A Bitter Fate | |
Orig Title: | Russian: Горькая судьбина |
Orig Lang: | Russian |
Subject: | Serfdom in Russia |
Genre: | Realistic tragedy |
A Bitter Fate (Russian: Горькая судьбина, Russian: Gorkaya sudbina), also translated as A Bitter Lot, is an 1859 realistic play by Aleksey Pisemsky.[1]
Started in early 1859 in St. Petersburg, finished on 19 August and first published by Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya in November that year,[2] the four-act play tackles serfdom in Russia and the social and moral divisions that it creates by means of a story that focuses on a provincial ménage à trois.[1] With the exception of Leo Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness (1886), it is the only major play to dramatise the experiences of peasants in the history of Russian realistic drama.[3] It has been described as a masterpiece of the Russian theatre and the first Russian realistic tragedy.[4] The play is available in English translation in Masterpieces of the Russian Drama, Volume 1, edited by George Rapall Noyes, Dover Publications, 1961.