Light Without Heat

Light Without Heat
Light Without Heat at Alexandrinsky Theatre, 1880. Nikolai Sazonov as Rabachev and Maria Savina as Olya. K. Brouge's illustration.
Written by	Alexander Ostrovsky and Nikolai Solovyov
Date premiered	6 November 1880 (1880-11-06)
Place premiered	Maly Theatre in Moscow
Original language	Russian
Genre	Realistic drama

External video

Светит, да не греет (fragment). Part of the 1974 Maly Theatre's The House of Ostrovsky production. Rufina Nifontova as Renyova, Tamara Torchinskaya as her servant Dasha, and Viktor Korshunov as Rabachev.

Light Without Heat (Russian: Светит, да не греет, translit. Svetit, da ne greyet) is a five-act play by Alexander Ostrovsky, based upon the play The Broken Happiness by his friend, a fellow dramatist Nikolai Solovyov, which Ostrovsky re-worked. It premiered at the Moscow Maly Theatre on 6 November 1880 (as a benefit for Mikhail Sadovsky who played Rabachev) and first appeared in print in 1881, in Ogonyok magazines (issues 6-10), as the Ostrovsky and Solovyov's joint work.

Modern Russian critics see it as a precursor to Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, both plays focusing on the Russian gentry at different stages of its decline or, in case of Chekhov's play, collapse.

In May 1880 Nikolai Solovyov approached Ostrovsky with the idea of writing a play together and suggested they should take as a basis his newly written piece called Broken Happiness (Разбитое счастье). In early August Solovyov brought the rough copy of his version to Shchelykovo, the Ostrovskys' estate. "I've just finished Act 1. We need not hurry. After the success of [The Marriage of] Belugin and The Wild One we have to put all our energy into this single work," Ostrovsky wrote him later this month (referring to the two plays they had recently co-authored and saw being staged).

What he did then was reject the original title, as well as the next one, Na Rodine (In the Native Place). On 2 October he wrote to Solovyov: "We cannot hit upon the proper title, what could this mean? Only that the play's leitmotif remains unclear even to ourselves. The plotline is still underdeveloped... and even the main question remains unanswered: what the play purports to say exactly?" He continued: "Ozerskoy [that was how Rabachev's character was originally called] is a hot-headed man, not very intelligent and somewhat primitive. His love for Olya amounts to little more than a sensual instinct. Only in the Act 4 it dawns upon him all of a sudden that his life with Olya will be as dreary as Zavalishin's life with his wife. So there it is, the core of his personal drama. He is torn between two women: one superior to him, another inferior. He rejects the latter and gets rejected by the former."