It's a Family Affair-We'll Settle It Ourselves

It's a Family Affair-We'll Settle It Ourselves (Russian: Свои люди - сочтемся, Romanized as Svoi lyudi - sotchtemsya) is a comedy by Alexander Ostrovsky.

[1] After his attempt to write a play called The Legal Request (Исковое прошение) failed Ostrovsky started working upon another storyline, again stemming from his experience in the Moscow commercial court.

Then Dmitry Gorev (real surname Tarasenko) emerged, the son of a merchant who lived not far from the Ostrovskys' (and later turned bankrupt), who published a drama called Tzar the Liberator or the Poor Orphan in 1843.

Ivan Goncharov, who was in Moscow on his way from Saint Petersburg to Simbirsk, has heard the Bankrupt, liked it a lot and advised Ostrovsky to send the play to Krayevsky's Otechestvennye Zapiski.

[4] In November 1849 Sadovsky read the play at the house of Countess Rostopchina who called it "our Russian Tartuffe" and expressed her delight with being the witness to "the birth of our own theatre literature.

The success of the play which satirized the uncultured, self-satisfied merchant class outraged some influential people and the reports "started to fly to Petersburg," as the actor (and later Ostrovsky's publisher) Modest Pisarev attested.

One of his aides, Count Orlov, forwarded this request to the 3rd Department's Moscow office and the city's secret police put the man who was still working in the court under surveillance.

The reason for the permission was two-fold: Ostrovsky agreed to make several changes and the general state of the Imperial Theatres' repertoire has been recognized in the report as quite deplorable.

Two weeks later it was staged by Maly Theatre in Moscow, with Prov Sadovsky (as Podkhalyuzin) using his skillful art of gesticulation to express without words some of the things the author had been forced to cut out.