April 12, 1823

Alexander Ostrovsky (April 12, 1823 to June 14, 1886 ) was a 19th century Russian dramatist. His significance is summarized in this paragraph by George Noyes (in the volume for which he is listed as editor: Plays By Alexander Ostrovsky (1917))

Alexander Nikola Yevtch Ostrovsky (1823-86) is the great Russian dramatist of the central decades of the nineteenth century, of the years when the realistic school was all powerful in Russian literature, of the period when Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy created a literature of prose fiction that has had no superior in the world's history. His work in the drama takes its place beside theirs in the novel. Obviously inferior as it is in certain ways, it yet sheds light on an important side of Russian life that they left practically untouched. Turgenev and Tolstoy were gentlemen by birth, and wrote of the fortunes of the Russian nobility or of the peasants whose villages bordered on the nobles' estates. Dostoyevsky, though not of this landed-proprietor school, still dealt with the nobility, albeit with its waifs and strays. None of these masters more than touched the Russian merchants, that homespun moneyed class, crude and coarse, grasping and mean, without the idealism of their educated neighbors in the cities or the homely charm of the peasants from whom they themselves sprang, yet gifted with a rough force and determination not often found among the cultivated aristocracy. This was the field that Ostrovsky made peculiarly his own.

In this same volume we find a proverb: from the play Sin and Sorrow Are Common to All:
[Krasnov]...Our Russian way is: husband and dog in the yard, and wife and cat in the house.

The other plays in English in this edition are:

Protegee of the Mistress
Poverty Is No Crime
It's A Family Affair—We'll Settle It Ourselves
In 1899 Constance Garnett translated Ostrovsky's The Storm, a task Doris Lessing duplicated in 1966.

Ostrorvsky is said to have captured the Slavophile heart of Russian society and that this makes translating him especially difficult. This may explain the 1997 production of an Ostrovsky play titled Life Is no Bed of Roses. A critic described this play as portraying "the games of power and humiliation that are played between people with wealth and those without it."

The original Russian title would read: literally, Not All Is Shrovetide to the Cat. This is apparently the play sometimes referred to as A Cat Has Not Always Carnival.

The mother of Ostovsky's children would have understood this proverb I suspect. They never married because she was from the lower classes, but he lived openly with her for all her adult life. A cat has not always carnival.