Without a Dowry

At the story's centre is a sort of 'Russian Carmen.' Except here, she is surrounded not by romantic toreadors and soldiers breaking rank, but with a strictly hierarchical and generally cruel band of "businessmen," with strange, invented names - for example, Mokiy Parmyonich and Kharita Ignatyevna. This allows us to see them as characters in a Russian commedia dell'arte, and to see Ostrovsky himself as the patriarch of a special genre in Russian drama.