AN. Ostrovsky and Carlo Gozzi

The paper studies A.N. Ostrovsky's attitude to the artistic heritage of the Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806). Interest in Gozzi is determined by the proximity of the Russian playwright's aesthetics and poetics to the Italian author. This paper considers the question of the nature of Ostrovsky's development of Gozzi's dramatic poetics, going back to the theater dell'arte and appearing in fairy tales and plays such as "True Love". The work is based on Gozzi's works preserved in Ostrovsky's book collection, marks made in the books, the playwright's correspondence with his contemporaries. Ostrovsky's book collection has two editions of works by Gozzi: 1) Gozzi, C. (1801-1803) Opere edite ed inedite. Vols 1-14. Venezia: stamp. Di G. Zanardi; 2) Gozzi, C. (1865) Theatre fiabesque. Trad. pour la premiere fois par A. Royer. Paris: M. Levy fr. In the book in French there are 5 fiaba plays: "The Raven", "The Stag King", "Turandot", "Zobeide" and "The Green Bird". Two volumes of the Italian edition have Ostrovsky's marks: in the first volume he highlighted the lines in the play "The Stag King", ("Il Re Cervo") representing a scene of fantastic imagination: the stone statue grimaces revealing the voiced lie by its actions, and in the fourteenth volume in the table of contents of the collection he underlined the titles of all plays. The author of the paper date Ostrovsky's interest in Gozzi to the second half of the 1860s, the time he was working on "Prince Ivan" and searched for artistic forms inherent to the theatrical world of Gozzi. They have a similar life-affirming tone of works imbued with folk humor, fun, parody. Ostrovsky's play is close to Gozzi's tales in using the genre of folk improvisation comedy, the combination of reality and fiction, prose and poetic forms, "transformation". Continued relations can be seen in "The Snow Maiden" and in the play "Labor Bread", associated with the translation of "True Love". There is no fantastic element in the play, but there are favorite heroes of commedia dell'arte: Tartalia is a wealthy innkeeper, Truffaldino is the servant of Don Ferdinando, Brighella is the servant of Count Otavio and Sergeant Pantalone: there is a combination of poems and prose, the funny and the touching, the comic and the tragic. The main connecting line of commedia dell'arte and "True Love" is the theme of the faithful, all-conquering love of a woman. Ostrovsky's work on this Gozzi's comedy shows his adoption of psychologism combined with national characters manifested in the use of the types of theater dell'arte. Gozzi's works were of double interest for Ostrovsky: Gozzi as the creator of the theatrical fairy tale and Gozzi as the opponent of Goldoni's theatrical reform. This is evidenced by Ostrovsky's translation of "Ingenuous Disquisition and Sincere History of My Ten Tales for the Theatre". For Ostrovsky, the art of creating folk types of national heroes the Italian playwrights objectively shared came to the fore. Gozzi's works attracted Ostrovsky's attention not only by their characterological national character, he saw them as as a way to create the festive repertoire of the Russian scene, in which the presentiment of a new time took place.

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