Katerina is a decisive, integral Russian character (based on the play “The Thunderstorm” by A.N. Ostrovsky)

– this is a nature that is not pliable, not bendable. She has a highly developed personality, she has a lot of strength and energy; her rich soul requires freedom, breadth - she does not want to secretly “steal” joy from life. It can not bend, but break. (See also the article The image of Katerina in the play “The Thunderstorm” - briefly.)

A. N. Ostrovsky. Storm. Play. Episode 1

Katerina received a purely national upbringing, developed by the ancient Russian pedagogy of Domostroy. She lived locked up throughout her childhood and youth, but the atmosphere of parental love softened this life, and besides, the influence of religion prevented her soul from becoming hardened in suffocating loneliness. On the contrary, she did not feel any bondage: “she lived and did not worry about anything, like a bird in the wild!” Katerina often went to churches, listened to the stories of pilgrims and pilgrims, listened to the singing of spiritual poems - she lived carefree, surrounded by love and affection... And she grew up as a beautiful, gentle girl, with a fine mental organization, a great dreamer... Raised in a religious way , she lived exclusively in the circle of religious ideas; her rich imagination was fed only by those impressions that she drew from the lives of saints, from legends, apocrypha and the moods that she experienced during worship...

“...to death I loved going to church! - she later recalled her youth in a conversation with her husband’s sister Varvara. - Exactly, it happened that I would enter heaven... And I don’t see anyone, and I don’t remember the time, and I don’t hear when the service ends. Mama said that everyone used to look at me, what was happening to me! And, you know, on a sunny day such a light column goes down from the dome and smoke moves in this column, like clouds. And I see, sometimes, as a girl, I’ll get up at night - we also had lamps burning everywhere - and somewhere, in a corner, I’ll pray until the morning. Or I’ll go into the garden early in the morning, the sun is just rising, and I’ll fall on my knees, pray and cry, and I myself don’t know what I’m praying for and what I’m crying about!”

From this story it is clear that Katerina was not just a religious person - she knew moments of religious “ecstasy” - that enthusiasm in which the holy ascetics were rich, and examples of which we will find in abundance in the lives of the saints... Like them, Katerina I had “visions” and wonderful dreams.

“And what dreams I had, Varenka, what dreams! Or golden temples, or some extraordinary gardens... And everyone is singing invisible voices, and they smell of cypress... And the mountains and the trees, as if not the same as usual, but as if they were written in images!

From all these stories of Katerina, it is clear that she is not an ordinary person... Her soul, squeezed by the ancient system of life, is looking for space, does not find it around her and is carried away to “grief”, to God... There are many such natures in the old days went into “asceticism”...

But sometimes in her relationships with her family, the energy of her soul broke through - she did not go "against people" but, indignant, protesting, she then left "from people"...

“I was born so hot! - she tells Varvara. “I was only six years old, no more, so I did it!” They offended me with something at home, and it was late in the evening, it was already dark; I ran out to the Volga, got into the boat, and pushed it away from the shore. The next morning they found it, about ten miles away!..

Eh, Varya, you don’t know my character! Of course, God forbid this happens! And if I get really tired of it here, they won’t hold me back by any force. I’ll throw myself out the window, throw myself into the Volga. I don’t want to live here, I won’t do this, even if you cut me!”

From these words it is clear that calm, dreamy Katerina knows impulses that are difficult to cope with.

The publication of “The Thunderstorm” occurred in 1860. Difficult times. The country smelled of revolution. Traveling along the Volga in 1856, the author made sketches of the future work, where he tried to depict as accurately as possible the merchant world of the second half of the 19th century. There is an insoluble conflict in the play. It was he who led to the death of the main character, who could not cope with her emotional state. The image and characterization of Katerina in the play “The Thunderstorm” is a portrait of a strong, extraordinary personality, forced to exist in the conditions of a small patriarchal city. The girl could not forgive herself for betraying herself, giving herself up to human lynching, without even hoping to earn forgiveness. For which she paid with her life.

Katerina Kabanova is the wife of Tikhon Kabanov. Kabanikha's daughter-in-law.

Image and characteristics

After marriage, Katerina’s world collapsed. Her parents spoiled her and cherished her like a flower. The girl grew up in love and with a feeling of boundless freedom.

“Mama doted on me, dressed me up like a doll, and didn’t force me to work; I do what I want".

As soon as she found herself in her mother-in-law's house, everything changed. The rules and laws are the same, but now from a beloved daughter, Katerina became a subordinate daughter-in-law, whom her mother-in-law hated with every fiber of her soul and did not even try to hide her attitude towards her.

When she was very young, she was given to someone else's family.

“They married you off when you were young, you didn’t have to go out with the girls; “Your heart hasn’t left yet.”

That’s how it should be, for Katerina it was normal. In those days, no one built a family out of love. If you endure it, you will fall in love. She is ready to submit, but with respect and love. In my husband's house they did not know about such concepts.

“Was I like that! I lived, didn’t worry about anything, like a bird in the wild...”

Katerina is a freedom-loving person. Decisive.

“This is how I was born, hot! I was still six years old, no more, so I did it! They offended me with something at home, and it was late in the evening, it was already dark; I ran out to the Volga, got into the boat and pushed it away from the shore. The next morning they found it, about ten miles away!

She is not one of those who obey tyrants. She is not afraid of dirty intrigues on the part of Kabanova. For her, freedom is the most important thing. Do not follow idiotic orders, do not bend under the influence of others, but do what your heart desires.

Her soul languished in anticipation of happiness and mutual love. Tikhon, Katerina’s husband, loved her in his own way, as best he could, but his mother’s influence on him was too strong, turning him against his young wife. He preferred to drown out problems with alcohol, and escaped from conflicts in the family on long business trips.

Katerina was often left alone. They did not have children with Tikhon.

“Eco woe! I don’t have children: I would still sit with them and amuse them. I really like talking to children – they are angels.”

The girl was increasingly sad about her worthless life, praying in front of the altar.

Katerina is religious. Going to church is like a holiday. There she rested her soul. As a child, she heard angels singing. She believed that God would hear prayers everywhere. When it was not possible to go to the temple, the girl prayed in the garden.

A new round of life is associated with the arrival of Boris. She understands that passion for another man is a terrible sin, but she is unable to cope with it.

“It’s not good, it’s a terrible sin, Varenka, why do I love someone else?”

She tried to resist, but she did not have enough strength and support:

“It’s as if I’m standing over an abyss, but I have nothing to hold on to.”

The feeling turned out to be too strong.

Sinful love raised a wave of internal fear for its action. The more her love for Boris grew, the more she felt sinfulness. She grabbed at the last straw, crying out to her husband with a request to take her with him, but Tikhon is a narrow-minded person and could not understand his wife’s mental suffering.

Bad dreams and an irreversible premonition of impending disaster drove Katerina crazy. She felt the reckoning approaching. With each thunderclap, it seemed to her that God was throwing arrows at her.

Tired of the internal struggle, Katerina publicly confesses to her husband that she has cheated. Even in this situation, the spineless Tikhon was ready to forgive her. Boris, having learned about her repentance, under pressure from his uncle, leaves the city, leaving his beloved to the mercy of fate. Katerina did not receive support from him. Unable to withstand the mental anguish, the girl rushes into the Volga.

<…>the idea of ​​domestic despotism and a dozen other equally humane ideas, perhaps, lie in Mr. Ostrovsky’s play. But they were probably not what he was asking himself when he began his drama. This can be seen from the play itself<…>The author spent less color on domestic despotism than on the depiction of other springs in his play. You can still get along with such despotism. Kudryash and Varvara nicely lead him by the nose, and young Kabanov himself is not too embarrassed by them and is very drunk. Old woman Kabanova is more grumpy than evil, more inveterately formalist than a callous woman. Only Katerina dies, but she would have died without despotism. This is a sacrifice of one’s own purity and one’s beliefs. But we will return to this essential thought, which follows directly from Katerina’s character. Now let's focus on this person.

Before us are two female faces: old woman Kabanova and Katerina. Both of them were born in the same stratum of society, and perhaps, and most likely, in the same city. Both of them, from an early age, were surrounded by the same phenomena, strange phenomena, ugly to the point of some kind of fabulous poetry. From an early age they submitted to the same demands, the same forms. Their whole life, measured by hours, flows with mathematical correctness. They look at life in exactly the same way, believe and worship the same things. Their religion is the same. The pilgrims and pilgrims do not talk in their house; they tell them the most absurd tales about their distant wanderings, tales in which they both believe as something indispensable and unchangeable. The devil with his pranks plays the same role for them as the most ordinary phenomenon, the role of some household person. And yet, all this life, all these circumstances, all this belief made one a dry and callous formalist, further dried out her naturally dry and poor temperament, while the other (Katerina), without ceasing to obey the phenomena around her, was completely convinced in their legality and truth, creates from all this a whole poetic world, full of some kind of enchanting charm. She is saved by moral purity and infantile innocence, and by the poetic power that is innate in this character. This face, without ceasing to be real, is all imbued with poetry, that Russian poetry that blows over you from Russian songs and legends. The poetic power in her is so great that she dresses everything in poetic images, sees poetry in everything, even in the grave. The sun warms it, she says, wets it with rain, in the spring the grass will grow on it, so soft, the birds will hatch a nest, the flowers will bloom.

We must cite here one poetic page of Mr. Ostrovsky’s drama in order to be able to further trace the character of Katerina!

“Was I like that,” she says to Varvara, her husband’s sister. - I lived, didn’t worry about anything, like a bird in the wild. Mama doted on me, dressed me up like a doll, and didn’t force me to work; I used to do whatever I want. Do you know how I lived with girls? I'll tell you now. I used to get up early; If it’s summer, I’ll go to the spring, wash myself, bring some water with me, and that’s it, I’ll water all the flowers in the house. I had many, many flowers. Then we’ll go to church with Mama, everyone and the pilgrims. Our house was full of pilgrims and praying mantises. And we’ll come home from church, sit down to do some work, more like gold velvet, and the wandering women will begin to tell us where they’ve been, what they’ve seen, different lives, or sing poetry. So time will pass until lunch, then the old women will go to sleep, and I will walk around the garden. Then to Vespers, and in the evening again stories and singing. It was that good.

And when Varvara notices to her that now she lives the same way, she continues:

Yes, everything here seems to be out of captivity. And to death I loved going to church! Exactly, it happened that I would enter heaven and not see anyone, and I don’t remember the time, and I don’t hear when the service is over. Exactly how it all happened in one second. Mama said that everyone used to look at me, what was happening to me! You know, on a sunny day, such a light column goes down from the dome and smoke moves in this column, like clouds, and I see, it used to be as if angels were flying and singing in this column. And sometimes, girl, I’d get up at night, we also had lamps burning everywhere, and somewhere in a corner I’d pray until the morning. Or I’ll go into the garden early in the morning, the sun is still just rising, I’ll fall on my knees, pray and cry, and I myself don’t know what I’m praying for and what I’m crying about; that's how they'll find me. And what I prayed for then, what I asked for, I don’t know; I didn’t need anything, I had enough of everything. And what dreams I had, Varenka, what dreams! Either there are golden temples, or some extraordinary gardens, and everyone is singing invisible voices, and there is a smell of cypress, and the mountains and trees are as if not the same as usual, but as if they were painted in images.

From this page, amazing in its poetic charm, character is clearly created in your mind. This is the same situation in which Kabanova finally became callous and which Katerina’s young, dreamy imagination transformed into such lofty poetry. For this pure, untainted nature, only the bright side of things is available; submitting to everything around her, finding everything legal, she knew how to create her own little world out of the miserable life of a provincial town. She believes all the nonsense of the wanderers, believes in evil spirits and is especially afraid of them. This power in her imagination was adorned with all the legends, all the folk stories. The ten thousand ceremonies that rule so despotically in the town where she lives do not bother her at all. She grew up among them and performs them religiously. Only where they rape her open and direct soul is she indignant against them. She will not, for example, no matter how much you persuade her, howl for her departed husband, just so that people can see how much she loves him. “No point! I don’t know how. Why make people laugh!” - she responds to her mother-in-law’s words that, they say, a good wife, after seeing her husband off, howls for an hour and a half and lies on the porch. She considers the slightest deviation from the straight path a grave sin. Hell with all its horrors, with all its fiery poetry, occupies her imagination just as much as heaven with its joys. But do not attribute its purity and virtue to one religious tendency of mind. This purity is innate in her. Without her, she, like thousands of others, would have entered into various transactions and agreements with her conscience and through various donations, penances, * extra fasts and bows, she would have gotten along perfectly with both hell and heaven, no matter how terrible one was, incorruptible another.

Meanwhile, the evil one or life confuses her and leads her into temptation. The bitter fate that she suffers in the house from her mother-in-law, the insignificance of her husband, who, although he loves her, is unable to make her love himself, force her to look around her, to leave the poetic world, which has moved away from her and now stands before her as a memory. In the beautiful scene of the first act with Varvara, she tells her with charming innocence the state of her soul. It only seemed to her that Varvara expressed sympathy for her, and she immediately laid out all the treasures of her heart in front of her. This trait of the Russian character of being frank in front of the first person you meet, which is extremely convenient for dramatic form, you will find in every work of Mr. Ostrovsky. If Katerina in this scene does not yet confess her love for Boris, the nephew of one overly eccentric merchant Dikiy, it is only because she herself does not yet suspect this love in herself. Meanwhile, she already loves and, once convinced of this, gives herself over to her love almost without struggle and with a full consciousness of sin. Katerina is an ardent woman, a woman of first impressions and impulses, a woman of life. She knows very well that she will fall as soon as her husband leaves for Moscow, that she cannot control her heart, and she is looking in advance for means and defense against temptation. When her husband refuses to take her with him, she asks him, on her knees asks him to take some terrible oath from her, “so that I don’t dare,” she says, “to speak to anyone without you under any circumstances.” strangers, not to see each other, so that I wouldn’t even dare to think about anyone but you... So that I wouldn’t see either my father or my mother! I should die without repentance if I..."

<…>She would keep her Oath. The whole character is visible in these words. She is a weak woman, although ardent and passionate. Everything that she says to Varvara about her agility is nothing more than sweet boasting on her part, the boasting of a nature that does not know either life or its real strengths. Only religion, which she, like all our common people, understands very narrowly and materially can keep her from falling. As a redemptive sacrifice of her oath, she will give the most precious blessings - her parents, her hope of not dying without repentance. But her husband did not take this oath from her, probably mistaking her desire for a woman’s whim, and she fell.

The evil one, who tormented her with temptation, loves such natures. They are very susceptible to love temptations and struggle little with them, as if they knew in advance that they would not be able to overcome the enemy. They know in advance that they will not survive their fall, that the days of delight will be followed by long years of tears and repentance, and that the best way their bitter life can end will be high monastery walls, or long and sincere wanderings to different pilgrimages, unless some river or the bottom of the nearest pond. And yet they fall.

Dostoevsky M.M. ""Storm". Drama in five acts by A.N. Ostrovsky"

Homework for the lesson

1. Collect quotation material to characterize Katerina.
2. Read acts II and III. Note phrases in Katerina’s monologues that indicate the poetry of her nature.
3. What is Katerina’s speech like?
4. How does life in your parents’ house differ from life in your husband’s house?
5. What is the inevitability of Katerina’s conflict with the world of the “dark kingdom”, with the world of Kabanova and Wild?
6. Why is Varvara next to Katerina?
7. Does Katerina love Tikhon?
8. Happiness or misfortune in the life path of Katerina Boris?
9. Can Katerina’s suicide be considered a protest against the “dark kingdom”? Perhaps the protest is in love for Boris?

Exercise

Using material prepared at home, characterize Katerina. What traits of her character are revealed in her very first remarks?

Answer

D.I, yavl. V, p.232: Inability to be a hypocrite, lie, directness. The conflict is immediately obvious: Kabanikha does not tolerate self-esteem or disobedience in people, Katerina does not know how to adapt and submit. In Katerina there is - along with spiritual softness, trembling, songfulness - and a firmness and strong-willed determination that Kabanikha hates, which can be heard in her story about sailing on a boat, and in some of her actions, and in her patronymic Petrovna, derived from Peter - “ stone". D.II, yavl. II, pp. 242–243, 244.

Therefore, Katerina cannot be brought to her knees, and this significantly complicates the conflictual confrontation between the two women. A situation arises when, as the proverb goes, the scythe lands on a stone.

Question

How else does Katerina differ from the inhabitants of the city of Kalinov? Find places in the text where the poetry of Katerina’s nature is emphasized.

Answer

Katerina is a poetic person. Unlike the rude Kalinovites, she feels the beauty of nature and loves it. In the morning I got up early... Oh, yes, I lived with my mother, like a flower blooming...

“I used to get up early; if it’s summer, I’ll go to the spring, wash myself, bring some water with me and that’s it, I’ll water all the flowers in the house. I had many, many flowers,” she says about her childhood. (D.I, Rev. VII, p. 236)

Her soul is constantly drawn to beauty. Her dreams were filled with wonderful, fabulous visions. She often dreamed that she was flying like a bird. She talks about her desire to fly several times. (D.I, Rev. VII, p. 235). With these repetitions, the playwright emphasizes the romantic sublimity of Katerina’s soul and her freedom-loving aspirations. Married early, she tries to get along with her mother-in-law and love her husband, but in the Kabanovs’ house no one needs sincere feelings.

Katerina is religious. Given her impressionability, the religious feelings instilled in her in childhood firmly took possession of her soul.

“Before I died, I loved going to church! Surely, it used to be that I would enter heaven, and I wouldn’t see anyone, and I wouldn’t remember the time, and I wouldn’t hear when the service would end,” she recalls. (D.I, Rev. VII, p. 236)

Question

How would you characterize the heroine’s speech?

Answer

Katerina’s speech reflects all the richness of her inner world: the strength of feelings, human dignity, moral purity, truthfulness of nature. The strength of feelings, the depth and sincerity of Katerina’s experiences are expressed in the syntactic structure of her speech: rhetorical questions, exclamations, unfinished sentences. And in especially tense moments, her speech takes on the features of a Russian folk song, becoming smooth, rhythmic, and melodious. In her speech there are colloquialisms, words of a church-religious nature (lives, angels, golden temples, images), expressive means of folk poetic language (“Violent winds, bear with him my sadness and melancholy”). Speech is rich in intonations - joyful, sad, enthusiastic, sad, anxious. Intonations express Katerina’s attitude towards others.

Question

Where did these traits come from in the heroine? Tell us how Katerina lived before marriage? How is life in your parents' house different from life in your husband's house?

Answer

P.235 d.I, yavl. VII (“Was I like that!”)

Conclusion

Outwardly, the living conditions in Kalinov are no different from the environment of Katerina’s childhood. The same prayers, the same rituals, the same activities, but “here,” the heroine notes, “everything seems to be from under captivity.” And captivity is incompatible with her freedom-loving soul.

Question

What is Katerina’s protest against the “dark kingdom”? Why can’t we call her either “victim” or “mistress”?

Answer

Katerina differs in character from all the characters in "The Thunderstorm". Whole, honest, sincere, she is incapable of lies and falsehood, therefore in the cruel world where the Wild and Kabanovs reign, her life is tragic. She does not want to adapt to the world of the “dark kingdom,” but she cannot be called a victim either. She protests. Her protest is her love for Boris. This is freedom of choice.

Question

Does Katerina love Tikhon?

Answer

Given in marriage, apparently not of her own free will, she is at first ready to become an exemplary wife. D.II, yavl. II, p. 243. But such a rich nature as Katerina cannot love a primitive, limited person.

D. V, yavl. III, P.279 “Yes, he was hateful to me, hateful, his caress is worse to me than beatings.”

Already at the beginning of the play we learn about her love for Boris. D. I, phenomenon VII, p. 237.

Question

Happiness or misfortune in the life path of Katerina Boris?

Answer

Love for Boris itself is a tragedy. D.V, yavl. III, p. 280 “It’s unfortunate that I saw you.” Even the narrow-minded Kudryash understands this, warning with alarm: “Eh, Boris Grigoryich! (...) After all, this means you want to ruin her completely, Boris Grigoryich! (...) But what kind of people are here! You know. They’ll eat you, "They'll hammer it into the coffin. (...) Just watch - don't cause trouble for yourself, and don't get her into trouble! Let's face it, even though her husband is a fool, her mother-in-law is painfully fierce."

Question

What is the complexity of Katerina’s internal state?

Answer

Love for Boris is: a free choice dictated by the heart; deception that puts Katerina on a par with Varvara; refusal of love means submission to the world of Kabanikha. Love-choice dooms Katerina to torment.

Question

How are the heroine’s torment, struggle with herself, and her strength shown in the scene with the key and the scenes of the meeting and farewell with Boris? Analyze vocabulary, sentence construction, folklore elements, connections with folk songs.

Answer

D.III, scene II, yavl. III. pp. 261–262, 263

D.V, yavl. III, p. 279.

Scene with the key: “What am I saying, am I deceiving myself? I should even die to see him.” Date scene: “Let everyone know, let everyone see what I do! If I wasn’t afraid of sin for you, will I be afraid of human judgment?” Farewell scene: “My friend! My joy! Goodbye!" All three scenes show the heroine's determination. She did not betray herself anywhere: she decided to love at the behest of her heart, admitted to betrayal out of an inner feeling of freedom (a lie is always unfreedom), came to say goodbye to Boris not only because of the feeling of love, but also because of the feeling of guilt: he suffered because of... for her. She rushed to the Volga at the request of her free nature.

Question

So what lies at the heart of Katerina’s protest against the “dark kingdom”?

Answer

At the heart of Katerina’s protest against the oppression of the “dark kingdom” is a natural desire to defend the freedom of her personality. Bondage is the name of her main enemy. With all her being, Katerina felt that living in the “dark kingdom” was worse than death. And she chose death over captivity.

Question

Prove that Katerina's death is a protest.

Answer

Katerina's death is a protest, a rebellion, a call to action. Varvara ran away from home, Tikhon blamed his mother for his wife’s death. Kuligin reproached him for being unmerciful.

Question

Will the city of Kalinov be able to live as before?

Answer

Most likely no.

Katerina's fate takes on a symbolic meaning in the play. Not only the heroine of the play dies - patriarchal Russia, patriarchal morality dies and becomes a thing of the past. Ostrovsky's drama seemed to capture people's Russia at a turning point, on the threshold of a new historical era.

To conclude

The play still asks many questions to this day. First of all, it is necessary to understand the genre nature, the main conflict of “The Thunderstorm” and understand why N.A. Dobrolyubov wrote in the article “A Ray of Light in the Dark Kingdom”: “The Thunderstorm” is, without a doubt, Ostrovsky’s most decisive work. The author himself called his work a drama. Over time, researchers increasingly began to call the “Thunderstorm” a tragedy, based on the specifics of the conflict (obviously tragic) and the character of Katerina, who raised big questions that remained somewhere on the periphery of society’s attention. Why did Katerina die? Because she got a cruel mother-in-law? Because she, being her husband’s wife, committed a sin and could not withstand the pangs of conscience? If we limit ourselves to these problems, the content of the work is significantly impoverished, reduced to a separate, private episode from the life of such and such a family and is deprived of its high tragic intensity.

At first glance, it seems that the main conflict of the play is the clash between Katerina and Kabanova. If Marfa Ignatievna had been kinder, softer, more humane, it is unlikely that tragedy would have happened to Katerina. But the tragedy might not have happened if Katerina had been able to lie, adapt, if she had not judged herself so harshly, if she had looked at life more simply and calmly. But Kabanikha remains Kabanikha, and Katerina remains Katerina. And each of them reflects a certain life position, each of them acts in accordance with its principles.

The main thing in the play is the inner life of the heroine, the emergence of something new in her, still unclear to her. “There’s something so extraordinary about me, as if I’m starting to live again, or... I don’t know,” she confesses to her husband’s sister Varvara.

2. The image of Katerina in the play “The Thunderstorm”

Katerina is a lonely young woman who lacks human participation, sympathy, and love. The need for this draws her to Boris. She sees that outwardly he is not like other residents of the city of Kalinov, and, not being able to recognize his inner essence, considers him a person from another world. In her imagination, Boris seems to be a handsome prince who will take her from the “dark kingdom” to the fairy-tale world that exists in her dreams.

In terms of character and interests, Katerina stands out sharply from her environment. The fate of Katerina, unfortunately, is a vivid and typical example of the fate of thousands of Russian women of that time. Katerina is a young woman, the wife of the merchant son Tikhon Kabanov. She recently left her home and moved into her husband’s house, where she lives with her mother-in-law Kabanova, who is the sovereign mistress. Katerina has no rights in the family; she is not even free to control herself. With warmth and love, she remembers her parents' home and her girlhood life. There she lived freely, surrounded by the affection and care of her mother. The religious upbringing she received in the family developed in her impressionability, daydreaming, belief in the afterlife and retribution for man's sins.

Katerina found herself in completely different conditions in her husband’s house. At every step she felt dependent on her mother-in-law, endured humiliation and insults. From Tikhon she does not meet any support, much less understanding, since he himself is under the power of Kabanikha. Out of her kindness, Katerina is ready to treat Kabanikha as her own mother. "But Katerina's sincere feelings do not meet with support from either Kabanikha or Tikhon.

Life in such an environment changed Katerina's character. Katerina’s sincerity and truthfulness collide in Kabanikha’s house with lies, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, and rudeness. When love for Boris is born in Katerina, it seems like a crime to her, and she struggles with the feeling that washes over her. Katerina's truthfulness and sincerity make her suffer so much that she finally has to repent to her husband. Katerina's sincerity and truthfulness are incompatible with the life of the “dark kingdom”. All this was the cause of Katerina’s tragedy.

"Katerina's public repentance shows the depth of her suffering, moral greatness, and determination. But after repentance, her situation became unbearable. Her husband does not understand her, Boris is weak-willed and does not come to her aid. The situation has become hopeless - Katerina is dying. It is not Katerina's fault one specific person. Her death is the result of the incompatibility of morality and the way of life in which she was forced to exist. The image of Katerina had enormous educational significance for Ostrovsky’s contemporaries and for subsequent generations. He called for a fight against all forms of despotism and oppression of the human personality. This expression of the growing protest of the masses against all types of slavery.

Katerina, sad and cheerful, compliant and obstinate, dreamy, depressed and proud. Such different mental states are explained by the naturalness of each mental movement of this simultaneously restrained and impetuous nature, the strength of which lies in the ability to always be itself. Katerina remained true to herself, that is, she could not change the very essence of her character.

I think that the most important character trait of Katerina is honesty with herself, her husband, and the world around her; it is her unwillingness to live a lie. She does not want and cannot be cunning, pretend, lie, hide. This is confirmed by the scene of Katerina’s confession of treason. It was not the thunderstorm, not the frightening prophecy of the crazy old woman, not the fear of hell that prompted the heroine to tell the truth. “My whole heart was exploding! I can’t stand it anymore!” - this is how she began her confession. For her honest and integral nature, the false position in which she found herself is unbearable. Living just to live is not for her. To live means to be yourself. Its most precious value is personal freedom, freedom of the soul.

With such a character, Katerina, after betraying her husband, could not stay in his house, return to a monotonous and dreary life, endure constant reproaches and “moral teachings” from Kabanikha, or lose freedom. But all patience comes to an end. It is difficult for Katerina to be in a place where she is not understood, her human dignity is humiliated and insulted, her feelings and desires are ignored. Before her death, she says: “It’s all the same whether you go home or go to the grave... It’s better in the grave...” It’s not death that she desires, but life that is unbearable.

Katerina is a deeply religious and God-fearing person. Since, according to the Christian religion, suicide is a great sin, by deliberately committing it, she showed not weakness, but strength of character. Her death is a challenge to the “dark power”, the desire to live in the “light kingdom” of love, joy and happiness.

The death of Katerina is the result of a collision of two historical eras. With her death, Katerina protests against despotism and tyranny, her death indicates the approaching end of the “dark kingdom.” The image of Katerina belongs to the best images of Russian fiction. Katerina is a new type of people in Russian reality in the 60s of the 19th century.