About the work
Fairy-tale drama in a prologue and four acts by Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky, drawing on Russian folk tales from Alexander Afanasyev's collections, first performed on 11 May 1873 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow with incidental music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The occasion was a special production combining the companies of all of Moscow's imperial theatres while the Maly Theatre was being renovated.
Plot
The Snow Maiden, daughter of Grandfather Frost and the Spring Fairy, grows up among simple peasants and longs for human love, of which, as a creature of ice, she is not truly capable. When her mother finally grants her a loving heart, she falls for the merchant Mizgir — but the first warm rays of spring sunshine make her melt away, a sacrifice that appeases the wrathful sun god Yarilo.
Cultural significance
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who counted Ostrovsky's play among his favourite sources, set the story to music in 1880–81 as the opera "The Snow Maiden: A Spring Fairy Tale," premiered in 1882 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, writing the libretto himself. Unlike Ostrovsky's socially critical merchant plays, the drama draws entirely on Slavic mythology and folk custom and is considered one of his most ambitious works.