SOURCE: "Realm of Darkness," in Selected Philosophical Essays, translated by J. Fineberg, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1956, pp. 218-44.

In the following excerpt from an analysis of Ostrovsky's plays first published in 1859, Dobrolyubov reviews contemporary critical responses and praises the playwright's psychological insight and realistic portrayal of nineteenth-century middle-class Russian society.

No modern Russian writer has met with such a strange fate in his literary career as Ostrovsky.⁶³ His first work (A Picture of Domestic Bliss) passed entirely unnoticed; the journal did not say a single word either of praise or blame of the author. Three years later Ostrovsky's second work appeared: Our Own Folks—We'll Settle It Among Ourselves; everybody greeted the author as an entirely new man in literature and immediately recognized him as a writer of extraordinary talent, as the best representative of the dramatic art in Russian literature since Gogol.⁶⁴ But owing to one...