"We pay no heed to the ideal… We pay heed to trifle and trifle…" The issue of moral and ethical evaluation of Alexander Ostrovsky's works in literary criticism of the second half of the 19th century

Abstract

In terms of newspaper-magazine reviews of Alexander Ostrovsky's works, published in the 1850s-70s, the problem of artistic text literary-critical evaluation is examined in the article. The author of the article assumes that artistic text evaluation is directly related to ideology and to the main request of time in terms of which, the text receives this assessment. According to Georgiy Fridlender, one of the most important tasks that Russian public life of the second half of the 19th century set for literature was to create an image of a viable and still positive hero. Alexander Ostrovsky in his work was oriented to answers to the most pressing social requests. Nevertheless, his works often did not satisfy his contemporaries, and sometimes insulted their moral feelings. An attempt to trace how the negative moral and ethical assessment of the playwright's creative work was conditioned and the role that newspaper and magazine criticism played in shaping the literary process is undertaken in the article.