Realism, in the sense which already has been indicated several times in these pages--that is, a realistic description of characters and events, subservient to ideal aims--is the distinctive feature of all Ostróvskiy’s dramas. As in the novels of Turguéneff, the simplicity of his plots is striking. But you see life--true life with all its pettinesses--developing before you, and out of these petty details grows insensibly the plot. “One scene follows another, and all of them are so commonplace, such an everyday matter!--and yet, out of them, a terrible drama has quite imperceptibly grown into being. You could affirm that it is not a comedy being played before you, but life itself unrolled before your eyes--as if the author had simply opened a wall and shown you what is going on inside this or that house.” In these just words one of our critics, Skabitchévskiy, has described Ostróvskiy’s work. In his dramas Ostróvskiy introduced an immense variety of characters taken from all classes of Russian life; but he once for all abandoned the old romantic division of human types into “good” and “bad” ones. In real life these two divisions are blended together and merge into another; and while even now an English dramatic author cannot conceive a drama without “the villain,” Ostróvskiy never felt the need of introducing that conventional personage. Nor did he feel the need of resorting to the conventional rules of “dramatic conflict.” To quote once more from the same critic: “There is no possibility of bringing his comedies under some general principle, such as a struggle of duty against inclination, or a collision of passions which calls forth a fatal result, or an antagonism between good and evil, or between progress and ignorance. His comedies represent the most varied human relations. Just as we find it in life, men stand in these comedies in different obligatory relations towards each other, which relations have, of course, their origin in the past; and when these men have been brought together, conflicts necessarily arise between them, out of these very relations. As to the outcome of the conflict, it is, as a rule quite unforeseen, and often depends, as usually happens in real life, upon mere accidents.” Like Ibsen, Ostróvskiy sometimes will not even undertake to say how the drama will end.