p Let us now consider this. It is easy to see that the last few lines were aimed against the critics from the Westerners’ camp who blamed Ostrovsky for showing such undoubted defenders of the old days as Rusakov and Borodkin in the play Stick to Your Own Sleigh in a favourable light. And it goes without saying that the enlightened critic who considers it impermissible 1o ascribe good features to this or that individual representative of stagnation is naive in the extreme. However, the question now arises as to whether the critics from the Westerners’ camp really did ascribe to Ostrovsky views which he never actually held. In other words, is it true that Ostrovsky was neither a Slavophil nor a Westerner?

p As far as we know now, this is not the case. Originally Ostrovsky sympathised strongly with Westernism. On the basis of information supplied to him by T. I. Filippov, N. Barsukov maintains that Otechestvenniye Zapiski,^^195^^ for which Belinsky was working at the time, was the greatest authority for the future dramatist. His negative attitude to old, Muscovite, Russia became so extreme that he found the view of tiie Kremlin with its cathedrals quite intolerable. "What have all these pagodas been built for here?" he once asked T. I. Filippov. But then his views changed; his sympathies moved over to the side of the Slavophils. N. Barsukov says that this happened mainly under the influence of the well-known actor P. M. Sadovsky and T. I. Filippov. But he says this on the basis of testimony from tin; selfsame T. I. Filippov. Therefore a certain scepticism is perfectly permissible here: we can assume that there were more profound reasons that led Ostrovsky to change his way of thinking. But this is of no importance to us here. The fact is that Ostrovsky had assimilated the views of the so-called young editorial board of the Moskuityanin, of which T. 1. Filippov was a member, and had evidently once again formed very strong sympathies. To quote T. I. Filippov, "during a friendly binge" the young dramatist exclaimed arrogantly one day: "We can do anything together with Terti and Prov.  [612•*  We shall turn back Peter’s cause!"  [612•**  It need hardly be said that they did not turn back Peter’s cause. But there can be no doubt that Ostrovsky’s sympathies strongly affected his literary activity. His first works, A Family Picture and It’s a Family Affair—We’ll Settle It Ourselves (The Bankrupt), should definitely be attributed H the "Naturalist school" which was created in the forties by young writers of the Westerner camp under the very strong influence of Gogol. When he began to sympathise with Slavophilism, these works began to seem one-sided to him—which was fully in keeping with the Slavophils’ aesthetics. He himself admitted this in a letter to M. P. Pogodin of September 30, 1853. "The view of life in ray first comedy,” he says there, "seems young and harsh to me.” Now he no longer demands of himself that which he demanded earlier when he was a Westerner. Now he repeals the Slavophils’ usual views on the task of the writer, in general, and the dramatist, in particular. "Let the Russian be glad, rather than grieve, when he sees himself on the stage,” wo read in the same letter. "Reformers will be found even without us. In order to have the right to reform a people without offending it, one must show it that one^knows its good points as well; and this is what I am engaged in now, combining the sublime with the comic. 613 The first example was the Sleigh and I am finishing the second."  [613•* 

p The Sleigh means the play Stick to Your Own Sleigh and the "second example" was the comedy Poverty Is No Crime. This admission of Ostrovsky’s is most instructive. Dobrolyubov thought that our dramatist was neither a Slavophil nor a Westerner, at least in his writings. But, as we see, in the plays mentioned here he was “engaged” in portraying the "good points" that he knew about the people. And at that time he regarded these "good points" through Slavophil spectacles. Thus it follows that the critics from 1 he Westerner camp were not as wrong in their comments on the main idea of these works as Dobrolyubov thought. And Ostrovsky’s opinion of the comedy It’s a Family Affair—We’ll Settle It Ourselves coincides perfectly with the opinion of it expressed a few years later by the Slavophil critic of Russkaya Beseda. This critic found that the comedy It’s a Family Affair "is, of_acourse, a work that bears the imprint of an unusual talent, but it was conceived under the strong influence of a negative view of Russian life ... and in this respect, regrettable though it may be, one must attribute it to the consequences of the Naturalist trend”. And Ostrovsky regarded the view which he expressed in It’s a Family A-ffair as young and harsh. This is the same thing, because the “harshness” lay, in his opinion, in the one-sided and precisely negative portrayal of Russian life. Thus, in discussing this comedy the Slavophil critic was simply repeating later what Ostrovsky himself had said about it. And this is understandable: Ostrovsky detected the “harshness” in his comedy only because he accepted the aesthetic ideas of the Slavophils.

p It is interesting that the critics from the Westerner camp who wrote about Ostrovsky included, inter alia, Dobrolyubov’s teacher, Chornyshevsky. Dobrolyubov does not refer anywhere to his dis-’ agreement with the latter on this question, but nevertheless disagreement there was, and very considerable disagreement at thai. In his review of the comedy Poverty Is No Crime, published in the fifth issue of the Sovremennik for 1854, Chernyshevsky says:

p “We should have said a great deal more about Poverty Is No Crime, but our article is too long as it is. Let us leave that which remains to be said about the false idealisation of obsolete forms for another occasion. In his last two works Mr. Ostrovsky lapsed into cloying embellishment of that which cannot and should not be embellished. The result was weak and artificial works.... It is in truth that the strength of talent lies; a false tendency destroys the strongest talent. And works based on a false idea are often weak even in the purely literary respect."  [613•** 

Dobrolyubov’s general literary views quite coincided with those of Chernyshevsky. I shall show below that the views of both were rooted in Feuerbach’s teaching on reality. But in this case Chernyshevsky is saying precisely what Dobrolyubov denies, i.e., that a certain way of thinking “(a false tendency”) left too perceptible an imprint on some of Ostrovsky’s works. What is the reason for this unexpected divergence of opinion? The conditions of the time. The articles "The Realm of Darkness" appeared five years after Ghernyshevsky’s review of the comedy Poverty Is No Crime. During that five-year interval a great deal changed in Ostrovsky’s literary activity. His sympathy for Slavophil ideas reached its height in the play Live Not as You Like which was written after Poverty Is No Crime. But then it began to wane. In any case Ostrovsky, as we can see, had already ceased to regard as compulsory the particular type of "combining the sublime with the comic" which had indeed marred Poverty Is No Crime and the Sleigh strongly. This turn for the better could not fail to delight the editorial board of the Sovremennik, which appreciated Ostrovsky’s outstanding artistic talent at once. The selfsame Chernyshevsky, who had been so critical of the play Poverty Is No Crime, added in the same article that, in his opinion, the author of the play had injured his literary reputation but not yet destroyed his fine talent: "It can still appear as fresh and strong as before, if Mr. Ostrovsky will leave the miry path which has led him to Poverty Is No Crime."  [614•*  And when the play Easy Earnings appeared, Chernyshevsky outlined its content briefly but with great sympathy in his Notes on Journals. He said there that in its strong and noble direction it reminded one of the play to which Ostrovsky primarily owes his fame, the comedy It’s a Family Affair—We’ll Settle It Ourselves.  [614•**  There is not a word in this outline of Ostrovsky’s new play about his earlier errors; here Chernyshevsky was evidently following the rule: "let bygones be bygones”. And it is quite understandable that the editorial board of the Sovremennik did not deviate from this rule when Dobrolyubov was writing his articles on "The Realm of Darkness" and when Ostrovsky was becoming more and more imbued with the mood of the progressive section of Russian society of the day. But whereas this rule gives a perfectly satisfactory explanation of the reticence about Ostrovsky’s former errors, it is not enough to explain the denial of them by Dobrolyubov. What was the reason for the latter? I can see only one explanation of it. The point of view from which Dobrolyubov regarded fiction, the point of view of "real criticism”, was so abstract that the question which had not so long ago provoked a heated dispute between the Slavophils and 615 the Westerners, along which path would Russia develop: the West European path or its own, Russian, “unique” path, lost almost all significance for him. True, Chernyshevsky held the same point of view entirely, but for him this question retained its interest up to the last. But it must be remembered that Chernyshevsky too by no means exhibited the same ardour with respect to it that we find in the works of the Westerners of the forties. He said that of the elements that made up the system of the Slavophil way of thinking "many are positively identical to the ideas which science has attained or to which historical experience in Western Europe has led the best people".  [615•*  He did not close his eyes to the Slavophils’ theoretical mistakes. But, at least at the beginning of his literary activity, he readily avoided them by saying that "there is something more important in life than abstract ideas".  [615•**  His negative attitude to the Slavophils was greatly mitigated by his agreement with them on such practical questions of Russian life as, for example, that of the land commune. Moreover Chernyshevsky was eight years older than Dobrolyubov; the decisive period for his intellectual development was nearer to "the period of the forties" and therefore a more important role could be played in his world outlook by elements which he inherited from this period and which were not of any practical interest to his younger followers. I shall now explain this using the example of Dobrolyubov.