Overview

"This book explores the curious anonymity in the West of Russia's foremost mid-nineteenth-century playwright, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovsky. It seeks explanations for this obscurity and, in turn, sheds further light on the wider relationship between Russian and English literature and the factors that affect the cross-cultural transfer of literary works. Part One examines Ostrovsky's own affinity with Britain, exploring his familiarity with English literature and discussing his visit to London in 1862. Part Two addresses the association in reverse, through a detailed analysis of the British reception of Ostrovsky's works from the earliest critical articles (1868) to the major productions of the late 1990s. It provides the first comprehensive performance history of Ostrovsky's drama on the British stage, and discusses how the style of productions and the critical response to them has shaped critical reaction to his plays and the frequency of their production in Britain. This study concludes that the British reception of Ostrovsky's work belies traditional explanations for his obscurity in the West - namely the difficulty of translating his plays and their peculiarly 'Russian' nature. It offers instead a number of other factors, among them, his anomalous position as the sole nineteenth-century Russian writer of note who was purely a dramatist, and the often detrimental response to his most well-known drama, ""The Storm [Groza]"". It further discusses the effect of the British admiration for Chekhov on the response in Britain to other Russian drama."

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...tells the whole story of Ostrovsky's relationship with Britain, including his fascination for Shakespeare... (Prof. A. D. P. Briggs University of Birmingham) Ostrovsky is significant for the British theatre because he helps us to understand more deeply what it is we love in those other Russian works, and why we love them. (Prof. Robert Leach Edinburgh University)

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