Considered by many to have been his country's greatest dramatist and the founder of its national theater, Aleksandr Ostrovsky belongs to the nineteenth-century Russian Realist tradition along with novelists Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. In contrast to those writers' aristocratic, educated, and intellectual heroes confronting vexing philosophical questions, Ostrovsky's plays present merchant and lower-class urban dwellers, largely uneducated and living common lives untouched by European culture.

Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovsky was born on 31 March 1823, in the region of Moscow called Zamoskvorech'e (meaning "beyond the Moscow River"). His father, Nikolai Fedorovich Ostrovsky, a graduate of the Kostroma Seminary and the Moscow Spiritual Academy, chose a career as a civil servant and worked in the Moscow City Courts. His mother, Liubov' Ivanovna (Savvina) Ostrovskaia, the daughter of a communion-bread maker, was the widow of a sexton. Ostrovsky was her third child, born after his two older brothers had...