordant but true picture of commercial morals, it aroused against
him the most bitter feelings among the Moscow merchants. Discussion of the
play in the press was prohibited, and representation of it on the stage
was out of the question. It was reprinted only in 1859, and then, at the
instance of the censorship, in an altered form, in which a police
officer appears at the end of the play as a _deus ex machina_, arrests
Podkhalyuzin, and announces that he will be sent to Siberia. In this
mangled version the play was acted in 1861; in its original text it did not
appear on the stage until 1881