Contemporary playwrights of the 21st century. What are the most important plays of the 21st century? Topics for independent study

Keywords

GENERAL DIFFERENTIATION OF ART/ GENOLOGY / DRAMATURGIC GENDER/ GENRE / DRAMA / MODERNISM / AVANT-GARDE / POSTMODERNISM / METAGENRE / ARTISTIC EXPERIMENT/CONDITIONALITY/ GENERIC-SPECIFIC DIFFERENTIATION OF ART/ GENOLOGY / DRAMATIC MODE / GENRE / DRAMA / MODERNISM / AVANT-GARDE / POSTMODERNISM / META-GENRE / ARTISTIC EXPERIMENT / CONVENTIONALITY

annotation scientific article on linguistics and literary criticism, author of the scientific work - Olga Konstantinovna Strashkova, Irina Andreevna Babenko, Irina Valerievna Kupreeva

The article identifies key problems of modern genology, such as: the lack of uniform criteria for defining a genre as aesthetic category, subjectivity of genre assignments in new concepts of genre, lack of generally recognized genre classifications and genre systems. The relevance of the study of a unified genre model of dramaturgy of the XX-XXI centuries is substantiated from the categorical position of transformation of dramatic genres, synthesis / syncretism of homogeneous and heterogeneous form-containing units in the integral structure of a dramatic text. Promising directions are identified this study. A definition of the category “metagenre” is derived. A new principle for constructing genre models in the latest domestic dramaturgy, built on the basis of transgressive connections, is demonstrated. There is an increase in the share of the subjective principle in the artistic modeling of modern times. Contemporary Russian drama is viewed primarily as a dialogical zone of aesthetic experimentation and the maintenance of stable literary traditions. At the same time, the integrity of the ontogenesis of the dramatic text in Russia, the continuity of stages of development and typological intersections of the “new drama”, “new wave”, “new new drama” with the heritage of 19th century drama are emphasized. All noted characterological features of the dramaturgical material under consideration are substantiated by the realities of increasingly complex socio-cultural construction and the paradoxes of metaphysical existence of the 20th-21st centuries.

On Question about Actual Problems of Study of Genre Synthesis Origins in Poetics of Russian Literature of 20th-21st Centuries

The article identifies key problems of modern genology, such as the lack of unified criteria for the definition of the genre as an aesthetic category, subjectivity of genre relatedness in new concepts of the genre, the lack of a widely acceptable genre classifications and genre systems. Relevance of the study of a unified genre model of literature of 20th-21st centuries dramaturgy is proven with categorical position of dramatic genres transformation, synthesis / syncretism of homogeneous and heterogeneous form-and-content units in the whole structure of the dramatic text. Prospective directions of this study are designated. The definition of the category “meta-genre” is given. New principle of construction of genre models in latest domestic dramaturgy built on the basis of transgressive compounds-mates is demonstrated. There is an increase in the proportion of subjective principle in the artistic modeling of the present. The newest Russian dramaturgy is primarily considered as a dialogical zone of aesthetic experimentation and sustained literary traditions. At this, the integrity of the ontogeny of dramatic text in Russia, the continuity of stages of development and typological intersection of the “new drama,” “new wave,” “new new drama” with the dramaturgic heritage of the 19th century are emphasized . All marked characteristic features of the considered dramatic material are based on the realities of the complex socio-cultural construction and paradoxes of the metaphysical existence of the 20th-21st centuries.

Text of scientific work on the topic “On the issue of current problems of studying the origins of genre synthesis in the poetics of domestic drama of the XX-XXI centuries”

Strashkova O.K. On the issue of current problems of studying the origins of genre synthesis in the poetics of domestic drama of the XX-XXI centuries / O.K. Strashkova, I.A. Babenko, I.V. Kupreeva // Scientific dialogue. - 2017. - No. 12. - P. 251-262. - DOI: 10.24224/2227-1295-2017-12-251-262.

Strashkova, O. K., Babenko, I. A., Kupreyeva, I. V. (2017). On Question about Actual Problems of Study of Genre Synthesis Origins in Poetics of Russian Literature of 20th-21st Centuries. Scientific dialogue, 12: 251-262. DOI: 10.24224/2227-1295-2017-12-251-262. (In Russ.).

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On the issue of topical problems of studying the origins of genre synthesis in the poetics of Russian dramaturgy of the XX-XXI centuries1

© Olga Konstantinovna Strashkova (2017), orcid.org/0000-0002-8740-5048, Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Department of Russian and World Literature, North Caucasus Federal University (Stavropol, Russia), olga.strashkova8@ gmail.com.

© Babenko Irina Andreevna (2017), orcid.org/0000-0001-7380-5561, Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Russian and World Literature, North Caucasus Federal University (Stavropol, Russia), [email protected]. © Kupreeva Irina Valerievna (2017), orcid.org/0000-0003-3613-0416, Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Russian and World Literature, North Caucasus Federal University (Stavropol, Russia), [email protected].

The article identifies the key problems of modern genology, such as: the lack of uniform criteria for defining a genre as an aesthetic category, the subjectivity of genre assignments in new concepts of the genre, the lack of generally recognized genre classifications and genre systems. The relevance of the study of a unified genre model of dramaturgy of the XX-XXI centuries is substantiated from the categorical position of the transformation of dramatic genres, synthesis / syncretism of homogeneous and heterogeneous form-containing units in the integral structure of a dramatic text. Promising directions for this research are outlined. The definition of the category “metagenre” is derived. A new one is being demonstrated

1 The work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project No. 16-34-00034 “The origins of genre synthesis in the poetics of domestic drama of the XX-XXI centuries.”

the principle of constructing genre models in the latest domestic drama, built on the basis of transgressive connections. There is an increase in the share of the subjective principle in the artistic modeling of modern times. Contemporary Russian drama is viewed primarily as a dialogical zone of aesthetic experimentation and the maintenance of stable literary traditions. At the same time, the integrity of the ontogenesis of the dramatic text in Russia, the continuity of stages of development and typological intersections of the “new drama”, “new wave”, “new new drama” with the heritage of drama of the 19th century are emphasized. All noted characterological features of the dramaturgical material under consideration are substantiated by the realities of increasingly complex socio-cultural construction and the paradoxes of metaphysical existence of the 20th-21st centuries.

Key words: generic differentiation of art; genology; dramaturgical gender; genre; drama; modernism; avant-garde; postmodernism; metagenre; artistic experiment; convention.

1. Introduction

The theoretical category “genre”, its scientific identification is rather unstable, blurred, filled with various structural and content features, which gives rise to such concepts as, for example, “genre form”, “genre norm”, “genre dominant”, “genre type”, “genre variety”, “genre-forming factor”, “genre memory”, “genre generalizations” and so on. At the same time, “genre” acts as a basic concept in the theory and history of literature; transformations of genre models serve as evidence of the dynamics of development and changes in types of artistic consciousness. All the more significant is the need to systematize the diverse, often polymorphic, form-containing units that make up the phenomenon of a dramatic text exposed to the presentation of the author, director, actor, viewer (or only one reader, if the play does not become a stage work).

The dramatic genre, initially genre-transparent (comedy and tragedy of antiquity), in modern times began to be distinguished by the synthesis of genre and generic characteristics within the boundaries of even one stage performance. Since the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th century, various new genre forms have been created, the inclusion of which in the general theoretical paradigm is possible on the basis of identifying a “repeating genre community” within their content (in accordance with the concept of G. N. Pospelov [Pospelov, 1972]) and structural features presented by V. B. Tomashevsky as “a form of attraction to models” [Tomashevsky, 1999], or, according to the concept of G. D. Gachev and V. V. Kozhinov, as “hardened content that has turned into a certain literary construction” [Gachev et al., 1964]. Classification of genre formations of new and recent

Our dramaturgy is supported by the idea of a typology of a constructive whole that creates a “genre model” based, in M. M. Bakhtin’s terminology, on “understanding” of reality, “thematic orientation to life,” “understanding mastery and completion of reality” [Bakhtin, 1998 ]. Literary studies of the 21st century introduces into the categorical apparatus of science fundamentally new concepts of genre formation and a new basic definition of “genre generalizations” [Lukov, 2008], which significantly expands the understanding of genres and genre systems in the art of the 20th century and putting forward reasons external to them as a principle uniting genres: “Genre generalization in this case means the process of unification, contraction of genres (often related to different types and types of art) for the implementation of non-genre (usually problem-thematic) common principle" [Lukov, 2006]. It is important to emphasize that in modern literary interpretations of the category of “genre,” along with the objective factors of its formation, more and more attention is paid to subjective indicators and conditions of genre compliance with the communicative tasks of artistic expression, as well as to the flexibility of the criteria for identifying genres. It is from the point of view of methodological variability that the concept of genre by M. Kagan is interpreted, who identified four components of genre differentiation: 1) thematic or plot-thematic; 2) cognitive capacity; 3) axiological; 4) typology created by art genre models [Kagan, 2008]. These literary principles, on the one hand, lead to such a situation in the field of scientific research, “when the same work can be characterized from different points of view and obtain several completely different genre assignments. This, at the very least, makes the genre something subjective and arbitrary" [Lebedev et al., 2016], on the other hand, in the field of artistic creativity - they provide complete freedom for genre experimentation, while the position of an active search for new solutions at all levels of the organization artistic canvas in relation to modern drama acquires absolute aesthetic significance. The new drama of the turn of the XX-XX centuries and the “new new drama” of the turn of the XX-XXI centuries are clearly perceived as domestic [Lipovetsky, 2007; Lipovetsky, 2012; Makarov, 2012, Strashkova, 2006], and by foreign scientists as an area of consistent updating of artistic principles and techniques in art in general.

2. Russian drama of the XX-XXI centuries: dialogue between aesthetic experimentation and following literary traditions

Today, almost all researchers admit that playwrights of the 20th and 21st centuries persistently searched and are searching for new artistic forms that could most fully convey a more complex reality (during this period, several major cultural and historical shifts occurred that radically changed social and aesthetic consciousness) and the inner world of a contemporary hero. This naturally entails the modeling of new genre forms and causes genre instability, a crisis of traditional, “canonical” genres, and the desire to create genre formations that correspond to the dynamic nature of time. Synthesis of genre possibilities, parodic interpretation of new and old elements, formal and meaningful experiments in the field of complex (and sometimes paradoxical) combination of markers of the lyrical, epic, dramatic genres, different historical eras and trends become decisive for the development of the genre paradigm of modern drama.

It should be noted that with all the diversity of points of view, a general theoretically meaningful genre model of dramaturgy, which absorbs the entire complex of transformations of genre possibilities, has not yet been created. However, this task seems to be one of the most urgent for the theoretical and practical development of aesthetic shifts in the dramaturgy of modern times, associated with the general direction of the modern literary process, which programmatically proclaimed the language of postmodern and post-postmodern aesthetics as artistic experimentation, the fundamental indefinability of the boundaries of the genre and multidirectional synthesis (gravitating towards syncretism) in as the only possible form of creativity.

Modern literary and art criticism require an understanding of the artistic unity of Russian drama of the 20th-21st centuries as a complex, diffuse aesthetic phenomenon, characterized by the interweaving of various styles, trends, trends, the variety of forms of expression of the author's worldview and active experimentation with all elements of form and content. The internally motivated integrity of the diversity of Russian drama of this period should be determined and recreated from the standpoint of the category of genre, identifying stable principles for the formation of genre models of drama and the differentiation of the latter.

The formation of a unified theoretical classification of the genre possibilities of drama should provide, according to the authors of this study, a strong theoretical justification for the multitude of practical studies conducted on the problems of dramaturgy of the period under review, and will also make it possible to compile a kind of anthology of dramaturgical experiments in modern drama, which determine the development of not only the literary text, but also performing arts. In this regard, it is necessary to develop an algorithm and methodology for further studying the principles of the author’s worldview of primary reality and its aesthetic world-transformation in the space of an artistic text, which would be justified, first of all, for a single focus of scientific understanding of the correlation between the categories of gender and genre.

The study of the specifics of the perception of reality and its reflection in a certain model of the dramaturgical genre by such key figures of Russian drama of the 20th century as M. Gorky, L. Andreev, S. Naydenov, A. Blok, A. Bely, V. Bryusov, Z. Gippius , N. Gumilyov, N. Evreinov, Vyach. Ivanov, D. Merezhkovsky, A. Remizov, V. Khlebnikov, A. Vvedensky, L. Lunts, V. Mayakovsky, N. Erdman, Y. Olesha, B. Romashov, A. Platonov, M. Bulgakov, E. Schwartz, A. Arbuzov, A. Vampilov, V. Rozov, A. Volodin and others, allows us to form an idea of the integrity of the ontogenesis of dramatic text in Russia. Contemporary Russian drama, with all its “modernity,” demonstrates a deep continuity of stages of development, and also reveals typological convergences of experimental dramatic forms of representatives of the “new drama” of the early 20th century, the “new wave” and “new new drama” of the late 20th - early 21st centuries with stable traditions of Russian drama of the 19th century.

An analysis of the dramatic works of M. Gorky in the context of socio-political and aesthetic concepts of the late 19th century revealed their relationship with the creative searches of L. Andreev and S. Naydenov. Creativity of V. Bryusov, N. Evreinov, Dm. Merezhkovsky, A. Blok, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanova, N. Gumilyov, Z. Gippius received a single focus of scientific understanding in the light of such a series of relationships: history - culture - philosophy - personality - text. Indicative in this regard is the aesthetic connection between the symbolists V. Bryusov, A. Bely, V. Ivanov, A. Blok, Z. Gippius with the apocalyptic ideas of Western European and Russian modernists. In the dramaturgy of postmodernism, the transformation of the existential translation by modernists of the motive of Death is revealed, where it acts not just as an image-symbol, but as a world-

modeling meta-image, especially in the work of Wen. Erofeev, N. Sa-dur, N. Kolyada, V. Kalitvyansky.

To understand artistic processes in modern drama, the study of the theoretical works of Andrei Bely, N. Evreinov, In. Annensky, Dm. Merezhkovsky, Vyach. Ivanov, V. Khlebnikov, A. Remizov in the light of their aesthetic and philosophical ideas, as well as the study of the innovative poetics of dramaturgy by V. Mayakovsky, N. Erdman, Y. Olesha, B. Romashov, A. Platonov, M. Bulgakov, E. Schwartz , A. Arbuzova, A. Vampilova, V. Rozova, A. Volodin.

Artistic experiments of modern theater, represented by the work of playwrights of the “new wave” (Ven. Erofeev, N. Sadur, N. Kolyada, L. Petrushevskaya, L. Ulitskaya) and “new new drama” (V. Sigareva, I. Vyrypaeva, E. Grishkovets, V. and M. Durnenkov, O. and V. Presnyakov), of course, are fundamentally innovative, but unstable and do not have clear genre definitions that distinguish rigidly determined formal-content formations.

The work of representatives of the “new wave” and “new new drama” is fruitfully considered in the paradigm of artistic comparisons of the theater of modernism, its most radical manifestation - the avant-garde - and postmodernism as an interrupted avant-garde tradition. The dramatic experiments of modernists, avant-gardeists and postmodernists are distinguished by such a single formal feature as convention. The dramatic experience of the avant-garde and its theoretical justification, presented by V. Khlebnikov and A. Vvedensky, allows us to trace the avant-garde tradition in the experiments of modern drama at the levels:

On the value-semantic level (denial of traditional axiological systems, affirmation of the value of violence as a mechanism for the liberation of the individual, society, and the universe);

On the formal and substantive (destruction of the boundaries of the traditional system of dramatic genres, attraction to hybrid genre formations, carrying out a valuable experiment on form);

At all structural and content levels of the play there is a dominance of the artistic principle of convention.

Characteristic convergence: real and unreal worlds recreated in the stage space of dramaturgy turn of XIX-XX and XX-XXI centuries - represents a certain conventional reality, and conventionality becomes the main artistic device in the poetics of drama.

we are modernists, avant-gardeists and postmodernists. An increase in the degree of abstract, conventional representation of primary reality occurs as we move from modernism through the avant-garde to postmodernism. If in the drama of modernism, convention, among other things, is most clearly represented in the image of a puppet, and in the experiments of avant-garde drama - these are image-schemes (V. Khlebnikov), the task of which is aimed at comprehending the substantial essence, then postmodernism resorts to the creation of large-scale artistic allegories that explore not the area of reality, but its potential possibilities, located in the plane of the unconscious (Ven. Erofeev, N. Sadur, I. Vyrypaev, V. Kalitvyansky, E. Gremina, P. Pryazhko, partially N. Kolyada). It is necessary to note the special tension of the interaction between the artistic systems of avant-garde and postmodernism at the point of the ideological component of art. The revolutionary avant-garde, at a certain stage of its own development, resorts to outright ideologization of the artistic word, the indispensable construction of the image of the enemy in an aesthetic statement, and anti-aestheticism as a rejection of embellishment and imagery, and an outlet for journalism. Postmodernism, deepening the revolutionary spirit of the avant-garde and its anti-aesthetic attitudes, at the same time uncompromisingly opposes any form of ideological influence, and, consequently, the violent influence of global meta-narratives on people and society, while the carrier of precisely such a meta-narrative is the avant-garde. Thus, the relationship between the avant-garde and postmodernism is distinguished by the complex and ambiguous nature of borrowings, which have a flickering, existentially fragmented nature [Strashkova, 2016b; Kupreeva, 2016a].

Modern postmodern dramaturgy, in addition to appeals to modernist and avant-garde drama, correlates with the artistic discoveries of A.P. Chekhov, which are today the object of experimentation. Hence the regular appeal of Russian drama to the personality of the writer, artistic organization and semantic components of Chekhov’s writing, which often acts as a prototext. The dialogue between the dramaturgy of the “new wave” and the “new new drama” with Chekhov’s creative model has a deeply natural, permanent a priori character. The most characteristic typological units of Chekhov's drama, which are regularly reproduced in Russian drama of the 20th century, are:

Giving a realistic reflection of reality a symbolic sound;

Recreating the state of the inner “I”, psychological mood, to which everyone is directed artistic media dramatic reality;

Weakening of external eventfulness due to the internal dynamics of action, focused on exposing the psychological conflict without a pronounced climax;

The special nature of the conflict, determined by the desire to show the “mechanics of relationships” of the individual with reality, is an indirect conflict of heroes with each other, but resistance (though sluggish or instantaneous, immediately fading) of each individual personality to the very routine-inertia of life;

Development of a form of “non-communicative dialogue” that creates a unique effect of dramatic polyphony, which “denies a common unified plot and affirms its discreteness”;

The absence of a main character, the equivalence of the characters in the drama as a special type of anthropocentrism, modeling life in accordance with the “ensemble effect” as a co-existence or participation of everyone;

A special “character substance” is an ambiguous hero who cannot be defined either as positive or negative, close to a character of the Dionysian type, whose change is carried out during the development of the action;

Activation of the primary role of pause, subtext, acquiring a symbolic and generalizing meaning.

The idea of a pronounced continuity of A. Chekhov’s dramatic concept with modernist and - later - postmodernist drama, both at the content-semantic level (waiting for death, elusive existence, the illusory nature of existence, the triviality of both life and death) and at the formative level ( nature of the conflict, open ending, montage, genre synthesis). The typological closeness of the aesthetics of the dramatic world of A. Chekhov and the experiences of representatives of the new drama at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries is determined in the plane of artistic experimentation with human personality, revealed in modifications of genre models.

The study of modern drama requires the use of new categories of literary analysis, which are only included in research practice and do not have a stable terminological fixation: performativity, metatheatricality, transgression, metagenre [Kupreeva, 2016b]. Thus, the last term introduced into use

following modern dramaturgy - metagenre - is used without a clear conceptual expansion in the works of M. Lipovetsky, A. Makarov, A. Zenzinov, V. Zabaluev [Zabaluev et al., 2008; Lipovetsky, 2007; Makarov, 2012]. As a metagenre, we understand a transitional unity of form and content, located in a marginal, unstable state of interweaving and diffusion of various genre forms. Moreover, this is not a conglomerate, not a synthesis of openly readable genres - comedy, tragedy, drama - but, to put it metaphorically, a transparent amphora into which multi-colored streams flow from different springs located on the same “plateau”, creating an aesthetic drink in which different tastes that make up a special bouquet [Strashkova, 2016a].

Building a unified paradigm for the formation and development of Russian drama of the 19th-21st centuries certainly turns to the innovative discoveries in the dramatic form of A. Griboyedov (metagenre), A. Pushkin and I. Turgenev (psychological drama), A. Ostrovsky (social and everyday drama), M. Saltykov-Shchedrin and A. Sukhovo-Kobylin (grotesque drama). New “non-new drama” by A. Chekhov, lyrical drama A. Blok, symbolist drama by A. Bely, Z. Gippius, Vyach. Ivanov, intertextual drama by Dm. Merezhkovsky, N. Gumilev, the epic drama of L. Andreev found refraction in the dramatic experiments of the post-October period of the 20th century and in the post-postmodernist drama of the 21st century, as well as travesty in the works of playwrights of the “new wave” and “new new drama” to create a fundamentally new hero a time in which the biological and archaic principles are primarily actualized.

At the same time, we can come to the conclusion that the destruction of genre boundaries in works of a dramatic nature is a traditional artistic principle that becomes more active in transitional aesthetic eras.

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On Question about Actual Problems of Study of Genre Synthesis Origins in Poetics of Russian Literature of 20th-21st Centuries1

© Strashkova Olga Konstantinovna (2017), orcid.org/0000-0002-8740-5048, Doctor of Philology, professor, Department of Russian and World Literature, North Caucasus Federal University (Stavropol, Russia), [email protected].

© Babenko Irina Andreyevna (2017), orcid.org/0000-0001-7380-5561, PhD in Philology, associate professor, Department of Russian and World Literature, North Caucasus Federal University (Stavropol, Russia), [email protected].

© Kupreyeva Irina Valeryevna (2017), orcid.org/0000-0003-3613-0416, PhD in Philology, associate professor, Department of Russian and World Literature, North Caucasus Federal University (Stavropol, Russia), [email protected].

The article identifies key problems of modern genology, such as the lack of unified criteria for the definition of the genre as an aesthetic category, subjectivity of genre related-ness in new concepts of the genre, the lack of a widely acceptable genre classifications and genre systems. Relevance of the study of a unified genre model of literature of 20th-21st centuries dramaturgy is proven with a categorical position of dramatic genres transformation, synthesis / syncretism of homogeneous and heterogeneous form-and-content units in the whole structure of the dramatic text. Prospective directions of this study are designated. The definition of the category "meta-genre" is given. New principle of construction of genre models in latest domestic dramaturgy built on the basis of transgressive compounds-mates is demonstrated. There is an increase in the proportion of subjective principle in the artistic modeling of the present. The newest Russian dramaturgy is primarily considered as a dialogical zone of aesthetic experimentation and sustained literary traditions. At this, the integrity of the ontogeny of dramatic text in Russia, the continuity of stages of development and typological intersection of the "new drama," "new wave," "new new drama" with the dramaturgic heritage of the 19th century are emphasized . All marked characteristic features of the considered dramatic material are based on the realities of the complex socio-cultural construction and paradoxes of the metaphysical existence of the 20th-21st centuries.

Key words: generic-specific differentiation of art; genology; dramatic mode; genre; drama; modernism; avant-garde; postmodernism; meta-genre; artistic experiment; conventionality.

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The concept of “modern drama” can be interpreted very broadly. First of all, any outstanding piece of art, raising the eternal, universal problems, art is timeless, in tune with any era, regardless of the time of creation. Such, for example, are world drama classics that do not interrupt their life on stage.

In a narrow sense, this is actual, topical dramaturgy with a sharp journalistic sound. In the history of Soviet drama, it is widely represented at different stages of our national history.

The subject of research in this textbook is domestic literature for the theater from the end of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century, and not so much as a time chronological “segment”, but as a complex, diversely developing living process. Playwrights of different generations and creative individuals are involved in this process. Here we are dealing with our new classics (A. Arbuzov, V. Rozov, A. Volodin, A. Vampilov), who updated the traditional genre of socio-psychological realistic drama in Russian drama. In the 70s, a new generation of writers entered this stream, whom critics defined as “post-Vampil”, or as “ new wave"(L. Petrushevskaya, V. Arro, A. Kazantsev, M. Roshchin, V. Slavkin, A. Galin, L. Razumovskaya, E. Radzinsky, etc.). These are writers whose plays were mainly the basis of the theater repertoire during the years of perestroika. And finally, despite the skeptical forecasts of some critics and theater experts, the “newest drama” has come to literature and to the stage: it is not only popular in modern repertoire N. Kolyada; Nina Sadur and A. Shipenko, bold in their aesthetic quests, but also a whole galaxy of new names discovered at drama seminars and festivals. Among them are E. Gremina and M. Arbatova, M. Ugarov and O. Mikhailova, E. Isaeva and K. Dragunskaya, O. Mukhina and V. Levanov, M. Kurochkin, V. Sigarev and many others, included in the literature in last decades. Each of them has their own voice, their own aesthetic preferences, interest in new forms and dramatic experiments. And novelty is a sign of the life-giving nature of the process: modern drama is developing, moving forward, updating traditions and at the same time remaining faithful to the most important of them.

One of the great traditions of the Russian theater is to be “a pulpit from which you can say a lot of good to the world” (N.V. Gogol). It was the WORD sounding from the stage that always helped to make spiritual contact with the audience.

The end of the 20th century was marked by truly revolutionary events in the socio-political, economic and socio-moral spheres of life in our society. Modern drama and theater were the first of all art forms to not only feel and reflect the coming changes, but also played a significant role in their implementation. In the process of development of modern drama, three stages can be roughly distinguished, related to the specific cultural situation at each of them. As journalists sometimes humorously define, these are the periods: “from the thaw to perestroika,” “from perestroika to new building,” and the period of “new new drama.”

The textbook was created in the process of many years of work by the author with students of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University in special courses and special seminars devoted to the problems of modern domestic drama.

The author expresses deep gratitude to the organizers of the Lyubimovka festival, playwrights - the “children of Lyubimovka” of different generations, the artistic management of the Center for Drama and Directing, as well as Theater.doc for their attention and friendly attitude towards young researchers of modern drama.

Russian drama of the 60-80s. Hero controversy

Introduction

Paradoxically, it is precisely the stagnant time, the time of lack of freedom in art, humiliating for artists with all kinds of prohibitions, that is remembered as “amazingly theatrical.” There was no stagnation in the theater. The basis of the repertoire then consisted mainly of new Soviet plays. Never before have there been so many discussions on the problems of theater and drama as in the 70s and 80s. In these ongoing, interested debates, leading trends, ideological and aesthetic quests in dramaturgy emerged, just as the positions of official criticism emerged, directed against the excessive severity of plays that called for active citizenship, for the fight against petty-bourgeois complacency, conformism, slogan optimism and exposed the flaws of the existing system. In this regard best plays stagnant times fully deserve the definition of “modern drama”. This is evidenced by their continued life on today's stage and the interest in their artistic merits in literary studies.

At this time, trends in literature for the stage clearly manifested themselves, such as the open journalisticism of “production plays” by A. Gelman, I. Dvoretsky, heroic-revolutionary, “documentary” dramas by M. Shatrov, and political plays on an international theme. Many artistic discoveries in dramaturgy of these years were associated with the search for other, “hidden” ways to tell the truth, with the development of parable, allegorical forms of conversation with the audience. Domestic intellectual drama was created in multinational drama based on folk myths and legends. In the works of Gr. Gorin, A. Volodin, L. Zorin, E. Radzinsky used methods of interpreting “alien stories” and turning to ancient historical times. However, Aesopian language did not always save the play. Much of what was written at that time remained unpublished and only with the beginning of perestroika, in the atmosphere of “freedom and glasnost”, found stage life (“The Seventh Labor of Hercules” by M. Roshchin, “Castruccia” and “Mother of Jesus” by A. Volodin).

Among the variety of genre and style trends from the late 50s to the present day, the socio-psychological direction, traditional for the domestic theater, prevails. In those years it was represented by plays by A. Arbuzov and V. Rozov, A. Volodin and S. Aleshin, V. Panova and L. Zorin. These authors continued to explore the character of our contemporary, turned to the inner world of man and recorded with concern, and also tried to explain the troubles in the moral state of society, the obvious process of devaluation of high moral values. Together with the prose of Y. Trifonov, V. Shukshin, V. Astafiev, V. Rasputin, songs of A. Galich and V. Vysotsky, film scripts and films of G. Shpalikov, A. Tarkovsky, E. Klimov and the works of other artists of various genres, plays named above, the authors were looking for answers to the questions: “What is happening to us?! Where does this come from in us?!” That is, the main line of study of life among playwrights of this time was associated with disputes about the hero.

Usually, the “hero of the time” in Soviet literary criticism was understood as a positive hero. For literature socialist realism the primary task was to create just such an image: a hero of the revolution, a war hero, a labor enthusiast, an innovator, a “Timurite”, a “Korchaginist” of our days, a role model. However, as you know, life is much more complicated and sometimes “does not give away” such a hero. That is why our dramatic classics were often subjected to devastating criticism. A typical assessment of truthful art was, for example, the article by critic N. Tolchenova “Next to Us”, published in the magazine “Theater Life”. Summarizing her impressions of A. Vampilov’s plays, subjecting to a devastating destruction the plays “We, the Undersigned” by A. Gelman, “The Wood Grouse’s Nest” by V. Rozov, “Cruel Intentions” by A. Arbuzov, not finding in them a positive opposition to evil, the author accused the playwrights of “pushing current art onto a path that runs away from the high roads of the life of the people, from the new tasks ahead of the people, from the inviolable humanistic ideals.” Somewhat earlier, the work of those who “started life late” in the dramaturgy of A. Volodin and V. Rozov was subject to obstruction for this as “heroless”, “petty-themed”, at the sadly memorable All-Union Conference of Theater Workers, Playwrights and Theater Critics in 1959. Then A. Arbuzov warmly supported them in his speech; he fought their critical ill-wishers, emphasizing that these writers are, first of all, talented and, what is especially valuable, “they not only know their heroes, but are also seriously concerned about their fate”: “While admiring them, they at the same time do not want to forgive anything , that's why they are not afraid to show us their shortcomings and vices. In a word, they want to treat us with truth, and not with elevating deception. That is why their plays are optimistic." These words perfectly characterize the work of Arbuzov himself.

The answer to this question will always be subjective, no matter who you ask it to. Only fifteen years have passed since the beginning of the century, and this is a very short period of time for new dramaturgy to be “tested” through the test of the theater. Many plays sometimes wait a century or half a century until they find an adequate implementation. There is little time for any objective opinion to be formed, verified by many experts and the public. In addition, it is very significant that Western drama does not enter the Russian context regularly; we only know it fragmentarily - this is due to the departure of many Western cultural and educational institutions from the Russian horizon, as well as the well-known inertia of the Russian repertory theater, underdevelopment of translation activities.

There has been a very rich dramaturgical movement in Russia in recent years, from which I would, first of all, single out Ivan Vyrypaev and Pavel Pryazhko. The first ("Delhi Dance", "Oxygen", "Genesis No. 2", "Drunk") tries to enrich drama with the philosophy of Buddhism, to test the genre with the conflict-free nature of Hinduism. The dramaturgy of the Belarusian Pryazhko, who writes in Russian ("The Locked Door", "Cowards", "Life is Good"), talks about the disappearance of language as a means of communication. Among the Russian plays telling about the spiritual problems of man in the 21st century are “Exhibits” by Vyacheslav Durnenkov and “Playing the Victim” by the Presnyakov brothers.

In Western drama, of course, in the first place is German theater, inheriting the traditions of intellectual, socially aggravated theater. This is, first of all, Marius von Mayenburg ("Martyr", "Stone"); Mayenburg's play "The Freak" deals with the phenomenon of physical beauty, which has become a bargaining chip in business games and factors of success and prestige. Roland Schimmelpfennig, whose "Golden Dragon" deals with social inequality and European exploitation of second and third world countries. Interesting is the German-speaking Swiss Lukas Bärfuss, who wrote “Alice’s Travels in Switzerland” about the ethical paradoxes of euthanasia.

The leader in British drama is Mark Ravenhill, who in his plays “Product” and “Shoot/Get a Prize/Repeat” talks about the aggression of media terrorism on modern consciousness. A significant phenomenon of British-Irish culture (and the most staged Western playwright in Russia) is Martin McDonagh (written in the 21st century “The Pillowman”, “The Lieutenant of Inishmore”, “The One-Armed Man from Spokane”), who talks about the dependence of modern man on the sophisticated violence and the paradoxes of desperate humanism.

A serious contribution to figurative, aesthetic dramaturgy is made by the Lithuanian playwright Marijus Ivaskevicius (Madagascar, Near Town, Mystras, The Kid). Polish playwright Dorota Maslowska (“Everything is fine with us,” “Two poor Romanians speaking Polish”) makes one of her themes modern language, signaling the agony, mortification, and automatism of human consciousness in the 21st century. Among the galaxy of Finnish playwrights, Sirkku Peltola stands out, whose “Little Money” explores the consciousness of the autistic, outsider, stranger.

The first post-perestroika years were marked by a revival of the genre of political drama, represented not only by plays by modern authors, but also by newly discovered works that were banned 20 - 30 years ago. The authors of plays of this type turned to previously taboo issues of history, rethinking established norms and assessments, and demythologizing individual events and characters. The leading theme in the political drama is the theme of totalitarianism, which conventionally breaks down into “anti-Stalinism” (M. Shatrov “Dictatorship of Conscience”, “Further, Further, Further”, G. Sokolovsky “Leaders”, O. Kuchkina “Joseph and Nadezhda”, V. Korkiya “Black man, or I am poor Coco Dzhugashvili”) and the theme of the Gulag (I. Dvoretsky “Kolyma”, I. Maleev “Nadezhda Putnina, her time, her companions”, Y. Edlis “Troika”, etc.). Most of these works are written in the traditional form - a chronicle play, a documentary drama, a socio-psychological play. However, gradually playwrights move away from traditional forms, translating the conflict between the individual and the totalitarian system into a different aesthetic plane, plays-parables, plays-parabolas1 appear (A. Kazantsev “Great Buddha, help them!”, V. Voinovich “Tribunal”).

Another pole of the dramaturgy of the post-perestroika period are plays with a predominance of moral and ethical issues. The material for creative understanding in them became those aspects of human life that were previously customary not to notice due to non-compliance with the norms of the socialist structure. As M. Gromova notes, “the ‘analytical study’ of the common man in the sphere of everyday life has intensified; for the first time since the beginning of the 20th century, at the end of it the words ‘the bottom of life’ were heard.” Marginal heroes are brought onto the stage: once successful, now degraded intellectuals, homeless people, prostitutes, drug addicts, street children. The artistic space of the plays reflects the image of a kind of “upside down”, but easily recognizable world, full of cruelty, violence, cynicism, and doom. The poetics of this dramaturgy is based on a combination of sharp journalisticism and illustrativeness with elements of “theater of cruelty” and “drama of the absurd.”

The leaders of the theater seasons in the mid-1980s were the plays “Stars in the Morning Sky” by A. Galin, “Dumping Ground” by A. Dudarev, “Dear Elena Sergeevna” by L. Razumovskaya, “Women’s Table in the Hunting Hall” and “Night Fun” by V. Merezhko and others. In the 1990s, this trend continued in the plays “Title”, “Competition”, “Siren and Victoria” by A. Galin, “Boater”, “Eclipse”, “Parrot and Brooms” by N. Kolyada, “Home ! L. Razumovskoy, “Russian Melancholy” by A. Slapovsky and others. The extreme rigidity of the artistic material, the condensation of naturalistic details, the grotesqueness of situations, the frankly shocking language that distinguish plays of this type, forced us to talk about “black realism” or, in other words, about the dominance of “chernukha” in Russian drama. “Shock therapy”, which fell upon the reader and viewer, could not remain in demand for a long time.

The mid-1990s in Russian drama was marked by a “change in intonation”3 (V. Slavkin). The “journalistic frenzy”4 of post-perestroika plays is being replaced by the exact opposite trend. The subject of artistic comprehension is the issues of the immanent existence of the individual. There arises “the need to turn to the sphere of ideals - not moral, but existential, comprehending the essence of what is proper, necessary for the individual... The need for direct comparison of man and his earthly existence with eternity.” Dramaturgy decisively retreats from life-likeness, from the forms of objective reality towards fiction, illusion, and aesthetic play. Instead of deliberately anti-aesthetic details of modern life, the plays appear “a desire for elegantly constructed, poetic pictures and images of past eras; instead of a strictly defined view of the world, there is a transparent elusiveness of outlines and moods, a slight impressionism; instead of hopeless and hopeless endings, there is a bright sadness and a philosophical attitude towards the inevitable “flight of time”; instead of deliberately rough language, there is a classically pure Russian word.”

Criticism defined the artistic space of this dramaturgy as a “conditional unconditional world” (E. Salnikova). Initially, the world of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s (b. 1938) prose was perceived by critics and readers as “naturalistic,” reproducing kitchen scandals and everyday speech with “tape-recorder” accuracy. Petrushevskaya was even characterized as the founder of “chernukha”. But Petrushevskaya is not to blame for these characteristics. She has been writing her prose since the late 1960s, when her career as a playwright began. Petrushevskaya's prose and drama are undoubtedly implicated in absurd collisions. But her absurdism is not similar to the techniques of Eug. Popova or Sorokin. Petrushevskaya does not parody socialist realism. Although it cannot be said that she does not “notice” the socialist realist myth at all. Petrushevskaya, bypassing the actual socialist realist aesthetics, seems to directly address “life” shaped by this aesthetics. It depicts situations that are, in principle, unimaginable in a socialist realist context, but the socialist realist myth here works as a “minus device”: it has formed a special world of “not allowed” within its sacred limits. The shadow twin of socialist realism was the concept of “life as it is.” The conviction that the discovery of the social “truth” about life is adequate to the ideals of goodness, justice and beauty fueled a powerful current of critical realism in the literature of the 1960s and 1970s. This faith united such different writers , like Solzhenitsyn and Aitmatov, Astafiev and Iskander, Shukshin and Trifonov. . . But Petrushevskaya consistently dismantles this aesthetic mythology, proving that the truth of life is more complex and tragic than the truth about the crimes of the social system. The simultaneous opposition of the lies of socialist realism to the narrow social truth of “critical realism” of the 1960s and 1970s forms the features of Petrushevskaya’s poetics, both in drama and in prose, the dramatic situation in Petrushevskaya always reveals the distortion of human relationships, especially in the family or between a man and a woman; the abnormality and pathology of these relationships invariably leads her characters to despair and a feeling of insurmountable loneliness; in general, Petrushevskaya expressed in her plays the catastrophic crisis of the family as a social institution; A feature of the plot of Petrushevskaya's plays is the intractability of the conflict; the plays end either with a return to the initial situation, often aggravated by new complications ("Three Girls in Blue", "House and Tree", "Isolated Box", "Twenty-Five Again"), or with "nothing" awareness of the futility of attempts to overcome loneliness, enter into human contact, find help or simply compassion ("Stairwell", "I'm rooting for Sweden", "Glass of Water"), or an imaginary ending that resolves the situation only illusorily ("Cinzano", "Day birth of Smirnova", "Andante", "Get up, Anchutka"). These observations are certainly fair, but the dramatic situation, characters, conflict and dialogue in Petrushevskaya also have features that distinguish them from the poetics of the theater of the absurd. But in the world of Petrushevskaya, the highest value is that , which does not fit into the conditions of this brutal struggle. That which exists in spite of it. This is helplessness and self-sacrifice. Petrushevskaya’s work, as a rule, associates the motif of helplessness calling for compassion with images of children. Abandoned children, scattered first in five-day kindergartens, then in boarding schools; Irina's son ("Three Girls"), left alone at home and composing touching and painful fairy tales from hunger - these are the main victims of the collapse of human relationships, wounded and killed in the endless war for survival. Longing for children and guilt in front of children are the strongest human feelings experienced by Petrushevskaya’s characters. Moreover, love for children is necessarily marked with the stamp of sacrifice or even martyrdom: One of the most “Chekhovian” works of Petrushevskaya is the play “Three Girls in Blue.” The title of the play, the intractability of the conflict, the loneliness of the characters, their absorption in themselves, in their everyday problems, the construction of the dialogue (the characters conduct a conversation as if not hearing each other, but there is no Chekhov’s “super understanding”, understanding without words), the versatility of the stage directions - all this proves , that the subject of Petrushevskaya’s artistic understanding is the poetics of Chekhov’s theater. Chekhov's “trace” in the works of L.S. Petrushevskaya is revealed both in the form of quotes, allusions, parallels, and in the form of structural similarities and coincidences. Writers are united by the desire to distance themselves from or break genre stereotypes, which is probably due to a distrust of genre concepts. “Quoting” the motives, situations, and techniques of the classic writer has a polemical nature (“Lady with Dogs,” “Three Girls in Blue,” “Love,” “Glass of Water”). But in general, Chekhov’s work is perceived by L. Petrushevskaya as a metatext that enriched the poetics of “psychological” comedy, reflecting the perception of the world and man, in tune with the 20th century, through a synthesis of the lyrical, dramatic, and tragic. At one time, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov called his sad plays comedies. Lyudmila Petrushevskaya did the same, managing to reflect the atmosphere of the Soviet 70s like no one else. Her “Three Girls in Blue” - a story about three unhappy women, their unhappy children and mothers - is also a “comedy”. The unlucky Ira is here trying to find her personal happiness, and at this time her mother is taken to the hospital, her little son finds himself locked in the apartment alone, and the roof at the dacha is constantly leaking.... The fate lived by each of Petrushevskaya’s characters is always clearly attributed to a certain archetype: orphan, innocent victim, betrothed, betrothed, murderer, destroyer, prostitute (aka “straight-haired” and “simple-haired”). We are just talking about cultural mediations of the same archetypes of fate. Petrushevskaya, as a rule, having only had time to introduce a character, immediately and forever sets the archetype to which her/his entire existence will be reduced

18. Main trends in the development of Russian drama at the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century. Poetics of B. Akunin’s drama “The Seagull”.

The play “The Seagull” by Boris Akunin, written and staged in 1999, is a modern interpretation and a kind of continuation of Chekhov’s classic “The Seagull”, while representing a rather symptomatic example of rethinking the role of classical texts in modern Russian literature. Akunin begins his play at the end of the last act of Chekhov's The Seagull, at the moment when Treplev shoots himself. Akunin's The Seagull takes the form of a whodunit with Dr. Dorn as the private detective who discovers that Treplev has been murdered. Like a classic detective story, Dorn gathers all the suspects in one room and then reveals the insidious killer and other dirty family secrets. However, unlike a conventional detective story, Akunin's play is structured as a series of takes, in each of which the investigation begins anew, and as a result, everyone present turns out to be murderers with a serious motive. The very task of completing Chekhov's textbook play involves a double gesture: firstly, it means a deconstructivist attempt to rethink classical literature from the point of view of leveling its absolute status; secondly, this is also an attempt to trivialize the canon. Namely: Akunin takes Chekhov’s play, which has canonical status, and writes a popular detective sequel to it (clearly hinting at the eternal attribute of any mass culture - seriality), mixing elite and popular, consciously playing with the concepts of mass, transitory, and classical, eternal, art. Akunin repeats Chekhov from an ironic distance: Chekhov’s dialogue is parodied by the actions of the characters, indicated in the stage directions, which also appeal to modern culture, for example, Treplev’s passion for weapons, indicating his psychopathological state (and Treplev was a psycho, and not just a sensitive young man, according to Akunin), refers the reader to the play on the theme of psychosis in thrillers and films of the crime genre. Finally, the most absurd allusion in “The Seagull” is related to the “green” movement and ecology. At the end of the play, Dorn admits that he killed Treplev, for the deceased brutally shot an innocent seagull. The theatrical pathos with which Dorn delivers his final speech, which serves as the epilogue and climax of the play, contrasts with the absurd motivation of the killer doctor.

This use of contrast between the deliberate stilted style of theatrical speech and the vague, cynical or absurd motivations of the characters constitutes an ironic detachment that undermines the authority of Chekhov's classic text. Thus, Akunin's play is a postmodern collage of different discursive practices and ironic references.

In line with postmodern poetics, Akunin’s “The Seagull” also has a metaliterary character, for example, the play contains a reference to Chekhov as a writer: Nina mentions “The Lady with the Dog.” Another example of metaliterary irony is the allusion to “Uncle Vanya”: Dr. Dorn’s naturalistic passions refer to the ecological pathos of Dr. Astrov. Moreover, Akunin introduces into the play a reference to himself and his detective novels about the adventures of detective Fandorin.

The various techniques contained in “The Seagull” illustrate almost all existing postmodernist writing techniques; in fact, the play refers the reader to conventional ways of constructing a postmodernist narrative. Thus, Akunin's text does not contain uncertainty and polyvalence of interpretations, but rather offers the reader a taxonomy that classifies and distributes postmodern techniques of playing with the canon. This means that the reader is offered a paradox that combines a multiplicity of interpretative possibilities, closed in the structure of what can be called textual taxonomy of postmodernism, although such a designation seems like a contradiction in terms. Thus, the play, in my opinion, does not fit into the traditional postmodernist understanding of an “open work.”

To develop the above thesis, let’s try to compare Akunin’s “The Seagull” and Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at different levels of these texts. At the structural level, both “Seagulls” are significantly different. It is worth noting that Akunin mentioned in one of his interviews that he was inspired to write “The Seagull” by the desire to finish Chekhov’s play, which seemed to him unfinished and especially not comic. Critics often argue that Chekhov's texts have an open ending. In “The Seagull,” the comedy ends with a tragic shot, which poses additional questions to the reader: indeed, why did Treplev shoot himself? Was the motive for suicide his conflict with his mother, an unsuccessful romance with Nina, writer's dissatisfaction, a feeling of hopelessness in provincial life and the meaninglessness of his efforts, or all of this together? The conflict situations that Chekhov talks about never reach the point of open conflict, especially since in his texts there is no possibility of resolving these conflicts, catharsis does not happen. The reader is not a witness to repentance or righteous punishment: the play ends before the reader (or viewer) is able to experience catharsis. All that remains are the various unrealized interpretive possibilities of the text over which we can puzzle. It was in connection with this quality of Chekhov’s works that his contemporaries called his dramaturgy the theater of “mood and atmosphere” (Meyerhold), the opposite in concept and execution of the didactic dramaturgy that prevailed before Chekhov. The ambivalence of the plot structure and the lack of resolution of the conflict served as the material on which Akunin was able to build his play. The very fact that every character in Akunin's The Seagull is given the opportunity to be a murderer provides Akunin with the opportunity to find solutions to many of Chekhov's rudimentary conflicts. Akunin takes the conflicts contained in The Seagull to their logical conclusion; he introduces murder - the most intense degree of conflict. However, Akunin’s conflicts are also presented from the point of view of an ironic distance, pointing to the deliberate redundancy of “detective catharsis” - in Akunin’s play there are still too many murderers for one corpse.

Thus, just as in medieval exegesis, the multiplicity of takes in a postmodern play does not imply a multiplicity of interpretations or an open, endless polysemy of the text. The serial structure of the play is aimed, first of all, at resolving conflicts and, secondly, at creating an eclectic postmodern text: the intensity of the conflict situation (Treplev is killed) is compared with postmodern irony about the fact that it does not matter who exactly killed Treplev (so how could everyone do it). Using a serial structure, Akunin guides the reader and instructs him about the rules of the peculiar “canon” of postmodernity, namely: how we should read and interpret the postmodern adaptation of the classical

Akunin applies the same strategies at the style level. The language of the characters in “The Seagull” is the language of the media and the “yellow” press. The speech of the characters constantly fluctuates between modern, slightly jargonized everyday language and speech stylization for the 19th century, which appears archaic and pretentious. Thus, Arkadina’s speech combines melodramatic rhetoric with cynicism typical of the sensational tabloid press:

Akunin turns the digressions into a direct reference to the sad situation of the murder. The displaced “insignificant” language of metonymy becomes a plot-oriented explanatory mechanism. From the point of view of semiotics, such a mechanism of signification can be called emblematic. Christian Metz 5 argues that, unlike a symbol or metaphor, an emblem does not condense, connect or shift meanings, but rather appeals to public knowledge. This knowledge in Akunin’s case is a reference to postmodern culture and aesthetics, which defines Dorn’s singing as a skillful combination of publicly available knowledge (a popular aria) with the plot of the play.

In Arbuzov's later plays, the “industrial fanaticism” of women is not accepted. Thus, Masha Zemtsova (“Cruel Intentions”) is condemned by the author for the fact that she “doesn’t know how to be at home,” that she is first and foremost a geologist, and that all other incarnations (wife, mother) are perceived by her as punishment, as captivity. “I’m jumping around like a fool in a cage,” she suffers. IN latest plays Arbuzova (“Winner”, “Memoirs”) are all subordinated to “women’s” issues.

"Memories"- a typical Arbuzov play. According to the director of the play at the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya, A. Efros, “attractive and annoying at the same time, as almost always with him. On the verge of banality, pretentious... True, this pretentiousness has its own pattern and its own poetry. In addition, there is unconditional sincerity.” Again chamber drama with an unpretentious plot of a husband “leaving” his wife, but uplifting eternal problems love and duty. A hymn of love, contrary to the fairly common in our time light, thoughtless view of the relationship between a man and a woman, as an echo of the “sexual revolution” in the West. Faith and love as salvation from the lack of spirituality of casual relationships. The play is written about the invaluable ability to give oneself to others. Astronomer-professor Vladimir Turkovsky, a talented scientist, completely immersed in his starry sky, an absent-minded eccentric, after twenty years of life with Lyubov Georgievna, a doctor who saved his life, “who literally put him back together in pieces,” admits that he fell in love with another and is ready to leave an established, comfortable world in a room in a shared apartment, with a woman with two children, two “ill-mannered girls,” if Lyuba lets him go. However, he says that he is ready to stay if she disagrees. The whole play, in essence, is about the dramatic struggle in the heroine’s soul over the course of several hours of her life, allotted for reflection. It is all the more difficult to understand oneself when the people around her react differently to the situation that has arisen. And, above all, daughter Kira, a sociology student, does not want to believe that her father’s actions are guided by love: “What does love have to do with it? After all, it doesn’t exist in the modern world.” “...The glorious era of scientific and technological revolution has come,” she bitterly tells her father, “the waters are poisoned, animals are dying out, herbs are disappearing, people are becoming depersonalized, the forest is becoming impoverished... And after this you hastily leave us. Everything is natural. Links of one chain - even the fact that you betrayed us. Napalm burns not only huts - and love, frightened, hastily leaves the world...” “Isn’t it funny,” Kira continues sadly, “in life no one knows how to love, no one wants to, or rather, but in the movies they run to see love, crowding around the box office. Still exotic for a modern person.” Denis, Turkovsky’s cousin, a 27-year-old man with no specific occupation, embittered by the whole world, goes even further in skepticism, bordering on cynicism, in discussions about love. In a conversation with his next partner in “cruel games,” Asenka, he throws out: “Did you love? Don’t be ridiculous, Asenka, this is in the realm of legends. After Juliet and Romeo you don't hear anything. People are busy with other things... Prestigious marriage? Isn't it trivial in our age? After all, you can finish yourself off in another way.” However, if young people, with their characteristic maximalism, do not take what happened seriously, then for Lyubov Georgievna the departure of her husband is a deep emotional trauma, a drama of life. The entire second part of the play is the tragedy of lost love, and with it happiness. “I probably should have kept him from this miserable, homeless life that awaits him,” she tells her daughter. - It was necessary to. But what’s funny is that in this reckless act of Volodin there is something that elevates him in my eyes. It’s desperately painful - but that’s how it is.”

The play “Memory” is one of the variants of Arbuzov’s favorite theme. “For me,” said the playwright, “no matter what the play is about, no matter what professions the people act in it; no matter what work conflicts arise, love is a determinant of a person’s state of mind. It seems to me that without love a person in the world lives in vain. Love can be unhappy, but even unhappy love is more beneficial than the empty, dead space around a person.”

The power of love helped the heroine overcome the severity of loss, to refrain from a jealous, and therefore unfair comparison of herself with Zhenechka, who at the first glance at her clearly loses to Lyuba. The heroine had the wisdom not to find out why Vladimir fell in love with Zhenechka, because from time immemorial it has been known that there is no answer to this question that could be “formulated” clearly and unambiguously. “No, no, I admit this thought - a person is capable of love more than once in his life... After all, if he is mentally rich, he can bestow this on someone he meets again... Of course, I could, I could force him not to leave the house... But he is my creation ! I didn’t give him back his life so that he would become unfree. I gave birth to him for happiness, and it’s not for me to destroy it.” Having accidentally witnessed such nobility and selflessness in love, Denis for the first time in his life was faced with something he did not believe in. And it shocked and changed all his ideas about the world, about life. This shock saves Denis from an inevitable fall into the abyss, towards which he was rapidly moving, committing a lot of senselessly cruel things along the way. “You taught me... to give,” he will say goodbye to Lyuba, and he will advise Kira: “And you forgive your father - after all, he loves. I didn’t believe in it, I thought it was all nonsense, fairy tales... But he loves so much, you saw it yourself. Forgive him, girl."

Arbuzov explores in his plays various options for an unfulfilled personal life, trying to answer the question “why?” And every time she affirms the idea of the need to protect as a huge value what is intended for a woman from time immemorial: to be the keeper of the family hearth, wife and mother.

The highest and most difficult art is to remain a woman in our fast-paced, “business” age, which requires her to be efficient, to be at the level of the realities of modern life, but at the same time to remain a weak, gentle, fragile, original person: to be able to unobtrusively and imperceptibly bring herself as a sacrifice to the interests of home, family, loved one.

Arbuzov's play "Winner" It was no coincidence that it had the working title “Tanya - 82”. Her heroine Maya Aleynikova, a prosperous businesswoman, is essentially “Anti-Tanya”, since she puts her business above all else in life and stops at nothing on the way to achieving her goal.

In terms of genre, this play is a parable-confession of a woman who, “having gone halfway through her earthly life” (offensively, victoriously, having reached the heights of her career and universal approval of her “purely male grasp”), is forced to admit this life of hers is “lost.” On the way to the “top”, Maya (the third person at the institute, in whose hands all administrative matters are concentrated), in pursuit of the “blue bird”, trampled on her luck and betrayed Kirill’s love - the most precious thing, as it turned out later, in her life. She almost broke up the family of her teacher Genrikh Antonovich, not loving him, but solely out of a desire to “safeguard” and strengthen her position. For careerist reasons, she refused to have a child, to do “the best act of a woman on earth.” She does not know how to love, does not know how to make friends, invariably subordinating those around her to her selfish will, regardless of their personality.

Memories of Kirill interrupt the heroine’s dialogues with people from her current environment, in whose company she celebrates her fortieth anniversary: Zoya, Polina Sergeevna, Igor Konstantinovich, Mark. She is guilty before all of them, but most of all before Kirill, and her memory relentlessly executes her for her long-standing betrayal. “I thought that I would never remember him, but now...”. Each of the characters makes her feel that “cruel games” invariably affect the fate of the “player”. “Don’t be upset,” Igor Konstantinovich remarks, not without irony, upon Maya’s admission of her inability to cook. “You cannot win victories on all fronts at once.” Polina Sergeevna reminds Maya that she once acted cruelly, but in the hope of at least “storming the heavens,” that is, out of a passion for high science, but it all resulted in satisfaction with administrative power. But the one who hits her ambition and current triumphs most sharply is Mark Shestovsky, a journalist with whom she suddenly wanted to one day “take a break” from the marathon of life, build a “quiet haven” and whose love for Maya was devoted and silent. He cannot forgive her for refusing to give birth to a child only because “events were brewing at the institute.” "Happiness? - he says to her at the anniversary. - Well, it happens. Once, it almost visited you and me... Only a certain Petrenko, with whom you fought courageously then, confused the cards... By the way, it seems that he was sitting next to you at the festive table today and broadcast hearty toasts in your honor... And how comfortably it ended now is your then significant ideological struggle. World! World peace! General waltz! And the past is forgotten. It has faded into oblivion... But the happiness that was then nearby is no longer there.” Mark is the first and only one to directly and unequivocally tell her what she has been afraid to admit to herself for twenty years: she betrayed Kirill. “How easily and simply you dealt with this boy. But she never fully admitted to herself the crime. And it was done!” . And if Maya somewhere, ironizing over her victories (“I win everything, I win everything...”), somehow spares herself (she did not invite only Kirill to her anniversary, of all the witnesses of her career), then Mark is quite merciless, completely removing from the word “winner” its direct, non-ironic meaning: “It’s just not clear why you started this anniversary. What did you want to prove? What virtues of life were you going to tell about? Why have you become businesslike and savvy? And that your female mind is almost as good as the male mind today? And in administrative matters you have no equal? What a great achievement to finally stop being a woman! Quite in the spirit of the glorious era of en-te-er."

Dialogue scenes and memory scenes are interspersed in the play with sound clips that reproduce the chaos of sounds in the air. These phonograms symbolize the turbulent flow of life, where everything is mixed: the whispers of lovers, the voices of children, modern songs, announcements of the arrival and departure of trains, scientific discoveries, about a missing puppy, for which the little owner, in a voice full of despair and prayer, promises “any reward... any... any...” It also interweaves information about the raging elements in different parts of the planet, about crimes against the environment, against humanity... And above Through all this chaos, majestically and wisely, as befits eternity, verses of Japanese and Korean classical poetry, philosophical, symbolic miniatures about harmony and the tragedy of its loss sound. These breakthroughs into silence in a frantic dance of sounds are like a call to stop, to rise above the vanity of vanities, to look back at your own life. In the Riga Youth Theater, which staged this performance for the first time, the stage recreates the interior of a passenger car, as if rushing in a noisy whirlwind of life. And in it there is a modern, elegant woman - a “loser-winner”.

The author, as never before, is harsh towards his heroine. Once she preferred the “golden carriage” instead of the life that Kirill dreamed of: “I promise you troubled days - grief and happiness, joy and sadness.” Now she would give a lot to bring back the past. But…

Visit me in my solitude!

The first leaf fell...

And man is like a river -

He will leave and not return again... The dragonflies are tired

Running around in a crazy dance...

Bad month.

Sad world.

Even when the cherry blossoms bloomed...

Even then.

She was hopelessly late for a long-arranged date with Kirill. Yes, it could not have happened: Kirill died.

A. Arbuzov's plays of the 70s and 80s were created in a very difficult time on the eve of the perestroika processes, the destruction of the atmosphere of ostentatious prosperity, official slogan optimism. It is difficult to say where his pen would have turned in the future. This time, in all its harsh realities, was recreated by his students, who joined the “new wave” of playwrights. The teacher understood everything. He tried to say his word about “cruel games,” but in his own way, in Arbuzov’s way. Having dedicated the play “Cruel Intentions” to his “studio comrades,” he did not betray himself. The bright sadness of Arbuzov’s last works does not cancel out the “feast of life in all its manifestations,” which was all of his drama.

Works by A. Arbuzov

1. Selection: Collection of plays. M., 1976.

2. Dramas. M., 1983.

3. Winner. Dialogues without intermission // Theater. 1983. No. 4.

4. Guilty // Theater. 1984. No. 12.

Literature about the work of A. N. Arbuzov

Vishnevskaya I. L. Alexey Arbuzov: Essay on creativity. M., 1971.

Vasilinina I. A. Arbuzov Theater. M., 1983.

Topics for independent study

“Cruel Intentions” as a moral problem in the drama of the 60-80s.

Genre searches in Arbuzov’s dramaturgy of the 70-80s.

“Weirds who decorate the world” in the plays of A. Arbuzov.

“Music of the text” of Arbuzov’s plays.

Chekhov's traditions at the Arbuzov Theater.

Heroes in the plays of B. S. Rozov

The philistinism of everyday life and the philistinism of the spirit excites B. S. Rozova(1913–2004) throughout his entire career. One of his mottos is: “Art is light,” and all his dramaturgy serves this ultimate task: the enlightenment of human souls, especially young ones. Everyone remembers the “Rozov boys” of the 50s. Maximalists, fighters for justice (albeit on a narrow, everyday front), they taught the adults around them lessons of independence in thoughts, kindness and philanthropy and resisted what suppressed their personality. One of them was Andrei Averin (“In good hour!”), who did not want to go to college “through the back door” and decided to independently look for his place in life: “But somewhere there is this place of mine. It is only mine. My! So I want to find him. Vocation is probably a craving for this point.” It was an ACTION. Oleg Savin (“In Search of Joy”) - a romantic, floating “on the clouds, weightless and winged” - at the age of fifteen, his whole being rejects the bourgeois psychology of Lenochka, the wife of his older brother, and when she threw his jar of fish out the window ( “They’re alive!”), can’t stand it: with his father’s saber torn from the wall, he frantically “begins to chop things” with which Lenochka has cluttered the apartment and from which “there is no life at all.” The reaction is naive and, perhaps, inadequate. But also – AN ACTION.

No matter how much the critics of the time scoffed at the “heroes in short pants,” these heroes amazed and attracted with their romantic fearlessness and purity of thoughts in the “unequal battle” with evil. “...Well, is this the most important thing that I will be? What I will be like is the main thing!” - the leitmotif of these plays.

Time passed, the “Rozov boys” grew up, life presented them with new, more cruel lessons, tests that not all of them could withstand. Already by the mid-60s, in the play “Traditional Gathering” (1966), Rozov’s dramaturgy introduced the theme of “summing up”, often disappointing and alarming. The author reflected the mood of “transition from social illusions to sobriety”, which was felt by many playwrights and their heroes coming out of “their sixties”: A. Arbuzov (“Happy days of an unhappy man”), V. Panova (“How many years - how many winters "), L. Zorin ("Warsaw Melody") and many others. The “change of songs” in the public consciousness also affected the heroes of the “Traditional Gathering”. For example, Agniya Shabina, a literary critic, replaced the honesty and courage of her early articles to the conformism of the present, he writes not so “head-on”, “moving further and further... from his personality.” Now the “charm of talent” of young authors irritates her: “I’m tired of these creepers with their banners of indeterminate color... Mediocrity and mediocrity are much less harmful.” Spiritual degeneration towards apathy, indifference, rejection of the ideals of youth is one of the most dangerous and persistent social and moral diseases of stagnant times, and Rozov does not limit himself to just stating it. Remaining true to the line of “psychological realism” that is closest to him in art, he deeply explores the problem of the “failed personality” in the plays of the 70s and 80s: “Four Drops” (1974), “The Wood Grouse’s Nest” (1978), “The Master” ( 1982) and "The Hog" (published in 1987).

In numerous conversations with students of the Literary Institute and young playwrights, V. Rozov invariably defended the specific high mission of the theater, its emotional impact on the viewer: “My love is unchanged - the theater of passions. If there is only one thought in the play, I begin to protest.” In pre-perestroika times, he was criticized for sentimentality and melodrama, but he remained true to himself. “The author must be kind at heart and be able to cry,” he states in the author’s remark – lyrical digression in the play "Four Drops".

Name "Four Drops" denotes not only the four-part composition of the play, but is also associated with the image of “Four Tears”. Despite the genre subtitles of the comedy series (“joke”, “comedy of characters”, “situation comedy”, “tragicomedy”), the author is talking about something serious. After all, only in a morally sick society are 13-year-old teenagers forced to stand up for the honor and dignity of their “out-of-date” parents from the oncoming rudeness (“Intercessor”), and the boors who have established themselves in life are arrogant and inventive in insulting those who do not live by their rules, they – slaves of embittered envy (“Quit”, “Master”); Graduated and graduated children prefer the company of “the right people” to their closest people, their parents (“Holiday”). Various manifestations of lack of spirituality in the characters and relationships between people, captured in these specific realistic sketch scenes, are a cast from a society in which there is a lack of “the amazing warmth of human kindness that heals the soul and body.”

By the beginning of the 80s, Rozov’s psychological realism acquired new, more rigid forms. Hero of a one-act scene "Master", The restaurant doorman is both an easily recognizable type of life and at the same time a symbol of a nonentity established at the “commanding heights”. Perhaps this is the first time such a satirically pointed generalization has been encountered by a playwright. It’s not for nothing that the author’s remark at the beginning of the play “orients” us to Leonid Andreev: the doorman “in gold braids, as if in Anathema” “Someone guarding the entrances”!”

A group of cheerful young intellectuals wants to celebrate the defense of their candidate’s dissertation in a restaurant and, anticipating “chicken tobacco”, “sturgeon on a spit” and “salmon”, they come across an unexpected prohibitive shout: “There are no places, citizens.” The doorman feels like the master of the situation (“I’m the boss here... I’m the only one around...”) and with pleasure swaggers over those who do not want to curry favor, humiliate themselves, beg, over people “nervous”, “with principles.” “I know people who have principles, I know what they want. They need to be driven out from everywhere. ( Almost screaming.) I'm the boss here! ( Blows the whistle.)". Unpunished rudeness gives rise, as he admits, to “the first of May in his soul.”

In a particular case, V. Rozov sees an alarming social phenomenon: an absurd, ugly-philistine understanding of “spiritual values” and “prestige”. V. Shukshin wrote about this with pain in his “Slander”, V. Arro in the play “Look who came.” Almost the same as in Rozov’s play, V. Voinovich recalls an episode from his own life of the same years: “The doorman is not exactly a small man, but, in general, puny... But nevertheless, the master of the situation, feeling like apostle at the gates of heaven. Some people came up, showed him something like coupons in confidence, and he let them through. The line grumbled delicately, voicing the fig in its pocket” (Izvestia. 1997, December 26). About such an “inverted” system of values in the era of universal queues, the need to “get” something, and not freely buy, to “get” somewhere, and not just come, about the emergence of a new type of “master of life” - from the service sector, from the “people of the retinue” - Rozov warned back in the “Traditional Gathering”, calling for the unity of honest people to resist evil: “In our time... every honest person is a regiment... Don’t you feel what a struggle is going on now?.. Well, if by and large - the state first of all needs honest people everywhere. All sorts of opportunists, like leeches, crawl around the huge body of our state, eat, suck, gnaw...”

The playwright turned out to be a visionary, because the life philosophy of the “doormen,” with their prohibitive “whistle,” turned into even greater absurdity in the psychology of the “new Russians,” with cell phones and armed guards.

V. Rozov considers his play to be satire, albeit “soft” "Gill wood grouse's nest." Its main character is Stepan Sudakov, former a kind person with a “stunning smile”, an active Komsomol member, a front-line soldier - now a big official who decides people’s destinies, and the owner of a respectable “nest”: He doesn’t understand why his household doesn’t feel happy in a six-room apartment with all the attributes “ best houses": a collection of icons, the "great and terrible" Bosch, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak on the shelves, "all sorts of things" brought to him from different countries. On the way to the “top”, at which, as he believes, everyone “simply must be happy,” Sudakov Sr. lost his moral compass. He was replaced by a career and things, “his soul became overgrown with a body” so much so that it became deaf to the pains of even those closest to him. “Don’t clutter my head with all sorts of little things... I’m not here, I’m resting” - this is the principle of his current existence. And “all sorts of little things” are the personal drama of his daughter, developing before his eyes, the serious troubles in the life of a friend of his youth, the problems of his youngest son Prov, the rebellion of his wife, who through his efforts turned into a “pet chicken.” He doesn’t understand the suffering of Iskra’s daughter, who is being cheated on by her husband, his wife’s dissatisfaction and Prov’s irony towards everything and everyone, including his own father: “What conditions I created for them. Others in their place would dance from morning to evening.”

The author makes us think about what made Stepan Sudakov a “grouse”? Ninth-grader Prov ponders this painfully: “Well, they say, if you cut a tree, then by its rings you can determine which year the sun was active and which year was passive. I wish I could explore you. Just a visual aid to history... What an interesting formation you have, father...”

By himself, Stepan Sudakov may not be very scary. His “titanic self-respect” and at the same time servile “throwing of pearls” in front of foreigners are rather ridiculous, and his belief in his own infallibility and the strength of his “nest” is a very fragile defense against the “pitfalls” and difficulties of life, which is confirmed by the final collapse of “Capercaillie” " The worst thing is that with blessings and light hand"grouse" are flourishing phenomena and people who are more dangerous. By the way, playwrights of different generations - Rozov and Vampilov - saw in modern life and presented in close-up an easily recognizable type of a successful person who has achieved a strong social position, satisfied with himself, outwardly very “correct”, but essentially cold, calculating, cruel. For Vampilov, for example, this is the waiter Dima; for Rozov, it is Sudakov’s son-in-law Yegor Yasyunin. Such people do not know mental anguish, reflection, remorse. “Strong nature,” “a man without nerves,” his wife Iskra says about Yegor. Waiter Dima (“Duck Hunt”) is one of those who walks through life like a master. And Stepan Sudakov’s commandment: “live cheerfully and don’t feel anything” has long become Yegor Yasyunin’s life credo. Seeing how worried his wife is about human letters coming to the editorial office of the newspaper where she works, he instructively remarks: “In his individual household, everyone must manage himself. They taught us to beg." He teaches Provo the science of “refusing” people’s requests. “It’s unpleasant at first, but then they will respect you more.” So, the main thing in life is not to worry! And Yasyunin married Iskra in order to establish himself in Moscow. Now the “great citizen of Ryazan” is undermining his father-in-law in order to push this “junk” out of the way and take his prestigious position in the service. At this new stage of his confident flight, he finds a new “victim” of careerist lusts: young Ariadne, the daughter of a higher boss. “Aren’t you afraid of Yegor, Ariadne?” – Iskra asks her rival, blinded by love, and warns: “You will not love flowers, you will stop listening to music, you will never have children. He will trample you, wipe his feet on you and walk over you.”

For people of this type, there are no restraining ethical standards, moral principles, which are considered obsolete “conventions” among them. “Only the absolute absence of conventions can make a person outstanding,” theorizes Yegor, a modern “superman.”

V. Rozov's characters are most often shown in the sphere of everyday life. The playwright also called the play “The Wood Grouse’s Nest” “Family scenes,” but its meaning goes far beyond the scope of everyday history, just like the meaning "Boar"- a play written in the early 80s, even before the 27th Party Congress, before the word “glasnost” appeared, before open revelations in the press and high-profile trials regarding abuse of power, corruption, bribery, flourishing in high circles. True, the text of this play was published only during perestroika. Playwright A. Salynsky, anticipating the publication of “The Boar” (Sovrem. dramaturgy. 1987. No. 1), wrote: the play “turned out to be so frank that the reinsurers were seriously afraid. Poor “Pig” couldn’t even squeak - he was held tightly for several years.” And when the play finally made it onto the stage (at the Riga Russian Drama Theater, directed by A. Katz), the author was asked to change the title of the play to a more neutral one: “By the Sea.”

The most secret thing for the writer here is a return to the fate of the young man on the threshold independent life and to metamorphoses in his character under the influence of difficult circumstances. In the 50s, Andrei Averin, a professor’s son, reflected on his ignorance of life (“...I’m probably so empty because everything was handed to me on a silver platter - well-being at home... well-fed... dressed”). It was still instinctive, but he felt that prosperity was not everything, that it was better to earn money yourself than to beg. However, he very sluggishly resists his mother’s worries about the institute, and in a conversation with friends, although clownishing, he does not reject the possible “cheat” when entering the institute through connections: “Eh! Who would put in a word for me!.. If only he would be knocked down in the legs! I swear! I sell my honor and conscience!” . As a result, as we remember, he decides to exchange the comforts of home for the road, to find himself in life.

Ninth-grader Prov Sudakov (“The Wood Grouse’s Nest”) experiences almost no such remorse; moreover, he believes that his parents are obliged to think about his future, fuss, run, “fulfill their parental duty.” It's disgusting, but not shameful. “It was a shame in your time,” he says to his father. “We are accustomed.” Prov is unlikely to be able to rush out of the “nest” into big life in order to look for “his point” in it. Firstly, he is skeptical about this very “big life” and its “heroes”, like the “great Ryazan resident Yegor”, with whom his father advises him to “make life”. However, he also does not spare irony towards his father, who has degenerated into an indifferent “grouse”. Secondly, the parental “nest” does not evoke in him, like Andrei Averin, active rejection and a desire to “not give a damn.” He willingly takes advantage of all this prosperity and does not reject the future prepared for him. He will enter the prestigious MIMO: “Father appoints him there... So what? Life takes on knurled forms. Time for stabilization... Father demands. He will be flattered,” he confidentially admits to classmate Zoya.

The author’s focus in “Kabanchik” is the soul of 18-year-old Alexei Kashin, a “wounded wounded man”, on whose fragile shoulders fell the almost unbearable weight of insight, awareness of the evil among which he, without thinking, had lived until now. His father, a big boss, became the “hero” of a noisy trial about major thefts and bribes, and the world turned upside down for Alexey. He felt himself on the edge of an abyss. “...For all its visual modernity, in this case even topicality, “Boar,” says critic N. Krymova, “continues one of the eternal themes. This is a mirror reflection of one generation in another... Fathers and sons met eye to eye - and this moment is tragic.” We must give credit to the playwright for his subtle psychological analysis of the state of Alexei, a “mortally wounded creature.” His nervousness and harshness in response to any – good or evil – attempts to penetrate his soul, to reveal the reasons for his “mystery” and strangeness, betray an expressive focus on his pain, a feverish “scrolling” of the film of life. Even in the “Traditional Gathering,” the old teacher’s thought was heard in her address to all school graduates about everyone’s personal responsibility for their own destiny: “You used to think that all the shortcomings in life come from adults, but now it turns out that these adults are you yourself. So now you have no one to blame, ask yourself.”

Alexey, a tenth-grader who had not yet completed his studies, realized this at the moment of the catastrophe that occurred in his family. Torn between feeling pity for his father and condemning his own immaturity, he blames himself most of all: “Why didn’t I understand? I'm a developed person. I studied quite well... I didn’t understand anything. I didn’t even feel it in my subcortex. But he could. ( Almost screaming.) No, I couldn’t not know anything, not see! That means he was pressing inside himself, pushing him deep into himself, as if I didn’t know!.. How filthy a person is made. Well, what was the salary for our dacha here? And in the Caucasus!.. Everyone smiled at me all the time. I’m used to it, apparently...”

Ruthless introspection is not repentance in public, in a world where “even death is red.” Alexey, on the contrary, runs away from the “world”, leaning for the first time against the only person who understands him, his father’s former driver, Yurasha, who knew and loved him since childhood. But he also rushes away from him when he reveals his secret. He rushes between people and the “biblical abyss”, in a hurry to write about everything he knew and saw, in a hurry to “catch up”... It is no coincidence that he feels defeated by the Demon (“I am the one whom no one loves and curses everything that lives...”), ninety years old an old man, before whom an abyss has opened (“I’ll die soon anyway...”), and moreover, he expresses a conscious readiness for death: “No, I still won’t disappear, I will merge with nature.

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