The Storm

The great Russian playwright A. N. Ostrovsky had a gift for depicting life itself so vividly, succinctly, and credibly that you can’t help but believe in the truth of his characters. That’s why his plays still “live” on stage today.

The events of the drama “The Storm” unfold in a provincial town on the bank of the Volga: the air is fresh and nature is beautiful, but the free expanses do not allow the townspeople of Kalyunov to breathe fully. Over personal freedom hangs the authority of the elders— their arbitrariness, hypocrisy, and tyrannical self-will.

In the living, pure soul of Katerina, her own storm rages. She is a captive of two forces: the desire to love and the demands of order and form, set before the heroine by society and the established way of life. The heroine’s tragedy lies in the irresolvability of this conflict.