RUSSIAN CRITICISM AND SOVIET LITERARY STUDIES ON EPIC DRAMA BY A.N. OSTROVSKY

The article overviews the wide range of Russian criticism of the XIXth century and the Soviet literary research to define the ways A.N. Ostrovsky’s talent was understood. The article focuses on the epic character of his plays that has become for the critics a stumbling block on the way of acknowledging the greatness of the playwright’s talent. The article analyses the opinion on the matter by A.A. Grigoriev, E.N. Edelson, A.V. Druzhinin, P.V. Annenkov, N.A. Dobrolyubov, N.N. Strakhov, A.M. Skabichevsky, N.V. Shelgunov, I.S. Turgenev, N.P. Nekrasov, N.S. Nazarov, P.D. Boborykin and some other critics as well as the Soviet researches E.G. Kholodov, A.L. Shtein, N.N. Skatov, Y.V. Lebedev, A.I. Zhuravleva et al. The article starts with the introduction of the problem of epic thinking in the literary studies.