Alexander Ostrovsky's A Profitable Position

I've recently been caught up trying to catch up with theater.  To this end, I've been building my collection of plays, both Russian and non-Russian.  I've read or reread much of Shakespeare, especially the tragedies, and spent some time on August Wilson and other modern playwrights.  With respect to this blog, I've posted recently on Chekhov and Platonov and stumbled on a few other Russian playwrights.  One glaring omission in my reading has been Alexander Ostrovsky.  I know little about either the man or his works, but finally decided to do something about this omission by reading Ostrovsky's A Profitable Position.

At first, I found the language of this mid-19th century play to be a little too formal, stiff, and dated.  It's themes seemed modern, but the language and structure seemed trapped between modern and pre-modern sensibilities.  However, by the time I had finished the play I was completely enthralled with the importance of the play's themes, the modernity of its conflicts, and the incredible tension that had developed between its characters.  A modern reader can't help but be struck by the fact that Ostrovsky's play prefigures Turganev's novel, Father's and Sons.  The conflict between a corrupt but successful uncle and a noble but impoverished nephew is a powerful dramatic engine.  The nephew strives to leverage youth, education, and idealism, against his uncle's experience, cynical wisdom, and venality.

The almost mythological power of the father-son conflict is supplemented by the author's critique of traditional roles.  Here, the author makes a sophisticated attempt to link societal corruption in the public sphere with societal corruption in the private sphere.  If men are tempted to steal in the public sphere, it is largely because they are expected to use stolen funds to provide consumer goods to females in the private sphere.  The critique is redolent of Engels' critique of bourgeois marriage.  Like Engels, Ostrovsky suggests that the ethics of marriage often resemble the ethics of prostitution.  The most impressive component of Ostrovsky's critique--which never completely releases women from a dependent gender role--is that he demonstrates the extent to which both men and women replicate the ideology of prostitution.  Young girls ask their husbands to buy them things to adore themselves in polite society, but their mothers teach them to do so.  And men seem only too happy to purchase the love and respect of their brides, as for example when the old male lead of the play, Vyshnevsky, showers gifts on his young bride in order to convince her to marry him, and remain intimate with him, despite her understandable disinterest in him.

The play's ending is optimistic.  Vshnevsky is publicly shamed, prosecuted for his venality, and ultimately suffers a stroke.  His foil, the youthful Zhadov, stumbles, but recovers his dignity, and decides that all of his philosophical training should be put into practice at any cost.   The optimism seems a little sappy to the modern ear.  However, its dramatic effect is heightened by the author's sympathy for the old Russia.  While the author knows corruption is wrong, he understands why even good characters, like the protagonist Zhadov, are drawn to it.  Modern readers may also see a hint of revolutionary tragedy in the whole affair.  While Russia's youth would continue to oppose ideological purity to Ancien Regime corruption, the cure would turn out to be worth than the disease.

Friedrich Engels: The Boy Wonder

Adam Kirsch’s review of Tristam Hunt’s new book, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, makes the book seem readable and timely. If the Soviet experience will one day be deemed important and fashionable again, Marxism has never quite went out of style. Varieties of Marxism—the New Left, Cultural Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, etc.—retain a strong presence in academia even today. But whether Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have garnered as much scrutiny as the theories they espoused is another question.

And how valuable are their biographies? What Hunt finds most interesting about Engels is the dualism of his personality—on the one hand, he was a Manchester capitalist who enjoyed almost every aspect of bourgeois life, and on the other, he was a radical who advocated for violent revolt and remained the dedicated devotee of Karl Marx all his life. One thing the book does for readers is carry him or her back to the worst abuses of the British industrial revolution. Engels’ hypocrisy aside (and the reviewer makes far too much of it), he uncovered some of the very worst aspects of unfettered capitalism in his famous treatise on the subject, The Condition of the English Working Class in England.

The work was journalistic and empirical rather than abstract or metaphysical. The reviewer takes a few shots at Engels. He thinks that Engels’ revolutionary stance missed the important fact that English liberalism was already addressing the problems he raised in his report. Indeed, much of Engels’ materials were drawn from parliamentary white papers or inquiries. Moreover, Kirsch thinks Engels was—however charmingly—hypocritical insofar as he waited for the end of the bourgeois world even as he enjoyed that world by going on wine walking tours and fox hunts. But one has to study men like Engels who were willing to prophesy apocalypse and revolution even as they maintained their place in the middle class.

It’s men like these who lie behind the success of any revolution. A ruling class expects the bottom rungs of society to be disgruntled; it doesn’t expect its factory owners and other close allies to lose all willingness to collaborate with it. The French monarchy was in trouble when nobles like Lafayette became disenchanted with it. And the Russian monarchy was similarly endangered when men like Lenin’s brother—son of a government functionary—decided to kill the czar.