National religious consciousness in A.N. Ostrovsky's "The storm"

The article deals with the problems of the poetics of Ostrovsky's "textbook" work "The Storm" in connection with the depiction of the people's consciousness. The author concludes that there is a clash in the drama of "hard", "legal" popular notions of sin and punishment and of the concept of forgiveness of sin and mercy to the penitent Catherine.